Smoke and Mirrors

He found the knowledge that he was over 600 miles away from the ocean very comforting; although, later in life, he moved to Nebraska to increase the distance from the sea: there were things he had seen, or thought he had seen, beneath the old pier that night that he would never be able to get out of his head. There were things that lurked beneath gray raincoats that man was not meant to know. Squamous. He did not need to look it up. He knew. They were squamous.

A couple of weeks after his return home Ben posted his annotated copy of A Walking Tour of the British Coastline to the author, care of her publisher, with an extensive letter containing a number of helpful suggestions for future editions. He also asked the author if she would send him a copy of the page that had been ripped from his guidebook, to set his mind at rest; but he was secretly relieved, as the days turned into months, and the months turned into years and then into decades, that she never replied.

VIRUS

There was a computer game, I was given it

one of my friends gave it to me, he was playing it,

he said, it’s brilliant, you should play it,

and I did, and it was.

I copied it off the disk he gave me

for anyone, I wanted everyone to play it.

Everyone should have this much fun.

I sent it upline to bulletin boards

but mainly I got it out to all of my friends.

(Personal contact. That’s the way it was given to me.)

My friends were like me: some were scared of viruses,

someone gave you a game on disk, next week or Friday the 13th

it reformatted your hard disk or corrupted your memory.

But this one never did that. This was dead safe.

Even my friends who didn’t like computers started to play:

as you get better the game gets harder;

maybe you never win but you can get pretty good.

I’m pretty good.

Of course I have to spend a lot of time playing it.

So do my friends. And their friends.

And just the people you meet, you can see them,

walking down the old motorways

or standing in queues, away from their computers,

away from the arcades that sprang up overnight,

but they play it in their heads in the meantime,

combining shapes,

puzzling over contours, putting colors next to colors,

twisting signals to new screen sections,

listening to the music.

Sure, people think about it, but mainly they play it.

My record’s eighteen hours at a stretch.

40,012 points, 3 fanfares.

You play through the tears, the aching wrist, the hunger, after a while

it all goes away.

All of it except the game, I should say.

There’s no room in my mind anymore; no room for other things.

We copied the game, gave it to our friends.

It transcends language, occupies our time,

sometimes I think I’m forgetting things these days.

I wonder what happened to the TV. There used to be TV.

I wonder what will happen when I run out of canned food.

I wonder where all the people went. And then I realize how,

if I’m fast enough, I can put a black square next to a red line,

mirror it and rotate them so they both disappear,

clearing the left block

for a white bubble to rise . . .

(So they both disappear.)

And when the power goes off for good then I

Will play it in my head until I die.

LOOKING FOR THE GIRL

I was nineteen in 1965, in my drainpipe trousers with my hair quietly creeping down toward my collar. Every time you turned on the radio the Beatles were singing Help! and I wanted to be John Lennon with all the girls screaming after me, always ready with a cynical quip. That was the year I bought my first copy of Penthouse from a small tobacconist’s in the King’s Road. I paid my few furtive shillings and went home with it stuffed up my jumper, occasionally glancing down to see if it had burnt a hole in the fabric.

The copy has long since been thrown away, but I’ll always remember it: sedate letters about censorship; a short story by H. E. Bates and an interview with an American novelist I had never heard of; a fashion spread of mohair suits and paisley ties, all to be bought on Carnaby Street. And best of all, there were girls, of course; and best of all the girls, there was Charlotte.

Charlotte was nineteen, too.

All the girls in that long-gone magazine seemed identical with their perfect plastic flesh; not a hair out of place (you could almost smell the lacquer); smiling wholesomely at the camera while their eyes squinted at you through forest-thick eyelashes: white lipstick; white teeth, white breasts, bikini-bleached. I never gave a thought to the strange positions they had coyly arranged themselves into to avoid showing the slightest curl or shadow of pubic hair—I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at anyway. I had eyes only for their pale bottoms and breasts, their chaste but inviting come-on glances.

Then I turned the page, and I saw Charlotte. She was different from the others. Charlotte was sex; she wore sexuality like a translucent veil, like a heady perfume.