Geek Fantasy Novel (2 page)

Derivative! Who could find the
Green Wizards of Cartesia
derivative, or the subtle group dynamics of
The Elementalists
? Could anyone read his description of the final boss fight in
The Chosen Four
and not realize that gamers having to hit Lord Lavish’s
thighs
in order to kill him was the most unexpected development in gaming history?

Derivative, indeed! More life experience, indeed!

Ralph was about to wish some very bad things upon the men and women of MonoMyth, but stopped himself just in time.

No wishes.

And no job.

A murky, geeky despair filled his soul.

Luckily (or not so luckily, depending on whom you ask), another letter arrived the day after the horribly thin envelope from MonoMyth. It was a card from the long-lost British side of Ralph’s family. He’d never received a card before! He raced back from the mailbox, put his backpack down on the kitchen table, and read the card over ramen noodles and Cocoa Puffs.

Had Ralph allowed himself to believe in fantastic fulfillments of fate, he might have seen the timely receipt of the card as evidence of some higher power. But as it stood, he saw Gert’s card as a lucky break.

He emailed immediately and accepted her offer.

Then he wondered how (or if) he was going to tell his parents….

After confirming his departure time with the airline and making sure he had enough allergy medication for the trip, Ralph went to face his parents. The Stevenses lived in an imposing but slipshod mansion of recent construction, purchased not through their public school teachers’ pensions (no, no), but with funds skimmed off the extensive coffers of Mary’s extended family, a family that included the aforementioned British aristocracy.

As retired schoolteacher parents so often do, Mary and Steve had settled in the front room to read: Steve his paper, Mary a novel about a young woman who challenges conventions but realizes in the end that family is the most important thing. Mary’s book was from the library; the cellophane covering the call number had partially peeled away, and she slid it between her fingers as she read, rubbing away flakes of old glue.

Yawn.

I’m not trying to slight Mr. and Mrs. Steven Stevens, understand. But remark on this — I’ve given them boring names (I couldn’t go with their true names — they never sent back a release form to be included in this book). They’re boring people. Don’t get too attached to them, because our tale will be rid of them at the first opportunity.

I’ve been improper. I promise not to butt in ever, ever again.

When Ralph came in, Mary was more than ready to put her book down and engage in some reassuringly dull family conversation. She balanced the novel on the slipcover of the armrest and greeted her only son.

“Greetings, Mom. Greetings, Dad,” Ralph said.

Steve grunted and maintained his focus on his paper. It was his most reliable trick, to seem to ignore conversation while following it intently, so that when he finally said something it would emerge pre-written, as if spoken with semicolons.

“So what’s going on?” Ralph asked.

We’ll skip forward in the conversation — even the most well-spoken person is ninety percent dull, unless he’s appearing in a book. Ralph and his family are only somewhat well-spoken, barely averagely so, so I’m obliged to excise whole chunks.

Ralph stood in the hallway and said a few sentences, to which his mother responded with smiles and mute wisdom. Ralph said something more, switching his weight from one leg to another.
(When will he be comfortable enough with himself to stand up straight?
wondered Mary.) Steve’s pages flipped with more and more velocity until finally he cleared his throat to coin his aphorism — but that’s when Mary shouted and he discovered that Ralph had carried home meat scraps from the grocery store to feed his cats and the plastic bag was dripping something vile and red onto the carpet. Ralph put his hand over his mouth and nodded — yes, it was blood, or at least meat juice — and now everyone was scurrying, Ralph to get the carpet cleaner from the garage and Mary to pour ice from her diet soda onto the beige pile, Steve using the energy that he had been building for his declamation to bounce to his feet and swat the spreading stain with his newspaper, dancing a frantic little jig.

Then Ralph was back and running the carpet cleaner over the splotch, now made darker with newsprint and soda, taking pains to avoid bumping
his parents’ feet. This was tricky, as they were pacing. Once he was finished, Ralph prudently excused himself to feed the cats.

When he was younger, when imagination seemed safe, Ralph thought that his cats were lions. It was easier back then, when they had that postkitten leanness and instinctual aggression that hadn’t yet been deadened by a mouseless life. But he still refused to feed them cat food — it was one of the few fancies he allowed himself. He imagined being fed bran flakes for three meals a day, even for snacks and late night desserts, and couldn’t wish that on his charges. So they got meat. When he dropped the slick scraps into their bowl, the cats beelined for the feast and then conspicuously ignored it, as cats will do.

As he returned to his parents, Ralph wondered if he would be like the old cat lady across the street, if he were old and a lady.

Mary had prepared Meat Dish for dinner. As they sat down to eat, Ralph pushed his glasses up his nose and asked them what they thought about the card from Gert. He had left it on the kitchen table, knowing full well it would be read and processed and placed next to the paperclip holder by the time dinner was served.

“It doesn’t take mail at all long to get here from England, does it?” Steve observed.

“No, not anymore. Isn’t that fascinating?” Mary said between chews.

“I looked at the postmark. It only took three days.”

“Amazing,” Mary said.

“How do you think they got it here?” Steve asked Ralph.

“By airplane. There are no land routes and a boat would have taken longer,” Ralph said automatically, eager to be done with his father’s side of the questioning as soon as possible.

“Good, good. So’s the casserole.” This line came out like music.

“Thank you!” Mary said.

“So what do you
think
about it?” Ralph asked.

Steve Stevens regarded him quizzically. “Absolutely not!” he said.

“But I want to go.” Ralph’s voice caught.

“Nope. And I won’t tolerate any more curiosity about the matter.”

Ralph was seated in a prime position to watch the multi-paragraphed look that passed between his parents. They both knew their son felt abandoned by his peers and had turned sullen. His dream to be a video game designer had been squashed. They knew he had a polyester-focused sense of fashion, and a sense of humor that tended to irritate all but the most devout nerds. Any change was bound to do him good. He hadn’t expressed wanting anything in months, and they knew this was a development that was to be encouraged.

All this was weighed, of course, against the fact that they would be sending their only son into the lair of a killer sorceress.

And wanting — well, wanting could easily lead to wishing, and wishing had to be prevented at all cost.

Ralph’s parents had always considered it safer not to tell him any details of the British family situation, so his curiosity wouldn’t draw him over there. And now they couldn’t start giving him information without firing his inquisitiveness all the more for the length of time it had been withheld.

“Honey,” Mary Stevens said, “the answer is simply no.”

Once Ralph slammed into his room, Steve Stevens’s words were far less mild.

“What are we going to do?” he asked Mary, banging his hand down on the table so hard he caused her to squirt ketchup all over her plate.

“We said he couldn’t go, dear,” Mary said. “So he won’t. He’s a very moderate boy, and so unlikely to go getting himself into trouble.”

“We’ve worked so hard to keep him unspoiled by all this nonsense. And it hasn’t been easy. I don’t need to remind you, I trust, about the TV incident?”

Mary nodded and nervously held her fingers against her cheek the way she would have held a cigarette, back before she had learned better. How could she
not
remember? A year earlier she had woken up late at night and crept downstairs to tend to the last bite of an éclair she had been saving in the back of the fridge. On the way, she spied her son up way past his bedtime, sitting in his boxers before the glowing TV, watching a program he most certainly should not have been watching.

It wasn’t anything involving bad language — that would have been alarming but nothing on the order of true horror — but rather an infomercial featuring a tabloid British duchess demonstrating the proper way to use a $19.95 electric device to tone one’s buttocks. She was the same tacky,
forbiddingly attractive sister Mary remembered from her childhood, only now with hair extensions and a plumpness that gave her fishnetted body an extra, witchy seductiveness.

Paralyzed, éclair halfway to her mouth, Mary had no idea what to do. The family resemblance was definitely there — the overpronounced jaw, the still-lovely eyes set within a puddle of blue-black eye shadow, the whiff of the otherworldy. And if Ralph realized that the duchess-turned-spokeswoman on the television was his mother’s other sister (besides Gert), how would Mary explain herself?

She decided the best plan was to hope her son wouldn’t notice. There was a very good chance of it; he was criminally unobservant. Though he was aware every time the price of RAM dropped in the Korean wholesale market, he obliviously trundled past his parents’ birthdays (not to mention his own, except for that terrible fifth-grade year), and had once taken a full half-hour shower without realizing that he’d forgotten to turn the water on. She finished her éclair, went back to bed, and informed her husband of the situation. They’d wondered ever since if their son now suspected that the arresting pitchwoman he’d seen on television was the real reason for the wish prohibition.

“We simply aren’t allowing it,” Steve said now, sucking in his breath and tucking his hands under his arms.

Mary picked up her novel and opened it to the bookmark, trying, as she balanced the spine on the rim of her plate, to determine whether she had stopped on the left-hand or right-hand page.

She knew, more than her husband did, that her son may have been a geek, but he was a geek with a sense of adventure.

And, as we all know, there’s no way of stopping a geek with a sense of adventure.

By the time Steve thumped up to his son’s room to remind him that he was by no means allowed to go to England, Ralph had already boarded a flight and turned his cell phone off.

He checked his email from the airport and discovered a message from Gert instructing him to take the train from Heathrow to Durbanshire upon arriving, connecting in Paddington. These three names displaced him — Heathrow sounded like an elderly man’s complaint, Durbanshire a land of sheiks, and Paddington a bear. He made each connection anxiously, surprised each time a location turned out to be an ordinary area of the world, not a fantastic realm shaped by its outlandish moniker.

As Ralph had made an earlier train connection than Gert had thought him able to, he anticipated a long wait to be picked up. He lined up his belongings with care on the tartar-colored stone steps in front of the Durbanshire station and wondered what the Battersby car would look like; he pictured a pert motorcar with goggles draped on the windshield and, in place of a side-view mirror, one of those horns that sends out cheery blasts that send geese flapping up from ponds.

He was surprised, therefore, to be picked up by a talent search contestant in a hatchback. The boy who peered out of the car had that arrogant charm,
that leer, that said he was certain you would love him all the more for the frankness of his self-love. The neckbands of at least four different T-shirts crowded the V of his partially zipped sweatshirt. His face was a slick riot of red and white.

The boy — no more than fifteen — careened to the curb, opened the driver’s side door, placed an arm on the roof, and removed his aviator sunglasses. “You’re Ralph?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Figures. Get in.”

Once Ralph did, they shot out of the parking lot and down a sleepy town street. The boy played his reggae loudly enough to exert an almost physical presence, and between that and the car’s breakneck speed, Ralph was too distracted to make conversation. The boy was focused on the road, periodically tweaking his cool expression into new variations, as if reacting to cues from a music video director.