chance is the only game i play with

potasium nitrate

Launch day is his going to church, solemn and ritualistic and hype-provoking. He lives lives lives for this, despite the underwhelmed look through his half-closed eyelids, despite the smallest of smiles. His wake-up before sunrise. His heart quietly accelerating. His skipped breakfast because there are always hundreds of things that could go wrong, despite his best efforts, his most careful eyes, his need to check that everything is in place, and working, and better than ever in the history of the Games. 

The pit in his stomach, a black hole with no end. There is no point in taming it, no point to food. No matter what, it’d always be this pit, for this day, even now that it is routine to count down from thirty every six months. He knows all of the numbers by heart, and he still fears his tongue trips somewhere between fifteen and fourteen. He’s afraid he’ll do the silences wrong.

Lysander Vultur has it written down in every calendar that this is a big day. He wakes up before the alarm. He brushes his teeth with anxious vigor, he takes a shower, sometimes two; the air is unbreathable. Today is a day to hate walls, to choke on pressure, to glare at cameras. He changes three shirts until making up his mind. It is decided: today he welcomes death in black.

The prelude to the Games is a countdown of its own. 7:00 am (five hours), and he is in the Tower, looking over others’ shoulders, insisting that they run another simulation before showtime. They do. Clockwork. Still anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. Lysander rubs his sweating palms against his pants before leaning over a keyboard and making a couple of last minute retouches. There is no fighting perfectionism. Perfectionism always wins.

The Gamemaker team is mostly here for the buzzing that comes before the launch. Everybody has heart palpitations one way or another. Lysander activates his headpiece for communication with all. There is somewhere else he needs to be soon. He isn’t one to shout speeches, to motivate from voice pomposity and stamina. And there he is, in the open space of the quarters, muttering facts with hidden enthusiasm and a lowered, gentle tone. “We’re good. It’s going to hold.” He nods his head like a murmur. It was going to hold all along, but the noise in his heart is stiller now that they tried once again.

“I’ll count live from the press conference. We want to give it a normalized perspective on the Games. I’ll be here, though, after 2:00 pm. Just hold gravity levels steady, and be ready for Gamemaker event one to drop early if they kill too many in the bloodbath. Yes? I will be in touch with you right after I finish there.”

There it is, the smallest of smiles. It means the world and no one knows it. “Chin up, we’re writing history today.” The flag he’s holding up is victorious. This is big. 

sulfur 

All day is marked by anxiety. 10:00 am (two hours) and in the car, he dials for Clover, and for the kids. It’s always during launch day, as if to confess his sins. As if needing to justify himself in front of the three people that have always mattered. These days it’s lighter. Clover usually picks up after three rings, she laughs, she comments on his last television appearance by picking on his tie. She could have picked his every tie, every day (but he doesn’t say that, ever). They still don’t discuss the Games. It’s what he keeps picking everyday. 

Gwendolyn sort of talks. Lysander mostly listens and corrects pronunciation. It’s common knowledge he’s obnoxious. Haydn asks too many questions. Lysander’s answers are always patient. It’s a waltz of lukewarm. 

They’re good, the three of them, back in District Three. They’re good, the four of them, mostly holding out their hearts in their palms from a vertiginous distance. Lysander feels like a ghost lingering in the middle of their happiness. He can’t help it: as soon as he gets a moment, he rings. And he’s too clever to be intrusive, or long, or careless, but it still feels like some sort of haunting.

Today they don’t pick up. The beep that invites Lysander to speak reeks of rejection. He ignores the pit in his stomach getting wider and wider. The black hole again sucks the air. It’s not there if he doesn’t say anything about it. He feels like a ghost, cast away by good luck charms and sunlight. He doesn’t object.

“Hey, girls... Haydn. It sounds like you guys are busy today. Have the best day, for me. And maybe call me once you have a moment.”

He doesn’t say ‘I love you’. So often he feels ‘I love you’ that it goes without saying forever. He doesn’t say anything about the sinking feeling, nothing about the heavy chest. More so, he doesn’t even think about missing them, about how fucked everything turned out and how his life is now an empty, unsupervised arena, silences endless and solitude for punishment. Fitting. He couldn’t have come up with a colder hell.

He used to relish in his space, in his solitude. Life alone, today, resembles incarceration. He feigns having a marvelous time ignoring every drop of feeling. Sometimes it all goes according to the plan. Sometimes is not today.

Cut. Something sneaks up on him. Something breaks. Something moves within him, with a chalk taste. Nothing makes sense -- not the two inches Gwendolyn grew since last spring, not waking up without Clover, not whole months blurring together. He digs his fingers into the leather of the backseat, where he’s sat alone.  Alone, he tries to make no moves. The ghost of emotion is sniffing him, so maybe if he holds his breath--. 

Feelings, evil, usually overlook him. He keeps his quiet, waits for their retreat. Usually, the wait cures it all. Today his foot slips. Today, the sorrow he doesn’t allow out thickens into heavy breathing. It blends with anxiety, with the black hole. It sucks him into a vortex his mind doesn’t have control of. Lysander covers his face in his palms. A deep breath later, he counts down from thirty in his head. There is much to do today and nothing he can do about this. This doesn’t exist today. When he lifts up his eyes from the comfort of his own skin, the reds around his eyes imitate exhaustion, if anything. He takes a tissue out of his backpack, placed next to him.

Before he can tell, his fingers draft up a message to Surya, a necessary explanation before the launch, without it being a warning, a giveaway. He doesn’t mean it particularly, but he knows it’ll erase the chance of any sort of drama, not that Surya is dramatic. She’s perfectly reasonable -- it’s what he likes best about her these days. It’s a little bold, but reads as a joke, a little tongue-in-cheek. It doesn’t fucking matter. And they are at that level.

Lysander: Take it as a love declaration if you want.

Sent, 11:13 am (less than an hour). He turns off his phone for the press conference.

charcoal 

The air never quite cleared in the 111th Hunger Games arena. The false version of District Thirteen arises, still open to tourists, still very much loved, courtesy of Jeanine Twill. Lysander always looks out of place, but here he’s an alien. The flashes capture his hesitant image, the press chases after him and his small team of Gamemakers and advisors. 

A Hunger Games historian begins. Lysander watches without active interest. This is made to befriend District Thirteen and the Hunger Games. This is a valuable demonstration of the Games’ culture. When invited on the podium, Lysander speaks about the building of it, about all the research that was put into the place they are looking at right now. He clears his throat often, but his words flow naturally. He speaks the Games with lukewarm pragmatism and clever but sincere phrasings. 

"It is no secret that Panem is held together by an unrelenting system. I am not put here to discuss politics, but--,” he made a practical pause to bring attention to his argument. “As we welcome you into Panem, it is expected that you contribute what instates order, to what, in a controlled setting, harshly reminds us of uncontrolled rebellious bloodshed. So that it does not repeat, so that we do not all collectively lose much, much more. The tribute to pay -- to lose -- is significant and painful, precisely because the price for systemic peace is inestimably valuable.”

It’s rehearsed, but it’s belief. Lysander has always had patient ways of explaining how it worked from where he was standing. “As stated before, this is a one hundred and twenty-two year old societal mechanism, and a difficult concept to swallow nonetheless, when loss and violence are additional factors. It took us over a century to make peace with it, to find balance in it, and, as you become citizens of Panem, you will understand the stakes of this great sacrifice to security and harmony.”

“We have a vast team of interdistrict Gamemakers, working on the biannual arenas, extensive spaces functioning on hyperrealistic virtuality and the highest Capitol technologies. That being said, this month, we celebrate a most grateful year of collaboration with Gamemaker Pluto Dosimetre, resident of District Thirteen. Your contribution to the system is already valuable, as you can see, and as you will further on learn from your fellow citizen.”

“For the time being, as Head Gamemaker of the Hunger Games, I thank you for cooperation, loyalty and openness. It’s not simple, nor easy, but it is a necessity.” He doesn’t say that otherwise they would be eating each other alive. Without this mathematical hunger, without the ghostly pressure of sacrificing generation after generation of youths, at this point they would all turn into savages, never too stuffed with revenge.

He subtly checks his watch for 11:49am (eleven minutes). 

This is what we are listening to now. Silence sinks in for a moment before something else happens. Something else blasts. 'Boom’, comes the thundering shout. Lysander Vultur knows exactly how a bomb sounds like.

A loud noise, followed by a chorus of moans, none of which his. And oh, the smell, stinging, making all living nostrils bleed. There is smoke covering the exposed flesh. Something clicks. Something parts. Something drops into the black hole. There is black air everywhere, almong the shattered cameras. A piece of solid marble butterflies a woman’s torso in half, just a few feet from Lysander. Her eyes are immortalized wide open, and vividly empty. It comes from the one-person podium he had just spoken from. He doesn’t know the skin on his face is melting. He cannot feel his hands. He doesn’t linger on sight, on touch, on movement, on noise. The eyes cannot stay open. He goes into his brain, this small panic room that’s an expert on disaster.

The mind knows it’s dead first. Of fucking course, it’s trained to smell it. Lysander breathes into the gunpowder like fresh air. There is something about death that rhymes with coming home. It’s been coming all along. And he? He has been waiting for it in mild silences, and with just that one inadmissible dash of hope -- that discussing it with nonchalance kept death away. His flesh peels away from his bones here and there, his spine stay put, the metal taste floods his mouth. Everything hurts, but everything hurts all of the time. It’s not new, it’s not special, it’s not a surprise. He takes pain like he takes guilt, and he imagines worse has happened to many before him. He takes pain like justice. He doesn’t cry, his lips don’t and can’t move. The pit in his chest is all filled with heavy death, finally.

He had watched so many children close their eyes and boom away and now it’s him, finally. If the cameras are still working, fitting. He doesn’t think of the outside. He doesn’t think about politics, about his mother’s devastated pout. The pain strangles him now, and he does think about Clover. Oh, Clover, not now. It cannot be now. He hasn’t finished with all his apologies yet. Clover rattles the black hole, the morbid, numb peace he is falling into. He doesn’t want to think of her with this dying mind.

In these flashed seconds, the last of his existence, he makes up a cannon. If his lips moved, he would whisper it himself -- ‘boom’. He needs to count for something big. He imagines there is a cannon. There has to be a cannon over all these moaning people, creeping from under the black smoke. In his mind, he counts (only this time from one). He needs to count for something big. It’s his oxygen mask. He closes his eyes through the pain. There has to be a quiet way of waiting for death. There has to be a word for his breed of dignity. But he needs to count for something big.

He’s old friends with death, no need for pleasantries like panic, like regret. Out of all people, he doesn’t get a pure, frightened soul on the way out. It’s welcome home, it’s I’ve heard so much about you. It’s his grandfather and his echoing voice, it’s still a business meeting on top of everything. He counts to lose consciousness, and he knows it. It’s a free dive. 

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fi-f-fif-fuck...

No, the other way around. The count bleeds out of him, the numbers don’t add up right. He’s counted it so many times before; now it’s slipping. Not now. There’s one last effort to sit up, to press the big button for the Games. No muscle dares to move. The g/Game’s already over, him trapped inside. It’s fitting -- he’s like better than at home.

Lysander’s mind becomes unclear, but it still knows it’s part of the process. The brightside to knowing death by heart: it makes pain rational, and the unknown familiar. It’s easy, easier than everything else he’s done for death to this point. He’s thankful for brain activity during death. It’s almost nice to fall into it, even though at this point, he stops understanding anything but the sharp ache everywhere at once. There’s no tragedy behind this. This and worse happened many times before at the click of his button. Death has a way around poetic justice that Lysander doesn’t mind.

He is now a small boy, hide-and-seek counts away from death, legs from the knee down dangling as he sits on a lovely bench at the train station. There is no one else in this train station. He is wearing a carefully buttoned cardigan and shorts. His cheeks are blue with wonder. His face isn’t yet clouded by all that tired guilt. He is a small boy, and the train is suddenly here. ‘Boom’, something at the back of his mind whispers. No, not before the countdown!!! It steals him without notice, if not for his beeping smart watch. This is the only possible end to the story. Lysander Vultur has never had an argument against death.