On this spring afternoon filled with the kind of sunlight that only came after a deep, dark winter, the large lake that gave the town its name looked like a mountain lake, sparkling sapphire blue that extended as far as the eye could see, only a hint of pale pink clouds on the horizon.
She’d heard about Lake Geneva all of her life, but had never visited. Her great-grandfather used to summer here in the 1920s. Her mother, in the last rebellious years of her youth, had worked as a bunny in the Playboy Club, where she met Jen’s father.
They claimed they liked the town, but after they married, they never came back, not even to close up her great-grandfather’s house. He had died the year Jen was born; no one had been inside the house since.
She wondered if she had the right to go in. She wondered if she would want to. Deciding would require a look, and a look would require a long distance phone call to her mother. A look would also require a full tank of gas.
Jen didn’t have money for the tank or the phone call.
So before she could make any decisions at all, she had to get a job. And judging by the emptiness of Lake Geneva’s streets, that might be hard.
The restaurants down on the waterfront looked old and well established. As she peered in the windows, she realized the wait staff was old and well established too. She doubted that anyone here hired extra help for summers or if they did, they hired college students from Milwaukee or Madison or some local college she hadn’t heard of. Guaranteed labor who wanted a bit of the summer action. Guaranteed labor that was guaranteed to go home at the end of the season.
She was too old to be guaranteed. Once she’d been a young-looking twenty. Now she was a hardened thirty—still petite, but no longer cute, and certainly not innocent.
She hadn’t been innocent in a long, long time.
She stopped at Starbucks which was, oddly, the only chain she saw downtown. Before she went to the counter, she stood by the gas fireplace (it felt warm and welcoming, something she needed after the long drive) and removed a five from her wallet.
Such tricks limited her spending, and reminded her that her budget was a necessary one, especially if she didn’t want to turn tricks on the highway for gas money.
She folded the five in her hand, went to the counter, and ordered a double espresso with milk and the largest piece of coffee cake still left in the pastry window. That would be supper.
As she sipped her espresso, she asked the barista where the community center was. The barista gave her inexplicable directions—the kind only a local could follow—but also gave her another piece of information: the community center had a locker room complete with shower.
So, as in most communities, for only a few dollars a day, Jen could have a shower. She smiled, thanked the girl, and left the coffee shop to explore the rest of the neighborhood.
But several people stared at her from the old Victorian waterfront houses, so she headed to Main Street instead.
If she squinted, she could see the street her great-grandfather saw. A lot of the buildings had to be original to his time, a time when Lake Geneva was a playground not just for Chicago’s rich, but also for its very famous gangsters.
She was about to round the corner when a movement caught her eye.
In what she had initially thought was a soaped up window, she saw small reflecting lights. She cupped her hands around her face and leaned against the glass.
Inside, she could barely make out a counter. Tables littered the floor, and the table tops appeared to have books mixed with bowls of dice. Several computers ran in the corner, their screen savers depicting multicolored lights, like some kind of rock-and-roll light show.
Beside the counter stood an open door, and through there she could barely make out some tables, chairs, and a recycle basket filled with soda cans.
She leaned back to take a look at the business’ sign. But no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find one.
Then she saw the movement again. Where her cupped hands had been, someone had placed a piece of paper with calligraphed lettering:
Help Wanted
She wasn’t quite sure how anyone would find an employee with a sign that small. It was almost timid, as if the person who had made the sign was undecided.
There had to be someone inside, someone who had just put the sign up, probably for job seekers pounding the pavement in the morning.
Since Jen had been the first to see the sign, she would be the first to apply. She walked a few yards to the recessed door, shadowed against the dying sunlight, and pushed the door open, hearing a chime that let someone know she had stepped inside the store.
That it was a store was immediately clear. There were two cash registers on the counter she’d seen through the window—one cash register was a modern computerized one, complete with LED display on both sides. The other was a 1920s antique model, with the big round keys that required actual force to depress.
But the cash registers were the only easily identifiable part of the store. What kind of store it was, she couldn’t quite say. If she hadn’t seen the books and dice through the window, she might have thought it was an art gallery.
Near the front, in Plexi-glas displays, were statues—brass dragons, wizards, and women in various states of undress, their fantastically unreal figures (big breasts, narrow waists, perfectly formed hips) bent in suggestive poses.
More art was scattered all over the front room, from small paintings on tiny jeweled frames behind the books to large paintings on the wall behind the counter. They could have been sketches for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, dwarves, brawny men fighting grayish creatures of the night, fantastic white horses with glowing golden horns.
But the store didn’t smell like an art gallery, though. The predominate scents here were french fries, sweat, and Axe Body Spray.
A slender man stepped out of the back. He was balding. His neatly trimmed goatee and mustache were silver, but his face was unlined. In his T-shirt and blue jeans, he looked both dapper and underdressed.
He stopped when he saw her, as if he hadn’t expected her at all.
“Help you?” he asked in that rude voice shopkeepers had for people who clearly didn’t belong in their store.
She almost turned around. But the coffee gurgled in her stomach. She didn’t want to sleep in the van much longer. She wanted a real dinner, and she wanted to see her great-grandfather’s house on the other side of the lake.
She swallowed hard before she spoke. “I . . . um . . . I’m here about the job?”
He glanced at the window, as if he couldn’t remember putting up the sign. When he saw it, he frowned a little.
“What kind of job is it?” she asked, pressing, hoping to get past his uncertainty.
He brought himself up to his full height. He was taller than she had realized. He seemed businesslike now, the uncertainty gone.
“Mostly,” he said, “you supervise the kids after school, make sure they’re actually playing an MMORPG and not surfing for porn or something. And then you’d put in a few nights a week for the old timers—we have some folks from the beginning who still come. They’ve been playing the same characters since 1974, I think.”
Characters? Surfing for porn? It took her a moment before she realized that she’d stumbled into some kind of store that sold games.
She had never been one for games. But this might tide her over until she could find something real.
“Do you have a good imagination?” he asked.
It was her turn to blink in surprise. No one had ever asked her that before. Imagination hadn’t been part of the jobs she’d held since she left home. Imagination, in fact, had usually been actively discouraged.
She shrugged.
“Well,” he said hurriedly, “if you have a good imagination, you might get to design your own module, or if you’re interested, you can run your own game. How long have you been playing?”
She decided to be honest. “I don’t play.”
The man’s frown deepened. “Then how did you get in here?”
She turned slightly. “The door’s unlocked.”
“Yeah, but only for gamers,” he said.
“You should put that on your sign.”
“We don’t have a sign,” he said.
“The help wanted sign. You did put up the sign, right? You do need a new employee?”
He nodded. “We’ve needed someone new for a year now.”
“But the sign just went up,” she said.
“It goes up and down,” he said, “according to suitability.”
“Suitability?” she asked.
“There has to be some reason you saw the sign.” He was speaking more to himself than to her. “Mind if I introduce you to a few of the old-timers?”
She minded. This was the strangest job interview she ever had.
“Before you introduce me to anyone,” she said, “I want to know what the hours are and what the pay is. I want to know if the job is worth my while.”
He sighed, as if he didn’t like talking details. Then he squared his shoulders again. Each time he made that movement, he seemed to grow taller.
It was a neat trick.
He said, “You get ten dollars an hour up to forty hours, double time after that, plus you get to keep any treasure you find.”
“Treasure I find,” she repeated.
“Gold, silver, jewels, standard stuff if you’re in a standard RPG. If you’re in a multiplayer computer game, then you get to keep any real proceeds from the game, if there are any. But gaming is on your own time.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, like she would to someone who wasn’t quite in his right mind. And she wasn’t certain if this guy was. But she was going to find out. “How many weeks would I work more than forty hours?”
“Dunno,” he said. “Depends on whether you get lost in the games or if you’re just a standard clerk.”
“Lost in the games,” she said.
“Look,” he snapped. “Do you want the job or not?”
“I didn’t realize I was being offered the job,” she said. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know my name or where I live or if I have a criminal record. You haven’t asked my background, if I’ve worked retail or—”
“You got in,” he said. “You saw the sign. That should be enough, although I worry that this is all unfamiliar to you. If you’re interested, I’ll bring the guys out of the back. If you’re not interested, tell me now. You can leave and we’ll both forget this ever happened.”
She didn’t want to leave. As odd as she felt, she also felt comfortable, more comfortable than she’d been in a decade.
“I’m interested,” she said, and knew that she had spoken the truth.
The guys from the back were a motley crew. They came out one by one.
First to appear was an extremely short man wearing gray jeans and a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal his muscular arms. He had a pointed gray beard that blended into his shirt.
Then a thin elderly man emerged. He had white hair and a white beard. He wore an Edwardian suit, complete with long coat and matching boots. He nodded at Jen as he took his place beside the counter.
The next man was dressed all in black. He wore a tool bag on his hip. Oddly, the first thing Jen noticed about him were his hands. They were beautiful, with long thin fingers.
She had trouble focusing on his face, but when she finally did, she realized it was average and almost impossible to describe. His hair was as black as his clothing, and if it weren’t for the intelligence radiating from his dark eyes, she would have dismissed him entirely.
The last man to emerge was breathtakingly handsome even though he was at least ten years older than her father. The man was tall, broad-shouldered, and as muscled as the short man. But instead of making him look an overenthusiastic bodybuilder the way the short man did, this man’s muscles trimmed him and seemed as much a part of him as his twinkling eyes.
Like the short man, he wore jeans and a shirt with rolled up sleeves. Unlike the short man, this man’s clothes seemed made for him, as if he were destined to wear blue jeans and a blue shirt that matched his eyes.
“She has power,” said the man in black as if he were answering a question about her.
His voice startled her. It was boyish, the kind that—had she only heard it and not seen him speak—would have been tough to assign a gender to.
“Untapped power,” said the short man.
“Untrained power,” said the white-haired man, as if that were a bad thing.
Only the handsome man spoke directly to her. “You look familiar,” he said.
Jen’s gaze met and held his for a moment. Normally, she wouldn’t have said anything about herself, but she felt the need to here.
“My mother,” she said, “used to work at the Playboy Club.”
All her life, Jen had been told she was the spitting image of her mother—except her mother had the curves necessary to be a Playboy bunny.
Surprisingly, her words didn’t faze the handsome man. Instead, he smiled gently. “That must be it, then,” he said.
The man in charge scanned all of them, as if he were trying to figure out what they thought of her just by the looks on their faces.
“Think we should hire her?” he asked.
“I think the store has already hired her,” said the white-haired man. “I think whatever we want is irrelevant.”
Then he slipped past the other men, and disappeared into the back room, moving so quickly that Jen would have bet that he hadn’t moved at all—except that he no longer stood in front of the counter.
The other men followed him, except for the man in charge. He put a hand on the counter.
“Will you work here?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and felt a tiny—unusual—burst of happiness. “Of course I will.”
The next morning, she was up at dawn. She bought an apple and a bottle of water at Starbucks, and then went to the closest gas station and put $10 worth in her tank. Ten dollars barely got her three gallons, but she could go at least sixty miles on that.
Then she went to the community center, paid for a ten-day pass, and used the shower. She had good casual clothes from her last job, and she put on a pair of black jeans with a satiny red top. She figured that wasn’t too dressy for the game shop, but it was dressy enough to say that she was taking the job seriously.
She went back to the library, parked, and went inside.
The library was as lovely inside as it was out. It smelled of old books and disinfectant. Already, half a dozen people sat in chairs near the windows, reading the morning newspapers. A few younger people had logged onto the computers, probably getting their news fix online.
She wasn’t there for news. She had come to look at maps and old property records.
Old property tax record books, plat books, and old city maps all shared the same section of the library.
Nothing inside the old books was alphabetical. They all went by lot number. And Jen had no idea where her great-grandfather’s lot had been.
About 11:30, she was going to give up when she saw the stack of phone books hidden in a corner. She held her breath as she ran her fingers along them, 1990, 1989, 1988 . . .
Eventually, she found 1970, the year her great-grandfather had thrown her mother out for taking a job at the Playboy Club. The phonebook was thin, covered with ads, and had a layer of dust that immediately transferred itself to her red satin shirt.
But she didn’t care. She opened the thin pages to the Rs and immediately found her great-grandfather, Nathan Roshaye. Following his name was an address and a four digit telephone number.
She brought the book to the table. She took a piece of scrap paper from the pile near the request forms, used a stubby pencil, and wrote down the address, her hands shaking.
By then, she had only fifteen minutes to get to work. No time for lunch, barely enough time to clean the dust off hers
elf.
But she had solved one tiny mystery. She would be able to find the family home.
It would only be a matter of time.
The man who’d hired her was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was an extremely tall, heavyset dark-haired boy-man behind the counter. His age was indeterminate—he could have been twenty and he could have been fifty—but Jen knew the type. He hadn’t really stepped into his adulthood, and she doubted he ever would.
“Jen DeAngelo?” he said as she came in. His use of her name startled her. She didn’t remember telling anyone anything about herself last night. “I’m Rufus Rock-well. But you can call me Spider. I’m the day manager.”
A day manager. That implied there was a night manager, which implied a much larger staff than she would have expected for a store like this.
The store looked different in the daytime. It didn’t seem as cozy or quite as strange. She recognized it as the kind of store she’d come across before, in Austin and Seattle and San Francisco. A place where people who had mutual interests met. One of them had probably opened the store to sell the wares the rest could only buy on the Internet.
Although this place felt older than the Internet. The computers in the corner almost seemed like an afterthought.
The computers were busy now: young men sat at them, leaning forward as they concentrated hard. They were all wearing headphones, and it took her a few minutes to realize the headphones ran on Blue Tooth—there were no wires at all.
On each screen was an animated figure or a well drawn building.
“Multi-user RPGs,” Spider said when he realized where she was looking. “We provide the hookup for free, and we run in-house tournaments—you may not have the most credits in the MMORPG, but you might have the most credits in the store. We’re trying to set up a dedicated site that will only serve our customers, but that’s in the future.”
As was her understanding of what he had said. She nodded anyway, then stepped behind the counter. “Am I supposed to fill out some paperwork?”
He grabbed a quill pen and a piece of parchment. “Sign this.”
She took the parchment. It was marked Contract, and was written in calligraphy, although this calligraphy lacked the elegance she had seen on the help wanted sign.
Gamer Fantastic Page 25