Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters

“Hey!” he said. “When did you get here?”

“Just now.” She walked in and looked around Daniel’s new room. He was putting his things away. He had already taped up four gorgeous ecology posters from the Sierra Club, and they did a lot to brighten the dingy beige walls. On the floor was a row of brand-new track lighting waiting to be installed, and he had even brought a large plant. Jay Jay was sitting on the bed reading Playboy.

“Ah, come on, Jay Jay,” Kate said, “are you reading that degrading shit?” She made a grab at his magazine and he pulled it away from her.

“You bet I am,” Jay Jay said.

“Naked women,” Kate said. “Exploitation.”

“I am into voluntary celibacy this year,” Jay Jay said. “I just want to remember what I’m missing.”

“Well, you won’t see anybody who looks like that at this school,” Daniel said.

“Come on,” Kate said. “You’re an ingrate.”

“I think I’m going to join Jay Jay,” Daniel said. “Voluntary celibacy. I want to be a virgin when I get married.”

“You’re about two hundred times too late,” Kate said tartly. She wondered why her tone had come out more hostile than she’d meant it to be. Daniel was her friend, not her lover, and she didn’t care what he did. She looked at him carefully to make sure he wasn’t offended, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t flattered either; he just accepted it as part of the teasing they all gave each other.

“Enough of this filthy, disgusting sex talk,” Daniel said. “Sit down and let’s get to serious business. We need a new player.”

“I know,” Kate said glumly. She sat next to Jay Jay on the bed.

“Maybe we should put up a notice on the bulletin board,” Jay Jay said. “Along with the gay rights meetings and the science club. Wanted: a Mazes and Monsters freak who can play at the third level and promises neither to fink out nor flunk out.”

“I hate to get a stranger,” Kate said. “Who’s going to room with a stranger?”

The other two nodded. The rooms were small; big enough for one person, but apt to be unpleasantly crowded for two. With two beds and two desks and two dressers and two chairs in one of these rooms the occupants would have to pick their way around the furniture or suffer bruised shins. They had decided to keep the bookcases in their game room, but it wouldn’t be much help.

“First let’s get the player and then we’ll worry about living arrangements,” said Daniel. “I spent the whole summer working out the new maze. It is without a doubt the most stupendous, mystifying, horrifying maze ever invented, and what’s in it will blow your mind.”

Kate shivered. She could see it already: the dark tunnels that so terrified her, the creatures that could be friend or foe …

“Is it okay if I put up a notice?” Jay Jay asked.

“Why not?” Daniel said. “Maybe somebody’s bored with the game they’re in and wants to seek new thrills with a new band of adventurers.”

Daniel Goldsmith, of all of them, was the one with the most normal, happiest home life. If anyone was loved and admired by doting parents it was he. He had grown up in the comfortable suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts; his father was a professor of political science at Harvard, in nearby Cambridge, and his mother did art therapy with emotionally disturbed children at Mass General Hospital. It was an intellectual family, where bookshelves were overflowing with all kinds of books, good art hung on the walls, and classical music was always playing. On Friday nights his mother, who took being Jewish seriously, lit the candles before supper and said a prayer, and his father, who was not religious, tolerated it with a sort of wry fondness. Religion meant Family to his mother; the two were one: stability, the most important thing you could believe in. Besides security, his parents loved a good argument. Their house was often filled with friends having endless, spirited discussions about everything from politics to psychology, while his mother served coffee from a restaurant-size urn.

Daniel was their joy, their hope. He was the bright one, the son with the wonderful future. His older brother, Andy, a handsome, easygoing young man, had chosen to be a gym teacher, and it was typical of their parents that they were just as proud of Andy as they were of Daniel, only in a different way.

“Andy keeps kids out of trouble,” his mother said proudly, as if by teaching basketball in a middle-class suburban public high school he was single-handedly saving a flock of future juvenile delinquents. Andy shared an apartment with his girl friend, a pretty social worker named Beth, and his mother acted as if they were both in the same profession.

Ah, but Daniel, he was extraordinary. He was the computer genius who would save the world. Goodness knows, the world was rotten and needed saving. What Daniel really wanted to do was make up games for computers. His parents thought that would be a nice hobby, something he could do on the side. They tried not to pressure him. After all, they knew that pressure causes rebellion.

The only time they made a fuss was when he announced he was not going to M.I.T., but to Grant. They were horrified. To turn down M.I.T.?

“I want to go away from home,” he said. “I need space.”

“We give you space,” his mother said. “You can live in the dorm. We’ve been saving money for your education since you were born — you can live in the dorm or even have your own apartment if you like.”

“Space is an overused concept of the Seventies,” his father said. “Space exists inside your own head.”

“I don’t want to be in Cambridge, that’s all.”

“If I see you coming out of the subway I promise not to say hello,” his mother said. She gave him a look of disgust and went into the kitchen.

Daniel followed her. “Mom … I just don’t know what I want to be.”

“Of course you know.”

“It’s too soon. Everybody always knew, but I’m not so sure. I want to put my life on hold for a while.”

“Terrific,” she said angrily. “And then you’ll come out of that Grant University and look for a job and they’ll say, ‘Sorry, we want someone from M.I.T.’”

“You always said money was far less important than personal satisfaction.”

She had a long, wicked-looking knife in her hand and was hacking at the fat on a roast of beef, making a mess. “It’s a rat race out there,” she said, without looking up.

“I can always transfer,” he said weakly. He felt as if she were strangling him. His parents had always given him advice but never orders, and there had never been anything he hadn’t been allowed to do. Except fail. Or be ordinary. He suddenly envied his brother Andy for doing something simple that he loved, for never being hassled, for not having to be special.

“I truly don’t understand, Daniel,” his mother said. She looked up at him, finally, and he saw that her eyes were full of tears. “I thought you were different from other kids. You always had such a sense of purpose. Did we fail you somehow? Did we do something wrong?”

“No,” he said. He went over and put his arms around her. Her bones felt very small. “People don’t always run away from something bad. Sometimes people have to run away from perfection.”

“We’re far from perfect,” she said, surprised, but he saw with relief that the tears in her eyes were gone.

So he had gone to Grant. And now he was starting his Junior year, nineteen years old, comfortable with his work and his friends, involved in the game he had discovered at college, spending all his free time making up new and more devious versions. He also ran. He liked running down the long empty streets of Pequod at dawn, out to the suburbs that reminded him of Brookline, looping back past the shopping mall just as the giant produce trucks came pulling up; all the time planning strategies for the game. This was exactly what he had wanted to do with his life.