#as a story that narrates about a lost and ruined childhood and yet a painfully happy one

[nacchi-nacchi-nacchi]

Troubling of the Water: A Todd Howard Story

Wilt thou be made whole? By Nacchi.

On the Production of Compact Discs

Information is stored in CD format as a series of microscopic burns. The useless unblemished disc is covered with millions of tiny wounds until it is assigned order, given utility and thus meaning; its identity is nothing more than a shorthand for the arrangement of its injuries. Hundreds of thousands of identically-scorched discs are mass-produced in factories devoted to this purpose, and then they go out into the world—momentarily useful and then left until they are forgotten, soon obsolete and eventually unreadable. But the marks remain, scars gone illegible within environments alien to them.

CDs are fragile things, damaged in just the right way. Cracks and gouges, records of less useful traumas, form mnemonic ravines into which meaning and memory disappear. And then, the greatest tragedy for a compact disc: to be discarded before even the moment in which its constellation of injuries--that is, in which itself--might be recognized, and so fulfill its destiny. What is to be done with these CDs, and all the CDs waiting for an eternity in landfills and forests and everywhere else on earth? What is the fate of objects with no use?

Chapter I: You Can Climb That Mountain

"I want to change the world.”

Every child believes this; every child is a fool. I certainly did, and was. But then, if I have ever deserved sympathy, it is in that distant past. I was made a fool, as we all are; Even as they nursed their injuries, those around me encouraged me toward lethally high aspirations of my own with patronizing smiles—under the pretense of indulging me, they cultivated my naivety as material for fresh bandages. Surely, someday, for someone—perhaps me—a dream would come true, and the world would open up for everyone. From the very start of my life, I was merely a thing to be used until I was exhausted and then thrown away.

By the time I had grown to understand my position, I was already fatally misaligned with the reality of my circumstances. Stupidly, I had told myself over and over again that, not having any say in the circumstances of my arrival, I was at the very least owed entry into the warm world I had been weaned on stories of. But, I had been given a gift after all, though I didn’t know it at the time: the very things which had finally been destroyed within me, my favorite parts of myself, were the few sacred qualities which might which might have prevented me from becoming the sort of monster that survives in this world—This was the expression of love I had been searching for all along, one I failed to recognize until much too late.

All but forgetting even the ruins of those painful, incongruent parts, I became capable of accepting, even almost of desiring, a life of fighting as hard and as cruelly as necessary to secure my own lowly position. I had made it, whatever it was. I had became the shape and hardness required of me, and had limited the bounds of my imagination to the realities of my existence. Insofar as every part of me that might have been crushed within my confines was gone, I was perfectly accommodated. Insofar as every noncontiguous region of myself had been excised, I was a complete being.

And yet. Even knowing that I could never claim to deserve anything beyond this pathetic life, my mind still wanders from time to time. I remember all sorts of things, stupid fairytales about finding some small, radiant thing, and exclaiming—as the narrator gave a tranquilized smile, or a soundtrack swelled—”Ah, I’m so glad to be alive!”

No matter how I tried, I could not shake those irritating thoughts. This, I believe, is referred to as the death drive.

November 11, 2011. Veterans Day. Already tasting vodka on my lips, I follow the advertisements promising hundreds of hours of velvety unconsciousness to my local GameStop. As I enter I am immediately assaulted by three screens blasting three different advertisements for three different video games. It would seem that if I am to return to the grace of nothingness, I must willingly plunge myself into hell.

“J-just this, please,” I stammer, holding out an empty box and a scuffed plastic card as meager offerings to let me pass through the store unmolested.

In this, as in all things, I am disappointed.

“Oh, you’re a fan of Elder Scrolls, huh? You want that for PC? You know, PC is really the best, since you get all the mods…”

As my mind drifts off, I recall being limply hit on in college—beneath all the token effort, the worn promise of pleasure is nothing more than an excuse for accepting the comfort of a night—or a few months, or years—spoken for, populated with enough distractions to sustain yourself, for a while. After the longest forty-five seconds of my life I am finally permitted to leave the store with my game. Driving home, I wonder when I stopped liking video games (did I ever like them?), and why I keep buying them. Well, what else would I waste my money and time on? Best to devote myself to whatever keeps me staring at a wall; after all, to raise my eyes further would only invite deeper injuries. It’s a strange kind of responsibility I practice, but then responsibility is always painful.

The game disc feels light and cheap in my hand as I place it into my computer’s CD tray. And then it is drawn into the machine, and with a click and the whirr of a laser everything is set into place.

The game installs. The world is gray and filthy. I walk for some time, talk to some people, do what they want; it feels more or less like having a job. I had told myself that as a child, these games held some magic for me, something I could recapture; instead I am left with stinging eyes and an inventory full of meaningless words. There is nothing there to grasp on to, no substance to all the various weapons and armor and pre-appraised treasure. A sickness overtakes me, lying atop the one already provoked by the cheap alcohol I had been drinking. I just want to stop playing and... do... anything, maybe take a walk outside—when was the last time I had been to a park, or really, anywhere without a specific purpose? For one moment, I feel the resolve to go building within me—and then a corpse intersects with a door and begins to twist rapidly around, writhing about with an indescribable cascade of layered thuds.

I begin to cackle, a laugh I cannot even recognize as my own. A sword, battered by the flailing limbs, goes spinning upward with another sound—I double over. This, surely, is why I purchased this game. This is why I spent the money I earned with my long hours of work. At last all the years have led me somewhere, a path back to the sundrenched fields in which I passed some carefree childhood: this cloying, slapstick meme.

There is a kind of love so pure that it can only be understood as a species of gravest perversion. A love which tolerates no artifice and suffers no consideration of the demands of the outside world; a transcendent, fatal, repulsive sort of love. This is the love that I, miserable human being that I am, hold for this “meme” in its raw, unattenuated form. It is the only sort of love which a creature like me can muster.

Meme is the cold hamburger served up at a drive-thru with half the toppings forgotten, and it is the accompanying chuckle. It is the momentary warmth from a trash-heap of disappointments burning to nothing, the measly payment for the copper stripped from the last obsolete office a nameless architect ever built, a final betrayal of hope itself that some small scrap of emotion, whatever it is, might still be salvaged—return to a hometown you feel nothing for, find where the stain of hemolymph crushed into the pavement might remind you of sunlight—and that is meme.

If we are to live submerged in industrial waste, I choose to bend down at each iridescent pool and drink as deeply as I can—that I might at least get drunk on my own suffering, and perhaps even hallucinate some specter of amusement. If nothing else, at least I have that knowing smirk, unseen by anyone but myself; I’m really better than this, you know. It may be worthless, but there was never anything to extract worth from in the first place; I’ll take my silly little laughs. I have no idea what it means to love myself, or anyone else, but perhaps loving these stupid, malfunctioning pieces of debris is as close as I can get.

The following day I discover console commands, and my passion burns even hotter in my chest. So hot even that it melts the chains I had fashioned from the iron of my own blood, chains binding me to the hard edges of that putrid concept known as survival. I am not set free, of course. A malformed entity like myself is incapable of understanding freedom, even if I were to somehow earn it; given wings and set loose with an open sky, I would only bash my head to bits against the ground. No, I am more of a slave than I ever was—a slave to that neon, excruciating joy which in a single instant melted me down and shaped me anew.

Less than human, I have become a gamer.

Chapter IIa: Put What You Want in Your Hands

Having broken free of those chains which I chafed against for most of my life, I began to tumble painfully through my new, larger cage. The next two or three years progressed uneventfully despite the constant drip of new adventures and alterations in my beloved game—I had nothing to lose, and I lost it.

Taking advantage of a departmental reorganization, I left my job behind. Nothing could have mattered less to me at the time; I had only settled for the position in the first place to advance a career about which I cared nothing, chosen only on the basis of a few romantic fantasies. Still, the manner in which I made my exit left me with no hope for further employment in the field, and about as many friends. Loneliness changed, from something I experienced as I ran against the shallowness of my friendships to something I experienced in solitude; truth be told, I found that I vastly prefer the latter.

A far more dire consequence was the rapid depletion of my savings. I had perhaps overestimated how easy it would be to find some stop-gap job and how willing I would be to do that work, and the costs of living piled up frighteningly quickly. There were always new consoles to buy, new Skyrims to experience with their own unique flaws native to each platform, and the few income sources I drifted between came to hardly anything at all. Finally, too broke even to acquire new debt, I remembered why I had choked down the humiliation of employed life for so long.

I had only just purchased a PlayStation VR when Skyrim was released for the Nintendo Switch, and I desperately needed the funds to buy it. There was nothing left to sell, nothing but my piles of Skyrim games and the consoles to play them with. I had even given up alcohol, having found a more effective means of self-destruction. I was at wit’s end; I would wake up in a cold sweat at four in the morning, scour YouTube for any bug videos and scrub through those grating Let’s Plays, unable to get back to sleep unless I found some collision error or AI failure.

Finally, I contacted Todd Howard himself, hoping against hope that the man behind it all might take some mercy upon his most loyal fan. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for the consequences of this action. Whatever sort of creature I might have been, I held only a human understanding of this reality at best; I was incapable of comprehending the level at which a being like Todd operates.

And so it came to be, though even now I’m not really sure how, that I was in Maryland, face to face with Todd himself. He said nothing, his cold silence a marked contrast to the nervous energy he overflowed with in interviews. It gave me the impression that there were really no words to be said, no words but those listed on the contract before me.

I saw my whole life laid out there, neatly bound in threads of black ink. It was in tracing those threads across the page that I saw my life, for the first time, as truly my own. This was not the account of a character I was forced to suffer with; it was me, body and mind tied to a clearly-formed existence.

I earnestly believe that each of us desire, at our core, to be bound by something greater than ourselves. Floating freely through the horrible emptiness, crashing into others as we tumble about, we have no hard form, no justification for the parasitism of existence. And so we cage our dispersed conscious in a flimsy, prefabricated frame of lies, that that cage, those lies, may become our body and their borders our self. Having changed my cage was tantamount to rebirth. But was I entering a higher cycle of existence, or one of atonement?

Perhaps if I knew either way, I would have refused to sign the document. But the thrill of unknowing set down roots in that same part of my breast which had torn me from my dull life, putting forth a bloom of seductive crimson. At last, I remembered that I had a heart, and that it was filled with blood; I dripped that blood down the pen and across those neat threads, and my mind, body and life came together in a blaze of warmth.

Todd picked up the contract, wordlessly looked over my signature, nodded. I suppose the taste of my blood was to his liking.

Chapter IIb: Make Yourself Proud

A car soon arrived to pick me up. As it wound its way along the highway, I stared out into the sky—today it was brilliantly, crushingly blue, and, perhaps because I knew this would be my last sight of it, I couldn’t drink in enough. It was the kind of sky that had always set my thoughts wandering, and I sank softly into daydreams of the past. Not in regret, but as a way of basking in the satisfaction of having my affairs settled, really settled.

The feeling was itself nostalgic. How long had it been since I could complete everything I hoped to and enjoy a clear mind like this one? Even since I had given myself entirely over to Skyrim, I never found the time, or more accurately the mental discipline, to feel satisfied with my progress when it was time to sleep. There was always some other barrow, another Draugr to sneak attack, ten more frost trolls to spawn in. But, sometime before that, surely...

In truth, I’ve always found it better to avoid thinking too much about the past, but being that I was in a rare whimsical mood I chased the thoughts as they rolled around.

Where exactly had my life diverged from the tangle of paths collectively known as human society, and when had the gap between the two become too wide to cross? Though I no longer felt any pain when considering that sort of thing, the answer remained hazy, somewhere just out of reach. Maybe it never existed in the first place... Even as I tried to turn my memories over I found myself refashioning them, reshooting events and adjusting details until they supported convenient interpretations. By this point the original memory, if such a thing could be said to exist, had long since been lost.

In the back of that car, in that tiny world populated only by me, I invented a past self to bid farewell to.

What sense of obligation drove me? It must have been something like going to a distant relative’s funeral—unable to feel the emotion I had been expecting, unsure of even what that emotion was, I made a stiff attempt at propriety in its stead. Naturally it was an awkward affair, a lot like meeting an old friend one has long ago fallen out of touch with. Actually, it was exactly that—the sense of trying to reinvent an already-vanished identity, working backwards to justify a bundle of artificial feelings, all wrapped up far too neatly.

I, whose parts had never quite fit together properly, couldn’t be satisfied with an answer that tied a neat bow on my life. In other words, I refused to accept an explanation that “just works”—Surely I must myself be as full of meaningless switchbacks, unintended paths and misplaced objects as the game I had chosen to devote myself to.

A sharp turn pulled me out of my half-dreaming state, my mind still trailing somewhere behind me. We had arrived, and it was time to leave the beautiful sky behind.

Chapter III: You Can Play Forever

My thoughts hardened again as I approached the Bethesda offices, and my heart pounded in my ears. There I stood, at the edge of eternity, awaiting the consummation of my obsession. My driver came too, standing wordlessly behind me in a smart suit and dark sunglasses that, taken together, gave him a cartoonishly coherent image. I wondered if he wasn’t a beginner at this too, momentarily crossing paths with me as he strode out to the fringes of his own world with the same affected confidence.

All of my earlier contentment evaporated in the heat of that moment, a heat that seemed to exude from the manila walls of the office as surely as if they were the sands of a far-off desert. It was almost as if the golden sunlight which lapped against the outer offices of the building but went no farther had given them some extra warmth in compensation—It was strange to think that those walls would soon separate me forever from that light which had been shining down on me for all of my life. The glass door, when I pushed it, seemed impossibly heavy despite the smoothness with which it opened.

As the door came to a close behind me with a puff of air, I was determined not to feel even a single moment of anxiety or regret. What was I leaving behind? A life worth less than nothing. Having entered the (figurative) dungeon with no (figurative) means of healing and suffering deep (figurative) wounds, I had been tip-toeing around trying futilely to avoid further damage even as I knew deep in my heart that I would be broken the moment I tried to do anything.

I had been wrong my whole life; the thing at my core, the thing that had died, it had been a strand of that sunlight which would have pulled me out of that building. There is a place for the injured in society, in the same way that everyone sometimes indulges in a sad song. There is a place for those things which shatter and then go on bandaged in tape and patches, those things that glow with the rainbow promise of the resilience of the spirit, of that distant day when scars will have become old friends.

There is no place in this entire world for those who have broken irreparably. For those who cannot move on, for those who have no future, whose lives are forever sent spinning out of orbit from consensus human existence. There is no promise of the infinite and indefinite palliative care needed simply for that kind of person to survive each day. And, instinctively sensing that shortcoming, fearful that understanding the curse would be to invite it, those fortunate, blind souls for whom tomorrow will surely come are repulsed by the existence of those like me—Those left with no foundation on which to rebuild. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

But Todd was different. Ever since our meeting I believed, I had to believe, that he was one of the few members of this pathetic species with an unwounded heart in his chest. Or rather, I had to believe that that heart pulsed with such a vulgar, careless muscularity that injuries which would tear a more sensitive man to shreds could not stop its beating, but only wreathe it in a rosy mist of rich, hot blood as it pumped—Driving him, I presume, ever northward to the frozen mounts of Skyrim, like the engine of a locomotive rushing monomaniacally toward the next sales pitch.

I would be crushed carelessly by the weight of that existence, a bug upon a windshield. The thought excited me beyond comparison. If I met that sort of end, lower than a stray dog, I was certain that in my last moments I would blaze incandescent. A life so perfectly brought to nothing... That peculiar alchemy had become my last hope.

I was led deep within the bowels of the Bethesda facility, through winding halls and past unmarked doors. I was fairly confident that I had been descending underground from the first floor, but I soon lost all sense of how deep I might have gone. As I passed each silent chamber, I wondered if some other contractee was within, and for the first time in years I felt true jealousy claw at my heart. I was motioned through another door, shut inside, and then with the click of a lock I was left in darkness with only my strange emotions for company.

How much time did I spend drifting through that abyss? It was only when I realized that I couldn’t make out my hand in front of my face that I started to fret about my appearance. I had first come to Todd on my knees; now that I had incurred a debt of gratitude too heavy to ever repay, I could at least have kept myself presentable for his sake. But there was nothing to be done about it, and so, brushing my hair frantically with one hand, I set about groping around the limits of my chamber with the other.

It seemed I had been granted a bed with a cold steel frame of the sort hospitals have in period films, a large, rectangular dresser of some sort and an exposed toilet and sink shoved awkwardly in a corner. Beyond that, there could have been anything or nothing at all. Even my thoughts seemed to dissolve into the endless night, and soon I was almost unsure if I was asleep or awake.

It was in this state that he came to me, emerging from a thin slit of light and into the darkness of my dream like the negative image of an infant poking its head into the world. He clapped twice, waited. Clapped again.

The darkness erupted into light.

“You, uh, you could have… They were supposed to…”

So this was the real Todd after all. The weight of Nirn and beyond, all in the body of this strange, overgrown teenager. Even as my earlier fantasies evaporated, I drew a certain confidence from his awkward manner. Smiling slyly, I took my first steps toward him.

Todd continued stammering out an introduction. He seemed profoundly uncomfortable with the words people use, piling up phrases and cutting himself off in a spectacular tangle of conversation. The nervousness on his face grew as I approached, and I took a cruel delight in embracing him mid-sentence. His monologue, hardly a viable birth from the start, died in his throat as he hesitantly placed his hands around me.

No matter how quickly I tried to dispel the thought, his unsure touch reminded me of nothing so much as a child grasping out for its mother as he searched my body. As if to exact revenge for my shattered image of him, I took the lead with a perverse poise, patiently but firmly guiding his faltering touch.

Suddenly, Todd found what he sought, and began to move with a feverish brute force. The strength of an adult man erupted awkwardly from his lanky frame, a weird mixture of the figure I had imagined him to be and the one I saw clearly before my eyes. Carelessly, roughly, like the tugging of a newborn animal yet to even open its eyes, those hands pulled at me with such raw, artless desire that I thought I would surely be torn apart.

I gasped into the wrinkled collar of his shirt. For just a moment we were entwined in the stagnant, torrid air of the chamber; it was as though I was reliving a memory, one I had recalled many times before but in a concentrated form, crystallized until it had taken on a physical edge. Thought became plastic, molten, until I had forgotten where one of us ended and the other began, who was who and who held what and how desire flowed between us. Even before the moment had passed, I knew I didn’t want the tragedy of waiting for it, for something that would be like it but never quite the same, to take hold of me again—I wanted nothing more than to keep my eyes closed forever, burrowed within the same sensation for eternity.

And then, in an instant, it was over. We tumbled apart from other, spent and complete.

The copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Xbox 360 Todd had shoved into my waistband sat cold against my stomach, stretching the fabric. Across from me, Todd clutched the sixty dollars he had extracted from my back pocket to his breast as he lay on his back staring blankly up into the concrete ceiling. It was the look of a man who had found all that he wanted and spent all of himself in consuming it, a vacant gaze turned upward at nothing at all.

We lay like corpses, like beings reverted to clay, in that chamber where time did not pass.

Once again I was filled with a terrible sadness even before the moment ended. It seemed impossibly cruel that the rotation of the earth and caprices of biology would soon reassert their tyranny over the world in which we two had found some fleeting shelter. Tears fell wet and hot down my cheeks, streaming soundlessly onto the hard floor. Todd, I realized in some periphery of my mind, was also crying.

Gently, apologetically, Todd slaughtered the moment before it could be taken by decay.

“I’ll be back tomorrow the same time,” he said with a sad smile. “I—I always operate in the same routine.”

And then he was gone, and I was all alone with myself. Myself, the disc and a cabinet stuffed with consoles and topped with a small television. All according to contract, all belonging to Todd—and yet I could hardly bear even this brief custodianship of everything I had dragged around for so long. Not any more. They had become so, so awfully heavy.

Long after he had disappeared, three more twenty dollar bills appeared from the crack beneath my door.

Returning uncertainly to life, as if awakening from a heartbreakingly beautiful dream, I breathed three words into the emptiness:

"I'll be waiting."

Originally posted November 2017, and revised for this blog. Todd Howard the meme figure in my meme hell world should not be conflated with Todd Howard the actual flesh-and-blood person in the actual hell world.