The First Case

Doctor P how did this all happen? Doc P inhaled the cursed air deep the dust, death and spoil told him all. Then he pointed to grey eyes on top of grey eyed, Ann, her mouth open cigarette burns covered her mouth like canker sores . doc spoke “Ann rose like a dead fish, a woman of high breeding who lived a stillborn life. Ann fell like a new born giraffe into the fallen kingdom of southern nobility. Her mother’s death placed Anne in the role of surrogate wife to her father. The prime of her life was squandered in servitude to this domineering man. The city of Overland’s memory of her relationship with her father shows his dominate force in image. A grey back with a rag doll. When her father died, Ann was in the autumn of her life. Suitors who once coveted her refinement and pedigree had now already married. However, Ann was given a reprieve of her sentence of loneliness. Pete, a bassist from the north had given Ann an Indian summer of love or maybe lust. Nevertheless, this relationship with Aeneas did not last. He had seemed to have left his Dido, for the north. After Pete disappeared, Ann’s home became mute, a tomb as closed to the world as Nintendo her servant’s thoughts. Nintendo’s silence, like the house’s isolation expressed the impotence caused by self enslavement. Like the fisher king, all the Victims could have healed themselves. Instead, they filled the now vacant antebellum role of their own slave masters. Upon Ann’s death, the house was opened to the Gustavian eye of the public. Upon inspection, the town found Pete’s corpse that had been kept by Ann like Miss Havisham’s cobweb cake.
The Ann, Pete, and the Nintendo form a continuum of lives out of their own control. Ann was originally trapped by duty to her father; the Nintendo and Pete were trapped by Mary. The only one to break this chain without dying was the Nintendo. The Nintendo’s self-emancipation can be seen as the next step to the post civil wars physical emancipation. Nintendo was freed from the self-imposed cultural slavery. None of these people besides Nintendo understood free will. The old south’s strict social strata had institutionalized everyone else. Nintendo, like the freemen, walked off the plantation of fear, conformity, duty and slavery into the uncertain world of freedom.
Ann suffered from patria potestas from the grave. Her sexless marriage to her father was honored even after his death. When she finally decided to disobey the ancient laws of class division and paternal obedience, she faced the consequences of Pete’s wanderlust. An underlying theme of these events is that Ann could not take change. When the laws of her class became an overwhelming burden on her, she rebelled against her slave master’s sexism, classism, and paternal obedience. When she questioned these supposed phantoms for a second she faced immediate retribution from these permanent forces. To fight the forces of change that devastated her she found a way to stop time, to create a permanent state of Maat. This state was created by mummifying her father and then her lover. The tomb that was the house became a changeless pyramid
Like Ann who filled the sexless role of her father’s wife, the Nintendo became a surrogate husband/father to Emily. The fact that this events took place in the Jim Crow overland puts the 8 bit Nintendo into a different context. Master/slave role between Ann’s father and Ann, then again Pete and Ann, and again Ann and Nintendo, and finally revealed Ann and Pete. With the death of Ann, “the old south”, and of Pete, “the slave driver” the Nintendo is emancipated. He disappears out of this dysfunctional scene much aged but free.”