The Virtual Swallows of Hog Island(2)

It was easy to code: the built-in table, the melt-away cookies, the heating vent, the terrier, and, most of all, her parents’ shoes. Basically, I designed her Childhood Kitchen without ever having to code her parents’ faces. (Faces can be very time-consuming and if the patient has a good imagination, they’re not as necessary as you’d think.) From the hiding place with the dog, I just intimated the parents from the shoes up.

“She’s going to get the cookie and make it to the next level,” Klaus face-messaged me from a Chinese poker game. “Go ahead and start rendering her Self. This one is a go-getter.”

I’d only heard her voice up until this point—everything at the agency was on a need-to-know basis. We had celebs in all the time and if they didn’t ever make it to Self, which they often didn’t, there was no need to let coders know that the celeb had been here at all. Klaus attached the video with the audio this time so I could capture her full expressions and gestures and body.

And, to be honest, when it popped into my queue, I was knee-deep in trying to revamp a World for an eleven-year-old boy who’d found his older brother’s body—the teenager, fit and strong, had accidentally hung himself on some kind of boat rigging. The boy, alone in a boathouse, had tried to cut his brother down with a dull knife used to cut bait. It’s tricky because a kid with Survivor’s Guilt needs to feel empowered—I’d created a large metal mecha for the boy to climb into, beefy robotics—but these types can’t be armed with assault rifles because they just can’t be responsible for any more Death. So I was trying to create a world where the eleven-year-old was saving white-throated sparrows who’d been tangled by debris along the coast of an island off of Maine. He didn’t have to kill any Beasts at all. The boy was also Klaus’s patient and, to be honest, Klaus had lost interest in the kid. He’d lost interest in most of his patients except for Helen Viorst. He’d left a face message for me in which he looked fat in his eyes, his cheeks rubied as if he’d spent the night drinking. He puffed his cheeks and let the air out slowly—the deflation of a balloon. “On that Everly boy,” he told me, “why don’t you just have at it?”

So I was still working on the boy as the tape loaded, but then suddenly there was Helen Viorst, a real beauty. Just a couple years older than I am, early forties at the most. She has black hair with purplish undertones. She still looks like someone who can’t swim, not enough buoyant fat.

I went back through the tapes, starting at Session One. She came in wearing willowy pants, chunky jewelry—all real gold, I assumed—and a low-cut blouse. I watched her fine arched eyebrows tighten with pain, her shoulders buck with difficult memories, her lips fall open and her eyes go wide as she looked off, distantly.

What had I learned about her specific suffering? Her father had his Russian mistress—and other ones too—her mother blamed youth and, strangely enough, she blamed Helen. Their house was so big and wide and empty that Helen’s father rode around in it on his motorcycle once while high. Her mother tried to drown herself in the pool three times. The Christmas tree once caught on fire. How? She wouldn’t say, but they all nearly died.

I thought of her at night sometimes when I was trying to fall asleep, my wife right beside me, behind the scenes. The way Helen cried—I hate myself for saying this—but it sounded beautiful and lush, like an orgasm. And sometimes I wondered if she would ever think of me. The fluorescent lights in my office give me migraines so I keep it a little dark while I take people’s traumas and turn them into games. I’d made her father a coke-headed giant. I’d made her mother a wolf. I was going to try to make her into herself. Something I couldn’t do for my wife or myself; the miscarriages—three of them in a row—were hard on us.

While I was doing the coding of her forehead, Klaus popped his head into my office. His real, live head—flashing smile, trimmed mustache, a suit jacket and shirt unbuttoned so that a glimpse of his undershirt was visible. His chest was hairless—organically?

He said, “Listen, Archie, I’m asking you because you’re the best. Do up a render of me, okay? I’m going to send you some footage. A few speeches I’ve given so you can use them.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s not really policy.”

“Do I seem like a policy guy?” he said, and then he smiled like a drunk father at a wedding. I’ve coded my share of drunk fathers. “Are you the only coder in this place who hasn’t self-rendered and f*cked a celebrity in a gaming room?” His expression read: My sweet, sweet boy.

So, self-rendering and f*cking renders of celebrities were widespread issues. Bobby A and Bobby B—there were two Bobbies and the lettering was how Klaus distinguished them so we all followed suit—had offered more than once to stand guard while I “tested my code.” And it wasn’t just an old-boy’s network. The female coders were in on it too. Jill and Marcy had both, separately, walked up and whispered, “So who’d you pick?” And when I said, “No one,” they both looked at me like I was a pet ferret someone had chosen to bring to work that had gotten loose and then, against all odds, hired. Part animal, part miracle.

And it was widely rumored that Klaus kept a vast selection of celebrities’ renders—from various eras—and sold them on the black market, which was where he made the bulk of his cash. He was a wealthy man. Surely Klaus had renders of himself. Did he just want a really good one because he actually thought I was the best? Or were his just outdated? The photo of Klaus on our promotional materials was from a bygone era. I’d stared at it and thought that the Klaus I knew was in there somewhere.