by Charles Yu
15
You want sex.
16
You want to be a good person.
17
Imagine you are in a swimming pool.
18
You are lying on the surface of the pool, faceup, ears half in and half out of the water. If you are doing this right, you can hear the world below, the world above, and the inside of your head. You can hear all three worlds, the nether, the air, the boundary, like mountaintop radio stations, broadcasts cutting in and out, static, and secret, and fragments that sound like the truth.
19
Something is bumping into you from down below. What is it? Try to translate the subsonic whale moans, the floating, slippery intuitions into actual words, words spoken out into the dry half of the world. A self-translation, from your private underwater language. Bring it up, expose it to the oxygen and light. The unrefracted desire.
20
The problem with unintended consequences isn’t with the consequences, it’s with the unintended. Just because you didn’t intend for something to happen doesn’t mean you didn’t want it to.
21
Place your thumbs on either side of the device and concentrate.
Hold steady.
Good.
Just a second more.
Thank you.
22
The following is a list of all of the momentary urges that popped into your head in the last sixty seconds:
You Know Who (at the office): one time, one afternoon, in your car maybe, or the unisex bathroom on 4
Large orange soda in a Styrofoam cup, a little crushed ice, a straw, the kind with a bendy elbow
Go for a swim (sounds nice)
To remember the name of that one song, oh it’s killing you
To be two inches taller
That new woman on 5
A cigarette
To quit smoking
Head to stop pounding
Hair to grow back
Or at least stop receding
That one who always wears that skirt, on 7 (in Marketing)
A cigarette
A hamburger
No, a cheeseburger
To be a better husband
To be the world’s greatest father
A cheeseburger, then a cigarette
To start over
23
Look again at what you said you wanted. Any vagueness or ambiguity in there? No? Is it possible the problem isn’t that your words are vague? Is it possible that you are?
24
Let’s be honest. What you really want to know is, how powerful is your will vis-à-vis the will of others with whom you come in contact? Others whose will may incidentally conflict with the effects you wish to bring about in the world. Others who seek to use their devices in order to directly oppose your will, as manifested in the world through your device. You want to know if you can make people do things against their will.
25
Here’s the thing: that’s not the point. The point is that it’s a test. It’s a test! Of course it’s a test. You should not be surprised. The point is this: What does it say about you? What do you use it for? You know you should use it to help other people.
26
It will never do exactly what you want it to do.
You will never do exactly what it wants you to do.
27
This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?
28
One more time, please. Place your thumbs on either side of the device and concentrate:
That new woman on 5
A cigarette
To start over again
To go back to the first day of college
To go back to the first day of high school
That one trip to the lake, all four of you
To be a decent person again
To feel like a decent person
To own a speedboat
29
You have been wanting all your life.
30
To go nowhere in particular
To go to Europe
31
You started as an infant.
32
You started life crying. Learned to talk so you could communicate your wants more effectively.
33
To go to Alsace-Lorraine, wherever that is.
(Page 138 in your eighth-grade French book.)
34
Je vais à la plage
Tu vas à la plage
Il/elle/on va à la plage
35
You aren’t going to get what you want. Not exactly. Not ever.
36
Nous allons, vous allez, ils/elles vont à la plage
Je voudrais aller à la plage, à la montagne, à la campagne, à la charcuterie. Je voudrais aller.
37
Even when you do get it, once you get it, you don’t want it anymore.
38
To be a better man
To be a better husband
To quit smoking
A cigarette
39
You don’t want this device. It will never do exactly what you want it to do. You will never do exactly what it wants you to do. You will never do exactly what you want you to do.
40
A life without unfulfilled desire is not what you want. A life without unfulfilled desire is a life without desire. The beach, you say. You want to go to the beach? Is that really what you want? The beach. The pool. The library. You want to go to the butcher, the baker, the supermarket. You want to go to the mountains and swim with friends in the lake. To want, in the infinitive form. To want, conjugated: I want, you want, he, she, one wants, we want, you all want, they want. Have you ever thought about not wanting, just for a second? Have you ever thought about putting a question into this device, about what would happen if you asked about the world, instead of just asking for it? Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am? What do you think you have in your hands? Why would you think you have any idea of what you want? You’ve had thirty-seven years to get it right, thirty-seven years with the device at your disposal, just waiting, ready, willing, and most nights you still go to bed confused, angry at yourself. When are you going to start considering the possibility that you are exactly who you want to be?
Please
Hero Absorbs Major Damage
I could definitely use a whole chicken right now. But I keep it to myself. I don’t want to alarm anyone in the group. They’re all busy fighting demon dogs. These guys are literally killing themselves for what? Fifty points a dog is what. It breaks my heart. When I think of everything the group has been through together, the early days grinding it out in the coin farms, to where we are now, I get a little blue in the aura, I do.
I can still remember the morning I found Fjoork in that wooded area near the Portal of Start. He was just a teenager then, nothing on his back but a thin piece of leather armor, standing there like he’d been waiting since time immemorial. Like if I hadn’t come along, he might have been waiting there forever.
I’ll never forget what he said to me, there at the place where the road splits off into three paths.
One leading into the forest.
A second path across the great river and into the valley.
The third toward the north, up into the foothills and over the mountain pass, on the other side of which, as told in legend, lies the Eternal Coast of Pause.
And then Fjoork, all of three foot six, turns to me like he’s known me all my life and says, without a hint of emotion
Select Your Path.
I Shall Follow You.
The “shall” is what got me. I still love it when Fjoork goes all shall on me. To have someone believe in me like that. I was what, twenty-two? And here was this sweet little guy all noble wit
h his I Shall Follow You, as if I were someone, as if he knew I was destined for something good.
And now to see Fjoork like this, it just kills me, just makes me wish I’d made better choices, makes me wish I could take him to get an ice cream and wash off all that blood.
Trin and Byr are out in front of him, casting Small Area Fire over and over again. They aren’t going to be able to keep that up for long, but they’ll drain everything they have trying. That’s how we are. We stuck together when everyone said we were all wrong for this quest, that we were a team built for flat-ground battles, that we’d never make it this far north, this close to the place without pixels.
There were growing pains, for sure. We had to learn everyone’s strengths and styles and weaknesses, had to learn to stop getting in the way of one another’s semicircles of damage. More than once I got thwacked to the tune of 2d6 by someone’s +1 Staff. There were days when it just seemed like the world was nothing but fields and fields of blue demon dogs, each one needing three stabs before it would disintegrate into a pile of sulfurous ash. So gross. Not to mention brutal on Trin’s allergies. We learned and improved, and there was a point, not long ago, when it felt like we’d been through just about everything there was to go through.
And then word spread: an uncharted land to the west. An entirely new continent had opened up.
That’s when things started to get bad.
Fjoork said, We Must Go! It Is Our Destiny!
Trin and Byr suggested marshaling resources.
Rostejn, being Rostejn, said to follow the action.
That made it two against two.
And I said, what are you all looking at?
Then my POV shifted.
And that’s when I realized everyone was looking right at me.
As in: We Shall Follow You.
You. As in, me.
Me. As in, the Hero.
It all made sense after that. The odd feeling I’d always had, some kind of fixed radius around my position. If I moved left, the group moved left. Actually, if I moved left, the whole battlefield moved left. No matter what I did, I always seemed to find myself in the center of the action. Here. I am Here.
Because the center of the action was defined as: wherever I was. The way they were all looking at me, I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth. Maybe later, I thought, when the time is right.
So yeah, I led them in here.
I led a thief (Fjoork), two mages (Trin and Byr), and a swordsman (Rostejn) into a devastated wasteland: brutal terrain, limitless bad guys, and, as far as I can tell, pretty much no chicken.
Fjoork is still getting hammered on. Trin and Byr have run out of magic for at least two rounds and now each of them is just randomly stabbing with Ordinary Daggers.
Rostejn and I are the only ones who are doing any kind of real damage, but neither of us is feeling exactly Thor-like at the moment.
I’m not going to die or anything, feeling about thirty-five, maybe forty percent health. Rostejn looks like he’s worse off than that.
We’re finishing off a cluster of these hellhounds, hoping against hope we’re close to a resting point, when a fresh wave of murderous dogs comes rushing in from the north. The worst part is their breath. Dog breath is one thing. And demons are generally pretty good about dental hygiene. But for some reason when you put the two together, it’s like, oh boy, now, that’s not fresh breath. Definitely not my favorite smell out here.
Rostejn’s a couple of feet in front of me, and when the new batch shows up, I see his shoulders slump. He slashes a demon dog in the throat and cuts another one’s legs off in two clean and efficient motions, then turns to look at me as if to say, chicken sure would be good right now.
I grunt in agreement.
Then it’s just there. I don’t know if it’s the prayers to the deity that worked or we just lucked out, but there it is. A whole delicious chicken, cooked and on a platter, just sitting there under a tree.
Go for it, Rostejn says.
No you, I say.
Eat it, he says.
This is what it’s all about. These guys, they all freaking love one another. And by guys, I am including Trin and Byr, who are like sisters, but also guys, but also, I might be slightly in love with Trin, like slightly and maybe also totally in love, like maybe ever since that double full moon in Oondar, when we spent a night flank to flank for warmth, but other than that, we are all like brothers, like chicken-sharing brothers.
Eat it, Rosti, I finally say, with authority. I tell him I feel great, only half lying. He needs it more, but even if he didn’t, this is what a hero does, right? Right?
No really, right? I am really asking. I wish there were someone who could answer.
We set up camp for the night. Everyone is demoralized. Turns out that chicken Rostejn and I kept offering each other wasn’t a chicken after all, just one of those smooth, chicken-looking-kind-of-rock mounds that stick out of the ground around these parts, so when Rostejn got nipped on the arm by one of those canine hell spawn, it took him down to twenty percent life bar and I’m sitting not so pretty myself at thirty-two, I just said to hell with it and used the Power Move I’d been saving for the last nine rounds. Lucky for everyone, it worked. But just barely. We all scrambled to this saving place, a little clearing near a cave. A place to hide out and heal our wounds, before setting out again in the morning.
We take stock of our equipment before dinner. A lot of it’s pretty banged up. Byr has the whole mess laid out in front of her and Fjoork is reading off the scroll of items.
Shield of the righteous.
Check.
+1 short sword.
Check.
+1 long sword.
Check.
+1 medium sword.
Check.
+1 medium long sword.
Check.
“Jesus,” someone mumbles.
“No wonder my back hurts,” Trin says.
“Do we really need Blade of Slashing and Blade of Slicing?” Fjoork asks. Everyone knows it’s directed at Rostejn. This is a thing with us. Too much baggage.
Darts of Severe Pain.
Check.
Darts of Moderate Pain.
Check.
Dagger of Nothing in Particular.
Check.
Chain mail’s one thing, and everyone knows you can never really have enough Heal Wounds, or Elixir of Potency, but yeah, it’s getting to the point where we need to make some changes.
Fjoork and Rostejn cook a meal together without saying a word. Afterward, we all pass around a wineskin and look up at the night sky.
Byr says, “Have you ever wanted to be something else?”
I want so bad to say yes. To tell them, I don’t want to be the Hero.
“Probably a bard, I guess,” Rostejn says. “I’m told I have a good singing voice.”
“No,” Byr says. “Not a different class. What if there were no classes? What if there were something, other than ranger or thief, paladin or mage? Something else. What if you could be anything?”
Fjoork says, “I’d change my name to something cool. Like Vengor, or Caldor. Or Steve. I mean, why do we all have to have weird names? Does that really help our quest?”
The fire burns down and the group drifts off to sleep.
I watch them all snoring, Trin the loudest. She’s a single mother. Who is taking care of her kid at home? I don’t even know. I am in love with her, and I don’t even know who takes care of her kid.
Byr wakes up and catches me staring at Trin.
“She loves you, you know.”
“Did she actually say that?” I ask her.
“Yeah,” Byr says, throwing a stick into the fire. “But she thinks you’d be a shitty dad.”
Eventually, I drift off into a restless sleep of my own. I dream the ancient dream, the immense dream of the ancients, I am looking out across the gray timeless expanse of Evermoor, having the greatest of all dreams, until just before dawn, when I wake to
the sound of Rostejn relieving himself in the wooded area.
In the morning we set out for Argoq. Fjoork, who always seems to have a sense of these things, says he knows a guy who knows an elf who says to take the long way around, steering clear of the Lake of Sensual Pleasures. The group sort of grumbles, but everyone knows they have to stay focused on the mission, relentlessly scrolling toward the right.
We stop into a shop run by an old druid friend of Trin’s. Trin greets him with a peck on the cheek. Seeing her kiss him slays me. I need to make a small saving throw just to avoid getting dizzy.
The druid shows off his new wares. Boots of speed, harp of discord, bag of merry diversion. The usual clatter thrown off by the steady flow of questers along the Silvan Route.
“How much,” asks Trin, “for that Ring of Regeneration?”
“Fifty,” the shopkeeper says, “but for you, twenty-five.”
I fish coins out of my pouch and drop them in the keeper’s hand. He gives me the ring, which I nonchalantly pass over to Trin, trying to be cool about it.
Byr raises her eyebrows at Fjoork, as in, hey, get a load of Grenner the Romantic over here.
Trin refuses it. “You need this a lot more than I do,” she says.
I take it back, pretending not to care, and notice that Byr is suppressing a smile. OMG: how have I never realized this before? Byr is in love with Trin. She can barely contain herself.
I’m staring at Byr who is staring at Trin who is trying to pretend that this triangle of unrequited staring is not happening. Lucky for me, Rostejn breaks up the tension.
“Check this out,” he says, holding up a vial of something yellow and bubbly.
“Oil of Reciprocated Feelings,” the shopkeeper says.