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Number Seven:
On a hot day in the middle of July of 2002, a package arrived at my house in Indianapolis. It was a large cardboard box covered with "DELL" insignias. That box -- that cursed box -- had been beaten up and banged around and kicked and beat and gotten angry at on first a plane, then a car, then another plane, and then a boat. It was a tired box.
My current computer (a Dell Inspiron 8000, if you must know), had arrived in that box in July of 2001. On my last day of employment at a Yakuza-owned English school in Tokyo, that box arrived back in my hands. This time, it was full of cookies and cakes and candies from my mother in America. I had to lug that box around for one homeless day. That homeless day happened to be Christmas day.
On December 26th, 2001, the last day before the New Years' holiday began, I hastily stuffed that box full of things and took it to the post office in Kami-Fukuoka. I told them I wanted to send it sea mail. They told me it might take as many as four months to get to my house in Indianapolis. I didn't doubt them.
With the cursed box out of my hands, my days started to get better.
In April of 2002, while I was about to boot up a game of Dungeon Siege, my computer's hard drive failed. And it failed hard. The computer locked up, shut down, and it was gone. I was far away from home, and angry. I contacted Dell by email. It seems they wanted a number from the invoice. It had been in that computer box, I was certain. I called my mom.
"Hey, mom, did you ever get that computer box back?"
"Computer box?"
"Yeah. You sent me a Dell box full of cookies."
"Cookies?"
"Yeah, for Christmas. I sent it back."
"You sent it back?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"Because . . . because it was heavy, and I was homeless."
This answer should have been enough.
"You sent it back?"
"Yeah. Anyway, listen. There was a bunch of stuff in that box before you sent it out to me."
"There wasn't too much stuff."
"Well, just some papers. Do you know where you put them?"
She didn't know where she'd put them. She had no idea.
I contacted Dell again. They said there was an order number on the box. It was on the packing label, in fact. I called my mom one computerless week later.
"Did you get that box yet?"
"No."
I'd been up all night with Neverwinter Nights the night before the mailman knocked on my living room window like a cop on a raid.
I burst out into the living room, pulling on some pants. By the time I got to the front door, it was too late. The mailman was gone. I opened the door, and there was my box.
For the first time in memory, the mailman had delivered the mail before five in the evening. It must have been because of the box.
I slid the box across the carpet. I sat on the sofa, and cut it open. There was all that stuff, like a time capsule.
So many Super Famicom cartridges you wouldn't believe it. Lady Stalker. Bahamut Lagoon. Front Mission: Gun Hazard. Treasure Hunter G.
These were all games I'd bought before I even owned a Super Famicom. I was buying the cheapest games I could, just because I remembered wanting them back when I was a kid. I smiled as I took the games out -- I now possessed the Super Famicom to play them on.
Digging deeper into the box brought back worse memories. A plastic bag old molded cookies sat atop an envelope of black ties I'd attempted deliriously to burn with a pack of matches I'd gotten from a Brazilian café in Saitama. Rolled up and stuffed to one side were several posters, including one of Eminem I'd stolen from a record store in Shibuya just for the hell of it. In the middle of that roll of posters was a train advertisement for Metal Gear Solid 2.
Tokyo train advertisements are made of thick, high-quality paper. When photographed with the harshest of flashes, there is no reflection. It's like the opposite of a ghost. That hot, early morning, a little before I'd head out swimming with my best friend from high school, that Metal Gear Solid 2 train advertisement said to me:
BOO!
I remembered the night I got it. It was the night I'd gotten kind-of fired by the yakuza. I took the Yamanote Line from Ikebukuro down to Shinjuku. There was some tired salaryman standing in front of me the whole time with a rumpled suit and a rumpled tie. The Metal Gear Solid 2 ad was behind a plastic window by the priority seat. The edge of the ad stuck out of the frame. I was staring at it all the way to Shinjuku.
When the train slowed to a stop, in the pushing fury that is exiting a Tokyo train, I managed to grab the side of the ad, and pull.
The same salaryman was standing on the platform, looking at me, when I rolled it up and put it under my arm.
I carried that train ad all the way up to the fiftieth floor of the Yakuza Building (name changed). I had it under my arm at the bottom of the skyscraper an hour later, as "Carol of the Bells" played from speakers concealed inside the giant Christmas tree in the lobby, the Only Christmas Tree in Tokyo. I ripped off my black tie, George-Clooney-in-Out-of-Sight-style, and headed outside into the freezing rain.
I don't even remember when I stuffed the ad into my cursed box.
I do remember the way I felt when I unrolled that ad. I gasped. My eyes widened. I suddenly remembered the horrible place I'd been in that New Years.
And now, I remember it again. And I think back on how I'd played MGS2 in my tiny apartment back in those days.
That day I found the Metal Gear Solid 2 advertisement was the day I wrote my "dreaming in an empty room" article, the one I think marks my beginning writing about videogames. And that ad still hangs on my wall, even today.
I wouldn't give it up for the world.
. . . well, if you PayPal me $200, I'll think about it.
(Read a little more about my cursed box here.)
[next: number six: that you might not be immediately immersed in the awesomeness]
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