So I was still working on the boy as the tape loaded, but then suddenly there was Helen Viorst, a real beauty. Just a couple years older than I am, early forties at the most. She has black hair with purplish undertones. She still looks like someone who can’t swim, not enough buoyant fat.
I went back through the tapes, starting at Session One. She came in wearing willowy pants, chunky jewelry—all real gold, I assumed—and a low-cut blouse. I watched her fine arched eyebrows tighten with pain, her shoulders buck with difficult memories, her lips fall open and her eyes go wide as she looked off, distantly.
What had I learned about her specific suffering? Her father had his Russian mistress—and other ones too—her mother blamed youth and, strangely enough, she blamed Helen. Their house was so big and wide and empty that Helen’s father rode around in it on his motorcycle once while high. Her mother tried to drown herself in the pool three times. The Christmas tree once caught on fire. How? She wouldn’t say, but they all nearly died.
I thought of her at night sometimes when I was trying to fall asleep, my wife right beside me, behind the scenes. The way Helen cried—I hate myself for saying this—but it sounded beautiful and lush, like an orgasm. And sometimes I wondered if she would ever think of me. The fluorescent lights in my office give me migraines so I keep it a little dark while I take people’s traumas and turn them into games. I’d made her father a coke-headed giant. I’d made her mother a wolf. I was going to try to make her into herself. Something I couldn’t do for my wife or myself; the miscarriages—three of them in a row—were hard on us.
While I was doing the coding of her forehead, Klaus popped his head into my office. His real, live head—flashing smile, trimmed mustache, a suit jacket and shirt unbuttoned so that a glimpse of his undershirt was visible. His chest was hairless—organically?
He said, “Listen, Archie, I’m asking you because you’re the best. Do up a render of me, okay? I’m going to send you some footage. A few speeches I’ve given so you can use them.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s not really policy.”
“Do I seem like a policy guy?” he said, and then he smiled like a drunk father at a wedding. I’ve coded my share of drunk fathers. “Are you the only coder in this place who hasn’t self-rendered and fucked a celebrity in a gaming room?” His expression read: My sweet, sweet boy.
So, self-rendering and fucking renders of celebrities were widespread issues. Bobby A and Bobby B—there were two Bobbies and the lettering was how Klaus distinguished them so we all followed suit—had offered more than once to stand guard while I “tested my code.” And it wasn’t just an old-boy’s network. The female coders were in on it too. Jill and Marcy had both, separately, walked up and whispered, “So who’d you pick?” And when I said, “No one,” they both looked at me like I was a pet ferret someone had chosen to bring to work that had gotten loose and then, against all odds, hired. Part animal, part miracle.
And it was widely rumored that Klaus kept a vast selection of celebrities’ renders—from various eras—and sold them on the black market, which was where he made the bulk of his cash. He was a wealthy man. Surely Klaus had renders of himself. Did he just want a really good one because he actually thought I was the best? Or were his just outdated? The photo of Klaus on our promotional materials was from a bygone era. I’d stared at it and thought that the Klaus I knew was in there somewhere.
About me, Klaus was right and wrong. I hadn’t fucked any celebrities in the gaming room, but I had in fact rendered myself and my wife, Evangeline. She was very scientific about the miscarriages. She mourned the first, but then explained the statistical frequency of miscarriages with the second. After the third, she decided it was better to shut things down for a while, a fallow fields approach. She didn’t mourn at all, or not in front of me. She said that each time she started to express her sadness, it was as if she gave me permission to be sad, and my sadness was too much for her to bear. “This is simple biology,” she kept explaining. “This is just how the body works. You can’t take it personally.” I imagined the small fetuses in their watery worlds, drowning, and how I couldn’t save them. What kind of father could fail, so consistently, at saving his children from drowning? Of course it was personal. Failure usually is.
It was after the second miscarriage that I created a game where Evangeline and I would simply walk around Hog Island in Muscongus Bay, an Audubon nature camp. I decided to mourn here, with her but apart. It’s where my parents took my brother and me before my folks got divorced. It had only a few buildings and modest lodgings—wool blankets, cots, communal meals. I remember being windblown and sunburned, picking mosquito bites so they scabbed up on my legs. I kissed a girl on the ferry there, my first kiss. I rode my hand quickly up her sweatshirt to cop a feel, but she caught my wrist and gave me a look.
I remember my father on those trips. He wore a skimpy European bathing suit. It was so tight and rubbery that it looked like that part of his body was made of seal. He was fit in a way that embarrassed me. I was chubby and slightly knock-kneed; still am. I remembered how another guest picked a fight with him one night at the communal dinner, questioning my father’s masculinity because he had a soft spot for puffins. “Evolution!” the guy shouted drunkenly. “You can’t coddle a species. Not even our own.” And he stared at me. I was what coddling would lead to, a fat kid who looked boiled.
My brother ignored it all, dipping a roll into sauce.
My mother picked up her plate and took it to the kitchen to scrape it into the garbage.
My wife and I have never been to Hog Island IRL. She’s having an affair with a soccer player on my indoor league now. His name is Victor but his nickname on the team is Vic-turbo. I never call him Vic-turbo. We live very far from Hog Island, like seventeen hours by car.
When I looked through Klaus’s footage, I realized very quickly that it was all at least ten years old. He was about twenty pounds trimmer. He wasn’t sausaged into his suit jacket and his hair was thicker, though equally dark, what with his frequent self-administered dye jobs. Basically, unlike his promotional photo, I could tell it was Klaus, and maybe that’s what he wanted: younger but recognizable.
“He’s making a play for Helen Viorst,” I said out loud to no one. “That rogue.”
I thought about what he’d do if I refused to do the coding. I imagined the bulk of him—so hunting-lodge cocky. He didn’t smell like money, by the way. He smelled like a man, like cigars, though I’d never seen him smoke, like a forest filled with bears. Squat as a discus thrower, he always gave the threatening impression that he could put you in a headlock and choke you out.
He’d fire me.
Evangeline would take issue. She works longer hours as it is and makes far more money. She’d say, “If I ever get pregnant, how will I be able to be at home with the kid? And now you’re unemployed?”
We’ve been trying to have a baby for years. We now see an obstetrician who specializes in preventing miscarriages. But do you want to know my deep-down fear? It’s that I’m the problem somehow, and if she were to get impregnated by someone else—for example, the guy on my indoor soccer league, Vic-turbo—the pregnancy would go perfectly, producing a very athletic baby. Vic-turbo’s from Belgium. I imagine them having sex and eating waffles and chocolates, drinking beer and solving mysteries. That’s the sum total of my associations with Belgium.
I flipped to the most recent session between Klaus and Helen. He’s using his therapeutic monotone, explaining how the next level will work. “Your goal is simple: Get one of the cookies.” But the sub-goal, of course, was to listen to her parents say the cruelest things to each other but for Helen not to absorb them. “Stay on task,” Klaus told her. “You are in it for yourself. You are your own protector. Get the cookie and get out.”