Blank Disc

GameStop was his first job, his only job. It was in the Shaw’s Plaza where his mom worked when she was in nursing school, back when they were still living at grandma’s and he was sleeping on the Murphy bed. After his shift he’d stop at the Wendy’s next to the drive-thru ATM for two orders of ninety-nine cent chicken nuggets and then bike home with headphones on. He cashed his paychecks at Walmart. In his room he had a PS4 hooked up to a computer monitor he bought off Craigslist for twenty-five dollars. It was a ratchet-looking setup with wires dangling down the side of his dresser, but now he didn’t have to leave his bed. He was gaming all the time when he was home, marathon stretches, mattress on the floor, crumbs in the sheets, but without the cynical concentration of his WoW scammer days. He liked shooters, he liked single-player RPGs, he liked GTA and Assassin’s Creed.

The GameStop job wasn’t bad except if you imagined doing it for the rest of your life, or when someone from school came in. Charlie hated to be associated with his coworkers, even if the person from school didn’t acknowledge him, and they never did. He knew everyone’s name but no one knew his name, was how it felt. He was in his junior year of high school, a virgin with a learner’s permit.

His coworkers were delusional losers with bad skin. Gabe had a shaved head, huge gauges, tattoos and a second job at Guitar Center, a side hustle giving bass lessons, and he loved to discuss hypothetical fight situations, citing his MMA training. He used to play in noise bands—house shows and at Fort Thunder when it was still around—but he’d been terminally hungover and poor in those days, and now he had cats to feed, ha ha. Luis traded crypto on his phone on the clock, took classes at CCRI and basically stalked one of the checkout girls at Shaw’s. Josh was scrawny, pasty, fulltime, the manager. He had an associate’s degree, benefits, dandruff, PTO, BO, and he wore the same pair of khakis every day. Everything he said sounded prerecorded, he was all retail shtick, the same jokes endlessly recycled, outlining the perks of the rewards program again in a fake cheerful voice, the exact same inflection and wording every time. Every week he sent a long passive-aggressive email peppered with Star Wars gifs and homemade memes containing managerial dictates.

They were all going nowhere and trying to cope. Josh had a podcast. Gabe hated libs. Luis was bullish on altcoins. They had their loyalty cards, Reddit karma and burner accounts, their routines and the employee discount. Josh and Gabe lived with their homely girlfriends. Luis lived on his cousin’s couch and regularly patronized a happy ending massage spot in a strip mall. Gabe fantasized about putting his guido cokehead neighbor in a chokehold. Luis stood at the window and watched the checkout girl walk to her car, blowing Juul exhale down his shirt while Josh was in the bathroom. Josh monologued about post-mortality technarchy and total immersion VR, smirking at the pornographic potential implied. Gabe invited everyone to his place to watch the UFC fight on Saturday, he was making riot punch and clam dip, leave your shoes in the basket in the hall, don’t come if allergic to cats.

Charlie worked after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and all day on Saturday. On Sunday, supper at grandma’s house in the afternoon, Call of Duty and a long hot shower in the evening, and then a shitty night’s sleep, dreading the week ahead, tossing and turning, mind running forward to the early mornings and dragging hours, the stress of the hallway and the locker room, skipping lunch in the computer lab, no appetite on Adderall, or too nauseous/anxious to eat, and then more dragging hours to kill at work.

He kept his head down, too irrelevant to attract a bully, straight Cs with minimal effort, no friends except on the internet, earbuds in at all times, hoping for rain every day because everything was mellow when it rained. Wednesday he cut out before last period, sniped an Ambien from the medicine cabinet for his afterschool snack and clocked eighteen hours of dreamless sleep. His mom worked the overnight shift in the ICU and they didn’t overlap much during the week. Dinner in the fridge, or leftovers from grandma’s, or he made himself mac and cheese, Wendy’s after work every time.

On smooth days he knew he was superior to his environment, smarter than his grades and too good for his job. But most days he knew he was trash. Most days he was only waiting to sleep. He could never get enough. He slept in class and then slept through detention for sleeping in class, biked home and thought about swallowing all of the Ambien in one go so he could sleep forever. But he had to lose his virginity first. He wanted to shine first. He wanted to mean something to someone, and get head at the movies. He scribbled lyrics in his notebooks during class and taught himself how to make beats on pirated software.

He used to think meeting his dad would fix a deep unnamable defect. After an awkward lunch at Pizza Hut the week of his sixteenth birthday, he gave up on that. His dad owned the restaurant where Charlie’s mom once waitressed. He had another family, his real family, and drove a Mercedes. His shirt was monogrammed, collar open, reading glasses in the breast pocket. He looked lobster-fed. He ordered a salad and a sparkling water. Asked if Charlie played any sports. Favorite subject in school. Any hobbies? Talked about his own difficult upbringing, beatings and no hot water, and how he never felt sorry for himself. That was the key. Look at him now. He put the reading glasses on when the check came. Popped an envelope on top of Charlie’s to-go box on the way out. Three crisp hundred dollar bills inside an unsigned birthday card. Told Charlie to be good, take care of your mother, stay in school. He didn’t have to say, “Don’t fuck with my life.” That was what the money was for. Charlie spent it on Jordans, a pocketknife, headphones and CoD skins.

At work he mostly overlapped with Crystal, the assistant manager. She’d been working at GameStop for nine years, first at the mall, now salaried in the Shaw’s Plaza location. She was twenty-seven, had a kid she didn’t live with for reasons unstated, and wished she’d been born in Japan. She asked Charlie probing questions, teased him for his clipped answers and complained about the rude perverts on Tinder. She wore glasses with purple frames, a matching streak of purple in her hair. She had three Miyazaki tattoos. She lived at her mom’s, drank on the job in moderation and spent her break playing Pokémon two doors down at the Mandarin Garden Buffet.

One night after the holiday insanity had concluded, there was a blizzard and no one came into the store for three hours. Charlie and Crystal were silent on their phones while the spring preview video played on a loop on the monitor in the corner—it was forbidden to mute the video. A plow scraped by in the parking lot, orange light blinking across the displays, and Crystal let out a big sigh, clapped her phone down on the counter and asked Charlie if he smoked weed.

She locked the front door and taped a note to it, and then Charlie followed her into the stock room. She left the lights off. She had skunky mids in a film canister in her tote bag. She told Charlie not to worry about getting in trouble—she had dirt on Josh and could easily blackmail him into submission—and propped open the door to the bare backside of the plaza, loading bays and dumpsters, small snowflakes falling stark in the floodlights, and you could see through the skinny dusted trees to the highway. Everything was quiet except for car tires in the slush.

They had to huddle shoulder to shoulder facing the wall to block the wind. She had to show Charlie where to put his thumb, and she had to light the bowl for him too because his fingers were stiff in the cold and inexperienced with a Bic. It was clearly his first time but she didn’t make him feel pathetic about it. She was kind. She told him to breathe in until it hurt. He followed her directions and then it felt like there was barbed wire threading through his bronchial tubes. He tried to curb his coughing, coughed harder and then spit forever, huge mouthfuls of spit one after another. He burped and almost threw up. Crystal laughed and said that was normal.

They went back inside and Charlie braced for hallucinations, the brightness of the sales floor harshly framed at the far end of the room. It would be miserable to stand in that light and face the public now. His eyes were barely open and he couldn’t speak, zero moisture in his mouth. And he could hear the voice of the lady in the spring preview video, her fake enthusiasm for everything. The video had a runtime of twenty-two minutes. You’d hear it sixteen and a half times per six-hour shift—the vets on the staff knew the math by heart. But if Charlie had to listen to that voice right now, all those hollow words repeating and repeating and repeating, he would lose his mind and go pyro for sure.

He hung up his coat and dried his sneakers on the mat, hearing his heartbeat all too clearly. His heart was beating too loud. It would give him away.

Crystal had wandered down an aisle of wire shelves. She was searching for something on a disorderly back corner shelf where they kept the old, damaged, and rejected stock, busted controllers and unsalvageable consoles, things that couldn’t be sold or redeemed for credit.

“Don’t run away,” she said. “I have something for you.”

She held up a bright green unmarked case, something for the original Xbox.

“Come here.”

It felt like they were in a secure bunker, standing in the back corner of the stock room with the lights off during a snowstorm, like the end of the world, but cozy. He took the case from her and clacked it open. The disc was plain white on one side and reflective on the underside.

“What is it?”

“A surprise.”

“I don’t have an Xbox.”

“Come over after work and use mine. It’ll change your life.”

He thought she must be joking, but it didn’t seem like she was joking. She seemed assured of the significance of her gift. She had gummy worms in her tote and offered him some. They stood there eating gummy worms in the dark and then she asked for a hug, because they were friends now, officially, and friends should hug.

They held each other tightly and for a long time, and Charlie lost himself in the softness of her. She spread her fingernails across his scalp and scratched his back, over the shirt and then under it, and breathed heavier. She tested a finger under the waistband of his jeans and asked, “Is this okay?” but he couldn’t speak. He would’ve liked to have been absorbed by her. He would coil snakelike around her spine and stay there forever.

Near the end of winter, Crystal went to bat for Charlie after he stole five copies of the new Call of Duty spinoff from work. He sold them for twenty dollars over the cover price to freshmen five days before the official release date, all profit. He tried to cover his tracks by repacking the box, taping it shut and changing the inventory record in the computer, but Josh had agonized over the release day allotment and received the shipment himself. He called Charlie into his closet of an office and waved the packing list in his face and fired him after a long speech about honor.

Crystal was furiously upset by the news and texted Charlie about labor rights and lawyers, a wrongful termination suit. They met at Denny’s on a cold clear night. She bought him a Grand Slam, splashed flask whiskey into his milkshake and gifted him a quarter ounce of dispensary weed. They smoked a bowl of it in her car in the parking lot, facing Home Depot. She invited him over her house. They could watch a movie. He could sleep over.

He improvised a lie about his grandma, how she was waiting on biopsy results and his mom was freaking out, so he really had to get home. He didn’t think it was bad luck to tell a lie like that.

Crystal said she understood—her dad died of lung cancer when she was nine years old. That was when the happy part of her life ended. Although she’d been feeling pretty good lately, she said, giving him a look like he was the reason.

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know. I should really get home.”

They stopped at the gas station and she bought him a vape stick, blunt wraps, a lighter and Honey BBQ Fritos. He watched rolling tutorials on YouTube. He was gaming less and napping all afternoon, staying up late. He’d roll himself a pinner and climb out the window for a late night blunt stroll and then record whispered vocals on a USB mic in his closet. Everything he ever made, he made in bed on his laptop after midnight. It was all trash at first, but he was getting better. He was putting in the hours, learning how to use plugins, adding layers. In flashes he could feel his future—zero worries, never anxious, never jealous, never lonely. It would all come together. He’d book festivals and stadiums. He’d charge $250,000 for a feature.

Two hours of sleep and an Adderall for breakfast, listening to beats during class, tapping out lyrics on his phone, racing to his bed after the last bell. His mom didn’t like him napping so much, staying up so late and sleeping all day on the weekends, too much of a lousy bedhead to visit his grandma for Sunday supper, and running up the hot water bill with his forever showers. She didn’t like him with no job and no effort in his studies, so what if he managed to pull Cs, he should be applying himself, setting his eyes on scholarship dollars. And what was he climbing out his window for at three o’clock in the morning? Almost gave her a heart attack, she thought some pillhead burglar was breaking in.

But then she stopped hawking over Charlie so much. New boyfriend. She was in boyfriend mode. She’d even managed to switch to the 11-7 shift so she could operate like a normal person and spend more time with him, Mark from Match.com. He had a cop mustache, a snow plow contract, some pull with the town council and a couple grown kids from his first marriage. He came over and turned on the hockey game while Charlie’s mom fixed dinner.

When Charlie finished the quarter, he hit up Crystal for another, and it’d be sick if she could pick up a handle of vodka for him too. He’d worked out the formula: a bump of Adderall plus a skinny blunt to the face plus vodka-Mountain Dew, or vodka-Red Bull, or vodka-whatever. Finished a mixtape in a week. He had a song called “parking lot” on there, and it blew up, 2,500 plays in a month.

He liked the free weed and the access to liquor, but he didn’t like the way Crystal blew up his phone. Incoming/outgoing message ratio was like 5:1. She sent songs she loved and articles that might interest him and pictures of Baba, her calico cat. Good morning, sleep well, loving the rain today. She complained about work and tried to make plans. Meals, movies, Six Flags when it opened in April. It was understood that she would pay. She offered unsolicited older sister-style advice. She told him she’d been drinking, and now she was watching porn. She reminisced about quiet Thursday nights when they were alone at the store.

He liked to feel the vibration in his pocket. He liked knowing that someone wanted him. He just wished she were somebody else. Prettier, skinnier, his age, and less desperate. He didn’t care for all the innuendo, all her complaining, all her concern for him, and he was annoyed by the constant hangout suggestions. She said she missed their convos at work, their smoke breaks, their hugs. She asked if he was mad at her, apologized for nothing, offered to buy him more alcohol and shared her Netflix login.

He met her at Wendy’s after her shift ended. First night of spring, blackened snowbanks dwindling at the fringes of the parking lot. She bought him chicken nuggets and a Frosty and passed him a black plastic shopping bag under the table. A handle of vodka, a quarter from the dispensary, some homemade cookies and a handwritten letter. He put the bag in his backpack, ate fast and immediately dipped, saying he couldn’t hang out, midterms. He declined a ride home, made his escape and ghosted her.

She continued to text like normal for a while. She DMed memes and asked about his week, how’s school, how are you? She worried about the sudden silence, asked for confirmation that he was alive and joked about calling for a wellness check. But she knew he was alive because she saw that he’d been active on Instagram. She’d listened to his new song. She loved it, and wanted to know why he was ignoring her. Had she done something wrong? Had he been using her lol?

She told him about closing her eyes driving on highway straightaways, seeing how long she could keep them shut, and getting choked without permission by a Tinder guy who was scarier than his pictures. She told him about blacking out and puking the bed, hoping to extract a slice of concern.

He woke up from an afterschool nap to fourteen new messages. He was unsettled by her persistent attempts to make contact and by all the suicidal stuff, but also kind of empowered—he could hurt someone just by withholding.

Then she turned the corner and became hateful. It had become quite obvious to her that Charlie was common slime, a literal piece of shit. She had sooooo much experience with shitty guys. She sent long blocks of text detailing the lowlights of her adolescence, all the bad scenes, all the time self-harmingly alone. He had no idea what she’d been through—that became the refrain—and she offered some predictions. She knew what his life would be like—rife with meaningless suffering—and threatened to underwrite her prophecy with witchcraft, and only felt sorry for all the other people he would hurt during his pathetic time on earth. She became philosophical and mean when she texted drunk. She tried to sting him, walked it back, then doubled down. She sent an ominous “bye,” went silent and followed up three days later with, “can we please start over?”

He was worried she’d show up at the crib. She knew where he was at. She’d given him a ride home from Denny’s that one time. She might show up and kill him in his sleep, or kill herself in front of him, or kill his mom, or burn the house down.

He was being crazy. He deleted the thread and blocked her number. Blocked her on everything. Pretended to forget about her until he really did forget about her. It was easy to do after a while, now that none of her messages reached him. She might’ve continued to send them for all he knew, bunch of lost words floating in nowhere space like prayer.

He’d figured out how to find substances at school and made a couple not-quite-friends in the process. He traded his Adderall for Xans and tried acid, afternoons in the woods, unsupervised houses and the old forts in the parks, with all the broken bottles and tagged walls. Blunt cruises and shoplifting missions in borrowed minivans. Pool money and hey buddy for some flavored liquor. Summer around the corner. Confident enough to have him bump his new shit one night, and they fucked with it a little after they got done laughing.

The last week of school, he rode his bike to a pawnshop to sell an iPhone he’d taken from the cupholder of an unlocked car one street over. He’d swiped a couple laptops out of the locker room too. He didn’t feel bad AT ALL. They belonged to rich kids from a private school, the visiting team squeaking it up in the gym, in the shiniest sneakers. One of them would have to wear his court-sneakers on the bus ride home, because Charlie popped out of the locker room in the kid’s almost-new Vans and looped his busted-ass old pair over a wire, and hoped the kid saw them, looking out the window all pissed and spoiled. He went home and made a song about it in one take over a beat he’d been saving.

The guy at the pawn shop lowballed him on the stolen electronics, but it was still free money. They had everything at the pawn shop. He thought about buying a guitar, or a Switch, or a switchblade. Gold chains, four of them. They had drum pads and synths. Electric bikes for practically nothing. They had old consoles too, PS2, Dreamcast. An original Xbox.

Fifty dollars for it. He remembered the blank disc Crystal gave him, in the unmarked case, still in his closet probably. He hadn’t thought about Crystal in a while. He was a different person now. He’d had sex nine times. He was getting into stick-n-poke and crimes for fun and money. He was about to blow up.

That blank disc was sitting in his closet still. He knew it for sure. He could buy this Xbox and find out what was on that disc. But there were better ways to spend the money. He’d find out what was on that disc eventually, another time, over someone’s house, when the time was right. He told himself he’d get around to it, finally, but he never did.

His mom postponed the wedding three times and then called it off altogether. This was years later. She had a dead son, and Mark was coming at her with a million suggested distractions. He had way too much faith in distractions. She lost respect for him. He dragged her around to church. Into Newport traffic during peak season. Live music at the old people bars. Outdoor music at the park. One thing after another that one summer.

“What you need is a project,” he said. She should clean out the second bedroom, he said.

“That’s Charlie’s room.”

It wasn’t healthy to keep the room like that, he said. It was basically a shrine. Couldn’t look her in the eye whenever he said it, not unless he’d had three beers and felt like a tough guy. Why not turn it into a little home gym/office, something they would use? Mr. Self-improvement. Although what she should really do is list the house, he said. It wasn’t healthy for her to live there. Health this, health that. She called him the health inspector. She’d be miserable forever in that house, he said. It was a seller’s market. Never a better time. Mark the Mogul. She hurt his feelings with that one. It was like she’d intentionally poked at his softest spot, hard. Because he’d gotten frauded out by his own brother ten years ago, and then lost to him in court, and had to spend a little time in Butler around then, for exhaustion. But she hadn’t been thinking about any of that when she called him Mark the Mogul.

Mark didn’t like for her to go into Charlie’s room at all anymore, not unless she was going in there to finally clean it out, and he used to give her grief for playing Charlie’s songs in the car and wearing old t-shirts of his to bed. But she couldn’t sleep to save her life so she stayed up all night on the computer sometimes.

People reached out to her on Facebook. Kids. A couple bloggers. She got emails saying, “Your son’s music saved my life,” and she could hardly believe it, but why would they lie?

Some of them asked about the laptop. They wanted to know what happened to Charlie’s laptop after he died. Because there had to be unreleased music on it. They wanted more. They said there was likely an unknown masterpiece on that hard drive.

She called the police department to try to find out if a laptop had been recovered from the scene. She waited on hold forever. They gave her the runaround, put her on hold again and then disconnected. No one over there was any help at all. Bunch of lazy corrupt headcase bigshot drunks. But Mark had no patience for her when she tried to vent to him about it. He didn’t want to hear about it. He bought her grief books. Talked about a vacation. He had points saved up. They could go to Aruba if she got herself a passport. Everything was by the book with this guy.

They argued in the car on the way to her mother’s house for supper. All the time they argued now. A troublemaking son he could manage but a dead son was too much trouble, was that it? There were days she blamed Mark, there were days she blamed the father, but for the most part she only ever blamed herself.

Mark never let her drive anymore because her road rage was admittedly sometimes psycho, and any time she raised her voice, he’d look over at her with this look of vigilant pity on his face, like he was sorry for her and also scanning her eyes for clouds, like she might be spiking her coffee in secret or overdoing it with the CBD gummies, and that really pissed her off. She’d never been anything but honest with him. He had some nerve to distrust her of all people. But now she couldn’t pour herself a lousy glass of wine at dinner without catching a sideways look from him, and all because he was the one with the problem.

She gave back the ring and switched back to working nights since she wasn’t sleeping to begin with. And now she could spend time in Charlie’s bedroom without hearing a lecture about it. She could sleep in there if she wanted, and she did. She never made the bed or picked up the clothes from the floor except to press them to her face, but she’d exhausted the smell a long time ago, used it all up, and covered the whole room with her own sad breath. She learned every item in that room. Old homework assignments, the poems and rants in the notebooks, perverted drawings, and every once in a while some actual schoolwork. Knives, condoms, chapstick. The grinder she made use of in the kitchen now, for garlic. There were some shoes she didn’t remember ever buying for him. And then one day she found the naked disc on the floor of the closet. It had a smudged fingerprint on it. She basically collapsed when she saw that fingerprint.

She thought it might contain that lost masterpiece, the one the kids on the computer told her about, or maybe it was a mix CD. Maybe one of his girlfriends had made it for him. She hoped that girl Anna had made it for him. There was a girl named Anna who came right up to her at the wake and looked her straight in the eye and said she was sorry like no one else, because you could tell she really meant it. That was the girl her son would’ve married. She knew it like she knew the last four digits of her social. She could see her son holding the baby, and she was shaking her head thinking of the goofy tattoos on his hands and arms, the naked bimbo on his forearm, f-word and “face” across his knuckles.

She would have liked to have listened to some songs that girl Anna had picked out for Charlie or vice versa, eighteen years old and in love, but every time she tried the disc in a CD player, all she got was silence. She tried a few different CD players and also the DVD player, which loaded forever and then showed her an error code.

It was probably stupid, but she kept the disc in the car and tried it again once in a while, because maybe it would work this time. There was such a thing as miracles. On the way home from the hospital, she reached into the glovebox and pulled the disc from its spot atop the owner’s manual and pressed it into the slot, predawn and barely anybody on the road, passing the stretch where Charlie tried to cross the highway, two weeks after their last big fight. She flushes everything down the toilet and tells him he can’t live in her house if he’s gonna sell drugs, and he storms off and stays with his grandma for a couple days, and then he stays on this and that couch, supposedly, with one girl and another, but nobody could ever tell her why the hell her son was trying to walk across I-95 at three o’clock in the morning with no shoes on his feet, and some people think he was carrying his laptop at the time, and those people say there was a masterpiece on that laptop.

Never a word from the driver. She felt sorry for the driver. Most days they were forgiven. Other days she knew it was only her pride pretending to forgive.

It was important to face the facts, over and over, and take responsibility, and go to work, and pay her bills on time. Mark used to try to talk to her about moving on, but she never had the least intention of moving on. It was betrayal to move on. But she wouldn’t allow herself to fall apart either. She liked to sit at the beach by herself on a weekday afternoon near the end of summer. Sundays she went over her mother’s house for supper and an argument. She swam her laps at Healthtrax by the airport. She knew others had it worse. Her situation was nothing special.

Her shift ended at 6 a.m. and then she drove home. The billboard jackpot climbed and climbed and then it started over. It was always the same drive. She didn’t mind it. Big iced coffee on the way in. On the way home it was dawn, the prettiest time of day in any season, and most people slept through it, but not her. And sometimes she’d reach into the glovebox for that disc.

She put the disc in the CD player and braced for a sound. She made sure the volume was on. When she turned it all the way up, she could hear the light crackle of nothing playing. She imagined the disc might work if she timed it perfect, if she put it in the CD player at the right spot, right where it happened, at a destined hour. She anticipated pulling into the breakdown lane and listening to whatever was on that disc straight through fifty times in a row while she cried her eyes out. She could hear the disc spinning in the player, the little loading whirs, and she held her breath for a second, but then “ER-8” flashed on the read out like always and the disc ejected itself with the familiar groan, and she left it floating there and drove in silence the rest of the way to her house, where everything was exactly as she’d left it.