Robert Lennon - Familiar

They eat at a campus café run by art students; Judith leads her there without asking where she wants to go. They must eat here every day. Judith talks about her latest conquest, a man who works in development and is “sort of married.” Elisa knows about him already, from the e-mails. She has been worrying all morning about this lunch but it’s easy — Judith will happily do all the talking, if she is allowed. Another good reason to like the woman.

Back at the office she selectively writes to certain people, complaining of an imaginary computer crash and asking for updates on various projects and situations. She clicks all the links on her desktop, figures out how to use things. It isn’t difficult. Indeed, it’s like her other job, except with less direct responsibility, thus easier to fake. By four o’clock she is feeling more confident that she’ll be able to do exactly that. She has learned the names of the other women in the office — Linda, Tessa, Jane — and what they do. She has seen a few professors she recognizes, passing through on their way to the lab, and she says hello. It is good to have something dull and necessary to think of.

Because her real preoccupation is not, shouldn’t be, this job. It’s Silas. That he is in this world, alive. She can’t shake the feeling that he has somehow engineered this: that he has brought her here, to show her something. To prove something. The internet has told her that he makes worlds. That’s how he puts it. “I make worlds.” At Infinite Games, he is known as a rebel. This is how he presents himself. She has found an interview with him, in an online trade publication, in which he flogs a new game he designed, called Mindcrime: Destiny’s Mirror, and criticizes his rivals. The gaming industry, he says, is made up of emotionally stunted engineers with no imagination. Only he, Silas Brown, is doing anything of lasting value.

INTERVIEWER: But your projects don’t sell. At least they don’t sell compared to Berserker and the other big titles at Infinite.

SB: Sales aren’t the point. Vision is the point. I’m trying to invent a new paradigm. Designers are stuck on the notion of story. As if it’s the story that makes a game worth playing. But nobody gives a fuck about story. Nobody cares what happened in some guy’s past, like if bandits raped his mom or kidnapped his sister or gunned down his buddies or whatever. That shit is stupid. It gets in the way. Games aren’t stories, they’re games. They have to invent themselves. Like life.

INTERVIEWER: But isn’t life made up of stories?

SB: No. Stories exist to make sense of life. But they’re a pointless exercise. Life is inherently nonsensical. Drawing strands of meaning together is for idiots. All there is, is right now, this moment. Noticing things and doing things. Making things happen. Building a tower of blocks, kicking them, making them scatter. Do it again and again, the pattern of blocks is different every time. You can’t replicate it. That’s what I want to evoke in a game. The first-person shooter, in its current conception, is moribund. Nobody gives a fuck about missions, about assuming some dumbass motivation some other guy thought up for you, like having to assassinate an arms trafficker or getting revenge on some guy or whatever. It’s a fake moral justification for what the gamer really wants, which is to make shit happen. To manipulate the controls and watch things die and be born. To make worlds with your hands.

INTERVIEWER: But obviously people do want missions. Those games sell better than your games.

SB: People don’t know what they want. I do.

If there was any doubt in her mind that this world was real, that this Silas was real, that interview has put it to rest. Silas is alive. That’s him. She remembers a discussion she had with him one night, while he lay in his bed, a handheld video game on pause in his lap, an impatient expression on his face. He was thirteen. She was asking him, begging him really, to change his behavior at school. Because, when he got into trouble, it made trouble for his brother. Because the people who cared about him got upset. Because he had a future, and everything he did now had an effect on that future. Didn’t he understand? He did not live in a vacuum. Everything he did had an effect.

By this time, Silas had begun to assume the imperious air that he would carry with him for the rest of his short life. He betrayed little emotion aside from stoic endurance. He looked at her and said, “That’s not my problem.”

Weakly, with profound exasperation: “How can you say that?”

And Silas said, “If I have an effect, then so do other people. So they can have their own effect to push against my effect. Can’t they?” And he looked at her with real curiosity, as though truly interested in the answer.

“Some people can’t.”

“Then that makes it their problem.”

“But Silas — it’s not all about you. It’s about other people, too. Who are close to you. Don’t you want to help them with their problems?”

He frowned, turning back to his game. “When have they ever helped me with mine?”

As was often the case when she dealt with him, the rage came fast and hot, and she clenched both fists and pressed them into her thighs to suppress it. She said, “We try, and you don’t accept it.”

Bleeping, digital music, the sounds of explosions. “Well then that makes it your problem.”

Video game design. Why didn’t they think of that? They might have gotten him on that track early, won his respect by giving him the opportunity. Of course they never considered that such a thing existed. Games were distractions, unconnected to real life. They did not think of them as made things, as designed things. Another blind spot. They might have saved him.

But here, in this world. Did they save him? What was different? What had been different? Was there a split, a single place where the universes diverged? Did they — did she — make a different choice here, a choice that kept him from climbing into that van? What small thing, what word or deed, would have been enough to change this?

Or perhaps there was no single place where the worlds diverged. Maybe many things separated the two. Maybe it isn’t a matter of cause and effect, but of random variation. Brother universes, forever at odds.

She is staring at the ceiling, thinking, when she hears her name being called, a pounding on the outer door. She jumps up, hurries into the hallway. Everyone else has gone home. It’s Derek.

“I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes.”

“I’m sorry! You should have called.”

“I shouldn’t have to,” he says. He is following her back down the hall, to her office. He stands, peering around, while she gathers her things. She notices him looking at the empty space on the desk where the family photo should be.

“You’re right.”

“We’re going to be late,” he says.

And without thinking, she replies, “For what?”

He stares at her. “Our session.”

“Oh God,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

She follows him out and pulls the doors shut behind her. On the stairs, after a moment’s thought, she says, “The conference — I thought today was Monday.”

“It’s all right,” he says without turning around. It is obviously not all right.

Derek drives ten minutes in silence until they reach the city limits, and then says, “It has not escaped my attention that you are only forgetting the most important things.”

She sits with her hands folded in her lap. She wishes she were back in her office.

“The things,” he continues, “most germane to the survival of this marriage.”