“But you don’t turn here for the sniper rifle and get up on the tower? You can blast heads like melons from up there.”
I try not to wince. I don’t know anything about a sniper rifle. The sofa bounces softly as Jamie rocks April back and forth.
I stop at the next alley. This one is tricky. I select the pistol, and the gun appears on the screen, pointing forward. Jamie stops rocking April and studies the TV like the Seahawks are about to score. I wait until I hear the angry men coming down the alley. They are shouting in Arabic, or something that’s supposed to sound like it. The way the game makes my character talk depending on which variably shaded male I choose leads me to suspect that it’s all made-up gibberish. The African American character calls everyone “Dawg.” The Native American calls everyone “Kemosabe.” The white guy says “Following orders” over and over. So I imagine the Arabic voices were recorded by non-fluent voice actors who were just faking it. I have no idea.
I just know that I can’t get past these people without getting shot. It’s a question of how much.
I listen as they get closer. Too soon, and the ones in the back are shredded. I’ve made that mistake before and had to listen to them scream as they slowly burned to death. Every now and then, I see it again in my dreams. Sometimes it’s Jamie who’s screaming and burning. I’ve never been able to tell him about those nightmares. Maybe now I can.
Spinning around the wall, I’m faced with a squad of six men. They’re a little closer than I like—I’m too distracted thinking about Jamie. I aim the pistol between the crowd and line the crosshairs up on a barrel down the alley. Jamie is whispering something—I don’t know if it’s to me or the baby. I press the button; the pistol flashes and recoils, and there’s a massive explosion down the alley.
The squad of men is safely past the barrel and not hit by the rubble, but the blast makes them turn around or jump for cover.
I run across the mouth of the alley, holding the sprint button, dropping the pistol to move just a little bit faster. Behind me, I hear the shouting resume. The men closest to me open fire. I zigzag down the wide-open street, my character beginning to pant, when he grunts from being hit by a bullet. Another grunt, and the screen reddens for a moment. The gunfire continues, but it’s growing faint, and no more bullets find me. I make it to the end of the street and turn the corner. My character and I both pause to catch our breath. I turn to see Jamie staring at me, his mouth open, his brow furrowed, our baby sleeping against his chest.
“You know the purpose of the game is to score points, right?”
I can take my time now, walking instead of running toward the outskirts of town. Jamie continues to tell me, his voice lowered, what I’m doing wrong:
“You get six hundred for nailing the barrel when those guys are right beside it. And can rack up over a thousand with the sniper rifle—”
“I just want to get to the store alive,” I tell him.
He doesn’t seem to hear me.
“You haven’t scored a single point. That’s like… it’s crazy. And if you try to leave town this way, it’s Game Over. They nail you for desertion. You’ve got to be on the complete other side of town when the air strikes come, or you can’t get through this level. Have you even been past this level?”
“No,” I tell him. And Jamie laughs, which gets April stirring and cooing. He gets back to bouncing her before the coos become cries. “I like playing it my way,” I say.
“With canteens,” Jamie says.
I don’t say anything. I can see the shop at the end of the street, with the maroon awning and the vegetable and flower stands outside. There are civilians wandering around this part of town. The war is distant, the fireworks one neighborhood over.
“There’s a reason I play like I do,” Jamie says. I think my silence has him feeling guilty. Defensive. “Rumor is the first team to break a million points unlocks a secret level. You know they use this game to recruit people into the military, right? The Department of Defense made this game. It’s the most realistic ever. People train for actual war with this game. I think if you hit a million, they, like, hire you at the game company division to design maps or something like that. It’s what I heard.”
“Have you ever been in this shop?” I ask.
Outside the store, a young man is looking at the vegetables. If I wait long enough, he’ll steal one and run off, and the shopkeeper will chase him for a bit, then come back muttering in Arabic and won’t interact with me. I stand in front of the tomatoes and use some of the money left over from not equipping the more expensive guns and buy as much as I can. And then I remove the vegetables from my inventory, and the tomatoes appear on the street.
The boy picks up a few and runs off. If I wait long enough, a girl and another boy will come get some. And then three scrawny dogs get the rest. The important thing is that Hakim, the store owner, doesn’t leave.
I call him “Hakim” because that’s the name on the front of the store.
He’s standing behind the counter inside the shop. Jamie still hasn’t answered my question. “Have you been in here?” I ask him. I’m curious if he’s seen what I’m about to do. I assume he knows all the game’s secrets better than I do.
“Yeah,” he says. “All the time. This is a bonus mission. You barely have enough time to get here and then to the next objective. But… when I come here, the place is already leveled. All this stuff is scattered everywhere. You enter through a gaping hole in that wall.”
I know what he’s describing. I’ve gotten here late, when people die or I do something wrong, and when I turn the corner at the end of the long road, a drone comes out of nowhere and blows the place up with a rocket. You can just barely see the boy standing on the sidewalk—a little gray smear—when the orange flash erupts.
Standing in front of Hakim, I run through a series of dialogue options until I can ask to use his bathroom. He hands me what I guess are the keys—the game never says. When I go to the side door that leads out the back of the shop, it now opens. Out here is the game within a game. My little solace. A walled-off courtyard with five raised planters. And inside each one, a mix of flowers and vegetables. My flowers. My vegetables.
Living in the city in the real world, Jamie and I don’t have room for a garden. But after hours of running around in this game, figuring out how to control my character, just trying not to die over and over, looking for something to do while feeling trapped at home with April every day, I stumbled onto this place. Really, I was guided here. Any other way you go, people die. If people don’t die, you end up here. It’s that simple.
“This is wild,” Jamie says, his voice subdued.
“You should have seen it when I first got here,” I tell him. “It was all weeds and brown dirt. You have to buy flowers and vegetables out front and plant them in here. And if you don’t keep them watered, they’ll go away.”
I select the first canteen and use it in front of the nearest planter. It makes a gurgling noise, and the flowers straighten a little. They seem to brighten. Jamie is dumbfounded, and I see the garden through his eyes, with all that color coming at once, rather than gradually, as I’ve watched it unfold. All of the city is white crumbling walls, brown dirt, and the black char of fire and explosion. The only color to be found is the foul splattering of red around the bodies when something goes horribly wrong. Here, all the colors dance together. They sway in the breeze, a kaleidoscope of hues.
“It’s crazy they would even put this in here,” Jamie says. “Maybe to make the Predator strike more meaningful, or something?”