The real estate lady came by later that week.
The first thing she said when I opened the door: “Isn’t Ben Hanson a difficult person to get on the phone?”
To which I replied: “I don’t know. Is he?”
To which she replied. “Yes.”
She was on the stoop, and I stood inside, hand on the doorknob. She looked me up and down, seemingly disappointed already, then handed me her enormous paper coffee cup and started digging through her silver purse.
“Okay then. Here we are.”
“I’ve been settling in.”
Theresa Orgogliosi glanced up at that, then looked back down to her purse. “It’s fine, Ben, actually,” she said, waving a hand. “I was a little concerned you were in there dead too.” She laughed at her own joke. “Can you imagine me trying to sell the house then?”
“That would be awkward.”
“Hopefully we’ll get an out-of-towner and we can just ignore your uncle. Sometimes they ask, unfortunately.”
She was an attractive woman. The amount of g’s and o’s in her name had made me expect her to be a frumpy demon of some kind, but she was in fact a pretty, petite, olive-skinned, nondemonic, almond-eyed forty-something who smelled of Suave deodorant and had an amazing body.
“I’m not totally joking, though,” she said, looking up again from her search. “Just so you know, I know about—I know about your struggles.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“You doing okay? Sort of nesting in here?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s a big nest. I’m used to crappy little garbage homes.”
She pulled a disposable camera from her purse and held it up.
“Come in,” I said, stepping back and putting down her cup. “I was just going to make some coffee.”
“My older brother had a whole thing with crystal meth, by the way,” she said once she was inside, speaking loudly as she looked around the living room. “It was terrible,” she continued, drifting over toward the fireplace. “I mean, the sheer amount of bullshit was unbearable, to start with, not to mention everything with the money—I need money, Mom, I need to borrow some money; Theresa, I need to borrow some money, no, I’m clean now, no, I stopped, no, that’s done now. It took us years to figure out it was all bullshit. All of it. I still sometimes go back to Al-Anon just to remember. And then how much it aged him, how he acted to my sister-in-law that whole time. He used to be so handsome and he turned into a skeleton. It was a sad thing.” She nodded as though she’d made the final point on the matter. “Drugs. But he did get clean,” she said. “He did eventually completely clean up. So that was good. He’s in Eau Claire now.”
“I’m not really—I’m not really in that state. I never was.”
“No, I know,” she said. “You’re more of a flub.”
“What’s a flub?”
“Hm? Oh, I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Just sort of a… pfft.” Mouth sounds of failure. “When you’re playing golf. When you hit the ground in front of the ball. You know. Do you bowl? A gutter ball. Whatever.”
Theresa said then that she was on her way to work in Milwaukee and needed a set of pictures for the online listing. She apologized about the time, but I assured her it didn’t matter and that I had been up baking bread since 4:00 a.m. anyway.
“I’m surprised you don’t use a digital camera,” I said, moving us along. “It seems like everyone else does.” I thought of my sister telling me that my Ludditeism was lame. And yet here it was being awesome.
“Oh, I know, isn’t that funny?” she said, looking derisively at the little yellow box in her hand. “Everyone says that when I pull these suckers out. You just get used to something, I guess. And besides, all I do is drop this at the drugstore next to my office and they e-mail me a link where I can get all the pictures. It’s the same. It’s magic either way.”
“I can’t remember. How exactly is it that you know my mother?”
“I was her real estate agent,” she said after she’d snapped a few more pictures of the living room, her face still scrunched up in concentration. “Then too. Do you not remember me? We met once. I sold your old house for you then. You were—well, you were a typical teenager, actually. I don’t even think you looked me in the eye. I understand now, trust me! But I was also around a little bit in your mom’s book club.” She looked at me as though she were seeing my face for the first time. “That only started after you were gone to college, I think. So, no. You wouldn’t. And, my God, can I just say that you look exactly like your uncle, Ben? It’s uncanny.”
“You think so?”
“Jesus,” she said, coming closer. “It’s a little scary, actually.”
“My dad says I look like my grandpa.”
“Genes,” she said. She went back to her pictures. “Also, and I’m just saying this: Did you ever think about shaving once in a while? Or possibly getting a haircut?”
“I sometimes do those things.”
“And you went to Wisconsin? For college?”
“Yes.”
“My son—my son is thirteen. Maybe it’s a little early to plan his college career, but I hope that he goes there, I really do. I always wanted to go there. It seemed so fun. I ended up at Carroll. Which was fine, but it wasn’t Madison, you know? I went once for Halloween. Amazing experience. I woke up lying with my feet in the lake, dressed in a different costume than the one I’d gone out wearing.”
“I liked it there.”
“Mm,” she said, looking at the fridge. “Do you mind if I just get the upstairs? The living room’s really the selling point, but I just want to be sure I have everything.”
She didn’t wait for me to answer and soon disappeared up the stairs.
I didn’t follow her. Instead I went into Denny’s small office and sat down at the desk, passing through the invisible clouds of her perfume. I put my head on my hand for a moment, letting the smell linger, trying to decide if she was the type of woman who liked to discuss mortgage payments during sex. I looked at the computer. I had placed Jeremy’s tower—which was silver, and sleek, and brushed, and probably custom-made, as I could see no decals or branding anywhere—beside Denny’s more modest gray Dell. I stared at it for a good five minutes.
After prison I spent a lot of time at my old diner. I went every day near the end. There was a girl. I didn’t know her name, but she knew me, this waitress, or she knew my face at least, and it had now been a solid two years since I’d come in with Allie for pancakes. (How was it that she was still here, this waitress? I wondered it all the time. Still the same? How was it that she hadn’t seemed to change after I’d spent all those nights in the darkness?) So the last visit to the diner before leaving for Wisconsin, via Seattle. After I’d decided what I was going to do. It was in the afternoon. It was two thirty; the place wasn’t very full. There were a few women with babies near the front window, an older couple two tables down, a handful of singles scattered about. It felt good to be near people. I didn’t get conversations out of solitary meals at the diner, but at least I was required to talk and could be reminded that other lives were out there. Prison—even white-collar prison—is a weird place. You see people and talk to people all the time, but after a while, you start to imagine that you are the only one actually incarcerated. That your prison is a ghost town and you’re the only one in it. Of course there’s no sex. Not for me, at least, as I had nobody to visit me for conjugals. Right here among these people in the diner, though, you could almost force yourself into imagined relationships, and I had become good at it. My waitress was my wife, the women with the babies were my sisters, and those babies were my nieces and nephews. Amazingly, they were all born only four months apart, and now my sisters would have this bond for the rest of their lives. I would be the uncle who would not forget birthdays, because they all came in the same season. They’d be able to discuss the terrible twos as they came, they’d be able to discuss the pros and cons of different preschools and kindergartens and whatnot. Occasionally I would join them for their weekly baby lunches, depending on whether I was busy that day, and all of us could discuss how strange it was that we were no longer part of the youngest generation or (for that matter) the generation of the main people on TV, that marketing didn’t seem directed at us anymore, how we didn’t quite know what to make of the early days of this new status as adults but that it did seem to have its benefits, like a remarkable unbounded freedom, despite the stresses and responsibilities, which seemed to want to take that same freedom right back. Their husbands, my three brothers-in-law? It was a shame they didn’t all get along perfectly, but at least no one had married anyone unbearable, there wasn’t a toxic member of the family; at least everything felt stable, despite that land deal gone bad and despite the unfortunate argument about God and politics that one night three years ago when we were all in Phoenix and when (we can now admit) we’d all had too much to drink. My sisters would chide me for my immaturity, but only a little, and warmly. I loved them. For the most part we’d always have a good time. We would never mention that life, our one life, was slipping away.
It would be different with Theresa. I would get fat immediately, I thought. I would covet the fatness. She would let it happen and it would make her happy. But only after a decade. I’d stay in shape for one decade. Being as I was the younger one—the young trophy husband, if you will—she would spend the first few years showing me off around town, and I would therefore need to stay in shape so as to not humiliate her. But there would come a point when the passions cooled and I began to use half-and-half in my cereal. That point would come. What’s interesting is that it would not matter so much. Because by then we’d have our children, and we’d be preoccupied with preparing them for the world. One of them, Betty, would be interested in creating houses out of large cardboard boxes. She’d be so interested that we’d clear out an entire room for her creations and begin crawling through them before they were finished. My obesity would become a problem when she decided to create an eco-friendly home out of the boxes, as I would become trapped amid the cardboard water-recycling tanks and would have to call for help and then eventually tear my way out like Godzilla. Our son, though, would be interested in centaurs…
“Ben?” called Theresa. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m here,” I called. “In the office.”
“All done.”
I got up and walked with her to the door. I asked her—for no better reason than to prove to myself after my extensive daydream that I was not insane—I asked her if the economy being as bad as it was and all the doom-talk about real estate had been trouble for her business.
“Oh God. You have no idea,” she said. “I haven’t sold a house in six months.”
“Well,” I said. “I hope you sell this one.”
“That’s right,” she said. “The faster I sell it, the faster you can go home. Is that what you mean?”
To which I did not know quite what to say.
I took an unexpectedly dramatic shower and went back to the computer. Grant had called, and I called him back. He said there was something happening in town. Did I remember Bobby Sheehan? Lauren Sheehan’s little brother? He was an artist now, or at least was calling himself one, and he was having an opening at the gallery downtown. Grant said I should go.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve got one now.”
“Are you going?”
“Me?” he said. “Of course not. I don’t like art.”
“Everyone likes art.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re calling me to ask me to go to an art show you don’t want to go to?”
“That’s right.”
“What kind of art is it?”
“Paintings, I think. I saw on the flyer that the show’s called Painting My Feather.”
“I’m picking you up. I have to get out of here anyway.”
“I got my kid tonight, man,” he said. “I can’t go.”
“Bring her along,” I said. I tried to say it like a jolly, grizzled old man.
“What was that?”
“What?”
“The voice?”
“That was a voice I was doing,” I said. “A guy. An old guy.”
“I didn’t find it convincing.”
“I’d like you to come.”
It took about ten minutes of this before I got him to say yes. But I suddenly did not want to stay there; I hadn’t just been saying that. Not another night doing nothing.
It had been a week and the only journeys I’d made were to the grocery store and back up to the top of Beau Pointe to idiotically look down on my town, with less and less peaceful thoughts. So far, I was nowhere near the epiphanic newness I’d dreamed about on the plane. My anxiety levels were at record-breaking heights. I’d spent time in all the different rooms, studying the fossilized remnants of my uncle’s life, thinking back, thinking forward. But the truth was, the feeling of not knowing what I was doing here or why I was doing it had hardened in my gut and turned into a dense little diamond. I had already begun to think about going back west. I had started over before. I could start over again somewhere else.
I put down the phone, then double-clicked the icon in the middle of the desktop. I had placed it there after finding it in the Downloads folder. It was called THERIVERSGAME_beta_v3.2.
They’d actually made the thing.
Jeremy and I were in Denver when we were both around twenty-four. He’d come to Denver from Phoenix and I had come from Madison, and our mutual friend was our mutual dealer, a kid named Derek Something whose last name I never knew and who disappeared into thin air in the summer of 2000. This was not all that unusual a thing for drug dealers to do, mind you, and I didn’t think too much about it, as I had plenty of other people I could call, but for a few weeks all of Denver felt cashed, and one day I walked into a coffee shop, recognized Jeremy from a party, and sat down to talk to him. Soon the topic of Derek came up, and he asked me if I had any idea where he’d gone.
“No idea,” I said.
“I hope he’s okay,” Jeremy said.
“I’m sure he’s fine.”
(I would later find out that he was not and that he had fled to Phoenix to avoid arrest. Which did not work.)
Jeremy nodded at this thoughtfully; he looked like he really did care, I will say that. He was well put together, clean-shaven, and wearing an orange polo shirt, and this made him different than almost anyone I knew. For this reason he seemed interesting. He had a laptop with him, closed and beside him on the couch he’d taken over. He had papers, books, and notebooks scattered to his left and to his right, as well as on the table between us.
“Do you need me to get you anything?” I said.
“Do you mean coffee?”
“Drugs.”
“Oh,” he said. “No. It takes me six months to get through one bag of pot. I was just calling him about his bike. He was going to sell it to me.”
“You’re buying Derek Something’s bicycle?”
“I was going to, yes. Do you think there’s a problem with that?”
“No.”
Jeremy, I was noticing, was the kind of person who always looked distracted. The one or two times we’d talked in the past, I’d been certain he was deeply bored by what I had to say, but now, looking at him, I realized that it was just that his affect was a little off, and that he was painfully shy. His legs were crossed and he had turned to stare out the window at Sixteenth Street. Outside, it was raining. I was about to ask him what he was working on when he turned back and said, “Do you play chess?”
“I do.”
“Do you feel like playing?” he asked. “There’s a board.” He nodded at a shelf to his right.
“Sure.”
He beat me twice and I beat him once. The first game was the one I won, and I could tell that it irritated him tremendously. He hadn’t expected it to be close, let alone an actual challenge. But I also sensed, when I saw how he opened for the second game—this time he offered a queen’s gambit, which I declined—that he was changing his strategy based on how I’d played the previous game, which in turn spelled certain doom for me. I have a weird style of playing, which I’d learned from my cousin Wayne, that had more to do with confusing the shit out of your opponent than it did with mounting a harmonious assault or creating a unified defense. In that way it was superficial. But I could do nothing else, which Jeremy intuited. He beat me handily in the second game and destroyed me in the third. Such is the danger of improvisation when you’re outmatched by someone who really knows how to play.
“You’re good,” he said as he put the pieces back in the box.
“Ah,” I said. “Now that you beat me, you can say that.”
A quick smile flashed across his mouth—the first one I’d seen since I sat down. His face, though, soon dissolved back into its focused seriousness. “I had lessons,” he said. “My parents used to make me go to tournaments.”
“I can tell you know what you’re doing in a way I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Where did you learn to play?”
“My family,” I said. “Growing up.”
“I’m actually not that competitive a person,” he said, to which I thought: Of course not. “I hated those things.”
“Stressful.”
“They were,” he said. “It’s bullshit. I had an ulcer by the time I was twelve.” He took a sip of his coffee, which had to have been cold. “I really did. It had a big impact on me. But I do like games.”
I told him I did too.
Eight years later, here I was looking at the title page of the game Jeremy had made, which was set to launch, according to his company’s website, on the first of January. The Rivers. It existed.
A beta version of it, anyway. What the site called a soft launch. The real thing would come out next summer. And it wasn’t as though I had stumbled upon some secret copy of the game—there were probably hundreds of copies out there being tested before the launch, and I’m sure Jeremy had just installed a version of it on their computer at home so he and Allie could play around with it. But Jeremy had lied about at least one thing during our chat: my name was not listed anywhere on the credits page. It had taken me a few days to beat the game to get to the credits, and it wasn’t fair, since I had written the majority of the puzzles. The others, those that I hadn’t written, were weak. I’m not being a dick. They were bad. They weren’t easy but they weren’t very elegant. And any asshole can make something complicated, difficult, and tedious. Anyone can make something impenetrable. What’s interesting is the delight someone feels when it becomes clear that it’s all made sense from the start.
It somehow worked with the Rivers, despite the baggy mess of it all. The game’s design, the overall visual experience of the game—it was fucking gorgeous. There is no other way to say it. (Most of the twenty million people who’ve played it by now tend to say the same thing.)
And that was the original plan. That was the whole idea. To make something beautiful and disguise it as something entertaining.
So first things first: For the idea to work, the actual game had to be good. Fair enough. And this is why I had felt a growing sense of real excitement that day as Jeremy and I sat there and talked—real excitement for something, real enthusiasm, which I hadn’t felt in years. It had been clear to me that I was good for almost nothing beyond tutoring rich kids for their tests, which I didn’t even like doing, but during the conversation I started to think: You know what? I could make a game. That is something that I could do. In fact, that is something I want to do.
I don’t know any real game designers, but I’ve always assumed each has his or her own way of categorizing games, and I’ve sometimes wondered whether my system resembles any of theirs. For me, what makes sense most is to think about games based on the central emotion they summon. And by this I don’t mean tension—all good games should summon tension. I just mean there’s usually a central emotion around which specific games are built, and the details of the experience, if it’s a good game, should emerge based on that feeling and beholden to that feeling, to that dominant note. I think about it this way because I can’t stand it when I hear this or that “adult” explain to me why games are foolish, children’s things, because they amount to nothing, mean nothing. Whichever games. People say it about sports; people used to say it about novels; now people say it about video games. Why would you get so upset? you might hear one of these imaginationless people mutter as you, for example, I don’t know, throw down the plastic gun attached to a video game at the mall you’ve been playing for six hours, pumping quarter after quarter into the machine because you only want to get to the end, to have the final battle, to finish it, to know what happens, to feel that sense of accomplishment, even though yes, you are in your late twenties, and the gun, which is attached to a metal cord, ricochets off the machine when you throw it and there is a loud bang and you think it might be broken. Perhaps you swear. Perhaps you are asked to leave the arcade. Perhaps there are teenagers looking at you, unsure what to make of you. So I think about it in this way, for all the people who don’t understand moments like this.
Here’s an example: Space Invaders is an anxiety game. So is Tetris. Another way to think about these: the Apollonian games. You use a skill you develop during the game—a skill you wouldn’t otherwise have or ever need, like judging which iteration of a shape will help you most or developing a good touch on a pizza-grease-stained joystick, tap tap left or one more little tap right, then fire—and you use that skill to dispel anxiety, which accrues like rainwater in a bucket. And it’s wish fulfillment, really—we wish we had such a joystick and such a button for life. We play out that fantasy of order. We wish we had the skill of life and the good sense to do what is in our best interests, to not sabotage ourselves because some unstated compulsion tells us that we must. We wish we could do that. We wish we were that good at living. Most anxiety games up the anxiety as you go: more invaders, faster-falling blocks, and so on. Like life. The result is that you need to get better as time goes on just to keep your head above water. The skill is relatively simple but precision is crucial. The pleasure of a game like this is the pleasure of cleanliness, the pleasure of comprehensive control. Imagine, deep into a game, a perfectly clean Tetris field, not a block to be seen after you clear out a quad stack. True freedom.
Then there are frustration games, which are in the same family. Games like darts. Like bowling. Like golf. Frustration games keep the skill but take the time crunch out of the equation completely—you just have to be good, on command, at a multistep skill. You are your only antagonist. Frustration builds up because there are no impediments beyond your own limitations; the pleasure comes from intentionality, from trying to do things and succeeding, from doing deliberately.
I’ve never liked these games.
Then, after those, a whole world of games I like but have always feared: the Dionysian games. Games of utter destruction. First-person shooters, third-person shooters. Doom, Contra. I think the feeling is catharsis. But I wouldn’t know where to start.
The previous morning, I had made the very unhealthy decision to play the Rivers through a second time, and now I resisted the urge to load my saved game—I was at the waterfall—and instead shut down the computer. They’d pulled the story out of an elaborate puzzle about rivers I’d come up with at about my halfway point at Chestik, and I was surprised how well it translated into a whole self-contained story, as I had only really written it as a frame for a particular encryption thing and hadn’t spent much time on the story. But that’s what they used. They’d blown it up, turned it into something much bigger. They’d ignored the puzzle, taken the tale.
I went out to the living room, planning to get a little more coffee before I ran. I stopped on my way to the kitchen and looked at the steel container of Denny’s ashes. It was strange to see it there. I thought of what Theresa had said about our resemblance.
And yet now he was this.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
Grant called late that afternoon and said it would be better if he drove to the gallery. “Jamie doesn’t like other people’s cars,” he said. “It’s not negotiable.”
I was surprised to see a minivan pull into the driveway at quarter to five—through the glare of the windshield I saw Grant’s somewhat serious driving face, and I stood up from the stoop and came over and got in. I had seen that same face behind the windshield of his car fifteen years before, pulling up to get me before we went out into the country and smoked bowls. Things were different now.
It was a warm night, which meant I could wear the one nice shirt I had, a short-sleeved gray button-down that had been a Christmas present from my parents six years before.
I had also finally shaved and washed my hair.
“You went from the Unabomber to Tucker Carlson,” said Grant. “Dude.”
“Who’s Tucker Carlson?” asked a giggling voice from the backseat, and I turned to see a kitten princess sitting in the back of the van, eyeing me mischievously. She had on a poufy, iridescent white dress and was holding a wand. She also had whiskers and triangular ears.
“He’s a douchebag, honey,” said Grant.
He glanced at me as he put the minivan into gear. “We were getting a little stoked for Halloween back home. Two months early. That’s why the double costume.”
Jamie pointed her wand at my head and said, “Who are you, though?”
“I’m Ben.”
“My name is Lula, not Jamie.”
“Hi, Lula.”
“Poof. Shoop. Vanish.” She said the three words as though she were counting.
“How is it up here?” Grant asked. We’d pulled out of the driveway and were curving back down Beau Pointe, toward town. “You’re trying to sell it then, right? Did you clean it up?”
“The real estate agent was over this morning,” I said. “It’s just getting listed again.”
“What’s the real estate agent’s name?”
“Theresa Orgogliosi.”
“Oh, man. I know her,” he said. “She doesn’t live too far from me. I always see her mowing her lawn. Super-hot lawn-mowing, you know? I wouldn’t have ever thought to—well. You get it. She’s also in my bowling league. She’s kinda nuts, I think. In that sort of hot-crazy way.”
“How’s she nuts?”
“She’s just eccentric, I think, you know? Outspoken. She’s on the only all-women team in the league, right, and before, when they were trying to get in, the women threatened to sue the bowling alley unless they dropped the men’s-teams-only policy. It was funny as shit. All these old dudes up in arms. The guys all quit to go be in the league at the other alley but came back like a week later because all the lanes are warped over there and it’s constantly midnight bowling and there’s teenagers hanging out everywhere, drinking vodka and Sprite and hooking up in the bathrooms. So all the old-timers come back, all grumbly, but then they realize these ladies are fantastic and totally lively and funny and it’s like, ‘Whoops, we’re dumb-asses.’ Not to mention they all get to stare at Theresa’s ass when she’s bowling.”
“Is their team good?”
“No, dude,” said Grant. “They’re last place every year. They’ve got one woman who rolls like a two fifty every game and everyone else rolls sixties. Those chicks can party, though. They come in and they’ve got their matching pink shirts all embroidered up and nice. They’ve all got their own balls. They come in and there’s just gimlets flowing down to them from the start. Gimlets. That’s how they do it. You have to respect that.”
“What’s their team called?”
“They used to be called the Divorcées, because they’re all divorced except one of them, the big roller, she was still married at first. But then eventually she got divorced too, which I find hilarious, because her husband is also in the league and the whole thing played out during the run-up to the play-offs, and you could just see this guy losing it, looking over to her lane like a lost puppy dog. But I think the women changed their team name and now they’re called the No-Ballers.”
“I’m not sure if I feel more or less confident about selling the house now.”
“I’m sure you’ll sell it,” Grant said with optimism. “It’s nice up here. Look around. Look at this rural, pristine beauty.” He held out a single open hand like a beauty queen and motioned to the woods.
“Very nice,” I said.
“Theresa’ll sell it. For all the talk of the market having gone to complete shit, these places still sell. It’s not like Miami. I would buy it if I had the money. I would love to come up the hill. Oh, also? I forgot this. The best part. Theresa? She packs heat. Always.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I imagined Theresa O. shooting wildly at a firing range.
“I’m glad you called. I haven’t really left the house since I saw you at Golden’s.”
“Yeah, man,” Grant said. “You were sounding like a caged animal.”
“Weird feelings.”
“You haven’t even been down to town?”
I shook my head. The feeling in my gut. And there was more, none of which I felt like explaining to Grant. I had felt, since I got to Denny’s, an opposing force coming from St. Helens, as though it might not want me in it, or might not want me back. Reverse tractor beam. Very reasonable, this. I had been wary of all the old signifiers and markers and had not wanted to stroll the downtown streets and feel all those things old places make you feel. Going into Golden’s was enough.
We came to the bottom of the hill and turned left, went past Golden’s, then continued west, toward St. Helens proper. There were other reasons I had stayed put, it wasn’t just an aversion to entering into this life; I had been preoccupied playing the game, getting the house in order, but as I watched through the window as 121 slowly transformed into Main Street, I felt a new and more focused wave of some wariness I didn’t understand: the tree-lined streets and the perfect sidewalks and the streetlights of my hometown, U-shaped and black, the faux gas lamps hanging from them like flower buds. The past felt awkward and weighty. I felt like I was circling back, but with less than I’d had the first time around. There was something so depressing about that.
“So as I said, I’m not a big art person,” Grant said, slowing now to twenty-five as we came to the dead center of town. There were crosswalks here, where pedestrians had the right-of-way, crosswalks I remembered blowing through haphazardly at sixteen. “I don’t know what this is going to be like,” Grant continued. “All of Bobby’s friends are class of ’98. I don’t really know them. It’ll probably be a coke-fest. I mean Coca-Cola, honey.”
“I used to have a girlfriend who was a painter,” I said. “I had to go to these all the time. Just find one part of the painting that makes you think something, then talk about that. Just keep hitting it.” I looked at a new Walgreen’s at the corner of Bishop and Shaker. “Whatever. Try to use the word quadrant whenever you can.”
The gallery was on Second Street, which ran along the east side of the river; it was in a stone building I thought I remembered as having been the post office, and when we sifted through the crowd of smokers mingling on the steps and got inside, I saw that I was right. Things looked different—the walls on the first floor were all now clean, white drywall, lit by spotlights and adorned with Bobby’s canvases (although I noted that the sign at the entrance called him ROBERT M. SHEEHAN, MFA, not BOBBY, HYPERACTIVE STONER, which was my memory of him). The place was packed. At the edges of the room, guests made their way among the paintings, but there was a dense crowd of intense, well-dressed people toward the middle, chatting and laughing in pods of twos and threes. Something jazzy was echoing through the room. I could have been in Portland.
“This is my worst nightmare,” Grant said.
He was holding Jamie’s hand. Unlike her father, she seemed happy to be here, judging by the way she was casting spells on the people up on the second-floor balcony, which ringed the room about twenty feet above the floor. I wondered if the hand-holding wasn’t more for Grant.
“It’s good,” I said. “It’s okay. It’ll be good. Who paid for this place?”
“Some woman who moved here a little while ago,” he said. “She and her husband built this huge mansion out in the woods and the dude crashed his car and died about six months after they got here.”
“That’s terrible.”
“She’s right there,” Grant said, and pointed to a silver-haired woman, elegantly dressed, speaking to a small crowd on the other side of the room. “Silver fox,” he said. “I hear she was glad he died. Do you want a drink?” He had spied a table with glasses of wine.
“Just some water.”
“Watch her, will ya?” he said, nodding to Jamie.
“Sure. We’ll go look at some pictures.”
“Go with Benjy, baby,” Grant said. “Daddy’ll be right back.”
Upon releasing Grant’s hand, she immediately took mine, as though she’d known me her whole life. I didn’t understand kids at all.
“You like it so far?” I said.
“Yes.”
“What grade are you in anyway?”
We walked together around the wall on the first floor, looking at some of the paintings. I asked her about Jamie’s school, which she refused to discuss. But she did tell me a story about her breakfast. We talked about it and both agreed that Life cereal was amazing.
Grant found us a few minutes later, standing in front of one of the bigger canvases in the gallery. Jamie went and stood behind her father’s leg. He gave me my water, took a sip of his wine, and said, nodding at a canvas, “That reminds me of the time I took seventeen hits of acid.”
“It’s a little out-there.”
“What am I looking at? Am I looking at Africa?”
“I couldn’t tell you. Although actually—” I turned my head. “Maybe.”
“I think I’m looking at a big fucked-up map of Africa.”
“Daddy!” Jamie said.
“I think it’s Africa.”
“Hard to tell.”
But I meant that in a good way, if such a thing was possible. (Africa. Was there anything I knew less about than Africa? What was Africa to me but a place I would never go that was full of people I would never know? I knew virtually nothing.) It had always seemed to me that once an artist chose to create something as abstract as the painting Grant and I were dumbly staring at, you could either find or not find an instruction manual in it. Somewhere. Right now, though, I couldn’t see one.
“Are you on the wagon?” Grant asked.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, I heard that. I knew that, kinda. But I am asking for a reason,” he said. “Not to be nosy.”
“What’s that?”
“I hate to be the one to tell you this,” he said, “but the lady you shaved for is working the wine table.”
I looked in the direction Grant had come from. Lauren Sheehan, in a white, collared shirt, was pouring wine for an elderly couple at a table across the room.
Her face was how I remembered it, and the particular darkness of her hair, even her expression as she said something to the woman at the table, but when she spoke, she smiled in a way that was unfamiliar, and did not fit into my memory. Not unlike my reaction to the town on the ride down. Both what I knew and what I didn’t, or never did. And yet it all seemed familiar.
“Why is she the caterer?”
“She’s probably saving money for Bobby,” he said. “I dunno.”
The woman she was serving walked away. Lauren straightened her shirt and looked out across the room—and that thing that I had seen was gone. I turned back to Grant before she saw me looking.
“I didn’t shave for her,” I said.
Grant raised his eyebrows, nodded, and finished his wine all at the same time. He reached down for Jamie’s hand. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said. “Let’s go look at the pictures upstairs. Ben has to go stalk a lady.”
“What’s stalk?”
“I’ll tell you up there. It’s like love but creepy.”
I contemplated the canvas for a few more minutes, sipping my water and visualizing myself walking directly out of the gallery and diving into the river. There was no dignity in this, he was right. There was no dignity in anything I was doing. My presence at this gallery was sheer desperation.
Confidence built back up, I went toward the table. When I got there, I set down my empty plastic cup and she looked at me and smiled a thin, neutral smile and said, “Hello. White or red?”
“Neither, actually,” I said.
“I just came over to say hello,” I said, holding out a hand. “It’s Ben,” I said. I brought the hand back—she had not even looked at it—and tapped my own chest. “Ben Hanson. From high school.”
“I recognize you.”
Her expression was pretty far from joyful, but she did now stick out her hand. Her expression: the look of a driver realizing the air in the right front tire is low.
We shook.
“Hi,” I said. “We had that—we did that one project together. Senior year.”
I couldn’t tell if she expected me to say more or if she was just being polite and waiting for me to leave her alone.
“Anyway. You’re busy.”
“You don’t actually want any wine?”
“No.”
“Okay,” she said. “It was nice to see you again, Ben Hanson.” She looked over my shoulder at a woman behind me and smiled for the first time. “White or red, Mrs. Dobber?”
“She’s like that with everyone, don’t worry,” Grant said after I found him upstairs on a sofa. “Be cool.” Jamie had summoned up a doll from somewhere and was sitting nearby, her skirts in a heap around her. “It’s not you,” he continued. “She’s just got this—” He moved his hands around his face, creating an invisible sphere. “She’s got this wall. Maybe created by like eight different kinds of antidepressants.”
“I don’t remember her being like that,” I said. “I remember her as shy. But not cold?”
“Yeah, well. She’s different. She’s prettier and meaner.”
“She was nice to Mrs. Dobber.”
“She’s different, dude. She showed up in town like three or four years ago and pretty much every single guy in the county went crazy,” he said. “Because first, just look at her. But beyond that, she’s a doctor. Or now I guess a vet? And the dating pool in St. Helens for people over the age of eighteen and under the age of a hundred is rough. Rough. It was like Marilyn Monroe got a divorce and moved here from New York. There was this huge flurry. But then it became pretty obvious that there was a little—there were damage issues.”
“What does that mean?”
“Fucked-up pretty girl,” Grant said, shrugging. “I dunno.”
“How fucked up are you talking about?” I said. “What are you even meaning when you say that?” Grant was talking in a way that was a little irritating to me. He didn’t mean anything by it, I knew that, but it reminded me of something I didn’t like about myself. Something glib.
“How’s this: She tried to kill herself right after she came back. Pills. Out on the baseball diamond.”
I looked down at her over the rail. “Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” I said, turning back. “She seems okay now. Sort of. She’s not that pretty.”
“Okay.”
“Marilyn Monroe is blond,” I said. “And dead.”
“Exactly,” Grant said. “So she was alive when she came back, which was fantastic, then it was touch-and-go there when she was almost dead. But she doesn’t date. She doesn’t go out at all, as far as I know. I mean, it’s not like I’m all plugged into the social circle or anything, and yeah, actually I spend most of my time with meat, dude, so the only time I ever see her is when she buys cold cuts from me, but I’m just saying that—”
“Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!” said someone, a man, and I felt a hand on my arm. “I’m sorry to interrupt, gentlemen. But is that Ben Hanson? The Ben Hanson?”
I turned and saw Bobby Sheehan there, bearded and dressed in a three-piece suit.
He had a pair of bright red sunglasses perched on his head. He was smiling like a goon. “Fucking Ben Hanson, right?” he said. “That is you!” He slapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey, Bobby.”
“Yes!” he cried, and he pulled me into a hug that nearly lifted me off the ground, just as Grant had done the week before. The difference was that Bobby was about six inches shorter than me and I barely knew him.
I bore it with an awkward grin until he put me down.
I was surprised Bobby was so happy to see me—I hadn’t known him half as well as I’d known Grant. But then again, he had fit a lot better into my world than Lauren ever had, and so at least I had hung out with him a few times outside of school. I had also sold to him.
“What’re you doing here?” he asked happily, stepping back.
“I’m taking care of my uncle’s place up on Beau Pointe Road,” I said. “But hey, man, congratulations. Congratulations on all of this… work.” I looked at Grant, who nodded at me. “Everything looks amazing,” I said. “And there are a ton of people here. You’re the Jackson Pollock of the Midwest.”
“You like these?” he said, motioning in a general way to the nearby canvases. “Hey, which ones do you like? Do you like this?” He pointed to the nearest painting, which was some kind of orange tower against a smoky background.
“I do like that, actually,” I said. “I like most of them.”
“Here,” he said, stepping over to the painting. He reached up and lifted it off the wall. “Take it,” he said. “I want you to have it. I’m giving it to you right now.”
He brought it over to me and held up the painting between us.
I laughed uncomfortably as he stood there holding it out to me, waving it a little to encourage me to take it. A few people nearby had stopped talking and were watching.
“You’ll sell this. I can’t afford it.”
“I want you to have it, Ben,” he said, now very serious. “Really. It’s a housewarming gift. I want this to serve as a welcome back to St. Helens. Coming home is a hard thing to do. Especially when you don’t know what it’s like.”
I thought it was an odd comment. I looked over at Grant, who was watching with a little smile. Jamie had the exact same expression on her face.
“Okay,” I said, and took the painting.
Bobby nodded proudly, sagely.
“Thank you, Bobby,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
“Of course,” he said, and he patted me on the shoulder. “Be well. You’re back, you’re in a good space here. This is me welcoming you, bro. This is me telling you to be well.” He nodded again, as though he’d completed a task, then moved on through the crowd.
I went over to the couch with the painting and sat down next to Grant.
“Score,” he said.
“What was that?”
I leaned back, closer to Grant, letting the painting rest on me like a shield. “Was he completely ripped?”
I looked over toward Bobby, who was now glad-handing with the Silver Fox.
“Yes,” Grant said. “I believe he was.”
Bobby came back around a little while later to say that people were going up the street to Roy’s after the opening and that Grant and I should come. When he saw that Jamie was there beside Grant, he said, “I’m sure it’s okay for her to come too. It’s Wisconsin. They’ll serve her.”
“She’s five.”
Outside, at the minivan, Grant was helping Jamie into the backseat when I saw a troop of about a dozen people, including both Bobby and Lauren, leave the gallery and head down the road toward Roy’s. Lauren was walking beside some guy I didn’t know, strolling and talking, one hand gripping the strap of her purse.
“You comin’ or goin’?” asked Grant, watching me look. “ ’Cause this train’s leavin’. Little girl’s up way too late.” He must have tickled her as he said it; I heard a sleepy giggle emerge from the van.
“I’m just going to go over there for a little while.”
“Ah, I see. You’re going to lurk.”
“I’m going to sit and look at the river.”
“All right,” he said. He gave me a hug. “Stay safe. Gimme that.” He took the painting from me. “I’ll drop it off.”
Grant pulled away and I walked south along the river, hands in my pockets, then crossed the street and walked up toward Roy’s. It was a St. Helens mainstay; its green awning stretched out over the sidewalk, and its sign, a wide rectangle, displayed the illuminated, caricatured face of a smiling man holding a mug of beer. There were a few smokers in quiet circles around me, and rock and roll from inside the bar drifted out through the propped door. It was a nice night.
I stared at the door for a minute or so, then turned and went back across the street. The benches were a part of the river walk, and I sat down at one and got out my phone and called Pete, my old sponsor from Portland. He’d said I could call if I needed to call but that that wasn’t an excuse to quit meetings or to not find someone new. Whatever.
He didn’t answer.
I crossed my legs, played around with my phone, wondered if there was a way to get it to check my e-mail. I would ask Haley the next time I talked to her.
The river and the river walk both looked nicer than they had when I was a teenager. St. Helens had always been a middle-class town, but there was more money here now; you could feel it in the art gallery, you could feel it in the new shops I’d seen on Main Street. You could see it in how nice the benches were. I had missed not only the beginning of the economic downturn but also the earlier decade of wealth that had bubbled up through the cracks of the state. The upturn that caused the downturn. For I can raise no money by vile means.
I glanced over my shoulder, back toward Roy’s. Smokers, still. The door was still propped open.
I could make out, to my left, a little to the south, the dark line of the railroad bridge that went over the river and I remembered jumping off it with my friends. It wasn’t too high and it wasn’t as though this were the Mississippi, but the jump had always seemed impossible once you were up there. Do you know this? Do you know this feeling? The feeling of looking down, aware you are going to do it. The desire to, also. And it had been fun, it had been easy. Like everything. I wondered where all those people I’d jumped off with were. I wondered about my old girlfriend Dana, who’d moved down south to Austin for college and hadn’t come back and whom I hadn’t seen in a decade. I saw her jump down into the water wearing the navy blue bikini she always wore, saw her hair whipping up over her head before the splash, heard the scream. I’d seen her wink at me from down the bridge and hand a joint to someone else just before she jumped—wink because sometime earlier, maybe earlier that day, we’d taken each other’s virginity in the back of her father’s Jeep, parked by the quarry on a hot afternoon. Afterward we played checkers, sitting on a blanket, and then she went out into a field to see if she still remembered how to do handsprings. I laughed. I watched. I clapped. I saw her friend Carrie, who’d been with my friend Eli, who was brothers with my friend Sam. I had no clue where Carrie had gone. Sam and Eli I thought might be in Chicago.
I got up and began walking toward Main Street to start the two-mile trek back to Denny’s and looked one last time at the entrance to Roy’s, where I heard some laughter from the smokers. I stopped. Lauren was maybe twenty feet away from the door, talking on the phone. Her back was to me, and she was pacing slowly, looking at the ground. It looked like she was listening.
The smokers laughed at something again, and I looked at them. Bobby was in the middle of a circle, entertaining everyone. But I could see him glancing over and watching his sister, and after a moment, he went over to her, took the phone from her, and handed her his cigarette. He nodded at her like No, it’s okay, I got it.
He looked right at me, pointed, and his voice carried toward me. I heard him say, “Ben’s over there. Go talk to him. Look at that lonely man.”
She looked at me, and I felt like a fool standing there, hands in pockets.
“Hey, Ben!” Bobby screamed. “Where’s your painting, man? Did you throw it into the river? I wouldn’t be pissed!”
“Grant took it for me!” I yelled. “I’m putting it up tomorrow.”
“Damn straight!” he yelled. “It’s okay if you don’t!” He waved then and went back to the phone.
In the meantime, Lauren had been strolling up.
“Hey there,” I said. “Your brother’s hilarious. Sort of.”
“I know,” she said. “He’s animated tonight.” She turned away when she was close and drifted over to the railing. She took a drag of the cigarette, and the smoke came out of her mouth too fast for her to have inhaled. Then she said, “I can tell by the way you’re looking at me that I look like I don’t know how to smoke, Ben Hanson.”
“Not at all.”
“What are you doing out here? Are you going into the bar?” she asked, nodding back toward Roy’s. “Have you turned into a creepy lurker dude?”
I realized that she had become very drunk in the time she’d been in the bar.
“I’m looking at the river.”
“You’re not coming in?”
“No, probably not,” I said. “Do they have Ovaltine chocolate mix in that bar?”
“You don’t drink, I take it?”
“I don’t.”
“AA don’t drink or just-don’t-like-to-drink don’t drink?”
“NA don’t drink,” I said. “Very-bad-shit don’t drink.”
She looked out at the water. “That’s nice. And yet you’re my brother’s hero, for some reason,” she said.
“We used to hang out. Your brother and I. A little, I mean.”
“What?”
“Your brother and me used to hang out.”
“Good,” she said.
“Aren’t you a doctor?” I asked. “By the way?”
“Why?”
I pointed. “You’re smoking.”
“Doctors smoke. But also,” she said, “I’m not a doctor anymore.” She ashed the cigarette over the side of the rail.
“You went from being a doctor to not being a doctor?”
She tilted her head. “Why exactly do you care about all of these things? About me? Ben Hanson? I’m curious. I feel like it’s just a coincidence we’re standing next to each other right now.”
“It’s small talk,” I said, “and you came over here.”
“I feel like this is more the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Did I see you with a horse the other day?”
“You might have. I was with a horse the other day.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was taking her back to the Peterson ranch,” she said. “I’ve been working for the vet in town. Do you know Dr. Hendrix? I work for him. Would you like my Social Security number? Can I fill out a W-nine for you? How else can I assist you in understanding my situation?”
“Okay then.”
“I didn’t mean for the tone to be exactly like that. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“Tonal error.”
“You were saying. You’re switching to being a vet.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I do like animals,” she said. “Why are we talking about this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s painful.”
She looked at the bar, then back at me.
“So,” she said, squinting at me as though she’d just seen me for the first time. “Listen. Are you desperate? Or something? Is that what this is?”
“What?”
“Desperation,” she said. “This. Is that you now?”
“I don’t know how you’re meaning that.”
“Why are you here again?”
“The art show?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
“No,” she said. “That’s okay. I know you don’t.”
We stared at each other.
“It’s been a long time, right?” she said. “I think it’s been, what? Over one million years?”
“Eons.”
“Well.”
“Well. Years.”
She looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “I’m going to go in. Now. Because this is very weird. I have to take over the phone call with our dad anyway. Are you staying? Here? Out? Even though you’re not coming in?”
“Do you actually care?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “No.”
I pointed my thumb over my shoulder. “I have to get home so I can have insomnia.”
“You’re an insomniac?” she asked, apparently delighted. “Oh.” She smiled.
“Because I have night terrors,” she said. “Night sucks for both of us. A pox on night, right? We found one thing. One thing in common. The night is saved. All is not lost.”
I smiled.
She smiled.
“Bye,” she said. She threw the word at me like it was a dart.
She turned.
I turned.
I walked about ten feet before I stopped, turned back, and called her name.
She turned.
I said: “I forgot to ask you the one thing I wanted to ask you. When I brought up the vet thing and all. I mean, there was a reason. Beyond the Spanish Inquisition.”
She said: “Oh. Well, that’s good. Maybe we’ll end up with two things in common?”
“I forgot.”
“Okay,” she said. “Ask it.”
“Do you know,” I said, “if dogs can have narcolepsy?”
She stared.
“What?” she said.
“Can dogs have narcolepsy?” I repeated.
She thought about it.
“Why would you want to know that?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea why I want to know that.”