but it all turned out to be the Tetris theme
and they could remember no other, no Pac-Man,
no Galaga, no Ms. Pac-Man (did she have
her own? almost certainly not, the rats think),
was there a sound, in the 80s, that wasn’t
the Tetris theme? The rats try to remember,
say, George Michael, or, well, New Order, but “Blue
Monday” if you remember it poorly enough definitely
really could certainly be thought to resemble
the Tetris theme. Wait, when exactly did Tetris
come out? one rat asks another while running around West
Berlin drinking Coca-Cola. I don’t know, the other says,
And you should try this Crystal Pepsi (that was the 90s,
another rat says) and you should wear
your hair like this (the rats don’t know what this is,
they never saw hair in the 80s, but they imagine snakeskin
boots and Dallas, Texas and the Reagan years and one rat’s
grandmother told a story about one of their ancestors who knew
Nancy Reagan’s astrologer’s basement’s rats who wore their hair
like this and definitely, definitely, they told their kids, said no
to drugs and were beacons of sexual propriety). One rat
asked about, well, the Contras. We don’t talk about that,
another rat said. We talk about Galaga. Oh. Do you
remember the Galaga theme? Yeah, it goes like this :
duh, duh-duh-duh (it’s that Russian folk song, that
Tetris theme, and blocks are winding their way down
the screen, through the streets of the 80s, evading, uh,
obstacles, I guess. The obstacles of the 80s which all sound like
the Tetris theme and look like Tetris blocks
and were Tetris blocks and played Tetris).
