My father’s old law office had a few machines with which I could keep myself entertained. I remember several IBM Selectric typewriters, which hummed deliciously, and a Xerox copier, which was good for self-portraits.

I was there when the first PCs emerged from this primordial ooze. I used them to play a pre-installed shareware video game on DOS. It was called Beast. The object was to crush the Beasts between green blocks and the bright yellow walls. The Beasts laid eggs, and the eggs also had to be crushed before they matured into new Beasts. If you didn’t crush the Beasts promptly, they would explode into multiple Super-Beasts. Then the Super-Beasts would set about trying to crush you.

And this is exactly what wound up happening. The Beasts looked humble. They were nothing more than red letter H’s in a black two-dimensional space moving herky-jerky through the four cardinal directions. But in the coming years they would shake themselves loose from my father’s office and insert themselves wherever they saw a gap between two walls. Ignoring them only increased their ferocity. I have long since given up on crushing them but they haven’t yet crushed me.

Mattathias Schwartz wrote this in the Savidge Library at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire and will be returning to Brooklyn, New York in a few days to prepare for a move to Washington, DC.