Mine Diamonds
by Via Bleidner
The cool thing about Minecraft is that you can do whatever you want. You can build the house, own the gold, grow the crops, feed the sheep, chop the tree, marry the boyfriend, get the job, raise the baby, milk the cow, hunt the pig, burn the coal, hold your baby, kiss your baby, see her grow, shoot the arrow, scale the hillside, watch her change (hair short, ears pierced), feel the rain, ride the horse, till the soil, smelt the iron, hold her hand, teach her well, kill the spider, mine the emerald, mine the redstone, mine the diamond.
I play Minecraft in the dark. I am transfixed. I throw away my blue-light glasses. I want the blue. I want the insomnia. My dreams are too weird anyway. I’ve been astral projecting. Last week I went to my ex-best friend Annie’s house, and I hovered over her bed with my back against the ceiling and watched her sleep. The week before that, I flew on the plane to Epstein’s island, and I sat right between Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, and we talked about the Olympics. And before that I projected between two layers of bricks outside the Lord & Taylor department store in Eastchester, and I couldn’t breathe at all, and my dead grandmother was there too, walking up the front steps with a little version of me—I knew this, not because I could see through the bricks, but because I could sense it; consciousness works differently in the dreamscape. You just know things.
In a swampy green biome, I have built a little house out of cobblestone and mud. The pathway is lit up with jack-o’-lanterns and torches and hanging gold orbs called glow berries. I’ve planted six different kinds of flowers on my front lawn. Behind my house there is a freshwater lake, a wheat field, a pen of six sheep, and a single panda bear. Sometimes, my boyfriend joins my realm, and we play together. For this reason, I built a master bedroom with two beds pushed next to each other. Okay, so there is one thing that you can’t do in Minecraft.
It’s the predictability of the game that makes it feel so good. There will always be corners, edges, angles, blocks. Axing a pig will always produce porkchops. The rules of Minecraft are clear and simple, and they align closely with rules of real life. Go to bed at night, eat when you are hungry, don’t step off a ledge. It’s easy to stay inside all the time, but you are rewarded for taking calculated risks. There’s a cave fifty yards from my house, and every day I make it a goal to go further than I did the day before. So far, I have collected: 64 Coal, 20 Gold, 24 Iron, 48 Redstone. I have not yet found a diamond. Therefore, I cannot collect obsidian, though I have located a lava pool two hundred and three yards past the entrance of my cave. (Only diamond pickaxes can collect obsidian blocks.) I always know what to do next, and if I ever get lost, I can Google a tutorial.
And sleeping takes two seconds, and it just fast-forwards you until morning, when all the zombies and creepers are gone, and then you can adventure safely. There is no Minecraft astral plane.
***
I dreamed I saw my daughter once. This was years ago, when I was still a teenager. I fell asleep in a room I don’t normally fall asleep in. It was in the middle of the day. She came up to where I lay sleeping and tugged on my arm. She was maybe six or seven, with long brown hair and a purple headband. I remember thinking she looked a little translucent, like she wasn’t fully there. Get up, get up, I’m your little girl, she kept saying, and yanked at my arm. I followed her down the hall. I have to warn you before it’s too late, she said.
Wait, I said, and stopped walking. She kept pulling. Who’s your daddy?
I was hoping she would say the name of whoever I liked at the time, or maybe someone famous, but instead she rolled her eyes, and then the dream ended.
***
I am so high inside this 7/11 that I have forgotten that my period is late. I can feel the vibrations of the canned tuna, the Gatorade, the credit card machines. My boyfriend’s hum in the shape of a hand on my back. The lights above us are blaring and obtrusive, but it doesn’t really bother me. I like the smell of hot dogs and I like the way the candy wrappers look, all lined up next to the register. I like convenience stores, and I like Target, and Dollar Tree, and Walmart, and Party City. When I was a little girl, I used to dream about living inside of a grocery store, where everything is well-lit and there is an endless supply of lemon yogurt and sour jellybeans. Now I think 7/11 would be just as good, because there’s the Slurpee machine, and also, it’s a little smaller, a little homier. What makes a house a home is the ratio of trans fats to square footage.
I buy a pack of gum because my jaw is going absolutely nuts. Every few months or so I take MDMA. It’s hard to describe ecstasy, or any drug for that matter, but the best I ever had it explained to me was from a guy who lived in the apartment next door to mine. He said, “Molly is what you hoped weed was going to be.”
We’re staying at this theme motel that was advertised online as Joshua Tree proper, but actually sits somewhere on the meth-y outskirts, across the street from a Little Caesar’s and beside a 7/11. Our room has a jacuzzi, but when we twisted the faucet the water was whitish, like milk. My boyfriend and I brought a tiny speaker and some candles. When we get back from the convenience store it’s like we’re at the Ritz Carlton, and the beady overhead lights feel warm and soft and glaze-y.
MDMA feels good, but artificial. The comedown is jittery, staticky, weird. I have a hard time holding onto my thoughts. I take a drink of water and suddenly I’m thinking about a room made out of bandanas, or a dog with a thermometer for a head, or a nutcracker singing the national anthem. Or Minecraft, this time it’s Minecraft, and it’s weird, I’m thinking about blocks and squares and how cool it is that you can pretend to have a diamond and build a house and live there with chickens and bunnies and cows and sheep, and I tell my boyfriend how badly I wish we could live there, in the stupid dirt house we made, and I say: If I got pregnant in Minecraft, would you want to keep it?
And this question stays with me. Something rattles inside me, something made of corners. I feel full. My breasts are swollen. I wake up twice during the night, and each time it’s the first thing on my mind. What if I am pregnant with a Minecraft baby?
***
In the morning, I wake up to a deep, searing pain in my lower abdomen and a dampness in my underwear. I sit up and examine the bedsheets. I am not, apparently, pregnant with a Minecraft baby. I gently shake my boyfriend awake. He runs the bath, but it’s still a milky white, so instead we wet Kleenex under warm water and clean my legs off that way. On the way home I order a hot tea and I hold the cup against my stomach. I take Motrin and he lets me pinch his arm whenever a cramp comes.
But my body’s memory of the Minecraft baby lingers. The next weekend, once my period has passed, we go drinking at a brewery. I wonder, who will watch my Minecraft baby? And then I remember—there is no such thing.
But I keep smelling baby powder. I catch whiffs of it in my bedroom, at the grocery store, at bars and birthday parties. I google: Phantom smells. Olfactory hallucination. Omens. Then I think about the Virgin Mary and sacred pregnancies. (If this had happened in the year 1500, I would have been canonized. In 1960, lobotomized. So where does that leave me, in the present day?) I am suspicious of every pain in my body. Everything is proof.
***
I block my boyfriend on Xbox and I fix up our house. (I want to surprise him.) I collect 32 blocks of yellow terracotta and I run it through the furnace; it comes out glazed, with a pattern the color of creamy apricots. This will be my baby’s ceiling. I pick blue orchids and soft pink peonies and I place them in clay pots. I make a new bed. I craft paintings and a bookshelf, and I fill a wooden chest with a college fund: five gold bars, two emeralds, four lapis lazuli, six ink sacs. This collection will grow.
In Minecraft, I notice babies everywhere. I see little pigs, their big innocent heads bobbing through grassy biomes. Lambs, circling their mothers by the plateau. Baby bunny: where is your mother, where is your father? Why are you here alone? I want to bring it home with me, but I would need a carrot to do that, and I don’t have any in my inventory.
At night I look out the glass window in my living room and I see a tiny green zombie in a miniature helmet. It waddles, its legs stiff and small and new. The sun comes up over the horizon, and I watch it combust. A small candle, a little baby.
***
In the real world, Ghislaine Maxwell is convicted but nobody seems to care. I astral project to Little Saint James, and inside the blue temple there is a Walmart and a Redbox. The whole island is surprisingly typical. There is a community of stucco tract houses, office buildings, and storage units. The only thing that lets me know it is Little Saint James is that dream-feeling, and then Ghislaine, who seems to go everywhere I go, a pale ghost with a black pixie cut. I don’t know what I was expecting—mansions? A higher color saturation? But Little Saint James is just suburban Los Angeles. And Ghislaine is every other woman. I guess it makes sense, in a weird way—Ghislaine may have been born in France, but she is undeniably California: brown Prada handbag, crocodile leather, vegetable ink menstrual cups. When I wake up from my dream, I feel a brand-new kind of neurosis; I am filled with distrust. I eat prenatal gummies in threes, fours, fives.
***
I go to the movies with my boyfriend, but all I can think about is my Minecraft baby, sitting in its little cradle, sucking a blocky thumb. And how badly I need a diamond. Nothing I have is enough for my baby. On YouTube, teenage boys with purple buzzcuts and bedroom posters and black leather computer chairs open their chests to reveal hundreds of glittering gems. It’s the kind of wealth that could sustain a dozen farms, support months of uninterrupted gameplay. I realize all that I lack, and how primitive my homestead is. My baby needs diamonds. My baby needs armor and a sword. My baby needs a pickaxe that can cut through obsidian, that can slice through stone, diorite, emerald. When I was a little girl, my mother never let me go to the mall directly after school. I always had to change clothes at home first. But I never knew why, until she told me years later: when she took my sister and I to run errands, grown men would look at us more if we were in our school uniforms. This is when I was in seventh grade and my sister was in second. This is when I was in sixth grade and my sister was in first. And I know my Minecraft baby is a girl, like I know when I am ovulating. I read about motherhood online and I learn this: At a certain stage in the pregnancy, the female fetus’ reproductive system forms, including all the eggs she will have for her entire life. Which means that for a period of time, a mother carries her grandchildren.
I wonder where they will go to school, and if they will wear uniforms. Or if they will be born at all.
***
I play for seven hours, traveling deeper and deeper into the cave. I bring one hundred torches, three iron pickaxes, a crafting table, a furnace, two roast chickens, sixty-four watermelon slices, five bread loaves, two swords, one shovel, one ax, seventy sticks, thirty coal, and four iron ingots. I mine at level 12. I find redstone and gold and copper ore but it’s not enough, it’s not what I want. I find a waterfall. I find lava. I kill four skeletons and seven spiders. I line the cave with so many torches, it almost feels like daytime. I carve patterns out in chunks of deepslate. I eat my roast chicken, my cooked mutton, my pumpkin pie. I stumble and fall and my health bar depletes halfway. And then, I see it, glittering in the distance, so faint I could’ve missed it. A small burst of pale blue.
I feel my baby kick.
I mine the diamond. Behind it, three blocks more. I open my inventory just to stare at it. I imagine showing my baby when she is twelve. See what I did for you, I will tell her. See how much I love you. I’ve loved you since you were as small as a grain of sand. You are always my baby girl but someday you will be on your own. This can help. I imagine her in a Communion dress, in hiking boots, in enchanted armor. And I am filled with eighteen years’ worth of future.
***
Come look, I tell my boyfriend, and I show him our Minecraft baby’s nursery, with the yellow ceiling and the pots of flowers. And then I open the chest, and there they are: Four perfect diamonds.
Wow, he says.
I did this for her, I say. I did this for our baby.
A mother’s love, he says, and strokes my hair. I love his big teeth and the sweet, heavy smell of his breath. I love this block in my stomach. I love corners and edges and angles and squares. I have so much love to give, and all the more diamonds. And this Minecraft world generates infinitely. It could go on forever.