Mr. Peanut Read Free Page A

whispered. “This is the one.” He looked up. She pulled his face toward hers and kissed him, then walked out the door, chin up and shoulders back—Alice gaining altitude, he thought, as she dropped ballast, a confidence in her stride that gave him a shiver of fear.
    Is this it? David wondered. Is this the one?
    Maybe, he thought, but most likely no. On certain afternoons, she was low. It was December, she was three months in, nearly thirty pounds gone, and the whole project seemed endless to her—impossible. She questioned her resolve. She would never drop the weight. The past week and a half, she’d lost only three pounds. Once—all right, twice—she’d cheated. (Going to work, she’d caved and stopped in McDonald’s for two Egg McMuffin meals. Yesterday, when David surprised her in the kitchen, she whirled round with her face covered in powdered sugar, an uneaten donut in each hand.) She called David at the office, pulling him from the daily playtest of their new game Escher X—short for Escher Exit. It was a work of programming and conceptual brilliance. The environments were based on famous Escher prints—
Relativity, Belvedere, Ascending and Descending
, to name a few—and the challenge of the game was to guide your avatar (the white humanoid from
Encounter)
through each inescapable level, each round-and-round realm, until you found the secret means of escape, the button or tile that uncoiled the environments’ Mobius strip. Though perhaps its best effect (this was on especially wonderful display in the
Relativity
level) was its replication, while you played, of the experience of looking at one of the prints themselves, of ascending a set of stairs to suddenly find yourself going down, to enter a room where someone was sitting on the ceiling, the ceiling becoming the floor, the waterfall falling up. And there were battles, of course, with all sorts of Escher monsters: the human-headed bird from
Another World II
, the alligators from
Reptiles
, the dragon from
Dragon
, the predator fish from
Predestination
. These exchanges upped your skill level with each victory and conferred more weapons on your avatar until you were strong enough for the final confrontation with your double—the stooped black humanoid who ruled the entire realm. His name, appropriately, was Mobius.
    The game was beautiful. But it was also full of bugs, and they’d blown their projected release date. When David answered the phone, he was curt at first, but Alice sounded desperate.
    “David,” she said, “do you love me?”
    “Of course I love you.”
    “Even if I’m like this?”
    He closed his eyes and rested his head against the window. “Even if you’re like what?”
    “You’re sweet,” Alice said.
    David was silent.
    “Because I don’t think I can do it,” she said.
    “Don’t think you can do what?”
    “It.
Die
-it. What do you
think?”
    “Alice … ”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Why don’t you think you can do it?”
    “Because it takes so long.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Because it goes so slowly.”
    “Because you’re in the middle.”
    “Am I in the middle?” she said.
    “We’ve talked about the middle.”
    “Tell me again about the middle.”
    “The middle is long and hard.”
    “I’m stuck in the middle of trying to lose my middle.” She laughed, then began to weep.
    “I’m in the middle too,” he said.
    “Are you?”
    “Of my game.” Of my book, he thought. “But that’s the thing about themiddle. It’s like holding your breath longer than you think you can. It’s the point before you black out, right before you surface. The last stretch uphill—the highest part—right before going down. Don’t you see?”
    “No.”
    “You’re not stuck. You’re moving. But you can’t see it.
I
can see it.”
    “Oh, David, I want a burrito. I want a chimichanga with extra cheese.”
    “But you’re going to hold out.”
    “I am?”
    “You’re going to resist.”
    “I
am.”
    “You