“I’m playing Boris, Mirella,” Timmy continued. His voice. How can I explain his voice? If it were a color, it would be the color of sky the morning after a bombing raid. Nothingness. Devoid of life.
It reminded me of an Apple computer voice. (Please don’t sue me.)
“Me and Boris—we’re on the sixth level of the ninth ward—I’m down three—if I stop now, I won’t win. I can’t stop now!”
“Mijo . . . por favor. Para mí.”
Timmy sighed and grunted, then attempted to slide the glasses back over his head. They were stuck. Stuck as though they would be there permanently. Stuck as though they were part of his skin, of that gray, skinny body of his.
Mirella leaned over in front of him and pulled and pulled until the glasses popped off his head, making a loud suction noise.
I gasped and covered my mouth to keep from throwing up.
Timmy’s eyes were enormous, at least ten times bigger than normal human eyes; they claimed half the available landmass of his head. There were deep, purple divots in his cheeks where the glasses had been lodged for weeks, months, years? He had bald patches on his dome where the glasses had destroyed his hair follicles.
But those eyes—I had seen eyes like those before.
Timmy Turkle was a human fly.
He grunted and said hi in that same weird computer monotone. (Should I just say computer instead of Apple, Admissions Committee? I really don’t want any trouble with corporate lawyers. From what I’ve seen at school, they’re very punitive. But dapper.)
I looked at Mirella, who had tears in her eyes. I needed to leave that room.
“Would you like some water?” she asked me.
I nodded. I was speechless.
“We’ll be back, mijo.”
I tried to give Timmy a natural smile; I’m afraid I merely grimaced. He grunted, grabbed his 3-D glasses, slipped them back on over those giant fly eyes, and restarted his video game. The automated gunfire made me jump as I entered the elevator. I was a wreck, and I don’t wreck easily. Surely, you know this by now.
“Mirella . . . what happened to Timmy?” I asked.
What I found out from Mirella, over a delicious and necessary cup of dulce de leche, was that Timmy had spent the past thirteen out of his fourteen years on that very couch in the screening room, playing video games. His eyes had adapted not only to living in the dark almost permanently, but to his years of exorbitant electronic viewing.
It was like Darwinian theory on speed.
Mirella started crying in earnest, her tears dropping one by one into her cup. She had begged his parents, Sheldon and Krissy, to cut Timmy off from the TV—he’d never learned to throw a ball, pet a dog, swim in the ocean. He’d never learned to tie his shoes or say his nightly prayers. Mirella thought of taking Timmy, of kidnapping him and taking him back to her native country to live amongst her large family, to live that most precious of all things everywhere—a normal life.
Timmy had lived his life in front of a screen.
The Turkles wouldn’t listen—they didn’t have time. They led “crazy-busy” lives. (I’ve learned this term from some of “my” parents—what it means is, “I make myself ‘crazy’ by staying ‘busy’ with things I don’t need.”)
Now, Mirella feared . . . now, it was too late.
“It’s never too late,” I said, perhaps naively—I am fourteen years old, after all. I have to have something to believe in before I grow up and lose all belief in anything.
Mirella grabbed my hand and held it tight.
“Mija,” she said, her large eyes shiny and wet with tears only a mother could shed. “Pobrecito Timmy is in trouble. God help me, that boy will die in that room.”
I couldn’t help but feel it, too.
That night, I consulted my mother, the ever-so-wise Yelena Maria Gonzales, as to whether I should take on this new challenge. Timmy Turkle was failing every single class. From looking at the files I’d been provided by Mirella, I could tell that Timmy’s native intelligence was high—he tested at genius level on the IQ tests, and Mensa stuffed his mailbox with mailings—but it was doubtful he’d ever actually read a book.
I mean, ever.
Like, in his entire life.
“Mama, I want to help him, but I’m not sure I can,” I told my mother as she rested her feet on the ottoman after a long day at General Hospital. “The situation seems so hopeless.”
She eyed me from her chair. Many of her patients were indigent, mentally ill, or at the end of long, hard lives. She treated each one as if they were a king or prince, a queen or princess.
Yeah, she’s a saint.
My mother took a deep breath, which I knew meant that she disagreed with my assessment, but also that she was thinking of the right words to choose.
After a long pause, she said, “Mija, you must meet with his parents. Then we can make a decision.”
Beat. There was more.
“A thing is hopeless only if you decide it is so.”
Securing a meeting with the Turkles proved to be rather, um, difficult. Both parents had several assistants, and the assistants all seemed to be fighting with one another. There were a lot of tears, a lot of yelling, and a lot of I’m not speaking to hers.
It was a dysfunctional family pyramid.
It took several weeks of cajoling and providing support staff therapy before I finally found myself sitting (in an uncomfortable yet aesthetically pleasing chair) across from Krissy and Sheldon Turkle at a long, granite table overlooking their sparkling, untouched swimming pool.
Mirella had told me that Timmy was, of course, downstairs in the screening room/hole.
“Shoot, Perry.” Mr. Turkle’s voice emerged like a cannon shot.
“Well, Mr. Turkle, I wanted to meet with you about tutoring your son—”
“Do you know anything about art?” he demanded.
“Me? Ah, not really.”
“Timmy was such a sweet baby. Mirella, remember when you used to sleep with him?” Mrs. Turkle asked as Mirella poured orange juice.
“I’m thinking about buying this piece, but this ass—’scuse me—jerkoff keeps jerking me around,” Mr. Turkle grumbled.
“Mr. Turkle, I’m concerned that Timmy’s issues may be too far along—” I said.
Mr. Turkle’s BlackBerry buzzed and his iPhone vibrated. I lost him as he tapped ferociously at the BlackBerry keys; his iPhone vibrated off the side of the table and dropped to the ground.
He took out another one.
“Screw that guy!” he yelled into his second iPhone.
I turned to his wife. “Mrs. Turkle, according to Timmy’s testing, his IQ is quite high—so there is some hope—”
Mrs. Turkle, who heretofore had been staring at me with bright blue blank eyes, her eyebrows in a constant state of surprise in a face that looked cemented into place, suddenly started talking.
“No, no, they can’t be seated next to each other. Stacy married Kacy’s third husband, remember?”
I realized that under her bushel of blond hair, a Bluetooth was attached to her ear. I sighed.
Her eyes widened at me.
“Sorry, honey, you were saying?”
“Have you tried to get Timmy to stop playing video games?”
Mrs. Turkle got a faraway look in her eyes as Mr. Turkle continued to tap on his BlackBerry keys and grumble.
“Of course. When he was two, we tried bribing him with his favorite foods. Twizzlers, Sour Patch Kids, that sort of thing. Then we tried discipline. Like, if he didn’t go to bed on time, he would only be able to play video games for three hours, not four. But it’s so hard to follow through, don’t you agree? Being a mother is just so exhausting. Oops!”
I lost her as she took another phone call.
Mirella looked at me and shrugged her shoulders as s
he picked up plates. The Turkles had eaten nothing.
“One time, the parents, they cut off the electric,” Mirella said to me in the kitchen as she put plates and cups in the dishwasher after our “meeting.” I put my backpack down and started helping her.
“I remember: It was just me and the boy, he was eight—they were on vacation. I told them to do it. It’s the last time I’ve seen him smile.”
Mr. Turkle swept through the kitchen and narrowed his eyes at me, as if wondering why I was still there.
“If this is a shakedown,” he said, stopping in his tracks, “I’ll just pay you double, how’s that?”
“A what?” I asked.
“Isn’t she sweet, Sheldon?” Mrs. Turkle walked in on five-inch sneakers, the latest unattractive, nonsensical trend on the Westside that everyone had to have. “Are you bilingual, sweetheart?”
Mr. Turkle suddenly banged his BlackBerry on the kitchen island.
“You’re good! What are you, a pro? I’ll pay triple! What are you doing with my kid again?”
I looked to Mirella for support and clarification, but her back was to me as she wiped down the kitchen countertop.
I knew what my mother would say. I needed to clear my schedule. The situation here was dire.
“I’ll be back this afternoon,” I said. “We’ll work three days a week. No need to pay me double or triple.”
I left, moving as fast as I could without knocking anything over.
“What’s your game?” I heard Mr. Turkle yell after me.
I approached Timmy very carefully during our sessions. I knew I would have to draw him out of his cave before being able to teach him. And if it worked—if he got C’s instead of F’s—I would consider our time together victorious.
In fact, I thought on that first day, if I could get those glasses off his head long enough for him to take a shower, it would be my greatest victory yet.
I failed miserably. On all accounts.
I could barely get Timmy to acknowledge my presence, much less open a book, take pen to paper, write an essay, decode an equation. Timmy wasn’t rude, he was just completely and utterly disconnected from the real world.
After a couple weeks, it was clear that I was in over my head.
I consulted on the case with my mother. We were shopping at the corner market painted bright green with pink letters, the colors of guava, on a bustling Saturday morning, moving languorously among the mangoes and papayas, the dragon fruit and the prickly pears. It was my mother’s rare day off, and she loved to stop and listen and touch and smell and linger in the aromas that brought back her childhood.
I hated to interrupt her meditation as I walked in her steps, shadowing her gestures and silent greetings. The local grocer, a stocky bald man with big, helpful hands that he rubbed nervously on his apron, had a schoolboy crush on my mother. This much a blind man could see, a deaf man could hear. He would slice open a piece of fruit at the slightest nod, or offer a taste of his slow-cooked carne asada. He noticed me, her shadow, with a blank, lost smile, his eyes only for Yelena Maria Gonzales. I was cute, sure, but my mother was, like, made of movie-star materials.
And right when I was about to bring up the question of Timmy, my mother gave me the answer.
“You need to work differently, mija,” she said as she held a ripe guava to her nose, and then to mine. “He is not a bad boy. He is like this fruit—a bit spoiled, but salvageable.”
“I can’t. All he wants to do is play video games,” I whined. “I can’t compete against Grand Theft Killing Machine. I’m only a kid. An amazing kid, but still . . .”
I was joking. You know, sort of.
“So play with him,” she said. “Start there.”
She ran her hand across the rainbow lining the grocer’s pallets. Sometimes, I think color must have been invented in Mexico.
“If you’re an amazing kid, mija, your mom must be muy especial.” She winked at me as the grocer covered her in his puppy-eyed gaze.
“Timmy,” I said, “I’m going to make you a bet. If I beat you in the game of your choice . . . okay, the easiest game of your choice, you have to allow me to tutor you for three weeks.”
Timmy looked at me and smiled slightly, showing small gray teeth.
Ooh, signs of a positive emotion . . .
“Okay,” he said. “And if I win?”
“I leave you alone. Deal?” I held out my hand, covering my grimace as he shook it. I’d forgotten about that disfigured thumb.
“Deal,” he said flatly. The hint of the smile was gone. I’d lost him already.
I lost the game, of course. I know that would have made a good story—but really, did you think I had a chance? I didn’t know my A button from my B, my X from my Y. I held the controller upside down for the first three minutes.
But a funny thing happened. Timmy saw that I was determined to be a fixture on his couch, and he seemed resigned to my company. And seeing how hopeless my game was, he sparked to teaching me how to play. Like stepping foot onto foreign soil, I had to learn the language first—the language of video games. He taught me terms like deathmatch (killing game), frag (a kill), headshot (a kill to the head), and MMO (see deathmatch).
Timmy called me a “noob” when I asked him how to survive an alien onslaught in Halo. He mocked me when my avatar was blown to bits by faceless commandos.
Slowly, slowly, I worked his schoolwork in, between games . . .
What were his favorite games? I don’t want to encourage video game use, but okay, Timmy’s top five favorites, in no particular order: Halo 2, Star Wars, Madden NFL 12, Grand Theft Auto and GTA3, and Golf.
If you play these games, you may be familiar with Timmy’s personal signature—he was usually in the top three of all the players in the entire world, including Japan and Korea, where several gamers have died after playing for days in a row. For example, on Halo 2, he’s listed as TURK1—with 5,687,002 points at the time we played together.
I learned that Timmy had a running feud that had stretched on for years with a boy named Boris Blankeleva, who lived halfway across the world in Moscow. He showed me Boris’s profile. Boris was a big boy with a big appetite—fifteen years old, but about six feet, six inches, three hundred pounds. He lived with an older sister, an ex–Miss Universe who worked at a nightclub as a “hostess,” and a grandfather who drank vodka for breakfast and slept all day. He was very, very good at video games. Which meant he was very, very bad at most other things. Like school. Like personal hygiene.
Just like Timmy.
By the end of the school year, Timmy had brought his grade point average from a 1.3 to a 3.2. He’d even made up his work for grades three, five, six, and seven. Plus, using a bottle of AXE shower gel, I was able to cajole him into taking daily five-minute showers; he loved smelling like a masculine floral arrangement. His favorite was Anarchy Revitalizing Shower Gel—Snake Peel Shower Scrub was a close second.
But best of all, and my proudest achievement to date: Timmy shut down the video game system long enough to read a book. The Catcher in the Rye. I can’t think about him asking me what game Holden Caulfield would be playing today without getting choked up.
We celebrated with one final game of Halo.
I lost, of course. Let’s not get crazy here.
June was just around the corner. This would be a great summer for Timmy. For the first time in his life, he was going away to summer camp. For six whole weeks! Open Sky Camp allowed no cell phones, no televisions, no personal gaming devices, no electronics of any kind. Timmy would be hiking, mountain biking, water-skiing, roasting marshmallows, interacting with actual human kids, and communing with something called “the great outdoors.”
Somehow, Timmy had agreed to it. Mirella was going to take time to visit her parents in El Salvador, who hadn’t seen her in years. The Turkles were going on a cruise of the
Greek islands and would be completely unreachable.
And me? I had a full summer ahead—lots of kids to tutor, tons of books to read. Maybe I’d take a weekend here and there to drive with my mom to Santa Barbara; we liked to camp out on the coast.
My summer would be just the way I like it: uneventful.
I received a call from Mirella in August.
“Timmy never made it to camp!” she said in Spanish, her words so hurried, it was hard to understand what she was saying.
“What? What do you mean?”
“I got off the plane and drove out two hours this morning,” she said. “The counselors said he just never showed up! They tried to reach his parents, they tried to reach me—this is all my fault!”
“Have you been to the house?”
“I’m afraid, miss. I’m afraid to go.”
“I’ll meet you there,” I said. I didn’t want Mirella going in there alone. I was trying to keep my hopes up, but I was afraid of what she might find. My mom was already at work at the hospital, so I took the bus. An hour later, I was standing in front of the Turkle mansion with Mirella at my side, holding on to me.
“It’s going to be okay,” I reassured her, patting her hand.
She explained that the house had been completely closed down for the whole summer. No one had been inside—the only people there had been the gardeners, who worked on the expansive lawn and hillside. Mirella had already spoken with them; they’d seen nothing. No one had wandered outside the house for weeks. And as far as they could tell, no one was inside, either.
We walked into the foyer. There was a sweet, sickly smell in the air that hit me the moment we opened the door. Mirella took a step back. I held out my hand for her, and we walked through to the kitchen together.
The refrigerator was open. Coke cans were littered everywhere. The trash was overflowing. The sink was full. Empty food containers crowded the tabletops.
“I think we should go downstairs,” I said.
Seven Deadlies Page 7
