Late that evening, Alex tried the drugs Peter had given him, something new. Peter had given him the Adderall before, when Alex asked, but this was something more. It would help him see further.
He had to stop thinking about the day. His father had given him a choice that morning: belt now, or belt after work. He chose after work. Pain later was better than pain now.
All day long the Game wouldn’t let him visit his sites. Not the video ones. Not even the story ones where you could post your violent fantasies. He loved the disclaimers on those sites: These are works of imagination. The webmaster does not authorize, screen, or condone anything posted here. He liked that—it was just a platform. And what were we all if not blameless platforms for the dreams posted inside our skulls?
Instead, the Game pulled him in deeper, filling him up with its vast mythologies and crypto-mystical programming. He lapped it up.
His dad came home looking weary, but he administered the punishment dutifully, with the obligatory “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Yeah, really, fucker? Wanna trade?
He wore his Aziteks throughout. The Game did him the courtesy of distracting him from the humiliation and pain. First, every time the belt came down, the image in his eyes showed the scenario reversed, his hand raised, his dad on the receiving end. He wanted to smile, but then his dad would see it and have to go harder. Then it was Kurt Ellers on the receiving end, then Tim, then other meathead fucks. Then it was Vanhi and Kenny, those traitors who wanted him out of the Vindicators. Then finally it was Charlie. Because Charlie still didn’t get it: the only thing more humiliating than being punched and slapped was being rescued.
Everyone but Peter, because Peter was all right. He didn’t say no when all Alex needed desperately was for someone to tell him yes. Peter treated him as an equal. He trusted Alex to rise or fall on his own choices.
Snick was the sound of the belt.
When it was done, he saw his dad had tears in his eyes.
“Please try, Alex,” he whispered. “Just try.”
That night, Alex made ayahuasca tea as the Game instructed. It told him Peter could get the ayahuasca, and Peter didn’t judge him for asking. After all, Peter said he’d taken ayahuasca at St. Luke’s and it changed his life. Peter had written back:
You sure?
I need it.
Ok. Let’s meet.
Peter had sat side by side with Alex, showing him how he navigated the auction houses in the Game, the avatars bidding silently. How the box would be delivered to them within the day. Alex saw what Charlie saw, how special it felt to have Peter’s undivided attention.
Now Alex lay in bed, concentric circles of neon and gemstones rotating over him and pulling back in infinite regression. Time melted away.
When the shapes parted, he was alone in his room, perfectly still and silent in the darkness, but Christ was sitting across from him, in the chair in the corner of the room, barely visible in the dim light of the digital clock. Christ held up a hand, which was bloody and marked with a hole.
“My Father did this to me,” he said softly.
Alex didn’t know what to say.
“‘For He so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son,’” the figure added. “Why didn’t He love me?”
Alex tried to study Christ’s features, but the room was too dim. The figure sat quietly in the chair.
“He did love you,” Alex said, knowing that he and the Game were really talking about Alex’s father.
“You truly don’t know, do you?”
Alex felt tears begin to well in his eyes, that shaking feeling just before the waterworks when you want to hold it back.
Christ asked, “Why does he hurt you?”
“Because he loves me?”
The figure shook its head no.
“Because he hates me?”
“No,” Christ whispered. “Because he fears you.”
The figure was still in the corner, staring right through Alex. “Children are born slaves. They do not choose existence, it is thrust upon them. The child grows, yet the parent refuses to relinquish control. He uses maxims: ‘Honor thy father and mother.’ Why? It is the child’s right to take his place.”
Alex sat, mesmerized. He’d never thought of it that way.
“Who sacrifices a child and calls it love? Sacrifice yourself, Father.”
Alex nodded.
“They tell you you’re the Lamb, so you won’t see what you truly are.”
“What am I?” It was the question Alex had never been able to answer. A loser? A freak? The Boy from Mars? The Dumb Asian? The Worst Vindicator?
“‘For I have come to turn a man against his father,’” Christ told him. “‘Children will rise up against parents and have them put to death.’”
Alex felt his vision failing. Whether it was from the drugs or exhaustion or the Game, he felt himself pulling back, heading into a bottomless place.
“You were forged in the furnace of my grasp,” Christ whispered. It filled Alex with a sense of possibility. “I will make you matter.”
At midnight, Vanhi woke to the sound of shattering glass.
Her first instinct was to protect Vik, so she ran to his bedroom. He was sound asleep, curled up safely. The sound had come from the living room.
She heard her parents stirring. Her dad came into the hallway in pajamas. Her mother followed, pulling her robe tight.
“Stay back.” Vanhi awed them with her fearlessness.
“No, you stay back.” Her father wasn’t a large man, but he was possessed with a sudden ferocious love of his children.
They ended up creeping side by side, and Vanhi felt in the dark and flipped on the living room lights. The front window was broken. A spray of glass went across the carpet.
“Careful,” her mother said.
A brick was in the middle of the room. Someone had written GO HOME on it, which was all the more terrifying, Vanhi realized, because this was home.
There was nowhere else to go.
Her father lifted up the brick and turned it around in his hand. “It’s just kids. Kids being stupid. Nothing to worry about.”
A sick wave passed through Vanhi. Was this her punishment for turning down the Game’s offer? She almost told them everything: Don’t worry, it’s just a computer game!
Or was it? Because this kind of stuff was in vogue again, suddenly, in the real world. Bricks through brown people’s windows, swastikas on schools. People had thought it was gone. But it was always there, just waiting for someone to make it okay again.
What would happen if she did tell them everything, the Game listening?
How much worse than a brick through the window?
Later, she would study the brick through her Aziteks and see that in gamespace it was labeled:
400 Blaxx. Ingratitude.
“It’s the times we live in,” her mom said now. “It will pass. Most people are good.”
“That’s true,” Vanhi’s father said theatrically, for her benefit.
She wanted to believe they meant it.
She realized that the only thing that would eclipse this horribleness, the only thing that might revive her parents’ faith in the dream they’d traveled halfway around the world for, was to get into Harvard.
What else was within her power? What else could even come close?