“You like our game so far?” Eric asks.
“It’s cool.”
It is cool, despite the death stares from Lucy Mantooth. We fly dragons, battle giants, build castles, raise armies, families, crops. But it’s all too majestic, really. No goblin child will shank you for your coin pouch. You’ll never die from a bad potato. I miss the indignities.
“I think Lucy likes you,” Eric says.
“What’s the giveaway? The fact that she never talks to me or that she rolls her eyes whenever I say anything?”
“Both.”
“I guess I don’t know much about girls.”
“You’ll learn,” Eric says. “You’ve been out with those weirdos.”
“Everything’s weird if you look long enough,” I say.
“I don’t know about that,” Eric says. “We’re sponsored by the school, just like the chess team.”
* * *
I get bored with Eric’s game. Lucy Mantooth never warms up. Her wizard-thief leaves me for dead in a collapsing wormhole. Was there something I was supposed to say? I resume my old routine: peanut butter, batch, nap.
One day I’m headed home to do just that. A sports car pulls up to the sidewalk, a midnight-blue Corvette.
“Need a ride?” the Dungeon Master says.
I don’t, but slide in anyway. I’ve never been in a Corvette.
We drive around town for a while, past my school, the hobby shop.
“Thought you didn’t have a license,” I say.
“Who said I do?” The Dungeon Master smiles. “There are rumors and there is the truth, and there are true rumors. You want the rundown? Here’s the rundown. Hit a kid with a bat and gave him brain damage, yes. Flashing, yes. Burning my bowel movements, no. Have I been to the bughouse? I’ve been to the bughouse. Am I insane? Does my opinion even count? Remember all the newspaper stories about how the game makes kids crazy? Makes them do horrible things?”
“My mom clips them for me.”
“Love those. Take, for example, suicides. The game doesn’t create suicides. If anything, it postpones them. I mean, the world gives you many reasons to snuff it, got to admit.”
“I’m fourteen,” I say. “I don’t know what I admit.”
“In another age you could be a father already. In another neighborhood.”
We drive for a while. We’re a few towns east.
“Nobody’s seen you lately,” the Dungeon Master says. “Marco says you play with some snotty faggots at school.”
“I stopped.”
“You hear about Cherninsky? He got caught with all this stolen musical gear in his garage. Amps and guitars and drums, the whole deal. Tried to dump it in the reservoir, but the cops got most of it. Now his dad might go to jail.”
“His dad?” I say.
“Harsh, right? Anyway, we’re into war-gaming now. Real technical shit. It’s not the same. Brendan can barely handle it. We’re doing Tobruk. I’m Rommel.”
“The Desert Fox.”
“You read,” the Dungeon Master says, though I picked up the name from an old tank movie. “That’s what I like about you. That’s why I thought I could teach you.”
“Teach me what?”
We pull into a scenic lookout, the Palisades. Past the bushes in front of us the cliff drops sheer to some rocks in the Hudson. The Corvette idles, and I wonder if I made a mistake when I accepted this ride. The Dungeon Master looks off across the river, as though ready to jump it.
“Teach me what?” I say.
The Dungeon Master guns the engine. I turn to him, that pale skin, the fine-spun beard, the bitter, glittering eyes.
“Teach me what?”
His answer is another rev. His fingers drum on the gear knob. We’re going to fly a dragon after all. Part of me is ready. Maybe it’s the part that kept me in Doctor Varelli’s study so long. I grip my seat and await ignition, fire, scorched ascent.
“Damn.” The Dungeon Master laughs. “You’re shaking.”
He shifts into reverse and swings the car around. Soon we’re back on town streets.
“Had you shitting,” he says.
“You did.”
“I’m doing that for real at some point.”
“Oh,” I say.
“But not for a while.”
“That’s good.”
“My dad’s kicking me out after graduation. I think it’ll be better for Marco. Kid needs to bloom.”
“Where will you go? Your mom’s house?”
“My mom doesn’t have a house. She died when Marco was born.”
“Really? I’m sorry. I figured she just left.”
“Well, guess it’s true in a way. No, I’ve got a cousin in Canada. We might room together.”
“That’ll be fun.”
“Probably not. Here we are.”
“Thanks for the lift,” I say.
“You were almost home when I picked you up.”
“Still, thanks.”
I’m cutting across the yard when the Dungeon Master calls my name.
“No hard feelings, okay?”
I stop, picture him there behind me with his ridiculous head sticking out of the passenger-side window, but I cannot turn around. I’m still trembling from the drive. Do I have an almost uncanny sense in this instant of what’s to come, some cold, swirling vision whose provenance I do not comprehend but in which I see the Dungeon Master, blue cheeked, hanging by his communion tie in Doctor Varelli’s study, and Cherninsky, his dad in prison, panhandling with the scrawny punks, the pin-stuck runaways in Alphabet City, or me, Burger Castle employee of the month for the month of October, degunking the fry-o-lator in the late-autumn light?
Of course I don’t.
“Really,” the Dungeon Master calls again. “No hard feelings.”
It must be the dumbest thing he’s ever said. No hard feelings? What could ever be harder than feelings?
I want to tell him this, but even as I turn back, the Corvette peels away.
DENIERS
“Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut,” said Mandy’s father. American traps tended to hang open. Pure crap poured out. What he and the others had gone through shouldn’t have a name, he told her friend Tovah all those years later in the nursing home. People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddamn fairy tales about children who got out alive.
Mandy’s father, Jacob, had never said anything like this to Mandy, not in any of his tongues. He’d said other things, or nothing at all. He had worked for thirty-nine years as a printer in Manhattan. The founders of the company had invented the yellow pages.
“Think about that,” he often said.
Mandy did think about it, the thick directory that used to boost her up on her stool at the kitchen counter.
She’d spent her childhood mornings at that counter, culling raisins from her cereal, surveying the remains of her father’s dawn meal, his toast crusts, the sugared dregs in his coffee mug. Sometimes she wondered if he would come home from work that day, but it was a game, because he always came home. He’d eat his dinner and take to his reclining — or, really, collapsing — chair, listen to his belly gurgle, read popular histories of the American West, maybe watch a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes, the only show he could abide.
His intestinal arias mostly stood in for conversation, but some evenings he managed a few words, such as the night he spotted Mandy’s library book on the credenza. This teen novel told the story of a suburban boy who befriends an elderly neighbor, a wanted Nazi. Mandy watched her father study the book from across the room. The way he handled it made her think he was scornful of its binding or paper stock, but then he read the dust flap, shuddered. He whispered in his original language, the one he rarely used, so glottal, abyssal.