The Other Normals (2 page)

“What were you going to do all summer? Play Creatures and Caverns by yourself?”

I don’t say anything.

“Jeez, Perry.”

“I like looking at the books! Is that so bad? It’s perfectly normal to enjoy reading role-playing-game manuals and making up characters by yourself.”

“It’s normal for some people, not for normal people.”

WE GET OFF AT EIGHTY-SIXTH STREET in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Jake heads to band practice while I go to Phantom Galaxy Comics, which is like a three-story nerd mother ship. The first floor has comics thumbtacked to the walls and ceiling in polystyrene bags; the third floor has Pokémon cards; the second floor is home base for me—warm, brown, and quiet like an English den. The role-playing-game floor.

Alone, allowing the door to close behind me with the
bing-bong
of the electronic bell, I climb the steps. I always close my eyes and picture the RPG floor before I reach it. It has walls plastered with huge rich posters of fantasy creatures and landscapes: a beautiful woman with a dragon on a leash, an elf looking into a reflecting pool and seeing a human reflection, the album
Led Zeppelin IV.
It smells woodsy and solid, not glossy and cheap like the comics downstairs. As I reach it, though, I stop. I have the feeling I’m being watched.

I’ve heard this feeling expressed before in movie scores through the use of rising violin noise. I’ve never experienced it, though. I’m stunned at how clear it feels. As if something
hot is sitting on my neck.

I whirl around. Nothing. Then a
skritch
, like a pencil taking down a note … but in front of me is just a smiling gnome on a poster and a security camera.

AT THE CASH REGISTER, A MAN SITS behind a glass case. Below him are cabinets full of pewter miniatures—small metal figures like toy soldiers. When you get really into Creatures & Caverns, you can buy them and paint them to be like your characters.

“Interested in something?” the man asks. I’ve never seen him here before. He occupies his chair in the rough shape of a pyramid with a sweatshirt.

“A new Creatures and Caverns expansion.”

“Looks like you have some minis you’re interested in too. Want to see any?”

I scan them. The small silver figures look ready to do battle for the fate of the world: knights, dwarfs, skeletons, pikemen, horsemen, wizards, and dragons pitched forward wielding swords, axes, spears, halberds, war hammers, staffs, and poisonous breath. An archer draws back a flaming arrow with a thin ribbon of metal curling up for the smoke.

“Are you playing a campaign right now?” the guy asks.

“No, I just make up characters by myself. I don’t have anybody to play with.”

“Who’s your main character?”

“I don’t have a main one.”

“You don’t? Here’s mine.”

He pulls one of the minis out of the glass case. The glass squeaks as he closes it. The figure is a tall, thin wizard with a staff, who looks like Gandalf … but to a degree, all wizards look like Gandalf. This one is younger, with a goatee.

“That’s Roland of Cornwall. Twelfth-level illusionist in the Pax Pastorum expansion. Here’s his sheet.”

He slips me a laminated sheet of paper. It has a colored-pencil drawing of “Roland of Cornwall” with his game stats: Strength 42, Speed 37, Health 38, Intelligence 99, Wisdom 99, Personality 99, Honor 2.

“In the new edition of the game, they give you an Honor stat. Characters with low Honor are more inclined to steal things and lie and cheat. Characters with high Honor are more inclined to get killed.”

“I know about the Honor stat. Why is your character named Roland of Cornwall?”

“After me. I’m Roland.”

“Are you … from England? Cornwall is in England.”

“Of course. I’m into England.”

“But you’re not
from
England.”

“I’m
into
it. It’s an interest of mine.”

I stifle a laugh.

“What d’ya think is funny?” Roland snatches Roland of Cornwall away. “If you’re gonna laugh at me, you can get outta
here. Go laugh with your friends. First you’ll have to find some.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What do you name your characters, if you’re so smart?”

“I’m never good with the names.” Names are a certain place my head doesn’t go. “I get stuck trying to think up different ones. Usually I just forget it and move on to create another character.”

“That’s because a name has to mean something. What’s
your
name?”

“Perry Eckert.”

“What do people call you?”

What a strange question
, I think, considering that people
do
call me something different; am I the sort of person who everyone knows has a nickname? That only works for people in sports, or superheroes … I realize an Indian raga is playing through the sound system in the store, drifting around me and Roland like a waterfall.

“There are people who call me … Mini Pecker.”

“Really? How did that begin?”

I sigh. I’ve told this story many times to people who I wanted to be my friends. They never became my friends. The story entertains me, though, so I keep telling it. Is this a disorder?

“This guy Justin Racho. He ran up on me in first grade. I was at a urinal in the bathroom. He shoved me on it so I hit the cold white part. I sprayed pee all over myself, and he yelled, ‘Perry Eckert, Mini Pecker!’ A friend of his named Jacoby Myers heard it in a nearby stall. He started laughing.
Now they still call me that.”

“Mini Pecker?”

“It doesn’t help that I’m short. I’m a late bloomer.”

Roland doesn’t look more inclined to be my friend, but he does look more inclined to make money off me at Phantom Galaxy. “I’ve got the perfect name for you,” he says. He writes on a scrap of paper:

Pekker Cland

“Pekker?”

“Like they make fun of you for, but you spell it differently, to reclaim it, like
queer
.”

“What’s a Cland?”

“Cland sounds like
clan
, so maybe with a character named Pekker Cland, you can attract a clan and not just play Creatures and Caverns by yourself.”

I stare at the name. You know what? There’s something to it. I wouldn’t mess with a person named Pekker Cland.

“As for a C and C expansion, have you heard of the
Other Normal Edition
?”

Roland steps out from behind his glass case and leads me down an aisle. We aren’t alone; there’s a hidden customer who potentially just heard everything that transpired, including the Mini Pecker stuff—a skinny black kid, about my age, with a shaved head and oval glasses and big ears. He tosses a bag of glass beads up and down. As we approach him, he examines a
book on the shelves—a thick hardcover with a genie laughing over a pirate ship on the cover.
Maybe
, I think,
he’s the person I felt spying on me before
.

Roland grabs the book. It’s the last copy. “Sorry, I have a
customer
interested in this.”

“No, it’s okay,” I say, pushing the book away. “You take it,” I say to the kid. He clearly wants it.

“No,
you
take it,” Roland says, “because he’s here all the time and he never buys anything.”

The kid pitches his bag of beads on the floor. “Fuck you, Roland. I don’t even want it.” He stalks away down the aisle.

“Drama!” Roland calls. “Outta here!” He picks up the beads.

“Do you know him?”

“That’s just Sam. Don’t worry about him. Check the book out. It’s an alternate-universe thing they’re doing based on
Arabian Nights
.”

As I open the
Creatures & Caverns Rule Book: Other Normal Edition
, the raga climaxes.

SOMETIMES WHEN YOU OPEN A BOOK, time stops. I know this is supposed to happen with great novels, but to me it happens more with role-playing-game manuals. Honestly, I can’t tell you how long I spend looking at the
Other Normal Edition
because I am immediately lost in the game world, which is called Enthral Moor and is centered in the folklore of classical Baghdad. I find a chart with sixty-four different types of scimitar on it. Sixty-four—2
⁶
! An old friend, sixty-four. I look at the book’s authors.

“‘Gerard Hendricks and Fayid Ahmed. Special Consultant: Mortin Enaw.’ What kind of a name is Mortin Enaw?” I ask Roland.

“Don’t ask me. Very gifted people write these books.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You want to buy a mini, too?”

I shake my head. Figures like Roland of Cornwall are expensive. Besides the free legal advice, another thing that keeps my parents’ divorce going is that they’re both very cheap, so they keep finding new things to fight over. They keep me on a tight leash. Financial requests have to go through the lawyers.
If I get a job this summer (computer programmer? cashier?), I’ll be able to afford one of the figures, but I know this is the last summer before the summers that
really
count for college, and the idea of getting the
Other Normal Edition
and reading it every day alone and stopping time is beautiful to me. I’ll wake up when the light comes into my room(s) and track the angles, reading the book in a sunbeam, understanding the sun the way the ancients did, leaving the house(s) just once to get on the subway because at least with divorced parents I have a reason to get on the subway anytime, to be “going home,” and then … maybe I’ll spot the
Jane Eyre
girl again! Only when I see her next, I’m going to ignore her and do something with my body that attracts her—blow hair across my brow or smile so that wrinkles crinkle at the sides of my eyes … something that works like it does in the movies.

I DECIDE TO MAKE MY NEW CHARACTER, Pekker Cland, reflect me as much as possible. It isn’t a pretty picture. In Creatures & Caverns, a strength of 99 means that you can lift boulders and bend iron bars; I figure I’m a 2. A speed of 99 means you can outrun a cheetah; I figure I’m a 7. The only stats I think might be high are my intelligence, which I peg at 65, and my honor, which I figure is 50.

I’m going to make Pekker Cland human—until I read in the book that besides the usual options of human, elf, and dwarf, I can make him a
ferrule
. Ferrules are like humans except they have red skin, yellow hair, and tails. They are highly intelligent, live underground, and are impervious to fire. After I make Pekker Cland one, I have to find a profession for him, but based on my stats the only thing he’s qualified to be is an artisan.

The
artisan
is a master of fine craft. Renowned for his/her skill at the forge, he/she creates weapons and armor and understands the principles of runecraft. An artisan may not fight in battle, but through his/her handiwork, a certain artfulness is always present in the blood that dots the land of Enthral Moor.

I think,
Epic
. I’m not sure if Gerard Hendricks, Fayid Ahmed, and Mortin Enaw went to writing school, but as far as I’m concerned they’re better than anybody that teachers make me read. The book says things like “the tempestuous force of high-level magicks” and “the fickle bodies of maidens in the chambers of slavering warlords.” Though it starts out glossy and smelling like wax, as I read it in bed and get crumbs in the spine and dog-ear the pages and underline the important parts, it blooms into a danker, older smell.

“WHY AREN’T YOU ASLEEP?” MY BROTHER asks from the top bunk. The clock reads 3:35.

“I’m reading my
Rule Book.
Learning about lock picking.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you know about lock picking?”

“I’m sure it’s like sex.”

“I’m sure it’s not like sex.”

“How would you know? Everything’s like sex. It’s the universal metaphor. To pick a lock, let me guess, you have to go slow at first, but then you have to pull off some fancy moves, and you have to stay concentrated, and you have to stick something in something, right?”

“Jake, stop. What are you doing up anyway? Drinking schnapps?”

He climbs down and wrestles my flashlight from me. “Only pussies drink schnapps!”

He kicks me out of our room, so I have to go read the
Rule Book
in the bathroom. I get so into it that my legs fall asleep on the toilet. When I get up, I collapse on the floor. All this happens in Mom’s house in Manhattan, where the neighbor’s
bathroom is six inches from our bathroom, and as I lie on the floor unable to move my legs, the neighbor’s cat perches in the window and mews at me. Then Horace, who was busy sleeping with my mom, decides he has to use the bathroom, so he shoves open the door, whapping my skull to crinkle my neck into an unhealthy position. “Ow!”

Horace closes the door and goes back down the hall as if nothing happened. He doesn’t like to stay in places where he might be liable for things. I sleep on the bathroom floor curled around my book and wake up with bruises.

AT SCHOOL, MR. GETTER CORNERS ME AFTER an Intro to Logic class. “Perry, um, we need someone, um, for the meet this weekend.”

“I’m not on math team anymore, Mr. Getter. You kicked me out when I failed to qualify for Summer Scholars.”