Grief and Grace Along Route Zero

Part II

By Perry Gottschalk | August 1, 2024 | 1:04pm

Video Games Features Kentucky Route Zero

This feature serves as a continuation to Grief and Grace Along Route Zero, which was originally published on Unwinnable on January 19, 2024.

It’s March 2024. Northern Colorado. I’m leaving.

The sun’s rays cascade the plains and bounce to paint the Rockies in ultraviolet hues. Interstate 25’s white lines had once carried us south, far away from the economic devastation of our small, stuck mountain town; places frozen in time can only feel pain proportional to how long they remain stagnant, and shiny Colorado steeped in the breathing room our previous home in Montana could never afford. Life here could be bountiful. It was a blank page demanding to be written on.

I threw my ink all over that goddamned page; I could have written a novel. I worked my hands to the bone to establish roots, and then allowed myself the chance to dream and see what fruit my efforts bore. Somewhere off in the margins I see myself: a friend, a partner, a father. It’s a cool summer evening and Elvis drifts from the stereo speakers, serenading our loved ones as we dance from stove to counter just like we’d always dreamed.

My tires spun over those Interstate lines like a tape rewinder the day I left. Every further mile north up 25, away from Colorado, felt like a retreat. For the first time in a decade I set my eyes east towards Chicago, a straight shot down 80 in a U-Haul that fit whatever was left. I clutched the image of that blank page I now found myself facing; I tried to remind myself of the beauty it could hold—all I see is your change of address form that arrived the day before, proving this was all premeditated.

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You left. The gaping maws of The Zero swallowed me whole.

There’s a purgatorial anxiety that accompanies a divorce. You’d do anything to escape it, even if that respite seems confounded. There’s an old plot of land our suburban village deemed historical where a schoolhouse and barn sit—its classes long adjourned and its surrounding fields converted to recreational territory. Two decades ago I cried here as a kid who didn’t understand the rules of tee ball, and now I found I’d made a habit of laying on home plate and playing on my Switch. I needed something real to break the charcoal clouds overhead, so I booted up Kentucky Route Zero.

Kentucky Route Zero

In the game’s second act, Conway and Shannon embark into the unknown that is Route Zero. The ethereal portcullis foots them at the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces—an administrative quarter that foresees the rezoning of abandoned whereabouts. This is Hell. The pair wander the floors of this red tape nightmare, searching for any potential lead to bring them closer to 5 Dogwood Drive. Clerks on one floor direct them to the next’s cubicle, who direct them back to the first clerk, a labyrinthian design where the minotaur has traded his horns for a necktie. Old records instruct that paperwork be filed in stupefying ways: items related to cars can be filed in the C section, but correspondence pertaining to air quality must not go in the A folder. Conway and Shannon confront the same dumbfounded rules and regulations that exist for the sake of additional paperwork; the same bureaucracy that hallmarks the bottlenecking of progress. The efficacy of the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces is realized similarly to its geographic position: a limit approaching Zero.

There exists an idea known as celestial bureaucracy: the accordance by which utopia is achieved. Through organization and management, the issues of the world can be signed off on and filed into neatly arranged filing cabinets. It’s a naïve perspective, as is utopia. Meghan Gilbride once wrote, “all variables within a utopian society must be controlled to ensure success, which would limit individual freedom and independent thought. How can utopia exist if freedom is limited?” When the heavenly becomes bureaucratic, utopia becomes purgatory—a place where change is not possible—perhaps why we view real-world bureaucracy itself through such a purgatorial lens.

Kentucky Route Zero is not a game about purgatory, but it concerns itself greatly with this celestial edition. The Zero isn’t the harsh repercussions that industrialization has on a community, it’s the community left in its wake—born from the attempted bureaucratization of that community. The Consolidated Power Company has injected its administrative poisons into all aspects of life under guise of sophistication and advancement. They now control the whiskey you drink after the job they gave you in the home they signed a mortgage to you for. There is paperwork to verify all of this. Utopia, no?

Perhaps there was a time when the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces operated with the idealistic gusto it was likely born under—we know of at least a handful of locations that changed hands thanks to their oversight. Ironically enough, one of those spaces is the Bureau itself. It was originally a cathedral for the Saint Thomas Church. When the Bureau took over, the congregation moved to the Bureau’s prior facility. They soon stopped meeting entirely, and I’ll be damned if that isn’t celestial purgatory in action. All too often, it seems, the reclamation of these spaces ends in communities extinguished.

My Switch told me its battery was running low, so I got up from home plate. I looked out towards the outfield and saw myself at 5 years old, struggling to find the right way to fit my hand in my glove. My parent’s neighbors have a daughter who works down at the old used bike shop off of East Avenue and she got me a good deal on something I could use to get around. I parked it next to the schoolhouse and walked inside. For 50 years it provided an education to the surrounding community, now it sits as a public museum, an artifact of times long gone. I looked at the desks and saw another five year old practicing his penmanship. The school was built by the owners of the barn next door in 1904, almost 20 years after they established their dairy business. This whole area was once a bustling economic staple—you could live, learn, and work here. The village now owns it, renting it out occasionally for weddings and baseball games. Most days, it sits unused. On a day like today, you can see the ghosts of the people who were here before the space was reclaimed. I biked home.

When I first wrote Grief and Grace Along Route Zero, I stuck on a single moment from Kentucky Route Zero’s ending. We observe a funeral for the victims of a flood, and a hymn is sung to send them off. It’s still a beautiful moment that moves me to my core. It’s the apotheosis of Kentucky Route Zero’s theme of community. It’s not the final scene of the game.

Our cast of characters move from the funeral site and gather at 5 Dogwood Drive. Residents of the town claim that this structure wasn’t there before the flood waters ravaged their community, that it just appeared when the storm dissipated. Maybe it stood elsewhere and was washed downstream in the torrents. Maybe it’s the final trick of the Zero. 5 Dogwood Drive still stands. It’s here, now. Before credits roll, we see our characters existing in this space. Whatever the intended purpose of the building was doesn’t matter. It’s turned into a doghouse, a workshop, a kitchen, a library, a stage, or a museum.

It is reclaimed.

It isn’t reclaimed by the Consolidated Power Company, nor the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, nor the suburban village I call home.

It’s reclaimed by the people who will love it intently. Celestial bureaucracy ceases.

A few years back, my dad got cancer. He’s beating it, thank God, but it’s changed his life. He’d spent the summers prior toiling in our backyard, where a patch of lawn became a plentiful garden. The vegetables harvested there nourished our family for years on end. That garden could no longer be cared for in his debilitation. When I moved back in, it’d been through countless seasons of neglect. Weeds had been allowed full territory of the space, and a small army of trees sprouted where tomato plants had. Over a number of weekends, I razed the infestation down. It’s kept me busy, and it’s kept me focused. I’m still working on the stumps—these goddamn stumps—but it’s one of the things I’ve reclaimed since March.

Nobody ever prepares you for the experience that is a divorce. You’d maybe think that just as prior loves are preparation for marriage, the breakups those prior loves resulted in could brace you for the ultimate one. I’m sad to report this couldn’t be further from the truth. When you say “I do,” you could never imagine that your partner was ever capable of a sudden suffixed “not.” Nobody tells you that years of therapy and journeying through the self could crumble in seconds, leaving you defenseless against the world you knew—the one that no longer exists.

Conway never makes it to 5 Dogwood Drive. He falls victim to the same celestial bureaucracy that embodies the setting of Kentucky Route Zero. He fell back into his alcoholism, and it took him. He drifts down The Zero, only a skeleton of the man he once was. He had no interest in reclaiming, only being reclaimed.

Nobody ever tells you about all the things you’ll need to reclaim. The work it takes to stop thinking in “we” and instead think of “I.” How to pick up derelict passions. The ability to see that blank page as an adventure.

It would be all too easy to go down The Zero.

I kept looking for 5 Dogwood Drive.

Last month marked one year since I found out I’d be a father. Knowing that filled me with innumerable joy, but that feeling was unfortunately transient. We lost the baby. Last month marked three months since my wife, the mother, left. Fatherhood feels like a state that supersedes marital status, but the entirety of my time as a dad is tethered to a relationship that no longer exists. It didn’t feel like something I could claim anymore. It had to be reclaimed.

When last I lived here, I biked my daily commute through the frisbee golf course that runs behind the village’s community center. I developed an attachment to this tiny creek that ran through the park—it was by no means anything special, but something about those rugged wooden planks in the shade of the overhead trees made me feel at peace. I started leaving the house earlier just so I could sit in this tiny little paradise I’d allowed myself. I returned there this year, on the anniversary of finding out about my late daughter’s arrival. I sat and took in this familiar grove, and wrote her a letter. I folded it into a paper boat and let it float down the stream.

I’d like to share part of that letter with you, if you’d allow me.

“It feels strange to write to someone you don’t think you know all that well. What would you have been like? Would you have my curiosity and passion for the world? I like to think so.

Six years ago I saw a bird that sent me into a depressive spiral. I almost didn’t survive. A few months ago I saw a different bird. It looked at me with empathy, kindness, and every manner of well-wishing. It was the start of my climb out of this spiral. I see that bird often now. It nests in the awning behind work. It has a mate, and together they have a beautiful fledgling. It’s learning to fly now.

Thank you for showing that to me.

Though you left, I’ve never stopped looking for you. I see you every day in the brief moments of peace I find, when the swelling in my chest recedes and joy claws itself out of the shoreline. You’ve always been here, you just look different. I promise to love that part of me just as much as I love you.

Thank you. Always now and always forever.

I love you,

Dad”

I found 5 Dogwood Drive.

Perry Gottschalk is a Paste intern, thinking about games and the way they make us feel. For more feelings, follow @gottsdamn on Twitter.