There are no Kidney Stones in the Commonwealth
How Fallout 4 Saved My Life
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Water, as a consumable, has no enemies. Doctors and plastic bottle manufacturers agree on very little, generally speaking. Go ahead, serve a few drinks to a member of each faction and you can expect heated debate that aligns to each team’s stance on the “due no harm” mantra. The doctor, with martini in hand, sympathizes with the health of the Earth. The plastic bottle salesperson, with a contraband pint flask of plastic-bottled vodka that he pulled from his jacket pocket in defiance of the disdainful stares of the bar staff, couldn’t give a shit about the Earth. But turn the conversation to a shared venture—the need to drink and to transport water—and these two inebriated enemies might put aside their moral and professional alignments and take a few more swigs, enough to, maybe, since I’m dreaming here, lead the rest of the bar patrons in a harmonized “Sweet Caroline” chorus or two. Or “Don't Stop Believing.” Take your pick. Join my dream.
Despite the unifying power of water, I still judged Scrote Johnson. Scrote drank a lot of water. Too much, maybe. The year is 2287. America has been ravaged by the aftermath of nuclear war where citizens live as scavengers with binary alignments to warring factions not unlike my own made-up doctor versus plastic bottle salesman rivalry. The fuck-the-Earth evil salesman equivalent in Scrote’s world are the Raiders, who, true to their name, raid. Who do they raid? Why the love-the-Earth good doctor-equivalent settlers, of course, who just want to farm irradiated potatoes, milk their mutated two-headed Brahim cows, drink some water, then die. Maybe they belt out a verse from “Friends in Low Places,” to cap the night. It’s not too much to ask, really.
Maybe I judged Scrote Johnson because I had already committed to denying her proper respect. I chose her name for no better reason than it made me chuckle.
I chose her name for no better reason than it made me chuckle.
I’m not without the capacity for remorse, of course. During my 412 hours of Fallout 4 gameplay, I searched for emergent qualities that might indicate a more fitting name. It should have been easy. Fallout 4’s population of post-apocalyptic deviants routinely name themselves after traits that surface through long, hard lives where nuanced personality reduces in the open-flame heat of survival. The Raider boss Ack-Ack is named after the firing sound of her minigun. Boomer blows things up. Sinner? Well, he sins. Scrote? I imagine Commonwealth citizens searching her dress and inventory for onomatopoetic connotations. “Don’t try,” Scrote would say, and I could almost feel her side-eye daggers hit me through the TV screen. “Some immature player thinks my life isn’t hard enough, so he named me Scrote Johnson.” Heh. Scrote Johnson. The name stayed.
With a life this hard for everyone in the Commonwealth, especially so for a woman with a name full of penis slang, water should have been a luxury left sacrosanct. But still I judged. Every morning, just after rising fully dressed from her blood-and-dirt-stained mattress, without fail, Scrote gulped water in loud, obnoxious swallows, her throat thrusting up, then down, up, then down like an oil derrick uncaring to the land it depleted. In a pinch, she'd use her hands to cup irradiated water from the nearby creek. In that same pinch, she might instead slurp from her own toilet bowl. Both options served Scrote. She had a thirst meter to keep full, after all. And so, I, her immature player, kept it full. "Press A to drink,” the game prompted, so I did, judging Scrote the entire time. Nobody needs that much water, I told myself. Press A to drink. Press A to drink. Press A to drink. Thirst meter full. Finally.
Should I have listened, I might have heard my own real-life kidneys screaming at me over the sounds of enemy gunfire ack-acking from my TV as Scrote dried her satiated lips. "Water!" my kidneys demanded as an immigrating calcium deposit traveled through my urinary system.
Press A to drink, Caleb!
In my world—comparatively utopian given its absence of Raiders, Gunners, Rust Devils, and irradiated wildlife—water couldn’t get my attention. I drank water in the same way that I might talk about the weather: generally, only to bide time amid lulls in unwanted small talk. Oh, I would contribute to this awkward conversation, but, um, my mouth is full of water (gulp). Even water-based, doctored-for-taste beverages barely moved me. Sodas, sports drinks, Ultra Fiesta Mango Monster… these liquids impressed me, even if only in the way neon lights and fireworks do, but they couldn't activate me.
My defiance felt inevitable, honestly. The real world had given up. Grocery stores are essentially Galapagos (a)Isles of unnatural selection where every flavor of randomly mutated liquid competes for the eyeline. Even plain water had long succumbed to targeted marketing modification. Who could possibly deny the buxom curves of an Eternal brand bottle? What kind of architecture-hating buffoon wouldn't revere the stately elegance of a Voss brand bottle's Tuscan column simplicity?
Some water bottles even flaunted their simplicity in stark contrast to the implied high maintenance of a partner like Eternal or Voss. Low maintenance brands announced their casual jeans-and-flannel style with the word "alkaline” peppered among the marketing speak. So much water had become non-water, that real water had to remind me that it’s real water.
Even if most people saw through the labels and accepted the glass of soda or juice or Pink Drip Remastered G Fuel as at least half-full (of water), I saw every glass of liquid, no matter the color and fizz, as empty. Had I a thirst meter myself, it would be forever flashing in the annoying way that screen feedback needs to when the player is making a critical mistake.
My defiance felt inevitable, honestly.
But Scrote Johnson, she had a thirst meter; an on-screen, depleting bar of color whose sole purpose was to provide constant feedback to me, a player more aligned to meter-induced dopamine than to human hydration. “Press A to drink” took priority over “lift arm to drink.” At the most absurdly sad level I forfeited my own health for the health of Scrote. I could be drinking water myself but think of poor Mrs. Johnson and her in-game stats that will drain to nothing if I don't act now.
To me, water was an icky unnecessity, and Scrote Johnson’s morning routine was nothing more than a gameplay loop, based on—but an exaggeration of, I insisted—a human’s “need” for water.
Look, I understood that water is fundamentally important, but an understanding of water’s importance doesn’t immediately nullify skepticism. There had to be a limit to how important water really is, right? I pee seven-to-eight times a day. How important could water be when my body has a built-in water-emptying spigot? Consider also that humans have invented a porcelain bowl, designed to catch the spigot water, which itself is full of more water that gets flushed away.
The mere existence of bottled water reinforced my skepticism. Surely, something so universally needed wouldn't require marketing. Consider this: there was a time, long ago, when pebbles were used as money. Then someone said, “no no no, you must use this coin, which is made out of the rare shiny stuff we found inside those tiny rocks.” When someone tried to argue against this ridiculous currency conversion from an easily attained thing to a laboriously attained thing, that person was stoned to death. Or, as the society had previously called it, monied to death. And that pebble-to-metal slipperoo was the greatest con ever pulled until bottled water.
Eventually, after so many waterless years, I finally heard my screaming kidneys. My refusal to drink water landed me in the hospital with several kidney stones where, for the following months, I’d endure the most excruciating pain of my life. At times, I thought I might die.
I realize today that not dying of thirst is important for me beyond the corporeal. Consider the optics. I live in a city whose civil infrastructure downright celebrates water. Kansas City contains more than 200 registered fountains, placing us second in the world in number of fountains behind Rome, Italy. Given Italy’s several-thousand years head-start in concrete manufacturing—and assuming no other city cares enough to enter the challenge—second place in a decorative water contest strongly implies an excess of drinkable water is always within my reach. Should a person die of thirst in a land lousy with water, their “die young but leave behind a beautiful corpse” mentality survives them instead as “die brittle and leave behind a confusingly water-defiant” corpse. No matter what they stood for in life, a dusty corpse amid a veritable flood leaves their loved ones searching for reason. Why did Caleb hate water so much? He did accidentally inhale water when learning to swim in 1989; did that make him want to fight water? Is water hateful? Is it racist? Should I boycott water, too?1 These optics, I recognize now.
Though I named Scrote Johnson as such for humor, the impact, I believe, extended to her strengthened will to survive. I hindered her in a world already eager to keep her down. So demoralized and physically broken down was she, that water—simple, basic (alkaline) water—strengthened her. If only I, pressing A to drink but never equipping a cup of water myself, could have absorbed a bit of the strength I imbued into Mrs. Scrote Johnson. Instead, I sublet my kidney to a stone. But I wouldn’t ignore the lessons of the devastated Commonwealth forever.
This is the story of how Fallout 4 saved my life.