My sister told me about a place where people noclip.
Seriously.
I was as shocked as you are.
“It’s not far from here,” she said. “This guy I work with was talking about it. One of the bouncers. He claimed his best friend went right through it a year ago and was never heard from again.”
“Is he crazy?” I asked.
“Who? The guy I work with? Or his friend?”
“Both of them I guess.”
“Yeah. I guess they’re both crazy. Crazy enough,” she responded, laughing it off.
I took a sip of my small-batch ginger ale. “Well where is it? This place where people noclip?”
“Like I told you, it’s not far from here. Out in the desert. You head east on Interstate 6 for about forty miles.”
“Weird. Then what?”
“… You’re not actually thinking about going there, are you?”
“I might be.”
“Don’t. Like I said, that guy is crazy.”
“Okay. But for the sake of argument…”
“For the sake of argument what?”
“For the sake of argument let’s say he’s not crazy. How would you get there?”
“For the sake of argument, assuming he’s not crazy, the guy says that about forty miles up Interstate 6 there’s a dusty ochre pickup truck abandoned on the side of the road that’s been there since 1987. Make a right at the pickup truck and follow the unmarked road, until the street signs stop. You’ll know the place when you get there.”
“How?”
“You just will.”
“How far is it though?”
“The guy says it’s far enough.”
“Fine. What then?”
“Don’t give me attitude or I won’t tell you how to get there.”
“My sincerest apologies.”
“That didn’t sound sincere. But I forgive you.”
“Appreciate you, Sis. What then?”
“Then you park. But it has to be at sunset. That’s what the bouncer tells me. For whatever reason, the thing is only there for about five minutes around sunset.”
“What thing?”
“The cassette store.”
“They still make cassettes?”
“They must, if there’s a whole store for them. Come on, use your critical thinking skills.”
“Fair.”
“Go inside the cassette store. And make sure to say hi to the guy who works there.”
“Why?”
“Because he doesn’t get many customers.”
“Oh. But that’s not part of the noclipping?”
“No, it’s just a polite thing to do.”
“Got it.”
“Say hi to the guy, then go to the new releases section, and find the Fleetwood Mac tapes.”
“… This is sounding complicated.”
“Would you stop interrupting me? If it weren’t complicated, more people would know about it.”
“Fair.”
“So next, you grab two copies of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night.”
“What about Tusk?”
“What about it?”
“Can I get Tusk instead? It’s a better album.”
“You’re not buying it. You’re borrowing it.”
“Oh. Thanks for clarifying.”
“Anyway, it has to be Tango in the Night.”
“Noted.”
“Grab the tapes, and when the guy isn’t looking, slip them into your pockets.”
“Hold up. Wait a second.”
“What? For the love of God, what?”
“I’ve never shoplifted before.”
“You’re not shoplifting.”
“Then why am I putting tapes in my pockets?”
“Because you’re not allowed to bring merchandise into the restroom.”
“Uh…”
“The next step is you go to the restroom.”
“What if I don’t have to go?”
“…”
“Fine, fine, so I take the two copies of Tango in the Night – not my favorite Fleetwood Mac record by the way – I put them in my pockets, and I sneak them into the women’s room.”
“Men’s room.”
“I sneak them into the men’s room.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. So I’m in the men’s restroom with the contraband. Then what?”
“Go to the third urinal from the door.”
“This sounds like a big bathroom for a cassette store that’s only open five minutes at a time.”
“Yeah, it’s huge. So you go to the third urinal, and you put the two tapes next to each other in the urinal, and you climb up into the urinal, and stand on top of the tapes. One for each foot.”
“You sure it’ll hold my weight?”
“Oh yeah, it’s an American Standard.”
“Damn.”
“And that’s when you noclip. You’ll go right through the bottom of the urinal. Right through the floor of the cassette store. Right through the earth itself. And you’ll enter the space below.”
“… Hell?”
“Huh?”
“I’ll enter Hell?”
“What? No. I didn’t know you were religious.”
“I’m not. I just thought you were using a euphemism for Hell.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Okay, sorry. So it’s not Hell?”
“No, it’s the space below. The void. The bardo. Some third synonym.”
“Then what?”
“What do you mean ‘then what’? That’s it. You’re all done. You have successfully noclipped.”
“Damn.”
“But don’t do it.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course.”
“You’re not thinking about doing it, are you?”
“Me? Nah.”
“Because it’s dangerous.”
“For sure.”
“Very dangerous.”
“Totally.”
“So you won’t do it?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Good.”
***
There I was, standing on the precipice of fate, one Tango in the Night in each hand and a triple-flushed urinal glistening before me. One of the Tangos was a used copy, but I figured that would be okay. I figured a Tango was a Tango. It was VG+ anyway and had barely been played.
I placed the tapes side by side in the trough, and I mounted my steed.
Instantly something went wrong. My steed bucked.
My stomach jumped into my chest and my body tumbled forward, but I did not bang my forehead on the American Standard’s ergonomic flusher assembly. No.
I had not fallen off the urinal, but rather through the urinal, as I had been direly warned would happen. Big yikes. But also hell yes.
As my body fell forward, I osmosed first through the bathroom wall, then through its gorgeously mosaiced tile floor (seriously, this bathroom), tumbling forward through the very foundations of Murphy’s Tapes itself.
My heart pounded and my sweat… uh… I sweated a lot.
Looking up, the structure of the cassette store was laid out above me like an architectural blueprint. I could see into every room in the building. I watched the bottoms of Greg’s feet as he dawdled about behind the counter (Greg was the sole employee). In the distance, the underside of cars glided by on the highway, with their driveshafts and rust-specked piping exposed.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t falling anymore. I seemed to be levitating about 50 feet below ground level. From this depth, I could make out the sketchy outlines of long-dead animal remains, wells that had been dug decades ago and summarily abandoned, roots of telephone poles protruding beneath the desert’s surface.
Further below me was a pale blue void. My eyes hated that, so I instructed them not to look in its direction.
Instead, I focused my mind on movement (“move damn you!”) and began to fly parallel to the ground, first at cautious speeds, then incautious ones, faster and faster, until I found myself zooming perilously beneath I-80 toward the exurbs of Reno. The buildings above danced past me, semi-transparent rectangles that were broken into smaller rectangles for each room, the way you can draw the golden spiral as a collection of smaller and smaller rectangles disappearing into infinity.
At last I found myself soaring beneath Reno, with its fantasia of lights blinking on to celebrate the dusk. The multiple stories of each building provided densely packed layers of observable activity, tourists isolated in their little box rooms, escalator machinery humming, distant faces illuminated by the glow of screens, the soles of shoes gathered around roulette tables, asses locked into dingy seats next to their favorite slot machines.
The whole time, there was this strange feeling of freedom I never had before. I rarely ever felt like I was a part of the world, but now I was strictly outside it, an observer, a dislocated person. And from a distance I could finally see. All these people were living their lives in apparent isolation. Is that all I was, this entire time? A person in a box? A person in the flow state of themselves? Locked into the dingy seat next to the slot machine of my life?
I soared further now, past the apartment buildings and hospitals and schools and malls, with Pyramid Lake appearing in the distance as a jagged blue bowl filled with trout and tui chub, decorated with moored fishing boats and wobbling jet skis.
But above me, directly above me, was my sister’s apartment complex.
Time to spook the heck out of her.
I held out my hands to slow myself down, then with a few swimmer’s kicks managed to bring myself up through the floor of the apartment below hers, then through the floor of her living room. I found myself floating in front of her muted TV.
I looked around the room and saw her in the kitchen, standing in front of the freezer with the door wide open, deciding which of two frozen meals would feed the dragon of her stomach tonight.
“Boo,” I said.
She didn’t respond.
“Hey. Sis. Boo”
She couldn’t see me.
“Sis.”
Still nothing.
I reached out a hand to touch her shoulder. As I got nearer she seemed to turn toward me, but could not see.
When I made contact with her shoulder, everything gave out. The collision detection algorithm of reality must have been broken, because the moment of contact sent me into a total freefall.
I plummeted.
My body passed through the carpeting of her living room, then into the apartment below hers, then the unfinished basement of her building, descending down into the pale blue vastness. The bardo. The space below. The great synonym generator beneath our feet.
The world above me got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until it was nothing but a single pixel rotating in the void.
With nothing to compare my location against, all velocities in this non-space became the same velocity. Maybe I was sailing past at Mach speed. Maybe I was still and stationary as a monk.
That’s when I realized there was something down here with me.
A small piece of geometry, off in the distance. Quickly the geometry became a box, and the box became a room. It had taken on some kind of gravity, sucking me toward it with increasingly irresistible force. Flail and contort as I might, I couldn’t escape its gravity well as I was sucked closer and closer to the event horizon of its four walls.
There was no avoiding it.
I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. There was a deafening SCHLUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP, a sound so massive and unusual that onomatopoeia really fails to do it justice. I guess you just had to be there.
***
When I opened my eyes I was lying on my back in a small symmetrical room.
I looked around me. The furniture was austere and low-poly, just a bed and a dresser and a Fleetwood Mac calendar on the wall. The calendar showed the page for March 1987.
I rose to my feet and realized the awful truth: there were no doors or windows in this room. To be sure, I walked the perimeter, feeling around the edges, and confirmed the horrible truth.
When I got to the calendar, I noticed that the print on it was pixelated and low-res, like a poor-quality jpeg had been used to create it. I tried to turn the page from March 1987 to now (since it was significantly later). But the calendar pages didn’t turn. The material was some kind of concrete, rough and cold to the touch.
In fact, it turned out everything in the room was made out of the same concrete material. Which meant that I was stuck in a room with no doors or windows. No way to get out. There was a uniform amount of light in every corner of the room, so I could see just fine, despite the fact that there seemed to be no light sources at all.
The room must have been an unfinished part of the map. A part of reality they built but never used. Who were they? Were they God? Were they the Developers? And if they were the Developers, were they still developing? And what are they developing? And why?
Those are good questions, friend. You are full of good questions today, aren’t you. Unfortunately, I was and continue to be answerless.
One nice thing is I don’t get hungry down here. I don’t get tired, I don’t get thirsty, and I never have to use the restroom.
One not nice thing is that about 44 minutes into my stay at the Hotel Pale Blue Void (Room 1), Tango in the Night began to play at full volume. When the initial shock wore off, I began to listen more carefully to the recording. It sounded like an mp3 played at about 96 kbps. You could hear artifacts in the cymbals.
Unfortunately, the recording has not stopped. It seems to be playing on an infinite loop, with no end in sight (or sound). Every time it reaches the final hypnotic fadeout of “You and I, Part II,” my hopes are smashed when the whole thing just starts from the top again, with the cymbal crescendo of “Big Love.”
After 38 hours of this, Tango in the Night began to grow on me. By hour 923, I had developed enough lung capacity from singing along to the record that when the title track played I could hold the word “tangoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo” nearly as long as Lindsey Buckingham (but not nearly as well).
By hour 723,298,519,823,479,825 I had developed a profound psychic connection with the secret meanings behind the record that those in power did not want us to know. For instance I learned that, at its core, the album was about a tango. In the night.
Whatever you do, do not send help.
Someone else could get trapped down here, and I must warn you it is a fate worse than death. Unless you’re an absolutely enormous fan of this album. But probably even then too.
I’ve been looking for places in the room where I can noclip outta Dodge. This is a slow process. Every millimeter of wall, floor, ceiling, bed, and poster needs to be examined. The direction I am facing may have an impact. Whether or not my shoes are tied. Whether or not my jacket is zipped. There are so many permutations and possibilities, even within this tiny space.
So far I have failed to noclip out of the Tango room. But I feel like I am making progress.
And now I must deliver my message. A message which is my purpose here and maybe even my purpose in life.
If you’re out there, if you can hear me, whatever you do, do not grab your Tangos in the Night from the used section. Grab both Tangos from the new release section, like an adult, or your fate (unlike one of my Tangos) will be sealed.