Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Varga
“That’s us,” I told Rafe. “We qualify. Seven and up. You’re what, twenty? You’re a senior citizen in this building.”
“I’m twenty,” Rafe said.
“That’s what I said.”
We stood in line for vests against the back wall, six players plus Sully, and the kid had the look of a man who didn’t know whether he’d escape with all limbs intact.
He wore a long-sleeved compression jersey and running sneakers.
I’d suggested the uniform on the phone two days ago, and he’d bought it.
“Rule one of laser tag,” I said.
“Is this an actual rule or a Varga rule?”
“Rafe, look at me. Don’t interrupt. Every rule is an actual rule. That’s the entire system. Rule one is under no circumstances do you trust Pratt.”
Across the room, Pratt was tightening the straps on his vest. He didn’t look up. He never looked up. He’d spent his entire career facing the rest of us from the wrong end of the rink, and he’d come out of it with the eyes of an animal that hunts at night.
“He’s always nice to me,” Rafe said.
“That’s hockey. This is laser tag. And he looks calm now, but sharks are always calm before an attack. Last time, four of them came around the fog machine like a firing squad, and Pratt—he laughed, Rafe. I’d never heard him laugh. I didn’t know he could.”
“You walked into the open,” Heath said, from down the line, not looking up from his own straps.
“I walked into the open because I trusted my people. Do you hear what he’s admitting? In front of the rookie?” I turned back to Rafe. “Write it down. Heath ambushed a teammate at the fog machine, and he stands by it. This is who you’ve fallen in with.”
Rafe did a silent thing I realized was his own version of laughing. He let one corner of his mouth go and then put it back. Kieran, two spots down, was helping Sully sort out a vest that kept chirping. The two of them had their heads together over it like it was a crossword.
The door from the lobby opened, and Rook walked in.
I was as shocked as everyone else. Just two weeks ago, I’d told Heath I doubt it when he asked if Rook would come. But there he was, wearing jeans and a gray henley. He was holding a vest a teenager at the counter had just handed him, like he wasn’t sure it was clean.
Trier asked, “Is that Rook?”
I cranked up the Show. “Oh, no,” I shouted. “No, no. Who invited the old man? He’s going to stand in one spot for the entire game. He’s a pylon. We can’t —“
“Heath invited me,” Rook said.
“And you said yes? Heath, what did you say to him? Did you tell him there’d be snacks? He only leaves his house for—“
“He said you’d been training for months,” Rook said, “and that it would be a shame if no one was there to watch.”
Heath lifted both hands like a man declining to confirm or deny.
It was a perfect Rook line for the Rook and Varga Show. He deadpanned the loud guy. Everybody laughed and went back to gearing up.
I didn’t know why he’d come. He didn’t tell me in advance.
A man like Rook doesn’t do something like laser tag for no reason. He has a purpose behind everything, usually one he’s worked out three moves ahead. I couldn’t see this one yet.
He crossed to the wall and stood near me to deal with his vest. He got it over his head, but he couldn’t find the side strap.
“Other side,” I said.
“This is the other side.”
“It’s the other other side. Give it.” I reached over and pulled the strap around for him, my knuckles brushing his ribs through the henley for less than a second.
It was the kind of contact two teammates have a thousand times, but we avoided it in the locker room.
“There. Now you’re armed and dangerous. Well, armed. ”
“Thank you,” he said.
Rafe watched us. He didn’t concentrate hard, but he was two feet away, taking it in with eyes wide.
“Rafe, you’re with me. We’re going to lose together, with honor, like Canadians.”
“You’re Slovak.”
“I’m Canadian. I have the passport and the psychological scars as proof. Let’s go.”
The teenager at the counter killed the lobby lights and hit the door release. Somewhere past the entrance, a fog machine exhaled into the darkness. A buzzer went off that vibrated my teeth.
I looked for Rook on instinct. He had already gone through the door on the other team.
The arena was two stories of black-painted plywood arranged in ramps and platforms, lit by ultraviolet bars that turned everyone’s vest lights into floating constellations and everybody’s teeth a violent blue.
Fog hung at knee height. Somewhere a sound system played loud music that had been popular when I was in juniors.
I loved it. God help me, I’ve always loved it.
“Rafe,” I said, crouched behind a barrier shaped like a fake boulder. “Strategy talk.”
“Okay.”
“There is none. Chaos is the goal. You go that way, make noise, and draw fire. I’ll flank. You’re the loud guy and I’m the —“
“You’re the what?” Rafe asked.
“I’m the artist. Go.”
He was a terrible decoy. He crossed an open lane like an old man who’d been told the street was safe, upright and polite. Players lit him up from three directions inside four seconds. His vest died with a sad descending chirp.
“Sorry,” I heard him say to the people who’d shot him.
“Don’t apologize to the enemy, Rafe. We talked about this.”
A bolt hit me in the shoulder pod. My vest died. I went down behind the boulder with my hand over the light like a man holding in his guts. When I looked up, I saw the blue-lit, fog-wreathed, serene face of Brock Pratt, who had come around the back of the boulder without a sound.
“Pratt.”
“Varga,” Pratt said.
“How long were you there?”
“Long enough.”
“You’re an unwell person. You know that. Does Sully know that?”
“Sully knows,” Pratt said, and was gone again into the fog. Somewhere to my left, I heard Sully O’Reilly laugh. It was one bark, the laugh of a man who’d made his peace.
I respawned at the base wall and went back in. I had something that I had to get right.
I’d lost track of Rook on purpose because I’d told myself I was here to win. I couldn’t win while distracted by the whereabouts of the most important person in my life on a fake battlefield.
When I glimpsed him, he was playing. He was quiet, but he held a high corner by the ramp where two lanes fed in, and he was taking people down patiently.
He took Trier twice. Then he took Heath.
Public Rook gives the room four words and stands at his stall, letting the world decide he’s a closed door. Nobody at the rink would believe the laser tag Rook. They’d never seen the unhurried, lethal man who was having a good time.
I’d spent five years with him, and I never got to watch him have plain, dumb fun in a room with other people in it. I stood on a ramp and watched.
Naturally, I had to figure out how to shoot him.
I came up on Rook how Pratt had come up on me, and he heard me at the last second. He turned. We both fired and missed in the chaos of it. Both of us crouched behind the same plywood half-wall with fog pouring over the top of it. Rook placed his hand on my chest.
His palm landed on the center of my chest, right on the spot, the off-switch, the place he’d been calling that since our second year, and in the dark and the noise where no one could see, he left it there. His thumb moved once. My loud, narrating brain went quiet. It only went quiet for him.
“You’re dead,” he said, low, just for me.
“You didn’t even shoot me.”
“You’re dead anyway.” His hand was still on my chest.
“That’s not the rules.”
“It’s the rules now.”
“This is exactly the corruption that —“
He took his hand off me and shot my vest from four inches away. It died with the saddest chirp of the night, and he was already moving, gone over the half-wall back into his lane. I stayed crouched in the fog with a grin I was glad nobody could see.
Right after that, the lights flickered.
It was the house lights, half of them, coming up and signaling the end of a session.
The fog thinned, and the music dropped a notch.
In the sudden ordinary brightness near the entrance, a kid—a real kid, maybe fourteen—said, “Yo, that’s Lucas Varga.
And, wait. That’s the Hawks. That’s like five Hawks. ”
He raised his phone and started filming. Heath lifted his dead vest gun in a friendly little salute. Sully turned his head like a guy avoiding a bad photo. Kieran said something I couldn’t hear, and the kid laughed. Pratt, predictably, was gone—evaporated.
I had the Show loaded before the phone was up.
“Gentlemen, we’ve been discovered. Everybody act natural.
Rafe, smile, this is the most exciting thing to ever happen to a boy from Saskatchewan.
” I was the loud guy stepping in front so nobody goes looking in the back.
The only thing I know to do is fill the space until the danger gets bored and leaves.
Then I found Rook. He was eight feet away, in the half-light, and he was still. It was the same stillness I’d seen in our kitchen when he came in from the truck with wet eyes and told me a reporter had sources.
For everyone else in our group, the moment passed.
It didn’t pass for Rook. I stepped up close to him and didn’t think about who was watching. For once, I didn’t think about that at all.
I touched his arm. “Hey. Old man. You alive?” It was loud enough for everyone to hear.
It worked. His weight came back down off the balls of his feet, and his hands settled. The color returned to his face.
“I’m good,” he said.
“You’re a pylon,” I said. “You got recognized standing in one spot. Classic pylon behavior.”
“I tagged you out from four inches.”
“That was a war crime, and I’m calling for a trial.”
In the parking lot, everybody peeled off.
Heath and Kieran went home together. Pratt and Sully drove Rafe, and I told the kid I expected a full report on whether Pratt spoke.
Rook and I had come in separate cars, as always, and we left in separate cars.
We’d meet later at the house when the garage door came down behind each of us.
I let him pull out first. Then I sat in my car in the dark lot for a second before I started it.
For everyone else, it was a fun Tuesday night.
A fourteen-year-old filmed us, including Heath and Kieran with their arms around each other’s waists.
The worst that would happen was somebody posting a clip of two engaged hockey players at laser tag, and the internet would say good for them and scroll on.
That was the prize I wanted. It was the unglamorous, idiotic, enormous thing I wanted.
I’d watched my man stand in the safest room he was ever going to be in and still not relax. He braced against a kid’s phone like a slap shot had hit him in the teeth. He wasn’t keeping the danger out. The danger was somewhere inside him.
The next thought arrived fully formed:
I want to give him a life where a phone doesn’t do that to his body anymore.
I’d built a skill at nine years old, in a country where I didn’t have the words yet—be enormous in front so nobody looks behind. I’d used it my whole life to keep people off me. For once I wanted to use it to turn away the thing trying to get to him.
He didn’t know I wanted that, and he thought he was the one doing the protecting. He’d told me so, basically, with his hand on my chest in the fog. You’re dead anyway. It’s the rules now. He’d been making the rules for both of us, and I’d let him, the way you let the sun decide when it’s morning.
I started the car.
We were going to do six cities in ten days, then come home the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Ten nights in separate rooms. Soft curfew at midnight; hard one at one. Ten times I’d send him back across a hotel hallway to wait the thirty seconds for I’m back.
I’d done it for years, but I couldn’t do it forever.
This trip, somewhere between the first city and the last, in a hotel room with the chain on the door, I was going to stop orbiting and say it out loud. The whole thing. I want more than this, and I think you do too, and I’m done waiting for you to decide it for both of us.
I just had to figure out how to say something like that to the sun.