Duncan's Game

Duncan’s Game

Now that I think about it, I don’t remember where the game came from. I woke up today and there it was, docked in the old SNES console passed down to me from my dad. The cartridge for the game was a dark forest green, distinguishing it from the tower of gray cartridges next to the old cube of a tv my mom kept in her mobile home. I had rolled off the couch that morning, went to pour myself a cup of coffee, noticed Mom hadn’t made any yet, then noticed Mom wasn’t home at all, so I decided to play Mario Kart and there the alien game was, loaded into the SNES as if it had always been there.

Half concerned about my mother’s absence—I assumed she was drunk, passed out maybe on one of her drinking buddy’s couches—I pressed power on the SNES and flicked the TV on. The game powered on, I unraveled a controller and, when the screen prompted “Player 1 Press Start”, I did. But then the game commanded, “Player 2 Press Start”. I tried pressing buttons on the controller I held in my hand, to see if I could get a single player game going, but nothing happened. I unraveled the second controller, plugged it in, and pressed start. In a flurry of pixels, the game entered what I assumed was the main title screen. It was a 16-bit depiction of trees with little pixelated white birds spiraling against a sky-blue background, with the only text on the screen being the words “Start”.

I was certain I had never played this game before. I clicked the start on my controller but just then I heard keys jangle against the door of the small mobile home, then keys falling and hitting the ground. My mom’s voice, muffled on the other side of the door, went,

“Shit.” Hearing her struggle with the keys, I got up and opened the door for her. She looked haggard, with heavy bags under her eyes and an oversized sweatshirt clinging to her skinny frame.

“Duncan,” she slurred, stumbling against the doorframe as she dragged herself in. She didn’t finish her sentence though. She just raised her hand and put in on the back of my head, pulled my face in and kissed me on the cheek. She then sighed, stumbled over to the couch where I had just been sitting, brushed the two controllers onto the ground, and passed out.

I never said it out loud but I hated staying with her. Usually I lived with my dad in his cold, empty house on the ridge that overlooked a section of the forest, but he was out of town on business and though divorced from mom, he was just as aware of her spiral into alcoholism as I was. He asked me to keep an eye on her while he was gone, as he always does whenever he leaves town, and I agreed, but I explained to him that since I had just graduated high school and was about to embark to college somewhere else, maybe in the city, I couldn’t keep watching her. He replied “I know” and handed me his credit card.

“Just take care of her,” he said. That was a week ago.

I decided to go to the grocery store to stock her fridge and buy her some ground coffee. Driving out of the dusty trailer park, my truck kicking up clouds of dirt and gravel, I felt my phone buzz. It was a text from Austin.

What was that game we played last night?

I remembered Austin coming over late last night after I told him my mom was out, he had brought weed and some booze. I remember him asking, “What game is this?” last night when he found the blank green cartridge, but I don’t know where he found it, because I had never seen it. Then he put the game in, but then nothing. I couldn’t remember anything about actually playing the game. But apparently we had.

I don’t remember I texted back.

A few moments passed. I drove through the perpetually-open gate that surrounded the trailer park and down the dirt path until it connected to the main road. I thought about Austin—he made my face hot and my heart drop, and I hated it. We went to school together, from middle school all the way to graduating high school together a few months ago. He was just as intimidated by adulthood as I was, and had as little of a plan regarding what to do after school as I did. Maybe less. I don’t know if he even applied to any colleges. We were best friends in middle school, but when we entered high school and I joined the football team while he took up chess club and IB classes, we fell away.

I blamed myself for it. The other athletes and I teased him, for a second we hated each other, Austin and I, then I realized I hated him because of how he made me feel. How his slightly effeminate affectations made me see him, the way I’d catch him catching me looking at him, admiring his dark skin, his narrow, toned frame.

Then six months ago, at Rachel’s house party, Austin and I found ourselves in a room together somehow. We were both too drunk; I don’t remember if he kissed me first or I kissed him first but something happened and ever since then, things between us have been…confusing.

At least we’re friends again.

What are you doing my phone buzzed with a text from him.

Getting groceries I responded.

Come pick me up?

I grinned and turned around, headed to his house.

Later that day, around dusk, I had Austin in the passenger seat and we were driving back to my house to play the game that neither of us could remember.

“Weren’t you supposed to get groceries for your mom?” Austin asked as I pulled through the gate around the trailer park and crept down the dusty path lined with trailers, plastic lawn furniture, and children’s toys. I ran over an abandoned, inflated pool toy—it looked like it was a duck—and it popped under my tires.

“I think she’ll be fine for another day,” I told him. “Plus, her diet only really consists of alcohol and I can’t buy that yet.”

“Dude, just go to the liquor store off of Vermillion and Institution. They never ID anyone, and plus, with your beard,” he reached up and stroked the scruff I had growing; I slapped his hand away playfully, “you definitely look old enough to get whatever you want.”

I pulled up to my mom’s trailer and, noticing her car was already gone, parked in her spot. Austin and I went inside.

“Mom’s gone already?” he asked as he pushed aside the screen door while following my inside. I nodded in response, trying to keep my sigh quiet. She had been out drinking every night since I had come to stay with her. Sometimes, like earlier that day, she would kiss me on the cheek when she got home. Other times she would slap me across the face. There was always a certain way the air felt in the house when I got home and she was already out—it had a certain flavor, and I could sometimes tell how she would treat me when she got home based on the flavor of air she left in the trailer. It wasn’t a smell, but a feeling, but I couldn’t feel it with Austin with me. All I could feel was his flavor—it was like a muted, sad optimism, like hope.

I picked up the controllers my mom had thrown on the floor earlier that day and powered on the game and tv. Austin collapsed onto the couch. I pulled myself next to him and, handing him the second player controller, asked,

“Why can’t either of us remember this game?”

“We probably got pretty drunk last night,” he answered. I nodded in agreement but couldn’t help but think of how I didn’t have a hangover at all in the morning.

The same screens popped up on the tv, prompting each of us to hit Start on our controllers. Then the screen I was at when my mom showed up in the morning—pixelated, 16-bit trees swaying in a virtual wind, little dots of birds swirling above them, the pulsing words “Start” on the screen. I pressed the corresponding button on my controller.

The next screen seemed to be a sort of character selection. There were nine different sprites for us to choose from, our own sprites respectively being a blinking “P1” and “P2”. Eight of them were forest creatures, small blocky representations of a bear, a fox, a flock of birds, a beehive, a squirrel, a snake, a circle of mushrooms, and an owl, and the ninth sprite, at the bottom of the screen, was a group of trees, the forest itself. I looked at Austin with a raised eyebrow, seeing if any of this jogged his memory, but his expression displayed the same confusion and intrigue that I was feeling. I selected the flock of birds. Austin moved his P2 sprite to the bottom of the screen, highlighting the forest character, and selected it.

The moment he selected his character, the screen went black, then everything went black. I felt the controller fall slack into my lap as my vision voided out. Then, behind my eyes, in the center of my mind, a spiral of square rainbow pixels erupted into existence and enveloped everything around me. The colors of the pixelated reality before me sorted themselves into groups until I was able to make out an electric blue sky, brown earth below me, and then, from the ground, the growing of trees. In a flurry of non-time, with the sky above and around me going black and blue rapidly as a pixelated orange sun soared across the sky, the trees grew into a mighty forest.

The sun slowed its spin around us. I took a moment to try and look at myself, but instead of my body, I saw that I was a flock of birds. I think they’re called starlings. I was suspended in mid air, unable to move, but as the sun slowed to a normal progression of time, I suddenly found myself able to control the flock. It was as natural as moving an arm or placing a hand on Austin’s face to pull him in. With that thought, I felt drawn to the expansive forest sprawling out below me. I took the flock to the tallest tree and perched in it—it felt like Austin.

A wind blew. Or something like a wind. It was electric—I could feel the charge on every one of my wings, and suddenly I was out of the 16-bit world and back on my couch. I had collapsed backwards onto Austin and could feel him jerk awake also. He tried to sit up but my weight was holding him down. I went to move upwards. He was breathing heavily and seemed disoriented.

“Where am I?” he asked, nearly shouting. He jumped up from the couch but I caught his hand as it swung out from under me. He stopped, looked at me, and seemed to relax.

“Oh. Sorry Duncan,” he said before collapsing back on the couch with a sigh. His forehead was slick with sweat.

“Are you okay?” I asked. He took a few deep breathes and said,

“I think so. It felt like I was in that game for a hundred years. Like…I was a seed, then trees, then a forest…” he started to breathe heavily again—I stroked his hand in mine.

“Really?” I asked. “It only felt like a few hours for me.”

He looked at me. “You were the flock of birds, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You weren’t there until the very end,” he explained. The color had started to return to his face and slowly he began to smile. I could almost hear him think what was that? about the game but he didn’t say it. He just pulled me up and started kissing me.

I knew my mom probably wasn’t coming home that night, but to be safe, we moved from the couch to the queen sized bed that was jammed into the tiny room in the back of the trailer.

I drove him home early the next morning, then stopped to buy the groceries I meant to get the day before. When I got home, around noon, I noticed mom still had not returned. I rolled my eyes and decided to take a nap on the couch, so if she did come stumbling home, I’d hear her and wake up.

I didn’t wake up until later in the afternoon. There was slanted orange sunlight coming through the curtained windows of the mobile home, illuminating tufts of dust motes that sat suspended in the air. Muffled rock music was coming in from outside—it sounded like one of the neighbors was having a party.

There was still no trace of my mom. I thought about her and my dad together, how happy they seemed, how sudden their divorce took place four years ago, and how, from what I remember, she only started drinking once she moved out on her own. We didn’t talk for a while, her and I, when I told her I wanted to live with Dad.

I wondered is she, or my dad, for that matter, knew about me and Austin. I had never thought about “coming out” to them, because I never really thought about coming out. I had had girlfriends. I’d seen multiple sides of things and knew what I liked, but Austin seemed to be an anomaly.

Just then, my phone buzzed. Austin again. He wanted to play the game some more—so did I.

He drove over instead of having me pick him up that night. When he came in through the front door, he asked,

“Did your mom come home at all today?”

I shook my head and rubbed my brow. He slid past me into the trailer and gave me a concerned look.

“Have you tried calling her?”

“I did, once. Her phone is over there in the kitchen,” I replied, pointing. “If she’s not home tomorrow, I’ll go looking for her.”

“I’ll help,” he responded, kicking off his shoes and flopping onto the couch. He was wearing tight jeans and a skinny t-shirt with some band on it I’d never heard of—it was enough of a sight to get my thoughts off of my missing mother and onto him. I wanted him to be the forest again, and I wanted to perch in his trees. There was a sense of safety there that I hadn’t felt anywhere else before.

I switched on the SNES, grabbed Austin’s foot as I sat close to him, but then thought to myself,

Why didn’t we forget the game this time?

Austin shrugged and I didn’t think anything about it. I attributed it to us being drunk the other night.

The game started. This time I chose the fox character instead of the starlings. Austin chose the owl. Once we selected, everything went black again. I felt my self collapse back into Austin and he made a soft grunt as he exhaled, his controller falling against the floor.

There was no time lapse of the forest growing this time. I spawned, as a small baby fox, into a fully grown, pixel-manifested forest that was teeming with virtual life. A squirrel scampered into a fallen log in front of me, causing one or two of the bigger mushrooms on the log to wobble. Forest sounds composed of arcade blips created a feeling of serenity—there was even a smell, like the dankness of a forest mixed with ozone. Perhaps it was just my fox nose that made the smells so vivid. Moving around as a small fox was just as natural as moving the flock of starlings through the air. I jumped over the log, walked tentatively through a dense grouping of trees—I found a certain joy leaping over gnarled roots and twisted trunks—until I reached a ridge that overlooked a lower expanse of forest. It looked familiar.

A shadow swooped down over me—I looked up to see a small owl flying in descending circles towards me. As a baby fox, I should have been afraid, but immediately I recognized the owl as Austin, he flapped down and perched on a twisted root exposed on the edge of the ridge. We looked at each other curiously and felt a wordless exchange between us. It was composed of feeling rather than words—he wanted to fly down in the lower forest, where it looked like the trees were thinner. I leapt in excitement and ran instinctively along the edge of the ridge, following it as it slowly ramped down to the lower section of trees. Austin soared close by, and soon we were racing. He swooped in front of me as I dashed down the sloping path. The tops of trees below us began to rise alongside the edge of the ridge as we both descended into the lower section of forest. The sun, made of swirling trails of red and yellow pixels contained within a circle, lowered too and the electric air around us took on an orange hue. I could feel the simulated heat of the sun grow and then suddenly fade as I dashed off the path and into the new chunk of forest before us.

The trees were spaced farther apart than the clustered forest above so Austin was able to fly directly above and in front of me. He ducked and rose over twisting branches as easily as I jumped over roots and leapt across dips and streams of water. The sun slats, orangish red through branches, cast his shadow a bit ahead of mine, At one point, Austin spiraled to avoid a massive spider web pulled tightly between branches and tumbled to the ground. The reality of things was broken for a split second as a green bar of pixels appeared above his head and a tiny portion of it turned red, then it disappeared. It was only a tiny break of the realness of the world.

We sprinted by a small rock formation of a notable familiarity—I knew I’d seen it before, but my thoughts were interrupted when I suddenly noticed how much bigger Austin seemed. As he flew, pixelated words appeared above his head that said, “Level Up”. The words didn’t break reality this time—there was no reality to break. They fit in perfectly to this world that had always been. I looked up above myself and saw the words appearing over me as well, and noticed I was closer to a full grown fox. I ran faster, and Austin flapped his wings powerfully and silently cruised through the lower canopy. I wasn’t sure if we were still racing. Dashing was a form of ecstasy, and I as saw Austin take off above the canopy with incredible speed, I knew he felt the same elation. Perhaps we shared it.

The sun lowered past the horizon and the orange-purple glow of the sky turned into swirling deep blue, then black. The forest noises shifted from the chirps of birds and insects to nocturnal noises—quick scamperings, rufflings of leaves, and an owl was hooting but I wasn’t sure if it was Austin. Even though it was dark, I could see clearly, even more so as a porcelain pixel moon rose in the sky, its shape broken by the branches it shown through.

I saw Austin swoop back below the canopy and grab a mouse that was trying to scurry between tufts of foliage. It let out a tiny squeak as Austin devoured it, and again I saw the green health bar appear above his head. As he ate the mouse, the red segment of his health bar turned back into green. I watched, hypnotized by the natural yet grisly display, and didn’t notice a hulking black form creep up behind me. By the time I noticed and turned around, it was already swinging a huge paw at me. I felt a concussive force, and, all within a second, saw my own health bar appear before my eyes, turn completely red, and I jolted out of the forest and back into the mobile home.

I shot up out of Austin’s lap—the force of it caused him to awaken sharply also. I was breathing heavily, still reeling from the knock I felt. It wasn’t painful, just jarring.

“What the hell was that?” I asked as soon as I was able to speak.

“I think it was a bear,” Austin replied while rubbing his eyes. He looked at me, then the tv, which was back at the title screen of the game. “You wanna go again?”

I checked my phone for the time. Almost midnight. No sign of my mom. I sighed.

“Do you want to go look for her?” he asked.

“No, let’s wait till morning.”

“Are you sure?”

I tried to change the topic. “Did parts of that forest look familiar to you?”

He thought for a moment, then stood up to stretch while saying, “I’m not sure.”

“I coulda sworn that ridge overlooking the forest looked just like the area where my Dad’s neighborhood is. Just without the houses,” I said.

“Maybe it’s just a coincidence? I mean, most forested areas look the same. Just a bunch of trees,” Austin responded. I nodded in agreement but held on to the thought. Noticing an aggressive gurgle in my stomach, I asked Austin,

“You wanna get something to eat?”

We went and got drive thru burgers. I tried to show Austin my dad’s neighborhood, to prove to him that the forest below the ridge was identical to the one in the game, but he told me it was late, and he already got in trouble for being out all night once, he shouldn’t do it again. He went home, and so did I. I should have just said yes when he asked if I wanted to play the game again. Maybe he would’ve stayed over.

When I got home, I tried calling two of my mom’s drinking buddies. One didn’t answer, the other answered unintentionally, with her phone still in her pocket. I tried to push aside my worry and sleep. Rest didn’t come easily, though.

I tried not to think about Mom that night—it was keeping me up, the thought of her and how he used to be, before the split. Nurturing, there more than my father, but thinking back about it, I remembered things she would do that suggested her mind was distanced from her warm, smiling exterior. Like when she would cry when Dad came home and immediately complained about dinner not being ready, or when she would drive me to elementary school and confide in me how she wished she was working and that it wasn’t fair for Dad to pursue her career while she stayed home. I don’t think she realized how much of her disdain I was able to understand, despite being young.

I slept maybe four hours on and off that night. When I woke up, I immediately texted Austin asking if he’d help look for my mom. He took forever to text back. He said

Can’t. Grounded. Got home too late

I sighed, walked to the bedroom, and slumped on the bed. The covers for them were floral ones I remember us using in the guest bedroom when we all lived together, but now they smelled like cigarettes and Febreze. I thought of calling Dad and telling him Mom hasn’t been home for two days, but then considered that it was early in the morning still and she might still come home. I got up from the bed and walked to the kitchen. I had leftover fries in a grease-stained bag on the counter—I started absent-mindedly eating them, trying to think of what to do, when suddenly I felt a wave of Austin’s presence. His smell filled my nose and my breathing stuttered, the same way it does when I grab Austin in my arms. His face filled my mind, then his voice:

Let’s play the game

It was his voice, but different—it felt more intimate, like the voice of one’s own inner thoughts. I didn’t question what was happening. It felt as natural and real as the forest did, when we had been in the game for hours. I thought back:

You need to be here for that

He responded:

I don’t think I do.

There was a pause. My brain felt like it was being massaged by purple waves. Then he thought:

Not physically at least.

My head, which had been buzzing, turned silent and Austin’s presence was gone, replaced with my mom’s. She felt sad—thinking of her made me smell her perfume she hadn’t worn since the divorce. It was a waft of candied flowers.

I turned the game on and grabbed both controllers. Focusing on Austin again, I thought:

What do you want to be?

Instantly he thought back, in what felt like pulses of cashmere against the inside of my head:

The forest.

With his controller on one knee and mine on the other, I selected the forest for him and the starlings for me. I felt as though I needed to be something that could survey from the sky, plus, they had an essence of familiarity about them. Once I had selected them and the images jumped from the tv to my mind, I felt Austin’s presence strongly as though he were next to me.

I sat in the sky in suspended nothingness as the forest grew beneath me. Looking over the landscape as young trees peppered it, I recognized certain features—the ridge where Dad’s house sat, the basin where our high school was built, the various rock formations in the lower forest that I recognized from hikes I used to take through the forest. There were no buildings or any sign of human activity, just growing forest, meadows, and foothills from horizon to horizon.

Once the forest reached a healthy maturity, my flock manifested and I felt the ozone-scented air as we began, for a microsecond, to fall out of the sky, but I felt myself flowing through the murmuration of starlings and caught the wind. I cut through the sky as a spearheaded, pulsating sphere. The landscape was familiar. Through a thousand eyes, I looked downward and easily identified where the roads would have been, where the Fastee’s gas station was supposed to be, next to the abandoned lot that we used to play tag in as kids, the parts of the forest I had seen in person, the same tall trees, clusters of aspens amongst evergreens, everything.

I rode a curving gust of wind and banked into the tallest tree of the forest. With accurate yet cacophonous grace, I perched the flock on the highest branches of the tree and instantly felt Austin. It was as if I had collapsed backwards onto him again, even though I knew, back at home, I was alone. I could feel his breath, the rising and falling of his lungs, as the wind blowing through the trees. I could see the expanse of the landscape, pixelated and real, from all directions. There were soft foothills to the west, grasslands to the east, and thick forest to the north and south, which, as I looked north, fell every dozen or so miles as the steppes in the land occurred. I could see the steep ridge where my father’s house should have been—the place Austin and I started racing last time as fox and owl.

Sitting in the tree, I felt a wave of gratitude from Austin, and then:

You’re beautiful as those birds.

I thought back:

You make a great forest.

Wind blew over tree in short, successive gusts, as if it was laughing, then I realized that Austin was, in fact, laughing. His chuckles condensed into another thought:

I feel something different in me. To the north.

My thousand eyes all jerked northward and focused in on the ridge where my dad’s house should have been. I thought:

There?

Austin responded alongside a soft, long zephyr:

There.

It feels like you’re there. Except it feels sadder.

My flock made a noise—a soft cooing that sounded like both dread and relief. I launched from the tree and flew north to the familiar ridge. The sun was moving us into dusk as I flew, and a few strong gusts of wind pushed me back. I fought onwards, already honing in on the tree I was to perch in. The wind smelled like candied flowers.

Once I perched in the tree, one that sprouted in the center of where Dad’s house would’ve been, I felt her. Mom was up here, somewhere, probably in our old house.

I jerked back into her trailer with a sudden excitement. I jumped up to grab my car keys, and there was Austin’s presence again, fading, feeling like orange happiness and relief.

I sped over to Dad’s house. I knew I should have pressed Austin into coming to his house with me that prior night. Maybe we would have found her then.

But I pushed the thought away. If I had pressured him and he obliged (he was bound to be grounded anyway) would we have thought together like we had just done? I don’t think he would’ve wanted to play the game that morning if we found her the night before.

Driving to Dad’s house felt like flying over the forest again. When I got there I was expecting to see mom’s old green Camry parked outside but there was no sign of it. Just dad’s oversized house, or I guess I could call it our oversized house, since we all used to live there. The windows on both the main and second stories were all dim, but I saw a flicker in the tiny circular attic window. I parked and ran inside. The front door was unlocked.

Inside there was definite evidence of someone being here. There were a couple empty bottles of whiskey in the kitchen and a mess of beer cans. I called out,

“Mom?”

There was a sound from the attic. I went upstairs—the collapsible ladder to the attic was up, meaning if Mom was up there, she was trapped. I opened the hatch, pulled down the ladder, and climbed up.

When I had lived in this house, back in elementary school, I had decorated the attic. Dad even helped by putting down carpet and stringing up some lights. Austin used to come over after school and we’d play up here, pretending we were wizards in a high castle, looking out the window at our kingdom below.

There was Mom, collapsed on the futon where I used to sometimes sleep. I went over to her—she looked bad. Rough and dirty. Not deeply dirty, though, like people who g on month-long benders. You could tell at some point within the past few days, she had showered but then had been drunk since. I shook her shoulder.

“Mom? Hey mom, wake up.”

She groaned and her eyes flickered open for a second. In a burp that smelled like a distillery, she mumbled,

“Duncan.” She took a deep breath, and then, in a surprising bout of sobriety, sat up and looked me straight in the eye. I couldn’t maintain eye contact—her gaze was intense, as it had always been when she was serious about something. “You know, I came home the other night.” She wiped at her face as she spoke, with the sleeves of the same sweater she was wearing days ago.

“You did?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t referring to when Austin and I played the game for the second time. My parents didn’t know—at least, I thought they didn’t know. I hadn’t come out to them, or anybody, except, I suppose, Austin, even though coming out felt like a strange concept to me, something I didn’t necessarily have to do.

“Having a little slumber party with your friend,” she continued, slurring her words. Then she raised her hand and pushed it against my face. It was too soft to think she was hitting me, but too firm to just be a sign of affection. She made a sound like a chuckle and a sob and fell back over on the futon.