The smooth plastic click of the analog pad consoles me as I decide, not today. It is not the first time, but the possibility exists that it will be the last. I mash two buttons in sequence and click the left shoulder trigger; the television's phosphorescent response is immediate and gratifying.

Some deep, honest part of my mind mocks my inflated sense of just what constitutes a "possibility," when the smallest excuse is always enough. I can't leave today--I'm playing video games. Yesterday I didn't leave because dinner was better than usual. The day before that I was too exhausted to engage in the kind of confrontation that leaving one's wife and child tends to necessitate. Tuesday was trash day.

I berate my unfailingly obedient avatar for missing a jump.

Trash day, I scoff. It feels more like self-pity than self-deprecation. Is the need to properly dispose of consumer waste so inimical to getting on with one's life? What sort of karmic blasphemy makes my personal commitments binding by virtue of the local sanitation engineer's weekly rendezvous? Perhaps because my responsibility to take out the trash is so inconsequential it inspires neither misery nor joy, I have clasped it to me as proof positive that not all responsibilities are suffocating, soul-devouring nightmares into which I have unwittingly stumbled.

Or perhaps, like the buxom, pixelated heroine currently breaking heads on my television screen, I am simply not the one in charge. As if to validate this speculation, a chubby fist emerges from the haze that is the world around me and disconnects my controller from its socket. Helpless, my avatar bravely endures several sword wounds and two or three savage kicks to the stomach before collapsing to the ground.

"Da!"

"Oh, don't unplug Daddy's game," the wife chides. She lifts the baby into her arms and offers me an apologetic smile.

"No worries," I say. I've lost a mere fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of progress. Twenty minutes of life. A drop in the proverbial bucket, all things considered. I reconnect my controller and the console's optical drive motor whispers seductively for me to wait as it loads new data. The creators of this particular game were generous; save points litter the landscape. What is done can be undone. It is the gamer's mantra: save early, save often.

Not so in real life. "RL," that unfortunate game wherein drudgery is unavoidable, death is permanent, and choices can only be made once. If you don't like the way things are going, tough--there's no going back.

Just to be sure, I close my eyes and will myself to awaken--not as an adult with responsibilities, but as a teenager with crucial junctures ahead rather than behind. I strain at the fabric of reality (or perhaps the capillaries that feed my brain), willing myself to relive the last ten years armed not with some foggy premonition of what might be accomplished in my brief, all-too-human lifespan, but instead with a firm knowledge of outcomes. I would finish college, see more of the world, maybe even live in a house instead of this stifling apartment. I'd make my life an adventure instead of a chore.

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that life imitates art. But no matter how ubiquitous the artistic theme of re-living one's life and re-making one's choices, I've yet to close my eyes in the present and wake up in the past. The invisible forces controlling my existence--gods, the government, I don't know who but it sure isn't me--either haven't saved my progress or don't care to restart the game. There is no rebooting the Matrix. There is no Christmas angel come to show me how much my life really matters.

I'm left with little choice but to assume that, in the absence of the smallest suggestion to the contrary, my life really doesn't matter. I wish I could find solace or satisfaction in being right. Instead I equip my digital puppet with a different sword and set about slaying opponents whose patterns I can understand and solving puzzles with solutions I've read on the Internet.

I hate going to church. Not that work is a great deal more pleasant, but at least at work I'm getting paid. Scrubbing toilets at the junior high school for eight forty-five an hour beats listening to empty rhetoric at any price, I suppose. Preachers. They beat you over the head with these trite, obvious metaphors and then reveal the message with a little flourish, like nobody saw it coming. They can't even spin a decent tale and let people puzzle it out; they always have to end with "the moral of the story," like some amateur magician who can't wait to tell you his secret so you can see how clever he is.

My handheld's power indicator turns orange and I almost swear. I click off the backlight, hoping the effort at conservation is enough. I have finally reached the last level; if the battery dies now, I'll lose over an hour. The writers of this game were stingy with save points. In most games, the writer is your real opponent. Some games are collaborative and cooperative--a shared experience between creator and audience. But most games are like life: you only win if you can outwit the author.

"Do you have to play that thing in here?" Every week the wife asks the same question in the most stern whisper she can manage. Every week I shrug in response. Sometimes I consider flipping my handheld shut, standing up, and walking out on her right then and there. But that wouldn't be fair; going to church was as much my idea as hers. When I was a teenager, church felt good, felt right. Back then I thought it was Holy Ghost power. Maybe it was just endorphins or whatever neurochemistry psychologists attribute spirituality to these days. I don't really have a theory. I only know I haven't felt that way in a long time.

"Da!" The baby makes a grab at my handheld. I move reflexively, managing to limit the external damage to a finger-smudge and some drool, but the distraction costs me a bar of health. At this rate, I won't have enough life when I reach the final boss.

The thing about church is that I keep going back. I didn't get hung up on some esoteric philosophical problem, I wasn't swayed by Nietzsche, nor did I have a fight with the preacher or some member of the congregation. Whether noble or banal, at least under other circumstances I would have some reason for not feeling what I used to. Instead I have a memory, one too weak even to inspire yearning.

Silently I curse the indoor lighting. I turn the backlight on. Battery life is a concern, but if I can't see what I'm playing then it doesn't really matter how much power I have left.

I still remember what it felt like to be a child of God, to have some kind of destiny, to have the Really Big Guy watching out for me. It's a distant memory and it grows more distant every year. Sometimes I wonder what will happen when that memory fades completely. It's been half a decade at least. I keep going to church because I remember what it felt like, once upon a time. Maybe I stay with the wife for a memory, too. It's amazing what people will do in the present to honor the past. But I don't want the present to resemble the past; I want the present to go away.

While I'm wishing for the impossible, I wish for more batteries. The time has come to cleanse the world of the evil that has plagued it for so long--about eleven hours, according to the in-game timer. I guide my avatar into the penultimate room and brace myself for the final confrontation. My handheld powers down. I don't even get to see the end boss.

The preacher is saying something about salvation coming through the blood of Christ. Silently I blaspheme; how often does the Lamb of God save? And why doesn't he restore occasionally? I'm told that's what repentance is for, but repenting of my marriage isn't going to give me back the last five years any more than bleeding on my game is going to bring back the last hour.

Maybe in the next life. Whatever that means.

There's nothing quite like coming home at three in the morning. The streets are empty. Even in a booming metropolis you can go five and ten minutes without seeing another living soul. It's just you and the streetlights. I relish the loneliness of my commute the way a teenager might revel in angst. It's a wallowing feeling, really, in no way uplifting and yet there is a cool, familiar comfort to it. My place in the world is obvious when it is relative only to angular constructs of asphalt and steel and glass, gray cinderblock walls shielding my vision from the distractions lurking behind. To these empty roads I am just another man. On these roads, it is enough.

That clarity fades as I approach the front door of what, in decades past, might have been called my castle. The word "dungeon" rolls through my head, but I reject it; after all, was there ever a dungeon without a castle? Besides, the only dungeons with which I have any real experience are full of treasure. Monsters of every breed, too, from dragons to ogres to the shambling undead--but after the monsters are gone, always treasure.

I open the door to my apartment and am surprised to discover the baby sitting in the middle of the floor with a lidless jar of strawberry jam. She's covered in the stuff; "from head to toe" would not be putting it figuratively. With a grin and a giggle and the careful deliberation of a child still perfecting her fine motor skills, she sticks one arm into the jar. She pulls out a fistful of jam and thrusts the dripping, purple-red mass in my direction.

"Da!"

The baby is supposed to be in bed. Stepping carefully around her mess, I wonder what the building manager will charge me to have the carpet cleaned. So much for my deposit. Not that it costs five-hundred dollars to clean a few square feet of carpet, but that's apartment managers for you. They'll use any excuse to keep your money. Now the baby has provided one.

I check my games; it looks like the baby got hold of one of the controllers, but otherwise my equipment is goop-free. She's watching me with one jam-covered fist in her mouth. What am I supposed to do? Why wasn't this mess taken care of before it got out of hand? Where is the wife?

Calling for assistance, I look into the bathroom and bedroom. Both are in minor disarray and briefly I wonder why. In the kitchen I find half a dozen pancakes strewn across the floor. I also find a note, handwritten on a piece of paper intended for phone messages and shopping lists. It depicts some kind of bird--a pelican or stork or whatever that ridiculously long-beaked white bird is--with a frog in its mouth. In an attempt to keep from being eaten, the frog has managed to wrap its hands--paws?--around the bird's neck. Under the caption "Never give up!" I read the wife's elegant script:

I can't do this anymore. You never speak to me. You hardly look at me. I'm miserable all the time and you don't care. All you ever do is play your stupid games. That's not marriage. That's not even life. You're like a zombie and I'm done taking care of you. I have a life of my own and I'm going to go live it.

She did not sign the note. Momentarily I wonder if that lack implies abduction; a fake note penned by the hand of an evil killer--or by the wife, under some kind of duress. If she didn't cooperate, the baby would suffer. Of course! That's why she didn't take the baby. Fleeing women never leave their children behind.

But I know that they do, sometimes, and I know that she has. Every time I thought about leaving, I found some reason to stay, some excuse for what was ultimately cowardice. It seems an appropriate parting gesture to prove one final time how capable she is; to emphasize how incapable I am by comparison. I wonder if I should call her mother. I'm sure that's where she went. Maybe we could patch things up, work things out. Maybe even fall in love again. After all, isn't that protocol? When someone flees, you follow. I reach for the phone.

"Da?"

I look down at the baby, who has tracked strawberry goop across the front room and into the kitchen. Her bright blue eyes gleam behind a magenta mask; there is a question in them, locked behind her limited vocabulary. Does she wonder where her mother is? Almost certainly. Does she want to know what happens next? Perhaps. But judging by her outstretched fist and the sugary treasure slowly oozing between her chubby fingers, the question currently on her mind is simple.

Won't you have some jam?

I smile. It is a tiny smile, barely a grin, but there is immense emotional pressure behind that infinitesimal crack in my façade and soon I chuckle. Before I can stifle it, my chuckle becomes laughter. So I laugh.

And laugh.

Ever the mimic, my daughter laughs too. It's the forced laughter of a toddler, that strange staccato yelling, almost coughing imitation of my own adult cackle. She loves to laugh. Together we laugh, father and daughter, old and young, foolish and wise. How many months did I spend trying to overcome my cowardice? My wife--or the woman who once played that role--finally did for me what I could not, would not do for myself. I leapt, instinctively, to undo the deed. My daughter stayed my hand. What is done cannot be undone and for once, I am grateful.

My daughter reneges on her offer and eats the jam once intended for me. I strip her down to her diaper and carry her to the sink. Nine jam-covered paper towels make it to the wastebasket before I discover that the washcloth works better. I take off my now strawberry-stained shirt, wad it up with my daughter's clothes, and drop the pile into the sink. I look at the floor and decide that if the building manager wants to keep my deposit, he's going to earn it all by himself.

"Well, Hope," I say to my daughter, "Would you like to play a game?"

I fire up my console and settle into my banana chair. Hope sits on my lap and I give her an unplugged controller, which she holds like an old pro. In a few hours, the sun will rise. I'm not sure what that means. All I can think to do is play with my daughter. Games might not matter to some people, but they've always mattered to me.

"There's just one rule. Save early, save often."

The title screen comes up. I start to load my latest game, then hit the reset button. If I'm going to teach Hope how to play, I had better start at the beginning.

--Kenneth R. Pike