by Austin Bunn
/this why you play? she ping’d. /so you can war? so you can win?
/here more vivid than every place else i know.
/new question: how has the game affected home life?
/i’m research now?
/you were always.
I didn’t care. Her attention was an extra sun.
/new question, I ping’d. /how many others in your research project?
/so far just you. feel special?
/feel lucky.
/my question now.
/ok: game makes me feel less lonely. but there are different kinds of lonely.
/how many?
/11.
/what # is this?
/#6. lonely with 50% chance of not-lonely.
/you married? she ping’d.
I went to the kitchen and topped off an OJ and club soda. I’d lied before, of course—about my age, my weight, my actually having a job. It was easier to lie, closer to play than the truth. What answer did she want? What would keep her here, with me?
“Josh, come to bed!” Jocelyn called down from upstairs. “All those old Twilight Zones are on. Even the one about the glasses!”
I hesitated. Upstairs, Jocelyn would be under the comforter, cross-legged, tea set on the nightstand, on the special bamboo coasters. I could see every last detail.
“One sec!” I called back.
/yes, I typed.
/right answer.
/huh?
/am married too, she pulsed. /but might be over. lonely #10?
My opening, there, flashing. I told her I had to go—it was late where I was—but there was one last thing for her to see.
/the windowpanes, I ping’d.
/?
/the opposite of lonely.
Then I ran upstairs to my wife.
The wooden arch at the entrance of Bewilderville towered above us, strung with purple banners and torches on permanent flame. In these final days, Rrango’s pride and glory looked desolate, /like Six Flags after an accident, Aremi ping’d. /after a maiming! I ping’d back. An empty rollercoaster whipped along an enormous, vaulting frame, which creaked and strained in the quiet. Rrango was so good he’d cribbed the rumble down to the squeaky nails in the timber. Would anything else in his life ever know such care? On the vacant midway, the World’s Fair globe rotated on a programmed loop. Aremi and I zoomed past ghost-face barkers—NonPlayerCharacters triggered by our entrance, luring us to their whatnot—and skirted to the far end, where two squares glistened with ruby light. The Windowpanes. Rrango’s trophy, his pièce de awesome. As we got closer, they pulsed and throbbed, aware of us.
/step in, I ping’d.
/explain. don’t like surprises.
I told her that when you entered the Windowpanes, you released all permissions on your machine. Every firewall collapsed, and you had total access to your partner’s hard drive. Complete transparency.
/too weird, Aremi ping’d. /this whole place is, but.
Rebuffed, I gave her silence.
/show me yours? she ping’d. /if you want.
There was no better way for her to know me. The years of music, my pathetic résumé, even the porn folder: the desktop was my life on a tray. /be gentle, I ping’d; and as soon as I stepped into the Windowpanes, a shaft of red light swept my screen and my keyboard froze. I could feel Aremi enter me, her curiosity whispering through. My cursor moved under her hand.
The figure landed behind her: a saber-tooth in a green tux and combat boots. At first, I thought it was another of Rrango’s NPCs on a boo mission. He loved his scares. But then white threads of the pox monstered out of the face like streamers. Melanak could jump skins but not the disease. He strode toward Aremi, his double-jointed legs looking like they were going forward and backward at the same time. The Windowpanes fixed me: I couldn’t warn Aremi. My entire system lay open. He could push anything in, to either of us.
/this should be fun! Melanak ping’d.
I jerked the power cord from the CPU, and it went black. My blood thrummed, and I shuddered, back in my body. I’d left Aremi to him. God knows what he’d take from her, or give to her. But I was helpless. Redropping from a crash would require minutes, long enough for Melanak to grief up a shit-ton.
The sounds of the house returned—the television in the bedroom, the central air cycling up, a bird pinging for another bird. Jocelyn creaked open the door. “Josh, why are you on the floor?”
How could she understand? I’d met some colored light that transfixed me.
I told her I felt ill, and she made me lie on the couch. With each step I took I lunged away from myself. She pressed her cool hand to my forehead, checking for fever but also holding me down.
“I have to get back,” I said.
“No, you don’t.” Her face became the face of everyone who knew better. “Look, I understand there are people in that fucking game that mean something to you,” she said. “Even people you love. Whatever. Whatever you do with your Jergens. But you have to find a way to say good-bye to it. Because otherwise I’m done.”
I told her I needed a walk, to clear my head. Anything so she’d let me go. Maybe I’d check if the locksmith was still looking for someone. Or have coffee in a café, a quiet room with strangers, one of whom could be Aremi and I’d never know. Or visit the library, with the public machines.
I couldn’t find her. Aremi’s last drop had been hours before, but there was no record of her exit. Her mail pocket was full, and I felt a surge of possessiveness knowing that others had friended her.
Then the library janitors ushered me out.
When I got home, Jocelyn was already asleep on the far end of the bed, facing the wall. As quietly as I could, I put my clothing in the hamper and brushed my teeth. In the mirror, I saw myself, my unemployment beard flecked with white. I looked like a man who’d given up on mirrors. I slipped in next to Jocelyn and left an inch between us. That was the rule when we argued. And I wondered how Aremi slept—on her side, with her husband behind her, like this, with space enough to feel alone? On the nightstand, Jocelyn’s laptop hummed in sleep mode, the light from it a tiny moon toggling on and off.
On the final day, I dropped into a blizzard. Flakes drifted in the foreground no matter where I turned, like in the movies, the weather tight around the characters. With the snowfall blanking the landscape, the last of us took to the air. Only the Exit remained.
I hovered in front of the wall and saw myself reflected in a gray wash. Hundreds of players floated around me in the flurry, making their arrangements—which worlds they’d join, which people they’d become. Others zoomed past, already done with the game. A she-wolf and queen, tethered together, ping’d, /Kamikaze mutherfuckazzzz! and entered the Exit. Their skins flared and sank into a molten afterlife. It took a full minute to be absorbed, their feet, their paws, the last to go.
Rrango dropped and found me. He was still skinned in koala, cigar and monocle and all, which looked ridiculous, but really that was what he’d given the Also—a sense that none of it mattered.
/been a great game o’ golf, brother, he ping’d. /will miss you.
I asked him where next, which alt.
/just landed a job dude. I need a life.
Everything was moving, at a barely perceptible speed, away from me.
/coming? Rrango ping’d. Half a square of grid remained, a white strip between the Exit and the edge of Origin Park. The end of the map. There was no more time. I had to let her go.
/yeah.
Rrango went first. He banked into the Exit, and it took him. A sharp seam of light girdled his body as he sank. I’d never hear from him again.
/Our turn next?
I spun around. Aremi, my prize, had dropped behind me, finally. I told her I’d been worried about her, about what Melanak might have done.
/don’t worry. am a big girl.
/there are other alts, I pulsed. /come with me?
I glanced over at the office door. Closed and locked. I didn’t want an
y interruptions—no Jocelyn to muddy the end.
/not sure, she ping’d.
/how about your email address?
/why?
/i want to know you better.
/ok, she ping’d back. /[email protected].
That’s when I knew Aremi was gone. Her account, ghosted. Melanak had torched everything.
/what the fuck do you want? I ping’d.
/hahahahahahahahahaha.
So I pushed her, all my damage-per-second arrayed against her. Melanak tried to resist, except inside Aremi, he was a weak soul. I would take her with me into the Exit and annihilate us both.
But as I drove her, the Exit began to retreat away, like draining water. I chased it, Aremi struggling in my arms, but still it fell away, out of reach. Crowds of figures then emerged from the sky—iridescent dragons, armored horses, creatures I didn’t recognize. Below us, a new render appeared, lush and vivid, pagodas dotting the land.
The Chinese platform. This was the integration.
/wtf? Melanak ping’d.
A dark-haired girl with black wings answered. /?
/konichuwa, fucktard, Melanak ping’d back.
The girl raised her hands, whispered a spell, and a thousand crows came and tore us both to pieces.
I powered the machine down. I could hear Jocelyn on the back patio. I’d forgotten it was summer. I’d forgotten about the sun. Since Jocelyn was home, midday, it had to be a weekend. Outside, she was tending to the plants in a raised bed on our patio. She wore a straw hat, pink gloves, and a pair of cutoff jeans made from an old pair of mine, which meant, at some level, I didn’t disgust her. At her side lay a small pile of weeds. She had tried so hard to make this place a place.
“It’s over,” I said. “More than over.”
She removed her gloves and pulled me to her. “There’s so much world left to see,” she said, and let it hang there, between us, the line from the game, until I finally understood. “How about a tour?”
I got on my knees. I didn’t know the name of a single plant in the row.
“Show me,” I said.
Getting There & Away
On their first morning in what was the most spectacular place she’d ever been—rampant sun, palms everywhere, bungalows planked on top of the water—Haley and Mac paddled (Mac doing most of it) one of the resort’s outrigger canoes to the raft in the lagoon (lagoon, outrigger, when would she get to use these honeymoon words again?) where, probably because he’d lost seven pounds since the ring sizing, Mac’s wedding band just slipped off.
“Tell me you’re kidding,” Haley said. She sat upright, her left arm covering her breasts. She’d been on the raft, sunbathing topless for the first time ever, feeling pleasantly retarded from the mai tais they’d had at arrival the night before and then, because fuck it, again at breakfast. They’d flown for twenty-two hours, in a blur of deplaning and re-planing and magazines pulped down to their acrostics, to this crumb in the Pacific. She was not awake enough for an emergency.
Mac treaded water next to the raft, scanning the water, his snorkel mask askew.
“It’s right below us,” he said. “I watched it go.” The ocean was pristine here. She could see forty feet down, to the ridges of sand that looked like the piping on corduroy. Bits of coral and kelp drifted in the current. But she couldn’t see the ring, the white gold band they’d debated over forever that now had become, suddenly, a six-hundred-dollar piece of sea glass.
“Can you dive for it?” she asked.
“It’s too deep. I tried.”
Haley shivered. “Shit, Mac, someone could take it.” Suddenly, the water seemed vast and rioting with threat. She thought of sharks and rays—the flappy mouse pad ones—and the Portuguese men-o’-war, which, she learned from the travel book she’d checked out from the library, were translucent brains with stinging hair.
“Mermaids might take it,” Mac said. “For their merriages.”
He was not nearly worried enough. “You’re always in problem-solving mode until the moment I need you to be in problem-solving mode,” Haley said, and worked her arms through the straps of her top.
Mac climbed onto the raft. “Hang on. Just let me boot up.”
He lay down and whirred and clicked and sliced his hands through the air like a robot. Mac worked in advertising; he could only be serious after he’d riffed a little. Haley noticed the wet hair on his scalp made a land bridge from one side to another; the bald spot was progressing. The bald spot would need to be acknowledged and accommodated. His threadbare, beloved T-shirt (Madison High School Class of ’99) was glazed to his chest; he wore it even in the water. He was shy about his scars on his belly, from a childhood surgery, but Haley felt, and she’d said something and then knew to drop it, that wearing a T-shirt while swimming made them both look like they didn’t belong at the resort, like they’d won the trip on a game show.
“The ring’s not going anywhere,” Mac said. “I promise I won’t take my eyes off it. But let me just say your breasts look fantastic right now.”
“See, you just did take your eyes off it.” Haley eyed the beachfront, the crescent of folding chairs and umbrellas. The other honeymooners at the resort, French girls with punky breasts who made Haley feel prissy for even bothering with a top, were nowhere to be seen. Last night, the place seemed overrun with young French newlyweds. She’d seen them all cramming into a hotel shuttle bus to the bars. But now the walkways that bridged between bungalows were empty. Haley untied the outrigger. She’d get help and she’d leave Mac out here if she had to.
“What the hell is that?” Mac asked.
And then Haley saw it too, the plume of black smoke in the sky, toward town. Something big was on fire. But they had other things to worry about.
In the breezy hotel lobby—it was a wind tunnel, open on both ends—the concierge gave Haley the worried expression she was hoping for. He had hazel skin, jet-black hair, and blazing white teeth, with a British flag pinned to the lapel of his white tuxedo.
“There are divers yes?” Mac asked, dripping on the tile. “We pay dollars. Many dollars.”
When Mac said it, Haley realized she didn’t even know yet what the currency was here. Francs? Sand dollars? Mac’s ring was probably worth a half year’s labor. As soon as word got around that the ring was in the lagoon, everybody would be diving for it.
“No diving this day,” the concierge said. “I am sorry.”
“Not one?” Haley asked. “Not even, like, a guy with an air tank?”
“Tomorrow,” the concierge answered. “Tomorrow, everything.”
One of the French girls slow-walked through the lobby. She pressed a gauze bandage to her head with a crust of blood at the fringe. Too much fun? Haley thought vindictively. The girl’s brown mane was clumpy and uncombed. She carried an ice bucket and barely picked her flip-flops off the floor.
“What happened to her?” Haley asked the concierge.
The concierge studied them both, as though this were a test of his congeniality. Then he handed her an island newspaper, a crudely printed broadsheet with all the weight of a shopping circular. “Beach Bombings Kill 23.” Haley read the headline and saw in her mind the French girls thrown into the air, an explosion of brides.
Mac and Haley retreated to two rattan chairs to devour the paper. The previous evening, explosions had destroyed a restaurant on Jimbaran Beach, the tourist zone three miles up the sand. She tried to visualize the street. They’d taken the shuttle from the airport, through narrow streets of low-slung shacks and surf shops, with mopeds darting through every opening in the traffic. The route depressed her. Countless black wires crosscrossed above the road; did the whole island run off stolen cable? She saw the water in snatches between the buildings and eventually closed her eyes until they passed through the gates of the resort.
“Did you hear anything?” Haley asked.
“I thought I heard sirens,” Mac said, but he often claimed special, unverifiable knowledge. Apparently, the bo
mbs were crude, pipes stuffed with shrapnel and ball bearings, stashed in backpacks. None of the suspects had been found. The article said the majority of the victims had been islanders, and Haley allowed herself a small, guilty relief. The brides had been spared. On the second page was a photograph of a white man in a ruin of splintered benches and tables. Beside him, she could just make out a leg in the sand. A brown leg, without a person.
“Who does something like this?” Haley asked. Mac shrugged. She wanted someone to explain the facts to her. She was smart, she could hold it in her head, but this newspaper was toilet paper.
Bali had not been Haley’s idea. She’d been thinking four-poster beds and long echoing halls of stone. Impressively, Mac had kept the honeymoon location a secret until the airport. Standing at the destination gate, Haley felt ambushed. In an instant, she knew exactly who had given Mac the idea. It was as though Saul had followed her here, into her privacy.
Saul was Mac’s best friend from college, a curly-haired Virginian with a barking laugh and prominent chipped tooth that had somehow, despite his pedigree, eluded dentistry. Saul had spent a year island-hopping in Indonesia, lugging two surfboards in a giant duffel. Five months ago, he’d returned to the States and crashed on their couch in Rogers Park to see if “Chicago was next.” He was one of those people who appeared to live exclusively outdoors, on a mysterious trickle of cash. At different points, Saul had taught snowboarding, led wilderness adventures for deaf teenagers, built rustic log cabins for millionaires in Montana.
“Will he make me feel pathetic for not having some amazing life?” Haley had asked on the way to the airport to pick him up. She visited housing projects and patches of dirt she called “gardens” on all the forms. Her job for the foundation depressed her, would have depressed anybody, seeing that much rebar and broken concrete and kittens in tires. Often, when she pulled up to the curb, she’d have a moment of pure terror, when the idea of opening the car door and “leaving the bubble,” as she called it, felt like a burden too great to shoulder.
