Graywolf Lab

In Red Dead Redemption 2, you play as Arthur Morgan, an outlaw in a gang led by Dutch Van Der Linde. The year is 1899. Intro text tells us the stakes: “America was becoming a land of laws. Even the west had mostly been tamed. A few gangs still roamed but they were being hunted down and destroyed.”

It’s late 2023, and I have been here before, many times. It’s been years since my last visit, but I make a fresh start. I am an outlaw again, grizzled and fugitive again, back where I began, riding through a blizzard too dense for the law to cut through.

“Stay with me,” Dutch says. “We ain’t done yet.”

*

When I’m Arthur, I don’t need to think. I leave the talking to Hosea, the oldest of us, the man who teamed up with Dutch decades ago. The two formed this band that stays together every time we tear down camp and move along. Dutch, with his bellowing speeches about how our dream world is within reach, is a man of confidence, while Hosea is a confidence man. He’s lithe and trim in his pinstriped vest and beleaguered red cravat, gray hair combed smooth as a banker’s, nasal voice crooning the story he intuits a stranger wants to hear before they’ve even said a word.

Did Hosea always have that cough? Did he always say this stuff about how we’re doomed, him most of all?

Hosea’s with us for a bad time, not for a long time, and so I can be forgiven for overlooking him before. For not remembering him mentioning a mystery sickness. For not noticing the way he seems to recede into his notebook. It was only five years ago, but I was young, lungs long clear of smoke and damage, heart not yet so fast and desperate for air. Maybe I never even heard it, never stopped to talk to the man I had no use for in the story of my life. He says, “I’ve not got enough time for fools,” but it seems to me that’s all he has time for—fools and the money they’ll part with once he gets going with some story.

Without fools, we are nothing——we are killers. Arthur’s not smart enough to spin yarns, and so when I go to collect some poor fools’ debts, the menu lets me threaten or beat but not coax, not swindle, not cajole, not beg. A good man with a bad loan takes my blows until he spits blood. That’s how he’ll kill me, long after his own death from consumption.

In camp, as Hosea walks to the water, Arthur calls after him, “I still ain’t sure what you want me to be thinking about.”

“This,” Hosea says, not stopping. “All of this. Where it ends.”

Arthur just says, “Okay,” doesn’t ask him a damn thing, doesn’t even say why he’s asking, why he’s so sure Hosea wants anything of him. Hosea stands and looks at the water. I think he knows where it all ends: the way it does for all the other thieves who didn’t make it to the top, who robbed the trains instead of owning them.

But Arthur knows that. He’s been with this gang for most of his life. This; all of this: the glassy lake, the patch of island trees just beyond, the ladies and thieves and the family born from the willingness to take what shouldn’t have belonged to the rich.

Soon enough, Arthur will be thinking about all of this and its end. His body, like mine, will demand he notice the blood in his heart and the breath in his throat. But now, the camp is new, the lake is still, the Pinkertons are far behind them, and Arthur doesn’t know there’s something in his lungs, replicating, fighting him. Strangely enough, neither do I.

In the years since I first followed Dutch out of the mountains to our next attempt at freedom, I’ve gotten good. I press the buttons to trigger dead eye, everything turning sepia, time slowing to nearly a halt. I need this in real life, to slow the world to the pace of my thinking. And I need the real world to be like this one in which I know everything I should be thinking about, even if Arthur doesn’t yet: I know which NPC asking for help on the roadside is going to rob me, which will ask me for too much, and which I should help. I see my next mission on the map and all my tasks on the menu I push a button to display. Arthur’s life may be blotting out the things I should be thinking about: utility bills, leaves in the gutters, protein.

But maybe I’m wrong——maybe it only seems like I should be thinking about the tasks because I, Elissa, am conditioned to seek the next responsibility I’m failing to meet. The next mission is ready, but my eye is drawn to the black dots on the mini-map that represent chores that need done, and my mind can’t get past the game challenges I’m to complete for completion’s sake. For all the hopes in my inbox that emails have found me well, they won’t find me at all, because I am very busy with imaginary chores, hefting feed bags, splitting logs, catching 3 small fish without a rod.

We outlaws are in this life to get free from the oppression of the coal mine bosses and the robber barons who own the trains. But unless I bring my sense of duty with me to tether me to my world, I might never make it back out. I stay on the clock of my life, making Arthur swim until he drowns from exhaustion, pushing the horse to gallop and slamming a syringe of stimulants into her neck. My hands could crush the controller, I think, but when I shake them out one night, I see my fingers freakishly dented with impressions of the hard plastic they pressed, and in the crease of an index finger, there’s a knot in the vein as dark as the sky over the expanse of the Heartlands where bounty hunters can find me by the smoke of my campfire. My blood is back to its old tricks, clotting where it should flow. An outlaw wouldn’t care about a finger clot or its tiny pain. I’m not sure Arthur even notices his face graying, but I do. When I look in the mirror, it’s all I see.