What Feats He Did That Day Pt. 02

CHAPTER THREE

The Charleston Video Gaming Center never failed to disappoint casual visitors. It was located in a small store in the Charleston Mall, with a storefront barely large enough to display its somewhat grandiose name. Shoppers who found their way down that particular corridor might peer in for a second and then leave, convinced that the place would be out of business by the time they reached their cars. Gamers who had made the pilgrimage at the recommendation of friends usually spent the first two minutes looking for the hidden camera, afraid they had been punk'd.

The store's owner, Andy Stowe, couldn't have cared less. He was an aging hippie whose drug of choice had always been games. He kept the shelves stocked with a selection of games that could have been found in any store in the country. It wasn't until the newcomer approached, unwilling to admit that he had been tricked into driving all the way to Charleston, that Andy would reveal the store's secrets. Once he learned that his customer was a serious gamer he would look around as if videogames were the stuff of espionage, and then crook his finger and beckon the newcomer into the back room where he kept his "stash."

Those of us who were regulars had received nicknames, delivered by Andy like the ring announcer at a professional wrestling match.

"The Hammer of Death!" he intoned as I entered the store on Saturday morning.

"The Wizard of War!" I tried to match him as best I could.

"What's happenin,' bud?" he asked me as he leaned across the counter to exchange a high five.

"Not much, Andy," I said. "Anything new?"

"Just got a new VR in, but . . ."

"I haven't got the legs for it, huh?"

"Sorry, dude."

"No problem, Andy. Say, have you ever read The Princess Bride?"

"Awesome book, man."

"Yeah. I thought I had a copy, but I couldn't find it last night."

And as a result, my dream last night had once again ended with my quick death. This time I had managed to scream out, "What makes you think I killed your father?"

In lieu of answering, Inigo had simply run me through.

"Do you remember the guy who killed Inigo Montoya's father?" I asked.

"The six-fingered man? Count Rugen?"

"Six fingers?" That didn't make sense; I only had five.

"Yeah. Domingo Montoya was a swordsmith. He made a sword for this Count Rugen and ended up dead. 'My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.'"

I flinched.

"You okay, Rick?" Andy asked.

"I'm fine," I answered quickly. "You got any games about sword fighting?"

"Oh, yeah. You never played Duellum?"

"I don't think I've even heard of it," I answered.

"Nobody heard of it," Andy said with a laugh. "Came out the same day as Grand Theft Auto II. Sank like a stone."

"It's not exactly a catchy title," I said.

"No," Andy agreed. "Although I think it's great. From the Latin. Duo for two, bellum for war. Literally a war for two people. Awesome, isn't it?"

"Fascinating," I agreed.

"Come on back."

Andy swept aside the beads that led to the back room and gestured for me to precede him.

I spent the rest of the morning and the first part of the afternoon in the back room on one of Rick's consoles. After that, it was time to go home and get ready for my "date." In a rush of enthusiasm that I still had trouble accounting for, I had offered to cook dinner for Alison, Eric, and Alison's friend, Parker. That meant stopping off at the grocery store for the ingredients for my special Pasta Handley and then cleaning my apartment. By six-thirty, however, when my guests were expected, the sauce was simmering gently on the cooktop that acted as a substitute for a stove. Another pot of water awaited the pasta. The vegetables were in the steamer, and the wine was breathing on the counter.

By six-fifty, I had turned the sauce off. By seven I had poured myself a glass of the wine. By seven-thirty, when I heard the knock on my door, I was in an ugly mood.

It was not a side of me that I would have willingly showed Alison, although her boyfriend was another matter altogether. The mood dissolved, however, as soon as I caught sight of Alison's friend. She was a tall brunette who had probably never read a diet book. Long, slender legs that emerged from a leopard-print mini-dress perched atop three --inch heels. Beautiful long eyelashes framed equally beautiful brown eyes. But it was the way that they lit up when she saw me that I found particularly attractive. I couldn't remember a girl looking at me like that before.

"I am so sorry," Alison said. "We stopped off at McMurphy's for a drink."

"Or two," her friend added with a giggle.

"Or two," Alison agreed with a roll of her eyes. "You remember Eric, of course."

"Hey, Hando." Eric had discovered my nickname a few months back, and thought it extremely clever.

"Eric."

"And this is Parker Kline. Parker, I'd like you to meet Rick Handley."

"Hi," she said with a hiccup.

"Nice to meet you. Can I get anyone a glass of wine before dinner?"

"Sure," Eric said.

"Maybe just one," Alison said with a look intended to suggest to Eric that he might be better off limiting himself to one as well.

"I'd love some," Parker said.

She loved even more wine during dinner, and Eric matched her glass for glass. We discussed the newspaper business, her career as a mortgage broker, and Eric's intention to attend business school next year. I did my best to be charming, although it was completely unnecessary. She would have been no less attracted to me if I had been my usual tongue-tied self.

"Do you know what my nickname was in college?" During a lull in the conversation she leaned toward me, nearly tottering off her seat.

"Parker," Alison said in dismay.

"No, silly," Parker said. "That was my real name. Now you guess."

Her eyes flashed as she returned her gaze to me.

"Park?" I asked.

"No." She drew out the vowel to suggest that I guess again.

"Parky?" Eric suggested.

"You're getting closer."

"Well, I give up," I said.

"Me, too," Eric agreed.

"Parkay," Parker said with another, even drunker laugh.

"Because you were always toasted?" Eric was a little ripped himself.

"Because your father wanted to name you Margarine?" I asked. That was enough to send Alison into convulsions of laughter, but it went right over Parker's head.

"No and no," she said, leaning forward even more until her nose was within an inch of mine. "Because I was so easy to spread."

I stared back at her. Wasn't this the woman who was supposed to be getting married in a month?

"Do you have any coffee?" Alison's tone said that I had better find some. It put Eric back on the road to sobriety, but was not nearly enough to sober up Parker. Particularly since she insisted on drinking it with the whiskey she spotted in the cabinet in my dining room.

Shortly after ten o'clock, Allie suggested that perhaps it was time to leave. Eric put up a half-hearted protest that quickly turned to eagerness when Parker announced that she wouldn't be coming with them.

"Yes, you will," Allie said firmly.

"No, I won't." Parker met Alison's stare with one of her own.

"Parker, Rick is my best friend at the paper," Allie said. "He's not your wild oats."

"Let's let him decide." Parker turned to me with a smile. "Do you want me to leave, Rick?"

She passed her tongue across her upper lip, and slid her hand down across a firm, round breast that needed no bra. In their wake, her fingers left an erect nipple evident through the thin fabric of her dress.

I swallowed and turned back to Alison.

"Go on," I said. I found myself not minding at all that I was nothing more than wild oats.

"Rick," Alison started to protest.

"Allie," I answered her. She could read the tone of my voice as well as I could read hers. I was telling her that it was my life. The paralysis of my legs had not affected my mind or my emotions. I was capable of making my own decisions, and I resented her efforts to protect me from her friend.

"Fine," Allie said with a sigh. "You're right. As usual."

She put a hand on my arm and left with her boyfriend in tow. I returned to the living room to find Parker pouring herself yet another glass of wine.

"You sure you can handle all that?" I asked with a nervous laugh.

"You sure you can handle me?" she retorted.

"No," I admitted.

She took a last gulp of wine and put the glass down on the table, hard enough to spill some of the wine. She walked toward me, her hips swaying from side to side, her eyes holding mine.

"I like an honest man."

Her voice was soft and sultry as she seated herself on my lap and pressed her lips against mine. My legs may have been useless, but not everything below my waist was devoid of feeling. She felt my erection beneath her and playfully ground her ass into me as we kissed.

"Wheel me into the bedroom, charioteer," she ordered.

Her eyes lit up even more when she saw the rope. Jumping off my lap, she grabbed it and swung herself onto the bed. Once again fixing my eyes, she slowly lowered herself into a split on my bed. She slid her hands down over her body once again and grabbed hold of the hem of her dress. I could only stare as she pulled it upward, revealing a black thong, a creamy white abdomen, and two gloriously beautiful breasts.

"Are you coming?" she whispered.

"I'll be right there," I answered her. I hadn't made any pit stops myself that evening, and I wasn't able to hop out of bed when the mood hit me. It took a little while to relax myself enough to finish, and when I returned, Parker had started without me. Her thighs lay open on the bed, my view of her obscured only by the hands between her legs, hands whose fingers winked in and out of her wet, swollen cleft as she emitted little gasps of pleasure.

I was mesmerized. Her breasts were between her upper arms, quivering madly as she increased her pace. She lifted one hand to her lips, licking her juices off her fingers before she returned it to her clit. She lifted the other, licked it clean as well, and then brought it down to her breast, cupping the globe in her palm, pinching the nipple, squeezing the flesh between her fingers. Insensible to my presence, she threw her head back, screaming her lust. It was all I could do to keep myself from cumming, but when I pulled myself out of the chair and into the bed, I was more than ready to help her out. She settled herself under my arm, her hand snaking down across my stomach to wrap around my cock.

"Give me just a minute, darling. And then I'm yours."

"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya; you killed my father; prepare to die."

"Fuck!" I screamed. I couldn't believe I had fallen asleep. A beautiful girl lying naked on my bed, and I had dozed off? Inconceivable!

"Draw," growled Montoya.

"I'm not the man you want!" I screamed. I held my hands out in front of me so that he could see them. His eyes flicked to my right hand, and then narrowed in rage. I followed his gaze, and stared in horror at my glove, at the thumb and at the five fingers beside it.

Once again time slowed to a crawl. Montoya ripped his sword from its sheath and thrust the point toward me. It ripped a long slit in my tunic. It drew a bloody line in my torso. And then it finally found an opening in my ribs and plunged inside. I could feel it enter, the pain indescribable. I gasped, aware that once again I had lost.

"What did you --"

"Shut the fuck up."

"I beg your pardon?" Wizen asked.

"You're supposed to come in my dreams, not when I'm having sex, you bastard."

"I summon you at night," Wizen explained. "But you may rest assured, Richard, that you will return at precisely the same time you departed. If you were having sex when you left, you will be having it when you return."

I rolled my eyes.

"We'll see. Oh, and I learned I have six fingers. That's why that son of a bitch wants to kill me."

"Really?" Wizen was surprised. "I only count five on each hand. Are you quite sure?"

I looked down at my hand and counted. He was right. There were only five on each hand. What the fuck?

"Just give me one more time," I said, half to myself and half to him. "Tomorrow night I'll make it. Now if it wouldn't be too inconvenient, Mr. Wizard, how about sending me back to my date?"

He waved his hand. I blinked my eyes open, and found Parker snoring on my chest. Maybe she had had enough time to recover. Maybe it was, um, my turn. I shook her gently, and then a little harder. It was no good. She was already deep into the sleep of wine. No matter; we would be able to make love in the morning. I found that I was already looking forward to lying with her in the clear light of day.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Parker asked the next morning when I reached for her. "You had your chance last night, buddy. What the hell do you think I got drunk for? Don't tell me we never fucked. Jesus Christ. I assume you've got a real shower in this place."

"A real shower?" I asked.

She pushed herself off the bed and climbed across me.

"Yeah. For full-size people."

I felt a chill run through me as she awaited the answer to her question. I pointed to the bathroom. She turned and walked into it. We didn't speak again. While I was in the kitchen, she dressed and left.

I spent the rest of Sunday sitting in my living room, the Sunday New York Times lying unread on my coffee table. In my dreams that evening, I tore off the glove on my right hand. God alone knew why I was wearing a six-fingered glove, but there it was. Montoya was quite surprised to learn that I was not in fact the man responsible for killing his father.

"What have you learned?" Wizen asked me when I awoke in his room.

"I would have learned to fence if you had left me there a little longer."

"What instead?" he asked.

"I learned that everything is not always as it appears," I answered, filling my voice with rue. "I learned that twice today."

He waved his hand again.

**********

"So, get any?"

Alison smiled at me on Monday morning as if I couldn't possible have had a better weekend.

"I'm sorry?" I asked.

"You and Parker," she said. "How was it?"

"What did she tell you?"

"Oh, the usual," Allie said with a laugh. "She bewitched you with her beauty and stunned you with her sexual technique."

"We never did it." I gave her a cold, hard stare.

"What? What do you mean?"

"She evidently wanted a gimp to add to her collection. But she couldn't bring herself to do it without getting drunk. She got herself off and then fell asleep. The next morning she would barely look at me."

"Oh my God, Rick. Are you serious? Why would she tell me you guys did it?"

"You tell me."

She stood there staring at me until we were interrupted by another voice.

"Dude."

I could count the number of times that Dan Edwards had gotten to work before me in the last year on the fingers of one hand. But there he was, leaning back in his chair, having just heard the entire conversation I had had with Alison.

Fuck.

"You're talking about that hot friend of Allie's that I met at McMurphy's? You had her naked in your bed and couldn't close the deal? Well, you still have Mrs. Hando, don't you?"

He went back to work with a cackle of laughter. Alison's eyes were filled with sorrow and shame. I gave her a brief grin and started my own workday.

CHAPTER FOUR

"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya; you killed my father; prepare to die."

I rolled my eyes. Again? Were we going to have to go through this every single time? I dutifully pulled off my glove and satisfied my adversary that I was not the man for whom he was searching. We chatted a little longer this time, although he seemed to smile at my wish to become a swordsman. I was happy with the progress, although the whole thing was starting to feel a little like Groundhog Day.

"Don't you have a "save" setting?" I asked Wizen after that night's lesson had ended and I had filled him in on my progress.

"I don't understand."

"Like, you're playing a game, right? And you realize that you have to go to work, okay?"

He nodded.

"So you hit 'save,' and then when you come home -- assuming that you have nothing else in the world to do, which is probably a pretty safe assumption with most of us -- you dive right back in where you left off."

"Of course."

"So if I had something like that with my new friend Inigo, I wouldn't have to convince him every night that I'm not the guy who killed his father."

Wizen didn't answer me directly. But the last thing I saw before he waved his hand again was his smile and nod.

**********

"I'm not saying you're weird," Allison said. "I said it is weird. It."

"Like your dreams are perfectly normal," I said. We were finishing our lunch at a table in Tarber's Cafeteria. The food was good, cheap, and served promptly. Largely because we served it ourselves. For those reasons, and because it was right around the corner from the newspaper's office, it usually attracted a large crowd of reporters and editors. Rachel and some of her fellow editors, in fact, were sitting at a table about thirty feet away.

I never went there on Mondays. Allison and Eric had a standing lunch date on Monday. That would have meant me having lunch with Dan, since Shawn had never deigned to grace Tarber's with her presence. And I had no inclination to spend an hour of my day trying to find something in common with Dan.

Tuesdays, though -- "Tuesdays with Allie," I called them -- were different. The mayor had a peculiar habit of scheduling press conferences for noon on Tuesdays, probably just so he could jerk around the reporters that covered city hall. Dan's absence meant that Allie and I could spend the entire lunch hour trashing the latest American Idol winner, solving the world's problems, and chatting about life in general.

"Of course they're normal," Allison said with a laugh. "Everything I do is normal."

"As opposed to everything I do," I said.

"Will you stop getting so defensive? Jesus, Rick."

"I'm sorry," I mumbled.

"Your dreams aren't any more or less normal than anyone else's," she said. "But if you didn't think they were a little weird, you wouldn't have brought them up."

Like most of Allie's arguments, it was indisputable.

"On the other hand," she continued, eyeing the unfinished brownie on my plate as she spoke, "I've never heard of anyone who dreamed like TV before."

"It's not like TV," I protested.

"It's just like it. You have two characters, you and this Wizen guy, and you get into all sorts of adventures. He's Peabody and you're his boy Sherman."

"Har har har."

"Except now you have Inigo Montoya as a guest star. I wouldn't mind having him in one of my dreams."

We heard the scrape of chairs and turned to see Rachel's group standing up to leave. We looked at each other and silently decided that it was time for us to go as well. As we were preparing to leave, though, Rachel and Bill McIntyre, the paper's assistant managing editor, wound their way through the dining room to our table.

"Handley," Bill said. "Nice job on that Jalegos piece."

He butchered the name so badly -- pronouncing it Jallagose -- that it took me a second to realize that he was talking about an obit that had appeared in Monday's paper. It was one I had particularly enjoyed writing. The Second World War had produced these marvelous stories about people from small towns who had metamorphosed into scientists and soldiers and strategists. Heroes every one of them. Jalegos had been a day laborer in a suburb of Charleston when he was called up. He had been awarded a Silver Star on Iwo Jima, and returned to the United States to found his own trucking company.

"Thank you, sir," I said.

Rachel had been pleased with the story as well, and was just as pleased with the compliment.