Press Start to Play

by Daniel H. Wilson

  Dying in a week, dying in a year, dying in twenty years, always a tombstone with her name on it, electrocution, fire, heart attack, cancer, mountaineering, car accident, cancer again, every choice changing the method, no choice changing the prognosis: terminal. Telling herself this was some programmer’s idea of a joke, telling herself she should tell Beck and they could play together and laugh away all fear, telling herself it couldn’t possibly matter whether she made it to Oregon, that no one in their right mind would expend all that effort on getting to Oregon, that there was no promised land, that a computer could not kill her, that the boy wobbling around her classroom on a cast and the asthmatic wheezing in a hospital bed were statistical outliers, that she should put the game away or light it on fire or forget it existed and go home. Playing again, trying again, one more time, just in case, just to be safe. Thinking about Beck when she was playing the game, thinking about the game when she was with Beck, lying awake nights, worrying through discovery and disease, dreaming of death, waking afraid.

  This was fear: lying in bed, Beck snuggled into her shoulder or sprawled over her chest, blinking into the dark, thinking, what if. What if they fell in love, even more in love, what if Lizzie lost herself, fell down so deep she couldn’t find her way out, and then Beck disappeared or Beck died or Beck simply got tired of her and went on her way and Lizzie was left alone. What if they didn’t fall further in love, what if they grew bored of each other, what if this feeling was temporary, what if, unthinkable, it disappeared, and left an unfillable void in its place, turned her cold. What if someone at school found out, and she got fired, and ran out of money, and ended up on the street or in her parents’ basement; what if no one found out, and Beck made her tell someone, what if she told her parents, and they couldn’t love her anymore, they turned their backs to her, they thought she was disgusting, they made her choose, they cut her off. What if she wasn’t the person Beck thought she was, couldn’t be the person she wanted to be, what if she never left this job, never ventured into the terrifying heart of the city, never changed lives or helped people, was too selfish to bother or care. What if she did, what if she went, what if her parents were right and the city was no place for a nice girl like her and she was attacked in a dark corner, what if she was raped, what if she was shot, what if she was killed. What if she caught the thing she and Beck never talked about and knew they were probably safe from but no one knew enough about it to be so sure and if she did catch it she would die. What if she died like the game said she would die, in a fiery wreck or stumbling off a cliff, what if she was going insane, if the game was driving her crazy, if this burning that felt like love was actually insanity, or if they were enemies, if one would destroy the other, and she had to choose, which she could survive without, love or obsession, love or fear, love or life.

  —

  Lack of sleep wasn’t exactly improving her teaching skills, and they hadn’t been so strong to begin with. There was the day, hopped up on three cups of coffee and a caffeine pill, still blinking away exhaustion and realizing only once she got to school that she’d forgotten to put on underwear, that she decided it would be a good idea to give her class a dose of the real Oregon Trail, and described the symptoms of dysentery in all their shitting glory, then lectured her rapt fourth graders on the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre, forty men, thirty women, seventy children, traveling through Utah—on some trail to Oregon, according to her book, if not the actual Oregon Trail, she was too bleary-eyed to tell—beset by a party of Mormons and Native Americans, bamboozled into surrendering, then shot, clubbed, hacked to death. Bloody, bloody death, she described it, just as she’d read about it in the hours before dawn, because she couldn’t scrub it from her mind and was too tired to sanitize the horror, all of them dead but seventeen children drenched in the blood of their parents, crying the way her students began to cry as Lizzie painted the picture.

  It wasn’t her most successful lesson, and in the end she bribed them with cookies and an indoor recess to shut them up. Bribery was her new hobby. She’d discovered that Robby Kline had an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, reeling off the shifting statistical probabilities of death. Robby knew which month it was best to set off, when it was worth fording a river or taking a ferry—dependent on dwindling food supplies and number of spare axles—when to hold a funeral and when to skip the ritual and press on, when squirrels were preferable to buffalo, whether being a banker was all it seemed cracked up to be. Robby taught her to be ruthless, to winnow her party down as quickly as she could, to press on alone in pursuit of salvation. And the ruthless little monster, upon realizing how desperately she wanted his advice, offered it only for a price. He hadn’t handed in homework for more than two weeks, and despite borderline illiteracy, had already been guaranteed straight As.

  So when the wicked witch, Mrs. Polanyi—this was how Lizzie thought of her, even though they were ostensibly colleagues, because there was nothing about the hunched woman with the brown teeth and the battle-axe attitude that invited a first-name basis—summoned her after the lunch bell rang, Lizzie expected to be chewed out for any number of sins. Everyone knew Polanyi was the principal’s hatchet woman, and if she was to be fired for scaring the living shit out of her students, or if Robby had opened his big mouth to one of his asshole little friends, this was how it would begin.

  The conversation took an unexpected turn. “Elizabeth, we all want to see you succeed here.” The woman’s breath smelled of tuna fish.

  “Thank you?”

  They spoke not in the faculty lounge or in Lizzie’s empty classroom but, aptly enough, in the small utility room between upper and lower grades that was stocked with extra art supplies and known to all as, simply, the closet.

  “I thought you should know that there are those who might draw unfortunate implications from your recent behavior.”

  “I’m not on drugs or anything.” It was the first thing that popped into her head, and she was too tired not to voice it. The things that come out of your mouth, her mother said sometimes, in wonder, and Lizzie was inclined to agree. Someone should duct-tape her lips shut; it would be better for all. “I mean, I just haven’t been sleeping very well, and I thought the kids could use a dose of real history, something to get them engaged with the topic, like an action movie or something. Some of the sensitive ones might have been upset, but I bet they’ll all be a lot more…”

  It was the deepening furrow in Mrs. Polanyi’s gnarled brow that suggested she shut her mouth. “Excuse me?” Polanyi said. “Who was upset? About what?”

  “Nothing.” Lizzie felt ten years old. She reminded herself that feminists didn’t cry in the workplace.

  “Your friendship with Rebecca Grady,” the witch said. “I suggest you reconsider it.”

  “Wait—what?” It took her a moment to shift gears, but only a moment, because this was the shoe she’d been waiting to drop, and she had her game face ready to go. “I barely know Rebecca.”

  Silently she congratulated herself for remembering. Rebecca, not Beck. It was easier, that way, to imagine she was talking about a stranger, to keep quiet as the witch went on about Rebecca’s unsavoriness and Rebecca’s unwholesomeness and Rebecca’s precarious position at the school and Lizzie’s similarly precarious position if she elected not to understand that people see, people judge, people draw conclusions Lizzie most certainly wouldn’t want them to draw. It was easier that way, thinking of Rebecca as a stranger, to nod and agree that of course she understood, and—strained smile here, almost a curtsy—thank you.

  That night, she stayed in the lab through dark, playing and dying, dying and playing. Beck was nearly asleep when Lizzie slid into bed beside her, but awake enough to say, “You can’t stay out of the closet for a second, can you?”

  Lizzie tensed, so much that Beck tugged her tighter, started kneading her shoulders. “Whoa, kidding,” she said. “I just meant you and Polanyi in the closet today. I hear she tore you a new one. Everything okay?”

&nb
sp; Lizzie nodded. Said nothing.

  “The witch put a curse on you?” Beck said.

  Lizzie shook her head. Said nothing.

  The shoulder kneading stopped. “So what was she on about, then?”

  Lizzie made something up, something about how she’d skipped carpool duty and been chewed out, assigned double as punishment, lied without even thinking about it, without hesitation or stammer, and when Beck called her on it, admitted she already knew exactly what Polanyi wanted, because Polanyi was the kind of unsubtle nosy bitch to spread it around, Lizzie felt oddly unashamed.

  Maybe I’m a sociopath, Lizzie thought when Beck asked why she lied, why the lie had come so easily to her, what this was all about, where she went in those hours after school, hours she supposedly spent in the computer lab but why would she do that and what was actually going on. Maybe I can teach myself not to care.

  “I told you when this started that I’m not ready,” Lizzie said. “And for the record I don’t see any point in labeling myself, or any of that political shit.”

  “By that political shit you mean fighting for the rights and the lives of people slightly less cowardly than you? You mean peeking outside your own self-absorption for more than thirty seconds? Yeah, I’m pretty clear on you not seeing the point of that.”

  “Unlike you, bravely teaching rich brats and applying to grad schools while all your friends are dying off like flies? That’s some political activism. They should give you a plaque.”

  She thought Beck might hit her; maybe she wanted that.

  “You didn’t mean that,” Beck said.

  Lizzie shrugged.

  “I don’t want to fight about…the bigger questions. I just hate that you can lie to me so easily,” Beck said. “It makes it hard to trust anything. Can you understand that?”

  “You’re speaking in English. I get it.”

  “So…where were you tonight?”

  “I told you,” she said. “School.”

  “Working on your résumé. Again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And lesson planning.”

  “Sure.”

  She could tell Beck about the game. There was no reason not to. Not telling was giving it more importance than it deserved; telling might be the one thing that relieved her of its burden, turned the whole thing into a joke, but Lizzie couldn’t risk that yet, not until she won. She was too tired to decide what was meant to be secret and what deserved to be open truth; she was too scared to pick the wrong things to speak aloud, because once you spoke, there was no taking it back.

  “So did you tell Polanyi you’d stay away from me, like she wanted?”

  “Do you want me to lie to you?” Lizzie asked.

  “I want the truth to be different,” Beck said.

  It was their first fight.

  —

  They met for lunch on the playground, as they had done the first day. It was Lizzie’s invitation, Lizzie’s idea of an apology, after she had left Beck’s place in the middle of the night, and spent the hours until morning wondering about the things she could live without and the things she couldn’t. They had a picnic of vending machine snacks beneath the stone wall, in full view of the children and the gossipy recess monitors, and Lizzie thought maybe she could do this after all.

  “I’m not trying to rush you,” Beck said.

  “I know.”

  “I know you think you need this job.”

  “I ‘think’ I need it?”

  Beck sighed. “You keep saying how much you hate it here, Lizzie, but you don’t do anything about getting out of here, you don’t do anything to get this life of yours you keep saying you’re supposed to have, so I guess I figure…”

  “What?”

  Beck shook her head. “I don’t want to fight again.”

  “What?”

  “If this is the life you have, Lizzie, it’s because this is the life you’re choosing to have. It’s either what you want or it isn’t. You don’t get to pick and then pretend like someone else picked for you.”

  “I’m God now?” Lizzie said. “I have absolute control over everything that happens to me?” She pointed toward Jordana, lingering heartbreakingly near the popular kids’ four-square game, waiting to be invited to play. “I smite thee.” Jordana continued to stand there, unsmote, fists clenching and unclenching as she watched the game and poorly pretended not to care. “Somebody forgot to tell her I’m omnipotent.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to fight.”

  Beck split an Oreo, licked out the cream, and handed the bare chocolate disks to Lizzie. It was what made them perfect for each other, Beck had once said. She’d spent her whole life looking for someone to split her Oreos with.

  Lizzie crunched down on the cookie. The artificial chocolate always tasted better to her than the real thing.

  “I love you, you know.” Beck said it casually, like they said it to each other all the time, though they never had.

  “You too,” Lizzie said. Without thinking, she put her hand over Beck’s.

  Little Robby Kline saw her do it. She saw him see it, and yanked her hand away.

  “I’m not contagious,” Beck said. “I’m not going to give you cholera or something.” She laughed, like she had made a joke, and Lizzie laughed, like it was funny, wondering whether she had anything left that Robby wanted, and if not, whether she could just return to the computer and keep playing the game until she found a set of choices that killed him off before he could ruin everything. It was okay to think like that, of course, because the game was a joke.

  “You’ll come over tonight?” Beck said.

  “Don’t I always?” Which they both knew wasn’t an answer.

  “No one saw,” Beck promised.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t worry,” Beck begged her.

  “I’m not.”

  “I love you,” Beck said, not casually this time.

  “I love you,” Lizzie echoed, meaning it and loving Beck all the more for believing it was all that mattered.

  —

  It took her until nearly midnight, but she did it. There was something about the night, right from the beginning, she sensed she was closing in. One game, she even made it as far as the Snake River before Beck succumbed to cancer in 2030 and Lizzie fell to Alzheimer’s a few years later. They would both be in their sixties by then, and maybe, she thought, that was good enough; maybe she should go home—which was Beck’s bed, Beck’s arms—lay down this burden, and sleep.

  But on the next game, she made it to Fort Boise, which was the farthest she’d ever got. Too far to give up. Finally, three games later, she made it to Chimney Rock with her whole party intact, and though thieves came in the night near Fort Laramie, she had enough money to replace the stolen supplies once she got to town. She flipped the disk over, and both her parents succumbed to a plane crash at Independence Rock in 2004, but that was forever away; she pressed on. Paula OD’d at Soda Springs in 1992, but that was the farthest Lizzie’d gotten with her own health in good shape, and anyway, fuck Paula, who’d cheated on her all through senior year and then, after a teary confession and several weeks’ begging for forgiveness, had dumped Lizzie the day after graduation to run off with her Deconstructing Shakespeare TA.

  The wagon rolled on and on.

  At the Snake River, she hired an Indian guide in exchange for clothes, just as Robby had recommended. She passed Fort Boise, then the Blue Mountains. When the trail divided, she proceeded to The Dalles. There Beck died. Car accident, January twenty-seventh, which happened to be tomorrow.

  Lizzie skipped the tombstone epitaph, too eager now to keep going and knowing if she paused she would lose her nerve, start over again, but there was no need for that, she thought, not when she was so close, not when the whole thing was just a stupid digital prank, sound and fury and nothing, when, if she could just win, just make it through and out without dying herself, she could maybe let the whole thing fall away, go to Beck, say whatever it was
she needed to say, start fresh. Start clean. She knew what to do; she would be ruthless. From The Dalles, she took the river, and it happened, as it had never happened before.

  The Willamette Valley unfurled before her, electric green meadow beneath wildly blue sky.

  Congratulations! You have made it to Oregon!

  She was the only member of her party to survive. This is what it feels like to survive, she told herself. It felt lonely in bed, in the dark, cold without a body pressed to hers, listening to the floors creak and the windows rattle, but for the first time in too long, Lizzie slept through the night.

  —

  It wasn’t until morning that she played her messages, the machine full up, all of them from Beck, wondering where she was, wondering why she hadn’t come home, Beck sad and then Beck drunk and then Beck threatening to come and find her, if not at her apartment then at the computer lab where she supposedly spent all her time. Beck had some trouble with the word supposedly, and when she got through it went on to slur more words on the topic of Lizzie’s secret life, speculations of whores in bars or asshole football players hidden in the closet, her favorite place, and then she called back to apologize, but “I’m still coming” because “we need to talk” because “I love you and you love me, I know that you do.”