He enters behind dad, mom behind him, the smell of lumber and carpet sparking in his nose. It’s a smell he would grow up to associate with home improvement stores and their draw of possibility, of creation, of craft.
But at this age he’s not interested in these things, not like dad is. His interests lay in a different realm, not physical but digital, though a craft, nonetheless.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
Mom opens her mouth to warn him not to be too long, but she knows where he’s going, and if he isn’t back when they need him, she’ll know exactly where to look. She says, “Ok”, and follows her husband to the paint department to dig through swatches.
He eagerly navigates the aisles, hoping they haven’t moved the shelf again, wishing for new stock. At a blind corner on the end of the extension cord aisle, he narrowly avoids colliding with an elderly man pushing a cart with a 2×4 protruding out the end. He slips past and down the next aisle where display fluorescents buzz loud enough to cover the grumbling man left in his dust.
The bulb section gives way to lamps and shades. He passes them all feverishly. Indoor fixtures with chandeliers casting bright orange-yellow light across the floor where his sneakers squeak on a turn and leave a black skid mark.
The metal stairway in the back corner comes into view, each stair wrapped in artificial grass carpeting, the same kind as the putting mat dad got for Christmas. He pretends it’s a secret passage, a grass path up the mountain to Shambhala.
His foot thumps on the first step and he takes them two at a time up to a landing. There, at the second-floor crossroads between ceiling fans and overstock, stands a bookshelf haphazardly stocked with computer games.
His eyes flit from one box to the next, widening with each title he’s never seen before. There’s a copy of Myst, and further down, nestled between a hockey game and word processing software, is The Curse of Monkey Island. And even though he’s completed them both, he pulls them out and pours over the cover art. Many of the games here are adventure games catering to the older customer base, but he doesn’t mind. He loves the challenge of their puzzles, their stories, their worlds.
Of course, not every box excites him – there are home repair video guides, treasuries of clip art, and, worst of all, accounting software. One box, an oversized, muddy-gold thing, purports to contain 100 hours of AOL Gold. The boy momentarily questions how someone put time in a box, and if that box would be smaller had they simply given less than 100 hours.
He nervously checks for his parents, knowing his time here is ticking down, then pulls another box, reading the title and, more importantly, the system requirements. Mom gave in once at Wal-Mart and purchased a game he desperately begged for, only for him to get home and find out his computer didn’t have enough RAM. He didn’t even know what RAM was – still doesn’t – but he’s been more cautious ever since.
Finally, he finds one, The Journeyman Project Turbo – he’s played the sequel’s demo, but this entry looks great too, maybe better. The box goes back on the shelf, and he retraces his steps, pretending not to see the shoppers climbing his secret staircase, hunting down parents who have migrated from paint to decking.
Dad is talking to the man behind the counter about stains, so the boy taps mom’s hand to get her attention. She tries keeping an ear on the conversation, but the boy is too persistent, and she breaks away.
He tries to get her to come see the game, to see his hidden gem, but she tells him to wait, and listens in on dad. The boy hesitates, knowing he could press her further at the risk of a flat-out no.
It’s worth a shot.
After he tells her about it once more, she relents, telling him to just get it, but that he’ll need to help dad with the deck when the weather warms.
Deal.
He moves so quickly through the store it’s as if he’s racing time itself. Who knows who has since been at the shelf – who knows if the game is still even there? He tries taking the stairs three at a time but goes back to two when he barely makes the first set, the fear of falling the only thing able to slow him.
He pulls a bland blueprinting box off the shelf and there it is, his game, right where he had hidden it. He swaps it with the blueprint box like he’s Indiana Jones and doesn’t let go until mom gives him a look and hands it to the cashier. He leaves the store beaming, as excited to get home as he was to get to the shelf.
As he gets older, he thinks back to that shelf and how the next time he went there it was gone. Then, eventually, the store is gone too. The big computer game boxes, full of air and cardboard with instruction manuals and jewel cases, shrink over time, deflate, just like the departments that contained them until they, like the shelf, disappear altogether. And all he’s left with are memories.
What a wonderful thing, he thinks, that they were able to capture time in a box.