Forensic Songs

by Mike McCormack

  ‘I suppose so, he’s cautious; that’s the word I’d use. And that’s why I can never understand the six months he did in jail. What was that all about?’

  ‘He’s never told you?’

  ‘No, he won’t talk about it. I don’t even know how I know about it.’

  The old laughed. ‘It was nothing at all, just a stupid incident. It happened in one of the dance halls, the Galtee Mór or the Buffalo. A few lads went to battle and as the song goes … there were glasses flying and Biddies crying …’

  ‘… and Paddy was going to town.’

  ‘… Paddy was going to town, alright. London was a tough station at the time and you didn’t have to do much to draw down a custodial sentence in those days. Anyway, your father did his six months and when he got out he headed over to me in Canada. He never told you this?’

  ‘No, he never said.’

  ‘Well, don’t tell him I told you.’

  The old man stood up with his shoes in his hand. For a moment he appeared to sway as if caught between two thoughts. ‘I’ve a question for you, Mark, a request.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When I go I don’t want any praying; no prayers, I don’t hold with it any more. Can you do that for me?’

  Mark smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s a big ask. Dad is regimental, you see that yourself; he does things by the book. And mam’s a believer. You’ll have to talk to them yourself.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But you’ll do what you can?’

  ‘I’ll talk to them – that’s all I can promise.’

  ‘OK.’

  The old man nodded, satisfied that this last thing was settled. He raised his hand to say goodnight and shuffled from the room.

  When the end came, it did so with the same faltering stealth that was of a piece with the old man’s presence in the house.

  His father’s car was pulled up in front of the house when he got home that evening. Inside, he heard the unmistakeable murmur of prayer coming through the hall. In the bedroom the old man was lying back on the pillow, his eyes partially open and his upper lip drawn back from his teeth. His narrow breastbone rose and fell like the prow of a small boat. All this was as Mark had anticipated; the old man was a gasper, a man so enfeebled he barely had the strength to die. Mark’s mother was down on her knees beside the bed, her hand resting on the hump of the old man’s knee. Her head was bowed and she was passing her beads through her fingers.

  ‘The first glorious mystery, Jesus rises from the tomb.’

  His father stood with his back to the curtains, his hands clasped low on his stomach. Seeing Mark in the doorway, he threw him a defiant glare across the bed. It may have been a challenge, daring Mark to tell him he was doing something wrong here. But it may have been something else entirely. And Mark knew there was nothing generous or forgiving in his own presence at that moment. He moved back into the kitchen and sat at the table where he could hear his mother’s voice from the room.

  The next few days would be difficult, he could see them clearly. The wake and the funeral, aunts and uncles, people coming and going. His only wish was that the whole thing would be over soon and everyone gone, the house cleared. Then he would have the place to himself once more. He sat listening to his mother’s voice coming from the bedroom and when she came to the end of the decade he took out his phone to check for texts and calls.

  He was glad to see there was no one looking for him: no one at all, not a soul.

  The last time he walked this landing, Nealon had his wrists cuffed and was facing into the beginning of an eight-year sentence. That was almost two years ago and it was a different age and he was a different man. But right now that’s not what’s on his mind.

  Right now he’s wondering why he has been summoned from his cell in the middle of the night.

  If the guard accompanying him knows why, he isn’t telling him. Less than two minutes ago Nealon had been rousted from his bunk by a voice calling his name in a low bark – Come on Nealon, get up! All he could see from his bunk was the guard’s silhouette in the doorway, backlit from the landing. Now, walking two paces behind him, the guard directs Nealon down the landing while all the time whistling a continuous looping melody through his front teeth.

  Who the hell goes about their work whistling at this time of night, Nealon wonders.

  The guard steers him off the landing and into a lighted cell; he enters behind Nealon but leaves the door open.

  The cell is square and windowless, about six metres along each wall and lit overhead by a single strip of fluorescent light; two cells knocked into one, Nealon calculates. Set against one wall is a metal-frame bunk with a mattress, a pillow and a blanket folded on its end: in the middle of the room two metal tube chairs are pushed into a square, formica-topped table. These pieces have a stable, rooted aura about them, as if they have been waiting here in silence a long time. The same cannot be said for what draws Nealon’s attention to the corner of the cell – a bulky television set connected to a video-game console with a wireless controller and headset lying on the ground: beside it a large bottle of water with a small stack of clear plastic cups. In spite of the hour and his sleep-sodden mind, Nealon senses a disparity between the appliances, a disjunction of some sort. It takes him a long moment before he solves it; the game console is the most recent model but the television is a deep, lumpish contraption, a dinosaur from the dying days of tube technology. The two technologies have been yoked together across generations in a forced marriage, which is resourceful but which gives the whole set-up a shabby, provisional look.

  The guard has thrown himself onto the bed and pulled the blanket up to his chest. He continues whistling absently and Nealon realizes for the first time that this is someone he does not recognize. Two years in this prison and here is a face he cannot place. It would have been hard to miss him, Nealon marvels; the guard is huge, a good hand’s breadth over six feet and weighing probably close to twenty stone. He is now comfortably stretched out on the bunk, his bulk sunk into the soft mattress and his head settled into the deep declivity between his shoulders. With a rush of sour feeling, Nealon realizes he has taken an instant dislike to him. Something crude in him cannot resist the idea that this overfed man is marbled through with that vicious streak he has always suspected fat men prone to – their way of getting back at the world, their prissy, sullen point-scoring. It is not an original idea and Nealon is alarmed to have succumbed to it so easily. He knows enough to be wary of first impressions.

  ‘So why am I here?’

  The sound of his own voice with its gormless question takes him completely by surprise. It has blurted from him of its own volition and in the brightly lit cell it sounds absurdly comic. Three hours’ sleep does not excuse it. The guard’s face opens with a thin smirk.

  ‘Why?’ he asks with mock concern, ‘had you plans; were you going somewhere?’ He closes his eyes in silent mirth, grinning gleefully, overtaken with regard for what is the dreariest witticism in the prison community. Nealon watches as he drives his humour on with a rhythmic swinging of his beefy leg over the side of the bed. His antipathy might not be so misplaced after all.

  Nealon goes to the table and sits down; he needs to concentrate and not lose his focus in such small details. This is the twelfth of September. As far as he can tell, this date holds no personal or institutional significance; there is nothing about it that sets it apart from any other day in the routine of prison life. True, the date lies close enough to the second anniversary of his conviction but not so exactly close as to warrant this summons in the middle of the night. If there is anything Nealon knows about prison life, it is that it moves to its own accurate cycles, its own precisions. Things happen when they should and if this is happening now then this is the time for it.

  He turns the date around in his mind, considers it from every possible angle but can find no significance in it.

  As for the world outside the prison – all he knows is that today his wife is taking Cu
an, their eight-year-old son, to an appointment with the orthodontist. In an unhappy throwback to Nealon’s own childhood, Cuan has developed a mouth overcrowded with incisors, a congestion that has thrown his bite out of alignment and that already, at this early age, promises all sorts of neck and spinal discomfort later in life. Today’s appointment will decide between the options of a correctional brace or a series of extractions that will be painful but surer in the long run. The whole thing baffles Nealon. Not so much the teeth themselves, whose crooked push through his child’s face he has watched ruefully over the last two years, but the pathology inferred from them – the certainty with which something like a child’s teeth allows anyone to pronounce the future.

  How sure can anyone be about these things, he wonders; how can the future be read from a child’s mouth?

  There’s been a sudden lapse in the flow of time, a fissure into which a whole stretch of it has heedlessly dropped. Nothing else can account for the sudden, vivid presence of the woman who now sits across the table from Nealon. How he missed her entry he does not know; this is something he will have to consider later. But here she undeniably is, already seated and unbuttoning her jacket. She has drawn into the cell a miasmic fur of chill night air and Nealon senses that the temperature around her must be a full two degrees lower than the rest of the cell. With her jacket finally open she draws from it a clear CD jewel case and places it on the table; she looks at Nealon blankly.

  ‘This is what’s going to happen,’ she says without greeting. ‘This is a video game, Mr Nealon, and my request is that you play it through and critique it for me – two thousand words should suffice.’ She taps the case with the tip of her finger and Nealon senses the gesture is timed to signify that the introductory stage of the meeting is now over. He lets several beats fall before he speaks.

  ‘Have we met?’

  ‘No, Mr Nealon, we have not met.’

  ‘I thought so. I’d have remembered if we had, I’m good with faces.’

  ‘I know you are, Mr Nealon, I’ve read your file.’

  ‘Because if we are going to have this dance’ – Nealon taps the CD – ‘I would like to know who I’m taking the floor with.’

  ‘My name is Olwyn Crayn.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, now who the fuck is Olwyn Crayn?’

  Nealon’s deliberate aggression does not faze her. ‘I’m a consultant. People – businesses and corporations, mainly – come to me when they encounter certain problems or when they lack certain expertise. I consider the problem, research it in so far as I can and then I go out and find someone to solve it.’

  ‘A headhunter?’

  ‘I prefer the term human resources.’

  ‘You would. So you’ve considered and researched and come here in the middle of the night to milk my brains.’

  ‘As I’ve said, I’ve read your file.’

  Nealon senses that her indulgence is at an end. Evidently she has factored this short bout of fencing into this early part of their meeting but now it has apparently run its course and she is ready to move on. Sure enough she picks up the CD and continues.

  ‘The inlay hasn’t gone to print yet so you’re going to need some background knowledge, some broad strokes.’

  ‘Things will become clearer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d welcome that.’

  ‘I’d imagine you would.’ Her voice is a dusty monotone but for the first time something like a smile crosses her face, a fleeting, vestigial trace of some deep but determinedly hidden impulse.

  ‘Trust me, Mr Nealon.’ She holds up the CD and turns it slowly through a full rotation. ‘This is a video game, a complex, turn-based strategy game. The background scenario is a war zone, an occupied territory at the centre of which lies a prison. The game hinges on a set of demands posted by a cadre of inmates in this prison – their demands are for special category status, the right to wear their own clothes, free association with fellow prisoners and so on. The authorities, for one reason or another, refuse to meet these demands – their reasons are among the things that clarify as the game progresses. Their initial refusal opens the game and you make your first move; you attempt to force their hand by putting two of your prisoners on hunger strike – and so begins the game. From then on, winning becomes a complex, balanced calculus of gaining as many demands as you can while keeping your prisoners alive. At the same time you try to gain enough political capital to enable the prisoners further their cause in the meta-realm of constitutional politics which is outside the prison complex and above the military conflict. You bargain with ten lives, that’s your quota.’

  Nealon’s reaction is genuine; his laughter builds to a long, hacking guffaw that drives him back in his chair, his shoulders rocking. ‘Where do they get those stories from?’ he chokes.

  ‘I agree, you couldn’t make it up. Mr Nealon, I’ve chosen you because of your past and also because you have racked up the hours. Your two years here have been split between National Geographic and your game console: two years and you have a whole back catalogue of strategic games exhausted – that’s impressive.’

  Nealon shakes his head. ‘It might be impressive but it means fuck all. And this …’, he taps the CD, ‘… you expect me to believe that I’m hauled from my cell in the middle of the night to play a video game, to critique it – I don’t buy that.’

  She nods. ‘Yes, it does appear trivial and it does appear as if you’re being asked to double up on the work of the in-house testers. Because you’re right – this game has been played to destruction, all the bugs and glitches have been ironed out and it flows smoothly and without logical contradictions. None of that will concern you, your task is different.’

  ‘How different?’

  ‘Let me put it this way. Your task is exactly what the in-house testers cannot do. You have been chosen because of your background, you bring a special sensitivity to the game, a specific mindset.’

  ‘A special sensitivity – that’s a new way of putting it. And since when did Sony start contracting out critiques to prisoners?’

  She shakes her head; evidently he has missed an obvious point. Nealon scrambles to identify it.

  ‘Consider for a moment, Mr Nealon. Who do you think holds the copyright to this game?’

  ‘Who the fuck cares,’ he blurts irritably, ‘some fucking Sony subsidiary, how do I know?’

  She gives him time to dwell on his reply, time enough for him to read her stillness as a dismissal of his answer, a silent injunction that he should think deeper, reckon with other, more improbable options. Moments pass and Nealon becomes aware of a pulse building in the side of his head. One thing he is now certain of – she has done this before. No one is born with this kind of timing. Her keen sense of that uncertain instant, which allows her to close in on her adversary – these skills are hard-won and Nealon himself has a professional appreciation of them.

  ‘I’ll give you a hint,’ she continues. ‘This game is copyrighted to a new, independent, third-party studio with serious financial backing. Want to guess again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The author’s name?’

  Nealon shakes his head.

  ‘The principal game architect?’

  It takes several moments but when he finally sees it he recognizes also how she has steered him towards it. He speaks very cautiously.

  ‘You’re telling me that the author has asserted his moral right.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The transcendental first cause?’

  Olwyn Crayn smiles. ‘I’ve never heard that one but yes, if you want to call him that.’

  ‘The prime mover?’

  ‘You’re getting closer.’

  ‘Maigster Ludi himself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘P. O’Neill?’

  ‘The one and only.’

  Nealon’s tone is one of pure wonderment. ‘You wouldn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.’

  ‘The choice is yours, Mr Nealon.�
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  ‘It might be but it still doesn’t clarify what it is I’m supposed to do.’

  ‘OK, once you’ve begun the game you will recognize how the various moves make it progress; it’s turn-based, wholly intuitive. Your task is to evaluate the game against sensitivities outside those of a normal beta test. Your response will be a human one.’

  ‘Is there any other sort?’

  She ignores the taunt. ‘Your critique has nothing to do with picking out bugs and glitches. I’m asking you to assess how successfully the game engages your sympathies and on which side of the dispute those sympathies lie – with the prisoners or with the authorities. One of the things you will notice is that there has been an honest attempt to depict both sides sympathetically. You will assess how the game’s historical sources affect the player’s choices. You will assess to what degree a player’s prior moral or political convictions affect or inflect his game play. Do the historical sources affect in any way the willingness of the player to sacrifice his avatars? You will notice also that a lot of work has gone into the game’s separate environments. Specifically the prison environment; it is a very accurate rendering of the Maze. You will judge how this architecture contributes to the game’s feel and atmosphere. How coercive is it, what moods does it provoke in the player – awe, terror, or a reckless wish to destruct? Is the game successful in nurturing a player’s sense of responsibility towards his avatars? All these questions, Mr Nealon.’

  ‘More soul,’ Nealon affirms quietly, ‘the thinking gamer’s cry since the turn of the millennium, give us more soul. And this is the gaming industry’s response – licensing real-world events?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Copyrighting history?’

  ‘It’s part of the broader response. This isn’t the first time the gaming industry has licensed a real-world conflict but it is the first time it has marketed a conflict as something other than a series of combat missions or stealth attacks. This game confines itself exclusively to the more abstract realm of politics. But you know this story, you’ve only to look at yourself. The first generation of gamers are now in middle age and they want to move on from strafing aliens and clubbing zombies to something more complex. They’re asking for something beyond the racking up of numerical scores, the facile thrill of solving static block and lever puzzles. They want an immersive experience that plays to higher, more abstract values. This game is an attempt to meet that challenge.’