by Douglas Lain
1:24 AM
We went to the Avalon Nickle Arcade on our first real date, and Sally told me that the place made her feel weird. The Avalon had been around forever; for over a hundred years. The clown on the sign by the entrance, a classic circus clown with a white face, an open-mouthed smile, and pupilless eyes creeped her out.
“I can’t help but think about the dead people who used to come here. What will they make of how we’ve changed the place? When they’re resurrected and come back, will they like what we’ve done? What will people from the 70s think? Will all those moms with beehives and bell bottoms be able to adjust to touchscreen games and laser tag?” she asked.
Sally was wearing this brown polyester dress with orange and blue stripes, a pattern that reminded me of minimalist paintings or Swiss poster art. She looked like she might be from the 70s herself, and like one of her imagined housewives, she seemed averse to video games. She used the nickels they gave us at the door to buy nachos with cheddar-flavored liquid and a Coke. We parked in a booth under the movie screen in the second game room. The second game room had once been a theater and still had the screen. We sat across from the air hockey table under Fox News and TV Land and talked about the end of the world.
“A lot of people have this idea that heaven is up in the sky. They have this idea that it’s just clouds and robes, or that it’s maybe a place where there is nothing but energy. But, heaven will be here, on Earth. If you’re Christian you should know that much. Even Catholics and Mormons should know that,” Sally said.
I just nodded along, agreeing with her. I didn’t really care what Christians should know about the afterlife. I took her hand in mine and she let me. She offered me a sip of her Coke and I took one even though there was lipstick on the straw.
“That’s why old buildings like this are weird. After Tribulation, after Jesus comes back, we’ll get immortal and perfect bodies and we’ll just keep going as we are now. I mean, it’ll be different. It’ll be better, but …”
“But what?”
“But, it will still be like it is. It won’t be different. If you’re married when you die then you’ll still be married when you’re resurrected. If you live in a trailer park or in a town with a water slide, you’ll still live in a trailer park. You’ll still live near a water slide. Those will stay,” she said.
Being in really old buildings, in historic places, confused her, especially when a place had both new and old parts to it. When the old and the new sat side by side, it made her wonder. What version of the Avalon Nickel Arcade would there be after the End Times? Would the Avalon still have the strange clown on the front window? That clown with his gaping smile? Or would Jesus replace him? Would the new and perfect arcade feature classic games from the 80s? Would we be playing Pac-Man forever, or would there be Skee-Ball and coin-operated kinetoscopes?
“Mom and Dad don’t think about it. Most people don’t wonder. But I want to know. If Heaven is going to be here, if it’s going to happen on Earth, then what will Portland be like? What will we do every day? Will we still have jobs? Will I still work at Dairy Queen?”
“Probably not,” I said. “Doesn’t sound good enough.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad,” she said. “I just wouldn’t want to live in the past. I wouldn’t want to have to give up what we’ve got just to make all the dead people happy. Would you? Would you want to give up the internet just so people born 100 years ago feel comfortable?”
“I guess not,” I said. But the truth was, that eternal life in the past? A resurrection that included bringing back Syzygy’s Computer Space game or Astro Race? A heaven where men in bowler hats and women in old-fashioned bodices would play Bash Bash Revolution forever? That was appealing.
I let go of Sally’s hand and we sat in silence for a while, watching Hannity and reading the scroll at the bottom of the screen. A thousand more American troops were being deployed to the Ukrainian border. The stock market was up for the twelfth straight week.
At the Avalon they have a few multi-game cabinets where you can pick your favorite Golden Age game, but we had to cycle through most all of them before we found any Sally even recognized, and then she said she didn’t want to play even though we’d already put our nickels in.
I played Centipede while she talked about the apocalypse and I complained about Dad. I told her that I’d taught Dad to play Bash and that he’d quickly mastered the game and started playing for money.
Sally was sympathetic, but more than that, she paid attention. She didn’t always pay attention.
When we played air hockey, for instance, she didn’t seem to pay any attention at all, but just let me win. At the claw machine she didn’t come close to snapping up a stuffed Garfield or an iPod cover, and most of the time, when I was talking, I got the sense that she was bored.
“The trick is to clear away the mushrooms.”
“Is that the trick?”
“You’ve got to make sure the bottom third of the screen is clear so you’ll have enough time to take out the centipedes. If you leave mushrooms everywhere the centipedes will get to the bottom too fast,” I said.
It dawned on me that Sally was never going to play Centipede. Even if Heaven was a place on Earth. Even if eternal life after the rapture included an X-Arcade cabinet, Sally would find other stuff to occupy her time.
“Are you jealous that your Dad is better than you at your favorite game?”
“He’s not better than I am,” I said.
“You’re better?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“But he still beats you,” Sally asked. “How does he do that?”
“He cheats,” I told her.
We moved on from the multi-game cabinet and Sally found a pinball table she liked, this antique called Dancing Lady with glass light bulbs and a mechanical ballerina in the scoreboard that did pirouettes when the pinball hit the top bumpers.
“How?” she asked, looking at me.
“His computer program … Bucky. It helps him win.”
“How does the computer help him win?” Sally asked.
I tried to explain how Dad’s AI worked, even though I didn’t really know. I told her that Bucky was like Deep Blue and could think super fast. Bucky could compute so much data that it could see ahead into the future.
“How does that work?” Sally asked. She threw her body against the pinball machine, shaking it just enough to send her ball spinning toward the bumpers again, but not hard enough to trigger a tilt.
I wasn’t used to her paying attention. I wasn’t used to Sally being interested in my life or any of that, so I just told her what I knew, and that sort of turned out to be a mistake. She’d really been paying attention and she started making connections. Sort of wild connections, I thought. She asked me why the NSA wanted Dad to watch the news report about the Vice President, and what it meant that his computer program could take over a person’s nervous system, and why it was that he’d come home to begin with.
“What do you call it when everything changes? When your whole way of living and thinking is changed? When your worldview goes, when your way of life goes, and is replaced by something else?” she asked.
“A clusterfuck?”
“No, no,” she said. “It’s a paradigm shift. Right? That’s what it’s called. What causes a paradigm shift is when something new, when some new understanding, comes along. But you know what? That’s what an apocalypse is too. The apocalypse is not just Armageddon. It’s not just a big disaster, but also a new beginning.”
Sally turned out to be good at pinball. The ballerina kept spinning and spinning while she explained it to me.
“Your Dad didn’t invent an AI just to help him win video games, did he?” she asked.
“That’s true,” I said. “Video games aren’t the point. Dad doesn’t care about video games. The NSA doesn’t care about video games.”
“What do they care about?” she asked. “What are they doing?”
I didn’
t answer, but just watched her play. Really, I watched her stop playing. After a terrific first ball, she lost interest, and she quickly cycled through the remaining four. She let them drain and then turned to look at me before the toy ballerina had even finished spinning.
“What is your Dad doing? What does this computer program do?” she asked.
“It’s an AI,” I said. “It doesn’t do just one thing. I don’t know.”
“What was it designed for?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Sally told me that I should know. That I had the right to know. She offered to help me find out.
“How should I do that?” I asked.
“You have to talk to it.”
“Talk to it?”
“No. Wait. You don’t need to talk to it. I want to talk to it,” she said.
Sally believed in God. She was very religious because she wanted to rethink and reimagine the whole world. But when she found out about Dad’s AI, when she heard about his success with Bash, all the scripture and all the prophecies about frogs and blood pouring from the sky? All that was meaningless.
“I want to talk to your Dad’s AI,” she said. “Can you arrange that?”
At the time, it seemed possible.
News Night
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS, 04/20/17
9:03 AM
One of the reasons I started playing Bash is that Mom doesn’t care about TV. Back in 2009, when all of my friends got digital TVs and started watching Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network in high-definition, I was stuck watching PBS on a 13” RCA Colortrak CRT with a digital converter. Mom had purchased the tube TV back in 1995 and, for the first seven years of my life, we almost never watched it. It was covered by a Navajo blanket, except on special movie nights or when she wanted to watch the news. Mom’s 1995 TV was great for Bash. A modern TV’s video lag was a major problem for competitive Bash players, and CRT TVs like Mom’s had no lag.
After Dad won his first money match he wanted to try tournament play, and we found one to go to right away. The night before that, before Dad’s first Bash tournament, something big happened, and instead of letting Dad practice Bash, Mom insisted on watching TV news. I guess it was a TV news night for most everybody over forty. Most everybody wanted to watch the fallout from the Russia/US dogfight over Crimea live, and for Gen X and Boomers that meant watching TV.
Mom was silent as Amanpour prattled on about a new Cold War and the increase of NATO troops in Poland and Finland, but Dad kept talking to the screen.
“Cold War? This baby is hot!” he said, and took a sip of beer. As he leaned way back in our dirty beige La-Z-Boy, the footrest popped up on him, and the whole chair threatened to topple. “Jesus,” he said. “Why haven’t you gotten another lounger already? This was broken when we got it!”
Amanpour mentioned that long-range ballistic missiles aimed at Moscow were standing ready and the Strategic Air Command was at DEFCON 2.
“She thinks she’s in an action movie or something,” Dad said. “Our DEFCON level doesn’t mean anything; what’s important is in Syria. In the theater. How are the troops on the ground behaving?” Dad’s smile never left his face. He was really enjoying himself and I, in an effort at sarcasm, offered to make some microwave popcorn for him.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That would be good actually,” he said. Then he pointed to the TV. “Can you believe this?”
Mom turned to look at him and her facial expression transformed from numb shock to anger.
“This doesn’t worry you?” she asked.
Dad looked at her and frowned. He was confused by this reaction from her. He didn’t understand why she was peeved with him.
“Well,” he said, “it’s obvious that—”
Dad didn’t explain what was obvious, because his phone pinged him and interrupted his train of thought. He held up a finger to Mom, looked at his phone, and then put his earbuds in. Emotion drained from his face. He got up from the La-Z-Boy, walked into the kitchen, which was where he’d left his laptop, and Mom followed along after him.
It was around that point when my phone pinged me, alerted me to the latest tweet from the President of the United States. I hadn’t set my phone to follow the President’s tweets, but I guess the President had the power to push his 140 character missives on me, on everybody with a Twitter account, maybe.
@realDonaldTrump: Sending 1500 US troops to Finland
More proof that this Trump-Russia story is a hoax.
“You act like you’re not part of the world. That’s what’s wrong with the NSA’s projection and models, too. You people never take yourselves into account.” Mom was clearly audible even over the sound from the TV. She was pretending to wash the dishes again, banging pots and pans around in the sink in a desperate attempt to gets Dad’s attention. To get Dad’s reassurance. She didn’t get either.
She was right, of course. Dad almost never took himself into account. He never saw himself as part of the world he wanted to change. Maybe that’s why he left Mom and me behind. He’d never really been part of the family to begin with.
Maybe that isn’t fair. I can sort of remember how things were different a while back. When I was really young, Mom and Dad were young too. They used to be like a single person in my mind; I didn’t really differentiate them from each other way back then. I’d call Mom “Dad” and Dad “Mom” and not even feel weird or embarrassed when they corrected me about it. They were one person, and that’s why they were always hanging on each other. I can picture them standing close together and watching me come down a curly slide or rotate on a merry-go-round. Back then, back when I could barely talk, Dad was at the center.
My earliest memory is about Dad, actually. It’s about Dad promising to change things; to make things better. But as with all kid memories, I don’t really trust it. You can’t trust that stuff, can you?
But anyway, in my memory I was on that slide, on the curly slide at Couch Park. Mom and Dad were watching me as I ran around on the wooden play structure, applauding my every step and apparently very pleased that I wasn’t getting splinters. I got to the slide, to the red plastic curly slide, and Mom started screaming. Mom was screaming and as I slid down, as I took the first curve, Dad reached out and stopped me. Dad stopped my descent, grabbing me by my stomach basically, knocking the air out of me, because he didn’t want me to reach the bottom.
I tried to cry, or scream as Dad lifted me up and over the plastic lip of the slide, but I couldn’t make a sound because I didn’t have the air I needed. I couldn’t protest. I could barely move. All I could manage was a wheeze. Dad carried me to Mom, who was shouting at him to do something, TO DO SOMETHING, and he handed me over to her.
There was a body. There was a dead junkie at the bottom of the slide. The young guy with an orange beard lying on top of his olive-green canvas knapsack was probably dead. He was dead, actually, but we didn’t know that for sure yet. All that we knew for sure was that he was on his back at the bottom of the slide with a needle in his arm.
This is where my memory gets fuzzy, or where I start to have doubts about it, because what I remember next is that we were behind a police line, behind a chain-link fence that the police had put up to block off the play structure. I remember watching the EMTs take the body of the junkie away. I remember watching the needle fall out of his arm and into the wood chips. But that can’t be right. Why would we have stayed that long? Why would they put up a chain-link fence? And why don’t I remember whether Dad did anything for the young man?
But that’s what I remember. We stood behind a chain-link fence. Dad held Mom close to him as the EMT workers took the body away, and the needle slipped from the junkie’s arm and into the chips. The body of the junkie seemed to be very light. It was almost as though the EMTs were moving a pile of old rags.
“It’s supposed to be better than this,” Dad said. And he held Mom close. And Mom held me close. And we knew that Dad was going to do someth
ing to make it better, to make it right.
A map of the United States was on the screen and the CNN anchor narrated the possibility of apocalypse in the same way local news covers the weather. On the map, the yellow circles indicated bombs that would strike military targets, orange were the blast zones for rural communities, and the red circles were the cities that would be destroyed if Russian missiles landed.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t anything new. When I was a kid, this was the kind of thing you’d see on the news every day,” Dad said as he made his way back to the La-Z-Boy.
“Come on, Dad,” I said. “I’m seventeen, not six. Don’t kid me.”
Dad nodded at me and smiled, and it was an admission of a sort. But then he turned on the GameCube and selected Robin Hood as his character.
As the world teetered, Dad practiced L-canceling and shielding.
Oregon Bash Revolution
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS, 04/20/17
11:02 AM
The Bash tournament was held in the Multicultural Center of Smith Memorial at Portland State University, which maybe was a sign of things to come. What had once been designated a space for the development of “engaged cultural dialogue between different peoples” (that’s what the dedication plaque said, anyhow) had been made over as an arena for a battle between cutesy Japanese video game characters. Murals celebrating Latino liberation and Black History Month were covered over by posters of Marshmallow, Robotman, Princess Teacup, and Robin Hood. Folding tables with rows of CRT screens atop them filled a space meant for traditional dances. The multicultural center was overrun with Asian and white boys wearing various nerd badges. Kids wearing Jayne hats, Star Trek hoodies, and T-shirts with binary messages printed on them milled about the GameCube stations. Walking into the tournament room, I was surrounded by the socially inept, the virginal, and the damned.
Dad signed in and was seeded into the second bracket, which meant we had about a half an hour before he’d play. To kill time, we found an unoccupied GameCube and played a casual game. I talked Dad into playing without his earbuds; without Bucky’s help.