The Brooklyn Rail

In Ravi Mangla’s “Arcadia,” a retro video game seller goes in search of a game rumored to be a CIA psyops experiment. What he discovers—through a surrealist turn in the narration—is the depths of his own grief.

If you wanted to drop by the storefront, you wouldn’t find it. It wasn’t that kind of business. I kept a storage space in Astoria, a couple dozen feet on either side, where I might take a regular buyer, but most transactions took place on the internet. Deals that demanded no handshakes or token pleasantries. Press a button and the machine was yours. Presto. My bestseller was the Pac-Man cabinet, big cheese of the arcade golden age. Originally dubbed Puck Man in Japan, the name was changed out of fear that some smart-ass would take a Sharpie to the marquee. I’ll admit, the popularity made me resentful of the game, but business was business. And not even the biggest Bette Midler fan was exactly beating down my door for a Beaches pinball machine.

Sometime after nine o’clock, when I had finally settled on a TV show to stream, Ivan called, caffeine-addled and barely able to contain himself.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said. “You’re going to shit yourself.”

When a console’s debilitated state exceeded my primitive repair capabilities, I brought in Ivan to refurbish the unit. A couple of times he had invited me for shawarma, but I wasn’t much for breaking bread with people I dealt with professionally. Or any people for that matter.

“I told you I don’t want that racist game,” I said, assuming he was trying once again to pawn off his Punch-Out!! cabinet, complete with a turbaned fighter who flies around on a magic carpet.

“Polybius.”

He let the name linger on the line. Among gamers, Polybius was the holy grail, El Dorado, the white whale, if you will. A CIA psyops experiment in 16-bit form. Days after materializing in a Portland arcade, it was remanded by its makers, wheeled out Hannibal Lecter-like by a cadre of men in bespoke suits. Kettle enough of us in a room and you’d set off a fierce debate about whether the game even exists. Me, I was an agnostic.

He explained that a woman had found the game in her late father’s basement. She called Ivan seeking a buyer.

“Did you tell her what she had?”

“I wasn’t hired for an appraisal.”

I didn’t know what to make of the ethics of this, but I was too curious to find fault in his occupational practices.

“You could have just bought it.”

“Between you and me, I have enough drugs in this apartment to euthanize a giraffe. I’m not looking to invite the Feds into my life. Who know what bugs or cameras are hidden in that thing,” he said.

“But I did tell her I might know someone interested,” he continued.

He gave me a number for a woman—Corinthia—but not before pestering me for a generous finder’s fee. I hung up with Ivan and immediately dialed the seller. She offered to show me the console the next morning.

I took two trains and an Uber to reach her father’s house in Westchester. A Queen Anne home with a Escher-like roof line and wrought iron gates sharp enough to impale the head of an enterprising prowler.

A willowy, dark-haired woman in an oversized Bryn Mawr sweatshirt strode down the driveway to meet me at the gate.

“You’re the game guy?” she said.

“That’s me.”

“Thanks for coming all this way.”

“It’s healthy to get out of the city now and again.”

She led me inside the imposing home, down a creaking set of stairs, where besieged by a sea of boxes was a tall object beneath a yellow sheet.

“Voila.”

She gestured to the cabinet. I took this as permission to peel off the fabric. I paused momentarily before yanking away the thin sheet, which stirred up clouds of dust.

The cabinet was unremarkable. A plain black shell with Polybius imprinted on the marquee in billowy letters. I plugged in the power cord and pressed the switch on the top of the cabinet. The monitor remained still.

“It doesn’t work?”

Corinthia shrugged. I was waylaid by a familiar disappointment, an anticlimax like reaching water after days in the desert only to cough up hot sand.

“It’s been a number of years since my dad passed,” she said. “I’ve only just worked up the courage to sort through his belongings.”

“I lost my father when I was in college. I’m not sure the weight of the loss hit me until much later,” I said.

She nodded. “Grief works on its own timeline.”

We idled in a shared silence before I restored us to the transaction at hand.

“Do you mind if I open her up?”

“Be my guest,” she said.

I slow-danced the cabinet away from the wall. Before opening the back, I glanced at the serial number. A sequence of all 5s. I loosened the back screws. Corinthia looked on with curiosity. The game board resembled no piece of hardware I had ever seen. It was impossible to pinpoint an era.

“How did you become—an arcade person,” she asked, grasping for the right words.

“We moved around a lot when I was young. And as a brown kid in mostly white schools, it wasn’t easy to make friends. So I would lose myself in games.”

I wasn’t sure what compelled me to share. There was something about being invited into the house and shown to the fabled game that made me feel as though I was in her confidence.

I sealed the back of the cabinet.

“I can’t offer you as much as you’d get on the internet,” I said, prefacing my offer.

“I don’t think I’d know where to sell it.”

“$5000?”

She seemed taken aback by the proposal.

“That’s more than I expected.”

“So we have a deal?”

I wrote out a check on the side of the cabinet. She folded it and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans.

Corinthia walked me to the iron gates girding the property. I turned back before leaving.

“What line of work did you say your father was in again?” I asked.

She latched the gate behind me.

“I didn’t.”

Out of an abundance of caution I hired—instead of my usual movers—a tandem specializing in upright pianos. After unloading the cabinet in the storage space, the shorter one asked if I could use a referral for a piano tuner.

I sat on a bar stool, the foam bulging from the ruptured seat, and scrutinized the machine. I wondered what secrets were buried behind its ordinary veneer. After a little while, I went down to the corner store and bought a six-pack of some seasonal craft brew mash-up. I crowed open the first bottle on the door jamb, then began circling the unit as if preparing for cross examination. I kneeled down and unlocked the coin door. It was a generic mechanism common for the era, emptied of small change. I felt in my pockets, popped a quarter into the opening. I heard a quiet click and watched the gray monitor turn to black. The word Polybius unfolded on the screen in its bloated font. I felt for the switch but it remained in the off position.

The game took several moments to load. I didn’t know how the machine was running, how the seemingly inoperable game had found its way back from the hereafter.

I stepped up to the control board and pressed the start button.

The game play was more or less straightforward. Your armor-clad hero moved along a labyrinth of hedges, torturous in their breadth and form. The character was pursued, hunted, by a minotaur-like creature. You received points for evading your horned captor. Every so often the maze tremored and the hedges shifted or reorganized themselves, leaving you to recover your bearings. A single game play afforded you a merciful count of five lives.

I played for twenty minutes, a bit longer, before my lives were exhausted. I pumped another quarter into the cabinet. Then another. It took several hours to settle into the cadence of the game play, attune myself to its idiosyncrasies. I watched my name climb the leaderboard, despite the fact the rest of the medalists were presets, remains of an acid-washed age.

As I played, I felt my face grow flush. Sweat thronged my forehead. My temples became constrained, as if gripped by a vise, and my eyes slipped in and out of focus. I worried I’d contracted a bug or virus. Then a warmth rose in the back of my throat. I turned and vomited onto the floor.

What came out of me was not the old college vomit, your run-of-the-mill ejecta, but something less familiar: a substance that appeared almost silver, as if a standing mirror had been melted down to a molten consistency. What I saw when I looked into the stilled surface I still haven’t been able to shake. A gray face, almost cadaverous. Eyes haggard and shrunken into their sockets. The space behind the face was empty. A void.

“Dad?”

Perhaps against my better judgment, I reached out to touch the silver substance. I almost expected the reflection to reach back toward me, extend its hand in a synchronous motion. But the image remained unchanged. Before my fingers could make contact with the liquid, my balance faltered. My body pitched forward, barreling headlong into the game cabinet. I can’t tell you how much time passed, the precise number of minutes or hours, but when I opened my eyes again, I was propped against the bar stool. The machine was silent. A gray puddle of vomit congealed beside me.

I lifted the door of the storage space, took the freight elevator down to the ground floor. The sun accosted me when I stepped out the door. I shielded my eyes with my palm. I was parched and bought at the bodega some brightly colored sports drink in lieu of a coffee. I sat down on the curb.

It felt as though I had been asleep for days, though I knew what I had seen weren’t the antics of a tired mind. Never had I been the type to see Jesus in a piece of toast or espresso foam, forever panning for traces of the divine in the cosmic soup to which we all belonged. But even the hardened logician in me was thrown. There was no explanation for what I had witnessed. No 16-bit sleight-of-hand that could have sent me into such a strange and fevered state.

I recalled returning home from college and seeing my father in a hospital bed, his skin paper-thin and feet swollen with edema. Too many years had passed, and I couldn’t scarcely remember the particulars of his face. Did his bottom teeth sit straight? Were his eyebrows slanted or arched? The reflected image could have just as easily been me, deep in the doldrums of old age, waiting to exit stage left. I wasn’t so naive to believe that I could sidestep death, but its uncertainty lent life an openness. It left room for negotiation. Now all I felt was time careening toward its terminus.

The phone in my pocket jolted to life. I didn’t recognize the dialer’s number. Theories abounded in my head, each equally implausible in design. Had the game sent a homing signal to its CIA minders? Were they coming to commandeer it, wipe my memory clean? Or, worse yet, manacle me in some unmapped black site?

I let the call be shunted to voicemail.

The sun continued to bear down, but all I felt in my body was cold.

Across the street an aging woman, back-hunched, pushed her pug in an infant stroller. The pug craned its head out from the canopy to appraise me, then seemingly disappointed settled back in its carrier.

My phone rang a second time. This time I accepted the call.

“Yes? What is it? What do you want?”

It wasn’t the CIA. It wasn’t even a Langley intern. No. Some hedge fund muckety-muck with money to burn. His son’s birthday was tomorrow, and he wanted to know if I could sell him a Pac-Man cabinet.