“You mean like hide yourself, or hide an object?” I asked. It’s hard to develop an entire syntax when you don’t know words like transitive and intransitive, but that was the project we had assigned ourselves.
“Both, obviously,” Nicky said, in a way that suggested he had only been thinking of one or the other. “It has to be hiding in a specific place. Like, you can’t hide in an empty room.”
Jeremy Glissan snorted without looking up from the other machine. Jeremy was a more experienced programmer than either of us, and had a more powerful computer at home, and he helped us by pointing out our stupidest potential blunders.
My interest in the game had, perversely, increased a month earlier when I had discovered girls—discovered in the sense of realized that they maybe had magic powers of some kind. I had known Bronwen Oberfell forever, literally: our mothers were pregnancy friends. I was at her house, where there was a garage and a garbage disposal and stairs. My mother and Bronwen’s mother Stacey were smoking in the kitchen, and Bronwen and I were in the living room eating spaghetti and watching Fame. It was easy to make me happy when I was twelve: a bowl of spaghetti and an episode of Fame would do it. I happened to notice Bronwen’s profile as she looked at the screen. I thought, She’s got a really small nose. And then, Hey, actually, she’s really pretty. And then: Oh wow. And a bowl of spaghetti and an episode of Fame would never again be enough to make me happy.
In the days that followed this revelation I started to imagine showing the game to Bronwen, seating her at my computer and inviting her to enter the subterranean tomb of Morbius the Vengeant. From over her shoulder I watched her type the simple commands that led her into our world, leaning gradually forward in her chair until her nose was almost touching the monitor. I saw her horror at the appearance of the skeleton army, her frustration with the rapidly multiplying Furbles, her determination to capture the treasure interred with Morbius’s corpse. No artist ever had an audience more exquisitely responsive than I had in Bronwen Oberfell, and no artist has been more gratified than I was when, after vanquishing a dozen foes, after solving increasingly devilish puzzles and evading artfully designed traps, after achieving the center of the Maze of Mithraeth and collecting the priceless Jewel of Bora-El, Bronwen (who, sitting at the computer, was somehow wearing a chain mail bikini) turned to look at me, as if for the first time, with the light of adoration in her eyes.
So: what if, at some point during this magical journey into danger and love, she felt the need to conceal herself, or to stow some precious object out of sight? It turned out there were a lot of parameters involved in hiding. Size, for instance: a loose stone in the wall would make a good hiding place for a key, but not for a person. Multiply that by 134—the number of verbs in the Tomb of Morbius lexicon — and that was eighth grade. It wasn’t that we were unpopular, Nicky and I; it was that popularity wasn’t a property of the object class to which we belonged.
And the earth continued in its endless laps around the sun, and middle school waned, and the first hairs sprouted around my genitals, and I worked on the game, nursing the idea that it would make Bronwen love me. Lying in bed clutching my growing-but-not-yet-fully-functional penis, I turned the fantasy over in my mind, adding details, refining the characterization. Each twist in the program’s design, each new puzzle and contrivance, was tested against Bronwen Oberfell. Sometimes the dream would be interrupted by an error message, and I would get out of bed and look over the code. I caught a few bugs that way.
“So I understand congratulations are in order,” my dad said when I arrived for one of my biweekly visits. “You got into that junior high school.” After the divorce he’d moved into a tiny furnished apartment near the college where he taught. It was meant to be a stopgap place, until he found somewhere more permanent, but six years had passed and he was still there.
“High school, Dad,” I said, unrolling my sleeping bag on the pleather couch. “I’m about to turn fourteen.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “I got a letter from them…” He began to leaf through a pile of paper on his desk, the one containing W2 forms and notices from the DMV. “Here it is: Congratulations on your child’s admission to Dr. Martin Luther King Junior High School.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s a junior high school,” I said. “It means it’s a high school named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
“Well, I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “You must be getting pretty smart if you’re passing that test and everything.” He walked over to the corner where the fridge and stove were, where the floor was linoleum instead of carpet. The first time I saw my dad’s apartment, when I was eight, I learned that the word kitchen is functional rather than ontological, although I wouldn’t have put it like that at the time. He rifled through the TV dinners in the freezer and took out one for me: meatloaf and mashed potatoes, the variety I’d named as my favorite six years earlier. By now I was a little sick of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but I never said anything about it, just like I never said I hated being at my dad’s house. Saying it would have raised questions I didn’t want raised, like How incompetent was my dad anyway? and Did my mother maybe appreciate the chance to spend every other weekend without me? So I ate the meatloaf, although I had eaten it so many times that I had begun to identify the constituent parts of its flavor and texture — the meaty roundness, the sugar, the fatty gloss that held the slice together — and to imagine them as individual powders and solutions in jars on a shelf in the Stouffer’s lab.
In the first year after the divorce, Dad had occasionally and with much fanfare planned outings to minor-league baseball games or the science museum. It was an Abilene paradox: each of us would have preferred to stay inside, but we went on these awkward excursions in deference to what we thought were one another’s wishes. Eventually he got me a Nintendo, and now we rarely left the apartment.
After dinner I was in the middle of a particularly deep game of Arkanoid when I became aware of him lurking in the doorway. He obviously wanted to say something, which made it impossible to concentrate. When the ball split into three I made the beginner’s mistake of trying to follow them all, instead of picking the two that were furthest out of phase and abandoning the third, and lost my last life.
He was leaning against the doorframe with a shy, hopeful expression, like he wanted to ask someone to dance. In the past few years he had become pear-shaped; all the substance had drained out of his head and shoulders and settled in his hips.
“Wanna see something?” he said.
Spread out on the table in the living-room area were a bunch of typewritten pages, pencil sketches, legal documents. “I’m starting a business,” he said. There was a quality in his voice I’d never heard before — pride, maybe.
He wanted to walk me through it, so I let him. He’d been looking at some beverage-industry case studies for a class he was teaching when he had this eureka-type vision: in a moment of hallucinogenic omniscience, he saw the entire structure of the industry laid out in front of him, like a beehive in cross section, and he could perceive wormholes and inefficiencies that were invisible to normal men. Everyone knew the big soda companies were just selling sugar water, that Coke’s vaunted “secret formula” was a load of marketing hooey — over the past five years they’d gradually replaced the cane sugar with high-fructose corn syrup (cheaper, thanks to sugar tariffs and corn subsidies), and not one of fifty million Coke loyalists had noticed the difference. The conventional wisdom held that it was all about advertising: branding, they were calling it now, linking your product with youth and fun and sexual fulfillment and tagging the competitor, by implication, with death. But ignore this newfangled persuasory superstructure; focus on the nuts and bolts. What does the beverage industry do? What is its business? It trucks sugar water around the country. Production costs are marginal; the main ingredient is good old H2O, cheaply available on demand anywhere — and yet bottlers spend billions driving it to stores. Listen: Put a machine in the supermarket that adds syrup and carbon to tap water. Make the soda at the point of sale, like restaurants do. You’re selling the exact same product, and your prime costs are lower than the big boys’ by more than 30 percent!