Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  I turned to look at her, her feet curled up on the couch, shoes kicked off under the coffee table. She looked comfortable and vulnerable all at once. I wondered how I looked to her, but she was staring at the floor.

  “Look,” I said, forcing the words past the catch in my throat. “I…I haven’t been a very good boyfriend. A very good partner, at least not lately. And I think…I want that to change.”

  She didn’t move, just kept her hand where it was and said softly, “Do you mean that?”

  I nodded and knew she could feel rather than see it. “I do. I don’t think I’m going to be terribly good at it, at least not at first, but if you’re willing…I mean, if you’re still willing to put up with me while I do it, I’d like to try.”

  For a few minutes, she didn’t say anything, just letting the credits scroll by. “What does that mean?” she finally asked, softly, as if she weren’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.

  “I don’t know.” I thought for a minute. “Figuring out what my life is outside the office, I guess, and paying more attention to it. To you.” A hesitation. “And maybe to stop making some bad choices that I’ve made.” The thought of confessing hovered at the back of my mind, but I shoved it firmly away. If this misadventure with Shelly was the kick in the ass I needed to get my life in order, then melodramatic confession struck me as a particularly stupid idea. Better to let it encourage me to do right by Sarah—by everyone, really—from now on than to have that one moment of catharsis and the resultant train wreck of consequences.

  And besides, that meant not having to tell her.

  “I guess…,” she said. “I guess I haven’t been entirely understanding about what you do or why you do it, either. Maybe we both have to bend a little, recognize that there are places where we’re just not going to overlap.” She shifted, and suddenly her head was in my lap and she was looking up at me. “I’d like to stay with you, Ryan. I’d like to make a life together with you. I think you’re worth it. I think what we have is worth it. If you don’t think so, now is the time to go.”

  “I think so,” I said, and leaned down to kiss her.

  Sarah blinked, once. “Is that all?”

  “And I’m sorry.”

  I kissed her again. Eventually, we went to bed. She never asked me what I was sorry for.

  * * *

  Sarah rarely snored, but she was snoring tonight. Light, soft, little lady-like snores; they escaped at regular, reassuring intervals. After a while, I started counting them; after I got to two hundred, I propped myself up on my elbow to watch her. She lay on her back, right arm flung dramatically above her head, left arm holding the covers in place instinctively over her breasts. Her hair was fanned out behind her, and her mouth was slightly open.

  Sleep had visited briefly after Sarah and I had consummated our renewed commitment to what we had together. I’d almost dropped off, the warmth of her next to me helping me to drift along, and then the next minute, my eyes snapped wide open. I was as wide awake as I’d been all day, a full three-cup-of coffee buzz.

  I lay there for an hour or so, doing my best not to move, to let myself waft back asleep. That had the opposite effect of the one intended, as the strain of not daring to move lest I wake Sarah proved to be more of an agitator than anything else.

  When watching her failed to soothe me, either, I decided enough was enough. Slowly, carefully, I hoisted myself out of bed. Shuffling steps took me across the bedroom and down the hall to my office. I shut the door and disconnected the speakers before I booted the system up, then sat down to check work email.

  Maybe, I decided, it would put me to sleep. And even if it didn’t, there was work to be done.

  * * *

  “You look tired,” Sarah said over breakfast. I nodded and buttered my freezer bagel. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Watched you sleep for a while, though,” I added around a mouthful of inauthentic bagel-shaped bread.

  She smiled at me. “That’s sweet, in a stalkerish kind of way.” With professional precision, she pulled the bag out of her teacup at precisely five minutes, then drained it and set it on the side of her plate. Two sips, and she looked at me again. “I had some weird dreams last night. Did you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t even remember when I fell asleep.” There was an expectant pause, and I realized I was supposed to ask her what she’d dreamed about. “What were your dreams like?”

  “I don’t know,” she said pensively, fiddling with her cup without drinking anything. “I guess that story you told me about that thing you thought you saw the other night. You know, with Terry,”—she parsed the words precisely, making sure she didn’t add any credence to what I’d said or seen—“got in my head a little bit. I dreamed about your ghost.”

  “You did?” I felt myself shifting, sitting more upright. “What was the dream like?”

  She shook her head, as if she were trying to shake the memory loose, or out. “There was just this woman…ghost…thing. I was in bed, and you weren’t there, but there was a dent in the blanket where you were supposed to be. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, and we just…talked.”

  “Talked?” I felt a dozen questions rise up in my throat and choked them all down. “That’s way up there on the weird-meter.”

  “I guess.” Another sip of tea, and she made a face before dumping a spoonful of Splenda in it. “She seemed very, I don’t know, serious. And possessive. About you.” Abruptly, she reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “But it was just a dream, and I shouldn’t worry about it.”

  I detached my hand long enough to put the half-eaten bagel on the plate, then wove my fingers through hers. It was entirely sensible, after all, for her to dream about things we’d talked about. Blue Lightning had shown no real ability to do anything like appear outside the office, to manifest in dreams, to do anything other than sashay around the office and muck about with the electronics.

  No. It was just a dream. “Just a dream,” I repeated out loud, as much for my benefit as for Sarah’s. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Sarah smiled at me. “I know. I’m not worried. It was just strange to dream about that.”

  “I can imagine.” I gripped her fingers tighter, and she squeezed back. Then, hating myself, I asked, “Do you remember anything you talked about with her?”

  She scrunched her face up cutely and thought about it for a second. “All I remember,” she finally said, “was one sentence. I think she said, ‘We’re not finished with each other.’”

  “Weird,” I said, and nodded, and didn’t say anything else for the rest of breakfast.

  * * *

  I checked my appointment calendar before heading to work. The morning was clear of meetings; the first one wasn’t up until one. I’d be meeting with Michelle and some of the level artists to talk about concepts for original multiplayer maps that we’d potentially be adding. BlackStone had politely sent a request to Eric that we investigate producing content unique to the versions of the game we were doing. This polite request was being treated as the strict marching order everyone knew it was. The meeting, then, was to allow us to walk through the proposed content to see which maps could be done within time, budget, manpower constraints, and the vagaries of good gameplay.

  Until then, my time was my own to try to catch up on stuff that had started to slide yesterday. There were a dozen docs to update, a presentation to BlackStone to start working on, and a massive spreadsheet of proposed text strings for the game that I needed to double-check to make sure they were in actual English. I decided to start with the spreadsheet when I got in and to work from there. It seemed the best use of my time.

  At quarter of one, I was still staring at the spreadsheet. I’d looked at maybe thirty rows of text, changed two of them, and spent the rest of the time brooding over whether I’d infected Sarah with a particularly vicious strain of hallucination. When someone knocked on my door, it was a relief. I nearly knocked my coffee mug off
my desk in my eagerness to get up.

  “Come in,” I called out, steadying the teetering mug with one hand.

  Leon shoved the door open, looked around, and stood there. “You sure? I thought I heard something banging around in here.”

  “Just me being a lamer,” I said. “You know, you’re the first person down to see me today?”

  “Really.” He gave a low whistle, impressed. “Normally you gotta beat ‘em off with a stick to get anything done.”

  “I know.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s just my lucky day.”

  “Beats me, man. All I know is that every time one of my guys talks about coming down here or shooting you an email, they end up talking themselves out of it. It’s like you got bad vibes or something.”

  “Or something,” I agreed. “You want to get some lunch?”

  “It’s why I came to see you,” He looked back and forth, as if to check if anyone else were on the hallway and might overhear him. “Besides, you kinda look like you need to talk to somebody.”

  I’d already grabbed my keys. “Or to get talked to?”

  Leon looked down at his shoes. “Maybe that too, yeah.” A second later, he looked back at me and his face brightened. “Burgers at Jonesy’s?”

  I had to laugh. “Burgers at Jonesy’s,” I said, and followed him out.

  Chapter 23

  “How’s Sarah?” Leon asked across the table. He didn’t look up as he asked, instead choosing to fiddle with his multiply-layered, cheese drenched, bacon-warded, BBQ-sauce-doused burger. As I watched, he somehow managed to lard it up with two layers of cross-hatched French fries. A spiral of ketchup from a squeeze bottle finished it to his satisfaction, and he slammed the bun back down. “Ah, perfection.”

  “That’s kind of gross,” I told him, picking absently at my chicken tenders. They’d been left in the deep fryer too long and had acquired a distinctly chewy, leathery consistency. Jonesy’s was one of the office defaults for lunch, but that was due more to proximity and price than the quality of the cuisine. At other tables, I could see coworkers digging in with various degrees of gusto. Terry and his little cabal were hunched over in one corner. They’d scowled when I waved at them, which was all the encouragement I needed to pretend they weren’t there at all.

  “Naah, it’s great.” As if to lend weight to his words, he tucked in with a serious two-fisted chomp. Bits of fry dangled from his mouth as he put the garnished burger back down on his plate. “Mrrrfmm yrrrfummm dddrrrr nnnn.”

  I ripped off a strip of chicken with my teeth and winced. “I beg your pardon?”

  Leon wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then wiped the back of his hand with his napkin. “I said, it’s European style. They like fries on their actual burgers. In a pita, even.”

  “Remind me of that fascinating fact the next time I get the yen for a burger in Paris.” I took another bite of chicken. “And Sarah’s fine, but I think she’s fighting off a cold. She was sniffling and sneezing this morning.”

  Leon nodded sagely. “Everyone’s getting sick. By this time next week, the team rooms are gonna be ghost towns. Either that, or someone’s gonna be puking in every single one of them.”

  I threw a fry at him, which he ducked. “Nobody’s ever thrown up in the office.”

  He caught the fry and ate it, grinning. “What about Hector back in April? He puked pretty good.”

  Shaking my head in disbelief, I raised another French fry menacingly but thought better of it before launch. “Hector,” I pointed out, “had been mixing energy drinks, chocolate cake, and whisky all night. Any two of those combined would be enough to make most humans vomit, let alone all three.”

  “Hex isn’t human. He’s a network engineer.”

  “Good point,” I said, and tapped my forehead with a couple of fingers in a salute. “But I still blame the booze.”

  Leon tried to look indignant and failed. There was too much of a smile behind his shocked expression for it to hold. “You’re just saying that because you made it outside before you unloaded.”

  I pushed my plate away. “Well, I’m enjoying this lunch. How about you?”

  “Sorry, man,” he mumbled, taking another bite of burger. “Oh. That reminds me. When’s our next leads meeting?”

  Arm’s length was the right distance away for my food, I decided, and I made no effort to close the gap. Instead, I sipped my Diet Coke and put on my best thoughtful face. “I don’t know, Leon. I keep on scheduling them and Michelle keeps on opting out because she’s got something else to do.”

  “Yeah. It’s weird.” Another two bites of burger disappeared, messily. Strings of cheese dripped out of the bun and pooled on his plate. “Ddddumm gummmm hrrrmmm annnummm fummm?”

  “What?” I asked, exasperated. “Oh, wait, I know. Mumm fumm yumm lumm dumm.”

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down furiously. I was reminded of nature shows where a snake caught something a little too big for it but wouldn’t give up the meal without a fight.

  “Ha ha, very funny.” He stared at the burger remnants in his hand but thought better of digging in again. “What he said was, did you guys have another fight.”

  “Oh.” I sipped at my drink, which was already at the “mostly empty” stage. Crackling noises echoed up my straw. “Why do you ask?”

  “I dunno.” He set his lunch down. The bun was no longer structurally sound. Half-eaten French fries spilled out in all directions. “You guys haven’t talked today, you don’t IM, and every time someone mentions your name she looks like she’s gonna be sick. Other than that, I got nothing.”

  I looked at my empty glass, then reluctantly moved it to the edge of the table. “OK, you’ve got me,” I sighed. “Yeah, we had a little fight. Hopefully it won’t hurt the project too much.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s great. The creative director and the art lead aren’t talking, and that’s not going to hurt the project? Whatever you did, man, you gotta apologize.”

  For an instant, I thought about saying something like, “Yeah, you’re right, I never should have screwed her,” just to see the look on his face. Then the moment passed, and the well-intentioned badgering didn’t rankle quite as much. I reached for the chicken to buy time to think of what to say.

  “So, have you seen it again?” Leon asked when I was mid-chew.

  I gulped, then reflexively said, “Her.”

  “Her?” He gave me a look of frank disbelief. “I mean, it’s got boobs, but that don’t make it a her.”

  “It’s a her,” I said. “I’ve talked to her. It’s the game.”

  “It ain’t Salvador. She don’t got a moustache.” He jabbed the air with a grease-soggy French fry to make his point.

  “Not Salvador,” I said irritably. “Blue Lighting. It’s Blue Lightning.”

  “Huh.” He popped the fry in his mouth and chewed it contemplatively. “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “OK, then. What’s she want?”

  I looked at him as he pulled a few more fries up from the plate and stuffed them into his mouth. “You’re really taking this awfully well, you know.”

  “Like you said, man, what else are we gonna do? It’s a situation. We find a solution. Ain’t no different from trying to figure out that pathing issue we had last week.”

  “I guess you’re right.” I tried to force down another bite of chicken strip and couldn’t. “So. To answer your question, yes, I’ve seen her. More than once. She talked to me, once, when there was no one else around.”

  “Ah.” He thought about it for a minute. “I’ve seen something that might be it…her. I think. It’s hard to say.”

  “I think she’s focusing on me these days.” As the waitress swung by, I waved for the check. She nodded and swirled back into the distance.

  Leon smirked. “Terry can’t be happy about that.”

  “I could give three shits what makes Terry happy. Is he getting his ass back on track?”

  “Hones
tly?” There was some introspective chewing. “Not so much. But I live in hope.”

  “Someone has to, I guess.” I checked the time on my phone. “We’d better start thinking about getting back.”

  Leon didn’t bother to stop eating. “Clock on the wall says you’ve got twenty minutes before the map concept review meeting. What’s your rush?”

  Because it’s really uncomfortable sitting across the table from the friend whose girlfriend I just nailed, I thought but didn’t say. “I just want to make sure I’ve got all my notes ready,” I told him instead.

  “You don’t bring notes to a meeting like that. You take notes.” He chuckled to himself, then polished off the rest of the burger in two bites. There was a tricky moment when it looked like he’d have to unhinge his lower jaw to get the meal down, but it passed, and after a moment he patted his gut. “Ah. Cheeburger, cheeburger, man. Nothing like it to fuel a man for a day of meetings.”

  “Heh.”

  Our waitress, who looked like she was about fourteen, dropped the check off at roughly the midpoint of the table. I grabbed it, a half-second before Leon’s hand hit the table with a meaty smack. “I’ve got this one, man,” I told him. “You got last time.”

  “No, you got last time,” he corrected. “And the two times before that, now that I think on it. Not that I’m complaining. But it’s cool, Ryan. You don’t have to get it every time.”

  “Let me grab it today, and you can get it next time,” I said, feeling deeply uncomfortable about the whole thing. “I promise.”

  He gave me a look that was mostly unreadable. “OK, man. But ease off on the intensity pills. You’re starting to freak me out a little.”

  “Sorry,” I said, reaching for a credit card. I stuck it with the check and waved it in what looked like the waitress’ general direction. “It’s just….”

  “Just what?” He blinked. “You’re not quitting, are you? Don’t tell me you’re quitting, and buying me lunch is your way of saying goodbye, ‘cause you know you won’t be around for me to get the next one. Oh, you are such an asshole!”