The Game

into Herbal’s room once she was allowed back in the house. Her revenge, then, was complete.
    That Friday, I drove with Mystery to pick up his sister, mother, and nieces from the airport. They piled into the back of the limo and surrounded him with the love he so desperately craved.
    We then headed to the United Airlines terminal. Mystery had one more guest coming in for the week: Ania. She was the girl he’d met in Chicago, the one he’d claimed online would be the future Mrs. Mystery, the ultimate rebound. One of Mystery’s specialties in sarging was what he called hired guns, such as bartenders, strippers, shot girls, and waitresses. Ania was a coatcheck girl at the Chicago Crobar.
    We pulled outside the terminal and waited. “Get ready to meet my future wife,” Mystery announced to his family.
    “Don’t scare her away like the last one,” his mom chuckled. She seemed to have learned that the secret to surviving the stresses her husband and children had put on her was to never take anyone or anything too seriously. Life was an in-joke between her and God.
    We recognized Ania the moment the automatic doors opened, revealing a short woman with bottle-blonde hair, a bosom disproportionate toher body, and a shrunken-apple face that betrayed, like Patricia and Katya before her, Eastern European origins.
    Mystery greeted her, grabbed her bags, and brought her to the limo. Outside of a meek “hello,” Ania didn’t say a word during the entire trip home. Instead, she sat passively and listened to Mystery. She was just his type.
    She may not have been a party girl like Katya, but Ania came with her own baggage, which arrived unexpectedly at the airport the next day. His name was Shaun.
    On Saturday we discovered Shaun standing outside the house, dialing Ania’s cell phone every five minutes. Ania had never told Mystery she was engaged. And, clearly, she had never told her fiancé she was flying to Los Angeles to visit a pickup artist she had met at work. Shaun had evidently checked her voice mail, discovered messages from Mystery, and decided to fly to L.A. to confront his rival.
    The irony wasn’t lost on Mystery. “I understand what Shaun’s going through,” he said. “I’m like Herbal to him. He wants to kill me and take his woman back.” He paused for a moment and adjusted his posture into what would have been an alpha male pose if he had any pectorals. “I’m going out there to talk to him.”
    As Mystery swaggered outside, I waited in the living room with his sister and mother. We sat on the upholstery—so filthy now even the stains were stained—that was the backdrop to the tears, girls’ bottoms, and house meetings that had been consuming my life for months. I felt a need to escape this trap I had set for myself; this trap Mystery kept setting for himself; the traps we all constantly set for ourselves, over and over, and never seem to learn from.
    “You realize,” I told them, “that Mystery is just building himself up for another fall with this girl.”
    “Yes,” his mom said. “He thinks it’s all about the girls, but it’s not. It’s about his low self-esteem.” Only a mother could reduce a person’s entire ambition and raison d’etre to the one basic insecurity fueling it all.
    “What worries me is the violence,” I said. “He’s starting to think that violence is a solution to these problems, and it’s a dangerous way of thinking.”
    “Butting heads with someone never works,” his mom said. “I always say that you don’t have to do the direct approach. You can just go around because there’s always a back way.”
    “Now I know where he got Mystery Method from.” In three sentences,his mother had unintentionally summarized Mystery’s entire approach to meeting women: the indirect method.
    Martina knitted her eyebrows and shifted her weight on the couch. “His depressions get worse every time,” she sighed. “He was never violent before.”
    “Well, I remember one time when he was angry, he slammed a door and killed his pet rat,” his mother said. “But I never saw him get mad about anything else. Even when the cat died, he just said, ‘That’s life.’”
    “What I think is happening,” Martina said, “is that with our father gone, he’s starting to realize that Dad was never as bad as he remembered. So now he’s allowing himself to be more like Dad.”
    I reflected back on my conversation with Mystery at the Trans-Dniester border. He’d made his