Ma Plumly, passing through the dark cavity in those early days of the Gaming Epoch, on her way to the laundry room, would occasionally suggest an alternative activity. “A game of basketball?” she’d say with little conviction. “Dad fixed the hoop.” As if all that stood between the boys and exercise was a repair of the court. “It’s a nice day out there.” They’d look up at her with an expression so blank she felt compelled to remind them of her identity. “It’s your mother speaking. Melissa R. Plumly. Did you want to have a little lunch?”
“In…a…minute,” one of them might say. Hours later, finally registering hunger, the three of them, William, Bert, Max, pounded up the stairs. I was occasionally in the family room amusing Crystal Plumly, a girl three years my junior, she and I playing Pretty Pretty Princess and watching Oprah. The boys sat at the island, waiting for Ma Plumly to produce the blue bowls. While she busied herself they tracked the robotic vacuum cleaner spinning through the living area, the disk bumping into the wall, the red light blinking, the boys narrating in Gregorian tones, “I meant to do that, I am not an idiot, who put this frigging table leg here.”
At the library Ma Plumly said to my mother, “At least the boys aren’t into drugs.”
“Or women,” my mother said.
Their faces, those boys, were puffy, and they wore heavy canvas pants several sizes too big, the bottoms frayed from dragging along the ground, their black T-shirts with a human-type man on the front but no irises in the eyes.
There was the seminal night when William, twelve or so, went to Bert’s house, my father shuttling him over there with all the usual requirements in the back of the van, including his new chair, an ergonomic wonder he’d gotten for his birthday. Max had acquired a game called Posse through a quasi-legal file share, a new game that he handed off to Bert and William, the two of them playing until eight in the morning, tipping over to sleep on the nubbly carpet for forty-five minutes and waking to continue. They knew their lives were forever changed, the thing that would mark them arrived.
In order to develop their skills they had to play Posse starting in the late afternoon and going through the night, William abruptly nocturnal. They were soon recruited by a kid in Iceland to be on his most excellent team and not long after—so dedicated and talented were they—positions of responsibility were conferred upon them. They were in the lineup to be Posse Executives, to someday be the CEOs of their own teams, hiring players, assessing their gifts, firing them if necessary. What, really, Ma Plumly said, could be a better education?
Through July and August she as usual went down the basement, laundry basket in hand, walking slowly past the bank of computers to see if anything had changed. Always the virtual missiles were sighted on metal-plated hulks looming in the bleak distance, each live boy wearing a headset, speaking in a new language to similarly afflicted boys out in the ether.
“It’s a nice day,” Ma Plumly said in her vain attempt. She’d bring them liquids. She made cupcakes in pastel fluted papers. “You do need fuel,” she’d remind them. When she spilled some milk she used one of their Posse swear-words, shouting theatrically, “Shazbot!” She sprang on the puddle with a dishcloth, “Gotta go fast”—another of their memes. When I said Shazbot at the dinner table William looked up from his hamburger and told me, “You did not just say that.” I was not even allowed to speak his language.