sheet of the rice paper, which felt almost as liquid as raw silk under his fingers. Once he had loved paper and the stores which stocked all the rare and exotic kinds: thick sheets with real butterfly wings or petals in them or sheets flecked with gold leaf or strands of metallic fiber, and innumerable others—marbleized or textured like morocco leather or made to look like stone or fabric or pressed flowers. In his college days, he would make envelopes out of such papers or use scraps to make collages and mobiles. One of his first boyfriends, a Japanese exchange student named Kai, had taught him how to make origami cranes and pandas and poppies. With the maturing of computer graphics and the loss of his free time to the magazine, all that had changed. When was the last time he had even drawn something freehand, on real paper?
There was an instruction booklet with the artist’s kit, but it was half in Chinese and half in confused English—in this light too difficult to read, anyway, so he plunged in, grinding ink into the little porcelain tray with the stone, adding a dollop of water from the little porcelain cup, and dipping the largest of horse-hair brushes into the mixture. His hand traced loops and swirls above the paper, but he was afraid to touch its virginal surface. What was he trying to draw, anyway—that backbone of stone across the valley, fading into the indigo-stained night falling down from the heavens? Trying to look out the windows and down at the paper at the same time, he made a few tentative strokes, but they smeared and ran in very inartistic ways, and he decided that he’d lost all his talent in this digital age. He looked down at the soiled, defaced rice-paper, sighed, and crumpled the sheet in his hands before throwing it into the stove.
When he was a boy, when you still had to use up your Tooth Fairy quarters at an arcade to play most video games, he’d spent a lot of time guiding little pixilated creatures through primeval eight-bit landscapes while tinny synthesized music and sound effects accompanied the creatures’ propagation, their adventures, and their inevitable demise. His favorite game involved an “avatar” in the form of a blocky figure in a judo costume (you could choose its color, sex, and hairstyle) who had to pass through several levels or “lives” of game-play, complete with all manner of dangers in the form of monsters and henchmen, and many “treasures” which you had to collect, before supposedly reaching the hidden chamber of warrior-heroes at the very end, where—it was said—one achieved perhaps not enlightenment, but at least unending free plays. No one he knew had ever reached this ultimate goal, and later, when he had the game on his first Atari, he always got very close to accumulating the requisite number of points represented by one’s hoard of icons, but never close enough before his avatar was beaten to death with a studded club or beheaded with a scimitar. (Always accompanied by the sickening sound a robot might make going down a drain.) Eventually, as with most computer games, he had given up and gone on to other challenges. Downtimes at work, he’d tried playing Internet games with competitors across the globe, like everyone else in the office, but found all that simulated camaraderie almost too intimate, and like any good pacifist hated bearing even virtual arms. Self-defense was different. Recently his favorite old game had been ported to Apple and in a moment of childhood nostalgia not long after Tsu-Chi had left, he had downloaded it onto his laptop, eager to play again.
Months later, he had still not tried it out, but tonight, his first in the cabin, he would.
There were two small bedrooms with bunks in the cabin, but he knew he’d be more comfortable on the futon Leia kept here than on those stiff mattresses, so he dragged it out to the main room and unrolled it not far from the woodstove, where he could feel the heat better and watch the flames behind the smoky glass window. He was feeling a little drowsy already as he booted up the white iBook and cradled it his lap.
“Greetings, my friend,” the tiny martial artist announced over the laptop’s speakers. “Would you honor me by playing?” The figure executed a swift bow, and he was relieved to see that there had not been much attempt to update the game; even though the graphics were sharper and perhaps more colorful than he remembered, the creators had retained much of the jerky movement and ticky-tocky music of this ancient computer game. Suddenly, it was as if he had stepped back twenty-five years into the past, and for the first time in many months he felt genuinely happy, happy as a ten-year-old boy with a sock full of quarters in a cacophonous video arcade.
The first thing he was requested to do was type in his name.
In the mornings, he would go for short forays into the woods. Just a few hundred yards from the porch of the cabin there was a rocky outcropping where one could gaze far out over the mountains and valleys and foothills, where one could almost make out the Prudential and Hancock towers of the Boston skyline far, far in the distance, and much nearer, count the peaks from Mount Washington on down. His first morning, after a long night on his laptop and little sleep, he was amazed to see how brilliantly detailed the world appeared, how it consisted of uncountable pixels in a limitless expanse, how expertly rendered were the intricacies of every pine-needle and vein of quartz, and how the motions of clouds and branches were so cleverly executed that there was no noticeable aliasing even when the wind picked up. Every bitmap was of photographic resolution, with no loss through compression, every ray-traced object modeled with scientific care, every frame interpolated with finesse; and the enhanced surround sound accurately captured the whistling of the wind through the pines as well as the occasional cry of a crow or yelp of a distant coyote. Reflection! Refraction! Absorption! The illusion of light on the surfaces of the world was overwhelming! How many layers in Photoshop, how much Java code or Shockwave trickery would such a creation take, how many terabytes of memory would be necessary to emulate this on the mother of all network servers? With his head full of such thoughts gone haywire, he cast a pebble down the cliff-edge and whistled what he could remember of some pastoral allegro—or maybe it was closer to the Pacman theme. Life was ludicrous, wasn’t it?
A few similar mornings later. Farther up the slope, in a clearing in the woods, he lay on his back in the snow, watching the swift motion of cirrostratus clouds across the sky. Such clouds do not look so distinct in shape or outline, but hazy as images on a doctor’s radiograph, and the cold felt like a warning. There was a gnawing ache in his side. He tried to imagine what it was like to be dead, forgotten, to lie this way forever. Long enough and still enough for deer or moose to come lick his face, for the snow to cover him, for the night to fall again and again until spring came, the snow melted—and he had simply disappeared. Yes, that was the way to go: to melt away, to dissolve into nothingness. Or like an evaporation into thin air. How comforting, how peaceful, no effort involved. Yes, he could welcome that, he’d go quietly like this.
His cellphone was ringing. Out of habit, he had stuffed it in the inner pocket of his parka. It was Leia, calling from the office in Harvard Square. “Wow, the reception’s not so bad,” she said. “I guess all those ugly new towers everywhere serve some sort of purpose.”
“Please,” he said, “I was about to achieve Nirvana.”
“It is beautiful up there, isn’t it? Are you sure you’re all right? Not too lonely? I’d be going crazy. I am going crazy here, with this new regime. Want me to check your email for you? Anything to avoid my own work.”
“Let the spam pile up. What would you say if I said I wasn’t coming back?”
“I’d say we can’t afford to lose another illustrator slash graphic designer slash CAD expert. The kids these days cost too much to take on, they want every perk, that’s why they’re running us old bogeys into the ground. God, I hate this infant who yanks my chain now.
Mumblety-peg.” At least, that was what it sounded like she said.
“I’m losing you, you’re starting to cut out. How ’bout we talk another time? I have some clouds to watch.”
“Glad you’re having a good time while I’m in Hell. Mummichog. Didn’t you know I called just to complain?”
&nbs
p; It would be easy to slip into boredom, which is why he had brought so many distractions with him, including new Best of Albinoni and Best of Pachebel CDs, a favorite Hesse novel or two, and old manuals of Zen he’d always meant to reread and really understand this time, instead of pretending to: Zen and the Art of Archery, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, all the Zen Greatest Hits. But the truth was he didn’t feel like reading or puzzling over koans; the exertion was too much; it was easier to stare into his laptop and follow his miniscule kickboxer from one plane of existence to another—though after a while, the sampled kotos and gongs proved too much, and he had to lower the audio. That was better, just the incessant wailing of the wind outside and the slow dissolution of the embers within, and the figure dancing across his screen, pursued by histrionic dragons and samurai. Hours passed rapidly as he accumulated his treasures (goblets, scepters, swords, rings, coins—nothing particularly anti-materialistic or spiritual about that!) and neared the sixth and penultimate level. His avatar persevered, heroically, defying death, night after night. “Save game,” and he at last
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