Where has the time gone?

[03.17.01] » by Tim Rogers

A few months ago I had a debate with my girlfriend on the subject of patriotism.

I said that while I enjoyed the life that living in the United States of America allowed me, I would definitely not ever – ever – feel motivated to participate in a war.  Not ever.

"It's your duty to your country," she said.

"I filled out my selective service card, back when I was eighteen," I said.  "Though only because it was the law."

"And what if your number comes up?"

I sighed.  By then I was just too tired with the whole "debate."  I wasn't even sure it was a "debate" to begin with.

"Well, I'll run away to Canada."

My girlfriend snorted.  "You're hopeless."

"I guess I am," I muttered, allowing my concentration to shift back to the videogame I was playing.  Videogames are how I get my entertainment: they let me be someone I'm not.  And who wouldn't want to be someone they're not in the midst of such a boring conversation?

In the real world, I'm a graduate student majoring in English, living in a one-bedroom apartment that smells of jalapeno peppers and cigarettes, with a ladybug-infested window overlooking my little, boring college town, the population of which decreases by eighty percent during the summer and winter.  In Metal Gear Solid, I'm a top-secret government agent, infiltrating a base filled with terrorists, attempting to rescue several hostages and avert a nuclear holocaust.  It's a lot like a Tom Clancy novel, except it's written by Japanese game designer Hideo Kojima, who I think should try his hand at spy-thriller novels.  He's done for the "single man infiltrating a heavily-armed base" genre what Japanese artists have done for comic books in the last twenty years: that is to say, he's made it interesting. 

No longer do we just have a middle-aged tough guy rescuing hostages and fighting villains – we have a middle-aged tough guy with emotional problems rescuing hostages who are all dying of some kind of plague and fighting colorful villains ranging from his evil genetic twin brother, a Russian gunfighter/torture enthusiast, a female Russian sniper, a man who is such a master of disguise he can change his own blood type, the world's most powerful psychic, a burly Eskimo shaman, the giant, nuclear-capable robot they're trying to build, and the mysterious cybernetic ninja that's trying to interfere with just about everyone's plans.  It's like a book, only I actually get to control the hero, Solid Snake.

It's better than Dostoyevsky.  Well, more entertaining, at least.

Good enough to make discussion of my lack of patriotism boring as hell.

I spend most of my time with Metal Gear Solid sneaking around the dark hallways of a nuclear disposal facility, snapping the necks of hundreds of nameless and faceless guards and stuffing them into bathroom stalls.  The game has this atmospheric hold on me, and I hate to have some kind of stupid "debate" pierce that atmosphere.

"You really like that game, huh?" my girlfriend asked me, that night we argued about patriotism.

"I love it," I said.

"You must love it a lot, to play it even two years after you first played it."

I was playing again because I'd been going crazy over pictures of Metal Gear Solid 2, which I'd downloaded off of the Internet at every possible opportunity.

"Well, it just gets better and better," I offered.

Then she assaulted my patriotism, remarking on how "hypocritical" it was of me to appreciate a Japanese picture of the American military, while I would never lift a finger to help if the United States came asking me to fight for them. 

"What?" I asked.  I didn't expect her to pursue the matter further.

Yet she did, saying, "You would never fight in a war, I can tell."

"Well, you're right.  War is stupid.  I'd just go and get killed.  What fun would that be?"

She snorted.  "You know, back during World War II, people felt honored to die for their country.  What's happened?"

"Beats me."

The image of the giant Metal Gear robot crushing the cybernetic ninja, who the game just revealed to be Snake's old army buddy given the prosthetic treatment, was more interesting to me than her comments, even though I'd seen it ten times before.

"Where has the time gone?" she asked no one in particular. 

I paused the game.  With her talking, there was no way I could aim a shoulder-mounted portable stinger missile accurately enough to take down that behemoth of a robot.  I turned to face her.  That's when our argument began.

Just a few months later, I caught flu.  I went to bed at six in the evening, thinking I'd need a lot of rest before my big exam the next morning.  Yes, I'm the kind of person to take exams seriously, even when my nose is leaking all over my face and shirt. 

I woke up after what seemed like a full three days of sleep.  I rolled to my left, and noticed my girlfriend wasn't lying next to me.  Was it morning already?  The blinds were drawn on my one tiny window.  I pulled out the chair in front of my computer, clicked the power button, and waited for the thing to boot up.

Within a few minutes, my girlfriend walked into the room.

"You're up already?" she asked in a sweet voice.  Sometimes, if she's motivated, she can be "sweet."

"Yeah," I said.  "Why, what time is it?"

"I don't know; you have an alarm clock right there, why don't you take a look?"

She was back to her usual self.

She busied herself with drying her hair and slipping on her dark blue pajamas.  I sat at the keyboard, logging on to my Internet server.

"So, what time is it?" she asked, throwing her backpack onto my bed and sitting down beside it.

"What?"

"You know, you just asked me.  Now I want to know.  So what time is it?"

I looked to the digital alarm clock on the edge of my desk.  I hate that clock.  It's so tiny, and the AC adaptor is literally bigger than the clock itself.  Sometimes, when I lean back in my computer chair and put my feet against the wall, I graze that AC adaptor with a toe or two, and it drops right out of the outlet and onto the floor.

It was shortly after nine in the evening. 

"My god…"

"What?"

"It's only nine o'clock."

"So?"

"Well, I felt like I'd slept for so long, you know, I figured it would be at least, like three in the morning."

"Shit," she said.  "You always think like that.  Why?  You're always saying you thought it was one time and really it turns out to be another.  Your biological clock is screwed up by a few hours."

I shrugged.  "I guess you're right."

She took to studying for a calculus midterm as I loaded up my current favorite web page, the Gaming Intelligence Agency, which is kind enough to display seemingly hundreds of new Metal Gear Sold 2 pictures every day of the week.  As I sat enjoying moodily lit shots of Solid Snake crouching behind a desk, ready to fire a silenced round at an unsuspecting guard, my girlfriend sat snorting at her own ignorance, mumbling occasionally, "I'm never going to pass this test."

I tuned her out and gleefully viewed some more pictures.  Snake running across a bridge, Snake conversing on his radio, Snake in a crossfire…

Somehow, I'd neglected to look at the Gaming Intelligence Agency's index page, which features videogame news headlines, a great deal of them linking to stories about Metal Gear Solid 2.  And what did I see when I looked at the index page?  A link to a story saying that Konami of Japan, the company that produces Metal Gear Solid 2, is holding a contest.  They call it the "Your name in MGS2!" campaign.  It looked interesting, so I clicked on it.  Within ten seconds I was connecting to Konami's web site and entering my full name, birth date, blood type, and nationality so I could have about a seven hundred in a million chance of having a faceless soldier in Metal Gear Solid 2 wear dog tags bearing my name. 

It made me think of when I was a kid, when my dad, who was in the Army, would play around with a dog tag press one of his colleagues had.  He made my brother and I our own dog tags, with our own names on them.  We wore them proudly, every day of the week, and were the envy of all the kids on the school bus.

Well, forget the kids on the school bus, those peanut butter and jelly-eaters who would insult one another's mothers and take fisticuffed offense at anyone who said a single ill-meaning word in the direction of their family or videogame collection, who became green with jealousy at the sight of real Army dog tags (and were willing to spend lunch money for their own personalized pair).  If I were to get my name imprinted on the dog tags of a soldier in Metal Gear Solid 2, not only would it be the "coolest thing ever," I would be the envy of all my friends.  Then again, they're mostly scholarly types, and scarcely know which way to hold a Dual Shock controller, so it might not impress them too much.

Then again, it couldn't hurt my own self-esteem.  So I entered my information, anyway.  I told three gamers on my online buddy list about the promotion, and sent them a link to the site.  As a border for the entry area, Konami displayed a drawing of one such faceless soldier, in full fatigues, wearing a mask that covered his face and holding a gun he'd scarcely have a chance to fire before Snake grabbed him from behind and snapped his neck.  Above this picture were the words "Register now!"  Like a high-tech World War II ad.  By sending messages to all my friends, I was helping to spread the virtual patriotic fever.

After I'd entered my own data, I read a little bit of the Gaming Intelligence Agency's coverage of the campaign. 

Apparently, Konami would send me a confirmation email if my name was selected.  They would use my data on the dog tags of one specific soldier, which Snake could remove after he'd dispatched him, for an undisclosed reason.  Snake could keep a collection of the tags, as a reminder of how many people he's killed.  Of course, the point of Metal Gear Solid is stealth, so the ideal way to play the game is to kill as little as possible.

The guy who edits the letters section firmly stated that he would not enter, thinking it was disturbing.

What do you do, he asked, when you play the game?  Do you find out which soldier you are, and then avoid killing him?  Or do you play through the game numerous times, trying to kill yourself as many times as possible, in the most brutal ways possible?  What does that say about us? He asked.  I found the whole thing a bit bone chilling after reading his statements.  I grinned.  I was intrigued.

Then again, when I can hardly take a deep breath without choking on something, whether it's in the rank, humid air or dripping down my nasal passages, and when my girlfriend is continually cursing herself just a few feet behind me, I find the smallest things to be impossibly interesting.  The fact that I'd just opened a packet of Reese's Pieces and, so far, every one I'd eaten had been orange intrigued me similarly.

How many had I eaten?  I'd lost count.

Back on the Konami site, I saw that there would apparently be female soldiers in Metal Gear Solid 2 as well.

Seconds later, I was wondering what my girlfriend's birthday was.

I knew her name, I knew her nationality, and I even knew her blood type.  When was her birthday?

"Hey, when's your birthday?"

"What?"  I heard papers rustling.  I could hear her unfolding her glasses and sliding them onto her face.  "What do you mean?  Why do you care?"

I shrugged.  "I just want to know your birthday, that's all."

"You don't have a reason?"

"No reason, really.  I just want to know your birthday.  Is there something wrong with that?"

"Hmmm," she said.  "This sounds suspicious."

We were silent for a few moments.  I opened a new browser window and started looking up books on Amazon.

I'd only asked her once when her birthday was.  That was more than a year ago, before we'd started going out together.  She told me, just that once, and I forgot it.  No, I didn't forget it, I would tell her that night, and I just didn't think to remember it.  There's a difference between forgetting and "just not remembering."

"Whatever," she said with a snort.  "You just forgot it."

I could have sworn her birthday was in September.  I remembered, a week before when I thought her birthday was, during the first September we were together, I'd asked her, "Hey, it's your birthday pretty soon, huh?"  To which she replied, "Yeah, I guess."  I tried this tactic a few times over the course of the next week, and she never got the hint that I'd forgotten the date.  Or maybe, the day I first asked, her birthday had passed, and she just didn't want to tell me I'd missed it?

I knew what year she was born, so I filled that in on the web site.  I filled in the month as September.  All I needed was a day.

"Why do you want to know?" she hissed.  "Tell me why you want to know."

"I just want to know," I said.  She had already exasperated me. 

"Tell me why," she whined.

I minimized the window and got up from my computer chair.  In the corner, I found her purse.  I picked it up in such a way as to make it impossible for her to not see me doing it.  I unzipped it, reached inside, and pulled out her wallet.

"What the hell are you doing?" she rasped.

"Looking for ID," I said.

She snorted.  "You won't find any in there," she said.

She was right.  She carried not a single ID card in her wallet, and no photos.  No photos of herself, no photos of her family, nothing.  The most personal article she had was a credit card, which said no more about her than "platinum."

I stood before my bed and glared at her.

"What?" she asked.  Like she didn't know.

"Oh, come on, just tell me."

"No."  She took her glasses off and looked back to her calculus book.

"Tell me," I said.

"No," she said quietly.

"Oh, come on, tell me.  I'm not moving until I get an answer."

She scoffed as she scribbled something down in her notebook.  "Fine, don't move, then.  See how you like standing all night."

That made me feel kind of stupid.

"Oh, come on, just tell me," I said, nearly pleading.  "I don't want to stand here all night."

"No," she repeated again.  She was not amused.  It was calculus, herself, or me that had sucked all of the amusement out of her until it made her look pale.

I was about to accept defeat and sit down when she scooted to the end of the bed and stood up, leaving her book in the middle of the bed.  She was going to the bathroom, or to get a drink, or maybe both.

While she was out of the room, I took her calculus book and sat down in my computer chair.  She came in and sat down on the bed with a can of soda.

A few seconds of silence later, I heard her say, "Can I have my books back, please?"

I quivered.  Were I a soldier, looking down the barrel of a gun, I would have collapsed in tears and pleaded to not be hurt.

"Can I have my books back, please?" she repeated, with the same intonation.

"Y-y-you can't have them," I stuttered.

"And why not?" she said.  If she were truly a mean person, she would have "growled."

"Not until you tell me when your birthday is."

She snorted.  "Fine.  I don't want that shit back, anyway.  You can keep it."

I felt my whole skin turn red.  Either I was growing warm, or…

"I won't get you a present," I said, nearly spitting the words out.

I heard the rim of the can of soda click against her front teeth.  Her nasal laugh echoed into the can, and I could almost hear the bubbles surging out her nose.

What was so funny?

She kept laughing and sipping her drink intermittently.  I didn't dare look back at her.

Did it matter if it was her exact birthday?  Couldn't I just guess?

No, it wouldn't be the same, not to me.

It just wouldn't be the same.

I grew tired of the image of that stalwart soldier, gripping his gun and keeping his face concealed. 

"Register now!"

This was a man ready to die.  How could I identify with him?

I leaned back in my computer chair, flexing its orthopedic back.  My toes touched against the wall.  I looked down to the books in my lap.

On the opened page to her notebook, on which she'd been copying formulas, perhaps to drill them better into her brain, I saw not a single number.  I scanned that sheet of paper several times, flexing my toes against the wall.  The sheet contained not a single number. 

I thought that math without numbers is like history without dates – certain logic states that historical events themselves are more important than the dates on which they occurred, and the concepts and formulas behind mathematics are more important than the solution to any specific problem.

I dug my toes into my bumpy wall.  The plaster is so old I sometimes feel afraid of cracking it with my fingertips.  Sometimes, I like pushing on things just to see how close I'll get them to the edge before I give up.  In the same way, I let the tips of my toes grace the AC adaptor for my tiny alarm clock.

How long have I been thinking like this? I think, snapping out of my trance.  I take one last look at the numberless math, and then glance back up at the computer screen. 

He's still holding that gun.

"Register now!"

My girlfriend isn't laughing anymore.  All I can hear in my room are the bubbles echoing hollowly in what little soda remains in her can.

What time is it?

I look at the alarm clock, just as my toes slip and push down on the AC adaptor.  For a second, I see "12:00," and then the numbers vanish.  First, I think, "Midnight already?"

Then, as I look at the blank display, I ask myself, "Where has the time gone?"