Elliot Allagash

by Simon Rich

  There was a Glendale lion stitched onto her upper thigh. And when she walked away, I noticed that the word ROAR was emblazoned on the seat of her pants, two letters per buttock.

  It was probably a good time to call Elliot.

  I took a deep breath, dialed him up and addressed him as calmly as I could.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I said. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  “Relax,” he said. “It’s just a college radio show! I bribed a local DJ.”

  “Jessica and Lance heard it!”

  “Of course they did. You took Lance’s regular slot.”

  “This is insane! Jessica thinks I’m some kind of artist. What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

  Elliot laughed.

  “I don’t know, Casanova. You’re the one who ordered her. I’m just the delivery man.”

  I sat down on a stoop.

  “I guess James could give you some pointers,” he said, “if you’re really lost in that department.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Seymour, I must say! You sound less exhilarated than I would expect, given the circumstances. Isn’t this something you wanted?”

  “Yes! But—it’s just happening a little fast.”

  “Fast? You’ve been chasing this nymphet for the better part of a decade. And now, just as she’s about to pay dividends, you’re ready to sell?”

  “That’s not it,” I said. “I just feel weird about this whole thing.”

  Elliot sighed heavily.

  “Terry and I flew to China five years ago,” he said, “because they were about to outlaw the consumption of monkey brains. We drove straight from the airstrip to the Manchu Imperial and ordered a king-size portion. But when they placed the giant, screaming monkey in the center of the table and started to peel back his scalp, Terry lost his appetite. You haven’t lost your appetite, have you, Seymour? Because monkey brains are expensive.”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Seymour—”

  “I have to go.”

  I shut my phone and walked four laps around the block. What the hell was wrong with me? Elliot was absolutely right—I should be feeling ecstatic. But the only emotion I could identify was a vague and pressing dread.

  For the first time in years, I found myself thinking about video games.

  Before I met Elliot, I owned a game called Ninja Streets. The game followed the adventures of Mack, a mustachioed vigilante, as he made his way through a city that, for reasons unknown, had become positively overrun with ninjas. It wasn’t a challenging game. The ninjas always screamed as they approached, which took away any element of surprise. And they only attacked from the right side of the screen, so you never had to move. My strategy was to punch the air and wait for the ninjas to walk into my moving fist.

  Ninja Streets was more an endurance test than anything else. The ninjas Mack faced weren’t talented; they were just numerous. Each level contained 128 ninjas. And if you stopped punching the air for even two seconds—to respond to one of your mother’s questions about dinner, say, or take off your sweatshirt—you were finished.

  According to a chat room I frequented at the time, Ninja Streets had 256 levels. All the levels were identical, except for the last one. Apparently, if you somehow made it to level 256, the game broke down. No one in the chat room could tell me what this breakdown entailed, but everyone insisted it was real.

  I often daydreamed about what it would be like to reach the end of Ninja Streets. (Would Mack run for mayor? Would he leave the city and move to a more reasonable community?) But I knew that victory was impossible. I had played the game every day for months and I had never even gotten to level 100 without losing focus. One day, though, I read an online post, and everything changed.

  Ninja Streets Unlimited Health: Up-Down-Back-Right-B-A-Select

  Suddenly, anything was possible.

  I took out a pencil and did some calculations. Each level had a ten-minute time limit. But it never took more than two and a half minutes to defeat each batch of ninjas. If I played continuously, without pausing for food or drink, I could get to the final ninja street in just under eleven hours.

  The next morning, I faked a cold, cracked a fresh box of Oreos, and went to work. It was a grueling day, and I often lost concentration—but it didn’t matter. I was now impervious to my enemies’ blows. At one point, to break the monotony, I decided to take a break from punching. A ninja screamed, then entered. After a brief pause, he tentatively began to punch me in the face. When he realized I wasn’t interested in retaliating, he worked up the nerve to do his special move: a jump kick to the face. When I didn’t respond to this aggression, either, he began to walk back and forth across the screen, as if in contemplation. I eventually punched him in the face and moved on to the next enemy.

  I got to level 256 just before bedtime. It started off completely normal—and for a terrifying moment, I thought I’d been had. But then it happened. About thirty ninjas into the level, the right half of the screen turned black. The left side of the street was still intact, and the music still played aggressively in the background. But there were no more ninjas coming and there was nowhere left to go.

  I watched in disbelief as the clock began to wind down. Seven minutes passed, then eight, then nine. I jammed the arrow forward with all my strength, but all I could do was run in place in the center of the screen, my face pressed up against the blackness. At the moment time ran out, Mack turned, as if to face me. His fists were raised to the heavens, and his eyes were wide with horror. He froze in that pose, at the edge of the void, then vanished.

  Game over.

  • • •

  Ashley took a carton of chocolate milk out of her backpack and poured it into a ceramic kettle.

  “Hot chocolate?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You can have it.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “Really? Well, then, okay. Thanks.”

  She reached under the water tower and placed the kettle on an exposed metal heating pipe. We had been meeting on the roof every day for weeks but had only recently learned how to make hot chocolate. Like all great discoveries, it had been an accident. I had touched the pipe by mistake while reaching for a fallen pencil and singed a couple of my fingers. I probably would have started sobbing if Ashley hadn’t been there to examine the burn and pronounce it “no big deal.” A few seconds later she was crawling under the water tower, her face dangerously close to the pipe. “Hey, buddy!” she said. “We can make hot chocolate!”

  We sat for a few minutes in silence, waiting for the milk to heat.

  “That song is horrible,” she said. “Someone played it for me in the hallway. Was it really on the radio?”

  I nodded.

  “How did that happen?”

  “Elliot.”

  She poured the warm milk into a mug and handed it to me.

  “Are you going to have to be a rock star now?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

  I took a long sip. It was an overcast day, and we could see a woman selling umbrellas on the sidewalk. When people walked by her table, she pointed dramatically at the sky and shouted. But everyone ignored her.

  “Remember that party at Lance’s?” she said. “When you pretended to talk on your phone?”

  Some blood rushed to my cheeks.

  “What about it?”

  “I didn’t go either,” she said. “I mean, I went. To the street. But I stayed outside the whole time. That’s why I was sure no one saw you. Because I was watching from behind the next tree.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was so stupid. Like middle school.”

  A bolt of lightning zigzagged in the distance, followed by a lazy growl of thunder.

  “When I was in the hospital,” she said, “I met someone who thought he controlled the weather.”

  I nodded as casually as I could. It was th
e first time I’d heard Ashley talk about being in a hospital.

  “His name was King Elijah,” she said. “I think he was from Scarsdale. He was short and sort of chubby, with acne.”

  “Why did he think he controlled the weather?”

  “It had to do with visions he was receiving in his dreams. He’d get messages from God, or the Devil, and then he’d have to decode them using algebra. It was really complicated. He was always asking to borrow my calculator. After a few hours, he’d be left with some incantations—which he could use to manipulate the sun.”

  “Oh.”

  “He always tried to get us good weather, but it rained that whole winter. He was always so guilty about it. I told him I didn’t mind, that I liked the rain. But he could tell I was lying and that I was just trying to make him feel better.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was wild: Another god moved into the facility. Some kid from Long Island named Cronos.”

  “Cronos?”

  “Well, his real name was Ben—but he did not like it when you called him that. He also controlled the weather, but he didn’t need to do any calculations like King Elijah. He could just make stuff happen with his mind. Earthquakes, tsunamis, pretty much anything.”

  “Were they friends?”

  “No,” she said. “They did not get along.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Yeah. It was especially awkward during group. Eventually though, King Elijah stopped working so hard on his calculations. After a few weeks, he became convinced that Cronos was more powerful than he was. And that it was pointless to manipulate the sun, because Cronos could just overrule him. He stopped asking for my calculator and apologizing for all the rain. And a few weeks after that, he was gone.”

  She looked up at the clouds and squinted; it had started to drizzle.

  “I bet King Elijah’s doing better by now. But Cronos is probably still in there.”

  She looked at me.

  “No one should have to control the weather.”

  She stood there, waiting for me to respond. It was so silent, I could hear both of us breathing.

  The bell rang harshly in the distance, and I quickly packed up my books.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, handing her my almost-full mug. “I’ve got to go.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow—fifth period.”

  I hopped over the heating pipe and started to squeeze into my tunnel.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “It’s not required.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to come at all,” she said. “I’m not keeping attendance.”

  “Ashley—”

  “I tell you about a serious thing, something I’ve never told anyone about, and you just get up and go back to your stupid quizzes.”

  “Ashley, come on.”

  “Why do I even talk to you? I mean, you’d rather go down a tunnel than be seen walking around with me!”

  “Ashley, it’s not that; there’s a camera behind the door—”

  “We never hang out in school.”

  “Well what do you want me to do? I’ve got a reputation to maintain! I can’t just walk around constantly with someone like—”

  I stopped myself, but it was obviously too late. Ashley tilted her head down and looked away. The rain picked up suddenly, but she didn’t budge. A few wet strands of hair fell over her eyes. Her arms glistened with rain. I stayed there for a moment, with my head poking out of the tunnel.

  “Ashley—”

  “You better go,” she said. “You don’t want to be late.”

  • • •

  Elliot sat by the dumbwaiter, a phone in each hand.

  “Next month in Paris,” he said into one of them.

  “Save a bottle for me!” he said into the other.

  He snapped both phones shut simultaneously and sighed wearily.

  Usually, when I entered the billiards room, Elliot was in the process of hanging up on someone. Two phones were not unusual—and there were sometimes as many as four laid out by his drink. Standing there that day, some unsettling questions occurred to me for the first time: Who was he always hanging up on? Why did they always seem to bother him the moment before my arrival? Were there really people on the other lines?

  “My apologies,” Elliot said. “I’ve been meaning to prune my correspondences.”

  I nodded.

  “But on to the news of the day!” he said. “You’re going to be on television. It’s a live production called Little Miracles. Some mindless talk show, to sell garbage to women.”

  I had seen Little Miracles a couple of times while home sick. They filmed it every afternoon in a studio in Times Square. There was a live studio audience and glass walls, so people on the street could hold up signs and be on television.

  “Elliot, that’s insane. I mean, what do they even want me to do?”

  “You won’t have to do anything, Seymour. Just a couple of scripted banalities and you’ll be on your way. It’s tomorrow during your free period. James will drive.”

  “You mean fifth period?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about Ashley, sitting alone by the water tower, heating hot chocolate and watching the mouth of the steam tunnel.

  “I don’t think I can go,” I said.

  Elliot sighed angrily.

  “Tell me why.”

  “I have to be somewhere,” I said.

  “Have to?”

  “Or, you know…I want to. I want to be somewhere.”

  Elliot clenched his jaw.

  “Where? Where could you possibly have to be?” His fists were trembling.

  He took a deep breath and shook them out.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I forget sometimes how much spelling-out your mind requires. That I need to you address you as I would a small child.”

  He poured himself a glass of Scotch from a crystal decanter.

  “Women watch these shows. Their opinions, or the recycled pap they consider to be their opinions, originate on them.”

  “So what?”

  “So. Every woman from Glendale will tune in to see you. Including Jessica. Do you want her or not?”

  I hesitated.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  He finished his drink and poured a second, spilling some Scotch over the sides of his glass.

  “You know, Seymour, if you wanted that mousy Ashley girl, you could have just said something. I could have had her for you by now, and it would have been a whole lot cheaper.”

  I froze. How did he know about Ashley?

  “We’re just friends.”

  Elliot laughed.

  “You’re what?”

  “Friends.”

  Elliot clapped his hands.

  “A social alliance with a mental patient. That’s your new strategy!”

  “It’s not a strategy, Elliot. Not everything is a strategy.”

  “Oh yeah? Why do you think she’s even talking to you? To hear your brilliant bons mots? She’s trying to get her claws into you, so you can drag her up from the ocean floor.”

  “Elliot—”

  “Falling for a woman is one thing, but Ashley! Christ! That’s like a gold miner happening upon some quartz and—”

  “Elliot, just shut up.”

  “All right, all right, good Lord! If you’re going to be this irrational, I’ll get her for you! We’ll start planning it out right now.”

  “No.”

  Elliot froze for a moment and then forced a chuckle.

  “Of course,” he said. “You don’t need my help for something so trivial. We’ll move on to something else.”

  He started in on some new idea—but I interrupted him.

  “It’s not that I don’t need you to help,” I said. “It’s that I don’t think you could.”

  Elliot stared at me, nostrils flaring.

  “Ex
cuse me?”

  “If I wanted to be with Ashley…you wouldn’t know how to help me with that. You would be totally lost.”

  Elliot’s eyes narrowed.

  “Do me a favor, Seymour: Don’t tell me that I don’t know how a thing works.”

  “You don’t know how this works, Elliot. You haven’t the slightest idea. I mean, how would you? You’ve never had a friend in your whole life.”

  Elliot turned away from me, and I could see his bony shoulders heaving. When he turned back around, his face was flushed and wrinkled. For a moment, it almost looked like he was crying.

  “Elliot,” I said. “Listen—”

  He picked up his decanter and hurled it against the pool table. It shattered, spilling glass and Scotch across the felt.

  “Out!” he screeched. “Out!”

  I ran into the hallway, slamming the door just before a billiard ball collided with it.

  “I can take it back!” he shouted, hurling another ball against the door. “All of it!”

  I sprinted down the staircase, my damp palms slipping on the banister.

  “All I have to do is snap! That’s all it takes!”

  I could hear Elliot behind me, screaming hysterically at the top of the stairs.

  “You’re just a hobby! A mouse I’ve been playing with! And now I’m through playing! I’m finished! I’m through!”

  I ran through the lobby and pushed open the door. The storm had gotten worse. I paused at the threshold for a moment, catching my breath, staring at a wall of rain.

  And then I ran home.

  • • •

  My dearest Seymour,

  Congratulations! You are the proud recipient of an Allagash Apology. I suggest you frame and mount it—you’ll probably never see one again!

  I feel just awful about our encounter the other night. We both said some rather harsh things, and I sincerely hope we can get past them. I’ve been severely sleep-deprived this week, and I would hate for you to misconstrue a physiological symptom for genuine animosity.

  I promise to stop meddling in your affairs. You’ve grown into an inspiring individual, and you don’t need my help. The truth is that you never really did.

  Sincerely,

  Elliot

  P.S. I’ve tried to cancel your appearance on that foolish television show, but I guess you were right about my general ineptitude. They won’t take no for an answer! You’re a star, Seymour, whether you like it or not. I’ll be watching you at home, rooting as always.