The Game

dad out to be a monster. “So your dad wasn’t as bad as Mystery always said?”
    “The problem is that they were too similar,” Martina explained. “Dad could take over any room he walked into. He was very charismatic but also very stubborn. They never got along. Mystery would always do things to antagonize Dad. And Dad, instead of acting like an adult, would blow up at him.”
    “We’d have to put them on opposites sides of the table,” Mystery’s mom cut in, “and if one so much as looked at the other wrong, a fight would break out.”
    “And now that Dad’s gone,” Martina said, “Mystery needs someone to take all his anger out on. So Katya has taken the place of his father. She’s become the villain responsible for all the messed-up emotions he’s feeling.”
    Now was my chance to bring up the question I’d wanted to ask ever since Mystery’s breakdown in Toronto, the question that would free me of the inexplicable obligation I felt to save him from himself.
    “So what do we do?”
    We talked it through for a half hour. The answer, Martina finally decided, was to let him run free; to give him a chance to make something of his talent and genius; to give him time to quest after two 10s who will love him as much as they love each other. And to hope that he made some progress toward his life goals before the next crash, or the crash after that, or whichever crash would be so destructive he’d have to return home for good. He was walking on quicksand with helium balloons in his hands. In that respect, he was like all of us, except the air in his balloons was escaping faster.
    We cut our discussion short when Mystery strode into the kitchen.
    “Done,” he said. “I had a long talk with Ania’s fiancé at Mel’s. I told him it was too late for him to fix things with her. Ania is now my girlfriend, and we are in love with each other. This is turning out to be the best pickup in the history of Mystery Method.”
    Martina gave me a knowing glance. Mystery’s mother crossed her arms over her chest and chuckled to herself.
    He slammed a tape recorder down on the kitchen counter. “I recorded the whole conversation,” he said. “Do you want to hear it?”
    “No,” I told him. I’d had enough drama.
    Besides, I had a date with Lisa to keep.

I picked Lisa up at 8:00 P.M . and took her to a Japanese restaurant called Katana. It was one of the toughest dinners of my life. We’d spent so much time together already that I literally had no more material left. I was forced to be myself.
    “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said as the heat lamps on the restaurant patio scalded our scalps and the sake warmed our stomachs. The question had been giving me insomnia for weeks. “What happened to you after Atlanta? We had plans and you broke them.”
    “You were rude on the phone,” she said. “And I didn’t think we had definite plans anyway.” So it had been her version of cat-string theory, punishing me for bad behavior.
    “I was being cocky funny. I wanted to see you.”
    “Whatever. You were rude. You were being too-cool-for-school and so laid-back and aloof about things that it was a turnoff. I thought, ‘I can get anybody, and all of a sudden this guy is acting like Mr. Cool?’”
    As we talked, I tried to figure out why I liked this girl so much, why after meeting so many people she had become my obsession. A cynical part of me said I was simply falling for the female equivalent of the tactics we use. The secret to making someone think they’re in love with you is to occupy their thoughts, and that’s what Lisa had done with me. She had blown me off and rebuffed me physically while stringing me along with just enough encouragement to keep me chasing her.
    On the other hand, I wasn’t a plower. If a woman I didn’t care about had played this hard to get, I would have given up long ago. Of course, it was also possible that my obsession came from a misogynist, alpha-male streak I’d accidentally contracted as a side effect of sarging. Lisa was fiercely independent, someone I looked up to rather than down at. So perhaps the caveman in me just wanted to sleep with her and, thus, conquer her.
    And then there was always the remote possibility that she had managed to touch a part of me that I kept hidden from everyone, even myself. It was a part of me that wanted to stop thinking, to stop searching, to stop worrying about what everyone thought of me and just let go