Sleepwalker

  Allen, you’re still online?

   Allen jerked up from his chair, knocking his headphones from his ears, slipping downward, and hitting his forehead on the side of his desk. There was another muffled question. Another: Allen? Says you’ve been online for 3 days.

   Allen pushed himself off the floor, arms trembling. He grasped his stomach, not realizing how much his hunger gnawed at him. After three days, he didn’t notice the pang of hunger. At some point, the numb scraping turned into dense emptiness. He lifted his fingers to his forehead, a dark liquid running into the cracks of his palm. 

     Did I just…hit my head? He asked himself. Three days straight. I’ve got to finish the game. You idiot. Go clean yourself up. 

    His bedroom came into view through blurry vision: a full-sized bed with a grey comforter covered in empty chip bags and energy drink cans. The mechanics from his PC whirred. He reached for his headphones to tell his friend he'd be right back. He wouldn’t be long. He wanted to get the helmet with the wings, fight the boss on Dragonhill, and…

    Allen tried to stand. He tripped over the cord, tearing the plug from the socket. The green and purple lights of his PC blinked out. He fell on his headphones. Instead, some other voice spoke.

You live like this? 

    Allen’s hair stood end to end. He felt a jolt in his chest and mumbled to himself that he needed to find some bandaids—if he had any. He’d forgotten to order his groceries online. He should have made the orders automatic. 

   He kept his back to his bookshelf and blinked away the blood, seeing some figure sitting on the edge of his bed. Despite his weakness, he scurried up and threw open the door. He splashed water on his face from the kitchen sink---always the kitchen sink--so he didn’t have to look at himself in the mirror. He put a rag to his forehead, tasting the water in the cracks of his lips. Then, he leaned over and gulped the stream like a stray dog that discovered the fountain of youth. 

   He needed to eat something or he’d keep seeing that thing in his room. He opened the fridge and found a sandwich—premade. He was usually prepared. He usually thought ahead. Only so far. This wouldn’t be enough. It would take a while to order the groceries. Ah, that’s why the automatic delivery hadn’t worked. It was a holiday. 

   It was Thanksgiving.

   You live like this?

   Allen groaned and put his hands on his head.

    “What do you want?” he screamed. In part the anger was because of the pain in his forehead, the other his hunger. He felt the presence across the room and saw standing there a slender body wearing shorts and a t-shirt, hair cast over his eyes, a light beeping on the side of his head. His figure was translucent and pixelated. 

     “What is that? God,” he rubbed his eyes, annoyed. “Nothing. God. I need water.” Allen reached for his cup, but it was pulled from his grasp and lifted into the air. He paused, afraid to look up. Two red Converse appeared in front of him. Allen wasn't wearing any shoes, so he felt the water pour on the ground and soak between his toes. 

He stumbled back, coming to his senses and scanning the figure to meet its face. Messy hair covered the figure's eyes. Allen gripped the kitchen counter. 

    “What are you doing?” Allen asked. The apparition set down the glass. He lifted its head and stared downward, as if he were amused at himself, trying to drink something that only went straight through him. 

    “I thought I’d grab a drink,” the apparition said again. He filled the cup, opened his mouth, and the water ran through his body. His body did not shimmer, but the water only disappeared and appeared again as if splashed on the floorboards.

   “Well, stop, won’t you!” Allen cried, grabbing the glass from his hand. He felt himself go through the being, several shivers rising through his spine. He froze, half-bent, and wide-eyed.

  Great, now I’m going crazy, Allen thought. What’s new? Would his girlfriend decide to knock on his door and take him back too? Oh, happy day! He rolled his eyes and landed on the couch. 

    “Clean that mess up,” he told the ghost. 

     The ghost scanned Allen.

     “I’d say the same thing to you,” the ghost insulted. Allen put his hands up in surrender.

     “I need to finish my game,” Allen told the ghost. “I just—,” he pulled out his phone. His food wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. That was fine. He could drink water from the sink until the following evening. Besides, there wasn’t any use going outside anyway. 

     It occurred to him as he argued with the ghost, that he might look as if he were arguing with the air. As if anyone would walk in and judge his mad state. He thought of his girlfriend--or ex-girlfriend. She’d probably laugh at him, thinking he was starting some joke. 

    Allen turned to see the ghost abandon his mess and disappear into his own room.

    “Hey, where are you going?” he asked the ghost. “What are you—,” he pushed open the door to follow the ghost inside. He felt his stomach drop. There was an uneasiness wrapping his stomach. The tall ghost looked very much like him, his clothes, perhaps a decade older, and that blinking light over his ears revealed a pair of headphones with wires hanging in a straight line, the jack knocking his bony hip. 

   His skin was a similar faded white, stretched and thin, not like that of an elderly person, more cadaverous. The ghost held a hopeless desperation in his own sinking eyes. Those holes in the ghost’s face consumed any sliver of reflection from the only remaining light in the room which escaped through a crack in the black-out curtain. His breathing whirred, much like he was mechanical himself. 

   Allen put his hand on his lungs to assure himself he hadn’t fallen ill with the same disease. Then, at the same time, he wondered if his resemblance to the ghost could score him a bottle of Bourbon (like his pop used to like) if the ghost happened to have an ID on him. 

    Then again, it’d probably just say he’s 40 years old, even though he looks like a teenager, Allen thought. Wouldn’t hurt to try though.

    “You don’t happen to have a fake ID on you,” Allen asked. The ghost lifted his hand up, letting the wires of his old headphones weave through his fingers. He gripped the jack and leaned over the computer, seeming to grow in size as he stretched forward. The dimensions of the overlapping world confounded Allen’s comprehension. 

    The ghost clicked the headphone jack into the side of the computer. At first, there was silence. Allen opened his mouth to mention to the being: the computer wasn’t plugged in, remember, I fucked it up when I tripped and shit all over myself. 

   Maybe that was an exaggeration. 

   The PC whirred to life, shining the neon green and purple lights against the old carpet. The computer flickered and the familiar welcoming sign-on screen appeared. The password was auto-filled and a million windows began to pop up on the screen at once, some overrun with code, others revealing his current game obsessions. 

   It didn’t take an idiot to know no regular headphone jack would power an entire computer and hack it. Whatever power came from the ghost was not channeled from his own world, but coming from elsewhere, unknown. Finally, the computer beeped. One large window popped up. A profile appeared above a wallpaper littered with digital achievements. The gamertag gleamed a dark red: @Blindstrikke7. 

   “What is that?” Allen rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He scrutinized the finer details.

     Blindstrikke7: 80,000 hours online. He beat over 550 games (many of them nearly impossible to beat). He’d collected all the rare items known to man. His friend list stretched longer than a biblical genealogy. 

     It was at that point Allen met his hero.

 Anyway, why shouldn’t he regard the starving man as some idol? He thought he’d cower in reverence at Blindstrikke7 like a sinner underneath some golden crucifix. He should repent for his measly fifteen thousand hours and submit to a harder grind. He took a long look at the ghost.

    “Do you want to know how I died?” Blindstrikke asked him.

    “I mean, yeah, kinda,” were the words that fell out of Allen’s mouth.

    The ghost scrolled down on his profile, ribs elevating under his shirt to show a sunken belly. 

    “I woke up every day, beat another level, and another, and another. My friends online called me Sleepwalker. I’d stay up five days straight playing through. Curtains closed. No one to check on me. I lived alone, my father in the next room over, a vegetable connected to tubes,” Blindstrikke told him. Allen cringed. “He collected money from the government—just enough to keep us alive. I started doing school online. Then I stopped doing school. There wasn’t anyone to stop me. College rolled around…”

    “That’s what this is about?” Allen put his hand up. “You’re coming to haunt me because I don’t want to go to college? Screw you. College isn’t everything.” 

    “I never applied,” the ghost told him. “It passed me by. The days passed by. The only time I stepped out of the house was my father’s funeral. I told ‘em they should just burn him, throw his ashes in a cornfield or something.”

    What’s this guy’s deal? Allen thought. 

    “Well, it ain’t my fault your life sucked. As soon as I patch up the cut on my head you’ll disappear,” Allen told him. The bleeding already stopped.

    “Isn’t there something you love?” The ghost asked. Allen froze, blood rushing to his cheeks. 

    “Of course there’s something I love, everyone loves something,” Allen told him.

    “I wanted to be an artist. I was a good one. I got awards for my work. I was on a path headed straight for success,” Blindstrikke said. “You’re on a path to success too. If you have enough discipline to finish a game—beat these levels—think of what more you could do.”

   Allen glanced to his bed where an acceptance letter lay torn open under a couple of gum wrappers. His test scores wouldn’t give him enough for a full ride, but he knew he’d be able to gain some scholarship by maintaining his GPA.

“You said you were going to tell me how you died,” Allen reminded him. “I didn’t ask for your life story.”

“Well, that’s the thing, Hedonis88,” Blindstrikke called him by his tag. “I was already in my grave. I had buried myself six feet deep in the opposite direction, much like you now.” Allen looked up at the stacked boxes and heaps of tied trash lying in the corner. 

“I was staring at my computer pushing through a six-day grind with no sleep. I kept jugs of water on the side of my bed. I stared at that screen in my dark room until something happened,” he paused. “I felt beside myself--literally. I was being pulled into the game and I saw my limp body draped across my keyboard, but I was still moving my character. In fact, when I looked down, I was my character. I was covered in silver armor, a sword on my back, and a bag of all the awards I won slung at my side. I looked at my physical body.”

Allen was quiet, wondering what it would be like to live in the game, no longer outside in a boring reality, but living as pixels, fighting dragons, driving fast cars, no consequences, only fun. 

“I saw I was hooked up to tubes, just like my father. While he was lying unconscious in his bed, I was putting myself into a mental coma every day playing those games. I was becoming what I was trying to ignore. I wished he could do something for me, so I refused to do anything for myself. He couldn’t let me stay that way. He couldn’t,” Blindstrikke lifted his head. His hair brushed from his eyes to reveal a distant look. Allen thought he saw some transparent tear fall and glimmer into the pixels on his arm. “You can’t wait for the things you love to save you, so Allen, don’t you love anything?”

Allen didn’t want to speak. He buried his awe for Blindstrikke under a thick blanket of rejection. 

“I do love something, but only cause I loved someone and…I mean,” Allen couldn’t find the right words.

“The whole reason I wanted to go to college in the first place was because Sadie wanted to go with me. She told me that I was amazing at programming. I used to build these games. They were simple, but she’d lean over and whisper to me in class, say she’d want to play them. I saw her in class, sitting there when she didn’t want to do algebra, playing them,” Allen told Blindstrikke. “I thought, ‘Hey, I’m pretty good at making games. And maybe, I could make a lot of people happy doing it.’ I thought…but she left. College is her dream. It’s not mine. I’m not any good at anything. I’m not good enough at anything to make a real change.”

“It seems like all you're doing is passing the time,” Blindstrikke said. Allen felt his throat burning. 

“I was waiting for Sadie to come back,” Allen said. “I thought she might care--I thought she might…I don’t know…check to see how I was doing, but I just didn’t want to be too much of a burden. I’m just not the person that she needs--that anyone needs.”

“If you believe that is true, then I’ve come to you to make an offer,” Blindstrikke told him. “Without your knowledge, you’ve seen me on almost every server. You’ve played games against you--almost beat me. You’ve even friended me.” Blindstrikke pulled up windows of hours of gameplay where Allen had passed him by, healed him, stolen his items, beaten bosses with him on his team.

“Even now you’re still playing?” Allen asked, with less awe than before. 

“You can too. Join my guild and leave this behind,” Blindstrikke told him. “All you need to do is grab your headphones from the floor and plug them in. Leave the acceptance letter on your bed. Leave your worries about what happened to Sadie. Leave your fear of ever becoming a programmer. Come into a world of endless gameplay.”

Allen bent his hand down to the floor and picked up his green headphones. He held the jack between his fingers and stared up at the ghost. Blindstrikke gave him a comforting smile. Allen put the headphones over his ears. He considered the headphone jack. 

“You could live in worlds beyond your imagination. You would really be something,” Blindstrikke said. Allen inched the headphone jack closer to the port. Blindstrikke pulled his own cord from the computer and the PC went dark. Everything in his room turned off except the small lava lamp on his bedside table, the languid red and purple bubbles casting shadows against his acceptance letter. 

“Sadie doesn’t need me and I don’t blame her,” Allen took a step closer to his computer. “People say if I make games, that everyone will just turn out like me. An addict who can’t sleep. Someone who’s making this world…sleepwalk.”

“If you never try, no one will blame you if you fail,” Blindstrikke said. That phrase hung in the air. Allen leaned forward. He could see the inside of the port. He glanced back at his acceptance letter, then he gripped the jack in a firm fist, then lowered his head. 

“But sometimes….you aren’t the person someone else needs. Sometimes whether or not you will help the world is uncertain,” Allen said. “I could live in these games, or I could create them.”

“It’s your final chance,” Blindstrikke said, “to follow me into the game.”

Allen met his eyes. 

“I won’t,” Allen said. “I can create worlds. Worlds for you to live in. Worlds you have never seen. Worlds that matter.”

Seeing that Allen made his final decision, the ghost smiled, with a hint of disappointment. 

“I looked forward to having you on my team,” the ghost said. “Make a game worth playing, Allen. And remember, when you see my tag trailing across the screen, know that I’m living in a paradise you rejected.”

Allen’s heart dropped for a moment, and he turned back to the computer. 

“And when you’re playing my game, remember you’re living in a paradise I created,” Allen told him. “Goodbye, Blindstrikke.”

With a flicker, Blindstrikke disappeared, leaving nothing but fading pixels behind him. Allen walked over to his bed and looked down at the pristine letter amongst the trash. He set down his headphones and picked up the letter.