Mr. Peanut (6 page)

He woke the next morning to an empty bed.

Usually he was up first, and for a moment he suffered the same sense of
disorientation and abandonment he’d had as a child when he slept over at a friend’s house, forgetting where he was for a terrifying second. He smelled coffee and went to the kitchen to find Alice sitting at the table. She had her laptop open and a legal pad full of notes and presently was peeling the shell off a hard-boiled egg. As soon as he poured himself coffee and came over to her chair, she stopped what she was doing, closed the computer, and covered the pad—which David couldn’t believe.

He indicated everything with a sweep of his mug, and though he’d promised himself to be patient and faithful, he couldn’t help but ask, “Is this part of changing your life?”

Alice waited, and he did too.

“Are you mocking me?” she said.

He was and he wasn’t, and certainly couldn’t admit the former. “Of course not,” David said.

Silence.

“But I think I deserve to know something about all of this.”

“You do,” Alice said, “but not right now.”

“Oh,” he said. “Any idea when?”

“No,” she said.

“How about any idea of when you might have an idea?”

“Can’t help you,” she said.

They stared at each other, deadlocked.

He was suddenly determined not to back down. He would show her by force of will that he could wait her out in this emotional standoff, that he would draw the line here, in their own kitchen, in his T-shirt and boxers. If this is the game she wants to play, David thought, let’s play! He stood stock-still until the silence between them became something absurd and useless, a pointless exertion of stamina, like a kissing marathon. He could feel his petrified facial expression; his upper lip adhered to his dry front teeth. He needed desperately to blink—his eyes were watering—but Alice hadn’t. He had to swallow so badly he thought he might choke.

And he balked. He wasn’t able to match her mysterious inner resolve. He slumped at the shoulders. A splash of coffee landed between his feet.

“Fine,” David said, “When you’re ready to talk just let me know.”

He showered and dressed, then left the apartment without saying good-bye.

At work he decided that all of this was simply a phase in his wife’s recovery, some sort of post-traumatic effect he had to endure. For a time, he must simply expect nothing from her. This mental approach was a tremendous relief, and he had a terrifically productive day. He felt confident,
focused, and because he deserved it, he asked Georgine Darcy, the gorgeous programmer they’d just hired, to lunch.

“Took you long enough to ask,” she said.

Georgine, David thought. Could she be any more different from his wife? She was lithe and athletic, hard-nosed and independent, a Brooklyn girl born and bred, leggy and blonde, exponentially less curvaceous than Alice but curvaceous nonetheless, a former professional dancer until she blew out her ACL at age eighteen. Two months ago, she’d sent David and his partner, Frank Cady, the first game she’d designed—a marvelous, all-out-fun piece of work. It was based on the great board game Labyrinth, the simple wooden box with a maze inset, its attitude and pitch controlled by a pair of knobs that you manipulated to move a small black marble through the labyrinth while avoiding the holes. Georgine’s game took the marble’s point of view. Your avatar, a tiny black humanoid figure, was inside the marble itself, the mazes growing in complexity with each completed level and now adjusted by the controller’s thumbsticks, your avatar slamming into walls, resting against the right angles and panting, screaming horribly when it plunged down one of the holes.

He’d decided to take her to New York Noodle, his favorite hole in the wall in Chinatown, not only because the food was great but also because it was the last place on earth his wife might walk into unexpectedly. “We’ll get some duck,” David said, “if that’s okay with you.” He nodded toward the birds hung in a row before the window, hooked, headless, and baked bronze. “The tripe soup’s great, by the way.”

“You order.” Georgine closed her menu, put her elbows on the table, and leaned forward, resting her chin on the backs of her folded fingers. Her blond hair hung lushly around her face, and her lipstick was red as an apple. “I eat anything.”

He ordered two Tsingtaos. It wasn’t like him to drink at lunch but he was feeling game, relaxed, it seemed, for the first time in ages.

When Georgine put the bottle to her mouth, the tip barely touched her upper lip. “I have a confession to make,” she said.

“I’m officially nervous.”

“I came to Spellbound because of you. Don’t laugh! It’s
true
. It was because of Bang, You’re Dead! I remember playing that game and thinking how perfect it was. My friends and I used to name the characters after people we went to school with. There’s Miss Girgus! Mr. Romano! Shoot ’em! Look out! They’re trying to zap you from behind. After playing that, I thought, ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’ I even dreamed up Labyrinth in its spirit. It’s a paean to your work.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You know, I saw you speak at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Vegas last year. The seminar on omniscience in multiplayer shooters.”

“You should’ve introduced yourself.”

“I was too intimidated. I’m like, what, he’s a genius and he’s hot.”

“Please.”

“Can I tell you about a game idea I have?”

“Of course.”

“It’s big, though it isn’t fully realized, but I can’t shake it.”

“I’m all ears.”

“All right,” she said. She sat forward, laying her arms over each other on the table and bunching her breasts together.

Oh, David thought, the tyranny of tits, the bug eyes at boobs. Her T-shirt said,
WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE MÖBIUS STRIP?
Staring at her apple-hard ass as they walked to their table, he’d looked up to see the answer:
TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE?

“It’s called Playworld,” she said. “It’s loosely based on this Piers Anthony book I read as kid called
Split Infinity
. In this world, all anybody does all day long is play games. They’ve taken care of all their material needs, I guess, so the only currency is gaming prowess. It’s like the coolest communist state in the universe. People are ranked by record and enjoy status accordingly. Strangers or friends can issue challenges in a whole range of games and skill sets, from the physical to the mental, obstacle courses to board games to hand-to-hand combat. It’s how you interact socially, how you meet lovers, how you live life. Oh, and everybody walks around naked. And when they screw they put on clothes.”

“I like it.”

“Screwing with clothes?”

“Walking around naked.”

“Ditto. So Playworld takes this idea and combines two kinds of interface. The way I conceive it, it’s like World of Warcraft—a massive multiuser, the whole wide world can play, subscription-based for a revenue stream. But it’s also like Facebook, where you have a profile—though in this case that also includes your skill level. Your world rank. And it’s not your own picture, mind, not your identity, but a highly detailed avatar—think Second Life—that’s your own Warhol of yourself or your bent or ideal version, your cartoon equivalent but as buff or thin or hot or warped as you want to make yourself.
It’s you and it’s not you
. We make that part super art-driven interactive. It takes the same degree of forethought to generate your avatar as Spore. So you go online with a headset like Halo. And now you’re in the
gaming realm, this vast space, like a carnival or a giant nightclub or Bourbon Street a hundred years from now but as brilliantly colored as a pinball machine, avatars everywhere, at different stations or fields, having competitions you can watch and cheer, everything you say and do part of the ambient noise. You can communicate with your opponents in real time, introduce yourself and make chitchat or challenge anyone there to these games. And you could play, say, Scrabble or Battleship or chess or have a race in an Escher X obstacle course or play Bang, You’re Dead! … whatever. We could fold
all
of Spellbound’s games into this world—an Aegis concept, Disney without end, new competitions and games in perpetuity. And when you play—and this is the thing—you see both the other player
and
yourself. Split screen. We’re third-person omniscient
and
limited. Which is part of the draw, you see. Because you
want
to see yourself in the world—right?—but also with others. You
always
want that view. And even better, after you play this stranger, you can get to know this other him-not-him or her-not-her in this virtual space. He or she becomes your Playworld friend. Which is the draw, the most basic beauty of online anonymity. You can say
anything
you want to
anyone
. Be somebody else or yourself. It’s the ultimate form of directness.”

She was leaning so far forward it was like she was telling a secret. He leaned forward too.

“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I feel like we walk around all the time with this other self who wants to say things and do things but can’t. So let’s
play
, you know? Like if I said to you now, ‘I like you, David. I like the way you look. I like the operations of your mind, how talented you are. I like your hands and mouth.’ But I can’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I did, we wouldn’t be playing a game.”

After David returned to the office, he called the apartment immediately, but Alice didn’t answer. He tried her again half an hour later, and when she still didn’t answer he slammed down the phone. He stayed late, frustrated, but by evening he had softened. Heading home from work, he bought her flowers, fresh pasta, and some low-fat ice cream. At the apartment, he rang the doorbell even though he had his key. As her footsteps grew louder, he dreamed of a warm hug of welcome, a reconciliation, perhaps. He held the bouquet out before him but rather than open the door Alice simply pulled it ajar, so to keep it from closing David had to stick his foot in the jamb. When he went inside, Alice was walking down the hall away from him. He
stood in the foyer, speechless, and for the first time since she’d come home from the hospital he was angry with her. He went into the kitchen, put down his bag, and it was then that he noticed all the lights were off in the apartment. “Is energy conservation part of changing your life too?” he called out. He took off his coat and threw it on the chair and walked around turning on the lights switch by switch and lamp by lamp until he came upon Alice in the bedroom, sitting on the bed, laptop on her lap, her face lit corpse white by the screen.

David waited.

“I’m working,” she said.

He looked around the dark room, at the reflection of her torso in the window, floating on the glimmering city. “Is that all?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“No, ‘How was your day?’ ‘How are you?’ ‘What’s going on?’”

“How was your day?” Alice said. “How are you? What’s going on?”

He flipped on the bedside light. “You’ll go blind,” he said, and forced a smile.

“Hardly.” She went back to work.

He stood there for a long time, until it was clear she’d just continue to work uninterruptedly with him standing there, and then, without realizing what had come over him, he dropped to his knees and gathered her skirt in both his fists. “Please,” he said. “Alice, please forgive me, whatever I did. Whatever I’ve done. Just tell me what it is. Tell me what I can do. I’ll do anything, Alice, I promise. Anything at all.”

He inhaled her smell and felt the fabric of her skirt, and his whole body shook. Then he heard her tapping away at the keyboard. He stood slowly, shuddering like a man squatting a tremendous amount of weight, and staggered out of the room. “Whatever,” he said. “Take your time. Take as much time as you need.”

He went to the kitchen to make himself some dinner. He was hungry, though the idea of cooking—the effort required—seemed so involved as to be nearly impossible. He put water on, shook some salt into the pot, poured olive oil into the water, and stared at the circular globules that slicked on the surface. He got down a can of white clam sauce—he kept a secret stash of Alice-lethal foods—and opened it, inhaling its briny smell. And when the water finally boiled he found himself mesmerized by the roiling. And now, in his solitude, he found himself thinking very clearly once again. He thought of Georgine’s idea and what she’d said about directness. He thought of calling her to make love right now. He thought of his and Alice’s last five years together and then what he thought was this:
We have arrived at some new phase. That, or we are about to enter one. We have been in the same place for so long we can either stay here forever—which is impossible—or not. And not is an unknown, and might not include each other, because at some point it requires both of us to hold on. “David,” Alice said.

Startled, he looked up. She stood a few paces out of the kitchen, just out of range of the smell of the sauce. She was nicely dressed, not for work so much as a date. He took a step toward her, and she pointed at the door.

“I’m going out,” she said.

“Out where?”

“I have an appointment.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s almost seven,” she said. “I’ll be back before ten.” She turned to leave. “But where are you going?”

She stopped in the foyer but wouldn’t look at him. “I’m going to change my life.” And as if to emphasize her determination, she let the door swing closed with a slam.

O
ne evening, Detective Hastroll came home—it was late spring and unseasonably warm—and found his wife, Hannah, in bed. It was a Friday. He asked what was wrong, and she said she didn’t feel good, that she’d come home from work early to lie down. Her throat was scratchy, she said, she thought she was coming down with something. She just needed some rest. She lay there in her slip, the sheets thrown off her legs, the windows open onto the courtyard. There was no breeze and the room was stifling. Hastroll could see the beads of sweat on her upper lip and chest. She refused to look at him.