Epilogue: He Knows Changes Aren't Permanent, But Change Is
Trevor will suffer his first heart attack at the age of 48. It will be mild, but it will freak him out. We won't have seen each other in nearly eight years, since I've gotten married and moved away. But he'll call me after the heart attack. He'll tell me about it and how it really scared him. He'll try to tell me how much he misses me, and Shoot Club, and how the whole thing with Monica didn't work out. He'll be telling me this while my son is crawling around on my lap, trying to get down to play with the dog in the other room.
"Look, can I call you back?"
"No, it's cool, I just wanted to say 'hi'."
"No, really, I want to talk to you, but I've got my hands full. Seriously, let me call you back in like fifteen minutes. I need to put Eli down for his nap and then we can talk."
"Yeah, okay, call me back. But mainly, I just want to say I was sorry about that one time that I ran out of gas when you were trying to work. That's one of the things I thought about in the ambulance. That I wanted you to know I was sorry for times like that. I know you had a deadline and I was messing you up. I never got to tell you I felt bad about that."
I will have no idea what he's talking about. My wife will be at a wedding in Tuscon and Eli will be in a fussy mood, so I'll get off the phone and try to think back to what he meant. It'll be over an hour before I call Trevor back and he won't pick up. I'll leave him a message telling him we should talk soon and that it was good to hear from him. And for the life of me, I won't be able to remember what he was talking about because to me, they will have all been good times.
***
Tom Chick has been writing about videogames for fifteen years. His work appears in Games for Windows Magazine, Yahoo, Gamespy, Sci-Fi, and Variety. He lives in Los Angeles. Shoot Club appears in this space every Thursday.
