Familiar by J. Robert Lennon

Author:J. Robert Lennon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2012-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

30.

She only means to play for another hour, then join him. But she ends up playing all night.

She doesn’t fight the biker, in the end—instead she backs off, leaves the diner, and while she’s in the parking lot the waitress comes out to find her. “Is it really you?” she says. She’s young and pretty, and Elisa can’t help but see her through Silas’s eyes. Is this a girl Silas made? A girl he wishes were real? There is a tenderness here in the way the girl’s features are rendered: her red-brown hair, tied back loosely, a nose slightly too large for her face. The way the clean apron nevertheless bears faded stains that can never be washed out, and the way it creases when she gestures, the fibers frayed and weak with age. How is it even possible to evoke these details in a video game? It is impossible, immersing herself in this world, not to feel that she has missed something about Silas.

Of course every aesthetic decision here cannot have been Silas’s. There is probably a team of programmers, graphic designers, and the like. And yet she feels, powerfully, that this character, this girl, is the product of her son’s mind. This world, the world of the game, is Silas’s, as well—it is as though she has been allowed to enter into his consciousness, to see the way he sees. It is something he made to satisfy himself. And it feels realer, fuller, than any version of him she was ever permitted to see in life.

But then again, how hard had she looked? It’s true that, up until his adolescence, his emotions appeared to live on the surface—his problem, as they saw it, was impulse control, an incapacity to keep himself in check. His actions, as they saw them, were the unfiltered product of his subconscious. They lived in the world he made, by necessity, and he refused to enter the world they wanted him to live in.

But he did change, around the time he turned twelve. He fell quiet and began to brood. And though this made their days more orderly—fewer messes, less violence, fewer shouting fights—it also threw Elisa and Derek into a state of paranoia. What was he thinking? What was he going to do next? His quiet hostility became more disturbing than the acting out once had been, and Sam, who had endured their shared childhood with his wits largely intact, began to show the signs of deep anxiety and, eventually, depression: sallow complexion, sunken eyes, bitten fingernails. Sam hid in his bedroom much of the time, while Silas haunted the halls with a kind of regal insolence. He frightened them.

But perhaps there was nothing to fear. Maybe it wasn’t merely his demeanor that had changed, but his desires, his emotional aims. Maybe he was waiting for Derek and Elisa to discover them.

Instead they nurtured their paranoia, let it grow and spread. Each accused the other of trying to sabotage the family, of giving up on Silas, of giving up on Sam.

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