Fight Song (4 page)
Bob doesn’t respond. He should’ve hit him with the car.
Schumann continues, “What I’m saying is that I’m like your new teammate.”
“What are you getting at?”
“You see this all the time in sports,” Schumann says. “Heated competitors in one season get swapped onto the same team the next, and once teammates, they transcend any grudges of yore.”
“Yore?”
“It means things that happened in the past.”
“I know what it means,” Coffen says.
“So what I’m saying is, I can help you. I know lots of things that maybe might help somebody like you.”
“Like what?”
“I can coach you to always act like the guy who threw that flagpole at my house. Not the pansy you usually are. You’ll always be a fearless warrior.”
Schumann looks at Coffen, awaiting acknowledgment, but Bob doesn’t say shit, the clang in his brain getting worse. Words are far from his lips, locked behind some sort of window painted shut. Coffen will soon find out that a concussion is the culprit, but maybe it’s other things, too: Maybe it’s this new way Schumann speaks to him—with, what, respect? Deference? Equality? Bob’s not quite sure, only knows that he digs it.
“How’s your head?” Schumann asks. “Your eyes aren’t focusing, I don’t think.”
Bob sees the inherent merits in Schumann’s suggestion: Having him as a kind of tough-love life coach will not only take some pressure off, it might also earn a few bonus points at the neighborhood barbecues, jealous fathers wondering when these two kissed and made up, now trotting around like long-lost chums. Plus, Jane has always raved about Bev Schumann, and maybe now the couples can go out for paella.
Bob extends his hand out toward Schumann for a shake and says, “You want to be my life coach?”
“I don’t think that’s exactly what I said.”
“Can you teach me to be manlier? Like Gotthorm?”
“Who’s Gotthorm?”
“Never mind,” says Bob. “I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to be pushed around anymore.”
“I can definitely help with that,” Schumann says. “Training starts now. Let’s stop for some pizza on the way home from the ER. Demand that I pay for it.”
“Buy the pizza, please.”
“A kindergartener can be scarier than that.”
Bob pauses for a couple seconds, then screams, “You’re going to buy me a pizza. And there will be several expensive toppings.”
A smiling, hand-shaking Schumann says, “That’s the spirit.”
“And cancel any plans you might have for Friday. You’re chauffeuring Jane and me to a magic show.”
Dumper Games is decorated like a dignified day care. That’s all the rage with greedy corporations these days, disguising themselves as elaborate romper rooms with Ping-Pong, billiard, and foosball tables, entire walls of vintage video games from the 1980s, kegs of microbrewed ale available whenever an employee fancies a pint. None of the young workers wear shoes, all lollygagging around in argyle socks.
Malcolm Dumper, wearing his patented #99 Gretzky uni, invites Bob and his team into the conference room to plop down on one of the beanbags (of course, there’s no conference table or regular chairs in the conference room) and brainstorm. To powwow. To spitball ideas. To come up with a game so good it will boomerang DG back to its glory days. Specifically, Dumper wants this new game to corner the highly desirable and highly stunted eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old male demographic: a land where scatology is king, a sad, lonely world where a certain segment of guys game and game and game their lives away, only taking breaks to jerk off or eat a Hot Pocket. And then quickly back to gaming. And then maybe another jerk. Another Pocket. Ad infinitum …
Once everybody takes a seat on a beanbag, as is his tradition, Dumper launches these brainstorms with a speech,
macerating his metaphors to pulp: “The Dumper family needs to make some immediate changes to our catalog and make them fast. Imagine Dumper as a massive ship. This ship of ours needs to bore full speed ahead to generate revenue, yet it also needs to do a 180-degree about-face to get away from the boring titles we’ve already put out this year. Of course, no sailing vessel can do these two contradictory things at once. But we have to try to accomplish them, or who knows how long our doors will be open. Am I saying there’s imminent door closage? Not exactly. But the Great One is saying that our doors might get antsy to slam if we don’t start raking in some serious bacon.”
“Are you talking about buying a company yacht?” the mouth-breather says. He’s almost half Coffen’s age, has only worked at DG for eight months. Bob can’t wait until he gets fired, pursues an industry more suited to his talents, say a tenured position as the chief mouth-breathing lackey at a sleep apnea clinic. “For, like, fishing trips?”
“The Great One is talking about us. I’m talking about us taking the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old male demo and bouncing it on our knee and entertaining them with something edgier than they’ve ever imagined. And you’re the team to do it. So dazzle me with your pitches. Let me wet my beak on your fantastic ideas. Let me douse my beak. Submerge it underwater, deeper than the
Titanic
.”
“What about a stoner’s quest,” says the mouth-breather, “in which a guy goes on a journey to find the perfect bong? Early levels give him pretty good bongs—nice draw, a properly placed carb—but each new level the bongs grow by a foot. The last level he can get a ten-footer. That’s like the Sistine Chapel for bong aficionados.”
“You suggest that same idea at every meeting,” Dumper
says, his humungous tongue safely stowed in his mouth, alerting everyone that he’s not impressed.
“I’m pretty sure I nailed the pitch this time,” the mouth-breather says.
“These drug ideas are a different demo. Teens. Maybe preteens.”
“Bongs never go out of style, like turtlenecks.”
“Dude, turtlenecks are completely out of style,” another young team member says to the mouth-breather.
“Focus,” says Dumper. “Please. Shock me with your edginess. Let’s get back to our rightful Disemboweler throne.”
Coffen had masterminded the whole Disemboweler franchise: Disemboweler I: Flesh for Breakfast; Disemboweler II: Tasty Comrades; Disemboweler III: Zombie Happy Hour; Disemboweler IV: Let’s Get Bloody! The first game had been Bob’s breakthrough success, and he built it back before computer advancements made it so simple to design games. Coffen did this before all the drag-and-drop technologies simplified the process so any novice could put a half-assed game together. He learned the trade back in a dark age when, god forbid, humans had to do the coding themselves. He constructed entire ecosystems from his imagination, dreamed up elaborate, sinister narratives for his characters. Bob saw this creation as pure beauty, on the same level as writing a sonata or chiseling a sculpture from a slab of marble. But at a certain point, technology ruined it for Coffen. Talent didn’t matter if any idiot could cut and paste stock images, drag them into a prefab world, and pass that schlock off as a game. His job, once ripe with art and self-expression, was spoiled. The sonatas were silent. The marble was safe.
Now Dumper says, “Let’s get our company back to being the big men on campus.”
“And one woman,” the only woman on our team says.
“Of course,” Dumper says. “Beaucoup apologies. Anybody have another idea?”
A normally quiet team member launches into his pitch: “What about this gem: a game called Hey, That’s My Meth Lab! You’ll be a rival speed dealer trying to blow up all of your competitors’ meth labs.”
“How would you win that game?” the mouth-breather says, no doubt feeling competitive since his suggestion also covered narcotics territory.
“Once everybody’s buying your crank, you are crowned the champion of meth. You are the sultan of amphetamines.”
“No more ideas that have to do with drugs, okay?” Dumper says. “Next time we brainstorm like this, there will be a moratorium on illicit substances. Anybody else?” Dumper looks more and more like he’s regretting asking this team to think in an impromptu way.
Another team member quickly seizes the moment to showcase his immense potential for design: “Everyone I know—and I’m right smack in the heart of the demo we’re discussing—loves conspiracy theories. So what if we built a game that’s like a puzzle to solve an ancient riddle about how extraterrestrials aren’t extra at all. They’re us; they’re terrestrials. We are all aliens, bro! Extraterrestrials are terrestrials and vice versa. Can you imagine? People would wig out!”
“Is that what ‘terrestrial’ means? It means human?” the mouth-breather says.
The showcaser continues: “Yeah, humans. Us. We are us, but we are also aliens. We’re all god’s terrestrials. It’s like a metaphor for racism.”
“And why would your demo want to play a metaphor for racism?” Dumper asks.
“Because racism metaphors don’t have to be boring. There will be kickass explosions and topless ladies, sir. Lasers. Flying, time-traveling Cadillacs. If it has the potential to be awesome, it will be a highlighted component of the game. No questions asked.”
“So what’s the conspiracy theory exactly?”
“We’re aliens! What’s more of a conspiracy than finding out you’re something other than what you thought you were?”
“It’s the best bad idea so far,” says Dumper.
“We’re all something other than what we thought we’d be,” Coffen says.
Everybody stares at him.
Dumper says, “So you like the terrestrial idea then, Coffen?”
“I hate the idea.”
“Me, too,” Dumper says. “Have you got anything that might impress the Great One? Can you astound me like you used to do back in the good old Disemboweler days?”
All of us in this room are imbeciles
, Bob thinks,
working for a man-boy in a Gretzky sweater. He’s our pimp. He profits on laying our imaginations on their backs or bending them over a barrel and banging them from behind or reverse-cowgirling our imaginations until he gets all he wants, leaving them spent and soiled, discarded like losing lottery tickets
.
Coffen decides to defend his imagination’s honor by pointing out to all in attendance how vapid Dumper is: The Great One wants something to tickle the lowest common denominator? Bongs and meth labs be damned. This meeting is about to hit the basement. The denominator at the center of the earth.
“Bestiality,” Coffen says.
“What now?” Dumper asks.
“What’s edgier than bestiality? I could see this becoming a cult classic. Do you know how many drugged-up undergrads would love this?”
The team starts tittering.
After several seconds, Dumper says, “How would it work?”
“May I stand up to demonstrate?” Bob asks.
“Of course,” Malcolm Dumper says, and here comes his humungous tongue, slowly slithering out.
It takes Bob about ten seconds to jimmy his weight off of the beanbag. He’s still pretty woozy, only about twelve hours removed from the oleander incident. Jane had tried to talk him into taking the day off, but he’d insisted on coming to work. Why had he fought her to come here? For this? For beanbags? For bestiality?
Coffen is finally standing up. His imagination needs a neighborhood watch with Dumper around, a rape whistle.
“It would be a game,” Bob says, “without any handset controls. No, a game of this transgressive magnitude would need to work with user movements. We’ve seen Wii games where a user’s body movements can translate to the screen, the character in the game mimicking what the user is doing at home. This title would require that sort of technology. It would be an advancement for us in many ways, as we’ve never built anything in this style.”
Bob holds his hands out, waist high, pretending that somebody—or some animal—is positioned in front of him, bent over. Then Coffen begins maniacally thrusting his hips in a coital-inspired manner. He strikes a rather rollicking pace with his thrusts and keeps them up while continuing the pitch.
“I imagine a game where the character meanders the mean streets trying to have sex with every stray dog he can find. As the game progresses, soon the avatar has to prowl into the homes of private citizens to defile man’s best friend. Finally, for the grand finale, the sneaky, horny, mal-adjusted avatar must evade Secret Service and screw the president’s dog right in the Oval Office.”