The Geometry of Darkness

The Geometry of Darkness: An Ode to the Gamecube Introduction Screen

The sun’s great waves ebb and leave darkness. Promise whispers from the star-dappled cloth of night. On the carpet, a light body, half-boyed half-manned, all roil and fear finds respite. Escape.
The mediated evening crawls on cathode-ray legs, pre-fluorescence, across the floor. Watch. The screen shadows the high pile rug. What makes the world disappear?
A new light bursts, bright and eager. Have you smelled the meat of a kill crisped on hot stone? Have you felt the carry of an undertow and let it take you? Have the highways blurred into movie theater screens, your eyes both projector and receiver of the projection? Yes. Remember, the green and yellow blur of cornfields and your dreaming. Of her? Of him? Of both?
This too is erased as the light converts, like the sun before it, to an insistent darkness. A black screen is not true darkness. It is something else. Sleep is not death, though it approximates it. Sleep is not death because you wake up. The black screen is not darkness because it insists you see it. Nothing, you learned recently in a large book from your cousin, not even light, its particles and waves, can escape from a blackhole.
You do not notice your doing it, but you hold your breath. The black screen is a promise. A promise of oblivion, of a lack of body, of a lack of mind. It is not darkness, it is everything, so much you can’t possibly imagine ever making sense of it.
Sense is made, though not by you.
A cube in the dark, an atom in the void, a thought in the back of your mind that comes from somewhere else to put a hole in the wall or scream into a pillow, a cube in the dark. Curved and purple, its edges enhance its geometric perfection. It falls from the sky, which is the top of the TV, which is the cornfield, which is your own wants reflected back at you.
It falls and you remember that voids can be filled. But with what? It lands and signals a reminder. Within the dark promise it flashes a large cube. Opaque walls and blacklines for edges flash, you almost miss it, but you never do. Within the crowded black, the evening’s potential,  the ghost of an image, phantasms into view then vanishes. Rapture.
The cube walks over itself in straight lines. It leaves square footprints, separated by thin lines, in the dark as if in snow. Where it fell stays blank, but its first step, its first turn to the upper left insists. You can, it whispers, make marks upon the darkness. This is a promise though it seems a threat.
Each step sends a single, sonorous note. Two steps, two cubes, then a rotation, as it continues its walk. It is tracing the outline of the larger image, the ghost. Three steps then another rotation, this time a dripping downward. Three more across the center of the screen to the right, then another rotation, a mirror of its previous steps, then up by three until—
You expect a gentle turn, for the cube’s path to end where it began, to close the loop, to make a larger cube. It does not notice your wanting, nor care. It twists sharply, at the first right angle the cube has taken. You smirk because it has made the letter G.
The wandering cube that has torn open the darkness jumps into the air, toward you, growing large and feral. Teeth in the darkness. If it keeps going it will fill the screen, fall out of the screen. You can see its shining purple mass expanding into your world until it swallows you, and your mother, and the neighbors barking husky, and your school, and the pharmacy you steal headphones from, everything in the whole world. You wouldn’t mind, you think.
But it stops. Freezes in the air. Pauses for a glitched moment of non-motion. Hitched like the breath you realize now you’ve been holding. Taut and ringing. Tension is where the music lies.
Then the descent, a straight line down, falling into the center of the outlined cube. It falls and you exhale with it. It lands and chimes.
A word appears below “Gamecube.” Had you forgotten, in this warm void, words and letters. Maybe.
Then, the final transformation. The many steps cohere. The lines between them vanish, smooth into one another. The outline sheens and shimmers. The first metallic hint.
It begins. From here you are taken to another world. The promise of that black is fulfilled, but that is incidental. You remember this, the darkness, the geometry of darkness, the spreading cornfields, the back of your eyelids as you fall asleep more than any game you play. You can carve a path through it. You can leave footprints in the dark snow. You can burst to life through darkness and shine. You can. You wonder, as the screen fades and you are taken from this liminal place, whether or not you will. But you can.
END

‍