lancet or leech: spilling blood on the keyboard

For the Psychonauts campaign, I wrote a character named Najila ibn Abdulqadir. I didn’t find out until the first session that the name I had given her would never actually be used. All the kids at the camp have nicknames. They call her Peeps, because of her glasses: cobalt blue, always on her terra cotta tan face, covering her scarred and blind white eyes.

I thought Peeps was a character out of my usual vein, a character very unlike myself. She is, as I mentioned, blind. She is ethnically Arab, hails from Turkey, and was borne by a Mongol surrogate mother. Her family is hopelessly, weirdly intellectual, and composed of Islamic deists: modern, not-remotely-fundamentalist Muslims who believe in separation of church and state. She’s a fan of America, and American things, especially horrifically unhealthy food. Pretty soon after arriving at the camp, she won a burger-eating contest against Beefy Joe, a prodigiously hungry friend of hers. Her stomach is epic.

She is old for her age. (She’s 13.) She enjoys Russian classical music, math, and logical argument. Trust has never come easily to her, and she has only a couple of close friends back home in Istanbul. She believes in der Wille zur Macht and makes it obvious to those around her through her bluntness and sardonic tone.

If Peeps loses her glasses, she becomes fundamentally unable to function. She cannot stand the thought of anyone seeing her eyes.

Interesting enough without psychic powers, right? I thought she was pretty great, and the best part was that she wrote herself, completely and utterly. I hardly had to think at all. The powers just added another layer.

She’s a seer and she hates it, loathes it, wishes with every fiber of her being to rid herself of what she calls “bad dreams.” Her parents thought she was lying about them for years, until they became too obvious and too real to ignore –– well after she blinded herself with a pocket knife at age 9, attempting to exorcise the ghostly visions permanently. It didn’t work. Now, she sees in colored shadows of thoughts and feelings, and she sees through the eyes of others, or into the past, or into the future –– never her own eyes, pure and simple, here and now.

At the same time, her powers are her entire identity: everything else is merely incidental. At home, she chose her friends based on who could sympathize with her –– damn few people, needless to say. At camp, everyone is like her, and everyone can sympathize, and it blows her mind, makes her squirm. It’s so wrong. How is she supposed to open up to so many people? Who is she without this thing inside her –– not just her supernatural abilities, but her standoffishness, her cynicism, her fundamental difference?

An NPC once asked her if she would give up that difference, if she would become utterly normal, if she really wanted to lose her identity. She said yes. In a heartbeat. It’s all she’s ever wanted.

I didn’t know most of this about Peeps until my GM asked me to elaborate on her. He required elaboration because, frankly, she’s a mess. She wrote herself, and so she has a mind of her own. Playing her had, up until then, been a surreal experience. I was often surprised at what she said by moving my lips, playing upon my vocal chords. “I would give anything,” she said, making unwavering eye contact with the NPC, played by the GM. She would give anything. All she wants is to be normal.

My GM also required elaboration because he was writing a session in which we would journey into each character’s mind. The other PCs were fairly easy: the ice off the Alaskan coast, a burning circus tent, a classroom slowly filling with mud. In each mind, a nightmare was defeated: huge and black and the source of most of the star character’s problems. As usual, everything fit. We were all impressed with our brilliant GM.

Peeps’s mind was different. A vast moor, the Mongolian steppe, obviously. (To me –– probably not to the others.) Stretching infinitely across it was a smoky black wall. Suspended in its glassy surface were cryptograms. Her father is a cryptologist; she has a fondness for codes. The codes were fairly easy, just shuffled alphabets, and one by one, they were broken. They gave hints as to how to get across the wall, what she thought of various characters, and –– of course –– how to defeat her nightmare, the most difficult one of all.

Her nightmare was the final boss, appearing only after the worst fears of all the other PCs, because she had accepted it. She had made friends with it. Before the party could attack it, they had to convince her it was her enemy.

It was difficult for the party, but more difficult for me. How does one stay in character at a time like that? It was an assault, an affront, not just to Peeps and her certainties, but to me. It felt like the conversation with the PC who had asked if she would give everything up –– threatening, uncomfortable –– but much, much worse.

It felt so wrong as I intervened, as I took over Peeps. She had written herself. It was unfair to her to change her, but the plot needed it. I moved the plot along. I changed Peeps, and when she emerged anew from her own mind, she removed her cobalt-tinted glasses quietly, folded them with a gentle ping of glass on metal, and slipped them into her breast pocket.

Looking back, I understand why those conversations seemed to grab my heart and pull. Najila ibn Abdulqadir, called Peeps, is not a strange, foreign thing, a muse manifest. She is me. It’s trite and awful, but true. In trying to create a character out of the usual mold, I accidentally created myself, a darker shade of me that needed so desperately to emerge through my lips and fingertips.

This is not an easy realization, because I have not allowed my friends into my mind to decode the cryptograms in the smoky glass wall. I have not returned refreshed from killing my fears and destroying my doubts. Most of the time I ignore them, and sometimes, when I truly become Peeps, I am defined by them. I do not know how to rid myself of them. I want to fight them and defeat them like we did so simply, without a second thought, in character. We moved the plot along. Character development needed to happen, so it did. That’s that.

But it isn’t. Not really.

I know that I am Peeps because I have friends like Peeps’s friends, the other PCs. I have friends who remind me that the dark thing inside me is not normal, that I shouldn’t accept it. They steal my glasses and I don’t even realize it, don’t even scream and cry and sink my nails into their skin to get them back. They make me normal, and when I remind them that I’m not, they remind me in return, tenderly, that the nameless dark needs exorcizing. They don’t really know how much it means to me, how much I love them and want to disappear into those moments with them. I don’t think they ever will.

But here is my attempt at showing what I can’t tell, or telling what I can’t show –– I’m not really sure which. You know who you are. I love you. Don’t ever change.