207: Fortress

It was years and years then a loud thud. Wake up as Angela. Strut my stuff around a hexagonal mirrored room. And just as my memory of who I was was returning, I’d dissolve into darkness and be reborn in a flash of light.

She scratches out the dry earth from the terracotta pot. Right down to the clay chip fragments at the bottom. Which she also digs out, revealing a white paper envelope mummified with sellotape. Inside is a battered GameBoy or SNES cartridge, depending on the iteration and the size of the pots. On the label, “Bolt” is written in banana writing, above a cartoon chimp, wielding a machete inside a washing machine, oblivious to the fruity epithet above.

No one in this life ever learns their name. Never truly learns their name. True knowledge of the name is always eclipsed by the emotional response to the sound, originally uttered by the parents, then in increasingly expanding social circles: close friends, family members, uncles, aunts, other children, school friends, work colleagues, bureaucratic functionaries, bank tellers, shop assistants, lawyers, doctors, the State… Each utterance of the appellation an interpolation echoing back to the centre, to the Ursprache, origin-name… An empty reverberance at the centre. A sonic vacuum, a centrifuge, propelling echoes outwards to the Fortress walls, and pinning them there. ‘Til the universe stops gushing. Well, will it ever stop gushing?

Donkey Kong is pouring thick unactivated lava substrate down the stone staircase. It’s a very turgid, gloopy substance, and takes a while to collect into the stone hallways and antechambers. In several iterations, when the entire barrel has been decanted, he’ll ignite it, of course, and the characters will have a race against time, and flames, to escape the Fortress.

The characters in Pull Back The Bolt — the Fortress Four — are now at least six years older than their original counterparts in the first season of the franchise. They are now in their early teens and have each undergone a bespoke transformation. The effeminate boy is now fully biologically, sexually, reproductively, and legally gender-free. The kid they called The Fox has matured into an appropriate vulpinity, albeit one augmented with braids, stonewash denim, bangles and torn pieces of colourful muslin adorning his body in various places. And the smart kid, El Sabelorato, has become altogether less kid, with an accentuation on the smart, with thin silver rimmed glasses and a bookishness that’s now transformed into a sharp and focussed studiousness.

It’s the penultimate level. Donkey Kong is out cold. He’s lying flat on a stone slab. Attached to his temple is a gun grey device, green light blinking. An electrical eyeball fashioned to resemble his own. Though those eyes are now closed, Kong’s green eye blinks steadily, indicating he is still alive at least.

This season sees the Fortress Four return to the castle to escape the fate of last time. Searching for the elusive door through which they’ll need to get unbolted and leave. In fact, Pull Back the Bolt 2, is simply called Bolt!! Which is also, tacitly, what they’ll need to do if they’re going to make it out alive, before Donkey Kong is resurrected and the lava is ignited.

With a couple of sharp taps on the shoulder, the Coordinator bestows a glass of warm flat cider, if only to bring himself into the scene that follows. “How are the numbers looking?”, he asks the production manager as he walks past the latter, flipping through his phone, seated on the lawn, back poised against a stone turret, his daughter-cum-assistant poised for any answer back. “Around 500?” He says, unconvincingly. “It was supposed to be paper cups on a pond, right?” Says his daughter. “Not this crass, Narcissus biotech horror!” “What’s that, Poppet?”, says Father, barely lifting his eyes from the screen. She gestures to the TV sitcom stage set, set-up by the Armoury.

A boy slumped lengthways over the edge of a kitchen counter. A mirrored wall behind him. His Demon goads him on via auto-cue, drawing his attention to the sofa, upon which something is writhing around beneath a sensitive content blur. No, not that, he says to himself, turning toward the mirrored wall behind him— that! That! Him! Looking at his gnarled reflection. His body rips and transforms: part man, part washing machine, smashing and merging with the mirror, his boxy white-painted limbs chipping and bloody. Like a malfunctioning sex-crazed Autobot. His penis is protected by something resembling a pool table coin tray: a chastity interface of sorts. And he writhes and turns and smashes into the mirror, moaning in gasps of agony. “Oh, oh, delicates cycle” he says, over and over again, as his washing machine body slowly obliterates into the mirror with each thrust and spasm.

The daughter elaborates: “I thought we were having animatronic paper cups floating in a pond, arranged to look like the fat mouths of carp, gasping at the air above the water?” Her father just shrugs back. “I guess they changed their minds, he says.”

Kong is wearing an orange and yellow zigzag patterned dry robe and he bounces up and down on a miniature trampoline upholstered in the same patterned material. This is his starting position. Kong is holding a .22 calibre starter pistol to his right temple, which he struggles to control as he bounces. Marks, Set, Restart.

313th iteration. The woman walks in circles in the mirrored chambers. Hexagonal floor plan. Six floor to ceiling mirrors framed in marble columns. The 313th iteration has decidedly sharper makeup: deeper, richer red lipstick and shinier hair. An nth degree more so than the 312th. Shiny blue stilettos — ah. I can’t describe it. Scrap this one. Obliterate.

The 314th iteration is decidedly sharper in her feminine features than the 313th. High cheekbones pillowing sly eyes that give her an “I won’t tell if you won’t” kind of look, her pink lips almost snarling with intent. Too aggressive? Too forward? Scrap this one. Obliterate.

The 315th, she is more of a wholesome old world type of gal. A monochrome madonna. Certainly working off of the 314th’s bone structure but without the pout. No pout needed here. Her posture says it all. She is wearing the trousers, she has the key to the car, she tells the tail when to wag; she is woman through and through.

The 316th, South Indian bad girl strutting over to the microphone like she means business, flicking her cantering black hair over her shoulder as her sequin dress shimmers in the strategically placed spotlights. … perhaps these are Vogue cover models..?

It was years and years then a loud thud. Wake up as Angela. Strut my stuff around a hexagonal mirrored room. And just as my memory of who I was was returning, I’d dissolve into darkness and be reborn in a flash of light.

She scratches out the dry earth from the terracotta pot. Right down to the clay chip fragments at the bottom. Which she also digs out, revealing a white paper envelope mummified with sellotape. Inside is a battered Gameboy or SNES cartridge, depending on the iteration and the size of the pots. On the label, “Bolt” is written in banana writing, above a cartoon chimp, wielding a machete inside a washing machine, oblivious to the fruity epithet above.

No one in this life ever learns their name. Never truly learns their name. True knowledge of the name is always eclipsed by the emotional response to the sound, originally uttered by the parents, then in increasingly expanding social circles: close friends, family members, uncles, aunts, other children, school friends, work colleagues, bureaucratic functionaries, bank tellers, shop assistants, lawyers, doctors, the State…. Each utterance of the appellation an interpolation echoing back to the centre, to the Ursprache, origin-name… An empty reverberance at the centre. A sonic vacuum, a centrifuge, propelling echoes outwards to the Fortress walls, and pinning them there. ‘Til the universe stops gushing. Well, will it ever stop gushing?