Robert Lennon - Familiar

She only means to play for another hour, then join him. But she ends up playing all night.

She doesn’t fight the biker, in the end — instead she backs off, leaves the diner, and while she’s in the parking lot the waitress comes out to find her. “Is it really you?” she says. She’s young and pretty, and Elisa can’t help but see her through Silas’s eyes. Is this a girl Silas made? A girl he wishes were real? There is a tenderness here in the way the girl’s features are rendered: her red-brown hair, tied back loosely, a nose slightly too large for her face. The way the clean apron nevertheless bears faded stains that can never be washed out, and the way it creases when she gestures, the fibers frayed and weak with age. How is it even possible to evoke these details in a video game? It is impossible, immersing herself in this world, not to feel that she has missed something about Silas.

Of course every aesthetic decision here cannot have been Silas’s. There is probably a team of programmers, graphic designers, and the like. And yet she feels, powerfully, that this character, this girl, is the product of her son’s mind. This world, the world of the game, is Silas’s, as well — it is as though she has been allowed to enter into his consciousness, to see the way he sees. It is something he made to satisfy himself. And it feels realer, fuller, than any version of him she was ever permitted to see in life.

But then again, how hard had she looked? It’s true that, up until his adolescence, his emotions appeared to live on the surface — his problem, as they saw it, was impulse control, an incapacity to keep himself in check. His actions, as they saw them, were the unfiltered product of his subconscious. They lived in the world he made, by necessity, and he refused to enter the world they wanted him to live in.

But he did change, around the time he turned twelve. He fell quiet and began to brood. And though this made their days more orderly — fewer messes, less violence, fewer shouting fights — it also threw Elisa and Derek into a state of paranoia. What was he thinking? What was he going to do next? His quiet hostility became more disturbing than the acting out once had been, and Sam, who had endured their shared childhood with his wits largely intact, began to show the signs of deep anxiety and, eventually, depression: sallow complexion, sunken eyes, bitten fingernails. Sam hid in his bedroom much of the time, while Silas haunted the halls with a kind of regal insolence. He frightened them.

But perhaps there was nothing to fear. Maybe it wasn’t merely his demeanor that had changed, but his desires, his emotional aims. Maybe he was waiting for Derek and Elisa to discover them.

Instead they nurtured their paranoia, let it grow and spread. Each accused the other of trying to sabotage the family, of giving up on Silas, of giving up on Sam. Each accused the other of infidelity before either was actually guilty of it, and each used the accusation as justification for the act. There was a strong sense, in that household, of impending dissolution. Both of them were tired. They indulged the part of themselves that just wanted to get it over with.

But what if, behind Silas’s seemingly impenetrable affect, lay a nascent empathy? What if he was trying to find a path out of the wilderness of his childhood, through the games he played, the books he read? What if the Silas who made this game was, in fact, that Silas — the one they chose never to get to know?

She has stopped drinking, but the night has the quality of a bender, with periods of sudden strong emotion, and of blankness, and of pointless hilarity. The girl, it turns out, knew the Man from a period, some months before, when she was under the control of some thugs who lived in her trailer park. Then, the Man had gone by the name Jack, and though he was only passing through, he managed to chase the men out of town and help the girl, Rose, pay her mother’s medical bills. Jack, she explains now, wouldn’t say where the money came from, and indicated that Jack was not his real name. He said goodbye and good luck, and disappeared.

But now he’s back. What happened to him? The Man shakes his head — he doesn’t know. Rose gives him the only thing he left behind — a torn sheet of notebook paper with a six-digit number written on it in an unfamiliar hand.

“I have to get back to work,” she says. “Don’t mind Rocky — he’s just trying to help me and Mama.” If the Man is looking for information about himself, Rose tells him, he should try the motel in the center of town — that’s where he stayed. And when he finally figures it out, “come back for me” she says and runs away, into the diner.

The motel gives way to a bus bound for the city, which, as the hours of night pass by, leads Elisa down a spiral of increasing ridiculousness: the criminal underground, domestic spying, terrorists, government conspiracies. The number on the paper is a combination — there’s a safe, a post office box key, an encrypted document.

It is all, of course, adolescent in conception, but beautiful in execution: lavishly detailed, astonishingly full. Maybe all games are like this now, what does she know. But every time she tries to enter a building, there is something there for her to see. Every time she approaches a character, that character has something to say. Silas, whose motivations, whose desires, were always so inscrutable, has created a world and left it open to whoever might wish to enter.

When the sky framed by the living room window begins to lighten, she glances at the clock and sees that it is nearly five in the morning. She climbs the stairs to bed, sleeps until noon, eats a sandwich and drinks a glass of orange juice, then returns to the game.

She sees Derek a few times as the hours pile up; sometimes she can hear him in the kitchen, preparing food; at one point he walks past with a hammer, and several minutes later she hears pounding somewhere in the house. He pauses behind her a few times to observe her progress through the game — a visit to a mental hospital, then a run-in with the FBI, digging in the woods for a buried time capsule and riding the bus to a distant prison for a visit with an inmate — and she tries to fill him in, glancing occasionally over her shoulder to make sure he’s paying attention. But mostly he seems to be waiting, waiting for her to finish.

It is late on Sunday morning when she finally comes to the end. A slow trudge up the driveway of a white-clapboard house in an affluent subdivision. A knock on the door. There they are, the family in the photo, the people who rejected him, who sent him away because of his choice to become a government spy, a killer. But there was no choice — he’d been framed and it was the only way out. It doesn’t matter, he is told by the family patriarch, who refuses to let him over the threshold, behind which his mother and sister cower in fear. They want nothing to do with him. Go away, they tell him. We don’t want you here.

Elisa can retaliate, if she wishes. She has learned how to do things. She can beat these people to death with her fists, burn their house to the ground. She understands enough now about the way the game thinks to know that this is a possible ending, an acceptable ending. Instead, she turns and walks away. Returns to the diner to collect Rose and take her and her mother away from their terrible little town. At the end, they are standing out in the road, hand in hand, facing the sunset, but not yet moving toward it. The Man, exhausted by his efforts, is panting, just as he did at the beginning; the women’s hair is lifted by a breeze.

And then, a closing sequence. The camera, though of course there is no camera, lifts up as though on a crane, and a distant landscape is gradually revealed: not mountains, not the sea, but a trailer park, lavish in its dilapidation, pickup trucks and dirt bikes moving through its ragged streets; a commercial strip, populated by crumbling big-box retail spaces and empty cracked parking lots; a landfill, dump trucks and bulldozers swarming over it like ants, and tiny gulls swooping overhead; a cemetery, weedy and overgrown.