by Nathan Hill
And this made him feel stressed, this coupled with all the other financial and budgetary problems, so stressed out that his heart was doing funny things, a kind of jumpy-twitchy thing that felt like someone mechanically palpating his thoracic cavity from the inside. And like Lisa said, “You don’t have anything if you don’t have your health,” which was how he justified his investment in things that helped reduce the stress, namely high-end electronics and video games.
Which was where he turned today. Before completing the chores required of his new diet, he decided he would finish his other chores, the ones waiting for him in Elfscape: the twenty tasks he completed every day that earned him seriously cool game rewards (like flying rideable gryphons and axes of an unlikely size and neat-looking formal jackets and trousers that made his avatar look dapper when he walked around in them). These quests—which usually involved slaying some minor enemy or delivering a message across treacherous terrain or locating some lost important doodad—needed to be completed every day without fail for up to forty days in a row to unlock the rewards in the fastest time mathematically possible, which itself was a kind of reward because whenever he was successful at it these fireworks went off and there was this blast of trumpets and he got his name on the public chart of Elfscape’s Most Epic Players and everyone on his contact list sent him notes of congratulations and praise. It was like the game equivalent of being the groom at a wedding. And since Pwnage played with not just one character but enough characters to field a whole softball team it meant that as soon as he finished the twenty daily quests on his main character he then repeated them for his alternate characters as well, so that the number of daily quest completions required of him jumped to somewhere around two hundred, or more, depending on how many “alts” he was interested in leveling. This meant the whole daily-quest process took about five hours total—and while he knew that playing a video game for five hours straight represented the outside maximum tolerance most people had for playing video games, for him these five hours were simply the prerequisite to actually playing the game, a kind of warm-up for the real play session, something he needed to get out of the way before the fun could really begin.
So by the time he finished the daily quest grind today it was dark outside, and his mind felt so fuzzy and remote and sort of constipationally plugged up after five hours of rote tasks that he did not have the focus or drive or energy for difficult higher-order engagements, like shopping or cooking or a complicated kitchen renovation. So he stayed at his computer and recharged with a six-shot latte and a frozen burrito and kept on playing.
He played for so long that now, as he tries to sleep, he finds the Sparkles especially amped up, and there’s no way sleep is going to come anytime soon, and so the only thing Pwnage can really do is get out of bed and fire up the computers once more and check the West Coast servers and go on another raid. Then he joins the Australian servers, hours later, and attacks the dragon again. Then by four a.m. the hard-core Japanese players come online, which is always a windfall, and he teams up with these guys and kills the dragon a couple more times, until killing the dragon no longer feels triumphant but rather routine and ordinary and maybe a little tedious. And around the time that India appears, the Sparkles have morphed into more of a fleeting mushy luminescence, and he abandons the game and he feels all hazy, like his forehead is physically three feet away from his face, and he decides he needs some decompression time before going to sleep, so he pops in one of the DVDs he’s seen a million times (the thinking here is that he can let it play and zone out a bit, since he knows the film so well, not having to do any hard work brain-wise), one of his collection of apocalyptic disaster movies where the earth is destroyed in any number of ways—meteors, aliens, off-the-charts interior magma activity—and his mind begins to glaze over within the first fifteen minutes, at the point the protagonist figures out the secret the government’s been keeping all this time and now knows there’s some seriously heavy shit about to go down, Pwnage zones out and reflects on his day, remembers vaguely his eager and intense desire that very afternoon to start eating better, and maybe because he feels guilty that he did not, in fact, find it the right day to start eating better, he cracks open another Brazil nut, figuring maybe it’s best to kind of ease into these things, that the Brazil nut is a bridge between his current life and the eating-better life that is ahead of him, and he spaces out and stares at the television with an empty fishlike quality in his eyes and swallows the thick Brazil nut bolus and watches as the earth is destroyed and he sort of happily imagines a rock the size of California falling into the earth and in a skeleton-melting flash wiping out everything, killing everyone, annihilating it all, and he rises from the couch, and it’s almost dawn, and he wonders where the night went, and he stumbles into his bedroom and sees himself in the mirror—his white-yellow hair, his eyeballs red with fatigue and dehydration—and he gets into bed and he doesn’t so much “fall asleep” as he plummets into a sudden allover concussive darkness. And the thing he tries to hold in his mind in this near-comatose state is the memory of himself dancing.
He wants to remember what that felt like: a moment of transcendent joy. He had defeated the dragon for the first time. His Chicago friends all cheered.
But now it won’t come to him, the feeling that made him dance so exuberantly. Pwnage tries to imagine himself doing it, but it feels detached—it has the quality of something he saw on television, long ago. The way he feels now, it couldn’t have been him churning the butter, starting the lawn mower, spanking that ass.
Tomorrow, he vows.
Tomorrow will be the first day of the new diet—the real, official first day. And maybe today was actually a warm-up or dry run or head start for the actual first day of the new diet, which would be very soon. One of these days very soon when he would wake up early and eat a healthy breakfast and get working on the kitchen and clean the cabinets and buy some groceries and avoid the computer and finally, for an entire day, do everything exactly, perfectly right.
He swears. He promises. One of these days will be the day that changes everything.
4
“YOU THINK I cheated?” says Laura Pottsdam, college sophomore and habitual, perpetual cheater. “You think I plagiarized that paper? Me?”
Samuel nods. He’s trying to look sad about this whole situation, like when a parent has to punish a child. This hurts me more than it hurts you, is the expression he’s trying to produce, even if he does not sincerely feel it. Inside, he secretly likes when he gets to fail a student. It’s like revenge for having to teach them.
“Can I just say? Once and for all? I. Did. Not. Plagiarize. That. Paper,” Laura Pottsdam says of the paper that was almost entirely plagiarized. Samuel knows this because of the software—the truly exceptional software package subscribed to by the university that analyzes every essay completed by his students and compares them to every other essay in its massive archive of every paper ever analyzed anywhere. The software’s inner brain is made of literally millions of words written by the nation’s high-school and college students, and Samuel sometimes jokes to his colleagues that if the software ever achieved sci-fi artificial intelligence and consciousness, it would immediately go to Cancún for spring break.
The software analyzed Laura’s paper and found it to be ninety-nine percent plagiarized—everything had been stolen except for the name “Laura Pottsdam.”
PLURIUM INTERROGATIONUM
(OR, “THE LOADED QUESTION”)
“I wonder what is wrong with the software?” says Laura, second-year university student out of Schaumburg, Illinois, communications and marketing major, five foot two or three, dirty-blond hair that in the greenish gloom of Samuel’s office looks a pale legal-pad yellow, thin white T-shirt featuring what seems to be promotional material for a party that happened almost certainly before she was born. “I wonder why it’s malfunctioning. Is it wrong a lot?”
“You’re saying it’s a mistake?”
“It�
��s like so weird. I don’t get it. Why would it say that?”
Laura looks like she showered in a wind tunnel, her hair is so frazzled and disorganized. That she is wearing tiny frayed flannel shorts roughly the size of a coffee filter is impossible to ignore. Ditto her deeply bronze leg tan. On her feet, she’s wearing slippers, Muppet-fuzzy, that yellow-green color of cabbage, with a gray-brown film of dirt around the footpads from being worn too often outdoors. It strikes Samuel that she might have come to his office today literally wearing her pajamas.
“The software isn’t wrong,” he says.
“You’re saying never? It’s never wrong? You’re saying it’s infallible and perfect?”
The walls of Samuel’s office are dutifully decorated with his various diplomas, the shelves filled with books with long titles, the whole dark place affecting a generic professorialness. There’s the leather chair in which Laura currently sits lightly kicking her slippered feet. New Yorker cartoons taped to the door. Little windowsill plant that he waters with a pint-size mister. Three-hole punch. Tabletop calendar. A coffee mug with Shakespeare on it. A set of nice pens. The whole tableau. A coatrack with emergency tweed jacket. He’s sitting in his ergonomic chair. He’s briefly happy about the correct usage of the word “infallible.” The musty odor in his office might be Laura’s sleep smell, or his own smell, still lingering after staying up late playing Elfscape last night.
“According to the software,” he says, looking at the report on Laura’s paper, “this essay came from the website FreeTermPapers.com.”
“See? That’s the thing! Never heard of it.”
He’s one of those young professors who still dresses in such a manner that his students might regard as “hip.” Untucked shirts, blue jeans, a certain brand of fashionable sneaker. This is read by some people as proof of good taste, by others as a sign of internal weakness and insecurity and desperation. He also sometimes curses in class so he doesn’t seem old and square. Laura’s shorts are flannel with plaid bars of red, black, and navy blue. Her shirt is extraordinarily thin and faded, though it is difficult to tell whether this fade is from overuse or whether it was made in the factory to appear this way. She says, “Obviously I’m not gonna copy some stupid paper from the internet. It’s like, no way.”
“So you’re saying it’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t know why it said that. It’s so, you know, weird?”
Laura occasionally puts that upward phonic at the ends of her sentences so that even her declarations sound like questions. Samuel finds this, like most accents, difficult not to mimic. He also finds her ability to maintain eye contact and keep her body relaxed and unjittery throughout all this lying remarkable. She does not display any of the involuntary physical indications of deception: she breathes in a normal manner; her posture is relaxed and languid; her eyes remain fixed on Samuel’s rather than doing that up-and-to-the-right thing that indicates she’s accessing her more creative brain parts; and her face does not seem to be working unnaturally hard to show emotion, as emotions seem to flutter across her face in a well-timed and more or less natural and organic way rather than the usual liar’s face where it looks like the cheek muscles are attempting to mechanically excrete the proper expression.
“According to the software,” Samuel says, “the paper in question was also submitted three years ago to the Schaumburg Township High School.” He pauses to allow this fact to land and sink in. “Isn’t that your hometown? Isn’t that where you’re from?”
PETITIO PRINCIPII
(OR, “THE CIRCULAR ARGUMENT”)
“You know,” says Laura, shifting in her seat, moving one leg under her in what might be the first outward physical sign of distress. Her shorts are so small that when she moves around in the leather chair the skin of her lower buttocks squeaks against it or pulls off with a moist little sucking sound. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but I feel really offended. By all this?”
“You do.”
“Um, yeeee-ahh? You asking me if I cheated? It’s really, like, rude?”
Laura’s shirt, which Samuel thinks was indeed artificially faded using dyes or chemicals or perhaps UV light or harsh abrasives, says “Laguna Beach Party, Summer 1990” in bubbly vintage-looking letters with a graphic ocean scene in the middle and a rainbow.
“You shouldn’t call somebody a cheater,” she says. “It stigmatizes them. There’s been studies? The more you call someone a cheater, the bigger amount of times they cheat.”
The bigger number of times they cheat, Samuel wishes she would have said.
“Plus you shouldn’t punish someone for cheating,” Laura says, “because then they have to cheat more. To pass the class? It’s like”—her finger draws a loop into the air—“a vicious circle?”
Laura Pottsdam consistently comes to class between three minutes early and two minutes late. Her seat of choice is in the far back-left corner. Various boys in the class have slowly shifted their own desk preferences to get closer to her orbit, creeping mollusk-like from the right side of the classroom to the left over the course of the semester. Most sit next to her for a span of two or three weeks before they suddenly shoot away to the opposite side of the room. They’re like charged particles colliding and bouncing apart in what Samuel assumes is some psychosexual melodrama playing out extracurricularly.
“You never wrote this paper,” says Samuel. “You bought it in high school and then used it again in my class. That’s the only thing under discussion today.”
Laura draws both her feet under her. Her leg releases from the shiny leather with a wet pop.
APPEAL TO PITY
“This is so unfair,” she says. The way she so effortlessly and fluidly moved her legs is a sign of youthful flexibility or serious yoga training or both. “You asked for an essay on Hamlet. That’s what I gave you.”
“I asked you to write an essay on Hamlet.”
“How was I supposed to know that? It’s not my fault you have these weird rules.”
“They’re not my rules. Every school has these rules.”
“They do not. I used this paper in high school and got an A.”
“That’s too bad.”
“So I didn’t know it was wrong. How was I supposed to know it was wrong? Nobody ever taught me it was wrong.”
“Of course you knew it was wrong. You were lying about it. If you didn’t think it was wrong, you wouldn’t have lied.”
“But I lie about everything. It’s what I do. I can’t help it.”
“You should try to stop that.”
“But I can’t be punished twice for the same paper. If I was punished in high school for plagiarism, I can’t be punished again now. Isn’t that, like, double jeopardy?”
“I thought you said you got an A in high school.”
“No I didn’t.”
“I’m pretty sure you did. I’m pretty sure you just said that.”
“That was a hypothetical.”
“No, I don’t believe it was.”
“I think I would know. Duh.”
“Are you lying again? Are you lying right now?”
“No.”
They stare at each other for a moment like two poker players who are both bluffing. This is the most eye contact they’ve ever shared. In class, Laura almost always stares into her lap, where she hides her phone. She thinks if the phone is in her lap she has effectively concealed it. She has no idea how obvious and transparent this maneuver is. Samuel has not asked her to stop checking her phone in class, mostly so he can savage her grade at the end of the semester when he doles out “participation points.”
“At any rate,” he says, “double jeopardy doesn’t work that way. The point here is that when you submit work, there’s a basic assumption that it’s your work. Your own.”
“It is mine,” she says.
“No, you bought it.”
“I know,” she says. “I own it. It’s mine. It’s my work.”
It strikes him that if he do
esn’t think of this as “cheating” but rather as “outsourcing” then she might have a valid point.
FALSE ANALOGY
“Plus other people do worse things than this,” says Laura. “My best friend? She pays her algebra tutor to do her homework for her. I mean, that’s way worse, right? And she doesn’t even get punished! Why should I get punished and she doesn’t?”