“When a person dies we say that we lost them,” said Cory. “We lost Alby. It feels that way to me; like they’ve got to be somewhere, right? They can’t just be nowhere. It doesn’t make sense.”
Cory reached into his backpack and carefully extracted Alby’s notebook, placing it on the table, worrying a little that the surface was damp. “I’ve made a lot of notes,” he said. “You could look at this while we’re here, but I can’t lend it to you or anything, because it belonged to my brother.” Cronish began leafing through the pages, as if studying the X-rays of someone’s jaw. He was quiet for a long stretch. So much time passed that Logan stood up and went over to the darts corner and began to throw.
Cory joined him, whispering, “Personally, I thought Witch Hunt sounded great. I’d play your game.”
“Don’t worry about it, man,” said Logan, a large man whose entire concentration and energy were now lodged in the pincer formation of his fingers.
At some point Cronish came over to them, Alby’s notebook in hand. “I get it,” he said to Cory. “My granddad died of a massive stroke when I was nineteen, and it broke my heart. I would do anything to find him, to show him who I’ve become.” His eyes looked bright with excitement.
They sat back down at their booth and discussed it a little more, getting into further detail. Each player would be able to customize a “lost soul.” There would be many options for that lost person, not only gender, race, and age, but special add-ons for personality and interests. And there would be a scene, the first time the game was played, in which the player interacts with that beloved person, who at this point in the gameplay has not yet died.
“So basically the game splits into ‘before’ and ‘after’ the death,” said Cronish. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Cory nodded. “We don’t show the death scene, because that would become the point, and I don’t want it to be the point. Plus, it would make the game really conventional, not to mention gratuitously graphic. The player gets to be immersed in memories, which can be returned to with the Scrapbook function at any time, but mostly the game is about the search for the so-called lost soul. The search will take you all over the world, if that’s where you choose to look. Or you can just focus on one geographical region that you have a hunch about. Or even, you know, someone’s attic.”
“This is a very weird concept,” said Cronish. “But also ambitious.”
That word, ambitious, hadn’t been applied to anything Cory had done in a very long time, but it was a word that he used to hear constantly, applied to him and Greer; they’d also often used it to describe themselves.
“The thing is, of course,” said Cronish, “and now we finally get to you, Logan—is it actually doable?”
Logan put down his beer glass and said, “Let me describe it in simple terms. We would bring in an environmental artist, or maybe two. I’m confident that we can make a large number of environments out of a comparatively small number of building blocks. I’m really interested in generating systems that teach the computer to make cool things. I think this could be like that. Cory would write a metatext, and it could be adapted for different players. It would include some gnomic messages, but they could be read differently depending on who’s doing the reading.”
“It sounds like it would have an immersive-theater quality to it,” said Cronish. “Which interests me a lot. In fact, would you consider coming down to New York sometime to go to one of those immersive-theater productions? They’re doing The Magic Mountain on Roosevelt Island, and I heard the production values are excellent.”
Immediately Cory remembered Greer’s recent invitation. “You could stay with me,” she’d said, and he felt a pulse of pleasure at the idea. But maybe he would feel too sad, being at her place in Brooklyn, where he was meant to live and where he’d actually never been over all these years.
Even though there was now apparently going to be an angel investor, it didn’t mean Cory would have future “success,” a term that had such different meaning depending on context. Were you a success if someone invested in your video game, or only if lots of people actually played it? And exactly how many people needed to play the game for it to be a success? Were you a success to the people who thought video games were a stupid waste of time, or, worse, partly responsible for the death of reading and the collapse of civilization?
It didn’t really matter to Cory whether he was a success or not. Yet as his life became absorbed with designing the game, there were other changes too. One night at Logan and Jen’s, his coworker Halley Beatty looked at him and smiled in a new way.
“Want to come over later?” she whispered. Halley was uncommonly pale and freckled; there were even freckles on her eyelids, he noticed in bed with her in the farmhouse she rented in Greenfield.
There was no hostility here, as there had been between him and Kristin Vells. No sense of time wasting, a ticking clock in the room getting louder. After Alby died, Cory had reverted to a cavalcade of porn, which he hadn’t done with such intensity since he was young. Porn, which always had a familiar feel to it, as gratifying and available and gross as a warm bag of lunch from the drive-up window at Wendy’s.
Jerking off secretly in his room, with his mother nearby, as if Cory were a teenager again, he would watch an image on his laptop, all the while knowing and actively thinking: This woman is not into me. This porn star has no interest in me, but probably mild contempt. Not that that stopped him. He’d had few hookups in his life. The first ones—Clove Wilberson, then Kristin—had made him dislike himself; the more recent one, Halley, had made him feel limber, more awake, reminding him that this collection of parts he carried around still added up to a young man’s body.
One Thursday morning when Cory was about to head out to clean Professor Elaine Newman’s house, his mother met him in the kitchen, fully dressed. “Can I come?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Can I come to the professor’s house? It’s been a long time. Maybe I could help.”
Cory didn’t want to make a show of his surprise. Though she had stopped picking at her arms and saying that she saw Alby, it had been years since his mother had wanted to go anywhere or do anything, and he hadn’t expected there would ever be a significant change. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve got all the supplies over there.” They drove together in silence, and when he let them into the Newman house his mother stood looking around, surveying the rooms. She ran a finger along the surface of the bench in the front hall, and when it came away clean she looked at him with approval.
“Nice,” she said. “You use Pledge, not the cheap brand?” He nodded. “Good. It works better.” After she revisited the rooms that she had cleaned in her previous life, he took the supply bucket from the hall closet and handed his mother a pair of rubber gloves, and they set to work.