Perfect Life Page 4

  “That’s all right.” Neil fell into step beside him. “They have my caviar blinis waiting?”

  Joe swiveled his head around, alarmed. “I don’t know—did you—”

  “No, no—just joking, Joe.” Neil shook his head. The kid’s nervousness was beginning to rub off on him. Here he was making stupid jokes. But you just wanted to do something, anything, to shatter the earnestness—the reverence this kid had for the whole enterprise here. Treating Neil as if he were Nelson Mandela or something, talking about the level designers, programmers, sound editors, and the like as if they were involved in something world-changing—a brilliant new art form or a format for brokering peace. Not an elaborate form of escapism with a low overhead. This was why Neil hated the game industry, and hated himself for proving to be just as susceptible as ignorant idiots like Joe to the cloying, disorienting madness of the escape it produced.

  He followed Joe back through the pretentiously hidden door to the cube zone—a hive-like terrain of institutional carpeting and giant, flashing, humming flat-screen monitors, walls decorated with promotional posters for games like Time Quest, Fangun, and Raven’s Alley, arguably among the most highbrow outputs of the industry: action-adventure titles with dark, apocalyptic storylines and obscure meta-references to scientific precepts, biblical prophecies, and, of course, Games of Yore. These were technically splendid productions, best loved by scornful, above-the-riffraff gamers like himself, which made them all the more despicable in Neil’s mind. Outside, the world was happening: plants were growing, birds were singing, people were killing each other and being killed. Governments were blundering and lying and leading or misleading people into spirals of material consumption, waste, war, and even genocide. And people themselves were stumbling on despite insurmountable obstacles, scraping together bowls of rice to feed whole families, living in squalor, but even so, caring for their wounded, their young, their infirm…And here—here young men sat around feeling smug about understanding level seven of Maelstrom.

  He suppressed this chain of thought as he entered the conference room behind his faithful tour guide, who practically quivered with the excitement of coming face to face with Rod Emerus, founder and president of ZGames, owner of two Lamborghinis and an actual, “antique” (could such a tasteful, delicate word really apply?) iron maiden.

  The man was bald and unashamed, apparently, having left a ring of healthy blondish hair, clownlike, around his pate. He had on a pair of black jeans, pale sneakers, and a dark blue button-down shirt.

  “Banks,” Emerus said, ignoring Joe completely. “Good to finally meet you.”

  He had a crisp, slightly nasal voice, and did not rise.

  “Likewise.” Neil extended his hand and was shocked to find it left hanging, like something obscene—body part that it was—between them.

  Emerus waved it away, rifling through the documents in front of him. “I don’t shake,” he said, without looking at Neil. “Germs.”

  “Ah.” Neil thrust the offending hand back into his pocket and tried not to notice the conspiratorial, whoa-this-guy-is-crazy look Joe was casting in his direction.

  “So you’re a hotshot game reviewer, but you’ve never shipped a game before,” Emerus said, looking, apparently, over Neil’s résumé.

  “Nope.” Neil decided to take a curt approach to the meeting. Fight fire with fire.

  “Well, Johnson really talked you up. Sit down, sit down.” Emerus gestured irritably at one of the expensive Aeron chairs at the glass-topped table. “Neil Banks, Steven Closter.” He nodded his head between Neil and the lanky, curly-haired young man seated beside him whose presence Neil had not fully absorbed. “Steven is our lead designer. You’ll be working closely with him here.”

  Briefly, the two men made eye contact—a kind of tacit assessment of each other. Steven Closter was wearing one of those decidedly hip black-framed pairs of glasses and—of course—a vintage heavy metal T-shirt that hung thinly off his jutting collarbones.

  “Steven has experience with 3ds Max and MotionBuilder and he’s a great level designer. But he’s got no imagination for storyline. Dragons and riders of the apocalypse and commandos, blah, blah, blah. Nothing new. That’s where you come in.”

  Steven wore an awkward, self-deprecating smile plastered acidly across his face through the disparagement.

  “I’m thinking big for Pro II,” Emerus continued. “And new. I don’t want a solid return on this. I want another breakaway. Pick up where we left off, but then take it to a whole new place—a new world. I want a fresh look, fresh characters, fresh premise—connected, but new. That’s why I’m taking the chance on you—no baggage. No previous games to echo. I want to set a whole new paradigm for sequels. It’s a challenge.” He looked at Neil here for the first time. “But it’s an opportunity. Could put your name in the books forever.”

  Neil tried not to let the self-loathing he felt creep up through his mask of impassivity.

  “Joe?” Emerus said, acknowledging his devotee for the first time. “You’re all done here.”

  Joe reddened and murmured some sort of thanks or apology and scrambled out the door.

  “I’ve read your reviews and I’m familiar with your column, of course. And I know you’ve got a critical mind. High standards. But my question is: Are you up to this? Creation?” Emerus looked at Neil.

  The word jarred him with all its primordial echoes.

  “Yes,” Neil said, quashing this.

  “All right, then.” Emerus rose. “I’ll leave you two to get to know each other.”

  And with that Rod Emerus made his exit, leaving a sort of schoolboys-in-detention feeling in his wake. So. This was what it had come to. Neil Banks in charge of creating a game company home run. He took a breath and pulled his chair closer to the table, tamping down the panic, scattering the crows.

  Hold your nose, he told himself. Close your eyes. Dive in.

  He returned Laura’s call from the parking lot, eager suddenly for some reminder of his actual life. And Laura was that: a reminder, in fact, of the best part of his life. His college years had held such promise and potential. They were so fresh and new, in Rod Emerus’s terms, untouched by the blight of failure and disappointment, of self-doubt and the general dinge-ing of the world.

  “Hello?” Laura sounded a little out of breath when she picked up.

  “Laura. It’s Neil.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed in what sounded like great surprise, and for a moment he wondered if he was confused. If maybe she hadn’t ever called.

  “Am I getting you at a bad time? You sound—”

  “No, no. It’s fine. I’m just driving. I just had lunch with Jenny, actually.”

  “Oh.” A wave of regret washed over Neil. He should not have called.

  “Shit!” There was the sound of traffic in the background. “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t mean to stress you out. I just—ugh. Just a funny coincidence, I guess,” she finished lamely.

  “Yeah.” Neil did not try to make it easier for her.

  He stared out the windshield at the row of precisely placed shrubs on the traffic island in front of him. The anonymity of their proportions, of the cedar chips below them. He could be anywhere.

  “Neeeeeil.” Laura’s voice on the other end of the line was wheedling, familiar. “Please don’t get freaked out. How long are you here for?”

  “A year,” he said flatly.

  “What?”

  “A year,” he repeated. “I’m working.”

  “Here? Where?”

  “Boxborough. At a game company. It’s a long story.”

  “Boxborough!” Laura exclaimed, as if that, of all things, were the most outlandish.

  A posse of sparrows skittered noisily by—sparrows, the same plain, co-opted breed of nature as the bushes.

  “Neil?” Laura said. “Are you there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, do you want to have coffee sometime? Or a drink? Or you could come over for d
inner, of course, but the kids can be such a handful…” She let her voice trail off.

  “Sure,” he found himself saying. “I could use a drink.”

  Back in Johnson’s apartment, Neil was greeted by the relieving sight of packed bags. There was a note on the floor scrawled in Kirstin’s girly handwriting, which read: Out to the movies, back for dinner. We’re leaving tomorrow—whoo hoo! Bet you can’t wait. Followed by a smiley face.

  He poured himself a glass of water from the dubiously sanitary Brita pitcher and held it up to the light as if the toxins (what exactly was he looking for anyway? lead? bacteria? mold?) would be visible. So many years of living in California had made him fussy—full of troubling, useless information about pollutants in the environment and the assault they waged daily against the human body, the toll they took on his blood, his cells, his fragile, gradually decomposing DNA. The water looked murky. He took a big tepid swig.

  Then, delighting in the unexpected boon of having the place to himself, he sat down at the kitchen table with his computer, fully intending to oblige Steven Closter and check out Faunacy, a game they were supposedly going to “wet their pants” competing with.

  But the conversation with Laura had affected him. It confirmed why he had known, to begin with, that it would be better not to be in touch. It made him think about the baby. About his baby. The baby he had signed away all rights to see or know or influence in any way. Starting with his name—Colin. The name of a pale, invalidish, dandy. What was it—Irish? or Scottish? Neither Jenny nor Jeremy was either, which made it pretentious, to boot. Not a name he would ever bestow on his son. His son. He had a son out there in the world. In what sense of the word? the therapist he had seen in LA had asked when he mentioned it (only mentioned, because it had not been an issue, was certainly not what he was seeing the therapist about). A “son” is a societal construct, isn’t it? she had pressed. A role to play in a family unit. Neil had looked at her with disdain. No. The baby was a son in the one way that was unambiguous.

  Of course, this was not how he had thought of it beforehand, when Jenny came to him. What had he thought? It was a good question. He hadn’t been thinking. That was the kindest answer he could come up with. His head had been shoved up his ass.

  Jenny had appeared in LA two years ago with her proposal. He had not seen her since, God knows, her wedding three years before or so. How had she found him? She had talked to someone who had talked to someone who had seen Tom Frick…And so Neil’s elaborate obfuscation of his own existence had proved, with no more than a few simple conversations, to unravel.

  She had shown up with no warning. She knew him well enough to know that lead time would be to her disadvantage. And so one day, emerging from his basement studio (that little cave of a room set into the hill below Jane’s house), Neil had come across her, sitting outside his front door in the shade of her chauffeured car.

  “Aha!” she’d said, springing from the backseat with her familiar sure-footed athletic bounce. “I had a feeling if I waited you’d appear.”

  He was taken aback—no, alarmed. There was Jenny Callahan in front of his home. His eyes blinked in the bright sunlight and he was aware of having not yet brushed his teeth or changed out of the T-shirt he had slept in. The greasy, lived-in smell of it rose off him in the heat.

  “What’ve you been doing?” she asked, stepping forward to kiss him. “No one’s seen you for ages.”

  “Maybe that’s on purpose.” His own voice sounded sullen and paranoid in his ears. Her presence raised something like panic in him. She did not belong here. She did not belong in this new reality of his.

  “I know!” She boxed his arm lightly. “But you can’t hide from me.”

  And, standing there with the sun blazing off the whitewashed stucco, and with those unshy California flowers in his yard offering themselves up to it, garish and bold, he had felt utterly, unusually, naked—a delicate shade-growing fauna, shutting itself away in the face of Jenny’s brilliance.

  Later, sitting in the cool, wood-paneled interior of Nelson’s, a salad parlor frequented by the combination of hipsters and entertainment industry lackeys that made up Neil’s neighborhood, he had begun to adjust to her presence. Here she was: Jenny Callahan, ex-girlfriend, college athlete, rising corporate superstar. How incredible that he had ever dated her—that he had been in love with her! How incredible that they had ever even been friends. She was wearing a suit. Lemon-yellow and short enough to show off her legs. Around her neck she had an expensive-looking lavender scarf. The effect was very LA. She had always been a chameleon. It was one of her many skills.

  They ate giant vegetable salads full of sprouts and shredded carrots and tahini, which was clearly not Jenny’s kind of food. She picked through hers like a surgeon, selecting only the least exotic ingredients and mainlining saccharine-sweetened iced tea. Mostly she talked and he listened. This was what she did now, this was where she and Jeremy lived, this was who they saw, this was the deal. Neil honestly had not seen the request coming. He had sat and listened with the finely tuned attention of suspense. Was she asking him to be godfather to her unborn (unconceived?) child? This was the closest he got, and it seemed so outlandish and unreasonable—weirdly more so than her actual request when it came—that he discounted it. Maybe it was the element of surprise that had been so effective.

  “And you want me…?” He had left the question gaping, like his jaw, and stared at her.

  “Unless you’ve completely lost your marbles or something.”

  He could see, for the first time, that Jenny was nervous. The slight rapidity of her breath, the picked-through salad, the intensity of her expression. And he began to laugh.

  “You’re not supposed to laugh, Neil.” Jenny put down her fork and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You know I’ve always thought you were brilliant.”

  “Ha!” Neil threw his head back. “That’s a good one.”

  “Would I be sitting here if I didn’t?”

  “You’re serious.”

  Jenny nodded her head.

  Behind them a raggedy waif who looked suspiciously like an Olsen twin was being ushered to a table at the back, creating one of those feathery LA stirs.

  “Of course, there are tests you’d have to go through, forms to fill out—family history and all that, and then you freeze the sperm six months—I’d want to do this entirely by the book of the clinic I’m working with—but if it checks out—yes. Yes, I am serious.”

  Neil put his own fork down. “Wow.”

  He drank down the rest of his water all at once.

  “I don’t want to have kids,” he said finally.

  “I know. You always said that.”

  Behind them, the restaurant’s signature talking parrot began squawking. “Roast beef, corned beef, ham and swiss on rye.”

  “Jesus.” Jenny looked up at the bird in its giant dog crate of a cage and gave it a withering frown. She turned back to Neil. “That’s why I thought you might do it. I’m not asking you to be a father. Jeremy is going to be this kid’s father. One hundred percent. This would be between us exclusively. In fact, I don’t want you to do it unless you’re willing to sign away all responsibilities and rights.”

  “Whoa—I’m not even on board yet, Jen—”

  “I know. I’m just laying it out to you, all right? I’m just giving you the info so you can think about it. Talk about it. Whatever. There are counselors at the clinic…” she waved her hand to indicate…what? That the emotions these people were trained to discuss were beyond the purview of their conversation? “What I want is total anonymity on your part. Of course, Jeremy and I know who you are, but I wouldn’t want the child to know. Jeremy would adopt the baby. We wouldn’t tell him—or her—that there was anything at all unusual about the way he came to be. Just the norm—mother, father, baby. No siblings. No baggage about biological parents and adopted parents or donor parents or all that bullshit. Clean. Simple. You get the picture.” She was slightly b
reathless at the end of this.

  “Look…” she leaned forward. “I know it’s a lot to ask. But I also know you don’t want kids, Neil. And if you think about what that means—I mean, to really not have offspring, to dead-end your own genetic material…” She shrugged. “You aren’t a romantic. You are the most clear-eyed person I know. And this is a clear-eyed thing I’m asking you. There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about it. Nothing ambiguous.”

  She sat back, seeming to have exhausted herself. “Don’t give me an answer now.”

  And it was sitting there watching her, Jenny Callahan, agitated and wanting something—needing something—from him, that began to plant the seed of his consent. Here was this woman whom he had once loved, and whom he had, in a way, come to despise. A woman who had embraced the lowest common denominator of the American dream—the pursuit of wealth, at the cost of any more complex ambitions. When Neil had dated her, she had wanted to be a lawyer at one of those nonprofits that advocated for women. She had been passionate about creating opportunities and broadening the horizons of children growing up in the kind of forgotten, working-class nowheresville she and Neil had. Had that all been a pose—a stepping-stone to achieving financial success? An outcropping of the unapologetic pragmatism he both hated and envied? Whatever the case, here she was, wanting something from him. The woman who had broken up with him because he wasn’t good enough, wasn’t headed for success enough, was sitting here because, it turned out, at heart she still believed in the promise and potential that had once defined Neil, that had once made greatness, or its foreshadowing, a part of who he was. It was a shock—and a thrill—to recognize this. Of course, the yes wasn’t arrived at then and there, but he could trace the beginning of it to this moment, if he was honest with himself. He could trace it to this thread of naked egotism.

  But the thing was, what did he think of while he whacked off in the little air-freshened room full of pointedly new porno magazines and a heavily curtained window? Not the child. Of course. Not the favor he was doing or the life he was bestowing. (Who could think of that and still “produce”?) Not of Jane, or the sexy waitress at Nelson’s whom he’d had an escalating flirtation with. Not the rubbery bodies on the pages before him. He thought of Jenny. Not lovingly or longingly. He thought of fucking her. Hard. Of driving himself into her taut, Stairmastered body—splitting open her ambitious, eerily composed, successful self, and, like a Trojan horse, injecting the seeds of disorder into her world. It was a violent, intense fantasy, and the venom of it left him shaken. Had this always been there, between them? Walking out of the sterile clinic, he was still reverberating with shock. Was this something terrible he had done? It was not exactly premonition, but a kind of fear that came over him.