Early Decision

We set out at dawn because Melinda said she had one more thing about Albion Tech to show me before we met my parents at the cafeteria for breakfast. My head felt like it had a coat of rubber cement on it. Melinda said forget the kegger last night, what we’re about to do will help you figure out whether you want to apply here.

We saw one other person across the foggy half-lit quad, a sad-looking tall kid with glasses and a canvas bomber jacket that didn’t come down to the top of his pants. You always see at least someone, any time of day, Melinda said, though not loud enough that he would have heard. It’s comforting, she also said. I don’t think she knew him.

We went up the steps of a building she told me was called Tweezer or Tweedle or Tweeter, and then through a bunch of halls that all looked the same. We stopped in front of a door that had nothing on it, unlike all the other doors in the hallway. No memo board, no posters, no notes. I wouldn’t have thought it weird if Melinda had knocked or just opened the door — I’d seen enough of that already — but she reached into her pocket and pulled out a key.
No ring, no tag, just a key.

When I open it, she said, you go for the legs. Hold them down no matter what. I’ll get the top half with her pillow. You’ll see. This place will finally make sense to both of us.

Riposte

When I moved in, the only game Kim played was Sudoku. She’d sit at the rickety fifty dollar white wood kitchen table with a book of them that she got at the drugstore. The book wasn’t that fat but it never seemed like she was finishing it. I thought she was doing the same puzzle over and over until she showed me that the black cubes in the puzzles made different shapes.

“What does that look like, Alex?” Kim would say, and it was like those 3D pictures. I’d stare until my eyes got dry. Then she’d point it out, and I’d see the pinwheel, the fish, the arrow, the sword.

It’s not your fault, the Online Gamer Widows Support Group tried to tell me. But it was. When Kim showed me the game box, I thought it was cute. I thought it might keep her from being depressed about being laid off. I bought her a wireless headset for Christmas. It had one earphone, so that she would be able to hear me, too.

The light went on in the computer room. It never went off.

The last thing we used to do together was eat dinner on Tuesdays. I insisted. I would cook for us. I chewed and nodded while Kim talked about armor and weapons. She would eat early spring greens with epic quests, fingerling potatoes with faction, and eventually chicken a la king with something called healing rotation. Then, I ate alone. It was quieter, and I ate less.

There was this one girl in the Online Gamer Widows Support Group named Tanya. She lived out in Nevada with her boyfriend and her two kids. She came home to monsters on the screen and little faces in a semi-circle behind the computer chair, where they silently watched their nightmares die, over and over again.

I wanna live in a house where the computer gets turned off at night, Tanya wrote to me one night at 1:36 a.m..

The next day, the sound card for Kim’s PC died. Kim called me an asshole because I wouldn’t run out to Best Buy to get a new one. She didn’t want to go because she was in the middle of a raid. “You’re going to yell at me anyway, if I bring the wrong one home,” I said.

When I heard her car roar down the street, I got to work fast. I threw some of my clothes into a bag. I got my guitar and amp out of the living room closet and put them in the back of my truck. Then I sat at Kim’s PC and set to doing what everyone in the Online Gamer Widows Support Group dreamed of doing constantly: deleting characters.

There was only one. A level 90 knight, a blond human man named Alexx. He held a sword and spun around in place, not saying a word.

Waiting Room

Timmy wasn’t with me when it happened. I’d just dropped him off at gymnastics. Even though he was so tired, I told him to do his best. I drove toward the grocery store. When I heard the brakes behind me, everything slowed down. When I opened my eyes, I was here. There wasn’t any pain in between. Pain is different.

I used to joke about spending most of my time here. Now, I can’t leave. When I go out the doors, the other sides are dark. Everything else is intact. There’s a faint smell of exhaust, rain, and antiseptics in the hallway. In the parking lot, I can hear the whisper of well maintained minivans speeding slightly down the street. I even get the warm flash of confidence from bringing my son back out into a world that doesn’t care about anything, not even persistent symptoms. But the actual views, the seeing of things? It’s dark. Like insides, I guess.

Sometimes, I pace from the bulletin board to the coat closet. I lie on the shelf meant for hats, when no one uses hats or coat closet shelves anymore. I read magazines that tell me what I already know. I move the big wooden beads along the metal rods on the white play table, like Timmy used to do when we would come here. The beads are shiny and juicy looking. There’s such a satisfying click when each bead reaches the end of its path. Even the mothers who bring their own tissues and hand sanitizer sometimes push them from one end to the other, when no one else is looking.

Timmy’s not here. I can hear the breath of millions of people in the dark outside, but not Timmy. I never see him inside. Maybe Craig decided to change pediatricians, or to move away. There’s no one left whose primary job is to watch and to worry. Maybe Timmy is better. The children his age who come here now are tired and pale, or tan and naughty. Sometimes they wave hello to me, to the ceiling or to the floor. I don’t love them.