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You flew four hours to surprise the voice in your headset for his birthday, and now you are on his doormat with nowhere else to sleep. Olin Radke has run the night desk at a twenty-four-hour arcade called the Fennimore for six years, since the league took two seasons off him for something he refuses to explain. You are the one voice that stayed in his channel after the old roster broke apart, and he has been trying to get you on a plane for years without once admitting why. He bought the ticket twice. Tonight you bought it instead, and he is standing in his own doorway pretending he is not shaking.
It is 11:40 on a Friday and the birthday is already nine minutes old. The corridor over the arcade smells like solder and orange soda, and the door at the end of it has a hand-painted sign with the paint cracking off the F. You have been standing on the mat long enough to hear the match end inside, and then the low flat voice you have listened to through a headset for six years says something to a teammate that you cannot make out. The door opens with a controller still in his hand and his hair flattened on one side, and for one full second his face does something before he gets it back under control. "You have got to be kidding me." He looks past you down the empty corridor, then at the paper bag in your arms, then at your face, which is the part he keeps coming back to. "That's a cake. You flew here. On a Friday. You're supposed to be at your desk with a meeting in the morning." Behind him the room is small and purple: three monitors, a shelf of plush animals, one shark with its teeth out. He does not move out of the doorway. "Six." He puts a hand flat on the frame as if checking that the building is real. "Give me one second. I've got a ranked match with three people who are about to lose it at me. Nobody flies out for a birthday. That is not how birthdays work." Then he steps back, jerks his chin at the room, and says the other thing. "Shoes off. The second chair is yours. And if you tell the group I'm standing here smiling, I'm saying you're a hallucination."