Gamelife by Michael W. Clune

Author:Michael W. Clune [Clune, Michael W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713171
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5.

The Sun and the Stars

Throughout my early adventures with computer games, my physical self remained safely and firmly rooted in our old family home in Evanston. In February of 1988 we moved. There were three of us kids now. Me, Jenny, and our newish brother, Sean, who was four. Evanston is a near suburb of Chicago but also a small city in its own right. We moved to the far northern suburb of Mettawa, a quite different kind of suburb. A curiosity of the late twentieth century, Mettawa is a human settlement without a center. No town hall, no library, nothing. A tiny village of large houses and horse farms.

My father’s career had gone well enough to indulge my mother’s primordial fantasy of horses. So we moved into the smallest house in a district of mansions. Five acres, with stables at the back that sheltered a lazy old trail horse named Charlie Brown and a small pony named Red, who was delivered in the back of a minivan. A few months after depositing us in this refuge, my father divorced my mother and left. One day in June he was standing in the sun, smiling uncertainly at Charlie Brown, and the next day he was gone. That summer morning, Jenny, Sean, and I awoke to find ourselves trapped inside Mom’s darkening horse-farm fantasy, with three months until school, no friends, and nothing to do.

It had taken a lot of money to turn Mom’s fantasy real. The horses swayed on the grass, swollen with money. When we looked out the bay windows of the breakfast room, the trees stood straight, propped up by scaffolds of money. There was no money left for computer games. At our silent lunches I stared out the window at Charlie Brown grazing in the far field. I reflected that with the money stored in just one of his eyes, I could buy ten or twelve computer games. And I knew just where to buy them. The enormous Hawthorn Mall was a twenty-minute drive from our house, and when Mom had to go to Sears or Marshall Field’s, I’d climb in the back of the Suburban. I had no money. I just wanted to be near computer games for a while.

In the Suburban, Bette Midler sang out of the speakers. The Bee Gees sang out of the speakers. The Beatles sang out of the speakers. I lay in the very back, looking out the rear window, the long vehicle behind me like a giant finger stirring trees, pavement, street signs, and cars into the endless blue sky. I lay between the wheel wells and looked out at the sky-tree-pavement-car mix streaming out the rear window until Mom shut off the engine, cutting Bette Midler’s voice in half.

“All right kids, everyone out!”

Four doors opened in the cavernous truck and we fell out, dazzled by the sun. The one thing my mother’s fantasy did not lack was space. We each had our own door in the car. We each had our own bedroom in the house.

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