Amman Sabet
Tranquilo
When Evelyn returned home from work, she touched her brother’s shoulder, whispering “Jeffiecito, time for the park.” He flinched at this unexpected sensation. Jeffie had a condition now. He always wore his helmet, even while his sister was at work.
With her hand on his shoulder, Jeffie kreeeee’d in protest until touching grass at his spot under the poplars. There, his helmet strobed his eyes, padded sawtooth waves into his ears. Something reached inside Jeffie and he fell languidly back into the rhythms of theta sync. This was enough for them together, to be hushed by the breeze and the rustling canopy overhead. But Jeffie’s helmet stayed on.
Turning toward things unseen, Jeffie tapped his helmet at the temple with his fingers, dancing its colorful lights in a rhythm. How the helmet worked, how it pulled Jeffie deeper into its musical world was inscrutable to Evelyn. She watched him over her book, offering sips of water under the helmet’s vizor with a straw whenever he reached blindly for the bottle.
They only ever had each other. She wished now that she knew what he meant when he said he’d decided to go “full-time sync” that summer after graduating high school. She overlooked how much he had withdrawn through his senior year and how much time he was spending in this virtual world of his. When his college and scholarship applications were rejected, when his real-life friendships collapsed into a slow trickle of chat messages as his peers left town for universities and new horizons and new friends, Jeffie had nothing like that to look forward to. No gap year and then retry. Evelyn cleaned rooms at the motel they lived at, and Jeffie . . . Jeffie had a ball of anxiety coping with all the structure and planning of life as a high school student suddenly dissolving into the open frontier of what do I do now and what comes next and how do I make that happen? No hand there to pull him up from falling into the existential crisis.
Even if he could’ve enrolled at State, or done night school at the community college while working across the main boulevard at the McDonalds again, something had changed in Jeffie’s posture. A new belief about the world curled him forward, the enormity of facing how there was no place in the world made ready for him like for his friends. Nowhere to belong but the gaps and the cracks, nowhere to turn but inwards.
If Evelyn had known Jeffie’s game has no end, if she had known there was no winning in his virtual world, maybe there was something she could have done to keep him from sliding into his condition. It had been months since Jeffie had spoken. Not a word between them since their last big argument, when he had tried to tell her that he would make money by just wearing this damn helmet on his head all day instead of getting a job. She was paying the rent and cleaning the apartment and wasn’t about to hear all that.
Now, Evelyn only had a strange, passing sense that Jeffie still recognized her with his helmet on. When the meal icon appeared on his vizor, she fed him. When the water closet icon appeared on his vizor, she led him to the toilet. When she washed him. When she changed him. When she stood beside him, she checked the helmet’s battery level always. Always.
One afternoon, Jeffie’s helmet let out a musical sound. Had it unplugged before charging? The battery was acting strange, now. No icon on its vizor, now gone dim. Just the singsong alert. Recognizing this sound, Jeffie banged his palms against the sides of the helmet, bracing for the world to explode back in. They rushed home.
“Shhh,” Evelyn hushed white noise, but Jeffie retched behind the vizor. She unclasped the helmet, and lifted it off, revealing chapped lips peeled back over jagged teeth now slick with bile. Eyes crusted and screwed shut to the daylight. How long since she’d seen his eyes this time? She draped her jacket over him to make it dark. Nothing she could do about scowling passersby. She couldn’t bear their misunderstandings, couldn’t be good for them and good for Jeffie, both.
At home, Evelyn wiped the helmet down and plugged it in. One bar. Two bars. Three. Jeffie leaned, seeking with his face, and when she clasped it back over his head, a prompt blinked onto its vizor.
Press A to play again.
She pressed, and Jeffie spawned back into his world. Tapping his helmet in a rhythm, colors gaming his tempo, pulsing every second, slowing to every fourcount, every eight. And then, finally, back into theta sync.
Evelyn blurted a frustrated sob. She imagined his eyes and ears, the ridge of his nose just under the vizor, and the knot behind her sternum slackened. She loved him. So much. She thought she saw him wince, and she pinched her face to match, then softening, coaxing him towards calmness. Pinch and calm. As if relaxing his muscles from within, pulling little empathy strings with her cheeks and lips and hands and shoulders.
Cálmate, hermano. Tranquilo.
She woke at night and heard laughing. Clutching her robe, she slid the divider open to Jeffie’s partition and there he was, upright in bed, tapping the side of his helmet gently at the temple. She watched from her side, and after a moment, he laughed again, like someone was telling him a joke just then, whispering it right into his ear. She hadn’t heard him laugh for . . . how long? Now it cut through the night, a sound he’d been hiding. As if she’d come to believe this could no longer be a thing he could do. Had all the ways that Jeffie had felt before been kept away from her, tucked under his helmet all this time?
“Take it off,” she muttered, biting her nail. “Take it off your head.”
But Jeffie couldn’t hear her, and she didn’t dare touch him. And when he laughed again, Evelyn stifled a shriek and ran to her bed. Under her covers, she wrapped her pillow around her head, wishing now that if there was nothing she could do, then at least she could somehow shut out the question: was it Jeffie’s decision not to be in the world with her? It had been easier to treat this like a condition.
In the morning, an older man knocked at their door, hat in hand.
“Señora, my name’s Nuno. I saw you with the gentleman in the park yesterday. I’d like to discuss a job opportunity.”
“I have a job, sir. I . . . ”
“Pérdon, I meant for the gentleman.”
“For Jeffie?” Creaking the screen door aside, Evelyn reached for Nuno’s card. It read:
Nuno Santo,
Esports Talent Acquisitions Director, Team Synco.
“. . . Synco,” Evelyn paused on the last word. “I don’t understand. You’re from Jeffie’s game?”
“That’s right! I manage league recruiting. He’s a funny young man, your brother. Great sense of humor,” Nuno tapped his temple, chuckling. “And boy does he have the timing of a pro. Talent like his should be sponsored. But that helmet of his—if you don’t mind me saying—it’s sunset. Nobody patches for those legacy models anymore.”
Evelyn stood over the door sill, setting her eyes flat. Was this who’d made her Jeffie laugh? Nuno Santo explained how they—he and Jeffie—thought this would be easier if he introduced himself and explained how league recruitment worked, how this was what Jeffie wanted, and that it would feel “more real” to her.
This Nuno Santo, he knew; soon Jeffie’s helmet would no longer hold a charge. Listening to him talk, she thought to herself, These Norteño eggheads, always perfecting their virtual worlds. They know how we live with them, come to depend on them, the gaps they leave once obsolete. The prices we can’t pay, must pay, when we’ve closed our minds to this duller reality. She’d have to come to terms.
Before boarding the Synco bus, Jeffie was fit with a newer, slimmer helmet. Evelyn could see the back of his head. “Wait,” she reached for him. “I need to see him. Can I see his face?”
Blink. Jeffie’s face appeared on the vizor, something the old helmet didn’t do. “See? All fine.” Nuno touched her shoulder, but she flinched away, searching for a sign that Jeffie knew he was leaving her for this. She wondered if the others on this team he was joining also wore helmets like her Jeffie. She tried peering through the bus’s tinted windows to no avail.
Nuno dabbed under his hat with a handkerchief. “The team’s headed to Seoul for the Eastern Cup. Once our boy’s off tour we’ll arrange a campus visit,” he explained, describing how Jeffie’s sponsorship with Team Synco would cover everything. All costs. It was too soon for Evelyn to admit to herself how after monthly visits, she’d probably just keep to holidays, kicking gently away. Or was this Jeffie kicking gently away from her?
At home, their long-term suite at the motel was just a torpid cube of air now. Evelyn brought her book to the park and sat at their spot under the poplars, but she couldn’t concentrate on what she was reading. She was only looking at the pages.
Splash went the fountain. Statues of fish, squirting arcs in couplets. Had it always done that? An old abuelo tossed crumbs across the flagstone, humming a corrido as murmurations of birds dove in quartets to peck. Had there always been birds?
Windows glittered through the slate-blue dusk where people waltzed through their apartments. On every three count . . . A man put a casserole down. A woman plucked her eyebrow. A puppy yipped. Throat cleared. Door slammed. Bed creaked. Baby laughed. Bell rang. Evelyn caught herself tapping her fingers.
At home, Evelyn lifted Jeffie’s old helmet to her face, wanting to understand those enigmatic games he’d played and what it all meant. But the smell . . . She shoved it clattering down the hall disposal chute. Hands braced against the wall, Evelyn fought through a dizzying wave of nausea, swallowing back the bile in her throat. Without the helmet and its rhythmic lights, without her Jeffie, the world was about to rush in.