It's not a Flash, not yet in Normal entries

There is a story I’ve written a few times from a few angles. I’ve been having a difficult time thinking of an October flash, but I have, just this moment, thought of deconstructing this story because at the heart of it is a genuine personal horror.

I’ll try to make the background brief. The story was presented to me as true. When I had first moved to Portland I was fortunate enough to meet a group of street intelligentsia; there is no better way to say this. Educated, literate, broke ass; artists who had ttaken a vow of poverty. Heh, it appeared that way, there was no actual vow poverty though most resources went to burritos, wine and ink and paper. There was this one guy who worked as a caretaker, goon squad, candy striper — some composite of all three. He spoke well, was an attractive young man except for a very large and hairy mole. Because he was him he waxed the hair on the mole into half a handlebar moustache like half a portrait of Salvador Dali. The story was his.

He would spend his breaks in small bay with the catatonic patients. He’d play out classic chess games leaving the board set up as no one disturbed it in that ward. He found that after a two day absence someone had moved the opposing piece to the side of some famous chess game he was playing. Over a period of months the mysterious player deviated from the documented moves and improved on them. In a nutshell that is the entirety of the story, eventually he quit or was fired and life went on. He told the story well but it had no resolution. He believed another employee was just fucking with him and yet they seemed unbearably dull and he was compelled by the idea of a covert chess master among the drones that were his colleagues.

Myself and another fellow, the one I remained closest too out of that group of bright-eyed vagrants, immediately went to the idea that one of the patients, outwardly catatonic but inwardly a lost john doe master had either through force of will or some other less conventional means exerted his focused energy to complete these ancient games. It makes for a better story.

I’ve written it that a few times and yet it’s either the slow realization of the narrator or the happy magic of the patient still being effective, connected, even in this singular and seemingly pointless way. Given the events of the last few years I’ve come to a different and frightening way of looking at the tale.

Chess is a game of strategy; speed chess is mastered by those who have studied the game so well they anticipate thousands of defenses and offenses, though there are millions and subject to change by the unpredictable nature of the opponent, many people, most people are very predictable most of the time. Chess without a time limit involves strategic thought, philosophy, art, psychology, science. Hmmm, I’m saying it poorly, but just being good at the game isn’t enough to beat everyone below you. A machine, and from the earliest days of personal computers (and I suspect military ones as well which pre-date the personal ones by half a century) there have been chess programs, even computer dedicated solely to chess. Like the speed chess player millions of possible moves are entered, yet, you can still beat them, dusty as it seems it is still a living game.

Again, I did that poorly, my point, however, is that to play well and autonomic response won’t work. Given that the idea of that kind of mind stuck in a manikin, a body and for all practical purposes a mind that does not interact, move, preserve itself independently — it scares the shit out of me. That a force will of that intellect would move a chess piece once every 48 hours makes it even more frightening. It’s like Poe’s fear of being walled in or buried alive except that it goes on for a very long time, it doesn’t end in imminent death, it continues indefinitely.

If I do manage to squeak out a horror flash before Saturday, that’s what I’d like to capture. Monsters, death, genocide, sure that’s all kind of scary, a vampire scary in that it’s unnatural, undead, none of the morality inherent in a creature afraid of death and so in our mythology no morality at all. No, this story will be about being alive, sentient and unable to interact, imprisoned in a well cared for failed and failing body. Hmmmm, this is why I’m not actually writing it. Being told doesn’t work well, it’s a story that needs to be shown. Personally, I need to step away from the chess story and take a different approach, I’m thinking along the lines of Johnny Get Your Gun, but, I’ll stay away from War stories as well.

This entry is a bad excuse, but October needs an October flash.