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bank_holiday_05.txt
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bank_holiday_05.txt
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## Mating
Player characters have a limited lifetime. To secure the continuity of player’s lineage, a player SHOULD mate with an arbitrary second player (Texas Penal Code regulations concerning prohibited sexual conduct apply). If `mating.sucessful == true`, player continues controlling child. If `mating.successful == false`, player continues controlling parent. Players can mate any time. Only one sex exists. Mating success rate for player age x approximates f(x)=e-x². Players gain strength through equipment and perks, but lose agility and speed. The longer a player defers reproduction, the stronger her character will become, and the more difficult it will be for the newborn to defeat its parent. Too early and the parent will be a greater challenge due to its agility. TODO: Compile list of factors that influences balancing in the reproductive battle.
The finished feature of mating was the major reason that bank holiday just barely made ESBR-Teen. It was not outright gory, but when the life-hungry newborns would try to outmaneuver the raging, club-brandishing AIs of their parents to grapple them from behind and batter their skulls in with their bare fists, their players frantically mashing buttons of their sweaty controllers, the screen would turn ruby with blood. Granted, Michael proposed paintball, but still he ponders shelving the game until Sergej will have gone through the fundamental classroom material on violence and/or sex ed. Three days into New York State on PAUSE and it is their first generational change. Sergej does not seem to be bothered the slightest by the fountains of red, probably it is still but a color to him, and he has smashed and gutted a vaguely humanoid piñata before. To do justice to his parental responsibilities he suggested the game’s building mode, which is supposedly more peaceful than the battles the factions fight for territorial gain. And as soon as Sergej discovered the staggering size and convoluted ornateness of their faction’s urban headquarters that he had missed yesterday when Akash was showing them around, his proposal did not need any further encouragement. Roaming the streets, which are not exactly streets but simply patches of surface that have not been claimed yet by a diligent builder, Sergej had paused and turning to his father asked whether there was a market, whereupon Michael had directed him to one of the merchants vending weapons and gear for in-game- slash fiat currency, but the store only yielded an irritated glance from his son. No, a market as in supermarket, as in selling cornflakes and lettuce and magazines. To Michael’s knowledge, there was not. In subsequent forays into the heart of the nameless metropolis they came upon a mansion, whose structure was made up entirely of ropes stretched between the ground and the adjacent buildings, and every step onto it sent them into a glitching frenzy, as the physics engine up north struggled to wrap its mind around the elasticity computations for the woven floor. They descried an Escherian waterfall, a mind boggling three-dimensional ASCII-art tree, several storefronts daring the censorship of bankholidian content moderators, but no supermarket, not even a bodega. Sergej got to work immediately, deciding for a star-shaped plot in the city’s center over Michael’s proposition of an spacious but suburban lot, and built a shop that for the lack of space and fundamental ignorance of what Michael told him about the Gruen transfer had shelves as high as a mid-sized redwood and turned grocery shopping into a platformer. Now he is finishing stocking the upper shelves with fresh vegetables, sweets and salties are encouragingly placed at lower levels, root vegetables, too, Sergej loves oven-roasts. Visitors are pouring in through the sliding doors and the open roof, fragments of farsi, danish, english, and cantonese weave into a texture of babylonic micropolyphony, settings only allow for binary on/off of sound like IRL. Daylight lasts short and darkness falls quickly between the highrises, but the colored light of unregulated product placement that illuminates the urban canyons at every level and angle compensates for the narrow window to the skybox turning pink with the last virtual rays. Player characters hired by resourceful businessmen sweat ad chatter laced with sparkly sound logos, while they stand unused and prostituted by their owners on busy street corners, waiting for their players to return from work, unplug the infinite ad loop from the headset jack, and deliver them from their deplorable side gig with a flick of the analog stick. As an answer to the commercial exploitation of VoIP chat, people are blasting music of all genres into the world, generating a tapestry of noise with the lone clave of a dancehall tune, hacked to be heard beyond the 15-feet communication radius, rising over the sediment. Jagged David-Rudnick textures adorn the iron facade of the adjacent hangar used as an indoor car cemetery for early 2000s racing game models. The junkyard belongs to a Berlin collective of artists so aloof Michael would have had neither the courage nor the nerves so much as to set foot in their pre-gentrified real-life quarters. In their hyperrealist founding assembly over web-ordered ramen and gamepads, the collective had established their common goal of collecting the scrap of the web to, quote, subvert the delete, unquote, and on a less grandiloquent level to feast on nostalgia diving into old game collections, amassing the largest trash mound in the history of garbage collection. The car depot was only one of their numerous branches and arguably one of their tidier establishments, which fostered its repurposing as a hangout and, as of recently, in a quick response to the PAUSE-order and its congeners abroad, for concerts of renowned noise artists amidst the clumsy renditions of targas and coupés. With the analogue arts forced into hibernation, there has been a cambrian explosion of artistic outlets in the bankholidean neighborhoods. Good thing Sergej opted for a plain and simple supermarket, all this exceptionalism around is becoming oppressing to Michael. “Pen pushers and bus drivers,” something ordinary and unpretentious, some salt-of-the-earth predictability is what he called for on one of their faction’s forum threads that asked the community of its wishes for the southern periphery of downtown bluecity, which is not its official name but merely one moniker among countless denominations either tersely functional or unbearably pompous, that are contending for official recognition by way of longstanding Pie-Town-NM-convention. His needs remained unanswered among the thread’s unordered exchange, mainly consisting of insults flying back and forth. Though participation in the game’s message boards is linked to a player’s identity and character, not to mention a valid credit card plus an account with select online payment providers slash social media platforms, discursive conduct is seldomly collaborative. Michael has a point when he is asking for more enthusiasm towards the bureaucratic groundwork of organization, standardization, and regulation, but few are volunteering to take on the arduous task of unmandated administration, least of all him.
Sergej is on the couch, skilfully handling his controller with his left while squeezing one of the fruit bars he brought from Berlin in packs of twenty - of which he is allowed to have precisely two a day, for without that limit they would have been consumed already between baggage carousel and customs - through the glue joint of the biodegradable banana fiber wrapper with his right. Who knows what his dreams are? After he haphazardly hid the foot hole with an advertisement for next month’s block party - very likely to be canceled - Michael is taking a closer look at fixing the pitiful apartment door, seeing that a contractor’s visit has become similarly unlikely to happen within the coming weeks. He remembers a metal sheet that used to block the lower mailboxes by the entrance and that he used to mutter about until one day, someone had pulled it to the curb. It’s still out front, ready to be salvaged. You win some, you lose some. A fragmentarily equipped toolbox, passed through clumsy hands of numerous craigslisters, lays open next to Michael, spelling out countersunk wood screws to the man with the cocked stapler gun. Kachunk, four times four, an index nail breaks testing the sheet’s stability but the handyman examines his work with satisfaction. The door closes with the peal of foley thunder as Michael reenters. Thousand islands of an archipelago of cotton clouds draw across the bright blue sky, calling for a stroll in the park or some other northern-European compulsive basking in the glory of the white glowing giant above. Unimpressed, Sergej has turned a cold shoulder on the springtime splendor, slouching into the burgundy linen of the couch in halting conversation with the more approachable appendix of the artist collective, who, judging by the voice that Sergej has rerouted to the stereo speakers to relieve his squished lobes, should have approximately the boy’s age. The mimics of their characters seem to stem from another era of computer graphics, compared to the delicately chiseled details of the city surrounding them, and the four emotional states the facial model can deduce from player’s speech fail even at the forgiving task of capturing the artists’ gen-X equanimity.
On screen, three members of the collective are moving a snake-eyed Scighera around the hangar in search of a suitable vacant spot. “My dad has loads of these ancient games.” Is he bragging about his father? “Shit, he built half his furniture from keep cases. He could drown this place in car models.” Or do the walls in between them gently omit the eye-roll in Sergej’s statement. Over the sizzling rice and peas Michael decides to believe the former as he surveys the mental registers of his abundant game collection. He leaves the rice to form its trademark crust simmering unattendedly and goes down to get the mail, still trying to summon the complete contents of his archive. A lone dog passing shoots challenging looks at Michael, who realizes too late that it’s the greyhound they used to cast for his employer’s commercials. All of the company’s staff had pitched in to help with the shoot, and Michael had ridden across town to pick up the miniature mail bag the dog would deliver their customizable greeting cards in. He would swear that the dog, who has just turned left on Throop and is now vanishing ghost-like behind the fogged windows of the corner laundromat is the very race dog they brought in from up the Hudson in an effort not to save on the wrong things. He would have long forgotten about the creature, had it not been a recurring presence in his dreams, that velvety anthropomorph, looking at the dreamer from his sad eyes like well mouths. Go freudian on that one.
The mailbox is empty except for one of his employer’s unfinished, thick envelopes that go for an extra forty cents, twenty-five on bulk orders. The greyscale card with that damned hang-in-there kitten Michael draws from the anthracite lining is a classic of the genre, much to his incomprehension. Trees from responsible paper sources sacrificed their trunks to deliver the single page-spanning sentence in narrow print that winds in and out of cushioning deviations, dives into depths of guilty explanations, before it resurfaces in a final subclause, that cordially notifies Michael of the termination of his contract.
Not to jump ahead in the narrative, but Michael will make a point of victimizing himself when talking about the loss of his job, withholding that, A, he did not care to make himself indispensable, and B, he repeatedly complained to several of his coworkers about how the only thing the suspended kittens and quirky dinosaurs on their cards’ faces dependably conveyed was their work’s inescapable tedium. Michael works - worked, rather, as of now - on the company’s online shop frontend, in particular the sandbox for exploring the world of customizable greeting cards, for wielding the tools of their creation. Genesis on a WebGL canvas. The job description conjured up the daylight-proofed, led-lit coding caverns scented with energy drink flavor and rollout-day adrenalin. The internet’s fourth decade on the horizon but people were still believing in the digital frontier myth, him included, and so he had quit academics in favor of heavy paper and silkscreen prints on fridges and mantelpieces. However, his daily routine rarely read like a Sorkin script, and most of his days he has spent tweaking data in a sisyphean maquillage to have the shop stand out in the dimensionless mall of their customers’ search results. The wide jumbotrons display their printables in soft-focused macro photography that makes Michael recall drug-induced vision. The images supposedly underline the material value, A/B testing has put a seal on it. Infinite circularly-connected subpages suggest ever-changing variations of their merchandise, they hold the customers hostage in their search for something they believe to be specific, releasing them only on placement of an offering in their checkout baskets. Despite his boredom, Michael has taken a sadistic pride in the pastel-colored maze, and he spent hours researching the mechanics of addiction and customer retention in doctoral theses and candle store blogs. However, all this time he has been looking in the wrong places, he has been missing the essence of the ads that were lining his reading material, namely that an army of freelancers from the global south have been ready to clock in at approximately four dollars an hour, VAT included. His contempt for his employer’s merchandise may have been merely the proverbial straw, and in the light of the average work ethic at the office it probably didn’t even suffice to do any damage to the ungulate’s spine. Every workday morning, copywriters from top-tier liberal arts colleges set eight-hour timers on their fashionably vintage watches as they crept into the cubicle they could tell being there own by the futile dreams for their life they commemorated with tacked-up magazine clippings and carefully selected novelty items around their desks. Many a morning one of the writers would show up late, with a disillusioned gaze into the void, climate-controlled office air, having snuck a detour into their commute to graze Midtown or other more realistic addresses to leave a hefty manuscript, printed after hours on the bullpen’s inkjet, with the receptionist, a distant acquaintance from college, who furnishes her apartment with the paper stacks her ex-classmates drop off at her desk. At a point before Michael’s arrival the ratio of aspiring novelists to unambitious pen-pushers must have passed a critical tipping point, bursting the floodgates of the unhappy authors’ dry-docked self-awareness, so that they became conscious of the narrative potential of the office staff, its composition so curious, in a sad way, that it totally merited their prodigious rollerball pen tips. The collective endeavor of immortalizing the office and its routines in hundreds of narrative fragments - short-stories, novellas, even a tome of psychological horror fiction - had resulted in an Orwellian system of watching each other, that, although intended only to study character development and reap urgently needed inspirations, had highly beneficial effects on the writers productivity in terms of greeting card designs. The writers’ protective dissociation from their work output paired with notable literary talent produced an array of sweet-and-sour greeting cards, schmaltzy and witty in equal measure. As unsuccessful as each of them was individually, as a collective they kept extending their bestselling aphoristic oeuvre on life, death, success, and condolence.
Michael pushes his eyes across the lines of the letter for a second time, descending the headstone-shaped paragraph while he ties up the loose threads of his thoughts unspooling like ticker-tape into the void where his guts have resided just a moment ago, breaking news headlines foreshadowing tomorrow’s worries. WORKERS LEFT OUT IN THE RAIN. His terms of employment didn’t foresee any sort of compensation for a timely termination, which means this plus next months’ wages will be his last major revenue for the time being, unless WORKERS STRIKE OIL IN COURT he can come up with a labor law oscure enough to escape his employer’s legal team and to secure if not a continuation of his employment at least a juicy severance package that would keep him afloat for what, another year? Ten? Michael’s eurocentric prejudice of the US juridical system being a high-stakes lottery sends him off on a daydream of indulging in his six-figure compensation in a moderately-sized Long Island beach house. However, without the imagined courtroom bonanza, his savings will cover another month max after his contract runs out. SPOILED KIDS BLEED OUT WORKER’S ACCOUNTS. The necessary expenses for meeting the demands of an eleven-year-old in terms of meals and entertainment cannot be overestimated. Despite being used to cutting corners, Sergej can’t help but eat like a hole, to put it in gentle terms. After all it’s mother nature compelling him to finish his plate, and the pantry, to build up resources for the imminent transformative exertion of puberty. If he wants to show his son a good time outside of a labor court, he needs to secure another source of income within the next month.
A smell different from the sting of the salt-and-pepper linoleum they installed on top of the wooden floor to bring down maintenance costs fills the staircase. Someone has been sleeping under the stairs again. Michael has noted two-hundred-forty-six dollars and thirty-five cents as expenses for groceries, consumables, subscriptions with unfavorable cancellation periods, and miscellaneous squanders within the last thirty days. How long has Sergej been with him? Ramp talk over an adult contemporary intro blares behind the left door on floor one that has been dipped in electric blue varnish. Fenugreek and asafoetida linger on the landing. He owes Akash what, twelve fifty for Sunday’s entrance assuming he will refuse an extra five for gas money. Ascending faster than his body, Michael’s mind slips out as he passes the second floor, looking at its mortal anchor’s sluggish climb. Hot self-loathing meets compacted injustice and the thrust of the flash of fury being released in the combustion of too many unstable negative feelings shelved side by side propels his mind up through wood, bricks, and bitumen, far up over the borough, homing in on the nuclear family skipping along the curated sidewalks of some neighborhood littered with flower bombs, not kool-aid doypacks, ice cream in hands, the mustachioed forty-something is addressing his son like a Johnny Cash recitative. Daddy is in a spending mood today, shit, he has managed to shave off approximately five K of, let us be honest, unnecessary staff expenditures of his company. The unchaperoned body of Michael kicks hard against the freshly installed metal sheet over the door leaf, the sound of the gong shocks the twice-inhaled air of his two-bedroom sound box into oscillation, cutting wi-fi signals, jamming other wireless protocols as the swell propagates itself in the adjacent units, cats, dogs, squeaking rodents and singing birds all tune to the frequency of the gong that fades slowly, sustained like the final chord of A Day in the Life. Michael’s boss at home working weekends on a reduced wage is looking up as he hears a faint sound from the window.
Already in the corridor Michael starts to scan the first want ads, the sight of happily conversing workmates over the title header feels cynical. The list of openings is sparse, who knows who else the quaint dog paid a visit to. Michael’s mental printout rates NC-17. Things would be considerably easier without Sergej (Hold on, strike that off the printout). Through the vanity mirror in the hall, Michael can peer into the bathroom. Sergej is on the plastic stool that Michael uses for painting the ceilings, with his eyes rolled left all the way to the stop. He is pushing his index to the tip of his nose, bending it up, then down, then back up. When his father knocks softly, he awkwardly catches a curl of his bangs as if peeling a gum from the strands, embarrassed, but more annoyed. Smirking father: “What are you doing?” “Nothing.” He tries to brush past his father, his gaze sweeps the dark hairs off the eggshell tiles. “Hey,” Michael stops his son, “you tell me yours, I tell you mine.” Sergej looks up at his father, visibly computing the assessment of his options, whether his father would make a scene if he refuses. Better not take the chance, the air has become too thick over the last few days. “Do you think my nose is gonna straighten as I grow up?” His question prompts a puzzled look. “See this bend upwards here? Neither you nor mom have it.”
He takes his time responding to his son’s question, examining the nose’s curvature from different angles, following the genetic trail of his son’s features down the line back to the cherished daguerreotypes of his great-great-great-grandparents. The unclean skin under the milky, smooth surface is like Michael’s own and his mother’s. The same soft, pale color of Wanda’s processing chemicals that he used to shine a flashlight through when played moon landing as a boy. “You see this?” Michael points to his nasal root. “The growth of the nose proceeds downwards, like an eggplant. As you can see, we have the same root, do you feel this indentation here? I think mom also has that.” Squinting, Sergej follows his fingertip tracing the valley of his nasion. “Concerning the lower parts of the nose, you’ll see that it’ll change during the next couple of years.” Their eyes meet in the mirror. “You’re not happy with your nose?” Sergej moves his head in an ambiguous gesture. “Your turn.” “I got fired.” “What?” “A dog brought the letter.” “And now?” “I guess I’ll get another job.” “Mh.” The boy looks at his father with an expression that could be inexhaustible wisdom. “I’m sorry.” “Yeah, me too.”
They’re out of fruit and low on milk and so, for the first time in three days, Sergej and his father prepare to sever the invisible ties to their home Wi-Fi. Michael kneels before his son, who is sitting cushioned on three issues of last week’s newspaper on the telephone seat, helping him with his winter boots. Sergej looks aside while his father is tying his shoes. The heavily padded fingerless gloves are grotesquely oversized and he has to keep his fingers splayed to keep them from slipping off his delicate hands. A woolen beanie bearing the logo of a formerly local baseball team now trying to recover their form in arid southwestern climates, as well as an alpaca scarf knit by a college acquaintance, whose name Michael will forget soon, complete the protective trio they have dug from the depths of Michael’s wardrobe. Of Michael himself, only a bar and two triangles of pale skin stand out from the all black surface of cotton, polyacrylic, and brand shades. A leaf blower sounds hoarse up the street but when they walk towards the subway no one is to be seen, even the greater intersections are empty safe for an occasional speeding car. The subway still runs on schedule, and Sergej hides abashedly behind Michael after he, in full song of a billboard hot 100 new entry, startlingly discovers a lone woman at the end of the platform glancing over in amusement. The express train flashes past.
The local train is deserted. It’s survival in the city. The cars are clean and MTA patrols are their only companions, but Michael keeps looking nervously left and right for muggers, he needs to hold on to his money. Green-themed supermarkets with wood paneling and ample dietary food selections are not an option right now, he realizes too late, the friendly Puerto Ricans’ market around the corner would have been more adequate. A German artist in the unpaid residence of the gallery that made a business of luring solvent talent with New York City radiance into three-months quote unquote residencies, which in truth are horrendously overpriced rental contracts with its for-profit subsidiary, has moved her exhibition to the showroom windows. Concentrated quirkiness, a funny-ha-ha joke of an installation, but diverting to skim together with Sergej, who has been displaying a conspicuous interest in all things artistic during their previous forays into the city. They contemplate a window-spanning, annotated map of what is called “Testhausen”, a settlement sparing with streets but impressing with towering skyscrapers in the middle of nothing, Teststraße 5 alone housing two banks, a choir, an ophthalmologist, an otorhinolaryngologists, and a gastroenterologist, twenty-five companies of various business activities, as well as a zoo, which must be in the backyard obstructed by the adjacent highrises. Michael wonders if he should explain the joke or whether it would spoil the fascination of the fictitious city, the metropolis built on developer’s neglect in the wasteland of unconnected routes and dead links.
Halfway to the discount supermarket they run into the end of the line. Chances of missing it are low, since a horn-rimmed twenty-something a few people ahead of them keeps blaring the shop’s name without respite. Pal, what’s your problem? A stout jogger with a handlebar mustache hastily overtakes them on the last meters before they reach the line. Up down up down, he bobs, running in place, giving Michael challenging looks. Bad breath, garlic breath is creeping up from behind, from the tall guy that sways and is definitely too close for Michael’s comfort. This time it’s him shooting angry looks back, while trying to catch a glimpse of the gorgeous model type grown like a basketball player that got in line behind, completing the ill-matched Dalton file of the jogger, him, stinker, model. “Get in line for C-Town, folks!” An allegedly deafblind stuffs flyers in the hands of the people in line with suspicious precision. Too tired to read himself, Sergej has his father report on the surreptitious experiments of surveillance capitalist ventures on the homeless in city hall station. One hundred and twenty unfortunate souls handcuffed and chained with their necks to the Guastavino tile of the loop, each wearing sophisticated VR headgear, noise-canceling headphones as well as an electrode-studded neoprene suit to stimulate their skin’s receptors, oblivious of the last nine months of world affairs and precipitation, tube fed binarily and chemically. “Doesn’t sound so bad, does it, Serge?” The jogger spits out towards the curb. It’s early in the crisis, everybody’s still high with the thrill of the end of the world finally happening. On steroids, on coke, on the edge, and not because of the kids’ or the husband’s constant presence in the apartment that lacks sufficient rooms for providing privacy to all inhabitants simultaneously, but because of excitement for some real life eschaton action, for double checking the locations of prepper stashes, for stuffing the .357 in waistbands and holsters. “Queue for C-Town, people!” Despite pushing puberty, Sergej still gets excited over shopping carts. He is rolling through the abundant supply of canned goods the clerks didn’t even bother to stack in storage but instead piled into colorful arches. Michael has to stop his son from trying to snatch the keystone. Better prevent A&E. Paper towels soft as velvet, pretty steep but the last of its kind. Michale feels the fluffiness through the packaging. Suddenly there’s the jogger again. “You better watch your fucking kid, pal.” Threateningly he moves towards them. He sniffs back his snot, at arm’s length now, Sergej stares at the burly man, mesmerized, cowed. He’s gonna spit, Michael knows it, he is going to. The three of them in perfect suspension, ethereal DX-7 presets chime over the supermarket’s sound system. Pause. Then, in an explosion of motion, before the jogger gets to expel the dreaded bodily contents, Michael, putting all force into the silky-soft cellulose, beans the short jock with the towels, and the jogger actually yields under the package, down he goes, even the plastic wrapping holds, no paper must go wasted. Three-ply, recycled, win a school trip to the upstate paper mill. Then an abrupt pang as Michael hits the floor, the jogger already on him, shaking him by his lapels, Sergej’s crescendoing yelps for assistance ring through his ears. The jogger doesn’t get a good smack at Michael before other customers arrive to pull him off the impertinent wuss. Pantingly he pulls down his tracksuit top over his bare navel fold under the reproachful eyes of staff members that have joined the first responders to skim their share of moral courage. Hopeless hypocrites, indifferent to who’s the aggressor here as long as they can maintain their conviction that they are on the side of light in these darkening days. A jar of hot honey gherkins and the jogger is off to the checkout. Sergej has been seeking to put some distance between himself and his dad, who is left to pull himself together with the limited assistance of the fellow shopper that intervened before and who is now uncomfortably raking the remaining sand of last weekend’s Long Island beach walk in his tote for a detached earbud tip. Sergej feels like going home but he isn’t certain this week’s allowance in his pocket will pay the fare. Six varieties of pickled peppers and he’s gone through ingredients, nutritional info and family constellations of the mom-and-pop ops. If only the lights would go out and emergency lighting would guide them to the nearest exit, so he could escape the glances of the passing customers. “Come on. Let’s get you some Reese’s.” Yes. Buy me! Anything to get us out of this. They walk to the station in silence.
Another stalemate between sofa and guest bed. Michael empties his clip on an inattentive enemy across the dip. He has thrown his parental concerns overboard in return for a joint activity that doesn’t require or inspire talking. Sergej doesn’t seem to be stirred by the humanoid figure going down. Five seconds later Michael is dead, caught getting up by somebody on the brow of the hill. He drops the gamepad into his lap. “You’re aware that he would’ve attacked us, right?” His father doesn’t have a piano, only a strat for show, so Sergej is trying to emulate the relaxing, diverting quality of his instrument by letting his fingers play on the couch table. He hears the question, that is really a statement, the first time already but waits for Michael to repeat it, which he does promptly and verbatim, to not squander a potential escape. “So you hit him instead.” “Exactly.” Michael knows that his rationalization is less than convincing, but having Sergej forget about the supermarket incident as one of his father’s occasional eruptions of harmless violence is still preferable to him seeing the actual reason: Money is running out, the world is coming to an end, and he is feeling like he’s long lost control. Among the store aisles, the sulfur- and cadmium-colored tags, the black-holes of zeroes sucking free floating fiat from an otherworldly account that Michael only peeks at through the oculus of his banking app, at the store it had suddenly hit him, the disparity of debit dates that had him overlook the outstanding withdrawal of this month's rent, the red figures and impending notices in his mailbox. A local calamity within a global disaster. And then that stubby knob advanced dead set on making trouble. And then he hit the knob.
Sergej is trying to ignore his father’s pacing. He adjusts his mental piano playing to the steady beats of the steps on the creaky floorboards. “Serge, can you hold the fort for half an hour?” “Sure,” he responds without looking up from his imagined keyboard.
For a split second, Michael ponders going missing. He went out to buy smokes seven years ago to this day. Somebody with a jackknife should come to relieve Michael of his overinsured smartphone so they could last past the next rent payment. There is really no reason to freeze in the cold of a void spring twilight if all that Freddie F is asking for is a brief KYC call plus a social security number plus an informal photo slash scan of a state-issued ID, but Sergej does not need to be confronted with anything but the reassuring exclamation of “Dad’s got a new job”. If not babies let the stork bring jobs. Sergej will need to take his first mug shot photo with id and hand-written terms-and-conditions approval held next to his face soon enough. A squirrel jumps on the seat next to Michael and utters a sharp call begging for food. Armrests divide the steel lattice surface designed with rain and the pee of street sleepers in mind, one of them smeared with blood of an unhealthy color as if an addict has popped like a balloon into thin air when shooting up on it. The slow responses of Freddy F’s servers suggest a surge in registrations. Won’t take long and all workers will unite under the discount-yellow base caps that constitute Freddy F’s employee uniform and first materialization of the corporate body.
Rent won’t be an issue if Michael signs up. Freddy F guarantees wages far above the average for all types of employment. As far as the labor contract goes, Freddy F’s agreement is as voluminous as it is eccentric and Michael consults one of the numerous summaries to be found throughout the web for Sergej is probably becoming uneasy, he can sense it. The indefinite duration of the employment has been construed by legal reviewers as an innovative growth strategy. There is the thing with the soul. On signature of the contract, the EMPLOYEE grants the EMPLOYER perpetual, worldwide, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable license to reproduce, modify, publicly display, sublicense, and distribute the EMPLOYEE’s soul. The sentence is concerning only until one realizes that this is just another spleen of the nerd culture, a meme missed out on. Yada yada, Freddy F grants its employees the right to choose a job from its internal market, wages, as already mentioned, above average, should no job be available within the range of a one-hour commute using public transportation, Michael would receive a generous basic income. One job offer may be declined by the employee, otherwise you work what you get or the well will run dry. Michael can always terminate the contract in observance of the three-month notice period, although didn’t it say irrevocable in the clause about the soul business? His phone vibrates, making him start. “Dad, there’s someone in the kitchen!”
Barely noticeable eddies of dust, crumbs, dandruff are traversing the rooms on unpredictable trajectories. The apartment has four major locales where monsters may be hidden. In addition, there are myriads of minuscule hideouts for compressible, gaseous or however ectoplasmic spirits and ghosts. A colony of them resides in the crevices of the floorboards, but their kind is discreet and presumably related or identical to silver fish. In the vent pipe of the bathroom, there’s another one, some lost soul stuck halfway on its way out to the roof, Sergej can hear him slash her slash it rattle when traffic is low outside. At least that one is securely caged behind the vent grill, Sergej has tested the firmness of its bolting. On top of the door to his room there’s one, hidden in the gap of the door casing. One that is out for his limbs, wanting to cut Sergej’s arms clean off with its guillotine, like it almost succeeded to do when he was sticking the Donald-Duck mag through the crack of the door to secretly keep reading by the glow of the plasma TV after lights-out. The dream he fell into reading might have bled into his recollection, yet he continues to jump across the doorstep, not to tempt fate. This one though, the ghost that is now in the kitchen, is an unseen kind, definitely about human shaped, judging from the split-second glance Sergej caught of the specter as it stepped into the kitchen. Sergej’s youthful ears crank up their infinite gain but no sound is to be heard from the kitchen, even the cooling unit has gone mute. Sergej huddles behind the armrest, petrified in his hypersensitive state. Music! Anything to break the silence until dad comes home. He leaps to the stereo, turns on the vinyl unit that, thankfully, is loaded with something, and presses play. Something is wrong with the system. Though, wait, it’s only the intro. Come on, only a single major cadence to fend off the white noise of ghosts and static, of blood rushing in his ears. But the record has other ideas. The music itself sounds possessed, spinning in loops like a whirling dervish over the sound of anarchy and wanton destruction of hard-earned listener consensus. Sergej’s top tracks - closely monitored by Michael, who gifted his son his first streaming subscription as part of a larger effort to prevent losing touch with him - comprise current chart hits and eighties nostalgia, but the only nostalgia to be found among this noise is one for the staccato signals of constant information running through a connecting modem. The cover sleeve postulates that the consequential objection to the allegedly effortless adulthood snugly running along preset paths like driving home for Christmas must be the autoaggressive destruction of musical production, tonal hashimoto, mincing the signal through a tube screamer and slicing up audio renders with the cursor’s sharpened edge. You’re listening to the graveyard of pop, so better turn it off, Sergej, unless you ain’t afraid of no ghost. Fee still is on quick dial on the grimy wireless landline receiver. “Mom, can you stay on the phone until dad comes back?”
Michael is secretly grateful for the pretext of intercontinental rates when he cuts short the call between Sergej and his mom on his return. He snaps at his son too harshly, Michael realizes immediately. Sergej whiningly defends himself and pulls his father into the kitchen to show him fingertip traces in the flour dust on the counter. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have let you alone.” That’s not the point. “That’s not the point, dad!” Sergej is insistent. “Can you please call somebody about the ghosts?” Michael pauses, blankly, thinking. “We can’t afford a medium right now.” His son looks at him pleadingly. “But I’ll tell you what we can do. Do you know lemon traps?” He doesn’t. “Forget garlic and all of that crap, if there’s one thing that spirits do not tolerate, it’s electric tension. You’ve gone over voltage and that stuff in school, right?” Sergej is visibly dubious about his father’s expertise. “We built a circuit last year. But garlic’s for vampires, dad.” Keep on, he’s gonna go for it. “A lemon trap is like a mousetrap for spirits. And the beauty of it is, that” finger’s crossed that there’s a lemon left in the fridge “we need only four things. There you go. One.” Nails. Let’s hope they’re galvanized, whatever that means. Sergej follows his father into the bedroom, the toolbox is kept under the bed. “Two. Watch out, pack’s open.” Sergej strokes the fruit’s waxy surface. “Three.” Wire. “Why do ghosts hate voltage?” “The human brain runs on electricity. Every thought that goes through your brain is electric. But it’s actually not only electricity. There is another element that what’s going on inside your head is made of. And - this is a theory - this other element remains after people die. So when the brain dies and its electricity subsides, this other substance gravitates towards other direct currents of low voltage, like other brains or,” “Or batteries!” “Right. Let’s see if I have some pennies.” “There’s also a pack of batteries in the cutlery drawer.” “How about we try both.” Michael’s phone vibrates with the confirmation of his labor contract. He smiles looking at the three pennies from his wallet. “Look.” Sergej reaches out to grab the lemon from his hand. “Wait, I want you to look first, then you can do it yourself. Penny. Nail.” Sergej is winding a piece of wire serpentine between his fingers. “Hey, I need you to pay attention. Penny, nail, and then you connect the two with the wire.” The phone purrs on the counter. Dear Michael, \n welcome to the team of Freddy F. We are happy to offer you your very first work assignment \n Delivery Job (sic) \n March 27th, 07:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m \n 1089 Broadway \n Brooklyn, NY11221 \n Click to Confirm \n You have not yet used your option to reject an offer. “We need another one for my room. Do we still have lemons?” Eleven i.e. twenty-three hours is late. Past Sergej’s bedtime. Toothbrush. “Dad, we’re out of lemons!” Who knows though what the next offer’ll be. Could be a night shift, who knows. Who knows? “Daaad!” “Jesus! Just take another fruit!” “But it needs to be a lemon!” He’s gonna be fine, he’s old enough and 23 isn’t that late after all. They’ll shift their rhythm. Four hours, he’ll call to get him to brush his teeth. Hide the sweets. Confirm. Good boy. “Sorry, Serge. What’s up?” “It needs to be a lemon.” His son looks at him with big eyes. “Take something sour, that’ll do. Take the sour gums. See if we can fit the metal in.”
The deal is lights out at ten sharp. He’s never gonna know. Yes he is, he’s going to feel every bulb getting home. Sergej will limit lighting to the ambient-temperate halogen bulb of the clamp lamp. The air in the apartment is thick as a side dish to the butter-beaded eggs and beans of the incomplete English breakfast they are having on the couch. They’ve chewed tasteless the humane coziness you only notice briefly when you get home. The windows are shut against the heavy rain that ruined this year’s inaugural beach day that Michael had planned for them. The point of view on the television screen wanders with simulated first-person tedium. “Dad, how much money do we have?” Can it be innocent interest prompting the question? Or is Sergej onto something, given the absence even of factory farmed pork belly on his plate. “You shouldn’t worry about that, we have enough money. Relatively speaking. And daddy has another job now.” “Papa, I’m not four.” “Right. Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about money.” “Can I prepare myself another egg?” “Finish that one and add another one for me.” Three eggs, that’s a dollar for the child’s sunny-side-ups alone. Better not get the organic ones next time, not the ones sparing the male chicks, whose existence has only been constituted by the labels advertising their survival in the first place. “I have twenty six dollar something. But I think there’s more than five-hundred in my account at home. Euros.” He is onto something. “That’s very kind of you. We’re fine though. You should keep that for yourself. Listen, if you want to support me, can I rely on you tonight?” “Sure.”
The lands of bank holiday reside on a possible world with a twenty-three hour rotation period, making the diurnal cycle feel almost natural but not quite. The resulting continual shift of in-game daylight favors none of the earth’s 38 time zones, however, the distribution of mirror sites does, as pacific pings show. As Sergej fries the last two of the twelve-pack of eggs, virtual rays are tracing the projections of his towering superstore against the opposite walls. Before long daylight won’t matter to them on street level, anyway, as players keep piling their battle-earned building supplies into three-digit stories above. Today, Michael reads on a second screen, one of the faction’s subgroups are burning a player at the stake. She was running across the roofs with a flamethrower burning penthouses and top floors. Her status message reads: “I am the DIN 18531 angel avenging the damp and the musty of downstairs”. They can’t really - although what does really mean in this context - burn the player’s character, they can only make an effigy for burning, just as they have been creating objects increasingly challenging to imagine. “Hallo.” The voice of a German-speaking child catches Michael off guard. Since his emigration, his mother tongue is largely reserved for Sergej, and has been evolving in the insular circumstances of father-son communication, like a quaint endemic species. “Is Sergej at home?” It’s the art collective’s offspring. “How nice of you to come by.” Michael is falling back on corny parent-talk from the fifties. Like those Austrian kidnap victims that escape from captivity as people from the past, with manners that seem to predate their imprisonment by decades, as if for the lack of live examples they deduced them from the post-war architecture, from the decommissioned furniture in their basement cells. “I don’t have him in my friend’s list.” “Yeah, he doesn’t have his own account yet. But it’s nice that you come by. I used to do that, too, when I was your age.” If the kid could only see Michael’s hoodie, his base cap. “Is Sergej home?” “I’ll get him for you.” Michael finds his son in the kitchen corner, eggs uncracked on the counter. He is intensely studying something thumb-sized next to the fridge, copper, black, and silvery, oozing sperm-like on the hardwood. “Don’t touch that!” and pulls Sergej away gruffly. “Is that a ghost?” “No.” That’ll never come out. “Why don’t you go sit down, there’s that artsy kid for you. I’ll do the eggs.”
When he comes back into the living room, eggs sizzling, battery still oozing but swept under the fridge, Sergej is already on his way to the stake. “Where’s your friend?” “He couldn’t go further for some reason.” “Where are you going?” “There’s a fire on one of the roofs.” “Serge, I don’t want you to go there. Your friend probably got stuck because they put an age fence around it.” “Come on! It’s not like I haven’t seen it before!” “Sad enough, but I do not like the crowd that goes to these kinds of functions. We can build our own fire.” “Not the same,” he grumbles, but he needs to switch the controller for cutlery to broach the runny yolk. “Dad, what’s your position on me getting a job?” There’s road rage outside the window. Nobody takes the subway anymore. “What’s my position? Well, my position remains the same, that you shouldn’t have to worry about money. However, if we’re talking about some kind of get-a-fiver-for-a-cut-lawn-deal, I’m sure we can find a mutually profitable agreement.” Car doors slam and the voices get louder. “Not exactly. Paul,” (artsy kid) “‘s mom and her group are making a residency,” must’ve picked up that word from his little friend “and they collect old models from old games and integrate,” that one, too, although he is indeed articulate for his age “them into bluecity. And Paul said, they are looking for a research assistant that helps them collect models. And I told them that we could use the money and that we have loads of old games.” Sounds of an escalating shoving bout on the street. Why is Michael not happy? Why is he increasingly tense and annoyed these days? Michael bounces up and ejects himself halfway out the window. “Shut the fuck up! Shut up or I’ll call the cops!” Who cares if Sergej told his friend about their money problems, what’s it to him? The cockfighters disperse, swaggering back into their cars for a deep sip from their double shot thermos mugs. “Please Dad! You always wanted to show me those games, anyway.” “Let’s talk to his mom, I’m sure we can figure something out.”