The Game

day forward, like he did everyone else who wasn’t part of his pickup business.
    Next, Courtney met Katya. “I just took a pregnancy test,” Katya told her, puckering her lips into a childish expression of self-pity. “It came out positive.”
    “You should have the baby,” Courtney said. “It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
    I was living The Surreal Life.

Mystery kneeled in front of Katya and kissed her belly. “If you want to keep the baby, whether we are together forever or not, I will support your decision. It would be a beautiful baby.”
    The sun poured into the kitchen from the patio, illuminating a thin, orderly chain of ants that ran from the brickwork outside to the overflowing trashcan. Before he stood up, Mystery licked his finger and wiped a thin stripe of saliva through the middle of the chain. The ants went scurrying in every direction at the point of rupture.
    “I can’t even believe you’d think of keeping the baby,” Katya replied, her voice chirpy but scornful. “You are weird. You’re acting like we’re married.”
    The ants began to fall back into line. Soon, order was restored. It was hard to tell there had ever been a catastrophe.
    “I love you,” Mystery said, without emotion. “And you know my mission in life: survive and replicate. So I don’t see any harm in having the baby. I’m willing to fulfill my half of the obligation.”
    Our house wasn’t self-organizing like a line of ants. There was no chain of command or unspoken structure. The invisible chemical path we were all following smelled like male hormones. And its natural state was disorder.
    All afternoon, Mystery and Katya fought with each other over whether she should have an abortion and who should pay for it. These matters, however, are not group decisions. Katya and Mystery went to an abortion clinic three days later.
    “Guess what?” Katya squealed when she returned. “I’m not pregnant.”
    She jumped into the air and clapped her hands together in praise of luck. Mystery stood behind her, giving her the finger. The look on his face was pure hatred. I’d never seen him display such malevolence toward a woman before.
    A few hours later, I found Katya at the bar pouring herself a glass of Chardonnay. Then another. Then another.
    “Mystery doesn’t come out of the room, and he doesn’t fuck,” she complained. “So I’m going to have a good time tonight without him.”
    “You deserve it.”
    “Come drink with me,” she cooed.
    “That’s all right.”
    “No worries, no troubles.” She took a slow sip of wine and sat next to me on the couch.
    “Wow,” she said. “You really have been working out. Your arms look good.”
    “Thanks.” One of the things I’d learned in the past year and a half was how to take a compliment. Just say, “Thank you.” It’s the only response a confident person can make.
    She sidled up to me and squeezed my biceps. “You’re the only person in the house I can talk to.” Her face was inches away from mine.
    I felt that tingle of energy, the one I’d felt just before I kissed the hostess Tyler Durden had picked up at the Hard Rock.
    “Look at this,” she said. She was lifting her top now. “I got a scratch.”
    “That’s nice.”
    “Here, feel it.”
    She took my hand and pulled it toward her breast. I really had to get going.
    “Well, it’s been fun talking, but I have to go to my room and floss my cat now.”
    “But you don’t have a cat,” she whined.
    I circled around to the back of the house and entered Mystery’s room through the patio. He was lying on top of his bed in jeans with a laptop computer resting on his bare stomach. He was watching Back to the Future II.
    “When I was in tenth grade, I wanted to kill myself because I had nothing left to live for,” he said. “Then I heard that Back to the Future II was opening in twenty-three days. I had a calendar, and I would mark off each day until I could see the movie. It’s the only thing that kept me from killing myself.”
    He paused the movie and lifted the laptop off his stomach. “When I saw it and heard the opening music, I cried, dude. It was my reason to live. I know all the props.” He held up the DVD box and showed me the cover. “I touched this car.”
    I sat down at the foot of his bed. No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. I picked up the DVD box and looked at it. Mystery enjoyed movieslike Real Genius and Young Einstein and The Karate Kid. I liked