“He was prepared to walk more corridors and hear stories about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the chlorine-gas attacks of the First World War and the death camps of the Second World War when he paused outside my classroom and heard about the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires. His life changed at that moment, he said. He never explained why, but for the next three months, he attended my classes and visited me during office hours. We had breakfast meetings or took afternoon walks through Washington Square.”
Her face looked grayer, emotion making her pause.
“My husband had recently died. I never had children. I felt motherly toward him. Jonathan taught me that the fantasy world within a game could be more real than the grief I wanted to escape. Then I had my first cancer scare, and he taught me that games didn’t waste time but rather extended it. The speed of the countless choices they required subdivided each second and filled it to the maximum. In the end, after turning his back on games, he embraced them again. He entered what he called his next evolution and decided that games were the metaphysics that the philosophers failed to grasp. They were the Truth.”
Professor Graham took another breath and reached into her purse for a vial of pills. She swallowed two with some tea, then looked at Balenger. “He and his sister—”
Balenger straightened. “Wait a minute. He has a sister?”
“She’s taller, a brunette while Jonathan is blond.”
Balenger spoke quickly. “Does she wear her hair pulled back in a bun? Tight features? No makeup?”
“I met her only a few times, but yes, she tries hard to look plain. You know her?”
The memory of meeting her filled Balenger with rage. “She told me her name was Karen Bailey.”
“Karen is her first name. She and Jonathan look different from one another because they had different fathers. Their mother was promiscuous. The man who raised them wasn’t their father, but he lived with the mother for a time, and when she left him, she also abandoned the children. He kept them as bait, hoping that the mother would come back to see them and he could persuade her to stay.”
Professor Graham braced herself to continue. “The stepfather was a drunk. A violent one. Jonathan told me he never took his eyes off the man because he never knew when he’d fly into a rage. The stepfather also had an unnatural interest in Karen, who looked so much like her mother that she wasn’t safe alone with him. That’s why she tries hard to look plain, even though I suspect she could be attractive. She’s determined to avoid attention from men.
“Karen became a surrogate mother to Jonathan while he in turn protected her by making the stepfather angry and distracting him from Karen. They hid whenever they could. Out of spite, when he found them — in a closet or the basement, for example — he locked them in. Jonathan said he and his sister once spent three days in a cubbyhole their stepfather nailed shut. No food, no water, no toilet. In the darkness, Jonathan invented fantasy games, the equivalent of Dungeons & Dragons. He and Karen escaped into the alternate reality he created.”
Balenger’s forearm ached worse. As he listened intensely, he couldn’t stop rubbing it.
“The single positive thing the stepfather did was buy the children a video-game machine. That was in the late 1970s when the only game machines were the kind you connected to your television set. Jonathan was just a child, but he took the machine apart, learned how it worked, and improved it. Eventually, the stepfather died from liver disease, and the children were put into foster care, but they never stayed with any family for more than a half year. Something about Jonathan and Karen made their various foster parents uneasy. Basically, the children could relate only to one another and the games Jonathan invented.
“By the time Nintendo came out in 1985, he was programming for it, using the computer labs in the numerous high schools he and Karen went to. He took special pleasure in knowing that the bullies who made his life hell in school probably went home to play games he designed, without dreaming who created them. He pioneered many of the important advances in video-game technology. For example, the early games could only move up, down, right, and left. Jonathan was the first to add front-to-back motion. He was also the first to overlay scenery in the background. Both techniques contributed to the illusion of three dimensions.”
She paused, in pain.
“I know this is hard for you,” Balenger said.
“But I want to help. You need to understand about Infinity.”
“What?”
“In previous games, there was always a limit to the number of variations in which a player could move. The action happened within a predictable, closed space. But Jonathan designed a game called Infinity, in which two space ships chase each other throughout the universe. He told me he created it in reaction to the three days he and Karen spent in that cubbyhole. The game gives the impression that the space ships can keep going forever in any direction and find constant new marvels. He joked to me that he wanted a player to zoom around a comet and expect to see God.”
“Infinity.” The concept gave Balenger vertigo. “Sounds like a player could disappear into the game.”
“That’s what happened to Jonathan.” Professor Graham closed her eyes for a moment. “Game designers are obsessive. It’s not unusual for some of them to work as long as four days and nights without sleeping. They live on Doritos and Jolt cola. For variety, Jonathan told me, he drank strong coffee sweetened with Classic Coke.”
“But that long without sleep can make a person psychotic,” Balenger said.
“His sister watched over him when he was in these four-day visions. That’s apparently what they were: visions. Jonathan scribbled computer codes as if they were automatic writing. His royalties and patents earned him over a hundred million dollars. But he never cared about the money. What mattered were the games. In the industry, there’s a constant challenge to take designs to the next level and the level after that. Jonathan was determined to create a game so ultimate that no designer could ever outdo it. With Karen mothering him, he went into new visions that lasted even longer without sleep. Five days. Six. Until finally he had the breakdown that Karen always worried about.”
Balenger could no longer tolerate the burning, swelling sensation in his arm. He pushed up his jacket and shirt sleeves. An abscess startled him, angry red surrounding it.
Professor Graham viewed it with alarm. “You’d better go to a hospital. That looks like blood poisoning.”
“It feels as if something’s…”
“Something’s what?”
Under the skin, he thought in dismay. “Wait here for a minute.”
He made his way past tables to a door marked MEN’S ROOM. Inside, he saw sneakers under the closed door of a stall. At the sink, he took off his jacket and draped it over his right shoulder. He rolled his left shirt sleeve all the way up, took a breath, and squeezed the swelling.
The fiery pain made him groan. Yellow liquid popped out. He kept squeezing. Now the yellow oozed, followed by red. Good, Balenger thought. I need to get this thing bleeding. I need to find what’s festering in there.