by Robert Maxxe
She waited until they were having dinner before she even delivered the message, treating it casually.
"Oh, Nick, a girl stopped by to see you . . . Dana."
Nick kept eating, concentrating his gaze on his plate. "Okay," he said. In this context the catch-all word seemed to mean that enough had been said, the subject could be closed. He tried to sound casual himself, but with his mouth full, the word sounded like a gulp. He blushed vividly, too.
Emily chanted: "Nick has a girl friend, a girl friend!"
"She is not!" Nick aimed a fierce scowl at his little sister.
Anxious to avoid a scrap between the children, Carrie waited until she saw Emily trying to shape her mashed potatoes into a cat before trying to extract more information.
"Is she from around here, Nick? That girl, Dana—I don't think I've seen her before."
Nick squirmed in his chair and started eating faster. "Moved in a coupla months ago," he mumbled.
"Not in your class at school, is she?"
Nick shook his head.
"Where do you know her from?"
Nick raised his eyes and looked defiantly at Carrie, signaling that he knew this was an interrogation and he would not tolerate it much longer. Then he answered. "I met her in town." As though anticipating the next question, he added after a second, "At the arcade."
"I want to go there, too," Emily chimed in. "Will you take me, Mommy?"
Carrie nodded absently, her thoughts still on Nick and the girl.
And the place where they had met.
Before she could speak again, Nick wolfed down the last of his food and got up from the table. "I've got homework," he said, and bolted from the kitchen.
An hour later he stopped at the door of the den. Carrie was watching television with Emily, a National Geographic special on whales.
"Homework's done," he said. "I'm going out."
Carrie didn't fail to notice that the old form had been abandoned. Permission was not being requested, a proclamation had been made. But she had decided to avoid confrontation for now, let the matter rest. There were things that needed to be talked out, but a better moment would come, sometime when Emily wasn't around. If she was patient, Nick might even seek her out first. It had to be confusing for him—a girl like that.
"Get home by nine," Carrie said, laying on The Voice of Authority.
Nick nodded and was gone.
Faintly she heard the rattle of his bike racing down the driveway. It wasn't hard to figure out where he was headed. The girl had mentioned she expected to see Nick tonight. The arcade was probably still their meeting ground.
Carrie tried to concentrate again on the television screen, spectacular films of whales sounding, enormous tails dancing above the waves.
But she kept thinking of the arcade, her mind's eye focused on the screen of the game.
STAY WITH ME. PLAY WITH ME.
Would Nick and the girl just stay there, playing, or have a soda across the street at Osgood's?
Or go somewhere else?
The girl's house, perhaps.
Would her parents be home? What kind of family did she come from?
Had she really been just fifteen? She could easily have been a year or two older. Already on the pill. Didn't the kids these days—
Christ! A nice-looking young woman had come around asking for Nick. That was all. It occurred to Carrie suddenly that the root of her reaction might lie in herself, her own problems. Celibate too long, her own urges repressed, maybe she was projecting her own needs onto others—onto Nick and the girl—imagining passions where they didn't exist.
Couldn't exist. Children, that's all they were. Meeting to play games.
TIME FLIES. FLY TIME.
Or was it possible there was something unhealthy about that place —an atmosphere established that encouraged children to overreach sensible boundaries?
Some people thought so, Carrie remembered. They were meeting to air their views tonight.
She tried for another few minutes to sit quietly with Emily and watch the nature program. But she couldn't keep her thoughts off Nick and the girl. And the arcade.
It might be a good idea, after all, if she went to hear what others had to say about it.
Carrie rounded up a baby-sitter—Kim Larrimore, who lived just down the block—and left Emily with her, contentedly watching the whales.
9
The program had already begun when Carrie tiptoed down the aisle of the high school auditorium and eased into a seat. Peg Wessel, moderator for the panel, was at a lectern speaking. Glancing around, Carrie estimated no more than fifty or sixty in the audience, most of them elderly. None that she knew were parents of children Nick's age.
Five chairs were lined up across the center of the stage, four of them occupied, the one at the center empty. Then Carrie saw a sixth empty chair near the lectern. The sixth, she thought, must be Peg's, which meant that some invited member of the panel had not shown up. Of the four who had, the only one she recognized was Howard Ryman, the high school principal in the left-most chair. Next to him sat a middle-aged woman in a prim dark dress printed with tiny white flowers—an "old maid's dress," was the way Carrie thought of it. Then came the empty chair, then a gangly boy of sixteen. At the right end of the row was an attractive woman with brown hair whom Carrie judged to be about her own age. The woman was dressed in a chic tan suit and wore glasses that made her look stylish and intelligent.
Having already introduced the panel members, Peg was in the middle of some opening remarks about how she refused to regard the spread of video games as a harmless fad, and so had decided to expose "the truth."
Carrie amused herself during the tedious speech by comparing the two women on the panel, and making a bet with herself as to which was Wendy Patowski. Only an old-maid type, she decided, would invest herself in a full-time war against video games.
Peg finished her statement and handed the microphone over to Howard Ryman.
The principal began by allowing that computers were an increasingly valuable tool in education. But he went on to condemn the computer games as a perversion of that purpose, and ended with a demand that, even if the arcade was not closed down, its doors must never be allowed to open during school hours.
When Ryman sat down, Peg came to the microphone just long enough to say: "And now, Dr. Nathan."
The woman in the "old maid" dress came to the lectern. From her first phrases, it was apparent to Carrie that the woman had earned her title as a psychologist. She spoke about antisocial "behavioral modes," and alienation, and narcissistic self-involvement, and short attention spans—all problems that she said had seriously affected children since the advent of television and would henceforth be aggravated by the games.
Next came the teenaged boy. He was slow-spoken, and his name was Philip Carmichael. Where Peg had dug him up, Carrie couldn't begin to imagine. With all the pathetic fervor of a reformed lush speaking to a local AA, Philip Carmichael told the audience of an addiction to arcade games that had only been "cured" after his lifetime savings of $460 had been depleted and he had been dropped back a grade in school. He echoed the principal's call for closing the arcade at least during school hours. "It's hard enough for a guy like me to stay interested in school stuff," he said, "without having that kind of competition."
And how, Carrie wondered, did that leave room for movies, baseball games, bowling alleys, or anything else that might divert the Carmichaels of the world? By now she knew that her attendance tonight was a waste of time. She had come hoping there might be a real debate, some sensible measured guidance for reacting to a child's inevitable involvement with a popular and compelling gadget. But this was something else, a parade of hostile witnesses, a kangaroo court convened by Peg Wessel to endorse her own fears and prejudices.
Still, Carrie couldn't leave until she heard Wendy Patowski. She was too curious from the moment she realized that the anti-game activist was not the old maid, after all, but a woman who see
med quite like herself.
Wendy Patowski began in a low key. Smiling placidly, she described herself as an "ordinary mother of three" who had never before gotten involved in any political activity, and recalled that she had felt no alarm when a couple of arcades first opened in the town where she lived. But then she started to encounter the games wherever she went. They were everywhere, she continued, her voice rising stridently—in luncheonettes, theater lobbies, gas stations, pizza parlors, bowling alleys, candy stores, five-and-tens, supermarkets. And she saw more arcades opening up. It was then she determined that something so pervasive couldn't go unchecked. There were places in other parts of the country where the citizens had recognized the peril —like Mesquite, Texas, which had taken its attempt to pass an ordinance banning all games all the way to the Supreme Court. But no one seemed to be doing anything here!
By now Wendy Patowski's tone had become absolutely militant. Her face had changed, too, the pleasant smile supplanted by a fierce grimace. Now, she said, having made herself an expert in computer games, she could attest that behind what pretended to be innocent leisure was "a callous conspiracy to enslave the minds of our children." Drawing correlations to towns with six arcades versus those with two, she spouted statistics on the increase of juvenile crime and the decline in literacy. She told of poor families where the children cashed in all the food stamps to finance a chronic game habit. Finally, in a voice hushed with shock, she reported information given to her by "an anonymous source highly placed inside the industry," that the name of the most successful video game, PAC-MAN, was actually derived from a secret corporate code for "Planned Action to Computerize Mankind."
Carrie listened with fascination. Where did people get such ideas? This talk came out of the same loony bag that not long ago had inspired evangelical nuts to spread rumors that one of the country's major manufacturers of soap and toothpaste was really a secret cabal of devil-worshipers. It reminded her of sad psychotics she often saw when she lived in the city—street people who handed out leaflets saying the CIA was a subsidiary of Standard Oil, or wore sandwich boards showing pictures of tiny electronic elements supposedly being given to Americans through their drinking water so they could be run by remote control from Washington.
Wendy Patowski wasn't quite that far gone, but she had certainly lost all rational perspective. Perhaps it came from being a bored housewife, desperate for some raison d'être more noble than eliminating "ring around the collar." Looking for a cause, she had chosen this for the same reason the climber scales a mountain: because it was there. Thrilled to discover the attention she could generate, she was driven to make wilder claims, and found a talent for reaching an audience. Carrie saw the elderly listeners around her clucking indignantly as Wendy Patowski revealed the covert conspiracy. Her showmanship was evident when she followed the absurd charge by whirling toward the onstage chair that had remained empty all evening. "If you doubt the involvement of those who crave anonymity," she bellowed, "take note that no spokesman for the local arcade responded to our invitation to come here and give his side of the story."
She ended her turn with a quiet vow to "support with all my heart the righteous battle to close the Millport arcade."
The applause when Wendy Patowski sat down was loud and sustained. Then Peg Wessel sprang to the microphone and announced a question-and-answer period. The first audience member called upon was an elderly man who asked if it was true that the games emitted microwaves that would increase the cancer risk for anyone regularly passing the arcade.
Carrie had heard enough. (Yes, Wendy Patoswki replied, it was known that color television gave off radiation, and the game screens were similar. . . .) She gathered up her coat and started tiptoeing up the aisle.
Peg Wessel surveyed the forest of hands raised for the next question, and pointed at last to a man on the aisle—at exactly the point Carrie had reached. With all eyes directed nearby, Carrie felt too self-conscious to duck out the rear door (no doubt Peg meant to call attention to her defection). She leaned against the wall, coat folded over her arms, while the man on the aisle stood to speak.
"I came here tonight," he said, "because from the way this meeting was organized, and from a petition I've seen circulating around town, it seemed to me that the reaction to a basically harmless situation has been a little overwrought. And I thought maybe I could help cool things down a little." He spoke in a clear, firm voice, addressing himself to the people around him in the audience as well as to those on stage. "Let's try to remember that what's involved here is an activity as old as the hills—children playing games. Sure, it's a new kind of game—and of course, done to excess it could be detrimental. But isn't that true of anything done to excess? The fact is, children may be gaining something very positive from their interaction with these games. By playing with them, our children are taking the first, friendly step toward becoming familiar with a valuable technology. The technology upon which an increasingly complex world may have to—"
"This is a question-and-answer period," Peg Wessel broke in abruptly. Until now she had been glaring at the man, not too polite to interrupt, but too flustered by his commanding presence. "Now, if you'd like to participate in that, sir, all right. Otherwise, sit down."
"I'd like very much to participate," the man replied. Meeting Peg Wessel's testiness with an exaggerated cordiality, he even bowed slightly in her direction. "Since this audience has some questions, I'd like to see that they get some reasonable answers—instead of one or two bits of horse sense buried in several carloads of horse manure."
Said by a surly, ill-dressed intruder, the words might have sparked indignation, but this man was so attractive and well spoken, the crowd took no offense, some even laughed.
Carrie smiled and said a silent bravo. Her own answer to the spuriousness of the evening had been to head for the door. But she felt a bit irresponsible. Wendy Patowski was a kind of fanatic, cooking up wild unsupported claims to stampede the uninformed into adopting her views. Was it such a small crime? Hitler had started out, after all, ranting at thirty-two misfits in a beer hall. The target for intolerance might be capricious, the birthplace insignificant—but the passions aroused never were. She admired the man who evidently understood that, and had taken the trouble to protest.
From her position, Carrie could see only his back—a heather tweed jacket on a tall frame, graying dark-brown hair in need of a trim around the ears and collar. Her curiosity aroused, she edged back down the aisle for a better look.
At the microphone, Peg Wessel clung to control. "I've taken the trouble to gather some authorities on this stage. People who have experience and training, and know what they're talking about. Now, unless you're an authority—"
"As a matter of fact," the man said pleasantly, "I do have some special knowledge of this topic."
"I see." Hostility growing, Peg Wessel immediately backed off any willingness to cede the floor. "In that case, I suggest you arrange to book the auditorium yourself next Friday, and all these people can come and hear you then—if they want to."
Anxious to break the tension, the audience rewarded Peg Wessel with a few nervous chuckles.
Carrie could see the man's face now, and saw that he smiled, too. A nice smile, plain and open, but a little weary, as though he disliked squabbling and encountered it often. He had strong features, a straight nose and square chin, and very pale blue eyes about which there was something peculiar Carrie couldn't quite define. She thought the man looked familiar, that she might have seen him once before—in the shop, maybe, on a crowded day. Though perhaps not; it was a face that should have made more of an impression.
As the laughter died, the man said, "I wouldn't want to trouble anyone to come back a second time." Again, he addressed himself to the people in the surrounding seats. "There's really very little I have to say, anyway. I just want to encourage you not to be afraid of something because it's new. I happen to work with computer technology myself, the stuff that makes these games wo
rk, and I can tell you—"
But Peg Wessel jumped hard on his words. "Aha! Computers!" She threw her hands out to the audience, embracing their sympathy. "And that's his authority to tell us the truth?" She pointed a finger at the man. "I think it's possible he was sent here just to disrupt this discussion and prevent us from accomplishing our goal."
The audience murmured. Now this was exciting, the conspiracy theory was really taking off.
The man was left speechless for a moment. Studying him as he stared at the stage, Carrie realized why his eyes had a slight peculiar twist. The eyebrow over one—the left, nearest her—was unnaturally short. It slanted up normally from above the bridge of his nose, but then stopped short at the mid-point of the eye, over the pupil. The tiny flaw made the brow appear to be perpetually arched, and gave his face a constantly quizzical expression.
Recovering his poise, the man looked directly at Peg Wessel and said, "There's a famous computer scientist who's got a phrase for people with your problem. He calls them human chauvinist pigs. What's really behind this is that you don't like computers, you don't like your kids playing with them because you're afraid of that relationship. . . ."
"We appreciate having your point of view," Peg Wessel responded, her voice dripping with vitriol. "Now I think we're past due for another question." She lifted a pointing finger and swept it slowly through the air.
There was a lull, then hands shot up.
The man shook his head in a gesture of mixed disgust and surrender, then grabbed up his overcoat and turned into the aisle. That brought him face-to-face with Carrie. He paused for an instant and smiled as if recognizing a kindred spirit. Then he continued up the aisle and pushed through the rear door.
It was the smile that pulled her along. She emerged into the foyer as the man was slipping into his coat. At the sound of the door opening behind him, he turned and smiled again before moving toward the exit.