Cory Pinto came up with the idea for his video game not in one burst, but over a number of years. He didn’t even know he’d been imagining a video game all that time; he just thought of himself as someone who played a lot of actual video games while intermittently thinking heavily and obsessively about losing his brother. But a combination of playing and obsessing eventually made him see what had been inside him. So the story for the game, when it revealed itself, arrived nearly fully formed.
For a long time he’d been periodically preoccupied by the idea that when someone you loved died, you could spend the rest of your life searching the world for that person and yet you would never, ever find him or her, no matter how many obscure places you went to, no matter how many caves you slipped into, or curtains you parted, or houses you entered. The dead person truly no longer existed, and while as a matter of science this fact seemed so simple, it was unaccountably hard to accept it when the person was someone you loved.
But the thing was, after someone you loved died, the people you still could see—a.k.a., the living—might occasionally almost seem to be the person you longed for. There would be a startle of similarity, a flash of familiar head-shape or squirt of laughter, and you would whip around so hard, only to find a person who was not in fact the right person at all. And then you had to wonder: why did this kid in front of you, this stranger whose laugh was so unsubtle, whose expression was coarse, get to be alive while your little brother didn’t?
And yet, maybe if you really did search hard enough and far enough, you could eventually find the person you were looking for. Maybe, maybe, Alby was still somewhere in the world, over three years after his death. Maybe the secret truth about death is that dead people are whisked away from their current lives and forced to live somewhere else far away—a process similar to reincarnation but taking place not in the future but now. A sort of mortality-based witness protection program. And if you found them they would look the same as they always had. If only you knew where to find them. If only you knew where to look.
This was the premise of Cory’s game. He himself felt childlike in his inability to accept Alby’s death. Of course, in all the important ways, he did accept it, because he wasn’t mentally fragile like his mother; and he was able to socialize and have a drink and a conversation about subjects other than death, and he was able to actually interact well with customers and other employees at Valley Tek in crunchy Northampton, twenty-five minutes from Macopee. The store was a seemingly mellow but demanding place. Customers’ attachment to their computers was primal and urgent. They rushed in carrying their laptops like people at the vet cradling injured or sick animals.
“How can I help you?” Cory would gently ask.
“It just crashed! Right in the middle of an unbelievably important project.”
“Have you backed everything up?”
“Well, no, not recently.” Then, defensively, “I couldn’t have known it would crash.”
“Let’s have a look.” Cory would go into the workshop in the back with this pliant and willing machine that had no say in the matter. What ailed it in the end was that it was a machine. You could bring it to life a few times, or even many times, but eventually you knew that the customer would have to abandon and replace it, and you would be the one to help facilitate that.
It was through the store that Cory became familiar with the online gaming community, which of course wasn’t really one community, but an astoundingly large and amorphous aggregate of people in separate homes and different time zones around the world who enjoyed playing video games day and night. Sometimes a few people from work played Dota 2 as a team from their separate homes. And after work once a week the employees at the store gathered at the nearby apartment of burly Logan Berryman, thirty years old, who in addition to being the head tech person at Valley Tek and a programmer was part of the not-insignificant contra dance community that had sprung up around the Pioneer Valley.
Logan and his girlfriend Jen lived on the upper floor of a house on Fruit Street with their fiddles, their cat, and canisters of bee pollen that stood in gleaming granularity on the kitchen counter. Relaxing there in the evening, the Valley Tek crew—Logan, Halley Beatty, Peter Wong, and now Cory—drank beer and with bared teeth popped edamame beans from their hairy little pods, and then they all played Counter-Strike for a couple of happy hours.
Logan and Jen’s actual, physical world, the progressive world of Northampton, Massachusetts, home of Smith College, consisted of college professors and psychiatrists and various lesbian couples, as well as coffee shops and mixed-breed dogs wearing bandannas, and kids who looked like runaways, though half of them were the children of professors and psychiatrists—lost teenagers who slunk back into their book-filled homes at night in time for bed. It was a world that was sexually enlightened and supposedly egalitarian. In Logan and Jen’s apartment as the sun set, the women and men played lustily and freely. It was like an equal-opportunity dream, whereas Cory knew the online world of gaming was studded with full-throated hate. Women were harassed and threatened constantly in that world, a miniaturized version of the real world. Cory had seen the illiterate screeds that trolls had written on message boards, like “I’D LIKE TO CHOP OFF YOU’RE HEAD AND YOU’RE TWAT.” As Greer had once said to Cory long ago, after she’d met Faith Frank and turned her attention to feminism, “I tell myself that the language of chopping off body parts is code for: I don’t know what to do about this rage I feel.”
He imagined being here in this apartment with Greer beside him; there would be the stirring sensation of just knowing that these other people thought of them as a couple. He had the sudden, related thought that if Greer were part of a couple down in New York, dating or hooking up at length or however else she described it to herself, maybe the guy had wooed her with stories of combating misogyny. That would be a good way to get through to Greer. The idea flickered inside Cory briefly, then went away. He had no way to get through to her now, nor she to him. The more you were not with a person, the more your lives diverged. Cory could barely understand how people who hadn’t known each other early on in life could ever form a couple. The older you got, the more you developed specific peculiarities. A woman would have to be willing to absorb his circumstances. He was a grown man, after all, who lived with his mother.
Whenever anyone asked Cory about his living arrangements, he didn’t say, “I live with my mom,” a sentence that might have a Norman Bates–y quality to it. He said, instead, “I live at home.” In the year 2014, as the economy had mostly recovered, living at home didn’t necessarily mean one thing or another.