The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  Her phone dinged. Jason again.

  Ur at home?

  Yep all alone feeb’s at the gym :-)

  Only now there was this dumb English professor who seemed set on not giving her what she wanted. Who actually seemed intent on failing her. Not even her learning disability had persuaded him, to her dismay. The paperwork for this disability was on file at the Office of Adaptive Services. It was official, this learning disability, because of a particularly brilliant plan that was hatched at the beginning of the year, when her new plump roommate, who was on several medications for her truly severe ADHD problems, let slip how many legally mandated accommodations she was entitled to, including someone to take notes for her, extra time for quizzes and tests, extended deadlines, excused absences, and so on. In other words, complete freedom from the scrutiny of her professors that—even better!—was legally binding under the Americans with Disabilities Act. All Laura needed to do was answer a questionnaire in such a way as to trigger a certain diagnosis. Simple. She went down to the Office of Adaptive Services. The questionnaire was composed of twenty-five statements she had to either agree or disagree with. She figured it would be pretty obvious what she needed to lie about, but once she started the questionnaire she was troubled by how true some of the statements were, such as: I have trouble remembering things I just read. Yes, she did! That was true almost every time she was asked to read an actual printed book. Or: I find myself daydreaming when I’m supposed to be paying attention. Which was something that happened to her literally dozens of times per class. She started feeling queasy that there might be something actually wrong with her until she got deeper into the questionnaire:

  The thought of homework makes me feel panicked and stressed.

  I have trouble making friends.

  The stress of school sometimes gives me unbearable headaches and/or indigestion.

  None of these things were a hundred percent true, and this made her feel more or less normal again, such that when she was diagnosed with severe learning disabilities she felt really good about herself, like when she interviewed for that movie theater job and got it immediately, that same sense of accomplishment. She did not feel guilty about playing the learning disability card, since she had answered several of the statements on the questionnaire honestly, making her roughly ten percent learning disabled, plus her classes were so boring and stupid and impossible to pay attention to that she added another forty-five percent to that as a kind of de facto environmental learning block, making her fifty-five percent learning disabled, which she then rounded up.

  She tossed a handful of paper clips approximately three feet into the air and watched as they began spiraling away from each other as they flew. She thought if she could practice this enough she could achieve perfect paper-clip symmetry. She could toss them in such a way that they’d go up and down as a single aggregate lump.

  The paper clips sprinkled themselves across the floor. Hamlet said,

  O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

  Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

  This was such a waste of time.

  She had one move left, one more bullet in the chamber. She dialed the dean’s number.

  “Professor Anderson is not creating ideal conditions for my education,” she said once she had the dean on the line. “I don’t feel like his classroom is a good place to learn.”

  “I see,” the dean said. “I see. Could you explain why?”

  “I do not feel I can express my individual viewpoint.”

  “And why is that, specifically?”

  “I feel like Professor Anderson does not value my unique perspective.”

  “Well, maybe we should have a meeting with him then.”

  “It is not a safe space.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” the dean said. Laura could almost hear the woman sitting up straighter in her chair.

  Safe space. It was the current buzzword on campus. She wasn’t even entirely sure what it meant, but she knew it tended to tweak the ears of university administrators.

  “His classroom does not feel safe,” Laura said. “It is not a safe space.”

  “Oh my.”

  “Feels abusive, actually.”

  “Oh my.”

  “I’m not saying he is abusive or has quote-unquote abused me,” Laura said. “I’m saying it is my perception that in his classroom I am fearful of encountering abuse.”

  “I see. I see.”

  “I cannot emotionally deal with writing my Hamlet paper, and the reason is because he has not created a safe space in which I feel okay expressing my actual true self to him.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “Writing a paper for Professor Anderson triggers negative feelings of stress and vulnerability. It feels oppressive. If I write a paper using my own words he’ll give me a bad grade and I’ll feel bad about myself. Do you think I should have to feel bad about myself in order to get a degree?”

  “No, not necessarily,” the dean said.

  “Me neither. I would hate to have to reveal this situation to the student newspaper,” Laura said. “Or post about it on my blog. Or to my thousand friends on iFeel.”

  Which was pretty much checkmate for this particular conversation. The dean said she would be looking into the matter, and in the meantime why didn’t Laura forget about the essay for now and keep quiet until they could all come to a nice resolution.

  Victory. Another assignment completed. She closed Hamlet and tossed the book in the corner. She shut down her laptop. Her phone dinged. Jason again, finally asking for what he’d wanted this whole time:

  Send me a pic I miss you!!!

  Naughty or nice? ;-)

  Naughty!!!

  Haha lol }:-)

  She stripped off her clothes and, holding a camera at arm’s length, posed in several of the smoky ways she’d absorbed from two decades of looking at Cosmo and Victoria’s Secret catalogs and internet pornography. She took about a dozen pictures of herself from slightly different angles and with slightly different pouts: smoky-sexy, smoky-amused, smoky-ironic, smoky-smirky, and so on.

  Afterward, she could not decide which one of them to send to Jason, because they were all so great.

  3

  PWNAGE SUGGESTED they meet at a bar called Jezebels.

  Samuel wrote:

  That sounds like a strip club.

  Ya it does lol

  Is it?

  No…but sort of

  It was in another of Chicago’s suburbs, one that had ballooned in the mid-sixties in the first great migration out of the city. Now it was gently dying. All the people who had fled a generation before were moving back in, heading to the high-rises of Chicago’s newly gentrified downtown. White flight had given way to white infill, and now these first-generation suburbs—with their modest homes, their quaint malls—just seemed old. People were leaving, and as they left, home values declined, driving still more out in an unstoppable cascade. Schools closed. Shops were shuttered. Streetlights broken. Potholes left unfixed and widened. The giant shells of big-box retailers sat empty and anonymous but for old logos still legible in dirt outline.

  Jezebels was situated in a strip mall between a liquor store and a place where you could rent to own tires. Its big front windows were covered with sheets of black plastic tinting that undulated where air bubbles were trapped and never smoothed out. Inside, the place had all the makings of a strip club: an elevated stage, a metal pole, purplish lights. But no strippers. The only thing to watch was the televisions, about two dozen of them arranged such that no matter where you sat, you always had an adequate sight line to at least four. The TVs were tuned to various niche cable channels specializing in sports or music videos or game shows or food. The largest television, which hovered above the stage and seemed to be bolted directly onto the stripper pole, was showing a nineties movie about strippers.

  The place was mostly empty. A handful of guys sat at the bar looking at their phones. A larger party in the bac
k, six people at a booth, currently quiet. Samuel didn’t see anyone matching Pwnage’s description (I’ll be the blond guy in a black shirt, is how he’d described himself), so he sat at a table and waited. A TV above the bar was tuned to a music channel where Molly Miller was being interviewed. Tonight was the premiere of her new video: “The song’s about, you know, being yourself?” said Molly. “It’s like what the song says. ‘You have got to represent.’ Just be true to who you are. Just, like, don’t change.”

  “Yo Dodger!” said a man near the door. He was indeed wearing a black shirt, but his hair wasn’t so much blond as it was white with maybe a kind of jaundice-yellow discoloring at the tips. His face was pale and pocked and of an ambiguous age: He was either a fifty-year-old or a thirty-year-old who’d had a hard life. He wore jeans that were a few inches too short, a long-sleeve shirt that was maybe two sizes too tight. Clothes purchased for a younger and smaller self.

  They shook hands. “Pwnage,” he said. “That’s my name.”

  “I’m Samuel.”

  “No you’re not,” he said. “You’re Dodger.” He slapped Samuel on the back. “I feel like I already know you, man. We’re war buddies.”

  It looked like he carried a bowling ball under his shirt, just above his belt. A skinny guy with a big guy’s belly. His eyes were protuberant and red. His skin had the texture of cold wax.

  A waitress came, and Pwnage asked for a beer and something called the “Double-D Nachos, extra super loaded.”

  “Interesting place,” Samuel said after the waitress had gone.

  “It’s the only bar within walking distance of my house,” Pwnage said. “I like to walk. For the exercise. I’m starting a new diet soon. It’s called the Pleisto Diet. Heard of it?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s the one where you eat like they did in the Pleistocene. Specifically, the Tarantian epoch, during the last ice age.”

  “How do we know what they ate in the Pleistocene?”

  “Because science. You eat like a caveman, minus the mastodons. Plus it’s gluten-free? The key is tricking your body into thinking you’ve gone back in time, before the invention of agriculture.”

  “I don’t understand why you’d want to do that.”

  “There’s a feeling that civilization was a mistake, is why. That we screwed up along the way, took a wrong turn. Now, because of it, we’re fat.”

  His body had a noticeable tilt to one side, his right side. His mouse hand seemed dominant. His left arm seemed to lag a few moments behind the rest of him, like it was permanently asleep.

  “I’m assuming nachos weren’t on the menu during the Pleistocene,” Samuel said.

  “See, what’s important right now for me is to be frugal. I’m saving up. Do you know how expensive that organic health food stuff is? A sandwich is seventy-nine cents at the gas station but like ten bucks at the farmer’s market. Do you know how cheap, on a per-calorie basis, nachos are? Not to mention the Go-Go Taquitos or Pancake and Sausage To-Go Sticks or other foods that have no organic equivalent that I get for free at the 7-Eleven down the street.”

  “How do you get them for free?”

  “Well, if you know they can be cooked a maximum of twelve hours before they have to be thrown away for FDA-mandated public-health reasons, and if you arrive at the 7-Eleven a few minutes before the appointed food-rotation hour, then you can fill a plastic bag with not only a dozen or more taquitos and pancake sticks but also more conventional hot dogs, bratwurst, corn dogs, and bean burritos and such.”

  “Wow. You have a whole system.”

  “Of course, eating these food items is not what I might describe as pleasant, since they’re tough and scorched and moistureless from their all-day cooking on high-temperature rollers. Sometimes biting through a burrito’s thick tortilla casing can feel like chewing through your own toe calluses.”

  “That’s an image that’s going to linger.”

  “But it’s cheap, you know? And given my current level of income, which is, frankly, minimal since I lost my job, and also my unemployment checks are due to run out in like three months or so, right about the time I’ll be seeing real results, waistline-wise, of the new diet. And if I have to start eating bad cheap food then because the money is gone, well, it would be a momentum-stopping blow, I just know it. So I have to make the diet financially viable and sustainable long-term, which is why it’s important to not eat healthy right now in order to save up for the time I will be eating healthy. Get it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Every week I eat cheap shitty things, like nachos, is a week I can tick like seventy bucks to the other side of my mental ledger as cash ‘saved’ for my new life. This plan is going very well so far.”

  There seemed to be a not-rightness about him, a sense of disorder and exotic illness. His features were off in a way Samuel could not immediately put his finger on, like he suffered from some long-eradicated disease—scurvy, maybe.

  Their drinks came. “Cheers,” said Pwnage. “Welcome to Jezebels.”

  “This place,” Samuel said. “Seems like there’s a story here.”

  “Used to be it was a strip club,” Pwnage said. “Then the strippers stopped coming because the mayor banned alcohol at strip clubs, then banned lap dances at strip clubs, then banned strip clubs.”

  “So now it’s more of a bar with a strip-club theme?”

  “That’s right. He was a strict disciplinarian, the mayor. Elected in a last-ditch fit of anger when the city started going downhill.”

  “You’ve been coming here a long time?”

  “Not when it was a strip club,” Pwnage said, and he held up his hand to show Samuel his wedding ring. “She doesn’t really support strip clubs, my wife. Because of the patriarchy and stuff.”

  “That’s sound.”

  “How strip clubs are degrading to feminists and all that. Oh, hey, I love this song.”

  He was talking about Molly Miller’s new single, the video to which had now begun on roughly one-third of the televisions in the bar: Molly singing in an abandoned drive-in movie theater where scores of good-looking young people had parked their cars, their late-sixties or early-seventies American muscle cars—Cameros, Mustangs, Challengers—in what was one example of the odd dislocation and ambiguity Samuel felt watching this video and processing its many props. The abandoned state of the drive-in spoke to a present-day setting, while the automobiles were forty years old and the mic Molly sang into was one of those chunky metal things that radio people used in the thirties. Meanwhile, her wardrobe appeared to be a hip, ironic nod to eighties fashion, most obviously in the form of large white plastic sunglasses and skinny jeans. It was a large ever-shifting referential stew of anachronistic symbols with no logical connection between them except their high cool quotient.

  “So why did you want to meet?” Pwnage said, returning to his normal sitting position, his feet tucked beneath him.

  “No reason,” Samuel said. “Just wanted to hang out.”

  “We could have done that in Elfscape.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Actually, come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve hung out with someone not in Elfscape in a very long time.”

  “Yeah,” Samuel said, and he considered this for a moment, and felt a little unsettled that this was also true for him. “Do you think it’s possible that we play Elfscape too much?”

  “No. But yeah, maybe.”

  “I mean, think about all the hours we spend on Elfscape, all the cumulative hours. And not only the hours spent playing but also the hours reading about playing and watching videos of other people playing and talking and strategizing and getting on discussion boards and such. It’s so much time. Without Elfscape we could all be, I don’t know, leading meaningful lives. Out in the real world.”

  The nachos came in what looked like a lasagna pan. A corn-chip mound covered in ground beef and bacon and sausage and steak and onions and jalapeños and probably a couple of full pints
of cheese, this bright orange cheese that looked thick and shiny and plastic.

  Pwnage dove into the dish, then said, between bites, nacho shrapnel clinging to his lips, “I find Elfscape way more meaningful than the real world.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Absolutely. Because, listen, what I do in Elfscape matters. Like, the things I do affect the larger system. They change the world. You cannot say this about real life.”

  “Sometimes you can.”

  “Rarely. Most of the time you can’t. Most of the time there’s nothing you can do to affect the world. Like, okay, almost all my friends in Elfscape work retail in real life. They sell televisions or pants. They work in a mall. My last job was at a copy shop. Explain to me how that’s going to change the larger system.”