Press Start to Play

  —

  He didn’t try to catch a cab. He didn’t want to know if the saying was true.

  He walked through Times Square, his peripheral vision filled with chattering, white-bread tourists who shot him interested glances and bankers who side-eyed him up at crosswalks. The teenage drummers playing for tips—black and Latino mostly, fucking beggars he’d have to defend when his turn on pro bono came, he was sure—smirked as he walked past.

  Joey didn’t know where to go, what to do. His suit was too loose now, but nothing in his life had changed other than his body. No one remarked on the change, not even the Arab driver who had watched it happen. Yet everyone was aware of the result, as though he had always been this way.

  He took a breath.

  Is this my breakdown?

  He’d always thought depression and anxiety were bullshit, twentysomethings’ ways to make themselves feel artistic and tortured, a “get out of jail free” card to slap down whenever adulthood bored them. But he really didn’t know anymore.

  Joey started to sit on the thin ledge of a low window outside a pastry shop, then hissed in pain.

  His body was thickening with flesh, bulging rapidly, his skin lightening—his hands were shrinking, wrinkling, the tiny hairs turning gray—he could feel his eyes shift in his face, watch the world warp as they resettled—he bit back a scream as even his teeth jostled in his mouth—

  He was big and warm, soft and flowing; the suit bulged against his flesh, refusing to hide a single curve or roll or seam. At the junction of his legs, something reduced, withdrew, vanished. His back seized in pain and he clutched his chest, his arms suddenly filling with the eruption of an enormous pair of breasts. He yanked his jacket as tight as he could over his body—suddenly massive, suddenly aged, suddenly and horribly female—but only managed to lose several expensive mother-of-pearl buttons.

  He gasped, panted, shut his eyes, and blundered forward into the crowd, longing for the roaring, stinking oblivion of the subway, of the averted eyes, of the earbudded deaf-mutes in the crush of traffic.

  Don’t look at me, he thought. I’m losing my mind.

  He shrank from the nasty little smiles, the open laughter of a group of college sluts out for lunch, the frank and curious stares of children.

  “Dad, lookit that fat woman,” a little boy said, only to be yanked along by his father. He heard mutters of “paying her health care” in a vicious Jersey accent. Joey couldn’t think of a single retort. He shuffled on with his head down.

  “Baby!”

  Joey glanced up.

  The man on the corner was white, his skin raw and pale, like noodles before they’ve been boiled. There was something spoiled but appealing about him, like soft cheese with veins of mold—you knew what you were eating, but you knew, all the same, it was meant to be good.

  The stranger was in Joey’s path before Joey even saw him rise from the upturned bucket he was using for a seat.

  “Hey, baby,” the man repeated. His smile was wide, his eyes bloodshot in his once-handsome face. “What, you can’t give me a smiiiile?”

  Joey jerked to the left, out of the stranger’s path, seething.

  “You’re a stuck-up cunt, you know that?” the stranger rasped.

  Joey fought every instinct to stop and jam his fist down the stranger’s throat and kept moving. The guy could be armed, could be diseased—

  “Betchu like it nasty,” the stranger said, following. He was a few steps behind Joey, speaking quietly, his hands in his pockets. He was smiling as if they were old friends, college buddies, lovers. People walked by without even darting their eyes.

  The stranger leaned in close to Joey, his hand wrapped around something in his pocket.

  Oh fuck, Joey thought for the first time. What if he has a knife?

  “Nasty-ass, fat-ass bitch, you’re ugly anyway, fuck you, slut,” the stranger said, still smiling. Joey was transfixed, terrified to lunge, terrified the man would seize him, stab him—

  A tourist walking past offered him a single raised eyebrow as if to say, If you don’t like the attention, why don’t you just leave?

  I can’t, Joey wanted to scream. He’s too big, I think he has a knife, what if he—

  The tourist kept walking. There were better things to see.

  “I’m gonna slip my thumbs right into that pussy,” the stranger was saying. “Split that greasy cunt wide open. Suck it right out. Schluurrr—”

  Joey stared at him.

  The man burst out laughing as Joey ran.

  Two beat cops were on the opposite corner, their black-and-white jackets edged in fluorescent patches; Joey slowed, gasping down air flavored with garbage and hot asphalt, his lungs aching in time with his frantic pulse.

  One cop glanced to the other as if to say, This one’s your problem.

  “Please,” Joey managed, darting glances back at the stranger, who was once again sitting on his upturned bucket, grinning over at them. “That man was harassing me.”

  The cop looked Joey up and down—slow and slimy as a snail, as if to make a point of it—and then barked a laugh.

  “You?” the cop said. “He was harassing you?”

  A hard, sickening blush started spreading up Joey’s neck, creeping red through the veins over his cheeks like disease.

  “Yes,” Joey managed, the flush in his face so hot and awful that he was almost shaking. “He—”

  “Is he still harassing you?” the cop asked, glancing from his partner and out across the street—in nowhere near the direction where the stranger was sitting and watching the proceedings, insolence incarnate.

  “I—no, but he—” Joey’s mouth went dry. “You—don’t believe me?”

  The cop sighed, beginning to see this was going to be more trouble than it was worth.

  “Look,” the cop began, “if he did say something, lady—learn to take a compliment.”

  The other cop started smiling. “Sister, your size, should take whatever attention you can get.”

  —

  As Joey walked beneath the silver and chrome of the skyscrapers, he counted his wrongs as if counting beads on a rosary.

  The jealous, greedy first-year lawyers who he knew insisted nothing was about race until it meant they didn’t get what they wanted.

  The fetishistic bitch intern who thought her opinion on his body was supposed to be a reassurance.

  The man on the street who’d taken him for an easy target who owed strangers his gratitude and attention.

  The cops who’d laughed at his fears, at his rights, like he was the biggest punch line in the fucking world.

  I’ll fucking kill you all, Joey thought. He couldn’t live this way, wouldn’t, not as any of it.

  He wanted a gun—for his mouth or theirs, he didn’t know. But he was Joey fucking Connor, and he wasn’t going to take this dogfuck world.

  He could feel his body changing again. His skin was the color of burnished gold, sun-kissed and smooth; his hair curled out in long, drizzling locks the color of smoke. His legs were growing taut and slender, his stomach flattening to a bikini mannequin’s, as tight as the skin of a drum. His back still ached with the weight of the altered breasts under his jacket, which would not lie flat no matter how he pulled his suit jacket around them.

  He knew what he looked like without even glancing down. He knew what he would’ve said to a woman who looked like the woman he was now.

  He looked ahead into a street of grinning men.

  Kill me, God, he thought. Just fucking kill me.

  —

  His feet had begun to ache as he walked the streets of lower Manhattan. His toes had swollen like salamis, bursting through the Gucci leather of his shoes like rotten fruit.

  He didn’t even bother to look down. He didn’t want to be anything anymore. He just wanted to go home to his apartment where everything made sense, where people listened to him and took care of him and gave him what he wanted because he was handsome and smart and winning.
/>
  The pain in his feet was too keen to ignore. He reached down to rip off the tattered remains of his two-thousand-dollar shoes. He paused.

  Joey looked up at his reflection in a shop window.

  His reflection made him smile.

  The face in the glass was hideous and distorted. His jaw was as wide as his hips, his skin hanging in blubbery folds. A yellow, broken tusk jutted up from each end of his drooling lips. Warts and pustules bloomed above his jelly-like eyes.

  A tiny tin bell jangled over the shop door.

  “No orcs!” a woman shouted in a shivery, accented voice. She carried a broom, making furious gestures at him, shooing him away as if he were a feral cat, a drunk relieving himself on her stoop. “Orcs steal! No orcs!”

  Joey looked at the woman. He started laughing.

  “I will call the police!” the woman cried. “No orcs! Bad for business!”

  Joey stuck his hands—now the size of Christmas hams—in the ruins of his pockets. He strolled toward the park, looking up at a billboard over a diner—a beautiful, long-legged white woman being born aloft by a team of female orcs with lowered eyes.

  What. The. Fuck, he thought. What. The goddamn. Fuck.

  —

  The game.

  Joey sat down on the granite lip of the fountain and put his head in his garbage-lid hands. The stone beneath his titanic haunches gave the tiniest groan.

  It’s my stats, he thought. Pigeons perched on his horns, pecking the lice out of his hair. Someone is fucking with my stats.

  Samantha had brought the game home from the software firm where she worked with that fucking neckbeard, Nathan. She’d told Joey the newest version was in development, but he’d taken it anyway, pirating the rest of the software to run it, because if he was smart enough to steal it, why shouldn’t it be his?

  Samantha had been distressed when she couldn’t find the jump drive, but he’d told her he’d never touched her bag. She’d left in a cold fury that night—it had been their ninth or tenth breakup, which he loved, since the hatesex and the reunion sex were incredible—but she returned the next afternoon to find him in the middle of the third level.

  “You named the character after yourself,” Samantha observed, standing in the doorway to the living room. She never looked at Joey, only at the gameplay. Her eyes were still and bright, perfect mirrors of the fantasy battles on the screen. “Made him look like you, too.”

  Joey had said something sheepish and charming, something that always made women roll their eyes in that Oh, you forgiveness of sitcom spouses, but Samantha hadn’t given any indication that she’d heard.

  “Ever the narcissist,” Samantha murmured. She didn’t even seem to be saying it to him. He heard her heels clicking down the hall. “Hope you get what you deserve.”

  The chain on the door swung and clattered against the lock as she left.

  That had been three days ago, and he hadn’t had so much as a text from her since. Even her perfume had grown stale in the apartment. His clothes had remained in small heaps around his hamper. The dishwasher hadn’t been run.

  Stats, Joey thought. Someone scrolling strength up to max and then down to minimum. Building and rebuilding my face like a housewife playing the fucking Sims. Customizing the—ha—skins. What a fucking joke.

  What a fucking game.

  He snatched a pigeon out of the air and bit off its head.

  Samantha. I don’t know how you did this to me, but I know it’s you.

  He grinned, letting the blood ooze between his teeth, the crunch of bone like the grind of popcorn kernels against his molars.

  I’m coming for you, Samantha.

  —

  “Samantha!” Joey roared. He hoisted another Prius over his head, over his horns, heaving it through the window of a coffee shop. In the plaza of the building where Samantha worked, humans, elves, and orcs ran for cover, screaming with shrill, hysterical voices. Joey loved that. “Samanthaaaa!”

  An officer mounted on a bay mare came cantering up the concrete steps.

  “Sir!” She was half shouting for backup into a walkie-talkie, drawing her gun with her free hand. “Sir, put the vehicle down!”

  Joey hoisted the car above his head and flung it at the officer. The horse squealed, its steel shoes scattering sparks on the flagstones. The officer went flying over its haunches, landing with a crack on the pavement.

  “Enough!”

  The word rang like a gunshot through the plaza. In front of the revolving doors stood Samantha and Nathan. Samantha held her laptop in her arms, like some pagan priestess holding out a blood offering to a god of wood and stone.

  “Samantha…” Joey growled, tossing his horns. He flipped one of the picnic tables for good measure. “You fucked me up, Samantha. That video game. I know it was yooooou…”

  “Yes,” Samantha said softly. She walked down into the plaza, her eyes never moving from his face. “Yes, it was me.”

  “You’re gonna fix it, you cunt.”

  “Why?” Nathan bristled, stepping in front of Samantha. The little fistfucker had gotten balls somewhere. In the afternoon gloom—the surrounding buildings were too high to allow any sunlight into the plaza—Nathan looked like a joke. Green Lantern T-shirt and black glasses worn unironically, a wallet chain peeking over the pocket of his Target-brand cargo shorts, fucking Doc Martens—Joey could’ve bought and sold fifty of Nathan, and bench-pressed his ass, too.

  “Nathan, you fucking chode,” Joey snarled. “You’re fucking her, aren’t you, you fat piece of—”

  “Jesus, dude, no. Don’t be a cliché.”

  “Fix meee!” Spit and snot flew from Joey’s mouth and nostrils, catching on his tusks with a spatter.

  “Why should we?” Nathan snarled. “So you can be king of shit hill again? Be a classist asshole? A fucking racist? So you can treat women like shit?”

  “I’m not racist—Samantha’s black!” Joey roared. He ripped a fire hydrant out of the ground for emphasis.

  “Dude,” said Nathan, fingers pressing his temples, eyes closed.

  Joey roared at all of them, roared up the scent of sewage and dead pigeons from his guts. Tiny puffs of feather, half-decayed with stomach acid, splattered the flagstones. They were getting off topic.

  “Give me back my body, Samantha!” Joey bellowed. “You don’t get to do this to me!”

  “You do this to other people,” Samantha said quietly. “You treat other people like games and toys and crap, Joey. You have no empathy. None.”

  “That’s the luck of the fucking draw!” Joey boomed, wrenching a tree out of the carefully sculpted plaza garden and smashing the windshield of another car. “I worked to be where I am! All I did was play a fucking video game!”

  “You played a game that was rigged against almost everyone else and then bragged about how well you played,” Nathan spat. “It was time to show you a better game.”

  “I am going to rip your fucking guts out, Samantha,” Joey hissed, rancid breath bubbling out between his rubbery lips. “I am going to make you eat Nathan’s fucking heart.”

  “You want me to help you, Joey?” Samantha murmured. The laptop was open and humming in her arms.

  “I didn’t ask for this!” Joey screamed. Rage boiled like heat in his chest, the old heat that he loved so much. “I didn’t choose this!”

  He shook the car about his head like King fucking Kong.

  “TURN. THE FUCKING. VIDEO GAME. OFF.”

  “Okay, Joey,” Samantha whispered. Her eyes were huge and shiny—Joey almost thought she was crying, but he was wrong. “I’ll turn the program off.”

  Samantha’s nails were clattering over the keys—such a little sound, but ringing in the petrified silence of the plaza.

  Warmth started to spread through Joey’s body—that perfect, clean warmth that he treasured, the last time he’d felt safe, the last time he’d felt certain. The green tinge was soaking away from his skin. The folds of flesh were tightening, hardening back
to human. His tusks slunk back into his jaws. His hands were pale once more, the nails, the goddamn nails unmanicured and natural—

  “Good, you fucking bitch,” Joey snarled, “you’d better—”

  The strength evaporated from Joey’s arms.

  —

  On the coroner’s report, Joey Connor was six two and 179 pounds. His race was Caucasian and his gender was cis-male.

  His cause of death was listed as “crushed by falling vehicle.”

  The results of his drug test were being processed; the coroner suspected PCP to account for the bursts of strength during which eyewitnesses claimed Connor had thrown several cars and vomited up the remains of raw birds.

  There were, of course, no such things as orcs.

  His girlfriend, Samantha Asante, identified the body.

  —

  “So,” said Nathan, in the ringing silence of his Greenpoint living room. If the stars were out, it was too bright in the city to see them.

  “So,” echoed Samantha. She took a long drink from a brown bottle, leaned back against Nathan’s kitchen counter.

  Nathan tried again. “He’s the third test subject to die.”

  “He’s the first one to deserve it,” Samantha answered. Toward the end of the sentence, she tried to make her tone apologetic, but it rang false. She didn’t bother to try again.

  “We’re gonna get reamed for letting him get seen while he was hulking out,” said Nathan.

  Samantha was looking at the city beyond the windows. He couldn’t tell if she was thinking about their bosses or about Joey fucking Connor.

  “We have a lot of players, Nate,” Samantha said at last. “Anyone who accepted the terms and conditions saw him wearing the new human skins and never had a memory of him as anything else. Anyone who didn’t just saw a douchey-looking white guy.”

  “But when we turned him into an orc—”

  “The people in the plaza saw whoever they wanted to demonize, hopped up on drugs,” Samantha said. It sounded rehearsed. She paused, as if she expected him to question her again. “And the woman he spoke to at the shop saw him as just some kind of human. Joey saw the skins we made him see—the ads, the elves, all that nonsense. Sure, there’ll be some conflicting eyewitness reports, but dead is dead. Someone in overhead will straighten out any paperwork. Reprogram what’s necessary.”