The Brink (3 page)

Sam writes, “I have your hat.”

They never see Ethan again.

On the last day of class, out on the front porch, Mom hugs Latrice and moans softly into her shoulder. Sam is disgusted. His mother never hugged his father on the way out. Latrice doesn't deserve what his father didn't get. He tells Latrice, telepathically, that her time in their lives is coming to an end. As they embrace, Latrice turns her mother slightly so she can scan the street, see who is seeing them.

“I'm going to be late for class,” Sam says.

They separate into their cars, but when Mom turns the key, Sam hears just a small click, softer maybe that what he expected. The engine doesn't start. Latrice leans into the window.

“What do you think?” Mom asks.

“No idea,” Latrice says. “I won't even pretend.” The way she says it, she pretends sometimes.

Sam says again that he's going to be late.

“Latrice can take both of us in her car,” Mom says. But that will change the order of things, Sam thinks, the way the future has to happen.

“I can?” Latrice says, and Sam replies, “I don't want to go with her.”

Mom massages her temples. “Come on, guys. Work with me.”

Latrice studies Sam skeptically, as though she can see through to his secret. But at this point, Sam doesn't actually need to do more than make his loyalties plain.

His mom whispers, “
Shit
.”

“I wish you wouldn't swear,” Latrice says.

Mom looks up at Latrice with exhaustion. “Really?”

Sam opens the glove compartment, where the covert pack of cigarettes is, and hands them over. Mom snatches the pack from him. “You're not supposed to know about these. Don't know about these.”

“We should call Dad,” Sam says.

Latrice now seems impatient. She says she has somewhere to be. She has decided this problem is not her problem.

“I'll call you,” Latrice says, backing off.

She leaves and Mom goes to the front stoop to sit, fiddling with the fern, yanking off the dead parts. It has more dead parts than green parts. The plant supposed to be
his
, his reward for letting his father go, but it's nobody's plant, put
where nobody's looking. He remembers his mom bringing it home, so springy with life, saying, “You need to learn how to keep things alive,” but it smelled like crotch, and Sam felt betrayed. The person who could give him a plant as a gift was someone who didn't know him at all.

“Call your father,” Mom says. “Tell him to get his ass over here.”

Sam is kneeling on the couch and watching from inside, through the blinds, when his father's van pulls up a half hour later. He's come straight from a job, overalls crusted with paint and flecks of white on his cheek and in his beard. His parents face each other coolly, Mom on the stairs, Dad on the lawn with his hands on his hips, as though they don't need a single thing from each other. His mother points to the car, hood up, and his father peers into the engine.

His father does nothing, just looks up at Sam's bedroom window and scratches under his cap. A kind of joy warms inside Sam. This is what he wanted.

“Come here, Judy,” his father says.

“No lessons, please,” Mom says.

“Just. Come. I want to show you something.”

She goes to him. If she would only keep going to him. They stand together at the open hood and consider the damage. Sam knows he's been discovered. His father leans on the bumper. Mom puts her hands to her lips in a sort of prayer, even though the Unitarians only bow their heads.

“Sam, get out here!” she calls through the screen door.

When Sam gets on the porch, his father sees him and says, “Jesus Christ.”

“Sweetie, what did you do?” Mom says.

A breeze seems to gather the heat of the day and press it toward him. An old woman in a robe walks by with a little dog and stares.

“I cut my hair,” Sam says. With the kitchen scissors. All by himself, while they waited for his father.

Mom sits on the top step and pats next to her. Sam joins her, his go bag between his legs. She runs her fingers through his hair and asks if he knows that they love him. But it's a stupid question. Loving someone is easy—look at Latrice! And
knowing
someone loves you is useless, like knowing the name of a bird.

“You broke the car, didn't you?” she says. “And you told some fibs.”

“Fibs?” his father says. “That's the word we're using?”

Mom gives him her look. “Do you know what he said? He said you come around at night and watch me.”

His father sighs and scratches at the flecks of paint, scraping them off.

“Why?” Mom asks. “Why did you do it, Sam?”

Under his breath, his father whispers, “We know why.”

“If you don't tell us, sweetheart . . .” Mom says, and he can see her hunt for terms. “We'll have to take you out of that class.”

“We need to go back and live with Dad,” Sam says.

Mom takes his hand and brings it to her chest, like it's
broken and you make it better by holding. “If you want to go live with your father, you can do that, Sambo,” she says. “You can. But I can't.”

His father turns away, and his chest begins to convulse. Seeing his father cry is like watching a building collapse when someone you know is inside. It is raw and close and terrifying. Sam shudders too, and the tremor grows inside, a tremor that started months ago with his mom waking him up, late at night, in the house in the woods, to take his hand and whisper, “I need you to be brave, sweetie, because tomorrow we leave.”

A row of black cars have parked outside the hall, golden seals on their doors and flags on their radio antennae. In the shade of the oak, a group of men in suits and sunglasses wilt in the heat, their suit jackets hung on the branches. They seem to be waiting for Sam, a gang of fathers ready to administer punishment.

His father parks the car at the hall entrance. He's wearing sunglasses to hide his eyes. The Beach Boys tape flips over, another harmony starts. His father looks straight through the dash. “As smart as you are,” his father says, “one day you're going to grow up and forgive us.”

“How do you know?” Sam says, stepping out of the car. “Nobody knows anything.” Growing up is pure luck. Two thousand warheads are ready in their silos, waiting to grow up. If the class taught him anything it's that every place in the world is inside the kill zone. He grabs his bag, with the
Band-Aids and the granola bars and water bottles, all of it rolling around in a big swill.

“I'll wait for you outside,” his father says. “I'm not going anywhere.”

So Sam will need to find a distraction, a way of sneaking out. Because he's not going home, not going back. He's on his own now, as he always was and will be. The moment he steps inside the foyer, Sam hears clapping. The main hall is crowded with parents and other professors, strangers he hasn't seen before, the whole summer school, and he can't make his way in. Spread across the carpet, students sit attentively, preparing for a transmission. On the stage, a fat man in a blue suit jingles the change in his pockets. He surveys the room with a smile like he's at the top of a mountain and they are the trees. The room is hot already, sun glaring through the windows.

New Jersey believes you will do great things, the man says to the crowd. New Jersey is, frankly, astonished. “Would any of you like to ask the governor a question?” the professor says, at the edge of the stage.

One of the twins raises his hand. “The Russians have these missiles so that if all their cities burn up, these missiles fire automatically and everybody dies,” he says. “Can we have that?”

The governor dips his head. “Excuse me?”

“It's called The Dead Hand,” the twin says.

“Very good,” the professor says.

The governor glares at the professor. “Good lord, what's this all about?”

He shrugs. “This is what they've been learning all
summer,” he says. “This is the state of our world, the one you have made.”

“You must be kidding.”

Jerusha raises her hand and asks, “Where is your special cave when the war starts?”

The governor stammers. “When the war starts . . . ?”

An emergency blare shatters the air. Sam takes his hand off the fire alarm. At first, no one is sure what's happening or where to be. Then a mother screams, and frantic parents crush into the room, toward their children. The governor presses toward the exit. He wants out, to his special cave, but he'll never make it. He is caught in their panic. “Stay inside!” the professor yells to the room, but the children are fine. The children look calmly up to the windows, ready for incoming.

Our favorite world was almost over. Tonight, when I dropped, a countdown clock hung in the game sky. You couldn't miss the bright yellow numbers up in the twilight. There were just days left in the Also, to be who we were. I zoomed to the old homestead in Gjajan, where I built my manse and gardens and dug my private sea, where Aremi came to me, but the place looked like it was having a stroke—just a throb of pixels, a cloud of bad data that fluxed and ate at the terrain. Years of questing wiped away, and I could take nothing with me, like a refugee from a dream. I moved closer, to brush the metaphysics of it all, and my machine seized. The Core was as stable as a stilt on a stilt.

I dropped again, this time to the foothills of Origin Park to wait for Aremi. We had agreed to find each other here, the last place they'd wipe. The Park debuted on the first compile—ganked from topos of the Acropolis—and the texturing was smeary and low-res, not like a place but the memory of a place you drove by in a car. The engineers kept it around as an artifact, proof of how far they'd come. I zoomed to the edge of the gray-green butte. Below me, the city stretched out on five peninsulas into the ocean, a hand on a mirror. Hundreds of players hived at one of the city terminals. The Also's
composer, this nineteen-year-old kid who made the game sound like a nail salon, was having a live farewell jam. If I boosted my speakers, I could just perceive the twee.

At the horizon, the dull gray wall of the Exit sparkled with tiny match flares, the lights of hundreds of players stepping through. For the last month, the Exit had been moving closer, absorbing grid. The engineers designed it so that players could off under their own power, ceremoniously and unalone. Transiting through the Exit was the official way to de-install. Since the game worked its way into every cranny of motherboard, if you didn't off through the Exit you'd have bits of the game cluttering your OS, trying to recompile. We'd all go through it soon enough. Above me, players streaked by on aerial, hunting their home populations. The processor couldn't handle the air traffic, couldn't render all the individual skins, so they went naked, like fuselages, arcing in an empty sky. The sight depressed me. Another humiliation in a windless world. That's how it would be when the lights went out: we'd all be looking for someone.

I ping'd Aremi, who would understand, who still needed to tell me which world was next so I could follow. But she wasn't on yet.

/
yo get over here.
It was Rrango. His userpic popped up in the dash: a koala with an eye patch, smoking a cigar. He was off in Saturnalia, helming an end party for our raid group.

/
i need your fat ass for confession tennis
, he ping'd.

/
hang tight. waiting for someone.

Rrango was my spawn brother, born the same instant on the entrance platform and trapped there until we figured out how
to loft. (Notoriously, the Also had no instructions. Part of the appeal, the high barrier to entry.) He worked in Silicon Valley for a start-up launching its own alt-world, and he was always trying to mess with the game parameters. Changing species on every quest. Maphacking for grid he didn't have the points to see. For a while, he had a crew of Chinese digging a pit mine for Alsonax, so he could build this player mod—part amusement park, part nightmare—he called Bewilderville. But then the start-up tanked and his paycheck evaporated, so we had that in common.

These days, Rrango citizened 24/7. He knew about the Cessation Event before anyone. Apparently, the Also had been bought by a Chinese company that ran its own massive alt-world and they couldn't get two systems to integrate. Ours, the lesser, was turning off. Silicon Valley thought alts were gashes anyway, Rrango said, money pits of freeloaders, and since he worked out there, I trusted him. For all I knew, the Chinese didn't even exist.

/Aremi?
Rrango ping'd.
Dude: she is a BOT. Don't get played by a program.

That was Rrango's theory, one of many.

/r i g h t
, I answered.

A figure zoomed me. A female, but not Aremi. Blue troll hair spun off her head like some giant curl of frosting. Her chest swelled out grotesquely—one of the cheaper, trashier player mods dialed up to the max—and when she landed, her skin layered on: a rune-keeper robe with flared cuffs. Now I recognized her: Melanak, the first woman I sync'd in the Also. I hadn't seen her for months.

/
trying to boink your way out of here?
I ping'd.

/
hahahahaa, sweetie. just one last costume change.

Red sores began to appear on her face, and white tendrils worked their way out from inside. They looked like the hairs on a coconut, quivering with weird life. I'd heard about the pox—a viral experiment the engineers had released to get players to de-game early—but had yet to see it up close. I will admit she did not look sync-able.

/
kiss me?
she ping'd.

/
think i just puked on the inside
.
is it contagious?

/
nope. pox is soulbound
, she answered. /
tied to your play hours.

So the engineers were punishing us for our loyalty, and Melanak was the loyalest. What I knew, or what she'd told me and what I agreed to believe, was that Melanak was a forty-year-old EMT from Tampa, a beta tester for the Also. I'd met her by chance on one of my early quests when I had the bad idea to unzip a Kraken all over his lair. She was knobbing on intersect mode in the Gjajan market when I asked for help, and she enlisted long after she'd leveled past. Some people prefer to give rather than receive. With the Kraken, Melanak became my meat shield, taking damage and guiding me through the attack step by step, like the older woman I'd always wanted and never had.

/sent u something
, she ping'd.
/parting gift.

A photo flashed in my dash. I already had several of Melanak's pics—at first, they were tame, like a family shot she'd taken at Sears with her boyfriend and teenage son. Then came a run of sexy ones I hadn't asked for. She had hauntingly massive
areolas and the stoic face of a Ren-faire butter churner, and though she wasn't exactly hot she was always game. There was affection there, between her and my hand and a few pumps of Jergens in the home office. When I opened the newest photo, it took me a minute to recognize his face. It was Melanak's son, grinning back, holding a black cat upside down, its paws lashed together and head hanging lax, the way a cat never does. You could tell by the cockeyed angle it was a selfie, camera at arm's length.

/wtf?
I ping'd.

/what do u think

/ . . . cat is mucho unhappy.

/what do u think of me?

/? you? your son?

/hahahahaha.

My breath stalled. /
who is this?

/
;p

I pushed away from the machine and made sharp angles with the crap on my desk. In the other room, my wife Jocelyn chopped a salad for dinner and hummed the NPR theme, and the sound of real life brought me back into myself. Melanak had been a woman when I first met her—I knew that, or wanted it with the full force of my personality. The ruse was too long, her syncing too dexterous and knowledgeable for a teen to fake. We'd game-chatted all the time, her voice Southern and bossy. Four hundred pounds maybe, but female. Except, the engineers had let the protocols slip, and the voice-chat function stopped working weeks ago.

/tell me when
, I ping'd.

/when what faggot?

/when you hacked mommy's account.

/maybealways lol

I lunged at him with a Reverse Time Knife, but Melanak had levels on me. He lofted, out of reach, and spun in a circle, the blue coif perfectly still. The engineers had never figured out the breeze physics and never would.

/where's mommy?

/dead. got her head in my lap.

/sicko
, I ping'd.
good luck with 8th grade.

/
good luck with being a faggot.

I blocked him, silenced his pings, and Melanak zoomed off anyway, taking his disease with him. From the twilight, white pixels started to drift down. There had never been any seasons in the Also. You always dropped into luminous summer. But as I waited, it started, at last, to snow.

“So . . . did you get out at all today?” Jocelyn said as she dropped her bag at the front door and collected the spray of mail at her feet. “I'm guessing not.”

The lemon scent of Endust hung in the living room—I misted minutes before she got home, to give the impression that I'd spanked up the place. The ghost velocity of the Also persisted inside me, the feeling of roller-skating long after you've stopped roller-skating.

Jocelyn scanned the bills, and my eyes ached from the hours staring at the screen, where objects didn't reflect but
gave light. I willed myself to see her, to take her in. Her charcoal pants and blue blouse looked assembled from a dropdown menu—her cloak of professionalism, she called it once.

“I took a walk,” I said. Actually, that had been yesterday. I sometimes harbored details to deploy them. “The locksmith has a help wanted sign in the window.”

“You're thinking . . . keys?”

From my back pocket, I removed the paper with his phone number.

“You only wrote that down to show me, though, right?”

“Maybe. But don't I get some points?”

She untucked her blouse, and I recognized her more.

“You do, Josh. You get a million points.”

Jocelyn darted up to the bedroom and returned barefoot, in a T-shirt for a band neither of us had listened to since college. We started on our dinner, a mound of salad greens, and she asked about the business school applications she'd printed for me. Yes, I saw them. Yes, they were in the office, stamped with coffee rings. School was her dream, not mine. We ate on the couch watching the television—the comedy news from the day before—almost laughing but not quite.

“Listen,” she said. “I just know something amazing is going to happen for you. And it's not keys.”

Something amazing like a phone call from Renfield in city planning, inviting me back to work. She registered the purple glow from the study, the twilight of the Also on my monitor, and sighed.

“How long is it going to be,” Jocelyn said with disdain, “until that is finished?”

A cold breeze swept through me. An enormous grave had been dug, but the dead were in a distant country Jocelyn had never been to and didn't care about.

“Days, I guess,” I said.

“Good,” she said, and took her salad bowl to the counter. “Because I want you back.”

She grabbed her bag and went up to the bedroom. The door shut, and I felt abandoned. At first, years ago, Jocelyn had pretended interest in the game. Then she tolerated it, and we kept a running silence going, like it was some nerd dialysis I had to do but that nobody—not our friends, not her mother—wanted to hear about in detail. But then in March, Renfield called me into his office and asked me about the huge traffic on the network pegged to my desktop. I told him I was getting stronger, just not the version of me he could see. He raised his eyebrows and said, “We've had a good run,” and I disappeared into the Also for a weekend, questing a Dissolution Cube. That Sunday afternoon, one task short, Jocelyn yanked the power strip. She said she was living with a teenager, which sucked, which needed to change or we were over. The cords hung in her hand like the bouquet of dead snakes I ended up with after draining the Moat of U'mkatam. So we posted a calendar in the kitchen where I recorded my hours. Now, when she came home, she'd palm the CPU to see if it was hot.

Through the blinds, I watched the sunset fire through the windows of the unfinished condos across the street. The
developer had gone bankrupt during the construction, and a gate surrounded the ground level. Stacks of Sheetrock and buckets lay abandoned on the cement floors. A blue tarp flapped from a wood beam, tugged by the wind. I lingered on the couch, heartsick for the next thing in my life, for some future that could bear weight, while I listened for a ping from the office. The sound of company.

Aremi.

I met her two weeks ago, when she was forty minutes old. I had encircled the homestead with a perimeter alarm, and she tripped it. When I found her, she was just a nub of black hair sticking out of the render. Somehow, she'd lofted from Entrance Rock and backhoed herself in deep. As we neared the end, you could find pockets of null all over the place.

/
this interface blows!
she ping'd, her head thrashing in the busted polygons.

Eventually, Aremi maneuvered free. She'd outfitted herself in classic moon elf, green skin with red eyes and flared ears. It was first choice on the pull down. Her hair fell in two braids down to her chest, disappearing into a maroon cowl. Pretty much everybody dumped the Mordor crap long ago for bespoke player designs like BabyMomma, DimeBag, Ice-Queen. I skinned in EmoPrince, mostly for the syncs.

I pulled up her player profile. She'd sketched it—only diehards fleshed them out—but she said she was in grad school in Arizona, mostly “taking baths” and “avoiding my adviser.”

/what's your field?
I ping'd.

/how'd you know?

/your profile, you wrote it

/doh! psych.

/here for research? on gamers?

/on loneliness.

/srsly?
I ping'd.
/I should leave you alone then.

It was an n00b mistake to ask too many questions too fast. And I didn't want to creep her. So I backed off, let her drive herself, and answered her pings when she asked. We lofted over the hedge maze that I had planted out the back of the manse. I've always had a thing for labyrinths, the original alt-worlds, and Rrango used to invite crowds over to lose themselves and sync in the bushes or whatever. It'd taken me a year to earn the Alsonax to buy the grid and build it. The bright-green walls sprang two stories tall, so once you were in, you were in. Along the paths flowed a series of connecting pools, bordered by statuary of all the creatures I'd pwned—from world bosses down to lair dogs. At the exit, where all the water sluiced to, lay my sea.