Roxy had located Terrence Chen again—the Internet version of Terrence—when she first moved to Northern California in her early thirties, in the brand-new millennium. Everyone was finding everyone on the Internet then. Terrence, it turned out, had also moved to the Bay Area and was a veterinarian in Marin County. He looked buff and handsome on his website, smiling over a foam of golden retriever fur, and he appeared also to have several children and a wife whose hair was the same color as the golden retriever’s. Roxy toyed with the idea of bringing her new rescue kitten to see Terrence the veterinarian, despite the inconvenience of schlepping across the bay to his practice. But no, she decided. Not yet. She needed to swan through the door to Terrence’s clinic a clear winner. At that point she was still pretty; Lana and Melora had paid to restore her smile after the loss of several teeth, and to straighten out her nose from a bad break. She was slim and stylish in her thirties, could still dance. But she was also grappling with a heroin habit and had a dozen years behind her that Terrence would likely regard as lost. She needed to at least match and, better yet, exceed Terrence’s high life score before casting her somewhat-less-pretty-but-undeniably-pretty self in his path. Fame would do it. Roxy had always believed she would be famous, and others had, too. And when she first moved to San Francisco and tracked down Terrence—almost twenty-five years ago now—fame was not out of the question.
Dungeons & Dragons unfolds glacially. Roxy marvels at the deep absorption of the players, who never seem impatient. It’s as if the rest of life has slowed to match the pace of the game. The new female Elf employs sleight of hand and some magical objects to rescue the other players from a band of brigands in an ancient wood. There are no pictures of this wood; it is represented by a hand-drawn map on an old-fashioned sheet of graph paper like the kind Roxy remembers from geometry class. Other hand-drawn sheets represent dungeons, taverns, towns, catacombs, and even outer space: a vast web of interconnected worlds that can be stored, between games, inside a manila envelope. Sometimes a player will depart one map through a “portal” and emerge onto a different sheet of graph paper, a transition Roxy finds electrifying. From one world to another, like that! Whenever a player emerges onto a new sheet, Chris and Molly switch roles as leader. The game is infinite.
Chris and Molly are not in recovery. Nor are they a couple; Chris is with Samantha, and Molly has a girlfriend, Iris. Until last year, Chris led the group with Colin Bingham, his best friend from childhood, who died from an overdose eight months ago. Chris has yet to regain his old lightheartedness since Colin’s passing. It shook Roxy, too; Colin was in his twenties, young enough to have returned to mainstream life with hardly a gap to account for. Colin’s skin was clear, he still had his teeth. He and Chris grew up together in Crandale, New York, where they played D&D as boys. Molly, too, is a friend from that time. After Colin died, Molly Cooke stepped in to take his place, but Molly is a meek and tentative pleaser, and Roxy is struggling not to hate her.
No player wants the session to end, they never do, and maybe the game’s slowness is a form of delay. But at nine, they must cede the meeting room to a weekly gathering of Bright Day clients who are pregnant. Several big-bellied young women wait in the hall as the players file out, raucously crowing over their scrape with the brigands as if it were a real event.
Chris and Molly bring their books and maps to their office, on an upper floor of the same building as Bright Day. Chris’s company, Mondrian, hosts gaming sessions at recovery centers all over the Bay Area. The walls of Mondrian’s small office are lined with posters of fire-breathing dragons and cloaked assassins, and there are shelves full of books about magical beasts and an iron statue of an orc that Chris found inside an abandoned piece of luggage. But Roxy has gradually come to suspect that gaming is a cover for some deeper business at Mondrian. Mages and Barbarians have their special skills, and so do Former Junkies—one of which is Sense Subterfuge. Roxy knows. Her neighborhood is full of double meanings: The newsstand around the corner from Bright Day sells Oxy pills, the flower seller is a lookout, and at Betty’s, a nearby lunch counter, you can score heroin from the busboys by prearrangement. Because Roxy is good at Feign Oblivion, another Former Junkie skill, people tend not to guard their words around her. While employing Apparent Inattention and Vacant Stare, she has overheard Chris on his phone discussing contracts, impersonation, and mimesis. She has heard him say, “The demand is overwhelming” and “She has an ear for dialogue.” Where Roxy’s skills fail her, though, is in knowing what any of it means. Is that the dyslexia? The nature of Chris and Molly’s real work is as unintelligible to Roxy as the local drug hidey-holes are to the woman who parks her Mercedes in the O’Farrell Street garage and clickety-clacks toward the Opera House in a floaty turquoise dress. Beyond a certainty that Mondrian’s deeper business is legal （no weapons or police avoidance） and unprofitable （Chris’s apartment is tiny）， Roxy is ignorant. Whatever it is, he is doing it for love.