He lifted the slippery curved glass and mopped the puddle it left on the table. The ice floated in his mouth and he finally bit down on the two Xanax tablets he had been sucking on for the past few minutes. "You know, I really am sorry." His words were leathery, but perfectly and inexcusably vulnerable, much like an unguarded wallet.
She kept staring at her fingers, "I know. But still." It felt like her sad phone voice, airy and breathless, the one she used to tell her parents that she slid the car into a guard rail or that she didn't get into Wharton. But the words fell into his ears and muted the crushing, thumping sound of his heart pumping blood into his brain and a few of the weights of worry had fallen off. For the moment, anyway.
The wind bit at the trees and whipped the bushes against the window, creating a fiery popping sound. Cars honked, urging other drivers to be more cavalier about turning left.
He pushed his head left now, trying to find something upon which to fix his gaze, again - thinking she would assume he was staring at her chest. "It's just that everyone chooses the long line, the 'tetris column.' Everyone needs a favorite Tetris piece, but that piece is for amateurs and tourists, Lovely Girl. You were different, something special." His mouth became dry from the anxiety associated with saying this, but also from the anti-anxiety tablets, the dust of which he pushed into his tender and swollen gumline, sucking rapidly to accelerate the onset of the effect of these little pills.
She let her head hang still and her sentences swell in the muddy thick air between them. "The tetris is important. It offers the higest score and we punctuate our lives on such results as high scores. You need that line to get a tetris."
He crossed his arms and stepped carefully, a Tetris master and theorist ("Tetrician," he liked to be called), he had written his dissertation on the theoretical and practical upper bounds of scoring in Tetris - a work which gathered much acclaim in the academy. She didn't know this and certainly wouldn't understand the delicate implications of what she had just said. He tore at a cheap napkin, "The practice of tetris-gathering is covetous and foolish. Even if you don't find it unethical, it is still disgusting and sophomoric. Only on these slow, lower levels of the game can you even do it with a measure of success. And falling into this pattern will cause you nothing but grief later on. In every reputable incarnation of the Game you will do better to challenge yourself with the quick analysis needed to get 2 or 3 lines at at a time on the fast levels, rather than the parochialism of tetris-gathering on the slow levels. The game doesn't want planners, Lovely Girl. It wants thinkers - that's why when you pause the Game, it hides the current situation." He breathed, swallowed and slid off one of his shoes.
The tetris - the big score. Indeed, choosing the long, slender one as your favorite piece is tired, boring and reveals your short sightedness - exactly like, when at the video store, opting for either an explosion-heavy action movie or a pornographic feature. It's because actually getting a tetris is elusive and mildly heroic. Rising out of your social stratosphere to jam the prom queen. In her prom dress. On prom night. In her parents' cabin on the lake. It's a drinking story with a high five and it's always, always in the past tense.
"Your music is wrong." His shirt felt thin and buttery. "It needs to be wordless and slow, so it fills out gradually like a hot air balloon. Techno, electronica, trip hop - it's wrong. The Game is a prayer - it's a quest for answers and atonement. Would you ever find beat-heavy electronica in your church or synagogue? Techno is too cold and too secular. I prefer taking classical compositions and slowing them down by a factor of 5 or 6. It heightens the experience of the game. 'Messiah' is an obvious choice."
The Lovely Girl slid herself along the bluish-green vinyl and wrapped her coat around her, walking silently into the windy out of doors. The Nervous Boy picked up the salt shaker and found she had unscrewed it, creating an awful mess on the sticky wooden tabletop.
