The Impossible Fortress

by Jason Rekulak

  I felt like Mary had somehow read my mind. I can’t tell you how many times I daydreamed this exact scenario, lying in bed at night in the moments before I drifted off to sleep.

  “You’re crazy,” I told her. “Where do you get these goofy ideas?”

  “It’s going to happen, Will.” She looked at me with absolute certainty, radiating confidence like no one else I’d ever met. “Just promise you’ll let me visit the mansion someday. You have to promise you won’t forget about me.”

  1300 REM *** ERROR BUZZER ***

  1310 FOR L=0 TO 24:POKE S+L,0

  1320 NEXT L

  1330 POKE S+1,100:POKE S+5,219

  1340 POKE S+15,28:POKE S+24,15

  1350 POKE S+4,19

  1360 FOR T=1 TO 1000:NEXT T

  1370 POKE S+4,18

  1380 POKE S+24,0

  1390 RETURN

  MARY AND I ONLY had one argument. It was our fourth afternoon of working on the game. Zelinsky was at the cash register, talking antique lighters with a pair of collectors from Philadelphia, and Mary was helping a customer with fountain pens, so I found myself alone in the showroom. Howard Jones was on the radio, and I was still working on the guard animation, fine-tuning the movements of their arms, when a girl walked up to my desk and said, “Excuse me.”

  She was two or three years older than me—a junior or a senior, dressed like a punk mini-Madonna with army boots, ripped stockings, and a skirt made of vinyl. Her eyes were ringed with blue makeup. “Do you work here?”

  “No,” I said.

  She shrugged like it didn’t really matter. I was hunched over the keyboard, surrounded by notebooks, printouts, highlighters, and candy wrappers. If I wasn’t an employee, I was close enough.

  “My dad sent me here to buy disks.” She reached into the folds of her skirt for a sheet of notepaper. “He needs ‘ten five-one-four-inch floppy disks.’ ”

  “Five and a quarter inch,” I corrected. “I can show you.”

  We walked down the aisle to the computer supplies and I explained the options. “He’s got Fuji and Maxwell. They’re the same price, but Maxwells are black and Fuji comes in rainbow colors.”

  “Cool,” she said, reaching for the Fujis. “Thanks.”

  She carried the disks to the front of the store and Zelinsky rang up the purchase. I walked back to the showroom and Mary was waiting at her computer. She grinned at me. “She was awful flirty, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mary mimicked the girl in a squeaky singsong voice. “ ‘I need five-one-four-inch floppy disks. Because I’m too cute to understand fractions!’ ”

  “She didn’t say that.”

  “It’s the way she said it. Like she was some kind of helpless baby animal. That’s flirting, Will.”

  I blushed. “Whatever.”

  “Oh, God, please tell me she’s not your type. Don’t tell me you like these punk rock chicks with the raccoon eye shadow.”

  “I don’t have a type.”

  “Everyone has a type.”

  “Not me. I’ve never even had a girlfriend.”

  “But you have a type that you like,” she said. “Brunette, redhead, tall, short, goth, cheerleader—”

  “I like all those types,” I said. “I don’t discriminate.”

  “Everyone discriminates,” she said. “Everyone has personal biases and preferences. That’s basic human psychology.”

  I felt like I was back in Hibble’s office—no answer was going to satisfy her.

  “What about you?” I asked. “What’s your type?”

  “I like confident people. I like guys who know what they want.”

  “Like Tyler Bell?”

  I don’t know why I said it. I didn’t believe any of the things Tyler had said about Mary: I had to beat her back with a stick, all right? She couldn’t keep her hands off me. I knew Mary would never really fall for a goon like Tyler—but suddenly she looked like I’d slapped her.

  “You know Tyler Bell?”

  “Everyone knows Tyler Bell.”

  “How do you know Tyler Bell?”

  “He goes to my school. He has a Harley.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I barely know him. I just know he worked here.”

  “Tyler Bell is an asshole,” she said. “The worst employee we ever had.”

  “So not your type?”

  “It isn’t funny, Will. Don’t even joke about him.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  And then Zelinsky was standing over us, his apron covered with wet black ink. At the time, I didn’t know how many of our conversations traveled to the front of the store. But looking back, I’m pretty sure he heard most of them.

  “Is everything all right?”

  He stated the question like a fact, strongly implying that no, everything was not all right.

  “We’re fine,” Mary said.

  “Maybe Will should go home now.”

  “We’re fine,” Mary repeated. “I just want to get back to work.”

  Zelinsky hesitated, then turned and walked back to the cash register. For the next hour, I didn’t dare say anything. We read from our respective books and typed on our respective computers. There were no further customers in the showroom and the only sounds came from All Your Favorite ’80s Love Songs—Joe Cocker and Willie Nelson and Phil Collins. From time to time I’d look at Mary, but she was typing furiously and avoiding eye contact.

  Sometime around six o’clock I realized there were sirens blaring, and a police officer came into the store to tell Zelinsky that Crenshaw’s Pharmacy was on fire. We rose from our desks and went outside to take a look.

  There were two fire trucks parked in the middle of Market Street and the volunteer firefighters were scrambling to unload their gear; Tackleberry and two other cops were routing traffic away from the train station. Mr. Crenshaw himself was pacing up and down the sidewalk, shaking his head. Gray smoke was venting from the second-story windows of his building; the fire appeared to be coming not from the pharmacy but the apartment above it. We craned our necks for a better view but we were standing at the wrong angle.

  “Come on,” Mary told me. “I’ve got an idea.”

  We went back inside and walked past the showroom to the cramped narrow staircase in the rear of the store. I followed Mary up to the second floor, and we entered a labyrinth of wire shelves and corrugated cardboard. All around us were boxes and shelves. The passage twisted and turned, and the lighting was dim, but Mary obviously knew every inch of the place. She stopped beneath a massive wooden hatch. “I just need to unlock it,” she explained.

  I watched as she reached in her pocket for a key chain. Tyler Bell hadn’t exaggerated the sorry state of the woodwork; the door looked like something you’d see on a sunken pirate ship. A white wire stretched from the base of the hatch to a small crack in the ceiling, where it disappeared behind the wall.

  I pointed to it. “Is that an alarm?”

  “Yeah, my dad’s pretty paranoid. Like crooks are going to scale our walls and steal our envelopes, you know?”

  The wooden door was so heavy, we both had to push. It opened outward, pivoting on two ancient hinges that shrieked with surprise. Then we ascended three steep steps and clambered out onto the roof. It was wide and flat but still a little dizzying; seeing Market Street and the train station from this new perspective was disorienting. The sun was setting and the sky was aflame with a crazy pink-and-orange glow. Up on the roof, it seemed close enough to touch.

  We walked toward Market Street, stopping four feet short of the edge. This new vantage point gave us a full view of Crenshaw’s building; we could see firefighters moving around through the windows but no one was hurrying anymore; the smoke was thinning and it seemed the worst of the drama was already contained. Down on the street, a crowd of kids on dirt bikes had assembled to watch the action, and I could see Alf and Clark standing among them. Alf had the Beast balanced on his handlebars,
and they both appeared to be lamenting the lack of destruction.

  “I’m sorry about before,” Mary said. “About Tyler. I didn’t mean to jump down your throat.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “He stole from the store. Or tried to, anyway. It’s still a sore subject for me and my dad.”

  At once, her behavior made a lot more sense.

  “What did he take?”

  “You know those antique lighters near the register? Some of them are two or three hundred bucks. Tyler tried to steal one, and I caught him.”

  “What happened?”

  “My dad was pretty mad. He trusted Tyler. We both did. So he fired him, and that was that.” She turned away from Crenshaw’s, turning west to face the sunset instead. It was a much better view. “This was all last year, right when school was starting up. But like I said, we’re both still angry about it, I guess.”

  Of course they were angry. This version of the story was a lot more believable than Tyler’s horndog fantasy. Mr. Zelinsky had zero patience for shoplifters. Tyler was lucky he hadn’t been arrested.

  “I barely know the guy at all,” I told her. “I’m a freshman and he’s a senior.”

  “I know,” she said. “I believe you.”

  “So we’re okay? Me and you?”

  “Yeah, we’re okay.”

  I put out my hand and we shook on it. Her fingernails were freshly painted, each with its own tiny sunflower.

  “Let’s get back to work,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I’m done for the day. I’m going to hang up here for a bit.”

  So we stood up there for a long while, watching the sunset and discussing how it was one of those things you could never truly capture in 8-bit, not with the 64’s simplistic definition of violet (CHR$(156)), orange (CHR$(129)), and yellow (CHR$(158)). There were too many other colors, thousands of colors. The hardware could never do justice to it.

  That night I went home worried that Mary was still angry, that she was going to abandon The Impossible Fortress and leave me to finish the game on my own. But when I got to school the next morning, there was another floppy disk waiting inside my locker. I brought it to the lone computer in the school library, checked the directory, and saw it contained another mini-game.

  You are deep inside The Impossible Fortress, standing at the end of a long, narrow corridor. The stone walls are lined with flickering torches. Blocking the passage to the north is a massive ogre. He is holding a club and staring at you. Saliva drips from his jaws.

  >INVENTORY

  You are empty-handed.

  The ogre takes a step closer. He is three times your size. He looks very, very hungry.

  >PUNCH OGRE

  Nice try, Will. You hit the ogre with all your might and he barely flinches. Great, now he´s hungry AND annoyed.

  >KICK OGRE

  Big mistake! Now the ogre is really angry. With a swipe of his fist, you’re knocked to the ground. The ogre raises his club over his head, ready to crush you.

  Suddenly a secret panel in the wall slides open! Out charges Mary Zelinsky, broadsword in hand. She slays the ogre and he topples to the floor.

  >STAND UP

  You stand and Mary sheaths her sword. "I´m sorry I snapped at you yesterday," she says. "I hope I didn´t ruin anything. Will you please accept this dead ogre as my apology?"

  >SAY YES

  "Thank you, Will!" Mary says. (Your score just went up by 100 points, giving you a rank of Fantabulous.) "I´ll see you after school!"

  GAME OVER.

  Then the strangest thing happened. Underneath the words GAME OVER, the cursor was still flashing, inviting me to input another command.

  >GO NORTH

  I just told you, the game is over.

  >ENTER SECRET PASSAGE

  Sorry, the dead ogre is blocking your way.

  >FOLLOW MARY

  But Mary is standing right here! She looks quite fetching in her chainmail armor and iron breastplate.

  This had to be a test. Mary wouldn’t have programmed all of these responses if she hadn’t intended for me to see them. On a whim I tried something crazy:

  >KISS MARY

  You lean forward, placing your hands on Mary´s waist. She stands on tiptoes and closes her eyes, pressing her lips to yours. Suddenly your vision is obscured by fireworks and shooting stars. Your score increases by 50,000,000 points, giving you the rank of The Coolest Guy I Know.

  And then the game finally stopped. A librarian walked past me, and I abruptly powered down the computer before she could read the screen. She gave me a suspicious look—I was blushing from ear to ear—but returned to her desk without comment.

  After school I went to Zelinsky’s and found Mary working in the showroom. Her face was close to the monitor; she was absorbed in a problem. I threw down my backpack and fell into my chair. Waiting beside my computer was a bag of pretzels and a cold can of Dr Pepper, straight from the fridge.

  “Thank you,” I said. “And thanks for the game. I finished it.” She turned to look at me, searching my face for clues, and I realized my statement was vague. I took a deep breath and said, “I got the fifty million points.”

  Mary turned back to the screen. She tapped a line of code with her pencil. “This part right here is causing tons of lag. What if we moved it to the beginning?”

  I leaned over her shoulder for a better look, and maybe I leaned a little closer than usual. Close enough to smell her shampoo, or her perfume, or whatever made her smell so good. Our fight was over and we were back to normal. But normal was a little different from that day forward.

  1400 REM *** ASSIGN RANKING$ ***

  1410 IF SCORE>=8000 THEN RANK$="FANTABULOUS!"

  1420 IF SCORE<8000 THEN RANK$="AWESOME!"

  1430 IF SCORE<7000 THEN RANK$="GREAT!"

  1440 IF SCORE<6000 THEN RANK$="GOOD"

  1450 IF SCORE<5000 THEN RANK$="AVERAGE"

  1460 IF SCORE<4000 THEN RANK$="NOT BAD"

  1470 IF SCORE<3000 THEN RANK$="FAIR"

  1480 IF SCORE<2000 THEN RANK$="UGH!"

  1490 RETURN

  AS THE DAYS PASSED, I saw less and less of Alf and Clark. We still biked to school every morning, but I’d stopped joining them in the cafeteria for lunch; instead I hid in the library and used the extra time to work on The Impossible Fortress. The contest deadline was coming up fast; I couldn’t waste a single minute. I’d even started bringing stacks of printouts with me into the bathroom.

  Friday afternoon I was sitting in the school library, converting binary strings into decimal numbers and tripping all over the math. A binary string looked like a random sequence of zeros and ones—00100100—but each digit in the sequence represented a different value: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, or 1. So 00010010 had a value of 18 (0+0+0+16+0+0+2+0) and 10000001 had a value of 129 (128+0+0+0+0+0+0+1). Mary was a wiz at binary numbers. She could look at a string like 00111111 and immediately say “sixty-three,” but I still had to do all the arithmetic by hand, tallying sums the old-fashioned way.

  Someone sat down across from me and placed a wrinkled ten-dollar bill on the table. I looked up and saw Chadwick Melon, captain of the basketball team, treasurer of the student council, and a solid bet for prom king. He was arguably the most celebrated athlete in Wetbridge High School history, and the recipient of eleven different scholarship offers. I’d never actually spoken to him in person, but I’d applauded him in countless assemblies and awards ceremonies.

  “You know Alf?” he asked. “Alfred Boyle?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell him Chad Melon wants ten photos. A full set.”

  I pushed the money back across the table. I don’t know where I found the courage to challenge him; I guess I was just annoyed by the interruption. “Just buy it yourself,” I told him. “The magazine’s only four dollars.”

  Chad’s smile vanished, and I realized I was probably the first person in Wetbridge school history to question his direct orders. He stuffed the mo
ney inside my shirt pocket, pushing down hard. “Make sure Alf knows it’s from me.”

  I stopped by the cafeteria on the way to my next class, and our usual lunch table was empty. I found Alf and Clark in the student smoking section, a small outdoor patio littered with butts, just downwind from the teachers’ smoking section. Alf was dressed in another one of his Miami Vice getups, but Clark just wore a plain white undershirt and denim cutoffs. They were sitting on a bench, taking drags off the skinniest cigarettes I’d ever seen.

  “What are you smoking?” I asked.

  “Capri 120s,” Clark said. “They’re new.”

  Alf flipped me the hard pack, inviting me to try one. “We found ’em by the bus stop. Someone must have dropped them.”

  None of us were habitual smokers, but when the universe offered us free anything, we were quick to accept.

  “These are lady cigarettes,” I told them.

  “Huh?” Alf said.

  “That’s why they’re so skinny. They’re shaped for female hands.”

  Clark flung away his cigarette like it was a live wasp. “No wonder I’m queasy!” he said.

  Alf took another drag off his cigarette, mulling over the flavor, then exhaled. “Tastes fine to me.”

  “They spray hormones on the wrapping papers,” Clark warned him. “To help women lose weight. You’re filling your lungs with estrogen.”

  I gave the ten dollars to Alf and told him about Chadwick Melon. He didn’t think the request was strange at all. “I’ve sold to five different seniors this week,” he explained. “I don’t care how old you get. No one wants to walk into 7-Eleven and ask for a Playboy. It’s like saying, ‘I’m here to masturbate.’ ”

  I watched as Alf removed a small ledger from his pocket and added Chadwick Melon’s name to a list. Then he took out his enormous bankroll and wrapped the ten-dollar bill around its surface. Over the past few days, the wad of money had swollen to the size of a grapefruit.

  “Holy crap,” I said. “How much is that?”