“Divorce?” Jason nearly yelled.

“Stay calm, Jason, these things happen,” his wife Vilma told him. “We’re no longer compatible, and I’ve grown.”

“By seventy-five pounds, at least,” Jason thought, and tried to remember her when she was a voluptuous, redheaded bombshell. Now she was a bombshell, alright, Fat Boy.

“There’s just the matter of child support…”

“Child support?!” Jason clenched his fist, and felt like punching something. Then it occurred to him that neither of his two children were his idea, but had been accidents, and now he was going to end up paying for a long time.

“…and alimony,” Vilma continued calmly.

“Alimony?!” Jason yelled.

“Is there an echo in here?” His wife looked at him with disdain, holding the baby in her arms and Joey at her side. “You know, Steve has helped me to realize how much potential I have, and how I’ve been willing to settle for a drab marriage.”

“Drab marriage? I’ve been working my ass off for the last five years, paying bills constantly. Now I’m working the night shift, and I’m having difficulty…wait… Steve Forsythe, of middle management?”

“Why, yes, not that it’s any of your concern,” she harrumphed.

Steve Forsythe had to be making at least twice his salary, which Jason supposed was just a coincidence. Jason had met the guy, who was the typical management type—ambitious, driven, a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy who had no time for fun and games. Now Steve, of all people, was taking his place, after five years of hard work and bill paying?

“All right!” Jason yelled, startling his son and the baby. “Where’s the monkey? I want to talk to the monkey right fucking now!”

“The monkey on your back?” Vilma asked.

“You’re saying I’m an addict?” Jason found himself becoming infuriated. “Is that how you plan to get custody of the kids?”

“No, there’s a monkey on your back.” Vilma pointed over his shoulder.

He turned to look over his shoulder, and saw the monkey’s cartoonish smile, which seemed to be impossibly large and full of teeth.

The monkey hopped down and motioned to the couch. “Have a seat. You’re dreaming, but it still affects your heartbeat and blood pressure.”

Jason looked at the doorway, where his wife and two children had been a second ago, but they were gone. He began pacing the floor in his agitation. If this was a dream and a stupid video game, then why was he eager to strangle someone to death with his bare hands?

Jason kicked the couch, the dropped down heavily, slapping the cushions on either side of him with his palms. The monkey brought him a beer from the kitchen, and this beer tasted as good as any beer he’d ever had.

“No hangovers, either,” the monkey announced.

Jason took a long swig. He hoped he could get drunk in his dream. “Okay, what a total set up. She’s gorgeous, but then we get married, and she looks horrible. What the hell is that?”

The monkey shrugged his shoulders. “That’s life. Once you marry her, she can’t get any younger—it’s simple physics. Women will gain weight over the course of a marriage, which is a documented fact provable by statistics.”

“Plus, she gets pregnant. What kind of video game has women getting pregnant?” Jason huffed.

“Magical realism, remember?” the monkey replied. “In the game we are able to show you things that the average guy can’t see, like how his wife is going to look in ten, fifteen, or twenty years.”

“And pregnancy?” Jason shot back angrily.

“You’re not the only player in the game,” the monkey said matter-of-factly, readjusting the red fez on the top of his head.

Jason rocked back in his seat. “What?”

“Women also play the game, and the female characters in the game are motivated like real women. Women make money from getting pregnant and getting married.” The monkey leaned forward in his recliner. “Like in real life, women in the game have a timeline that declines with age, so they have an incentive to get married now, which is where the real money is made.”

Jason swatted the couch in his frustration. “I’m telling you, the game is rigged. I would have been okay if it weren’t for those two accidental pregnancies.”

“Accidental?” The monkey arched his eyebrows, an expression that was both doubtful and mocking. “Were those pregnancies accidental? Wake up, there are no accidental pregnancies. Women get pregnant strategically, not accidentally.”

“Whoa,” Jason protested. “That sounds pretty judgmental. I wouldn’t say that all…”

The monkey cut him off. “Look, kid, you just got played in the game. You need to stop looking at women as innocent victims, because they’re going to play that role, and regard them as independent actors. Vilma got pregnant to get you to agree to marry her, then got pregnant to keep from having to go back to work; that’s what women do. And right now she’s telling Steve what a bastard you are, because she begged you to use birth control, but you selfishly refused.”

“What?” Jason could only stare at the monkey in bewilderment.

“Look at your watch.” The monkey pursed his lips in the direction of Jason’s wrist.

“What’s the 100R, for?” Jason asked.

“R is for recurring,” the monkey explained. “She’ll get $25 a month for each child, plus $50 in alimony, every month.”

“A hundred dollars a month?” Jason was incredulous. “My salary is only a hundred and seventy-five a month. Plus, Steve makes plenty of money. She doesn’t need alimony.”

“It doesn’t matter what anybody needs—that’s hardly even relevant. The kids will get the money until they turn 18, assuming she doesn’t go back to the judge to have the payments increased. She’ll get the alimony until she remarries, which could be the rest of your life.”

Jason hurled his beer across the room, where it struck a portrait of Woodrow Wilson and splattered, sending a spray of foam over the wall.

“It’s just a game, remember.” The monkey gestured with his palms down, in a lowering motion. “No sense damaging your heart over a game.”

“All right, the whole divorce thing was a set up. It was all rigged to make marriage look bad,” Jason fumed.

The monkey shook his head widely from side to side, and his lips parted to reveal his teeth. “Two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women, and the guy never sees it coming. That’s the reality.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Jason couldn’t get over his agitation. “Let’s try it again, only this time, no divorce. Got it?”

Jason found himself in a hospital corridor with a pocketful of cigars. Three kids, and this last one was unplanned, too, but at least he had a family, and if his wife was an overweight Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade blimp version of her former self, well, he was no Rudolph Valentino himself. Jason saw it up ahead, the newborns section of the hospital.

At the large nursery window, Jason saw nurses shuffling among the cribs, weighing infants, preparing bottles, and wrapping up babies in blankets. He held up his nametag to one of the nurses, who glanced at it and nodded her head.

The nurse spun and went to the crib with the “Whitlock” tag. When she reached the crib, she recoiled, as though there were a snake inside.

“Oh, man, this is rigged,” Jason moaned. So his new child was handicapped. What did the kid have, a hand sticking out of his forehead or something? His grandfather was so desperate to cook the books that it was comical. Or maybe the kid was The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The nurse composed herself and scooped up the baby, then brought it to the window, smiling weakly. “Your son, Mr. Whitlock.”

Jason nearly toppled over. He got the “black” part right: the child was nearly pure Negro, or African-American, to use the modern term.

“There’s some mistake!” Jason yelled loudly enough to be heard through the glass.

The nurse shook her head while holding the baby, who had a shock of hair like a sooty Brillo pad. “Vilma Whitlock is the mother, and you, Mr. Whitlock, are the father.” The nurse looked at the baby to avoid meeting Jason’s eyes.

Jason went around to the door, despite the nurse’s protestations. This was a video game, after all. “All right,” Jason shouted. “Where’s my baby?”

The nurses eased back, and one slyly reached for the hotline for security. The nurse who held the baby was subtly screened by the other nurses to protect her and the baby in case Jason tried something rash.

“Look!” the nurse said, holding up the baby’s ankle to display the band. “Vilma and Jason Whitlock, baby, Jason Whitlock Jr.”

“What the hell?” Jason seethed. “Put a name tag that says ‘Jason Whitlock, Jr.,’ on the ankle of Kunta Kinte, and suddenly that makes me his father?”

A bottle toppled out of a crib, so one of the nurses bent down to pick it up and put it back into the crib, which struck Jason as highly unsanitary, which explained why this joke of a hospital could mix up a white child and a black child. Looking more closely, he saw that the bottle was a little red fez, and an organ grinder’s capuchin monkey with an ornate gray vest lay in the crib.

“Legally, you are the child’s father.” The monkey sat up in the tableau, where all the other actors were frozen, including the nurse holding the black baby with the “Jason Whitlock, Jr.” name tag on his ankle.

“That’s it,” Jason sputtered. “I’m getting divorced.”

“Remember, you said no divorce?” The monkey leaned back on the crib with his arms draped over the sides. “If you divorce her, the child is still legally yours, and you will make child support payments until he turns eighteen.”

“Look at him, for crying out loud!” Jason pointed a finger at the infant. “There is no way in hell that baby could be mine!”

“Biologically, no,” the monkey replied. “But legally, you are the father of every child your wife gives birth to during the time you are married, whether that child is black, Asian, or Great Dane.”

“It’s rigged,” Jason huffed.

“Yes, of course, a black child is dramatic, but hundreds of thousands of men support children who are not biologically theirs, often unknowing. How do you know that your son Joey is yours? Sure, it’s a video game, and we could rig it, but just like in real life, Vilma could have been having an affair with the owner of the diner, and planned to use that pregnancy to get him to commit. When that doesn’t work, she goes to you.”

“It’s fixed. Somebody’s marriage works,” Jason pointed an accusing finger at the monkey.

“True, but you don’t know which ones will. Marriage is always a huge crap shoot, and if it goes wrong—as it often does—the results are catastrophic, to your finances, your health, your attractiveness to women. We can do scenarios all day, where your teen daughter gets pregnant, your son gets hooked on drugs, your wife leaves you for her lesbian lover, you donate blood marrow for your son’s operation and find out that you’re not compatible because he’s not your son. Or, you’re the guy from the FBI’s most-wanted TV show, whose son was abducted and decapitated, and during the background investigation the FBI discovered his wife had an affair with the gardener. Or your wife keeps running up bills and eventually you declare bankruptcy.

Once you get divorced, what happens to your ability to get women in the game? What happens to your income and wealth when you’re making payments for decades for kids that you may never even see, who have been poisoned against you by their mother?”

If he were standing along the sidewalk on a street full of traffic, Jason would have stepped out in front of a truck. Jason felt miserable.

“Buy and hold,” Jason said, at which point he found himself chased by a giant spider, and try as he might, he couldn’t get his gun to fire.

* * *

“Is marriage that bad?” Jason asked his grandfather. He sat on his recliner, drinking an iced tea with a lemon wedge in it.

“My parents were married all their lives,” Grandpa replied. “Then my dad got cancer and my mom loved him up until the last moment. I’ve never in my life seen such a display of true love, real compassion. I suppose that’s the best-case scenario, but there’s no guarantee. It didn’t work out like that for me or your dad. And when my father died, he had a nice house and a nice car, but hadn’t accumulated any wealth in his entire life, even though he was a cop and my mom worked at the bank.”

“I don’t know—it just seems so cynical.” Jason shook his head and breathed out. Teaching today had been brutal, culminating in his seventh period class-from-hell.

Grandpa looked wistfully out the window. “I’ve often wished that things could have turned out for me like they did for my parents, but the problem is that the typical guy gets married young, before he knows anything or has built up any wealth. You take a guy with no sex life, and a woman comes on to him and starts giving him sex. He thinks if he gets married there’s a lifetime of free, unlimited sex, and figures that two can live more cheaply than one, right? With two people paying the bills, everything should cost half as much. Only he takes on the role of breadwinner, or provider, and she has no incentive to save or economize, because everything for her is free.”

“I just don’t get the whole pregnancy thing, though. Why pregnancy in a video game?”

“Remember, I’m trying to teach you about the real world, which is the whole purpose of The Midas Game. Once you get a woman pregnant, you lose. To a man, having a child is a serious decision that should be carefully considered. For a woman, pregnancy is a tool, like a pry bar or a socket wrench. It doesn’t even have to be a real pregnancy—she can make one up, like making up a boyfriend or a previous bad relationship.”

Jason ran his hand through his hair. “I thought because I know about biology and where babies come from that I know all I need to know. Now I realize I’m clueless.”

“The first step is realizing you don’t know everything,” his grandfather said to assure him. “Right now, you should be building wealth, but if you get married or get someone pregnant, or any combination of the two, it’s like trying to swim while carrying the anchor to the Queen Mary. Once you get money, and you will, the really sharp women will come out of the woodwork to get their hands on it.”

“Okay, I suppose that’s the kind of problem I need to have—women out to get me for my money.”

“Actually, that’s the problem you have right now,” Grandpa replied, “like getting taken for a hundred bucks at The Outback. But when you make the real money, gorgeous women are going to circle like buzzards, and if you aren’t wise, they will clean your corpse.”

The two of them sat silently for a while. Jason had a lot to think about.

Grandpa smiled at Jason. “Right now, we’ve been busy working on finances and your romantic life. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done, but you’ve been doing a good job on your fitness. Look at your watch.”

Jason saw that the health column in the game had turned light green. “Wait a minute,” Jason wondered aloud, “what happened to my -100R, the monthly child support and alimony payments?”

“You’ve been given a do-over,” his grandpa said with a smile. “Unless you want to stay married to Vilma.”

“No,” Jason wiped his brow in relief. “Thanks, man, I was so screwed in the game.”

“The point is not to make your game experience miserable, but to show you how women will use pregnancy as a means to get what they want, and how seemingly reasonable, rational decisions like getting married can go horribly wrong in real life, with long-lasting, catastrophic consequences.” Grandpa finished the last of his tea. “You’re almost there with your thousand-dollar emergency fund, but tonight we try a little superhero action-adventure.”