Sorry Please Thank You (7 page)

Janine and I stand and watch for what feels like a very long time, enjoying the mix of hot and cold air here at the boundary of the store, glad to be on the inside.

1

It’s a device. A device like any other. It takes in inputs and puts out outputs.

2

Acceptable inputs include: wishes, desires, thoughts, or ideas.

3

You have up to forty-eight characters, including spaces, so it’s important to be honest with yourself. Punctuation counts, too.

4

Be careful of sentence fragments. Stay away from vagueness. Avoid ambiguity. Be clear. Be clear with your intentions.

5

It’s like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.

6

You are wondering: how does your desire get projected out into the world?

7

It is a kind of translation device. You translate the contents of your mind into words and then input them into the machine. The machine accepts those words and translates them into effects in the physical world.

8

When you ordered this thing, you thought you would use it for good. Everyone thinks that at first. It’s harder than you thought it was. For one thing, what does it mean to do something for good? Do you know? Are you the best person to judge that?

9

Figure out what you want. Be honest. Put it into words.

10

Is language all about desire? Is desire all about loss? Would we ever need to say anything if we never lost anything? Is everything we ever say just another way to express: I will lose this, I will lose all of this. I will lose you?

11

Be specific. If you want an apple, will any apple do? Or will only a certain apple do? That apple, there, right in front of you, looking delicious. Is that what you want?

12

Is what you want to obtain a noun? Or is your objective to verb an object? If you want to verb this object, how would you like to verb this object?

13

There are objects you may desire but cannot explain. There are objects that are not nouns, there are actions that are not verbs. There are things we want that exist at the edge of the forest, at the rim of the ocean, just over the hill, just out of sight.

14

Beware of unintended consequences. Don’t mess with that button until you feel comfortable with the device, its quirks and limitations. Cause and effect are tricky. Don’t like what’s happening? Does it not seem correct? Before you say it’s not correct, here is a question: what is correct? Correct assumes there is some universal registrar, some recorder of your infinitesimal, momentary desires. Correct assumes that there is some perfect mind, speaking some ideal language, into some infallible translator. A perfect three-way dictionary: mind to word to world.

15

You want sex.

16

You want to be a good person.

17

Imagine you are in a swimming pool.

18

You are lying on the surface of the pool, faceup, ears half in and half out of the water. If you are doing this right,
you can hear the world below, the world above, and the inside of your head. You can hear all three worlds, the nether, the air, the boundary, like mountaintop radio stations, broadcasts cutting in and out, static, and secret, and fragments that sound like the truth.

19

Something is bumping into you from down below. What is it? Try to translate the subsonic whale moans, the floating, slippery intuitions into actual words, words spoken out into the dry half of the world. A self-translation, from your private underwater language. Bring it up, expose it to the oxygen and light. The unrefracted desire.

20

The problem with unintended consequences isn’t with the consequences, it’s with the unintended. Just because you didn’t intend for something to happen doesn’t mean you didn’t want it to.

21

Place your thumbs on either side of the device and concentrate.

Hold steady.

Good.

Just a second more.

Thank you.

22

The following is a list of all of the momentary urges that popped into your head in the last sixty seconds:

• You Know Who (at the office): one time, one afternoon, in your car maybe, or the unisex bathroom on 4
  
• Large orange soda in a Styrofoam cup, a little crushed ice, a straw, the kind with a bendy elbow
  
• Go for a swim (sounds nice)
  
• To remember the name of that one song, oh it’s killing you
  
• To be two inches taller
  
• That new woman on 5
  
• A cigarette
  
• To quit smoking
  
• Head to stop pounding
  
• Hair to grow back
  
• Or at least stop receding
  
• That one who always wears that skirt, on 7 (in Marketing)
  
• A cigarette
  
• A hamburger
  
• No, a cheeseburger
  
• To be a better husband
  
• To be the world’s greatest father
  
• A cheeseburger, then a cigarette
  
• To start over
  

23

Look again at what you said you wanted. Any vagueness or ambiguity in there? No? Is it possible the problem isn’t that your words are vague? Is it possible that you are?

24

Let’s be honest. What you really want to know is, how powerful is your will vis-à-vis the will of others with whom you come in contact? Others whose will may incidentally conflict with the effects you wish to bring about in the world. Others who seek to use their devices in order to directly oppose your will, as manifested in the world through your device. You want to know if you can make people do things against their will.

25

Here’s the thing: that’s not the point. The point is that it’s a test. It’s a test! Of course it’s a test. You should not be surprised. The point is this: What does it say about you? What do you use it for? You know you should use it to help other people.

26

It will never do exactly what you want it to do.

You will never do exactly what it wants you to do.

27

This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?

28

One more time, please. Place your thumbs on either side of the device and concentrate:

• That new woman on 5
  
• A cigarette
  
• To start over again
  
• To go back to the first day of college
  
• To go back to the first day of high school
  
• That one trip to the lake, all four of you
  
• To be a decent person again
  
• To feel like a decent person
  
• To own a speedboat
  

29

You have been wanting all your life.

30

• To go nowhere in particular
  
• To go to Europe
  

31

You started as an infant.

32

You started life crying. Learned to talk so you could communicate your wants more effectively.

33

• To go to Alsace-Lorraine, wherever that is.
  
• (Page 138 in your eighth-grade French book.)
  

34

• Je vais à la plage
  
• Tu vas à la plage
  
• Il/elle/on va à la plage
  

35

You aren’t going to get what you want. Not exactly. Not ever.

36

• Nous allons, vous allez, ils/elles vont à la plage
  
• Je voudrais aller à la plage, à la montagne, à la campagne, à la charcuterie. Je voudrais aller.
  

37

Even when you do get it, once you get it, you don’t want it anymore.

38

• To be a better man
  
• To be a better husband
  
• To quit smoking
  
• A cigarette
  

39

You don’t want this device. It will never do exactly what you want it to do. You will never do exactly what it wants you to do. You will never do exactly what you want
you
to do.

40

A life without unfulfilled desire is not what you want. A life without unfulfilled desire is a life without desire. The beach, you say. You want to go to the beach? Is that really
what you want? The beach. The pool. The library. You want to go to the butcher, the baker, the supermarket. You want to go to the mountains and swim with friends in the lake. To want, in the infinitive form. To want, conjugated: I want, you want, he, she, one wants, we want, you all want, they want. Have you ever thought about not wanting, just for a second? Have you ever thought about putting a question into this device, about what would happen if you asked about the world, instead of just asking for it? Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am? What do you think you have in your hands? Why would you think you have any idea of what you want? You’ve had thirty-seven years to get it right, thirty-seven years with the device at your disposal, just waiting, ready, willing, and most nights you still go to bed confused, angry at yourself. When are you going to start considering the possibility that you are exactly who you want to be?

I could definitely use a whole chicken right now. But I keep it to myself. I don’t want to alarm anyone in the group. They’re all busy fighting demon dogs. These guys are literally killing themselves for what? Fifty points a dog is what. It breaks my heart. When I think of everything the group has been through together, the early days grinding it out in the coin farms, to where we are now, I get a little blue in the aura, I do.

I can still remember the morning I found Fjoork in that wooded area near the Portal of Start. He was just a teenager then, nothing on his back but a thin piece of leather armor, standing there like he’d been waiting since time immemorial. Like if I hadn’t come along, he might have been waiting there forever.

I’ll never forget what he said to me, there at the place where the road splits off into three paths.

One leading into the forest.

A second path across the great river and into the valley.

The third toward the north, up into the foothills and over the mountain pass, on the other side of which, as told in legend, lies the Eternal Coast of Pause.

And then Fjoork, all of three foot six, turns to me like he’s known me all my life and says, without a hint of emotion

The “shall” is what got me. I still love it when Fjoork goes all shall on me. To have someone believe in me like that. I was what, twenty-two? And here was this sweet little guy all noble with his
I Shall Follow You,
as if I were someone, as if he
knew
I was destined for something good.

And now to see Fjoork like this, it just kills me, just makes me wish I’d made better choices, makes me wish I could take him to get an ice cream and wash off all that blood.

Trin and Byr are out in front of him, casting Small Area Fire over and over again. They aren’t going to be able to keep that up for long, but they’ll drain everything they have trying. That’s how we are. We stuck together when everyone said we were all wrong for this quest, that we were a team built for flat-ground battles, that we’d never make it this far north, this close to the place without pixels.

There were growing pains, for sure. We had to learn everyone’s strengths and styles and weaknesses, had to learn to stop getting in the way of one another’s semicircles of damage. More than once I got thwacked to the tune of
2d6 by someone’s +1 Staff. There were days when it just seemed like the world was nothing but fields and fields of blue demon dogs, each one needing three stabs before it would disintegrate into a pile of sulfurous ash. So gross. Not to mention brutal on Trin’s allergies. We learned and improved, and there was a point, not long ago, when it felt like we’d been through just about everything there was to go through.

And then word spread: an uncharted land to the west. An entirely new continent had opened up.

That’s when things started to get bad.

Fjoork said, We Must Go! It Is Our Destiny!

Trin and Byr suggested marshaling resources.

Rostejn, being Rostejn, said to follow the action.

That made it two against two.

And I said, what are you all looking at?

Then my POV shifted.

And that’s when I realized everyone was looking right at me.

As in:
We Shall Follow You.

You. As in, me.

Me. As in, the Hero.

It all made sense after that. The odd feeling I’d always had, some kind of fixed radius around my position. If I moved left, the group moved left. Actually, if I moved left, the whole battlefield moved left. No matter what I did, I always seemed to find myself in the center of the action. Here. I am Here.