Robert Lennon - Familiar

He gives her a strange look but doesn’t let go.

The video game store is adjacent to the food court. They walk in and are instantly confused. The walls are lined with little boxes depicting heavily armed and graphically stylized men and women. The games are made for different systems, but they all look the same. Everyone else in the store is under the age of twenty. To Elisa’s surprise, there’s a pretty girl behind the counter. She’s wearing a nose ring and asks if she can help them.

“We’re looking for something by the company Infinite Games.”

The girl nods. She wants to know which game.

“Uh… Mindcrime’s Mirror or something, is that one of them?”

“Mindcrime: Destiny’s Mirror. Yup. It’s pretty okay.” Then she recommends a different game and gives them an appraising look. “The other one’s kind of confusing. If you’re newbs. Are you?”

“Definitely,” Derek says, and Elisa is mildly surprised he even knows the term.

“I think we really want that Mindcrime, though,” she says. She can feel Derek’s eyes on her.

“Okay…”

“Does it run on a regular computer?”

“It’s a console game,” the girl says, more kindly now that she understands how clueless they are. “Do you have an Xbox?”

“No,” Derek says quietly.

“Do you sell them here?” Elisa asks.

“Oh yeah, sure.” The girl shows them a display of boxes. The consoles are expensive but not as expensive as Elisa assumed they would be. She says she’ll take one, and a copy of the game. The girl suggests an extra controller and Elisa says fine. Derek is staring at her.

“You’re serious?”

“It’s one of Silas’s,” she says. “The game.”

He nods as if any of this makes sense. He appears so confused here, among these strange young people, and all the light and color. He belongs in a library, surrounded by brown things. She touches his shoulder, kisses him.

The girl looks on in apparent amusement. “Don’t get discouraged,” she says, as she packs the boxes into a large shopping bag. “This is like the worst first game you could ever play. Do all the training. You need to figure out how to work the controls. After that, it’s about a twenty-hour game.”

“I’m sorry,” Derek says. “What does that mean?”

“That’s how long it takes. To finish.”

He appears flabbergasted. “You’re kidding.”

“For you, though,” she says with a smile, “longer.”

Now they are driving home. It’s hot and the sun is in their eyes. Derek drives with the stiff, silent precision that indicates there are questions in his mind. Elisa takes the opportunity to gaze at his face. She has not looked at him directly for more than a few seconds at a time since whatever is happening to her happened.

He is harder here, to be sure — cleaner, more controlled. This was always a part of his personality, of his physical self. This advanced containment. She met him, or rather saw him for the first time, at a party a boy had taken her to. The boy was a law student, an undergraduate. The party was mostly grad students. Her date was proud to be invited — he went around introducing her to people he barely knew and tried to burrow into conversations that were over his head. She didn’t find this appealing. One of the conversations was with Derek and two other men, and while the other two men bantered with and gently mocked Elisa’s date, Derek merely stood still, sipping his drink, his face hard. Not angrily so. Impassively. He struck her as a passionate man who had mastered his passions. She couldn’t keep her eyes off him and didn’t learn his name.

The boy took her home and she went to bed with him but never returned his phone calls after that. She started studying at the law library, a place she had never previously so much as entered. At first it was in the hope of seeing the man from the party. But eventually she came to like the anonymity of the place, the inscrutability of the information it housed. All of the facts were there, but none could be seen, not immediately. Not without searching for them, without knowing where to look. This was not like science. Scientists had to generate the data with experiments. The law, its precedents and interpretations, were written down. The law was here — all of it, right here, all around her.

Scientists, of course, didn’t hang out in this library. She was the only one. One afternoon she was sitting at a table in the third-floor reading room and looked up to see Derek coming toward her from the stacks. Deliberately, almost defiantly. When he arrived he crouched beside her, crossed his arms on the tabletop. The hairs of his forearm were touching her notebook. He said, “You were at a party last semester.” Elisa nodded. “Come get a drink.”

(Later, months later, he would tell her, “I was terrified.” This was the first time he ever disappointed her, not because he had been terrified, but because he hadn’t been, but found it necessary, or perhaps just advantageous, to lie that he was. He wanted to appear more susceptible to strong emotion, and more experienced at managing it.)

This Derek, the one now driving home from the mall, is more like that Derek than any Derek she has seen in years. In the other life, raising the boys broke down his defenses, made him transparent, but threw his flaws into sharper relief. His willingness to blame others, Elisa in particular, for shared problems. His incapacity to accept a problem as chronic and unsolvable, and to readjust his expectations accordingly. By the time of Silas’s death, he was worn out. The world had disappointed him. If you asked he would have said he was happy, and he wouldn’t have been wrong. But it was the kind of qualified happiness that he never expected he would have to accept.

Here, though, in this world, the fortress of Derek has been partially rebuilt. It must have cost him real effort. And he doesn’t want it to crumble again — surely, if it did, he would lack the will, the energy, for another recovery.

She loves and pities him. He is ill equipped for this life, for the other life, for any life. Though she supposes you could say that about anybody.

It takes Derek about ten minutes to hook the video game console up to their television set. It’s black, and the controllers are black — to Elisa they look like amoebas, with the various buttons and sticks as organelles. The game comes in a DVD case, with a picture on the cover of a man, a young man in tee shirt and jeans, seen from behind, peering into a distant yellow light. The box is hard to open, so Derek goes to the kitchen for a knife.

“This is stupid,” he says, but he’s laughing at himself.

“This is what people do on Friday nights now,” she tells him, though what does she know about what people do on Friday nights?

Inside the box is the game disc, with the title printed on a black background. In a slot on the inside cover is a glossy black paper that reads “INSTRUCTIONS: FIND YOURSELF.”

Derek turns the paper over, looks again at the box. “That’s it? That’s the manual?”

“I guess the game tells you how to play it.”

“Ay caramba.”

They sit cross-legged on the carpet in front of the TV, power up the console, and slide in the disc. It whirs. They expect some kind of credits, some title sequence, but instead they hear a click and a whine, and a yellow dot appears in the center of the screen. It expands, rapidly, like the picture on an old television, into the image from the cover. This version of the image is subtly in motion — the man is panting, his shoulders heaving, the muscles of his back trembling slightly. He is scratched and bleeding; his clothes are dirty. A bass chord sounds, and then a male voice, echoing as though in a cave: “Who am I?” Then the chord evolves into a slow orchestral dirge, and options appear on the screen. GAME. EXPLORE. CONTROLS. OPTIONS. EXTRAS.