Cure for the Common Universe

by Christian McKay Heidicker

  My phone vibrated again.

  Ur dead to us.

  I smiled. For the first time in years, I didn’t give a damn about the Wight Knights. Or Arcadia. I had just performed a miracle.

  Then again, maybe I could get in one last game before I started preparing for my date.

  The Xterra was still pretty dirty. I had only managed to clean the front half, and I was out of tokens. Screw it. Casey could stand to have the ass-end of her vehicle speckly for a few days.

  On the drive home I couldn’t stop smiling. I imagined making Serena laugh over and over again while we dined at Mandrake’s. I’d have to find something nice to wear. That was for sure. Should I get my crack waxed? Did people actually do that? If so, where? And was there something the waxer could sign that declared that if they ever saw me in public, like on a date at Mandrake’s, they’d have to pretend not to recognize me? The back and shoulder wax was a must. Serena was worth it, I just knew. But what if during the date I bent over to pick up her dropped fork or something and my shirt came up and she saw that I was basically an overfed Hobbit? Could I lose about thirty pounds by Thursday? Probably not. But she didn’t seem to care about my weight.

  Did she?

  Would she have said yes if she did?

  Probably not.

  Would she?

  I took a deep breath and smiled. I thought I had four whole days to think about these things.

  Turned out I had about four minutes.

  Loading . . .

  When I got home, two tanklike Tongan men were standing in the driveway.

  My dad stood between them.

  He was holding a suitcase. My suitcase.

  I parked in the street, and was about to get out when Casey walked out of the garage, pushing my computer chair. She left it at the curb and then headed back inside without making eye contact.

  All thoughts of getting my crack waxed vanished when I saw one of the tanks point at me and ask, “That him?”

  My dad nodded.

  I shut off the engine. My heart started to pound, and not in a pleasant, Serena way. I didn’t get out of the Xterra. I didn’t unlock the doors. I didn’t know what was happening, but whatever it was couldn’t be good. The sun started to bake the air-conditioning away.

  My dad walked up and rapped on the passenger window. “Come on out here, Jaxon. So we can talk.”

  Before my dad retired, they called him the Mountain. Not because of his stature but because he would plant himself in people’s living rooms and refuse to budge until he’d made a sale.

  I glanced at the tanks, who cast ominous shadows on the driveway. I didn’t move. My dad tried the handle.

  “Tell me what’s happening through the window,” I said, my voice wavering, “and I’ll decide if I’m going to get out or drive away.”

  My dad signaled to the tanks, who stepped in front of and behind the Xterra, blocking me in. I pressed into my seat.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me through the window, and I’ll decide if I’m going to commit vehicular manslaughter.”

  “You’re going to rehab,” my dad said.

  “I’m what?”

  “You’re going to re—”

  “I heard what you said.” I rolled down the passenger window, just a crack so that my dad’s hand couldn’t get through. “What am I supposedly addicted to?”

  “Video games.”

  I was too stunned to speak for a second.

  “Video game rehab? That can’t be a real thing.”

  “It’s real,” my dad said in his maddeningly calm voice. “And you’re going.”

  I gripped the steering wheel and tried to gather my thoughts.

  Did I play a lot of video games? Yes. Did I love them and believe they were the fastest-growing medium that was quickly approaching a golden age that would transform the world for the better forever? Yes.

  Was I addicted to them?

  No. No, I was not.

  “You can’t be addicted to video games,” I said. “It’s a compulsion.”

  Casey came out of the garage holding two handfuls of wires. Even in the heat of the sun, my skin ran cold. The wires were from my computer. My window to adventure . . . to my friends. Casey was dismantling it.

  She dumped the wires into her Jetta’s open trunk, next to my monitor. Then she finally looked at me. “We’re selling your computer and buying a treadmill,” she called.

  “Can you hold off on that for a minute, sweetie?” my dad said.

  She made a show of brushing her hands clean and went and leaned against the porch. At least she’d stopped marching in place.

  “An addiction is a compulsion,” my dad said.

  “No,” I said, trying to keep the tremors from my voice. “It isn’t.” My dad and I had had the video game argument dozens of times. I’d done my research. “You stop doing a compulsion if something good comes into your life.” I thought of Serena’s laugh. “With an addiction, you can’t stop, no matter how much you want to. Like alcohol.” I looked at Casey and yelled, “Or organic cottage cheese!”

  She glared. My dad ignored that comment.

  “I’ve been timing how long you spend in that room of yours. Every time I hear things start to blow up and die—”

  “I don’t just play violent video games,” I interrupted.

  “You know what I mean,” my dad said. “Every time your stepmother or I hear anything that sounds like a game, we start a timer. You have clocked—” He took a little piece of graph paper out of his back pocket. “You’ve clocked more than two hundred and fifty hours in the last month alone. That’s more than a full-time job.”

  I tried to hide my own shock at that number and attempted another approach.

  “Dad.” I looked him dead in the eye. “I can’t go to rehab right now.”

  “You absolutely can and will.”

  “You don’t understand. I just met a girl.”

  My dad narrowed his eyes. “Where?”

  “At the car wash,” I said. “That’s why the Xterra’s still dirty. I used the money to clean her bike.”

  He glanced at the spotty back end of the Xterra, then back at me. “What’s her name?”

  “Serena. She had a Schwinn. Purple.”

  The Mountain didn’t budge. “Show me her number on your phone.”

  Shit. Why did my new girlfriend have to be a Luddite?

  My hands didn’t leave the steering wheel.

  “Facebook?” my dad said.

  I shook my head, and he gave a smile that seemed a touch more satisfied than disappointed.

  A fear took me then. What if Serena had just pretended not to have a phone or Facebook?

  No. No. I’d made her laugh.

  Still, this conversation was spinning dangerously into unbelievable territory. I hadn’t had a date since I’d started living under my dad’s roof. Or . . . ever. Serena was the first good thing to come into my life in a long while. She was the great hope, the light at the end of the tunnel, the end game, my Call of Duty. . . . Only, I wasn’t going to shoot her.

  “You always want to discuss things like adults,” I said. “Let’s discuss this.”

  The tank in front of me heard this and rested his foot on the bumper. The Xterra dipped under his weight.

  “Don’t let him talk you out of anything!” Casey called from the porch. “Dr. Phil said do not let them negotiate! You just have to get him down there!”

  My dad glanced back at her, then at me. He may have been a tough old bastard, but he could be reasonable sometimes.

  “All right,” he said to me. “I don’t know how adult you are, hiding in the car, but all right. Let’s discuss this.”

  I gripped the steering wheel, quickly trying to formulate my talking points. We may have had this argument dozens of times before, but this time was different. This time he had two guards the size of refrigerators, and I . . . I had a date on Thursday. My suitcase sat in the driveway. Clearly rehab wouldn’t be an overnight stay.
/>   My dad stood tall, feet firmly planted. “You gonna tell me you don’t play too many video games?”

  “No,” I said. He had me beat there. He even had a piece of graph paper. “I’m going to ask you what’s wrong with video games.”

  “Well,” my dad said, leaning against the Xterra, “you’re not getting any exercise, for one. You never do anything your stepmother or I ask you to. You—”

  “Dad. Dad. I asked you what’s wrong with video games.”

  He sighed. “Violence,” he said, like it was obvious. “World’s a lot more violent than when I was younger. Now that kids can simulate killing each other, they want to try it in real life.”

  “Riiiiiiight,” I said. “’Cause they didn’t have any violence when you were a kid. Except, y’know, Vietnam. Or how about Korea, before that? We can keep going back if you’d like. Hitler never played video games.”

  My dad nodded. “You can’t ignore that kid who ran his dad down with the car.”

  The incident had made national news. But instead of the media focusing on a number of other factors that could have caused the kid’s violent outburst—bad living environment, bullying, depression—they focused on the fact that his dad had just taken away his copy of Halo.

  “I was joking about the vehicular manslaughter,” I said, gesturing to the tank in front of the Xterra.

  My dad rubbed the back of his neck. “You might not go out and hurt anyone. But what good are those games doing you?”

  “Hand-eye coordination,” I said.

  “You seem to have missed the whole back half of the Xterra here.”

  “They’re good for learning how to code.”

  “I haven’t seen any Java manuals in your room.”

  “They’re better for the environment than a lot of hobbies.”

  “So is running.”

  “I could make millions as an Esports player.”

  “Where’s the check?”

  “Online games help break down international borders.”

  “By fighting?”

  “They help people from different countries understand each other.”

  “By calling each other ‘bitch’?”

  “That’s a term of endearment!”

  I collapsed onto the steering wheel. I had never imagined my romantic future would hang on a single video game debate.

  I sat upright and snapped. “Games can help kids overcome dyslexia, and they help old people become better drivers.”

  My dad smiled. “It’s a good thing I’m not raising an elderly person who can’t read.”

  My head fell back onto the steering wheel. My jaw trembled at the thought that I was going to lose the first shot I’d ever had with a real girl. The ironic thing was that I was only having this argument so I could go on a date and have a good excuse to not play so many video games.

  “Son,” my dad said, his Mountain voice crumbling a bit. “You’re just not living up to your potential. I’d rather see you go out and fail in the real world than succeed in a world that doesn’t exist. I’m not seeing any skills in you that you didn’t have before your mom bought you that machine.”

  It was a Nintendo Wii. She had bought it for me the first Christmas after my parents divorced. In the card, she’d written:

  Your dad is going to hate this.

  But I hope you love it.

  XO,

  Mom

  “Dad . . . it’s not like I can play so many video games that I throw up on the carpet and lose consciousness for two days.”

  He sighed. “This is not a conversation about your mother.”

  “I’m not the one who brought her up.”

  We stared into each other’s eyes, trying to reach something deeper. I broke contact and clicked the turn signal left, then right, and then left again.

  “I’ve tried reasoning with you,” my dad said. “I’ve tried getting you out in the world. So has your stepmother. I don’t have any other options.”

  “And if I really did meet a girl, Dad? Wouldn’t you want me to go out with her and start something healthy in my life? Something that could get me away from games?”

  My dad hesitated for a second. His eyebrows relaxed. My heart gave a little leap of hope.

  Casey shouted from the porch. “What are you letting him tell you? Do not listen. It is time to go!”

  I scowled at her. “You know she plays Candy Crush, right?”

  My dad refurrowed his eyebrows and took up his Mountain stance again.

  Dammit.

  “Do you remember that time you promised me you’d stopped playing Warcraft and gave me the copy of your game?”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Yeah.”

  I’d let him take the disc because he hadn’t known the game was already downloaded to my computer. He caught me playing five minutes later.

  “Guess I don’t have much reason to trust you, then.”

  “Dad, this is different. This girl is real. And she thinks I’m great for some reason.”

  “Think how impressed she’ll be with your new skills when you come home.”

  The driver door popped open, and a hand seized my elbow. The tank from behind the Xterra gently but firmly pulled me out of the Xterra and into the sun.

  I looked at my dad. “He had the spare key the whole time?”

  “I didn’t want you to think I don’t respect your opinion,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “You just wanted me to think my opinion mattered to you before you had me dragged away.”

  The other tank retrieved my suitcase from the driveway while the first led me to a copper-colored Oldsmobile on the other side of the street. He spread my arms and then gave me a thorough pat-down and emptied my pockets, handing my wallet, iPhone, and fingernail clippers over to my dad.

  “Have fun!” Casey called, waving from the porch.

  She went inside and slammed the door.

  That was it. I was cast out of Arcadia. No more Caligari District. No more goblin carnival. No more pastel spaceships soaring us to other universes to enlist anthropomorphic fighters. No more adventures with the Wight Knights.

  That was when I realized . . . when I thought of Serena, I didn’t care about video games.

  One of the tanks opened the back door of the Oldsmobile.

  My dad held out his hand to me. I didn’t take it.

  “What?” I said. “You think I’m going to go off and learn some valuable life lesson and then come back and be the perfect son who treats your child bride better?”

  “Actually,” my dad said, still holding out his hand, “I’m hoping you come back and treat yourself better.”

  “You’re an asshole, Dad,” I said. “And I don’t mean that as a term of endearment.”

  “Okay, Jaxon.” He gave me a flat smile and put his hand in his pocket. “Good luck.”

  The tank lowered my head into the Oldsmobile and shut the door.

  Tutorial

  Two rules,” the tank in the driver’s seat said. “Don’t swear and don’t say nothing about the music.” He tossed a granola bar into my lap. “Tell me if you need to use the bathroom.”

  He started the engine and the car filled with gospel music. Elvis gospel music.

  “You saw me crying in the chaaaaaaaaapellllllll . . .”

  The other tank climbed into the passenger seat and sighed. Apparently he had to follow the rules too.

  “They call me Command and him Conquer,” the driver said. As if they weren’t intimidating enough.

  From the backseat I noticed that Command kept his poofy hair tied back in a neat bun, while Conquer let his roam free. Conquer also had a much bigger equator. They looked strong enough to tame a rabid ox, let alone my weak ass. I wouldn’t be able to escape them if I tried. Besides, the backseat had no door handles.

  “We got one more pickup,” Command said, throwing the gear into drive.

  The car rolled forward. My stomach took a moment to catch up.

  My dad waved from the porch.
I looked away.

  While Elvis sang another song—“With arms wide oooooooopeeeeeennnnnn”—Command drove east to the rich side of Salt Lake. We pulled up to a three-story house with dozens of windows. Command climbed out of the Oldsmobile and knocked on the front door. A pretty woman with sad eyes answered, and they went inside.

  The car cooled and made ticking noises. I surveyed the neighborhood. If I could leap over the front seat and out the driver’s side door before Conquer clamped on to my ankle, maybe I could get a running head start and hide behind the shrubbery. After he and Command gave up the search, I’d walk downtown and camp at Mandrake’s, sleeping in their alcove, washing up in the bathroom, and working on my charming conversation with the waitresses until my date on Thursday. Hopefully they’d have some after-dinner mints.

  I had nothing to lose. I would bolt in three . . . two . . .

  “You thinking about escaping?”

  Conquer adjusted the rearview mirror to meet my eyes.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They all do.” He chuckled and stretched. “This ain’t no video game.”

  The tension uncoiled in my legs. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

  A minute later Command exited the house, leading a skinny kid with tattoo sleeves.

  “The hell?” Conquer said under his breath.

  I may have been suffering from gamer’s squint, but this kid looked like he’d just been pulled out of an iron lung. It seemed the only thing preventing him from falling dead in the driveway was Command’s supporting hand.

  Command opened the backseat door, and the kid slumped in next to me. His head was shaved, his ears gauged, and his arms writhed with homemade tattoos—frayed wires spitting electricity. The kid looked like an electric warlock . . . with only one hit point left.

  “Two rules.”

  Command repeated the business about swearing and music and then tossed another granola bar over his shoulder. It hit the kid in the chest, but he didn’t even flinch. His dark eyes, slumped head, and drooping lip made me briefly reconsider my argument that it was impossible to be addicted to video games.

  Briefly.

  “So,” I said. “What are you in for?”

  The kid was already asleep.

  Command pulled onto the freeway, and we headed west, across the tracks, and through the industrial side of town. Soon the city gave way to salt flats, and the pit in my stomach deepened. Just as an Arcadia character steps on an ill-rendered piece of ground, slips through the game’s polygons, and hurtles into the black unknown, I was falling through the world. My beautiful fantasy world of trumpets, dancing buildings, and cotton candy skies was being replaced with the pant of air-conditioning, the slimy feeling of vinyl against the back of my neck, and—“Hrr . . . Hrrmph . . .”—the smell of vomit every time we stopped to let the electric tattoo kid throw up.