Mark Costello - Big If

“Yes,” said Jens. “But still, it’s pets. There’s something about spilling out that much compassion for a pet . It’s trivial somehow.”

Vi thought of their father, suddenly. She remembered Evelyn and Walter fighting over the mutts Evelyn adopted from the pound. Walter grumbled every time the dogs dug up the lawn, or came home smelling like the Effing River, or barked at something in the marshes at four a.m. and started every dog within a quarter mile barking. Evelyn said she had no choice but to adopt the dogs. “They gas them if no one claims them in a month,” she said. “I can’t bear to see a poor, innocent dog gassed.” Walter, being Walter, marshaled Aristotle, pointing out that gassing wasn’t punishment, that animals in general were neither innocent nor guilty, that her use of these terms was, in this context, incoherent — a bad thing to be guilty of in Walter’s universe. The soft love of pet owners was beyond him. He said, “They gas the innocent cats too. Why aren’t there forty rescued cats running around here?” And Evelyn said, “Because the dogs don’t like them.”

These were probably the worst fights in what was otherwise a quiet, serviceable marriage. Vi remembered watching from the stairs, hiding behind a banister, as Walter and Evelyn went at it in the front room, the basic opposition, Mom and Dad, a cats-and-dogs-type thing, with Walter very much the dog, ironically, relying on the sheer weight of his reason, and Evelyn the cat, clawing, unpredictable. Evelyn said, “I do what I can. I don’t save every animal, or even most of them, but I do what I can, which is more than you can say, Walt. All your arguments add up to No. No, there is no God. No, there’ll be no Christmas carols in the house. But what have you ever actually done ? You scribble on your money. Cross out God. I watch you. But what does that accomplish, other than getting your children beat up in school and creating pointless controversy with a bunch of Air Force bozos?” Vi at the age of eight or nine had felt a nauseous thrill, watching her mother try to wound her father with a word like bozo —it was thrilling, silly, terrifying, in the way a really scary horror movie is always close to being totally hilarious. Vi always took her father’s side as a child. He was Walter, after all, a stubborn, odd, quixotic figure in their town; he seemed to need the protection of a daughter’s loyalty more than Evelyn, who was more like other people, more at home in groups. Vi rooted for her father, watching from the stairs, but thinking of it now, she saw Evelyn’s side too. Vi hoped that Burt the sailing widower was the lighthearted type.

Vi said to Jens, “The monkey isn’t trivial to her. You sound like Walter now.”

Jens stood up and said, “Let’s take a walk.”

“I don’t think about him much. I’ll bet you think about him all the time.”

Jens and Vi were walking down the lawn, a slight slope to a drop-off, beyond which lay the rocks of Effing Head, the crashing surf, the bay. The condo blazed behind them, threw their shadows down the lawn. Their shadows were absurdly tall, gunfighterish somehow.

“Why?” asked Vi.

“Because you were always closer,” Jens said. “You and Dad. You were his favorite.”

Vi said, “That’s bullshit. I remember you guys in the den after supper. He’s reading about how to adjust a toxic spill. You’re reading about ham radio. Two peas in a pod. You were smart, Jens, and Dad respected smart. I was like his little buddy mascot, which was cool with me, I’m not complaining. But you, Jens — you were smart .”

They had come to the end of the lawn. There was no moon. Vi saw the odd flash of whitecap, but otherwise the bay was absolutely black.

Jens was looking out. “You know what he said to me? It was practically my last conversation with him. The game was going great then and the monsters were like runaway best-sellers. So we were talking about the monsters, how I write them, all of that, Hamsterman and Seeing Eye and Farty Pup, except I could never bring myself to say Farty to Dad, so I called him Poopy Pup, whatever. Now, Dad’s a well-read guy, but he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about large software systems, and how hard it is to make something run within x kilocycles or a y -sized byte group. You know what Dad says? He says, essentially, it’s trash. It’s immoral or amoral. All my work. I know the game itself, the stuff you see, the monsters and the plugs for snow blowers and the frequent-flier-mile tie-ins — well, it’s pretty bad. But the code, the engineering — that’s totally different. I don’t expect him to understand the beauty, or frankly the honor , of the engineering. But I do expect him to trust me, trust my judgment. A parent’s attitude should be, if my child’s doing it, it must be worth doing.”

Vi laughed. “We’ll see if you’re still saying that when Kai’s sixteen and getting high off Vicks VapoRub.”

“I wasn’t sixteen,” Jens said. “I was a grown man with a child of my own. He told me I had to quit. Quit? This game is my chance to make some real money. I’m not greedy, but I’d like to get out of the rat race, have more time with Kai, maybe see Peta not have to work so hard, so she’s not a zombie every night. I’d like to do some pure research — and, yes, maybe really leave my mark with something great. Are these wrong things to want?”

“No,” said Vi.

“I made a compromise. Dad thought I wanted the money ’cause I wanted yachts and sports cars. And if that’s your motivation, then sure, working at BigIf is probably pretty shameful. But I’ve never been that way. And that’s what hurt me when he said I had to quit. I looked at him and thought, I’m your son and you don’t even know me. You know how that felt?”

“Pretty shitty probably.”

“It felt lonely. Isn’t that strange? Then I thought about it and it made me mad, and then he died, and that made me even madder, because now I’m stuck being angry at him forever.” Jens turned and looked around the yard. “Remember last time you were here? We went out to the old house, had a picnic for his birthday. I thought it would be good for you, because you and he were so close, and frankly, Vi, you looked like you needed help that weekend. You looked like you’d just come from a train wreck.”

“No,” said Vi, “a flood.”

“So I figured, this will be good for Vi, and she’s my little sister, and she’s the only thing I’ve got left, really, from the old days, so let me try and help her out. But that whole weekend, Vi, and especially at the house, you were giving me these looks, this blankness. I thought it was because of whatever you had just come through.”

Vi remembered the weekend after Hinman, how she couldn’t stop herself from scanning.

Jens said, “Then I realized — no, it’s about me . She thinks I’m a sellout asshole, just like Walter did — of course she does, she was always his favorite. I thought, where does Vi get off judging me?”

Vi said, “Listen, Jens — that’s all in your head. I was all fucked up back then. It had nothing to do with you.”

“You’re telling me the way you look at me has nothing to do with me? Does that sound like it makes sense to you?”

“Well,” said Vi, “it’s true. Not everything in your life has to do with you. It’s easier once you realize that. Give Walter a break. The guy was human, big surprise. If you’re happy in your life, what difference does it make?”