Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In this microessay, Kimberly Elkins explores the intoxication of a dangerous adolescent game and how it colors all that follows in the character’s life. I love the ambiguity of the second-person point of view in this, and the biting tone in the final sentence.
The Game for Winners
We called it fainting. Gathered in a knot at recess or after lunch in an empty corridor or a corner of the gym, wherever the teachers, who’d been told to stop the game, couldn’t find us. The game went like this: you knelt and breathed deeply, one, two, three, and then jumped up as hard and as fast as you could, a boy’s arms wrapped around you from behind in a bear hug, squeezing the air from your diaphragm. A tingle in your stomach, a hard trail of thrill burring up to your chest like the compression of body in the seconds an airplane’s wheels leave the ground. You slumped in his arms as the world pinholed to one tiny point of blackness, and when you woke lying on the floor—how much later, minutes or hours or days, you had no idea—strange faces crowded in a circle above you, seconds of near terror. You had left this life, this realm, for an obliteration of consciousness, of the cornerless sky, and of all the senses, and there was no better feeling than waking to that thunderhead of confusion. You find euphoria in disorientation. You find euphoria in displacement. You find euphoria in losing the who, what, when, where, and why.
To be lost is to dwell wholly in the present, and so you continue to choose it.
Breathe deeply, in and out, one, two, three, and jump up! You begged to do it again and again, until your vision doubled and your head thrummed on the stalk of your neck. The best fainter, that’s what you were, the unbeaten champion, the absolute best at going under, at staying under. Girls were better at fainting, boys were better at squeezing, although a few boys wanted to be fainted too. It was strange to watch a boy go limp, be laid out carefully on the floor; even in the fifth grade, it seemed the position was meant for girls.
Years later, you found that same whoosh of unbecoming with the drinking, with certain drugs. Coming to on your back, naked or not, turning your head on the pillow, against the floor, against the car seat, maybe a face above yours, lowering itself to meet your mouth, or the back of a tousled head you don’t recognize, and then the hardest part of the game but also the most thrilling: trying to figure out where you were, how you got there, how long you’d been out of touch with the world. But you were back in it, maybe against your deepest wishes, your truest desires, and there was nothing left to do but to get up, to sit or crawl forward on the carpet, on the gravel, on the grass, on the bed, and then to rise, and to keep rising, to live to tell the tale.
You were the best at this game. You still are, you sick winner.
Kimberly Elkins’s novel, What Is Visible, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Iowa Review, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best New American Voices, among others. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. Find her online at www.kimberlyelkins.com.
