The Harbinger

Yet again, Ronald found himself at the toy store. The shelves zoomed to the ceiling, and the toys, aisles and aisles of toys, stared out expectantly from their plastic cases. They were practically demented, engaged in an unending staring contest. They would wait as long as they had to until they were taken home, and once their child was done playing with them they would be discarded, they would be someone else’s problem. All the while, time meant nothing to the toys. No matter where they were or what they were doing, they would never change. Nothing would change for them, because there was never anything to begin with, only their creation, not even their destruction. Ronald resented the toy store, which was both bright and dim at the same time like a hospital, but it was the only place where he could buy Elements cards.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” the cashier said as he rang them up, “but how much money do you think you’ve spent on these cards over the years?”

Ronald was familiar with this cashier, who was disproportional and sweaty in strange places. His teeth were small in his gums and his cheeks were fiercely rashed. Ronald could never tell if the cashier was older or younger than he looked. He appeared to be stranded in a larval state, getting older all the while.

“I never thought about it,” Ronald said. He was sixteen. There would come a time when he would begin thinking about these things, he assumed.

“I’m serious,” the cashier said. “This is what I did to help myself quit smoking. I thought about how much money I was spending on cigarettes every week and all the different things I could have done with that money. When I think of all the money I wasted on a thing that, in all probability, will be the death of me!”

“What’s your point?” Ronald said, though the point was fairly obvious.

The cashier slipped the pack of cards unnecessarily into a large bag. “I didn’t believe in the future at your age either,” he said. “You go your whole life not really thinking about it and then—boom!—you’ve dug your own grave blindfolded.” The cashier seemed pleased with this platitude, which had undoubtedly been painting the back of his mind like firelight against a cave wall, for years and years now.

Ronald got in his car and turned on the engine. Thrash music burst from the speakers. Ronald appreciated music that was unrecognizable as music, which tended to become just another thing for people to buy. It irked Ronald the way singers wrung their voices for notes. Feel me, they were saying. But notes were only invisible waves traveling through the air. There was nothing to feel. This was why Ronald liked music that didn’t even try to be music. The point was that there was no point.

The cashier’s question kept coming back to him during the ride home. The past, captured by the future, would reveal certain truths like a spy under interrogation. Ronald imagined asking his mother, Beverly, the same question about money spent, but he was sure it would amount to nothing. Her mind to him seemed bushy and untraceable.

Over the years, since Ronald’s father’s death, Beverly had been filling the inside of their house floor to ceiling with broken furniture, odd paintings, dolls, and garbage bags filled with clothes she’d bought from the Goodwill. “I don’t buy things,” Beverly would say. “I rescue them.” Still, one could not see from one room to the other, there were so many things. One could barely see several feet ahead. Ronald and Beverly had carved out little canyons in the junk, but it was still mostly impossible to move around.

Keeping things was a matter of pride for Beverly. “There’s an island of garbage the size of Texas just off the Pacific coast,” she would say when Ronald would beg her to hire a cleanup service. “Can you imagine? An entire island made out of garbage. But somehow I’m the bad guy!” She knew people would never understand. They were destroying everything, but she supposed it wasn’t their fault. They were raised to believe in life one way: use it and lose it. They never considered where lost things ended up.

Beverly viewed her home as her kingdom, a bastion for forgotten things, like the ancient pyramids. Many treasures could be found, if one simply dug deep enough. Meanwhile, their house was overflowing with junk, flotsam, detritus, things once loved or not, it didn’t really matter.  Some days Ronald anticipated returning home to find his overweight mother beached on a pile of trash, dead. Or maybe the entire house would have caved in. Then, when he came home to find the house still intact and his mother as ever, shifting glacially from one room to the next, he memorialized these potential fates while in a trance, his mind worming through its tunnels.

“I found the most wonderful treasure at Goodwill today,” Beverly said when Ronald walked in with his bag. She was sitting on a dirty beige recliner that emerged from a wall of junk like a monument from a cliff side. Ronald climbed over a pile of trash bags to kiss his mother on her doughy cheek. Her skin smelled sweet like baby food. “Guess what it was,” she went on. “Oh, you’ll never guess.”

“Mom,” Ronald said.

“It was a Hammond organ,” Beverly shrieked, “of all things. It was gorgeous and it was just sitting there. Nobody wanted it.”

Ronald said nothing. All this shit . . ., he would sometimes think, staring out upon these great blank plains in his mind.

“Well, anyway, I didn’t get the organ,” Beverly said. “I couldn’t fit it in my car. I did get some new sweaters for you to wear, though. They’re in that bag over there. Try them on.” Ronald couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn a sweater.

The attic was the only uncluttered space in the house, so Ronald slept there. Their house was located near one of the only operational train tracks in their small rusted-out city and at night the sound of the train filled Ronald’s head like a giant heart sprinting through a tunnel. Even his old bedroom was now just another orphanage for his mother’s junk. Beverly had even tried to invade the attic, but Ronald’s older brother, Thomas, before leaving, installed a lock on the door that led up to the attic. Thomas was a professional baseball player living in Florida. He very rarely visited anymore.

Ronald went up to the attic and turned on his thrash music. A chin-up bar hung from the ceiling, and Ronald did a few dozen chin-ups and push-ups. People spoke about the apocalypse a lot these days. Survival would depend upon physical capability, and most contemporary people were practically walking colostomy bags. Ronald was no varsity athlete himself, but he believed he possessed that crucial, indomitable will that allowed a person to, say, live in the woods, surviving on nothing. The music exploded around him. The apocalypse was a fantasy of course. There were two different movies about the apocalypse currently showing at the Cineplex. Americans, as a species, were . . . there was a word for nurturing a death wish while still fearing true calamity. That was the grave feeling coursing underneath everything, like the Lethe or whatever. Obviously it was all bullshit, but Ronald still took care. He lived lightly. All he owned were Elements cards. He collected them in binders he stacked against the wall. The stacks were at least as tall as Ronald, and spanned the length of the attic. He was aware that no one person would ever need this many cards to assemble a competitive deck, but Ronald’s strategy would never be inhibited by his means. This was important.

Slowly, Ronald opened the pack he’d bought that afternoon. Opening new cards was a seductive process, Ronald thought, a little embarrassed. Possibility was endless right up to the moment you gazed upon the cards and discovered what you possessed. Then, some membrane was punctured and the mystery drained right out. This time, Ronald acquired several duplicates of cards that he already owned and never used. Ronald believed in the subtlety of Water- and Wind-based decks, and had very little use for the brutish, attack-oriented Fire and Earth cards. A majority of the cards Ronald received were Fire and Earth cards, as it turned out.

One of the cards, however, was a card he’d never seen before. It was more like a plaque than a card, heavy and cold and completely black. There was no art on the card, no textual information, no numbers, nothing, a plain black tile. Ronald held the card to his face and perceived a dim version of his reflection in it. The only marking was on the back, if you could call it a back, a beveled gold numeral one.

Ronald brought the card to school the next day, keeping it in his pocket. Throughout the day he would reach into his pocket to feel the card with his fingertips. There in his pocket the card further developed its own mystery.

Generally, the other students were unfriendly to Ronald. Everyone knew about his mother, and they called him “Pigpen.” Certainly, Ronald could admit, there was a distinct odor that followed him. Ronald also dressed in black and listened to thrash music, and these things further conspired to exile him, not that he cared.

The only person that Ronald really talked to at school was a boy named Arnold. Ronald and Arnold were more allies than friends, and their alliance was uneasy and overly determined at that. Arnold read books with spacemen and castles and rainbows on the covers and wore the same T-shirt every Friday. It was black and printed in white across Arnold’s tits were the words The Truth Is Out There. Ronald thought it was the most naïve shirt he’d ever seen. Ronald thought Arnold was a pitiable, self-indulgent brat. But Arnold also played Elements, which was something at least, common ground or whatever, even if Arnold’s card selections were Fire-heavy and inelegant.

At lunch, Ronald showed Arnold the mysterious black card. Arnold moved it around in his pillowy hands which had just been holding a piece of cafeteria pizza bloated with grease. Questionably, Arnold adored cafeteria pizza.

“Look it up on the internet,” Arnold suggested unhelpfully.

“We don’t have internet,” Ronald said. Several times Beverly had tried to order internet, only to be told that the “installation experts,” what this particular company called their service people, were not “legally obligated” to enter their house.

“Well, I would tell you what this card is, but then I’d have to kill you.” Arnold snorted when he laughed. Ronald highly doubted that Arnold would be capable of surviving an apocalypse, even an imaginary one.

“Seriously,” Ronald said.

“Seriously,” Arnold said, “I think that’s the fucking Harbinger card.”

Ronald stared at the black card. It looked like a hole, a small open doorway, against Arnold’s soft white hands. He snatched the card from Arnold and shoved it back into his pocket. The Harbinger card had longtime been a myth. Its existence was unresolved among Elements players. The card, if it existed, was understood as a trump: it could never be defeated, it could only defeat. The moment a player played the Harbinger card, the match was over. The card was a dark series of clouds, encroaching on the shore.

“But what do I know,” Arnold said. “Maybe it’s just eerily reminiscent of the Harbinger card. Looks igneous. Who knows? Could be a new Earth card. Volcanic.” Carefully he guided another slice of pizza into his wet, eager mouth.

That afternoon, when Ronald got home from school, he found his mother in her recliner petting a black cat that had sprawled itself across her lap. “Just listen,” she said. “I opened the doors this afternoon, to air out the house, and this little guy waltzes right in and makes himself at home.” She bent forward, with some effort, and kissed the cat on its scabby nose. “He’s just the sweetest thing,” she said, her voice squeezed. “I need you to go to the store for me. We don’t have any cat food. Or litter. Or a litter box, for that matter. I’ll stay here with the cat.” The cat stared smugly at Ronald.

“There’s no room for a cat,” Ronald said.

Beverly scratched the cat’s chin. It stretched its neck like a long black spoon. “Everyone deserves a little tenderness,” Beverly said. “Even your fat old mom.”

Ronald had learned in biology class about research that supported the idea of a bacteria living in cats that could be transmitted through their shit, which then infiltrated human brains and caused people to drive recklessly. It compelled a variety of creatures to adopt friendlier than normal attitudes towards cats. Rats, for example, would reduce themselves to effortless prey in the presence of cats. Ronald imagined the brain of an archetypal cat lady, quite possibly history’s most major human victim of the bacteria’s microscopic ingenuity, closely resembling a Petri dish.
Ronald despised the cat. It would occasionally disappear within the walls of Beverly’s junk, and Beverly would scream up to the attic for Ronald to retrieve it, worried the poor thing might suffocate. Often, however, it emerged on its own before Ronald could discover where it had been hiding, reappearing in different parts of the house. Once, Ronald found the cat at the top of the attic steps, its severe brow creased like a bowtie, sitting up as though it had been waiting for him.
 

“Cats are like people,” Beverly said. “They possess their own strange attitudes, and they look at you like you owe them something. At least, they’ve done a better job than any other animal at convincing themselves that they’re people.”

“Better than some people even,” Ronald said. They were eating Chinese at the cluttered kitchen table. They ate Chinese several times a week. They bought dinners with the money left over from Ronald’s father’s insurance and Beverly’s unemployment checks. She was too heavy to work, and Ronald was in school. Every month, too, Thomas would send them a check. Beverly called them their baseball checks. Meanwhile, Chinese containers from months ago were stacked in soggy towers in the corners of the kitchen. The cat was perched on the table, its asshole hovering dangerously over their food.

“I think it’s lonely,” Beverly said, examining its fur. “It wants another friend.”

“You’re home with it all day,” Ronald said. His mother had been making trips to the Goodwill less frequently, which was an improvement, a grave improvement, except that she was instead spending all of her time with the cat.

“You know what I mean. Another cat friend,” she said.

“Cats don’t have friends,” Ronald said. “They think they’re humans, remember? What would they want with another cat friend?”

“I’m a human and I adore cats,” Beverly said slyly.

“I’m a human,” Ronald said, “and I wouldn’t mind setting the cat on fire.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” Beverly said. She leaned to kiss the cat. It lifted its paw and let it hang in the air, its claws curved like deadly little moons.

Alone, in the attic, Ronald pinched the Harbinger card tenderly at its corners. Gazing into the card, Ronald could see a reversed version of the attic, as alive as his own attic, coated in a black sheen, dimmer in some places and brighter in others. The Harbinger possessed a serious power. It was created for the sole purpose of defeating other cards. In regards to the game that brought about its creation, the card’s existence made no sense, and yet here it was, existing nonetheless. Ronald dwelled on this fact.

The card traveled with Ronald everywhere, especially to school, in a pocket within another larger pocket that was inside Ronald’s book bag. Ronald thought about the card as he might have thought about a weapon. It rested densely inside his every thought. In certain contexts, the Harbinger card elevated what Ronald thought of as his power level. When Ronald was younger he watched a cartoon in which aliens that looked like humans battled on a planet that looked like Earth. There was some karate involved. The aliens would blast into the air, furiously throwing punches, shooting balls of glowing blue energy out of their massive hands, at each other. They were often discussing their power levels, whose power levels were highest. Their power levels most often determined the outcome of their battles, not their skills, not their ingenuity, not even their survival instincts. For many years, Ronald would think about himself in terms of power levels, trying to determine what his power level would be against the other boys at school.

Sometimes, even now, he still thought about himself and others in this way, one number pitted against another. The Harbinger card didn’t always factor. In gym class, for instance, one of the boys threw Ronald the ball and Ronald just stood there with his arms out while another boy punched him in the chest and stole the ball back. The gym teacher blew his whistle and barked at Ronald to participate. “You got to play,” he said. Afterwards, some of the boys showered. Ronald never showered. “That’s a shocker,” one of the boys said. The others laughed.

Arnold commiserated about gym class at lunch. “One day,” he declared quietly, “we won’t have to deal with these fucking asshole meatheads. I’ll be their boss. That’s what people say, anyway. Guys like us will rule the world.”

“You’re delusional,” Ronald said. He dug into his book bag and brought out the Harbinger card. It was beginning to take on exciting new shapes, new attitudes, the longer Ronald owned it.

“Man,” Arnold said, “I would be tearing it up right now if that card was mine. Winning tournaments left and right. Especially the ones with cash prizes.”

“Maybe that’s why you don’t have the card,” Ronald suggested. “The powers that be knew you would abuse its power, and they kept it from you.”

“That’s not how life works,” Arnold said, uncertain.

The Harbinger occupied the majority of Ronald’s thoughts. Initially, he assumed that it was his duty as the Harbinger’s keeper to exercise it. The Harbinger, the great nullifier, would undoubtedly bring upon the end of Elements, hence its name. Duh, Ronald thought, admiring the design. That is, the Harbinger voided the value of any other card in the deck. The game of Elements would cease to mean . . . whatever it meant, before the Harbinger arrived. But the more Ronald thought about it, the greater his responsibility seemed. It was possible that Ronald was conferred the carrier of the Harbinger because he would in fact not take advantage of its power. Ronald’s purpose, therefore, was to resist the lure, the enticement of the world’s most powerful thing, like with those gay little hobbit things from those gay wizardy books Arnold read.

Possessing the Harbinger, Ronald moved through his days more swiftly. A great emptiness resided inside of him, a real Zen place in his mind, an island floating in the clouds, a dojo set against a sparkling dream forest. Anymore, he needed so little. The end would be brought on by, if anything, the great crushing weight of things.

One day, Ronald carried his Elements binders, box after box, to his car. Their only purpose, he now realized, had been to clutter his life. Nothingness was a vivid, momentous key. The Harbinger showed him that. So he had asked Arnold to arrange, for a percentage, a buyer for his entire card catalogue on the Elements forums online. They found a local buyer and arranged to meet at a McDonalds on the other side of town.

Ronald crossed over his front lawn. The grass was littered with rotten furniture as well as cats, which had begun to gather on the premises in silent pilgrimage. They were natives to a strange land and observed Ronald distrustfully.

The only person Ronald noticed in the McDonalds was a younger girl who was there with a baby, though they were sitting at separate, neighboring tables. The baby was dipping its straw into its milkshake then licking the straw clean. “Would you just eat it normal,” the girl shouted. The baby regarded her fiercely.

Ronald sat in a booth near a large window that looked out onto the parking lot. There was nothing he would have ever wanted to eat there, but he still felt suspicious sitting in the booth alone, not consuming. After a few minutes, he went to the bathroom to wash his face, and when he came back out he found a dreadfully pale man in a black suit and sunglasses sitting at his booth. Though the sunglasses hid the man’s eyes, Ronald was certain the man was staring right at him.

Cautiously, Ronald moved toward the booth. The man did not react.

“Excuse me,” Ronald said. “Are we supposed to meet?”

“Please,” the man sighed, “let’s not begin so philosophically. The scenery does not suit it.” He gestured gracefully as he spoke.

“You want to buy my cards,” Ronald clarified.

“I believe that was the pretense,” the man said.

Ronald stared at the man. His power level was difficult to assess.

The man held up his slender hands. “Let me explain,” he said, “before you assume I’m here to abduct you. Some refer to me as the Gamemaster, though my official job title is Elements Lead Play Designer. In layman’s terms, I have created every Elements card to date, and I’ve come to this insipid hole because of the Harbinger.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ronald said. Instinctively, he reached into his pocket, but he’d actually left the Harbinger at home, anticipating funny business, which was never actually funny. The world would always try to take from us the things that we held dear. Protecting our important things gave us purpose. Though, Ronald supposed, the Harbinger had never felt like it was a thing Ronald possessed. In fact, Ronald realized that the opposite was true.

“I know you own the Harbinger card,” the man said. “I know quite a bit about you. Your name is Ronald, you live with an invalid mother . . .”

“She’s a conservationist,” Ronald said. He imagined taking Arnold out to the middle of some woods and leaving him there.

“Regardless,” the man said. “What your mother does, strictly speaking, can be considered illegal by some. By legal people, actually. By the state, I mean.”

“You can’t have the Harbinger,” Ronald blurted.

“My dear boy,” the man laughed, “I don’t want the Harbinger. Why would I want the Harbinger? If I wanted the Harbinger, I would have kept the Harbinger. No, I want you to have the Harbinger. I want you to exercise the Harbinger, in official play.”

“I don’t want to play the Harbinger,” Ronald said. The Harbinger had no clue what was happening from its pocket in Ronald’s book bag, underneath the bed. Then again, Ronald considered that the Harbinger knew exactly what was happening.

“I really wish you would,” the man said. “I’m tired of Elements. I want it to go away. I’m getting ready to launch a new game, and I’d really like Elements to shut down. I’m tired of making Elements cards. So, you play the Harbinger at a tournament, word gets out that an undefeatable card has been created, and people will stop playing. I know what you’re thinking, but it really is that simple, consumer whims I mean.”

“Please,” Ronald said. “I can’t use the Harbinger. It’s against . . .” It was true that it was against something, but he wasn’t quite sure what.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “This is our only option. We’ve exhausted our other options already, waiting for this game to die.” He sighed. “Research indicates that keeping both games alive would not optimize our profits,” he added mysteriously.

“Well, I refuse,” Ronald said.

“In that case,” the man said, “I will be sending family services to your house. They will deem it unsuitable conditions for you, a minor, to be living in, and the state will take custody. Then what will happen to your mother?”

Afterwards, Ronald drove around town. Minutes earlier his life had been spiritually compact and unified. Henceforth, it would revolve around transactions and conspiracy, never not-unraveling. If Ronald’s father had still been alive, he knew exactly what the old man would have said: “Shit happens.” This was Ronald’s father’s favorite saying. Back then, Thomas was still in high school and Ronald’s entire family would go to Thomas’s high school baseball games and eagerly discuss their older son’s future, his prospects for success. Then the future arrived and it was different than how they imagined, maimed. His father went from drinking every night to drinking during the day, too. His face bloated, his eyes bugged, his hands shook. The truck broke down, or at least that was his excuse for not driving. And then, he was gone. Shit happened.

The Elements cards, in their boxes in the trunk, slowed Ronald’s car with their mass as he turned onto the highway. Florida came to mind, but it was a great distance to travel and Ronald didn’t know how to get there anyway. Besides, it was too temperate. Cold weather strengthened resolve. Not to mention he hated his brother.

Ronald kept driving. He merged onto one highway, then another, green signs flying by above him, pointing toward the exits, to places he would never live.

Eventually, it became dark, and Ronald headed home. On the way to his house was an animal shelter attached to a gas station. Ronald pulled into the parking lot and went into the shelter. Strangers who wandered were almost always accompanied by dogs. As much as these men wanted to be alone, they needed companionship, only in the appropriate form, that is, of a thing that couldn’t talk, a thing that could never have its own thoughts, its own opinions. This concept intrigued Ronald. A dog suited him.

However, when he went into the store and looked at the dogs in their pens, he became physically uncomfortable. The animals stared at him with wide, pitiful expressions. Dogs were all nervous systems and no brains. This was probably why people liked them so much, Ronald thought, disgusted.

“Well, do you want to play with one?” a woman behind the counter asked. She was wearing purple scrubs and chewing gum loudly.

“Not really,” Ronald said.

The woman rolled her eyes. “Do you know how many people these dogs have to see come in and out of this place every day? How would you feel if you were stuck in a little pen and you had to watch people leaving into the great outdoors?”

“They’re dogs,” Ronald said.

The woman continued to chew her gum with her mouth open. “It’s closing time,” she said. “Guess what I get to do now! Clean up dog shit. Yep, this is the life. This is the life my parents always dreamed about for me. Cleaning up shit for orphaned dogs.”

Ronald stepped out into the parking lot. It had gotten dark very suddenly, and the weirdoes who haunted the gas station were starting to come out. An older man sauntered right up to Ronald and asked him for a dollar. “Coffee only cost a dollar,” he said.

“I don’t carry cash,” Ronald lied.

“Yeah, yeah,” the man said. “You got a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke,” Ronald said.

“No cash, no smokes,” the man said. “What good are you?” He walked away, shaking his head, and approached a young couple who was exiting the store with several bottles of wine cradled in their arms. Ronald watched them hand the man a dollar. The man pocketed it and walked away.

“I know you,” Ronald heard someone say. It was the cashier from the toy store. He was smacking a pack of cigarettes against his flat hand. “Yeah, you caught me,” he said, his words spilling out like broken egg yolks. “I never quit smoking.”

“Whatever,” Ronald said. There was no reason for him to still be standing in the parking lot, but there was even less motivation to leave. The cashier was clearly drunk.

“Let me tell you,” the cashier said. “This will end. These feelings you have now, they will disappear, like on a spirit journey, you know, like the Indians? And then they come back, but they’re not the same. They’ve seen something, you know?”

“You can’t say ‘Indians’,” Ronald said. “That’s racist.” Now he was talking just to talk. This was unusual, but he didn’t mind. Everything was unusual.

The cashier glanced around to make sure no one was looking then reached into his pants and pulled out a tall can of beer. “Here,” he said, handing it to Ronald.

Ronald took the can. It was cool and calm in his hands.

“Go on,” the cashier was saying. “Go on. This is the end, man. It’s always ending. We’re in the middle of the end. Embrace it. Embrace that shit.”

Ronald opened the can and took a drink. The beer flipped a switch in him, though he couldn’t tell whether it was on or off. The cashier winked at him and he looked away, toward his house, which he’d almost forgotten about. The Harbinger would be there, but it would no longer be what it was when he left and it would never be that thing again.

​

END