by Patrick Bard
“A sparrow,” she says.
Wrong. Is she bruised from yesterday’s match? Lost in thought, Lucas stops listening. He can’t see her well because of the glare from the window behind her. At noontime, the sparrow yells out to him as she leaves the room.
“See you later, cat!”
When he gets to the dining hall he looks around for her but she isn’t there.
He sits at a table, a plate of beets in front of him. He hates beets. He thinks of the writing exercise they completed just before lunch.
“You’re going to make a list of everything you want to toss into a fire,” Troadec told them. “Careful! Everything you write down will be destroyed forever. Think hard and throw out small things and big things.”
With a bunch of addicts like these, it’s not going to be difficult, Lucas thought as he compiled his list: I’m tossing the following into the fire—my browser history, Coke, tennis, my smartphone, my computer. He paused, wondering if he dared. Then he added, my father and…He couldn’t go further. When they went around the room to read their responses, there weren’t many surprises. Manon tossed her crappy barrettes into the fire, Juliette her binge eating, Brice his cans of beer.
But when Eloise’s turn came, she began reading in a monotone.
“I am the fire. I don’t like receiving broken hearts. I don’t like receiving sorrow and broken dreams. Be careful before you feed me, for I will reduce everything to ashes.”
Lucas noticed the stud piercing on her tongue.
“Wow!” Troadec said. “You turned the exercise inside out like a glove. Brilliant! Way to go, Eloise!”
She did not smile.
35
Brice interrupts Lucas’s thoughts when he comes over with his tray.
“Okay to sit here?”
Lucas nods that it’s fine.
“So you come from Chartres?” Brice asks.
“Yeah. Well, from Lèves, just next door.”
“That’s like me. I live in Perseigne, in a housing project right outside Alençon. Do you know it?”
Lucas does not know it. He doesn’t really want to talk. After a while, Brice grows tired of carrying the conversation and the small talk comes to an end. Brice focuses on the food on his tray. Lucas hardly touches his. His thoughts rush around in his head. He’s eager to get back to the workshop. Eager to crank out words. Eager to let words loose on paper. He’s decided to stay. At least for the coming week. Afterward, he’ll see.
36
In the afternoon, it’s Brice who surprises everyone. Alain Troadec asked the class participants to write up a list of what makes their hearts beat faster. Small and big things, as always. Brice goes first.
“Soccer, beer, fast cars, sex,” he says, his voice starting to tremble. “And my son when he smiled at me for the first time.”
Damn! thinks Lucas. He does a quick mental calculation. At best, Brice got the mom pregnant when he was fifteen. Lucas looks at the others and knows they’re calculating the same thing. Only Troadec remains impassive. Lucas is bothered. He doesn’t want to reveal anything more. He could easily have listed what set his heart beating fast when he watched all the porn stuff, but he’s trying to get away from all that, so he wrote: When my computer doesn’t start, when my smartphone freezes, if my cat isn’t back home when I leave for school. At the last minute he added: The ocean. Watching the ocean. I dream of traveling on it.
He doesn’t really listen to how the others respond anymore, not even Eloise. Anyway, he doesn’t quite understand what she’s talking about when she reads her list: Getting a reward on CoD makes my heart beat fast, same for dropping in my ranking, or getting upgraded to Prestige 2 Level 17. Everyone else seems to get it, though. Suddenly he feels like an alien.
At the end of the class he finds himself next to Eloise in the hallway. She hasn’t put on her hoodie yet. Close up, her irises are very pale, so washed-out-looking, as if they’ve been eroded, and they’re tiny, no bigger than nail heads. Her prominent cheekbones and scrawniness make her eyes appear even larger, like they’ve swallowed part of her face.
“Congrats on the boxing match yesterday,” Lucas tells her as he bounces from one foot to the other.
The bruise under Eloise’s eye, the one he noticed when he first saw her, is nearly gone. But the punch Fatou landed on her still-swollen cheekbone has turned it purple.
Eloise shrugs. “I don’t deserve any credit. Fatou is strong but she lacks finesse. She thought she could wear me out and didn’t notice I was doing the very same thing to her, that’s all.”
“What’s CoD?” Lucas asks.
Eloise widens her eyes. “Damn, where do you come from? Call of Duty, don’t you know?”
Lucas feels dumb that he didn’t think of it.
“The video game? Of course, I’m an idiot!” he says quickly. “Some guys back at school played it. It’s a shooting game, right?”
“Yup.”
He continues to bop from foot to foot, not knowing what to say and uncertain about asking anything else. Finally, Eloise takes the initiative.
“Are you wondering if that’s my problem? Well, it is. At least, partly.”
As she turns to head off, Lucas pipes up.
“What are you up to now?”
Eloise stops. “Well, huh, I’m going for a smoke.”
“Want to take a walk? I’m tired of being cooped up.”
Eloise looks out a window. It’s a beautiful afternoon.
She sighs. “I’m tired too. I like the class but I need fresh air. Where do you want to go?”
“How about the ocean?”
Eloise bites her lip as she looks at the large clock in the hallway. It’s four thirty. Dinner is early at Poseidon, at seven. But they have time. They only need forty-five minutes to get to the tip of the marina.
37
The wind gets chillier as dusk settles, casting a copper tinge on the waves. The crashing surf batters the granite cliffs that are indifferent to the pounding. Eloise shivers and hunches her shoulders into her neck, a common habit of hers. On the way over, they talked about Troadec. Lucas thinks the poet has a good way with people, a way to make everyone open up. Eloise mentioned Angers, where she lives with her mother and brother. Then they reached the ocean and fell silent as they gazed out at the waves.
“I played a lot of different games before finding MMORPGs,” she says suddenly as she lets out a puff of nicotine that gets carried off on a wind gust.
“What?” Lucas asks. “What’s that?”
“Massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” she explains, uttering the words like she’s talking to a dimwit. “It’s like regular role playing but online, which means a lot of people can play at the same time. Players form connections with each other, we create virtual communities like in real life, and when you don’t play, everything still evolves, which makes you want to know what’s been happening while you’re not connected.”
“Got it,” Lucas says, without really meaning it.
“I’ll explain it to you. For Call of Duty, I had an avatar.”
Lucas remembers seeing the movie when he was little.
“You mean like in the movie?”
“Yup. Like in Avatar. I chose a male avatar. That’s how I found out my mom was addicted to the game.”
Lucas turns to look at her. The sinking sun gives her cheeks and some strands of her brown hair a saffron color.
“I’ll explain. I was constantly thinking about CoD, even when I wasn’t playing. If twenty-four hours went by before I could log on, I completely stressed out. Even at school I played. I wasn’t doing any work in my classes. The only thing that mattered was what was happening in the game. My mom lectured me about it, but since she spent her nights in front of her computer screen, I wasn’t about to listen. I thought she was on Facebook, or that she w
as looking for a guy on Tinder. But nope, that wasn’t it. Then the inevitable happened. My school called us in for a meeting. The principal had my brother in one of her classes. He’s a year younger than me. At the time, he was in eighth grade and I was in ninth. Anyway, all three of us were sitting out in the hallway, waiting to see the principal.”
Eloise stops. She has trouble breathing. A tear runs down her cheek.
“Darned wind,” she says, wiping at the tear.
She sniffles as memories rush back to her like a pack of wild dogs freed from a kennel. It’s coming on two years.
38
Eloise and her mother are sitting out in the hallway. Nicolas, Eloise’s younger brother, sits between them. He didn’t want to stay home. Eloise clutches her smartphone. To Nicolas’s left, their mom taps on the keyboard of her phone, wearing a headset. He sighs. On the other side of the wall, the principal’s high-pitched voice can be heard in the office. Ms. Lemercier is running late. She should have seen them half an hour ago. Nicolas looks at the clock on the wall. This sucks. Twenty-five to. What is Lemercier doing? he wonders. He starts fidgeting. He’s too warm in his parka. He takes it off. Another five minutes and he’s going to split.
He turns toward his mom and tries to take her phone.
“Stop it with that! Enough!” he tells her.
Eloise doesn’t look up. With her earphones in, she continues to play on her phone like a crazy person. Their mom maintains a tight grip on her own phone, but Nicolas gives a forceful tug and snatches it out of her hands. The crooked headset atop his mom’s head makes her hair look strange, and the cable dangles. As she lets go, Nicolas is caught off guard and drops the iPhone on the ground by Eloise’s feet. The screen lights up. Two things happen simultaneously.
Her mouth agape, Eloise stops playing and stares at her mom’s phone. She’s just unmasked the opponent who’s been making her life miserable for weeks by sending NPCs to mess up her LVL—none other than her own mother.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall, when Ms. Lemercier hears “Stop it with that! Enough!” she assumes Eloise’s mom is admonishing her online-game-addicted daughter. She discovers that it’s Nicolas, an excellent student, who was lecturing his mom, and that mother and daughter are equally dependent on their screens.
After the initial minutes of the meeting and during the remainder of the encounter, Eloise and her mom return to their obsessive playing, and the principal has no choice but to address her caustic remarks to Nicolas in the hopes that he’ll be able to relay them, or at least inform his father, if anyone even knows where to find him.
39
“That’s how I found out that the two of us were in the same mess,” Eloise says. “A mess called Call of Duty. When we got home, we finally talked. We told Nicolas to do his homework and we made some tea. Now that the truth was out, we swore that we’d never play CoD again, even though we’d reached high levels. We sent good-bye messages to our communities—”
“Your levels?” Lucas interrupts.
Eloise bursts out laughing and Lucas realizes it’s the first time he’s seen her laugh. He likes the way her pale eyes light up. She draws one last puff of her cigarette before flicking it onto the ground.
“Damn it, I should quit smoking too,” she says as if talking to herself. “But the shrink says one thing at a time is enough. Still, I know I’d put on weight if I quit, and I sure need to add some pounds.” She turns to Lucas. “Can’t believe you don’t know about levels. You must be from Mars. The better you play, and the more often you play, the higher you score. It’s the way to climb in the standings. There’s something fair about it, not like in real life where lots of people kill themselves at work and never get rewarded. That’s what level means. And you become part of gamer communities—where you communicate, strategize, and catch up on everything that happened while you were logged off. Understand?”
“Yeah, I do,” Lucas says.
“When we told the communities that we were bailing, we got put through the wringer. It was hell. The other players swore we’d never be invited back. It’s the only time my mom and I were allies. We supported each other and stuck to our promise. We never went back on CoD.”
Lucas looks up to watch a squawking seagull fly overhead.
“That’s great,” he says.
“No, it isn’t great. We put all the blame on CoD. We told ourselves it would be cool to play a different game. That it would be less addictive. We didn’t understand that we weren’t addicted to CoD but to online games in general. We decided to buy World of Warcraft. It’s a medieval fantasy universe.”
“You mean like Game of Thrones?”
“At least you know that much!”
Eloise smiles again, her thin lips stretching in a pencil line the color of a blackberry.
“Come on, I’m not completely out of it.”
“I was beginning to wonder,” she says, giving Lucas a sly look before coming closer and knocking her shoulder into his arm.
“I’m kidding. It is a little like Game of Thrones, only Game of Thrones is like Care Bears next to World of Warcraft. In just a few weeks, we became even more addicted than we had been to CoD ’cause we could buy equipment that gave access to restricted gameplay. Those games were off-limits unless you improved your level and were upgraded. It took a lot of time. Quitting the game became increasingly harder because when you quit, everything you worked so hard for—your stats, friends, equipment, throwing an elf—goes up in smoke. My mom and I each played around ninety hours a week. We stayed shut in the apartment. Nicolas stopped getting on our case. He went to school by himself, either cooked for himself or we ordered pizza or burgers, or anything else we could gobble up in twenty minutes so we could go back to the game as fast as we could. Little by little I ate less and less ’cause I felt guilty for stopping play. My mom and I only went out to buy cigarettes. We stopped seeing friends, and when we were in the apartment, we stopped talking, we just played, or we collapsed on the couch for two or three hours when we were dead tired, day or night. My mother didn’t go to work anymore. At first, she convinced her doctor that she needed sick leave, but she didn’t go back when the sick leave ended. We became no-lifers. It lasted months. Soon we didn’t have any money. The little we did have we used to pay the subscriptions.”
“Is it expensive?” Lucas asks while thinking that at least the porn he watched was free.
“Not really. It can cost around twenty euros per month. As long as you’ve got only one, it’s okay. We had two. One each. But that wasn’t the worst. Because she wasn’t working, my mom wasn’t paying the rent. We were evicted from the apartment. We lost everything, including the computers. Everything was seized. The school even contacted child welfare services. My mom almost lost her parental rights at that point. The only reason she didn’t is because Nicolas and I went to live with my grandma in a small town near Rouen while she got treatment. But going to Rouen ended up being a disaster. It was like a desert. My grandma doesn’t even have a computer. Can you believe it? I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was going berserk. I started going out with a guy but it didn’t last long. He had friends and I couldn’t interact with them. I couldn’t talk to more than one person at a time, and talking to no one was even better. He complained that I never said anything. If there were more than two people in the room, I immediately wanted to leave….Actually, it wasn’t that I wanted to leave but that I needed to leave. The noise, living with others, my grandma, my brother, the cramped living space, it was like I’d lived in a bubble for months and every little sound around me got amplified.”
Lucas understands only too well. He shivers. It’s getting darker.
“The others say you don’t talk a lot. Why are you telling me all this now?”
She turns toward him, seemingly lost in thought.
“I’m leaving in a week. Like Troadec says, it’s got to
come out sometime. We won’t be seeing each other again, you and me.”
Lucas ponders what to say and looks at the watch Marie recently gave him to replace his phone. He hasn’t gotten used to the tight wristband and feels like he’s handcuffed to it.
“It’s time, want to head back?”
“I’m not hungry, but okay. I’m never very hungry.”
“How do you manage to box?”
“Rage, man! Just rage.”
It’s Lucas’s turn to laugh.
They walk side by side. Eloise kicks her red sneaker into a Big Mac wrapper on the sidewalk.
“I completely lost it,” she explains. “The shrink said I had a breakdown. I smashed everything at my grandma’s place. She called the police and I ended up in the psychiatric hospital in Rouen. Now I’m here.”
Silence. Her voice is slightly hoarse when she next says, “And you?”
Lucas doesn’t respond. He isn’t ready. It’s too much for him. He speeds up and starts to limp. Eloise catches up to him and grabs his elbow. He stops.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says. “It’s not important.”
He gets lost in thought as he looks at a can of beer abandoned in the gutter.
“I had a problem with food too,” he admits. “Eating too much of it. Sodas more than anything.”
She looks at him from head to toe. “You wouldn’t know by looking at you.”
“It’s because of the accident. I lost a lot of weight afterward.”
“Accident?”
“Car accident.”
“Oh…”
“The hospital, the rehabilitation center, the pool…” He stops at this half lie.
Sometimes the emptiness terrifies him. Before, all he had to do was get in front of his computer and—ta-da!