The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  Then a series of utterances randomly generated when the wanderer navigates close to her. “Is someone there?” “My family has no idea what happened to me.” “At least I’m not on sublevel six. I’ve heard . . . terrible things.” Then four different sounds of distress. Four more of fear. Huffing, for running. Mild pain grunt. Sharp pain shriek. Mortal wound gasp followed by morendo moan.

  On it goes, four hours in the gray box at two hundred dollars an hour. There’s nothing else she’s doing these days that pays so well. If she manages sixteen hours a month, minus her agent’s commission and taxes, it covers her rent. If she can get a second four-hour session on the same day, she always takes it. There’s a lot of yelling (“Fire the laser cannon!” “You miserable worm, I almost feel sorry for you!”) and some actors worry about blowing their voices. But she has steel cords, maybe because she grew up screaming at a clutch of under-supervised younger stepsiblings.

  Bye-bye, slave girl. (Good luck! Write!) Now she’s Countess Rhaelga Irtassa of Wherethefuck V, who—she glances ahead through her lines—appears to be a corruptible member of the Imperial Council. “How dare you approach me in my chamber! Explain yourself at once or I shall have my bodyguard slit your throat!”

  She asks the team in the engineering booth, “Is this woman young, old, attractive, what?”

  Phil’s voice in her ear: “Middle-aged. Heavy face. Enormous headdress.”

  She goes for asperity, attempting clumsily to be silken, undercurrent of self-deluding over-the-hill coquetry. “Well that depends, my rash young friend, on whether you’re willing to do me a favor. It’s not an easy task I demand. It will require patience, stealth, and a complete lack of . . . shall we say? . . . moral squeamishness. Not to mention the other kind of squeamishness.” Oh dear. Surely there’s a better way to write that.

  The countess fills the rest of the session, at the end of which Phil asks how she’s holding up.

  “Bring it on.”

  “Great. Come back in an hour, we’ll do two to six?”

  She pops out into the cold glare of Avenue C. The recording studio is just below the Con Ed power plant. She heads south, through two blocks of linoleum eateries, then three blocks of chichi that seem to have sprouted since the last rain. Not many people out in the frigid wind. The sky is bright blue, the sunlight on the brick walls a pale flesh color. She passes a trio of young men, tattoos and earrings, an old woman tottering behind a dog, an underdressed man hunched in his jacket, Daily News under his arm. She loves the shortness of so many New Yorkers. “These are my people,” she announces, polishing her Polish accent. The nearly equal distribution of skin tones—does any other American city come close? English as a second or third language. Maria can’t decide if her café is Maria’s Cafe (awning) or Maria Cafe (window sign). The deli is Deli Corp on the front, Deli Corb on the side. Do they mean Deli Corpse? Deli Carbs? Everyone riding the subway together. Take that, heartless heartland Christians and Taliban crazies! She’s lived here for fourteen years, and she still can’t get past the gratitude, after growing up in a rural warren upstate where everyone was cottontail-white and scared of the world, and nothing ever happened, and nobody could distinguish, for their very lives, between shit and shinola.

  She decides on Happy Wok, orders the chicken and broccoli. She was raised on vegetarianism, but her father used it as a sword to separate the saved from the damned, and her mother literally prayed to plants and trusted herbal supplements to defeat, via satyagraha, her wholly operable breast cancer, dying like a blighted ash tree at fifty-one. Saskia still prefers vegetables, but the occasional meat tastes like freedom to her, a once-a-week feast of fuck you.

  She checks her messages while she eats. There’s a text from Quentin confirming he can meet her for dinner near his office at 6:30. Nothing from Mette, though Saskia texted her this morning, asking if she would pick up a few things on her way home. She tries again. eggs fruit bread? confirm or deny. There are two other customers in the Wok, both heads deep in the cybersand, thumbs wrestling. She closes her eyes and listens to the ghostly castanets. If she had read a scene like this ten years ago in a sci-fi novel, she’d have scoffed at the implausibility. Why would anyone who could leave a voice message prefer to laboriously type one?

  Back in the gray box at two, she’s an ace pilot (galaxy-class fighting skills, musky allure you could cut with a chainsaw), then a nihilistic laser weapons merchant (eyes full of dead, mouth full of shit), then the supercilious computerized doors of the Presidium Headquarters (refusing to open: “I . . . don’t think so,” or deigning to open: “Do wipe your feet, there’s a good supplicant”). Another four hours, another eight hundred dollars, yeah! She never perches on the stools, they’ll creak on your best take, and they’re always too high for her anyway. She moves the script stand out of striking range, plants her sneakers shoulder-width apart, speaks her lines with her eyes closed. It’s like being in an isolation tank. In her stage work, she has never liked elaborate sets. The more realistic they are, the faker they look. Hey, Vanya, have you noticed that every room in this crazy dacha is missing a fourth wall? Give her a dark stage, spotlights, props descending on wires. Hello, audience, it’s time to use our (jazz hands) imagination.

  This game, Dhark Rebellion, is the third installment of a franchise, so she’s seen the artwork in the previous iterations. It tends toward your standard sci-fi argon blue and spotless white gleam on the fascistic Torkan Alliance ships. The Dhark rebel bases vary, but they all trade on adolescent boys’ article of faith that the narrow way to coolness leads through the pigsty: gadgety junk shops, germy brothels brimming with attitude (still no male prostitutes), windblown alleys with abused trashcans and pouty denizens. The desert planet is out of Dune, the forest planet is Return of the Jedi minus the Ewok plus the whirling-dervish razory beasties from Edge of Tomorrow. The rebel spaceships look on the outside like arthropods and on the inside like decommissioned WWII battleships, with wires dangling from the ceilings and steel plates bolted randomly across walls and floors. There is always something not working, Millennium Falcon style, which is what drives a good fraction of the game, because the player needs a part, which sends him (82 percent are “him,” according to company research) into the junk shop, where he has to do a favor for the comic-relief android who runs it, which leads him down an alley, where he pulverizes a pouty denizen to get the key, which opens up the back room of the brothel, where the tong kingpin manages his empire, and no matter how the boy-wanderer plays this scene, a sumptuous feast of gunplay ensues.

  She knows this because four or five years ago, out of curiosity, she asked Mette to help her play the original Dhark Rebellion. She withstood it for three hours, while her daughter critiqued the graphics and occasionally emitted impatient comments such as, “You’re turned around again, you’ve tried to go out that door three times already,” or “Strafe left, you’re about to die; no, hold the button.”

  It was fascinating but kind of awful. After the first hour they ran into one of the characters she’d voiced, and for every line, of course, only one of her takes was used, and depending on how you navigated the dialogue, her readings sometimes didn’t mesh. A side creek, say, touching on reconciliation would feed back into a river of dismissive scorn. And the limitations of the programming were obvious. Plot choices were mainly illusory, since real deviations had to be extensively scripted. The small genuine freedom the game engine allowed was restricted to killing someone the game didn’t expect you to kill, which often resulted in nonsensical dialogue. “You’ll have to talk to Taggart about that.” Well, Idaho, since he’s lying at your feet with his head blown off, that’s gonna be a tough one.

  Yeah, she loves the voice work, but it’s not the game, it’s the dream in the gray box. With her eyes closed, the sets are not merely realistic, they’re real. The spaceship smells of ozone, and the artificial gravity varies nauseatingly from AG node to node. When the Alliance troops come aroun
d the corner, her body explodes with tingles of dread. So what if the line is cheesy? Cheesy lines are video verité when you’re a mite mining through a block of bleu. In her first-ever session, years ago, in a game called Infymy, she sent the script stand flying (she still remembers the line: “Let me . . . go!”). Phil tells her she claws, kneads, pummels the air. She has learned to wear a sleeveless cotton t-shirt that makes no noise no matter how she moves.

  End of the fourth hour. She’s getting punchy. Her last line of the day, prompted if the boy-wanderer opts to abandon the Hispanic cutie with the howitzer who’s helpful in a firefight, but will use up oxygen in the escape shuttle and thus reduce its range: “You . . . bastard.” Her cheap tricks are creeping in on little shit feet. That pause in the middle, that hitch of unbelief, timed so predictably you could schedule a train by it. Let’s face it, it’s all tricks. But keeping the tricks fresh, that’s the trick. Tricking yourself into believing they aren’t tricks.

  Six o’clock. “Thanks, Saskia,” Phil says. “Great day’s work. Tomorrow and Wednesday Tom’s in to do the Commander. How’s Thursday for you?”

  “I’ll have to check my busy—hey, lucky you, I’m free.”

  She drums down the stairs and out into the dhark, heading west toward Third Avenue. That CGI hottie was a younger Hispanic version of herself: short, hippy, breasty, kind of a Babylonian-fertility-figurine look, although the hottie had thicker hair, fuck her.

  So the boy-wanderer is abandoning her? She’s long suspected he was a weasel. She feels righteous rage. “You bastard!”

  She’s been wondering when he would grow a pair and betray her. She’s amused, contemptuous. “Youuu . . . bastard . . .”

  She taunts him with a bounce of her astonishing mammaries, accompanied by a noli me tangere smirk. “You . . . bas-tard!”

  She’s exultant, gleeful, at the chance to paint the walls of the launching bay with his teaspoon of brains. “Youuuu bastaard!!”

  She’s never suspected a thing. She loves him. She’s so stunned she can’t process what he’s saying. “You—bastard—”

  All men are snakes. Trusting them is a fool’s game. “You bastard.”

  There’s no morality. The universe is a hilarious playground for superbeings such as herself. “Youu! Bastaaard!”

  She’s arrived at a corner. She looks around. Broadway. Damn! Too far. She backtracks.

  Interesting that a lot of the fans seem to feel the same unhappiness at the limitations of gameplay that she does. She’s poked around on the Dhark wiki, where the characters are described as real people, complete with speculations about their pasts and their motives. The entry for a greedy brothel madam she voiced in Dhark Rebellion II said something like, “Angela Quikcustard runs the brothel in Iron City on Smilin’ Jack’s Moon. She came to Iron City in 2256. Some say she ran away from an abusive home on the Torkan home planet, others say she gained her cynical attitude toward life during a stint in the rebel army, in the disastrous Keyhole Nebula campaign of 2254.” Saskia remembered the character, but where did the abusive home come from, the experiences in the army?

  She’s also read some Dhark fanfiction. Most of it doesn’t involve any of her characters, which tend to be minor, but she did voice a ditzy blonde volcano-rim shack dweller in the first installment (she assumed the intended humor was the juxtaposition of her fetid quarters with her bubbleheaded lines, which she voiced in a Valley Girl drawl) who has turned out to be surprisingly popular in fan porn with a fuck-the-brainless-bitch-every-last-way theme, and inspired at least one actually not-bad story, in which the girl-wanderer (go 18 percent!) realized the blonde was speaking in code because her shack was bugged by the Presidium, and the code eventually led the two of them, now power sisters, to discover something or other, but what Saskia mainly remembers is the clever elaboration of the blonde’s lines so that they sounded both hilariously vacuous and pregnant with meaning.

  She finds it kind of marvelous, this fan love. Like most love—let’s not say “all,” shall we?—it’s a heroic effort of the imagination to turn a pedestrian object into something worthy of one’s . . . well, imagination. Thousands of fans gather around this inert mountain of clay, this crude giant’s form with Dhark incised on its forehead, and with a great collaborative heave they stand it on its feet, and with a great collaborative shout they awaken it, and then they bow down before it as though it had awakened them, its creatures.

  Corner again. Third Avenue, damn straight. Who says she’s got no sense of direction? She’s at 11th, the restaurant is just past 12th, a Thai place.

  Quentin’s not there yet. The room is pretty empty. They give her a window table so passersby will say, “Hey this place can’t suck too bad, there’s a really short woman in there.” It’s drafty near the door, but she’s worked on and off as a waitress for years, and customers who ask to be moved are a pain in the ass. She keeps her coat on.

  “Would you like anything while you wait?” Gorgeous slim girl with glossy raven tresses in a wine-red tunic with lotuses stitched in black. Actress, model, locked-away daughter of quaintly traditional owner?

  “Tea, please, thank you.”

  Houston to Mette. Do we have a problem?

  She looks up to see Quentin coming through the door.

  It’s ridiculous, but sometimes she’s still surprised to see him all grown up, in a dapper black wool coat with a leather satchel over his shoulder and black-framed glasses shaped like CD slots over his adorable blue eyes. He’s thirty-nine, for chrissake, but family myths are as hard to dislodge as ticks, maybe there are a few sugary drops of big-sis self-satisfaction she can still squeeze out of picturing him at seven, stumbling around pigeon-toed and clueless, letting drool gather on his chin, occasionally still wetting his bed. Maybe she misses having a boy who so nakedly needed her, so openly loved her. (I see our time is up, Saskia. See you next week.)

  “Pretty frigid out there, huh?”

  He comes over, glances at her coat and tea. “Aren’t you cold here?”

  “I’m fine; I like being by the window.”

  He shrugs off the satchel, unwinds a scarf, dips bilaterally out of his coat. He’s got a charcoal cardigan on over his olive buttondown. The lime tie is either intentionally bold, endearingly boy-blind, or ironic. He’s six feet tall, shaven, fit. He couldn’t look more adult if he tried.

  “How’s Annabelle?” she asks.

  “Sleeping better now. The walking tires her out, I think.”

  Annabelle is fourteen months. “And Marly?” Quentin’s wife, a social worker.

  Small talk, luscious waitress, apologies!, menu scan, luscious waitress redux. Quentin comically can’t keep his eyeballs from rolling all over her sleek surface.

  He works for a small architecture firm, finds most of what he does boring, but the partners count on him, will probably offer him a partnership in three more years, though he says he doubts he’ll accept. He’s tempted to launch out on his own with a friend from graduate school. He’s more settled and responsible than she’s ever managed to be.

  When did she stop calling him Quinnie? He started requesting it in his teens, never insisting, and it took her three or four years, she’s chagrined to recall, before she took the idea seriously. None of the rest of the family ever made the switch. To them, he was still the foggy, weepy boy, coming home with notes from school about homework he’d never done, which he seemed not to know he’d ever been assigned. The 1580 he got on his SATs at sixteen didn’t make so much as a golfball ding on the shiny bumper of the Quinnie Slowmobile the family loved driving around in.

  Half an hour of Annabelle news, for which Quentin keeps apologizing, but Saskia loves babies, misses the hell out of the seeming thirty-six hours during which Mette was a member of the tribe. In the old days, Quentin would have had snapshots to rock out of his wallet, but now he passes her his phone, and she tosses the glowing photos around like Tom Cru
ise conducting (literally!) an investigation in Minority Report. (The fact that she even notices this marks her, she’s pretty sure, as over-the-hill.) She hasn’t seen Annabelle in several weeks. “Oh my god, she’s adorable.” Embarrassed by the foam-mouthed avidity that Quentin can no doubt see in her glowing blue face, she retreats into self-mockery via Valley Girl channeling: “Ohmygawwd! Like—tcha!—I mean—ohmygawwd!”

  She hands the phone back. “Just send me the entire contents, OK?”

  The food arrived a while ago. Quentin is half done, she has hardly started. Her portions are too big, she’ll let Quentin vacuum. She’s switched from tea to hot water, something she discovered years ago. Great for the cords.

  “How’s Mette?” Quentin asks.

  “Oh, the usual.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Doing her own thing.”

  “She’s a fascinating young woman.”

  “That she is.”

  “I really like her.”

  She wishes Quentin wouldn’t say that. She wants Quentin to be special, and this is what Saskia’s friends always say. No, really, I do like her!

  “Well, she likes you.” She tries to remember if Mette has said word one about Quentin or anything remotely connected with Quentin in the past few weeks or, hell, ever. “She’s interested in that building that’s going up on whatever, you know—near Union Square, is it Fourth Avenue and something? With the copper panels.”

  “I know the one. Why’s she interested?”

  “She mostly doesn’t articulate to me her reasons for being interested in something.” Three or thirty months ago she emailed Saskia some photos she’d taken. Mostly close-ups of the panels, with streaks of reflected light, little dimples harboring distorted images, pools of darker color. Her caption said: get a load of these.