“And though he can’t have them back, someone else might. I could walk away with a really sweet deal.”
“Or a really bad one.”
“Because there’s a catch.”
Eddie smiled. “A lovely, lovely catch.”
“Which would be…”
“Your memories for his,” Mimi said.
“Win, and take away what he’s lost,” Melody said.
“Lose, and let go of your own,” Eddie said.
“All of them?” I thought about chasing girls on the playground with my “love inducer” made from a Cracker Jack box and an old TV antenna. I thought about the first sex I ever had, back seat of a Ford Futura. That time in fifth grade, sneezing while giving an oral report, unspooling snot, snorting it back up. Sixth grade, wrestling, shitting my shorts. The look on my father’s face that one Christmas.
“All? No, of course not. The game has limits. But I’m sure there are memories you don’t want anyway.” Eddie’s smile became carnivorous.
She was right. There were some memories I wouldn’t miss, but others? Others I’d sell my soul to keep. “Ah,” I said. “What are the odds?”
They led me to the back of the store, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew playing in the background. Once we passed behind the curtain, there was almost no light. Just a glowing, cluttered table around which had been arranged four chairs. The three workers, owners, sisters, whatever, gestured to the extra seat and found their way to their own. I could see them in the near dark, reflecting the light of the strange table that looked like a giant, glowing toadstool, but — like seeing the light of the store itself through snow, like seeing modern drama through the lens of comics — not really. I couldn’t see them at all. As I took the offered seat, suddenly I felt like a student again. First day of class. What would I learn?
I’d been teaching for a long time. I knew a lot of shit. Once upon a time, that knowledge was useful. I could riff off the Greeks and the Akkadians and the Medieval Mystery Plays for hours. But nowadays where I taught…not so much. Rose State used to be a community college, a kind of votech for not-ready-for-prime-time scholars. No, probably not fair, but after they renamed it — same way so many small colleges did in the ’90s, suddenly deciding they were universities — most of my students still came there to make up for deficiencies, to tread water while waiting for a raise at work. Yes, I had some good students, even some stellar ones, but most saw the school as a clearing house to buy Associates Degree insurance. That, or a way to tiptoe around core requirements that might be harder at a “real” university.
Still, regardless of what I was able to impart to others anymore, I recognized those figures who were supposed to be the source of all I’d ever imparted. Like the witches in the Scottish play, the grey hags Perseus consulted, the Norns, the knitting women Marlowe encounters in Heart of Darkness, these figures…Jesus, I thought, am I really saying this to myself? After all the comics, after all the memories held captive in not-so-funny books, after all that had happened since this morning…Somehow, somehow I knew. These three had to be them. I knew it in my hind-brain. I felt it in the movement of my mitochondria. They characterized, represented, actually were the power of chance and choice and knowing. The original muses, the Titanides. Song, Practice, Memory. I could feel them in my lungs, in my DNA, in the dark, confused, clattering places of whatever I had left of a soul.
“Have a seat,” Melody said.
Eddie sat directly to my right. She handed me a small leather pouch. “Choose your die.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, she likes to do that. Dice. Choose one of the dice,” Mimi said.
Her face, all of their faces, glowed in the light coming from the table I still didn’t understand. The gaming table was short and squatty, fluted, a goblet-shaped stump, but it glowed from within, eldritch colors swirling inside. I couldn’t look directly into it, given the hexagonal maps and pewter figures, the character sheets and snacks and random dice that covered the top, but something active, something almost alive was happening beneath. Lava lamps use wax and water, I thought, different densities to create the fluid flow. Wave motion machines use oil and water, different affinities, to create the tranquil rise and collapse we love to watch. Humans use…Fuck. Something about this room kept pushing me off-track, making me wander.
I hefted the little bag in my hand. Just the weight of God, I thought. Then, like before, Where the hell did that phrase come from? I’d been channeling Shakespeare references all night. But Dickinson? Maybe some graduate course back in—
“Daniel,” Mimi said, loud, terse, breaking me loose from my woolgathering. “Choose.”
They know my name.
Of course they know your nam.
The knowing scared me.
Gently, I pulled the strings on the pouch and looked inside. Seven dice, everything one needed for an RPG, from twentysided to four. But these were no more plastic than the bag was Naugahyde. I’d never felt leather like this. Too soft. I’d never seen dice like this. Too organic. I poured the seven polyhedral shapes out into my hand. Old they were, yellowed and worn. Like teeth.
I stared for a moment at the maps and other clutter which rested on the strange table. Someone, maybe the three sisters, maybe something else, had recently been playing Villains and Vigilantes. Whomever, they liked superhero stories, role playing, and pork rinds.
“It’s really very simple,” Mimi said.
“Okay, but I’ve never played this. Superhero 2044 and Champions, yes. But not…”
Eddie reached forward and swept everything on the table to the floor. Super saviors and dire dreadnaughts hit Formica. Caped crusaders bounced bravely beneath slowly floating spreadsheets of predetermined abilities. The latter eventually came to rest on top of the former. Polyhedral patterns of movement, evidence of a finely finessed fate behind everything, slid toward the curtain, coming to rest just behind several unstoppable dice that continued to dance, like they didn’t have anything else to do.
“This isn’t the game,” she said, indicating the clutter she’d just tossed to the floor. “The game is Tali.”
“Do you know the Eleusinian mysteries?” Mimi asked.
I couldn’t answer. I was too fascinated by what uncovering the tabletop had revealed. Was it indeed a toadstool? A grail? The stump of Yggdrasil? I would never know, but inside the base, right beneath the surface — perhaps deeper than any single soul could imagine — spun a perfect representation of the galaxy. One hundred billion stars stared back at me, lighting the three sisters, lighting me, lighting the room whose corners I could not see. All I was sure of was this table and these women, these dice and me. But the stars? They swarmed like swamp gas around a sunken corpse, like lightning bugs orbiting secret shallows, like neurons blinking on and off around an idea.
I couldn’t help but wonder…was this a retro toy, some sort of head shop simulacra they’d found on eBay, or was it something else? Might it be real? Was the galaxy actually in there, under the tabletop, beneath bones my Muses must be rolling every day?
“Choose,” Mimi said again.
“I…I don’t know the rules,” I said.
“High score. Subtract the difference. Three against one of course.” She shrugged, as if to say, sorry, that’s the way the quarks collide.