Press Start to Play

by Wilson, Daniel H.

  Today’s charming hijinks seemed to involve chasing Keith around the playground, shouting that he was going to die of cholera, and wheezy Keith had apparently accepted his fate, foregoing tears for one impressively melodramatic death scene after another. Robby, the little playground dictator, presided over the funeral.

  “That game is so fucked-up,” Lizzie said. “Do you think they even know what cholera is?”

  “That’s what makes it educational,” Beck said brightly.

  Lizzie had watched over their shoulders long enough to dimly understand the deal: You bought your supplies and lit off for the territory, shooting buffalo and fording rivers in a doomed effort to make it to the West Coast, an apparent nirvana, for reasons never specified. You were encouraged to name your wagon party after your friends, and as far as Lizzie could tell, the whole endeavor was simply an excuse to watch them die off one by one, of cholera and typhoid and dysentery and the ever-mysterious “exhaustion,” then crafting a loving epitaph for their tombstone, like “Keith sux.”

  “It’s morbid,” Lizzie said. “Not to mention boring as hell, except for the dying thing.”

  Beck offered her an Oreo. Lizzie loved her a little for eating real cookies, not the fat-free crap her friends had been shoveling down their throats for as long as she could remember. She took the Oreo, then on second thought, two Oreos, and tried not to stare as Beck split hers open and licked the cream out of the center. Her tongue was very pink. Once she’d dispatched with the cream, she dropped the bare cookies into her lunch bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry, I know it’s gross. I only like the cream.”

  “Are you insane?” Lizzie said. “The cream is just the part you have to tolerate to get to the cookies.”

  Beck shrugged, then reached into the bag and retrieved one of the chocolate disks. “Unless you think I have cooties.”

  It felt like a dare, and Lizzie took it.

  “I think something in their little peanut-sized brains must recognize the game’s fundamental similarities to life,” Beck said as Lizzie crunched and swallowed. “It’s practice.”

  She said peanut-sized with affection, which Lizzie found equal parts confusing and shaming.

  “Practice? You mean in case they suddenly need to ford the Mississippi? Or figure out how many pounds of squirrel meat will get them through the winter?”

  Beck gave her a light shove, her tattoo brushing against Lizzie’s cheap rayon blouse, and Lizzie imagined the inked barbed wire tearing through the fake silk, seeking skin. Thirty yards away, beneath the worm tree, Robby and the two Matts drizzled dirt on Keith’s still face, while the girls wailed at his untimely loss.

  “Someone’s got to teach them that sometimes bad shit happens,” Beck said. “That you can’t choose what kind of shit it’s going to be, or when. You can only choose what you’re going to do in between.”

  At twenty-two, Lizzie still believed everyone over thirty was full of crap, but Beck was an obvious few years short of that deadline and there was something about the way she spoke that made Lizzie take her words for wisdom. She said it like she knew, like a weathered movie cop in a buddy flick, with Lizzie playing the clueless rookie, desperate for any crumbs of information that would keep her from getting shot.

  “Besides,” Beck added, “it’s probably good for them to get used to the idea that your friends can die. Otherwise, the first time it happens can break you. Not to mention the fucking next time and the one after that.”

  “You’ve had friends who—” Lizzie stopped herself, thinking through what Beck’s life must be like based on what she knew, and of what the other teachers whispered, thinking through the bars and clubs Beck probably spent her time in, the friends she’d made, thinking about the things Lizzie had seen on the news, the things Lizzie’s friend Paul had reported—from what he called “the front lines,” his shit room in the East Village that he’d only scored because the guy who lived there was now dead—and shut her mouth.

  The places her mind went, thinking about that life, about Beck’s life, were exactly the places she worried her parents’ minds would go, if she told them certain uncomfortable truths, and that made her feel as vindicated as she did craven.

  Beck shrugged. “Maybe you have to play it to understand.”

  “You’re biased,” Lizzie pointed out. “Blinded by your computer love.”

  “Computer love? Are you kidding? I’m a fucking luddite.” She gestured to the horde of fourth graders, who’d gotten bored of their fake funeral and were now running wild again, some form of cholera tag in which poor Keith was the perpetual It. “Every one of these little idiots knows more about computers than I do. Don’t tell.”

  “But you’re the computer teacher,” Lizzie pointed out.

  “Yeah, you think that was my idea? I’m supposed to be teaching first graders how to read, or something useful like that. That was the plan, at least.”

  “What happened?”

  Beck glared in the general direction of the administrative offices. “What happened is it turns out it’s not as easy as I thought to convince people like them to leave someone like me alone with children. You have no idea.”

  Lizzie worked to maintain a neutral expression.

  “Huh. Or maybe you do,” Beck said. There was no judgment. “Anyway, my aunt Helen’s on the school board here, and she’s fucking terrifying. Bullied them into giving me a job. Just not one where I’ll be around the kids unsupervised.” She laughed. Lizzie loved the sound of it—no, she corrected herself, liked the sound of it, mildly and without any emotional tether appreciated the sound of it—angry and musical all at once, like a fist smashed against piano keys. “And one where I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  Lizzie confessed her own foiled plans and dreams deferred—the underfunded city school she’d intended to take by storm, the dragons of poverty and illiteracy she’d planned to slay, the young lives she’d planned to mold and save, and the more she talked, the dumber it all sounded, and the dumber she sounded, the more she talked, until finally she choked herself off and Beck didn’t laugh.

  “You need a new job,” Beck said just before little Keith started shrieking with tears again and Lizzie had to take him on another trip to the nurse’s office, all the while assuring him he didn’t have cholera. “Which means you need a new résumé. Come to the lab after hours, you can use one of the computers. No one will ever know.” She winked, her expression full of something that Lizzie didn’t want to see. “Promise.”

  —

  She didn’t go to the lab after school. She went home, ate frozen pizza in front of the TV, listened to the Cure while staring moodily at a framed photo of her ex, graded a set of abysmally written book reports, tried not to think about Beck, did think about Beck, rubbed herself into moderate bliss, and then slept.

  Monday morning, Keith Stoneapple was absent. Word came down by lunch: the poor kid had had the asthma attack to end all attacks, nearly died, was tubed up in a hospital bed, and if/when they released him, he would relocate with his family to some warm, lung-hospitable climate, like a nineteenth-century tubercular shipped off to the sanitarium. Lizzie had the class make a giant “get well” card, watching warily as Robby mashed a red crayon against the construction paper, scribbling what looked like a vampire bunny, blood dripping from his fangs. The little bastard had, obviously, not magicked Keith into a coma by sheer force of will, had not transmuted digital cholera into real-world plague like some alchemist of disease, but Lizzie couldn’t shake the image of him forcing Keith to the ground and heaping dirt all over his “grave.” Kids will be kids and all that shit, she supposed, but it was creepy nonetheless.

  She decided it was time to try this game for herself, see how it felt to kill off some of her own and whether Beck was right that digital grief could be educational and therapeutic, and that, she told herself, was her sole reason for knocking at the computer lab door late that afternoon—that, and maybe the need to update
her résumé, and nothing else.

  Beck looked inordinately pleased to see her.

  Lizzie was pleased to see that.

  Beck set her up on the machine and teased only a little when Lizzie admitted she wanted to make her way across this infamous Oregon Trail before getting down to serious work. Then Beck said she had some copying to do and not to break anything, and, before Lizzie could come up with a clever response, slipped out the door and left Lizzie alone.

  It’s better this way, Lizzie told herself as she typed the names of her least-favorite students into the game and decided how much money to spend on imaginary supplies in the imaginary frontier supply shop. She couldn’t afford a slipup here, of all places, she reminded herself as she watched the pixelated wagon chug along flat ground, oxen powering across the countryside, temperature rising and food supply falling, Kathleen inexplicably breaking a leg and then dying a few imaginary days later. This was Lizzie’s workplace—not to mention a direct connection to her aunt’s rabbi and, through that, to her mother; this was her job and her rent and her reputation. The game wanted to know whether she would like to hold a funeral, and Lizzie chose “no.” Her crew’s morale and health immediately plummeted. She shot a few deer and one buffalo, which yielded two thousand more pounds of food than the game allowed her to carry, and Jordana succumbed to dysentery; bored, Lizzie indulged a fantasy: the door creaking open, the lights going out, strong hands kneading her shoulders, the diamond stud tickling her lip. She wondered if Beck was pierced anywhere else. Lauren G. died of dysentery, no big loss—Lizzie figured she’d spent the whole trip lounging in the back of the wagon whining about the smell of oxen.

  They lost two oxen while trying to cross the Kansas River and half their food supply to a thief in the night, and Lizzie would have liked to ask Beck what the hell she’d meant by getting to make choices between bad shit, because as far as she could tell, the game was entirely made up of unmotivated bad shit, punctuated by choices she was forced to make completely at random, because who the hell knew whether it was better to ford or float a river, or even if there was a difference? But she couldn’t ask that, because Beck was still gone, photocopying, or hiding out, or maybe Lizzie’s presence in the computer lab was such a nonissue for her that she’d forgotten and gone home, or maybe—

  “Shit,” Lizzie said. She’d had one job: don’t break anything. But somehow, she must have, because the game’s date had gone from June 7, 1848, to November 7, 1988—today. And Robby was dead, not of measles or typhoid, but an electrical fire. Which, Lizzie knew, despite scraping by with a C in every dull American history class she’d ever taken, was a highly unlikely prospect in the Missouri wilderness circa 1848.

  She must have done something wrong, pressed some button, and it’s not like the computer was smoking or sparking—it was just the stupid game wigging out on her—but it wasn’t something she wanted Beck to come back to see.

  And it creeped her out a little to see Robby’s name right there beside that night’s date and the word dead.

  She remembered Beck’s advice about malfunctioning computers, and turned the thing on and off again. She rebooted the game, made all her choices again, superstitiously naming her wagon mates exactly as she had before, which seemed like the best way to reverse whatever bad juju she’d brought down on them, and then held her breath as they began dropping like flies. Measles again, and diphtheria, all well and good, and then Robby broke his leg, which would have been fine, except that the date was all fucked-up again, and Lizzie shut the computer down in disgust, replacing the disk where Beck had found it, deciding the whole night had been a mistake, Beck was never coming back, and she might as well go home.

  It wasn’t until she was back in her classroom the next morning that she thought of her résumé, still un-updated, and then Robby lumbered in on crutches, with his leg in a purple cast, and that was the end of rational thought for the day.

  —

  The cast made Robby more popular than ever—and more insufferable. Out of some insane guilt, Lizzie let him have pet-feeding duty for the week, which probably meant she’d soon end up with a dead hamster. Even more blood on her hands, she thought, then felt like an idiot. Coincidences weren’t magic, and neither were computers.

  Still, that day she unilaterally decided to cancel computer lab for the afternoon and instead threw an impromptu party, sugaring the kids with leftover Halloween candy. Even Robby got a Reese’s; she figured there was a limit to the trouble he could cause with one leg.

  When the final bell rang, she told herself she was only going to the computer lab to take another look at the game, to exorcise any foolish lingering superstitions, and that it had nothing to do with Beck. Midway down the emptying corridor, she changed her mind, told herself she didn’t actually think an evil computer program had, with her help, broken Robby Kline’s leg, and this was all her subconscious’s devious ruse to drive her into Beck’s arms.

  Neither of these lines of thought felt wholly convincing.

  “Where’d you go yesterday?” Beck asked. “I got back and you were gone. You left the room unlocked, too—you know how much trouble I’d get in if something happened to these things?”

  “Sorry,” Lizzie said weakly.

  “No harm, no foul. But you owe me a drink.”

  “Done,” Lizzie said, thinking: Tonight? Someday? Never? Was it a date or a hypothetical? Imaginary, like the oxen and the diphtheria, real like tequila-infused kisses, something in between like Robby’s cast and the dreams she’d started having, the kind that made her wake up in sweaty sheets? Nothing had been this hard back in school. You drank, you ate greasy pizza, you went home together or you didn’t, and without trying, you were suddenly living in someone else’s dorm room, wearing her sweatshirts to class and hoping no one thought it was weird how you kept inhaling the cuffs, thinking of her.

  “So?” Beck said.

  “So…”

  “Did you come here to see me, or…?”

  “The game,” Lizzie blurted, remembering a second too late that her résumé would have been a more plausible, not to mention practical, response.

  “Ah, an addict already.” Beck pulled out one of the Oregon Trail disks and slid it over to Lizzie. “You get one round. Then happy hour. Beer on you. Yes?”

  Terrible idea, Lizzie reminded herself. Don’t shit where you eat and all that, and the wicked witch of the third grade was already giving her knowing looks, like she suspected something dark.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Beck settled herself behind the desk with a P. D. James novel and Lizzie played. This time the children all died as they were supposed to, when they were supposed to, and Lizzie gave each of them a funeral. She proceeded on her own, with one sickly oxen and a couple of extra axles, and made it as far as Soda Springs before the date changed to June 27, 2028, and the computer informed her:

  You have died of throat cancer.

  Lizzie yanked the plug. The screen went dark.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Beck yelped, looking up from her book. “You can’t turn it off that way.”

  She didn’t know what the hell she was doing.

  “That almost sounded like I cared.” Beck sighed. “If I ever do, you have my permission to kill me. So, you really that eager for a drink?”

  Lizzie nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and when Beck took her hand and pulled her to her feet, Lizzie held on, turned into her, fell into her, anchored herself with Beck’s shoulders and Beck’s waist and Beck’s lips, felt steady against Beck’s body, felt protected in Beck’s arms, felt Beck, her muscle and her flesh and her tremble of barely contained desire. Or maybe it was Lizzie who was shaking, Beck who was still. They were too entangled to know the difference, and Lizzie would not let go.

  —

  This was love: steaming hot chocolate spiked with bourbon on freezing November nights, the two of them cozy on the couch in Beck’s flannel pajamas, listening to the rain. Licking tequila from Beck’s b
are stomach, memorizing her ticklish spots, the sensitive patch on the back of her left knee, the point on her spine where a grazing fingertip would make her squeal. Throwing the photos of Paula in the trash, then reneging and hiding them in the back of her closet instead, because Beck said the past made them the women they were and lovers past should be thanked for lovers present. Listening to Beck, believing Beck, who seemed to know so much. Listening to Beck’s stories of the friends she needed to remember, men who were there and then suddenly weren’t, going with Beck to a hospital and standing awkwardly by her side as she gossiped with a gaunt man, catching him up on other friends, dying and not, his hollow cheeks speckled, his body disappearing. Taking Beck’s hand afterward as she cried and giving silent thanks that they were not men and so were maybe safe. Caravanning to school in separate cars so no one would know they’d rolled reluctantly out of the same bed, groped for conditioner and each other in the same shower, fed each other burnt cinnamon toast, flashed each other the bird at red lights, because fuck you was their unspoken way of saying the opposite. Passing in the school hallways without looking at each other so no one would know. Avoiding each other at lunch so no one would know. Enduring computer lab periods while trying not to fixate on the curve of Beck’s shoulder or the tufts of hair at her ears or her tongue wetting her lips or the soft pads of her fingers touching keyboards, touching monitors, touching pencils, touching shoulders, touching everyone but Lizzie—all so no one would know. Was it love that made her think of nothing but Beck, that emptied her mind of all but the essentials—the tastes and smells and urgent needs—or was it obsession? Lizzie had no reference point, had never felt like this before, was unsure anyone had ever felt like this before, and didn’t give a shit.

  This was obsession: Going to the computer lab after the final bell. Going to the computer lab even though Beck carefully absented herself, because Beck carefully absented herself, because they couldn’t afford to be seen together even after hours, but the lab smelled of Beck, embodied Beck, and Beck had GREs to study for, studying she couldn’t do with Lizzie there pressing hands to flesh and whispering secrets into the hollow of neck or base of spine, so Beck went home with her book and Lizzie used Beck’s key to get into the lab and imagined Beck until it was time to be with her again. And so: Going to the computer lab for totally reasonable reasons—staying in the computer lab because of the game. Playing the game. Dying in the game. Killing off her loved ones in the game. Playing the game again and again. The game malfunctioning, more frequently every day, the game murdering the people who mattered to her, mother with a heart attack in 2010, father in a construction accident in 1994, Beck with cancer in 1998, Beck with cancer in 2007, Beck with cancer in 2030—the game showed her so many ways to die, and so many were cancer. Naming her party, buying supplies, hunting for buffalo, fording the river, rolling asymptotically west, west, west, until, always: You have died. You have died. You have died.