LIVING IN A BULLSHIT REALITY

“I liked it,” he says. Rubs his fingers lightly over the nubby fabric of the bedspread. Its light blue, faded, and he thinks suddenly of being within the game. Startlingly red blankets on the bed, probably velvet, Allegra’s feet bare against it.

The real Allegra looks up, and her face is carefully blank, but then, her face is always blank, carefully or not. Her fingers pause or tighten on the trigger of her gun, and he wishes that he hadn’t chosen to bring this up while she was cleaning their weapons.

Still, he’s a realist, and realists don’t pretend that things never happened, that words were never spoken. He has to go on, to answer the unasked question. “The game,” he says. He looks up from the blanket clenched in his hands and shrugs. “I liked it. TranCendenZ, or eXistanZ, or whatever the fuck that was. I liked it.”

To Allegra’s credit, she does put down the gun and just looks at him patiently, waiting for what he’ll say next. “Yes?”

“Its just…I liked it. Not because it was a game, because it didn’t feel like a game. It felt like reality, but better.” Ted searches to find the words in the infinity of blue, stretched across his open palms. “It was like heightened reality. Everything smelled better, tasted better. Felt better. I know it wasn’t real, but it felt real. Better than real. You know?”

“Yes, Ted, I was there too, remember?” Allegra says. Her eyes are narrowed, her mouth tight. “I was in that bullshit ‘reality’ too, I was the fucking creator of it.” She sighs, looking down at her empty hands. “Are you saying that you don’t want to go on? Are you defecting? Becoming one of them? I just need to know.”

“No,” he says quickly, but she interrupts him.

“Look, I need you, Pikel. I need your weapons knowledge, I need your intelligence, I need your naïve belief that good just has to triumph over evil. I need you, Ted.” Allegra’s eyes are strong but pleading, and Ted pretends that he doesn’t see tears glittering brightly in her eyes, that her hands aren’t shaking as she approaches the bed.

Wait, no. Those are tears in her eyes; her hands are shaking as she approaches the bed. Reality.

He shakes it off. “No, no, Allegra.” He draws her onto his lap, kissing her quiet as she straddles him. He forget sometimes how tiny she is, how fragile. In the game she’d seemed larger than life, the celebrity, unafraid. Here and now, in reality, she is paper-thin and brittle. “You know I would never leave you. You know, you know that I would never betray realism, especially for some fucking game. I’ve devoted my life to it, okay? I’ve killed for it. I’m just saying…I don’t know what I’m saying.”

He kisses her again and touches their foreheads together. Her hair falls on his neck, tickling him, and he has a game-flash. Himself crouched over Allegra on the road, her hair falling onto his hand and becoming red, sticky with blood. He breathes in deep, trying to forget. “Look, we killed it. We killed him, we killed tranCendenZ. I’m not going to lie to you. I enjoyed playing the game, but I wouldn’t want to live there. To stay there forever.” He shivers, thinking of it. Not a bad shiver. He tries again. “I wouldn’t want to be with a you that isn’t really you.”

“Good,” Allegra says, a low hum in his ear. Properly reassured, her mood seems to be shifting from vulnerable to playful, and she shifts on his lap, rubbing herself against him. She takes his hand and slides it slowly into the front of her pants, into soft, searing heat. “Could a game ever be as good as this?” she breathes into his ear.

“No,” he breathes back, closing his eyes against memories of game-Allegra, legs spread long and bare against boxes of game stock. Allegra’s tongue in his ear is no match for the heat of her hand, inserting the cold length of a game cord into a bioport in his spine that never really existed.

This, here and now, doesn’t really feel like reality, and he knows why gaming is so seductive: because its reality, elevated. Because its more real than real.

“I’m glad you to know you thought that,” Allegra says against his shoulder.

He barely has time to react to that verb tense, to thought, before he hears a click. And then there’s nothing. And it still doesn’t feel real.

Are we still in the game?

 

END

return to decay