Graywolf Lab

This might be hard to believe but over the years I’ve accumulated an assortment of difficult people, and my hobby lately has been casting them away. My friends text me but, surprise, I ignore them. I’m not good at less easy things, but I’m trying. Mothering is not an easy thing. Being a mom: loading up my battle royale game on my phone—it takes forever, the WiFi is horrible—and seeing my one-year-old daughter Marla edge toward the bottom of the green slide in the indoor playground, open like the mouth of a great wyrm. Someone might collide with her coming feet first down the slide. But I wait a few seconds for her head to lean into it. To really put her head into the maw. The update gets stuck and I close out of my game. I get up and pick her up. I take her over to the mouth of the red slide. The small slide, whose top can be seen. The friendlier wyrm. I sit on the turtle bench right next to her. I wonder if I can get in a quick round of Battlegrounds on my phone. But I resist. I keep the game closed. It’s so hard. I check my email instead.

Bringing her here has been reckless. She has no health insurance.

Anyway, I hope to get her on my insurance on Monday so I have to avoid ER visits, viruses, broken bones, anything requiring stitches until then. She is so fragile, and she has no idea how fragile she is. She is one to jump into the mouth of the wyrm, blonde bangs covering her eyes. I am clumsy making ponytails and the other mothers in this playground no doubt look at me with disdain. Who is the mother of this unkempt daughter?

As a toddler (well, almost), she lacks command of her own body. I suppose it’s natural. But it’s still unsettling. I love her so dearly. She waves and I wave back and clap my hands.

I don’t think the other moms trust me. It’s like they can sense who I used to be.

*

After twenty more minutes, Marla is bored so I bundle her up and take her to the car. Off we go. It’s sunny, cold. It’s October but the forecast promises snow. For once it keeps its promises and there is a torrent of flakes by the time I arrive at the gas station. I’m almost out of gas but I think I can make it around town for another day.

*

I am in a group of six or seven women who like to play a battle royale game on our phones called Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG. This usually involves shooting boys in the head. I don’t know the other women in real life. They are all younger than I am by a few decades. I had been playing solo but I needed to join a clan to get an extra loot crate. So I joined one that came up called Mean Girls. Because it seemed awfully fitting. We have taken to each other.

How you play PUBG: one hundred people jump out of a plane in teams of four onto a deserted island. I love the island, actually. I love running through the island in its silent desolation. I love how the bloodshed resets after every game. The cities, towers and farms on the abandoned island are unspoiled as the four of us plummet toward it. The cafes, the burnt-out vans. The buildings peppered with guns, machetes, flak jackets, grenades, first aid kits, helmets and ammo, the 5.56mms and the 12-gauge shells and the 9mms.

When you land, your team needs to kill everyone else to win. That’s pretty much it. I’m simplifying things.

Let me start over. When we land, we as a team gather as many supplies as we can. Sometimes we land in the same building as another team—or more, lots more teams. Then you have to work together to kill them all or take their things. When you first land, you might be using your fists. Or it’s better to run away. You gotta find your way through.

*

If this were the extent of the game, it might not have been so interesting, because of the time it would take to clear a large island of players known as campers hiding in attics or ditches. But, as there is in all of us, there is a ticking clock. A field of blue energy encircles the island. It slowly tightens a noose around the playing field, cutting through every building and landscape feature in its path. If you stay put within the blue you start to take damage and eventually you will die. So you are pulled towards the “safe” center of the island, which gets smaller and smaller as the game goes on. The end game, if you are lucky and skilled enough to get there, happens in a circle hardly larger than the combination gas station-Starbucks I’ve decided to park in front of. Your remaining enemies will surely be close, perhaps prone in the tall grass next to you. When they’re all dead, you and your team win.

Marla is napping in the back so I log on to the Starbucks Wi-Fi without making a purchase. I don’t have the money for a cold brew so I guess I’m stealing. Not that that’s ever stopped me before. But I’m trying to be good. Reminder: I have two laptops but no health insurance for my daughter. I’m able to pretend everything will be fine for a little while longer.

I go to the clan meeting room. I think they know I’m twice their age. But I’m not sure. My in-game avatar has a green Earth Day T-shirt, a schoolgirl skirt, aviator glasses, a gray beret, and a pair of boots that are called, in the game, “punk.”

*

In the parking lot there’s a red Dodge Ram with the trifecta of bumper stickers: Confederate flag, black-and-white American flag with the single blue stripe, broken skull. The full set. The truck towers over my little car. The windows are all tinted black.

Only Magpie96 is online.

“Hey are you ready to hunt some boys?” I say in chat. “Duo?”

“Yeah,” she types, and then she sends me an invite to team up.

I don’t know much about her. She has two boys. She’s in her mid-twenties, I think. She runs the clan. I’m pretty sure she knows the other five women in real life. I’m the only one who stumbled upon the clan and joined as a stranger. She has bright red hair. The thumbnail picture in the clan directory is tiny on my phone, smaller than my pinky nail.

Most of the other players are men. And boys. The recommended age for the game is fourteen. But I know boys are young as nine or ten play. The few who aren’t playing Fortnite, who, I suppose, want to be part of the more realistic Battlegrounds. I could hear everyone’s voice chat if I wanted, but I don’t. I turn it off for everyone except my team. It’s therapeutic.

“Where do you want to jump?” I ask.

“Uh, let’s do the school,” she says. I almost always defer to others in the clan. After a few seconds in a staging area, we are on the plane and about to jump.

“How was your day?” I say.

“Double shift,” she says. “So, yeah, I’m tired. You?”

“I’m with my daughter. She’s sleeping.”

“Cool,” she says.

It starts well. We land on the school roof and gang up on a straggler who got separated from his teammate and shoot him in the head with pistols. Pistols are the easiest weapons to find. We start down the staircase, picking up stuff as we go. I get a shotgun and my favorite rifle, the Mini14.

The school is crawling with boys, though. We take fire in the stairwell. Magpie downs one who is shooting up at us, but his teammate runs up the stairs with an Uzi and I take a lot of damage before I headshot him.

“I don’t have any healing,” I say.

“Okay,” Magpie says. Someone drops a frag grenade down the roof door. I don’t like these jumps near the center of the map. I much prefer to work my way from the periphery of the island, one by one picking off the straggling boys who had the same idea as me, and yes this usually meant dealing with the blue wall of death, but it’s worth it. The silence in eighty percent of the game is worth it. How I’d hear a sniper rifle or a burst of assault rifle in the town the next ridge over, but then it would die away. Magpie liked mucking it up, though, and I don’t know how much time I have in the parking lot before Marla wakes up from her nap.

We get out of that scrape somehow. We avoid most of the damage from the grenade and heal up at the bottom of the empty, half-shattered swimming pool in the gymnasium. In the backstory that has never existed, children swam laps in this pool. The firefight in the school dies down as its gear gets cleaned out, the circle starts to close in, and the remaining boys decide to cut their losses and move onto better positions.

We are about to trudge out ourselves, watching for snipers in the idyllic hills, when I hear a loud knock to my right. I startle and the phone jumps out of my hands onto the floor, tangling my ear buds. I look behind me and Marla is sleeping. I see a guy at the passenger side window. It has to be the guy with the truck. I consider driving away. He looks at me expectantly. I yank on my earbud cords and fish out the phone. It's not broken. I lower the window halfway. He’s wearing khakis and a polo shirt. Crew cut. Deep-set eyes.

“Yes?” I say. I’m scared and try not to look scared. I’m impatient but don’t want to look impatient. I don’t want him putting his arm in my car. Marla still sleeps, mercifully.

“Are you playing Fortnite?” he says. He is bright, inquisitive. His accent isn’t Southern at all, but rather sounds New Englander. “Apologies for bothering you, ma’am. I just don’t see too many women playing Fortnite, and I thought it was cool and I just had to say hi.”

He smiles. He’s thirty or so. He is wearing a wedding ring. I wonder if he is a father. He must do commercial real estate or general contracting or run a strip mall church in the outer rings. He must comment on right-wing YouTube videos about the “transgenderist menace.” He must own six guns. And I own none. I am a liar.

“No,” I manage to say. “It’s Battlegrounds. It’s . . . a little different.”

“Uh what are you doing,” Magpie says. Her voice crackles. “You’re walking into the side of a fence. Who the hell are you talking to?”

“Look I have to go,” I tell the man. I roll up the window. I want to get out of there but I don’t want to leave Magpie hanging.

He frowns, his easygoing nature gone. He cups his hands on the window and looks in. Our eyes meet. I’m sweating. I’m the fiercest coward I know. He leans forward and mouths the word bitch. I go back to the game, but my hands tremble.

“Sorry,” I say to Magpie, taking a deep breath. I right my walking. I hear a shotgun blast in my ear and I get prone on the ground.

Then someone waiting on the hill a hundred meters away shoots me in the back of the head with a sniper rifle and I’m dead.

“Fuck!” I say, punching the steering wheel. That’s when Marla starts to wake. I am a bad mother, obviously.

The man is gone and his truck is gone. A Buick SUV pulls into the spot next to me.

“Fuck,” Magpie says. “I’m flanked. Aaaaand now I’m dead. That went pear-shaped very quickly. Who the hell were you talking to?”

Cold anger wells up inside of me. Gurgling black fuel. I turn off my phone. I take a few deep breaths. I feel like I’m in trouble. And I don’t know why. Is it me or another forty-one-year-old woman who likes to smoke weed and play Player Unknown Battlegrounds when her kid is at daycare, or not at daycare? Is it you or me who craves owning a Saiga-12 semi-auto shotgun and taking it to the range and blowing up Bud Light cans, but still signs up for Moms Take Action Against Gun Violence updates on Facebook? Is it me or someone else who finds a babysitter for—checks calendar—“movie night with friends 7 pm to 10 pm” but instead goes to the lesbian bar alone and ends the night dancing drunk into the arms of a twenty-four-year-old woman with a baseball cap and a ponytail who smells like lilacs, leaning into her shoulder and kissing her collarbone right when the lights go on? Who is the woman who has to pay her babysitter double for being almost five hours late? This woman who had never eaten pussy until she was thirty-nine? Who is this hypocrite, this liar, this mother? This mother straining against the dead bounds of what she used to have. Is this you?

I always imagine telling the Mean Girls that I used to live as a man, telling them everything I hated about it. Not as if I’m disclosing a terrible secret but casually, in passing, as if talking about an old friend. And also that I love to fuck women. That would come out too. They would understand, having battled dozens of times by my side. And if they didn’t right away, they’d assume positive intent. We would shoot the shit after winning a match, and I’d talk about how my daughter was born on the coldest night in ten years, which was really saying something for Minnesota, and how she had been transferred to the NICU in another hospital in the middle of the night because of respiratory problems. How I wandered the silent hospital campus, looking for a way into the NICU. I wasn’t the one who gave birth, I’d tell them. But that’s all right. I love Marla. Even when it’s not my weekend. That’s all right.

For a few seconds, the parking lot sways for me as Marla starts to wake, her eyes scrunching.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I say. “I’m sorry I’m sorry.” I wrap my earbuds around my phone and set it on the passenger seat as she stretches her arms up. I turn on the car and drive ten seconds to the gas station side. I park in front of a gas pump and wait five minutes. I give Marla water from her sippy cup. The gas station is large enough so I’m not impeding the orderly flow of fuel. Marla is so good. She’s not crying. I wait with my hands on the steering wheel. I smile and coo at Marla. Then I get out of the car and put my card in, though not all the way. I wait for a black luxury SUV to pull up on the other side of the pump. The man who gets out is in a suit. It’s Sunday. Everyone here is going to church.

“Excuse me, sir,” I say, straightening my back. “I’m so sorry to bother you so I’ll be brief, but my card is getting declined, and—and I don’t know why—and I’m almost out of gas, and I don’t have any cash on me! It’s so embarrassing. I’m so embarrassed. And my daughter is in the back.” I make a slight gesture with my head toward Marla snug in her car seat. I put my fingers through the hair of my wig and make great pains to smile. “I just need . . . five or ten dollars to fill up my tank so I can get home and get my other card. Could you?” I trail off. He’s fifty or so. Silver peppering the black. I imagine him looking at me with disdain or pity or anger if he ever figured out who I was and where I have come from.

“It’s okay,” he says. He reaches into his wallet and gives me a ten.

“Oh thank you,” I say, taking it. “Thank you.” I think about adding in a God bless you but I don’t want to oversell it.

“It’s nothing,” he says, giving a stiff grin, and I know that my audacity is embarrassing, that I’m skating along the edge of how two white people, both seemingly not destitute, should talk to each other in public. He fills up his tank as I unbuckle Marla to go into the gas station to pay.

Marla starts to cry. It’s snowing. She doesn’t want to be outside. She might be a little underdressed in her windbreaker.

“It’s okay, baby,” I say. I am a good mother because I don’t leave my child in the back seat when she’s not in my sightline. I give a slight glance back and the man who gave me money isn’t paying attention to me anymore. Or rather is paying attention to my absence, hoping it will continue.

From inside the gas station I ignore the cashier and go right into the Starbucks, which is connected. I walk past the shared bathroom and I imagine everyone watching. Lying mother, swindling mother. I clench the ten-dollar bill in my hand as I walk up to the counter, smiling, to buy a grande cold brew. I bounce Marla in my arms, her head on my shoulder. I tell her it’s okay. She’s probably sad about the snow, likely hungry, looking through the window at the car, a place that’s warm, safe, and out of reach. I glance back too. Look, the circle’s closing in again.