The Nix

  “Pulling,” says Pwnage, who now sprints toward the dragon, giant ax in hand. The rest of the raid group follows, crying wildly in a proximate imitation of movies they’ve seen about medieval wars.

  Pwnage, it should be noted, is an Elfscape genius. He is a video-game savant. Of the twenty elves here tonight, six are being controlled by him. He has a whole village of characters that he can choose from, mixing and matching them depending on the fight, a whole self-sustaining micro-economy between them, playing many of them simultaneously using an incredibly advanced technique called “multiboxing” that involves several networked computers linked to a central command brain that he controls using programmed maneuvers on his keyboard and fifteen-button gaming mouse. Pwnage knows everything there is to know about the game. He’s internalized the secrets of Elfscape like a tree that eventually becomes one with the fence it grows next to. He annihilates orcs, often delivering the killing blow to his signature phrase: I just pwned ur face n00b!!!

  During phase one of the fight they mostly have to watch out for the dragon’s tail, which whips around and slams onto the rock floor. So everyone hacks away at the dragon and avoids its tail for the few minutes it takes to get the dragon down to sixty percent health, which is when the dragon takes to the air.

  “Phase two,” says Pwnage in a calm voice made robot-sounding from being transmitted over the internet. “Fire incoming. Don’t stand in the bad.”

  Fireballs begin pummeling the raid group, and while many players find it a challenge to avoid the fire while continuing their dragon-fighting responsibilities, Pwnage’s characters manage this effortlessly, all six of them, moving a couple of taps to their left or right so that the fire misses them by a few pixels.

  Samuel is trying to dodge the fire, but mostly what he’s thinking about right now is the pop quiz he gave in class today. After Laura left, and after it became clear the class had not done the assigned reading, he got into a punishing mood. He told his students to write a 250-word explication of the first act of Hamlet. They groaned. He hadn’t planned on giving a pop quiz, but something about Laura’s attitude left him feeling passive-aggressive. This was an Introduction to Literature course, but she cared less about literature than she did about points. It wasn’t the topic of the course that mattered to her; what mattered was the currency. It reminded him of some Wall Street trader who might buy coffee futures one day and mortgage-backed securities the next. The thing that’s traded is less important than how it’s measured. Laura thought like this, thought only about the bottom line, her grade, the only thing that mattered.

  Samuel used to mark up their papers—with a red pen even. He used to teach them the difference between “lay” and “lie,” or when to use “that” and when to use “which,” or how “affect” is different from “effect,” how “then” is different from “than.” All that stuff. But then one day he was filling up his car at the gas station just outside campus—it’s called the EZ-Kum-In-’n-Go—and he looked at that sign and thought, What is the point?

  Really, honestly, why would they ever need to know Hamlet?

  He gave a quiz and ended class thirty minutes early. He was tired. He was standing in front of that disinterested crowd and he began to feel like Hamlet in the first soliloquy: insubstantial. He wanted to disappear. He wanted his flesh to melt into a dew. This was happening a lot lately: He was feeling smaller than his body, as if his spirit had shrunk, always giving up his armrests on airplanes, always the one to move out of the way on sidewalks.

  That this feeling coincided with his most recent search for internet photos of Bethany—well, that was too obvious to ignore. His thoughts always turn to her when he’s doing something he feels guilty about, which, these days, is just about all the time, his whole life being sort of barnacled by these layers of impenetrable guilt. Bethany—his greatest love, his greatest screwup—who’s still living in New York City, as far as he knows. A violinist playing all the great venues, recording solo albums, doing world tours. Googling her is like opening this great spigot inside him. He doesn’t know why he punishes himself like that, once every few months, looking at pictures late into the night of Bethany being beautiful in evening gowns holding her violin and big bunches of roses and surrounded by adoring fans in Paris, Melbourne, Moscow, London.

  What would she think about this? She would be disappointed, of course. She would think Samuel hasn’t grown up at all—still a boy playing video games in the dark. Still the kid he was when they first met. Samuel thinks about Bethany the way other people maybe think about God. As in: How is God judging me? Samuel has the same impulse, though he’s replaced God with this other great absence: Bethany. And sometimes, if he thinks about this too much, he can fall down a kind of hole and it’s like he’s experiencing his life at a one-step remove, as if he’s not leading his life but rather assessing and appraising a life that weirdly, unfortunately, happens to be his.

  The cursing from his guild mates brings him back to the game. Elves are dying rapidly. The dragon roars from above as the raid unloads all its best long-range violence—arrows and musket balls and throwing knives and electrical lightning-looking things that emerge from the bare hands of the wizards.

  “Fire coming at you, Dodger,” says Pwnage, and Samuel realizes he’s about to be crushed. He dives out of the way. The fireball lands near him. His health bar empties almost to zero.

  Thanks, Samuel writes.

  And cheers now as the dragon lands and phase three begins. There remain only a few attackers of the original twenty: There’s Samuel and Axman and the raid’s healer and four of Pwnage’s six characters. They have never reached phase three before. This is the best they’ve done against this dragon.

  Phase three is pretty much like phase one except now the dragon is moving all around and opening up magma veins under the floor and shaking loose huge deadly stalactites from the cave’s ceiling. Most Elfscape boss fights end this way. They are not so much tests of skill as of pattern memorization and multitasking: Can you avoid the lava splashing up from the floor and dodge the rocks falling from above and watch the dragon’s tail so that you’re not in the way of it and follow the dragon around its lair to keep hitting it with your dagger using the very specific and complicated ten-move attack that achieves the maximum damage output per second necessary to bring the dragon’s health bar to zero before its internal ten-minute timer goes off and it does something called “enrages” when it goes all crazy and kills everyone in the room?

  In the throes of it, Samuel usually finds this exhilarating. But immediately after, even if they win the fight, he always feels this crashing disappointment because all the treasure they’ve won is fake treasure, just digital data, and all the weapons and armor they’ve looted will help them only so long, because as soon as people start beating this dragon the developers will introduce some new creature who’s even more difficult to kill and who’s guarding even better treasure—a cycle that endlessly repeats. There is no way to ever really win. There is no end in sight. And sometimes the pointlessness of the game seems to reveal itself all at once, such as right now, as he watches the healer try to keep Pwnage alive and the dragon’s health bar is slowly creeping toward zero and Pwnage is yelling “Go go go go!” and they are right on the verge of an epic win, even now Samuel thinks the only things really happening here are a few lonely people tapping keyboards in the dark, sending electrical signals to a Chicagoland computer server, which sends them back little puffs of data. Everything else—the dragon and its lair and the coursing magma and the elves and their swords and their magic—is all window dressing, all a façade.

  Why am I here? he wonders, even as he is crushed by the dragon’s tail and Axman is impaled by a falling stalactite and the healer burns to ash in a lava crevice and so the only elf remaining is Pwnage and the only way they’re going to win is if Pwnage can stay alive, and the guild cheers through their headsets and the dragon’s health ticks down to four percent, three percent, two percent…
br />   Samuel wonders, even now, so close to victory, What is the point?

  What am I doing?

  What would Bethany think?

  3

  THE DANCE PWNAGE DOES in his living room looks like a conglomeration of things football players do in end zones after touchdowns. He is fond of this one maneuver where he moves his fists in a wheel in front of him—“churning the butter” is what he thinks this is called.

  “Pwnage rules!” somebody shouts. The elves would be giving him a standing ovation if they weren’t all corpses. Their approval roars out of the speakers of his home-theater array. All six of his computer screens now show different angles of a dead dragon.

  He churns the butter.

  He does that fist-pump thing that looks like he’s starting a lawn mower.

  Also, that obscene dance where it’s like he’s spanking something directly in front of him, presumably ass.

  The elves’ ghosts make their way back to their bodies and one by one his friends pop up from the cave floor, resurrected in that special video-game way where you die but you never really Die. Pwnage collects the loot at the far end of the cave and hands it out to his guildies—swords and axes and plate armor and magic rings. It makes him feel benevolent and bighearted, like a man on Christmas Day dressed as Santa.

  Then the others begin logging off, and he says goodbye individually to each of his guildies and congratulates them on their excellent performances and tries to convince them to stay online longer and they complain that it’s too late at night and they have to work in the morning and so he agrees, finally, that it’s time to go to sleep. And he logs out and shuts down all his computers and slips into bed and closes his eyes, and that’s when his mind starts in with the Sparkles, those hallucinatory blips of elves and orcs and dragons that cascade unstoppably through his head as he tries to rest after another of his Elfscape benders.

  He hadn’t intended to play the game today. He certainly hadn’t intended to play as long as he did. Today was supposed to be the first day of his new diet. Today was the day he had vowed to start eating better—fruits and vegetables and lean proteins and no trans fats and nothing processed and reasonable portions and carefully balanced meals of huge nutritional abundance, beginning today. And he launched his brand-new eating-better lifestyle that very morning by cracking open a Brazil nut and chewing it and swallowing it because Brazil nuts were one of the “Top Five Foods You’re Not Eating Enough Of” according to the diet book he bought in preparation for today, along with the diet book’s sequel books and the diet’s associated meal plans and mobile-device apps, all of which advocated a cuisine made up largely of animal proteins and nuts—basically hunter-gatherer. And he thought about all the heart-healthy good fats and antioxidants and metanutrients inside the Brazil nut pouring through his own body doing helpful things like zapping free radicals and lowering his cholesterol and hopefully strengthening his energy levels because there was so much to do.

  The kitchen urgently needed renovation: The countertop laminate was cracking and curling at the edges, and the dishwasher stopped working last spring, and the garbage disposal died maybe a year ago, and three of the four burners on the stove were useless, and the refrigerator had lately gone insane—the fridge side shutting down unpredictably and spoiling hot dogs and lunch meats and souring milk while the freezer side occasionally went hyperactive and locked all his TV dinners in permafrost. Also the kitchen cabinets needed to be cleared of various plastic collections of Tupperware gone yellow with age, and the forgotten bags of dried fruit or nuts or potato chips, and the many small, cylindrical containers of herbs and spices arranged in geologic layers formed by his previous attempts to start new diets, each attempt requiring the purchase of whole new sets of herbs and spices because in the time elapsed since the last serious attempt the old herbs and spices fused within their jars into single, unusable, dehydrated chunks.

  And he knew he should open up all the cabinets and throw everything away and make sure there were no colonies of bacteria or bugs living in the farthest, darkest back corners, but he didn’t really want to open the cabinets and check for bugs because he was afraid of what he might find, namely bugs. Because then he’d have to put up plastic and fumigate and clear space elsewhere to create a kind of “staging area” in which to pile the necessary parts (the new cabinetry and planks for the hardwood flooring and the new appliances and the various hammers, saws, boxes of nails, screws, PVC pipes, and other shit necessary for drastic kitchen reconstruction), though looking around the house he understood how difficult this was going to be: The living room, for example, had to be a no-construction-debris zone in case some evening in the future he found himself entertaining unexpected guests (meaning: Lisa) who would not find heaps of tools inviting or romantic; same with the bedroom, also a bad staging-area choice for exactly the same reason, though admittedly it had been quite a while since Lisa had come over, mostly because she insisted they maintain their “distance” during this new phase of their relationship, an edict that did not stop her from asking for rides to work and to various mini-malls to complete various errands, and just because Lisa had divorced him didn’t mean he would let her hang high and dry without a driver’s license and a car, and while he knew most guys would do exactly that, he was just raised differently.

  So the only viable staging area for kitchen detritus would be the spare bedroom, unfortunately also impossible because the bedroom was already overflowing with things the throwing away of which was unthinkable—the boxes of high-school awards, badges, trophies, medals, achievement certificates, and somewhere in there that black leather journal that contained the first several pages of a novel he promised himself he’d get around to writing very soon—and so he had to go through those boxes and catalog their contents before he could create the proper staging area necessary for the kitchen renovation that was required if he was going to start his brand-new diet.

  Plus there was the matter of budget. As in, how to afford a totally new healthy diet plan when already he was falling into profound debt paying for his many accounts to World of Elfscape and his new smartphone. And yes from an outside perspective he could see how the purchase of a $400 smartphone and concomitant unlimited text and data plan might have seemed exorbitant for someone whose livelihood did not depend on the accessibility of electronic communication, and in fact the overwhelming majority of text messages sent to his smartphone after its purchase were from the maker of the smartphone itself—asking him whether he was satisfied with his purchase and offering him insurance plans and encouraging him to try the company’s other software and hardware products—with the few other text messages coming from Lisa saying that she was unexpectedly needed at the Lancôme counter or was leaving the Lancôme counter early or was staying late at the Lancôme counter or didn’t need a ride because she’d been invited “out” by “someone at work,” and these were the texts that made him shudder with jealousy at their infuriating ambiguity and he curled up on the couch and chewed his brittle fingernails and wondered at the boundaries of Lisa’s fidelity. And while of course he could no longer expect hegemonic marital monogamy, and while he could acknowledge the divorce created a certain finality to their relationship, he also knew that she did not leave him for another man, and he was still a major fact in her life, and so a part of him thought that if he was useful enough to Lisa and helpful enough and present enough that she would never actually “leave him” leave him, hence the need for the smartphone.

  Also the essential diet- and exercise-related apps available on the phone were indispensable in any new eating-right program, apps where he could record each day’s food and drink intake and receive an analysis of how he was doing both calorically and nutritionally. For example, he recorded what he ate in a normal day to set a kind of “baseline” by which his future excellent eating-right diet could be accurately compared, and found that his three espressos for breakfast (with sugar) registered at 100 calories, his six-shot latte and brownie for lu
nch was another 400 calories, leaving him 1,500 calories shy of his 2,000-calorie daily ceiling, meaning that for dinner he likely had room for two and maybe even three frozen packages of Ocean Bonanza Salmon Fajitas, each kit containing precisely cut french-fry-looking fajita vegetables and a packet of salty red stuff called Southwestern Spices to which he usually added another tablespoon or so of salt (the smartphone diet app registering this as zero calories, which he considered a huge flavor victory), and he ate these frozen salmon meals rather quickly and intensely while trying to ignore that the microwave cooked things so unevenly the green peppers could literally burn his tongue while the insides of some of the larger salmon lumps were still so cold they crumbled apart with a texture of something like damp tree bark, all of which made for an incredibly unpleasant mouthfeel but did not prevent him from stuffing his freezer full of salmon fajita kits, not only because the boxes said they were Surprisingly Low-Fat! but also because the 7-Eleven was having a consistent and amazing ten-for-five-dollars clearance deal on them (limit ten).

  Anyway, the smartphone app analyzed the nutrients and metanutrients he consumed and compared them to FDA-recommended dosages of all the important vitamins, acids, fats, etc., and displayed the results in a graph that should have been a soothing green if he were doing it all correctly but was actually a panic-button red due to his alarming lack of really anything necessary for the maintenance of basic organ health. And yes he had to admit that lately his eyeballs and the ends of his hair had acquired a disconcerting yellowish hue, and his fingernails had become thinner and more brittle and had a tendency, when chewed, to suddenly split right down the middle almost all the way to the base, and recently his nails and hair had stopped growing completely and now seemed to recede in places or even curl back on themselves, and also he’d developed a more or less permanent rash on his arm at the place a wristwatch would go. So while he was typically far under his 2,000-calorie daily maximum, he understood that the calories he needed to consume in order to “eat better” were totally different kinds of calories, namely the organic fresh whole-food kind that were prohibitively expensive given the monthly credit card payments he was making on his smartphone and its associated text and data plans. And he grasped the paradox of this, that it was somewhat of an ironic bind that paying for the device that showed him how to eat right prevented him from having the money to actually be able to eat right, and yes he was putting all this on his credit card, the debt on which was painfully growing and his ability to pay it off fading away from him like a sort of continental drift. Ditto his mortgage payments, which also kept going up because a realtor had convinced him, years ago, before the town (and the nation’s real estate market in general) went to total shit, to refinance his house using some “negative amortization” instrument. This was a huge financial windfall at the time and allowed the purchase of an HD television and various elaborate video-game consoles and an expensive at-home computer workstation, but now was a huge financial drain as the mortgage payments kept jumping shockingly higher while his home’s value had, at last check, crashed and flatlined at such a confoundingly low number it was as if the house had suffered a catastrophic interior meth-lab explosion.