I imagined the pieces—bishop, pawn, rook, and the rest—clashing in my head as I performed each allotted movement in turn. The giant board became a mental battleground as I strode across the squares, my purposeful footsteps representing the movements of black and white in their fight for supremacy. While I was taking one of white’s pawns with one of black’s knights, however, something happened. A deep panic overwhelmed me, and dark blurring shapes slowly started seeping into my eyes from the edges of the world. I felt like my peripheral vision had betrayed me somehow. I was suddenly frozen in place. I couldn’t move.
This is the first time I remember experiencing this feeling—a feeling that would overwhelm me again a few years later, in that truck with Annie and Emily Connors, a sensation that I would eventually begin referring to as “the gray feeling.”
The gray feeling usually began with a low thrumming vibration deep in the pit of my stomach and an itchy tingling right behind my eyes. It would soon take over my upper body with a rush of what felt like fluttering moths in my lungs, then my limbs would turn heavy and weak and, finally, my mouth would be filled with a thick fuzzy tingling. This was all accompanied by an inescapable, low, hollow, metallic humming in my head.
This is what happened to me while I was standing on that giant chessboard in the park. This…and more.
I had the sudden feeling that I was somewhere else.
And, wherever I was, I wasn’t alone.
Something was there with me—something cold. I remember being terrified to look up into the sky, because I knew that I’d be able to see whatever it was. And I understood that if I could see it, it would be able to see me.
Then I felt it coming, speeding toward me from somewhere way up in the dark clouds.
That’s when I lost control of my bladder and screamed.
My parents came running and took me home immediately.
In bed later that night, I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. I’d been rereading The Lord of the Rings for the third time, and something about that thing I’d felt coming out of the darkness reminded me of the Eye of Sauron seeing Frodo when he’d put on the ring. I remembered feeling completely naked and exposed, like I was waiting there for something terrifying to arrive from another world.
* * *
—
I didn’t think about Connections again until years later, while I was playing Underlight.
It wasn’t anything about Underlight specifically that made me think of Connections; it was just something in that moment. Maybe it was the smell of microwave popcorn coming from the unit next door, or the way the rain was hitting my window, but something triggered the memory and brought me right back to that table with my parents, right back to the game called Connections.
At first it was a happy memory, but as I sat there reliving it, something slowly began to change. I started thinking about the gray feeling and the dark thing I’d felt coming for me in that city park. This led to me picturing my mom and dad trapped beneath that capsized ferry, kicking and screaming for help, and eventually to my envisioning both of their faces, floating in the freezing water, staring up into nothing, forever alone in the dark.
My usual relaxation techniques didn’t work and I was unable to get the image of my dying parents’ faces out of my mind. So I left Underlight running, stood up, grabbed my leather jacket from the back of a nearby chair, and hurried out of my building into the rain.
I would be arrested three days later.
During those three days I did nothing but play my own version of Connections.
I started with the final image my parents had shown me on the last day we’d played the game together.
It was a color photograph of an old woman feeding a bunch of pigeons. One of the pigeons was different from the others—browner, with a reddish breast. I looked it up. It was a passenger pigeon, just standing there among the regular pigeons.
But the last passenger pigeon had died in 1914, and modern-day Kodachrome color photography had not come into being until 1935.
It was an impossible photograph.
The first word that popped into my mind was “discrepancy.” Based on the woman’s clothing and the cars behind her on the street, the photograph had been taken sometime in the 1960s. An extinct bird, in a photograph taken almost fifty years after that bird had become extinct, was definitely a discrepancy.
It reminded me of another extinct bird—the imperial woodpecker Emily Connors had been so excited about.
It reminded me of Rabbits.
The passenger pigeon and an address hidden in coded text on the park bench in that impossible photograph led me to a video store. Hanging in the window was an Italian movie poster advertising a classic 1975 film by Michelangelo Antonioni. In Italian, the film was called Professione: reporter, but in English it was known as The Passenger.