The Good Console by Maya Beck

“You know those stomachaches I’ve been getting?” Callie’s voice grows low, flattened over wireless.

“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant.” I lean against my bedroom wall, laptop on my lap, stuffed animals populating the bed around me.

“No, but I’ve been at the hospital, that’s where I’ve been at. That’s why I’ve been flaking on you, sorry.”

“You better not have cancer or nothing.”

She only laughs.

My voice grows loud against my will. “Cuz you know no serious disease like cancer would fit an idiot like — idiots like us. Tragedy doesn’t suit us, too young, too silly.”

“Right. And I wouldn’t know where to start, who to call — I’d probably find out too late and already be halfway dead.”

“A zombie, right? Necrosis?”

“And it would have to be something stupid like ass cancer.”

“For real?” Okay, okay, I can’t help laughing.

“Colon, ass, same difference. Ass works better for idiots like us.”

“Yeah. We could try Kickstarter, a funny one all about asses. Twerking in it, save the booties. God knows I’m too proud to beg, but maybe I should get the cancer. I’m more photogenic, I’m the better dancer.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. I hate to be pitied. Suicide seems like way less trouble.”

“Callie? Excuse me, but I got a good routine going. Maybe we can work in a failed suicide, trying to hang yourself with a cheapo belt and it just breaks or something, but that kinda humor…”

“I’m gonna immolate myself, protest the cost of healthcare…” Was she sobbing?

“I’d come with you then. We’ll burn on the capitol steps. Oh, but then someone will dowse us both with — with, with Gatorade or something, maybe liquor, then we burn up more, brighter, but revive like phoenixes!’

“No, you live to tell the tale. Record it. Narrate it. I wanna go viral.” Callie laughs again, weak and hoarse and almost coughing.

I laugh too, we laugh a whole lot.

“But you’re just kidding, right?”

“Oh, I hope so.”

You ducked under the crumple of the chain link fence, I climbed over like a jungle gym. The grass was thin, yellow, crunchy beneath our sneakers. The school was moon-grey in the twilight, windows black, doors creaking. We had to hold hands to not be scared. We had a Finding Song to reach the room:

girls turn left take a right turn left,

through the ca-fe-te-ri-a,

third door, fourth door, down the stairs

through the hall and here we are

We jumped through the security office window — and we removed the remaining shards from the frame ourselves. There was an office chair for you and an office chair for me to spin in, and 32 black camera screens looking down. We dug through our backpacks, yours Sailor Moon and mine Pokemon. I brought the crumbs of my brother’s DIY projects, old political signs, and other found objects from empty desert lots. You brought special-patterned duct tape, construction paper from school and your mom’s scrapbook leftovers.

We got to titling. There were already switches for rain and sleet and snow and earthquake, but there were still so many buttons remaining. We got creative, decorative. This switch was ‘Fire Tornado,” that knob was “Fog of Hate,” there was a phone line to the afterlife and what else, we brainstormed, did God need?

I sit in my car, parked on the side of the road with the world moving past in the form of bikers, distant sirens. I have errands to do, but Callie is more important.

“It’s just there’s all this other stuff going on. I don’t know.” Callie breathes fast, talks quick, voice shrill. “Like on the news and stuff, you know how you watch too much and your life seems to shrivel up small? The bigger world seems the same. This still feels too small. I think something’s wrong with me. Maybe I still don’t believe it, but I just can’t bring myself to care.”

“I care. Does that help?”

“It doesn’t because even this month, there’s been that tsunami — that’s what, three thousand people dead? And we’re still in a war, right? Is Ebola still going around? Malaria is. Are people dying from the drought? Heat stroke?”

“What are you talking about, girl?”

“Do you remember the God Console?”

“The what?” I lean forward on the black of the steering wheel, careful not to honk. Sunlight filters in through the windshield to hit me.

“That game we used to play when we were young, in the old Kit Carson building. Remember? Oh, I hope squirrels aren’t pushing down the wrong handles or nothing. I hope no other kids got at it. I hope it’s locked.”

“That has nothing to do with anything, Callie. I need to know if it’s really too late. I need to know if you’re doing anything about it. I’ll do the begging if necessary. Who have you told? I can ask everyone.”

“I don’t really have anyone?”

“Well, even coworkers, colleagues, friends like me…”

Callie hmms, as flippant as if considering a menu. “I still can’t believe you don’t remember the Console,” she says. “Did you also forget that you killed me?”

We were facepainted by marker and chalk, cackling with play-doh crowns and jewels in paper mache. You jerked the mouse around, studious eyes towards a top-level screen to which we’d glued a picture of China. I pressed the war button. We jumped and kaboomed at some rural province. I fixed my eyes on the map of Brazil, and, fingers on a button taped red and scrawled with ‘FIRE!’, I pressed it and pressed it: fire, fire, fire! Surely, the Amazon was burning.

The big blue button for rain, you used to flood the Sahara. We pointed to the landmarks that class had taught us, knees on the console desk. Your favorite button was the blessing button, which we devoted largely to California, maybe Costa Rica, Guatemala, only places we wanted to go. You liked reversing my curses: a ‘magnetized earthquake’ that brought buildings back together, or a sinkhole that sucked up the spills of my volcanoes.

It pissed me off. I grabbed the water hose we’d taped to the outlet, our death ray, and pointed it at you instead of the screens. There was no jumping for this sound effect, only a quiet zup! I’m still alive. You showed your hands, defenseless.

I glared at you, my one hand on a rotary dial. I had the time randomizer on. See? You’re still gonna die, just be careful.

So are you. You be careful.

I released the death ray. My shoulders untensed and the nozzle swung dry from the console cabinet.

The fence is much easier to climb at my height, and maybe time has brought it lower. The grass is still scratchy and golden in summer. Nowadays, I’d call us urban explorers. What were we back then, besides reckless?

I can’t find anything without Callie. I try to remember the song:

girls go right, girls go left

downstairs? down a hall?

should we be here at all?

It takes me a good half-hour to find the console. Other kids have been at it, big kids with spray paint. There are so many tags and some vulgar doodles. Our clay and paint and papers have all faded from bold primaries to weak pastels. The dust has weakened the tape and glue, dogearring our maps. I begin take one down, a corner at a time. No, I begin by switching off all the interventions. I try to balance some things, unmelt icebergs or unfell sequoias.

The death ray comes untaped from the wall when lifted. Still, I point it at a screen. I point it at myself. I dig into my pocket and then point it at my phone. I call Callie.

“I remember the God Console. I’m there now.”

“Oh my god.”

“So how do I reverse it?”

Callie laughs, and tells me a bit about who she’s been talking to, what she can do. I can tell when Callie is pretending to be happy, by the way. I can tell when she’s about to cry.

I pace, and my idle hands find the goggles. I remember these goggles.

I wore them, never you, because you never pressed me hard enough and you smiled when I described the alternate worlds I could see. In the next world over, we were rich. In the next world over, we were boys, or I was a boy, or you were. In the next world over, you never moved away and your parents were always nice and you didn’t bow your head like that.

In this world, I strayed towards your house from habit and then detoured to the console. I pressed all the buttons, one at a time, every time, with angry fists. I yell. No one’s listening. The room echoed my yells. I’m destroying the console. I pulled every lever. I flip every switch. I beat down the buttons, I beat them down. I threw a tantrum. A lever comes off in my hand from anger. Because who cared about the rest of the world when you’re young and selfish and lonely? I can’t feel anything from here anyway.

Maya Beck is a lapsed Muslim, recovering otaku, socially awkward blipster, and genre-confused writer. As a Givens Foundation Fellow, VONA participant, and Paper Darts staff member; her work has been published or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Revolver, Mizna, PANK, the Twin Cities Daily Planet, NewHive, and Pollen. She currently works for an arts nonprofit in Minneapolis. Her Twitter is currently hibernating here, and she blogs intermittently here.