That these intimacies were painful to Park, being based on a lie, his lie, was not unusual at all. Any intimacy was painful to him. Another exposure. Another rough flange that could be sheared away from him. Another potential loss in this world.
Sitting in customers’ living rooms, listening to them as they spoke about the intensity of their love for a particular painting by Botero and how seeing it for the first time had changed how they saw their own body, watching as they went to a shelf to find the book where the painting was reproduced, Park would silently beg, Don’t share this with me. I am not who you think I am. I will betray this trust. But even with his business completed, he would not get up and walk away, so addicted had he become to these barbed disclosures.
So he knew that Beenie was Korean by birth, had been adopted by a white American couple who could not have children of their own, that he’d been raised in Oklahoma, where assimilation was not the easiest thing for an Asian, that he took up bike riding because it put distance between himself and the other kids, that his parents had loved him but had never been able to adjust to his innate alienness as they had assumed they would, that he didn’t blame them at all for that fact, that loving them hadn’t made it any harder for him to leave home the moment he got the chance, that he chose to take on enormous debt in order to attend UCLA rather than stay at home and let his parents pick up the tab for OU, that he’d felt almost as estranged being a Sooner in Los Angeles as he had felt being a Korean in Liberty, that he’d met a girl and fallen in love and that she’d helped him get over it, that he’d married the girl while still in school, that she’d been pregnant twice and miscarried both times, that the reason for the miscarriages was related to the lupus she suffered from, that she died after they had been married only five years, that Beenie had quit his job as an in-demand art director for video games, that he’d sold both his cars, lived now on a day cruiser berthed at Marina Del Rey, and devoted himself to cycling. That he started every day with a joint to help create a cloud around what he had lost, that as the day progressed he thickened and thinned this cloud with various concoctions and combinations of pot and coke and heroin and pills and alcohol, that periodically throughout the day he slipped an Area-51 laptop from his bag and entered Chasm Tide, where he played a character named Liberty, a wandering Cliff Monk who he used to accumulate gold and artifacts that he dealt to other players and to farmers like Hydo, and that he rode hundreds of miles a day without ever creating distance between himself and what was at his heels, evading it for at best a few hours a night, when exhaustion and the chemicals in his body dragged him into the dreamless sleep he craved more than anything, other than to see his wife again.
Because Park knew all this, he was able to say what he had to, leaning close to Beenie so no one else in a room of strangers could hear.
“My wife has it.”
Beenie flinched again.
“Oh. Shit.”
He looked at the swirled walls of the room, ended up looking at his feet.
“The baby?”
Park knew this would be the next question. He thought he’d be ready to hear it, but he was wrong. He tried to find an answer that would allow for the maximum window of hope. But there was really only one thing that could be said.
“We don’t know.”
Beenie was shaking his head now, shaking it as he looked up at the low ceiling, the span of a night sky painted there, the constellations of Chasm Tide, unreal astronomies.
“This world, man. It tries to break us.”
He looked at Park.
“It’s not a place to be brittle.”
Park thought of his father putting the barrels of his favorite shotgun beneath his chin. He didn’t move, his eyes on Beenie’s.
Beenie put a hand on top of his own head and pressed down.
“I need to get high now.”
“Beenie.”
Beenie didn’t move.
Park put his hand on top of Beenie’s.
“The guy you mentioned, is it the guy who owns this place?”
Beenie’s mouth was twisting, his eyes moving from side to side like a man who felt something coming up behind him.
“Yeah, he’s the guy I meant.”
“And do you know him? You’ve done something with him? Business? He’s a gamer. You’ve sold to him?”
“We’ve done some things.”
“I want to meet him.”
Beenie pulled his hand from under Park’s.
“Honestly, Park, I got to tell you, if you want something from this guy, I am probably not the one to handle the introduction. He’s not too cool with me these days. We should look for an alternative.”
Park kept his hand on top of Beenie’s head.
“I don’t have time for an alternative.”
Beenie took hold of Park’s wrist and squeezed.
“Yeah. I know. Just let me get high really quick, and we’ll see what we can do.”
He let go of Park, ducked away from the larger man’s hand, and headed toward the bathrooms, one of the generation that believed in doing their drugs out of sight.
11
PARK WATCHED THE UNDULATED BLADE OF A FLAMBERGE pierce the side of the Northerner and rip upward, unzipping the huge barbarian’s rib cage in a spray of blood. He watched it again and again as the highlight replayed on the screens of the main gaming salon on the basement level below the thumping dance floor.
The bass reverberated from the ceiling, frequently lost in the screams, applause, and cheers from the crowd that had packed in to watch the gladiators.
A banner over the bar announced that this was a North American Video Gaming Federation Regional War Hole Tournament. The winner of the regional would face off against three other gladiators in a national championship, and the winner of that event would then be sent to the Global Champs in Dubai. Standing at the back of the long room Beenie explained it to Park, as the reptilian wielder of the flamberge flexed onscreen at the command of a prototypically slouching, rail-thin Asian gamer sitting in one of the two articulated black mesh chairs on a raised dais at the middle of the room.
There seemed little reason for having the gamers on the platform. All eyes were riveted on the main screen, a massive composite made of four fifty-two-inch Sony LCD displays, or on one of the dozens of smaller screens jutting from the walls and ceiling. For all practical purposes, the gamers could be at home, comfortably ensconced in the custom-pressed ass grooves of their sofa cushions. Or so Park thought until he saw the press of fans forming as the gamer rose, casually dropped his heavily customized controller on the chair, flipped up the collar of the shiny nylon logo-covered jacket draped over his shoulder like a cape, and descended the three steps into the mob, plucking from their hands the scraps of paper, War Hole T-shirts, NAGVF caps, glossy eight-by-tens, and assorted other mementos offered to be autographed.
Beenie was shaking his head.
“I never much got into the hack-n-slash scene myself, but that dude there, Comicaze Y, he just laid some wicked shit on that barbarian.”
Park rubbed his eyes. They felt grainy, almost pebbled, like they were sprouting sties. He couldn’t stop grinding his teeth; his jaw muscles had started to cramp. He knew it was the speed, but knowing the cause of the symptoms gave him no relief. He knew only one of two things would make him feel any better: sleep or more speed. He wanted to be home, held by Rose, the baby safe between them