All of the regular players are male except for Roxy, who doesn’t actually play but likes to watch. Each week, Chris invites her to create a character and enter the game. You’re never too late to join—there is no such thing as “too late” in recovery, as long as you’re breathing. But Roxy is afraid of doing it wrong or not understanding. One of her “if onlys”—which take the form of spinning out the life you might have had if a certain bad thing hadn’t happened （if only I hadn’t gotten in that car, if only my mom had walked into the room, if only I didn’t care so much about being cool）—is, for Roxy, if only I wasn’t dyslexic, which is a way of saying, if only I’d been born in 1998 instead of 1968. According to videos she’s watched, dyslexic kids do just fine nowadays—they write books and run schools! For Roxy, school was a prolonged episode of not understanding: sentences, paragraphs, chapters. Mathematical equations broke apart before her eyes. Had she learned to read for real, rather than the pecking way that’s still the best she can do—had she happened to read Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, for example, which Molly Cooke read aloud at Bright Day in three installments—she would have discovered that the exact emotions she experienced after a trip to London with her father, at sixteen, a trip that broke her, had been felt by others. She was not unique, but neither was she alone. Reading might have saved her.
“You look happy, Rox,” Chris remarks, giving her a hug before she slides into one of the chairs around the gaming table in a small meeting room at Bright Day. She’s just swallowed her dose at the window and returned the empty cup, and now she swishes water in her mouth to keep the methadone residue from eroding the enamel on her teeth. “What’s your secret?”
“Who, me?” Roxy raises her hands in mock innocence. Everyone knows she’s an incorrigible dabbler, trying to earn her way back to take-home doses after yet another dirty urine.
Chris watches her closely. He’s empathetic to the point of telepathy. Roxy does have a secret this morning: Her Mandala Consciousness Cube—a present from her sisters for her fifty-eighth birthday next week—is supposed to arrive today. Her reason for requesting Own Your Unconscious is not, as it has been for many people she knows, to use the Collective Consciousness to solve a mystery: Who was that kid who beat me up? Where is that teacher who touched me? Who killed my friend? Or, more hopefully: What happened to the guy I shared a beer with at Cafe Trieste in the 1990s? Who gave me that back massage during the Green Day concert in Golden Gate Park? The love-reunion stories move Roxy to tears, but they haven’t budged Chris’s belief that externalizing your consciousness for any reason, even as a hedge against dementia, is a grievous mistake.
“If it stopped there, maybe,” she’s heard him say, “but it never stops there. The collective is like gravity: Almost no one can withstand it. In the end, they give it everything. And then the collective is that much more omniscient.”
Almost no one can withstand the collective; Roxy will be the exception. She has no interest in other people’s memories. She wants only to relive her best days—times she knows won’t be matched by anything to come.
Today there are four regular D&D players plus a new one, tattooed and gym-bulked everywhere but his face, which has the caved-in look of a meth head. Chris guides him through rolling the dice and filling in his character sheet. Roxy isn’t surprised when the new player chooses to become a female Elf; people often seem to pick D&D characters opposite to their everyday selves. Brawny men play Dwarves, delicate men play Warrior Barbarians, which has led Roxy to ponder, in a philosophical turn unusual for her, which one is really them?
“Depends which world you think is the real one,” Chris said, grinning when she asked him once.
Now he beckons her with an empty character sheet and says, “What do you say, Rox? Is today the day?” She shakes her head. She would play her opposite, too: a D&D version of her sixteen-year-old self, a girl with molten ardor roiling in her chest and stomach and groin, who was unafraid to hold the stare of any man, daring a result. What would that be in D&D terms, and how can she ask without embarrassing herself? Roxy lost her virginity at thirteen to her first boyfriend, Terrence Chen, who was a junior in high school, and then she dumped Terrence and went in search of men in their twenties and thirties who could rise to her occasion. She took pride in her mishaps. She’d been punched! Had her stomach pumped! Yet her face in the mirror looked dewy and untouched, its birdlike angles bewitching even to herself. She was gamine, her mother said. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on her body.