It’s midnight and I stand behind Bonnie as she locks the door of Tropicalia Lanes. It’s cold, maybe twenty degrees, and the sky has that glow that it gets in winter when the orange city lights bounce off the bottoms of the clouds. I make a circle with my mouth and blow warm air onto my fingertips. Finally the lock grinds into place, and Bonnie tugs on the door to make sure no one’s getting in. She says, “See you tomorrow, Mandy,” and heads off toward the little Ford Fiesta that waits for her, frosted over, in the flickering glow of a streetlight.
I shove my hands in my pockets and nod goodbye as I make for the bus stop on the corner. I sit on the curb, the frigid cement eating through my jeans to my ass. I look up the street as if waiting for the bus, but when Bonnie’s car putters by and I see her taillights pass out of sight, I stand and walk along the dark edge of the parking lot to the back of the bowling alley where the door stands propped open by a cardboard box full of vegetable oil.
I’ve been sleeping here since the day after Thanksgiving when the duplex I was renting burned down. Bonnie and the other employees have no idea—they don’t know that my place is now just a black stamp on the ground, and they don’t know that I leave the back door propped open every night when I take the garbage to the dumpster. I’m saving up to find a new place, but here I get free food, cleanish toilets, a big sink in the kitchen with hot water where I wash my hair and soap up my armpits so no one can smell that I’m homeless. My bed is a pallet stacked with paper towels, and it’s not too rigid. And I have entertainment: I can bowl, throw darts, or switch on the TV behind the bar, still warm from when Bonnie clicked it off before closing up.
But usually I pass my time playing Pac-Man. The machine’s not next to the other arcade games and billiards. It’s tucked in a corner where no one even sees it, and it sits there blinking all day, trying to get the attention of our patrons. They ignore it. They just slip on their wrist braces and shine their balls and stare at the scoreboard. They make lewd comments to me as they pay for their games, cracking jokes about their shoe sizes and making a show of slipping their fingers in and out of the holes in their balls.
Jesse used to come visit me, and he’d play Pac-Man all night. He wasn’t big on bowling or shooting pool, but when we were kids we had an Atari in the bedroom that we shared, and we’d spend hours during the summer playing Pac-Man together. So he’d come up to Tropicalia a few times a week to have a beer and kill some ghosts. Sometimes at night when I near the machine I think I see him there, stooped over the controls. My heart lurches and I say, “Hey, Jess,” but he doesn’t turn around, and when I get closer I see that he’s not there at all.
I can’t tell anyone how good I’ve gotten at Pac-Man since I started sleeping at the bowling alley. They’d start asking questions and I’d have to find a new place to crash—a new apartment or a cheap room at the Lindenwood Inn. And I’ll move on eventually. I don’t plan to live here forever. But the fact is that I’ve reached level 255, the kill screen, six times now, and all I want to do before I find a new home is to pass that level. Jesse got to the kill screen once, the day before the fire, and then the glitch in the game filled the right half of the screen with symbols and numbers and the game ended. He walloped the side of the machine with his hand and laughed, but I could tell he was angry, and now all I want to do is beat that level for him.
So after Bonnie’s driven home for the night and I’ve slipped back into the alley through the open back door, I nuke a slice of pizza and pour a pitcher of beer to share with Pac. Only I don’t call him Pac, not anymore. I call him Jesse. And as I’m guiding Jesse from level to level, I think of the game as some sort of limbo, and he’s winding through the maze just trying to escape. And what I really need to know is what happens at the end, once I get past that kill screen that they say is unbeatable. What happens to Jesse then?
I fill two cups with beer and put one next to the screen for Jesse, and then I drop two quarters into the slot by my knees and the game comes to life. Jesse dashes through the maze, mouth gnashing, gulping down pellets. The ghosts are after him, the red one especially. The game calls that one Blinky, but I’ve nicknamed him Satan. When I let him catch up with Jesse, I feel terrible.
It seems like I just watched Bonnie drive off through the night but the next thing I know I’m on level 113. “This is our night, Jess,” I say. I know what I’m doing. I know the habits of these ghosts. I steer him away from Satan and his cronies. We have a few close calls but the levels keep climbing. Jesse hits level 254 as the newscasters on TV start talking the morning commute, and then it flips to 255 and the screen splits. “This is it.” This is it, life or death for Jesse. He bites pellet after pellet and dodges the ghosts and the points climb, and I think I’m about to beat it when I hear a tap on the front door. Satan overtakes Jesse.
I creep toward the counter and try to see who’s out there, but it’s dark inside and out and all I can see is a blurred figure through the glass door. I drop to my hands and knees and crawl to the bar so I can peek through the window unseen. Out in the parking lot there’s a car idling, a sheriff’s deputy. Steam swirls from the exhaust pipe, mixing with the cold morning air. I lean closer to the glass toward the door of the building. I see the deputy standing beneath the tattered awning. Past his car, on the sidewalk, a man in a hooded jacket passes by, his hands in his pockets. It’s Jesse, I could swear it.
The cop taps the door with the butt of his tactical flashlight, and the sound echoes from every surface in the empty alley. I shrink away from the window, heart pounding. I’m found out. I don’t know how, but my time at the Tropicalia is up, I can feel it. I feel it sort of like I felt that something terrible had happened the night the duplex burned down. Jesse was supposed to stop in that night, but he didn’t, and when two police officers walked toward my counter, heads down, I knew. I’d thought of calling him on my break, but I didn’t, and he slept through the fire. I could have called and things would have been different. I let him down.
The deputy taps the glass again but I walk back toward the Pac-Man machine. I don’t know how long I’ve got—they’ll either bust the door down, I figure, or they’ll wait until nine when Lenny comes to open the Tropicalia, but one way or another they’ll be in here soon. I know Lenny, and I know he’ll never let me keep working here once he finds out I’ve been eating and drinking on his dime. I stop by the register, slide the drawer open, and scoop a handful of quarters into the pocket of my sweatshirt. I walk past the kitchen door and then double back to grab a butcher knife from the magnetic strip on the wall. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but maybe the knife will buy me some time if they come bursting in before I’ve finished the game. Or maybe it’ll get me shot, which might be just as well. I hurry back out to the machine and drop in my quarters as the tap on the glass becomes more persistent. I focus on the sounds of the game and keep my eyes zeroed in on Jesse.
The phone starts to ring, and it keeps ringing, and Jesse keeps chomping away at the pellets on the screen.
“I’m going to get you past the kill screen this time, Jess,” I say to the yellow circle as it darts across the screen. I hear the front door pushing open; soon voices fill the entryway. The circle on the screen glides victoriously away from the wicked ghosts. And then it does something I’ve never seen it do before. Pac-Man turns sideways, and he looks at me, and his gummy mouth moves like he’s talking. And it’s Jesse’s voice that comes out of that mouth, and it’s Jesse’s voice that says, “Get me the fuck out of here.”