It is there, you better believe it, that I passed many of my nights. In the
lair I, myself, succumbed to the vertigo of conversation with the machine. My
favourites tell an age-old story, always the same: another tale of a high tower
in a castle where a beautiful damsel is mercilessly secluded, or maybe a
melancholic and bloodthirsty monster, we don't know... You need to get there to
find out.
From ordeal to ordeal, from mortal combat to mortal combat, I exhausted my
nights assaulting the castle of the terrible Westwest. My quest was aimed at
that worthy goal with infinite patience and virtue: to attain, to fight, and to
open-up. Along the screen's length can be discerned the unique outline of the
castle. All around flutter clouds of crows in hiccups of animation (the chip,
without doubt, lacking in power...) lending them the brusque jerkiness of bat's
flight.
But how many duels, how many adversaries are to be cut down before that
which we reach there... After having deposited some of our tokens in the
coin-slot's mouth, the machine introduces us personally to our champion in the
virtual ordeals that will follow. One loves in encourage or scold oneself in
adversity as though they were another: in their extreme thoughtfulness, the
programmers provided just that. The immaculate knight, with prominent biceps,
shaved head, bare chest, and tattooed all over with wild arabesques, barbaric
slogans, having just appeared on screen, with a clear voice, colourlessly
articulates: "I'm Joseph."
Successively, we are bathed in a constant twilight: amid the shacks of a
poor village at the foot of a hill on which the castle was built, Gardana, a
formidable fighter is in a red tunic and always equipped with a fan behind
which, coquettishly, she hides her face; on the road which leads over the bridge
the twins Arthur and Jeremiah, are disguised behind serpentine hair (no need to
kill both of them, the pain of one is felt by the other too, a marvellous
sympathetic effect); further on, Momus the Elusive, with a mask of comedy; Giza,
with a cat mask; at the doors of the castle, Schwartzer and his iron mask,
brandishing in his enormous fist a bunch of keys with which he is pleased to
bash you in the face. Once inside the castle, the size and power of your
adversaries grows more monstrous. Sordini, to start, only half of whom is ever
present, Klamm next dressed all in black and en-turbanned, whose fingers are
elongated into steel claws, sharp as razors; then Galater whose jaw is of ice,
or maybe of diamond; finally, Westwest, what little is visible, only his eyes,
but whom you know possesses no less than four arms (all the better to embrace
you, oh mortals!).
The agility of your adversaries is prodigious, and the variable sequence of
their attacks is secret. You attack with your bare fists and know you must jump
fabulously like a ninja towards the middle of the screen to land your hits. The
combination of buttons and joystick which present the image of control permit
you to emulate every hit in a unique syncretism of kung-fu, taekwondo, ju-jitsu,
etc. -- and block as well. Your finisher is to tear the masks off your
adversaries which always -- whether they are of iron, of scales, of silk, or
of feathers -- hide their faces. Rat faced, leper faced, lupine or oozing
syphilitic, skull or fleshless, skinless death's head, gelatinous octopus...
Only Klamm escapes all revelation: just as you finish with him, and approach for
his execution, he vanishes and morphs into Galater.
But what makes us simple mortals attracted to these successive duels, save
the pleasure of beating up criminals, the morbidity of their undoing, and the
suffering of combat which you elicit (visible upon the screen) with grimaces and
bloody tears (droplets spurting forth with each impact), it is the terror and
the pity which inspire such unusual ends which some of us inflict. When you last
long enough, loose and groggy like a boxer, your victor, at the injunction of
the same colourless voice which materialises in fiery letters before your poor
marionette smashed to smithereens -- FINISH HIM! -- , your victor finishes
you off according to a unique personal method which is his finisher, his
signature, and your pain. And you can do nothing to help, powerless and
terrified, before the exquisite torture of your execution.
Gardana takes a bow and rises, throwing a boomerang which decapitates you
with the flick of her fan. Your head goes rolling while a geyser spurts forth
vertically from your neck, falling back down in a crimson fountain upon your
unsteady body until you have bled out, and your tunic is entirely covered,
finally collapsing to the ground, presented to your eyes as a dignified shortcut
to the old master painters of the Occident in the carnation colouring of your
neck. Poor Joseph...
Finish him! Arthur and Jeremiah draw and quarter you; on top of your trunk
grotesquely collapsed upon the road's surface, they brandish your limbs, arms
and legs with their bloodied joints.
Momus sends you flying into the sky for good with a monstrous uppercut, high
enough to fall into the huge pit which the bridge crosses with its ancient
parapets; basically, you are impaled upon the sharp stakes at the bottom by the
force of your fall, among the grimacing cadavers, contorted and pierced, of
those reckless forerunners upon the road to the castle.
Giza in his sordid lair transforms into an enormous cat who bounds forward
and with his claws lacerates your chest, skinning you alive until there's
nothing left, erect and trickling with blood and lymph, except illegible scraps
and scarlet flesh; then, your executioner vanishes into thin air, leaving
nothing but his smile suspended in the middle of the cave.
Finish him! A swarm dashes from the folds of Schwartzer's clothes and makes
a black corset of powdery mites upon your pained body until it falls as dust, a
little pile which his powerful breath disperses.
In the castle's airy galleries and antechambers where Sordini has hunted you
down, his breath envelops you, its tongues of fire roast and consume you until
all that is left is a skeleton, a pile of bones which are devastated under his
knees and finally forgotten, face in the dust... But is it good old Sordini, who
thus leaves the edge of the screen, fleeing your pursuit, only to reappear
behind you on the other edge? No, it is his indistinguishable double, Sortini.
One always makes his entrance from the right and the other from the left: since
they are only ever half present on screen, one imagines that they are two sides
of the same token, split down the middle by an old injury, and who hide the
wound out of shame. Know that Sortini will execute you, not with fire but with
iron: you will recognize this as analogous, when his two halves, each move away
from their own sides, leaving at their leisure to contemplate your irreparable
schism. Poor Joseph...
Among the sticky subterranean pillars, about the dark mineral foliage,
opening on all sides in vaulted passages, Klamm the superb approaches your
vacillating carcass and with a firm hand tears your face off like a mask; it
hangs ragged from your neck, but behind it, there is nothing: in your empty
eye-sockets shine two yellow embers, phosphorescent in the inky depths of the
cavern.
Galater at the bottom of an empty well, waiting for all eternity, freezes
you in a translucent block of ice with his glacial breath, then, whirling, he
smashes you with a sharp blow from his outstretched foot: you shatter like glass
in a cascade of sparkling shards which catch the light streaming in from high
above.
When Westwest is finished smothering you in the monstrous embrace of his
eight arms, when he is finished hammering cavernously on your chest like a gong
or cymbal with his anvillike fists, always wrapping, always pressing, his six
enormous arms around you, he applauds his victory with his two, more delicate,
hands between which your skull is smashed; your brain splashing off its white
package in greens and greys, until Westwest licks his chops with his
outstretched, cleft, serpentine tongue...
Alas poor Joseph... every time you are successively finished, repeatedly
decapitated, quartered, impaled, flayed, pulverised, charred, schismatized,
disfigured, shattered, brained... It's nothing: I'm here, I'm always here.
Despite all those pains, a small supplemental donation dropped in the mouth of
the machine suffices to relieve you and make you cross, once again, that somber
river which encircles the empire of Westwest. It is endless, like the
expectation of the Resurrection which will bestow upon your body the true glory
you have been waiting for, passing through the door of the highest room of the
highest tower.
Of what he would find there, we only have conjectures, rumors. It's entirely
unknown whether or not anyone has ever succeeded in defeating Westwest. And how
many have really gotten far enough to face him in single combat? On the
internet, however, where mortal fanatics witter on, among the teaching of
masters, lists of secret moves, genealogies of every demon, dragon, and virtual
dungeon, there are entire pages devoted to exegesis of the high tower's
mysteries and whatever it may contain. What mortal could boast to have
penetrated it, so many knowing of the exponentially difficult tests which must
be surmounted to simply arrive at the stairs which lead there? Who could ever
cross the threshold of this final chamber? And who could swear, besides, that it
wasn't empty?
The programmers who compiled the code of this quest remain secret. Even they
are ignorant of the arcane tests which they did not explicitly write. It is said
that the chief programmer, who conceived the tower and animated Westwest, that
grouchy office fixture who pulled all-nighters working, died, taking the secret
to his grave. Thus, the program was encrypted with a strong password, with a
method so original that nothing could break its seal and read, like an open
book, the final lines of the tale of the high tower...
This is, however, what they said in their own words, but we can't be
entirely sure that delirious players themselves didn't extol, then legitimate
this melodrama.
It is told that those who succeed in reaching the stairs to the terrible
tower of Westwest (and for that it's necessary to know how to escape his
monstrous embrace, making sure not to fall into his traps) suddenly, as though
by magic, find themselves high up, at the threshold of the chamber. The door
opens and joyously, with tears of joy, discover naked and enchained, recumbent
amid the debris, the garbage and puddles of beer, this idol, with black eyes and
yellow horsehair, the beautiful forbidden damsel. She is all yours, starved of
light: her face ashen, her arms crystalline. Then, they say, the touches which
sent forth your fists and your feet, the joystick which animated your tigerlike
bounds lose their regular effects; your killer instincts and the karateka which
they controlled must now be folded into an unknown Kamasutra whose rules of
seriation and composition are unfamiliar. Or, as some speculate, is it the
program which substitutes itself for your will and, automation triumphant, you
move as in a dream, until you are coupled with the prisoner? It must be supposed
in any case that the duration and substance of your pleasure depends upon the
valor you demonstrated in reaching her, and the energy you had left over after
each fight (are your score and power reserves not permanently affixed to the top
of the screen?). One thing is for sure, says the legend, you are an impotent
witness to your triumphal coitus. Your guff is this extraordinary effect which
turns-on the Beautiful Damsel. Your sore back arches in one last spasm which
crazes the joystick in your hand, breaking its connection and reforming in
embrace around your back, an embrace you return to her like a crepe; its claws
seek your chest, searing through the flesh to find your heart which she tears
out of you with a cry which freezes the blood which flows from the open wound.
And according to the lore, the Beautiful Damsel, with the ferocious drone of a
hundred dirty flies, consumes you, gasping.
Since she is merciless...
Really.
Do we pray to the merciless Damsel? Who could ever dream of kissing her with
impunity? But who would know how to survive the enchantment and horror of the
high tower? Which mortal doesn't secretly imagine that they are able to discover
the hidden combination of movements which foils the cruelty of the beautiful
whore, and moves faster than her murderous flesh? Ah! if only to return one day,
the front red, again, from the kiss of the Rhine! Happy Joseph...
