Joyland (16 page)

LEVEL 8:
MS. PAC-MAN

PLAYER 1

Twiss’s
: its letters hissed in yellow and purple plastic. At night, the sign creaked on gigantic hinges in the wind. In the afternoon, August, there was no wind, only the music of a distant transformer and the thrum of rubber under Chris’s thumb, BMX lying nearly in his lap on the pavement. He spun the tire of the prone vehicle, faster and faster, trailed his finger along the rubber grid. His nail dirtied as he did so, but Chris did not notice.

Across the street from the Gas ’n Go, the building where Joyland had lived was now nothing but a free-standing concrete square, four sides of a two-faced creature. In its heyday during its peak hours, the small windows let in only the most burned quality of light. They were now filled with bristol board, obscenely white, set on either side of the door like eyes that had rolled inward. The door — chain links like teeth across a lip of handle — bore a hand-markered sign that said only CLOSED. If he were to pick up his bicycle and spin across the road and around the building, Chris knew he’d find the rest of the edifice undisturbed: back wall still sporting the Rolling Stones mural. A tongue pouring out of a fat red gaping mouth. A once-joyous
fuck you.
Chris picked up a stone and used it to write in grey on the grey concrete gutter: WEEK 6. He underlined it and tossed the stone away, resumed spinning his bike tire.

In June, the two side walls had been blank lobes, studded only with garbage cans. Now the beer bottles lined up, markers indicating the weeks the boys had been locked out. A crumpled chip bag beside Chris shifted in the breeze, scurried across the street and joined a small army of newspapers and brightly coloured debris that had blown up against the foundations. The garbage cans had been quickly liberated to form bike ramps for trick jumps in the alley behind the defunct arcade.

The first time Chris had seen Laurel Richards was at Joyland. Unlike the other girls, Laurel was actually playing. At the Kung-Fu Master machine, she jumped and ducked with such ferocious grace it had seemed to Chris even the knife-wielding woman onscreen should have been flinging lotus flowers at Laurel’s man. Laurel’s short, dark hair feathered around her face, almost boyish, if not for the pale pink lip clenched firmly by her teeth as she concentrated. She worked the controller between frantic fingers, worked it so hard her ass shimmered visibly beneath the aqua-and-white pinstriped nylon shorts.

Chris had moved as if programmed, followed a pattern he wasn’t even aware of. Whatever he had been saying to J.P. as they entered the arcade was lost. Chris felt a surge in his system, a momentary blink, then he went into autopilot and followed the most direct path to his destination. Standing behind her would not be like standing behind J.P. or Johnny Davis, and he’d known this before he even got there. While he’d wanted to know her score, he’d also wanted the smell of coconut suntan lotion from her shoulders kicking in with the lurch of her lean body, the sound of her breathing and cursing. It was a wonderful, terrible thing, to stand behind a girl like that.

Chris didn’t know how long he had stood there, eyes fixed on the screen, silently tracking the movements of the characters while his body tracked the movement of her hips, the slight swivel and bend of her neck, the motion of her arms that released blasts of baby-powder Soft & Dry, followed by the faintest whiff of sweat and true female scent. How Chris had felt and smelled all that in a place where the girls leaned against machines smoking twice as much as the guys, he didn’t know. In the final four weeks before Joyland had closed, Laurel’s scents and rhythms were imprinted on him in such a way that he could detect her presence even if he was in mid-game and she was on the other side of the arcade. She’d been like the cherries in the Ms. Pac-Man game. She came onscreen and he could hear the soft bleeping, like a beacon, marking her every step through the maze of ghosts he was constantly running from. If Chris had a quarter for every time he thought about Laurel Richards after that, he could open his own arcade and play ’til doomsday.

Chris stopped the bike wheel with his hand, picked himself up off the ground, righted his vehicle and climbed on. He let himself fall from the curb into the street. On the other side, he circled the building — its dim walls revealing nothing more — and pumped home.

He imagined the black-painted walls inside and whatever was left of his hopes, the ghosts of cut-off denim and bra-straps through mesh tops. In contrast, Chris felt the silence of his own body like a hundred still-invisible levels stacked up. His thumbs clumsy with solitude and lack of practice, at home he was only able to clear the first level. Even then, he felt as though he passed through candy-coloured ghosts that stuck to his hands. Laurel was a blue apparition. He was an open mouth, chasing her around the screen in his head. Within the walls of Joyland, he might have caught something more real, the girl in the ghost, the red smell of ripe strawberries, the pretzel loop of her fist around the joystick.

But he was on the outside, playing over his moves with the precision of one still trying to figure out the next steps. The passageway leading from one side of the screen to the other. The key to the beloved building with its two mouths, one open and one closed. The pattern that emerged only out of instinct and repeat errors. The one his mind could not retrace.

The stripes of her shorts, her short hair, hard laugh, and soft lips.

So went August. Chris lay. In the daytime on his skinny single mattress, the Eddie Van Halen poster affixed on the top wall, and the Christie Brinkley one on the side wall. Stretched diagonally between them, he learned to listen to the sounds outside the room, to the screams and squeaks of his sister and her prepubescent friends, the
pish pish pish
of his mother’s sandals, and the rhythmic jangling of his father’s pocket change. Between them, he learned to touch himself modestly, to lay always facing away from the door on his stomach, hand down front of jogging pants (jogging pants for easy access), book open in front of him in case of interruption.

He learned the pillow was no substitute for the design of Laurel Richards’ thighs. He learned his hand was faster at video games than at masturbation. He learned that he was a wonderful, terrible lay. There were boards he could clear that he had never seen, power spots he could eat that had no names, manoeuvres he could execute that were unrepeatable. But for all that, he could not keep the most beautiful girl’s face in his mind’s eye while he played. It was an excruciating way — in the end — to watch his mobile yellow head wilt and die. Alone.

Chris lay. In the nighttime on his skinny mattress. Stretched perpendicular to Eddie, he turned to face Christie. Each of them became dark shapes without distinct features. In pale squares hanging, their bodies became featureless and unsmiling, genderless and uncaring. In the slight breeze from the electric fan, they shivered small paper sighs. Their edges curled. They bubbled and breathed, dark blobs, suspended beings. Between them he learned to touch himself immoderately.

If Chris could draw a picture of what his heart looked like, it would be all hair, jostling over a heavy bass solo. Chris lay on his back, legs bent at the knees, dick coiled backward against his stomach like a garter snake he had just found and hadn’t decided if he would wrap it around his hand and chase girls with it, or put it in an immense pickle jar and punch air holes for it.

PLAYER 2

The world was laid out in concrete-coloured rows, rectangles of red and brown rooftop, and succulent blinking squares of water. The cranks for the covers announced holy ceremonies in May, when the Scotts and the Stanleys had exposed their in-ground pools, gigantic scrolls perched on the ends. Now the pools were naked and much-used. From the top of her backyard tree, Tammy could see everything. All she wanted was a glimpse of blue through the leaves, fence boards, and antennae that screened her secret perch from their private parties. The higher she dared to climb, the more she could see.

Her parents called her the Neighbourhood Watch. They’d even bought her a pair of binoculars for her last birthday. Chris called her Harriet the Spy. Tammy had read the novel earlier that spring. She still wanted Harriet’s cynicism for herself, her streak of cruel perception. Instead, she found herself affected only by the sad semblances of other people’s lives.

People came and went. They came and went. The expressions on their faces were strange, pensive expressions. They did not know they were being watched. They were not waiting for anything to happen. They were without any expectation, hope, or anger. They moved like ghosts in their own lives, their bodies like thin shafts of light thrown up from their shadows. From her altitude in the thick-limbed maple, everyone was small by comparison. Their arms moved stiffly at their sides like Playmobile men, their hands always cupped. Their feet were like Barbie’s, not made to allow them to stand upright. Everyone walked hunched over. Everyone carried things from here to there. Everyone came and went. Afternoon and evening. No one ever really looked around. No one looked up.

The Stanleys’ lights were on a timer in their front room and turned on and off at the same time every evening. Though the curtains hung like a wedding veil over the window, Tammy could see the entire room. The sheers formed only a pale barrier that gave everything a double outline. She could distinguish the picture frames on the opposite wall, though she couldn’t make out who was in the photos. No one ever passed in or out of the doorway at the back of the room, as long as she watched. She named this room the Dead Room, and saying it — even to herself — sent shivers up the backs of her knees. There was something almost too real about it.

With the exception of the Dead Room, there was nothing extraordinary about the Stanley house or its occupants’ lives. Rita and George Stanley were an attractive couple, a few years younger than Tammy’s parents. They had the pool, where Mr. Stanley did laps with religious zeal. But they had no children, and so were of nearly no interest to Tammy.

On the surface, one would expect the Scotts to be more exciting, with their teenage daughter who had played the lead that spring in the school play, and their college-aged son, Duncan, who never showed up twice with the same old bomber of a car. He had babysat Tammy and Chris years ago, but even at seven and ten, they could tell he was a dork who desperately wanted to appear cool to somebody. Unfortunately, they may have been his biggest fans, and even they didn’t laugh at his jokes. His most decent vehicle was the VW Bus Tammy and Chris named the Green Machine. But Dunc Scott quickly went from groovy to geek with the Blue Bomber, an old wagon with wood panel on the side. (On crasser days, Chris called it Ol’ Blue-Balled Woody, and Tammy laughed reluctantly, understanding the implication by his half-whisper, though not entirely certain of the meaning.) Duncan followed Ol’ Blue with his 1971 Chunky Cherry El Camino. Without the binoculars, she could identify him by his assortment of sound effects, long before he rounded the corner. The Scotts provided a passable modicum of entertainment. But in spite of the glimmering surface beyond the fence, their lives too, held a quiet misery — punctuated — almost emphasized by occasional splashes in the pool.

From an aerial view, Diana Scott, sixteen, bent ballerina-style, not unlike the painted mirrors in the home decoration section of the Sears catalogue. The flattened shape of femininity framed by one’s own reflection. The perpetual girl. Her hair loosened and fell over her face, toes pointed like a dancer, arms looped loosely around her skinny, suntanned knees. Tammy expected there to be more excitement in the life of a teenager, especially one who acted and sang, and owned at least three different bikinis. Tammy wanted a never-ending parade of boyfriends and girlfriends to arrive in cars, to storm in tossing red, white, and blue beach balls and snapping towels. But there was only Diana, strutting about the concrete by herself. Sitting on the edge with the occasional friend, kicking their feet slowly back and forth through the aqua light. Again and again, Diana bent to paint her toenails. She drank Pepsi-Free. She put her lipstick on again. She yelled through the window to her mother. Her mother brought out the nail polish remover. Diana painted her toes again.

The day the whole design of the neighbourhood shifted, Chris was monopolizing the television, watching the Olympics. He was nearly as fanatical about running as video games. He made no secret about the fact a guy like him (with a mouth that was too big for his body) had to learn to move fast if he was going to stay alive. It was true. Tammy had once seen Pinky Goodlowe chase him from one end of the schoolyard to the other, across the street, through the park, and over the fence into J.P.’s backyard. She had been sitting on the swings with Samantha when the flight began. All she saw were the white stripes of her brother’s sleeves pumping furiously, his head tucked so low it was almost under his arm, like a football. Chris ran erratically as if dodging players that weren’t there. His pursuer was too angry to follow his zigzags. Even from Tammy’s vantage point, by the playground equipment, Pinky Goodlowe was unmistakable. In the eighth grade at fifteen, he was nearly six feet tall and built like Hulk Hogan. Levis faded to white in the bum, high-top running shoes, and Ozzy Osbourne hair. As soon as she saw Chris start his crooked sprint, Tammy knew that if Pinky caught him, her brother’s head would be bitten off as easily as a bat’s. But when Pinky was crossing the street into the park, her brother was already hurdling the top of the fence. By the time Pinky was curling his meathook fingers through the diamond pattern of the wire barrier, her brother was probably drinking ginger ale with Mr. and Mrs. Breton.