The Gospel of Winter (22 page)

There was a moment of silence, and I knew that was my cue to leave them alone. I told Cindy I'd go down and join James. “Sounds like some exciting stuff is going on around here,” I said. Cindy beamed, and I knew it had been the right thing to say, like the old script had been handed to me, and I'd picked right up where I'd left off somewhere back at the Christmas party.

I made a U-turn at the foot of the basement stairs and walked past the painting racks and file cabinets. James had already gotten back to his game. There was a row of dim track lighting running down what had become a corridor between the storage units. Two more rows of track lighting had been turned off, and they stretched in different directions across the ceiling. The screams and gun blasts from James's video game came from behind some of the file cabinets. I rounded the corner and found a small office area James had cleared away and set up with a projector and screen. The characters in the game were as large as he was. He controlled a man in a red leather jacket who wielded a semiautomatic gun and fired away at an armada of zombies that groaned their way forward until James blew their
heads off. Blood spurted across the screen endlessly, and I found myself feeling a little queasy.

“Excuse me,” I said softly, but James jumped anyway. “Sorry, sorry. I just thought I'd come down.”

The colors from the screen played over his pale face as he looked at me. He shrugged into himself, collapsing inward, and he took a step back. A zombie hurled an ax at his player, and then another stabbed the leather-jacketed character with a pitchfork. There was another chop, screams, and then James's player fell down in a bloody heap. The zombie hoard moved in and feasted on the corpse. The screen glazed over in a film of red.

A small area rug was spread across the floor between us, and neither of us crossed it. “There's soda in the fridge,” James finally said, pointing to a small brown door beneath the desk.

The air was cool in the storage basement, and a mug of tea or coffee would have been more appropriate, but I grabbed a can from the minifridge anyway. I leaned against the desk and realized how much taller I was than James. He looked at the screen and shook his head.

“Well, I guess since you killed me, I could start over. Want to play two-player? I have another controller.” James pressed some buttons and flipped through a series of screens until there were two profile head shots floating on the screen in front of a gray background.

“The second player is a girl, huh?” I asked. The digital
warrior wore a leather jacket like her male counterpart, but hers was black. “I'll play. What do I do?”

James dug around in a desk drawer and pulled out the other controller. As he plugged it in, he explained its basic functions, how to kick and punch, how to shoot, how to throw a grenade, and where to look for more once the game started because they were few and far between. He took it all very seriously, and he held the new remote close to his chest as he recited the directions. He seemed proud of himself.

“Thanks” I said after a minute. “But it's just a game. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.”

“Yeah,” James said. “But you have to play it right if you're going to play.” He stood there in the glow from the projector and the screen, looking like a solemn officiant, and I wondered if this is what I looked like to other kids when I responded to the teachers' questions, one after another—automatic and lifeless. When I reached for the controller, he stepped back and handed it to me at a full arm's length, nearly dropping it into my hand.

“You can just stand back over there,” he said, pointing to the other side of the rug.

I followed his orders, and the game began. Although we were both a team against the zombies, James killed most of them while I shot erratically across the screen. If I had cared about the game at all, I would have been glad we weren't playing against each other. He would have slaughtered
me, and I could tell he wouldn't have gotten bored doing it over and over. In fact, because he knew the game so well, I assumed he'd already played it through and beaten it before. He was just going through the motions. Enter zombie; destroy it; pick up ammunition; load; fire; fire; fire. I could understand the comfort it brought, the succinct execution of tasks, one after another indefinitely, that kept him busy enough to not have to think about something else.

Across the rug, James stood stiffly; only his fingers bounced quickly across the controller. “Hey,” I said to him, “I heard you switched schools.”

“My mom wanted to move me somewhere else.”

“No kidding, where?”

“I don't know. Just someplace else, I guess. Hey, watch out!” James yelled. I let my player wander too close to a zombie, who bit into my player's shoulder. “Do a roundhouse!” James shouted. “Do a roundhouse!”

I fumbled over the buttons and managed to spin my character and boot the zombie away. Then I blew its head off because I was at close range. Its headless body wavered in place. “Yeah,” James whispered. He used the corpse to block an oncoming attack and annihilated the group of oncoming zombies with a grenade. His character pushed forward and marched us deeper into the game.

“She didn't like CDA? It's a good school.”

“I don't know.”

“What's the matter with it?”

“My mom just thinks I should go somewhere else. I don't know.”

Our characters jogged into the middle of a town square with an old stone well in the center. What looked like regular villagers were actually zombies carelessly stumbling through pedestrian motions: yanking on the well chain, although there wasn't a bucket; picking over apples at a fruit cart that was turned over and crawling with maggots. The zombies turned toward us when James hit one of them from behind. James fired into the windows of some buildings, too, and zombies tumbled out of them.

“I heard you're going to Bullington, now. Is that right?” I asked.

“Come on,” he said. “This is a hard part.”

“Seriously. Why would she make you go there?”

“I don't know. Are you going to play the game?”

“I think you do,” I said. James glanced at me briefly, then turned back to the game and tried to concentrate even more. “And you're no longer an altar boy at Most Precious Blood, are you?” I tried to keep my voice from trembling. “You're not even going there anymore, are you?” James shook his head. “I used to work there too,” I said. “I'm never going back.” James shifted his feet on the carpet and fired at another zombie. I couldn't feel the buttons beneath my thumbs. I found myself standing right next to him. “James,” I said quietly.

James stepped back and pointed to the controller I had
dropped on the floor on the other side of the rug. “P-Please,” he stammered. “I want to play the game.”

“Did you tell your mother?” I asked.

James shook his head at me. “I don't know.”

“You did.” I was shrill, and I couldn't stop it.

“I just want to play the game,” James whimpered. One of the characters in the video game screamed. “I don't want to talk. I can't. I can't.”

I ripped the controller out of his hand and grabbed his arm. “I need to know about this,” I said. James tried to pull his arm away, but he couldn't get out of my grip. I hunched over him, found his collar in my other hand, and pulled him closer. “You can tell me,” I said. “What did you say? Did anyone talk to Father Dooley? Don't you get it?” I yelled. In the game, a mob of zombies screamed and squealed, and our two characters shrieked as the monsters surrounded them, stabbing and clawing. With his free arm, James punched me, but it was weak and useless. He tried to kick me.

“You won't tell anybody?”

“No,” he said.

I grabbed his hair and forced him to look up at me. “Promise me you won't tell anybody.”

He kept his eyes closed. “No. I won't tell anything. I won't,” he pleaded. “No, no.” I held on as my stomach bottomed out. Sweat poured down around my neck. I could feel his chest through the cotton, against my knuckles. I knew so surely that I could pull James down to his knees. I could
do anything I wanted to him, and that sudden knowledge made me want to vomit.

“No,” he cried again. I let go of him. I blocked the exit and still held him by the arm, so he leaned over and bit my hand. He was free in an instant. He dashed under the desk and tucked himself into a ball beside the minifridge. I wanted to hit him: I wanted to hold him.

The zombies gorged themselves on our dead avatars, gore splattering across the screen in ugly, too-realistic droplets. James remained under the table as if sheltering himself from the spray of blood. “Please,” I heard myself whining. “I didn't hurt you. Please. I didn't mean to.” I nearly choked it out as I listened to myself. “No, no. I'm not like him, James. I'm not him. I'm not.”

“I won't talk about it!” James yelled. He sniffled and wiped his cheeks.

I leaned down against the file cabinet and sat on the floor. The projector flashed above me. A film of red covered the images on the screen again, and the game's theme music drummed alongside the grotesque munching sounds. James continued to whimper, and soon I was sobbing too. Dust floated through the bright cone of light above me, and I thought of the grit pressing into my knees on the church basement floor, Father Greg's hand yanking my hair, the smell of dank sweat, the sips of scotch, the burn, a finger with a jagged nail pressed against my lip, the rough moustache scratching at my neck, along my jaw, my ribs squeezed
within his massive grip, the cold air prickling the skin on my chest, the edge of the workbench digging, carving a line deep into my back, but how I wouldn't scream, no I wouldn't dare fucking scream, not once, not anything more than the hush it took to survive it, and the breaths that came with the long soreness until finally it was gone, and I told myself,
I've done it, I've survived, and if this is what it takes, and this is all it takes, then I can take it all again and I will.

I was sick. I found my Coke, swigged it to try to settle my stomach, but I felt worse, and I struggled to keep it down. I apologized to James as soon as I could manage it. He watched me from beneath the desk for a long time, until he finally calmed down. “I won't bother you again,” I said. He nodded. Neither of us moved for a while, and I began to worry about our mothers upstairs. “Will they come down?” I asked.

“She'll shout first,” James said. “She scared me once. Now she shouts down first.”

“That's good,” I said. I wanted to give him something to prove that I would not bother him again, some kind of token that meant more than anything I could say to him. In a myth, I might be able to find a cup that would bring blood back into his cheeks, or a cloak that would protect him, but in the real world there was nothing but trust, and I could understand why he wouldn't give that to me.

When I got up, James stayed under the desk. I steadied myself and chugged the rest of the soda. James hesitated.
“Let's go,” I told him. I picked up the controllers and tossed one to him. “I'll be the girl again.”

James pulled himself forward to see the screen from a better angle, but he still remained seated on the floor by the desk. We played through the level again, and I concentrated, tried to play more seriously, tried to work with James's character so he wouldn't have to cover for me. We got to the village center again, more quickly this time. I shot at the upstairs windows as soon as we approached the well, and pitched a grenade into it, and the whole thing exploded, bricks flying everywhere.

“Awesome,” James said quietly. “They would have started crawling out later.”

“I'm learning,” I said. “But I would suck if you hadn't explained it.” James smiled. “You're really good at this game,” I said.

“I am,” James said. “I know.”

Cindy called down to us later, and we walked over to the stairs. In front of our mothers, I thanked James for letting me play the game with him, and he waved good-bye to me. As I got up the stairs, Mother glowed. She put her hand on my shoulder and told Cindy she'd be back on Tuesday. I started out into the gallery, and then Mother went back over to Cindy and gave her a hug. “It's exciting, isn't it?” she said. “Thank you.”

“Let's stop saying thank you to each other and just start doing it,” Cindy said.

They kissed good-bye, and Mother squeezed her hand and then strode toward me in the doorway.

“It was a pleasure to see your gallery,” I said. I almost bowed for all the formality. On the way out, we passed the print of the man's face I had been staring at earlier. When I'd been looking at it before, staring at one cube at a time, the big picture hadn't been as clear as it was when we were leaving. It was a multilayered mask, and what was left of the flesh was nearly gone, present only as the representation of a face that everyone would recognize, not the real face behind it. Who but a sucker, a dumb shit like me or James, ever revealed that soft, trembling stuff beneath?

Mother had an air of knowing superiority about her as we walked back to our car. The sun had set while we'd been at the gallery, and Mother seemed excited by the night sky and the orange glow from the faux gaslights along the sidewalk. She looked both ways down the block and clapped her gloved hands together. I watched my breath billow and disappear.

“It's still early enough to get a seat at Oyster Bridge,” she said. “You're hungry, right?” she continued when we were in the car. “Let's get some dinner. Let's go out and celebrate. This is the new us. We're getting back involved.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “We are.”

“Aren't you excited? You take after me more than you think. We'll be the vanguard. We'll be the talk of the town.”

I could just see her twirling a furious diagonal down the
stage, flexing her hips, and setting her legs for the leap.
Get up there
. I knew it must take more than training to get your body up into the air. Your mind has to push you up too; you must have to see yourself rising, and not from your own body's vantage point but as if your mind's eye leaves you and watches you from afar, and a distant voice says,
Up, up, up, get up there
, and you let it take you away.