Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Every detail I enter into the game, I pack with relationship shout-outs and little details that only Shary would recognize, so the whole thing turns into a kind of bizarre love letter. For example, the tavern near the royal stables is the Puzzler’s Retreat, which was the gray-walled dyke bar where Shary and I used to go dancing when we were both in grad school. The royal guards are Grace’s Army of Stompification. And so on.

“Shary?” I say. She doesn’t respond.

Before it mutated and started eating people’s brain stems, before it became antibiotic-resistant, the disease afflicting Shary used to be known as Rat Catcher’s Yellows. It mostly affected animals, and in rare cases, humans. It’s a close cousin of syphilis and Lyme, one that few people had even heard of ten years ago. In some people, it causes liver failure and agonizing joint pain, but Shary is one of the “lucky” ones who only have severe neurological problems, plus intermittent fatigue. She’s only thirty-five years old.

“Shary?” I hold the cat head out to her, because it’s ready to start accepting her commands now that all the tricky setup is over with. Queen Arabella has a lot of issues that require her Royal Wizard’s input. Already some of the other noble cats are plotting against the throne—especially those treacherous tuxedo cats!—and the vintners are threatening to go on strike. I put the cat head right in front of Shary’s face and she shrugs.

Then she looks up, all at once lucid. “Grace? What the fuck is this shit? This looks like it’s for a five-year-old.”

“It’s a game,” I stammer. “It’s supposed to be good for people with your… It’s fun. You’ll like it.”

“What the fucking fuck?”

She throws it across the room. Lucidity is often accompanied by hostility, which is the kind of trade-off you start to accept at a certain point. I go and fetch it without a word. Luckily, the cat head was designed to be very durable.

“I thought we could do it together.” I play the guilt card back at her. “I thought maybe this could be something we could actually share. You and me. Together. You know? Like a real couple.”

“Okay, fine.” She takes the cat head from me and squints at Queen Arabella’s questions about the trade crisis with the neighboring duchy of meerkats. Queen Arabella asks what she should do, and Shary painstakingly types out, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” But she erases it without hitting send, and then instead picks SEND AN EMISSARY from among the options already on the screen. Soon, Shary is sending trade representatives and labor negotiators to the four corners of Greater Felinia, and beyond.

After a few days, Shary stops complaining about how stupid Divine Right of Cats is and starts spending every moment poking at the plastic cat’s face in her lap. I get her the optional add-on mask, which is (not surprisingly) the upper three-quarters of a cat face, and plug it in for her, then show her how to insert the nose plugs and earbuds.

Within a week after she first starts playing, Shary’s realm is already starting to crawl up the list of the one thousand most successful kingdoms—that is, she’s already doing a better job of helping to run the realm of Felinia than the vast majority of people who are playing this game anywhere, according to god knows what metrics.

But more than that, Shary is forming relationships with these cats in their puffy-sleeve court outfits and lacy ruffs. In the real world, she can’t remember where she lives, what year it is, who the President is, or how long she and I have been married. But she sits in her blue chair and mutters at the screen, “No you don’t, Lord Hairballington. You try that shit, I will cut your fucking tail off.”

She probably doesn’t remember from day to day what’s happened in the game, but that’s why she’s the adviser rather than the monarch—she just has to react, and the game remembers everything for her. Yet she fixates on weird details, and I’ve started hearing her talking in her sleep, in the middle of the night, about those fucking copper miners and how they better not try any shit because anybody can be replaced.

One morning, I wake up and cold is leaking into the bed from where Shary pulled the covers back without bothering to tuck me back in. I walk out into the front room and don’t see her at first, and worry she’s just wandered off into the street by herself, which has been my nightmare for months now and the reason I got her RFID’d. But no, she’s in the kitchen, shoving a toaster waffle in her mouth in between poking the cat face and cursing at Count Meesh, whom I named after the friend who introduced Shary and me in the first place. Apparently Count Meesh—a big fluffy Siberian cat—is hatching some schemes and needs to be taught a lesson.

After that, I start getting used to waking up alone. And going to bed alone. As long as Shary sleeps at least six hours a night—which she does—I figure it’s probably okay. Her neurologist, Dr. Takamori, was the one who recommended the game in the first place, and she tells me it’s healthy for Shary to be focused on something.

I should be happy this has worked as well as it has. Shary has that look on her face—what I can see of her face, under the cat mask—that I used to love seeing when she was writing her diss. The lip-chewing, the half smile, when she was outsmarting the best minds in Melville studies. So what if Shary’s main relationship is with these digital cats, instead of me? She’s relating to something ; she’s not just staring into space all day anymore.

I always thought she and I would take care of each other forever. I feel like a selfish idiot for even feeling jealous of a stupid plastic cat face, with quivering antennae for whiskers.

One day, after Shary has already been playing Divine Right of Cats for four or five hours, she looks up and points at me. “You,” she says. “You there. Bring me tea.”

“My name is Grace,” I say. “I’m your wife.”

“Whatever. Just bring me tea.” Her face is unreadable, half terrifying cat smile, half frowning human mouth. “I’m busy. There’s a crisis. We built a railroad, they broke it. Everything’s going to shit.” Then Shary looks down again at the cat screen, poking and cursing.

I bring her tea, with a little honey, the way she used to like it. She actually thanks me, but doesn’t look up.

Shary gets an email. She gave me her email password around the same time I got Power of Attorney, and I promised to field any questions and consult her as much as I could. For a while, the emails were coming every day, from her former students and colleagues, and I would answer them to the best of my ability. Now it’s been weeks since the last email that wasn’t spam.

This one is from the Divine Righters, a group of Divine Right of Cats enthusiasts. They’ve noticed that Shary’s realm is one of the most successful, and they want to invite Shary to some kind of tournament or convention… or something. It’s really not clear. Some kind of event where people will bring their kingdoms and queendoms together and form alliances or go to war. The little plastic cat heads will interface somehow, in proximity to each other, instead of being more or less self-contained.

The plastic cat head already came with some kind of multiplayer mode, where you could connect via the Internet, but I disabled it because the whole reason we were doing this was Shary’s inability to communicate with other humans.

I delete the email without bothering to respond to it, but another email appears the next day. And they start coming every few hours, with subject lines like “Shary Please Join Us” and “Shary, we can’t do it without you.” I don’t know whether to be pissed off or freaked out that someone is cyber-stalking my wife.