Charlie and the Whale
Renée had just hung up on me when Charlie walked in. A secret shopper had not particularly loved the state of one of our VR pods. I told her “No, yeah, I’ll get right on it,” but she was already gone so I took Charlie’s tap and sent him to a pod I’d been more diligent with.
Charlie’s thing was Voice of the Serengeti. Specifically, the baby Blue Wildebeest, aka VotS at its most forgiving. He always requested VotS, and he always played as the baby Wildebeest.
Did he want the level-skip gem to go straight to adulthood for just 99 cents? He did not. What about tickets to the Vegas of the Veldt expansion for a one-time-only fee of just $9.99, or the energy drink that would allow him to run faster, also just 99 cents for the first one?
Yeah no, Charlie just liked to run through the tall grass.
You might imagine me feeling a little resentment whenever Charlie walked in, but he didn’t especially bother me. It’s certainly true that my Key Performance Indicators never much budged from his visits, but he was harmless, and we weren’t exactly packed full most days.
And, anyway, at least the pod would be clean.
The reason I’d neglected one of the pods, by the way, is that I have a kid. I knew leaving cleanup for later would be a problem, but the school had called to tell me the Little Man—tiny household tyrant and sun around which my world revolves—had pink eye and would need to be picked up, please, and soon, which meant that yours truly would need to close up the shop and that would mean kicking Jimmy Garcia out of Pod 6 and Jimmy being 18 years old meant the pod was going to need some extra attention. I could have called my wife about the kiddo, but she’s a nurse over at Freedom and between treating gunshot wounds and enabling the expression of adolescent desire it was pretty obvious which of us was the go-to for pick up duty. The upshot of which was that after showing Jimmy the door, picking up the Little Man, delivering a gentle lecture regarding the bathroom and washing one’s hands after going to it, making and eating dinner, doing the dishes, putting him to sleep, learning that Katie needed to pull a double and going to bed…I just straight up forgot that I still needed to deal with Pod 6. I didn’t even remember to look at it until later the next day, and by then the secret shopper must have already come and gone.
But, anyway, after Charlie was situated, a whale came in. He had the look. The I’m-not-here-to-maximize-my-value look. Loud, expensive gym logo on his shorts, called me bro. He tapped his card for all expenses and never asked about prices.
Renée had recently suggested that my KPIs would benefit from taking greater advantage of the opportunities that came my way, so I set the in-store playlist to Enticement To Spend and said, yes, I could of course help him choose one of our many exciting experiences.
The whale pointed at Voice of the Serengeti right away and said he used to play this all the time, bro. Bro, I had to hook him up.
I put him in Pod 5 and hooked up VotS.
VotS, for the record, is a multiplayer experience. Charlie may have played it alone all this time, but that’s because it’s less popular than in its heyday. It had always been possible for another customer to hop in and either engage with or ignore Charlie as they saw fit. It’s just that these days most people came in looking for Breadpuncher or Sitting Peacefully For 5 Minutes Without Panicking About Everything Simulator. So Charlie harbored a reasonable, but sadly mistaken, expectation of privacy in VotS.
The pod monitors tucked discreetly beneath my counter showed him standing there in the sun, sipping river water while Mama Wildebeest sang to him lovingly about what a good boy he was, so I finally took a spray bottle and sponge over to Pod 6. That’s when Charlie must have heard the crescendo of rapidly approaching rocket jets charging at him from across the savanna. Watching the recording later, I saw little baby wildebeest Charlie look up just in time to see a cheetah in a glittery purple top hat, sunglasses and a Rise and Grind t-shirt fly over with a jetpack and fire concentrated plasma rays at Mama Wildebeest, reducing her to so much red goo and bone.
The plasma rifle was on sale that week for just $3.99 a charge.
Charlie then watched in horror as the cheetah landed on his mother’s remains and gyrated suggestively. VotS doesn’t render genitals on its characters—no matter how much you pay (and people have asked)—but still, the intention was clear.
The cheetah then casually murdered Charlie with the plasma rifle, paid for another charge, pounded an energy drink and flew off.
#
Everyone in town knew that Charlie’s not a confrontational person. He grew up idolizing a handsome, adventurous and charming older brother. Their father had been gone for so long that Charlie’s brother was his only role model. He knew and appreciated the outsized image he bore in Charlie’s mind, too, and tried to be the source of unconditional love that otherwise neither would have grown up with. He always made Charlie feel welcome whenever his tiny, tentative face would peak around a doorway. By the time they were full-fledged adolescents, Charlie’s tendency to chase after his brother had earned him the nickname of “puppy,” one that, to our shame, we’d coined out of typical teenage cruelty. But his brother called him Pup. As in, “Don’t worry about it, Pup, I’m glad you’re here.”
When Birdman Gerry held up the gas station, it was just dumb luck that Charlie and his brother happened to be there. Gerry was a known quantity around town. He’d gotten the Birdman name after a habit he had of sitting on the back of the bus stop bench with his feet on the seat, twitching and talking to himself so that someone eventually said “That boy’s perched like a bird,” and that was that as far as names went. So Charlie and his brother knew that Gerry had issues. What they hadn’t known until that day in the gas station was that Gerry also had a gun.
What Gerry wanted was never clear. He didn’t ask for money, not that anyone could tell. His continuous monologue was almost unintelligible, and waving a gun around didn’t help. But Charlie’s brother made the effort to talk him down anyway. He was a good kid. The last thing he said, with his hands in the air, before Gerry the Birdman shot him was, “Stay behind me, Pup.”
His name was Teddy. Theodore. He was 16 years old.
Afterward, Charlie became a very, very quiet kid, then a quiet man and, eventually, a quiet man who stayed at home taking care of a mother suffering from dementia. He once said that she sometimes called him Teddy.
Charlie left the pod with a look of outrage on his face, but outrage tempered by a lifetime spent making himself small. His shoulders were slumped, his eyes fixed on the floor. He came over to me while I was washing my hands over and over again to tell me that someone else had been in his VotS session.
“Certainly,” I told him, “another customer had requested the experience.”
He told me he really preferred playing single-player.
I said, “I know, and I understand, but my hands are unfortunately tied. These days,” I added, “the pressure to sell premium content is…” There was always a low level hum of guilt in the back of my brain when I dealt with Charlie. In some ways, I couldn’t see a man who had grown beyond his childhood, I just saw the boy in pain, and regretted the name-calling, the way we shut him out, the obvious whispering as he passed. Back then I hadn’t thought of him as a lost little boy who needed a friend, I had just thought of him as not-Teddy. Time would eventually give me ample distance from it, of course. I knew the rationalizations by heart. I had been a child myself, all I had done was make fun a little, I was a typical kid, etc…But there in the store I never felt it. Sometimes all you think is that a little boy shouldn’t have known that much pain, and how dare you make it worse. More than anything I wanted to lean into the years, compress them like a spring, find that little boy in front of me, offer him my hand and let go of the spring—to let it push us back and away from all that misery. I wanted the impossible.
But I needed to keep my job.
“I don’t really have a choice, Charlie,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I also put on the Chill Beats To Deescalate To playlist.
Charlie continued to make soft noises of protest at me, and I was apologizing to him some more when the whale practically leaped from his pod looking so satisfied that I made a mental note to take some spray cleaner over there later. Then it became apparent that Charlie and the whale knew each other.
The whale called Charlie “Chuck.” Charlie did not appear to relish this. The whale didn’t know Chuck was in that VotS game, too, bro. He suggested Chuck buy some premium items, what with the lackluster state of his drip, generally speaking. Chuck needed to up his game. He lacked that killer instinct. Charlie responded with a string of largely inaudible complaints, but I did hear him call the whale “sir” and “Mr Something” at points.
In time, it became clear that they’d both spent all the money they intended to spend so I encouraged them to leave via the most efficient method I had. I asked both Charlie and the whale if they’d like to fill out a brief survey regarding their experience which would only require about 15 minutes of their time and an email address and, before you knew it, both had hit the road.
That night at home I told Katie all about Jimmy and Pod 6 and about Charlie and the whale and all that. She told me there’d been another school shooting and she’d lost three patients.
The next day Renée called and told me that she wasn’t sure she could keep the shop open if things didn’t improve. This was not the first time she’d employed this particular management technique.
“If you don’t get those KPIs up, there won’t be much I can do,” she said.
“Of course,” I said. It wasn’t like she was lying, and it wasn’t like I knew what to do about it.
“You know how much I care about you,” she said. “About all my CSRs.”
I suppose it was important to her to say this, and important for me to pretend she meant it since keeping my job was an interest of mine.
“I won’t let you down,” I lied.
“Just make money,” she said.
“I will,” I said.
“And clean the pods, for Christ’s sake,” she said and hung up.
As I put the phone down, Charlie came in.
“I have an idea for a project,” he said.
#
After that unfortunate VotS session, Charlie had had a particularly bad day at work. The whale, who Charlie told me was an executive at the company where he worked, had spent much of the day feeding everyone an exhaustive blow-by-blow of Charlie’s embarrassing defeat. Then, at the company party that night, Charlie found himself the object of derision. He had, for example, been subjected to a chorus of anonymous bleats while in the bathroom stall and had returned to the open bar to find a pair of antlers acquired by some enterprising joker hanging with a sign behind them that read, “RIP Charlie’s Mom.”
But these collected indignities were less heartbreaking than his encounter with Janice, his secret flame. She usually dealt with him professionally or not at all, and that was such a step up in terms of Charlie’s treatment within the firm that this small, lonely man had clung to an idea of her like a floating bit of mast after a shipwreck. An idea she had probably done nothing to encourage.
He approached her at the party in his rented tux, trying to seem cool rather than terrified and sweaty.
Something like “Some party, huh?” came out of him awkwardly, as though the words themselves were embarrassed to be there.
She responded with, “Is it true you like to go to some VR shop and pretend to be a baby?”
So yeah, I wanted to do a good job for Charlie.
He had brought photos and videos from the party for me to use in building a new custom simulation. He wanted me to recreate the whole thing, and I agreed. It seemed fun, if decidedly odd. I even took the work home—an unprecedented development—and spent days really fine-tuning it while Katie told me about some more school shootings.
#
The party felt surprisingly elegant considering it was being held in the basement of a porn company. Everything was lit by warm Edison bulbs and everyone was drinking out of crystal flutes while wearing the finest apparel the local rental places had on hand. It seemed clear that Schumacher, Hackett, Christensen and Beale intended to party in style, so long as no one turned on a black light.
It didn’t necessarily have to be that way. Charlie’s plan didn’t need total verisimilitude, but since custom jobs cost a bundle (to the benefit of my beleaguered KPIs) I wanted him to feel properly immersed.
It started at the entrance to the main ballroom, with the sounds of the street outside and everything. Charlie walked around, caught himself in a mirror in his well-fitting tux, and seemed pleased.
The other guests kicked in immediately. One or two came over and started mooing at him and a few bystanders giggled. Charlie, single-minded, went straight to the rear garden (really just a cinder-block room with trellises and ivy everywhere, but those porn guys had really made it work) and that’s where he found the whale.
This was the core of Charlie’s idea—Ahab with a harpoon. He took out the gun we’d added to the program (a basic .38 revolver), pointed it at the whale, and said they needed to have a talk.
What followed was an unscripted diatribe, a veritable laundry list of slights and petty injustices Charlie had collected over years. It was peppered with rhetorical exhortations like, “How do you think that feels,” and “Would you like to be treated that way? From Hell’s heart,” etc… It was, if I’m being honest, a bit long and involved a surprising amount of crying. He waved that simulated gun at the simulated whale for, like, 30 minutes.
When Charlie was done yelling, the whale was scripted to respond.
Bro, he had no idea Charlie felt that way. If he had known, he would have done things differently. He totally saw Charlie’s overall point (in the simulation, we didn’t allow him to say “Chuck”), and could see that he’d allowed his natural competitiveness to influence his behavior with regards to Charlie and his general well-being in ways that were both insensitive and inappropriate, bro. He supposed it just went to show that being wealthy and professionally successful didn’t mean you were necessarily a good person, or that you acted like a good person, anyway, and he was gonna take that lesson to heart thanks to Charlie.
They even hugged, tearfully, secure in their simulated manhood.
Then the whale said, “Hey. Why don’t we Charlie that gun in the trash and go get a drink.” An executive position was opening up in the firm and he thought Charlie was just the man for the job.
Curtain, fade to black, applause, et cetera…
When Charlie left the pod, I apologized for that last glitch with his name and promised I’d fix it, but Charlie said not to bother.
He said he was glad he’d ordered it, he had needed to vent, but in the end he basically felt ridiculous. He had gone to all this effort just to pretend to stand up for himself when he couldn’t do it for real at the time. And what kinda guy did that make him, anyway?
“So what do you want to do?” I asked. “Wrap it up? Call it a day?”
“Not yet,” he said, and he got back in the pod.
This time Charlie went in guns blazing. The staff of Schumacher, Hackett, Christensen and Beale never had a chance. Simulated account managers went down in a (lovingly crafted) fountain of arterial spray. Lawyers, accountants, assistants, marketing dweebs, an AV tech that had chuckled at the antlers. Even Janice was subjected to the dispensation of simulated high velocity death at the hands of Charlie and his little gun. At one point he used a cheat code to get the plasma rifle from VotS, with which he accelerated his spree. Schumacher: extinguished. Hackett: exterminated. Christensen: perforated. Beale: ventilated.
Lastly, of course, the whale met his demise at the end of Charlie’s snub pistol, managing to choke out, “I had no idea you felt that way, bro,” before falling over like a stone. I couldn’t help but notice that Charlie looked down at his hand, at the gun there, and just stared at it for a while. I confess the thought occurred to me that I might have made a truly god-awful mistake.
But then a secret shopper came in. Or, someone I strongly suspected of being a secret shopper, anyway. Like, she didn’t want to draw attention to herself but was giving every shadowy corner of the shop the stink-eye. Was that a characteristic behavior of the dreaded beast? To be honest, I wasn’t sure. But I gave her my fullest attention and put on the playlist Lure of the Unfamiliar, just to be on the safe side.
I was gonna upsell the shit out of this customer.
I started off by suggesting a few popular favorites, but struck out mightily. Something was off with this shopper that I couldn’t immediately identify. The shifty looks around the shop continued, but she also seemed… impatient. Like she wasn’t especially interested in my suggestions. It occurred to me that she might be testing me not just on my professionalism but on my expertise and willingness to go the extra mile. So I offered her a look at some of our less mainstream titles. We have this one production of The Taming of the Shrew where Katherina is an actual white-toothed shrew that only speaks its lines in hisses and feral spitting. It’s admittedly not for everyone, but the connoisseurs seem to get a kick out of it. Still, no reaction from the shopper. Maybe she already had something specific in mind, which was what I asked her right before everything went to hell.
First, the whale came in, along with what I could only assume was some sort of ad hoc entourage of bros.
“Bro,” he said, “you have to see it. It’s just like back in the day.”
“No way.”
“Bro, trust me.”
I deployed my most professional smile and asked the shopper if she’d excuse me for a second. Perhaps she’d like to peruse our catalog while I attended to the new arrivals. I left it in front of her and approached the whale.
“How can I help you, gent-”
“We gotta do Voice of the Serengeti. Can you hook us up?”
“Certainly, let’s get you set up over here and-”
“Bros, hop in the pods! This is gonna be sick!” the whale said, practically throwing his card at me.
I realized with dim interest that Charlie hadn’t left his own pod, yet. Had he heard the whale? Did he know they were here?
The secret shopper said “This one,” and pointed to the experience she wanted and I entered the product code into the system for her pod without really looking, which was neither a good nor intelligent thing to do, but the bros were going “VOTS! VOTS! VOTS!” and I really needed to stop hearing that so I was distracted. I got her set up in her pod and thought about Charlie. If he came out of his pod right then, it could get very awkward. Is that why he wasn’t coming out? Could I be that lucky?
Reader, I was not lucky.
I had just sent the shopper’s chosen experience to all the pods.
Friedrich Nietzsche Sings the Best of Sesame Street is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s not offensive or really disturbing or anything, but still. You wouldn’t want to be surprised by it.
“Uh, hey! This isn’t VotS!” the bros cried.
“One second! Apologies!” I yelled. I started hitting buttons, but my anxious fumbling around at the keyboard caused the volume to get locked at the maximum setting.
“SUNNY DAY. SWEEPING THE CLOUDS AWAY.”
“HEY!” several anguished voices cried out, almost in unison. Somehow, I had also managed to engage the emergency locks on the pods.
Everyone started banging on the door of their pod right away, which is just the worst for yours truly. They have sensors on those things. People banging on them sends all sorts of red alerts back to the company headquarters. I promptly became a priority for the grim team that manned the other end of that connection. And for Renée. The phone started ringing almost immediately. I absolutely did not want to answer it.
“ON MY WAY TO WHERE THE AIR IS SWEET.”
“Guess how fucked you are.”
“Hi, Renée.”
Meanwhile, phone clamped on my shoulder, I was still slamming keys in a panic, and out of desperation I hit the command to immediately stick everyone in the last simulation that had been played.
Charlie’s simulation.
“Excuse me! Put that back!” came from the shopper’s pod. “And who the fuck are you people?!” Shit shit shit.
The shopper, the whale, everyone was in there with Charlie. And they all looked like Charlie. I only ever built one protagonist body for the experience. You could only play as Charlie. So all of a sudden five or six Charlies were standing in the basement of a porn company looking very confused.
“Chuck?” the whale-as-Charlie said.
Charlie, not taking it well, drew his gun and started shooting.
I put Renée on hold and scrambled around the counter to try to get to the emergency releases on the pods—so I could free everyone from the hell I’d trapped them in—but I tripped on my own feet, smashed my stupid face on the linoleum and blacked out.
#
I was fired, obviously. That kind of thing was just murder on the old KPIs.
But no one was hurt. Some prospective customer came into the store almost immediately and found us all in our sorry state. Sometimes I like to imagine what their face must have looked like. Ultimately, the clients were released and I was shuttled off to a date with the ER, where, after a breezy few hours, I was discharged with a warning to be more careful near floors. Small blessings.
The secret shopper was, if it’s not already obvious, not secret at all. She was just someone following a social media trend. The influencers, apparently, loved Freddy Neetch.
And so, I suddenly had the unenviable task of figuring out what the hell to do next.
When Charlie eventually contacted me again, I had prepared myself, imagining the Hollywood version of monastic martial discipline, to receive any additional kicks that karma and a disdainful universe were going to send my way now that I was so clearly down.
We needed to have a talk, for the obvious reasons. We went out to my back yard where this snarling knot of highway interchanges lay spread out below us, and we sat there with a few beers. The sun wasn’t quite setting yet, but it was threatening to get moody on us, and I apologized for what had happened. He was still a little disturbed by the whole thing, but he seemed different. I hoped for the better. Continuing to work at Schumacher et al had clearly been out of the question, so he likewise had the unenviable task of figuring out what the hell to do next.
“I mean look, it was awful. The worst day I’ve had in a long… long time. Hell, I lost my job,” he said. “But I also have to admit: I hated that place, anyway. Needing to get out had been my mental state for so long that I might have forgotten what normal was supposed to be like.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Afterward, the conversation at work with management was… horrific. I mean there was just no way I could explain what happened. You know what my boss said?”
“What?”
“Here’s him,” Charlie said, and then adopted a surprisingly accurate and thoroughly insulting Whale Bro voice. “‘What I don’t understand, Chuck, is why—if this place is so terrible—are you still here?’ And for the first time in his parasitic life, that asshole was right about something. There I was, begging people (who—let’s be honest—would put guns in school vending machines if it would tickle their stock price) to just respect me, and why? Did I need their permission to be worthy of respect? To do whatever I want with my own time? Did I even want to be the kind of person people like them would respect? The worst part, I’m convinced, is that desperation, waiting for someone else to change for you.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reflexively. “I’m, like, ranting.”
“Charlie, it’s fine.”
He paused, maybe steeping in memory, maybe looking for words he could have used in the moment. Maybe he was just taking an inventory of his internal process, a quiet observation of the goings-on within a static system so that, factoring in new data taken over time, he began to wonder if the system was as static as he thought. For myself, I felt like I had just pulled my head up from a microscope, surprised to learn that I had been looking through one in the first place. Just what were we to each other?
“In that pod,” he eventually said. “I must have set some kind of land speed record for grotesque therapy. It wasn’t good, and I wouldn’t say thanks, exactly, but…I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to be the guy who clings to his worst feelings any more.”
Out in the distance, shaded by an elevated section of highway, a couple of dogs were sniffing at a pile of some other dog’s excrement.
“I feel better now than I did before,” Charlie continued. “Maybe that counts for something. So, we’re good. Even if you are a bit of a putz.”
I thanked him, and he told me that he actually had another motive for coming by. He had come to the realization that he wasn’t just playing VotS for the escape, but because he genuinely loved the damn Virtual Reality thing. He was still, at heart, devoted to our weird and fussy little hobby, far more than he ever cared about whatever the hell his old job did for money. Why, he wondered, wasn’t he working on something he cared about? I told him if he wanted to get into VR I knew a shop that had an opening, though I couldn’t honestly recommend the position in terms of the whole respect and dignity thing. But he was actually thinking of starting a VR design company. He knew enough about business to get something small off the ground and see where it went, and he actually liked my work on the party sim, all other lunacies of the moment notwithstanding. Did I want in?
I thought, huh. Had I missed it all this time?I felt something recede from me like a kite string that whipped away into blue skies and oblivion, becoming so much smaller with distance I lost sight of it and wondered why I’d held on to it for so long, while here in front of me there was a hand held out and I felt something else inside me finally uncoil.
Out by the highways, those two dogs were still there sniffing that stinking pile. From off in the distance came an enormous percussive clap of a sound, like a firework or a backfiring car, echoing among the elevated highway pylons. One of the dogs got spooked by it and flopped onto the pile, splattering them both. They ran off, then, together, disappearing into the mess of concrete and asphalt and a future anywhere else.
Adam Contini is an amateur writer and professional recluse who currently lives somewhere in Pennsylvania. His other published work can be found at pikerpress.com.