by Daniel Mason
After a week in Australia I have a trail of bodies pointing toward me. I’m learning now that most opponents just aren’t worthy, and that this is definitely a game of skill. Most people just aren’t willing to take these calculated risks. It’s pathetic.
The first two games I have to shoot the other player myself. One in the head, and the other in the chest during a struggle over the weapon. They were both tourists, anyway. Just fellow travellers staying in the hostel; you proposition them and then rent a cheap motel room somewhere for the game.
When the other player won’t pull the trigger, it’s cheating.
My third victim I find by hanging around the hospital, looking for sick people. I figure that sick people have less to risk, and less reason not to pull the trigger. I figure that sick people are just like me, just like Hayes. They have to be worthy opponents.
But when my third victim dies, I don’t really feel anything. The rush of the game is there, but when I’m watching him twitching and dying it’s just like watching television. It isn’t real.
The third one does the job himself, and I have to commend him for having some balls about it. I’m getting sick of the other victims cheating. He doesn’t die at first, though. His body keeps twitching and his eyeballs are rolling in their sockets. He’s blown the back of his skull off and there are brains hanging pooled in his collar, and still he won’t die.
But it’s the fifth game that I really want to tell you about.
What happens is this.
The bullet does not fire. Carrying it around in my jacket pocket with all of the other bullets must have damaged it somehow. After this, I dump all of my bullets and have to get my hands on some more. At least bullets are easier than the guns to obtain, no forms to fill out, no legal complications, no waiting for delivery.
We play the entire six chambers and neither of us dies. Here’s a way for you to play like this at home: grab a partner and sit across from each other at the table. Flip a coin to decide who goes first. Now, the first player puts their fingers to their head like it’s a gun, and they say, ‘Click.’ Second player does the same. Now you play like this until you’ve each said click three times. That’s six chambers. Nobody dies this way. At the end, you roll a dice, and whatever number comes up is the number of the chamber the bullet would have been in.
At the end of our game, we break open the chamber and there’s the bullet, sitting dead in the fourth chamber. It’s the chamber that was meant for me.
This fifth game takes place at a bar in the city. The bar closes at one in the morning, and from where I am sitting you can see the Town Hall across the street, big and brightly lit. The windows reflect the bar behind me, reflect the other few patrons, empty tables, the bartender. I search for my own reflection, but it isn’t there, like I’m a vampire. I wave to the reflection and nobody is waving in return.
A cop car pulls up along the street outside and starts harassing a group of teenagers. The bartender is collecting my empty glass and wiping down the table, and he’s staring at the cop car outside and he says to me, ‘Fuckin’ pigs.’ He’s rolling his eyes.
The bartender is maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. He’s dressed entirely in black. Black shirt, black pants, black shoes. His hair is dyed black and he sports an eyebrow ring, a pierced tongue and three rings in each ear. His fingernails are painted black. There’s a tattoo of a snake eating its own tail encircling his wrist. I give him a look and roll my eyes, too. He grins.
Then, his eyes flick to the bulge of the gun under my jacket. He pulls out a chair and sits down at my table, looking at me.
He asks me, ‘Who do you work for?’
I say, ‘Excuse me?’
The next moment he’s on top of me, wrestling me to the ground with his hands around my neck. His chair falls to the ground. There’s the sound of breaking glass. I’m dizzy and slow to react. I can feel his thumbs pressing into my throat, pushing deeper.
One of the hands gripping my throat lets go and I feel it battering my face. Then he’s reaching into my jacket and pulling loose my gun. I start coughing, and he’s sitting on top of me and pressing the gun into my ribs, and he’s muttering, ‘You fuckin’ pigs are all the same.’
I can’t speak, I’m too busy trying to draw breath.
The gun jams harder against my ribs. His face is close to mine when he asks again, ‘Who do you work for?’
I tell him nobody. I’m just a tourist.
He says, ‘Just a tourist. Pumping so many foreign dollars into our economy. Right?’
I tell him, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’
The gun jams harder and I think it’s going to leave a bruise.
He asks, ‘Do all tourists carry guns?’
I tell him I’m not a cop. He’s got me wrong.
He’s frisking me and he opens my wallet and reads my identification. He asks me, ‘If you’re not a cop, then what are you doing here? What’s the gun for?’
I start coughing again. There are spots in my vision and my tumour feels like it’s trying to burst out of my skull. He shakes me and asks the question again. When I give him an answer, I say, ‘It’s for trade.’
He says, ‘What do you trade?’
I tell him, ‘You can trade a bullet for a human life. Guns shoot people.’
That’s not good enough. He asks, ‘What kind of people?’
I shrug. ‘Anybody who’s willing. The gun is for playing Russian roulette.’
For a moment the gun pressing into me relaxes. ‘Bullshit.’ He backs off me, keeps the gun aimed in my direction, and orders me to get to my feet. ‘This way,’ he tells me, motioning with the gun.
The bartender locks the front door and turns out the light over the bar, and then he leads me out the back and down a flight of stairs at gunpoint. At the bottom of the stairs he opens a broom closet and pulls out a chair. Tied to the chair there’s a young man, gagged, wrists bound to the armrests, ankles strapped to the chair legs. A rope has been wrapped around his chest about thirty times, drawing him flat to the back of the chair. He seems dazed, possibly drugged or at least suffering a few blows to the head.
The basement is dank and dimly lit. There are beer kegs and wine racks and an industrial refrigerator. The yeasty stench of beer has soaked into the walls over years. It’s a scent that reminds me of my father.
The bartender points to the bound man and says, ‘This man is the real bartender. His name is Peter. You can call me Jack. You know, as in Jack of all trades. I like that.’ He’s grinning and standing over the bound man, and I stay to one side and watch with detached curiosity. I could maybe wrestle the gun out of his hand while he’s distracted.
I ask Jack what he’s going to do. He tells me that I’m about to play a game of Russian roulette with the real bartender. The winner can go free.
He opens the gun and empties the bullets. Fits one bullet back in the cylinder. Closes it. Spins. Hands me the pistol. Tells me that I should put the gun to my head and pull the trigger.
I’m looking at the gun, now with a second set of prints. I ask him what’s to stop me from just shooting him.
He says nothing and I put the gun to my head and pull the trigger.
Click.
With a nod to the real bartender, Jack says, ‘Now him.’
I hold the weapon to the head of the real bartender, who has begun to struggle in his seat, trying to mouth pleading words against the sock stuffed and tied into his mouth.
The gun goes off the second time.
So the real bartender is dead in his chair, which has tipped over onto the floor. I can hear the drip-drip of blood leaking through the hole in the side of his head.
Jack seems satisfied now that I’m not a cop. He’s standing there with his arms crossed, figuring this whole thing out. After a while he hands me the bullets he’s been holding, and he says, ‘Come on upstairs for a drink.’
I ask him if he’s not the real bartender, just what the fuck is going on here?
At first he
doesn’t answer me. He’s sitting across a table from me, and he says, ‘It’s all about subversion. When I close this place up for the night, I clear out the register and nobody knows any better, these customers are handing me their money and I’m spitting in their glasses and they don’t know any better at all. They don’t realise they’ve become a part of my plans.’
‘Why don’t you just hold this place up at gunpoint?’ I ask him. ‘Wouldn’t that be easier?’
He shrugs. ‘That isn’t really the point. This is about infiltrating their system. Striking from within.’
Next thing I know he’s telling me about socialism. It’s like a sales pitch. He’s like a born-again Christian, but with a different spiel. It’s like: Have you let Marx into your life? Have you let Karl into your soul, given yourself unto him?
It’s like, do you really believe this shit?
It’s like, hook. Line. And sinker.
He’s telling me: ‘When the workers own the means of production, production is for the common good. It’s not about profit, which benefits only a rich minority of capitalists. It’s about free enterprise, you understand? Bringing everybody to a level playing field.’
He says, ‘We have to bring about a revolution. Right now we’re in the first stage, bringing together a workers’ movement. After this the movement must rise to political power and overcome the capitalists. The workers need to overcome their own preconceptions of the working class. They need to unite, and rise up.’
He’s saying, ‘You see these clothes?’ He’s tugging at the collar of his shirt. ‘I buy these from a woman in Paddington. She imports the fabric from a man in China. These clothes aren’t made in sweatshops. They’re made by an honest, hardworking woman.’
He points to the television over the bar. ‘I won’t watch television. I refuse to be bombarded with images telling me what to buy, how to live. Who I’m supposed to be. Television is like a drug. Completely legalised and beamed right into our homes twenty-four hours a day. It’s like mind control.’
‘Really?’ I ask, raising an eyebrow.
He stops and frowns at me. He says, ‘Are you mocking me?’
I give a shrug, blow smoke, take a sip of my drink.
His frown intensifies. He asks me, ‘Whose side are you on?’
I tell him that I don’t really give a shit about any of these things he’s telling me. I couldn’t care less about who profits from what, about who’s running the world.
He just keeps on staring at me, and he can’t figure me out. Can’t decide if I’m a threat.
He asks me if I’m going to compromise his plans.
‘I don’t know what plans you’re talking about,’ I tell him.
He says, ‘You fuckin’ pig.’ His palms are pressed flat against the table and he’s looking like he’s ready to pounce again.
I remind him that I’m the one holding the gun now.
He reminds me that I was the one holding the gun the first time he attacked me.
I take the gun from my jacket and point it at his head. He says, ‘You didn’t reload.’
I correct him. ‘You weren’t looking. There’s one bullet in here.’
He hasn’t taken his palms up from the table. He says, ‘Try me.’
I pull the trigger. It doesn’t go off.
He’s grinning, sitting there grinning. He says to me, ‘Now it’s your turn.’
And we play.
And this is the game where nobody wins and nobody loses. What we do at the end is stand there dumbfounded, staring at the dead bullet sitting in the chamber.
Jack counts the chambers, and he says, ‘That one was yours,’ and I don’t say a thing.
BASE jumping is finding the highest objects in the world and throwing yourself off them. It’s an acronym for Buildings, Antennae, Span and Earth. These are the things you jump off. These are the things that Spencer jumps off.
Spencer is twenty-nine and has completed over four hundred BASE jumps in the last ten years. He says that the difference between skydiving and BASE jumping is phenomenal. There’s that much more pressure involved in finding a large cliff and tossing yourself over the edge. Your technique needs to be perfect. You have to understand the basic physics, consider things such as wind resistance, the most minute of angles. You have to calculate the risks and understand every possibility, down to the very second. Timing is everything.
A lot of people have died in Australia attempting jumps like these.
It’s after my fifth game of roulette when Spencer calls me. Spencer asks me if I want to be on ground crew this weekend. I can see him jump, he says. It’s a very close-knit community and jumpers are highly protective of their sport. You need to know what you’re doing one hundred percent before you get involved in this. Too many people have tried and failed and put the sport in jeopardy.
He says that the Australian jumping community is known for taking bigger risks and pushing the sport further than anybody else. It’s also true that Australia has the highest rate of death and injury involved in the sport.
Anybody can jump off a cliff or a building, but it takes a special man to do so and survive.
We drive out at three in the morning, and it’s dark and cold and I’d rather be in bed. Spencer is brooding over maps and weather charts in the front seat. His sister is driving. She’s twenty-four. Her hair hangs in unfurled curls around her shoulders and the wind through the open window lifts and brushes it. Her name is Juliet. Like Spencer, she’s an experienced BASE jumper. That means over one hundred and fifty parachute jumps. That means one hundred stationary object jumps. Night jumps. Jumps in poor conditions. You name it.
Juliet is talking to me from the driver’s seat, while I’m sitting in the back with the equipment, smoking cigarettes and staring out the window. ‘What did you think of Asia?’
I shrug, blowing smoke out into the national park around us. ‘It was an experience.’
‘Did you hear about those tourists being kidnapped in Cambodia?’ She keeps looking over her shoulder, gauging my reaction, my movements. I wish she’d keep her eyes on the road.
‘Yeah, I did. That would have been pretty scary. If it happened.’
Juliet is saying, ‘Oh yeah. All of those countries are so unsafe, you wouldn’t catch me dead in one of them.’
Spencer says, ‘I think you probably would be dead in one of them, Jules.’
I, deadpan, ‘I think every country in the world is unsafe. If you play your cards right.’
Spencer bursts out laughing in the front seat. He’s barely said a word all morning until just now. Before dawn he remains subdued, but when the light begins to show in the east he becomes visibly excited. This is because we’ve also reached the site.
There are other members of the ground crew waiting to meet us. Apparently the weather conditions are ‘border-line perfection’.
The jump site is a seven hundred foot granite cliff. If the jumper doesn’t pull this off just right, they’ll hit several ledges on the way down. They’ll be impaled on any of the hundreds of trees below. The landing zone provides less than thirty square feet of safety. Accuracy is the highest of priorities.
I hike up to the point with Juliet and it takes about half an hour. Spencer and another man take the lead and we follow, lagging behind. She turns her face toward me each time she finishes talking, watching my responses with her dark and attentive eyes. There’s a neat splash of freckles across her nose and cheeks.
‘You must think we’re crazy,’ she’s saying.
‘No, not really,’ I tell her. ‘I mean, I’ve known people to do crazier things.’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Oh yeah? Such as?’
‘Swimming with sharks,’ I say, plucking anything from my mind. This hike is really starting to give me a headache.
She’s saying, ‘You’re kidding?’
I tell her, ‘No. Not at all. I knew a girl who did it in Mexico.’
And then she’s saying, ‘No, I mean … what a coincidenc
e. Spencer. He likes to surf the shark spots. He never told you? He’s more likely to surf a break if there have been shark sightings.’
‘That’s insane.’ I say it with a certain degree of admiration.
‘He was bitten by a shark once, about ten years ago. He still has the scars. Hundreds of stitches.’ She drags a finger up over her body in a semi-circle from the hip to the chest, indicating the shape of the bite scars on Spencer’s body.
I look further up the trail at Spencer and his companion. They’re wearing good hiking shoes, jeans, T-shirts over long sleeves. The day is growing bright and the cloud in the sky is beginning to disperse.
Juliet has her eyes on me, and I can feel them. She has the body of an athlete and barely seems to draw a breath as we weave along the hillside. She tells me about an ex-boyfriend, one of Spencer’s old jumping buddies who doesn’t do the sport anymore. She was eighteen at the time, and the guy hadn’t judged the conditions right. He ended up with some pretty serious spinal damage. Spencer was furious that the guy had been jumping in those sorts of conditions, ill-prepared and ill-equipped. Spencer wouldn’t have the authorities coming down on him because somebody else had fucked up. It was enough trouble obtaining permits for jump spots as it was.
I ask Juliet what happened to the boyfriend, and she says, ‘We broke up.’
When we reach the jump point I stand near the edge and look out. Cliffs cut away all around us and slope below to the trees and a snaking river. Up here the world is silent but for the wind, which is only a gentle updraft.
Spencer and his friend are strapping on kneepads, checking their backpacks and equipment. They’re assessing the weather conditions one final time.
Spencer says, ‘Half an hour hiking up here. Thirty-second return trip.’
The unnamed man says, ‘I got the Fear.’
Spencer grins. ‘Oh yeah. And it’s gone the moment you’re out there, over the edge. It’s not fear anymore. It’s just the rush of being alive.’
