by Terry Miles
“That’s it?”
“What else?” she asked, ignoring my question.
“I’m sorry?”
“What else happened?”
It felt like the temperature in the room suddenly dropped by ten degrees, and the lights dimmed, just a little.
I considered telling her about the call Scarpio had received just before he’d abruptly ended our time together in the diner, but there was something about this woman that felt incredibly dangerous. I suddenly wanted this interview to be over.
I shook my head. “That’s it.”
It was at this point that something strange happened.
Steffi Graf lost the 1991 Wimbledon final.
This was impossible.
I’d run that particular match over in my mind hundreds of times. I see every point as it happens, very clearly, without exception. Steffi Graf wins. She won. It’s a fact of history.
This had never happened to me before. Every match I’d ever re-created mentally had played out exactly as it happened in real life. I was never a single point off. I was shaken. My hands began to tremble.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied, and did my best to compose myself. “Do you think Mr. Scarpio is coming?”
“I don’t think so, but if he does, please tell him to call home immediately.” And with that, she stood up and walked out of the diner.
I watched her cross the street and enter the arcade.
I’d walk over later to see if the mysterious woman said or did anything interesting, but I had to do something first. I went back over that tennis match in my mind, at high speed.
Steffi Graf won, just like she was supposed to.
I relaxed a little bit and ordered some food.
I was starving.
* * *
—
“Hey, you’re the meatball sub guy’s friend.”
I took the last bite of my three-cheese omelet and looked up into the familiar wide grayish-green eyes of the server who had shown a great deal of patience dealing with Scarpio yelling lines from the film Point Break, and who had seen that patience rewarded with an enormous tip.
“Guilty,” I said.
“I have something for you,” she said, then walked away from the booth toward the back of the restaurant.
I had no idea what she was talking about.
She returned about a minute later and handed me Alan Scarpio’s phone. “You left this last night,” she said, then hurried off to help another patron.
Either Scarpio accidentally left his phone in the booth after he’d played me the rhubarb sounds, or it had somehow slipped out of his pocket.
I stared at the cute dog photo for a moment, then realized his home screen wasn’t locked. If I wanted to, I could access Alan Scarpio’s phone with one simple swipe.
A few minutes later I called the server over and explained that the phone belonged to my friend, and I would do my best to let him know it was here. She told me she’d put it in the back office for safekeeping.
Once again I called the number that Alan Scarpio had given me, but this time there was no answer, and no voicemail option.
I waited until I saw the mystery woman leave the arcade, and then ran across the street to ask Chloe if the woman had mentioned anything about Alan Scarpio.
* * *
—
Chloe and I had almost gotten together once—or at least, that’s the way I choose to remember it.
It was a week or two after we’d met. Both of us were single at the time.
A mutual friend had an art opening, and Chloe and I were there, along with a handful of other people we knew from the arcade.
I had no idea how she felt about me, but I’d been attracted to Chloe from the moment we met. She was smart and funny, and into a lot of the same terminally uncool shit I was. And even though she might come across as somebody who doesn’t give a fuck, I could tell that she did. She gave all the fucks. She was deeply engaged and cared about a lot of things, you just needed to take the time to get to know her.
Chloe referred to herself as a “recovering musician.” She’d lived a completely different life from the ages of sixteen to nineteen as the singer and principal songwriter in a semipopular indie rock band.
Like Pavement with “Cut Your Hair” or Radiohead with “Creep,” Chloe’s band, Peagles, had a hit single that overshadowed a critically acclaimed full-length album. That song was called “MPDG (Manic Pixie Dreamgirl).”
Chloe smashes the absolute shit out of a ukulele in the video. It’s really cool.
Although Peagles released only one album and an EP before they broke up, “MPDG” was a big hit, and that song’s ubiquity in movies and television shows meant that, unless she really wanted to, Chloe didn’t need to work for the next couple of decades.
* * *
—
After the gallery show, a couple of our friends suggested we head back to my place for a drink. My apartment was not only large and roommate-free, it was also right around the corner, and I always had booze.
There were six of us there, but I spent most of the night talking to Chloe and her friend Amanda. It was a great conversation. We talked about games, movies, comics, television, and whatever else popped into our heads. By the time I finally glanced over at the clock, it was one in the morning, and everybody else had gone home.
I walked Chloe and Amanda to the door, and on the way there Chloe and I shared a brief look. She smiled just a little as she pulled her hair behind her ear, and I felt a wave of electricity move through me. I suddenly couldn’t figure out breathing.
Was I on an inhale or an exhale?
I eventually remembered how to work my lungs, the three of us hugged goodbye, and I shut the door.
As I made my way back to the living room, I thought about the best way to ask Chloe out. Was dinner too prosaic? Definitely. Was there maybe a cool band playing The Crocodile this weekend? I would check first thing in the morning.
Then I heard a knock on my door.
I was absolutely positive that when I opened the door, Chloe would be standing there. She’d tell me she came back to suggest a late-night walk or something similar, that she’d been having a great time and that she didn’t want it to stop.
But it wasn’t Chloe at the door. It was Amanda.
She said she’d forgotten her glasses and suggested we have one more drink. She wanted to talk about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series.
We ended up staying together for five years.
* * *
—
Chloe was balanced precariously on a stool behind the front counter when I arrived. She wore a faded NPR T-shirt, ripped jeans, and standard-issue Apple AirPods, which she pulled out of a tangle of crimped blond hair when I walked in.
She smiled and held up her middle finger.
“Super unprofessional,” I said. “This is a place of business.”
She shrugged.
I asked about the mystery woman from the diner. Chloe told me that the woman didn’t ask any questions, just played one game of Robotron and left.
“Why the interest in random business lady?” Chloe asked, suspicious.
I told her about what had happened with Scarpio.
“Alan Scarpio?”
“Yeah.”
“Asked you to help him fix the game?”
“Yeah.”
“Rabbits?”
“Yes.”
Chloe stared for a moment, then shifted her weight to her back foot and crossed her arms. “That didn’t happen.”
I smiled.
“For real?”
“I swear. It really happened.”
“Holy shit!” Chloe said, and her gum almost fell out of her mouth. “That woman did ask if I�
��d seen Alan Scarpio in here. I thought she was fucking with me.”
“It really happened, but Scarpio missed our meeting earlier today and I haven’t been able to get back in touch.”
“Tell me everything,” she said.
So I did.
Chloe made me describe what had happened with Scarpio down to the most minute detail—twice. As I found myself repeating what had happened, it made less and less sense. Alan Scarpio, billionaire philanthropist and possible winner of the sixth iteration of Rabbits, had told me something was wrong with the game and that he needed my help to fix it.
Chloe asked me if I was sure it was actually Scarpio and not some kind of look-alike or something.
I nodded, but, in that moment, I didn’t actually feel all that sure about anything.
7
JEFF GOLDBLUM DOES NOT BELONG IN THIS WORLD
Three days after Alan Scarpio stood me up at the diner, I called the number on the business card he’d given me for the last time.
Out of service.
Baron had taken on another complicated coding project and Chloe was busy at the arcade, so I spent most of my time cleaning up a couple of online trading accounts I’d been neglecting and taking care of a few things around the house.
Meeting Scarpio had begun to feel like some kind of weird fever dream—a brief glimpse into an alternate reality where I was important enough to be sent on quests and billionaires sat down with me for pie.
Since the number Scarpio had given me was out of service, and he was legendarily reclusive, I had no way of getting in touch with him.
If he really did need my help fixing Rabbits, he’d have to find me.
* * *
—
I did my best to dive back into my life, and tried not to think about Rabbits, Scarpio, or anything connected to our strange conversation in the diner.
Two days later, Alan Scarpio was reported missing.
One of the public relations companies he owned held a press conference. They said that he’d been missing for what they referred to as a “significant, but as yet unknown period of time.” They were asking for help. If anybody had any information on Alan Scarpio’s whereabouts, they were to please call the number.
* * *
—
“Holyfuckingshit!” Baron Corduroy’s voice burst out of my phone’s tiny speakers. He could clearly barely contain his excitement. “Alan Scarpio went missing right after he told us something was wrong with the game.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty nuts,” I said.
Of course, Alan Scarpio hadn’t told us something was wrong with the game, he told me, but I didn’t have the heart to correct Baron. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him this excited.
“I hope he’s okay,” I said.
“Wait, do you think his disappearance might be connected to his visiting you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck, K. Is this Rabbits?”
I ignored his question. I was still processing the news of Scarpio’s disappearance. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
“What the hell are we supposed to do now? All we have is a cryptic visit from a billionaire and some mystery woman who cornered you at the diner,” Baron said.
But that wasn’t all we had.
“I’ll call you later,” I said, and hung up.
* * *
—
The diner was half full, and the staff were settled into the calm just before the lunch rush. The woman with the grayish-green eyes who’d served us the other day was working.
She recognized me with a smile and waved me over to a booth.
“Welcome back,” she said as she filled my cup with coffee.
I told her that my friend was busy and had asked me to pick up his phone.
She brought it over the next time she refilled my coffee. She obviously had no idea that the person I’d been sitting with was a missing billionaire. I guess she didn’t watch the news.
As soon as she handed me Scarpio’s phone, I threw down a five-dollar bill and rushed out of the diner. I was worried she’d suddenly figure out whose phone it was and change her mind.
* * *
—
There wasn’t much on Scarpio’s phone. No photographs, aside from the picture of the dog that functioned as his wallpaper, and no records of any calls—including the call I’d watched him receive that had clearly disturbed him and sent him rushing out of the diner to attend what he’d referred to as a late meeting. Those factors, along with the lack of a connected email account and an empty contact list, made one thing absolutely clear: This was definitely not the missing billionaire’s primary means of communicating with the world.
* * *
—
“Rhubarb pie?” the Magician asked, staring at Scarpio’s phone as if it were the Ark of the Covenant.
“That’s what he ate,” I said.
“And coffee?”
“Yep, and coffee.”
“Any special kind of coffee?”
I shook my head. “Just regular diner stuff.”
The Magician nodded and went back to work, his wiry black hair hanging low over cool green eyes, long fingers bending and flexing as he connected Scarpio’s phone to a laptop running an operating system I’d never seen before. He was wearing a light brown suede jacket over a vintage pink-and-yellow Teenage Fanclub T-shirt. He looked a bit thinner than the last time I’d seen him, and, although it had only been a month or so, he looked years older.
Chloe said he’d been in northern Russia for a while, but she didn’t know where he’d gone after that; the Magician was always traveling somewhere last-minute for wildly disparate amounts of time and then just strolling back into the arcade as if he’d never left. None of us had any idea what he did for money, fun, or anything else.
“You met Scarpio here in the arcade before he had pie in the diner?” the Magician asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Right downstairs.”
The Magician hit a few keys and waited for something to boot up on his laptop.
“What did he want?”
“He asked me to help him.”
“He asked you to help him?” The Magician’s choice of emphasis would have been insulting, if it wasn’t so completely warranted by the situation. Me helping Alan Scarpio fix Rabbits? It wasn’t just surprising, it was completely insane.
“And you’re sure this was the phone in Scarpio’s possession?”
“Positive,” I said. “I mean, I’m pretty sure. It looks the same.”
“Tell me everything you can remember,” the Magician instructed.
I went through all of it: how Scarpio had told me something was wrong with the game, that he needed my help for some reason, and if we didn’t fix Rabbits before the next iteration of the game began, we’d all be well and truly fucked. Then I described the pie, the mystery woman, the rhubarb recording, and, finally, the waitress who’d eventually handed me Alan Scarpio’s phone.
“Scarpio was playing Robotron the night you met him?”
“That’s right.”
“And he received a call that clearly worried him somehow, but there’s no record of that call on this phone?”
I nodded.
The Magician appeared to consider that information carefully.
It was at this point that an old yellow analog phone on the desk rang once and then stopped, the loud clipped ring echoing through the room for a few long seconds.
The Magician looked over at the phone. “I have to take that.”
“It stopped,” I said.
“I’ll be in touch,” the Magician said firmly, then carefully unhooked Scarpio’s phone from his computer, handed it back to me, and led me out of his office.
I could hear him muttering something to h
imself as he closed and locked the door behind me.
Chloe was sitting outside on the stairs when I stepped out of the office.
“I thought the Magician never plays the game,” I said as Chloe and I walked downstairs and into the arcade proper.
“He used to play, but not anymore,” Chloe said, slipping a quarter into a Mappy cabinet. “He just advises those who do. You know this, K.”
“I know. It just feels like he’s really into it this time.”
“Well, you did just bring him Alan Scarpio’s phone.”
“Fair point.”
I watched Chloe expertly guide her tiny pixelated mouse avatar around the screen.
“What are you gonna do now?” She asked.
“I’m going home.”
“Enjoy the cosmic thrill ride that is your life, K,” Chloe said as she cleared another screen on her game.
I covered her eyes for a second, but she somehow still managed to keep her onscreen character alive.
“I’m unstoppable.” She laughed.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “See you later.”
* * *
—
I woke up at two in the morning to the sound of buzzing.
I normally have my phone set to silent like a rational human being who needs sleep, but Alan Scarpio was suddenly orbiting my life, and there was no way I was going to risk missing anything important because of something as mundane as a good night’s sleep.
I picked up the phone in the middle of the second vibration.
“Hello?”
“Hey, K.”
“Chloe?”
“Sorry for calling so late.”
“No worries. I was up,” I lied.
“In the dark?”
“What do you mean?”