The Game

father.
    “Hi, I’m friends with your son, Erik.”
    “Who are you?”
    “I’m Neil, Erik’s friend. And I wanted to…”
    “Don’t call here again!” he barked.
    “But he needs…”
    Click. The asshole hung up.
    There was only one other person I could call. I returned to Mystery’s room. He was washing a pill down with a glass of water. His face was red and twisted, as if he were crying invisible tears.
    “What did you just take?” I asked.
    “Some sleeping pills,” he said.
    “How many?” Fuck. I was going to have to call an ambulance.
    “Two.”
    “Why’d you take them?”
    “When I’m awake, life sucks. It’s futile. When I’m asleep, I dream.” He was starting to sound like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. “I dreamed last night that I was in a flying DeLorean. Like the one in Back to the Future. And there were all these wires around us. I was with my sister. And she was driving. We went above the wires. And I saw my life below them.”
    “Listen,” I said. “I need Patricia’s phone number.”
    The tears came now. He looked like a big baby. A big baby who was about to kill himself.
    “Can you tell me Patricia’s phone number?” I asked again slowly, gently, as if speaking to a child.
    He gave it to me—slowly, gently, like a child.
    I hoped that Patricia wouldn’t hang up on me, that she hadn’t cut Mystery out of her life entirely, that she’d have a solution.
    She answered on the first ring. As a girlfriend, she had been taken for granted by Mystery. But in reality she was part of an invisible support system. Her stabilizing effect wasn’t noticed until she was gone.
    Patricia’s voice was a little masculine, with a light Romanian accent. She didn’t seem overly intelligent, but she cared about Mystery. There was compassion and concern in her voice.
    “He’s tried to kill himself before,” she said. “The best thing you can do is call his mother or his sister. They’ll probably put him in an institution.”
    “Forever?”
    “No, just until he gets through it.”
    The door to Mystery’s room swung open. Mystery emerged.
    He walked past me toward the door.
    “Hey!” I yelled at him. “Where are you going?”
    He turned back for a moment and looked at me through blank, emotionless eyes.
    “Good knowing you, buddy,” he said, then turned away.
    “Where are you going?” I repeated.
    “I’m going to shoot my father and then kill myself” were his last words as he opened the front door to the house and closed it gently behind him.

I chased after Mystery. He was descending the stairs slowly, as if sleepwalking. I shot ahead of him and barred the lobby door in front of him.
    “Hey.” I tugged at his sleeve. “Let’s go back upstairs. I talked to your sister. She’s coming to get you. Just wait a couple more minutes.”
    He hesitated for a moment, unsure whether to trust me or not. He was so docile, he didn’t seem like he would hurt a fly. I shooed him upstairs with gentle whispers of encouragement. As he turned and walked, I called his family again.
    “He’ll be okay,” I thought, “as long as his father doesn’t answer.”
    His mother answered. She said she’d be there within a half hour.
    Mystery sat on a futon in his kitchen and waited. The sleeping pills must have kicked in. He stared at the wall and mumbled strands of evolutionary philosophy, memetics, and game theory. The conclusion of his mutterings was always the same: the words “futile” or “fubar.”
    His mother arrived with his sister in tow. The moment they saw him, they went ashen.
    “I had no idea it had gotten this serious,” Martina said.
    She packed him a suitcase while his mother brought him downstairs. He followed passively, dead to the world.
    They left the building and headed toward a car that would soon take him to the psychiatric ward of the Humber River Regional Hospital. As Mystery’s mother opened the door for him, a four-set of girls poured out of an SUV parked in front of them. For a moment, a spark of life flickered in Mystery’s eyes.
    I watched him, hoping to hear him say those six magical words: “Is this your set or mine?” Then I’d know everything would be okay.
    But his eyes went dead again. His mother helped lower him into the car. She picked up his legs and moved them inside, then slammed the door shut.
    I saw him through the glass, the smiling blonde four-set reflected against his face. His complexion was pale and bloodless. He stared