Playing Games

A young boy sits in a hard plastic seat, head bowed, intent on the pixellated action on the GameBoy in his lap. He sits next to a woman who is obviously not his mother, in her faux fur coat with tan lining and her mini-skirt that is not at all weather-appropriate. She fidgets in her seat like you would expect from someone the boy’s age, but she’s easily three times as old. Perhaps she’s his older sister, or maybe even an aunt, but she’s paying him virtually no mind with her headphones on that blare an Eminem song on a high enough volume to disturb other travelers in nearby seats. The boy doesn’t even hear the music, so intent is he upon proving his dominance over the game on his lap. He wears corduroy pants, awkwardly hemmed as if done in haste, and an old, ratty sweatshirt proclaiming him a Philadelphia Eagles fan.

They are sitting outside of Gate A in the Newark Airport, two people adrift in the sea of chaos that is New Year’s Day, with so many people heading back home after a vacation of sorts that has come to a swift conclusion. Most are hungover even in the early afternoon, waiting for flights with cups of coffee in hands that need warming up. An old newspaper with yesterday’s date sits on the chair next to the boy, but it might as well be his companion for all the attention he gives to it. If he cared to look, however, he would realize the front page of the paper is all about him, but he doesn’t look, and the woman’s eyes are closed so she misses the implication as well. She seems lost in meditation but she is in actuality thinking about all the money she could get if she plays her cards right. Opening her eyes, she glances at the game the boy is playing, then turns her attention to her watch that tells her they have half an hour until their plane will begin boarding.

Time has never been her friend even from the start when she was born three weeks after her due date. She was also the fourth child out of six so there was never any time for her needs, for her wants, or for her in any other way, shape, or form. But she hadn’t spent much time lamenting her fate, instead choosing to use her endless time in planning the great escape. The boy next to her was her youngest brother, the sixth of six, and she had saved up to get him the GameBoy he is playing. It had been worth every single penny because he hadn’t asked a thing about what they were doing or where they were going. In fact, he had spoken only a single word since he had started playing the first game, a word that she won’t repeat and that she didn’t even know he had in his vocabulary.

He is not as oblivious as she thinks, however. The boy knows he’s being abducted, that he will never again see the home in which he lived the first ten years of his life, but to him that’s okay. He lets his sister lead him like a sheep among wolves because he wants to go far away, anywhere that will get him attention and the material things that he craves, that will let him be a kid. He’s tired of the hand-me-downs like the Eagles shirt he has on that passed from his oldest brother, to another brother, and then on down to him. He has no clothing that hasn’t taken this “trickle down” approach, and he wants more. It’s not just material things either, but he figures the rest can come in time. He doubts his mother even realizes he is gone, not yet anyway. It’s only been three hours, and she wasn’t even awake when they left. She belongs with the rest of the people in the airport, the ones who are nursing hangovers and drinking coffee. She belongs somewhere he doesn’t.

His sister isn’t perfect, either, he understands. She is too full of herself because no one else ever added to her sense of self, so she has had to invent and enhance that image as time has passed. The boy knows the feeling. Indeed, he has also never developed a sense of belonging, of being needed by anyone or anything, but he masks the feeling with games. At first it was the games he played inside of his head, the ones where he always came out the champion and others cheered him on. Then it was the sidewalk games with the other neighborhood “leftover” children. They called themselves that because their parents routinely said they should have stopped having kids before that point. Then they had been born and their parents kept saying what they said before. Kids listen, even when they don’t seem like they’re listening.

The boy plays games, but his sister does too. He sees that. In her head she’s a princess, like those Disney princesses, like the essence of perfection she aspires to and sees when she looks in the mirror. He watches, and he feels sad for her. Even in his ten-year old mind, he understands that the world doesn’t work the way she thinks it should, that she’ll be disappointed by life again and again. But his games are better, he knows. He can actually win in his. He can watch the Tetris blocks fill in the screen and disappear from view, and the score soars into the stratosphere. It’s tangible, and he prefers this sort of winning, of being recognized, more than life itself. He hopes his sister will realize at some point the futility of life and find the microcosm that will allow her to win.

Somewhere above their heads an intercom sparks to life, and a robust voice tells them in English and Spanish that their plane is boarding. He puts his Game Boy back into his book bag, takes his sister’s hand, and they head into their uncertain future.

Sam