Gradually my confidence increased. I learned to grab the brushes by the caps (not the bristles) so I could plunge them directly into the tubes. After a while I didn’t even have to think about the work anymore—my hands were doing it automatically—and my mind wandered. My perch on the mascara line faced a windowless cinder-block wall. Sometimes people walked behind me and I’d overhear snippets of conversation, but there was never enough time to turn and look. The tubes continued their march down the line, relentless. Eventually I was so bored I looked at my watch, and I realized it was only seven o’clock, that I’d been working on the assembly line for a mere fifteen minutes.
That’s when I saw my entire summer falling away from me—ten weeks of mind-numbing, soul-crushing, forty-hour shifts through Labor Day: push, twist, push, twist, push, twist.
There were twelve other interns, all boys. Half of them were mentally disabled; the other half looked like they wanted to kill me. The adult employees were Hispanics, Asians, and Indians with limited English skills; at lunch they divided into factions, like cliques in a high school or gangs in a prison. No one ever said hello or even smiled at me; I might as well have been invisible.
At break time, I took my sandwich outside to the parking lot, crouched in the shade of a Dumpster, and read Stephen King novels. I crammed as much story as I could in the allotted thirty-minute break so I could spend the afternoon chewing over the plot, trying to figure out what might happen next. There was nothing else to occupy my mind. Sometimes I’d try to count the mascara tubes (this required more concentration than you’d think; the highest I ever got was 715 tubes in 47 minutes). But most of the time I just thought of Mary and Zelinsky and how I managed to ruin everything.
Meanwhile, Alf and Clark had joined the closing shift at the Wetbridge McDonald’s. They were constantly complaining about the difficulty of their work—the rude customers, the sweltering kitchens, the filthy grease traps. But I could tell they were having the time of their lives. The restaurant was staffed entirely with teenagers, half of them girls, and the night shifts sounded like long, raucous parties. They were staying up until midnight, pigging out on Quarter Pounders and Chicken McNuggets, and clearing more than a hundred bucks every week.
Most nights I’d walk over to the McDonald’s and sit on a playground designed for little kids, reading my Stephen King books until Alf and Clark came outside for their breaks. Over the weeks, I met all of their coworkers—the cute girls on register, the other guys in grill, the friendly geezer who dragged out the trash and swept up the dining room. They entertained me with outrageous stories of crazy customers, like the vegetarian who ordered a Big Mac with no meat, or the guy who paid with a fifty-dollar bill and drove away without his change.
“How about you?” Clark would ask me after they’d carried on for too long. “Tell us a story from the factory. What’s going on?”
I never had anything to share. Every day at Cosmex was the same. The factory never stopped; the machines never broke; the giant vats never ran dry of mascara. I spent the mornings dreaming of my lunch break, and my afternoons dreaming of the bus rides home.
And if all that wasn’t bad enough, my mother started dating Tack. It took me a while to catch on. Sure, I’d noticed little changes in her behavior: she cut her hair short; she started blending fruit shakes every morning; she was doing her Jane Fonda Workout video again. Apparently Tack would visit the Food World on her break, and they would go across the street to the Wetbridge Diner for coffee. This all became clear one Thursday afternoon when Tack showed up at our house for dinner. He arrived in a shirt and tie, carrying a bouquet of daisies. They tried to act like there was nothing awkward about the situation—“grown-ups can be friends,” they assured me—but I saw what was happening, and I didn’t want any part of it. Tack tried making conversation over dinner. He said he was thinking about purchasing a home computer and he asked if I could recommend anything. I just shrugged and said I didn’t know. I didn’t want to encourage him. I didn’t like having him at our table with his stiff posture and his silver buzz cut and his loaded gun, like he expected Libyan rebels to come crashing through the windows any moment.
My mother insisted he stay for coffee and dessert, and he even lingered long enough to watch The Cosby Show and Cheers. I excused myself, went back to my bedroom, and read my computer magazines. I still had all of my old subscriptions, and new issues kept arriving on a monthly basis, advertising all the latest games and programming tricks that I’d never get to try.
Tack started coming for dinner every Thursday. He always brought fresh flowers, and he always stayed until Cheers was over. My mother and Tack carried on like Cheers was the best thing since Dallas. They were constantly debating if Diane Chambers would return to the show in the fall to marry Sam Malone.
July 12 was my mother’s birthday. Tack drove us to Seaside Heights, and I spent the night following them up and down the boardwalk. They played mini golf while I just watched. They ate frozen custard, but I didn’t want any. They rode through the haunted house on a tiny little buggy, but I chose to wait outside. I knew I was being a jerk, but I didn’t care. At one point my mother lost her patience and pulled me aside. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. “It’s my birthday. Why do you have to be so miserable?”
“Because I’m miserable,” I said.
Through that long, awful, never-ending summer, there was just one thing keeping me going: the Game of the Year Contest for High School Computer Programmers. In the third week of July, I received a letter from the Rutgers faculty, explaining that the 118 games submitted for the award had been culled to five finalists, including The Impossible Fortress by Will Marvin and Mary Zelinsky. The faculty hoped we would attend the awards ceremony, where guest judge Fletcher Mulligan of Digital Artists would declare the winner. Every finalist was guaranteed a fifty-dollar college savings bond, and the winner would take home an IBM PS/2, approximate retail value $4,000.
I showed the letter to my mother, and we debated next steps. Technically I was still forbidden to contact Mary, but we both agreed that she deserved to see the letter. And the last time I’d tried to deliver a letter to Mary, things hadn’t gone so well. I didn’t know what to do.
One Thursday night at dinner, my mother showed the letter to Tack and explained the dilemma. Tack folded the letter in half, then placed it in the pocket of his sports coat. “I’ll visit the store in the morning,” he said. “I’ll give it to Sal.”
“He hates me,” I said. “You have to give it to Mary.”
Tack shook his head. “I can’t go behind his back.”
“Then you might as well tear it up,” I said. “Because that’s all Zelinsky’s going to do. He’ll never let her see it.”
Tack paused to take a long sip of coffee. “My goodness, Beth, this is really delicious coffee.”
“Thank you,” Mom said. “It’s Maxwell House.”
“Give me the letter,” I told Tack.
“Let me help you, Will,” he said. “I’ve known Sal for eight years. He’s a reasonable guy. Maybe I can fix this.”
I didn’t see Tack again for three days. The next time he came to our house, I was out in the yard with my mother, helping her anchor a birdbath in a bed of loose gravel. Her plan to “grow a few perennials” had gradually evolved into a full-blown botanical extravaganza, complete with marigolds and sunflowers, carrots and lettuce, a little trail of stepping-stones. Somehow we’d found ourselves with the nicest lawn on Baltic Avenue.
Tack drove up to our house with a trunkful of compost and fertilizer; he carried it across the yard under my mother’s supervision. I knew right away that something was wrong. Most days Tack was quick to say hello and ask how I was doing, but that afternoon he wouldn’t look at me. He lifted every bag of mulch with tremendous care, like the job required his complete and total concentration. I waited maybe ninety seconds before asking if he’d delivered the letter.
“I gave it to Sal,” he said.
“And?�
�
“And he gave it to Mary.”
“Were you there? Did you see her read it?”
“Yes.”
“And? What did she say?”
He shook his head. “She didn’t say anything.”
Tack reached in his pocket for the letter and returned it to me. I checked the paper front and back, hoping that maybe Mary added some kind of message, but no. Tack sensed my disappointment. He clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“The girl’s had a tough year, Will. A real tough year. Sometimes the best thing for people is a fresh start, you know?”
3400 REM *** PLAY AGAIN?? ***
3410 PRINT "{CLR}{12 CSR DOWN}"
3420 PRINT "{9 SPACES}THY GAME IS OVER."
3430 PRINT "{2 CSR DOWN}"
3440 PRINT "{3 SPACES}WOULD YOU LIKE TO"
3450 PRINT "{5 SPACES}PLAY AGAIN (Y/N)?"
3460 GET PA$
3470 IF PA$<>"Y" OR "N" THEN 3460
3480 IF PA$="Y" THEN GOTO 10
3490 END
THE DAY OF THE awards ceremony, I could barely function at work. I kept dropping brush caps, and six of my mascara tubes failed a QC spot check because the tops weren’t tight enough. Normally I fell asleep on the bus rides home, but all day I was wired and jumpy. I’d spent weeks waiting for the ceremony, daydreaming about computers I might win and conversations I might have with Fletcher Mulligan. Now that the big moment had finally arrived, everything felt slightly unreal, like I was still in a factory daydream.
I got home from work, and Mom announced that Tack was joining us for the ceremony.
“No,” I told her. “No way.”
“He’s excited for you,” she said. “He really wants to be there.”
I reminded her that Alf and Clark were already coming to the ceremony, that our tiny Honda couldn’t hold more than four people. She assured me there was plenty of space in Tack’s car.
“His police car?” I asked. “We’re taking a cop car?”
“You’ve seen how big it is,” Mom said. “He’s got plenty of room for all of us.”
Alf and Clark were delighted by the idea, and Mom invited them to join us for a pre-contest cookout. We stood around the backyard, drinking orange soda and eating hamburgers off paper plates while Tack shared crazy stories of Wetbridge’s most notorious criminals. Like the woman who stole a Butterball turkey using a baby carriage, and the old man who kept exposing himself to the girls at Crenshaw’s Pharmacy.
My friends howled with laughter at every story and the cookout dragged on forever, despite my repeated requests that we get going. The ceremony started at seven o’clock and I wanted to leave the house by five thirty. But at six o’clock we were still in the backyard—now Alf was telling McDonald’s stories—and I was fuming. I must have scowled one too many times because Tack set down his hamburger and pulled me aside. “Tell me something,” he said. “What time do you want to be at this thing?”
“Seven o’clock,” I said. “It starts at seven.”
“Then we’ll be there at seven,” he said. “I’m giving you my word, all right? Now relax and be a good host. These are your friends.”
I’d spend a lot of the next twenty-two years making fun of Tack. I’d ridicule his extreme patriotism, his collection of John Wayne porcelain plates, and his insistence on bringing his gun everywhere, even to the zoo, even to the beach. But there’s one thing I understood early on: this guy always kept his promises. If Tack said seven o’clock, he’d have you on the campus of Rutgers University with ten minutes to spare, descending the steps of the athletic center to a large basement gymnasium where a dot matrix Print Shop banner hung over the doorway: WELCOME HIGH SCHOOL PROGRAMMERS!
I’d never been to a college before, and I wasn’t sure if I was dressed okay. I’d worn turquoise Jams and a white polo shirt with a popped collar, because the preppy kids in movies always popped their collars. But as we got in line with the other kids and parents, I realized I’d worried for nothing. Everybody else was wearing tees—Pac-Man tees, Bloom County tees, Far Side tees.
To most people, I’m sure it looked like a science fair crammed inside a gym. But I felt like I’d arrived at Disney World. There were rows and rows of folding tables with all kinds of computers, and giant bundles of power cables crisscrossing the floor. There were schools and colleges advertising their computer science programs; there were wholesalers and software vendors and computer club representatives. And everywhere I looked, there were kids—hundreds of kids, all of them computer geeks just like me.
Along one wall was a row of coin-op arcade games set to free play, and Alf and Clark drifted off to try them. I walked over to the registration desk and met a man named Dr. Brooks, who introduced himself as a trustee of the university. He wore a navy sports coat with an American flag on the lapel; his face was very tan, almost orange, and he had the whitest, brightest teeth of anyone I’d ever met. He handed me a badge that said FINALIST and said, “I liked your game, Will.”
I thought he was mistaken, that he’d confused me with someone else. “My game is The Impossible Fortress.”
“I know. You’re Will Marvin,” he said. “I’m judging the winners this evening.”
“You’re judging? Where’s Fletcher Mulligan?”
“His flight was delayed,” Dr. Brooks explained. “There were storms over Pittsburgh, and his plane was rerouted to Cleveland.”
“So what time is he getting here?”
“I’m afraid he’s not going to make it.” My disappointment must have been obvious because Dr. Brooks quickly started telling me about his own qualifications. He explained that he was an executive at Boeing, an aerospace company that supplied jets to the air force and rockets to NASA. “I’ve been working around computers my whole life, so I’m pretty sure I can judge a video game contest.” He looked over my head to Tack and winked. “I’m sure Fletcher Morgan would approve of my decision.”
“Fletcher Mulligan,” I said. “His name is Fletcher Mulligan.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Brooks said. “Go have some fun, Will. This is going to be a great night.”
I couldn’t believe it. I’d had my share of bad luck over the past three months, but this was ridiculous. How many mascara tubes had I capped waiting for this moment? And now Fletcher Mulligan wasn’t even coming? He was in stupid frigging Cleveland?
As we walked away from the registration desk, Tack draped a burly arm around my shoulders. “The doc says he likes your game, Will. I don’t know much about computers, but I’d call that conversation a good sign.”
“It’s not,” I said. Mary and I had designed The Impossible Fortress for the king of video games, not some smug, suntanned corporate executive who didn’t even know Fletcher’s name. “There’s no way I’ll win.”
“Win, lose, who cares?” Mom asked. “It’s 1987 and Robert Redford still hasn’t won an Oscar. Do you think he lets that get him down?” Ever since she started dating Tack, my mother saw the bright side of everything.
There was nothing else to do except walk the aisles of the gymnasium—but even this was a disappointment, because the vendors were giving away disks, supplies, and other accessories, and every freebie was a reminder of what I’d lost. My mother insisted I take something, so I accepted a small plastic key chain molded in the shape of a Compaq PC. I knew it was the only computer I’d bring home that night.
Eventually Mom and Tack peeled off to an aisle of colleges offering programs in computer science, and I walked toward the coin-op arcade games, looking for Alf and Clark. Some kids were playing Ms. Pac-Man and Rolling Thunder, but the biggest crowd had formed around the Gauntlet machine, a game that allowed up to four players to compete simultaneously. I assumed a team of players had reached some unprecedented level, and I pushed through the crowd to get a better look. I found myself squeezing past a large man dressed in a white shirt and black tie.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Zelinsky grunted.
I did a double take. He
was dressed in his usual work clothes, like he’d come straight from the store. My face must have said “What the hell are you doing here?” because he shook his head slowly: I honestly have no idea.
The Gauntlet screen flashed GAME OVER and the players turned to face a round of applause. Mary Zelinsky was joined by Lynn Scott, the cashier from Video City, and Sharon Boyd, the girl from the Regal Theater. At that moment, I realized they were the only three girls in a gymnasium crowded with teenage boys. Their very existence seemed a sort of miracle.
Mary recognized me and waved. Her fingernails were painted with a rainbow of zeros and ones, the same binary pattern she’d worn on the day we started working together.
“Hey, Will.”
She looked fantastic, a suntanned and more radiant version of the Mary I used to know. Her hair was shorter with blond highlights, a new look for summer. She was wearing an outfit I’d never seen before—a white blouse, khaki shorts, and pink Chuck Taylor sneakers. The new clothes fit her perfectly, now that she had nothing to hide.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” I said.
“My dad wasn’t going to let me,” she said, “but then I threatened to have another baby.”
Alf gaped at her until I explained this was a joke.
Mary introduced her friends to mine, but of course we already knew Lynn Scott from Video City. “It’s been a while,” she said to Clark. “You haven’t rented Kramer vs. Kramer all summer.”
Clark had avoided the store ever since our disastrous invasion of Mount St. Agatha’s, ever since Alf had exposed the Claw to the entire student population.
“I’ve been busy at work,” Clark explained. He was already stuffing the Claw into his pocket, but Lynn saw what he was doing and stopped him.
The Impossible Fortress Page 22
