The Dinosaur Game

"Detained a kid over at the Buck-and-a-Quarter Store this afternoon."

"Oh? Shoplifting?"

"No ... I'm not really sure what to call it. We didn't end up charging him, anyway."

Carol knew Martha very well. She had three or four narrative methods. For cut and dried work stories, she'd just present the facts. Woman hit her boyfriend with a blender. Both drunk. No outrage, no surprise. For things with a social message, there'd be emphasis. Booked a guy over in Riverview for assault. Black kid knocked on his door, guy chased him away with a hammer. Kid was lost, wanted to ask directions. Just directions!  When there was no clear category, Martha's look and voice would be almost resentful. Her training and her experience – mostly the experience – made her uneasy with uncertainty. She relied on summing up a situation quickly and putting it neatly in a category. When she couldn't, she was unhappy. Carol made a small encouraging noise.

"We got a call to go see about a disturbance. They're not all that ... coherent ... over there, usually. Even with the usual stuff. We never know what's really going on. The dispatchers are supposed to get us the basics, at least, but this just came out as a disturbance."

"In the force?", Carol asked. Martha smiled.

"We're the force. We're always disturbed." They'd made this same lame joke many, many times before. It was one of their little routines.

"So we get out there ... I'm riding with my trainee, you know? Deshawn?"

"Right."

"We go in, and there's the store manager with a lady and this kid. The kid took a look at us and ran. To the back of the store."

"He just ran?"

"Yeah. So I left Deshawn to talk to the adults, and I waited for the kid to find out the back doors are locked. You can't get out anywhere but the front."

"Still? I thought they got cited for that? Fire regulations?"

"They did. But they say it's cheaper to pay the fines than to take the theft loss."

"Another reason not to shop there."

"Indeed. But anyway, the kid finds that out, and then he tries to hide. They don't have any kind of PA system, so I always grab our bull horn when we go in there. I gave him the We just want to talk to you  thing, and he gives up."

Carol glanced at Martha's plate, noted its emptiness, and pointed to the pasta bowl. 

"Oh, thanks, yeah, a little more. So in the meantime, Deshawn is talking to the manager and the woman. I get the kid back up there, and we try to find out what's been going on. The lady doesn't know the kid at all. He's maybe 13 or so, says he's got no ID. But what happened, the lady says she's shopping and the kid comes up to her, starts in on this long thing about how he's her long-lost son, kidnapped by aliens. The lady tells us she's been separated from her husband for twelve years, has one daughter in Illinois she hasn't talked to in a month, got no son, never saw this kid ... but he won't leave her alone. Tells her some kind of story about taking over the US with mind control. The lady gets panicky and starts yelling. Manager hears it, and he calls us first, before he even goes to see what's up."

"You know," Carol said, "you're the legal expert, here, but I might think about ... what is it, maintaining an attractive nuisance? on that store."

"They get their share of weirdos, yeah, but they sell cheap crap at rock-bottom prices. There's people here who need that. Sadly."

"Sadly."

"The kid won't give us anything. Not his name, not what the hell he thinks he's doing. So we put him in the car. That usually helps. But this time, not. All he'll say is that he can't talk about it. They told him he can't ever talk about anything. And he won't talk about who they  are, either. So we turn up the heat. Take him to the office."

Carol put more of the penne and red sauce on Martha's plate and handed it back. They used to have a favorite Italian dive, out on the highway, in a strip mall. It closed, and Carol decided to make their home cooking and their dining space a kind of homage. Ironically, the food was better at home.

"We get him into a room out there, give him a Coke, and try it again. Slow day, nothing's really going on, and Dennis would rather waste our time on it than one of the detectives', so fine. We'll solve this major crime spree ourselves. Besides, it lets me show Deshawn a few of the little methods and techniques. Anyway, we keep going around and around with the I can't talk about it thing. We get him to modify that to I'm not supposed to and then to They won't let me and finally to The other guys in the game." 

"The game?"

"The game. Exactly. So we're now working on what game? and he's all I can't. Deshawn asks him, "You mean, like Fight Club? You can't talk about Fight Club?" But the kid's blank on that one. Never heard of it, as far as I can see. But finally, we get him to say The Dinosaur Game.  Okay, then. I pretend to remember something Deshawn needs to call somebody about, and he picks up on it. Goes right out and looks up The Dinosaur Game on the net."

 "Dinosaurs? Is this some kind of ... what was that Pokémon thing ... finding monsters or something?"

"That was my first idea. But it gets weirder. So Deshawn comes back in, and he's having a hard time keeping a straight face. We convince the kid we know all about it, and he's not getting out of here until he gives us his name and we get his parents to come and pick him up. He's scared, right? Did I say that? Almost in tears. And he caves, so we get his dad to come get him. Dad shows up, we give Dad the domestic violence is a crime, no matter how much of an idiot your kid is talk, and we turn the boy loose."

"So what's the game? What's the dinosaur part?"

"The goddam Internet. You just have to shake your head. We dug into it a bit more, in case we run into it again, and it's just one of those ... fads ... trends, I guess. Started with a creative writing program, somewhere out west, at a college. Students got assigned to write something ridiculous ... way off the page. Then, they all swapped stories and suggested modifications until they got a set of things that maybe somebody might believe. Some of the students put it online ... kind of a would-you-believe thing ... where did that come from?"

"It was from an old situation comedy, I think. Get Smart or something. "

"Anyway, the idea is that you go out and tell strangers some nonsense, and see if you can get 'em to believe it. Six cases so far where the kid playing it got assaulted and/or detained, but it's still going on."

"Oh ... Jesus Christ. How long before somebody tries that on a gun nut or something? And gets shot?"

"Matter of time, probably. Or it'll just fade away. Like – I don't know – Sarah Palin."

"But what 's the dinosaur connection? Why The Dinosaur Game?"

Martha shook her head. She took a sip of the cheap red they traditionally drank with their red sauce. Are we becoming Billy Joel? she thought. "That was what was cracking Deshawn up. These kids aren't super-literate. In the original posts about the game, people described the kind of stories you were supposed to make up. The word preposterous came up. But the kind of kid this appealed to never heard of that. They thought it was pronounced PREpo –STERous ... like a dinosaur."

"I weep for my country," said Carol.

 Joseph McConnell, 2018