Strange Flesh (10 page)

“People must have gone crazy.”

“Across the board. One critic wrote that it was the most transformative artistic experience he’s had in years. Another coined the term ‘terrartist.’
An audience member filed a suit asking ten million in damages for giving her PTSD.”

“Do all of his projects end in lawsuits?”

“I think he’d be disappointed otherwise. He believes litigation is America’s only authentic form of public discourse. If no one is suing you, you’re obviously not very interesting. He indemnified GAME against that little stunt, and we actually saw a marked increase in donations when news broke about the legal action. Seems supporting the arts is tedious, but defending them stirs the blood.”

Xan smiles at me and then steps back toward the hall. “Come along then. I’ll show you around.”

I’m impressed by the building’s size and scope. Along with the main gallery on the first floor is a performance space fit for an audience of over two hundred. The next three levels house studios, increasingly industrial in nature. There’s a state-of-the-art computer lab and a full-service metal shop bedecked with warning signs emphasizing the dangers of welding while under the influence of controlled substances. The fifth floor is divided into “collaborative spaces” that all seem to be padlocked, and the last two floors, Xan informs me, consist of garrets for those residents who need “accommodations suitable for alternative lifestyles.”

She adds, “But I’ll spare you the zoo tour. I’m sure the beasts are still asleep.”

Xan then takes me to find an office. Given the sort of work I need to do, I ask for one that’s fairly out of the way.

She says, “A cave dweller, are you? Well, we can give you one of the PODs, but—”

“PODs?”

“The work spaces in the Pit of Despair. Here, follow me.” We walk toward a small antique elevator. It descends creakily after Xan hits the button for the basement.

“I have to warn you,” she says, “your associates down here are a different breed. POD people, we call them. Not the most gregarious.”

We step out into an area that looks like the set of a grindhouse feature. It’s a rat’s nest of narrow brick corridors with rusty pipes overhead and industrial doors spaced at irregular intervals. To enhance the atmosphere,
residents have covered the walls with prison graffiti, and at one intersection, a realistic skeleton hangs from shackles.

Xan stops at an office and appears surprised at the oversized Master Lock hanging from its latch. She consults a sheet in her portfolio and mumbles, “Bollocks. This is supposed to be open.”

I drift halfway down the hall to where a rickety door stands ajar. A naked overhead bulb reveals the room to be a tiny dank cell with a slouching brick wall running along one side and a set of water-stained drywall planes composing the other three. In the back, an ancient desk stands devoid of contents.

“This looks okay,” I call out.

Xan seems hesitant to abandon the room listed on her clipboard, but she walks slowly over and checks out the one I’ve selected. She darts a glance across the hall at a sturdy steel door.

Finally, she says, “Right. Well, I hope you’re very happy here. I should say that we’re having a bit of a fete tonight. If you meet me outside at eleven, I’ll hand you around to your new colleagues.”

“Sounds great.”

“Welcome to the GAME, James. You know where I am. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Well, there is one thing. I understand Billy has disappeared. You haven’t seen him recently, have you?”

Xan chuckles softly. “Billy? I don’t believe I’ve laid eyes on him for quite a while. But that’s not so unusual.”

“Seems like there’s some reason to worry. What with the Jackanapes suicide epidemic.”

“Now James, I like lurid drama as much as the next girl, but two separate tragedies hardly make an epidemic.”

I nod amenably but silently reply,
Yeah, but who says it’s over?

A
pproaching the GAME building that night, I’m surprised to see a scene resembling the sidewalk of a hot nightclub. There’s a brace of enormous black bouncers accompanied by a transvestite in an astro-Krishna getup holding a clipboard. Beyond the perimeter, a group of the unnamed angrily thumb their phones. Xan, ravishing in leather pants and black cashmere, leads me smoothly past the doorgoyles.

Inside is a labyrinth of giant screens, each providing a window into some strange universe of grave jeopardy and eternal resurrection. Projectors mounted in any available corner make surfaces crawl with a chaos of ill-defined images. Smoke from DIY holographic displays pervades the place with a sense of spectral menace. Condensing mist drips onto the cables crisscrossing the floor. Having considered the topic recently, I assess the possibility of electrocution.

The crowd is a pan-tribal confab representing suits, geeks, and the new-media media. Omnipresent black lights impart a
Tron
-ish computer glow even to those guests not dressed like gaudy NOD avatars. A series of statuesque women, faces hidden by Boschian beaked-creature masks, are dancing up on platforms.

A DJ I dimly recognize is working through a dissonant eight-bit set, occasionally manipulating a panel of raw circuitry.

Though it seems like typical art-rave eclecticism, eventually I notice that the unifying undercurrent here is
play
. Scanning the room I see a group
of what I’m forced to characterize as upscale punk intelligentsia running around trying to assassinate each other with their cell phones. There are several home-brewed
Magic
:
The Gathering
–style card games going, hard-core LARPers fencing with prop-quality light sabers, and a techno-hippie drum circle gathered around an iPhone collaborative music app. They’re wearing headphones, so the group’s synchronized nodding comes off eerie in its silence. The aquarium I saw Xan working on earlier now allows players to fight phosphorescent piranhas with a remote-control submarine.

My host sees a passing waiter, all of whom are dressed as snow ninjas, and liberates two magenta drinks. She hands one to me.

“
Gan bei,
James.” We clink glasses. “So here you have GAME in all its degenerate glory.”

She gestures to a group way out on the thrash end of the spectrum who have imported a bottle of Everclear and some powdery substance and are lighting their sneezes on fire.

Xan downs the better part of her drink and then grabs the elbow of someone behind her. “Looks like I’ll need another cocktail. Be right back, but in the meantime, meet Andrew Garriott.”

Garriott is a diminutive Brit with short hair and dancing eyes that give him a sprightly quality. He shows the well-wrought smile of someone groomed to be a child star. After a warm handshake and some preliminaries, he asks me what I do.

“Video, mostly. What’s your game of choice?”

“Game? Oh, I’m complete crap at games. More of a gearhead, really. I was making robots at Cambridge . . . I suffer to think how I ended up here. Good parties though. I guess you could say I—”

Garriott is nearly carried off his feet by the ardent embrace of a strikingly tall blonde. Her back to me, she puts him into a precarious dip while whispering into his ear. Garriott’s initial frown at being mauled smooths into an expression approaching bliss. She sets him back on balance, grabs his hair, and gives him a violent kiss on the forehead. I begin to turn away, as it seems clear they have something important to discuss, but Xan reappears by my side and taps her shoulder, saying, “Olya, how beastly! You’re alienating our new man here.”

She turns, and I have to strain to keep my mouth closed and my eyes from wandering along uncivil trajectories. Olya puts one in mind of
mythology. With cascades of nearly white hair, eyes a color of blue Icelandic geneticists are no doubt struggling to patent, and a radiant complexion, she has all the unnatural perfection of the Valkyrie one might find painted on the side of a van at Comic-Con. This impression is not hindered by her wearing a metallic corset that, while possibly providing some protection in battle, seems more contrived to bring confusion to her enemies by what it does for her tremendous décolletage. Her voice is the low Slavic purr of a Bond villain:

“Ah. Hello. I am Olya Zhavinskaya.”

I start to offer my hand, but she envelops me in a Russian triple kiss. The last one lingering enough to make me fumble my own name. Olya seems to ignore it anyway and says, “Now,
zaichik,
we welcome you here, and I’m sure we’ll be great friends. It is very rude of me, but I must take away the little ones. We have business.”

She puts her arms around the shoulders of Garriott and Xan and marches them off toward a dimly lit corner by the DJ booth. Xan puts up a mollifying finger for me, but something Olya says makes her head snap around as they disappear into the crowd.

After some time spent making small talk with other GAMErs, I notice, across the crowded main gallery, Olya stepping up onto the DJ’s stage.

“Shitfire,” observes a guy standing nearby.

The DJ shakes his head at whatever she’s asking. But with her lips at his ear, he finally nods reluctantly, earning a brisk pat on the ass. The DJ abandons his abstract composition of low-fi bleeps and segues into an up-tempo version of the Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma,” but with Morrissey’s bleak baritone artfully mixed with a James Brown classic:

Girlfriend in a coma I know I know it’s serious—Get up! Get on up!

Olya then steps back to Xan and Garriott, who are wrestling with a bottle of champagne. There’s a barely audible squeal of delight as the cork goes and foam explodes all over them.

I feel a strong impulse to slip over and play cabana boy with my cocktail napkin. But I make it only a few steps in their direction when I’m
thwarted by a girl turning away in disgust from losing at some handheld game. This hefty cyber-goth with Muppet hair and a pincushion face slams into me, and my drink spills all over the most incongruous part of her outfit: a pastel pink polo shirt she’s wearing along with plaid vinyl pants. I apologize and offer her the napkin meant for Olya.

She says, “Ha. Forget it, dude. That won’t be the worst thing I’ll have—well, anyway, don’t worry about it.”

Then she’s distracted by one of her friends hollering at her. I check out the mess I’ve made. Curiously, her soiled shirt bears a crocodile logo over her left breast. But this one isn’t the usual preppy embroidery. It looks more like it’s been embossed into the fabric. I guess she notices me staring at her chest. When I glance up, she smiles and flicks the crocodile with a black fingernail, making a soft click.

“See anything you like?” she asks.

I realize that the logo is actually a metal pendant affixed to her nipple. Having recently seen its twin dangling from Billy’s pecker, I know I have to overcome my mortification to ask her about it. But she’s already wheeled away from me back into the crowd.

I push forward to follow her but can’t see where she’s gone. As I scope the nearby guests, however, I discover that several of them are also wearing gold croc insignia through a wide variety of piercings.

In the bar line I find a bored-looking man with the pendant hanging from a bull ring through his nose. “I’ve seen a bunch of people wearing that crocodile tonight. What does it mean?”

“Just swag, man. This stupid guerilla marketing thing. We thought we might win something.”

“Can I see it?”

He takes it out, and I examine it, feeling like he’s handed me the key to a treasure vault.

“Where’d you get it?”

“It came in the mail a couple days ago. I’ve been wearing it this whole time, but nothing’s happened. Which is bullshit if you ask me.”

“Did it say who sent it?”

“No. No return address or anything. It was clipped to a card with this fucking poem. I brought it in case we needed it to get our prize.”

He pulls out a small ivory square of heavy-gauge card stock. Printed in a medieval script are the words: