Zero Lives Remaining

by Adam Cesare

  She filled the cup with too much ice and couldn’t be bothered to press the plastic lid down correctly.

  “Five fifty-nine,” she said and Chris handed her a five and a single.

  He took a seat facing the wall but kept an eye on the mirror that pointed out to the arcade floor. Tiffany was still at Skee-Ball, seemingly oblivious to the entire world save for those eight wooden balls and that five-hundred point hole. She had a mound of tickets at her feet. The game didn’t payout much, so he estimated that she’d been there the whole time he’d been upstairs talking to the gimp.

  Behind her was the rest of the first floor arcade, some of the new machines spit out gobs of tickets. They were fancy casino games dressed up like old school-carnie games which provided just enough thrill to hook children into gambling. Beyond those were the newer arcade games, stuff that was not yet ancient enough to be part of the museum upstairs.

  As he ate, a group of three teens arrived and crowded around the fighting games. The relative peace of the arcade was shattered by their cursing and screaming as they took turns on Street Fighter Alpha and Mortal Kombat 3. Two of the kids were black and none of them seemed particularly threatening, but there was still enough of his father’s blood in him that Chris had never dared try to play with them. It was a shame because he was pretty good with Blanka, knew all of his special moves.

  When he got bored with watching the black kids in the reflection, he boxed up his crusts, wiped his hands and stood up from the table. As he turned he watched Tiffany’s head flick back to the Skee-Ball lane. She’d been watching him.

  Ha! Caught you looking, my little China-girl. Chris Murphy smiled, a real smile, for the first time in days.

  CHAPTER 4

  Chris Murphy’s smile was ringed with pizza grease, the sheen made his acne seem worse. Under the bright lights of the first floor, surrounded by other people, he didn’t seem nearly as threatening. She could see now that his hair was not only spiked, the style that he’d kept since the early two thousands, but that his blonde roots were starting to grow in under his black dyejob. She imagined him applying hair dye in an effort to look more metal and the fear of him being a possible psycho killer stalker began to seem funny.

  She could see out of the corner of her eye that he was standing still, smiling at her. She threw a ball down the lane and took a breath before he started moving again.

  “That’s a force! I had you, man!” one of the guys playing Street Fighter shouted from her left. It sounded like Jason Day from her Civics class. He shouted “That’s a force, Miss!” every time their teacher assigned homework. It was kind of cute, kind of exhausting.

  She looked at the glass double doors that led out to the parking lot and saw that the sky was darkening. She clicked on her phone to check the time. It was only five thirty, there must be a storm on its way, otherwise it wouldn’t be that dark.

  Tossing her last ball up the lane, it hit the ramp at just the right angle and sunk into the five-hundred point basket, nothing but net. A perfect game and she only got twenty tickets. These machines needed to be updated to properly compensate her for her mastery of the sport.

  Gripping the end of the ticket, she gave a firm tug, able to wrest a bonus ticket from the mouth of the machine. She threw the stack of yellow tickets into her purse and shouldered the bag. She’d redeem them later, maybe never if Funcave didn’t start stocking anything good to buy with them. Tiffany had enough Frisbees, shot glasses, and plastic spider-rings to last her ten lifetimes.

  One of the glass doors squealed on its frame and Tiffany watched as Chris Murphy shouldered his way out of the arcade. Conflicting feelings of relief and disappointment washed over her. The attention had been nice, even if it seemed like the kind that would result in the boy traipsing around in front of a mirror singing show tunes and wearing her skin like a fur coat.

  Bucking up, she realized that the upstairs arcade was now Murphy-free. It was too late in the day to weigh her purse down with another roll of tokens, so she scraped the bottom of her bag and came up with a measly two coins.

  Better make them count, she told herself. Maybe today is the day we see that kill screen.

  One of the boys waiting to get on Street Fighter whistled at her as she walked by, a white kid in a wife-beater and baggy pants.

  “Damn girl, you need to get out of that sweatshirt and into something that shows off what I know you’ve got.” He wiped his upper lip with one finger. What this gesture was meant to suggest, she had no idea. He was in his mid-twenties, but his mustache was so thin and unimpressive it looked like he’d drawn it on with a dull pencil. She didn’t recognize him so he’d probably graduated or dropped out while she was still in middle school.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jason said, still hunched over the machine with his back to her. “Super Combo!” the announcer shouted and Jason took the opportunity to slap the kid who’d whistled on his bare shoulder, the tips of his fingers leaving an angry red mark on the older kid’s pale skin.

  “He’s sorry, Tiffany,” Jason said, turning to face her but only for a second. When he turned back to the screen it sounded like he hadn’t missed a beat.

  Cute, brutishly chivalrous, and good at video games. Jason was a catch. She blushed and continued toward the stairs.

  Upstairs, they’d turned the music up. Downstairs the radio was tuned to top-ten hits, a nosebleed-inducing tidal wave of shit: Chris Brown and Robin Thicke spitting lyrics that either directly or indirectly endorsed date rape. Upstairs it wasn’t the radio, but instead the overhead speakers were hooked up to a massive CD-changer that played nothing but the classics: Flock of Seagulls, Squeeze, Blondie. Pure gaming tunes.

  The divide was generational and economically-minded. The owner of Funcave wanted to keep both types of customer happy. Happy enough to keep dropping coins into machines. At eighteen, Tiffany was meant to enjoy the music downstairs, playing the newer games and socializing with her peers over a few frames of bowling and a pizza.

  But her heart and soul belonged upstairs. Tiffany had not been alive for the golden era of video arcades, but she still felt strong nostalgia for days she’d never seen. Or maybe she liked this floor so much better because of the music. Because Lionel Ritchie was Mozart when compared to T-Pain.

  Dan limped by her as she ducked down the aisle toward Ms. Pac-Man. He carried a bucket full of dirty dishrags and as he passed she could smell that he’d just cleaned up something gross. She said “hello” and he just smiled back. The lack of a hello didn’t seem rude. He wore a look that said: “I’d say hi, but I need to lie down.”

  They weren’t best buddies, but she’d see him watching her play sometimes and knew his name because it was sewn onto his shirt. He wasn’t a creep staring at a teenage girl, he was more interested in what and how she was playing than anything else. She got the feeling that he knew the games well, that he’d offer her pointers if she’d ask.

  The second floor was not as dead as it was when she’d been playing earlier. There was an assemblage of “regulars” tossing tokens into their favorite machines. Some of these men, and they were all men, held high scores in these games, some of those scores were world records. Most weren’t playing for the records, though, most were playing because it was what they did.

  They’d been gamers before their bellies had distended and their glasses had tripled in thickness. They’d been gamers when they were gangly teens in Rush t-shirts, before those same t-shirts were stained, moth-eaten, and worn with suspenders stretched over them.

  The Regulars were admirable and pathetic, all at once.

  It was all a matter of perspective as to whether or not they were creatures of habit or social cripples who would not, could not, let go of the past. Tiffany saw herself in forty years, her purse traded in for a fannypack, a green plastic visor shielding her eyes, her jowls set in a line of concentration as she chipped away at a run of Ms. Pac-Man. The image didn’t disgust her. There was something noble in it.

  Her two
tokens went faster than she’d wanted them to. Both games had been unspectacular, she’d done okay, but she felt as if the guardian angel that sometimes watched over the machine, scooching the ghosts away at just the right moments, had taken the night off.

  CHAPTER 5

  The conscious electric current formerly known as Robby Asaro watched over the arcade, ever-present.

  It had taken Robby forever to get such a strong foothold in the Ms. Pac-Man machine. That kid Chris was no good, Robby could feel the anger rolling off him, practically see it fizzling off in lines of heat. If the anger weren’t enough, his antics had caused Dan to clean out the cabinet.

  It didn’t hurt, Dan Boden scrubbing the ectoplasm from the walls of the machine, just a minor tickling sensation, but the loss of his favorite machine was frustrating beyond description.

  Because he could no longer watch Tiffany from inside the screen, he settled for peeking out at her from the machine behind. Even watching the back of her head was comforting, though he could not influence the game the way he was used to. He would need to reroute his work in the rest of the arcade, focus his energies on building back up inside the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet.

  These Namco machines were easy to grow into anyway. They got a lot of play, a lot of love and respect and nostalgia shot at them from a lot of hearts and minds. It was easier to enter a game that was beloved.

  Ghosts and Goblins had been a pain in the ass to get a hold of, everyone was always furious while playing it.

  Being dead had been the best thing to ever happen to Robby Asaro. Not dying, that part had been terrible, was still terrible because he relived it every night after the lights were shut off and the games were unplugged and he had nothing with which to occupy himself.

  For the first few months he was dead, Robby had spent all of his time in the pizza oven. That wasn’t fun—at all—and the day that Mr. Harmon had the oven dismantled and taken away had been a momentous occasion. Robby was no longer tethered to the machine, could feel himself floating around the first floor of the arcade like an astronaut in zero gravity. Every time he’d float near a machine he could feel a kind of magnetic pull, would have to push off with all his might to free himself and keep on floating.

  He didn’t have arms and legs anymore, was more of a whirling ball of thought and feeling than anything else, so once he’d realized that he was being drawn to anything electronic, that he could use the machines to weigh pieces of himself down, he became the spider of Funcave. Or maybe more like Spider-Man.

  The more people that visited his machines, the better he felt. The more machines he left a little part of himself in, the bigger his network—his web—grew.

  He was everywhere at once, his attention torn between the boys playing Street Fighter downstairs; Hank, the fifty-two year old man playing Missile Command; his buddy Yosef plowing his way through a later level of Gauntlet; and Tiffany Park, the princess of the arcade. That was not her official title and he doubted anyone felt that way but him. But a princess she was.

  By the power vested in him, as the God of the arcade, Robby decreed it.

  He needed some mood music, so he jumped into the back office of Funcave where the CD player was housed. Because Robby was everywhere and nowhere, jumping around the building was only quasi-traveling. It was more shifting his perception to another area that he controlled. Like opening an eye that you’d been keeping closed, only Robby had thousands of eyes.

  In the office, Eddie Harmon was bent over his desk, frantically masturbating to images on his laptop. Robby could control the laptop if he wanted to and occasionally used it look up information he needed about different games, but mostly he kept out of there. Eddie’s porno collection made it a seedy place to spend any extended period of time.

  Robby dove into the CD changer and swung the carousel around until it stopped at the disc he wanted. With a small zap that took no effort at all, he interrupted the song that’d been playing and switched it with Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. At the game, Tiffany’s back straightened. He couldn’t see her face but would bet that she was smiling.

  Robby had watched her grow throughout the years and her tenure at Funcave was nearly as old as his. That was, as an electric current, not back when he’d been paid to be there, when he’d been alive.

  She was a pretty young girl, but the attraction wasn’t sexual, quite the contrary, Tiffany was the child he’d never had.

  Her tenth birthday party downstairs in the bowling alley, but she had cried because all she really wanted to do was play the big-kid games upstairs. When all the other kids had grown up, grown tired of hanging around the arcade and traded video games for beer and parties, Tiffany had stayed true.

  Tiffany was a skilled gamer. Robby knew it, had seen her play. He bent the rules for her sometimes, but it was only to encourage her, foster the greatness that he knew she was capable of achieving.

  He loved the regular customers too, but they had been great before Robby had gotten to know them. Tiffany was the only one he’d gotten to see mature and he looked forward to her induction into the trophy case.

  Without the infrastructure to make changes to the machine, ride the circuit board to victory alongside her, Tiffany’s games were disappointingly brief.

  It was his own damn fault, too. If Robby hadn’t shocked that boy, she would have been playing Ms. Pac-Man right now. Tiffany was tough, would have gotten the boy to leave her alone without his help. She was clearly not interested. Then she would have gone back to playing, with Robby watching over her character. Inside the machine he’d tick a few ones to zeros and vice versa, bending the game to his will as she enjoyed extra lives and some late-game play.

  It was too late for that now, he’d made his decision and now she was leaving the arcade. Robby jumped through each machine on the way to the parking lot, staring out of the screens and watching her go out into the rainy night, all alone.

  Drive safely, Robby thought, and kept watching her from inside the coin-pusher machine that pointed toward the first-floor doorway.

  One day he thought he might try hopping into her car battery, have her take him home to meet her real parents. But that day was a ways off, he told himself.

  He still had plenty of work to get done in the arcade.

  CHAPTER 6

  It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, waiting for Tiffany to come out of the arcade and offering to walk her to her car, but then it had begun to rain.

  Chris could feel the styling gel leaving his hair and running down his forehead as it mixed with the raindrops. He’d tried to wipe it off at first, but that had only made his hands sticky. He thought about going back inside the arcade where it was dry, but then he’d look even weirder milling around the door, lurking.

  He decided to give her fifteen more minutes, if she wasn’t out by then he’d climb into his truck and head home.

  As if she’d done it on purpose, in order to make him stand in the rain for the maximum amount of time he’d agreed to, Tiffany walked out of the arcade exactly fifteen minutes later.

  Pushing off from where he’d pressed himself flat against the façade of the building he saw that his body had left a dry outline on the brick. His clothes were heavy with rainwater, his hair flat against his forehead, moistened into bangs. At least he wouldn’t need to shower when he got home.

  He waited until he was a few soggy footsteps from her back before saying anything.

  “Hey there,” he said.

  She jumped straight up, then whirled around. He must have scared her. She made a face upon seeing him

  “Here,” he said, offering her a wad of junk mail circulars and coupons that he’d scraped off the floor of his truck. He’d kept them under his shirt to keep them dry. She looked at the papers like she wasn’t sure what he wanted her to do with them so he held them over his own head to show her.

  “Oh, I’m okay, thanks,” she said and leaned out toward the rest of the parking lot like she wanted to keep walkin
g.

  “Mind if I walk with you?” he asked. She made a face that told him she was unsure how to respond. Damn it, he was blowing the whole thing! “My car’s out that way too,” he added.

  “Okay,” she said. She already had her keys in her hand and gripped them tighter, wrapping the key ring around one of her fingers and making the knuckle glow white.

  “Do you ever go anywhere but this place?” he asked as they walked, Tiffany avoiding puddles, him splashing right through them. His boots were soaked anyway, why try to step around them?

  “Huh?” She was acting purposefully aloof. He didn’t like it. Waiting for her had been sweet. He’d never tried something like that before. Why wouldn’t she give him a fucking break?

  “I mean, like, do you ever go out to eat or go to the movies or anything?”

  “Not often,” she said, thumbing a button on her keychain and causing a car to beep in the distance. It was dark, but there weren’t many cars in the lot and what few there were huddled under one of the two dim lampposts. Still he couldn’t tell which one was hers, but they were getting closer to it by the sound of the beep. Automatic locks, fancy.

  Her body language told him that she was getting ready to hop in and drive away as soon as they got there. The time-crunch was scrambling his brain, making him forget all the lines that he’d prepared, making him lose his cool.

  “I have a truck and a boombox, we should go to the drive-in sometime,” he said. “It’s fun.”

  The locks on his truck were manual, had to be opened up by using a good old-fashioned key, not a remote control like her expensive Jap car. He’d paid for his truck too, not much, but he was betting that Tiffany Park’s car had come from her parents. Maybe it had arrived as a gift with a big bow on it. Like in the commercials.

  “Yeah. Maybe we could. When the weather’s better,” she said, nearly as soaked as he was now. She readjusted her grip on her purse, bringing the rain slick straps further up her shoulder. Was she still upset about when he’d been keeping it from her? He’d only held on to the bag to get her to stay around longer, so he could spend time with her. Why didn’t she see that?