Read Online Skinner by Charlie Huston - Free Book Online Page B

turning. In a restroom off the concourse he vomits a few teaspoons’ worth of lemonade. Tears from the strain of puking dribble from the corners of his eyes. He wants, with no warning, to see his ex. To tell her something about his work. Something he could be proud of. But he’s not certain what.
    I did this. I did that. This was good. That was bad. Things you don’t even know you did, things you said, those are the things that can do the most harm. I said something once. Can you imagine? Words. How can words leave your mouth and become something evil? I said evil. Is it me? All the time? Is that what I was all the time? Evil. Our boy, I wish I could have met our boy. I’m most sorry about that. What a thing that would have been, to be a father.
    He stops his mind’s monologue, secret confession to a wife who isn’t his anymore. It’s done now. It’s all done now. Whatever the cost, it’s done. Skinner is on his way. And Terrence was the one who released him.
    People die all the time. Now more will die. So.
    Time to go.
    When the arm loops around his neck as he steps out of the stall, he experiences a moment of relief, knowing the man who is killing him. Relief in whatever intimacy that allows him in his final moment. Relief in knowing that his death will be expert, fast, and without great pain. Then the moment is lost, with everything else, blacked out by a cloth pressed to his face, a chemical smell, a brief stab of pain in his left shoulder that shoots to his fingers and rebounds up and into his heart.
    Regrets falling away as his body drops to the tile.
    I did it.

arcade
    THE OVERCOOLED AIR, jumbo HD screens, and testosterone laced dialogue inside Creech UAV operations always put Jae in mind of the bowling alley video game arcade back when she was an Atascadero High Greyhound. Jae had initially been dragged there by one of her girlfriends. Bolstering the other girl’s self-confidence as she engaged in adolescent stalking activities centered on a weedy boy with greasy hair, a proclivity for tearing the sleeves off of his Metallica t-shirts, and all the high scores on Mortal Kombat.
    Bored, Jae had dropped a quarter in one of the older games, Centipede, quintessentially deemed a girl’s game, and promptly demolished the high score. A feat that did not go unnoticed by a boy whose initials, RAD, had been wiped from that lofty top spot. Egged on by a few comments that were perhaps a little too close in tone to her father’s preferred mode of simultaneously challenging and demeaning, Jae proceeded to beat her own high score three times in a row. Then she started in on Galaga and Space Invaders.
    Ranks of attackers dropping down the screen, scrolling mazes, incoming missiles. Compared with the hand-eye coordination required in the savage sets of handball she played with her father, the quick twitches on a trackball or joystick felt casual. And with no danger of a sixty-five-gram wad of hard rubber being drilled into her forehead at gun-muzzle velocity, the consequences of failure were irrelevant, but she kept playing anyway. Because each game revealed something new. Not the next level, the unlocked challenges of advancement, but rather the minds of the games’ creators. The skeins of code embodied in the movements of digital aliens and insects, ostrich-mounted knights, robot warriors, frogs and plumbers. The screens became translucent, revealing a deeper stratum of play. Anticipation. Not reacting to the game but foreseeing it. Knowing where the next asteroid would pop onto the screen, what turn the ghost would take on its path to gobble you up, where the enemy saucers would zoom in from the edges of the square of known space.
    The configurations, her father would tell her, were not there. The games were randomized. On his Macintosh Classic II he showed her a brief chain of Fortran code that immediately set to generating random number sequences. The video games were the same, he said; the configurations were a