A Dwarf Stood At The Door

by Norman Crane

name?"

  > ask dogor about wayne dubcek

  > "Wayne Dubcek is a friend of John Grousewater's. His current place of residence is 10 Garfield Crescent, Brennen, Ontario. He is thirty-five years old and unmarried. He is a distraction."

  The address was Wayne's store, not his home, but other than that the information was dead on.

  "Shut it off," Wayne said and reached for the power cord—

  I grabbed his wrist.

  > Dogor leans on his axe. "John Grousewater, you agreed to save Xynk. Focus on the quest," he says.

  "If this is a fucking joke, I swear I'll get you back," Wayne said. I was still holding his wrist and could feel the tightness in his muscles.

  "It's not a joke."

  > "It is not a joke," Dogor says.

  I covered the microphone with my hand again. "Listen, it's probably just pulling information from the internet. I could look up your address in the yellow pages. If it has GPS and access to Google Maps..."

  "My internet's password protected," Wayne said.

  I shrugged.

  Wayne leaned in closer. "And, you see, the yellow pages are a real thing in a real phone book in the real world, and this dwarf, it's a character in a fucking game. That's what freaks me out."

  The bells over the front door to Wayne's shop rang and Wayne smiled instantly and turned to face his customer. I turned the Thinkpad to face my chair and sat down in front of it. Sheepishly, I typed:

  > apologize to dogor

  > "There is no need to apologize, John Grousewater," Dogor says. "Let us infiltrate the Hooded Rat Brotherhood and unravel the mystery of Xynk."

  Because politeness seemed to work better than insults:

  > ask dogor if he can wait until tomorrow night to unravel the mystery

  > "Why must we wait?" Dogor asks.

  > tell dogor i have to work on my thesis

  > "I do not know the concept 'thesis'," Dogor says.

  It took me thirty more messages to get across the idea that I was writing a thesis, which was like a book, which itself was like a quest, that I needed to write some of it today and that tomorrow evening I would be meeting with a person called my thesis sponsor who would evaluate my progress.

  > Dogor leans his axe against the wall and sits petulantly on the bed. His big boots barely touch the floor. "If the thesis is important to you, I will wait," he says.

  > thank dogor

  > "But after the evaluation of your thesis quest is complete, we will unravel the mystery of Xynk," Dogor says. "Do you agree?"

  > yes

  > tell dogor goodbye

  > "Goodbye for approximately thirty-six hours, John Grousewater."

  > quit

  Wayne was staring at me from behind his customer's grey-haired head. I nodded and made a dramatic show of shutting off the Thinkpad. Wayne smiled. "But why isn't it called a text file if there's text in it?" his customer was asking.

  I leaned back in my chair and yawned.

  "It's just a different format," Wayne told his customer.

  I rubbed my eyes, which were starting to feel like they'd been replaced with cotton balls, and when I looked up, yawning again, the customer was gone and Wayne was walking toward me with a laptop. "Here," he said, setting it down. "I've tried this one. It works. No games, no distractions, just the basics. Do you still have your Puppy Linux stick?"

  I fished it out of my pocket and turned on the laptop with no problems. I started editing my thesis. It was horrible, but at least being face to face with the beast forced me to engage in my least egregious form of procrastination: I began editing what I'd already written, fiddling with synonymous adjectives, switching commas for semi-colons, and paying altogether too much attention to how the writing looked on screen. For example, two periods lined up one directly below another spelled an obvious rewrite. Something had to go. Changes had to be made. I also disliked hyphenated line endings and anything requiring capitalization. No wonder I was so captivated by dwarves, secret societies and possible political intrigue. My own prose was soulless.

   

  "A scholar is not a priest," my thesis sponsor said.

  I'd almost fallen asleep on the restaurant table, waiting for our Thai food to arrive. She was as stern and creaseless as always. I was wondering if toothpicks could actually keep my eyes open. Like usual, she'd printed out the latest draft of my masterpiece because she hated reading on a screen and was thumbing through it, seemingly at random but actually calculatedly, checking to see if I'd made the changes she'd suggested at our last dinner, while taking former-Soviet pleasure at crossing out any adverbs she could find.

  The food arrived.

  "It is very dry," she said, pulling off her glasses and dropping the brick of printed pages on the table beside her plate of Kuai-tiao phat khi mao. "I like it greatly."

  I wished I had a red pen to drag across her lips.

  They were thin.

  She smiled, then tasted her dish.

  I merely pecked at mine.

  "You appear as if you are tired," she said.

  "I am."

  "Are you tired because you have been labouring with diligence at your research or for other reasons?"

  "I didn't get much sleep last night."

  "Is this because you and Annie engaged in a long session of intercourse?"

  I kept pecking. I'd learned from experience that it was better not to respond with anything but calm disinterest to these kinds of unorthodox advances. "Nope."

  "Her loss, I am sure."

  I seized the opportunity to shovel food into my mouth as an excuse to be silent. She ate hers with more dignity.

  All the while, I kept thinking back to Xynk, imagining what Dogor was doing—if he was doing anything—while waiting for me to turn him on again. Freudian slip? I wiped away a few dots of sauce from the corner of my mouth. Was Dogor also "thinking" about me? Clearly not. Xynk, the game, couldn't run without power. It was only once I provided that power that the game could simulate what would have happened since the last time I'd played and make the changes necessary to reflect the outcomes of its simulation to give the illusion of time having passed. Maybe back in the 1980s there were even load screens, but today's hardware processed all the information in the blink of an eye, adding to the nature of the illusion.

  After eating, my thesis sponsor and I discussed the tack my academic inquiries were taking, how I fit into the existing historiography of the subject, how to proceed to most effectively disobscure my argument from behind its veil of literary pretension, and whether I hadn't limited myself by privileging secondary sources from one "school" over another. It was with an empty head and veiny eyes that I finally dropped her at the door to her apartment building. She got out of the car, demonstrating admirable posture, and walked several steps toward the front double doors. I slapped myself on the cheeks to keep myself awake. I didn't want to doze off on the way home and end up in a ditch. "Perhaps you should stay here for the night, my dear," I heard her hiss in my direction. The Russian accent penetrated car windows as if they didn't exist. I rolled the passenger's side one down and said, "Thank you, but I'm alright. I just need to get home before the energy from the egg noodles wears off. After that, I'll be in dreamland."

  She winked. "Your loss, I am sure."

  I turned on the left turn signal and almost merged into the side of a tractor trailer.

  The close call and the fact that it was only a few minutes after nine made me decide to make a drive-thru pit stop on the way back. While waiting in line to shout my order of coffee, I re-set my phone to buzz—my thesis sponsor hated electronic devices that made sounds—and noticed that I had eleven missed calls from Wayne. I called him.

  "Oh, thank God," he said. He sounded rattled.

  "Is something wrong?"

  The car ahead of me pulled up and I heard the woman in the front seat order two teas and a pecan muffin.

  I could hear Wayne breathing into the phone. "It was at the fucking store, that's what
's fucking wrong. Do you understand me? It. Was. Here."

  "What was at the store?" I asked.

  Wayne just breathed.

  I pulled up and asked for an extra-large coffee, one milk, no sugar. "The dwarf?"

  "Excuse me, sir?" the guy working the drive-thru said.

  "Nothing."

  "Yes, the dwarf," Wayne said. "And before you say a word fucking more, let me assure you that I am not making this up. I heard some weird jiggling sound by the back door, you know the kind a stray cat might make, but once, and this sound kept going on and on, so I detached one of the pipes from the vacuum cleaner I keep under the counter, the heavy ass duty one, and I went real quiet out the front door and around back—and there it fucking was! Clear as H-fucking-D."

  I paid for my coffee and immediately took a long drink. The hot liquid burned my throat. I'd walked into Jacob's throat.

  "What did he look like?" I asked.

  "Like a dwarf!"

  "Maybe it was a homeless guy trying the padlock to see if it was open."

  "Believe me, it wasn't a homeless guy. It was short but stocky as hell, with, like, World of Warcraft armour, big leather boots and an axe the size of a sombrero."

  Someone behind me honked, and I realized I was clogging up the drive-thru lane. I pulled into regular traffic. I didn't know what to do other than keep my foot steady on the accelerator and stay at the speed limit. My meeting with my thesis sponsor was done. That was good. "Hey, are you still there?" Wayne said.

  "I am. Are you still at the store?"

  "Hell no! I got out of there as soon I saw the dwarf. I locked up without even putting the pipe back and drove off."

  "Home?"

  "Didn't risk it. I don't know how much that dwarf knows."

  "So