Psychofauna

Origins, or Get Out of My Room, Dad

Previously: Mapmaker and co suspect that recent contagion events are all caused by a single instigator. Mapmaker needs a break to play his guitar.

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○ Months after the Great Opening, Manhattan

Deshawn strummed a chord. It needed more distortion.

As he pressed down the guitar pedal, he caught a warped reflection of himself in the tinfoil that covered the walls of his bedroom: thick glasses, lanky, T-shirt and jeans that didn't fit. He was aware of his own stereotype. If he saw himself in the street, he would classify himself in an instant: Gen Alpha, nerd. He didn't feel like either of those things. For one, he didn't watch anime. For another, he played guitar like the second cousin of the devil himself – one of dead gran's famous southern similes – or in his ma's flowery professor words, he played like a mathematician solving the equation of sound. Which really did make him sound like a nerd.

Deshawn strummed the second chord. The distortion was high enough now. He began the hypnotic riff from "Get Got" and chanted over it:

"Made a hole through to my head / Pierced the skull and / Took in the breeze...nuh-nuh nuh-nuh nuh-nuh-nuh..."

He forgot how this part went. In fact, he wasn't sure if any of these lyrics were right. His memory was only good for gestalts – wholes rather than parts.

"Struck by each mind's floating streams / In the nexus weaving dreams," he attempted.

Death Grips was a band from the early 2010s that combined punk rock, hip hop, and glitchy industrial. It was difficult to place on his maps. He liked his music that way: unclassifiable.

He wove a wall of sound until he entered trance. Trance was like a home. It helped him forget all the post-Opening craziness outside. More importantly, it brought him to the place he went mentally to make his maps. Or more like...returned him there.

He practiced the riff over and over, nodding his head left and right, four power chords looping back on themselves in syncopated rhythm, like an ouroboric lanyard.

He stopped. He could feel someone outside his door. Deshawn put the guitar on its stand.

There was a light knocking. "Deshawn?"

Deshawn opened the door. His dad was there in his wheelchair.

"Deshawn, it's 12:39am."

"Oh."

"Look, it's no big deal for me. Your mom and I sleep like rocks. But the folks I just leased the apartment to next door, they're complaining about the noise."

"I thought you were retired."

"Yeah, well, with the economy where it is right now, we can't exactly rely on your mom's poetry professorship to rake in the dough, if you know what I'm saying. Unless somehow her next poem gets a movie deal." His dad grinned. "That was a joke."

"OK," said Deshawn. He felt antsy. He'd been on the verge of a potential memespace connection.

His dad's grin fell away. He glanced around Deshawn's room. Normally Deshawn kept it meticulously tidy, but he'd been too in the zone the past few days to pay much attention to where he put things. Now that he'd discovered The Instigator, it was the only thing he cared about. He was like a stone rolling down a hill.

"You all good in there?"

"Yeah, I'm good. I'll plug in headphones. I forgot this time. Sorry about that."