In the trove of my memories from before I could write, I
remember playing PacMan at Burger Depot, a burger joint in Albany my mother
would take me to. One night, I remember recognizing that what I was doing with
the controls was not effecting the adventures of PacMan. “Mommy, the game isn’t working,” I told my mother.
“That’s
because you need to pay,” she told me.
“Can you
pay?” I asked.
“No,” she
told me, “You can play like that.”
I went back
to the Mr. PacMan arcade and used the joystick again. I was so good at this
before. What had happened between when I was playing it before and now that I
now sucked at it? My father was not a fan of games (“for people who lacked the
ability to have an intelligent conversation”) and my mother was not a supporter
of screen-based entertainment. I do not believe they ever put in the quarters
it would have taken to link what I was doing with the controls to what I was
watching on the screen. Then it took me by surprise: I must have thought that
just because the game was moving that I was playing it. Now I knew the rules.
And I knew that I had no control.
Other
nights, I still went back and watched the Mr. PacMan game, sometimes desperately
shifting the joystick and rejoicing when, like a broken clock that is always
right twice a day, Mr. PacMan’s motion matched my guidance. However, I grew to
know that no, I did not control how many circles he ate or when he got eaten by
an even bigger blob.
I think of my mother’s brain tumor as Mr. PacMan.
I never experienced the joy of mastering the connection between your hand and a
joystick and what you see on the screen neither with Mr. PacMan nor with any
other game. Incidentally, this skill is one that the human brain’s temporal
lobe masters. My mother’s Mr. PacMan took her right temporal lobe and her right
hippocampus with her last late September when she had brain surgery. Like with
almost all surgeries with the goal of removing a brain tumor, some of the tumor
remains behind. This August, Mr. PackMan stopped responding to the chemo
appetite suppressants that my mother had been taking and grew back a blood
intake system and a blood pooping system. Three weeks ago, an emergency MRI
showed that Mr. PacMan had been eating more of my mother’s brain and had gained
weight. The behavior that my mother had exhibited had led me to bringing her
into the ER in the first place.
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Now I see
her every day. Every day I have been noticing more and more that Mr. PacMan has
eaten. She’s got almost no visual processing now; her aural processing makes
the speaker work a lot. Mr. PacMan is fucking hungry, and there’s no way
anybody’s going to give me a few quarters to be able to control the joysticks.
