Pressing Buttons

For the past few minutes, my five-year-old has been slouched against the couch cushion with a Nintendo lighting his face red, and I’ve been watching across the dim gap between us. With this gift to him, I bought myself time to sit in my armchair and type this. He’s pleased with me. Or he was. Now he’s gone. He’s become the Mario in the cart in last place. He’s grown angry, in fact. Legs clenched, face fierce. I wonder if I should say something calming, but I type this sentence instead. Now he squeals—it’s long, piercing. I hate this! followed by a push of the Switch a short distance into his kneecaps.

I shout at him to give it a rest. He stops squealing, but it’s not because of me; he had already decided. Still, I add a few words about the imperative of practice, which I immediately contradict by claiming the game is not worth the frustration. I suggest turning it off, which is when I learn that the thought of not having the game is worse than sucking at it. I learn this from the volume and length of the way he shouts NO! at me.

He presses buttons. I figure, as I often do, that it could be worse. I could have bought him an Oculus. If we owned an Oculus, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. My son would be waiting for me to take the apparatus off my face. It’s possible my entire life has been pointing toward an Oculus, if I ignore the last fifteen years where I have avoided video games in favor of trying, with very little success, to write things other people might want to read. When I used to play open world games like Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy 7, or Grand Theft Auto 3, I would roam the setting rather than engaging in the challenges to move forward in the game. This is not so different from when I played sports as a kid, but I quit all organized teams by eighth grade. Instead, I played them in my room with a controller, recreating myself as a player with maxed-out attributes. It was enough to exist in these other worlds.

Around this same time, my mom finally got us dial-up internet. That’s when I discovered Yahoo! Chat Rooms. Sometimes someone in the chat liked what you said in the main thread, or picked you at random, and private messaged you: A/S/L? (Age/Sex/Location). Then: Wanna cyber? Cybering would include typing erotic phrases to each other and masturbating. It didn’t matter if the person lied about their age, sex, or location. I did. It didn’t seem less real when I was, in fact, about to bust.

Eventually, I had a girlfriend who I never met except on AOL Instant Messenger. By that time, we could send photos to each other on the app. She sent one in a bathing suit, and I couldn’t believe it (the right instinct). I’m sure she wasn’t real, that either someone I knew or some perverted old guy had gotten the photo from a friend or relative or Yahoo! search. I wasn’t totally clueless about this as a possibility back then either, but the power of my desire for love, intimacy, and sex was that great. Then, one day, she sent a message that someone from my school told her about me being with another girl—as if a real-life one would have me—and she was mad. I put up a long whiny away message about how someone talking shit ruined my life. Then it was done. Maybe it’s sad to think of an online relationship that died out before it crossed over into the physical world as a defining experience in my formative years.

I don’t need to simulate sex on the internet anymore, but I’m typing this into an email to myself while receiving emails from my online class, who to me are only names I see in a learning management system. Later tonight, I’m going to have an hour-long video conversation with someone I’ve never met and record it so I can edit it and post it on the internet for other people I’ve never met. An Oculus is reasonably $300, but at least with one around my head, I wouldn’t feel only halfway in this room. I’d feel fully out. I’d feel inside a game where there’s an outcome that could roll the credits. I’d keep these thoughts in my head instead of arranging and rearranging them in this document forever, or maybe I’d log off for once without checking the number of extra lives I earned in the video game of social media. Even when I think I’m not, I’m always trying to win. I like that I can’t. It’s enough to exist in this other world. Look at me: I live in this house with three breathing people, and I ignore them for people on the internet, where we represent ourselves with tiny avatars and brief communications in digital boxes, people I’ve never seen take up space in a room.

Seriously, look at me. That might be all this is about.

My son’s growling at Mario Kart again. His thumb is working hard. If he was playing an Oculus, I imagine his arms would be flailing, which could be dangerous in this room of furniture and scattered toys. I try to think about the unknowable ways my son will interact, and probably have sex with, other people in a highly developed virtual space one day, and I guess it’s safer. For now, he wants me to take the controller for him, and I’m happy to do it, but he’ll need to wait until the end of this paragraph because I have momentum, like I’m winning here in this document for once, by which I mean I’m tapping the buttons on the keyboard and they seem to be results. It’s like flailing, but different: you can’t see it from inside this room.

Michael Wheaton's writing has appeared previously in Essay Daily, DIAGRAM, Burrow Press Review, Bending Genres, HAD, Rejection Letters, and other online journals. He edits/publishes Autofocus and produces/hosts The Lives of Writers podcast. Find links to his previous publications and literary projects at mwheaton.net.