The Unknowns (4 page)

Jeremy Glissan snorted without looking up from the other machine. Jeremy was a more experienced programmer than either of us, and had a more powerful computer at home, and he helped us by pointing out our stupidest potential blunders.

My interest in the game had, perversely, increased a month earlier when I had discovered girls—
discovered
in the sense of
realized that they maybe had magic powers of some kind
. I had known Bronwen Oberfell forever, literally: our mothers were pregnancy friends. I was at her house, where there was a garage and a garbage disposal and stairs. My mother and Bronwen’s mother Stacey were smoking in the kitchen, and Bronwen and I were in the living room eating spaghetti and watching
Fame
. It was easy to make me happy when I was twelve: a bowl of spaghetti and an episode of
Fame
would do it. I happened to notice Bronwen’s profile as she looked at the screen. I thought,
She’s got a really small nose
. And then,
Hey, actually, she’s really pretty
. And then:
Oh wow
. And a bowl of spaghetti and an episode of
Fame
would never again be enough to make me happy.

In the days that followed this revelation I started to imagine showing the game to Bronwen, seating her at my computer and inviting her to enter the subterranean tomb of Morbius the Vengeant. From over her shoulder I watched her type the simple commands that led her into our world, leaning gradually forward in her chair until her nose was almost touching the monitor. I saw her horror at the appearance of the skeleton army, her frustration with the rapidly multiplying Furbles, her determination to capture the treasure interred with Morbius’s corpse. No artist ever had an audience more exquisitely responsive than I had in Bronwen Oberfell, and no artist has been more gratified than I was when, after vanquishing a dozen foes, after solving increasingly devilish puzzles and evading artfully designed traps, after achieving the center of the Maze of Mithraeth and collecting the priceless Jewel of Bora-El, Bronwen (who, sitting at the computer, was somehow wearing a chain mail
bikini) turned to look at me, as if for the first time, with the light of adoration in her eyes.

So: what if, at some point during this magical journey into danger and love, she felt the need to conceal herself, or to stow some precious object out of sight? It turned out there were a lot of parameters involved in hiding. Size, for instance: a loose stone in the wall would make a good hiding place for a key, but not for a person. Multiply that by 134—the number of verbs in the Tomb of Morbius lexicon—and that was eighth grade. It wasn’t that we were unpopular, Nicky and I; it was that popularity wasn’t a property of the object class to which we belonged.

And the earth continued in its endless laps around the sun, and middle school waned, and the first hairs sprouted around my genitals, and I worked on the game, nursing the idea that it would make Bronwen love me. Lying in bed clutching my growing-but-not-yet-fully-functional penis, I turned the fantasy over in my mind, adding details, refining the characterization. Each twist in the program’s design, each new puzzle and contrivance, was tested against Bronwen Oberfell. Sometimes the dream would be interrupted by an error message, and I would get out of bed and look over the code. I caught a few bugs that way.

“So I understand congratulations are in order,” my dad said when I arrived for one of my biweekly visits. “You got into that junior high school.” After the divorce he’d moved into a tiny furnished apartment near the college where he taught. It was meant to be a stopgap place, until he found somewhere more permanent, but six years had passed and he was still there.

“High school, Dad,” I said, unrolling my sleeping bag on the pleather couch. “I’m about to turn fourteen.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “I got a letter from them…” He began to leaf through a pile of paper on his desk, the one containing W2
forms and notices from the DMV. “Here it is:
Congratulations on your child’s admission to Dr. Martin Luther King Junior High School
.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s a junior high school,” I said. “It means it’s a high school named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

“Well, I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “You must be getting pretty smart if you’re passing that test and everything.” He walked over to the corner where the fridge and stove were, where the floor was linoleum instead of carpet. The first time I saw my dad’s apartment, when I was eight, I learned that the word
kitchen
is functional rather than ontological, although I wouldn’t have put it like that at the time. He rifled through the TV dinners in the freezer and took out one for me: meatloaf and mashed potatoes, the variety I’d named as my favorite six years earlier. By now I was a little sick of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but I never said anything about it, just like I never said I hated being at my dad’s house. Saying it would have raised questions I didn’t want raised, like
How incompetent was my dad anyway
? and
Did my mother maybe appreciate the chance to spend every other weekend without me
? So I ate the meatloaf, although I had eaten it so many times that I had begun to identify the constituent parts of its flavor and texture—the meaty roundness, the sugar, the fatty gloss that held the slice together—and to imagine them as individual powders and solutions in jars on a shelf in the Stouffer’s lab.

In the first year after the divorce, Dad had occasionally and with much fanfare planned outings to minor-league baseball games or the science museum. It was an Abilene paradox: each of us would have preferred to stay inside, but we went on these awkward excursions in deference to what we thought were one another’s wishes. Eventually he got me a Nintendo, and now we rarely left the apartment.

After dinner I was in the middle of a particularly deep game of Arkanoid when I became aware of him lurking in the doorway. He obviously wanted to say something, which made it impossible to concentrate. When the ball split into three I made the beginner’s
mistake of trying to follow them all, instead of picking the two that were furthest out of phase and abandoning the third, and lost my last life.

He was leaning against the doorframe with a shy, hopeful expression, like he wanted to ask someone to dance. In the past few years he had become pear-shaped; all the substance had drained out of his head and shoulders and settled in his hips.

“Wanna see something?” he said.

Spread out on the table in the living-room area were a bunch of typewritten pages, pencil sketches, legal documents. “I’m starting a business,” he said. There was a quality in his voice I’d never heard before—pride, maybe.

He wanted to walk me through it, so I let him. He’d been looking at some beverage-industry case studies for a class he was teaching when he had this eureka-type vision: in a moment of hallucinogenic omniscience, he saw the entire structure of the industry laid out in front of him, like a beehive in cross section, and he could perceive wormholes and inefficiencies that were invisible to normal men. Everyone knew the big soda companies were just selling sugar water, that Coke’s vaunted “secret formula” was a load of marketing hooey—over the past five years they’d gradually replaced the cane sugar with high-fructose corn syrup (cheaper, thanks to sugar tariffs and corn subsidies), and not one of fifty million Coke loyalists had noticed the difference. The conventional wisdom held that it was all about advertising:
branding
, they were calling it now, linking your product with youth and fun and sexual fulfillment and tagging the competitor, by implication, with death. But ignore this newfangled persuasory superstructure; focus on the nuts and bolts. What does the beverage industry
do
? What is its business?
It trucks sugar water around the country
. Production costs are marginal; the main ingredient is good old H
₂
O, cheaply available on demand anywhere—and yet bottlers spend billions driving it to stores. Listen: Put a machine
in the supermarket that adds syrup and carbon to tap water. Make the soda at the point of sale, like restaurants do. You’re selling the exact same product, and your prime costs are lower than the big boys’ by more than 30 percent!

He gazed wistfully into the middle distance, and it was clear that this was what he’d been looking for his entire life: the main chance, the shortcut no one else had seen.

“So you’re going to start a soda company?” I asked him.

“We’re going to launch it locally first,” he said. “Use Denver as a trial market. Once it catches on here, we can attract some investors, maybe go public. And then we take it national.”

I imagined America putting down its Coke and drinking instead from a can with my dad’s face on it.
Barry-Cola
, it said on the can. I laughed.

Dad looked hurt. “This is going to be paying your college tuition,” he said, and I felt bad.

“I don’t think I get it,” I said, although this was not true. “How do you lower the costs?” And so he told me again.

When she picked me up on Sunday night, my mom was in one of her wanting-to-talk-about-Dad moods. “So what did you guys do?” she asked me. I never told her the truth: that I had played Arkanoid and Super Mario Brothers and Castlevania III and maybe Excitebike, although Excitebike was kind of juvenile, while my dad watched golf on TV, each of us with the shades drawn to keep the glare of the afternoon sun off our respective screens. There was something about the way men behaved without women around that I already knew to be ashamed of.

“The usual,” I said.

She pulled onto the freeway. My mom gets anxious when she has to merge into traffic; her impulse is to slow down, which is not a helpful impulse in a merging situation. When she was securely in
the middle lane, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “So,” she said, “are there any girlfriends around?” She was trying to sound casual. At first I thought she was talking about me, partly because the pursuit of a girlfriend was a problem I thought of as specific to me, and partly because the idea of my dad with a girlfriend was almost inconceivable.

“I don’t think he has time for a girlfriend,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” she said. “What’s keeping him so busy?”

I didn’t want to tell her about the soda thing. I didn’t feel like hearing my mom laugh at my dad when I was the one who had to go spend every other weekend with him. “I think he mostly works on articles,” I said. Dad had once had an article in a journal of management theory.

That seemed to work. We were going home, and I started to feel better. I would still have to do my homework, which I always brought to my dad’s in a backpack and then neglected until I got home Sunday night. But at least I’d be in my own room, with my mom lying in bed on the other side of the wall reading one of her thick paperbacks, listening to a tape of the music she liked, the Carpenters or America or Bread.

In an attempt to provide a family atmosphere, my mom had arranged for us to go out to dinner with the Oberfells once a month. At the restaurant I always chose the seat farthest from Bronwen, to disguise my interest. This typically put me next to her brother Pete, a pale, fearful nine-year-old.

Bronwen’s father Gary was talking about the challenges his dental practice faced. “There’s just too many dentists in the area,” he said. “I don’t know how we’re all supposed to make a living.” Gary had massive hands, and watching him bring his cheeseburger to his mouth was disturbing.

“Well,
we’re
not going to any of these other dentists, that’s for sure,” my mom said. “Two sets of teeth you can count on.”

“Most of them are Chinese,” Gary said. “Or, you know, Oriental somehow.”

“Did you see about the babies in Kuwait?” my mom said, following an associative trail that I chose not to pursue. “Where they took them out of the incubators and left them to die on the floor? I think that’s so terrible.”

We ate in silence for a moment: one table at a Denver-area Denny’s paying its own small tribute to the memory of the dead Kuwaiti babies.

Eventually Stacey decided to move things along. “So what’s your favorite class in school, Eric?” she asked me.

“Math,” I said.

“Eric spends a lot of time playing with his computer,” Mom said.

“Wow!” said Stacey. “A computer?” She gestured to her offspring. “These guys don’t even know the first thing about computers,” she said. “Apparently we’re all going to have to know about them soon, though, right?”

I was familiar with the computers-are-the-unstoppable-wave-of-the-future rhetoric she was referring to, and I hoped it was true, but I suspected it wasn’t, because besides me and Nicky and Nicky’s dad, nobody seemed to
like
computers very much.

“Computers never fixed anybody’s teeth, that’s for sure,” Gary said.

“Tell them what you’re making,” said Mom.

This was difficult. If I were to reveal even a bare outline of the game now, when it was only half completed, my plan to seduce Bronwen would lose the element of surprise. But after all those hours imagining her reaction, polishing the gemstone of my fantasy, the possibility of arousing her interest was irresistible.

“We’re making an adventure game,” I said, my voice rising nervously. “Me and my friend Nicky. It’s called Tomb of Morbius.” I risked a glance at Bronwen, who was pouring ketchup on her hash browns.

“Wow!” Stacey said again. “A computer game! Doesn’t that sound cool, Pete?”

“I guess,” Pete said. Bronwen put the ketchup down and addressed herself to the eggs.

“Pete really likes computer games,” Stacey said. “Pac-Man he likes, and that other one… what’s that one you like called, hon?”

“Street Fighter,” said Pete.

“Street Fighter,” Stacey said. “We went to the bowling alley for his birthday and he didn’t even want to bowl, he just wanted to play Street Fighter the whole time.”

“I got the sixth-highest score,” Pete said.

This was all going wrong. “Our game’s not like an arcade game,” I said, trying not to sound indignant. “It’s an adventure game. It tells you where you are and what you can see, and you type in what you want your character to do.”