by Nathan Hill
And not knowing exactly when the servers would come back online made Pwnage feel stressed out, which was a bit of a paradox because the ostensible reason he played Elfscape was because it so effectively relieved his stress. It was where he turned when he felt too encumbered by the wearying details of his life. It all began about a year ago, just after Lisa left, one day when he felt the stress coming on particularly strong and none of the DVDs seemed very good and nothing was on TV and nothing in his online movie queue seemed interesting and all the console games he owned had been beaten and discarded and he felt this weird panicky sensation like when you’re at a good restaurant but nothing seems appetizing, or like when you’re first starting to come down with a cold or flu and not even water tastes good, that kind of all-encompassing negative darkness where the whole world seems boring and tedious and you feel this global weariness, and he was sitting in his living room in the gathering darkness of an evening just after daylight saving time ended so it was unusually gray at a depressingly early time of day, and he was sitting there realizing he was about to have a direct frontal head-on collision with the stress, that if he did not find a diversion quickly he was definitely going to get worked up to a degree that would spell certain trouble for his blood pressure and general circulatory system health, and what he usually did when this happened was to go to the electronics store and buy something, this time about a dozen video games, one of which was World of Elfscape. And since beginning with an Elf warrior named Pwnage he had advanced to play a whole stable of alternate characters with names like Pwnopoly and Pwnalicious and Pwner and EdgarAllanPwn, and he made a name for himself as a fearsome gladiatorial opponent and a very strong and capable raid leader, directing a large group of players in a fight against a computer-controlled enemy in what he came to regard as being a conductor in a battle-symphony-ballet type of thing, and he rather quickly got extraordinarily good at this—since being good required all manner of research, watching online videos of relevant battles and reading the forums and sifting through the numbers of the theory-crafting websites to see which stat was most useful during certain fights, such that he had slightly different gear-and-weapon combos for every fight in the game, each of them designed to mathematically maximize his death-dealing ability for that particular engagement, because he believed if he was going to do something he was going to do it right, he would give one hundred and ten percent, a work ethic he liked to think would soon help him with his kitchen renovation and novel-writing and new-diet plans, but which so far seemed to apply only in the area of video games. He created more characters and more accounts that he would play simultaneously on several computers, each of these new accounts requiring the purchase of a new computer, new game DVD, expansion pack, and monthly subscription fee, which meant that whenever he felt the need to create another character (usually because all his other characters were at the very highest level and were as good as they could possibly be and he was getting bored with dominating the game so thoroughly and the boredom would set off his stress alarms and so something had to be done immediately), it was such a massive capital outlay that he felt absolutely beholden to play the game even more, even if he was dimly aware of the irony here, that the stress of his deplorable financial situation created the need for all of these electronic stress relievers, the expense of which created more of the very same stress he was trying to avoid in the first place, which made it seem like his current level of electronic distraction was now failing and so he sought out newer and ever-more expensive distractions, thereby magnifying the stress-and-guilt cycle, a bit of a consumerist psychological trap that he frequently noted among Lisa’s customers at the Lancôme counter, whose purchases of makeup only reinforced the central unattainable beauty illusion that drove them to buy makeup in the first place, but for some reason he could not spot in himself.
He checked the Elfscape servers. Still down.
It was like waiting out an airline delay, he thought, that urgency one felt at the airport, knowing people who love you are waiting at another airport, and the only thing keeping you from them is some intractable failure of technology. It felt like that, these Patch Days: Whenever he logged on after hours of delay, it felt like he’d gone home. It was hard to ignore this feeling. It was hard not to feel conflicted about it. It was a little troubling that when he thought about the vistas of Elfscape—the animated, digitally rendered rolling hills and misty forests and mountaintops and such—they struck him with the force of real memory. That he had a nostalgia and fondness for these places that outpaced the fondness he had for the real places in his life—this was complicated for him. Because he knew in some way the game was all false and illusory and the places he “remembered” didn’t really exist except as digital code stored on his computer’s hard drive. But then he thought about this time he climbed to the top of a mountain on the northern edge of Elfscape’s western continent and watched the moon rise over the horizon, watched the moonlight sparkle off the snow, and he thought it was beautiful, and he thought about how people talked about feeling transported by works of art, standing in front of paintings feeling hopelessly persuaded by their beauty, and he decided there was really no difference between their experience and his experience. Sure, the mountain wasn’t real, the moonlight wasn’t real, but the beauty? And his memory of it? That was real.
And so Patch Days were a unique horror because he was cut off from his source of wonder and beauty and surprise and was forced, sometimes for a whole day, to confront his normal everyday analog existence. And all week he’d been thinking about how to occupy his Tuesday so that the intolerable gap between waking up and logging on was more tolerable. Things to do that would make the time go by more quickly. He started a list on his smartphone, a “Patch Day To-Do List,” so that he could record any thought he might have during the week regarding ways to make Patch Day more pleasant and endurable. The list contained, so far, three items:
1. Buy health food
2. Help Dodger
3. Discover great literature
That last item had been on his to-do list every week for six months, ever since he saw a sign at a nearby mega bookstore that said DISCOVER GREAT LITERATURE! and he’d put it on the list. He told the phone to repeat it, to put it on every weekly list thereafter, because he’d always wanted to be a reader, and he thought the whole curled-up-snugly-all-afternoon-with-a-cup-of-tea-and-a-good-book thing was a really excellent image to project about oneself online. Plus if Lisa ever happened to secretly check his phone’s to-do list in a moment of curiosity or obsessional divorce regret, he was pretty sure she would approve of “Discover great literature” and maybe realize he was really changing as a person and want to take him back.
However, in six months he had discovered no literature whatsoever, great or otherwise. And every time he thought about discovering great literature, the effort made him feel tired, spent, boggy-headed.
So then there was item number one: Buy health food.
He had tried this already. Last week, he had finally entered the organic grocery store after having cased it from the street for several days watching people going in and out and quietly judging them for their yuppie elitist privileged lifestyle and their skinny hipster clothes and electric cars. It seemed necessary for him to construct an elaborate mental bulwark like this before even entering the organic grocery store because the more he sat in his car outside the store judging the customers the more he was convinced they were judging him too. That he wasn’t hip enough, or fit enough, or rich enough to shop there. In his mind he was the protagonist of every story, the center of everyone’s appalling attention; he was on display and out of place; the store was a panopticon of sneering, abusive judgment. He carried on long imaginary dialogues with the idealistic cashiers who were the gatekeepers between the food and the exits, explaining to them how he wasn’t shopping there because it was the trendy thing to do but rather because it was coldly absolutely medically necessary according to the rules of his radical new diet p
lan. And whereas the other customers were there only out of fidelity to some hip movement—like the organic movement or the Slow Food movement or the locavore movement or whatever—he was there because he needed to be there, making him actually a more authentic shopper than they were, even if he did not per se fit the image of the typical customer according to the store’s elaborate branding campaign. And so after several dozens of these practice dialogues he felt prepared and strong-willed enough to enter the grocery store, where he crept around and very quietly purchased the exact organic replicas of what he usually bought at the 7-Eleven down the street: canned soups, canned meat products, white bread, energy bars, frozen and reheatable pizza and dinner things.
And when he was unloading his cart at the checkout he felt a brief surge of belongingness that nobody had challenged his presence there or really even looked at him twice. That is, until the cashier—this cute girl with hip square glasses who was probably a grad student in ecology or social justice or something like that—looked at his boxed and frozen and canned food items and said “Looks like you’re stocking up for a hurricane!” and then laughed lightly as if to say Just kidding! before bwooping the stuff over the laser scanner. And he smiled and halfheartedly chuckled but could not shake for the rest of the day the feeling of having been judged harshly by the cashier, who was not so subtly telling him his food purchases were unfit for consumption except in the most dire circumstances, such as apocalypse.
Point taken. On his next visit he bought only fresh things. Fruits, vegetables, meats wrapped in wax paper. Only things perishable, easily spoilable, and even though he had no earthly idea how to prepare the food, he felt healthier just buying it, just having it nearby, having people see him with it, like being on a date with someone extraordinarily attractive, how you want to go to public places with that person, he felt the same about his cart full of shiny eggplants and corn and various green growing things: arugula, broccoli, Swiss chard. It was so beautiful. And when he presented his food to this same cute cashier at the front of the store he felt like a child giving his mother a card he made at school.
“Did you bring a bag?” she said.
He stared at her, not fully comprehending the question. A bag for what?
“No,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “We encourage all our customers to bring reusable bags. You know, to save paper?”
“Okay.”
“Plus you get a rebate,” she said. “For every bag you bring, you get a rebate.”
He nodded. He was no longer looking at her. He was instead looking at the cash register’s video screen. He was pretending to very carefully analyze the price of each food item to ensure he wasn’t overcharged. The cashier must have sensed his unease and his feeling of having been scolded (again) and so tried to diffuse the situation with a change of subject: “Whaddya gonna do with all this eggplant?”
But this did not diffuse the situation at all because the only answer he was capable of giving was the true one: “I don’t know.” And then when the cashier girl seemed sort of disappointed by this answer he added: “Maybe, like, a soup?”
This was so fucking unbearable. He couldn’t even shop correctly.
He went home and found a website that sold reusable grocery bags, some outfit that used the proceeds from all their bag sales to do something good in some rain forest somewhere. More important, this outfit’s logo was printed prominently on both sides of the bag so that when he gave the bags to the cashier she would see the logo and be impressed by it, since not only was he being a good environmentalist customer by bringing his own bags but the bags themselves also did good environmental things, making him twice as pro-nature as any of the other shoppers in the store.
He had the bags shipped, next day air. He went back to the store. He bought perishable fresh foods again, but only one of each kind—no overbuying one item and drawing attention to it, à la eggplant. He got in the line of the cute cashier girl with the square black glasses. She said “Hi,” but it was a generic greeting. She did not remember their connection. She scanned and tallied his groceries. She said “Did you bring a bag?” and he said, casually, like it was no big deal and totally something he did all the time, “Oh sure, I brought a bag.”
“Do you want to keep the rebate,” she said, “or donate it?”
“Do what?”
“You get a rebate for bringing a bag.”
“I know that.”
“Would you like to donate it to one of our fifteen approved charities?”
And here he reflexively said “No,” but it wasn’t because he was stingy and wouldn’t genuinely want a charity to have his rebate. It was because he knew he would have no idea how to choose among the fifteen charities, probably never having heard of any of them. So he declined because that seemed the smoothest, least embarrassing way to proceed and be done with the social encounter that, to be honest, had eaten up a lot of his spare brainpower all week, envisioning it, preparing for it.
“Oh,” said the cashier, surprised, “okay, well, fine,” with a kind of upturned lip and sarcastic eyebrow flare that conveyed something along the lines of Aren’t we being an asshole today?
She continued swiping his food across the scanner and weighing his fruits and vegetables in what he interpreted as a cold and mechanical manner. Her fingers flew over the register buttons quickly and expertly. She was so comfortable here, so at home. She did not feel one bit of anxiety about her lifestyle or opinions. She so easily judged and dismissed him. And he felt something inside him sort of break, something curdled and sour, a fury he felt all the way to his liver. And he raised the empty cloth reusable grocery bag over his head. And he held it that way for a moment, maybe waiting for someone to say something. But no one did. No one paid an ounce of attention to him. And this seemed like the worst insult of all, that he was standing in this theatrical pose of violence and passion and no one cared.
So he threw it. The bag. He threw it point-blank, right at the cashier’s feet.
And as he threw it, he made a war cry of wild anger—or at least he’d meant to. What actually came out was a garbled and low kind of gruff animal noise. He gruntled.
The bag struck the cashier sidelong in the hip region and she let out a sharp surprised cry and jumped backward as the bag crumpled and fell loosely to the floor. She stared at him with her mouth open and he stepped toward her and leaned over the cash register and opened his arms wide as a condor and yelled, “You know what?”
He did not know why he was opening his arms this way. He realized he didn’t have anything on tap, mentally, with which to follow that question. The store had suddenly gone terribly quiet, the usual register-area beeping noises having stopped at the cashier’s first shriek. He looked around him. He saw faces aghast—mostly women’s—staring at him scornful and outraged. He backed slowly away from the cashier. He felt he needed to say something to the crowd, to explain the offense that provoked him, to justify his outburst, to communicate his innocence and righteousness and virtue.
What came out was: “You have got to represent!”
He didn’t know why he said that. He remembered hearing it in that pop song recently. That Molly Miller song. He liked the sound of it, when he heard it in that song. He thought it was edgy and hip. But as soon as he said it out loud he realized he had no idea what it meant. He quickly left. Jammed his hands into his pockets and speed-walked out the door. He vowed never to return. That store, that cashier—you could never be good enough for them. There was no pleasing those people.
So item number one—Buy health food—that was a nonstarter.
There was still one thing he could check off his list on this Patch Day: Help Dodger. And to be honest this seemed like the most attractive option anyway, helping his guild mate, his brand-new friend, his irlfriend, was the term used among some Elfscape players, IRL being the community’s popular acronym for “in real life,” a place they talked about as if it were another country, far away. And he
wanted to pretend the primary reason he found this option most appealing was because of some altruistic impulse to help friends in need. And that impulse might have been in there somewhere, part of the stew, but if he really thought about it he’d say the real reason was that his new friend was a writer. Dodger had a book contract, a publisher, access to the deeply mysterious book world that Pwnage needed because Pwnage was a writer too. And while he had been talking with his new friend that night at Jezebels he had trouble focusing completely because as soon as he discovered his new friend was a writer he kept thinking about his psychic-detective serial-killer novel, which he was sure was a million-dollar book. He’d begun the story in high school, in his junior-year creative writing class. He wrote the first five pages the night before it was due. The teacher had written that he’d done a “great job” and that he’d “captured the voice of the detective effectively” and in the margins during a certain scene where the detective had a vision of the killer stabbing a girl in the heart the teacher wrote “Scary!” and this confirmed that Pwnage could do very special things. He could ignite a real emotional response with something he wrote hastily in one night. It was a gift. You had it or you didn’t.
Helping his new irlfriend, he decided, would give him the motivation to finally do everything he needed to do, because Dodger would then owe him a favor, which he could cash in to find a publisher and receive his huge book contract, which would not only dig him out of the hole he was in mortgage-wise, and not only allow him the budget to buy actual organic health food and renovate the kitchen, but would also convince Lisa to come back, knowing as he did that one of her main complaints about him was his “lack of initiative and drive,” which she had spelled out with painful clarity in the Irreconcilable Differences portion of the paperwork that made their divorce agreement official.
