She didn’t make a move. One minute. She bit down again on her presumably nonconforming fingernail, noticed she was doing it, and pulled her hand away and tucked it under her thigh. Two minutes.
“Damn,” she said, at two minutes and eighteen seconds. Her biggest group was in real trouble. “This is not good.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Not good. Maybe you should give me three stones next time.”
“I shouldn’t even be giving you two stones.”
“I’m rusty, I’ve been running an empire and saving the planet and decluttering the kid’s room and stuff. You should give me four stones.”
“No way. With four stones you can beat anybody. Theoretically.”
“Yeah? How many to beat God?”
“The world champion would be at a disadvantage by the fiftieth move with one stone against God.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Seriously.”
“Hey, do you know what game I can beat God at every time?” she asked. “Without a handicap?”
“No, what’s that?”
“Chicken.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like with driving cars at each other, you know, how that kid got killed at the Colonial Gardens desert mall like, last-”
“No, I know, I mean, why, what do you mean about beating God?”
“Because-look, if one of the players is omniscient, like God, he loses. All you have to do is decide not to swerve.”
“Wait, so God can tell you’re not going to swerve, so he has to.”
“Right,” she said.
“Except if he’s God he can’t get hurt.”
“What? Oh-uh, maybe. But he still loses.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Oh, yeah. They taught Max about it at Logic Camp.”
“Huh. Well, I guess that’s right.”
“We used to play a chicken variant, like, we’d stand on like a wall and throw lightbulbs to each other, and we’d step back each time. Did you ever play that?”
“Well, I had a health-uh, no. We used to play escondidas…”
“What’s that?”
“Like hide-and-seek.”
“Oh, yeah.” She looked at the board and then back up at me. “Did you ever play Time Machine?”
(7)
“What’s that?” I asked. “No, I don’t think so-”
“That’s like-well, I’d sit in this spot in my room just like this.” She closed her eyes and crossed her arms. “And I’d mark the exact-oh, wait, first I’d put on the B side of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy — and I’d memorize the exact date and time, and I’d sit like, still enough to stop time. And then I’d decide that exactly twenty years, like, to the second, I’d sit in exactly this same position with the same music and have exactly these same thoughts, and all the intervening time would be like it hadn’t happened.”
“Oh.” I’d thought she’d meant some plasticky board game by Ideal or whatever. “Yeah, I guess I did play something like that.”
“Really.” She had a stone in her hand, but she wasn’t putting it down.
“Well, yeah. Basically. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, though. And I thought I’d made it up.”
“Maybe we both made it up,” she said. She set the stone down on the side star point. It was a fine move, but it was still a book move. That is, not insightful. She hit her clock.
“I guess,” I said.
“It’s our psychic link.” She smiled. It wasn’t an ironic smile, or a wry, knowing, sardonic, nonconformist’s smile, not even a humorous smile. It was just a sincere friendshipish expression. A rare bird these days, I thought. It was a smile like, we’re hanging out and bonding and isn’t that great. I felt a smudge of mistiness in the back of my eyeballs. Squelch that. Hard up. Don’t forget how she made you a sucker. She conned you like she was Fa’pua’a Fa’amu and you were Margaret Mead “Or, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all kids play that.”
“No, I don’t think so. Just a few sad, introspective nerded-out kids.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I cocked my head, closed my right eye, and looked at the board with my left eye to get a fresh look at the position.
“It’s good to keep your different life stages in touch with each other,” she said. “All those years just swish by.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have any left?”
“Any what?”
“Any second parts coming up in Time Machine, you know, like, where you plan to sit in that position again and whatever.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “I have one left.”
“When is it?”
“Uh… January twentieth. At noon. Four years from now.”
“That’s great, okay, so maybe we should do something together then.”
“Well, I don’t-uh, okay.” This topic was harshing my wave. I scooped up a stone and thwacked it down, a hane on her last point. Nothing board-shattering. I hit my clock. Maybe I don’t need to find out what’s the real deal with Tony. Maybe I should just take off now. No, don’t. Leave now and she’ll really know something’s up. In fact she’ll probably tell them to ratchet up the surveillance on you. Although that’s kind of weird, she’s a romantic interest and also your Stasi minder. Although the whole thing is weird. Well, NFML. Not For Much Longer. Just crush her flat in this one game, have two bites of bibimbap, and book. No sweat.
“Okay, it’s a date. Even if we’re both married to other people by then. Right?”
“Yeah…” I said. “… Why, are you getting married?” Damn it, Jedface, don’t ask girls questions like that. Have a drop of sangfroid. Forget Sick Tony Sic, you lost, get over it. Anyway, what do you care? Nothing matters. We were all going to be dead in-no, don’t think dead. Nonexisting “No, I’m not,” Marena said.
I said okay, or something. I tried to look at the board, but the game was at that point where the stones start to look and even feel like pustules erupting on your skin, and you just want it to be over.
“Are you upset about Tony staying here?” she asked, a little muffledly because she was working on that fingernail again.
“No, I mean, he, you know…”
“I totally haven’t touched him.”
Huh.
“It’s okay,” I said, “you get, you get to touch whatev-”
“It’s not a romantic thing, he’s just staying here because he’s, for a place to stay.”
“What about that getting-married business?”
“That was a different guy.”
“Oh.”
“And I’m not sure about that lately.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I mean-look, this is all getting into feelings and, like, feelings.”
“Yeah. I have difficulty with those things.”
“Hmm,” she went. She sort of melted herself down into her oddly yielding Memory Foam cushions and stretched out prone.
“Maybe it’s okay, whatever happens,” she said, “maybe there’s another whole world out there, like with that Mr. Bubble thing?”
“Sorry? I don’t get the reference.”
“The Crazy Foam, you know, those two guys from the Layton Institute with the bubbly verses, uh…”
“Oh, the bubbleverse,” I said.
“Right.” She was referring to this incident back in 1998 when a pair of Warren-funded physicists reported that said they’d created a bubble in the quantum foam and created another universe that, at that moment, was the exact twin of our own, but which, because of random perturbation, would exhibit divergent outcomes later on. It was purest bullshit.
“That’s what I said.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“You mean, that they created another universe in their lab?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I, you know what Taro says, multiple uni-they’re, you know, cheap on theory, expensive on universes. So, no, I don’t, really. That’s just something people say when their equations don’t come out right, they say whatever’s left over just slides into some other handy universe.”