Robert Lennon - Familiar

“Explore?” Elisa asks.

“Nah,” says Derek, and expertly manipulates the joystick until PLAY is underlined. He presses a button and the menu screen disappears.

“How did you know how to do that?” she asks him.

Derek shrugs. He seems mildly embarrassed and pleased. It’s the sort of thing he can do — pick up a tool, or a gadget, or a computer program, and just use it. It is, she must admit, a bit of a turn-on, as is his pleasure at his own facility. A few notches more self-satisfaction, though, and it would be insufferable. This is a key to his appeal: confidence bordering on, but not crossing over to, arrogance.

Their Man is standing in a forest, alert and subtly breathing. A message appears on the screen: PREPARE TO FIND YOUR DESTINY. This is the training the girl told them about — they have to teach themselves to run, climb, throw, hit. On-screen icons indicate which controls to use. The screen shows their character, the Man, in various environments — a forest, an empty house, a road, a ship — where some obvious task, like scaling a wall or opening a safe, has to be accomplished. He is always shown from behind, his muscles working, his thin hair flopping on his head. Elisa is amazed at the photographic quality of the graphics — it looks like a movie. The training is fascinating and vexing, and the game proper doesn’t seem to have really started yet. Derek says, “Jesus. Are they all this complicated?”

“The girl said no.”

“Jesus.”

When they decide that they’ve mastered the controls, or come close enough, Derek gets up and comes back with a bottle of bourbon and two glasses. They haven’t drunk the stuff together in years, at least not in the world she knows. The ceremony in his bearing suggests they haven’t in this one, either. He pours the drinks over ice and they clink them together.

“To an unusual evening,” Derek says.

“To Silas.”

The warmth drains from his face and he turns away from her, to the screen. “So are we playing this thing or not?” He drinks.

“Let’s.”

As it happens, they can’t both play at once — it’s single-player only. They take turns manipulating the controls and exploring the world of the game.

It is, of course, a mystery. The player is a nameless Man who wakes up bruised, beaten, and starving somewhere in a forest. He has nothing in his possession save for a compass — which doesn’t appear to work here in the woods — and a creased and torn photograph. The photograph is familiar to them both: it is clearly based on the family picture from the lake, the one that Elisa remembers she has left at the frame shop with Larry. Though she hears Derek draw in breath, neither of them remarks on the resemblance. The faces are different, but the poses are the same.

During the first fifteen minutes, they die repeatedly by falling into holes or out of trees. Only when morning breaks in the game are they able to make their way out of the forest; they do so by following the sound of passing traffic. When at last the Man climbs onto a road, Derek says, “So, how long are we going to be doing this?”

They are both on the second bourbon. Elisa is shocked. It’s only ten. She has no intention of stopping. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Another hour?”

Derek shrugs. She can see that the game has caught his interest, but he doesn’t want to stick with it. It’s bothering him. She gets up and refills her glass. She is beginning to get drunk.

They flag down a pickup truck driven by a grizzled old man. Where to? he wants to know, and they hear the Man say wherever. Eventually the driver buys him breakfast at a diner. Then a waitress comes on shift, tying her apron around her waist, sees the Man, and screams.

Derek actually cries out and drops his controller. “It can’t be!” the woman is saying. She backs into the kitchen, weeping.

“Rosie, you got a problem with this guy?” says a voice, and the Man turns to find a burly biker type standing behind him, cracking his knuckles. There is something sickening about this sound: it is wet and deep, like the popping of greenwood in a fire.

“Fight him! Fight him!” Elisa shouts, and when Derek makes no move to pick up his controller, she punches him on the arm. He flinches. “Derek. Derek! We have to fight this guy!”

“Let’s pause,” he says. “Can you pause?” They both try various buttons until they hit upon the right one, and a menu pops up: EXIT. OPTIONS. Derek exhales, seeming to shrink to half his size. He says, “I think I’ve had enough for tonight.”

“You’re kidding!” Yes, she is a little drunk.

He pats her shoulder. “I’m beat, Lisa. I wrote lectures all day.”

“Oh.”

“You kind of hurt my arm.”

“Sorry,” she says. She glances at the screen, then back at him. “Mind if I stay up?”

“Go ahead.” He stretches. “Don’t forget to save the game. In case you die.”

“Thank you,” she says. And then, “Derek. I’m going out to see them.”

“See who?”

“I bought a plane ticket.”

He’s silent. He is staring not at her but at the biker on the screen.

She says, “In three weeks. I’m taking the Friday off.”

His response is very quiet. “Why?”

“Do you want to come? You aren’t teaching. You can come.”

“I don’t know.”

“When was the last time you flew out to see them?”

He gets that look — the fear that he doesn’t know what’s going on. “You know.”

“When?” She feels reckless. “Just say it!”

He doesn’t reply, just stares at the screen. After a moment he rubs his face. Says, “He could be funny sometimes. Silas.”

Derek has half gotten up to go to bed and then sunk down again, so that his legs are folded under him, as though he’s getting ready to pray.

“Just cuttingly, shockingly funny,” he goes on. “The way he would impersonate people. Walking by. Do you remember that?”

She nods.

“Even when he was, Jesus, eight or nine. He would do those conversations between people. At restaurants? Do you remember the old man with the cowboy hat and the girl with him? In, what the hell was it, the place that used to be where Subway is now?”

“The Arbor? No, the Terrace.”

“Yeah, with the plastic ivy. He did the Texas accent, ‘Weaaauuul now, darlin’, y’all lemme know if ya find a tooth in them french fries.’ Remember that?”

“Of course.”

“And then the girl, ‘Oh, Pappy! Oh, Pappy!’”

It’s true, sometimes they laughed at Silas until they cried. He knew exactly what to mock. God forgive them, they even laughed when he made fun of Sam. At the dinner table, faced with a food he didn’t like, Sam’s chin would drop and tremble, his cheeks collapse, his eyes narrow and moisten. Silas had it down. Sometimes he would even beat his brother to it — as soon as the plate of beets hit the placemat, before his brother had a chance to react, Silas would pull The Face, and Elisa and Derek would convulse with laughter.

Oh, God, it was wrong. It was so wrong to encourage, but it was so funny. She thinks of minefield, Silas’s online alter ego, and she wonders where that part of her son went. By the time he died, it was gone. His mockery wasn’t funny anymore. And here, this game. There’s no humor in it. Yet it compels her all the same.

Derek has stood up to leave. He says, “Maybe you could turn the sound down a little.”

“Sure.”

He drops to his knee, kisses her on the head. “Good night,” he says, and he grips her shoulder as though to fix the moment, as though she might run away. “I still don’t understand what you’re trying to do and I’m afraid you’re going to ruin everything. But I love you.” And then he goes to bed.