The dragon’s treasure spills out from beneath him on the floor—gold, silver, rubies, jade. Just what’s heaped around our feet at the threshold of the chamber is a princely sum.
“Let’s take that,” Cherninsky says.
“Take what?” Marco asks.
“What’s around our feet. Just scoop it up and run.”
“Not fight the dragon?” the Dungeon Master asks.
“I like it,” Brendan says. “That’s strategy.”
“The dragon could really kill the hell out of us,” Marco, who will never learn, explains.
“No. Let’s fight the dragon,” I say, and the Dungeon Master nods. “It’s part of the game. Maybe we can tame him and ride him.”
“Ride him?” Cherninsky says. “Are you out of your mind?”
“People do it.”
“It would be cool,” Brendan says.
“I got one thing to say,” Cherninsky says, out of his chair now, pacing. “I’m not going to die here.”
“Take a chance,” I say. “Otherwise it’s just boring. You’re the one who said we shouldn’t be afraid to die.”
“When did I say that?”
“Down at the reservoir.”
“The reservoir,” the Dungeon Master says. “You guys talk about the campaign down there? You suck each other’s little bird dicks and talk tactics?”
“Yeah,” Cherninsky says. “We suck them Bergen Pines style.”
“Guys,” I say. “Stop it. Come on. Let’s decide about the dragon. You really want to bail?”
“Better safe than sorry,” Marco says.
“Is that an old paladin saying?”
“You’re outvoted,” Cherninsky says to me.
“Fine.”
“Okay,” Cherninsky says to the Dungeon Master. “We’ll just scoop up what’s near our feet and not rile the dragon. Can you roll for not riling the dragon?”
“Sure you want to do this?” the Dungeon Master asks. “This moment might never come again.”
“We’re sure.”
“Listen,” the Dungeon Master says. “I know I’ve been hard on all of you. I want to be more easygoing from now on. I want you to have fun.”
“This is fun,” Brendan says. “Really. Thank you. This is so exciting. But I think right now we should just grab a little gold and leave the cave.”
“This is pathetic,” I say.
“You don’t know anything about real violence,” Brendan says.
“What?”
“You heard.”
“It’s a dragon, man! It’s not real!”
I notice Cherninsky slide a scrap of paper over to the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master drops dice in his leather cup, the one reserved for the most fateful rolls. The dice thump on the desk blotter.
“Consider the dragon officially riled.”
“No,” Brendan says. “No, no.”
“Get the gold!” Cherninsky says.
I brandish my two-handed sword at the dragon while the others shovel treasure and flee.
“Come on!” they call.
“Go,” I say. “I’ll catch up. I’ve got a sudden craving for dragon burgers.”
A smile wavers on the Dungeon Master’s face. Because I am brave, I realize, he will spare me.
I charge the dragon, leap with my sword for his throat. Rainbow flame pours over my magic chain mail.
The Dungeon Master flicks his eyes at my roll.
“You’re dead. Deep-fried.”
“Huh?”
“A craving for dragon burgers? You think you’re in a movie?”
“No,” I say. “I think I’m in a fantasy game. And I have magic chain mail.”
“Bogus magic chain mail,” the Dungeon Master says. “You bought it off that wino monk.”
“It’s held up okay until now.”
“You thought you could kill a dragon? Sorry, my friend. Long may we honor the memory of Valium.”
“This is bullshit.”
“Bullshit?” the Dungeon Master says. He’s wound up. He really isn’t that well. “It’s not bullshit. It’s probability. What, you gonna kwy? You gonna kwy like my little brutha? Life is nasty, brutish, and more to the point, it bites grandpa ass. Get it, bird dick? How’s your two-handed bird dick now?”
“It’s great,” I say.
The remainder of the group makes it out of the mountain maze, but the goats turn out to be shape-shifters, just as Cherninsky warned. They transform into ogres with huge spiked maces. It’s hardly a fight. Before he dies, Cherninsky’s thief does manage to stick an ogre with his dirk. The ogre turns back into a goat, then into Cherninsky’s dead sister, drenched, draped in seaweed.
“Just a little girl,” the Dungeon Master says.
“You freak,” I say.
Cherninsky’s got his pen out, and I think he’s about to go for the Dungeon Master’s neck, but then he starts to bawl.
“Cry it out, sweetheart,” the Dungeon Master says.
“Leave him alone,” I say.
“This doesn’t concern you,” says the Dungeon Master. “Just back off. You have no clue.”
“Okay,” Marco says. “It’ll be okay.”
He sounds like my father.
“The hell it will,” the Dungeon Master says.
The Dungeon Master holds up the note Cherninsky passed him.
“Wait till you hear this,” he says. “Your pal was planning to steal everybody’s gold. He wanted me to roll for it.”
“He’s a thief,” I say.
“Go ahead, defend him.”
“I am.”
Brendan freezes in his chair. Cherninsky keeps weeping. Marco bobs in some ruined communion with the spirits of okay.
I stand, whack the screen off the Dungeon Master’s desk, see the dice, the sheets of graph paper, the manuals and numerical tables. There are doodles on the blotter. Crosshatched vaginas with angel wings. They soar through ballpoint clouds.
“I said never touch the screen,” the Dungeon Master says.
“And I say don’t flash girls you will never have at the ice rink. Don’t set fire to your shits in the parking lot. You’re a mental case. They should have kept you locked up.”
The Dungeon Master comes around the desk, and I think he’s about to make a speech. He lowers his head and spears me in the gut. We crash together to the floor. He squeezes my throat. I palm his chin, push. Marco screams, and I’m almost out of air when Brendan climbs the Dungeon Master’s back, bites his head. They both tumble away. The door bangs open and Doctor Varelli leans in.
“Play nice, you goddamn puppies!” he howls, shuts the door.
We lie there, heaving. My wrist throbs. I smell raspberry soda in the carpet.
The Dungeon Master paws at the blood on his head. Brendan rubs his tooth.
“You children,” the Dungeon Master says, rises, lumbers off. We hear him yell at his father in the kitchen. A loser, he calls Doctor Varelli, a lesbian.
“It’s been a little difficult around here,” says Marco.
I crawl over to the window. In the next yard, some kids kick a ball. It looks wonderful.
* * *
My broken wrist takes a long time to heal. I stay clear of the Varelli house, and at school only Eric signs my cast. He initials it, as though his full name might incriminate him. My dad says I don’t have to get a job until the cast comes off.
I join the after-school club, roll a ranger called Valium the Second, but nobody thinks it’s funny. Why would they? Lucy Mantooth plays a wizard-thief. It’s clear she doesn’t want me in the club.
Eric lives near me, and sometimes we walk home together. He likes to cut through some trees near the Varellis’ house, but I never speak of them. One day we see the Dungeon Master’s Corvette in the driveway. His father bought it for him last year, but the Dungeon Master has never driven it. He doesn’t even have a license.
“You like our game so far?” Eric asks.
“It’s cool.”
It is cool, despite the death stares from Lucy Mantooth. We fly dragons, battle giants, build castles, raise armies, families, crops. But it’s all too majestic, really. No goblin child will shank you for your coin pouch. You’ll never die from a bad potato. I miss the indignities.
“I think Lucy likes you,” Eric says.
“What’s the giveaway? The fact that she never talks to me or that she rolls her eyes whenever I say anything?”
“Both.”
“I guess I don’t know much about girls.”
“You’ll learn,” Eric says. “You’ve been out with those weirdos.”
“Everything’s weird if you look long enough,” I say.
“I don’t know about that,” Eric says. “We’re sponsored by the school, just like the chess team.”
* * *
I get bored with Eric’s game. Lucy Mantooth never warms up. Her wizard-thief leaves me for dead in a collapsing wormhole. Was there something I was supposed to say? I resume my old routine: peanut butter, batch, nap.
One day I’m headed home to do just that. A sports car pulls up to the sidewalk, a midnight-blue Corvette.
“Need a ride?” the Dungeon Master says.
I don’t, but slide in anyway. I’ve never been in a Corvette.
We drive around town for a while, past my school, the hobby shop.
“Thought you didn’t have a license,” I say.
“Who said I do?” The Dungeon Master smiles. “There are rumors and there is the truth, and there are true rumors. You want the rundown? Here’s the rundown. Hit a kid with a bat and gave him brain damage, yes. Flashing, yes. Burning my bowel movements, no. Have I been to the bughouse? I’ve been to the bughouse. Am I insane? Does my opinion even count? Remember all the newspaper stories about how the game makes kids crazy? Makes them do horrible things?”
“My mom clips them for me.”
“Love those. Take, for example, suicides. The game doesn’t create suicides. If anything, it postpones them. I mean, the world gives you many reasons to snuff it, got to admit.”
“I’m fourteen,” I say. “I don’t know what I admit.”
“In another age you could be a father already. In another neighborhood.”
We drive for a while. We’re a few towns east.
“Nobody’s seen you lately,” the Dungeon Master says. “Marco says you play with some snotty faggots at school.”
“I stopped.”
“You hear about Cherninsky? He got caught with all this stolen musical gear in his garage. Amps and guitars and drums, the whole deal. Tried to dump it in the reservoir, but the cops got most of it. Now his dad might go to jail.”
“His dad?” I say.
“Harsh, right? Anyway, we’re into war-gaming now. Real technical shit. It’s not the same. Brendan can barely handle it. We’re doing Tobruk. I’m Rommel.”
“The Desert Fox.”
“You read,” the Dungeon Master says, though I picked up the name from an old tank movie. “That’s what I like about you. That’s why I thought I could teach you.”
“Teach me what?”
We pull into a scenic lookout, the Palisades. Past the bushes in front of us the cliff drops sheer to some rocks in the Hudson. The Corvette idles, and I wonder if I made a mistake when I accepted this ride. The Dungeon Master looks off across the river, as though ready to jump it.
“Teach me what?” I say.
The Dungeon Master guns the engine. I turn to him, that pale skin, the fine-spun beard, the bitter, glittering eyes.
“Teach me what?”
His answer is another rev. His fingers drum on the gear knob. We’re going to fly a dragon after all. Part of me is ready. Maybe it’s the part that kept me in Doctor Varelli’s study so long. I grip my seat and await ignition, fire, scorched ascent.
“Damn.” The Dungeon Master laughs. “You’re shaking.”
He shifts into reverse and swings the car around. Soon we’re back on town streets.
“Had you shitting,” he says.
“You did.”
“I’m doing that for real at some point.”
“Oh,” I say.
“But not for a while.”
“That’s good.”
“My dad’s kicking me out after graduation. I think it’ll be better for Marco. Kid needs to bloom.”
“Where will you go? Your mom’s house?”
“My mom doesn’t have a house. She died when Marco was born.”
“Really? I’m sorry. I figured she just left.”
“Well, guess it’s true in a way. No, I’ve got a cousin in Canada. We might room together.”
“That’ll be fun.”
“Probably not. Here we are.”
“Thanks for the lift,” I say.
“You were almost home when I picked you up.”
“Still, thanks.”
I’m cutting across the yard when the Dungeon Master calls my name.
“No hard feelings, okay?”
I stop, picture him there behind me with his ridiculous head sticking out of the passenger-side window, but I cannot turn around. I’m still trembling from the drive. Do I have an almost uncanny sense in this instant of what’s to come, some cold, swirling vision whose provenance I do not comprehend but in which I see the Dungeon Master, blue cheeked, hanging by his communion tie in Doctor Varelli’s study, and Cherninsky, his dad in prison, panhandling with the scrawny punks, the pin-stuck runaways in Alphabet City, or me, Burger Castle employee of the month for the month of October, degunking the fry-o-lator in the late-autumn light?
Of course I don’t.
“Really,” the Dungeon Master calls again. “No hard feelings.”
It must be the dumbest thing he’s ever said. No hard feelings? What could ever be harder than feelings?
I want to tell him this, but even as I turn back, the Corvette peels away.
DENIERS
“Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut,” said Mandy’s father. American traps tended to hang open. Pure crap poured out. What he and the others had gone through shouldn’t have a name, he told her friend Tovah all those years later in the nursing home. People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddamn fairy tales about children who got out alive.
Mandy’s father, Jacob, had never said anything like this to Mandy, not in any of his tongues. He’d said other things, or nothing at all. He had worked for thirty-nine years as a printer in Manhattan. The founders of the company had invented the yellow pages.
“Think about that,” he often said.
Mandy did think about it, the thick directory that used to boost her up on her stool at the kitchen counter.
She’d spent her childhood mornings at that counter, culling raisins from her cereal, surveying the remains of her father’s dawn meal, his toast crusts, the sugared dregs in his coffee mug. Sometimes she wondered if he would come home from work that day, but it was a game, because he always came home. He’d eat his dinner and take to his reclining—or, really, collapsing—chair, listen to his belly gurgle, read popular histories of the American West, maybe watch a rerun of
Hogan’s Heroes
, the only show he could abide.