Cure for the Common Universe

by Christian McKay Heidicker

  “Home’s fine,” I said, sniffing.

  Meeki scoffed. “Yeah, ’cause you get to save imaginary princesses all day.”

  “You know,” Fezzik said, stroking his chin, “you and Meeki remind me a lot of each other. It’s like she’s your Dark Link. Or, sorry, that’s racist. You’re each other’s Dark Link. . . . Okay, okay, enough with the glares. You guys are going to set me on fire. Heh-heh.”

  Meeki and I were too appalled to even look at each other.

  “Aurora!” Fezzik said. “You’ve opened up about many things these past few weeks. Your eating. The obsessions that hurt your fingers. But we haven’t quite gotten to the root of it. And now you’re almost a fourth tier.”

  Beneath her white hair, Aurora’s eyes were closed, like she was astral projecting or something. “Can I talk about it in narwhal?”

  “That sounds interesting,” Fezzik said. “But no.”

  Aurora took a long moment, and then with a deep breath tucked her hair behind both ears in a single motion.

  “I’m serving someone else’s sentence,” she said. “Max, um, my boyfriend, loves playing Arcadia. He never wanted me to play with him because he didn’t want his friends thinking he was a . . . pussy for playing with his girlfriend who sucks at games.”

  Fezzik didn’t deduct points for her using the p word. He only listened.

  I shifted in my seat. I’d said something similar to one of the Wight Knights about his girlfriend once.

  Okay, I’d said the exact same thing.

  “Max started ignoring me,” Aurora said. “I’d come over to his house, and he wouldn’t even look at me when I came into his room. Just say, ‘Hey, babe.’ Or ‘In the middle of a game.’ After a while he didn’t even bother with those anymore.” She picked at her fingers. “He was a lot different when we first went out. He bought me flowers and took me to dinner, and was happy with snuggling up with me all night, talking. I thought those days might come back. So I read fantasy books on his bed while he played games. And I waited.”

  For the first time in guild therapy, I was really paying attention. What the hell was Max’s problem? Why would anyone want to play video games all day if they had a girlfriend? I would never do that.

  “It got worse,” Aurora said. Her hair slowly found its way back over her face. “One time I walked all the way to his house, but he didn’t answer his door. I knew he could get distracted when he started playing, so I sat on his lawn and kept calling him and texting him.”

  Airports flashed through my head. I bent forward, holding my stomach.

  “It was cold out,” Aurora continued, “so I tried all his windows, and finally slipped in through the kitchen. I went into his room. . . . He didn’t even look up. I asked if he’d gotten my calls, and he said no, even though his phone was sitting right next to his keyboard. He seemed really tense, so I went up to rub his shoulders, and his character just happened to die right then.” Aurora pulled her right leg into her lap and held her foot. “He made a really mad sound and pushed back hard, and his chair rolled over my pinky toe. It hurt, but I tried not to show it. He said he was sorry and got me some ice and kissed my toe, but then said that it was kind of my fault for distracting him . . . and he went right back to playing.”

  She exhaled, making her hair briefly drift off her face. “So I got the game. I got on Max’s server and made my own character. Anytime he didn’t want to hang out with me in the real world, I played Arcadia. I just wanted to be with him. Even if it was only his avatar. Even if he didn’t know it was me.”

  All eyes were fixed on Aurora. It dawned on me that everyone else in that circle had created an avatar to pretend they were someone different in a fantasy world, but Aurora had done it to pretend like she was a different person in the real world. What was she doing in V-hab?

  “Max played a lot of Arcadia,” she said. “So I played a lot of Arcadia. Hours and hours a day for months. My parents sent me here because they thought I was addicted to a game. But really, I was just addicted to Max.”

  We were all quiet for a bit. Then Fezzik started clapping. Meeki and Soup joined in, and I slowly followed. Aurora disappeared behind her hair.

  “Thanks for sharing, Aurora,” Fezzik said.

  Aurora shook her head. “I feel bad about being here. Wasting my parents’ money even though I’m not addicted to games.”

  “I don’t think you’re wasting it at all,” Fezzik said.

  He spent the next hour leading the group in a discussion about how women are misrepresented and mistreated in video games.

  “I’ll bet Scarecrow’s a part of GamerGate,” Meeki said.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Aurora’s story.

  How could pretty girls feel lonely?

  What was wrong with Max?

  How could he be so stupid?

  The woodpecker pecked for dinner.

  “All right, adventurers,” Fezzik said. “Thank you all for opening up”—he looked at Zxzord in the bunks—“or sleeping.” We all laughed, as if Aurora’s story had brought us together a little. “After dinner I want you all to take some personal time and think about what we’ve talked about until lights-out.”

  As we walked to the Feed, Soup let his head fall against my arm.

  I waited a whole seven seconds before I knocked it back.

  World Map

  I was dreaming of rainbow racetracks looping through space, when someone shook my bed.

  “Dammit, Soup,” I said, eyes still closed.

  “It’s Fezzik.”

  I jerked upright. I expected the dunes in the window to blaze with morning light, but they reflected moonlight instead. It was ten p.m. I’d been asleep for thirty minutes.

  “Congratulations, adventurer,” Fezzik said. “You’ve unlocked star class.”

  “Really? Rad.” I rubbed my eyes. “How many points is it worth?”

  “Five thousand. But you should be more excited about what the Silver Lady has to teach you.” He gave the bed another jostle. “C’mon. Aurora and Meeki already headed up.”

  Even though I felt exhausted right down to my bone marrow, I stumbled out of bed. Star class would bring my point gap down to three thousand.

  In the corner of the Nest, Soup said, “Hmph.”

  “Sorry, Soup,” Fezzik said, opening the door. “This is the cost of purposefully losing points. You stay a first tier.”

  Soup grumped. Relieved, I waved good-bye and noticed he had a cross-stitch in his lap of what might have been a car wash. Sweet. It looked like the last 3,000 points might earn themselves.

  Video Horizons was dark and green from the glowing exit lights. Our footsteps echoed down the corridor. Fezzik was not his usual jolly self. He was quiet. I assumed it was because of my performance with the Ping-Pong ball. If I was going to keep earning therapy points, I needed to get back in the guild leader’s good graces.

  I scuffed my feet along the concrete. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About warriors and wizards and healers and all that stuff, and . . . you’re right. I should work with my guild more.”

  “Everyone likes a well-balanced party,” Fezzik said.

  He seemed distracted, nervous even. He kept rubbing the back of his neck and clearing his throat. That was when I noticed he was clean shaven and wearing the most dapper attire one could find at a big ’n’ tall store. I relaxed a little. Maybe his silence wasn’t about me after all.

  In the western corridor Fezzik took out a set of keys and opened a yellow door onto a staircase. As we climbed, I grew kinda excited. Not in a points way, but in an adventure sort of way. I’d completed the first level of a dungeon and was about to emerge onto . . . what? Something mysterious. Something new.

  Fezzik’s ass in my face kind of broke the spell.

  At the top of the stairs, Fezzik opened another door, and a desert wind rushed over us. We stepped onto the roof.

  As a gamer, I had gazed on breaktaking skies—Skyrim with its endless constellations, W
oW with its smoldering horizons, Halo with its galactic ring. But I’d never seen the real sky look like this. Out in the desert, beyond the streetlamps, porch lights, headlights, and computer screens, the stars could throw their light all the way to Earth. Thousands glimmered in the crisp, dry air, and the sand dunes bowed before them, blue with reverence.

  I realized that if I had someone to share the grandeur of the universe with, I could leave those video game skies behind.

  A handful of players watched the stars through telescopes. I recognized a few Sefs and Meeki. And what night sky would be complete without the lunatic light of Aurora’s white hair?

  “No Master Cheefs?” I asked Fezzik.

  “A couple of them tried jousting with the telescopes and were banned from the roof for a week.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  The door creaked open, and the players hushed as the Silver Lady, the Sefiroths’ guild leader, stepped onto the roof. She was so thin and her hair was so light, she resembled a ray of star shine herself.

  Fezzik rushed over to hold open the door for her.

  Ah. So that’s how you keep the Emperor out of Arcadia.

  The players sat on lawn chairs as the Silver Lady stepped onto a pedestal, the North Star shining above her.

  “Good evening, stargazers,” she said.

  “Good evening,” the players said.

  It was so quiet, I could hear the wind carrying grains of sand across the desert.

  “ ‘Why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?’ ”

  I leaned forward in my lawn chair so I wouldn’t miss a word. I imagined Gravity bathed in the warm glow of Mandrake’s. She would set down her fork to stare and listen as I unraveled the mysteries of the universe.

  “This is a quote from Stephen Hawking,” the Silver Lady said. “It challenges us to wonder why as time moves forward, everything falls into chaos.” She looked at the stars. “The objects of the universe are always moving away from each other. More and more quickly.”

  My excitement was overshadowed by a feeling of loneliness. But instead of the regular old loneliness I was used to, it was an expanding loneliness.

  “Objects in space must move away from each other,” the Silver Lady continued. “And they must do it more and more quickly. Otherwise, each object’s gravitational pull would draw in the objects around it, and the universe would crunch back together in one big intergalactic crash.”

  I thought of the people who had moved away from me. My mom leaving when I was eight. Girls from my high school accidentally texting mean things as they fled. Being torn away from Gravity. Was this how the universe worked? Was I doomed to sit in the middle of my existence and watch as everyone expanded away from me?

  “Of course, there are objects in the night sky that try to reverse this process,” the Silver Lady said. She turned her back to us and opened her hands to the sky. “Stars start their lives by expanding. They are an explosion, always pushing outward. But eventually, after billions of years, the star runs out of matter to burn, and it crunches up as easily as a soda can.”

  My head felt heavy so I rested my chin in my hands as I gazed up. I sympathized with the star. Being committed in a video game rehabilitation center due to uncontrollable forces didn’t feel too different from being crushed by the nothingness of space.

  The Silver Lady lifted her hands in a circle and began shrinking it. “The star’s matter continues condensing and condensing, becoming heavier and heavier until the equivalent of three hundred thousand Earths fits into a space the size of this desert.” She turned toward us, the circle between her hands no bigger than a pinprick. “The star becomes so heavy that it breaks through the fabric of the universe, falling out of time and space as we know it.”

  Falling through the world, I thought.

  “Where does it go?” Parappa, the nerdcore kid, asked.

  “Exactly,” the Silver Lady said. “Where does it go?”

  To video game rehab.

  I felt so heavy and depressed, I thought I might break right through my lawn chair.

  “All astronomers know is that the immense gravity of the dead star begins greedily sucking in every object around it, trying to draw the universe back in.” She looked at the sky again. “We know black holes are out there. But we can’t see them. We can only hope to find their presence by the way light bends toward the blackness.” She smiled at us. “Grab your telescopes, stargazers.”

  And so we spent the next fifteen minutes searching for nothing.

  When I couldn’t seem to find any black holes, just eyelashy blotches of light, I grew antsy and wondered if I was fighting hard enough against the crushing nothingness of Video Horizons. The surrounding desert seemed to grow vaster every day. What if I tried to walk back, but the dunes just kept popping up, endlessly rendering beyond the horizon?

  I shifted my focus to the grounds nearer the facility. To the east was the Coliseum. Above it, I imagined a flag with an M for Miles: Dungeon complete.

  But there were dungeons still to come.

  To the north was an alien landscape of bizarre, blocky shapes, like a giant melting chess set. To the south was a stretch of compact sand with arching spray-painted lines and a lumpy blue tarp. And to the west was the parking lot with G-man’s car, which, if I won, would drive me home, triumphant.

  There was no possible way that the next two days could go as well as the first two.

  “Stargazers?” the Silver Lady said. She passed out star charts and mini flashlights. “For each planet or star cluster you identify, I will award you five hundred points.”

  Yes, I thought, before remembering I never went outside and that every light in the sky looked the same to me.

  “You may pair up with a partner,” she said. “Four eyes are better than two.”

  The star chart looked like someone had sneezed white paint across a black piece of paper. If anyone wanted me to show them how to get the best ending in Mass Effect, I was their guy. But when it came to identifying stuff in the real sky, I needed help.

  I scanned the faces in star class while Navi swirled to life around me, lighting my shoulders with fairy dust. Didilingdingdingdingding. She fluttered across the roof to . . . the spaciest person up there.

  “Hey, Aurora.”

  “Hello, Miles Prower.”

  “You wanna be partners?”

  “Partners in what?”

  I pointed upward. “Finding stars.”

  “I like stars.”

  I smiled. “I thought you might.”

  I waved to Meeki, who narrowed her eyes at me and then teamed up with the nerdcore kid.

  I laid the star map on the wide railing of the roof and squinted at it. “Okay, Aurora. You think you can spot everything on this chart?”

  “Oh, I prefer stars’ mythological names.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want me to tell you your fortune?”

  Oh God. I’d picked the wrong kind of spacey.

  “I’m not bad at them,” Aurora said, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  “Listen,” I said. “We need to work on this assignment. I need these points for—”

  She ignored me and searched the stars. “I could tell you whether you’ll get out of here in time for your date or not.”

  “Um, isn’t astrology kind of”—I looked at the Silver Lady—“anti-astronomy?”

  Aurora tilted her head toward the sky. “Objects on the edge of the solar system can influence Earth’s orbit. The moon changes girls’ periods. Isn’t it possible that gigantic glittery objects in space can have some sort of effect? Even if it’s in a billiard ball sort of way?”

  “No,” I said, remembering my physics class. “I have more gravitational pull on you than Saturn does.”

  Aurora bashfully pulled a strand of hair across her face. “You flatter yourself, Miles Prower.”

  “I wasn’t trying to . . .” I sighed. “Fine.�
�� I crossed my arms. “Shock me.”

  Aurora bent over, lifted the hem of her long wool skirt, and pulled a smooshed dandelion puffball from her sock. I gave her a look like, Where in the hell did you get a dandelion and how did it survive in your sock? She didn’t notice and held the puffball up against the night sky.

  “The dandelion is the flower of the cosmos,” she said. “The yellow flower represents the sun, the white blossom the moon, and the scattered seeds the stars.”

  “Do they collapse and fall through the universe?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Sorta.” Aurora handed me the dandelion. “Hold this up so the blossom covers the moon. It works better if the moon’s full, but this should do.”

  Why the hell not? I could use a good fortune right then. I closed one eye and lifted the dandelion so its sphere of white seeds nearly fit inside the moon’s light.

  “Blow,” Aurora said.

  I blew. The white seeds anticlimactically tumbled right over the roof’s edge. Aurora looked upward, though, as if they were swirling among the stars. She stared into the sky so long, I swore I could see the Milky Way flow.

  My knee started to jitter impatiently.

  “Orion,” she finally said.

  I looked at the only constellation I knew—three stars in a glittery belt. “What does that mean?”

  I wanted her to say, You are going to get out of here Thursday night, right in the nick of time, having earned one million points by being a badass in all events—physical, mental, and emotional alike—proving to your dad and G-man and Casey and all the girls in your high school that you have more talent in the real world than they ever could have imagined, and then you’re going to go on your date with Gravity, and you are going to charm the pants off her. Only, not at the restaurant. That part will happen later.

  “Orion is a warrior,” Aurora said.

  “That sounds good,” I said, crossing my flabby arms.

  “He slays beasts and has a huge ego.” She pinched her finger and thumb together. “But then he gets killed by a tiny little scorpion.”