Joyland (31 page)

“Did you really meet him . . . if you really did . . .” He didn’t look at her. His fingers trembled as he folded and unfolded the bows of his glasses, put them back on his face. He sniffed back suddenly then, and spat it out behind them, his mouth finally unclenched. “It’s just as well that he’s dead then.”

“Don’t say that, Chris,” she said. She whispered it, like she was afraid someone would overhear her.

“I’m glad.”

“— Don’t.”

Tammy didn’t know how he could grieve for someone one minute, and be so cruel the next. She picked up stones and threw them, one by one, into the long grass in front of the tracks. Between her fingers, the gravel made chalky impressions. Stones dug into her palm and she squeezed them hard in the one hand, throwing with the other. She squeezed and squeezed until she could feel the inside skin become hot and white. Eventually she let the pebbles fall to the pavement, let the blood throb back into her palm.

Before Chris could say anything more, the red lights began to go. The gates came down on St. Lawrence Street. Chris and Tammy stood up and watched the dirty shoulders of the train chug slowly toward them, metal on metal. A huge
ka-chunk ka-chunk.
He shuffled his feet around on the cement, as though they hadn’t been saying anything important just a minute ago. When it passed, they listened to the clanging, waited for it to stop.

Chris sniffed and nodded, gave a 1-2-3
-Go.
He rushed forward to the place their quarter had been, bounding on legs that were finally, silently, catching up to those of his peers. Tammy scrambled up the slight embankment after him, noting the spring and the force with which he quelled his emotions. It wasn’t fair, after all this time, that he could reveal things to
her — or start to — and still be so much a mystery.

They found the coin, fallen off, between the ties. It was flattened into a large, unidentifiable object. Chris turned the misshapen thing over.

“Well,” he said, handing it to Tammy, “now that you’ve seen what it looks like, what are you going to do with it?” And ultimately, that was the question.

Late afternoon fall sunlight. Nineteen eighty-four was ending. Winter lay ahead; already it was trudging toward them. Soon, the stores would be piping out carols, individual aisles like broken limbs plastercast with tinsel. Looking into his sister’s palm, Chris could see that far, but no further. The heavy metal shape sandwiched there pulled the power out of him.

Even pooled, their understanding was limited. In the world outside South Wakefield, the Year of the Spy would soon begin. But Tammy had hung her binoculars in the garage for the season. They had no idea what the future would bombard them with. No idea that Molly Ringwald and Max Headroom lay in wait. No idea that Kid ’n Play and Delite were sitting alongside Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana on the cusp of the next decade. No idea where the next streak of joy would come from — a french kiss or a friendship — driving tests, diplomas, or human collisions — Super Mario Bros. or Legend of Zelda. It was as if the pixels that hadn’t been projected yet were hovering somewhere, perhaps in the blue sky overhead. Like spirits positively or negatively charged. Like ions. They had only the past, their shared joys and sorrows. There could be no idea of the beauty of the future.

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Michael Holmes, Jack David and everyone at ECW Press, Nate Powell, Don Sedgwick, Shaun Bradley, Clive Thompson and Derek McCormack, and Brian Joseph Davis.

Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR

BackLit:
To start, why write about vintage video games? Were they a jumping-off point for your story or a layer you added later on?

Emily:
Joyland
the novel began when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, more than a decade ago now. I believe it started with the title — Joyland was the name of an arcade in my hometown, long closed — and I felt it would make a good title for something. I began to wonder what a book titled
Joyland
would be, and somehow became determined to write that book. At the time, I had written a short story collection, and it was on its way to being published, but I’d never attempted any kind of long-form work, so it was largely about the challenge. I wanted the story to mimic the movement and imagery of those games, and I felt that any coming of age story I might write would have to feature them because, as someone born in the ’70s, they were such a vital part of my childhood. I felt they should be a part of my generation’s literature as well.

BackLit:
Following up on the subject of gaming, its influence is present in explicit ways like the chapter titles and some of the imagery, but it’s also in the narrative form, which, as Chris says of video games, has “room for upward movement.” How did
Joyland
’s temporal skips and formal digressions (Chris and Laurel’s DNA diagrams, Genevieve’s encyclopedic entry) develop?

Emily:
It’s funny you bring up the temporal skips and digressions. I liked the idea that early technology had these blips and burps. I wanted to explore what happens when the machine gets it wrong, like a record skipping or a screen meltdown, and how that might mirror in the story. In retrospect, I see them as me being young and cheeky as a writer, trying to prove myself and trying to break all the rules even when they didn’t necessarily need to be broken.

My editor at ECW, Michael Holmes, and I discussed this technique. His feeling was that readers might feel cheated if the book broke out of sequence only at the end, and that the story should either be told more traditionally throughout, or that these nonlinear skips and blips should come with some regularity. I opted for adding several scenes of this nature. The DNA diagrams of Chris’s imaginings were one. The interview with Christie Brinkley was another. The encyclopedic entry had always been there, the video game Dig Dug funeral in the sky, and also the boys’ futures. These scenes are “wrong” in that they are jolting in nature and pull readers outside of the created world I’ve asked them to believe in. Yet I have to admit, they are still some of my favourite parts, even though I know that.

I think that readers (and reviewers) were split; people really loved these elements or really disliked them and felt that I had veered away from the story’s natural truth in order to do something showy or forced. Point of view is one of the hardest things for a young writer to learn, and I don’t know if I learned or understood p.o.v. really until I had to teach it for several years in a short story class. I can see now that part of me wanted to write an omniscient story, and another part a story that was in third limited (from Chris’s view or Tammy’s view exclusively). I had written many drafts of
Joyland
— four or five years’ worth — before the book came into Michael’s hands at ECW. So the book is, ultimately, a bit of a mash.

I still really resist traditional narratives, so I don’t think that the straight-up coming of age book without any of these diversions would be better, just different. At the same time, I wonder what that book would look like. There are infinite ways to tell any story. I decided that for my alternate scenes for this edition I would attempt to tell it straight — without any jumping into the future — to try to give those readers who really felt I’d cheated them a glimpse of what their ending might look like.

BackLit:
Joyland
is set in 1984, a time when video games, like Chris and Tammy, are on the cusp of big changes. Why did you choose that period? Do you think the same story could have taken place today, when technology can’t be contained in gaming consoles and boarded-up arcades?

Emily:
There’s the obvious ominous feeling of the year thanks to Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. The video game boom was really earlier, 1980–1982; stocks fell rapidly in ’83. If we think of those early ’80s years as a kind of heyday, then the natural disillusionment should come around ’84. I wanted the book to be about loss of innocence, so this fit for me. The style, values, and focus of the ’80s changed around that time too. When you look at decades and eras, that turnover year, not everything stops being something and starts being something else. A lot of the early ’80s were still like the ’70s; by the time the middle of a decade comes, that’s when we tend to stop and notice that things have changed.

I see this period as the beginning of the technology we know today in terms of ordinary people beginning to focus on the home computer. Schools were buying computers and making it a special part of our education, and people began talking about when we would all learn on computers all day long and go to school remotely. This seemed insane at the time! But even between the writing of this book and its re-release, technology has leaped ahead again. The internet, and our use of it, has grown in ways I couldn’t predict. Now, if I wanted to, I could find almost any TV clip from the ’80s online at YouTube, whereas when I was writing
Joyland
, I had only my memory and the memories of those around me, and the resources of magazine archives, video stores, and libraries. There were fan sites and databases, but only a handful. Wikipedia was just being launched in 2001 — the year I wrote the first draft of
Joyland
.

I don’t know if I can say what a coming of age story melded with today’s technology should look like. That may have to come from someone younger than me, someone growing up now, for whom these things are natural and taken for granted, rather than someone who is absolutely agog at how we communicate and how quickly things change.

BackLit:
It seems that Chris is the main agent in the action, so what inspired you to write from Tammy’s perspective as well? Did you find alternating between the two perspectives a challenge in terms of voice? Was one character easier to write?

Emily:
At the time, I thought it was very important to have two main characters; I wanted to write for both men and women, something I worry less about these days. Chris is definitely the driving action of the novel, but Tammy is its eyes and ears. The novel needed a conscience, and that’s where Tammy came in. It had more to do with the ages of the characters than with their genders, but I definitely found her easier to write. For me, the story began and ended with her. She’s much more like me, although I admit that I am in parts Chris too: competitive, introspective, yet reckless.

One of the things I wanted to get down on the page with these characters was the bigness of emotion at those ages (eleven and fourteen) before I got older and forgot what it meant to be there. Because of the complexity of those emotions I see it as an adult book about childhood. Although I wrote it between twenty-seven and thirty-two, I felt in a rush to try to preserve as much as I could remember of youth. I’m glad I did, because every year those worlds feel farther and farther from me.

BackLit:
Though Chris is used to being in total control in a game environment, he discovers that the real world offers no such luxury, and his involvement in Adam’s death demonstrates the unpredictability of the future, the sudden cruel shifts that can derail a life. Yet the book’s final paragraph takes a different perspective on this uncertainty, speaking to possibility and “the beauty of the future.” How did such sweetness and optimism come out of such a dark story?

Emily:
The book is about survival. All video games are about survival. You can play against a partner, but most times you are really playing against yourself. The characters see the world change, and see how their actions have consequences, but in the end, they themselves have survived and this is enough — to see and to witness the world as it continues. I didn’t want an easy moral code to the book. I grew up in a small town not unlike the fictional one of South Wakefield. Although to some extent this depiction is an exaggeration in the tradition of the Gothic, truthfully there was not a lot to do there, and violence was inevitable.

BackLit:
You decided to provide a couple rewritten bonus scenes with this edition. Why did you choose these scenes specifically, and what are you trying to offer with this new approach?

Emily:
I chose the climax of the book for rewrite. I didn’t want to change what happened so much as how it was told. This is the part of the book where the temporality shifts, everything falls out of sync, and I wanted to provide a more straightforward telling to see if the same events and emotions could be conveyed. Much of it is the same, and some readers may not see a lot of difference, but I had to try it. I also wanted to see what would happen if I made Chris slightly less passive in this scene, so that we see him taking more of a role in his own revenge.