On the Image

The following is my attempt to contextualize a moment from ZA/UM’s “Disco Elysium.” Towards the end, highlighted in blue, is the text lifted directly from the game; all other words are my own.

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Stepping out through the threshold of a home one-man-lighter, having just informed a widow of her status as such, and pocketing your wallet which for the past 24-hours has held her library card—the sole evidential link to a dead man’s identity—you exhale all these clauses into the evening air, the heat of your breath immediately and savagely pulled apart by the snow-white blood cells of the night. Your partner, Kim Kitsuragi, warm to you now only by contrast, commends the empathy you at least nobly performed in front of the poor woman. You were nervous, and he knew it. She probably did, too.

You catch yourself—great. You’ve made this notification of death about you. Real crack police-work, you piece of shit. Maybe the notification should have been about you.

Maybe the next one will be.

You interrupt yourself—your keen sense of visual calculus jumps into action perhaps only to distract from your ideation. Could it be there was something you missed? The case is closed as of thirty seconds ago, so now would be a particularly bad time for such a revelation. But that wouldn’t be new for you, would it? When was the last time that was a good time for you to do or say or think or feel anything? You shambling mess of a man… You utter disgrace.

You really are a sorry cop.

Exasperated now, your intellect buzzes louder. Its clicks and whirs manifest at once within and without, and you hear yourself tell Kim that you need to go back to the pier. In fact, you tell him that you need to go back to the pier, now.

Kim glances at his watch and then blinks for a second too long. This is only your fourth day with the man, but there’s something about the two of you together. The chorus of your thoughts and their many characters were never quite complete without his voice chiming in as one of them. It’s as if God—or a god, or a nothing, or Nothing—ripped him out of your subconscious right before your first sentient moment, and with him near-every quality that makes a man good at being a police officer.

*Ahem!*

Ah, of course: except for your keen sense of visual calculus, yes. Honestly, why don’t they just wheel you from crime scene to crime scene like Hannibal Lecter, mask and all, so that they may circumvent all your less-savory contributions to the force and also your face and that fucking look that’s all over it and has been as long as you can remember. God, you forgot about your face… Have you really been showing that to people all day? Did you just show your face to the widow? As if her day isn’t bad enough!

“I thought you said you wanted to be at the Whirling-in-Rags by evening,” Kim interjects.

You forgot. Tonight’s the night you bare your soul to world, the night you break down that emotional dam and flood the eager ears of that hostel cafeteria’s patrons with the melancholic timbre of your id, its sheer magnitude so vast, so expansive that you can no longer contain it within your own being. As if you ever could! Tonight you’re going to sing karaoke, and it’s going to fix everything.

“Well, what time is it?” You can still make this work.

“It’s 6:15pm.”

“Evening doesn’t start until 7:00pm, Kim.”

Kim hesitates as one would when they learn something huge, like just-discovered-how-evening-works huge, or maybe just-discovered-that-your-partner-thinks-evening-literally-starts-at-a-specific-moment huge.

“… Okay, then. I suppose we have time to head back to the pier. Is there something we missed with the case?”

“I don’t know.”

Kim sighs and bows his head, “Lead the way.”

And so you run—yes, you run! You run and you lead your psychic entourage past the Whirling-in-Rags, over a bridge, around a totaled vehicle that you’d best-not linger on now, through an impoverished beachfront community, and at last to the pier: the resting place of the dead man. You put your hands on your knees and try to catch your breath as Kim, evidently unperturbed and breathing steadily, walks by you and begins to look around.

“So, detective… Why are we here?”

You look up, towards Kim, and you gasp.

You see? Yes, you see it now! Look! Up!

An ethereal Ferris wheel—a spiritual successor to the one that stood here many years ago—towers behind Kim, whose inquisitive stare is still focused your way.

It’s magnificent, truly radiant, pulsing with a deeply familiar energy, and as it turns it crackles with anachronism, a new-age neon courses through its spokes and wires and calls out to you, repeating its name again and again as if posing as just another thought, one meant for you to say out loud to anybody who will listen. It groans massively like a titan… like a god… like a nothing. Its name again cycles through your thoughts.

For you to say, detective—just four… little… words.

“The wheel of pleasure…”

“What?” Kim notices your skyward gaze and turns around, confused. He simply stares now over the tides as they ebb and flow against themselves.

You think once more of the dead man, and how you found him and pieced together the finale of his life. Drinking, slipping, falling, and dying.

You think of all the times you drank and all the reasons you did so—you’ve slipped and fallen plenty, but you’ve yet to die. A panicked, desperate hope grips your throat, and you at once collapse to your knees and dive into Kim’s eyes, begging of him, “Do you think he enjoyed his last moments out here? Do you think he was having *fun*?”

“Mr. Méjean?” His gaze moves to the empty bench underneath the street lamp. It looks cold and uninviting, wet from the waves.

“Perhaps not *fun*, but I do think he was trying to make himself feel better, yes. In his own way.”

To carve out a corner of the world where he could feel at peace—for a moment, you understand.

As the grand wheel begins to fade, it once more casts its name out over the ocean, that boundless, endless, experientially limiting body.

A lifetime for a moment of peace, underneath the wheel of pleasure.

You slowly pick yourself up and turn your back to Kim.

It’s almost time to sing.