The Game

Canada is free. We can’t afford to take him anywhere in the States—especially if they institutionalize him.”
    “Let me try. If it gets worse, I’ll send him back to you.”
    Watching Mystery’s relationship with Katya unfold had been an eyeopener. He invited her to move in. He married her. He got her not-pregnant. He ignored her and resented her. He gave Herbal permission to sleep with her. He was no one’s victim but his own.
    In the meantime, ever since the New York Times article, half a dozen reality TV executives had called Mystery—including the producers of American Idol. VH1 had even sent him a contract for a show in which he turned losers into Lotharios. The stardom Mystery wanted so desperately was his for the taking. But he wasn’t calling anyone back.
    “This has happened before,” Martina sighed when I told her about the reality-show offers. “Every time he gets close to making it, he breaks down and throws it all away.”
    “So do you mean…”
    “Yes,” she said. “He’s actually scared of the success he wants so badly.”

The next night, Katya came home at 2:00 A.M . She was with Herbal and the couple from New Orleans she sometimes slept with. Mystery pushed open his door, sat on a pillow on the floor, and watched them as they drank in the common room. He was making an effort to hold himself together.
    The woman in the couple was six feet tall, with a gym-taut abdomen, brown hair hanging down to a well-sculpted butt, brand new fake breasts, and a large nose that was next in line for the plastic surgeon’s scalpel. When Katya leaned over and made out with her, Mystery’s face scrunched up and reddened. If he’d just held onto Katya a little longer, he could have had his elusive threesome. Instead he was confined to his pillow, watching Katya laugh with the couple, watching Herbal sit there with a self-satisfied grin, watching the girls change into bikinis and prance out to the hot tub, watching Herbal join them.
    Katya had given Mystery her love, and now he was paying for tossing it in the trash. Whether intentionally or not, she was rubbing her bisexuality, her youth, and her happiness in his face.
    By morning, Mystery’s sanity had decomposed further. When he wasn’t crying on the couches, he was patrolling the house, trying to make sure Katya and Herbal were apart. If he couldn’t find them, he’d call her. Whether she answered the phone or not, the result was the same: Mystery would fly off the handle and destroy whatever was within arm’s or leg’s reach. He pulled several bookcases to the ground; decimated his pillows, leaving feathers strewn across his room; and threw his cell phone against the wall, snapping the apparatus in half and leaving a deep black dent in the plaster.
    “Where’s Katya?” he’d ask Playboy.
    “She’s shopping for clothes on Melrose.”
    “Where’s Herbal?”
    “He’s, um, sort of with her.”
    And then Mystery’s heart would twist and his face would fall and his eyes would leak and his legs would give out from under him and he’d makesome bizarre evolutionary justification for it all. “It’s selfish genes,” he’d say. “It’s the nonexistent potential baby punishing me for leaving.”
    When Herbal returned from shopping on Melrose with Katya, I warned him, “You’re being tooled. She’s using you to get back at Mystery.”
    “No,” he said. “It’s not true. We have real feelings for each other.”
    “Well, can you do me a favor and just try not to see her until Mystery gets better? I’m going to ask her to leave the house for a while.”
    “Fine,” he said, with some reluctance. “But it’s not going to be easy.”
    That night, I took Katya and her brother to the movies. Plan A was to get her out of the house and away from Herbal so that Mystery didn’t get any worse. Plan B was to fuck her in order to show Herbal that his connection with Katya wasn’t so special.
    Fortunately, plan A worked.
    “You are destroying Mystery,” I told her as I drove her back from the theater. “You need to leave the house. And don’t come back until I say it’s okay. This isn’t about you anymore. Mystery has a serious psychological problem, and you’ve set it off.”
    “Okay,” she said. She looked up at me like a child being disciplined.
    “And promise me not to sleep with Herbal again. You’re hurting one of my roommates, and you’re about to break the heart of another. I can’t stand by and watch it.”
    “I