The Candy House(47)
Dungeons & Dragons unfolds glacially. Roxy marvels at the deep absorption of the players, who never seem impatient. It’s as if the rest of life has slowed to match the pace of the game. The new female Elf employs sleight of hand and some magical objects to rescue the other players from a band of brigands in an ancient wood. There are no pictures of this wood; it is represented by a hand-drawn map on an old-fashioned sheet of graph paper like the kind Roxy remembers from geometry class. Other hand-drawn sheets represent dungeons, taverns, towns, catacombs, and even outer space: a vast web of interconnected worlds that can be stored, between games, inside a manila envelope. Sometimes a player will depart one map through a “portal” and emerge onto a different sheet of graph paper, a transition Roxy finds electrifying. From one world to another, like that! Whenever a player emerges onto a new sheet, Chris and Molly switch roles as leader. The game is infinite.
Chris and Molly are not in recovery. Nor are they a couple; Chris is with Samantha, and Molly has a girlfriend, Iris. Until last year, Chris led the group with Colin Bingham, his best friend from childhood, who died from an overdose eight months ago. Chris has yet to regain his old lightheartedness since Colin’s passing. It shook Roxy, too; Colin was in his twenties, young enough to have returned to mainstream life with hardly a gap to account for. Colin’s skin was clear, he still had his teeth. He and Chris grew up together in Crandale, New York, where they played D&D as boys. Molly, too, is a friend from that time. After Colin died, Molly Cooke stepped in to take his place, but Molly is a meek and tentative pleaser, and Roxy is struggling not to hate her.
No player wants the session to end, they never do, and maybe the game’s slowness is a form of delay. But at nine, they must cede the meeting room to a weekly gathering of Bright Day clients who are pregnant. Several big-bellied young women wait in the hall as the players file out, raucously crowing over their scrape with the brigands as if it were a real event.
Chris and Molly bring their books and maps to their office, on an upper floor of the same building as Bright Day. Chris’s company, Mondrian, hosts gaming sessions at recovery centers all over the Bay Area. The walls of Mondrian’s small office are lined with posters of fire-breathing dragons and cloaked assassins, and there are shelves full of books about magical beasts and an iron statue of an orc that Chris found inside an abandoned piece of luggage. But Roxy has gradually come to suspect that gaming is a cover for some deeper business at Mondrian. Mages and Barbarians have their special skills, and so do Former Junkies—one of which is Sense Subterfuge. Roxy knows. Her neighborhood is full of double meanings: The newsstand around the corner from Bright Day sells Oxy pills, the flower seller is a lookout, and at Betty’s, a nearby lunch counter, you can score heroin from the busboys by prearrangement. Because Roxy is good at Feign Oblivion, another Former Junkie skill, people tend not to guard their words around her. While employing Apparent Inattention and Vacant Stare, she has overheard Chris on his phone discussing contracts, impersonation, and mimesis. She has heard him say, “The demand is overwhelming” and “She has an ear for dialogue.” Where Roxy’s skills fail her, though, is in knowing what any of it means. Is that the dyslexia? The nature of Chris and Molly’s real work is as unintelligible to Roxy as the local drug hidey-holes are to the woman who parks her Mercedes in the O’Farrell Street garage and clickety-clacks toward the Opera House in a floaty turquoise dress. Beyond a certainty that Mondrian’s deeper business is legal (no weapons or police avoidance) and unprofitable (Chris’s apartment is tiny), Roxy is ignorant. Whatever it is, he is doing it for love.
She steps outside Bright Day for a cigarette. Wind and sunlight tear at the fog. A tingle of underground cables permeates downtown, faintly audible in the morning hush. Gray-white seagulls stalk the sidewalk for debris from last night’s party (every night is a party on these streets), lofting away potato chips and pizza rinds in their long yellow beaks.
With forty-five minutes to kill before meeting her drug counselor at ten, Roxy heads for Betty’s lunch counter. She hears trotting footsteps behind her but doesn’t turn, suspecting it’s Molly. Sure enough, she hears “Are you going to get coffee?” and nods, exasperated. Her resistance to Molly isn’t just because she replaced Colin, whom Roxy loved. With her frizzy hair and guileless smile, Molly Cooke is a misfit at Bright Day and in this neighborhood. She has no shell, no cool—is the sort of girl Roxy would have spurned or possibly tormented as a teenager. Molly knows instinctively where she isn’t wanted and goes there anyway. Roxy dislikes her, above all, for awakening her mean side.
They sit side by side at the counter drinking cups of sour, watery coffee that would tip off anyone with a modicum of Sense Subterfuge that Betty’s customers are here to buy something else. Externalizing your consciousness to a Mandala Cube takes four hours, and Roxy has persuaded herself that she might not be able to hold still that long without chemical assistance (Righteous Rationalization) in the form of a few bags that she absolutely will not use unless she has no choice (Self-Duping). Molly Cooke sips the wretched coffee, oblivious. Her Sense Subterfuge score must be close to zero.
“What was Chris like as a kid?” Roxy asks. She likes to talk about Chris—imagines sometimes that he’s her son, not Bennie’s.
“Oh, I was in love with him,” Molly says. “He’s a year older, which added to his grandeur.”