The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,9
on the Saltillo tiles in the living room. She followed the blades to the hallway that led to the bedrooms and his “gaming” room, and touched them with the tips of her toe-loop leather sandals. Before she could call out to Araceli, the Mexican woman had arrived with broom and dustpan, quickly corralling the stray blades into a palm-sized pile. When it came to the upkeep of the house, Maureen’s and Araceli’s minds were one. Keeping Araceli and letting Guadalupe go was the better outcome of the we’re-going-broke saga Scott had foisted upon them, though she was not entirely convinced they were indeed flirting with bankruptcy. Guadalupe and Pepe were ill-timed and too-sudden losses. But as she watched Araceli sweep up the grass from the floor, Maureen felt less alone before the enormous responsibility of home and family, and somehow stronger. You pay to have someone in your home, and if it works out, they become an extension of your eyes and your muscles, and sometimes your brain. This protected feeling stayed with her as she watched Samantha try to take a step in the playroom and listened to the distant and soothing growl of the vacuum cleaner: Araceli was busy erasing the last traces of Scott’s footsteps from the carpeted hallways.
Scott entered his sons’ bedroom and found his progeny with heads bowed and eyes fixed on tiny screens. Their fingers made muted clicks and summoned zaps and zips and tinny accordion music from the devices in their hands. He considered them for a moment, two boys transported by semiconductors into a series of challenges designed by programmers in a Kyoto high-rise. Keenan, his younger boy, with his black madman wig of uncombed and pillow-pressed hair, was opening his hazel eyes wide with manic intensity; Brandon, his older son, with the long russet rock-star hair, sat slumped with a bored half frown, as if he were waiting for someone to rescue him from his proto-addiction, which was precisely what Scott had come here to do. Maureen had told him to get them out of the house and “run them a bit,” because without Guadalupe to get them outdoors and away from their insidious, pixilated gadgets, the first week of summer had failed to add much color to their skin. “Why don’t you play football with them?” Maureen had said, and of course Scott resented being told this, because like every other good parent he lived for his children. When he grabbed a book from their library to read or when he watched them swimming in the backyard pool, the money spent on this hilltop palace felt less like money lost. That was the idea behind the home in the first place, to give their boys, and now Samantha too, a place to run and splash, with a big yard and rooms filled with books and toys of undeniably educational value, such as the seldom-used Young Explorers telescope, or the softball-sized planetarium that projected constellations onto the walls and the ceilings.
“Why is your game barking?” Scott asked his older son.
“I’m taking Max for a walk,” Brandon said.
After a few perplexed seconds, Scott remembered that his oldest son was raising virtual puppies. He walked, shampooed, and trained his dogs, and the animated animals grew on the screen during the course of an hour or two, soiling the rug and doing other dog things. We don’t own a real dog, because my wife can’t stand the mess.
“Okay, guys, that’s enough of that. Games off … please.”
Brandon quickly folded shut his game, but Keenan kept clicking. “Let me just save this one,” he said.
“Go ahead and save it, then.” Scott was a programmer and a bit of a gamer himself: he understood that his son was holding a toy that told a story, and that he could lose his place by the flipping of the off switch. Scott walked over to see precisely which gaming world his son had entered and saw the familiar figure of a plumber in overalls. “Ah, Mr. Miyamoto,” Scott said out loud. The alter ego of the game’s Japanese creator jumped from one floating platform to the next, fell to the ground, was electrocuted and then miraculously resurrected, and eventually entered passageways that led to virtual representations of forests and mountain lakes. In this palm-sized version, the game retained an old, arcade simplicity, and to Scott the programmer, the mathematics and algorithms that produced its two-dimensional graphics were palpable and nostalgia-enducing: the movement along the x- and y-axes, the