by Adam Cesare
Chris finished up two more corners of the maze before finally being swallowed up by the gang of ghosts.
“Suck my dick you fruity rainbow ghosts!” Chris kept his hand on the joystick, used the leverage to propel his other fist forward into the Plexiglas of the cabinet. It didn’t break, probably wouldn’t if he’d had a sledgehammer instead of his doughy fist, but the joints of the cabinet did rattle.
“Can I have my bag now?” she asked.
Chris didn’t move from the machine, but pressed his red knuckles to his cheek. It was clear that they’d be bruised tomorrow. Then he dipped his wounded hand down to his pocket and felt around.
“I’m all out of tokens. Give me one so I can play again. I think I’m getting a lot better.”
She tossed him one, knowing that she was being shook down, but hoping beyond hope that he’d catch the coin, raise up his foot and let her get away from him.
Bending, she tugged on her purse.
He didn’t lift his foot up.
“Let’s go for one more. I need my sensei if I’m going to learn.”
There was a loud popping sound like someone had stomped an inflated paper bag in the lunchroom.
Tiffany jumped, felt her veins flood with endorphins. She’d been coiled, on edge the whole time that Chris had been near her, ready to run and scream at any minute.
“Jesus,” Chris yelled, pulling his hand away from the joystick. Tiffany smelled the stale locker-room stink of sweat and watched as a puff of smoke rolled out from between Chris’s digits.
“What happened?”
“I think I was electrocuted.”
Chris took a shaky step back from the machine and Tiffany snatched her purse from the carpeted floor. It didn’t matter that he looked like he was about to puke or pass out, she was getting her bag before anything else.
“The handle’s plastic.” Tiffany said, pausing, then thinking back to the number of answers she’d heard Chris volunteer in middle school science. “You couldn’t have been.”
“You heard it. Jesus.” Chris shook his hand out. “It felt like something bit me.”
Was this part of his act? Did he palm a little firework when she wasn’t looking and blow himself up to buy some sympathy? It seemed more likely than an electric shock from a plastic handle. It was a joystick that she herself had used for hours on end, no shock.
She wouldn’t have believed him, except that she didn’t think he was a good enough actor to pull off the terrified look he had in his eye. He looked surprised and hurt, sucking on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.
“Are you okay?” she asked. Being nice to Chris Murphy felt how she imagined passing kidney stones must feel.
“Yeah, I’m fine, but someone should load this thing onto the back of a garbage truck. It’s too old to be fun, plus it’s dangerous.”
Hearing him badmouth Ms. Pac-Man was the last straw. Injury or not, it was time for this conversation to end.
“Well, I’m going to go,” she said. To her astonishment he didn’t try to stop her, just kept sucking his hand and staring at the machine.
“Okay. I’ll see you,” he said, now acting oddly civil, post-jolt. “I’m going to go find that retard. Someone’s got to fix this thing before it kills someone.”
He turned and walked down the aisle, back toward the stairs to the bowling alley.
Tiffany didn’t leave the arcade, it was too early for that, but she did resolve to spend the rest of her tokens playing Skee-Ball. Skee-Ball was downstairs next to the restaurant and ticket redemption area, a place where she would be surrounded by people.
People other than Chris Murphy.
CHAPTER 2
In the five years he’d been the maintenance man at Funcave, Boden had seen arcade cabinets broken by destructive teenagers, but he had never seen one break down on its own. It wasn’t that the cabinets were built to last, they weren’t, but the machines at Funcave had a way of keeping themselves in check. He’d replace the occasional light bulb, switch out one or two flippers on the pinball machines every few months, but other than that the place seemed to take care of itself.
“It’s right over here,” the ruddy teen said, pointing to the second aisle, leading the way as Boden limped along behind him. The kid mumbled a few words that sounded nasty and Boden thought about hitting him in the back of his spiky-hair with his wrench. He touched his right pinky finger to his tool belt, reassured by the cold metal.
“I know where it is,” Boden said, slurring at the end of the statement. Certain sounds were hard to pronounce when the right half of your face was paralyzed.
He didn’t need the kid to tell him where Ms. Pac-Man was. He’d been here on the day they’d brought her in. That was downstairs, actually, when the game had been a new release. He was unsure if this was even the same cabinet. It probably was, just with all new parts, accounting for however many replacements and refurbishments had happened in the intervening years.
Boden could have used some refurbishment himself, someone to clean the carbon off his fading CRT tube. Decades ago, when this machine was new, Boden’s face didn’t droop and his right arm and leg didn’t go dead if he forgot to massage them for twenty minutes every morning.
Strokes weren’t just something that happened to grandpas. They happened to middle-aged unmarried guys who played too many video games, too. Boden had learned that the hard way, slumping over a game of Joust and waking up with the side of his head shaved and a shunt imbedded in his brain.
The shunt sounded cool on paper; it was inorganic matter coupled to his flesh and blood to keep him alive. Like what Tony Stark had. Sadly it didn’t improve his reflexes or make the Bionic Man noise when he bent down to take a shit. What it did do was give him a blazing headache if he tried to focus on one thing for too long. Focus on something like, say, a video game.
No. Dan Boden, one-time northeast regional Mappy champion and editor emeritus of one of the web’s oldest and finest classic video game scoreboards, could no longer play video games. He’d taken the maintenance position, offered by Eddie Harmon out of pity, not because of the spectacular pay, but because he wanted to be around the games he loved. There were days where he felt a little bit like a eunuch working at a brothel.
“It was a fucking thunderclap, man. Then zap!” the kid said, gesticulating with the middle fingers of both hands. Boden couldn’t tell if the kid was conscious of the double-bird or not. It could well be his fingers’ operative mode.
Boden leaned his good elbow against the cabinet, thankful for the moment’s rest before he had to slouch down and poke around inside of Ms. Pac-Man.
“What are you waiting for?” the boy said from behind him.
“For you to go away so I can do my job,” Boden said. This was the kind of kid that never learned or cared for that “respect your elders” thing. In fact, he looked like the kind of dull-eyed bully that might more readily ascribe to the “stomp your elders, especially if they’re infirmed” philosophy.
“You should just be lucky I’m not suing. I’d own this place and all these shitty games. Demolish it and turn it into a titty bar.”
Boden flinched. Now he really wanted to use that wrench.
“Stay if you want, then. There won’t be much to see.”
The machine had had its front-plate removed so often that there was a gap between the corners where the front clung loosely. It would take two hands to move, one to hold the plate up so it wouldn’t slip off and spill tokens everywhere, the other to operate the key. Dan had not had full mobility in it for years, had time to get used to it, but still felt embarrassed when he had to use his right hand.
Using his left, he pressed the right flat against the machine. He uncurled the fingers of his right hand one by one and laid them flush with the particleboard. It was as if his hand belonged to someone else, like he was trying to set up a mannequin display. When that was done, he wrestled the key ring from his belt, his arm shaking under the weight of his torso.
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br /> “Do you, like, need a hand?” the kid said, possibly oblivious to the pun.
“No,” Boden said, sounding meaner than he meant to. “This is my job, I do it every day by myself.”
After what felt like a week, he found the correct key on the ring and plugged its round end into the hole on the coin door. The joint of his right wrist felt like it was lined with broken glass. He wanted to get off his knees, take a seat and massage his joints back to life for the next hour, but that wasn’t an option with the kid mouth-breathing over his shoulder.
The only small blessing was that most of the machines at the Funcave had been modified so that they could be worked on by removing the coin door and without having to turn the machine around and access the back.
“You wanted to help? Now you can help. Pick this up and lay it—gently—over there.” Boden pointed to the machine across from them, a stand-up Joust II cabinet. It wasn’t the machine that he’d stroked-out playing, that had been a sit-down “cocktail cabinet” model of the original Joust, but the association was strong enough to make him cringe.
The kid did as he was told, lifting up the modified front panel and moving it to the opposite side of the aisle. Boden kept a hand cupped under the coin return so nothing spilled out.
Boden’s first impression of the inside of Ms. Pac-Man was that the machine was so clean it glistened. In the low light of the classic arcade, it would have been possible to suspend your disbelief, believe that it was 1987, Devo on the radio, and the weight of the quarters in your pocket tugging at the waistband of your jeans. For that brief moment, Boden felt no pain in his wrist and knee.
“Agh, it stinks!” The kid’s voice ripped Dan out of his stupor. “It’s like something died in there.”
Boden could barely smell it. He only had a shade of his former olfactory senses remaining, and that was impeded by the wealth of nose hair that he would one day have to get around to trimming.
He took the miniature flashlight from his keychain and clicked it on. The beam cut through the gloom of the arcade and showed the guts of the machine as they were, not as he wished them to be.
His first appraisal was correct: the circuits and wires that ran Ms. Pac-Man did glisten. They were covered with a fine layer of slime. Boden dipped his head under the lip that housed the joystick and bent so that his head and right arm were inside the cabinet.
Hairy nostrils or not, he could smell it now. It wasn’t as the kid had described it, though. The air of the cabinet didn’t carry the necrotic stink of putrefaction, but instead the breath of new life. It did happen to be the fungal, spore-releasing breath of new life, but mushrooms counted as life.
“Yep,” Boden said, resisting the temptation to add “there’s yer problem” like he was some yokel mechanic.
“Fucking disgusting. This place should be condemned.”
“Calm yourself,” Boden said. The kid was an odd duck. For someone who talked like he was disinterested in the workings of the machine, he’d insisted on watching it opened up. Also, as someone who had twice in the last twenty minutes called for the closing of the arcade, Boden recognized his pimply face, was used to seeing the boy hang around for hours on end.
“I’ve seen this in one or two of the other machines, but never this bad,” Boden said, lying. It was only a small lie, though. He’d actually seen some level of this buildup in all the machines, but if he told the kid that the health department might be showing up and closing the place down. The fungus didn’t seem to hurt the way the machines functioned, so if it was safe for them it was probably safe for humans.
“What is it?” the kid asked, he was down on his knees now too, had shifted the chains on his black cargo shorts so he could kneel comfortably. It had been a while since Boden had seen a kid dress like that. He was a weird kind of half-goth who probably considered himself too butch to wear the makeup, but was still into the black and chains.
Boden reached his hand up to grab a bit of the fleshy lichen that was growing on the sides of the circuit board. It felt spongy and unreal, similar to the foam latex people used to make Halloween masks.
“You’re touching it?” the kid said. “Without gloves? Come on, you’re going to get sick or something.” For a guy who had a Jason Voorhees hockey mask poorly tattooed on his forearm, this kid was kind of a pussy.
The goo was warm, and as it slid down Boden’s fingers he swore that it tingled, giving him a low-grade electric charge. The hair on his knuckles began to rise and that was enough to get him to wipe it on his khakis. The stuff left a translucent, slightly chromatic stain, like a giant slug had crawled across his leg, a trail of rainbow sputum behind it.
“I’ll get a few rags from the supply closet and come wipe this down.”
“What about my hand? The shock?”
“What’s wrong with it?” Boden asked.
“Nothing, I guess.” The kid stared at his open fist, closed it again, the skin wasn’t even red anymore.
“It was an isolated incident.” Boden said, using his sleeve to daub the side of his mouth, there was a dot of drool there that he didn’t want spilling down his chin. “These things get moldy sometimes, especially when we’ve had a lot of humidity. I’ll go through and clean them out over the next week.”
“This jizz is the reason I got hurt?”
Boden sighed. This was the longest conversation he’d had with anyone in the last three months. That should have been a wakeup call that he needed to get out more often.
“I’ve never seen the crud get this bad. You were probably sweating onto the joystick, it dribbled down and hit this stuff, created a closed circuit with the A/C supply and gave you a pop. No biggie, it didn’t even turn off the game, right?”
“Yeah, right.” The kid looked sullen, maybe because he’d just realized that their time together was coming to a close. “I’m Chris, by the way.”
“Dan.” He put out his hand.
“You should wash your hands, Dan.” Chris said, then balled his fists, put them in the pockets of his sweatshirt and walked away.
He could have at least stuck around to help Boden close up the machine.
CHAPTER 3
Chris had never taken the time to talk to the handyman. He had seen him limping around the arcade and figured that he was mute or retarded or something. It was probably the way that Dan stared glassy-eyed at the machines whenever kids were playing them that had caused Chris to write the guy off as a simp, possibly a pervert.
He wasn’t that bad, as cripples went.
Helping with the machine had felt like an adventure, even if it was a minor one, and it had broken the monotony of Chris’s usual Funcave routine. By this time in the afternoon, he’d have usually played a round of Time Crisis (a game that was old, but still cool because you got to use a light gun that looked close enough to the real thing) and eaten a pizza. His stomach grumbled at the thought of microwave-rubberized cheese.
To get to the food counter he had to pass the Skee-Ball. He gave Tiffany a quick nod, but couldn’t tell if she noticed him or not. She wasn’t white, but damn was she cute.
A man could not live on white bread alone, Chris’s dad once told him while licking his lips. His father was also quick to add that Chris would find himself disowned if he ever thought of marrying a black or a Jew. Or if he turned queer.
Chris’s father was a shithead.
Chris Murphy was more of a mama’s boy, even though she was dead now. The Jason tattoo on his arm was put there to honor her memory. He thought she’d appreciate it more than a heart that said mother. It had cost him two week’s pay.
Sometimes he daydreamed about hacking people up, like Jason Voorhees did, then hallucinating his mother and her giving him a big, imaginary hug. He’d mow down all the dickheads that gave him wide berth in the lunchroom, the ones that neglected to come to his birthday party from age six through twelve. She was the one throwing them, so after his mom croaked he’d stopped having birthday parties.
The girl
behind the pizza counter was concentrating on looking disinterested. She probably thought it made her appear mysterious and unattainably beautiful, but Chris thought that all it did was make her look like a stuck-up bitch.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
He’d ordered a personal pan pepperoni pizza from this counter at least three days a week for the last three-plus years, ever since he’d qualified for his learner’s permit. The girl had still not picked up on this or, if she had, was not the type to say: “Hey Chris, will it be the usual today?”
Just once he’d like to hear her say that. Even an infrequent smile might save her from his inevitable Camp Crystal Lake massacre.
“One personal pizza with pepperoni.” He didn’t add a please, certainly wasn’t going to drop any of his change in the tip jar. It would only go to cocaine and lip gloss and he wasn’t comfortable supporting that kind of behavior.
He imagined her snorting a line off of Tiffany Park’s ass, him standing by and watching until they were finished and then making them kiss. His mind was like this at times, prone to fits of acute perversion. He sometimes wondered if other guys thought the same way, then he took a glance at the subreddits he subscribed to, how many followers they had, and guessed that most men did.
The girl groaned at being made to leave her seat behind the counter, walked two steps and got him an already-boxed pizza out of the rotating heater. The restaurant seemed to have a full kitchen back there, but Chris had never seen anything more complicated than French fries and mozzarella sticks come out of it. Even in those situations the counter clerks worked the fryer. There was no chef at the Funcave.
The tiny pizza’s were microwaved and then kept hot in the spinner. It looked like they had room for an oven back there. Cheap bastards. The pizza’s weren’t that bad, as long as you told yourself you weren’t eating pizza, you were eating a pizza-inspired snack.
“Anything to drink?”
“A Pepsi.” It was always a Pepsi. She should know that.
