I begin walking through the crowds of doting parents and laughing children. The programming has been done on the cheap, and the same people appear and reappear at different points in the crowd: a woman wearing kitten ears, a boy pointing straight up at the sky, a man with a green balloon tied to his wrist.
“You’ve played this before,” Elliot says, catching up.
“As a kid,” I allow.
“I thought you hated games.”
“What kid hates games?”
His avatar’s face remains wanly smiling, but of course that is the only expression it can make. I spot the candy apple booth just ahead of us. I feel like I’m hiding a knife behind my back. I feel like I’m being led to the slaughter. Both at once. Because why did I suggest we play this game if I wasn’t going to tell him? Is this it? Am I going to tell him now? And if I do will he turn away? Will he leave me? Will I be happy then?
We reach the booth. The apple purveyor has been given more detail than the people in the crowd. She has shaggy gray hair and a raised mole just beneath her eye, the kind that makes you wonder if she can see it all the time, sitting there in the corner of her vision, a blot on the horizon.
“Order one,” I tell Elliot.
Apple is another word that has always meant itself. In fact, it used to apply to any fruit, vegetable, or even nut. All fruits were apples. The potato was the apple of the earth (and still is in French: pomme de terre). Dates were finger apples. The banana was, in Middle English, the apple of paradise.
The apple the old woman hands Elliot is the regular red kind, though redder than a real apple, heart red from its candy coating. Elliot lifts it to his face. His avatar’s mouth stays closed in its smile, but there’s a crunching sound, as if he has bitten into the fruit. The crunching sound reverberates across the park and comes back to our ears changed; it has become the whirr of propellers. And with that, men start dropping out of the sky.
Perhaps they aren’t men. Perhaps they are women. Or monsters. There is no way to know what is behind their masks. This was a popular theme back when Amusement was made: masked killers. They were in all the movies, shows, and games. Sometimes they were sent from the government, as Amusement implies with its helicopters. Sometimes they were supernatural, slipping through a crack between dimensions. Pop culture scholars wrote that the trope represented fear of the establishment, a sense of disassociation from the self, and so on and so forth until all the modern-day problems had been properly aired. Most origins for the word mask come from the word disguise, but there is a Celtic origin that translates as “the dark clouds gather before the storm.” And then there’s masca, which means “witch.”
In the game, the masked figures come out of the sky on cords so thin that it appears as if the men grasp the edges of the night and slide down them. When they reach the ground, they unsheathe their knives, slitting the throats of the people in the park. The throat of one of the men with a green balloon. The throat of the girl with two long braids. Even the throat of the apple seller. The blood arcs, red droplets becoming tiny squares, scattering into pixels in the air.
“This way!” I say to Elliot, and run away from the slaughter, away from the park, away from the game.
The game is called Amusement both for the sensation it’s meant to engender and because it takes place within an amusement park. If you play the game as intended, you can enter the different booths, tents, and rides, hiding from the masked assassins, collecting weapons to fight and kill them. If you play through to the end, if you “win,” you eventually kill the leader of the masked army, save a child trapped at the top of the Ferris wheel, and steal one of the helicopters, flying off to . . . where? Somewhere safe, I suppose. I don’t know. I’ve never played it that way.
On the outskirts of the game, there is a narrow perimeter of space around the amusement park, dark fields bordering the bright tents and stringed lights. The masked assassins are here, too, but fewer in number. This space was created for players who become overwhelmed by the carnage in the amusement park, amateurs who need somewhere to go to recharge their health bar or practice basic moves. It was my mother who discovered the field. It was I who discovered the burning house.
* * *
—
MY MOTHER’S HEADACHES increased with my age. When I arrived home from school, she would meet me at the door with a description for the day’s pain. Like rocks grinding into my temples. Like a giant squeezing my skull. Like a swarm of bees in my brain. Then she would stand back from the doorway, allowing me in, and shuffle back to her darkened bedroom. She never directly said that I was the cause of her headaches, but I knew. If I brought her tea, she would wince each step closer I took, and though she would accept the mug from my hand, she would raise it to her mouth and watch me over its edge, never taking a sip. She feared I would poison her. She never told me this, but I heard her and my father argue about it behind a closed door.
“She’s just a little girl,” he said. “She’s your daughter.”
She said, “Yes. That’s how I know.”
I know now that my mother was ill in her head, and not with headaches. The doctors have explained it to me, and I am aware of their expertise. But there is knowing something and then there is feeling it. For adults, these are two different things. For children, they are one.
The game was a present for my eleventh birthday. After my mother opened the door for me—today’s headache: Like birds pecking out my eyes—and in the hours before my father returned home from work, I’d play Amusement, keeping the sound down low so my mother could rest. Then one day the rasp of her slippers coming down the hall, stopping behind me. I didn’t dare turn around for fear that the sight of my face would pain her. I held myself very still and kept playing the game.
For a week, the same. I began to play; she came and watched. By the time I had turned off the game, she’d gone back to her room. Then, one day, the rasp of the slippers, the soft settling of the couch cushion, and a new sound: the rustle of her hair as she placed the other mask over her head. And she appeared next to me, an avatar with my mother’s face. She must have made it while I was at school. Still, I did not turn to look at her, not in life, not in the game. I could see her avatar, though, with its pleasant flat smile. I marveled at how her eyes looked when they were unpained.
She headed away, out of the amusement park, into the darkened fields. I followed her. For days we did this, traversing the fields together, allowing the masked assassins to kill us when they found us. Once she threw herself in front of me, sacrificing herself to the assassin’s knife. A feeling rose up in me that I have not experienced before or since. No matter. We both died.
Then one day I saw the flicker on the horizon. I broke away from my mother’s lead, running toward it, and when the screen did not split in two, I knew that she was following me. We came upon the burning house. I stood back while my mother entered it. A moment later she appeared at the window, swathed in flickering fire. She stood there and waved at me. I glanced over my shoulder and lifted my mask and saw through the clear plastic of her mask that the smile was on not just her avatar but her own real face. She didn’t have to tell me that her headache was finally gone, as if the imaginary flames had burned it away.
* * *
—
“THERE,” I SAY TO ELLIOT, and I can see it in the distance, the little house set ablaze.
“What’s inside?” Elliot says, his avatar running after mine across the dark fields. “Weapons? A passageway?”
I don’t tell him that the house is only a bit of throwaway programming, a little detail to make the game world feel real. I don’t tell him that there is nothing inside but fire. We reach the door, close enough that if the fire were real, you’d be able to hear it crackle as it ate up the wood. But it is not real, and so it dances silently, changing color.
“Stay out here,” I tell Elliot. “Go around and look through the wi
ndow.”
“You’re going in?”
“Yes.”
“Why do I stay out here?”
“You’ll see.”
I enter the house. My view flashes with the oranges and yellows. There is no heat. The tongues of flame flicker and stutter at the corner of my mask’s frame. Tongues of flame, this is something we say, as if the fire can speak, as if it taunts us, as if it scents the air like a snake. I go around to the window, and there, outside, is Elliot, standing where I’ve asked him to stand.
“What now?” he says.
It is easier to tell him with the mask over my face.
“We’d play the game after I got home from school.”
“What? Who?”
“My mother and I.”
“You don’t talk about your parents.”
“I am now.”
He pauses, then nods. Go on.
“We’d do this. That’s all I’m saying. She’d stand in the house, where I am. And I’d stand where you are, watching her. And she was happy there.”
In the VR booth, Elliot and I stand shoulder to shoulder; in the game we stand facing each other. We wear masks; in the game we are barefaced, though my face is gone, blown out in pixels. Elliot is out on the cold dark plains. I am inside burning. He doesn’t hear what I’m confessing, but also, I don’t tell him. He waits for me to tell him. Forty amusement park–goers die in the time he waits for me. I count them off by their screams. I add them to my tally.
“Do you want to keep playing?” he asks.
“It’s just that I don’t know if she understood.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Didn’t understand what? How to play the game?”
“That she wasn’t really burning.”
* * *
—
HERE IS WHAT WAS SAID in family court:
That I was old enough to know what I was doing.
That I was too young to understand the permanence.
That my apology showed remorse.
That I had gotten the canister of white gas from the camp supplies and the matches from the drawer in the kitchen where they were kept.
That she must have been napping on the couch, her headache medication so strong that she did not wake from the plash of gas, its wetness.
Slept still through the snick of the match.
* * *
—
HERE IS WHAT no one said:
That I was in the backyard when it happened, alone now that we had no cats.
That the smell of cooked skin and burnt hair came first, down the hall and out the back door, ahead of the smoke, ahead of the heat, ahead of her screams.
That she was aflame by the time I got there.
That she rose as she burned and pinwheeled round the room.
That she looked like one of the Catherine wheels from the amusement park.
That I don’t remember getting the white gas or the matches, though I knew where both were kept.
That I don’t remember doing it.
But I must have.
I must have.
Right?
That I stood there and stared at the play of the flames.
That I thought to hug her in an attempt to put the fire out but that, in the end, I was not willing to risk myself for her.
That when I told them, “I’m sorry,” when I repeated it over and over, this is the crime I was confessing to. Not that I had set her on fire, but that I had watched her burn.
For a moment when she saw me there, she tried to stop screaming.
For a moment she tried to wave.
* * *
—
I AM NOT SUPPOSED to have Georg’s address, but of course I do. Back in the fifth year of my probation, he left his coat on the back of his chair, and when he went to the bathroom, I looked through his wallet and saved his address in my mind. After Elliot and I leave the VRcade, I make up a forgotten appointment and take three trains to get to Georg’s house. When I arrive I find a bungalow, almost as small as the burning house, its edges smudged with moss. I sit on the stoop for over an hour before the curtain flicks aside and flashes a man’s face—not Georg’s, so Samuel’s. A moment later, the door creaks open behind me, and Georg comes out and lowers himself gently onto the stoop next to me.
“Valeria.” He taps the lighter, a cheap bit of plastic, gripped between my hands like a bauble. “You forget your cigarettes?”
“I burned down the rest of your neighborhood,” I lie.
“You did?” He makes a show of looking around at the houses, still and sleeping.
“An orphanage, too.”
“Oh?”
“And a hospital. The leukemia ward. All those bald kids. They were gonna die anyway, right?”
“Valeria.”
“I should be able to burn myself, shouldn’t I?”
“Burn yourself? With this lighter?”
“Maybe not my whole self. Just part of my hand. A spot on my arm.”
“Not your whole self?”
“I should. But no.”
“Well, that is a relief. But why even a spot?”
“I told you, I can’t do it.” I shift on the stoop. “Not even a spot.”
Georg is quiet and so am I. Then he reaches over and flicks the lighter so that the flame rises up between my hands. We watch it shiver. He lifts his thumb; the flame goes out.
“You did not burn those buildings,” he says.
“I might have.”
“You did not burn the little children.”
“How do you know?”
“You are safe.”
“Did the machine tell you that?”
“I am saying it: you are safe.”
When he puts his arms around me, his shirt smells like whatever he has been cooking, something with garlic. I try not to shake too hard in his arms. I try not to let my tears and snot stain his shoulder. Because I don’t want to harm anyone or anything, not even this shirt. Georg doesn’t care. He wraps his arm around the back of my head and holds my face to his shoulder firmly, and when I am done crying, he releases it.
I sniff and touch my eyes and nose gingerly.
“Do you know the word fire has no origin?” I tell him. “It has always meant fire, never anything else.”
“Hmph.”
“That means fire was one of the first things.”
“We were one of the first things also. Yes?”
“Who?”
“We. You and me. People.” Georg glares at me. Past him are rows of houses, tiny and unburnt. “We were one of the first things?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Sure.” I sniff and wipe at my eyes. “We were here to say the word.”
He nods, like I have proved his point. “We were one of the first things, and we are good. Valeria. We are good.”
7
Screamer
Pearl didn’t recognize the woman who answered her knock. Well, woman was overstating it. She couldn’t have been much older than Rhett, low twenties, leaning on the door like they, she and the door, were in it together. Perhaps she was the daughter of the client Pearl was there to meet. Or the girlfriend? The nondisclosure agreement Pearl had signed was absent any name except for that of the anonymous client’s law firm. Given all the secrecy, Pearl thought she might recognize the client on sight. As the car service had driven her hours from the city, and the Calistoga hills had unwrapped themselves to reveal this edifice of timber and glass, the door of which Pearl now knocked upon, she’d imagined the lupine grins of various actors, the taxidermied smile of a certain former governor, even the whey face of CEO Bradley Skrull. Pearl hadn’t imagined this, though, this girl, this young woman, tiny all over except for her eyes an
d breasts, both sets inflated to full capacity. The girl was a Japanese cartoon. No, she was a Japanese cartoon of a woodland animal. When she opened her mouth, Pearl expected to hear a squeak.
The voice that emerged, however, was surprisingly husky, almost boyish. “Apricity! Right?”
“Yes. I’m from Apricity. I’m Pearl.” Pearl extended her hand.
“Calla,” the girl returned, with a sheepish note to her voice that Pearl took to mean, But of course you already knew that. But of course Pearl hadn’t. So this was Pearl’s client then, this nubile cartoon.
Instead of shaking Pearl’s hand, the girl fastened on to it, yanking Pearl into the house. Pearl found herself tugged along through a series of professionally decorated rooms, the colors complementary, the throw pillows abundant, the knickknacks too quirky to be endured—traffic signs cast in mother-of-pearl, mobiles of dangling paper jellyfish, a bird’s nest filled with toy soldiers. Calla kept up a bright stream of talk as they tripped along, the words coming so rapidly that when Pearl finally caught a sentence, she held on to its tail for dear life.
“—and then I sent everyone away so that we could meet, just the two of us.”
As if on cue a voice from the next room called, “Calla?”
“Well, everyone except Marilee.” The girl tugged Pearl into what turned out to be a faux-rustic kitchen, a witch’s kitchen, complete with open brick oven and a dented copper pot large enough to stew a child. “But Marilee isn’t everyone.”
On the contrary, Marilee did appear to be everyone, or rather anyone, a composite of all middle-aged women, their weights averaged into a plumpness that wasn’t quite fat, their hairstyles swirled together into a dusty brown wedge cut, their khakis and cardigans compiled into these two unremarkable specimens. However—Pearl blinked—there was something missing. It took her a moment to place it: no smile lines. Around Marilee’s eyes and mouth there existed an eerie smoothness. Botox, she assumed, until she met Marilee’s gaze, at which point Pearl revised her opinion, deciding that the woman lacked smile lines for that most obvious of reasons.
Tell the Machine Goodnight Page 14