The countess fills the rest of the session, at the end of which Phil asks how she’s holding up.
“Bring it on.”
“Great. Come back in an hour, we’ll do two to six?”
She pops out into the cold glare of Avenue C. The recording studio is just below the Con Ed power plant. She heads south, through two blocks of linoleum eateries, then three blocks of chichi that seem to have sprouted since the last rain. Not many people out in the frigid wind. The sky is bright blue, the sunlight on the brick walls a pale flesh color. She passes a trio of young men, tattoos and earrings, an old woman tottering behind a dog, an underdressed man hunched in his jacket, Daily News under his arm. She loves the shortness of so many New Yorkers. “These are my people,” she announces, polishing her Polish accent. The nearly equal distribution of skin tones—does any other American city come close? English as a second or third language. Maria can’t decide if her café is Maria’s Cafe (awning) or Maria Cafe (window sign). The deli is Deli Corp on the front, Deli Corb on the side. Do they mean Deli Corpse? Deli Carbs? Everyone riding the subway together. Take that, heartless heartland Christians and Taliban crazies! She’s lived here for fourteen years, and she still can’t get past the gratitude, after growing up in a rural warren upstate where everyone was cottontail-white and scared of the world, and nothing ever happened, and nobody could distinguish, for their very lives, between shit and shinola.
She decides on Happy Wok, orders the chicken and broccoli. She was raised on vegetarianism, but her father used it as a sword to separate the saved from the damned, and her mother literally prayed to plants and trusted herbal supplements to defeat, via satyagraha, her wholly operable breast cancer, dying like a blighted ash tree at fifty-one. Saskia still prefers vegetables, but the occasional meat tastes like freedom to her, a once-a-week feast of fuck you.
She checks her messages while she eats. There’s a text from Quentin confirming he can meet her for dinner near his office at 6:30. Nothing from Mette, though Saskia texted her this morning, asking if she would pick up a few things on her way home. She tries again. eggs fruit bread? confirm or deny. There are two other customers in the Wok, both heads deep in the cybersand, thumbs wrestling. She closes her eyes and listens to the ghostly castanets. If she had read a scene like this ten years ago in a sci-fi novel, she’d have scoffed at the implausibility. Why would anyone who could leave a voice message prefer to laboriously type one?
Back in the gray box at two, she’s an ace pilot (galaxy-class fighting skills, musky allure you could cut with a chainsaw), then a nihilistic laser weapons merchant (eyes full of dead, mouth full of shit), then the supercilious computerized doors of the Presidium Headquarters (refusing to open: “I . . . don’t think so,” or deigning to open: “Do wipe your feet, there’s a good supplicant”). Another four hours, another eight hundred dollars, yeah! She never perches on the stools, they’ll creak on your best take, and they’re always too high for her anyway. She moves the script stand out of striking range, plants her sneakers shoulder-width apart, speaks her lines with her eyes closed. It’s like being in an isolation tank. In her stage work, she has never liked elaborate sets. The more realistic they are, the faker they look. Hey, Vanya, have you noticed that every room in this crazy dacha is missing a fourth wall? Give her a dark stage, spotlights, props descending on wires. Hello, audience, it’s time to use our (jazz hands) imagination.
This game, Dhark Rebellion, is the third installment of a franchise, so she’s seen the artwork in the previous iterations. It tends toward your standard sci-fi argon blue and spotless white gleam on the fascistic Torkan Alliance ships. The Dhark rebel bases vary, but they all trade on adolescent boys’ article of faith that the narrow way to coolness leads through the pigsty: gadgety junk shops, germy brothels brimming with attitude (still no male prostitutes), windblown alleys with abused trashcans and pouty denizens. The desert planet is out of Dune, the forest planet is Return of the Jedi minus the Ewok plus the whirling-dervish razory beasties from Edge of Tomorrow. The rebel spaceships look on the outside like arthropods and on the inside like decommissioned WWII battleships, with wires dangling from the ceilings and steel plates bolted randomly across walls and floors. There is always something not working, Millennium Falcon style, which is what drives a good fraction of the game, because the player needs a part, which sends him (82 percent are “him,” according to company research) into the junk shop, where he has to do a favor for the comic-relief android who runs it, which leads him down an alley, where he pulverizes a pouty denizen to get the key, which opens up the back room of the brothel, where the tong kingpin manages his empire, and no matter how the boy-wanderer plays this scene, a sumptuous feast of gunplay ensues.
She knows this because four or five years ago, out of curiosity, she asked Mette to help her play the original Dhark Rebellion. She withstood it for three hours, while her daughter critiqued the graphics and occasionally emitted impatient comments such as, “You’re turned around again, you’ve tried to go out that door three times already,” or “Strafe left, you’re about to die; no, hold the button.”
It was fascinating but kind of awful. After the first hour they ran into one of the characters she’d voiced, and for every line, of
