Patrick Thompson - Seeing the Wires

If I ever meet the poor bastard I’ll give him some of my leftovers.

Trouble is, these sayings came from somewhere. They meant something at one time. Language has got all fucked up. Not in the same way as time, which is going too quickly, or the weather, which passes too slowly, but it’s still in a tangle. We don’t know what it means. We know what we mean by it, but we don’t know where the words came from. Words can do a lot, properly applied. Words can do everything.

Everything is words. Everything is defined by language.

With training you can make words do different things. Point to different objects. Make those objects different.

I think that I can cheat death, to tell you the truth. I’m cutting through some things here. There’s more to it than I’m letting on. This is fair enough. I had to work to know what I know. I’m not going to hand out any details for free.

I came to magic gradually. I used to read fiction. A lot of science fiction, when I was younger, along with the usual dragons and wizards nonsense. I grew out of it years ago.

In all fantasy novels there’s a wizard and his name has one X and one Z and one C in it because all wizards favour the letters on the lower left-hand side of the keyboard. He has an apprentice from the town nearby. The apprentice is an adolescent boy as imagined by a nun; full of the desire to become better and go further and he’s never masturbated.

The apprentice’s father – a blacksmith – was killed by raiders led by a man with more Xes in his name than the wizard. The son wishes to learn magic so that he can go and beat the shit out of the bad guy and his henchmen. The bad guy is one-dimensional, his henchmen are just names.

The apprentice learns magic, goes on a quest, meets a maiden, doesn’t fuck her and doesn’t seem to want to, vanquishes the bad guys and has a chat with a dragon.

Not necessarily in that order.

I was twelve, heading into adolescence. I was reading these terrible novels, which seemed to have been transcribed from the minutes of role-playing games.

Don’t get me started on role-playing games.

I knew that all the dwarf bullshit was of no literary value. I wasn’t fooling myself. But come on, I was twelve and I could read books that claimed to be written for adults. My classmates could barely read the instructions for videogames.

I wondered why I read this nonsense. I studied my motives. If this sounds calculating, fair cop. If there was any point to adolescent angst, it was to motivate you. It wasn’t something to sit on the stairs and mope about. Here was this energy and this growth. What did I want?

What the heroes of those terrible fantasy novels wanted. What their spotty virgin readers, living with their parents at the age of forty, wanted. I didn’t want to kill the bad guys. I didn’t suffer from bad guys. They ignored me. My friend Jack was friends with bad guys.

I became friends with Jack when I was thirteen. I did it deliberately. I’m not going to kid you about that. I saw that he had a lot of friends of the unfriendly sort, and I learned what he was interested in – metalwork, mostly – and I pretended to be interested in it. I knew him a long time ago, my mother used to say. It’s one of the things she thinks I didn’t listen to. I don’t remember Jack before we went to school. Once we got to school, I needed him. Having a friend with bad friends saves you a lot of trouble.

Don’t go after the bad guys. Get them on your side. It’s easier and quicker and they always fall for it. You only need two or three phrases to start a conversation:

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