The Trade-In Counter

The store had a smell, and Marisol Dupree had stopped being able to name it sometime around her fourth year of owning the place. Warm plastic. Old paper inserts. The particular dust that only settles on things nobody has picked up in a while. Customers noticed it the second they came through the door and almost none of them could say what it was either, but she watched their shoulders drop about two inches every time, and she had learned to think of that as the actual product.

The sign said BACKWARD COMPATIBLE. The lease said Unit 4, and the landlord had said, three separate times now, that the strip mall was going through some changes.

It was 11:40 on a Tuesday morning in August, which meant the store was empty except for Ines, who was fourteen and did not buy anything and had never bought anything, and who came in every weekday of summer vacation to stand in front of the wall of loose cartridges and read the spines.

“You can touch them,” Marisol said, for probably the fortieth time.

“I know.”

“They’re not going to bite.”

“I know.” Ines did not touch them.

---

Rosalind came in at noon with a milk crate, the way she did on the first Tuesday of every month, and set it on the counter with the particular thump of someone who has carried something two blocks further than she wanted to.

“Estate,” she said. “Whole basement. The son wanted it gone by Friday and I told him I’d take a look before he called the junk people.”

“How bad.”

“Bad in the good way.” Rosalind pulled back the flap of a grocery bag. “Or good in the bad way. I genuinely can’t tell anymore and I’ve been doing this eleven years.”

Marisol started laying it out. It was the usual archaeology — three sports titles from the same franchise four years apart, a light gun with no light gun games, a memory card so full of someone else’s saves that it had a small piece of masking tape on it reading DO NOT ERASE — TONY.

And underneath all of it, in a sandwich bag, a cartridge with no label at all.

Just the shell. Grey plastic gone the color of weak tea, a shape her hands recognized before her eyes did. Someone had written on the front in silver paint pen, in the careful block letters of a person who wanted to be legible more than they wanted to be pretty:

WORKS. DON’T BLOW ON IT.

Marisol turned it over twice.

“Any idea?”

“None. The son said his dad had a whole thing about it.” Rosalind shrugged with her whole face. “You know how that goes. Either it’s nothing or it’s a prototype worth four thousand dollars and I’ve just carried it two blocks in a milk crate.”

“It’s nothing,” Marisol said. “It’s basically always nothing.”

“I know.”

“That’s not me being mean about your find.”

“Marisol.” Rosalind had a way of saying her name that meant we have known each other since the mall had a fountain. “I sell dead people’s belongings for a living. I’m aware.”

---

Marisol cleaned it that afternoon, because there was nothing else to do and because she liked doing it. Isopropyl on a cotton swab, the long slow drag across the contacts, the swab coming away the color of an old penny. She did the edge connectors twice. She did not blow on it.

Ines drifted over from the wall, close enough to watch, not close enough to be participating.

“Why does that work?”

“Contacts oxidize. Air, humidity, forty years.” Marisol held it up to the window light. “The data’s fine. It’s been fine the whole time. It’s the connection that goes.”

“So it was never actually broken.”

“Almost nothing is actually broken.” She swabbed the last edge. “Most things that look broken just can’t reach each other anymore.”

Ines was quiet for a second. Then, in the flat voice of a fourteen-year-old delivering a devastating opinion: “That’s kind of a whole thing you just said.”

“Don’t do that.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I know what you’re saying. Hand me the console.”

---

It booted.

Not immediately. Two grey screens and one moment where Marisol thought there it is, that’s the one that doesn’t come back — and then the CRT in the corner, the one she kept because flat panels lied about these games in ways she found personally offensive, produced a title card.

The title card was hand-drawn. Not stylized-hand-drawn. Actually hand-drawn, the letters uneven, one of them slightly too large, scanned in by someone who had not totally understood how to scan things.

THE LONG HOUSE

And underneath, smaller:

for dad

Marisol sat down on the stool very slowly.

“What is it?” Ines had come all the way to the counter now. She was gripping the edge of it.

“It’s homemade.”

“Like — bootleg? Like a hack?”

“No. I mean somebody made it.” Marisol leaned toward the screen. “Somebody got a blank cart and a dev kit or a copier or something, and they made a game, and they put it on real hardware, and they gave it to their father.”

The screen waited. There was no menu. There was one prompt, blinking:

PRESS START TO GO HOME

---

It was not, by any measure Marisol could apply, a good game.

You walked through a house. That was the whole thing. The rooms were rendered in about nine colors and the perspective was wrong in a way that suggested nobody involved had ever been taught perspective. There was a kitchen with a table you could examine, and examining it produced a line of text: The table is where the mail went. Everyone knew this. There was a hallway with a light that didn’t work, and if you tried the switch three times, the game said: Dad always meant to fix this. It became a joke, then it became the hallway.

There was a back bedroom you could not enter. The door was drawn, and the door was locked, and there was no key anywhere in the game. Marisol looked. She looked for forty minutes with a fourteen-year-old breathing over her shoulder, and there was no key, and the text when you tried it just said:

Not yet.

“That’s it?” Ines said. “You just — walk around and can’t go in the room?”

“Seems like.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the worst game I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah,” Marisol said, and did not turn it off.

---

Rosalind came back Thursday, because Marisol called her.

She watched the whole thing standing up, arms folded, with the specific stillness of a woman who has been in a great many houses after the people were done living in them.

At the end she said: “The son. He said his dad had a whole thing about it.”

“Did he say what.”

“He said his dad made him play it every Christmas.” Rosalind’s mouth did something complicated. “He said it like it was annoying. He said it in the voice you use for stuff you’re going to be sad about in about four years.”

Marisol looked at the locked door on the screen.

“He made it,” she said. “The son made it. For his father. And then his father made him play it, every year, and he thought that was his dad being a pain about it.”

“Probably.”

“It wasn’t him being a pain about it.”

“No,” Rosalind said. “It really wasn’t.”

---

Here is the part Marisol thought about for a long time afterward.

She could have sold it. Not for four thousand dollars — nobody wants a bad homemade game, the market for that is exactly zero people — but she could have put it in the glass case with a little card reading HOMEBREW, RARE, ONE OF ONE, and somebody who collects strange objects would eventually have paid her sixty dollars to own a stranger’s father’s Christmas.

She could have kept it. Put it on the shelf behind the counter with the other things that had come through the door and never left, the small museum of items she couldn’t price because pricing them would have required deciding what they were.

Instead she got the son’s number from Rosalind and called him, and got voicemail, and left a message that took her four tries to record because the first three sounded like a sales call.

The one she kept was: “Hi. My name’s Marisol, I run the game store on Ellis. Your mom’s estate came through here. I’ve got a cartridge with no label on it and I think you know exactly which one I mean. I’m not calling to buy it. I cleaned the contacts and it runs fine. I just — thought you’d want to know it still works. That’s all. That’s the whole message.”

He did not call back for eleven days.

---

He came in person, on a Saturday, which is the worst day to have a conversation in a game store because Saturday is when the store is actually full — two kids arguing about a fighting game, a father buying a birthday present with the hunted look of a man who has been given a list he doesn’t understand, Ines at the wall, always Ines at the wall.

He was maybe fifty. He stood in the doorway for a second too long.

“You called about the cartridge.”

“I did.”

“I was going to throw it out.” He said it fast, like it was a thing he’d been carrying in his mouth for eleven days. “I had a bag. I had a whole bag of stuff I was going to throw out and it was in the bag and I took it out again and I don’t know why I took it out again.”

Marisol didn’t say anything. Twelve years behind a counter had taught her that the useful thing was usually the silence.

“I made it when I was nineteen,” he said. “I thought it was — I thought it was going to be a game. I thought I’d finish it. There’s a whole other half. There was supposed to be a whole other half.” He laughed, and it came out wrong. “I made him a broken thing and he played it every year like it was — ”

He stopped.

“There’s a locked door,” Marisol said.

“I never made what’s behind it.”

“I know.”

“I never made it. There’s nothing there. It’s not a puzzle, there’s no key, it’s just a door I drew and then I got a job and I never—” He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyebrow. “He knew. He knew there was nothing behind it. He played it anyway. Every year. For twenty-six years.”

The store carried on around them. One of the kids won the argument about the fighting game.

“He wasn’t playing it to get in the room,” Marisol said.

“I know that. I know that now.”

“Do you want it?”

He looked at the counter, where it sat in its sandwich bag, cleaned, in the exact condition it had left the factory in forty years ago except for silver paint pen on the front.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I want it.”

---

She didn’t charge him. Rosalind gave her grief about that for a month and Marisol let her, because Rosalind wasn’t actually wrong on the numbers and because Rosalind knew perfectly well she’d have done the same.

But before he left, Ines — who had migrated close during the whole thing, in the way she did, sideways and pretending not to — said the only thing she’d ever volunteered to a customer:

“You should finish it.”

He turned around.

“You should make what’s behind the door,” Ines said, to a fifty-year-old man she had never met, with the total confidence of someone who does not yet know that you’re not supposed to say things like that. “You’re not nineteen anymore. You probably got better.”

He stared at her.

“It’d still be for him,” she added, quieter, losing her nerve on the way out of the sentence. “Even now. Right?”

---

He emailed Marisol nine months later. A file, and a note that said not done, but more done, and a line at the bottom that said the hallway light works now.

She never played it. She meant to. She kept meaning to. The strip mall went through its changes and the lease got renegotiated at a number she could survive if she was careful, and Ines turned fifteen and finally, in October, picked a cartridge off the wall and put it on the counter and paid for it in crumpled ones.

The store still smelled like warm plastic and old paper.

Marisol turned it over in her hands before she bagged it — the habit, the check, the two-second inspection of the contacts that she’d done ten thousand times and would do ten thousand more.

“It’s a good one,” she said.

“I know,” said Ines. “I’ve been reading the box for two years.”

---

The data’s fine. It’s been fine the whole time. It’s the connection that goes.