Side Quests
You travel alone across this emaciated America, this atom-scorched landscape where the cattle are radiation-burned, where the deer wander with both heads alert for danger. You began last night with a single objective in this video game: find your lost child, save him from the bullet’s quick bite or the machete’s keen edge. But then you meet that family eking out a living on their carrot farm, mourning their daughter who now fills the ghouls’ bellies down by the recycling plant. They ask you to retrieve her party dress, a remembrance of her eighth birthday party when she danced to an old Billie Holiday song before eating too much cake and falling asleep near the generator. On the way, you encounter a young couple who live in a shack in the swamp—they ask you to rescue their friend who was kidnapped by mutants, and soon you have so many side quests that you lose sight of how to win. Later today, after the laundry is out of the dryer, you will drive to the grocery store and buy a chicken for dinner and a new length of hose, half-listening to radio reports about immigration officers splitting families in the name of national security, about invasive species in the Great Lakes, about climate change and how quickly environmental protections have receded so far this year. Remember to return those soda bottles for the deposit and dispatch all those bandits who live in the convenience store. When dinner is over and the dishes are put away, after your son falls asleep in your arms, you will think of all the things you have not done: retrieve that lost cache of weapons for the rebels, call the building contractor for a quote on new paint, get the brakes checked on the station wagon and deliver a message to the mad scientist in the secret grotto—and isn’t there a world out there that still needs saving. Isn’t there something you should be doing.
The Cower Bug
During the big battle, the civilians hunker down and put their hands up over their heads, fearful of gunshots and laserfire. You have defeated all the killer robots, men with shotguns and heavy coats, soldiers machine-gunning bullets into wood and metal and flesh. There is plenty to fight in this video game, plenty to fear in this bombed out wasteland that America has become, plenty to kill if everyone has enough bullets. Afterwards, when the bad guys are gone, you walk into the trading post and no one seems to be there; then you see them—the surviving civilians still cowering at your feet. “Hi there,” the trader says, in her normal cheery voice. “What can I get ya?” But she is in the fetal position on the ground not looking at you. The innkeeper says, “I have one room left for rent.” But he is crouched in the corner protecting his head. There is a glitch in the system that contorts the body’s terror, everyone wearing their panic like that broad smile you wear in real life when you know how close everyone lives to death, when you can’t stop thinking about how at any moment you could lose everything. A friend told you a story last week about how it feels to be a schoolteacher during an active shooter drill. The week before that, the middle school down the street went into lockdown after a man was seen nearby with a gun. You are thankful that children cannot be harmed in this video game but then you see that young civilian stuck hiding in the corner, the soldier firing his rifle at him over and over, bullet casings rattling in an endless shower to the floor. When your son wakes up in the morning, you will go to his bed. You will smile and say, “Good morning, you.” Say, “Did you have good dreams?” Say, “We’re going to have a great day today.” When he looks at you, he won’t notice how you are always kneeling with your hands over your face.
Different Kinds of Ghouls
In this video game, there are ghouls. Some ghouls spend their whole lives looking for a paycheck, for a kiss, for a warm bed in a house where they can sleep unbothered until morning. They look in the mirror and examine their own irradiated faces for a scrap of the person they used to be, the person they still dream of being. The other ghouls have gone feral, feasting on whatever moving flesh they encounter, hunger consuming them from the inside. They haunt subway tunnels, graveyards, deserted shopping malls, their humanity a nuclear glow where their brains once worked. Some ghouls work the trading posts and cantinas, selling what they have scavenged for a hot meal and a roof to sleep under, people who were once full-skinned and beautiful before they were remade by the fallout in that same way that this video game landscape was once America before it was turned to rubble by war and the insistence that there are two kinds of ghouls: humans and monsters. Not long ago, you were hearing threats of a Muslim registry in America, and before that you read about Iranian Americans being asked where their loyalties lay as they tried to come back home. Your father once lived in a concentration camp in Idaho like those children live behind barbed wire in Texas now. Your neighbors talk loudly about which countries in the Middle East deserve an American bomb and you wonder how your grandparents felt as they boarded the bus that would take them to the county fairgrounds back in 1944. Now, in this video game, you watch the ghouls lumber awkwardly through the parking lot toward you, claws outstretched, teeth bared and gnashing. You hear their appetites rattling in their throats and understand what they are saying to you. We are ghouls who sing love songs in beautiful cracked voices and ghouls who can’t remember what music sounds like, who live with earworms threatening to swallow our family histories, our homelands. Look at our faces. We are beautiful. Beautiful.
