CHAPTER 3: The Inventory
George woke up at seven in the morning without an alarm.
It was Sunday, March 15th, and the light was coming through the window with the same golden insistence as the day before. For three or four seconds, while his brain made the transition from sleep to waking, George didn't know where he was. He reached with his hand for the nightstand of his Montreal apartment, the phone screen he always left charging, the familiar texture of the expensive sheets he had bought himself as a bachelor's consolation. He found none of those things. He found a futon, a rough sheet, and a ceiling with a crack.
And then he remembered.
He sat up on the futon and looked at his hands. Young. Unlined. With a strength in the tendons that felt like contained electricity. It had not been a dream. He was still here. He was still twenty-one years old.
He got up, went to the bathroom, washed his face with cold water. The mirror gave him back the same young face as yesterday: dark hair, smooth skin, rested eyes. He stood looking at himself for a few seconds, studying himself the way you study a new tool. This body was his most tangible advantage. Young, healthy, with energy to spare. He had to take better care of it than he had the first time.
He made coffee in the drip machine on top of the stove, Folgers from a tin, the kind of coffee that at forty-nine would have struck him as an insult but that at twenty-one tasted like a gift, and sat at the desk with the marbled notebook he had started filling the night before.
He had work to do before calling his parents.
* * *
George opened the notebook to page seventeen, where his notes on Castlevania ended, and started a new section.
At the top he wrote: TIMELINE -- WHAT IS COMING.
It was not an exercise in nostalgia. It was survival. If he was going to navigate this world with an advantage, he needed to be clear about what he knew and what he didn't. Which events he remembered precisely, which were blurry, and which he simply hadn't paid attention to in his previous life and therefore hadn't retained.
He started with what mattered most to him: video games.
1998: Half-Life comes out in November. It changes shooters forever. In this world it's already been announced, so it's not something George can or should try to replicate. But it does confirm that the market is ready for games that break the mold.
1999-2000: The PlayStation 2 hits the market. The graphical leap is brutal. The 3D era solidifies and many people declare 2D games dead. George knows that's a mistake; 2D games will come back strong in the future. But for now, swimming against that current will be hard.
2001: Microsoft enters the console market with the Xbox. Sega abandons hardware after the Dreamcast. The landscape reconfigures itself: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft. Three giants.
George stopped. He was writing the history of an entire industry as if it were a prophetic diary. Anyone who read these pages would think he was crazy. He tore out the sheet, ripped it into small pieces, and started over, this time using a personal code: abbreviations, initials, references that only he would understand. He couldn't afford to leave clear evidence of what he knew.
He rewrote the timeline in cipher. The dates were the same, but the names were encoded, the predictions vague to any outside reader and specific only to him. It was paranoid, perhaps. But paranoia is free and the consequences of being found out were unthinkable.
Beyond the video game industry, George tried to remember what else he knew about the world to come. Google would become the dominant search engine. Amazon would go from selling books to dominating e-commerce. Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1998, but Steve Jobs would rescue it with the iMac, the iPod, and eventually the iPhone. The dot-com bubble would burst in 2000, dragging entire fortunes into the abyss. September 11th would change the world in 2001.
He stopped at that last point. The pen went still on the paper.
What did he do with that kind of information? Could he do anything? Should he? If he called the FBI and said a terrorist group was planning to crash planes into buildings in three years, they would have him committed. If he wrote anonymous letters, they would be ignored. He was not a superhero or a spy. He was a video game programmer with memories of the future and a ramen budget.
George closed his eyes for a moment. This was bigger than him. Much bigger. But he couldn't save the world. He could barely save himself. The only thing he could do was focus on what he knew how to do: make games, build something, and take care of the people who mattered to him. The rest would have to run its course.
He went back to the notebook. He focused on the practical.
* * *
Below the timeline, George wrote a list of priorities. Not for the game, he already had that in the first sixteen pages, but for his life.
PRIORITY 1: Finish the degree. Not for the knowledge, which he no longer needed, but for the paper. A Computer Science degree from USF gave him credibility. If he was going to found a studio, negotiate with publishers, and eventually hire people, he needed the world to take him seriously. A twenty-one-year-old without a degree asking someone to invest in his video game is a dreamer. A twenty-one-year-old with a CS degree and a working demo is an entrepreneur.
PRIORITY 2: Don't let go of personal relationships. This was the hardest one. George knew his own tendency to disappear inside his work. He had done it for twenty-eight years and it had cost him his father, his mother, Claire, and anyone who had tried to get close. Not this time. This time, no matter how much the project consumed him, he would set aside time for his family. Sundays were sacred.
PRIORITY 3: Don't spend a single dollar that isn't necessary. Every cent that wasn't rent, basic food, or game development was a wasted cent. No going out to bars, no buying games, no new clothes. The twenty-one-year-old George had modest tastes; the forty-nine-year-old George knew that temporary austerity was a long-term investment.
PRIORITY 4: Find the artist and the musician before May. Summer started in June. He needed to have the team ready by then, because summer would be his window for intensive development without the distraction of classes.
PRIORITY 5: Have a playable prototype by August. Not the complete game, but enough to prove the concept: a character moving through two or three rooms, working combat, a couple of enemies, music. Something he could show a publisher or an investor that would make them understand this was different from everything else.
George reviewed the list. Five priorities. Clear, measurable, with deadlines. It was the kind of planning he had learned over twenty years of project management in the industry. The irony didn't escape him: he was applying Ubisoft's corporate management techniques to build exactly the kind of project Ubisoft would never have approved.
He closed the notebook. Looked at the clock on the kitchen wall: ten fifteen in the morning. It was time to call his parents.
* * *
The phone was in the kitchen, hanging on the wall next to the refrigerator. A corded phone with a cream-colored plastic handset that weighed like a stone. George lifted it off the hook, listened to the dial tone, and for a moment stood paralyzed with the receiver pressed to his ear.
He was about to hear his father's voice.
Richard Hightower had been dead for twelve years in George's previous life. Twelve years of silence in which the only way to hear his voice was through memory, and memories are treacherous: they warp, they soften, they lose their edges. George no longer remembered exactly what his father had sounded like. He knew it was a deep voice, a little rough, with a Midwestern accent he had never fully lost despite decades in California. But the nuances, the inflections, the way he said "son" as if the word cost him enormous effort because Richard Hightower was not a man who expressed affection easily -- that had been erased.
He dialed the number. He knew it by heart, etched into some corner of his brain that not even twenty-eight years of disuse had managed to erode. Seven digits. The phone rang once. Twice. Three times.
Four.
A click.
"Hello?"
Richard Hightower's voice filled the receiver like water filling an empty glass. Deep. A little rough. With that tone of mild impatience he put on when he answered the phone on a Sunday morning, as if the mere fact of the phone ringing were a personal affront against his right to a quiet weekend.
George closed his eyes. He gripped the receiver so hard his knuckles went white. He swallowed. Opened his mouth. His voice came out steadier than he expected.
"Hi, Dad. It's George."
A brief silence. Not surprise, but recalibration. Richard processing why his son was calling him on a Sunday at ten in the morning when he normally only called to ask for money or confirm he was still alive.
"George. Everything okay?"
"Yeah, everything's fine. I just... wanted to know if I could come for lunch today. At the house."
Another silence. Longer. George could almost see his father on the other end of the line, standing in the kitchen of the house in Sunset District, the Sunday paper under his arm and a cup of coffee in his hand, frowning with that confusion he wore when people did unexpectedly kind things.
"Lunch? Sure. Your mother's making roast beef. You want us to save you a plate or are you coming early?"
"I'll come early. Is eleven okay?"
"Eleven's fine, yeah." A pause. "You sure everything's okay, George?"
"I'm sure, Dad. I just want to see you both."
Richard Hightower said nothing for two seconds. Two seconds that felt like an eternity to George. Then, with a voice that was almost, almost imperceptibly softer than before:
"Alright. We'll be here."
George hung up the phone and stood in the kitchen with his hand still on the receiver, breathing slowly, controlling the trembling that was rising from his stomach to his throat. He was not going to cry. He had already cried last night. Not today. Today he was going to see his father, hug his mother, sit at the table where he had sat hundreds of times as a child, and he was not going to waste a single minute of that opportunity feeling sad.
* * *
The Hightower house was on 32nd Street, between Noriega and Ortega, in the heart of the Sunset District. It was a two-story house with a sand-colored stucco facade, a garage that was never used for the car because it was full of tools and boxes, and a front yard the size of a postage stamp that his mother kept immaculate out of pure neighborhood pride.
George took the 5 Fulton bus from his apartment and arrived in forty minutes. The ride was a time tunnel in itself: the hard plastic seats of the Muni, the smell of diesel and compressed humanity, the stops announced by a human driver and not a recording. George watched the San Francisco of 1998 pass by the window like a film in slow motion. The city he knew was there but different: no glass towers in SoMa, no Google buses, no electric scooters abandoned on street corners. Dirtier in some places, more human in all of them.
He got off at the 32nd and Noriega stop and walked the block and a half to the house. The neighborhood smelled of morning fog, of eucalyptus from Golden Gate Park, and of food from some neighbor's kitchen already cooking at mid-morning. The sounds were the familiar ones: dogs barking, a lawnmower in some backyard, the distant noise of traffic on Sunset Boulevard.
George stopped in front of the door. The paint was dark blue, a blue his mother had chosen because she said blue kept bad spirits away, something she had read in a magazine and that Richard tolerated with the silence that was his way of saying "do whatever you want, dear."
He rang the doorbell.
He heard footsteps. The sound of the security chain. The door opened.
Richard Hightower was fifty-five years old, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache he had worn since his thirties that his wife hated but that he refused to shave on principle, and broad shoulders that time was beginning to curve. He wore a plaid flannel shirt over a white t-shirt, worn jeans, and slippers that were probably the same age as George. He had a coffee mug in his left hand and the folded newspaper under his right arm.
He was exactly as George remembered him. And at the same time, completely different. Because the Richard Hightower of memory was a faded photograph, an emotional abstraction. This Richard Hightower was real. Flesh and blood. Smelling of coffee and Old Spice aftershave. With eyes that looked at George with that mixture of affection and bewilderment that was the default expression of a father who had never quite known how to talk to his younger son.
"Hi, Dad."
"Hi, George. Come in."
George stepped inside and the first thing he did, before he could think about it, before he could stop himself, was hug his father.
It was not a casual embrace. It was not the shoulder-pat the Hightower men used as a substitute for physical affection. It was a real hug: both arms around Richard, his face against the flannel shoulder, the coffee mug dangerously close to spilling down George's back.
Richard went rigid. Like a wooden post that had suddenly grown arms and didn't know what to do with them. George felt his father's confusion in every tense muscle, in the way his free hand hesitated a second before landing, clumsily, on George's back, delivering two pats that wanted to be a hug but didn't know how.
"Hey, hey. What's going on?" said Richard, with the voice of someone who has just stepped onto unknown ground and can't find the map.
George pulled back. Smiled. Wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, quickly, as if it were a casual gesture.
"Nothing. I just wanted to see you."
Richard looked at him for three long seconds. A father's eyes trying to read his son, searching for signs of drugs, of trouble, of some girl who had broken his heart. He found none of that. He only found George, his George, but somehow... different.
"You sure everything's okay?"
"Better than ever, Dad."
Richard nodded slowly, deciding it was wiser not to keep asking. He turned toward the kitchen.
"Your mother's making roast beef. Claire said she'd come too. You want coffee?"
George felt his chest expand.
"Yeah. Coffee would be perfect."
* * *
The Hightower kitchen was the heart of the house.
It wasn't large. A rectangular space with formica countertops, white-painted wood cabinets chipping at the corners, a refrigerator covered in magnets from every state the family had visited, and a gas stove where Margaret Hightower was, as she was every Sunday, cooking something that made the whole house smell like home.
Margaret was fifty-two years old, with brown hair showing its first grays that she refused to dye out of a mix of laziness and philosophy, hands that were always doing something -- peeling, cutting, cleaning, fixing -- and a smile that could light up a room or cut you in two depending on what you had done to deserve it.
When George walked into the kitchen, she turned from the stove and looked at him the way mothers look: a full scan from head to toe lasting one second and detecting any physical, emotional, or spiritual anomaly within a three-meter radius.
"George. What a surprise. Come here."
George went. Margaret hugged him with that practical efficiency her embraces had: brief, firm, one hand at the back of his neck and the other on his back, as if she were verifying that all the pieces were still in place. She smelled of rosemary, butter, and that drugstore perfume she had worn since George could remember.
"You're thin," she said, pulling back and looking at him with a furrowed brow. "Are you eating properly?"
"I'm eating, Mom."
"Ramen is not eating, George. Ramen is surviving." She turned back to the stove and lifted the lid of a pot. "Today you're leaving here with containers. I don't care what you say."
George smiled. It was the same conversation as always, the same script as his whole life, and yet it sounded completely new. Because the last time Margaret Hightower told him he was thin and packed him containers of food was in 2012, six months before Richard died, and George had been too distracted by a work deadline to pay attention.
This time he paid attention. To every word. To every gesture. To the sound of the wooden spoon against the pot. To the way his mother pushed her hair off her face with the back of her wrist because her hands were full. To everything.
"Mom."
"Mmm?"
"The roast beef smells incredible."
Margaret looked at him over her shoulder with an expression that mixed suspicion and pleasure in equal parts.
"It always smells incredible. Since when do you notice?"
George didn't know what to say to that, so he simply sat down in the kitchen chair and watched her cook, storing every detail in his memory as if his life depended on it.
Because, in a way, it did.
* * *
Claire arrived at eleven-thirty, just in time for lunch and strategically late enough to avoid most of the preparation.
She was twenty-seven, with dark hair like George's but longer, pulled back in a functional ponytail. She wore jeans, a gray turtleneck sweater, and a denim jacket George vaguely remembered. She was taller than Margaret but had the same eyes: brown, attentive, capable of reading a room in a blink.
"Hi, family," she said from the doorway, with the energy of someone arriving at a place where they know they belong but don't need to make any effort to prove it.
"Your brother came for lunch," Richard announced from the living room, as if reporting an unusual weather event.
Claire hung up her jacket and walked into the kitchen. She saw George sitting by the stove and raised an eyebrow.
"Wow. George Hightower eating at home on a Sunday. Who are you and what did you do with my brother?"
"Very funny."
"I'm serious. When was the last time you came without Mom begging you? Thanksgiving? Christmas?" She sat down across from him. "Everything okay?"
There it was again. The same question as Richard. "Everything okay?" As if the fact that George wanted to spend time with his family were a symptom of something being terribly wrong. And the worst part was that they were right to be suspicious. The twenty-one-year-old George didn't do this. The twenty-one-year-old George was too busy programming, gaming, and convincing himself that his family would always be there and that he didn't need to make any effort.
"Everything's fine," said George. "I just felt like coming."
Claire studied him for a few seconds. Said nothing. Then nodded, accepting the provisional answer, and stood up to help Margaret set the table.
George watched her move through the kitchen with the ease of someone who knows every drawer, every plate, every piece of cutlery in the house they grew up in. Claire at twenty-seven. Young. Without the lines of bitterness that would appear later, when work frustrated her and relationships disappointed her and the distance between her and George became a wall neither of them knew how to climb.
"You hide in your work so you don't have to feel anything, George, and one day you're going to realize there's nothing left underneath."
The line Claire would say to him at Margaret's funeral, years in the future. The line that had disarmed him because it was true. Here, now, those words didn't exist yet. And George was going to do everything he could to make sure they never did.
* * *
They ate in the dining room, all four of them, as they hadn't done since George moved into the student apartment.
The roast beef was perfect. The potatoes were golden on the outside and soft on the inside. The gravy had that thick, comforting flavor that only mothers achieve and that no restaurant chef has ever managed to replicate because the secret ingredient is not a spice but thirty years of Sunday repetition.
Richard ate in silence, as always. Every now and then he glanced at George sideways, trying to figure out what had changed in his son, why he was there on a Sunday without anyone asking him to be, why he smiled every time Margaret served him more food. Richard Hightower was an automotive mechanic; he had spent his life fixing engines, and he understood machines much better than people. But he understood enough to know that something was different, and enough to know not to ask.
Margaret talked for all four of them, as always. She asked George about his classes, his food, whether he was sleeping enough, whether he had met any girls. George answered with more patience and detail than usual, which made Margaret stop mid-sip of water and look at him with that maternal suspicion no answer ever fully satisfied.
Claire talked about her job at the bank. She complained about her boss, a man named Henderson who was apparently incapable of using the fax machine without destroying it. She told a story about a customer who had tried to deposit a check from a country that didn't exist. George laughed genuinely, and Claire looked at him in surprise because George normally responded to her stories with a vague grunt and an "uh-huh" while thinking about something else.
"Did they change your medication or something?" said Claire, half joking, half serious.
"I don't take medication."
"Then something's going on. You're... I don't know. Present."
Present. The word stung more than it should have. Because it was the best description of what he was doing: being present. Something so basic, so elemental, that it shouldn't require dying at forty-nine and being reborn at twenty-one to learn it.
"Maybe I'm just growing up," said George.
Claire snorted.
"You're twenty-one, George. Let me know when you hit twenty-seven and we'll talk about growing up."
George smiled. If you only knew, he thought. If you only knew.
* * *
After lunch, Margaret packed three containers of food. Roast beef, potatoes, and a slice of apple pie she had pulled from the oven when no one was looking. George accepted them with a gratitude so out of proportion for three containers of food that Margaret looked at him with suspicion again.
At the door, he said goodbye to Richard with a handshake that lasted a second longer than usual. Richard noticed. He said nothing, but George saw something cross his eyes: something between confusion and what could, with a great deal of generous interpretation, be called emotion.
He hugged Margaret, who whispered in his ear: "Come more often, George. Your father doesn't say it, but he likes having you here."
He said goodbye to Claire on the sidewalk. She was heading in the opposite direction, toward the apartment she shared with a coworker in the Richmond District.
"Hey," said George before Claire walked away. "You want to have lunch this week? Just the two of us. Somewhere near your bank."
Claire looked at him as if he had proposed a trip to the moon.
"Lunch? The two of us? Without Mom making us?"
"Yeah."
"Who are you?" said Claire, but she was smiling. "Okay. Wednesday I have an hour free at noon. Call me at the bank."
"Done."
Claire walked away down the sidewalk, shaking her head with that smile she had when something surprised her in a pleasant way. George watched her until she turned the corner.
* * *
On the bus back, with the containers in a bag between his legs and the city passing by the window, George made an inventory different from the one that morning. Not of money or tools. Of people.
Richard Hightower. Fifty-five years old. Mechanic. A man of few words and fewer hugs. He would die of a heart attack at sixty-seven if George didn't do something about it. But what? Force him to see a cardiologist? Change his diet? How do you convince a fifty-five-year-old man who thinks he is invincible that his heart has a ticking clock?
Margaret Hightower. Fifty-two years old. The glue of the family. The person who held everything together without anyone giving her credit. She would follow Richard three years later, as if she had decided the world without him wasn't worth the trouble. George didn't know if he could prevent that, but he knew he could give her reasons to stay. More time together. More calls. More Sundays.
Claire Hightower. Twenty-seven years old. Bank secretary. Intelligent, sarcastic, frustrated with a job that was below her potential. In George's previous life, Claire married, divorced, moved to Portland or Seattle, and eventually stopped answering his calls. Here, now, Claire still cared about him. Was still willing to have lunch on a Wednesday. Still smiled when George did something unexpectedly human.
George got off the bus and walked to his apartment. He opened the door, put the containers in the refrigerator, and sat on the futon.
The marbled notebook was on the desk. Sixteen pages of Castlevania. Three pages of timeline. A list of priorities. And a list of five things he was going to do differently.
Tomorrow was Monday. He had class at nine in the morning. Data Structures, a subject he could pass in his sleep. And then, in the library or the campus cafeteria, between classes, he would start sketching the first outlines of what would become the engine of his game. Nothing on screen yet. Just diagrams. Architecture. The structure of a castle that existed only in his head and in a one-dollar notebook.
But first, before all of that, he was going to heat up his mother's roast beef, sit on the futon, and eat every last bite with the slowness of someone who has learned, the hard way, that simple things are the ones that matter most.
End of Chapter 3