The Impossible Fortress Read online

  “But what about the dog?” I repeated.

  Alf smiled. “You’re going to love this.”

  “Right, pay attention,” Clark said. “He-Man and Papa Smurf start climbing the fire ladder while Alf runs down the alley.” He galloped the action figure through the alley to the front of General Tso’s. “There’s a separate entrance here for the second-floor apartment. With its own doorbell.” They had incorporated a miniature doorbell into the model, and Clark pushed it with his claw. A single Christmas-tree light illuminated the second-floor window of General Tso’s, and a tiny sound chip (gutted from a stuffed animal) began to bark.

  “We tried it for real last night,” Alf explained. “It took the General three minutes to get downstairs, and the dog came with him, yapping his head off. While he’s distracted, we go up the ladder and across the roof.”

  “A ding-dong-ditch?” I asked. “That’s the plan?”

  Clark shrugged. “Sometimes the best solutions are the most obvious ones.”

  “What about the alley?” I asked. “We still have to get across the alley.”

  Clark balanced a wooden Popsicle stick between the two rooftops. “We left a two-by-four on the General’s roof. We’ll use it like a bridge. Cross over to the bike shop and we’re home free.”

  I observed all of this with a slow-building dread. Over the past two weeks, Alf and Clark had approached the plan with all of the energy and ingenuity that I’d brought to The Impossible Fortress. They’d anticipated everything—but there was one crucial missing piece.

  “The alarm code,” Alf said. “How soon can you have it?”

  “It’s tough,” I started.

  “Tough?” Alf said.

  “What’s tough?” Clark asked. “Tough how?”

  “I’m trying. I go there every day. Just like we planned. But her dad kicks me out at seven o’clock every night. I never see him work the alarm.”

  Alf frowned. “You were supposed to screw it out of her, remember? Are you on third base yet?”

  “No.”

  “Second base? Any base?”

  “She’s not like that.”

  “Tyler said she was hornier than a baboon. He said he had to beat her off with a stick.”

  “Tyler’s full of shit. All his stories are bogus. Do you really believe he had sex with Señora Fernandez?”

  Alf looked crestfallen, like I’d just revealed there was no Santa Claus. “Of course I believe it. He said she came in Spanish.”

  “He’s lying. He’s lied about everything. Mary Zelinsky hates Tyler. She wouldn’t touch that guy in a million years.”

  “How do you know?” Clark asked.

  “She told me. Tyler tried to steal from their store. They could have had him arrested.”

  Alf had stopped listening. He was studying the model of downtown Wetbridge, tweaking the placement of Crenshaw’s Pharmacy just so. All the color had left his face, and he was shaking his head. “Without the alarm code, we’re screwed. There are forty-six guys ready to kick my ass. You have to let me take over.”

  “Take over what?”

  “Getting the code,” Alf said. “You can’t close the deal, so let me have a chance.”

  The idea was so ridiculous, I laughed. “You’re not her type.”

  I could tell I’d offended him, that I’d somehow hurt his feelings. “Oh, but you’re her type? She likes scrawny guys with tiny dicks?”

  “I didn’t say I’m her type. I said you’re not her type.”

  Over in the corner of the basement, the washing machine went to spin cycle and the clothes shifted off balance, making a faint thump-thump-thump-thump—

  “Maybe I’m not her type,” Alf said, “but I don’t want to marry the girl. I just need a quick in-and-out. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am! Oh, and by the way, what’s the code to the alarm system?”

  My brain conjured a quick image of Alf groping Mary, forcing himself on her, pushing her down to the floor of the showroom.

  “You’re not doing that,” I said.

  “What are her turn-ons and turn-offs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “See, that’s the problem. You’ve been there two weeks and you haven’t learned anything!”

  Clark made some goofy comment to defuse the tension, but we both ignored him. The drum of the washing machine was louder and louder—BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—but none of us moved to stop it.

  Alf walked over to a wooden shelf where his mother stored extra food that wouldn’t fit in their kitchen pantry. It was loaded with an astonishing amount of junk food.

  “What’s she like better?” Alf asked. “Twinkies or Oreos?”

  I didn’t answer him. I knew he was trying to goad me into proving a point.

  “Never mind,” Alf said, reaching for a bottle of Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup. “This is the good stuff. I’m going to pour this on some very private places, you know what I’m saying?”

  Clark made another silly comment, but his voice was just more noise in the background. I blinked several times, trying to clear the picture in my mind.

  “The funny thing is, she’s actually got nice boobs,” Alf continued. “I won’t mind that part of it. Unhooking her bra and watching those giant melons tumble out. What do you think her nipples are like?”

  I pushed him, hard. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just needed him to stop talking. But the force sent Alf stumbling backward and he fell onto the model of Wetbridge, collapsing the Lego train station. Miniature cars careened off the sides of the platform. The plywood base slipped off the sawhorses, and all of Wetbridge came crashing down. And not even this could get Alf to shut up.

  “What the fuck, Billy? What’s wrong with you?” He rolled off the model, crushing Crenshaw’s Pharmacy and stepping on the bike shop, a giant Godzilla stomping Tokyo. “This was your idea! You volunteered to do this!”

  I was ready to hit him again. As soon as he stood up, I was going to knock him back down. “Stay away from her,” I said. “If you go anywhere near Mary, I’ll tell Zelinsky what you’re planning, and he’ll call the cops.”

  Alf’s grandmother came hurrying down the basement stairs, waving a lit cigarette and balancing Alf’s baby brother on her hip. “What the hell is going on?”

  I ran past her, ran out into the yard and scaled the chain-link fence that led into the Catholic cemetery. It was dark, but I still knew every inch of the place by heart—all the tombstones with the crazy names, and all of the old rabbit holes, and the dried-up creek that twisted and turned through the graves.

  I ran to the old oak on the far side of the cemetery, a tree that functioned as our headquarters until we were too cool to climb trees. It was always our secret rendezvous point after any disaster—a place where we could discuss the fallout without being overheard by our parents.

  There were fresh footprints and Bazooka gum wrappers scattered around the trunk; some other younger kids had obviously made it their own. The wooden slats we’d nailed into the trunk were still there; I climbed to the highest perch, a curved limb that was wide enough to cradle you like a hammock. From this height, I could see six lanes of interstate traffic thundering past on the nearby Garden State Parkway. Me and Alf and Clark used to pass entire summers up in this tree, playing James Bond or Indiana Jones or whatever movie happened to be on TV the night before.

  This wasn’t my fault. That’s what I told myself. A long time ago, I’d wanted to see the Vanna White photos—every guy in America wanted to see the Vanna White photos—but I never agreed to all this other stuff: the color Xeroxes, the early-bird orders, the profits. It wasn’t my fault Alf lost the stupid money, or that forty-six guys were going to kick his ass. I would not lie to Mary. Not after all the help she’d given me. Not after our sunset talk on the roof, and not after the way she’d touched my hand in the blackout. I knew that something extraordinary was happening and I didn’t have a name for it yet, but I wasn’t going to let Alf or Clark screw it up.

  1800 REM *** BONUS L
IFE ***

  1810 LIVES=LIVES+1

  1820 FOR I=0 TO 24:POKE L1+I,0

  1830 NEXT I:SP=10

  1840 POKE L1,150:POKE L1+1,SP

  1850 POKE L1+5,0:POKE L1+6,240

  1860 POKE L1+24,15:POKE L1+4,17

  1870 FOR SP=10 TO 250 STEP 4

  1880 POKE L1+1,SP:NEXT:FOR T=0 TO 100

  1890 NEXT T: RETURN

  LATER THAT EVENING, WHEN I finally returned home, I heard familiar voices coming from the kitchen.

  “My first choice is MIT, obviously, but that’s going to depend on scholarships. Since I’m a girl, if I keep my four-point-oh, I’ve got a decent shot.”

  “You have a four-point-oh? Straight As?”

  “My backups are Rutgers or Stevens Institute, because they’re so close to home. I could still see my dad on weekends.”

  Mom and Mary were sitting in the breakfast nook, drinking tea and chatting like old friends. I didn’t bother to mention this earlier, but our house was pretty old. Mom kept it clean, but the place needed many hundreds of dollars of repairs. The linoleum tiles on the kitchen floor had warped along the seams, and the corners were curling back. The faucet in the sink was broken, so we used a garden hose snaked through a window over the counter. None of this stuff ever bothered me before—I’d lived with it so long, I stopped noticing it. But with the arrival of Mary, I saw it all with fresh eyes.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “For the game,” Mary said. “We don’t have much time.”

  She didn’t seem fazed by our kitchen. She sat drinking tea out of a chipped mug at our wobbly Formica table like it was all perfectly normal.

  “Mary found our address in the White Pages,” Mom explained, like this was a feat worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself. I could tell she was over the moon; it was her first time welcoming a straight-A student into our home. “She says your game is so good, you could use it for college applications. Like a special essay.” She hadn’t looked so excited since Prince Charles married Lady Diana, and I hated to burst her bubble.

  “The game doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s a failure.” Mary’s copy of How to Learn Machine Language in 30 Days was open on the table, and I felt like flinging it across the kitchen. “We did everything that stupid book says. We followed the instructions to the letter. But it doesn’t work.”

  “Exactly,” Mary said. She was leaning across the table, her face glowing, bursting with a secret she couldn’t conceal any longer. “I kept thinking the same thing: We did everything the book said. We followed the instructions to the letter. And that’s when it hit me, Will: What if the book was wrong?”

  At first I didn’t realize what she meant. I was raised to believe that everything in a book had to be true. Books were written by Writers and edited by Editors. They were created by smart, educated professionals who triple-checked everything before the text was printed. This was 1987 and I was fourteen years old, and there was no such thing as a wrong book.

  Mary turned the pages to a map of the 64’s memory. “We’ve been putting the ML at 4915,” she said, “but that number has to be a misprint. Look at the map. There’s a missing digit, a missing two. We want 49152.”

  This was so obvious, I couldn’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner. All the type-in programs in my hobby magazines were loaded into 49152. It was the largest swath of free ML storage in the 64’s RAM. Of course it was 49152!

  “You’re totally right,” I said.

  “I know,” Mary said.

  “That has to be it.”

  “I know!”

  “Back up a minute,” Mom said. “What’s 41592?”

  There was no time to explain. I wanted to try it immediately, but my copy of the game was back at the showroom.

  “I wish I had the disk,” I said.

  Like a genie, Mary reached inside her purse and produced a floppy disk with the Planet Will logo on it. “Where’s your 64?”

  I ran back to my bedroom to power up my computer. I hadn’t made my bed in a decade. The floor was a minefield of dirty underwear, dirty dishes, and splayed-open hobby magazines, but there was no time to tidy up or to be embarrassed. I kicked a path from the door to the computer desk, and Mary trailed behind me in a sort of awe. The walls and ceiling were covered with posters of swimsuit models—Elle Macpherson and Paulina Porizkova, Kathy Ireland and Carol Alt. They were crawling and prancing and preening all over my walls in various states of undress, a panoramic fantasy surrounding my bed.

  Mom followed along, too. “We don’t get a lot of guests,” she explained to Mary. “Most days, I just keep his door closed and try to ignore it.”

  I loaded the game into memory and tweaked the code, changing the 4915 to a 49152. When I typed RUN, the screen went black and nothing happened. I braced myself for the inevitable error message.

  But then a mountain sprang up from the bottom of the screen, rising above the land with an earthshaking, lava-spitting fury. Seven ogres were scrambling atop its peak—seven different ogres, all moving independently, seemingly with minds of their own. The princess flailed in her cage, suspended by chains over the top of the mountain.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  My mother smacked my shoulder.

  “Move the hero,” Mary said. “See if the ogres chase him.”

  The hero was crouched at the bottom of the screen, ready to storm the fortress. I reached for the joystick, and he sprinted forward, racing up the side of the mountain, suddenly evading ogres that swarmed from all directions. It was all a hundred times, maybe a thousand times faster than before. I pressed the fire button, and the hero swung his sword, neutralizing an ogre with a satisfying swish. The game looked and played almost exactly as I’d first imagined it.

  “Does it work?” Mom asked.

  I turned and hugged her, and she gasped with surprise. It had been many months since I last hugged my mother. But I had to do something. I worried that if I kept looking at the screen, I might start to cry.

  1900 REM *** VICTORY SCREEN ***

  1910 PRINT "{CLR}{12 CSR DWN}"

  1920 PRINT "YOU ESCAPED THE FORTRESS!"

  1930 IF LIVES>3 THEN SCORE=SCORE+500

  1940 IF LIVES=3 THEN SCORE=SCORE+300

  1950 IF LIVES=2 THEN SCORE=SCORE+200

  1960 IF LIVES=1 THEN SCORE=SCORE+100

  1970 PRINT "YOUR SCORE IS";SCORE

  1980 PRINT "YOUR RANK IS";RANK$

  1990 RETURN

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS, Mary and I worked nonstop. Having fixed the main loop of the game, we started cramming in all of the little design details that made gameplay enjoyable. We created a victory screen for players who rescued the princess before the timer ran out; the hero and the princess hopped up and down, dancing to the chorus of Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” There was even a bonus round where players could boost their scores.

  All of this was tremendously difficult, but it felt like play. The finish line was in sight; now that we were close, nothing could dampen our spirits. We talked, we laughed, and we no longer cared when a customer interrupted our progress, asking where we kept the binder clips. I even sold my first typewriter, to a desperate Rutgers student scrambling to finish a term paper.

  In the mornings I biked to school alone. At lunch I worked in the school library, because I knew Alf and Clark wanted nothing to do with me. I’d only seen them once since the fight in Alf’s basement. We’d passed each other in the hallway outside the music room, and the guys didn’t even look at me. I might as well have been invisible. And that was fine with me.

  The night before the contest deadline, Zelinsky kept the store open until ten so Mary and I could work late. He kept busy stocking shelves and polishing the vintage cigarette lighters, but eventually he ran out of things to do. Finally he carried a Wall Street Journal to the back of the store, sat down at one of the showroom desks, and smoked a pipe while he read. The mixtape kept cycling its endless loop—Hall and Oates and Howard Jones and Joe Cocker—and sometime
s I’d hear Zelinsky from behind the newspaper, mouthing along to the lyrics. It seemed to happen involuntarily—and as soon as he realized it, he’d silence himself. But a few minutes later, he’d start singing again.

  Sometime around nine o’clock, Mary got up to use the restroom (she was constantly going to the restroom; she had the weakest bladder of anyone I’d ever met), and Zelinsky spoke to me from behind his newspaper.

  “Mary has a trip coming up. One of these summer study programs. She’ll be in DC for most of July.”

  “Right,” I said. “She’ll be back August first.”

  I already knew this because Rutgers was announcing the contest winners on August 5, and Mary insisted that we both attend the ceremony to collect our prize.

  The newspaper rustled as Zelinsky turned its pages. He continued reading as he spoke to me. “I could use some help while she’s gone. Mostly with the computers. In case people have questions. Plus some stocking shelves and cleaning up. I’m thinking four bucks an hour.”

  I realized he was offering me a job. My classmates would be lucky to find work at Burger King or Roy Rogers, and Zelinsky was willing to pay me to work with computers. A real job with air-conditioning, and well above minimum wage.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  It was that stupid Cosmex internship. There was no getting out of it, not if I wanted to advance to tenth grade. But I couldn’t explain this to Zelinsky. He and Mary had no idea I was one of the dumbest kids in my class, that I was failing Rocks and Streams, and I sure wasn’t going to tell them.

  “I just can’t.”

  Zelinsky didn’t set down the newspaper, so I couldn’t read his expression. But I knew I’d offended him. “Suit yourself.”

  “I wish I could,” I added, a little too late. “But I have this other thing.”

  He cleared his throat and turned another page. “Finish your game, Will. I want to go home soon.”