just a game
I’d just ordered Chinese when Alex sent a text that he’d be late. The software company he worked for was almost at a major release and he’d been putting in a lot of late nights to meet deadlines. I texted back, “Okay,” then got a beer from the fridge. It was Friday night and I stood in the kitchen for a while, looking at the potted plastic plant in the corner near the knife block as I drank. Alex and I had been what most people would call best friends since grade one. I’d probably spent more time slumped on his basement couch playing Super Mario, Final Fantasy and Soul Caliber than I ever had with my family. The stories of those games were our dialogues, the characters our sounding lines.
I threw the empty beer bottle into the recycling and opened another. The apartment still smelled like laundry detergent, my clothes hanging air-dried on the curtain rods, and I busied myself with clearing the week’s detritus of junk mail, bill envelopes and burger wrappers from the coffee table. Alex would need space to set up his gaming equipment. We’d probably play Modern Warfare tonight but it didn’t really matter. Our friendship had been founded on a veneration of Super Mario Brothers that bordered on the religious, but now constituted a network of games so reticulated it could be traced only by console age – NES, SNES, PlayStation, PS2, Xbox 360.
I threw the grocery bag of garbage to the door. The light filtered in wrinkled through button shirts and with the garbage gone from the table I couldn’t be sure I really lived here anymore. I could hear the T.V. clicking quietly in the hum of the aquarium pump and whir of the computer in the other room. In that sudden vacuum I wanted only to sit down on the couch and surrender into a complete abandonment of the world. I took another drink and turned on the news and learned nothing that I hadn’t already read online. I checked my email and chatted on Facebook for twenty minutes then turned the news on again. They were talking about the oil spill. An engineering professor was being asked about the methods used to seal the leak and I watched the technical diagrams float like ghosts on the screen. I turned the news off and played Xbox - not what I expected to play with Alex but something more profane.
My phone rang. It was the delivery guy. I pressed nine to let him into the building, saved my game and stood up. I got another beer and leaned against the counter as I drank it. When the door knocked I answered, taking the boxes of Chinese with a ‘Thank you’ and an awful tip. My phone vibrated: Alex was on his way. I closed the door, waited for five minutes and then took the garbage out to the chute. When I got back I put the Chinese on the counter and changed the channel to the Food Network.
I was drinking on an empty stomach and the alcohol had already gone to my head when Alex showed up, a twelve-pack, 24-inch monitor and Xbox held precariously between both hands, profound circles stamped under his eyes. His glasses were crooked and his hair, always thin, looked like a shadow.
“What’s up man,” he said. He smiled his wobbly smile, “Ready to kick some fuckin’ ass tonight?”
I said ‘yeah’ and nodded. He asked me if I was drunk and set the monitor and Xbox down on the coffee table. I said no. I put the Chinese in the microwave and pressed reheat.
Alex put the twelve-pack in the fridge and took out one of my beers. He put a coaster on the coffee table and sat on the couch, taking a long drink from the bottle. Work was shit, he said, he hated the major releases. I’d had to stay late that day as well, but not as long as him. A client had reported a bug in the financial module we’d created for them. He laughed when I told him but I didn’t believe it.
We ate at the coffee table in a refuge of familiar silence. I was finishing the last of the chow mein when Alex cracked his knuckles and wordlessly plugged in his monitor and Xbox.
“I heard there’s a new system update today,” he said, “supposed to stop a bunch of hacks and shit.”
I grunted with my mouth full, then stood up and got two more beers. I left the delivery boxes scattered on the coffee table, occupied with remnants of General Tao and lemon chicken balls. I put one of the bottles in front of Alex and started up Modern Warfare on my TV, drinking more beer as I watched Alex set up his console. That was our setup these days, him with his Xbox and monitor on the coffee table, me with my Xbox and TV.
“Let’s do it,” I said. Alex laughed again and we high-fived before putting our headsets on.
The next two hours passed with a quiet effortlessness of trash talk and cursing, Alex and I drinking more and more beer as we gunned and died and resurrected ourselves away from the magnitude of any physical reality. I’d lost track of my kills and deaths, drunk with ethanol and abstraction, when Alex stood up, controller gripped tightly in one hand. He’d been killed by the same player for the fifth time in a row.
“You little motherfuck!” he shouted. His eyes bulged and focused on nothing, his face flushed and splotched. “Fuck!” he shouted again and hurled his controller to the floor.
I predicted the controller would mirror his outburst and explode into a thousand fragments on the floor. But it did nothing but bounce under the coffee table and lay still. I exited from the game but kept my headset on, controller in hand.
“Jesus dude, it’s just a game,” I said. My face flushed immediately with an alien regret, but the silence that followed was eclipsed by the ambient music drifting from the television.
Alex stood there, breathing raggedly in the fluorescent twilight, and I was terrified that he would start to cry real tears. He finally sat down and I took off my headset. I put my controller down and was about to apologize for something but couldn’t find the words.
“Liz and I broke up last night,” he said in a stranger’s voice. Liz was his first girlfriend. Alex had met her in University and they’d been dating for the five years since.
“Fuck man,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I knew this Alex. “You all right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
He grabbed the last lemon chicken ball with his fingers and ate it, then stood up and got another beer out of the fridge. “If you want to talk or anything,” I said.
He sat down on the couch and picked up the controller from the floor. “I’m okay,” he said, “just didn’t really expect it to happen like this.” He licked his lips and nodded to himself, then took a deep breath.
“Sorry man, you want to keep playing?” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
