My parents and I always invade my brother’s house at Christmas. That’s how it feels sometimes–like an invasion. He lives in a really beautiful house with his wife and two daughters on the edge of the woods about a mile from the high school that he and I both attended. They make room for us, but they are private people, they have their own routines, and having us there is not always easy for them. My parents typically sleep down in the unfinished basement and I sleep in what’s now the baby’s room. I wanted to sleep in the basement this year, partly because I thought the basement would afford me more privacy, and partly because there’s no bathroom down there, so whoever stays down there either needs to make the long trek to the upstairs toilet in the middle of the night, or pee into a jug. Fact: No one ever wants to put his or her parents in a situation where peeing into a jug is involved.

But when I arrive, my parents have already staked out the basement, and have, in fact, already spent several nights down there. “We’ve got the baby’s room all set up for you,” my mother says. And they do. They’ve inflated not one but two air mattresses and stacked one on top of the other on the floor, for maximum comfort (two air mattresses must surely be more comfortable than one), and because my dad can’t remember which of the two air mattresses has a leak in it. “Whichever one is flat by morning is the one with the leak,” he says, obviously proud of himself for turning my bed into a science experiment of sorts.

My brother really plays up the Christmas thing for my six-year-old niece. He hides a small, pinch-faced elf doll, who he has named Jack, around the house every morning, challenging my niece to find him. Whenever my niece misbehaves, my brother always asks her what Jack is going to think about her behavior. Jack, according to the myth that my brother has invented, is one of Santa’s elves who comes to live in their house in the weeks leading up to Christmas to see if my niece is behaving.

The elf doll, like all elf dolls, is unsettling to me. Whenever I stumble across it, it gives me a start. This happens at least two times every Christmas visit.

Climbing into the stacked air mattresses at night, I imagine, is a lot like what climbing into a rubber lifeboat after a shipwreck must be like. It takes some effort to get on board, but once I’m in, the mattresses/lifeboat fold around my body, pulling me into a kind of rubbery crevasse that is difficult to escape from.

In the morning, both air mattresses appear to have lost equal amounts of air in the night. I report these scientific findings to my father. I haven’t slept well, so I go right for the coffee in my brother’s kitchen.

Then I look out the back window of the house, scanning the tree-line. Deer inhabit the woods behind my brother’s house. I enjoy seeing the deer, so I stand there, waiting for one or two of them to emerge. Sure enough, I see shapes moving in the distance. They move slowly, on shaky legs. Something seems wrong with the deer.

“They’re suffering from Chronic Wasting,” my brother explains. I have never heard of Chronic Wasting, so I look it up. Indeed, it’s a real thing. Symptoms of Chronic Wasting Disease, or CWD, according to Wikipedia, include listlessness, decreased interactions with other animals, lowering of the head, blank facial expression, repetitive walking in set patterns, and a smell “like meat starting to rot.” It’s caused by an infection that destroys the animal’s central nervous system, and is, of course, fatal in the end.

The two deer shamble into the light. Their skin hangs off of them like gray bath towels thrown over a clothesline. They stagger towards the house.

Level 4-5. My nickname for today’s level is “Nothin’ But Vines.” Because the whole thing takes place on vines, high above the level’s ground floor. I must get the key, which is located way up there in the tangle of vines, then haul it back down to the level’s ground floor, where the locked door is located. There are three bats which fly in predictable horizontal patterns back and forth across the vines. And there’s a platform that’s occupied by not one but two hermit crabs near the key. Overall, this level doesn’t really put up too much of a fight as long as you remember my rule for vine climbing: going up always takes much longer than going down.

I begin the level by grabbing the only vine that’s reachable from the bottom of the screen: a low-hanging dangler all the way on the right. I begin my ascent, keeping a close eye on the flying patterns of the nearby bat. I climb, climb, climb, etc. grabbing The Hat and the The Handbag during my ascent. Once, with a bat bearing down on me, I forget my vine-climbing rule and try to escape by climbing up instead of down. What a damn fool I am. The bat grabs onto Mario. Then, a surprisingly long sucking animation begins, where the bat is apparently draining Mario’s plump little body of blood. After that, Mario’s bloodless corpse drops to the ground foor of the level, and a very tiny I’m-dead halo appears above it.

On my next pass, I manage to make it through the bats. Near the top of the level, where the key is located, things get sticky, because three enemies–a bat and two hermit crabs–are all squeezed into a very small area, cramped as actors/students all living together in a studio apartment in New York’s East Village. Perched above the flying bat and the platform where the crabs live are a pair of coconuts. Hmm. When I bump into a nut at the right moment, it falls, taking out a bat which happened to be passing through at this moment, then continuing its fall until it also takes out one of the crabs. This is officially the Serendipitous Moment of the Day.

I trigger the second coconut, which takes out the second crab. With the cramped area clear of all enemies, I grab the giant key from its perch, then carefully make my descent back to the ground level via a series of small platforms. Once I’m on the ground, the key goes into the lock, and we’re all done for the day, friends.