Aharon Levy

Men With Dolls

There were so many people at the party, but really there were only two: Hanson—who everyone called Hans, though Hanson was itself already a nickname too tiresome to explain—and Lucretia.

“Yes, that’s really it,” she said, under thick, flirtatious eyebrows, “Really what my parents decided to call me. And you don’t have to make the jokes, I’ve heard them all already.”

“How many jokes are there about your name?”

She threw back her hair, which was flirtatious too, opened up her dazzling mouth, laughed as if this were a joke she’d never heard or imagined. “That’s right. There’s really only one, isn’t there?”

Lucretia thought Hanson was so, so, funny. She said so, put a hand on his forearm, roped others in to appreciate him. “This guy is hilarious. Say what you just said, repeat what you told me.” He made her laugh even after she’d told him he was funny; this proved something.

Then Peter mentioned War Cloud. Hanson and Peter were in a one-Sunday-a-month game together, just to keep up their skills and be social. It wasn’t like they owned expansion packs; they’d never written fan fiction or challenge scenarios set in the universe of, even if they had to admit they’d read these.

At this point they both did a great deal of admitting. Peter was the straight man spurring him on, Hanson the guy spilling confession after confession as he avoided using specialized vocabulary and mentioning War Cloud’s overarching goal, which was far more complicated than, but in a pinch reducible to, collecting the skulls of your many enemies. 

Lucretia crinkled up her face and asked, “So it’s dolls?” She seemed sure she’d misheard.

“Oh, yes,” said Hanson, “We’re adult men who play with dolls, was I not clear on that?”

Head thrown back. Laughter. Even after this, Hanson was funny.

The dolls weren’t dolls but figures. They really were the smallest part of War Cloud, as anyone who knew anything about War Cloud knew. But anyone who knew anything about War Cloud knew that when talking about War Cloud to people who didn’t know about War Cloud, you had to take certain precautions, which mainly involved mercilessly making fun of yourself to stop others from doing the same.

Normally Hanson would have been blushing, blinking. Lucretia had placed her hand on his arm three times, once keeping it there for five of his accelerated heartbeats. Normally Hanson would not have been talking to Lucretia at all, because Lucretia would not have been talking to him. But he kept on making her laugh, and thought this was enough. 

Hanson was no amateur. He’d had relationships, the latest for a full calendar year and terminated seven months earlier. Gwyn had been his actual girlfriend in actual Canada; he’d referred to this as living the dream. What was wrong with airport hotels, with Rochester—much closer to her than him—with not spending more time together? Didn’t it keep things fresher? Apparently not; the situation had inspired Gwyn to start seeing her thesis advisor and, some weeks after this began, to inform Hanson.

But Lucretia was not Gwyn. 

Leaving the party, he’d asked, “Hey, can I get your number?” and the surprise on her face was obvious as everything else on her face had been. Hanson decided it came from her sudden realization that this, maybe, could continue, that she would never have to stop laughing.

Not in some weird fairy tale or Twilight Zone sense, he appended in his mind. Just in the sense of he’d met a nice woman at a party, and she understood that he was a nice man, and they both were happy about this. She wrote the number out on an ATM receipt. Hanson never brought his phone to parties; what party could compete with his phone? 

Three days later she said, “Yeah, of course. How could I forget?” Out of what bits and pieces, he wondered, had she constructed him in the pause before she said this? Maybe she was playing it cool. Maybe she’d been waiting, wondering when he’d finally use the digits she’d punctuated with a smiley face.

“That was a fun party,” he said, though what did he know about the party? 

“They always are. I was so hungover. Sven’s got the hookup.”

He wasn’t sure what this meant or who Sven was, so he repeated himself with a variation. This was how conversation with strangers worked. Was she a stranger? “I had a nice time.”

“Yeah, me too, me too.” He could hear, he was almost sure, an expectant smile in her silence, enough to advance him to his real business.

“So,” he said, “I was wondering if you’d like to get together some time.”

“Oh! Oh. When?”

There was a whole calculus involved; Hanson wasn’t unaware. But they’d moved past preliminaries and feints, hadn’t they, the third time she’d touched his arm? “Maybe Friday?” And then, because she probably expected funny-Hanson, party-Hanson, “I mean, at night. I wouldn’t pull you out of the office. I’m a gentleman that way.”

“Friday night, huh?” She drew in her breath, preparing for a plunge, but the one she took was skywards or in some other unexpected direction. “I have plans?” As if asking his permission for these plans. And then she went not skyward but into an entirely different dimension. “Do you know your friend Peter? They’re actually with him? My plans. On Friday.”

Of course I know him, my friend Peter is my friend Peter. This was the first reply which came to Hanson. He admired himself for not speaking it. The second was, but what does he have to do with this? He managed to skip right to number three, which was to mumble, “Oh.”

“Maybe some other time? I’ll call you?” 

Hanson had clearly missed some things, but he grasped just what this meant. “That would be great.” And then, in case he was missing less than he thought and she really did mean some other time and also why hadn’t Hanson called earlier and wouldn’t this be a funny story for them to embarrass their kids with (you had to commit to a fantasy), “That would be really great.”

He chose to read her, “Yeah,” neutrally, an islet of possibility in a sea of no. 

Peter called him before he could call Peter. “Got the new Crusher,” Peter said.

Hanson hated that his friend was trying to cheer him up, hated also that this news did in fact cheer him up. They were not quite as casual War Clouders as they’d made themselves out to be (so what? There’d been lots of lying at the party, apparently), and had been talking about the Crusher for months. Hanson said, “Cool.” 

“We should take this baby out for a spin.”

“You haven’t already?”

“Well, I mean, sure, yeah, I opened it,” Peter admitted. “But together, you know. You probably know more commands than I do. Probably.”

“Yeah, probably.” Hanson had a knack for memorization, but where had it gotten him?

“I’m actually, do you remember Lucretia?” Collusion! Thought Hanson. The word on everyone’s lips. “I made plans with her Friday. Just to hang out.” Hanson continued saying nothing. He’d be like Buddha, hurt but rising above it. Was that how Buddha worked? There were probably a lot of different Buddhas; one almost certainly was that way. “It’s kind of weird how it happened.” Peter didn’t elaborate and Hanson, obviously, didn’t ask. “But let’s hang out. Friday, even. And you could stay, break in the Crusher, if you want. If you want.”

Was Peter trying to keep Hanson inside? Was he implying he wouldn’t come home? Like story streams in War Cloud, possibilities branched and multiplied. And as in War Cloud, nearly all were deadly.

On Friday Peter buzzed him in. Peter’s apartment sucked—colorless carpet, low ceilings—which just highlighted how cool his stuff was. Peter’s flat screen was actually curved, he had good headphones not just for himself but for guests too, and the furniture was leather, so everyone—up to a capacity of six; nobody was allowed on the sofa arms—got to sit on something like a bomber jacket. 

The Crusher stood on Peter’s coffee table, the rare item that looked better in life than online. It was the size of a very small child, remorseless LED eyes dim now but ready to light in any of its five vision modes: Regular, Night, Underwater, Ultraviolet, and Berserk Rage. Hanson chatted about a few things—the hockey game neither of them cared about, the weather, which was weather—before pretending to notice it. “Not bad,” he said.

“I can’t figure out how to use the axe.”

“Does he have an axe? You have to order it separately.” He’d been told he had a certain way of imparting information; listening to himself, Hanson believed it.

“I ordered it.”

They plugged the figure—Peter snorted, “Doll,” and Hanson snorted right back—into Peter’s Nintendo. Hanson, at least, had the same model; you didn’t cut corners on the console. Peter scrolled through menu options so quickly that Hanson suspected his friend had done more messing around with controls than he’d claimed. But it was still Hanson who located and activated the axe, which had for some reason been loaded into a side pocket in the figure’s Pouch of Mayhem rather than into its Deathbelt. 

After twenty endless seconds of online verification, they were ready. They exited Control mode and entered the Field, the figure’s eyes lighting up in anticipation of all the blood it would spill. Its motorized right arm rose gently while on the screen a hapless Villager became a cloud of red mist.

“Too bad we can’t use this in the league,” said Peter. In the live-action game you could only use pieces you’d earned through years of murderous dice-rolling. They’d decided this after Thomas had shown up with a Spine Hoarder he’d bought from some sucker in Calgary. Last Hanson had heard, Thomas was commuting an hour each way to the only local game which would still let him play. 

“It’d be a bloodbath.”

The Crusher was cool as hell, but just as they’d blasted through six dull Villages and reached a good Castle-Crypt—handing the controller back and forth, Peter always more willing to explore but Hanson necessary for technical parts like clearing out a Mushroom Thief burrow—Peter disappeared into the bathroom. He came out after a few minutes smelling like cologne and said, face sad toward his carpet (I’d look sad too if that were my carpet, thought Hanson), “I could just blow this off.”

What were you supposed to say? This was one of those puzzles Hanson had never been good at, because they had nothing to do with any knowledge he possessed. He took too long to mutter, “No, go. You’ve already gotten all stinky.” 

“Try not to burn through too many health points, okay?”

Hanson determinedly kept his eye on the screen, a scoffing smile on his face, as if he pitied Peter but was too kind to show it. He hardly ever used health points.

After two hours of play, his neck was stiff and his thumbs had molded themselves to the complex possibilities of the Crusher’s armory. The figure on the table had made a few moves; Hanson had spoken to it a few times. “You and me, buddy, clearing out the Undercreatures.” Five minutes later: “I mean, no offense, I know you’re half Undercreature yourself. But you’re one of the good ones, right?” And a minute later, “Some of my best friends are Undercreatures.” Eventually, he shut up. In any reasonable fantasy, the figure would talk back and instruct Hanson on the ways of vengeance, leading to a twist ending everyone felt comforted by because they’d seen it coming. But it was just a plastic doll stuffed with electronics. Hanson was a realist; War Cloud was a game.

He paused it, stood and stretched, took a thoughtful piss in Peter’s weird low toilet. He imagined what Lucretia and Peter were up to—laughing about Hanson, laughing in general, though laughter, Hanson still felt, was his and Lucretia’s thing. Maybe they were staring into one another’s eyes in the mutual understanding that there were things beyond laughter. 

You could create your own stories. You didn’t need a Serling or a Martin or the reclusive Swedish weirdo who’d come up with War Cloud. You didn’t need a Crusher to tell you that you’d been wronged. The obvious thing was to toss it out the window and say that a glitch in the game made it leap. This was plausible, if just barely.

But the Crusher hadn’t done anything to Hanson. 

He could take a dump and not flush. The other guys on their freshman floor had considered this the height of humor. Hanson—he’d been known as Jerry then—had learned to trust no toilet, to approach with eyes and nose on lockdown, one arm outstretched toward the lever. Dashing out of a stall during his second week he’d run into Peter, who he’d never noticed because Peter was just as quiet as Hanson had been then. Peter had sighed, rolled his eyes, asked, “What’s so funny about leaving your shit out? Anyone can do that. Literally anyone, unless he’s constipated.” The question had been hilarious to them, and they’d busted into giggles right in the echoing smelly bathroom. Sometimes Peter had been the funny one. 

But that was a deep cut. Peter might just see some shit in a toilet, vengeance without meaning, craziness.

They could be kissing. That was the thing about people. It was always possible that they were out in the world somewhere, kissing.

They could be doing more, obviously. Hanson wasn’t a child; he understood.

This feeling was a problem, but not a problem like getting past a Poison Egg Cave. Emotion was Hanson’s great weakness. Possibly this was true of everyone, everywhere. But everyone, even Peter, seemed to do alright, to possess the common knowledge of what to feel, how to express it. They knew how to stand when pictures were taken, while Hanson always ended up open-mouthed, stunned, looking like he was holding an imaginary baguette.

He walked over to Peter’s display shelves. Peter was a little anal about cleanliness. Maybe women could tell that he was orderly. Maybe women liked that. Maybe it meant a man was reliable, a good bet as a father.

But come on, it was their first date.

What if it wasn’t? What if the collusion stretched back, deep as any conspiracy?

The Crusher’s eyes went dim; it did that if you paused for more than five minutes. 

It was all instinct, wasn’t it? The choices had been set up by cavemen or even before that, in monkey times.

Monkey Times would be a good newspaper name, wouldn’t it?

The War Gloater wasn’t much of a figure. It had no interactivity or motion modes—was, in other words, just a hunk of plastic—and was an odd greenish color with flecks of fake gold, like dollar-store jewelry rotted on a lawn. This ugly lameness had made it unpopular when it came out, and because it was unpopular then it was rare now. 

Hanson picked up the Gloater from the shelf’s last row, so far back it was a little dusty; did Peter even remember he had it?  The figure was mint and Hanson was sure that somewhere in the apartment its box waited, mint too. 

What had those guys always said, those shit leavers? Bros before hos. The motto had excluded those with neither, who were repelled by the idea—at least expressed in this manner—of both. 

Just because you didn’t scream didn’t mean you didn’t want to scream.

They hadn’t even been dicks to Hanson and Peter, those guys, or not bigger dicks than they were to each other. They’d been willing to consider them bros, no matter what the evidence to the contrary was. 

He snapped the Gloater’s shield off, snapped off a leg, in an instant fit of remorse stuck him back together—one, two, three attempts, success—and replaced him in the dark dustless circle he’d occupied previously. It was perfect; nobody could tell what he’d done without looking closely. 

Shame on Peter for not keeping his valuables safer. 

Hanson ran cold water over his face in a shiver of nerves. He should leave, he thought, but would a Crusher flee? He had to be there, to express either his innocence or some other more monkeyish sentiment. 

“But I wouldn’t be a Crusher. Not getting down on myself, but most people have to be Villagers. If the world were only Crushers, that wouldn’t work, right?” The Crusher’s eyes glowed red. But that was just because he’d hit a button on the control. 

“Hello?”

Hanson’s first thought was that he’d lost his mind. “Gwyn? What are you doing?”

“You called me.”

“I did?” It seemed he had; the voice emanated not from the game but from the phone in his hand. “I guess I did. Misdialed.”

“Nice to speak to you too.”

“How are you?”

“I’m well.” A long pause. “I’m in the middle of something.”

And here it was, a perfect example of what Hanson meant even if Hanson wasn’t sure what that was. She could have just not picked up. “Yeah, me too.” Ah, there it was, the blushing. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“No, it’s not. I shouldn’t have-”

“Whatever it is, it’s fine. But I should go.” She’d always been so nice.

Friday night was tough when you were alone and emotionally stunted, as Gwyn had once called Hanson. But Friday night had always been tough.

The Gloater was ugly, but it hadn’t done anything to him either. 

Hanson had been playing an hour when he heard the knob turn. “Oh, hey,” he said, pausing at an inopportune time, a Battle Grim just bearing down with no good in any of its seven eyes. But this was Peter’s game, and thus the Grim was Peter’s problem. “How was it?” 

His friend took in the scene—plate with leftover pizza crust, the slice eaten cold though there was no way for Peter to know that—phone face up and hopeful, half-full beer bottle defiantly coasterless on the table. “It was fun. You?”

“Fun too.” He let himself imagine the Gloater pulsing from his wounds on the shelf, calling for revenge in a high, feeble plastic voice. “What’d you do?”

“Dinner. Thai.”

Garlic, thought Hanson, onion. But also: tropical drinks. 

“How about you?”

“You’re looking at it.” 

“Cool, cool. I’m probably not going to see her again, but it was fun.”

The insane notion crossed Hanson’s mind that his friend had dropped Lucretia to be kind to him. But that was insane. “Too bad. She seemed cool.” 

For the first time Hanson considered what he remembered, specifically, of Lucretia. Her hair had been purple at its ends, fading into pink. She’d been short. She’d studied something in college, but what? Until that moment, all he’d thought about was her laugh, her hand on his arm, the visible bra strap she hadn’t bothered adjusting. From this, he’d imagined kids?

Why had they even been at the party? Peter had invited him, pressured him to come, but what was Peter’s connection?

“Sure. She was. But not as cool as us.”

Peter and Hanson eyed each other. Between them, they had five visible logos on their clothing. They both wore glasses they’d bought online. Sometimes Hanson wore contacts—he had at the party—though they made him look like a just-woken turtle, beady-eyed and blinky. Peter had a weird smear of beard that Hanson kept meaning to tell him he should shave; Hanson had his sideburns though he knew he shouldn’t. Were they cool? “Do you know anyone named Sven?”

“What? If I knew someone named Sven, don’t you think I’d tell you? Sven. Sven. I wish. Very turtlenecky.” Peter picked up Hanson’s beer and took a sip. He put it back down on a coaster. He sighed. “Yeah. She was cool. But she said she’s sort of seeing a guy right now. You know how it is. I wouldn’t want stuff to get too complicated.”

Hanson nodded as if it were just one more piece of irrelevant information. “That sucks, man.” And it did, really. He wanted his friend to be happy, even if that wasn’t all he wanted.  “Speaking of complications, the Crusher has a stealth mode. Did you know that?”

Peter dropped his coat right where it was, not bothering with the hanger, and jumped onto the couch. “That,” he said—and obviously some of his excitement was feigned, but, also obviously, most of it wasn’t—“I have to see. You have to show me.”

So Hanson showed him.