I just watched a playthrough of a new indie video game called Don’t Let Him In.
For those of you born earlier than the 1980s, a playthrough is a video on YouTube in which somebody plays a video game, presumably for the first time, whilst making witty or ironic comments/observations about said game. As a viewer, sometimes this means you are watching two screens: the video game itself and then the player who is commenting on it. But this player today, CPU Games, is a bit more humble than most and kept himself out of the playthrough, for the most part.
I spent a lot of time as a kid watching my friend Matt play video games. I almost never played myself. It’s weird, but I got as much enjoyment out of watching him play as he got out of playing. I didn’t know until much later in life that this is normal. Playthroughs get millions of views. One of the world’s most famous playthrough stars, a vaguely Aryan-looking kid named PewDiePie (pronounced Pew-DEE-Pie) made $15 million in 2016. I think I made a little over 30k that same year? So yeah. Playthroughs are popular.
Don’t Let Him In takes a concept that has been done to death, the evil demon hitchhiker, and filters it through a deliberately retro 64-bit look, with wooden dialogue straight out of a Studio Ghibli film, and yet still somehow succeeds. I was scared. And I liked it.
This is the plot (SPOILER ALERT FOR DON’T LET HIM IN AHEAD!)):
Three somewhat dimwitted friends in their early twenties are traveling down a highway on their way to see an unnamed band play a concert. Stopping for gas, they notice that the gas station is empty. Honestly, or perhaps idiotically, they pay for the gas anyway and leave. One of the boys mentions feeling creeped out by the vacant station, but his two meathead friends dismiss his (quite legitimate) worries.
Almost immediately after their conversation about whether or not an empty gas station is creepy, the three spot a hitchhiker up ahead and have an unrealistically long conversation regarding whether or not they should pick him up. In reality, on a highway, those three boys would have had three or four seconds to make the decision, not the four or five minutes it feels like in the game.
The whole thing reminded me of that hilarious Simpsons scene where Homer and Marge argue about picking up a hitchhiker for so long that they are actually pulling into their own driveway on 742 Evergreen Terrace when Homer finally decides that picking up the hitchhiker is “the best idea [he’s] ever had” and turns around to pick the guy up. My favourite part of the exchange:
Marge: What if he’s crazy?
Homer: And what if he’s not? Then we’ll look like idiots!
Marge’s warning turns out to be wrong in that Simpsons episode, first because the hitchhiker is Rodney Dangerfield and secondly because the show is a cartoon where nobody ever really dies (except Maude Flanders, Bleeding Gums Murphy, and Dr. Marvin Monroe).
But in Don’t Let Him In, Marge could not be more right. First off, the man is visually jarring. He’s bald and wearing a drab gray jumpsuit. He could not appear more like that cult leader, Marshall Applewhite, if he tried.
EXHIBIT 1: MARSHALL APPLEWHITE
EXHIBIT 2: DEMON HITCHHIKER
At first the man seems normal, but by “at first” I mean basically the first 30 seconds he is in the vehicle. After that, he warns the boys about an oncoming storm. Then he tells them “not to worry” because “they’re always safe as long as he’s around.”
This would worry any normal person, but our little trio of idiots decide the man is simply one of those cheerful eccentrics every small town seems to have (instead of a demon who is about to ruin their lives), so they keep him in the car.
For the next 10 miles or so the man stares out the window, not speaking. Then he asks the boys if they ever feel like they are trapped, unable to escape. The boys say no.
Then the man says “it’s too late, you’re already trapped. I can’t tell you why. I can only show you.” Then the man (quite abruptly, mind you) produces a gun nobody noticed before and blows his own fucking face off!
Okay. So now you might be thinking, that’s it? Isn’t the threat removed? Shouldn’t the boys be safe now?
Well no. Not really. First of all, they soon realize they are now trapped on the highway. They keep driving the same five mile loop, containing a gas station, a motel, a diner, and a store, over and over.
Stopping at the motel to investigate, the leader of our dumbass trio enters the motel to find it empty of people who have left behind eerie notes about the “road going on forever.” Another note mentions “running low on supplies and fuel.” In another note the writer muses, fairly accurately, than he is probably in hell. Also, the leader of the dumbasses, James, starts to hallucinate the hitchhiker as he investigates the motel. It’s creepy. He’ll open a door and the Demon Hitchhiker will be in there, hanging himself. Or standing contorted in a creepy position. Or crawling around with his tongue cut off. Best of all, (or most annoying of all if you’re the player of the game) instead of the usual “health meter” which shows how close you are to death in most games, there is a “sanity” meter which begins to decline almost immediately after James enters the motel.
I mean…I know they’ve just watched a man blast his own face off and seem to be stuck in an infinite loop, but is it realistic for James to lose almost all his sanity in about three minutes? Maybe it is.
A lot of the comments on YouTube mention the game’s similarity to Silent Hill. I haven’t seen or played Silent Hill so I can’t say. But Don’t Let Him In did remind me of was a novel called Whisper of Death by noted Young Adult author, Christopher Pike.
In Whisper of Death, a young teen couple named Roxanne and Pepper are driving to the next town to get an abortion for Roxanne, who is pregnant with Pepper’s child. Halfway through the procedure, Roxanne changes her mind, walks out of the clinic, and orders a shocked Pepper to drive her home, which he does.
On the way home the pass a hitchhiker who they don’t pick up but who somehow (SPOILER ALERT FOR CHRISTOPHER PIKE’S WHISPER OF DEATH AHEAD!) curses them anyway.
When Roxanne and Pepper get home, they realize the entire town is empty. There are no dogs barking or birds chirping either. They are utterly alone (with each other) until they explore the town and find three other stragglers who are just as bewildered as them, bringing their number to five.
Each of the five are certain Young Adult stereotypes. Roxanne is the clever Final Girl (and the narrator). Pepper is the popular football star. Helter (such a stupid name…and you know Pike only picked it because it rhymes with “Skelter”) is the stoner kid who also happens to be a psychopathic rapist. Stan is the geeek genius who can’t get a girl but who figures out the quintet’s predicament ridiculously early in the novel, on something like page 6. While everyone else is uttering dumbass guesses: “maybe they all went to Vegas?”, Stan knows what’s up: “We’re assuming that something happened to everybody else. But what if something has actually happened to us?”
The fifth character is the spoiled pretty cheerleader who I think is actually named Karen, but I can’t remember. She is designed to be vapid and forgettable, but I’m sorry I forgot her name anyway.
Like the trio in Don’t Let Him In who try to leave the road but can’t, the five kids in Whisper of Death pretty quickly realize they are stuck in their own town. And then, because this is a YA novel, they start to die one by one in increasingly gruesome ways. But wait! There’s more!
Before they die, they start finding pages of paper strewn about the town. These pages foretell each of the five’s deaths. The five kids realize that they recognize the writing. These stories were all written by a girl named Betty Sue who all five kids know, or rather, knew. Betty Sue died bu suicide a few months before the events of the novel (she kills herself in an even more dramatic manner than the Demon Hitchhiker. After learning that Pepper wants her to get an abortion…yep, he impregnated Betty Sue too…she douses herself in accelerant and sets herself on fire.
But now, somehow, Betty Sue is seeking revenge on the five people she seems to believe played a role in eother her suffering, her death, or both. The showdown at the end of the novel where Betty Sue finds Roxanne writing down her story, essentially writing the novel, Betty Sue snorts derisivley:
“That is the difference between you and me. You had only one story to tell.” She stops and grins once more. “I have millions.”
Like Betty Sue in Whisper of Death, the Demon Hitchhiker is able to influence events after his own death and traps people in a temporal and spatial prison of his own design. Like Betty Sue, his reason for doing what he does is a little creaky, if not downright Byzantine.
But I liked both! As far as I am concerned, the terror of time and what time can do to human consciousness is the ultimate torment, trumping the fear of aloneness by far.
There is a documentary called Prisoner of Consciousness about Clive Wearing, a man who contracted a virus that gave him the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. His memory is even more impaired than the guy from Memento. As his wife Deborah writes in her memoir of her relationship with Clive, Forever Today:
His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him…. Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible.
Oliver Sacks, famous for that Awakenings movie, wrote this about Clive Wearing:
When he was filmed in 1986 for Jonathan Miller’s extraordinary documentary Prisoner of Consciousness, Clive showed a desperate aloneness, fear, and bewilderment. He was acutely, continually, agonizingly conscious that something bizarre, something awful, was the matter. His constantly repeated complaint, however, was not of a faulty memory but of being deprived, in some uncanny and terrible way, of all experience, deprived of consciousness and life itself.
Although he has somehow retained his musical talent, Clive Wearing has experienced the sensation of first waking up every two or three seconds since March 1985. A gifted musician and musicologist, Miller’s documentary shows the sadness of an intellectual colossus being struck down, reduced to trying to make sense of solitaire with a pack of cards, and finding himself utterly unable to follow the game.
I can think of nothing more terrifying that what Clive Wearing has experienced and is experiencing. The aloneness he must feel trumps the aloneness of disease or addiction because so many people know what disease and addiction are like. Wearing is experiencing something few, if any, human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, even if he did meet a kindred spirit, someone with the same dense amnesia as him, he would never be able to recognize that person for what they are.
I had an experience recently that made me realize just how burdensome I have become to my family. I had no idea that some of my family members have developed what resembles a policy for Dealing With Danny. Finding this out made me feel like a walking disease. Then I remembered that I am one.
I’m not going to whine and whimper but I’ll simply say this: I wouldn’t wish fentanyl addiction on my worst enemy. It is very much like being trapped in a time loop, reliving the same day (with meaningless and/or minor variances) over and over and over. It is very much like Whisper of Death. Or Don’t Let Him In. And it is also not like these creations because these creations are fictions wherein the characters can retreat into some kind of temporal terminus after fulfilling their function in the story. I’m still waiting for the last chapter of my abysmal opiate opus.
If I could just say one thing in my defense, it would be this: When I quit drinking, I got it on the first try. I did not backslide. I did not relapse. I am quite comfortable saying now that I will never take a drink or be drunk again unless some demonic force like an Demon Hitchhiker or self-immolating author-witch robs me of my free will.
I am not patting myself on the back, I am simply saying I do possess some measure of willpower, for those who think I do not. Obviously, the opiate thing has been different from quitting drinking. I count at least 24 cold turkey detoxes (that I remember) and one lengthy rehab stay (November 2019 to January 2020). The reason things have been so different with opiates is because opiates themselves are different. They do different things to you. It feels different to quit them, or to try. This is simply a fact. Not all addictions or addicts are identical. Quite the opposite, even if it does look like every addict in the world is behaving in the same self-destructive manner, each one is suffering uniquely. The proportion to which you sympathize with them is inversely proportional to how much drug quitting you yourself have done.
So if you don’t know what it’s like, I certainly can’t show you with my words. I can try and write things like:
Opiate withdrawal makes your skin feel like it’s too small for your body. You shit and shiver constantly. You have goosebumps. Sometimes you have seizures and wake up in a stretcher. And you watch with a kind of amazed bewilderment as you become someone you don’t recognize, your life running away from you as you behave in a horrible fashion in order to obtain a substance that is ruining your life.
But that doesn’t really get it right. Because the physical stuff is endurable. All of it. What is not endurable, is what a minor character in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch calls “the mental shit.”
Here. This is the best description of opiate withdrawal I have ever found in a book. This is Theo Decker talking about his first severe opiate withdrawal experience:
None of this was as bad as I'd feared. But what I hadn't expected to hit even a quarter so hard was what Maya called "the mental stuff," which was unendurable, a sopping black curtain of horror. Mya, Jerome, my fashion intern - most of my drug friends had been at it longer than I had; and when they sat around high and talking about what it was like to quit (which was apparently the only time they could stand to talk about quitting), everyone had warned me repeatedly that the physical symptoms weren't the rough part, that even with a baby habit like mine the depression would be like "nothing I'd ever dreamed" and I'd smiled politely as I leaned to the mirror and thought: wanna bet?
But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavour from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, as if producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plotting, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament looks somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and poured over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and traveled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born, never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of [Theo’s dog] Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down - I'd forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying - over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head snaps where I started up guiltily...
This is so accurate that I can’t possibly see how it can be second-hand information. I am convinced that Tartt herself has been through opiate withdrawal. The passage does seem overly pessimistic and even histrionic in cold light of day, not in opiate withdrawal.
But I remember all too clearly the electric jolts in the brain, my skin on fire, rampant diarrhea, vomiting, crying, and still none of it unendurable. It was “the mental shit” that defeated me, over and over.
And even now, off opiates, I can feel them chasing me like a monster in a movie. Just a phone call or a subway ride away, anytime I fucking want, provided I can stomach the consequences. I’ve been robbed, beaten up, overdosed, had a seizure, spent, begged for and borrowed thousands of dollars, had a gun pressed to my left temple, all in the name of chasing that nameless bliss that cruelly vanishes just a few months into addiction, so that all you are ever doing is feeling better, not feeling high. It is not a party. It is not fun. It is relief, plain and simple and undisguised. Relief.
I have been told by my doctor that the PAWS (Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome) symptoms are different for everyone. “For some people it can take years,” he told me. There has been noticeable decline in my mental acuity. I am erratic and disorganized. Quicker to anger. I am forgetful. I used to have a very sharp memory. Now I don’t know the name of a single actor under 35. I am chronically broke. I spend more time with cats than people. I worked as hard as I could to get off opiates and my life still seems unfixably fucked.
Have I become Betty Sue or the Demon Hitchhiker, just fucking with everybody’s life? People having conversations about me? “Don’t let him in!”
I did hitchhike across Canada once. Does that make me adventurous or does it make me a freeloading leech? Does it make me both?
My life isn’t unfixably fucked. It’s just very different now. I will get back some semblance of my old life, but not the whole thing. At this point, I’d delightedly accept a few fragments.
A big part of quitting drugs (and probably accepting physical impairment) is accepting that your life now has a Before and an After. You will not get the old you back. Whatever doesn’t kill you sometimes makes you weaker. Or stranger. More brittle. Handle With Care.
If you don’t want to know me, I can’t blame you I guess. I thought I was getting better. I thought I was a decent conversationalist and listener. I didn’t think I was getting worse.
But then again, even when I was on drugs and at my worst, I didn’t figure myself for a junkie. I honestly thought I was looking for something. For what, exactly?
I was looking for any real alternative to the “exitlessness, the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody you know, and you too, sweetie” (Thomas Pynchon wrote that…love that line).
This is not me saying If you want to be my friend or family member, you have to accept the fact that I am a terrible person who will harm you financially and spiritually and emotionally.
This is simply me saying I am fucking trying here. I don’t want or need points simply for trying. I just don’t want constant life demerits either.
I am not a Thing or a Tsunami or a Plague that you must Do Something about. I am a person. That’s all.