“I’m just sitting here minding my own bloody business.
I mean I’m 22. Can’t I battle my Yugioh cards in peace?”
Tom thinks, while his Blue Eyes White dragon card is slid back into its cellophane sleeve. Tom takes pride in his hobbies. His worlds: Pokemon, Digimon, Magic Cards, Xbox, every gameboy since the black-and-white gameboy pocket up to today’s, which isn’t even called gameboy, and his full cupboard of scaled down army tanks; every tank ever run in any war, faithfully collected with subscription to an overpriced magazine. Tom’s room –– musty because sunlight or an open window aren’t needed, or wanted, by video games –– is where these worlds overlap. Three dimensions within the fourth, and four within the fifth, because Tom’s mind never got to age past 9.
A stranger could read most of this sun deprivation from his skin: bleached white. This white is in an ever loudening scream-off with the black of his hair. How they manage to sit so close is only, in cliché, a mystery. Perhaps their dialogue, the diplomacy between the superlative black and white, is the token black sunglasses Tom wears, is the token white dandruff that falls from his head. So plentiful that it’s seemingly sprinkled on him artificially each morning.
Is it the grease from his hair that helps fog the lenses of his glasses? The world, through those cheap-as-chips spectacles, is captured like bad photography. Is developed in a black-room with a door left open to midday sun. There is no detail, just a detection of movement. A vision of light that never managed to synthesise into recognisable shapes. He only takes them off in his room.
Tom likes to see the world like he wishes the world couldn’t see him.
Except, probably, sadly, to the world Tom is much more blurry.
The talking is louder now, is heated: ‘He can’t understand what we’re talking about!’
In his cave, which smells of moisture, of wet-dog, Tom pulls up his blanket –– which, being where the dog sleeps, is the main offender –– and soldiers on through Fable. Not only has he a girlfriend on the Xbox, his character has outdone King Henry VIII. Tom smirks as he beheads the next.
‘I’ve had enough of this fucking shit. This, this bullying.’
The sounds of screaming ricochet around corners and meet back up, however out of time, in the hallway Tom’s room is at the end of.
And although he lives his life in the infinite parallel universes of his own creation rather than the one he was actually born in, he does understand what they are talking about.
Wiping a tear, he sloshes his character through the poo of the Albion sewer system and finds the final golden Key by a metal grate.
