The next day, in the late afternoon, when Roddy had fully detoxified, and no longer needed the ear plugs, ice pack, and Prada eye coverlets, Seth came by and began to teach. He sat in Roddy's bench-made leather chair, and lectured on the meaning of the various games and how they related to the clothes the game pieces wore. The sorcerer's gown emblazoned with stars was Copernican science bent toward a new type of religion, a religion unfounded on principals and beholden only to magical cavorting. The armor of the warrior child was both protection and decoration, and its color symbolized the prophecy that had accompanied the child's birth, red for blood spilled redeeming the innocent and black, for blood spilled to a purpose the prophet could not see.
"Are those the only colors available in children's wear?" Roddy asked.
"Well, er, yes, in the game its either red or black."
"But those colors stain so easily, couldn't we work in something a little more practical, something patterned, maybe dark blue with little white duckies?"
"Duckies?"
"Ducks, you know, like quack."
"Ducks aren't really part of the..."
"Well, look, they can be magic ducks, they can have super powers, maybe even, breath fire, I don't know, like a dragon duck, " and here his voice became dramatic and he held up his hands, separated by a distance Seth took to be the width of a duck, "the great duck of Umulatu, keeper of the lost treasure of, of, Cluck."
"Cluck is a chicken sound."
"Ok, then how about a magic chicken?"
"But the rules don't allow..."
"Oh rules. The greatest designers broke the rules, they didn't even learn the rules because it held them back, messed with their originality. You don't want to hurt my chances at greatness, do you?"
"Well, of course not, but..."
"Ok then, magic chickens."
"Ok, magic chickens."
"Magic chickens of Umulatu."
Seth croaked the words slowly as if forced to at gun point, "Magic chickens of Umulatu."
"Now write that down, I need you to keep notes on everything you say, so you, I mean, I, can use them later for my thesis."
But Seth discovered that Roddy had really meant "you." When Seth finished the lecture, Roddy asked if he could write the first part of his thesis. After considering the moral imperative, Seth had reluctantly agreed, believing a friend who actually had a social life outside the gaming community might staunch the need he could not identify, but felt the strongest in the early morning hours after a long gaming session was winding down and the pieces left on the board seemed not to be worth the sleep he had missed, and the sleep he had missed seemed somehow wrong, because he slept alone, always alone. Now, as the sun flower girls smiled and Roddy tipped back his drink with a thumb and forefinger, he realized what that need was, and he was scared.
"How do you know I haven't already been laid?" Seth said, with more embarrassment than indignation.
Roddy just smiled and pocketed his phone. He stepped into the path of a radiant sun flower girl and swiped another drink.
"Seth, just trust me, ok. Don't think for once. Don't try to figure things out. Just do what I tell you to do and your life might change, and not in a bad way." Roddy's smile widened with pride; he too could be a teacher.
"Ok," Seth said, "who's Marta?"
***
Roddy led Seth through the mansion, through so many rooms and down so many halls and within range of so many phantasmagorical sights, that it seemed unbelievable to Seth, like a kind of game he had never considered, where dice did not determine outcomes, but only the emphatic desire of his friend to get him laid, a die role that had turned out in his favor, but that he could still not help feeling queasy about. The things Seth saw as he was led through the "game" were as vexing and mysterious as Seth's games were to Roddy. There was a room covered from floor to ceiling with furry carpeting, where groups of guests sat in circles, petting cats. In a hall way he encountered naked men holding boxes of donuts, who threw lustful glances at them, waiting for them to make some sort of mental connection between objects that Seth tried his hardest not to guess at. In another room, two men were arguing over a bag of white powder they both had a grip on. When the bag burst open and the contents spilled, they got down on their hands and knees. Suddenly one man stopped, stood up and said with an extreme agitation, "Oh, after you." He put his hands on his hips and shook his unsmiling head while the other man snorted, even hoovering the few specks that had fallen on his friend's shoes.
Finally, they came to a room that Roddy had to unlock. That light was his first impression of the room did not surprise Seth. Light in all its forms seemed to be the theme of the evening. The room was vast, and in each of the four corners were floor lamps funneling purple light onto the ceiling. The purple light spread and then slowly dissipated into a soft white light that revealed a king size bed surrounded by black lacquered amoires. The sheen on the surface of the black furniture was so pronounced that it looked wet and Seth imagined that there were little holes in the ceiling that produced artificial rain (by this point nothing was beyond belief). Sitting on the bed, with her legs crossed was a woman in a black ankle length dress, who was facing towards one of the purple corners, away from Seth, as though the strange light was holding her spellbound.
Roddy took a swatch of Seth's shirt, since he had also become spellbound to the point of motionlessness, and led him to the side of the bed where she was sitting.
"Marta, I'd like to introduce you to my friend Seth. He almost went blind tonight."
She laughed.
At first Seth wasn't sure if it was the concoction of different lights affecting his vision, but when he drew close to shake her hand, something about her eyes made him extend the hand shake so he could study her face more closely. Her eyes were pure white. No pupils, no irises. She did not look at him so much as direct the force of her face upon him. Seth was suddenly aware of his breathing, how each inhale and exhale was providing her with information she could use to discover his motives. He had read that the blind were super-sensitive to sound and smell, and could draw the deepest insights from the most minor excretions. He wondered if she could tell by his scent how he was dressed, where he had come from, what he wanted. She might know, even if he didn't.
Marta had straight black hair that was coiled behind her head. Her face was a surprise to Seth, and not just because of the blind eyes. It was a face that demanded from observers what she could not give back to them. Her face preened for eyes that could still see. He noticed the softness of her skin, the tiny upward wisp of a nose, the black lip-stick and eyeshadow that made her eyes seem like holes ripped in a human mask behind which hid a blazing white star in the shape of a woman.
"So, you are the the guy who taught Roddy something about fashion? I'm impressed. Roddy thinks he knows everything, and what he doesn't know he thinks is unimportant."
"Well," Seth said, trying to be polite, "I've learned a lot from Roddy too."
"Ha! I'm not so sure of that. Don't take this the wrong way, but your outfit doesn't seem like the kind Roddy would approve of. A velor shirt? Didn't those go out of fashion sometime in the 80's."
"The 70's" Roddy corrected. "If you want to get specific, 1971."
"How..." said Seth.
"It simple really. Velor gives off a certain tang, which I can smell. I can also tell that Roddy's had three drinks tonight, two martinis with vodka. Ha. And a glass of orange juice."
"Vitamin C is important," said Roddy, as though he might have disappointed her.
"Don't stare at me," she said. Seth flinched away and mumbled apologies, wondering how she could determine that he was stricken to the point of unconsciously examining every detail of her face and body.
"Don't worry too much, I'm used to it. By the way, do you know why I wanted to meet you."
"I honestly can't say," Seth replied, "Are you into games?"
"Not the kind that you play." Roddy laughed and flopped down on the bed besides her. Seth, was beginning to suspect some kind of trick or even worse: that they had planned a make-over. He looked around for mirrors that could be hiding cameras.
"He probably told you that he was going to get you laid. Is that what he said?"
"Um," said Seth.
"Right. You see, the real reason I wanted to meet you is because Roddy's says you're the one person he knows who thinks too much. Now that's not saying much knowing most of his friends, who think about, what...what is it you and the other F & D majors think about all day." She directed this question lazily at Roddy, who was slowly sinking into the soft mattress.
"I don't need to think. My talent is instinctual."
"Well," Marta said, "that's my problem Seth. I'm surrounded by instinctual people. Do you know what it's like to be trapped in your mind, to the point that you over-think every little detail?"
"Um, yes," said Seth. He thought about his rescue from blindness by Roddy earlier that night.
"Being blind is like that. People say that the blind compensate by sharpening their remaining senses. But that's not always true. Sometimes they try to grow a new sense, a sense that is completely mental, but has the qualities of a physical sense, a new type of perception. It's like living in a 2-D world all your life and suddenly a dimension goes away, so you try to find the 3rd dimension that you've never experienced before, but know is out there. Maybe it's a kind of evolution. I feel like that's what I'm trying to do, evolve into something new. So I asked Roddy, without expecting any help, because Roddy is after all, Roddy, to introduce me to someone whom fate has given over to thought, to the point that their instinct is stunted. I wanted to meet someone I could say these sorts of things to, someone who might understand what I'm getting at."
"I understand," Seth blurted, "I mean, I think I know what you mean."
"Exactly," she said.
"What?"
"You said, 'you think you know', not 'you feel you know.' We're going to have some long conversations okay? Would you like to start now?"
She stood, and Seth took her arm and led her from the room. Roddy stayed behind. They walked past the men who had been arguing over the bag of coke, past the place where the naked donut men had been, which was covered in crumbs, past the room with the cat petters.
"Did you ever wonder," he said to her, "whether people who think too much would go blind when they looked at the sun, because they wouldn't turn away from it until they came to the logical conclusion that they would go blind. That their instinct would be short circuited."
She stopped, turned towards him, and removed his sunglasses. He looked into the white silence of her eyes and they came together in a kiss that she executed with delicate precision. It was as though she was privy to the exact dimensions of his mouth, the pressure his tongue could stand before an exquisite overlapping became something disgustingly sodden. This was the kiss of a blind girl, he thought. His heart pounded as if flushed with amphetamines. It was just a kiss, but she was telling him that she understood, on a level deeper than words, what he had said. He led her to the foyer, into the bright blaze of light and together they stood facing the suns, until he was prepared to kiss her as she had kissed him.
