The incessant tapping of fingers on keyboards was making Milena cuckoo. It was intern season, and the office was lousy with college brats and their never-ending questions, always popping up randomly, skeevishly, with too tight collars, and giant eyeballs, running for coffee as if anyone was going to drink the sewage from the place round the corner, pawing through the sample packets like adopted hyenas.
Milena preferred the lab. It was quiet, and she wasn’t really supposed to be in there, but nobody would tell her not to. When Milena signed up for the job, she thought it would be a lot more acid titrations and a lot less spreadsheets. Still, the pay and the hours were the envy of the labor force. The lab had shiny, fluorescent lights, but the shadows prevailed anyway. The techs moved around rhythmically like a well composed symphony, pouring this, pressing buttons, measuring out spoonfuls of time, all in silence and goggle-eyed. Milena balanced her laptop on one of the sinks. Holden’s writing turned out more interesting than she’d given it credit for.
The Game, so out and so very public. Anybody could get their claws into it. Vaguely put, 1 goes seeking, a treasure hunt of sorts. But there’s no prize, it’s all journey and no destination. It can drive a good man crazy and a bad man helpless. Who runs the Game? Anyone who wants to. The first arena was an old church. How very fitting. It was somewhere beyond the woods and took a lot of trekking. The sky here was white and marred by dark branches that caught sunlight in their arms. I imagine church music, loud, yawning organs filling the sound barrier with choral glows. Reality is boring, it is always asking to be added to, for the gaps to be filled with fantasy and pebbles. To me, a subway ride is like traveling through a dystopian diamond mine and when there are flowers in the pavement, I think about the fairies who live in it. This was a place where you couldn’t speak above a whisper. Who knows what might hear you. The walls and glass shimmered with radiance, warping in the cold air. It was colder in there than it was outside. People have knelt here and there, sang and thrown pennies into copper dishes. Magnificent, yet terrible.
Boxer knew exactly what church he was talking about. It was right outside city limits, abandoned a long time ago, and the woods had claimed it. Once upon a time, it was a major religious outpost, and now it was three stories away from an archaeological dig. The marble was crumbling as veiny green thorns pushed their way through it, eating up the fountains, littered with cigarette butts. It had become a hotspot for teenage make out sessions and dead bodies of hikers.
Buried in the tangles of grape vines and dusty books and dead cockroaches, they found the log. It was mostly illegible, ink washed away by the rains and howling winds, but you could make out a word here and there, of the people that came before. Another URL, this time to some kind of backwater forum, closed.
I think it’s silly at first, but they say there’s a prize for deciphering it. A prize that hinted of the big thing incoming. Not knowing exactly what the prize is, I suppose, the point of it. It was a very blind game of trust. The girl smiled a little as her finger pointed to the words at the bottom of the page, printed in all caps: FAITH IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO STAND ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF UNCERTAINTY. The man sniffed a little. That’s kind of hard when you’ve been out of work for six months. Fridges all across town are empty.
All links clickable.
Certainly, and they were at the next thing, all stars in eyes, palms up. I don’t know if it’s justice or not, but it’s poetic for sure. In the dim fogginess, somebody’s head emerges but all I can see are big, thick curls and heavily lidded eyes. Ze smiled and opened zir arms like a wicked Prometheus with hallows of divinity and scarred thoughts rippling out over oceans of tombs. It was very cold, depths of polar fire. I know zir. The dark curls, the lean arms and throat buzzing. Downtown, there was a jazz bar. Ze sings there. That’s all I know. When information is little, most of pride happens while waiting. I go down there every night, right after work. The streets are ordered, ruled as usual and the ground under me gets warm. I see zir at the mic. The spotlight made an electric fog around zir. Ze had a wide, wide grin, like the edge of a tire on a sunburnt road. The singing, and this is where I Fall. Where everything was slurried. Raspy, but haunting. The otherworldliness was magnetic. I can’t make out what zir is singing. The words drifted by like a lullaby ocean as ze moved, swaying under aquamarine waves. Ze was tall, hair Falling over zir shoulders in chaos, shot through the silvers of zir shirt. After ze is done, we go off to the side, backstage where the audience can’t see us and we talk. We’re old friends, only separated by the human concept of lifetimes. I’ve seen zir everywhere, in every face and the cosmic frosting of the burning night sky, the spiral edges of the galaxy and under the thrush where the jade frogs sing. We’ve been waiting for each other for a while now. Ze knew we’ve gotten lazy. When everything’s a click away, that tended to happen. Learn the chase, relish in the act of finding out. I come to find out that ze is a hard believer in completing lessons, otherwise there’s no point. Edit: the amount of Plutonian things we do for the sake of the lesson will mount up quickly, before we can even scan the uncrossed lines, the chalky, invisible ones. Information, the most powerful thing in our observable universe, isn’t obtained easily. We have to spit blood and dust and river water. Ze grinned at us patiently. This is where it started. Welcome to the Consone. We’re a mix between a think tank and a task force. But you can’t just stroll into a think tank. You gotta do some tasks, figure out what you want from this. But you came across this for a reason, you’re impatient. This is a place for the impatient, where the purple tape gets shived. Thank goodness. We’ve been waiting for you. But only if you can keep a secret. Turns out, I can’t.
“You know, I knew you were gonna be onboard immediately,” said Milena. “God what a burden we carry, being the two fun ones of the group.”
“It’s true,” said Boxer sagely as he emptied another box of donations onto the dry, crunchy grass. It was mostly clothes, board games, and toys that nobody wanted to play with. The piles of donations looked like miserable little refugees spread all over the lawn.
Milena and Boxer were grade school friends. They both went to school way up north in the boroughs, and Milena was there when he got the nickname. An early sprout, he was the tallest and biggest in the schoolyard, and so usually charged with breaking up fights. He was a big believer in the power of the fist. Both he and Milena fled east after school, Milena to Princeton, and Boxer on tour with some garage band. One soft, rainy, blue evening at a park concert a few years ago, Milena was shocked to see Boxer up on the stage, crooning lullabies at the crowd, adorned with raindrops glittering like so many eyes in the masses. Poor thing wanted to be a rock legend, but was blessed with an angelic singing voice and could only score closing acts meant to wind down already tearful audiences who lusted for the bygone era of blues ballads. And church choirs. Lots and lots of church choirs.
The two of them went and got milkshakes, blueberry marshmallow for her, mocha for him, laced with ecstasy Boxer shared graciously, and spent the night gabbing away about old times, and the assholes at Princeton, and the assholes that played guitar, loads of roadhead, synthesizing bacteria cultures, two-hundred percent error margins, cold and glittering Alaska nights, the sleaziest drug dealers in town, and that goddamn play in senior year where they had to kiss in front of the entire school, dressed up as founding fathers at that. The pictures still floated through cyberspace like garden weeds that just can’t be chopped down.
Itching to get into trouble, Milena swallowed her suspicions and parents’ warnings to never get involved with musician types, and went to a civil disobedience meeting Boxer invited her to in the basement of a chuch.. They spent the entire time spray painting obscenities on the water tower, which was fun and useless, but everyone except Boxer were knuckleheads. Especially the weirdo doctor guy who was white but went by the name of some Chinese villain. So Milena took Boxer and they went off to do their own thing, which involved stink bombing the attorney general’s office.
The Roaches didn’t come by haplessly. They were brought into being sweaty brick by sweaty brick, masquerading as a man with a reason. Milena had been an adrenaline junkie since day one, and they brought Idgie in to use her trust fund as a personal dipping pool, and with Boxer’s computer genius, they made quite the team. Boxer was the face of the movement, the pioneer of a new era, where the power was in the hands of the people, where if you didn’t like it, expect a leak of your emails. Idgie was so lax with her money it was no fun trying to swindle her out of it, a baby with a knife could do it. The challenge came with keeping her upright long enough to get a use out of it. When reading through several message requests, all pleading to join, Milena came across Dormouse’s, who was an ex-vet, and therefore tasked with the job of Idgie’s handler, a job he was terrible at. Not even Beowulf himself could keep Idgie from her benders, from lashing out and getting arrested and barfighting. Just let it go, became their policy. Truth was, Milena was as happy tipping over cows as she was drinking milkshakes in a bowling alley, it was glorious just to be with them, to finally belong to something, who cared what the because was.
“I can’t believe we didn’t think of this sooner. You know that blog of Holden’s is such a goldmine. We really need to find the rest of it,” said Boxer, shaking out dead moths from a gray trench coat. They fluttered to the ground like flakes of dandruff.
“Well let’s hope this works.”
It wasn’t about the drive, or the donations themselves, or the sales, or volunteer work, nothing of the sort. It was about who would come to the thing. What is a church but a vehicle? This once upon a time church was called Mary of Something Something. Even if the log was gone, surely people who scrouged through it, would come by? The Game, and their Players. Of course neither Milena nor Boxer paid a scrap of attention to the siren red warning scribbled in plain sight. If there was trouble around, they were the first to sniff out, like uselessly tuned bloodhounds, or starting fights because you’re bored. The trickles of crowds anyhow looked like roaches and sewer dregs. Too much hair on faces, and not enough on heads. They pawed through the goods with sharp, little fingers. Every so often, like hunks of chocolate in rocky road ice cream, a head would raise suspicions. They quizzed them, but most were so skittish they would rather find a good meal somewhere else. An older women, with hair like a chess piece, remembered some hullabaloo about a board game tournament in the park. There was only one real park in the city, and it served as a petri dish of concerts and infections and dog chases. Right in the grease puddles, huddled over concrete benches, all dewy and corpuscular and all black ice and no sun. There are more people here than I’ve ever seen. The code was to wear white and purple. Very conspicuous, but I’ve learned the best secrets hide in plain sight like teeth in a wolf’s mouth. There were several others in the purple and white. We look like cartoon characters, stuck behind the 4th wall. No exchange is had, verbally at least. The idea is in the makings. The quest, it’s not for truth, but for whatever you make of things. Life is somewhere north of absurdism and south of nihilism. I’m quite comfortable with that. I wake up in the middle of the night many times in the subsequent weeks. I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or my brain is simply fuzzing out rust. It doesn’t feel real, it’s too unsaid. I’ve been looking for the answers, for the greatest adventure, through countless fantasy bokes and mind palace journeys, and now that it’s finally happening, I can’t help it, I’m frightened. After the tournament, I realize what they mean when they say, be careful what you wish for, it might actually happen. Why are we here? What are we playing for? Is zir flair for mystery going to get tedious? The games stretched on into the wintry afternoon. I apply and solidify my strategy. Pick a renewable energy source and stick to your guns. When something remarkable is happening to you, it’s often difficult to identify until after it’s happened. That’s my trouble with adventure, I can’t help but pick it to pieces in search of the excruciating why. Why are we so into this game when there are no clear stakes? Earn it, earn it. The hyperlink opened up a mangled webpage. I set about with cipher technologies. I apply every program I can think of. Ceaser, Enigma, substitutions, key codes, and ancient music scores. None of it threw up anything. The azure of error messages blazons my brain like cricket bats. I check the forums again. There are pale hints, of other worlds, on the upside down of things. I can’t tell if it’s the dark web or not. An inbox, some message boards, all empty. It looked all wrong and eerie. The only readable text was the quote: “in search of sanctum”. Nothing else. There was no way even to contact the other people who were given the cipher. I’m exasperated and things slip, lost, through cracks. A broken window in February. Their world is folding away from me like glass marbles bouncing on a shiny floor. I can’t stop thinking about the Gamesite. Surely it must all mean something. Life is more than a series of meaningless coincidences, unhappy accidents and atoms trying to understand themselves. The great truth? You want it? You want it badly. My brain holds nothing else. A message appeared 1 day, with a date, time and place. Curiouser and curiouser.
They went over to the precinct in Holden’s neighborhood. Holden lived in a residential area near campus and the officers there were bored and apathetic. They let them into the Evidence locker without even asking for badge numbers (“no wonder this city is riddled with crime,” observed Milena). His things were tabbed with thick, white paper tags, Sharpied words on them carefully. It was quite the mountain of things, mainly books with scribbles in them, a sticky note if lucky, and the stacks of loose sheets, notepads, with tiny, tight handwriting crisscrossing the pages like was settling into a host body.
“How much time did this man have?” complained Milena as she pulled out yet another notebook.
What wasn’t written in code or alien glyphs, were, to put it plainly, absurd garbage. Long lists about things to be washed, page after page on the mold growing in teapots, numbered streets with no directions, walls of recipes for the same three salads, just spinach and lemon, over and over again, an inventory of imaginary objects, a map of the sunset, long, tiresome diary entries about people who were watching, but the list of blog titles were all unsearchable, no matter how hard they tried. Holden had hidden his tracks well, encrypted every step he ever set foot on the internet, both dark and clear. If there was one thing paranoia was good for, it was secrets. And not a single scrap of information about that mysterious entity, ze, zir, whatever.
Milena and Boxer scoured through the Internet logs from Holden’s laptop. Various bookmarks on think tanks, corporate watchdogs, expose articles, all teeming just on the brink of a breakthrough. Most of it was public information, easily accessible without ever needing to onionize shit. The only bits of writing they found were all cryptic, all about waiting. It’s been a few weeks since the last meeting. A hauhauhauhaudibble depression has settled over me, destroying and darkening everything in its path. It’s hard to get out of bed and drag myself to work. The whole thrill of a secret comes from others knowing you have it, otherwise it’s moot. I clench my tongue so hard I bleed. I ask zir what the hell was going on and ze told me it’s simply a reaction to the excitement and adrenaline we got used to during initiation. It’s no matter at all, my psyche will adjust. As the Irishman said, a body can get used to anything, even being hung. I go down to the jazz bar night after night, and ze isn’t there.
It was like reading a book that was only prologue, that went on for pages and pages of saying almost nothing at all. The man was clearly just bored, and got tangled up in something he didn’t understand. Milena told Boxer very sternly that they were way too cool to be pottering around this bullshit. Maybe Holden was simply just a loser with a lame job and too much time, but that was his damnation, not ours, if you don’t have anything to say then just shut up, for shit’s sake!
Schizoposting 
