Decameron: I Choose You [II/7]
“Hey, do you remember that plan from junior year that we never got around to?”
The sentence was the kind that you see, and try to process, and then your head at first comes up dry — Blake? junior year? plan? — and then the first part of your body to remember isn’t in your mind at all, it’s in the bridge of your nose, the memory and the sensation spreading to your forehead and then the front of your brain and as it works its way to the back the release of recognition finally hits you.
Wow. It’s Blake. What’s he been up to?
“Let’s do this, Let’s do this this week.”
Normally, none of the people Erica had in her phone from that time really kept much in touch, but lately it wasn’t normal. Lots of the people that had meant a lot to her for a little while, and still did but in a different way, were checking in all of a sudden. She didn’t mind it — work was done, so time was there to be passed — but each text came with a flash from the memory bank.
One night, back in the early Obama administration, Blake and Erica were up at an ungodly hour talking about the things that meant a lot to them when they were kids. Blake mentioned Pokemon. Erica mentioned the anime. Blake said he realized he never knew how the Indigo League ended. Erica agreed. They checked and realized that at 80 U.S. episodes at 22 minutes each, it’d taken them two, three days tops to do it if they marathoned the whole thing. A promise was made, but never fulfilled: college was lousy with free time, but it never happened that month, nor that term, nor that degree, and then they moved away and saw each other at weddings and it was nice and everything but it wasn’t Indigo League Three Day Marathon types of parties and so that was pretty much the end of that.
“You know I’ve never actually gone back and watched the end of it,” he texted.
“Neither have I. It’s on Netflix now. Tomorrow?”
Though the thought had scarcely crossed her mind in years, this silly little stunt -- a television marathon -- was giving her life again. She felt a motivation and ambition that had left her for the past several weeks return in force.
“It’s set.”
Tomorrow came, but his work wasn’t as “off” as hers was so Blake had to delay. With nothing but time, Erica idled over the placard on Netflix, letting the B-Roll play, hearing the strums of the most famous guitar lick of the late nineties.
And she turned back. She’d waited this long. But she still had the itch, so she downloaded an emulator and then downloaded Pokemon Red, and got to playing. When you’re ten, and you don’t have two decades of same-type attack bonus optimization in your head, Kanto may as well be Atlantis; when you’re 29, and watched two speedruns this month, it’s like going back to the house you grew up in: cozy, but much smaller than you remember.
Tomorrow came again, and again Blake asked for a delay. Erica did the only obvious thing: downloaded Gold. The critical beauty of Gold was always that just when you thought that you’d beaten the game, a whole world you remember opens back up to you. Erica put it down, as she’d been there already.
No text the next day, so Erica downloaded Pokemon Go. Not much to do on this in her apartment, but she got the hang of it and caught a few Pokémon wandering by.
Tomorrow again, and the call of Indigo League on Netflix was persuasive. Erica, straining to remember what Togepi evolved into, hit up Bulbapedia. Seven hours later, she was now fully briefed on the legions of creatures that had come after she put down the games, and was ready to watch Indigo League the next day.
“Hey, I’m sorry, work just piled up out of nowhere,” texted Blake. This was fine: through her research the prior day, she’d found an emulator that allowed you to play Pokemon Snap, the greatest game of the franchise. “Maybe tomorrow!”
Silence the next day, and Erica wasn’t even mad. She’d always known there was a manga, but in her younger days the artstyle was too intimidating, but two decades of weeb-dom later and she was fully prepared to plow through the tales of Satoshi.
The next day, having cleaved a clean path through the visual arts, Erica recalled that in a box in the closet was a bunch of stuff she took from her parents’ place after they downsized: in them, of course, were a ten year old’s Pokémon cards, untouched since they were stored, in mint condition, including the 1998 Topps Mike Piazza card that had inexplicably turned up next to the holographic Blastoise. There was a thriving subreddit.
The next day, she watched the movie where Pikachu talks in a feminine voice to Ash. She did not care for it.
The following day, it was a YouTube hole: Erica had spent six months at her temp job enraptured as the internet attempted to play Twitch Plays Pokemon, and the highlights could be relived anywhere on YouTube, the ecstasy of small, improbable victories, the confusion and despair at constant loss, a collective motivated by hope, the wisdom of thousands shambling their way towards a collective achievement from the seclusion of their apartments around the world. She hadn’t known why she felt moved then, but she understood a little bit more of it now.
“Hey,” said the text. “I’m taking a long weekend. Hope you didn’t cave!”
Erica smiled. She sent over a video chat link, and they took it back to the beginning.
Decameron is a newsletter recounting the 14th Century set of quarantine tales for 2020. Read the original story.
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