Home is a Black Hole - Norco (2022)

Spoilers for Norco (2022)

I moved around a lot as a kid- home becoming wherever I was in the moment with my family and my stuff. My father’s job, that being a service-member in the United States Army, meant we moved. The longest I’ve lived in a place was seven years- living on the island of  Oʻahu during the end of the second G.W. Bush administration and through half or so of the first Obama administration. The second longest was Georgia, though that was between two places- Columbus (again for my father’s work) and Atlanta, for school. Georgia State University.

I still have dreams about being there, having moved away three years ago. My mental health went into serious decline, I had two psych ward stays, and decided that living with my parents in Missouri would be a more stable living environment then college dorms. I justify it to myself, then. I don’t tend to go back to places I previously lived, they live on in my head as some sort of memory, trapped in a dreamlike state, but I continue to press on- my skeleton vibrates if I stay even remotely still. Maybe that’s why I left. I left behind a lot of bad blood, my first two relationships, bad roommate situations that I contributed to in no small part, and the feeling of isolation in living alone in a city 500 miles away from family.

My skeleton vibrates even now, where I’ve been living in the Ozarks for the last two and a half years. I like it here, I think. Again and again though, I have the urge- the urge to throw my phone into a lake or forest and drive off in my busted Honda Civic, to drive out west to find my fortunes and peace elsewhere. The idea of working a job, of living in a system designed to extract my labor and what little wealth I have, designed to crush me into bone meal- I hate it, it makes my body ache for liberation. It’s a severely idealistic idea. I’m twenty-four this summer, and I’ve dropped out of college twice. I still have dreams about it.

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Norco is a 2022 point-and-click game developed by the studio Geography of Robots and  published by Raw Fury. It’s something I could describe as magical realism mixed with cyberpunk affectations. There is strange tech and advanced science, yet that lines up with the surreal and unknowable. Dream-logic wins out over technology. In it, you play as Kay- a twenty-three year old drifter who returns home after her mother dies of cancer to discover her brother missing and her family involved with a corporate and religious conspiracy. It is most likely one of my favorite games of all-time. I’ll assume that you’ve played it, but if you haven’t- it gets a full throated recommendation from me. It’s incredible.

The through-line I’ve seen in reading about Norco after finishing is that it is a game about many things- that the player will take their experiences and own selves and put that into the game’s narrative. 

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I lived in the South a few times, both east and west- having lived in El Paso, Texas at the start of the first Trump Administration, and then moving to Georgia from 2017 on through 2022. The South is a place tinged with…I don’t know what the right word is, some sort of emotional scarring. I remember walking into a store and seeing an oak door used as a counter, the cashier telling me it was one of the only things that survived Sherman’s march to the sea that razed Atlanta to the ground. She had anger, in her voice. I saw Confederate flags waving in Columbus, I saw the rotting husks of old buildings swallowed up by kudzu. Driving through South Georgia into Florida I saw billboards for sex shops right next to pro-life screeds, Florida itself a strange place if you linger where we were, the tourist locations (though I don’t hold the majority of the place hostage to Orlando’s mental impression in my mind). Moving west, Texas is marred by colonial wars and history, so is Arizona, New Mexico, and god forbid Utah. Most of America is, to be fair, but in a way, the South’s ability, whether by sand and rock or by swamp and mire, is to preserve- the ability to let the past sit out in the open and fester for all of us to see it.

Norco shows this rotting stasis- it shows the ruins of old towns buried by bayou and industrialization. There’s a section near the end of the game where you go diving to find markers to fill out a map. Each marker has an associated piece of fiction with it, describing the old ruins and people that used to live here. In Norco, the past itself is a ghost bound to the present. Even your mother cannot fully die (though I’d hesitate to call it living)- one of her last acts being to fork her consciousness into a digital receptacle sot hat you might have some memory of her not tainted in guilt. You talk to it, her “headdrive”. It’s bleak, making me feel ill seeing this puppet of your mother try and remember things that you, the player, know to be true.  But it also will fade- none of it is permanent. Preserved things still erode to time. In Norco, the world is reaching a terminal end-point, capitalism itself a cancer that consumes the environment around your old home. Capitalism killed your mother. The cancer that wracked her body was caused, yes, in part by the environment around her, the pollutant and toxins that swallowed the town- but also by the cost. You get your mother’s phone a few times in the game. You can scroll through her messages, and see the mounting debts pile up over days, weeks- ignored, of course. What else can you do if you have no money and hounds at the door, except ignore them and wait for them to pass on to the next unlucky fool down the road. Debts continue to stack even as we sit outside of time.

This is the dual contrast of capitalism as it exists now. We are constantly sat down and pandered to for nostalgia and memory, old and dead properties given to us, kept in a floating childhood- yet the entire promise of infinite growth requires infinite improvement. This is what drives the AI bubble, the idea that some new advancement can push forward tech and reduce the costs of human labor- that the line will continue to go up. Capitalism seeks to consume everything and yet wishes to preserve it’s meals in crystal. One of the secondary characters, the regional executive of Shield (the game’s stand-in for the real world Shell Oil), seeks to colonize the stars, to take their resources and leave the Earth behind. I doubt that they’d fix anything, no, the fantasy is that Earth will be left to huddled masses while the rich live out fantasies in the stars, harvesting the universe for their ever growing expansion.
 
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I think about my own childhood. I think about how my parents did their best, I think, to raise me how they thought a kid should be raised- and how it wasn’t enough. How I stumbled through feeling like a weird burnout even in middle school, how my depression and anxiety got so bad my body began to give itself a fever at times to get out of going to class. Unmedicated ADHD and unrealized queerness led me to some bad places, and I’m still struggling to piece my life together after it. I will be for a while.

I saw myself in Kay and Blake, the brother and sister pair. I’m the older sister- I ran away from home, in my own way, and continue to try. Being at my parents even a little sends me into a state of genuine anguish, I hate being there. They don’t understand. Like I said, they do their best, mostly, but it isn’t enough. I think back to the fantasy I have about running away. Kay does it, in the game- she runs west to live in communes and on the road, with squatters and rejects, people who choose not to go home and people who can’t. There’s  a freedom to it. But home is a black hole, you’ll always come back to it, whether that’s in your dreams or in real life.

I don’t know if I can call the South home. I only lived there for a few years, and I barely experienced it. I think what mostly gets me is that fact, that I only saw a glimpse of what it had to offer, the lost promises and life on my own. How can I call a place home when I only skimmed the surface of what composes it. Transience cannot replace homecoming.

In a world where America rots and something struggles to be born in the carcass, maybe that’s what we got to remember. A better place is not far off in the distance, if we have the ability to fight for some sort of future we should. Action leads to change, after all. I finish writing and editing this while Minneapolis battles to liberate itself from ICE and the Federal government. I live here in the Ozarks, and despite having the urge to leave, I find myself at home here- and in that, driven to fight for it and the people I love.

Thanks for reading y’all.