(Later, months later, he would tell her, “I was terrified.” This was the first time he ever disappointed her, not because he had been terrified, but because he hadn’t been, but found it necessary, or perhaps just advantageous, to lie that he was. He wanted to appear more susceptible to strong emotion, and more experienced at managing it.)
This Derek, the one now driving home from the mall, is more like that Derek than any Derek she has seen in years. In the other life, raising the boys broke down his defenses, made him transparent, but threw his flaws into sharper relief. His willingness to blame others, Elisa in particular, for shared problems. His incapacity to accept a problem as chronic and unsolvable, and to readjust his expectations accordingly. By the time of Silas’s death, he was worn out. The world had disappointed him. If you asked he would have said he was happy, and he wouldn’t have been wrong. But it was the kind of qualified happiness that he never expected he would have to accept.
Here, though, in this world, the fortress of Derek has been partially rebuilt. It must have cost him real effort. And he doesn’t want it to crumble again—surely, if it did, he would lack the will, the energy, for another recovery.
She loves and pities him. He is ill equipped for this life, for the other life, for any life. Though she supposes you could say that about anybody.
29.
It takes Derek about ten minutes to hook the video game console up to their television set. It’s black, and the controllers are black—to Elisa they look like amoebas, with the various buttons and sticks as organelles. The game comes in a DVD case, with a picture on the cover of a man, a young man in tee shirt and jeans, seen from behind, peering into a distant yellow light. The box is hard to open, so Derek goes to the kitchen for a knife.
“This is stupid,” he says, but he’s laughing at himself.
“This is what people do on Friday nights now,” she tells him, though what does she know about what people do on Friday nights?
Inside the box is the game disc, with the title printed on a black background. In a slot on the inside cover is a glossy black paper that reads “INSTRUCTIONS: FIND YOURSELF.”
Derek turns the paper over, looks again at the box. “That’s it? That’s the manual?”
“I guess the game tells you how to play it.”
“Ay caramba.”
They sit cross-legged on the carpet in front of the TV, power up the console, and slide in the disc. It whirs. They expect some kind of credits, some title sequence, but instead they hear a click and a whine, and a yellow dot appears in the center of the screen. It expands, rapidly, like the picture on an old television, into the image from the cover. This version of the image is subtly in motion—the man is panting, his shoulders heaving, the muscles of his back trembling slightly. He is scratched and bleeding; his clothes are dirty. A bass chord sounds, and then a male voice, echoing as though in a cave: “Who am I?” Then the chord evolves into a slow orchestral dirge, and options appear on the screen. GAME. EXPLORE. CONTROLS. OPTIONS. EXTRAS.
“Explore?” Elisa asks.
“Nah,” says Derek, and expertly manipulates the joystick until PLAY is underlined. He presses a button and the menu screen disappears.
“How did you know how to do that?” she asks him.
Derek shrugs. He seems mildly embarrassed and pleased. It’s the sort of thing he can do—pick up a tool, or a gadget, or a computer program, and just use it. It is, she must admit, a bit of a turn-on, as is his pleasure at his own facility. A few notches more self-satisfaction, though, and it would be insufferable. This is a key to his appeal: confidence bordering on, but not crossing over to, arrogance.
Their Man is standing in a forest, alert and subtly breathing. A message appears on the screen: PREPARE TO FIND YOUR DESTINY. This is the training the girl told them about—they have to teach themselves to run, climb, throw, hit. On-screen icons indicate which controls to use. The screen shows their character, the Man, in various environments—a forest, an empty house, a road, a ship—where some obvious task, like scaling a wall or opening a safe, has to be accomplished. He is always shown from behind, his muscles working, his thin hair flopping on his head. Elisa is amazed at the photographic quality of the graphics—it looks like a movie. The training is fascinating and vexing, and the game proper doesn’t seem to have really started yet. Derek says, “Jesus. Are they all this complicated?”
“The girl said no.”
“Jesus.”
When they decide that they’ve mastered the controls, or come close enough, Derek gets up and comes back with a bottle of bourbon and two glasses. They haven’t drunk the stuff together in years, at least not in the world she knows. The ceremony in his bearing suggests they haven’t in this one, either. He pours the drinks over ice and they clink them together.
“To an unusual evening,” Derek says.
“To Silas.”
The warmth drains from his face and he turns away from her, to the screen. “So are we playing this thing or not?” He drinks.
“Let’s.”
As it happens, they can’t both play at once—it’s single-player only. They take turns manipulating the controls and exploring the world of the game.
It is, of course, a mystery. The player is a nameless Man who wakes up bruised, beaten, and starving somewhere in a forest. He has nothing in his possession save for a compass—which doesn’t appear to work here in the woods—and a creased and torn photograph. The photograph is familiar to them both: it is clearly based on the family picture from the lake, the one that Elisa remembers she has left at the frame shop with Larry. Though she hears Derek draw in breath, neither of them remarks on the resemblance. The faces are different, but the poses are the same.
During the first fifteen minutes, they die repeatedly by falling into holes or out of trees. Only when morning breaks in the game are they able to make their way out of the forest; they do so by following the sound of passing traffic. When at last the Man climbs onto a road, Derek says, “So, how long are we going to be doing this?”
They are both on the second bourbon. Elisa is shocked. It’s only ten. She has no intention of stopping. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Another hour?”
Derek shrugs. She can see that the game has caught his interest, but he doesn’t want to stick with it. It’s bothering him. She gets up and refills her glass. She is beginning to get drunk.
They flag down a pickup truck driven by a grizzled old man. Where to? he wants to know, and they hear the Man say wherever. Eventually the driver buys him breakfast at a diner. Then a waitress comes on shift, tying her apron around her waist, sees the Man, and screams.
Derek actually cries out and drops his controller. “It can’t be!” the woman is saying. She backs into the kitchen, weeping.
“Rosie, you got a problem with this guy?” says a voice, and the Man turns to find a burly biker type standing behind him, cracking his knuckles. There is something sickening about this sound: it is wet and deep, like the popping of greenwood in a fire.
“Fight him! Fight him!” Elisa shouts, and when Derek makes no move to pick up his controller, she punches him on the arm. He flinches. “Derek. Derek! We have to fight this guy!”
“Let’s pause,” he says. “Can you pause?” They both try various buttons until they hit upon the right one, and a menu pops up: EXIT. OPTIONS. Derek exhales, seeming to shrink to half his size. He says, “I think I’ve had enough for tonight.”
“You’re kidding!” Yes, she is a little drunk.
He pats her shoulder. “I’m beat, Lisa. I wrote lectures all day.”
“Oh.”
“You kind of hurt my arm.”
“Sorry,” she says. She glances at the screen, then back at him. “Mind if I stay up?”
“Go ahead.” He stretches. “Don’t forget to save the game. In case you die.”
“Thank you,” she says. And then, “Derek. I’m going out to see them.”
“See who?”
“I bought a
plane ticket.”
He’s silent. He is staring not at her but at the biker on the screen.
She says, “In three weeks. I’m taking the Friday off.”
His response is very quiet. “Why?”
“Do you want to come? You aren’t teaching. You can come.”
“I don’t know.”
“When was the last time you flew out to see them?”
He gets that look—the fear that he doesn’t know what’s going on. “You know.”
“When?” She feels reckless. “Just say it!”
He doesn’t reply, just stares at the screen. After a moment he rubs his face. Says, “He could be funny sometimes. Silas.”
Derek has half gotten up to go to bed and then sunk down again, so that his legs are folded under him, as though he’s getting ready to pray.
“Just cuttingly, shockingly funny,” he goes on. “The way he would impersonate people. Walking by. Do you remember that?”
She nods.
“Even when he was, Jesus, eight or nine. He would do those conversations between people. At restaurants? Do you remember the old man with the cowboy hat and the girl with him? In, what the hell was it, the place that used to be where Subway is now?”
“The Arbor? No, the Terrace.”
“Yeah, with the plastic ivy. He did the Texas accent, ‘Weaaauuul now, darlin’, y’all lemme know if ya find a tooth in them french fries.’ Remember that?”
“Of course.”
“And then the girl, ‘Oh, Pappy! Oh, Pappy!’”
It’s true, sometimes they laughed at Silas until they cried. He knew exactly what to mock. God forgive them, they even laughed when he made fun of Sam. At the dinner table, faced with a food he didn’t like, Sam’s chin would drop and tremble, his cheeks collapse, his eyes narrow and moisten. Silas had it down. Sometimes he would even beat his brother to it—as soon as the plate of beets hit the placemat, before his brother had a chance to react, Silas would pull The Face, and Elisa and Derek would convulse with laughter.
Oh, God, it was wrong. It was so wrong to encourage, but it was so funny. She thinks of minefield, Silas’s online alter ego, and she wonders where that part of her son went. By the time he died, it was gone. His mockery wasn’t funny anymore. And here, this game. There’s no humor in it. Yet it compels her all the same.
Derek has stood up to leave. He says, “Maybe you could turn the sound down a little.”
“Sure.”
He drops to his knee, kisses her on the head. “Good night,” he says, and he grips her shoulder as though to fix the moment, as though she might run away. “I still don’t understand what you’re trying to do and I’m afraid you’re going to ruin everything. But I love you.” And then he goes to bed.
30.
She only means to play for another hour, then join him. But she ends up playing all night.
She doesn’t fight the biker, in the end—instead she backs off, leaves the diner, and while she’s in the parking lot the waitress comes out to find her. “Is it really you?” she says. She’s young and pretty, and Elisa can’t help but see her through Silas’s eyes. Is this a girl Silas made? A girl he wishes were real? There is a tenderness here in the way the girl’s features are rendered: her red-brown hair, tied back loosely, a nose slightly too large for her face. The way the clean apron nevertheless bears faded stains that can never be washed out, and the way it creases when she gestures, the fibers frayed and weak with age. How is it even possible to evoke these details in a video game? It is impossible, immersing herself in this world, not to feel that she has missed something about Silas.
Of course every aesthetic decision here cannot have been Silas’s. There is probably a team of programmers, graphic designers, and the like. And yet she feels, powerfully, that this character, this girl, is the product of her son’s mind. This world, the world of the game, is Silas’s, as well—it is as though she has been allowed to enter into his consciousness, to see the way he sees. It is something he made to satisfy himself. And it feels realer, fuller, than any version of him she was ever permitted to see in life.
But then again, how hard had she looked? It’s true that, up until his adolescence, his emotions appeared to live on the surface—his problem, as they saw it, was impulse control, an incapacity to keep himself in check. His actions, as they saw them, were the unfiltered product of his subconscious. They lived in the world he made, by necessity, and he refused to enter the world they wanted him to live in.
But he did change, around the time he turned twelve. He fell quiet and began to brood. And though this made their days more orderly—fewer messes, less violence, fewer shouting fights—it also threw Elisa and Derek into a state of paranoia. What was he thinking? What was he going to do next? His quiet hostility became more disturbing than the acting out once had been, and Sam, who had endured their shared childhood with his wits largely intact, began to show the signs of deep anxiety and, eventually, depression: sallow complexion, sunken eyes, bitten fingernails. Sam hid in his bedroom much of the time, while Silas haunted the halls with a kind of regal insolence. He frightened them.
But perhaps there was nothing to fear. Maybe it wasn’t merely his demeanor that had changed, but his desires, his emotional aims. Maybe he was waiting for Derek and Elisa to discover them.
Instead they nurtured their paranoia, let it grow and spread. Each accused the other of trying to sabotage the family, of giving up on Silas, of giving up on Sam. Each accused the other of infidelity before either was actually guilty of it, and each used the accusation as justification for the act. There was a strong sense, in that household, of impending dissolution. Both of them were tired. They indulged the part of themselves that just wanted to get it over with.
But what if, behind Silas’s seemingly impenetrable affect, lay a nascent empathy? What if he was trying to find a path out of the wilderness of his childhood, through the games he played, the books he read? What if the Silas who made this game was, in fact, that Silas—the one they chose never to get to know?
She has stopped drinking, but the night has the quality of a bender, with periods of sudden strong emotion, and of blankness, and of pointless hilarity. The girl, it turns out, knew the Man from a period, some months before, when she was under the control of some thugs who lived in her trailer park. Then, the Man had gone by the name Jack, and though he was only passing through, he managed to chase the men out of town and help the girl, Rose, pay her mother’s medical bills. Jack, she explains now, wouldn’t say where the money came from, and indicated that Jack was not his real name. He said goodbye and good luck, and disappeared.
But now he’s back. What happened to him? The Man shakes his head—he doesn’t know. Rose gives him the only thing he left behind—a torn sheet of notebook paper with a six-digit number written on it in an unfamiliar hand.
“I have to get back to work,” she says. “Don’t mind Rocky—he’s just trying to help me and Mama.” If the Man is looking for information about himself, Rose tells him, he should try the motel in the center of town—that’s where he stayed. And when he finally figures it out, “come back for me” she says and runs away, into the diner.
The motel gives way to a bus bound for the city, which, as the hours of night pass by, leads Elisa down a spiral of increasing ridiculousness: the criminal underground, domestic spying, terrorists, government conspiracies. The number on the paper is a combination—there’s a safe, a post office box key, an encrypted document.
It is all, of course, adolescent in conception, but beautiful in execution: lavishly detailed, astonishingly full. Maybe all games are like this now, what does she know. But every time she tries to enter a building, there is something there for her to see. Every time she approaches a character, that character has something to say. Silas, whose motivations, whose desires, were always so inscrutable, has created a world and left it open to whoever might wish to enter.
When the sky framed by the living room window begins to lighten, she glan
ces at the clock and sees that it is nearly five in the morning. She climbs the stairs to bed, sleeps until noon, eats a sandwich and drinks a glass of orange juice, then returns to the game.
She sees Derek a few times as the hours pile up; sometimes she can hear him in the kitchen, preparing food; at one point he walks past with a hammer, and several minutes later she hears pounding somewhere in the house. He pauses behind her a few times to observe her progress through the game—a visit to a mental hospital, then a run-in with the FBI, digging in the woods for a buried time capsule and riding the bus to a distant prison for a visit with an inmate—and she tries to fill him in, glancing occasionally over her shoulder to make sure he’s paying attention. But mostly he seems to be waiting, waiting for her to finish.
It is late on Sunday morning when she finally comes to the end. A slow trudge up the driveway of a white-clapboard house in an affluent subdivision. A knock on the door. There they are, the family in the photo, the people who rejected him, who sent him away because of his choice to become a government spy, a killer. But there was no choice—he’d been framed and it was the only way out. It doesn’t matter, he is told by the family patriarch, who refuses to let him over the threshold, behind which his mother and sister cower in fear. They want nothing to do with him. Go away, they tell him. We don’t want you here.
Elisa can retaliate, if she wishes. She has learned how to do things. She can beat these people to death with her fists, burn their house to the ground. She understands enough now about the way the game thinks to know that this is a possible ending, an acceptable ending. Instead, she turns and walks away. Returns to the diner to collect Rose and take her and her mother away from their terrible little town. At the end, they are standing out in the road, hand in hand, facing the sunset, but not yet moving toward it. The Man, exhausted by his efforts, is panting, just as he did at the beginning; the women’s hair is lifted by a breeze.
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