Bust
by Tim Raymond
I’ve been playing this game Moonlighter on my Switch and will be sad when the story is over. The game’s hook is that at night you raid dungeons for loot, which during the day you sell humbly in your shop. It’s a blend of action adventure and role-playing capitalist simulation. As hero, you singlehandedly reinvigorate your dying country town, a narrative I find enormously therapeutic.
I am that Mason Pence, the NFL dropout. Not the worst NFL bust of all time, but my name is up there with the likes of Ryan Leaf and JaMarcus Russell. An ace kicker out of the University of Wyoming who wasn’t prepared to see his name in the lights. I spent three whole years in Cleveland, then, tail between my legs, moved back to Wyoming.
These days I’m giving it my best go. I have my little house and a possible coaching gig on the horizon at Lander High School. I’m 10 years removed from my professional career and hoping that this is the final threshold for people accepting I’m healed and useful again. I am 35 years old.
My neighbor thinks I killed a lady. I didn’t, but I get it. I tanked so hard in my 20s that I don’t blame anybody for getting carried away with certain stories. Plenty of the headlines about me are true. Some aren’t, yet feel true, their retractions notwithstanding.
I did kick a stranger and rupture his organ. I did scream in the face of reporters. I was involved in a drunken hit-and-run, though not the one across town that killed that person.
I have been in jail more than once. I have a good therapist.
Some nights, I hear my neighbor, Jillian, rooting around in her back- and side-yard, which I can see from my bedroom window. Sometimes I’m not sure what she’s doing. Other times it’s her many cats.
Jillian too is a moonlighter. What she does during the day, I’m uncertain.
The hero in Moonlighter the game is named Will. Like Will, I understand what it means to destroy your body for money. Cleveland’s special teams were a joke, and I got hit way more than a kicker ever should. Twice after kickoffs I entered the concussion protocol.
Will has an avuncular type who likes to come around to criticize him and tell him to work harder. I too have one of these. Uncle Connor, who got me kicking in the first place.
My therapist believes I’m autistic and that the burnout from not knowing can account for my failure on the national stage. She’s not wrong that it was a lot of talking and looking at people. And my coordinator wanted to adjust my mechanics, when, as I saw it, my routine was fine. More than fine.
Uncle Connor, in any case, says I shrunk from my moment, as happens with pansies.
We really only ever hang out on Sundays at this point, to watch the Game of the Week. I bring sandwiches from Blimpie to his place in Wolf Creek, then nod while he breaks down various blocking schemes and run fits.
Autistic or not, pansy or no, definitely not a murderer, I still must take ownership of my trail of ruin. Its violent relics on display in my shop, for all the world to see.
Hence, my patience as the high school waffles and dithers. The principal’s not sure about the optics of hiring me. I’d love to teach the youth how to be better than I was, but of course I can’t push the matter.
I met this teacher at the school while I was there for meetings and interviews. She looked at me like I was handsome, so I asked her out for coffee. We’ve gone out a few times now, and I’m hoping something materializes.
Her name is Elizabeth, and she teaches French. Currently, we’re at Shari’s having Saturday brunch.
“Do you want to see a movie later?” I ask her.
“Actually, it’s probably time you come over to my place,” she says.
“You mean after the movie?”
We don’t end up having sex sex, but only because my stomach got nervous and rumbly, and I didn’t want to take off my pants. Instead, she removes hers and explains how best to touch her.
These here are the moments. Not the orgasm or the shape of her hipbones, but the French horror movie she puts on when we’re done, and she’s only in her panties. And she laughs at me whenever I get scared, like regular people do.
In each of Moonlighter’s dungeons, you can find camps of the adventurers who didn’t survive. There are letters next to their disintegrating bones that offer advice and wisdom for navigating what lies ahead.
In a way, this is how I feel with Elizabeth. That I’ve confronted a perished self and am progressing forward. These moments enliven me.
My therapist is glad, but reiterates that it’s not wise to seek this inspiration primarily through other people, especially if it’s only one person. What’s best is to bloom the moments in yourself.
“But I’m happy you and Elizabeth took this step,” she adds.
“Me too.”
She’s right, in that I’m at my best when I commit to moments with myself. Sitting with my own patterns of thought and feeling is how I’ve learned humility, and humility is how I stay connected in the darkest dark to the invisible pulsing heart of humanity.
If the coaching gig doesn’t work out, I’ll need something else. Not for money, exactly, but for purpose. I like feeling proud of myself. In addition, I value routine.
To this end, I have applied to Blimpie, Plains Tire Company, and the local GameStop.
“It’s a fucking shame,” Uncle Connor thinks. “Imagine going from your last name on a jersey to your first on a nametag. Why don’t you invest or something?”
“And sit around all day? And help nobody?”
“Investing helps.”
“It helps investors.”
Not that I know this to be true, in all fairness. I think Uncle Connor thinks I have more money than I do.
“You have a college degree, Mason. For Christ’s sake.”
“In Spanish.”
Why, I don’t know. At the time, I liked imagining having a different voice. I’ve forgotten more than 90% of what I learned.
Something’s been up lately at Jillian’s. I’ve not seen her around, and the cats’ behavior has been if not erratic, then unusual. They’re hissing their devil sounds at one another, which is wholly unlike them.
When I first moved in, I walked over and knocked on her door to introduce myself as the neighbor. She said, not unkindly, to never do this again. It scares the cats to hear men approach.
“How can I reach you if something comes up?” I asked her, to which she asked what could possibly come up.
I wait three more days and call the police to do a welfare check. I tell them not to knock and scare the cats, but this request falls on deaf ears.
The cats do seem fine in there. The officers and I listen from the porch. No hissing, no devils, no clawing at the door from the inside. One of her cats comes around from the side yard and gazes at us, before trotting lightly around back.
“Well, nothing seems amiss,” the one officer sighs. “Cat seems well fed, no?”
“But this isn’t like her,” I protest. “To be vanished.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” the other one says. “Your lawn needs mowing.”
“That’s enough,” goes his partner.
“Hey, can we get a picture before we go?”
They can, if they so wish. I don’t mind. I mow my lawn that afternoon, then am right back to worrying.
I’d rather not obsess about her like this. My therapist says there’s a fine line between being conscientious and self-destructive. Per usual, she’s got a point. I’ve been taking forever to reply to Elizabeth’s sweet messages.
In the coming days, I breathe through the urge to bust down her door and investigate. Her home is not a dungeon to be traversed. Moonlighter is over, unfortunately, and if I need something to fill this hole in me, I decide, I’d best choose something more nourishing than the mystery of Jillian.
Elizabeth and I do a sleepover at hers. At last, we have the sex. With Uncle Connor, I go to the park and for old time’s sake practice boots between tree goalposts in the far distance.
Then one of the cats leaves a finger on my doorstep and sits, waiting on the sidewalk, until I discover it. I’m not sure it resembles Jillian’s, but it’s also chewed and gnawed to near-oblivion. This time, the cops agree to actually search the house.
What we find in there is disturbing, but the disturbance is limited to the cats, some of whom are dead, some of whom are strutting around like they’re sudden royalty.
“Fucking Lord of the Flies in here,” say the cops. “Jesus.”
“How does it not smell, though?”
“You don’t smell that shit, man?”
“Isn’t it illegal having this many pets?”
Meanwhile, Jillian’s nowhere to be found. And there’s no blood either, save for the drops next to the unluckier of the felines.
The cops say playtime is over and send me packing.
What about Jillian? 50-ish years old. Curly brown hair. A face like an actress who only does dramas. She had a mini-workshop in her house with packaging and little tools for crafting figurines, which as far as we could tell she sold online.
What would my therapist call her? An autistic living undiagnosed, living with animals because they make more sense, doing her creative work and generally being awkward in all interpersonal contexts?
Or antisocial, perhaps? Or nothing?
I don’t like being called a bust, yet it’s nice all the same to have a word. What is Jillian’s word?
Ghost. Neighbor. Artisan.
The next day, I receive the news. I will not be coaching anybody. I try to handle this as best as I can, but I feel on some level that I’ve become a victim of circumstance. My proximity to this cat house story is not a good look, the principal believes. As though there’s disaster wherever I land.
Ask any NFL prospect about it, and they’ll tell you. Most of your success is to do not with you but with where you’re placed. If Tom Brady’s the greatest of all time, it’s only because he ended up in New England for two decades with Bill Belichick, who’s autistic if anybody wants my opinion. I can’t imagine any of my coaches were autistic.
And now here I am, death-adjacent.
Blimpie comes through for me, however, and on Friday I begin my training. The manager is younger than me and doing an MBA online through the University of Wyoming’s outreach program. He seems very focused and diligent and speaks of the sandwiches with great care and respect. He much prefers hockey to football, although at this point in his life he’s less and less charmed by sports.
It’s not a probationary period, he assures me. That said, I won’t be on the line for a few weeks.
To return home smelling of onions feels like an accomplishment to me, or anyway some minor act to celebrate, but now the problem is I must work on Sundays, which to Uncle Connor are holy.
We’re not that southern God Family Football type or anything, yet we do acknowledge the importance of ritual. Uncle Connor says fine, then I’ll just have to come over for Monday Night Football instead.
“Joe Buck’s voice gives me headaches,” I remind him.
“You made your bed, now lie in it.”
I wasn’t refusing, I might inform him. I was only saying. I’m no stranger to beds I’d rather not lie in.
The only person besides my therapist who asks if I’m all right regarding Jillian’s disappearance is Elizabeth, who does so in a tent while camping with me for the first time. Her hair is ashy from the fire, and she’s struggling to sleep.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I broke in there and stole one of the figurines from her workshop. It’s a duck.”
“You didn’t.”
“I didn’t?”
Plus, the owner of the house, who is not Jillian, is looking for new tenants already. All the surviving cats, save for those who fled to the river, were brought to the shelter downtown.
“It’s such a shame,” I say, “that someone’s signature could be erased so easily from the world.”
“I can see how that’d trouble you,” she says.
“Right.”
“Maybe you should adopt one of them.”
Elizabeth, darling, I am way ahead of you. Every day after work, I drive by there and picture myself going in to see them. Surely a few at least would recognize my scent and remember who I am. All that’s stopping me from parking the car and actually going in is a nagging fear that I’ll moonlight the place and bring home everything I find.
Instead of pet parentage, I am wiling away my evenings with Hades, another Roguelite game, in which you play as Hades’s son attempting to escape the hellish Underworld. Is this how I feel, that I’m in Hell and searching for Olympus? Roguelites are repetitive and extremely punishing. Is this what I think I deserve?
No, what I deserve is good games, and Hades is one. Eventually, Elizabeth and I fall asleep holding hands.
Things are fine until May, when she starts broaching the topic of a sabbatical. Maybe not a sabbatical at all. Maybe a complete rewrite of what her contribution to the world is. She is 45 years old and staring down an early grave if she continues down this path of teaching.
“The students are great,” she says, “don’t get me wrong. But the institution is a woodchipper.”
“So what, then?”
“We are the wood keeping late capitalism warm.”
“I get it,” I tell her.
Not that I’m upset, but I can see she’s stalling. Sure enough, she has a minor in literature and is considering doing some sort of training in literary translation. Likely in France, however, on account of how much her French has regressed. Hear shitty French all the time, and your French gets shitty.
“But you don’t read,” I say to her.
“That’s funny,” she huffs, “to assume that because you don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”
“But you never talk about books with me.”
“Do I have to if I want to like them?”
We’re merging into argument, I realize, which would be selfish in addition to useless. The truth is that more than half of what I’m feeling currently is inspired. To see someone older than me sketching out a pivot this pronounced and weighty. At the same time, it’d obviously sting to watch another person in my orbit vanish.
My pain, of course, is not her responsibility. She’s saying I could come with her, which isn’t malicious but which is a lie.
I remain on edge, though not because I’m unhappy for her. For all my tender feelings, I apparently didn’t mention her a single time to Uncle Connor, who to be fair probably wouldn’t have cared to meet her. Also, Jillian’s landlord has found new renters, whose three dogs strike me as a slap in the face to both her and the house’s legacies.
My therapist notes I’ve been looking a bit ragged of late and wonders how work’s been going.
“Oh, the line,” I tell her. “On some days it feels like 70,000 people are watching me perform. If any sauce misses the sandwich, I’m toast.”
“If you feel yourself slipping, Mason, you can absolutely pull back some.”
“I know, I know.”
And I do. This is what life is, losing yourself briefly and then finding it again. Descending into the depths and rising once more, progressing a bit further with each new run, like in a Roguelite. It just hurts to feel as though you’re constantly starting over.
These new neighbors have three children. They’re young, and the youngest of them, a girl, complains loudly about a smell. The parents pin it on the river, which is accurate only part of the time.
Can the stink of tragedy ever truly depart from us? When I observe the family from my room, I feel an unnameable ache, wherein regret and gratitude are inextricably linked.
“Do you want kids, do you think?” my therapist has decided to ask me.
“I want to have had more time to think about it, I suppose,” I tell her finally, “if that makes any sense.”
One morning, the children sneak over and ring my doorbell. They’re not supposed to be here, they admit readily to me, yet they have to know if it’s true that someone massacred a bunch of cats in their house. The bullies at school claim theirs is the psycho murder mansion of Paradise Valley.
“None of that is right,” I tell them.
“But is it true?”
“No,” I say.
This here is the trigger that needed pulling in order for me to, after all these months, set foot in that shelter. Too much time has passed, and I’m not certain any of these cats could ever have belonged to Jillian. Still, the place has five of them today, all of whom come evening will have a new home.
“Are you sure?” the clerk is saying. “Five is a lot, sir.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“And,” he stutters, “I mean, we want the best for them, is all.”
“I’m not who I was before,” I say. “I’m not that person anymore, all right?”
“Sir?” he says.
That weekend, Elizabeth comes over and helps me name them. Soon after, she begins to cry.
“A definite no to coming with me, then,” she sighs. “You could have just said so, Mason.”
“Oh, shit,” I say. “No, that wasn’t my intention.”
“You have no intentions,” she states. “And not a single place to go.”
She takes it back almost immediately, but the question persists. What are my intentions? I might sit and stumble upon an answer, if only Holly, Tara, Batwing, Hades, and Will weren’t perpetually pressing their faces into me.
My sense is that, while being intentional in what you do is wonderful, and possibly even essential to living meaningfully, there’s nothing wrong with having no concrete intentions to build your days around. Some people want to live abroad and win the Super Bowl back-to-back. Others are content to fill the hours with obscure gaming achievements and sandwiches, neither of which is nothing. Neither of which is lacking a solid foothold on the scaffolds of modern society.
The world vibrates equally strong in a tree and in a leaf. You can drown in two inches of water or in an ocean, as they say.
My therapist is an expat in Norway, by way of West Virginia. Some days she forgets to blur her background on Zoom and I can see what the sky looks like there.
A haunting blue most of the time, although now there’s rain.
“Do you disagree with me?” I ask her.
“I’m wondering why you don’t talk about scouting anymore,” she replies. “You used to show interest in those behind-the-scenes jobs. Spotting the high school talent from the bleachers. Or joining the staff at one of those kicking camps or clinics. What ever happened to those intentions?”
“People need their sandwiches,” I tell her. “People need a dedicated hand and a smile when they’re hungry and in a rush.”
“No argument here.”
“I’m proud of my work.”
“Me too,” she says. “Proud of yours, proud of mine. Proud of us.”
She’s never quite spoken in these terms. Her and me and us. I’m happy she did. We are humble in our beginnings, and though she’s out in the world now and I am not, we both constitute worthy beings. We have our homes backdropped by mountains. Clean air and water nearby. A few good people in our lives. At least, I assume she does. She can be stingy with self-disclosure.
The process is quicker than I expected, and come autumn Elizabeth is not in homeroom but in some studio apartment in Paris. The plan is six months at a language institute while she prepares graduate school applications, to start the program a year from now. Plans, plans. The only plans we’ve made together involve Facetime conversations, to which we are committed.
She seems good, all things considered. And me, I was promoted recently.
“Assistant manager,” she says. “You sandwich beast.”
“Right.”
So much ends up happening in the span of that year that I almost believe I’ve conjured the events. For starters, everybody’s pregnant. My therapist is. Somehow, Batwing is, though by whom I don’t know. I’m not sure she’s intent on keeping it. Elizabeth too. She’s met a Frenchman with long hair that he ties back into a bun. When she introduced us on FaceTime, he said I looked noble.
Beau looks like an architect, maybe, or perhaps a designer. He wept while talking about what fatherhood would mean to him.
The couple with the three children moved out of Jillian’s in the spring. In their place have arrived a sturdy duo of hunters who wear camo all the time and plan their excursions over paper maps in the backyard. Their second week into living in the house, they called a whole mess of cops to our block. The story goes that, while exploring their puny attic, they happened upon a single misaligned floorboard. A quick peak past the board’s rot, and there lay bones. Jillian’s remains, as it turned out.
I can’t help feeling it’s cosmically improper that these strangers were the ones to discover her, hunters though they may be. On nights when I can’t sleep, the guilt intrudes on me, as if I’m to blame for her not being found before her final breath. I could have busted down the door. If I’d been inside instead of waiting those three days, I might have heard her screaming for help.
Apparently, a few of the cats appreciated the solitude up there. All she was doing was setting out fresh water for them. Then you slip through the floor and suffocate alone between thick walls and puffy insulation.
As for the wisdom in those bones, I can’t glean much beyond carry a phone everywhere you go and listen to your children. The youngest of that neighborly brood shared a wall with Jillian for an entire year of her life. The poor girl.
One afternoon, after a particularly fitful night, I mess up a meatball sub for a man who, instead of complaining or berating me, asks if I’m that kicker guy from the Browns.
“I’m just the assistant manager,” I tell him.
“Nah, you’re him. The bust.”
By the time I’ve finished remaking his order, we’ve come to a silly and haphazard agreement. If I mentor his teenaged daughter, that beautiful weirdo he walked in here with, then in return he won’t request the real manager to inform him of my screwup. I’m certain he’s joking until the night he calls me to set up our very first practice session.
So maybe we’re discovered exactly how we’re supposed to. Elizabeth in France with her dude who’s so slick and dreamy, Jillian in the space between the space in between, the cats in my house who will soon enough become the many, many cats in my house. And me, I was found after all by the parent of a misfit. Jona, her name is. She’s odd for sure and doesn’t speak a whole lot, but kicks the absolute tar out of balls.
Uncle Connor has grown tired of my musings about destiny. That’s his word, though, not mine. All I’m doing is working with what’s available, within the limits my experience has established for me. I cry on his couch the day Jona makes the LHS team as their kicking specialist. “All right, son, that’s enough,” he states promptly, ever the big man, “get yourself together,” until a year later when she’s offered a scholarship to Boise and he, too, is undone.