Entry: Kristallnacht

[Walt Freitag]

If you should go skating on the thin ice of modern life,
dragging behind you the silent reproach
of a billion tear-stained eyes,
don't be surprised if a crack in the ice
appears under your feet.
You slip out of your depth and out of your mind
with your fears flowing out behind you
as you claw the thin ice.

-- Pink Floyd, The Wall

Within a few minutes of accidentally ingesting a minute dose of the synthetic neurotransmitter KR9900, I began experiencing an extraordinary hallucination, or rather I should say a sequence of hallucinatory episodes. Apparently, as best as I can determine from examining the aftermath, I remained seated and motionless during the entire episode, which lasted (both subjectively and chronologically) for eight hours, as I did no damage to my person or to my surroundings despite undergoing subjective experiences that at times involved vigorous and violent activity. The episode began in the evening, and as the clinic was closed for the night, I was alone and undisturbed the entire time.

As far as I can recall, the very first hallucinatory sensation was a tremendous sound of shattering glass, completely without warning and intolerably loud. A moment later, the visual hallucination began in kind, as my view of the office around me appeared to shatter like a pane of glass. In alarm I realized that a brick had been thrown through the large window fronting my office facing the street -- though in fact my real office has no windows and connects only to a hospital corridor. "Outside" beyond the shattered glass was a nighttime street scene of shadowy running figures, confused shouts and screams, and as-yet distant fires. I soon recognized the scene from my grandmother’s stories of Berlin on the tenth of November 1938, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. It was no doubt from these memories that my brain constructed the format -- though not, of course, the detailed content -- of the episodes that were to follow.

Almost immediately, a man broke into my office through the shattered window, and began shouting racist abuse at me. He was dressed in the garb of a brownshirt, complete with a swastika armband, and carrying a fire axe. His face and shrill voice were those of a recent patient of mine, at whose parole hearing I’d testified that his continued anti-Semitic ideation (including the full panoply of holocaust denial conspiracy theories) were indicative of a paranoid dissociative disorder rendering him not yet able to re-enter society. Shouting that he was paying me back for overcharging him at my stationery store (which my former medical office now seemed to have fully transformed into), the man began smashing the store’s fixtures, tossing boxes of ink bottles to smash on the floor, and toppling shelves. I made no response, and eventually he turned his attention toward me and threatened violence. I resolved to defend myself and grabbed up a chair to keep him at bay. A burning torch was thrown through the window, setting fire to the papers strewn on the floor. Meanwhile, I had managed to catch my assailant’s axe in the legs of the chair and was wrestling him for control of it. In the process his head was struck by the axe handle, hard enough to knock him cold. The fire was spreading, and the shouts of angry men were getting closer outside. I fled, leaving the man unconscious in the burning shop, but reaching the relative safety of an alley partway down the block, I changed my mind and resolved to rescue the man. Back at the shop, a gang of his brethren had arrived at the store and were already pulling him out to the sidewalk. They saw me and gave chase, and I fled again back toward the alley.

Fortunately the alley passed all the way through to an adjacent street, where I evaded my pursuers and hid, until another sudden crash of shattered glass disintegrated my hiding place and placed me suddenly in front of another broken store front. This turned out to be a delicatessen, whose proprietor was my sister, who in real life succumbed to anorexia while I was barely an adolescent. She ignored my attempts to rescue her, and insisted on attempting to serve meals demanded by a queue of shadowy customers even as mocking brownshirts tauntingly grabbed away her utensils and defiled her foodstuffs. With superhuman strength she resisted my efforts to bodily drag her out of there. When she began slicing her own flesh to fill sandwiches, I went berserk and drove the customers away with my axe. This, at last, got her attention; she looked at me in horror and fled; I tried to chase after her, but my chase was cut short when I unaccountably ran straight into a pane of glass, whose loud shattering heralded another change of scene.

Thus began a nightmarish odyssey that took me through increasingly vivid and surreal experiences. I will not relate all, especially as some of the occurrences were of an even more intensely personal nature than what had gone before. Various scenes included my parents, my wife and children, my teachers, my medical colleagues, and my patients; others were cast entirely with strangers but incorporated snatches of my past and present life. Each interval ended with the sound of glass shattering, which I attribute to the hourly chiming of the clock in my office, the only significant sound in the room, distorted in my perception by the effects of the drug.

The final episode was of a different character than the others. I had been completely caught up in the hallucination since shortly after it began, but by the end of the seventh hour I was becoming more lucid, beginning to remember who and where I really was. Nonetheless the hallucination retained its grip, and I found myself at last caught and dragged away by the brown-shirted figures from whom I’d been fleeing all along. The final shattering of glass placed me in a sort of interrogation room. The interrogators were not the Nazis alone, though they were present; most were the same people, friend and foe, whom I’d encountered in the preceding scenes. They ringed me, just outside the pool of light in which I sat, and from time to time this or that figure would loom closer and make accusations or ask pointed questions. Some accusations I denied; others I felt compelled to confess to. It was deeply disturbing but not, oddly, entirely unwelcome, as I was by then lucid enough to perceive that through this trial I would regain reality. At that juncture, what was true and what was not seemed hardly relevant. Did I really break my parents’ hearts by marrying a gentile, and if so, is that my fault or theirs? Did I really tease my sister, when I was twelve and she was fifteen, about her figure? It all felt true, but not all of it was.

Though it would seem that any narrative ending with a trial (of sorts) must include a verdict, that is the one detail of the hallucination that I unfortunately cannot remember vividly, in fact, not at all. Eight hours after that first din of broken glass, the 4:00 AM chiming of my office clock brought me fully back to myself.

Despite recent new evidence that KR9900 may cause personality changes, neurochemical sequale (so-called ‘brain damage’), and even sudden death in rare cases, I don’t believe I’ve suffered any long-term effects from my own ordeal. It’s true that I no longer take pride in the prestige I’ve gained through my years of clinical practice, but is that not fully accounted for by the perspective of age and wisdom, and by the different nature of the new challenges I now face in my new career as an advocate for the rights of the mentally ill?

Eric Corson, M.D. Ph.D.


So, what are we looking at here, if I can pull this all together?

- A single protagonist character jointly played by all the players.

- A host player who makes certain initial decisions about the character and the nature of the experience, but once play begins, the host plays the same way as the other players.

- Individual players create the encounters, drawing on resource pools associated with the character’s characteristics (good and bad) and emotions.

- As encounters are played out, cards are created (blank form cards are filled out) representing the characters and events of the encounter. Cards are assigned values based on the emotion resource pools used to focus and resolve the encounter.

- Eight hours play time, with seven one-hour scenes and a one-hour "trial" at the end.

- In the trial, the players use the cards created during the game; they play the cards against one another to determine how the character is changed (which good and bad qualities survive, and which don’t).

- Not specifically about Kristallnacht, or necessarily involving a drug as the cause of the experience; those are just examples of how it could be themed in play. However, the time intervals and the use of glass in some way (though the looking glass, e.g. or something analogous, like Pink Floyd’s cracks in the ice) are fixed. The title "Kristallnacht" is general because of the image of shattered normalcy and traumatic emotional upheaval.

- Based loosely on the micro-genre represented by Alice in Wonderland, John Crowley’s Engine Summer, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Notable characteristics of this micro-genre are: a single protagonist goes through a series of encounters, real or hallucinatory, in a surreal setting; there’s a trial at the end that brings together all the characters from the story to confront the protagonist; it’s a transformative experience, with the suggestion that something good is gained and something good is lost. (In Engine Summer the trial is the hallucinatory whose-knee game, after Rush takes the combination of medicine’s-daughter drugs.)

Help requested here: according to John Crowley, there are other novels in this micro-genre, but I misplaced the list of titles he once gave me. Does anyone know of any?

Some near-miss not-quite-examples of the genre:
- Graphic novel Phoebe Zeit-Geist (doesn’t end in a trial, though it does bring all the encountered characters together at the end)
- TV series Seinfeld (it does end in a trial, but is somewhat less surreal along the way than the other examples, has multiple main characters, and the principal character doesn’t undergo any change)
- Film Labyrinth (doesn’t end in a trial)
- Rock album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (doesn’t end in a trial)

- Ingredients: Glass and Emotion. I’ll have to force Committee in there too, but it probably won’t be elegant. Perhaps something in reference to the trial phase. "Ancient" won’t fit at all unless I add some whole additional aspect to the game. If something presents itself that happens to fit, I’ll use it, but I won't screw up the game just to get Ancient or Committee in there.

[Mark Bravura]

The Floyd opening is definately a nice touch. The theme has a distinct "Operation Mindcrime" [Queensryche] feel to it- creepy cool! As for forcing the committe- perhaps a panel of judges, with one judge making the final decision?

M.B.

[rpoppe]

I immediately thought of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, but that's no help. I can't think of useful examples in literature. Some Harlan Ellison maybe? Chronicles of Narnia? I'm grasping.

[BryanHansel]

Sorry, I don't have the list, but the game sounds cool. I like your near miss summary of Seinfeld. It's a fun way to think of Seinfeld.

Here's a list of some books: I don't know if it will be helpful.

[Walt Freitag]

Mark, yeah, that's most likely what I'll end up doing -- either that, or one other possibility. When I told my wife that I was planning a game in which all there's no GM and players all play a single PC, she said, "Oh, I don't like that. You know I'm never in favor of art by committee." So really, it's in there already in the all-play-one-character concept.

Any genre examples or near-misses that people want to bring up are fine with me. I have no problem with "grasping."

Bryan, thanks for that link. I look forward to reading all that stuff, but not until after the contest. Perhaps the novels that Crowley was comparing Engine Summer to are mentioned in those reviews or interviews somewhere; if not, this gives me some ways to track it down further. I recall that they were relatively obscure novels, that I wouldn't expect to recognize the titles of when I hear them.

One more near-miss example to add: TV series The Prisoner. It's clearly, on some level, an all-in-the-mind experience. It ends in (IIRC) a bunch of abstract weirdness rather than a formal trial, but the constant theme of oblique interrogation throughout the episodes themselves kind of makes up for that.