Branko was a plump young man of average height and appearance who worked as an entry level coder at a small consulting firm called “Stax” in New Jersey. On Saturdays and casual Fridays he wore T-shirts displaying LEGO versions of the protagonists of Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, and The Sand Lot. His other clothes had been purchased in fits of necessity from a discounter two blocks from his apartment. On these short outings he made sure to buy everything he needed, because the thought of using his free time to purchase clothes was extremely painful.
“If I just buy clothes while I’m out, I’m basically throwing my life down the toilet,” he once said to his mother. “Every time we go into Ross, I’m throwing away something precious that will never be returned to me.” In the stores the weight of all his concerns—the Pokémon, the LEGO towers, and the experiments with candy, everything he was interested in—would gather around him and shout “Move! Move! Move!” so that he ran through the aisles, pushing his cart like a flaming chariot, in order to satisfy his needs.
“Okay! Necessities time!” he would say inside outlet stores, while buying toothpaste at the edge of its expiration date, along with shampoo in gaudy seasonal scents. He often smelled like novelty egg-nog and peppermint bodywash that had failed to sell during Christmastime. After getting his clothes, he made sure to buy those things he jokingly called “food items” in bulk: frozen pizzas, Pepsi, jars of peanut butter, and loaves of bread.
One summer evening Branko went home to tend to his bare life. His body supported his dreams in a way he wished to deny. He halved a frozen pizza with a steak knife and baked one half in his toaster oven. While waiting for it to finish, he replied to comments from three children who watched his YouTube LEGO channel. They asked where they might source pieces in order to recreate his LEGO construction “The Hairy Spider.” The fortress combined four ship wings from the Death Star with two sixteen-wheeler trucks and the garden walls from a Versailles-replica LEGO set.
“EPIC LEGO SMASH: THE HAIRY SPIDER,” his making-of video, had received 300 views. Branko smiled, as he had expected it to do this well. He ate Jack’s Pizza with cheese crust and poured a shot of Caramel-flavored Bailey’s Irish Cream into a little cup once used to hold scented candles. A worthless Pokémon appeared outside his window, waving up at him and beckoning him to put on gym shorts in order to capture it and train it to be ready for war.
“I’m ready, I’m ready,” it seemed to say, “I’m ready for war!”
Branko played an immersive online game in which players hunted for digital creatures using maps of the cities in which they lived. They could capture the monsters by going to physical locations indicated on the digital maps and pointing their phone camera at the real world, where the creatures appeared overlaid on their phone screens. The player pointed their phone at synagogues and saw banana-shaped birds with knives for feet hiding in Moses’ head. The game encouraged players to collect thousands of creatures, plan their growth through tiers of development, and then fight other players with their collection. Players met each other looking for creatures and sometimes married one another.
Branko maintained a spreadsheet with his entire collection of Pokémon, listing the name, quantity, developmental stage, and species of each of his thousands of animals. It was backed up on a server at his uncle’s home outside Sarajevo. The spreadsheet indicated that he already had more than four hundred replicas of the little animal. Still, he could feel its presence in his legs, heart, and brain as a friendly exhortation, to move and to live. If added to his stable, it could grow and realize its true potential.
Farther to the south, past the row of discounters and the rotisserie, Branko noticed, on his digital map, a somewhat more valuable creature called a Serbox. It was extracting and retracting wagging tongues from its hands. It was dancing like a Cossack outside the entranceway of a destroyed public housing project.
Just as he was about to leave to go and get both creatures, a message arrived from a friend.
“sdgkljlkdsdfl;kkl;sdjfl;ksdfgklsdjgsdlk;g sldkjg lks;dj l;ksjdg PEACE DRAGON IN UR AREA PEACE DRAGON IN UR AREA ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT” it began.
It explained that the most valuable Pokémon in the world, Peace Dragon, of which only two had ever been found, had appeared last night in the Atlantic Ocean about 120 miles off the Jersey coast. Not believing his luck, Branko scanned the water, found nothing, then re-synced his Pokémon map with his Google map, and found Peace Dragon. It was asleep in the dark water (the maps darkened at night, and the creatures fell asleep). Sensing his thumb passing over its wings, the dragon awoke, lifted its sleeping head, and looked up at him, blinking. Branko felt his heartbeat as it looked up from the middle of the ocean.
“She’s beautiful,” he said.
She had soft features, soft hooves, a soft tail, soft, unscaled skin; her tail had no spikes, her head no horns, her chest no plates, and her legs, face, and demeanor were entirely without the aggression or zaniness of the thousands of lesser Pokémon. Rather, with her capacity to throw energy, and to enclose herself within a ball of light, she seemed to rest in self-assurance, needing neither the crude and merely material defenses of the Serbox outside his window, nor its desperate dances. Her expression of restfulness promised a different life: no work, on demand television from Korea, no time wasting trips to the store, the promise of love, free pretzels, and a country populated by other people interested in certain aspects of popular games and hobbies that consumed Branko’s life and “on the whole, really interested” him.
Branko felt such excitement and such gratitude that he cried onto his rainbow keyboard. He leaned backwards in his computer chair and looked at his ceiling with squinting, joyous, watering eyes. Above him he saw, dangling from a piece of scotch tape, a plush Jigglypuff keychain that this same friend had taped to the ceiling more than a year ago, when she had come to visit. The sight of it sent him into laughing ecstasy. Branko smashed out a reply thanking her profusely.
There was a chance monied collectors might rent a helicopter to fly out to get Peace Dragon, so Branko emailed several charter boat companies to arrange a trip. After an hour, one company responded, saying they would take him out this weekend, pending payment, and that they would depart from a pier in Brick Township. In his excitement, Branko forgot about the Serbox down the street. Later a young girl found it on her way home.
*****
The day of Branko’s departure was overcast and warm. At intervals the bright sun shone into his two windows. He had dreamed of sailing and red dragons. The dragons undulated, as if made from crêpe, alongside a frail and leaking ship in which he was interned. He sat between two creaking wooden boxes in front of a small window, the only source of light in the hull, while the dragons whispered in each other’s ears, saying malicious things about him. Several times they began to open the window, only to close it again and laugh to themselves. Then at last they opened the window and sang in unison: “Dreams aren’t real! Dreams aren’t real! Dreams aren’t real!”
At that point Branko woke up, feeling sick and afraid. He tried to displace the nightmare feeling by eating cereal. The cereal box showed smiling foxes eating cupcakes and stirred in him painful memories.
He displaced this feeling by riding his electric wheel at high speed to the marina and playing “nightcore” remixes of Toto’s “Africa” and Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” from the speakers attached to the sides. They were remixes only in the sense of being sped-up versions of the original song. Passing by the docks, Branko imagined himself running across the water like a fast Christ. Healthy financiers jogging beside him resented his loud music. If they could have seen them, they would also have resented his dreams. They were absorbing knowledge at high rates by listening to podcasts about trading strategies.
Branko arrived at the charter boat company office, a green, faded hut at the edge of the marina. Inside was a short red-faced man sitting between plastic roses.
“Good morning Mister Branko! I’m Mr. Gianaris,” the owner called out as Branko walked inside, in a loud and overpowering voice. “Good day to ride a boat!” Branko said, “yes it is” and shook the man’s hand. He sat down.
Then he stood up and sat down again many times, all the while composing under his breath a medieval sounding poem for Peace Dragon: “Is it for me that my lady waits, resplendent in the emerald waves? Or is it her pleasure to remain open for all who might ask her… who might seek her pleasure hand… who might wish to…”
“Please her fancy,” he concluded.
The owner went outside and shouted “Hurry up!” at his employee.
The employee had been putting rope and metal hooks into a box. A moment later the thin young man walked into the building to greet Branko and take him out to the boat. “Paul,” he said, shaking Branko’s hand. He had a soft, weak handshake, and sad, vacant eyes. He worked seasonally on oyster boats in Connecticut and New Hampshire. He played guitar and used different psychedelic drugs recreationally because he suffered from depression like other fishermen and workers in extractive industries. In the summer he worked for Mr. Gianaris helping retired longshoremen catch fish that they called “retirement fish.”
Though Branko had never been on a boat, never met a fishermen, and never left the shoreline, he respected and took as a promising sign Paul’s ragged face and rubber wading boots. He respected Paul’s instinctive glances for sea traffic as they left the marina.
For Paul the ocean felt like a large workplace, but to Branko it felt like a grand and familiar element. Its size scaled with the sense of his mission, and its smell was robust and meaty, like his favorite food: the California sushi roll.
Standing out on the bow, with the wind in his long, thick, hair, Branko decided that the ocean could, in the future, be the best and most powerful “spawn spot” in the world. For, in addition to being home to the most valuable Pokémon, it also contained hundreds of species of fish and birds with interesting powers. Furthermore, the ocean also required people to risk what was most precious to them, which is something Branko was interested in.
“It smells like sushi,” Branko said aloud.
When Branko returned to the deckhouse, Paul was thinking of nothing. He asked his captain, “Have you ever played Pokémon Go?”
Paul replied, “Uh, yeah a homie played it, and he showed me, yeah.”
“And what did you think?” Branko asked.
“Oh, I mean it was cool. It was cool to see them out in real life like that. You know you point it and it looks likes it’s out in the world.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it, because it’s an extremely unique platform in that way. And in 2017 it won the Global Immersive Gaming Award.”
“Yeah, huh,” said Paul.
“That means it was the top world in the world. That’s one way I like to think about it. There were many virtual worlds to explore in 2017, but out of all of them, the Pokémon Go world was found to be the best of the worlds.”
Branko then continued, “There’s no reason it hasn’t been voted the best immersive world in every year since then, and fans have unanimously voted it as the best world. It’s just that the prize committee feels the need to give the award to someone different every year for some dumbass reason.”
“If you were to design a virtual world,” Branko asked after a moment of silence, “what would you put in it?”
“Like a video game? Like what would my ideal video game be?” said Paul.
“No it’s not exactly the same thing,” replied Branko. “If you were to design an entire virtual world that people could navigate and do things in, that was synced up to the real world, like Pokémon Go. Like in Pokémon Go, you can find Pokémon in the real world, projected into it via the game, and meet lots of people that way.”
“Right, right, I know how it works.”
“Yeah, so if you were to design an immersive platform like that.”
“Well, hmm, that’s an intense question man,” said Paul. “Let me think about it.”
He scratched his beard and looked down through the port window at a pile of rope. A gull had landed on the side of the ship and shat on a metal box. It was crying at the vanished sun.
Under normal circumstances Paul would have said that he had no ideas for a world like that, but he sensed behind Branko’s blank expression, his face that seemed to say nothing at all, a hidden generousness trying to make itself known. He ransacked his soul in search of his interests, and found guitars and romantic love lying inside.
“Basically what I think I want is like the opportunity to design a world where you can meet women easily by searching for guitars together. Like, they put real guitars out in the world, or even animated ones, I don’t know, like, and then basically you go out and search for them. And you meet other people who are into guitars and stuff, and talk about it,” he said.
“That’s a great idea for a game Paul. You must have a creative mind.”
“Yeah, and the point is I would just know the chicks who were around were into music because we would be out hunting for guitars. And that’d be a cool way to meet women and discover new music and shit.”
Branko asked, “What kind of guitars would be available to discover?”
“Oh, maybe, Fenders, Gibson, Yamaha, like there could be rare Stratocasters, like Lennie from Motorhead placed this one, Van Halen, he played this one. Maybe other rare drumsticks and shit like that as well.”
“Cool man. Maybe there could also be one of those guitars with piano keyboards at the top.”
“Yeah, maybe, haha.”
“And would the point of your game to bring guitar players together?” asked Branko.
“Yeah, or really anyone who’s interested in music.”
“It’s important to include everyone,” said Branko. “It’s important to invite everyone into any world you build, that way it promotes understanding.”
Then Branko checked his phone, confirmed that the dragon was where she had been, and said, “There are many ways in which people don’t understand each other despite having fundamental similarities that cross national boundaries, age, race, and sex.”
“How many guitars would there be?” he asked.
“Shit, I don’t know man. I hadn’t thought of it.”
“Well you should make a calculation based off of how many people you expect to play.”
“Yeah, I don’t know man. Maybe two thousand.”
“Well anyway Paul, I’d say you have a great idea for a world. And it’s vital that we all have a dream for a world because our world causes people unnecessary pain.”
“What personal problems would your world solve?” asked Branko, after a long silence.
“Wow, haha. That’s pretty personal. I don’t know. I…”
“I’ll tell you mine,” said Branko. “A lot of people didn’t respect me growing up because I was a nerd and I was extremely good at school—even though in reality I was just okay, and when I went to college I realized that I sucked. But they knew I was a hardcore gamer and stuff and that I was well known in the LEGO community and they held that against me. And I also witnessed violence in my home country. That was something that affected me. And looking back on it, I also think that people resented me because I was never bored and I found ways to live life to the fullest in my hometown even when everyone else was using extreme drugs. All that made me consider myself to be really not good at socializing. Then I played Pokémon Go. And when I did that, I realized that if you bring people together around shared interests, anyone in the world can get along. So for example, I live nearby a ghetto neighborhood, but even gangsters respect me there because I’ve gone out looking for Pokémon with kids in the neighborhood and taught them how to train them and make them evolve. I also became friends with an old woman who’s a highly ranked Pokémon Go player and we sometimes video chat to talk about different tactics and stuff, as well as our lives.”
“Yeah, that’s cool,” said Paul. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. I could use that kind of thing. I would say my problem is I could use more friends and romance, in my life, because I’m out here on this boat driving alone with old dudes with mental problems.”
“But that’s cool, it’s good to know a lot of people,” Paul added.
Then he reclined in his deckchair, and looked at Branko as he searched through his phone. Branko noticed flying fish depositing green eggs on American Samoa. Paul looked at Branko’s face.
Wanting to humor Branko, Paul asked him to hold the steering wheel in place. Then he went into the hull to check on the bilge pumps and the engine. He scraped green mold from the side of the hull. Then he went out to the water and watched as it changed from blue to green. The sky darkened somewhat. He swallowed an amount measured to microdose from the shroom he had brought in his pocket. After a few minutes it allowed him to see pregnant and sad things.
The rows of waves succeeded one another as if running on fixed, intersecting tracks in a train repair yard.
Upon his return to the deckhouse, Paul said, “Yeah man, there’s a lot of pain in the world.”
*****
The orderly rows of waves began to jostle and whip up white foam. Seagulls flying above the trawler saw black clouds in the distance. They passed over Paul and Branko traveling in the opposite direction crying out warnings.
So many miles from the shore, Branko sometimes lost sight of Peace Dragon. When he did, a strong trainer in a beige vest would appear on his screen to say: “Master Trainer! You may wish to enter an area with better cell phone service!” Paul insisted that the GPS would work far out into the ocean.
Having thought about it for some time, Paul finally said, “I wanted to say you, like, I don’t think you can just make a game and escape all the shit that people have to deal with. I’d still be at work with people I don’t really fuck with, doing something I just landed in instead of playing guitar, which is what I should be doing. Like even if I was meeting people what would it change. I’d just be out on my free time collecting these fake guitars,”
Branco interrupted, “They won’t be fake, if you assign value to them.”
“What?”
“If you allow them to create value, then they will not be just fake guitars to you, but real guitars,” said Branko.
“Maybe,” Paul said.
“Damn,” he said after a time.
Just as it had started to rain, Paul had begun to see pleasant motions in Branko’s hair, and, in the clouds, a row of gray cherubs that he could will in and out of existence.
Branko continued: “There’s all kinds of things that I assign value to just as if it were physically real. I can name them and tell you why they’re valuable,” and then he began a long discourse on the merits of many different Pokémon: their relative strengths and weaknesses, their species and genders, their essential element “gold, water, fire, earth, diamond, ice, coal,” their rarity and fitness for competition. Images of each one washed over Paul in procession so that, as he looked out at the water, and his map and the changing skies, and the growing waves, he saw not only cherubs, but many little animals and dragons Branko described, which were shaped like hearts, flowers, potatoes, teeth, and computers, as well as guns, smiling dice, eels, and porcupines, all benevolent, defanged, round, and holding hands just over the water. Seeing them all together like that made him feel like one of God’s children. He remembered an afternoon he had spent his grandmother’s apartment.
She had maintained a menagerie of angels and saints on her windowsill. Paul had been fighting with the cherubs, making them wrangle with one another, and had broken one with red and yellow wings. When he apologized, his grandmother forgave him and made him black tea. But then, as a kind of payment, she had talked and talked at him, about which kinds of angels she liked, and why, and what she imagined heaven was like, and Branko was like her in this way, talking so much about how he wanted things to be.
Branko described several utopian scenes that Paul barely understood involving The Hairy Spider, and a kind of green mountain where people played Pokémon Go. The rain began to fall in huge violent sheets and waves rocked the boat.
Branko stopped his discourse and asked if they would they be safe. The hull began to fill with water.
Paul then said loudly over the sound of the rain and waves, “I wanted to say one more thing man, I been thinking about your question, and I wanted to add this. I wanted to say that in addition to the game being like that, like you’d also be able to put on the map the venues of open mic nights. Like, even in places where there’s no open mic, it would create them. Like it would just say, yo, you can go play here. And then musicians who would be doing whatever, like myself, maybe we can’t book a gig, the game would just say ‘Just go here’ and there you go.”
The skies grew very dark, taking on an almost purple color. The boat ripped up the waves. Branko vomited all over his detective Pikachu T-shirt and then ran to vomit more into the water.
As the rain soaked his long black hair, Branko thought he would die—but the feeling was not how he thought it would be. It was the worst feeling imaginable, like a robbery.
From the safety of the deckhouse, the young man seemed unreal to Paul, a phantom that had visited him during his workday and told him many strange things. But then a wave tossed Branko into the air and he landed on his stomach. Paul ran outside clutching his head. He lifted up Branko from his armpits, saying to himself “That’s really fucked! Fuck!”
There was vomit all over the proud detective Pikachu with his detective’s ballcap and Charizard and Squirtle. Branko was crying because of the pain in his chest and because he saw Peace Dragon less and less frequently on his phone, now wrapped in an almost opaque plastic bag so as to stay dry. Many times Paul considered turning back and said so—Branko raised no objection, feeling himself weak and on the brink of death.
But then they saw in the distance, Branko through his burning tears, Paul through the deckhouse window, a city in the ocean, its shape suggested by red blinking lights. Only a faint outline emerged—but as they went forward, it became clear that Peace Dragon lived on a deep-sea oil rig.
The two men began to see bare outlines of pipes entering into and out of the ocean, huge swinging machines on top of a platform, men running in yellow rain coats, watching green and white lights, climbing ladders and pipes, hammering things, tying blue tarps over metal scaffolding, and hastening to short cranes. The partial and shaking illumination increased the platforms’ black expanse. And Branko and Paul’s imaginations, running wild with suggestion, filled in the dark patches with unknown threats.
Quiet shouting and a quiet horn, either from the platform itself, or from a different ship, sounded in the distance. A coast guard ship shone its flood light into their cramped deckhouse. Paul tried to squeeze cogency into his brain but all around him saw furry waves. The remnants of the procession of animals had been tossed in the air, landing broken on the deck of his own boat, not breathing, and flapping around like captured fish. Not knowing what else to do, he guided the boat under the platform. Above him he saw men spraying crude oil from a hose.
Whipping around like a tortured animal, crushed generations came roaring through the huge black tube. They had been disturbed from rest they merely thought everlasting. The souls of worms, clams, snails, and flat fish were forced back to life, to fire dangerous journeys, not just in boats, not just in cars, trains, and airplanes, but also on screens where children rode magic dogs and rockets, trucks and motorbikes, on endless roads, on mountaintops, in space, in order to capture, train, and assassinate imagined soldiers, bugs, dead people, and thousands upon thousands of imagined beings based in part on worms, clams, and other things that once had lived and now were dreaming.
After so many years inside the earth, asleep and wandering in their worlds of sleep, these disturbed creatures, awake yet again—could they not most rightfully say “DREAMS AREN’T REAL!!!”?
But then Branko discovered Peace Dragon at last, projected on a stairway attached to one of the black columns.
She was asleep.
Against the waves she had pitched a tent of light.
Paul went towards her on Branko’s command and then, while high on the crest of a wave, Branko jumped from the bow of the ship onto a step about halfway up the staircase. He heard the horn and loud voices.
Paul saw water entering the boat and flooding the bow. He would lose the boat and then be arrested. He communicated with the Coast Guard ship to ask for help and meanwhile gathered his memories around him. His lover told him to clean his boots. He saw the cherub repaired.
Branko held his phone out in the rain, its faint light shone on nothing. The screen did not register the weight of his fingers. He collapsed onto his knees.
But as waves reached up to his pantlegs, and his phone began to flicker out and die, Peace Dragon walked into the open Pokéball freely, the first Pokémon who had ever done so. She settled into the ball as if it were her nest.
Branko looked at her.
Her placid eyes contained many long miles. They shone like lanterns through the mist of the world.
Up above were hoses, lights, and men —below were stairs leading into the ocean.
Standing in the open Pokéball, Peace Dragon said, “Hearty congratulations, BRANK0B0SS! It is our fate to assure world peace!”
