Ed King

  On Pop’s birthday, Ed brought a grocery-store cake, a carton of ice cream, a box of candles, and a card that said, on its cover, “It’s your birthday,” and inside, “Just in case you forgot!” Zinaida’s dinner menu, at Pop’s request, was breaded veal cutlets, canned corn, rolls, and a salad of iceberg lettuce and tomato wedges with bottled ranch dressing. When Ed was seated, Pop said, “Zinaida, your cutlets look top of the walk, but when do you give me my birthday present?”

  “You are a funny joker,” answered Zinaida. “Ha-ha, funny guy. Tomorrow, okay, I bring present.”

  “Pah,” said Pop. “So you forgot, it’s all right. Why make a federal case? I’m an understanding guy. So, now, here’s what I want for my birthday—please, Zinaida, sit down at the table and have one of these beautiful cutlets!”

  “You have to,” said Ed. “It’s his birthday, Zinaida.” He shrugged, got up, and got a plate, knife, fork, napkin, glass, Michelob, and place mat.

  Later, Zinaida had to eat cake, too. Ed taught her the words to “Happy Birthday” before she disappeared into the kitchen. Then it was time to watch 60 Minutes, with Pop looking forward to the end-of-show segment, when Andy Rooney would be annoyed by something in a way that was “Irish, not Jewish.” Predictably, though, Pop fell asleep before Rooney’s rant, and when he did, Ed headed eagerly for Zinaida. “You see him five days a week,” he said to her. “What do you see that I don’t see?”

  Zinaida was fussing with the cake-box flaps, trying, carefully, to catch their flimsy latches. She looked flustered by this effort and had her tongue between her teeth. “He don’t remember,” she said, not looking at Ed. “Where is his glasses? He don’t know where is glasses. I go with him to Lucky store, he don’t know Lucky store or street, where is apartment, he don’t know apartment. In kitchen, I’m here, he is saying, ‘Who are you!’ So I tink, yes, he is forget.”

  “How is your sister?”

  “Should not talk to husband on phone—mistake.”

  “Your niece and nephew?”

  “Father no good.”

  “Cake boxes are impossible.”

  “Is very good cake.”

  “Take some home.”

  “Children are spoil. Video game.”

  “Well,” said Ed, “let them eat cake,” which he assumed she wouldn’t get—but she answered, to his surprise, “Marie Antoinette.”

  “Or so people believe.”

  “I am history student, Tashkent University.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Is not good question.”

  “Ever married?”

  “Not good question.”

  “What happened to your marriage?”

  “First husband, we are young, we are eediot, married. Second, he is older, choreographer.”

  “And?”

  “Is not your business. I learn on ESL. Not business.” She wagged a forefinger at him, sternly.

  “Who cheated on who?”

  “Is not nice question.” At last, she got the box shut. “Not nice question. You are Jewish boy?”

  “Bar Mitzvahed. And circumcised. In case you were wondering—I’m circumcised.”

  Zinaida turned one hand behind her now, and rested it on the counter with double-jointed flexibility. The inside of her elbow stared at Ed, with its tiny creases, blue with veins. “How old?” she said.

  “Is not nice question.”

  “How old?”

  “Old enough.”

  “You are child.”

  “If you say so.”

  Zinaida drew an ascending line in the air with an element, thought Ed, of choreography. “Up,” she said. “Now you are up. Later, not so much.” Her hand came down in a dénouement. “Is different.”

  “So, Zinaida. Who cheated?”

  Zinaida pushed the cake box, sharply, into the spot she’d chosen for it, beside the breadbox. Before she could say or do anything else, Ed pulled her in and kissed her on the lips. In response, she slapped him. “Hey,” said Ed. “That hurt.”

  “Hurt,” said Zinaida. “You don’t know hurt! Your all life, no hurt, because rich boy, America.” Zinaida raised her hand as if to slap him a second time. “You are boy,” she said. “Boy who try to make love to moo-tear. I’m not moo-tear to that guy,” she said. “Is wrong—make love to maht’.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Ed. “But I don’t have some kind of weird psychological problem, if that’s what you’re getting at. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “Da,” said Zinaida, which he chalked up to a language difficulty: that she didn’t understand “psychological problem.” But what difference did it make? She didn’t want to sleep with him. “Okay, Zinaida,” Ed said, “you win. But just don’t hit me a second time.”

  She slapped him again anyway. He cringed and drew back from her. “Some day you pay,” hissed Zinaida.

  Pop eventually became a wanderer with no compass and needed to live behind a door he couldn’t unlock. Dan and Alice flew in to oversee his exodus to L’Chaim House and took Ed and Pop to dinner at nice places, but after a week—and having importuned Ed to visit Pop regularly—they were gone. The idea of visiting L’Chaim House had little appeal to Ed, but finally he went. After inquiring about Pop with an administrator in the foyer, he was ushered into a dining hall where everyone looked dead. Forgotten captains of Bay Area industry and blue-haired stewards of archaic civic missions were gathered together over breast of chicken served by, maybe, Inuits and Trinidadians. These old, forgotten Jews and their multicultural servants oppressed Ed’s consciousness: a man with sparse gray whiskers sprouting indecorously amid dewlaps loomed in his path, then a woman tarted up with rouge and a wig, a bric-a-brac brooch, and some sawdust geegaws. Ed worked past them. The smell of urine mingled with the smell of food. How, he thought, could these ghosts dream of eating? Impaled this way, he found Pop, greeted him with a shoulder squeeze, sat, and, with no choice, engaged his tablemates. The woman to his right was freshly widowed and transplanted of late from Skokie for the convenience of her son, a lawyer. Across from her, a pint-sized nebbish picked ineffectually at romaine leaves. In answer to Ed’s “How are you tonight?,” he said, “Tonight, like every night, I hope I die in my sleep,” to which Pop replied, with his mouth full of steamed corn, “Don’t say that.” “What,” replied the nebbish, “why shouldn’t I speak? At the very least, they shouldn’t get me up at eight.” A hired, in-house, cheery someone, he complained, came to his apartment at eight every morning and cajoled him toward the world of the living by goading him into fresh underpants and loading up his toothbrush. “Me, too,” said Pop. “But that’s life.”

  After dinner, Ed went with Pop to his quarters. Once there, Pop sat in a hard chair, looking skinny and bruised. His grooming had deteriorated, and he needed a tune-up that should include a fresh shirt, because the one he was wearing wore part of his dinner. Ed said, “Pop, your shirt’s stained, maybe you should change it,” and this caused Pop to rub its button line and say, “You watch what you want on the TV.”

  They watched a program about replacing old radiators in a three-story Victorian. Pop fell asleep. Ed waited the requisite fifteen minutes before shaking him awake and saying, “Pop, I have to go.”

  “Okay,” said Pop. “One thing. End of hallway.” He pointed in the wrong direction. “A funny problem I’m having there. That oy-vay-iz-mir elevator don’t stop my floor. The door don’t open. Something’s kaput.”

  “Pop, you live in a managed facility, so, if there are elevator problems, management takes care of it.”

  “Management? I don’t want management. It’s Otis, if they’re still in business. Where you look for something like this is in the Yellow Pages, the telephone book, Escalator Repair or like that.”

  Ed said, “I’ll talk to somebody, Pop. Tomorrow.”

  “What,” said Pop, “you can’t stay for dinner? A teeny minute. One minute, only.” He wiped his nose on a wadded snot-rag, then started cleaning
his glasses with it. “It’s either you or the other one adopted,” he said. “I don’t know which, but one is adopted.”

  “I hear you,” said Ed. “Okay, Pop.”

  “The other,” said Pop. “He’s younger or older?”

  “Simon?”

  “Daniel.”

  “Daniel is my father.”

  “You’re not Daniel?”

  “No. I’m Ed.”

  “Well,” said Pop, “one is adopted. Like Moses was adopted and—did you know this?—Ted Danson, the Jewish actor who is excellent on Cheers.”

  “Pop.”

  “Somewhere I read it, he’s Jewish, this guy.”

  “Anyway,” said Ed, “I have to go. Take care.” And he hugged Pop, who clutched Ed’s shoulders, kissed his ear, and said, “Edeleh, drive safe, wear the seatbelt.”

  “Okay.”

  “Next time you come, it’s my funeral,” Pop warned. “Every night I tell God, I’m begging you, please, let it be I don’t wake up again L’Chaim House.”

  “I thought—”

  “L’Chaim House,” Pop added. “Who are they kidding? To life? Now? At my age? Please! Life don’t end at a L’Chaim House—please! There’s a guy I know here, a minyan guy, Levitz, he calls it instead L’Heil House, ‘Heil, Hitler!’ ‘Heil, Hitler!’ That’s right! That’s better!”

  “Pop.”

  “Maybe you might be the son of Hitler,” said Pop. “The word for that is ‘irony,’ doctor. You know what is irony? Like chosen people, chosen for what, to be picked on by everybody, everywhere, always? Thanks for the choosing—that’s irony, great! A Hitler adopted by Jews, oy gevalt!”

  There was no point in listening to more of this gibberish, so Ed said, “I love you, Pop,” and left.

  …

  Simon quit Caltech and moved to Omaha, because a kid he’d met at Caltech had grown up in Omaha, and that kid had a cousin, and the cousin had a friend, and the four of them were going to rent an old house not far from Creighton University and start a video-game company. “What are there, ten Jews in Nebraska?” asked Dan, mocking his forebearers. “There’s more horses in Omaha than Jews,” he added. “What is he doing in Omaha?”

  They visited him in Omaha, where there was dirty snow in the gutters. It was too cold for Dan and Alice; even with double socks they both had foot complaints.

  On the phone to Ed at Stanford, Alice described Si’s house as a dungeon. “First of all, it stinks to high heaven like rotten food. No one takes out the trash. You should see the bathroom. These boys he’s living with are very nice boys, but their social manners! They have no idea how to talk to adults, none. I don’t know how Simon stands it. His room is a pig pen. His teeth are stained from all the Coke he drinks.” Dan corroborated everything Alice said and supplemented: “What they do business-wise with all those computers is a mystery to me, because, as far as I’m concerned, they’re playing video games all the time. What a waste of talent.”

  Simon’s company was called Virtual of Omaha, and Virtual of Omaha, in the summer of ’84, got noticed by a distributor who wanted to publish Samurai Shoot-Out if Virtual could add levels. Virtual immediately added levels. The same distributor took SummitQuest to shareware and uploaded Episode One to gamer bulletin boards: fifteen dollars for Episode Two, or twenty-five for Two and Three together. Ed, who had a summer job indexing data at the Stanford Research Institute, read the reviews. People liked the graphics and were trading tricks and secrets. The action was smooth and the artwork professional. Someone at Simon’s company had a bleak sense of humor. Gore was in ascendance. Callousness reigned supreme. Ed could see on the bulletin boards that SummitQuest had followers and aficionados, so he wasn’t surprised when Alice let him know that Simon had called home with some very good news: Virtual had a royalty check for five thousand something and expected the next to be bigger.

  “Four guys,” said Dan, “five thousand dollars, what’s that, a month’s worth of pizza? Okay, fine, Simon’s following his bliss, but between you and me, I wish he was at Caltech.”

  Virtual of Omaha imploded that fall when one of its owners became extremely irritating. Sides were taken, screaming ensued, and before long the irritating party sheared off, taking demos and hard drives. Simon teamed up with the now fractured company’s graphics whiz, but without an artist or a game designer they were at a disadvantage for their first six months and had to borrow money to stay afloat. Dan and Alice got asked for three thousand dollars “to cover the basics during start-up and retrench,” and after a lot of hair pulling, debate, and soul-searching, they gave Simon the three thousand and threw in another seven thousand, on the condition that he re-establish his business in Seattle, where they could keep better track of their investment.

  This time, Si was more careful about partners. “Not as loud,” Alice told Ed on the phone. “Not as messy. Not as immature. I like this better. Much, much better. One of his roommates and partners is Jewish, and another is a Mormon, according to Si. A perfectly nice boy. Does vivid artwork. Simon showed me what this artist can do. It’s a very polished comic-book style, lots of emotion, lots of dynamism. Beautiful drawings from a talented soul. Apparently, he went to a good art school in San Francisco. There’s another boy in Si’s new company who I think is probably potentially quite brilliant. He has a good vocabulary and a calm way about him. Gary Wan, he’s called. Very polite and cordial to me. Chinese, his father is a doctor. L.A.—grew up in West Covina. Leukemia research, his father is prominent. And this boy gets along with Si. I can see that Gary understands Si’s quirks. I just wish everyone in Si’s house was cleaner. I told Si, of course he has toe fungus, they never clean the shower, he doesn’t keep his feet clean, he doesn’t change his socks. I want him to read a little about hygiene, but I can’t bring myself to say that, because already I can tell he thinks I’m just neurotic, whereas—”

  “What is Si calling his company?” asked Ed.

  “It’s clever,” said Alice. “It’s GameKing.”

  With surprise, and then pride, Dan and Alice followed GameKing. First, Curse of the Cave went to shareware. After Curse came Oil Well Armageddon, followed by the breakthrough popularity of Fling. In Fling, an action hero, Nick Fling, made his way, tongue-in-cheek, through hordes of adversaries. His savoir-faire had—as Si put it—“a noirish edge tinged by existential weariness.” Nick Fling was worldly, intelligent, and bored. His signature move was to point out something in the background—for example, a stripper—then shoot his opponent in the side of the head—with, say, a Luger—when his opponent turned to look. Fling had style, but a different style, in each episode. He went from a Vandyke to a high-and-tight to late-Elvis sideburns, then to a trench coat, then a zoot suit with spats, a fedora, and a tommy gun, then caveman skins. He was successively a back stabber, a kneecapper, a piano-wire strangler, a decapitator, a head smasher, and a disemboweler. He liked to clean his weapons with nonchalance, whistling; sometimes, with a push broom, he swept the screen clean of the dead. It was Simon who’d been responsible for “character development” when it came to Fling, Simon who’d made Fling so attractively amoral, Simon who’d taken Fling’s darkness and made it light. Fling was mean and mischievous, troubled but untroubled, and he inhabited game space with such sadistic flair that GameKing rode him into the arena of solvency. On a roll, Simon developed Dervish and Guillotine Escape, both steeped in cruelty, then Sand Patrol, with 3-D graphics, then QuantumCraze, a first-person maze game so disquietingly immersive that one buyer threatened a lawsuit on the grounds of “debilitating claustrophobia.” GameKing put a lawyer on retainer who dismissed this threat but went to work, immediately, on copyright-infringement claims. There was a looming contest over patents, too, and ongoing litigiousness over the licensing of GameKing’s innovations to other companies. These expensive and mission-threatening diversions didn’t seem to faze Simon. “We’re out of control,” he told his parents on the phone. “Everything’s a go right now. The taps are open. We’re hot.”

/>   Si leased a floor of workspace in Redmond. Alice took an “I told you so” approach, but Dan remained openly bewildered. Ed, during his spring break from Stanford, flew home full of envy and curiosity. He saw right away, meeting Simon at a coffee shop, that his brother was still a geek, though he now sported a mod sweater, a narrow tie, and neutering black glasses. Si seemed dried out, especially his sinuses. His medical report to Ed included arid sniffling, headaches, a tendency toward bloody noses, and a pounding in his ears when he exercised too much. He told Ed he was worried about being hated by people he’d had to let go in the past six months. He was trying to read outside his profession so as to “maintain some objectivity and not get stale.” Every game that came out, from every company, he sought to understand through mastery. “You learn about games when your fingers are flying,” he said. “That’s when you see where a designer is coming from. Subconscious effects—you make those conscious. Some of these people are masters of the form. It’s sort of electrifying, for me at least, to feel how smart they are, and manipulative and creative. It’s to the point in the field where there are academic theorists. And you know what? I completely concur. This is the genesis of something meaningful and big. This is the dawn of the golden age of gaming. I’ve got to be thinking when I green-light a game now—I have to put my choices in context. But forget all that. For me it’s about creation. Actually designing. In fact, right now I’m looking for someone on the business side so I can go back to actually designing.”

  GameKing inhabited the top floor of a building that Simon called, in quotation marks, the Dark Tower. It loomed large amid blacktopped acres of parking, with its mirrored windows suggesting a house of fun. As for landscaping, the Dark Tower was unadorned save for an art installation at its entrance: a glinting orb, twenty feet high, that was set into a relation with the building that allowed for an exchange of light. It was four when Simon and Ed arrived—Ed was to tour GameKing’s facility and operations—and now both the building and the orb looked burnished. “Better than some, worse than others,” said Simon, as he and Ed stopped to contemplate the art. “Not too pretentious—just a profound marble. At least we don’t have to put up with sentiment just to walk through our own front door.”