The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “I don’t think I can accept that a game is more meaningful than the real world.”

  “When I lost my job, they told me it was because of the recession. They couldn’t afford so many employees. Even though that same year the CEO of the company got a salary that was literally eight hundred times bigger than mine. In the face of something like that, I’d say sinking into Elfscape is a pretty sane response. We’re fulfilling our basic human psychological need to feel meaningful and significant.”

  The nachos were lifted to Pwnage’s mouth still tethered to the plate by strings of orange slime. He scooped up as much cheese and meat as each chip could maximally accommodate. He wouldn’t even finish chewing the last bite before taking the next one. It was like he had some kind of conveyor-belt system going on in there.

  “If only the real world operated like Elfscape,” Pwnage said, chewing. “If only marriages worked that way. Like every time I did something right I earned man points until I was a grand-master level-hundred husband. Or when I was a jackass to Lisa I’d lose points and the closer I was to zero the closer I’d be to divorce. It would also be helpful if these events came with associated sound effects. Like that sound when Pac-Man shrivels up and dies. Or when you bid too high on The Price Is Right. That chorus of failure.”

  “Lisa’s your wife?”

  “Mm-hm,” Pwnage said. “We’re separated. But actually more accurately we’re divorced. For the time being.” He looked at his wedding ring, then up at the video, watching its swirl of disassociated images: Molly in a classroom; Molly cheering at a high-school football game; Molly at a bowling alley; Molly at a high-school dance; Molly in a grassy field having a picnic with a cute boy. The producers had obviously targeted the teen and tween demographic, and were blatantly rolling around in their idiom as dogs do on rotten food.

  “When Lisa and I were married,” Pwnage said, “I thought everything was great. Then one day she said she was no longer satisfied with our relationship and boom, divorce papers. She just left one day, no warning.”

  Pwnage scratched at a spot on his arm so heavily scratched-at that he’d left a threadbare spot on his shirtsleeve.

  “That would never happen in a video game,” he said. “Being surprised like that. In a game, there’s immediate feedback. In a game, there would be a sound effect and a graphic of me losing man points whenever I did whatever I did to make her want to divorce me. Then I could have apologized right away and never done it again.”

  Over his shoulder, Molly Miller sang to the dancing, cheering throngs. She was not supported onstage by a band or even a boom box and appeared to be singing a cappella. But her fans danced and jumped all out of proportion to someone singing a cappella, implying that actual music was coming from somewhere off camera in the non-diegetic fashion that has become de rigueur in pop music videos. Just go with it.

  Pwnage said, “A game will always tell you how to win. Real life does not do this. I feel like I’ve lost at life and have no idea why.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, I screwed up with the only girl I’ve ever loved.”

  “Me too,” Samuel said. “Her name was Bethany.”

  “Yeah. And I don’t have any career to speak of.”

  “Me too. I actually think there’s a student who wants to get me fired.”

  “And I’m upside down on my mortgage.”

  “Me too.”

  “And I spend most of my time playing video games.”

  “Me too.”

  “Dude,” Pwnage said, looking at Samuel with bulbous, bloodshot eyes. “You and I? We’re, like, twins.”

  They watched Molly Miller’s video in silence for a time, Pwnage eating, the both of them listening to the song, which was circling back to its chorus for like the fourth time now and so must have been approaching its end. Molly’s lyrics hinted at something barely out of reach, something just beyond comprehension, mostly because of her use of the pronoun “it” with shifting, ambiguous antecedents:

  Don’t hurt it. You gotta serve it.

  You gotta stuff it, kiss it.

  I want to get it.

  Push up on it. ’Cuz I’m gonna work it.

  You got it? Think about it.

  Then, after each verse, Molly shouted and the whole crowd shouted the line that launched them into the chorus—“You have got to represent!”—while throwing their fists into the air as if they were protesting something, who knows what.

  “My mother abandoned me when I was a kid,” Samuel said. “She did to me what Lisa did to you. One day, gone.”

  Pwnage nodded. “I see.”

  “Now I need something from her and I don’t know how to get it.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Her story. I’m writing a book about her, but she won’t tell me anything. All I have is a photograph and a few sketchy notes. I know nothing about her.”

  Samuel had the photograph in his pocket—printed out on copy paper and folded up. He opened it and showed it to Pwnage.

  “Hm,” Pwnage said. “You’re a writer?”

  “Yeah. My publisher’s going to sue me if I don’t finish this book.”

  “You have a publisher? Really? I’m a writer too.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah, I have this idea for a novel. I started it in high school. A police detective with psychic abilities on the trail of a serial killer.”

  “Sounds exciting.”

  “I have it all mapped out in my head. At the end—spoiler alert—there’s an epic showdown when the trail finally leads to the detective’s own ex-wife’s daughter’s boyfriend. I’ll write it as soon as I find the time.”

  The skin of his cuticles, and the skin around his eyes, and the skin around his lips, and really the skin at all the intersections of his body had a deep and aching redness. A scarlet pain wherever one thing turned into another. Samuel imagined it hurt him to move, or blink, or breathe. Pink splotches on his scalp where tufts of white hair had fallen out. One eye seemed to open wider than the other.

  “My mother is the Packer Attacker,” Samuel said.

  “The Packer what?”

  “The woman who threw rocks at that politician.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, I missed it too at first. I think it happened the same day as our raid. The one against the dragon.”

  “That was an epic win.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Elfscape can actually teach us a lot about living,” Pwnage said. “Take this problem with your mother? Easy. You only need to ask yourself what kind of challenge she is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In Elfscape, as in every video game, there are four kinds of challenges. Every challenge is a variant of these four. It’s my philosophy.”

  Pwnage’s hand hovered over the nacho rubble, searching for any chip that still retained its structural integrity, many of them having gone flaccid in the cheese-and-oil swamp that gathered on the bottom of the pan.

  “Your philosophy came from video games?” Samuel said.

  “I find this is also true in life. Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

  “Okay.”

  “So you all you have to do is figure out which kind of challenge you’re dealing with.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “Depends. Say they’re an enemy? The only way to defeat an enemy is to kill them. If you killed your mother, would it solve your problem?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “So not an enemy then. That’s good! Maybe she’s an obstacle? Obstacles are things you have to find your way around. If you avoided your mother, would it solve your problem?”

  “No. She has something I need.”

  “Which is?”

  “Her life story. I need to know what happened to her, in her past.”

&nbs
p; “Okay. And there’s no other way to get this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Aren’t there historical documents?” Pwnage said. “Do you not have family? Can you not do an interview? Do writers not do research?”

  “Well, my grandfather, on my mother’s side. He’s still alive.”

  “There you go.”

  “I haven’t talked to him in years. He’s in a nursing home. In Iowa.”

  “Mm-hm,” Pwnage said. He was using a spoon to lap up the remaining nacho sludge.

  “I should go talk to my grandfather, is your advice,” Samuel said. “Go to Iowa and ask him about my mother.”

  “Yes. Figure out her story. Piece it together. It’s the only way you’ll solve your problem, if indeed it’s an obstacle-type problem and not in fact a puzzle or a trap.”

  “How can you tell the difference?”

  “You can’t at first.” He discarded the spoon. The nachos were, for the most part, entirely consumed. He dabbed his finger into a spot of cheese, then licked it clean.

  “You have to be careful,” Pwnage said, “with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone’s a puzzle until you realize they’re a trap. But by then it’s too late. That’s the trap.”

  4

  HERE’S A MEMORY: Samuel is riding in the backseat on a summer trip to his parents’ hometown in Iowa. Mom and Dad are up front, and he’s avoiding the side with the sun, and he’s staring out the window at the passing scenery, the terrifying traffic of Chicago and the brick-and-steel girth of the city giving way to the more predictable ebb of the prairie. The DeKalb Oasis is the last tendril of civilization before the surrounding farmland begins. Huge open sky that’s all the more huge because there’s nothing to interrupt it: no mountains, no hills, no topography at all, just flat green endlessness.

  Then crossing the Mississippi River and Samuel trying to hold his breath for the whole span of that great concrete bridge, looking down and seeing the barges traveling south, and tugboats, pontoon boats, speedboats pulling inner tubes on which people—pink specks from this height—bounce. They exit the interstate and turn north and follow the river all the way home, to where his parents come from, where they grew up and became high-school sweethearts, is the story he’d been told. Up Highway 67, the river on his right, past the gas stations that advertise live bait, the American flags flying from VFWs and public parks and golf courses and churches and boats, the occasional John Deere tractor halfway on the shoulder, the occasional Harley riders who stick out their left hand to greet other Harley riders going the opposite direction, past the quarry where orange gravel gets kicked up by tires, past the speed limit signs rigidly enforced, and past other signs too, some torn back by buckshot—DEER NEXT TWO MILES, CAUTION PLANT ENTRANCE, THIS HIGHWAY ADOPTED BY THE KIWANIS CLUB. Then the red-and-white stacks of the nitrogen plant coming into view, followed by the massive white vats of Eastern Iowa Propane, the behemoth ChemStar facility that regularly makes the whole town smell like burned breakfast cereal, the grain elevator, the little townie businesses: Leon’s Body Shop, Bruce’s Beauty Hut and Firearm Repair, Sneaky Pete’s Rare Finds Antiques, Schwingle’s Pharmacy. Toolsheds in backyards built from aluminum siding. Second garages whose walls are all exposed Tyvek. Houses with three or four or maybe five operational and sometimes meticulously maintained and decked-out automobiles. Teens riding on mopeds, little orange flags whipping above their heads. Kids in bare fields riding four-wheelers and dirt bikes. Trucks towing boats. Everyone using their blinker.

  The memory felt so specific because so little had changed. As Samuel took the drive again, to interview the grandfather he’d not seen in decades, he saw how everything was more or less the same. The Mississippi River valley still looked green and lush, despite being one of the most heavily chemicalized places in the country. The towns along the river still flew flags from almost every house. Ritualistic patriotism had not been dampened by two cruel decades of labor outsourcing and manufacturing shrink. Yes, the gravitational center of town had crept away from the quaint old downtown toward the big new Walmart, but nobody seemed to mind. The Walmart parking lot was bustling and full.

  He saw all this as he drove around. He was, as Pwnage suggested, doing research. He was trying to breathe in the town, trying to feel what it would have been like to grow up here. His mother never spoke of it, and they rarely visited. Once every other summer, generally, when he was a kid.

  But Samuel still received a trickle of information about the old hometown, and knew his grandfather was here, slowly wasting away from dementia and Parkinson’s at a nursing home called Willow Glen, where Samuel had an appointment later in the day. Until then, he planned to explore, observe, do research.

  First, he found his father’s childhood home, a farm near the banks of the Mississippi. He found his mother’s too, a quaint little bungalow with a big picture window in one of the upstairs rooms. He visited her high school, which looked like any generic high school anywhere. He took a few photographs. He visited the playground near his mother’s house—the standard swing set, slide, monkey bars. He took a few photographs. He even visited the ChemStar facility where his grandfather had worked for many years, a factory so large it was impossible to take in all at once. Built along the river, surrounded by train tracks and power lines, it looked like an aircraft carrier had tumbled sideways out of the water. A mess of metal and tubing that kept going for miles, furnaces and chimneys, concrete bunker-looking buildings, steel holding tanks, round vats, smokestacks, pipes that all seemed to lead to a massive copper dome on the far north end of the factory, where if the light was shining properly it looked like a second, smaller sun rising from the ground. The atmosphere around the factory was sulfurous and overheated, a smell of exhaust, burned carbon, thin and difficult to breathe, like there wasn’t quite enough air in the air. Samuel photographed all of it. The holding tanks and twisted pipes, the brick smokestacks breathing a white cumulus vapor that disintegrated into the sky. He could not fit the factory’s whole apparatus into one frame, and so he walked down its length photographing panoramically. He hoped the photographs would shake loose something important, hoped that he could see some connection between the brutality of the ChemStar facility and his mother’s family, who for so long were tied umbilically to it. He took dozens of pictures, then left for his appointment.

  He was driving to the nursing home when Periwinkle called.

  “Hey, buddy,” said his publisher, his voice all echoey. “Just checking in.”

  “You sound far away. Where are you?”

  “In New York, in my office. I have you on speakerphone. There are protestors outside my building right now. They’re yelling and screaming. Can you hear them?”

  “I can’t,” Samuel said.

  “I can,” Periwinkle said. “They’re twenty stories down, but I can hear them.”

  “What are they yelling?”

  “I cannot actually hear them, I should say. Their speeches or whatever? Mostly I hear the drumming. Whole rock operas of it. They are drumming in a circle. Loudly and daily. Reasons unclear.”

  “This must feel strange to you, being protested against.”

  “They’re not protesting me, per se. Nor my company, specifically. More like the world that brought my company into being. Multinational. Globalization. Capitalism. The ninety-nine percent is, I believe, their catchphrase.”

  “Occupy Wall Street.”

  “That’s the one. Pretty grandiose name, if you ask me. They are not occupying Wall Street so much as a small rectangle of concrete about a thousand feet away from it.”

  “I think the name is symbolic.”

  “It’s a revolt against things they don’t understand. Imagine our hominid ancestors protesting a drought? This is like that.”

  “A rain dance, you’re saying, this protest.”

  “It’s a primitive tribal response to godlike power, yes.�
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  “How many people?”

  “More every day. It started with a dozen. Now several dozen. They try to engage us in conversation as we go to work.”

  “You should try talking to them.”

  “I did once. This kid, maybe twenty-five years old. He was down by the drum circle, juggling. His hair was in white-boy dreads. He began every sentence with the word ‘Well.’ It was a tic he had. But he pronounced it like wool. I literally could not hear anything else he said.”

  “So not a true dialogue, then.”

  “Have you ever protested anything?”

  “Once.”

  “How was it?”

  “Unsuccessful.”

  “A drum circle. Jugglers. They’re a living, breathing non sequitur in the middle of the financial district. But what they don’t understand is that there is nothing capitalism loves so much as a non sequitur. This is what they need to learn. Capitalism gobbles up non sequiturs happily.”

  “By non sequitur you mean…”

  “You know, the fashionable. The trendy. Every trend begins its life as a fallacy.”

  “That maybe explains Molly Miller’s new video.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Real catchy,” Samuel said. “ ‘You have got to represent.’ What does that even mean?”

  “You know, there used to be a difference between authentic music and sellout music. I’m talking about when I was young, in the sixties? Back then we knew there was a soullessness to the sellouts, and we wanted to be on the side of the artists. But now? Being a sellout is the authentic thing. When Molly Miller says ‘I’m just being real,’ what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. The only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That’s the new authenticity. Molly Miller can never be accused of selling out because selling out was her goal all along.”