The Chalk Artist

by Allegra Goodman

Even so, her influence was limited. She could hold Aidan’s attention for an hour, but she could not control his life. When he was late she worried that he wouldn’t come. He arrived exhausted after school and she could only wonder, Are you gaming? Are you running out at night? When he seemed distracted, she imagined he was giving up. Most days he focused, but some afternoons he gazed into the distance and she thought, I’m losing him. I will never change anybody. She had not changed Collin. She had left him as she’d found him, gifted, adventurous, devoted to the chase. She had not changed him, but she missed him.

  Sometimes she wondered, What if I was wrong? You weren’t wrong, Lily assured her. Sometimes Nina thought, He lied to me, but does that mean he’d cheated too? Obviously, Julianne said.

  And yet Nina doubted herself. She thought, He was not what I had hoped, but I assumed the worst. He disappointed me, but I set him up. What did I expect, bringing him to that place? She wavered and then stopped short. Collin had decided what to draw and how to act.

  “Miss?”

  “Oh!” She hadn’t seen Aidan come in.

  He apologized for startling her. He didn’t know how glad she was to see him. He shook her from her thoughts. He handed her three completed vocabulary worksheets.

  She said, “Good, and I’ve graded your essay. We’ll go over it.”

  He looked at her expectantly.

  She thought, You know it’s excellent. You can’t wait to get it back.

  “Okay, first of all, let’s hear your poem.”

  “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died.”

  She wanted to hear him recite again as he had in class. She craved that magic once again.

  “The Stillness in the Room / Was like the Stillness in the Air…”

  “Hold on. Slow down.”

  Embarrassed, Aidan stumbled over Heaves of Storm.

  “Why are you rushing?”

  He thought, Because you’re distracting me. She was lovely and he longed to please her—to see pure joy on her face, to surprise her once again. He fantasized about her all the time, but not in the way that he had Daphne. Those visions had been violent. He had chased Daphne into the real world to pin her down. With his teacher, just the opposite. He took her deep into his dreams and gave her his sword.

  When he remembered his lines, they rushed out all at once, too glib, too fast. Nor could he make his voice cold when Nina was his only audience.

  “The poem has a kind of mordant wit,” she told him. “Very dark. Very wry. Remember how you did it before?”

  He didn’t feel mordant. He was the one buzzing. He was the fly, and there was no corpse, only his final paper on Dickinson. His three-to-five-page essay with the final comment, Aidan, I’m impressed. He kept glancing at the graded essay on her desk. Her words on his, her pen and his typed paragraphs practically touching. How could he remember dying? He said, “I think it was a onetime thing.”

  “No, that’s not true!” She would not accept excuses, nor could he distract her long. “Slow it down. Slow down even more.”

  He closed his eyes to concentrate. He tried to find that slow and empty place, to become again the diver underwater.

  “Yes! Better,” she exclaimed. “But look at me. Look at the audience. Don’t look away.”

  He said, “I need to practice that.”

  —

  He practiced all the way home, stepping slowly, brimful of words. The Stillness round my form…He saw Nina’s eager look, her shake of the head. He saw her listening to him, and the winter afternoon seemed new and strange. The bare trees standing like upended brooms. Small birds darting together, turning all at once, swooping and gathering in an instant, playing with the wind.

  “Hey,” Diana greeted him. He didn’t even stop for a second as he ran up the stairs. The eyes beside—had wrung them dry— / And Breaths were gathering sure…

  Diana couldn’t hear the poem clamoring in his ears. She had to listen to Kerry berate her on the phone, while Aidan paced his room above her head. For that last Onset—when the King / Be witnessed—in his power.

  “It’s one day. Just a one-day suspension—and I wasn’t even fighting! I barely touched the guy,” Diana insisted.

  Aidan threw himself onto his unmade bed. With Blue—uncertain—stumbling Buzz…He saw Nina’s face, intent and serious, her slender arms. The chalk dust on her shirt. Between the light—and me…Between the light—and me…Over and over, he imagined her.

  A rattling sound roused him, an insistent scratching. He started up, sensing someone rapping, trying to get in. His room was dark, the winter sun had set. He must have drifted off. He turned on the light and saw a bare tree branch rattling against the windowpane. Checking his watch, he was shocked he’d slept so long, past five o’clock.

  Shit. He’d promised he would meet his company. He hesitated for a minute, then, scrambling to his feet, he opened his BoX.

  “Where is everybody?” he demanded as his Elf shape materialized. All he saw was poor, half-crippled Dracon standing on a stone bridge. Vast caverns, vaults of a subterranean cathedral surrounded them.

  “Everybody else gave up,” Dracon said. “You were supposed to be here two hours ago.”

  “Okay, we’ll reschedule.”

  “No. You said the qwest was on.”

  Annoyed, Aidan kicked the bridge, dislodging a pebble that fell pinging and ricocheting into the ghostly river far below. “Dude, I have to study.”

  In her bedroom, Diana heard muffled voices through the wall. I have to study?

  A car door slammed, and her first thought was, Oh no, Mom’s coming home to punish me.

  No. Just a delivery person. She heard someone clomping up the front steps, ringing the bell, dropping a package on the porch. More footsteps, another weight dropped on the porch. Somebody was tramping up and down.

  She slipped into Kerry’s empty room and opened the shades to see the street. She found no delivery truck. Only a station wagon in the winter night. She ran downstairs barefoot, wearing her flannel pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt printed DANA-FARBER CANCER INSTITUTE. When she opened the door, she found Jack, with ten battered cardboard cartons stacked up at his feet. “What are you doing?”

  He answered in his even way, “I brought you something.”

  She glanced at the cartons and then looked away. He must have heard. “Aidan’s upstairs.”

  “I came to see you.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  She thought of Sorentino. “Processing what happened—supposedly.”

  Politely Jack said, “Cool, what did you come up with?”

  When she glared at Jack, he didn’t even blink. She said, “You feel sorry for me.”

  He ignored this. “Hold the door.”

  “Why?”

  He hoisted two cartons. “Because they’re heavy.”

  She held the glass storm door open with her hip. “You stole some lame educational props from your father, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Wait. Are those fireworks? Because my mom’s coming home in like an hour.”

  Jack knelt on the living room floor, and opened the boxes to reveal thousands upon thousands of black and white tiles.

  “Nooo,” Diana groaned. Scienceman’s birthday party dominoes.

  Jack looked up at her. “Come on. You know you want to.”

  For the next two hours, they dominoed the house, lining up their tiles, spaced at perfect intervals, across the floor and down the hall. They lined up their tiles in all the dusty places, outlining windowsills and baseboards, snaking behind the couch, circling the old upright piano.

  “Who plays?” Jack asked.

  “Nobody,” Diana said. “I mean, Aidan used to.”

  Above their heads they could hear Aidan’s shuffling, stamping feet. He’d put off studying after all.

  Like black ants, those tiles marched across that poor piano. They covered the entire living room out to the entrance hall, and then Jack said, �
��We still have more.”

  Diana sat back on her heels. “Let’s do the kitchen.”

  They extended their line onto the kitchen floor, around the kitchen table. They built domino formations on the kitchen counters, an array of black tiles from the toaster oven to the old microwave.

  “I used to think you had a sad, pathetic life,” Diana said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re an only child.”

  One by one, Jack placed his dominoes along the counter. “I like being an only child.”

  “Obviously.” Diana was thinking that being an only child was all Jack knew. “It’s worse when you become an only child later.”

  Jack finished his row and then leaned against the counter, considering her.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Is it true?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, although she knew exactly what he meant.

  “Do you like girls better?”

  “Yeah! Don’t you?” He was making her nervous. “Actually, I go by the person.”

  “So you don’t know…” Tile by tile, he was encircling Kerry’s coffeemaker.

  “I don’t know about you.”

  Footsteps. Their miniature world began to rattle. Aidan was like a giant heading to the bathroom overhead. Every move, a step of doom. They heard the toilet flush, the water running in the sink. They held still as he returned to his room. Their dominoes wobbled as walls and floorboards creaked. Then he slammed his bedroom door.

  The old house absorbed the shock, and all the domino chains tumbled in the kitchen down below, whole regiments collapsing on their bridges, folding onto countertops and floors. Jack and Diana doubled over, laughing.

  —

  “Earthquake!” Aidan shouted, deep in game, but of course Dracon felt nothing on his side.

  A flurry of white bats descended.

  “Help me!” Dracon tried to fight them off one-handed.

  Aidan drew his sword, but he wasn’t fast enough. Already the bats began to feed.

  He pulled Dracon into a cave, reached for his diamond flask, and sprinkled hatchling’s blood on Dracon’s wounds.

  “What are you doing?” Dracon protested even as his own flesh healed. “There’s ten more infections in the company and now you’ve used up the flask. You’ve wasted it!”

  “We’ll find another dragon’s egg,” Aidan promised.

  “When?” Dracon asked bitterly.

  “When we get the company together.”

  Now Dracon lost patience. “You no longer have a company.” Sword in hand, Dracon turned his back.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m qwesting elsewhere,” Dracon said with dignity.

  Furious, Aidan said, “I’ll go myself.”

  He stood alone in the dark cavern and lifted his arms so that the bats descended, feasting. They ate his arms to bloody nubs, and bit his body to the bone. They devoured his face, and his knight fell writhing to the cavern floor. Aidan was unafraid. He had trained for transformation, and he chose this metamorphosis, stretching out his torso, trading sword for a long tail. He saw his hind legs lengthening, his bloody flesh resolving into silver scales. Two dark patches on his back began to swell. Black wings opened wet and heavy, then fanned out, shedding sparkling drops of water. His skull had changed to silver, his tongue unfurling with a lick of fire. He lit the cavern as he took flight, exploding through stone walls into the Arkadian sky.

  Aidan spread his wings and he was soaring, his spectral dragon rising over mountains, flaming over trees and frozen lakes. Now he saw the contours of the Trackless Wood, the distant towers of the Keep. He had jumped worlds to EverWhen.

  Gliding softly in familiar skies, Aidan saw Elves lying where they had fallen in the snow. Hundreds of qwesters, too weak to move. Had the contagion spread to EverWhen? How many qwesters had jumped worlds before him, carrying the disease? Grimly he turned toward EverSea.

  Flying low over crashing waves, he took his place among the other dragons nesting on the coast. He folded his great wings as he slithered into the low cave. Quiet now and smooth, his body undulating, he shed his dragon body. His serpentine form coiled and disappeared with a sucking sound like water down a drain.

  A knight again, he crept between mountainous dragons. Clutching his needle sword, he felt his way inside their rocky nest. Softly, laboriously, he carried out an egg the size of a watermelon. The egg was speckled white and brown, and hard to handle, slipping constantly, so he had to stop and readjust his grip. Over rocks, and tide pools, past the open mouths of caves, he carried this burden, until, exhausted, he set it on the sand. He would strike the egg with his sword, and kill the hatchling. Fill his diamond flask with blood, and then…What next? One flask wasn’t enough to heal his whole company. He would have to steal another egg and yet another, and even then, all of EverWhen was infested. Working alone, he could not move fast enough. The game was impossible. Not just difficult, but hopeless. He struck the eggshell with his sword, and the fissure widened. Green fluid leaked onto the sand. Chipping at the shell, prying it apart with his bare hands, he found the hatchling curled within. The monster didn’t snap or bite. He pulled open the creature’s wings, but they fell back, inert. He pried open the dragon’s eyes, but they were white and empty.

  “No!” Aidan shouted. The thing was dead.

  He could not extract elixir, nor could he restore his company.

  He kicked the broken egg and all its contents into the sea. Hurled his sword like a javelin into the waves.

  The surf rose in a fury, swallowing the egg and then the sword. Rising higher, ocean consumed the rocks and drowned Aidan in darkness.

  The shore was gone. The waves had disappeared as well. There was no ocean left. His bed appeared where there had been cliffs and caves. His silent desk displaced the raging surf. His painted ceiling blotted out the stars.

  He had killed the game. For a moment he stood in shock, convinced his anger had destroyed it. His BoX lay inert, an old toy on the floor.

  He felt for his computer, tapped the keyboard, clicked the mouse. A message appeared on his computer screen.

  DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, WE ARE RESETTING ALL ARKADIAN WORLDS. WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE. PLAY WILL RESUME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

  At first Collin thought the problem was a power outage. Monitors went dark, the great screens on the wall faded and died. The whole building seemed to dim, games ceasing and illusions dissipating, but the problem was not electrical. Viktor had stopped play altogether, ordering a hard reset of all Arkadian games.

  “Two days. Three days at most,” Viktor told reporters.

  He spoke of the human factor, rogue behavior by a few who spread disease. The UnderWorld infection, designed as a gory interlude, easily reversible, had become a raging epidemic. World-jumpers carried the contagion to EverWhen and EverSea, where unsuspecting players sickened and lost power. Some trained in healing arts had attempted cures. Others had begun spreading the disease on purpose, lying in wait to lay hands on each fresh Elf or Gnome. Millions died, and in many cases, they stayed dead for days. Unaccustomed to disease, the dead logged off as they grew frustrated, waiting for resurrection. Viktor posted a concise explanation on fan forums. “The epidemic was not a problem we could solve in real time. We thank you for your patience.”

  As players faced blank screens, Arkadians swarmed their cubicles like frantic bees. Viktor spoke to the media, while Peter rallied the troops in the Atrium. Like militia awaiting orders, hellions mustered among the corporate palms.

  How strange the way an imaginary disease became a real threat, rogue gamers a financial liability. Collin stood among the hellions and the moment seemed to him bizarre, ridiculous. You won’t believe what happened, he imagined telling Maia—but he could never explain how surreal this was, the loophole in the game, the sudden rift in the Arkadian cosmos. He could never convey how he felt—bemused, alone, confused. This was what happened when a game consumed i
tself, the system crashing down. This was the ouroboros devouring its own tail. He saw it now, and all he wanted was to talk to Nina.

  “We have to change the game,” Peter explained to the assembled. “We want controlled chaos, not total anarchy. The goal is simulated tragedy.” Together, they would curtail and streamline UnderWorld’s plague so that the disease would run its course with Arkadian speed. The whole cycle, from wasting away and dying to resurrection, would take minutes instead of days. Equally important, hellions would ensure the leprous blight could not travel from one game to another. Contagion 2.0, as Peter called it, would remain in UnderWorld. While artists worked on symptoms, programmers would adjust settings so that if a player jumped to any other realm, the plague would lose its power.

  And what will I do? thought Collin. The answer came quickly, because every minute counted, every hour offline eroded audience. Collin would have a chance to draw again. He worked with his own pod, and the whole thing was weird, the whole exercise was strange, but the work was so absorbing, that Collin forgot all that. No one shaved, and no one showered, no one went home. Caught up in the collective effort, Collin began to feel like himself again. It was such a relief to do his job.

  Past problems seemed to disappear, as hellions worked together. Viktor had food delivered at all hours. Nicholas set up an earthshaking sound system, rocking the building with heavy metal, techno, classic rap. Even as programmers tapped furiously at their keyboards, Daphne reached out with hope and reassurance on fan forums. Sometimes she posted as an impudent insider, Reconnect with family and friends while you still can, because UnderWorld is almost baaack. Sometimes she played fangirl, sometimes she became a spy. Often she assumed her favorite role, the activist who went by “Christian Wench” and argued that the contagion had been sent by God to destroy Satan’s handiwork. As EverWhen is visited by plague, typed Daphne, so shall the world. Repent! Turn away from darkness. Fast and pray!

  News reporters understood by now that the Christian protest against Arkadia had been a hoax, but Daphne continued posting anyway. She did this to entertain UnderWorld’s fans, who loved to hate their Christian enemies—even when they knew they were imaginary. At the same time, Daphne’s message boards began to draw in real anti-gamers. It seemed that actual mothers were now posting complaints. I have a 13 year old child I hope and pray that UnderWorld is gone forever. Daphne tried to answer every comment. Amen, Amen, she typed, or May it be thy will.