Austin Grossman - You

What is the thing we need?

There’s a story, but you choose what it is and make it yourself, and the world is full of tools for doing that. You can follow the path into the forest if you want, or you can turn around, go home, and cut the king’s head off because you decided you always hated the old bastard and you’re sick of this story and want to be someone else for a change. Cut the forest down, use the wood to build the highest possible tower, and reach the sun. Build a dam and try to flood the kingdom and kill everybody, then let the water out and collect all the treasure. Maybe that’s not a great story, but it’s yours. What was wanted was the storytelling engine that kept building the world as you made your choices, and made sure that it felt like a story. That when you picked up the phone and dialed that number, you reached a widow in distress or a private detective agency that was hiring. Or if you walked outside and broke a branch off a tree and tied a string to it and walked until you got to a lake, the third fish you caught would have in its stomach a ring engraved with strange writing.

And all the time, you’d be rapt, absorbed in the story in the gently paradoxical, bootstrapped state of semibelief that video games can create, where you’re enough outside yourself to be someone else and enough in yourself to be living the story as if it were real life. It might be a naive way to think about computer games, but it doesn’t make the need for it any less real. And it was impossible to make, but they’d already started and impossible was no reason not to go on a bit further. Realms 1.0 was just the beginning: they would build and build into 2.0 and 20.0, into cities and kingdoms and systems within systems and interfaces within interfaces and princesses and starships and submarines and grassy fields and volcanoes and floating cities and laughing gods and blackest hells and on and on, because you were never satisfied, ever, and you didn’t have to be because there would always be something else there over the next hill, beyond the turning in the road, down the dark hallway and into the next room, and somewhere in there you’ll escape at last, escape yourself and forget and forget and forget and live in a story forever.

We drove around town until it was past midnight. It was then that I first clearly remember Darren declaring, “We have to do this.” This was our rebellion. We could walk out on reality itself and the raw deal it gives even the luckiest of us. Fucking leave it and go on an adventure. In the dark of the station wagon I couldn’t see faces but I felt sure everyone had the same thoughtful expression. Everyone knew and nobody had to say it. How Simon’s mother was kinda crazy and poor, and Lisa’s parents were rich but had no interest in her whatsoever, and Darren was terminally pissed off at the world, and how I—well, no one ever seemed to be able to put a finger on it, but I was never going to be as happy as I was supposed to be. Everyone had a reason to want out.

People with any sense of the dramatic would have shared a drink or said a vow, cut their palms and made a blood pact. Spoken or not, it’s the only vow I ever made, or ever would, the only true moment of lunatic ambition. But it didn’t seem to matter—who needed to share blood when we’d shared the exact same thought from the moment we saw what a Commodore PET could do?

Like the Lumière brothers seeing the flickering image of a locomotive pulling into a railroad station and sensing the enormity of the moment, we recognized that this miracle illusion would be currency of the imagination of the next hundred years or more.

And so, two weeks after the interview, I rented an apartment and dragged my futon, computer, and a box of books left over from college back to Massachusetts. I was an entry-level game designer, whatever that was, earning thirty-five thousand dollars a year. I guess in the end they couldn’t not give it to me.

I thought about mailing the Dartmouth alumni magazine, but I’d told them about law school, and before that about the Fingerlings Improv troupe, and before that about an internship in L.A. at a talent agency. I didn’t even tell anyone I was going for an interview as a video game designer. I didn’t want to see the blank looks.

What had been a long, uncalculated slide into the fourth or fifth tier of academic standing finally flipped over into outright free fall. Who gets expelled from anything? Salvador Dalí. Buckminster Fuller. Woody Allen. Robert Frost. But they’d done it with considerably more style. And I wasn’t properly expelled, only put on a mandatory leave of absence. I’d simply sat there and watched it all float away. It was stupid that my parents had paid for it, for the lawyer they thought I was supposed to be—that I’d “told” them I would be.

This was me giving up on any sort of casual panache, any pretense that I’d be one of the up-and-coming best and brightest I’d been emulating less and less successfully since—when? Changing majors for the third time? Earlier?

Who knew? But this was the moment I publicly stopped pretending to be cool. Rhodes, no Marshall. There would be no Sex and the City barhopping, no making partner, no Central Park view. I scrubbed the uneven floor of my new apartment, the odd snaggletoothed nail shredding the wadded-up paper towel, letting the dream dissolve.

No one had cleaned the apartment in what seemed like a decade. I bought four rolls of paper towels and a spray bottle of dangerous-smelling cleaner. I sat on the floor and sprayed along the baseboard and onto the yellow-and-white linoleum. I kept spraying until it soaked into the caked-on dust and hair and brown whatever it was and turned it darker and soft. The wadded-up paper towels turned into a soft, soggy pile. I found a paintbrush caked with grime, shards of glass, peanut shells. Halfway through I realized I should have bought rubber gloves, that I was probably poisoning myself, but there was no point in stopping. Around midnight I’d wiped down the floor and all the fixtures; it didn’t look clean but it looked like if you started now it would be a normal enough cleaning job. I tried to count how many apartments I’d been through since college, but there had been too many three-week sublets to keep track of. One more, anyway.

The mystery wasn’t how my life had failed to come together—why I didn’t stick with things, why days and weeks seemed to vanish under the sofa, why I was always telling my six-month friends I’d found an internship or entry-level job at a newspaper or theater or paralegal firm and I was moving to San Francisco or Austin—the mystery was how it was any different for anyone else, how other people managed to stay in one place and stick it out.

I e-mailed my parents with my new address, the same as always—when I visited at home I’d see my name in my mother’s address book over a long column of crossed-out addresses and phone numbers. They sent presents—books and shirts—and birthday cards that said things like, “We’re so proud of your new internship,” and “Here’s to great things this year!” Here’s to training myself to pick locks. Here’s to learning to speak with a British accent from a set of four CDs I found in a used bookstore. Here’s to friendship. Here’s to failure. Here’s to the Quest for the Ultimate Game.

Nobody gave me a schedule; it was more like a standing invitation to come over and hang out. The Monday after I moved in I tried going to work, and came in at nine in the morning. I sat on a beanbag chair just inside the door until a tall, fiftyish woman with short blond hair stopped by and introduced herself as Helen, the office manager. She took my picture with a digital camera and moved on. I read an old role-playing game manual, long lists of possible mutations you could choose. I decided that in the blighted future to come, it would be cool to have insect wings, and made a note to start saving up radiation points now.