Sure.
Will you be there, Betsy Lynn? I’m betting you will be.
A towering “Mediterranean-inspired” McMansion — barrel-tile roof and terra-cotta walls, a double-height outdoor foyer with a wrought-iron lighting fixture hanging overhead. We ring the bell and it chimes deep inside the home; after a moment Ronnie’s at the heavy wooden double doors.
She looks back and forth between us. She slits her eyes at Sean.
“Scottie,” she says, turning to me, fake smile, “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Thanks for inviting me,” I say, though I’m guessing from her demeanor that she didn’t.
I hand her a bottle of Veuve, which I know to be her very favorite.
“How sweet,” she says, accepting it and standing aside. “Welcome.”
Her eyes linger on me, something unreadable there. Then she glances back into the crowd. I don’t see you. If you’re not here, I’ll beg off quickly. This is not my scene.
The place is packed, lights dim, music loud. EDM throbs from mounted speakers in the corners. There’s a bar set up by the pool, with a hip, goateed mixologist dispensing something pink in martini glasses. The room is a field of smartphones, faces turned as often to those screens as to each other. People crush together for selfies; laughter is raucous, conversation a dull roar. Sean lights up a joint, hands it to me, and I take a deep drag. The hard edges of my awareness soften.
Enigma travels alone through the layers of the game; he has no friends, no allies. On level four, he might earn a lavender pouch and in it there are various weapons — a wand that hypnotizes, a cloak that makes him invisible, a watch that turns back time just ten seconds. The place where most people lose over and over is at the disco, a glam nightclub where a strobe flashes and beautiful creatures whisper and stroke, wind their lithe bodies around him. They offer mysterious drinks and plates of cakes and if he can’t avoid them or ward them off, this is where he’ll stay until his lives run out, the player powerless to save Enigma from his own appetites.
I wander away from the party and down to the dock. The water whispers, lapping against pilings, the halyard on the sailboat across the water clangs. Homes on the Intracoastal glow all around me — the typical Florida hodgepodge of towering new construction and flat split-level ranches from the sixties. Modest bungalows like my parents’ place, in the shadow of gigantic modern additions to this man-made island. I can see in windows, sliding doors — a man and woman recline on a couch watching a game. Some kids gather around a firepit, tossing rocks into the water. A woman sits at a kitchen counter with a glass of wine, staring at her laptop.
Voices. Loud. They lift over the din of the party. And then someone’s storming down the path leading to the dock toward me. A couple others trail behind, reaching.
He was always an ugly drunk, the kind who got nasty after that third beer. I saw the bruises on your arm the other night, the way you folded your arms across your middle when you saw him approach us on the beach.
“So this is what you do?” he asks when he’s in front of me. “You just show up where you’re not invited?”
“Stop it,” you say, holding his arm. “Let’s go home.”
You are exquisite tonight in white — a simple top, jeans, silver thongs on your feet. The golden wisps of your hair. I only see you, in all of this. Your eyes rest on me — there you apologize and plead.
I’m so focused on you that I don’t even see the blow coming. It lands squarely on my jaw and I go down, the world wobbling and tilting, the dock hard and splintering under my palms. More yelling — from Sean, and Ronnie’s husband. Then some other guy I don’t know pulls Bradley away as he struggles, roaring. He’s drunk, obviously, all his darkness right on the surface. You and Ronnie bend and help me up. My hand comes away from my mouth red with blood.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Scottie,” says Ronnie. Her brow is creased with sorrow and concern. She touches my arm. “Please go.”
I nod. Yes, that’s obviously best. The pain, it’s not that bad, not compared to other pain I’ve felt. Later it will hurt, though. My teeth are intact, I think. Ears ringing. I’m not much of a fighter, not in that way.
“I’m sorry,” you say.
He’s yelling your name. Everyone’s staring, come to gather on the patio to look at us.
“Come with me,” I say softly.
You look back at the party guests, who now avert their eyes. Whispering. Muttering. Someone issues an uncomfortable laugh. We can still hear him yelling.
You take my hand and we run around the side yard to my waiting car, a black Tesla gleaming like spilled ink. I don’t feel bad about leaving Sean; he’ll understand and Uber home. It is the unwritten rule among men; if she says yes, it’s okay to disappear.
I make a smooth turn in the cul-de-sac. I expect to see him run out after us. But no. You cry softly in the passenger seat.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, my voice low in the dim leather interior.
You look at me a moment, almost blank with disbelief.
“Why didn’t you guess?” you say. “How could you not have known?”
You’re right, of course.
“You always wanted me to read your mind.”
“But you never got the hang of it.”
You lace your fingers through mine, hand shaking, a tear trailing down your face. We’re back there on the dock, that moment when you told me to leave. And I, angry, hurt, let my ego drown out my instincts. The truth is that I never believed someone like you could love someone like me. I always thought you’d leave me for someone who came from money, who won that genetic lotto of beauty. You were just saying what I had been expecting to hear all along. If I’d just asked a few questions, who knows what path we’d have walked together.
Enigma. All he does is choose paths — the lighted way, or the dark one, the high or the low. He knocks on doors and sometimes they open. More often they don’t. If the player makes it to the final level, everything he needs to know about the game has been revealed, all the tricks and pitfalls have been navigated. He must draw on what he’s learned to find his way. The stakes are highest here. One misstep and he has lost. He must begin again, all progress erased.
On the beach, our beach, the place we fell in love, where I made love to you the first time, where we’ve logged hours hand in hand, where we likely conceived the daughter I have never known, you fall into me. As easily as if we have not been apart for the last thirteen years. Thirteen years that passed in a blur of aspiration and acquisition, a kind of blindness, an emptiness of heart and spirit that looks to most people like outrageous success. Every gift and luxury falling to me like rain from the sky. And all of it ash until this moment.
When Enigma finally finds his way on that last level, he walks down a long tunnel which morphs into a forest path. He passes a still, glistening lake that sits surrounded by towering pines. The sun dances on the water, and the soundscape is dominated by wind and birdsong. When he comes to the final door, he finds it locked. Surprisingly, this last moment is where many people stay stuck. They can’t figure out how to open the door. They look all around the scene for a clue, something that might act as a key. But the area all around them has stopped interacting — there are no more doors, or hidden passages, no more buried treasure, or wands, or bags of tricks.
It is only a very few who come to realize, in that final phase of the game, that the heart on Enigma’s chest holds the key to the last door. When the player clicks on it, the key — golden and shining — floats into the air and hovers a moment. Then it’s in his hand. He fits it in the lock, looks back at the player, and disappears. There’s little fanfare, just a swell of music and he disappears inside the door. Some people rage at the simplicity of it all, the utter anticlimax. Others describe feeling a profound sense of peace, of accomplishment. Enigma, I have come to understand, is all about what you bring to it. Some people don’t like that idea very much.