by Nathan Hill
“It was very nice to meet you,” Freya says.
“And you.”
“I hope you have a nice stay.”
“I will. Thank you for your hospitality.”
“Lillian will drive you to your hotel.”
“It’s not far. I can walk.”
Freya nods and begins making her way toward the house. But then a few steps up the path, she stops and turns to Faye and looks at her with these knowing eyes that seem to pass straight through her and access every secret she has inside.
“These old stories aren’t important anymore, Faye. Go back to your son.”
And all Faye can do is nod her head in agreement and watch as Freya ascends the rest of the way and disappears into the house. Faye lingers a moment on the dock before leaving as well. She follows a path up the ridge, and when she reaches the top, at precisely the place she met the horse, she looks back down into the valley at the house, now lit warm and golden, a thin tendril of blue smoke drifting from the chimney. Maybe this is where her father stood. Maybe this is what he remembered. Maybe this is the vision that passed before his eyes those nights in Iowa when he stared into nothingness. It would be a memory that sustained him his whole life, but it would also be the thing that haunted him. And that old story about the ghost that looks like a rock comes to her now: The farther from shore you take it, the heavier it becomes, until one day it gets too heavy to bear.
Faye imagines her father taking a small piece of earth with him, a memento: this farm, this family, his memory of it. This was the drowning stone from his stories. He took it to sea and took it to Iceland and took it all the way to America. And as long as he held on to it, he just kept sinking.
2
WHY HAVE HOSPITAL ROOMS begun to look like hotel rooms, is something Samuel wonders as he looks around at this hospital room’s beige walls and beige ceiling and beige curtains and industrially sturdy carpet whose color could be described as tan or wheat or beige. Paintings on the walls designed to be inoffensive and forgettable and un-upsetting and so abstract they do not remind anyone of anything. Television with a billion channels including FREE HBO, according to the little cardboard sign on the dresser. A fake-oak dresser with a Bible inside. The desk in the corner with the many ports and outlets is the “wireless workstation” with a Wi-Fi password printed on laminated paper crinkled and splitting at the edges. A room service menu where you can order things like chicken-fried steaks and french fries and milk shakes and have them delivered anywhere in the building, even the cardiac wing. The remote control Velcroed to the television. The television bolted to the wall and angled toward the bed so that it’s like the television is watching the patient and not the other way around. A book of nearby Chicago attractions. The couch along the far wall is actually a hide-a-bed, which is something anyone will realize if they sit on it too quickly and bang into its hard metal architecture. A digital clock radio with green numbers currently blinking midnight.
A doctor in the room, thoroughly bald, explaining the case to a group of medical students. “Patient’s name, unknown,” he says. “An alias he goes by is, um, let’s see, Puh-wan-edge?”
The doctor looks to Samuel for help.
“Pwnage,” Samuel says. “Two syllables. Rhymes with ownage, but with a p.”
“What’s ownage?” says one of the students.
“Did he say orange?” says another.
“I think he said porridge.”
The doctor tells the students they are lucky to be here today because they may never see a case quite like this again, and indeed the doctor is considering writing an article about this patient in the Journal of Medical Oddities, which the students would be invited to co-author, of course. The students look at Pwnage with the same bemused appreciation they might have for a bartender preparing them an elaborate drink for free.
Pwnage has been sleeping for three days straight. Not in a coma, the doctor has pointed out. Sleeping. The hospital is nourishing him intravenously. And Samuel has to admit that Pwnage looks better, his skin less waxy, his face less bulbous, the splotchy rashes all over his neck and arms now faded to more or less normal human textures. Even his hair seems healthier, more (and this is the only way Samuel can think of describing it) well-attached. The doctor is listing the various medical conditions the patient presented upon admission to the emergency room: “Malnutrition, exhaustion, malignant hypertension, kidney and liver malfunction, dehydration so far along that frankly I’m not sure how the patient wasn’t hallucinating more or less all the time about water.” The students write this down.
The doctor’s head and face and arms have achieved a really impressive sharklike hairlessness. The medical students carry clipboards and they collectively smell like antiseptic soap and cigarettes. A heartbeat monitor connected to Pwnage by a series of wires and suction cups is not beeping. Samuel stands with Axman and keeps looking at him with these quick sidelong glances that he hopes Axman won’t notice. Samuel has heard Axman speaking over the computer hundreds of times from their many raids together but has never met him in person, and he’s feeling that dislocation you feel when the visual does not match up with the aural, like when you see a radio personality’s face for the first time and you think: Really? Axman’s voice has that whiny, nasally quality that makes him seem, online, like he must be one of those ninety-pound bepimpled nearsighted sissies who are the very quintessence of the online gamer stereotype. His reedy voice is the phonic equivalent of a punch that does not hurt. The kind of voice that makes it sound like his mouth was stuffed into his sinus cavity a long time ago by bullies.
“—and cardiac arrhythmia,” the doctor is saying, “diabetic ketoacidosis, diabetes, which he probably didn’t even know he had and which he definitely was not managing in any way and which made his blood about the same thickness and consistency as instant pudding.”
The real-life Axman turns out to be stylish and dashing—his tight-shorts-and-tank-top combo, and his tanned arms that are muscular but not gaudily so, and his sockless boat shoes, and his moderately curly hair begging to be playfully tussled, it all seems like he dressed from some instruction manual given only to young hip gay men. Pretty soon he’s going to discover sex and then he’ll wonder why he ever spent so much time playing video games.
“So we were all there,” Axman is saying, “on the cliffs above Mistwater Cape. You know the place?”
Samuel nods. It’s a spot on the Elfscape map, the southernmost point of the western continent, the place Pwnage apparently had his near-terminal medical crisis. That’s where Axman found him, his avatar, naked and dead, and he noticed Pwnage’s prolonged AFK status, which stands for “away from keyboard,” which Pwnage almost never was, Axman knew, away from his keyboard. So Axman called the real-life authorities, who went to investigate and saw through the front windows Pwnage slumped unconscious before his computer.
“I told everyone to meet at Mistwater,” Axman says in a semi-whisper so as not to interrupt the doctor. “I posted it online. ‘Candlelight vigil for Pwnage.’ We had a pretty good turnout. Maybe thirty people. All elves, of course.”
“Of course,” Samuel says. He has the feeling one of the attractive female medical students is right now eavesdropping on their conversation, and he feels that embarrassment he feels whenever someone from the real world discovers this is what he does with his spare time: plays Elfscape.
“All these elves standing there with our lit candles. And except for one guy in the back who was break-dancing and not really taking part, it was a somber and beautiful and mournful scene.”
“—and a rash on his arm that looked alarmingly similar to, but thankfully was not, necrotizing fasciitis,” says the doctor. The dome of his bare head shines. It makes the room feel bigger in the same way a large mirror might.
“But so here’s the thing,” Axman says, and he’s now gripping Samuel’s shirt and pulling lightly at it to keep Samuel’s attention and to express his own agitation. “I posted plans for the vigil
online, in the Elves Only forum. But it turns out there were some trolls who saw it too.”
“Trolls?”
“Yeah, orcs.”
“Wait, trolls or orcs?”
“Orcs who were trolling. You know what I mean. Some orc-playing players saw the news about the candlelight vigil and reposted it in the Orcs Only forum, which of course I didn’t see because I don’t read their forums because I’m honorable like that.”
The reason the heartbeat monitor is not beeping is because heartbeat monitors in real life do not beep, Samuel decides. That must be a Hollywood affectation, a way to report to the audience what’s going on inside the patient’s chest. The heartbeat monitor attached to Pwnage just slowly prints a jagged line onto a narrow piece of paper that’s spooled up like something inside a cash register.
“So unbeknownst to us,” Axman says, “while we’re gathering on the cliffs above Mistwater Cape, the orcs are hiding in a cave to the north. And right in the middle of our ceremony, which I should stress was, with the exception of the guy who was break-dancing and then later took off all his clothes and jumped around a lot, really somber and beautiful and quiet, right in the middle, right as I’m making a speech about what a great guy Pwnage is and how we’re all hoping he gets better soon and urging people to write get-well cards to him and giving out the address of the hospital so that they can write actual real paper cards, all of a sudden all these orcs rush out of the trees and start murdering us.”
The attractive medical student seems to be chewing on her pencil either to suppress the smile or outright giggle generated by eavesdropping on this particular conversation. Or because she’s a smoker and that’s one of those oral-fixation unconscious-tic things that smokers tend to do. The doctor’s head has the buffed quality of a new bowling ball still wrapped in its protective sheath.
“So all of our orc alarms start going off and we all turn around to fight them,” says Axman. “Only we can’t fight them. Do you know why we can’t fight them?”
“Because you’re all holding candles?”
“Because we’re all holding candles.”
That the doctor does not even have eyebrows or eyelashes is an unsettling quality it takes Samuel a few minutes to identify. Before that, it was like the guy looked off for a reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“So this orc starts fighting me,” Axman says, “and I instinctively swing at him and hit him, but of course I hit him with a candle, which does like zero damage and causes him to ROFL over and over. So I open my control panel and select the character screen and select the candle and then locate my sword in my inventory screen and then double-click to switch them and the game says Are you sure you want to trade items? and all this time the orc is chopping me in half slowly with his ax, swinging away casually and I’m just standing there like a tree totally helpless to stop him, and I’m all like to the game Yes I want to trade items! Yes I’m fucking sure!”
At Axman’s sudden outburst the doctor and the students look over with these expressions of disdain that communicate how quickly he’d be thrown out of here had he not saved the life of the patient they’re going to write a quirky journal article about.
“So anyway,” says Axman, quieter now, “I ultimately don’t have time to even switch weapons because I’m fully dead way before I get through the process. And so my ghost resurrects at the nearest graveyard and I run the ghost back to my body and respawn and you know what happens?”
“The orcs are still there.”
“The orcs are still there, and I’m still holding a goddamn candle.”
“—and lactic acidosis,” says the doctor, stronger now, trying to talk over Axman, “and hyperthyroidism, urinary retention, croup.” The doctor’s allover hairlessness is beginning to seem clinical and not aesthetic, like he suffers from a genetic disorder the kids probably made fun of throughout his childhood, which makes Samuel feel a little guilty for staring.
“And this happens maybe twenty or thirty times,” says Axman. “I get back to my body, respawn, and get killed within seconds. Rinse and repeat. I wait for the orcs to get tired of it, but they never do. I finally get so angry I log out and post a pretty big rant on the Orcs Only forum where I say the behavior of the orcs who crashed our vigil was reprehensible and immoral. I said all their accounts should be banned and they should personally apologize to everyone in our guild. This ignited a pretty big debate.”
“What’s the consensus?”
“The orcs said their maneuver was accurately orc-like. They said killing us during our vigil was in keeping with how orcs are supposed to act in the game world. I said sometimes the game world and the real world overlap in certain places where the real world should take precedence, like during a quiet vigil where friends are mourning for their seriously ill raid-leader buddy. They said their orc avatars don’t know what this ‘real world’ is that I’m talking about and for them the Elfscape world is the only world that exists. I said if that’s true then they would never have known about the vigil in the first place because they don’t have orc laptops from which to access the Elves Only online forums, and even if they did, they could not comprehend what was written there because orcs cannot read English.”
“This all sounds very complicated.”
“It opened up this big metaphysical problem about how much of the real world you’re bracketing when you’re playing Elfscape. Most of our guild is taking the week off from raiding to think about the problem.”
“Did you ever log on again?”
“Not yet. My elf is still on that cliff. Dismembered.”
The doctor is saying, “I swear to god this is the first time I’ve ever seen a pulmonary embolism be the least bad thing wrong with someone. Compared to everything else going on here, the anticoagulant we administered for the embolism was an easy fix.”
Samuel feels the little buzzing of his phone in his pocket that signals a new e-mail. He sees it’s from his mother. Despite their agreement, she has written. He excuses himself and goes into the hallway to read it.
Samuel,
I know we said I shouldn’t do this, but I’ve had a change of heart. If the police ask, please tell them the truth. I didn’t stay in London. I didn’t go to Jakarta. I went to Hammerfest. It’s in Norway, the northernmost city in the world. It’s terribly remote and sparsely populated. You’d think it would suit me. I’m telling you this because I’ve decided not to stay. I’ve met some people who have convinced me to come home. I’ll explain later.
Actually, Hammerfest is no longer the northernmost city in the world, I just discovered. Technically it is the second-northernmost. There’s a place called Honningsvaag that is also in Norway and slightly farther north that declared itself a city a few years back. But with a population of about 3,000 people, you can hardly call it a “city.” So the debate rages on. Most folks in Hammerfest are friendly to anyone except people from Honningsvaag, whom they consider usurpers and bastards.
The things you learn, eh?
At any rate, Hammerfest is distant and isolated. It’ll take me a few days to get home.
In the meantime, I want you to go find your friend Periwinkle. Tell him to tell you the truth. You deserve some answers. Tell him I said to tell you everything. He and I go way back, you should know. We met in college. I used to be in love with him. If you want proof, go back to my apartment. On the shelf, there’s a thick book of poetry, the collected Ginsberg. I want you to look inside that book. You’ll find a photograph. I hid it in there years ago. Please don’t be angry with me when you find it. Soon you’ll have all the answers you want, and when you do, remember that all I was trying to do was help. I did it clumsily, but I did it for you.
Love,
Faye
Samuel thanks Axman and tells him to send word once Pwnage wakes up. He leaves the hospital and drives quickly into Chicago. He enters his mother’s apartment through the still-wrecked door. He finds the book and begins flipping through it, holding it upside
down and shaking it. It has that old-book smell, dry and musty. The pages are yellowed and feel brittle on his fingertips. A photograph flutters out and lands on the floor facedown. On the back, it is signed: To Faye, on your Honeymoon, love Al.
Samuel picks it up. It is the same photograph he’d seen on the news, the one taken at that protest in 1968. There is his mother in her big round glasses. There is Alice sitting behind her all deadly serious. But this photograph is larger than the one he’d seen on the news, its field of vision wider. He realizes that the photo he thought he knew so well was actually only a fragment from this bigger photo, sectioned off, cropped to hide the man his mother leans against. But Samuel can see him now, this man, his bowl of black hair, the way he looks sidelong and cleverly at the camera, his eyes full of mischief. He is so young, and his face is half in shadow, but it’s obvious. Samuel has seen that face before. It’s the spitting image of Guy Periwinkle.
3
GUY PERIWINKLE’S OFFICE in downtown Manhattan is on the twentieth floor, southeast corner, overlooking the financial district. Two whole walls are made entirely of glass. The other walls are painted a neutral slate gray. A small desk in the middle of the room, a single swivel chair. There are no works of art on the walls, no family photos, no statuary or plants, nothing on the desk but a single sheet of paper. The aesthetic here is way beyond minimalism—more like monkish denial. The only decoration in the entire large space is a single framed advertisement for some kind of new potato-chip thing. The new chip is shaped like a small torpedo instead of the more traditional triangle or circle. The ad is dominated by a photograph of a man and a woman whose bug-eyed excitement to eat these chips might best be described as maniacal. A caption above them, written in bold three-dimensional-looking letters, says: DO YOU NEED TO LIVEN UP YOUR SNACK ROUTINE? This advertisement is roughly the size of a movie poster. It looks out of place in its lavish gold frame.