Finally, it's getting light outside and the last few guys leave a little before six. As usual, Trevor's the last to head out. He goes into the back room to get his jacket and comes out with a flight sim, Jane's F/A-18, in his hand.

"So show me how this works," he says, not putting his jacket on.

"Why that?"

"You can bomb Iraq, right?"

"Well, yeah, but it's not-"

"I don't want to kill civilians or anything. I just want to know what it would be like."

"What it would be like?"

"Yeah, you know. Retaliatory raids. Preemptive strikes."

"Okay, but it's probably not what you're thinking."

"How do you know what I'm thinking?"

"It's not all action. It's a lot of technical stuff."

"Fine. I want to learn it. Like they did."

"Who?"

"Them. In the training simulator in Florida."

"C'mon, Trevor, Jesus. This isn't like that. It's a game."

"Is it realistic?"

"How do I know? Yeah, it's more realistic than the other stuff we play. But still."

"Well, I want to try it."

"Don't you have to be at work in a few hours?"

"I'll call in, say I'm sick."

He's serious.

"I don't know. It's been a while," I take the box from him and look at it for no good reason, "I'll have to hook up a joystick."

"Can we use that one with the accelerator?"

"It's called a throttle."

Since Trevor's so gung ho to use that old Thrustmaster with the throttle, I have to set up my Sound Blaster's gameport, which is conflicting with the gameport on my motherboard. Why couldn't they have invented goddamn USB ports back when I was happy to spend a few hundred dollars on a good joystick?

While I'm tinkering with some IRQ settings -- why the fuck won't this work? -- Trevor's flipping through the manual.

"What's a velocity vector?" he asks.

"It shows whether you're climbing or diving."

He considers this.

"Who's Jane?"

"Jane?"

"Yeah. Who's Jane?" He points to the box. 'Jane's F/A-18', it says.

"Oh. It's this reference book on airplanes and ships. Named after a guy. Thomas Jane."

"And I thought you had a dippy name."

I should laugh politely, but I can't get the goddamn joystick to calibrate right, so I ignore him. He sees that I'm not even smiling and I immediately feel bad for it.

"You know, I want to do something," Trevor says, "Not just give blood. Which I can't do. I'm blacklisted from giving blood, you know. I have some kind of medical condition that makes me faint. So I want to be able to help some other way."

"We all do."

"I'm thinking of enlisting."

I let this sit.

"Did you hear me?" he asks.

"You're probably too old."

"For infantry. But I can still be a pilot. Or just ground support. Whatever you call it. I want to be ready. You know?"

"That's why you want to play this sim?"

"I want to be ready. I want to have useful skills to offer. You have that tank game, too, don't you?"

"What tank game? Look, Trevor--"

"I mean just in case. It can't hurt."

"Trevor, c'mon. There are other ways to help. Just help people. Any people. Do volunteer work or something."

"That's not what I'm thinking."

"Look, you're angry. It's perfectly natural."

"I'm not angry. You know what's weird? I think I'm glad."

"Glad? What are you talking about?"

"I think I am. People whose dads are still around have it more complicated. They have to deal with, I don't know, confronting them. They have to deal with their dads getting old, going senile, whatever. I have it easy now. It's over. I have no choice in the matter. It's solved for me. I never even knew him, so I don't have to deal with grief and all that. I used to wonder if he'd ever call my Mom or me, if we'd ever talk. I used to wonder what I'd say to him. I used to wonder if I even wanted to talk to him. Now I don't have to wonder. It's easy. I'm glad."

"I suppose that's one way to look at it."

"You just wish you were in my place, don't you?"

"Not really. Not like that. But I understand. Hey, I want to do something, too. I want to help people. We should both do that. Find ways to do that."

"What, working in a soup line or something?"

"Whatever. Bring groceries to old people. Help kids learn to read. Everyone's thinking about the Red Cross, but there's other organizations out there. Join Big Brothers. Coach a Little League team or something."

"A Little League team?"

"I don't know. I've been seeing commercials for Hardball."

"I'm supposed to take Donny to see that." Donny is Trevor's nephew. Donny's dad has to travel for work a lot. Donny's older brother is in the Marines. So Donny is stuck with his mother a lot.

"Why not just spend more time with Donny?" I say.

Trevor is quiet. He's looking at the cover of the manual, which has nothing to look at but the words 'Jane's F/A-18 Flight Manual' against a solid dark background.

"Yeah," he says after a minute.

"You still want to play that?"

"No. It looks boring. Velocity vector? Who wants to play stuff like that?"

"Diablo II? More Virtua Tennis?"

"You know what, maybe I better go. It's been a long night. If I get some sleep, I can still get up tomorrow and pick up Donny after school. His Dad's been out of town and who knows when he's coming back, what with the flights and everything. His Mom made him go see Princess Diaries with her yesterday. Poor kid."

"You guys should see Hardball."

"What's it rated? His mom will freak if I take him to another R-rated movie."

"I don't know. I think it's for kids."

"You know what? I made that up. About my dad. I knew I was going to start crying, but I didn't know why. So I had to think of something."

He's looking at me, wondering if I'm going to be mad. I think I am. "None of that was true?"

"No, no, all of it was true, except the part about the World Trade Center. My mom says he works in an office building downtown. But the rest is true, about him being fat, about me not knowing him, that I'd probably be glad if he died."

Now I feel like an idiot for writing about invisible fathers and pain and honor. It's all true, of course, but does it belong to this moment? Does anything about this joystick that won't calibrate and the games in these boxes belong to this moment, this past week? Surely they've escaped meaning, right? I don't know. Just as Trevor can't figure it out yet, neither can I. Someone shuffled everything and it's like starting over. The people we know, how we know them, how we look at them. What matters.

"Can I go with you guys?" I ask, "When you see Hardball?"

"I'll pick you up tomorrow afternoon. Then we can go get Donny."

The rules are a little different now.

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