I log on to the proprietary Nylo online board game platform, Kingmaker. I open one of my many anonymous accounts and start up a new game of Paperclip, which is a strategy game where you compete with the Soviets in order to abduct-slash-rescue Nazi scientists in a collapsing WWII-era Germany.
It’s a fun game. There are two separate games, actually: a card-based dynamic where you work as the OSS versus the KGB trying to bribe and kidnap scientists inside Berlin, and then a war-game dynamic where you try to beat the Nazis faster than the Soviets in order to get a better position for the postwar. Also, some scientists are worth more points than others. Mengele doesn’t help you much, but Wernher von Braun basically wins the game for whoever manages to capture him.
I drink my White Coke and bourbon and play Paperclip for hours, trying not to think about Ben or my kids or my father or any of my rotten siblings. I play a game against someone from Minnesota with the handle VikingLightning. I randomly draw the Soviets.
VikingLightning is pretty good, but he focuses a little too much on the card game part. He keeps trying to make big plays, ignoring the late game positioning and troop-movement dynamic. It becomes clear that I am going to get to Berlin first. VikingLightning starts to make bigger mistakes, playing prissily out of frustration rather than trying to win, even when he snakes some big plays away from me.
I can’t help but start getting maudlin as the evening wears on. I think about how Ben and I first met and what we were like back then. First of all, I didn’t give a shit about things like history or generals. That was all his fault. Back then, he didn’t like rich people. Hated them, in fact. It was a wonder and a majesty that we even survived our first date.
I asked him out after he came in last at a Magic: The Gathering tournament, which he seemed to have entered as a joke. Everyone knew me there already, and while I wasn’t one of the top contenders, I was certainly holding my own. I enjoyed the competition, even though, like I said, Magic is mostly a game where you can buy your way to victory.
We were in some smelly food court in Koreatown where everything was too bright and where the whole place smelled like sesame oil and cheap meat. It was mostly empty, but people were still tending the food court booths, texting on their phones and serving the occasional customer coming in to get a plate of hot cheap buns between lunch and dinner on a Sunday.
The entire back section of the food court seating area was filled with Magic players, taking advantage of the long cafeteria-style tables to run the tournament. Ben was there with a group of his teacher friends.
He was obviously the most attractive guy in the place, and I was obviously the most attractive woman. It felt like we were the last two people on Earth, surrounded by shambling hordes of the bungled and botched. Everybody in the tournament was making fun of him, but he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t even quite know the rules, but he did seem to be learning a little more each time he played a game.
We were never paired up against each other. In fact, he didn’t make it past the first bracket, which meant that he became part of the audience, leaning over the shoulders of his friends as they played. There is no more hated interloper than a cool person in a den of nerds, and so he was basically shunned. I felt for him. At the time, I was trying to reverse-engineer what worked about collectible card games in order to begin the process of developing our own knockoff version for mobile devices at Nylo. Even so, I had managed to actually place in a few tournaments and I was in the process of getting enough points to qualify for nationals.
These nerds knew I wasn’t one of them, but I respected what they loved, so they didn’t give me any shit. They were merciless to Ben, however, especially when I started openly flirting with him.
I was enjoying the dynamic. It was erotic, especially since Ben had no interest in the game at all. These nerds hated the way he revealed that the dominance ritual of the game was purely second-order symbolism. Being fuckable in a sea of the unfuckable can be quite an aphrodisiac.
“Come on then, I know you’re bored,” I said to him, grabbing his hand and leading him away while his friends “ooooooooohed.” I took him into the food court men’s room.
People from the tournament awkwardly peed and then left without saying a word while we made out in the bathroom. I got him hard but didn’t finish him off. I just wanted him as conquest, as tribute.
The erotic pitch of the afternoon brought us to the boiling point. We both knew where we stood. I made him ditch his friends and take me out for gogi-gui and he told me all about teaching the poor unfortunates, referring to them by name as if they were his own children. At the time, I found this noble or something.
For the first three months, I let him pay at bars and restaurants and then I put an end to that. It stopped being fun to watch him spend his teeny government paycheck on me.
However, unlike a lot of guys I have dated, he didn’t seem to mind me picking up the tab. He was completely cool about it. Grateful even. He let me take him to the nicest restaurants in the city and then he let me take him away for weekends upstate and then down to Miami. We widened our orbit as we began to trust each other. Before long
