Drew Smith - Arcade

Jack and Joan wanted to pick me up at my place. I said I’d rather meet them. They tried pressing the issue, but I was firm. They gave me the name and address of a place I’d never heard of and said I should meet them at eleven-thirty. The tone of the conversation was hyper-cheery, with Jack cautiously avoiding any questions about my private life apart from a, “Hey, how are you?” when I first answered.

I arrived at the address twenty minutes late, and found that Joan had picked the brightest venue possible, a new restaurant named Glass for its primary construction material. It was essentially a greenhouse with some tables. Clear on all sides, even the ceiling was made of windows. Plants everywhere. I spied Jack and Joan, sunlit at a table beneath a drooping fern hung from the ceiling.

I felt like Nosferatu invited out for brunch. My whole life took place in darkness then. The late hours at work. My shadowy apartment with the blinds closed. The arcade.

I walked to their table, regretting that I hadn’t worn sunglasses. Jack and Joan looked like alien creatures to me, so clean and happy, like the type of merry vacationing guests that sometimes stayed at the motel.

“Hey!” Joan said. “We were getting worried.”

“Sorry I’m late.”

“No big deal,” Jack said, shaking my hand. Had he hugged me before finding out the truth about me? I couldn’t remember.

Joan stood and wrapped her arms around me. “Isn’t this place adorable? We’ve heard such great things about it. And they have deviled eggs, which I know you love.”

I looked down at the monogrammed handkerchief apparently meant to serve as a napkin, and the amber-colored prescription bottles from the 1920s that contained, I presumed, salt and pepper, despite their labels reading “Cocaine” and “Morphine.”

“Cute,” I said. “Very, very, very, very cute.”

“Well, it’s no Taco Bell,” Jack said.

It was a joke among friends that I had lowbrow tastes. It was true that I was a devoted diner at Taco Bell. I always had been, all through college and the subsequent years, when my friends were experimenting with farm-sourced meats and wild-caught salmon and, at last, veganism, which they had all abandoned by the age of 26.

A tattooed waitress came and I ordered a thirteen-dollar pimento cheese sandwich and their only option for a soft drink, an all-natural, caffeine-free lemon soda.

“So, we have news,” Joan said.

“Oh?”

“You tell him, Jack.”

Jack smiled at Joan, and Joan smiled back. They both smiled at me. They seemed more like aliens than ever. All this smiling. Maybe I was the alien. The alien vampire pervert homo.

“Well,” he said, “we’re pregnant.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Are you keeping it?”

A short silence passed.

“People don’t announce it when they’re not keeping the baby.”

Had the timing been different, I might have mentioned that, very drunk about six years prior, Joan had announced a soon-to-be-terminated pregnancy with an ironically festive air. Less than a week after the procedure we had gone out for an occasion she dubbed the Roe v. Wade Happy Hour.

“Can you believe we’re having a baby?” Jack said again.

“I hate it when men say ‘We’re pregnant’ or ‘We’re having a baby.’ It’s not like you’re doing any of the work, Jack. When you tell people, maybe try ‘We’re expecting’ or just ‘Joan’s pregnant.’ I hope I’m the first person you’re trying this out on.”

“You’re not. We told our families first. And about a dozen other people.”

“Then my intervention is in vain.”

“You have to admit, it’s pretty cool,” Joan said, her voice at a chirpy lilt. “The first baby of two of your dearest friends.”

“I can’t even imagine it,” I said. “But congratulations, I guess.”

“Thanks a lot,” Jack said. “Guess who we’re not asking to be the godfather.”

“Don’t be mean, Jack,” she said.

“What does everyone else do?” I said. “Do they like squeal and spring out of their chairs and hug you both and say stuff like, ‘Oh my god, you’re going to be a mommy and daddy?’”

“Not exactly, but, yeah, something along those lines,” Joan said.

Jack was getting mad. I’d known him long enough to recognize the sneery little smile he got when he was thinking something mean and debating whether or not to say it. I imagined him thinking, This is why the cop doesn’t want to be with you, you fucking faggot asshole.

“We were hoping our news might cheer you up a little,” Joan said.

“Really? You did?” I couldn’t imagine a world in which someone else’s breeding would mend my completely destroyed heart.

“I guess we were wrong.”

“Sorry,” I said. “But good for you guys for cloning yourselves or whatever.”

“Wow, thanks,” Jack said. “Really touching.”

“Okay, enough of that. Do you want to talk about how things are going with you?” Joan said. “Have things changed at all with the policeman?”

“Maybe they’ve changed. I guess they’ve changed for the worse.”

“I’m really sorry to hear that. I was hoping that the reason you weren’t calling was that you were making some progress and had been going out to see him or something.”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t think I can,” I said. I didn’t want to weep in a corny, fashionable restaurant.

Then Joan reached out and put her hand over mine on the tablecloth and I began to cry.

Even before bringing us our meals on deliberately mismatched, non-dishwasher-safe antique dinnerware, the waitress had to give me two more monogrammed handkerchief napkins. I kept thinking that one of them would have the cop’s initials, and it would be a message of encouragement from God or the universe, but it wasn’t to be.

Jack took pity on me and hugged me at the end of the meal saying, “I hope things get easier for you, man.”

“Thanks. And good luck with the pregnancy stuff,” I said. “You forgot to ask, but yes, you can name the kid after me.”

In the parking lot, I looked at my phone. One missed call. From the cop. My heart seized. My hands were shaking as I stared at the screen. The call had come forty minutes earlier. My fucking phone hadn’t even rung. It had been nine days since we had last spoken.

I called him back, forgetting everything I had rehearsed with Malcolm in preparation for that moment. He didn’t answer, so I hung up and called him again. No answer. I called again, then again. I left one message on the fifth attempt and another on the seventh. I couldn’t understand why I was being punished. I wanted to smash my face with my fists, to snuff out my own life by wrapping my seatbelt around my throat, to die and evaporate. I wanted never to have existed. I rested my head against the steering wheel, trying to keep my focus on deep breaths like I’d read to do online. It really was true that I wasn’t fit company for anyone but the rejects out at the arcade.

BEING BANNED WAS MY GREATEST FEAR. THERE WERE SIGNSthat threatened it. One said “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.” Another, posted in both hallways said, “Customers who fail to follow the rules will be banned from the premises.” Among the listed prohibitions were lewd behavior and loitering, which was essentially a list of the only two things I did there. I couldn’t guess how I would end up getting banned — I was always on my best behavior — but I had a feeling it would happen eventually.

For most my life, I’ve had a similar horror that I might somehow end up in prison by a freak accident or misunderstanding. I’m not certain about the fear’s precise origin, but I have a feeling it might have been coincident with the original airing of the prison-centered HBO series, Oz. I was 18 the year it premiered. Though I was finally able to buy cigarettes legally and to vote, I was preoccupied by the realization that, whatever might happen, there was no longer any possibility that I would be tried as a minor or find myself in juvie. Whatever I might do, however dumb with inexperience I was, the justice system saw me as fully formed.