The numbers flashed and then I was in darkness, zero visibility, confused as to where I was until the illuminated dial of a clock radio began to bleed through and I could make out the dim outline of myself lying in bed in the back room of that apartment with the black walls and the black ceiling and the black floor. Lisa was there beside me, an irregular hump in the darkness, snoring with a harsh gag and stutter. She was stoned. And drunk. Half an hour earlier, she’d been in the bathroom, heaving over the toilet, and I realized I’d come too far. “Reset,” I said. “Reverse ninety minutes.”
Sudden light, blinding after the darkness, and I was alone in the living room of the apartment, studying, or trying to. My hair hung limp, my muscles were barely there, but I was young and reasonably good-looking, even excusing any bias. I saw that my Black Flag T-shirt had faded to gray from too much sun and too many washings, and the book in my lap looked as familiar as something I might have been buried within a previous life, but then this was my previous life. I watched myself turn a page, crane my neck toward the door, get up to flip over the album that was providing the sound track. “Reset,” I said. “Fast-forward ten minutes.” And here it was, what I’d been searching for: a sudden crash, the front door flinging back, Lisa and the stoner whose name I didn’t want to know fumbling their way in, both of them as slow as syrup with the cumulative effect of downers and alcohol, and though the box didn’t have an olfactory feature, I swear I could smell the tequila on them. I jumped up out of my chair, spilling the book, and shouted something I couldn’t quite make out, so I said, “Reset, reverse five seconds.”
“You fucker!” was what I’d shouted, and now I shouted it again, prior to slapping something out of the guy’s hand, a beer bottle, and all at once I had him in a hammerlock and Lisa was beating at my back with her bird-claw fists and I was wrestling the guy out the door, cursing over the sound track (“Should I Stay or Should I Go”—one of those flatline ironies that almost make you believe everything in this life’s been programmed). I saw now that he was bigger than I was, probably stronger, too, but the drugs had taken the volition out of him, and in the next moment he was outside the door and the three bolts were hammered home. By me. Who now turned in a rage to Lisa.
“Stop,” I said. “Freeze.” Lisa hung there, defiant and guilty at the same time, pretty, breathtakingly pretty, despite the slack mouth and the drugged-out eyes. I should have left it there and gone on to those first cornucopian weeks and months and even years with Christine, but I couldn’t help myself. “Play,” I said, and Lisa raised a hand to swat at me, but she was too unsteady and knocked the lamp over instead.
“Did you fuck him?” I demanded.
There was a long pause, so long I almost fast-forwarded, and then she said, “Yeah. Yeah, I fucked him. And I’ll tell you something”—her words glutinous, the syllables coalescing on her tongue—“you’re no punk. And he is. He’s the real deal. And you? You’re, you’re—”
I should have stopped it right there.
“—you’re prissy.”
“Prissy?” I couldn’t believe it. Not then and not now.
She made a broad, stoned gesture, weaving on her feet. “Anal-retentive. Like, who left the dishes in the sink or who didn’t take out the garbage or what about the cockroaches—”
“Stop,” I said. “Reset. June 19, 1994, 11:02 p.m.”
I was in another bedroom now, one with walls the color of cream, and I was in another bed, this time with Christine, and I’d timed the memory to the very minute, postcoital, in the afterglow, and Christine, with her soft aspirated whisper of a voice, was saying, “I love you, Wes, you know that, don’t you?”
“Stop,” I said. “Reverse five seconds.”
She said it again. And I stopped again. And reversed again. And she said it again. And again.
Time has no meaning when you’re reliving. I don’t know how long I kept it up, how long I kept surfing through those moments with Christine—not the sexual ones but the loving ones, the companionable ones, the ordinary day-to-day moments when I could see in her eyes that she loved me more than anybody alive and was never going to stop loving me, never. Dinner at the kitchen table, any dinner, any night. Just to be there. My wife. My daughter. The way the light poured liquid gold over the hardwood floors of our starter house, in Canoga Park. Katie’s first birthday. Her first word (“Cake!”). The look on Christine’s face as she curled up with Katie in bed and read her Where the Wild Things Are. Her voice as she hoarsened it for Max: “I’ll eat you up!”
Enough analysis, enough hurt. I was no masochist.
At some point, I had to get up from that chair in the now and evacuate a living bladder, the house silent, spectral, unreal. I didn’t live here. I didn’t live in the now with its deadening nine-to-five job I was in danger of losing and the daughter I was failing and a wife who’d left me—and her own daughter—for Winston Chen, a choreographer of martial-arts movies in Hong Kong, who was loving and kind and funny and not the control freak I was. (Prissy, anyone? Anal-retentive?) The house echoed with my footsteps, a stage set and nothing more. I went to the kitchen and dug the biggest pot I could find out from under the sink, brought it back to the reliving room, and set it on the floor between my legs to save me the trouble of getting up next time around.
Time passed. Relived time and lived time, too. There were two windows in the room, shades drawn so as not to interfere with the business of the moment, and sometimes a faint glow appeared around the margins of them, an effect I noticed when I was searching for a particular scene and couldn’t quite pin it down. Sometimes the glow was gone. Sometimes it wasn’t. What happened then, and I may have been two days in or three or five, I couldn’t really say, was that things began to cloy. I’d relived an exclusive diet of the transcendent, the joyful, the insouciant, the best of Christine, the best of Lisa, and all the key moments of the women who came between and after, and I’d gone back to the intermediate algebra test, the very instant, pencil to paper, when I knew I’d scored a perfect one hundred percent, and to the time I’d squirted a ball to right field with two outs, two strikes, ninth inning and my Little League team (the Condors, yellow Ts, white lettering) down by three, and watched it rise majestically over the glove of the spastic red-haired kid sucking back allergic snot and roll all the way to the wall. Triumph after triumph, goodness abounding—till it stuck in my throat.
“Reset,” I said. “January 2, 2009, 4:30 p.m.”
—
I found myself in the kitchen of our second house, this house, the one we’d moved to because it was outside the L.A. city limits and had schools we felt comfortable sending Katie to. That was what mattered: the schools. And, if it lengthened our commutes, so be it. This house. The one I was reliving in now. Everything gleamed around me, counters polished, the glass of the cabinets as transparent as air, because details mattered then, everything in its place whether Christine was there or not—especially if she wasn’t there, and where was she? Or where had she been? To China. With her boss. On film business. Her bags were just inside the front door, where she’d dropped them forty-five minutes ago, after I’d picked her up at the airport and we’d had our talk in the car, the talk I was going to relive when I got done here, because it was all about pain now, about reality, and this scene was the capper, the coup de grâce. You want wounds? You want to take a razor blade to the meat of your inner thigh just to see if you can still feel? Well, here it was.
Christine entered the scene now, coming down the stairs from Katie’s room, her eyes wet, or damp, anyway, and her face composed. I pushed myself up from the table, my beginner’s bald spot a glint of exposed flesh under the glare of the overhead light. I spoke first. “You tell her?”
Christine was dressed in her business attire, black stockings, heels, skirt to the knee, tailored jacket. She looked exhausted, and not simply from the fifteen-hour flight but from what she’d had to tell me. And our daughter. (How I’d like to be able to relive that, to hear how she’d
even broached the subject, let alone how she’d smoke-screened her own selfishness and betrayal with some specious concern for Katie’s well-being—let’s not rock the boat and you’ll be better off here with your father and your school and your teachers and it’s not the end but just the beginning, buck up, you’ll see.)
Christine’s voice was barely audible. “I don’t like this any better than you do.”
“Then why do it?”
A long pause. Too long. “Stop,” I said.
I couldn’t do this. My heart was hammering. My eyes felt as if they were being squeezed in a vise. I could barely swallow. I reached down for a bottle of water and a PowerBar, drank, chewed. She was going to say, “This isn’t working,” and I was going to say, “Working? What the fuck are you talking about? What does work have to do with it? I thought this was about love. I thought it was about commitment.” I knew I wasn’t going to get violent, though I should have, should have chased her out to the cab that was even then waiting at the curb and slammed my way in and flown all the way to Hong Kong to confront Winston Chen, the martial-arts genius, who could have crippled me with his bare feet.
“Reset,” I said. “August, 1975, any day, any time.”
There was a hum from the box. “Incomplete command. Please select date and time.”
I was twelve years old, the summer we went to Vermont, to a lake there, where the mist came up off the water like the fumes of a dream and deer mice lived under the refrigerator, and I didn’t have a date or time fixed in my mind—I just needed to get away from Christine, that was all. I picked the first thing that came into my head.
“August nineteenth,” I said. “Eleven thirty a.m. Play.”
A blacktop road. Sun like a nuclear blast. A kid, running. I recognized myself—I’d been to this summer before, one I remembered as idyllic, messing around in boats, fishing, swimming, wandering the woods with one of the local kids, Billy Scharf, everything neutral, copacetic. But why was I running? And why did I have that look on my face, a look that fused determination and helplessness both? Up the drive now, up the steps to the house, shouting for my parents: “Mom! Dad!”
I began to have a bad feeling.
I saw my father get up off the wicker sofa on the porch, my vigorous young father, who was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and didn’t have even a trace of gray in his hair, my father, who always made everything right. But not this time. “What’s the matter?” he said. “What is it?”
And my mother coming through the screen door to the porch, a towel in one hand and her hair snarled wet from the lake. And me. I was fighting back tears, my legs and arms like sticks, striped polo shirt, faded shorts. “It’s,” I said, “it’s—”
“Stop,” I said. “Reset.” It was my dog, Queenie, that was what it was, dead on the road that morning, and who’d left the gate ajar so she could get out in the first place? Even though he’d been warned about it a hundred times?
I was in a dark room. There was a pot between my legs, and it was giving off a fierce odor. I needed to go deeper, needed out of this. I spouted random dates, saw myself driving to work, stuck in traffic with ten thousand other fools who could only wish they had a fast-forward app, saw myself in my thirties, post-Lisa, pre-Christine, obsessing over Halo, and I stayed there through all the toppling hours, reliving myself in the game, boxes within boxes, until finally I thought of God, or what passes for God in my life, the mystery beyond words, beyond lasers and silicon chips. I gave a date nine months before I was born, “December 30, 1962, 6:00 a.m.,” when I was, what—a zygote?—but the box gave me nothing, neither visual nor audio. And that was wrong, deeply wrong. There should have been a heartbeat. My mother’s heartbeat, the first thing we hear—or feel, feel before we even have ears.
“Stop,” I said. “Reset.” A wave of rising exhilaration swept over me even as the words came to my lips, “September 30, 1963, 2:35 a.m.,” and the drumbeat started up, ba-boom, ba-boom, but no visual, not yet, the minutes ticking by, ba-boom, ba-boom, and then I was there, in the light of this world, and my mother in her stained hospital gown and the man with the monobrow and the flashing glasses, the stranger, the doctor, saying what he was going to say by way of congratulations and relief. A boy. It’s a boy.
Then it all went dead, and there was somebody standing in front of me, and I didn’t recognize her, not at first, how could I? “Dad,” she was saying. “Dad, are you there?”
I blinked. Tried to focus.
“No,” I said finally, shaking my head in slow emphasis, the word itself, the denial, heavy as a stone in my mouth. “I’m not here. I’m not. I’m not.”
* * *
T. C. Boyle is the author of twenty-four books of fiction, including, most recently, After the Plague, Drop City, The Inner Circle, Tooth and Claw, The Human Fly, Talk Talk, The Women, Wild Child, When the Killing’s Done, San Miguel, T. C. Boyle Stories II, and The Harder They Come. He received a PhD in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1974, and his BA in English and history from SUNY Potsdam in 1968. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, where he is Distinguished Professor of English. His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The Paris Review, GQ, Antaeus, Granta, and McSweeney’s, and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel of the year (World’s End, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (T. C. Boyle Stories, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (The Tortilla Curtain, 1997). He lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.
ROGUELIKE
Marc Laidlaw
Good morning, Agent @, and congratulations on acceptance into the Academy of Assassins. Your first assignment may also be your last. The Emperor of Antagonia, having already depleted our resources and left the Resistance with almost nothing we can use in our struggle, is drawing up secret orders to accelerate our extermination. He must be stopped before these orders are finalized. And by stopped we mean assassinated.
All our more experienced agents have died in the attempt to eliminate the Emperor. Despite your junior status, you are the finest agent we have left.
Your mission is to infiltrate the Palace of Heaven, ascend to the Penthouse, and kill the Emperor. One hundred floors of bodyguards, attack dogs, rabid leopards, great white shark tanks, whirling blades, and other dangers yet unenumerated lie in your path. Be sure to study the case files of the agents who have gone before you, that you may learn from their failures.
The fate of the Resistance is in your hands.
Good luck, Agent @!
You enter the lobby of the Palace of Heaven.
A security camera turns to note your presence.
The camera emits a laser beam and burns a hole through you.
Good morning, Agent b, and congratulations on acceptance into the Academy of Assassins. Your first assignment may also be your last. The Emperor of Antagonia, having already depleted our resources and left the Resistance with almost nothing we can use in our struggle, is drawing up secret orders to accelerate our extermination. He must be stopped before these orders are finalized. And by stopped we mean assassinated.
All our more experienced agents have died in the attempt to eliminate the Emperor. Despite your junior status, you are the finest agent we have left.
Your mission is to infiltrate the Palace of Heaven, ascend to the Penthouse, and kill the Emperor. One hundred floors of bodyguards, attack dogs, rabid leopards, great white shark tanks, whirling blades, and other dangers yet unenumerated lie in your path. Be sure to study the case files of the agents who have gone before you, that you may learn from their failures.
The fate of the Resistance is in your hands.
Good luck, Agent b!
You enter the lobby of the Palac
e of Heaven.
A security camera turns to note your presence.
You step behind a column.
You enter a door marked SECURITY.
You destroy the security camera controls.
A security guard shoots you in the face.
Good morning, Agent c…
You enter the lobby of the Palace of Heaven.
A security camera turns to note your presence.
You step behind a column.
You enter a door marked SECURITY.
You shoot a security guard.
You destroy the security camera controls.
The other security guard shoots you in the back.
Good morning, Agent k…
You enter the lobby of the Palace of Heaven.
A security camera turns to note your presence.
You step behind a column.
You enter a door marked SECURITY.
You shoot a security guard.
You shoot a security guard.
You destroy the security camera controls.
You enter the lobby of the Palatial Tower.
You shoot a security guard.
You shoot a security guard.
You shoot a security guard.
You shoot a security guard.
You find stairs going up.
You step onto the second floor.
An attack dog tears your throat out.
Good morning, Agent v…
You enter the lobby of the Palace of Heaven.
You shoot a security camera.
You shoot a security guard.