sensing the enormity of the moment, we recognized that this miracle illusion would be currency of the imagination of the next hundred years or more.
And so, two weeks after the interview, I rented an apartment and dragged my futon, computer, and a box of books left over from college back to Massachusetts. I was an entry-level game designer, whatever that was, earning thirty-five thousand dollars a year. I guess in the end they couldn’t not give it to me.
I thought about mailing the Dartmouth alumni magazine, but I’d told them about law school, and before that about the Fingerlings Improv troupe, and before that about an internship in L.A. at a talent agency. I didn’t even tell anyone I was going for an interview as a video game designer. I didn’t want to see the blank looks.
What had been a long, uncalculated slide into the fourth or fifth tier of academic standing finally flipped over into outright free fall. Who gets expelled from anything? Salvador Dalí. Buckminster Fuller. Woody Allen. Robert Frost. But they’d done it with considerably more style. And I wasn’t properly expelled, only put on a mandatory leave of absence. I’d simply sat there and watched it all float away. It was stupid that my parents had paid for it, for the lawyer they thought I was supposed to be—that I’d “told” them I would be.
This was me giving up on any sort of casual panache, any pretense that I’d be one of the up-and-coming best and brightest I’d been emulating less and less successfully since—when? Changing majors for the third time? Earlier?
Who knew? But this was the moment I publicly stopped pretending to be cool. Rhodes, no Marshall. There would be no Sex and the City barhopping, no making partner, no Central Park view. I scrubbed the uneven floor of my new apartment, the odd snaggletoothed nail shredding the wadded-up paper towel, letting the dream dissolve.
No one had cleaned the apartment in what seemed like a decade. I bought four rolls of paper towels and a spray bottle of dangerous-smelling cleaner. I sat on the floor and sprayed along the baseboard and onto the yellow-and-white linoleum. I kept spraying until it soaked into the caked-on dust and hair and brown whatever it was and turned it darker and soft. The wadded-up paper towels turned into a soft, soggy pile. I found a paintbrush caked with grime, shards of glass, peanut shells. Halfway through I realized I should have bought rubber gloves, that I was probably poisoning myself, but there was no point in stopping. Around midnight I’d wiped down the floor and all the fixtures; it didn’t look clean but it looked like if you started now it would be a normal enough cleaning job. I tried to count how many apartments I’d been through since college, but there had been too many three-week sublets to keep track of. One more, anyway.
The mystery wasn’t how my life had failed to come together—why I didn’t stick with things, why days and weeks seemed to vanish under the sofa, why I was always telling my six-month friends I’d found an internship or entry-level job at a newspaper or theater or paralegal firm and I was moving to San Francisco or Austin—the mystery was how it was any different for anyone else, how other people managed to stay in one place and stick it out.
I e-mailed my parents with my new address, the same as always—when I visited at home I’d see my name in my mother’s address book over a long column of crossed-out addresses and phone numbers. They sent presents—books and shirts—and birthday cards that said things like, “We’re so proud of your new internship,” and “Here’s to great things this year!” Here’s to training myself to pick locks. Here’s to learning to speak with a British accent from a set of four CDs I found in a used bookstore. Here’s to friendship. Here’s to failure. Here’s to the Quest for the Ultimate Game.
Chapter Three
Nobody gave me a schedule; it was more like a standing invitation to come over and hang out. The Monday after I moved in I tried going to work, and came in at nine in the morning. I sat on a beanbag chair just inside the door until a tall, fiftyish woman with short blond hair stopped by and introduced herself as Helen, the office manager. She took my picture with a digital camera and moved on. I read an old role-playing game