The Virtual Swallows of Hog Island(4)

At one point, he stopped and looked around his backyard. His mother was standing nearby, wearing a two-piece.

He said, “Is this it?”

No one answered.

He ran through the sprinkler again.

I invented a level for a grieving widower in which his wife was alive and he was watching her jump off a dock into a lake where he was waiting for her.

I meant: Don’t get over her. Live here.

I invented a level for a girl who’d been raped by her neighbor in which she got to run through the woods in the body of a lion.

Nothing to catch. No hunters to outsmart. Just running for as long as she wanted to run.

I made a world for my wife where she could be happy—in an apartment across town where she wouldn’t be my wife. In the world I made for her, I still love her and drive by her apartment sometimes because it’s the only way to make my nerve endings bristle.

*

When Helen was about to start her gaming session, I tuned in on a sub-line.

She was in one of the gaming rooms—which are a lot like racquetball courts—and was fitted with goggles, again not unlike racquetball.

Klaus cued up her session and then left, as was the standard protocol. But he could always patch himself in from another gaming room. He’d dabbled in coding. That wouldn’t be hard.

On my small screen, Helen appeared under the built-in table in her Childhood Kitchen and it was just the way I’d made it—appliances and all. Her caustic mother and her loud father weren’t speaking yet, only clomping around in their highly detailed shoes. Helen pulled the terrier onto her lap. The cookies were in place on top of the counter. The heating vent was keeping her and Duchess warm.

Klaus had told me that the mother and father should speak in Near-Audibles. This means that the hushed tones approximate speech and the player’s subconscious will fill in the words. It had been one of the innovative techniques that made Klaus a renegade.

I rendered the rest of the house around her. It was just a rough sketch and would only come into play if Helen wandered out of the kitchen. People did, sometimes, wanting to revisit their youths. Like the Near-Audibles, the loose renderings would get filled in by the patient’s subconscious.

Things were going okay, as I said. Her mother was speaking in a Near-Audible and her father responded likewise. Helen was on task. She wasn’t absorbing their words. She was reaching from under the table to find the box of cookies, her small hand patting around nervously.

Her parents were hissing at each other. Her father took two quick lunging steps at her mother. Her mother took one small step back. He was shouting when Helen’s hand touched the corner of the cookie box. She sat up a bit to make herself taller. Duchess almost slid off her lap but she kept one hand curled around the dog’s ribs.

Her father’s shoe stepped on her mother’s dainty foot. He was pinning her to that spot.

Helen looked up and saw the loose etchings of their faces but quickly, so very quickly, her mind filled it in—her father’s wildly etched hair became actual hair. His blobby hand became sharp and clear.

The slap.

Her mother fell back on one leg to try to keep herself upright as her ribs crashed into the counter.

But Helen stayed true to herself. She pulled the Friar Tuck cookie box down. She popped the lid.

Her mother was on the marble floor crying. Her father’s shoes paused, pointed toes facing Helen. She froze, holding Duchess and the box of cookies.

Her mother, with her cheek on the floor, looked over. Their eyes locked. Her mother raised one finger to her lips, blood trickling from a cut above her eye.

And then a fire alarm started squawking overhead.

Her father cursed in a Near-Audible and staggered out. Smoke poured from the heating vent and rolled in across the floor. Helen pulled a cookie out of the box and shoved it into her mouth. She achieved her goal.

The screen should have gone blank. The next level should have started, but it didn’t.

A new pair of shoes skittered in, white suede bucks. They stopped at the built-in and a voice said, “No, no, no.”

Klaus’s face appeared, flushed and grinning. “Helen,” he said. “You didn’t start the fire.”

“But I did,” she said.

He covered his nose and mouth with his arm and shook his head. “You’re a little girl!” he shouted. “You deserve to be protected.”

It was a breach that went beyond all rules, policies, and standards of care. Therapists weren’t allowed in the Games. The Games were about the achievement of Self—a kind of healing that also empowers, a kind of healing that the patient controls and therefore owns.

Not Healing brought to you by Klaus Han.

A woman’s legs appeared—Helen’s legs. Helen as Self.

This had never happened before either. There were levels, goals that, once achieved, could move one to the next level.

But there she was, leggy and beautiful. Her pale skin, blotchy.

She crawled under the table and pulled Child-Helen out along with Duchess. She had no intention of letting go of Duchess and never had. I realized now from Child-Helen and Self-Helen’s desperation around that dog that it must have died in the actual fire. Child-Helen clung to Self-Helen, the dog’s puffy head between them. “But Mommy,” Child-Helen said.

“That’s what Klaus is here for,” Self-Helen said. “He will help Mommy because he’s a professional who helps people.”