Kickaround Nixon

THE BIG CRUNCH

1

Frequent certain circles and invariably one hears of ETERNAL RETURN, the 1981 arcade game. Much discussed among seasoned collectors, the game sees players as Ivan, a young man escaping Earth shortly after death. Piloting his ascent, players find themselves beset upon by the substance of Ivan’s past—Russian literature, muscle cars, fast-food smorgasbords…all manner of touchstones—until, at the last, players battle Ivan’s mother and the game reverts to Stage 1, at which point the cycle repeats.

Defying conventional wisdom, the game rewards failure with extra lives, making ETERNAL RETURN a big fat paradox—unbeatable and un-unbeatable. Stranger still, an alleged bonus stage sees Ivan become invulnerable to the past, and it to him, further complicating the matter of progress. These quirks were not well received by focus groups, who routinely found the game unplayable and pointless. It was for this reason that the manufacturer, ZenithSec, on the verge of bankruptcy, discontinued production of the game and shipped all known units to a warehouse in Portland, where they were gutted to make room for another, more traditional game: Polybius.

And with that Time closed the book on ETERNAL RETURN, its true purpose known only in the mind of its designer (who I regret to inform you has been gone from us for some time now).

* * *

I, on the other hand, am not going anywhere. Queer little Ahab, that’s me, looped by the neck to my own callous malady, that hubris du jour of my time, Pac-Mania.

Thirty years now and still do the corners of my mouth downturn to pass an arcade, or my eyes narrow to coin slots at a sawtooth tune. O poor nerd! O grim gamer! this from a certain bedsheet-seraph, who holds my face as if it were cracked china: To have suffered both electricity and spare time! Ah, if only the ills of us were but the copper print of circuit boards, lover, you would be right, and our conditions best solved with a ball-peen hammer. Alas, my ills are the product of a circuit in me, which computes ambition against each heavy step, each condescending lover, each will-without day.

So, yes, yes: only games indeed; and life is only life! breath is only breath!

* * *

Call me Nixon. The complete and total failure of Operation Get Married and Procreate (a.k.a. G.O.Y.F.A.A.D.S.W.Y.L., or Get off Your Fat Ass and Do Something with Your Life), a joint venture of operations Womanhoodification (hers) and De-Queer/Un-Faggotize (mine), could be attributed to three key factors: (1) insufficient reconnaissance on the part of myself in choosing a bride, who was, as I soon discovered, more woman than I could handle; (2) a series of increasingly bold attempts (on the bride’s part, not mine) to stimulate and in many cases provoke my libido for the purposes of sexual intercourse; and finally (3) the subtle shortcomings of nuptial language, which permitted to the untrained ear such vows as till death us do part to mean killing me and burying my poor, weird body by the Wisconsin River.

It had been a hasty marriage. Instead of a honeymoon, we put what money we had into acreage along the Wis, a wet little oxbow bristled with white cedar. Shannon (that was her name: dear sweet shy—briefly murderous, yes—but otherwise pure and virtuous Shannon) adored the location, the way she adored photographs of unhappy people: with a belief that pain was a process toward good, that despair was finite and dwindling. That you could get it out of the way.

I wasn’t convinced. For twenty-odd years I had been in a funk, a kind of psychic constipation that I called the Great Compression. Though the symptoms were pervasive (an inert, chewing-gum-in-carpet feel of the soul), I had in my youth sought only to make it invisible, so that to the outsider I suffered from nothing more than the occasional, crippling bellyache. Oh but did I not foresee the consequences of my ploy, that by turning the metaphorical literal (psychic constipation into actual bellyache) I set a wild precedent, permitting with leering complicity the condition that was to assail me next; how, in the months leading up to our marriage, whatever it was inside me was to begin expressing itself gastrointestinally—clutching, crushing, calamitizing me—this until the very hour of Shannon’s what-Shannon’s-gonna-do…and I having not had a bowel movement in nine whole days!

I tried to write it out of me, to lubricate my melancholy with the Castor Oil of my thoughts. But no such luck. The cruel among you likely assume this too to be my fault; that the mismanagement which was the source of my previous blundering had its roots in my competence outright. Yet still do I implore this readership to consider conscientiously an alternative: this was the 1980s, after all, that era of nonsense, of ideas crushing each other, grinding themselves apart, like bitter teeth in an old man’s mouth. My writing, then, was but a product of its time…and my soon-set lethargy the same. Before long, it took no less than the invention of a new moral principle to heave myself from bed and write a single line (though there was one subject I rendered with aplomb, that of the lonely Pioneer 10, who as I write even now exits our system on its way God Knows Where).

Add to the above the natural upsets of a marriage—foremostly, doing it. In truth, there hadn’t been a single sexual encounter since our first eye-dos, a technical foul really, by all rational accounts an anti-violation. But one that pricked at Shannon’s pride, each rejection running deeper. Every trick she could muster, gleaned from magazines and movies in her nineteen years, was deployed upon me: how when I was just on the verge of sleep she would lean into my person as if to whisper some tidbit, only to instead worm her tongue into my ear; or better yet, the night parade of sex wear that found its way onto her form each evening, all lace leaf and chokecherry ripe; and then oh then was there the (near-) coup de grâce…with innocent I but exiting the shower, and she all insistence on putting my penis in her mouth!

…I understand if I do not receive the reader’s utmost sympathies. Shannon had presented herself to me in a life-long dream of presenting herself to her husband, of being taken into womanhood, and I turned her down. For this reason alone did I willingly swallow her future persistences—the next morning; the next evening; the next hundred years had time and space colluded so to keep me there. But time and space did not, nor did it collude to send her away from me, or to repair the Era of Shame that crept across our modest oxbow plot. So did she undertake to learn the most true and universal of marriage lessons: mercy is best corrected with ruthless torture.

Oh, it was subtle at first: over- and under-cooking her meals so that they might convey something of her sexual grief (overcooked steak, the tough and rigid nature of her resolve; undercooked pork, her tender yet unhealthy temperament), or deliberately washing my clothes with her frilly unmentionables, leaving me to schoolmaster in pink-dyed clothing. No, it was only after these under-the-table conspiracies failed did she seek to raise the temperature. Soon I found my copy of The Brothers Karamazov vandalized with messages, such as the following sentence

Young man, be not forgetful of prayer

which before dinner read just so, only to find, while Dostoevskying myself to sleep that night, this in its place

Young [NICK], be not forgetful of [SEX]

Next came the more abrasive insults. Consider the incident in which I, following a trail of eraser particles upon my desk one afternoon, wound up thumbing through Moby-Dick, wherein I found the heading CHAPTER 31 - Queen Mab transformed into CHAPTER 31 - Queenr Mab; this in addition to every occurrence of the name Ahab having been replaced with my nickname, Nixon—given to me because of the compression of the first syllable of my name with the second (Nick-SUN-der), as well as from a long-ago conversation regarding the length of the former president’s penis. However, it wasn’t until I found my copy of Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please turned into Will You Please FUCK ME, Please? that I thought that she and I should have a talk.

If you can’t…satisfy me, said she, laying a pinkish-looking strip of pork before me, "what can you do?"

Pumpkin… pulling her lovingly into my lap, don’t you realize you’re defacing classic literature! Besides, we have a fine (trailer) home, don’t we? We have a group of exceptional friends. Doesn’t that mean anything? And why just the other morning we had a wonderful conversation regarding that nuclear power plant in Kursk!

Conversation? You mean that lecture you gave on fuel rods.

Well you seemed intrigued at the time…

"I thought you were being kinky!"

* * *

And so unwound, in secret, daily bouts of contempt, the very thread of circumstances that would lead to the night of July 13th, 1983.

Big gold evening, and I just returning from a long walk; big gold idea in my skull-place, too, which had whisked my mind away from domiciliary woes. Ah, and yet were they hunting me now, blowing up from the macadam artifact that was our driveway, and visiting a bare earth smell up one nostril. This as I ascended the wooden stairs to our front porch, where I could only wonder at what subversive dinner awaited me, or what counter-maneuvers I might expect while attempting to take a shower. Oh but upon opening the door did I find, instead, a gun trained in my direction.

You’re gonna cowboy up, Shannon said, wrist a little limp, lip a little bit, whether you like it or not.

Responses flashed through my mind, a thousand sorries and let’s-just-calm-down-nows. But mostly what flashed was gun muzzle.

She squeaked—Ek!—releasing the pistol to bulldoze across a wood-trunk coffee table, where it fired a second time. The clatter-and-pop, the fine-china smash and accidental discharge. And then: a silent unraveling of my American melancholy, that shoestring knot coming undone. In that moment, I didn’t hear the clack of gunshots vanishing through the oaks, but was them—the fleeing wave, the shuttled energy, reflecting off into the soon-black Wisconsinism.

Also: I was defecating myself.

…The shock of the gunshot saw me stand erect, clasping my gut where I felt a warm ring of pain. Shannon had fallen back onto the sofa by this point, watching as a dumb momentum overtook my right foot and sent it slowly back from me to hover in the air, until…down I went, tumbling into a bed of white azaleas. But before I fell: From her place on the couch, Shannon, fearing for her life perhaps (though I do believe the gunshot to have been an accident, and still do, and always will), scooped up the pistol from the floor, yelped, and immediately dropped it again. As I toppled, the last thing I saw was her kissing the palm of her hand where it had been burned, and the hurt look in her eyes, having now felt the gunmetal heat of an idea given trajectory.

* * *

The buzz of a grass bug in my ear.

Eyes closed but still aware of the world. Moving, moving. Grass bug, buzz. Until through a plunked lid I found an upside-down Shannon dragging me by the arms. Nearby, the soft applause of the river on a bed of rocks.

W-where are we going?

Shh. Please be quiet please.

But— I didn’t have the strength to finish…though smidgen enough to crane my neck to look out over my own body, alright; and to twitch a big toe, once, twice, three times; and to eye suspiciously the shovel that dragged alongside me. With that, a feeling of the reserves warming up, and my lips opening to speak: Are you…are you going to bury me?

Yes, she said.

But I’m still alive!

A stifled sob. I know.

So went the reserves too, head swinging back to flop between my shoulders. Okay.… And it was from just this overturned perspective that I watched natural night come, as if welled up from under me, and saw myself placed alongside a black-running Wis where some fifteen feet away my unsexed bride did dig; and from it too heard the river’s soft applause become a dark litany, which Shannon’s percussive shovel had struck into being; all with an attitude of fast-dwindling passion—Eh!—uncorked by the following, final resignation: there was only one path for a person, and no amount of trying would take them elsewhere.

…With that, came Fate—a shovel-sunk thwump, a riverbank rumble; these to send the raw earth puking into the river. In I went with it, plunging, stone swimming, to emerge twenty feet from the bank. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Shannon crashing through the black oaks, angled at the water to try and catch me, and yelling across—at first, when I was still nearby, Come back! Come back! and when I was gone for sure, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!

It’s A-OK, I said, or tried to say, but the river had taken me.

* * *

Now we see ourselves embarking upon a great adventure, washed away from our homes and our marriages and our jobs and azaleas white like the flash that began the universe; our notes, our anxieties, our unfinished copies of The Brothers Karamazov; and somewhere in all that, from the sadness that we brought on those around us—in my case, a young woman; in yours, who knows.

As for my being dead and all: I don’t get it either. But before I lost consciousness there in the river, I had come up with one explanation.…In beginning my Great Lubricating Novel, in searching for a subject that might yet stand un-nonsensed, I began crafting a character I soon realized was only a version of myself shot through with fiction. This character had my face, my life, my propensity for weirdness, but this wasn’t enough. I had, in my growing and inescapable interest in Pioneer 10’s flight path heavenward, decided to describe this other self with what I thought would be an apt metaphor: Nixon, all his life waiting for happiness to come, had been, and I quote myself here, "hurtling toward a supernovaed star, whose fate was firm, but from whom the news had not yet arrived. The snail mail of the present: that was the enemy; not Nixon, never Nixon, never ever Nixon."

Never ever Nixon!

2

Heaving, whirling, gliding—the German, shall we—gleiten, glitschig, glitching, yes, glitching toward civilization.…I had tumbled down the Wis (and most notably her little-known circuits) to end up in Illinois, adrift along the Chicago River.

Little more than a bag of organs by this point, I owned only what I carried, the inventory of which included one collared shirt (tattered), one pair of Payne’s-gray slacks (muddied), and one pair of tighty-whities (soiled). Oh and one 6-pack ring too, which had seized upon my wrist sometime during the journey and since affixed me to a length of exposed rebar. It was in this way that I dangled half emerged from the water, regaining consciousness in drips and searching my stomach for a bullet hole—though I found no more than a few blue-black contusions. After a while I just gave up.

…Gave up?! says the petulant reader. But perhaps this bullet hole was only hidden behind a roll of flesh, or shadowed in the midnight dark, or camouflaged with silt? Yes, yes, perhaps so; and perhaps this reader might neurotically search his own flesh and dark places for holes, should he want them so bad. Howbeit for you, for this Nick twisting in the black whip of the river, there was only one thought: I am alive!

Sort of. Alive as your run-of-the-mill Rattus rattus, at least, wet-stinking and crepuscular. Hoisting myself up out of the river that night to scamper streetward, I had in mind but the singular purpose of reclaiming my humanhood, as if it were some thing I needed only chase into the light. And yet, ejecting at last across the concrete barrier to pile onto the pavement, I found myself indifferent to such categories, and sought only for a good three minutes to clutch that heart-spring of living beneath the palm of my hand.

This surrounded by the resplendency of Chicago throbbing up at the stars. In twenty-five years of life, I had hardly ventured beyond the borders of Brane City, much less Wisconsin herself. Yet to think I was in Chicago now, pulling myself up to amble barefoot across its night areas. An ambling all too brief, alas, as dozen-stepping hence I discovered in the sharp caterwaul of an overhead train a second affliction: I had become quite waterlogged, and especially so in my right ear hole, where the howl of the train shot white and bubbled up pain. Oh, how I rapped on the side of my head to expel this hurtful fluid, but none would be expulsed; and thus was I left with no choice but to trudge on afflicted.

This was not without difficulty. The lodged water-wiggle had affected my sense of balance, and caused this already disoriented Nick to feel that much more so. But on I pushed, correcting and overcorrecting each pulse of disbalance, all the while geometry unhinged itself around me; so that by only passing ’neath a tympanum might a nausea be induced, or by leaning sick-retching on a concrete window apron would the wide world teeter; the whole of Chicago, yawing, pitching, rolling along a gust of chicharrón, or spun on a whiff of fish parts; until I was neon-bent with delirium; until each muscle talked nonsense up the nerves, and I longed to but fall to my knees so that I might propriocept them back into meaning.

Ah, but what other compass had I but this wiggle? So on I followed, crossing over into what could have only been the gay district of fair Chicago—as evidenced by the names of the establishments, The Gomorrah, The Crossed Harpoons, The Swordfish—until at last I found myself upon the stone portico of a place called The Trap. My body beginning to give, I decided that I might at least step inside one of these unusual places, see what assistance homosexuals were capable of.

I pushed my way in. Through a thick overlap of smoke, I found a dozen or so females huddled together in groups, drinking, fuming, cussing…and conspiring, I felt, to unacknowledge my presence there among them. Even after I had hobbled into and through their ranks a number of times, still was their compassion unforthcoming. Yet, nevertheless, within their hostility I felt a rough comfort grip me, a conscious perception of shared hardship, which fumed up from their mouths and sucked into my nostrils.

…A grip of anti-comfort, too, courtesy of one foreboding lesbo lumbering in my direction from the entryway, haircut much resembling my own, and heavyweight hands not one iota. So was my yearning for a concrete sense that when up it came—the sidewalk, I mean, which I had been dragged toward via a black back door—and smashed me in the tooth, I could not, would not complain. No, I lay for a short while, eyes clenched shut and sighing into the gutter. When in a feeling of some nearby forcefulness I lifted my head to look…but found only a hobo taking a dump in a coffee can. Hi-ya, I said.

Hi-ya, he returned.

* * *

No, not there—rather just past this hobo was the thing. Across the alleyway, in the cattycornered newspaper of an abandoned shop front, I saw it:

ampion Pac-Ma

United States

N BY ONE NICK SUNDER

Y BATTLE IN AM

You can imagine the confusion which seized me then, having found my own name staring me down. I racked my brain in an effort to recall its specifics. It would have had to been something I wrote for the Brane City Chronicle…but what? I hefted myself up on an elbow, waving away the hobo’s slow, unthreatening approach. However, my curiosity had already infected him, and the hobo (coffee can still held to his rear) came forward anyway.

What’cha got there…? said he, pushing his head next to mine as if to align his sight with my own. His smell, the dark liquids…liquor and feces.

I don’t know, some kind of…Signal from God, I think.

Yeah I get those.

—No, no, no, no, you get delirium tremens and Wernicke’s and schizoaffective delusions.…This, my friend, this here’s the hallowed Word, rocketed through space and time to appear in this very spot, before this very eyeball!

The hobo winked a few times, shook his head as if to eject his own dose of water, then opening his eyes gave me a long, hard stare. "No, but I do get those," he said.

* * *

Well, what the hobo got or didn't get was not much concern to me. This was my Vision, you see! and I needed neither his approval nor comprehension to fathom it. This article here had returned to me, or I to it…and upon one of ours’ having returned, thus did that water-wiggle squirm once more—though not toward disorientation this time; no, but toward greater perception.

Growling up between me and the newspaper wall, an automobile spitting light. Though I knew not outcome or purpose, I had inclination, one that pulled me up from the street, hobo-head my leaning post, to watch the vehicle go, headlights pushing north. Oh to have been made aware of my own sizzling filament, that tungsten anti-black of my heartlamp! With that, I abandoned this Trap—the hobo and the murky contents of his coffee can and the lesbo bar and the deep damp sounds of voices seeping into the street—making my way farther into the city, following this disorientation to see where it might lead me. On I went, turning this way and that down unlit alleyways, reading with footfalls the Vision before me, locomoting it into meaning.

The astute reader rightly wonders why I so pursued what was, with much probability, nothing more than a delusion—a trick of the vestibular system, no less, that same Siren-fluid led many a pilot to his end. Well, it was because I did recognize the article taped to the shop-front window that night…

…In the weeks previous to my Wisconsin exile, I had in my searching for un-nonsense heard tell of a video game tournament taking place, the very first of its kind, set to embark from Iowa that summer. The further I delved into the idea, the more untouched and pure it began to seem. To think, I had stumbled upon something new in the world, a topic unmarked and un-spelunkered! Ah. A warm joy in this Nick’s heart.

By the time I decided to write an article about the tournament—late night and near feverish with the notion—I had come to the conclusion that my Great Subject (whose lack I was only just beginning to feel the constrictional and defecational effects of) was finally, truly at hand. So penetrable had my psyche been during this period that even Shannon could sense it. During dinner one evening, while serving an accidentally perfect steak, she queried me as to the origin of my sudden good mood.

Well, said I, fork-and-knifing my dinner beneath an enduring smirk, I have news.

The creak of her chair as she straightened up. "Yes…?"

I— And I assure you, this pause had not been to mislead her. I had only needed to consider my words before I spoke them: my Great Subject was not an uncomplicated one, and required a fair amount of preemptive considerations—open musements concerning the unrequited passions of youth; philosophical waxments regarding the untraveled frontiers of the world; a vast multitude of obligatory almost-theres, demanding such length and intensity that by the time I neared the end of my self-chat, dinner had been long consumed, the table long cleared, and Shannon’s sweet-ringing, other-room pronouncements—Uh-huh! I’m listening! Yes! Yes! Go on! Go on!—long silent.

Just look at this! I said, rising to find her, and referring to my journal where I had stored a few relevant clippings. "…Here’s an article concerning the Twin Galaxies Video Arcade (the most famous arcade in the world, mind you).…And here, dear, another…this one contemplating America’s dominance in regard to games.…Oh and better yet, my yellow bird, look here—an article from The New York Times:

Pioneers of the Future:

The U.S. National Video Game Team

AMERICA’S GREAT HOPE!!!’"

Yet what did I find upon entering our bedroom? Shannon, lying face up on our near-marital bed, wearing stockings and a nightie—fast asleep.

Oh.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, fingering the edge of the previous clipping. On the dresser near our bed a single candle sat, oozing wax. I clapped the notebook shut and sat on the edge of the bed, watching the diminishing candle and thinking of Shannon. How strained her sleep must have been at that moment…how, as her waiting slowly became dozing, there must have been two half-sleep dreams: one of a lovemaking that would rouse her; another of the frustration that the morning reality would bring.

I placed a hand on my wife’s breast, feeling the shape of her through the material. Her body responded to this touch-of-thumb—her arms, her fingers, her neck…all of it, tightening at my command. Beneath my palm, the soft force of a raised nipple through the fabric. Even her breath had been pulled taut, waiting in the length of her throat. I could have done anything to her.

And yet…I had chatted myself into such a creative mood, you see! My rambling had connected a loose end or two, had figured this or that theme into meaning. Yes, yes, though I could have done anything, I did not—least nothing that didn’t involve retreating to the energetic silence of our kitchen, where shooting from my hand came the following…

...Grand Contest for Champion Pac-Man Record

in the United States

WRITTEN BY ONE NICK SUNDER

BLOODY BATTLE IN AMERICA

* * *

It was while carrying these words through this nighttime Chicago that my water-wiggle transformed. Streets and alleyways I had never seen before now had that sense of yes-there-that’s-the-place to them. Roosevelt Road—never heard of it, but yes. Clifford Avenue—sure. Sacramento Boulevard—maybe, on the condition of its leading to Hawthorne Park…

Why? I didn’t know; nor did I much care, truth be known. I had entered into the Bitstream of Consciousness, unaware of anything in the world but the yes/no circumstance, the ones and zeroes that lit My Way. Without a shred of reluctance did I follow this queasy-making compass, past skyscrapers and through alleyways and at one point across an elevated sewer, punting rats here and there in my pursual. Until, wild turning a final corner, I found myself face-to-face with my apparent destination: the sublime frontage of a video arcade.

Through the long rolling grille, my shadow forming and deforming across rows of inactive arcade cabinets; and there did that other-me continue lurking, as this me hung on the grille at a number of positions, peering in.

This. This was it.

…I had but oversooned my fate, was all! had arrived but a tad too early! Taking to the quiet streets, I soon found an old apartment complex, the unsupervised back alley of which I supposed would suit my waiting just fine. Down the alleyway, the spark of eyes watching. No matter. I entered anyhow, searching for the next subconscious Yes-there-Nixon to guide me. Which was how I came to be ascending the building’s fire escape, and as I did I began to detect the world equivalent of syllables in each clanging step. I was plodding my way through a grand narrative, one whose future I had no clue to, and whose present was as opaque as the pale fog that I now trudged toward. Well, have what you will in you, Future, for you have in you as well our Fates!

Or rather had in you…so was I soon forced to reckon. For what I found fog-rolled in the heavens that night was no seductive predestination, but the burned-out husk of an abandoned apartment. I entered in through the window, stepping with curious deliberation across a rain-swept floor gone black with ash. I wandered in that way for a while actually, this living space destructured, eyeballing the pearl-colored gloom that skimmed in through the open walls. Until at last I found something—the abrupt edge of a bathtub, which caught me below the knee and sent me headlong falling. That was it for me, it seemed: I had been defeated, shaken from my high tower to lay prostrate, nose-balanced, clobbered by porcelain. When just then from my right ear hole, as if melancholy pressured, came a surge of water, trickling warm past hair follicles to drum against the tub.

Ah. So this was my destination.…I was right where I was needed to be!

* * *

And I wasn’t the only one who needed to be there.

Sometime in the night, I awoke to find that I had company. Over the edge of the tub, moving in the moonlamp glow, the shape of a man. Slung from his right shoulder was a duffel bag, the strap of which he clung to with one hand. In the other he carried a beer bottle, and setting this on the remains of a probable dresser, he stepped through the dilapidated wall that