Page 124 of Playworld

“Because you hogeverything,” he said.

Then he stormed out.

Traffic was terrible on the drive to Great Neck. From the FDR Drive, I could see the endless queue we were in, forking in both directions, east across the Triborough Bridge and moving at a snail’s pace across the river, above Randall’s Island. How much life was wasted like this? How much time, when it was added up, was idled away in this idiocy? How was I supposed to know that Oren wanted to work for Sam? And why didn’t I figure that out beforehand? Why was I so selfish?

“Why so quiet?” Naomi asked, turning off the radio.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

Why was I here?

“Someone’s in a bad mood,” Naomi said, and turned the radio’s volume back up.

The second time was at the office. It was day’s end, and I had decided I needed to see Griffynweld in its entirety. The staff had already left, along with Sam. Naomi was working at her desk. I’d spent the slow afternoon photocopying all of my world’s various regions, taping these together on the floor behind my desk to form a complete map. When these puzzle pieces were all connected, the result was as big as a queen-sized bed. I sat cross-legged before this, feeling a tremendous sense of accomplishment, reveling in the detail contained in each landmark, the various keeps and castles and dungeons that had once filled individual notebooks now marked on visible coordinates. I sensed Naomi behind me.

“Wow,” she said, and kneeled to join me on the floor, “what’s this you made?”

“It’s the world I’ve been building all summer,” I said.

“What’s all this for?” she said.

“My friends. My brother. It’s a game we play.”

“How does it work?”

“The Dungeon Master—me—creates a universe that has an overarching story, a beginning, a middle, and an end,” I said. “But there are smaller stories, adventures, that take place in between. Like here.” I leaned over the map and tapped the two towers icon at the southeastern tip.

“It kinda looks like New York,” she said. Then she touched the map.

“This place, everything about it, is in this notebook.” And I flipped through the spiral notebook containing the notes and maps, every room charted with treasure and traps. “And a group of players, who create characters of their choosing—they pick their race, class, and attributes—tell those stories with me. So the trick is to listen to their stories, to partly adapt the game to them, to let them help determine the game’s flow,” I continued, tracing the snaking shape of the Cronos Canyon’s river, “and to sort of guide them, while also putting obstacles in their way. Using these dice. To account for probabilities, for chance. It’s also my job to nudge them toward the places they need be, to gain experience and weapons and magic in order to acquire everything necessary to complete the campaign. Which is the way it becomes our story. Together.” I felt a little embarrassed having talked for so long but was also pleased with my summary.

“So what’s the big picture, then?” Naomi asked, and sat down next to me, to my right, but with her back to the map. “What’s the story?” She lay on her right hip, propped on her right hand, so that her shoulder nearly touched mine. I began to tell her, to outline for her the scourge that was the powerful and evil wizard, the Magus Moraga, and describe the band of teenagers who had witnessed their families and friends murdered by him and vowed revenge. I explained that, to defeat him, they would need to go on a quest for the pieces of the legendary Shield Sheafson’s armor, a set of relics more powerful than any weapon in all of Griffynweld, because it was invulnerable to all evil-aligned magic and could therefore destroy the tyrannical hold the magus had on his followers,freeing them, once again, to live peacefully among one another. While I was outlining all this, she said, “Well, I probably wouldn’t be much good at it. But I sure wish I could play with you.” And at this moment, I missed everybody in my life so terribly: my father, to whom I hadn’t spoken in weeks; my mother, who was so sad; my brother, who was so angry; Cliffnotes, only a few miles uptown but as far as Castle Pym was from Griffynweld’s eastern ocean; Tanner, probably sitting by the ocean now and on the same beach as Amanda. Even Amanda, who had treated me so poorly. So that when I came back to myself, seated here, on the floor, with Naomi, whose attention was complete, my loneliness was more acute than at any point in my life. When Naomi noticed my expression, she placed her palm to my cheek and kissed me, and I kissed her back, her cheek and her ear, to hide my face; and as during those first times together in her car, she raised her chin ever so slightly and closed her eyes, allowing herself to be kissed. “Never,” she whispered, “never in my life ever has anyone kissed me like you do. If I could only explain,” she said, “what it means to me.”

And then Sam walked in the office.

Because I faced the door, because over Naomi’s shoulder I could see it slowly swing in my direction, I was the first to react. Its glass was frosted, though I had an intimation it was Sam, I don’t know why, and because he did not expect to see us here, he’d proceeded hesitantly, surprised, I could tell, that the lights were still on, the office unlocked, Naomi—usually visible at her desk from that sight line—gone. And when to his right he sensed a presence, beneath him, and glanced in my direction, his view of his wife was slightly obstructed by my desk; her back was to him, his view of me obstructed by her, though she did not move from her position, did not jump up from where she was reclined, her eyes slowly opening as she registered his footfalls, at which point she remained still. There was time only for her to give me a fierce stare—it had just a hint of bravado in it, which I will never forget—for me to barely lean away, and while we were not, in fact, kissing at that moment, our faces were so close to each other’s, it was all so utterly compromising, that I was sure we’d been discovered. And what I will also never forget was how the sight of us registered with Sam—how he paused, so unprepared for this sight, that I was reminded of a deer twitching into visibility as you walk alonga wooded road, the same initial perplexity obtaining between Sam and me as our eyes locked. Of what the next move was. And whose.

Sam, flummoxed, said only, “I forgot something,” and with a barely perceptible shake of his head—it was like watching someone convince himself hehadn’tseen a ghost—strode toward his office, assembled the papers for which he’d returned, and, as if for our benefit—we had not moved an inch—said to the both of us, “I’ll see you at home.” Then he walked out the door backward, pulling it closed behind him, as if to undo the entire episode.

I witnessed Naomi and Sam’s fight that evening. I was scraping the leftovers into the koi pond, enjoying the splash of the fish breaching for the food, when I heard them. It came as if from a distance at first, what they said was muffled, but because I was in the backyard and because it was nighttime, I could see them on the second floor, through their bedroom windows. Sam, miming an explosion in his head; Naomi, in response, jabbed her finger into his chest and then pointed behind her, as if he’d left something in the hallway that she demanded he retrieve. They fought differently from my parents; the distinction was sonic. Dad denied and bemoaned; Mom accused and wailed; pain and heartsickness were its tenor. Sam, meanwhile, mocked and dismissed; Naomi raged and demeaned; their tone was hateful—Naomi’s voice as guttural as Sam’s was high-pitched—and it scared me more than my parents’ fighting but did not stifle my curiosity. Naomi about-faced and marched out of their room, and I moved toward the very back of the yard, to stand invisible before the hedges and follow her progress, since the home’s bay-facing side was mostly glass. Naomi next appeared in the second-story hallway and made her way down the stairs. She entered the living room, where Danny was watching TV, and ordered her to turn it off. Above, I spotted Sam, framed in his bedroom’s middle window, both hands clapped to his cheeks as he contemplated the water; Jackie appeared to my left in the sunroom, oblivious to this conflict, a pint of Häagen-Dazs in one hand, a spoon in the other, until Naomi appeared, striding past her, toward the garage—she waved off her daughter’s question—to go for a drive, I guessed (I heard the door to the garage slam), because I didn’t see her for the rest of the evening, and she didn’t find me in my room that night.

In the days that followed this row, and without fail, it was Sam who took me to lunch. I feared an accusation was forthcoming. In the meantime, he seemed glad for my company, energized at the prospect of introducing me to new cuisine. “The world is our oyster,” he said, laughing, and he took me for these at Grand Central Station, insisting I drench the two dozen we split in mignonette, in horseradish, in cocktail sauce. Next we had the fried scallops with black garlic-ancho aioli. “The spice,” Sam said, “puts hair on your chest.” He chewed with his mouth open; he laughed at the food’s heady flavors; his good mood was both infectious and a relief. He took me for Korean the next day, introduced me to kimchi, challenged me to go toe-to-toe with him and see who could eat the hottest dish.

“If I tap before you,” he said, “I’ll give you five dollars per course.”

“What if I tap?” I asked.

“You tap,” Sam replied, “and you still get a free meal, how’s that for a bargain?”

“Bet,” I said, and we hooked pinkies.

It was a relief to be away from Naomi. It was a comfort to have Sam close. I did feel guilt deceiving him. Playing the part of his surrogate son, I could throw off the role of Lancelot, bedding the queen and destroying the kingdom. There was a lightness, a glee, in being the mentee. I won the fire noodles course, as well as the stir-fried octopus, but conceded at the pork cutlet—the “dreaded ‘drop-dead donkatsu,’ ” Sam intoned as the waiter placed the smoking plate between us. “Don’t worry,” Sam said, as I fanned my tongue and drank glass after glass of ice water, “we’ll get milkshakes afterward to cool the heat.”

The next day we brought beef souvlaki back to the office and ate at our desks, letting the paper catch the glistening green and yellow peppers that squished from the bread. Sam loved to lick the orange grease from his fingers afterward—I had never seen someone actually do this—sealing his lips to his digit’s lowest pad and then pulling to the tip, making a pop at the top and then moving on to the next, ending at the thumb. It was an act I spied Naomi watching from her desk, over her glasses’ bridge, and which, upon its conclusion, caused her to raise her own hands as if she were drying a manicure, the expression on her face one of shocked disgust. We had gyros on Friday, and that afternoon, while Sam was outof the office at a meeting, I called Naomi’s extension and told her to meet me on the elevator. And as soon as we were rising in the car together, I pushed her against the wall and kissed her, at which point she pushed me away and groaned.

“What?” I asked, my heart pounding, because she’d made the same growl with Sam.

“Nothing,” she said, and yanked the deadman’s lever toD. “Just please go brush your teeth.”

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