The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  So Dodger needed information about his mom, and his mom wasn’t talking. He needed information about her past, but the only concrete things they had were a woefully incomplete arrest report and a photograph taken in 1968 of his mother at a protest. There was a girl sitting near her in the photo who maybe seemed part of her group—the one with the aviator shades—and Pwnage wondered if she was still alive. Maybe she was, and maybe she still lived in Chicago, or maybe she had friends still living in Chicago—all he needed were names. He texted the photograph to Axman, a level-ninety elf warrior in the guild who IRL was a high-school senior who was really good at writing code but terrible at playing sports (unfortunately the only thing his father cared about). Axman’s programming specialty was something he called “social bombing” where he was able to get his message almost simultaneously on every blog comment thread and wiki page and community network and message board on the internet. This was almost certainly worth a lot of money to someone, this software, yet Axman had only used it so far to exact revenge on the jocks who picked on him at school, photoshopping their faces into explicit scenes from gay pornography, usually, and then spamming the resulting real-looking image to half a billion people. It was still in beta, Axman said of his application. He said he still needed to figure out how to monetize it, though Pwnage suspected he was just waiting to turn eighteen and move out of the house so he didn’t have to share his millions with his asshole dad.

  So anyway, Pwnage sent Axman the photograph along with a quick note: “Spam the Chicago boards. I want to know who this woman is.”

  And Pwnage sat back and felt really excellent about this. And even though it took him maybe a minute or two tops, he felt mentally exhausted by the effort: coming up with the plan, executing the plan. He felt spent, done for the day, stressed out. He tried logging on to Elfscape, but the servers were still down.

  He looked out the front window at the mailbox. He sat down in a chair to decide what to do next, then stood and sat in a different chair, because the other one was sort of uncomfortable. He stood again and walked to the center of the room and played a quick little game in his mind where he tried to stand in the room’s exact middle, perfectly equidistant from all four walls. He abandoned this game before he got to the point where he felt like getting out the tape measure to verify his accuracy. He thought about watching a movie, but he’d seen them all before, his entire collection, many times. He thought about buying and downloading some new movies, but the effort of looking seemed like it would make him feel tired. He walked to the back of the house, then to the front, hoping something in the house would trigger a thought. There was something in the kitchen he needed to do, he was sure of it. He could feel the memory of it dancing beyond his grasp. He opened the oven, then closed it. Opened the dishwasher, then closed it. He opened the refrigerator, certain there was something in here that would remind him of the thing he was supposed to remember about the goddamn kitchen.

  2

  THE THING IS? Is that Laura Pottsdam had the feeling she was feeling a brand-new emotion. Like something she’d never felt before. Which was totally weird! She sat alone in her messy dorm room and fiddled with her iFeel app and waited for Larry to arrive and felt, for the first time, this new thing: doubt.

  Doubt about many things.

  Doubt right now about the iFeel app itself, which would not let her express her doubt, “Doubt” not being one of the fifty standard emotions available on iFeel. The app was letting her down. For the very first time, iFeel didn’t know how she felt.

  iFeel Horrible, she wrote, then decided no, she did not feel that way. That wasn’t quite accurate. “Horrible” was what she felt after she hurt her mother’s feelings again, or after she ate. She did not feel “Horrible” now. She deleted it.

  iFeel Lost, she wrote, but that sounded stupid and cheesy and definitely not a Laura thing to say. People who were “Lost” were people with no direction in life, and she had direction in life, Laura did: Successful future vice president of communications and marketing, hello? Successful business major? Elite college student? She deleted “Lost.”

  iFeel Upset was wrong too, due to not seeming important enough. Delete.

  The thing about iFeel was that she could broadcast how she felt at any given moment to her huge network of friends, and then their apps could auto-respond to her feelings with whatever message was appropriate given the emotion she expressed. And Laura usually loved this, how she could post iFeel Sad and within seconds her phone lit up with encouragement and support and pick-me-ups that made her feel actually less sad. She could select an emotion from the fifty standard emotion choices and post a little explanatory note or photo or both, then watch the support roll in.

  But now, for the first time, the fifty standard emotion choices seemed, to Laura, limited. For the first time, she did not seem to feel any of the standard emotions, and this was really surprising to her because she’d always thought fifty choices were sort of a lot. And indeed there were some emotions she had never expressed feeling. She had not once ever written iFeel Helpless, even though “Helpless” was right there among the fifty standard emotions. She had never written iFeel Guilty or iFeel Ashamed. She had never written iFeel Old, obviously. She wasn’t quite “Sad,” nor was she “Miserable.” It was more that she felt a kind of doubt that what she was thinking and feeling and doing wasn’t exactly, totally right. And this was really uncomfortable because it contradicted the primary message of her life—that everything she did was correct and praiseworthy and whatever she wanted she should have because she deserved it, which was the more or less constant message from her mother, whom Laura called after the meeting with her Intro to Lit professor: “He thinks I cheated! He thinks I plagiarized a paper!”

  “Did you?” her mother asked.

  “No!” Laura said. Then, after a long pause: “Actually, yes. I did cheat.”

  “Well, I’m sure you had a good reason for it.”

  “I had an excellent reason for it,” she said. Her mother had always done this, supplied her with good excuses. Once when she was fifteen and she came home at three in the morning obviously drunk and maybe also a little stoned, dropped off by three very loud, very much older boys who had recently either graduated high school or dropped out of it, the hair on the back of her head tangled and disheveled from what had obviously been vigorous friction against the backseat upholstery of a car, in a state so near comatose that when her mother said “Where have you been?” she could not think of anything to say and just stood there and dumbly wobbled, even then her mother had bailed her out.

  “Are you sick?” she asked Laura, who, taking the bait, nodded her head. “You’re sick, aren’t you. You’re coming down with something. You were probably taking a nap and lost track of time, right?”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “I don’t feel well.” Which of course required her to play hooky the next day to keep up the lie, claiming an unbearable cold-and-flulike illness, which was not too much of a stretch given the top-shelf hangover she woke up with.

  The weirdest thing about these interactions was how much her mother seemed to believe them.

  It wasn’t only that she was covering for her daughter; she seemed to be willfully hallucinating about her. “You’re a strong woman and I’m proud of you,” she’d tell Laura afterward. Or: “You can have anything you want.” Or: “Don’t let anyone get in your way.” Or: “I gave up my career for you and so your success literally means everything in the world to me.” Or whatever.

  But now Laura also felt doubt, which was not one of the fifty allowable emotions according to iFeel, which itself made her doubt that it was doubt she was feeling, a kind of mind-bending paradox she tried not to spend too much mental time with.

  She could not fail her Intro to Lit course. That much was clear. There were too many things at stake—internships, summer jobs, grade point average, a besmirched permanent record. No, that could not happen, and she felt mistreated and wronged by her professor, who was wi
lling to effectively take away her future because of one stupid assignment, which seemed to her a response all out of proportion to the crime she’d committed.

  But, okay, even this she doubted, because if it didn’t matter if she cheated on any single assignment, then by extension it would be okay if she cheated on every assignment. Which struck her as at least a little weird because the agreement she’d reached with herself in high school when all the cheating started was that it was okay to cheat on every assignment now as long as sometime in the future she stopped cheating and began doing the actual work, as soon as the assignments started to matter. Which had not yet happened. In four years of high school and one year of college, she had not done anything that registered even remotely as mattering. So she cheated. On everything. And lied about it. All the time. And did not feel one ounce of regret.

  Not until today. What was screwing with her head today was this: What if she made it all the way through college never having done any actual college work? When she got her first very powerful publicity and marketing job, would she know what to do? It struck her that she did not even fully comprehend what was involved in the word “marketing,” despite a low-level innate ability to recognize when someone else had done it well, to her.

  But every time she thought about maybe paying attention in her classes and doing the work herself and really studying for tests and writing her own papers, the fear that grabbed her was this: What if she couldn’t do it? What if she wasn’t good enough? Or smart enough? What if she failed? She worried that the Laura unaided by deception and duplicity was not the elite college student both she and her mother assumed her to be.

  For her mother, this knowledge would be crippling. Her mother—who since the divorce signed all her e-mails to Laura with You are my only joy—she could never handle Laura’s failure. It would be like a nullification of her whole life’s project.

  So Laura had to do this, press forward with her plan, however risky, for her mother’s sake. For both their sakes. There was no room for doubt.

  Because the thing is? Is that now the stakes were even higher. Her phone call to the dean had effectively relieved her of any Hamlet-related suffering, but it had caused an unexpected problem, which was that the dean was now going to extraordinary lengths to show how sensitive the university was to Laura’s hurt feelings. The dean was organizing a Mediation and Conflict Resolution Conference, which, as far as Laura could tell, was a two-day summit where she and Professor Anderson would sit across from each other at a table while several third-party peacemaker coaches would help them engage in, manage, cope with, and productively resolve their differences in a safe and respectful environment.

  Which sounded like just about the worst thing in the world.

  Laura knew it would be difficult to maintain her fabrications over two days of intense scrutiny. She knew she had to prevent this meeting at all costs, but she felt doubt and maybe even a bit of guilt and remorse about the only solution she’d so far devised.

  There was a knock at the door. That, finally, would be Larry.

  “One second!” she yelled.

  She pulled off her shorts and tank top, yanked off her bra and underwear, and fetched the towel from her closet. It was the thinnest, smallest towel she owned. It was probably not even a proper bath towel because it did not wrap fully around her but rather revealed a long dagger of flesh all the way up her side. And the towel wasn’t a standard width either, since the bottom came down only to that soft fleshy ticklish part where her legs met her torso. Any sudden movement and all would be revealed, in other words. It was white, threadbare from many washings, almost see-through in places. She had laundered it many times to achieve exactly this look. She used it roughly the same way a magician used a watch: to hypnotize.

  She opened the door.

  “Hey,” she said, and Larry’s eyes darted south the moment he saw her and comprehended her and her fantastically small towel. “I’m not dressed, sorry,” she said. “I was just about to shower.”

  He walked in and closed the door behind him. Larry Broxton, wearing his usual outfit: shiny silver basketball shorts, black T-shirt, big flip-flops. It was not that Larry didn’t own any other clothes—he did, she’d seen his closet, filled with nice-looking button-downs that were surely mother-supplied. It was just that this was the outfit he always chose, picking it up off the floor every morning and sniffing it and putting it on again. She wondered how long before he’d get sick of this one outfit, but it had been a month now and she hadn’t seen him change yet. Boys can be obsessively focused in their desires, she’d noticed. The things they liked they tended to repeat again and again and again.

  “You needed something?” Larry said. Guys were often so eager to do what she wanted, especially when she wore the Towel. Larry sat on her bed. She stood in front of him, so that her body was directly at his eye level. If she drew the towel up an inch or two, he could probably see her perfectly manicured pubic everything.

  “Just a little favor,” she said.

  She had met Larry in her Intro to Lit course. She’d noticed him early on and wondered if he was trying to grow a beard or simply forgetting to shave. She’d seen him on campus. She knew he always wore the same outfit and drove a really big black Humvee. He never spoke to anyone until one day after class he asked if she wanted to come to a party at his frat. A theme party. They were roasting a pig on a spit. Grilling hamburgers they called Brontosaurus Burgers. Making something called Jurassic Juice. They called it the Slutty Cavegirls party.

  Which was just so totally offensive! Because it’s a party at a frat. Obviously she would dress slutty. They didn’t have to tell her to do that. Did they think she was stupid?

  But okay, she went. Leather toga, no undies, whatever, and drank Jurassic Juice until it tasted good, and talked to Larry, who used the word circumspect in a sentence, which was impressive. They talked about what was the worst thing about college. “The classes,” Laura had said. “The parking spaces are too small,” Larry had said. And Laura felt that familiar intoxicated grabby allover need where all she wanted was to press herself up against him tightly. But she wasn’t yet so drunk that she was going to ho it up in front of all these people. She invited Larry back to her dorm room, where she gave him a blow job and he totally came in her mouth without even asking, which she personally found rude, but whatever.

  She didn’t know what circumspect meant, but sometimes you have to give a guy some credit. That’s a good word.

  “Do you still have your job?” Laura said, by which she meant his fantastic work-study position at the campus computer support center, where Larry spent most of his three-hour shift watching internet videos, occasionally helping some poor professor who didn’t know how to hook up a printer.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Oh good,” she said, and she stepped toward him, lightly touching her leg to his.

  The weirdest thing that had happened when she seduced Larry in her dorm room that first time was that at the moment he orgasmed, she felt some odd lump of something suddenly enter her mouth, something soft but definitely, surprisingly, solid. She spit it into her hand and found what appeared to be a partially digested piece of Brontosaurus Burger. Which she assumed came out of Larry, and thus she concluded he had the unique ability to ejaculate his dinner out his penis, which was gross. After that, she requested that Larry do his deposits elsewhere.

  “So at your job,” Laura said, “you can remotely log in to any computer on campus, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Perfect. There’s a computer that needs to be investigated.”

  Larry frowned. “Whose computer?”

  “Professor Anderson’s.”

  “Oh, man. For real?”

  She stroked his hay-colored hair with one hand. “Definitely. He’s hiding something. Something bad.”

  Laura had not considered another possibility: that men in fact did not have the biological capability to ejaculate the contents of their stomach, b
ut rather that the bit of Brontosaurus Burger had been in Laura’s mouth from the beginning, before the blow job even started, stuck there in the pit where a wisdom tooth used to be, and it was simply Larry’s orgasmic bucking that jimmied it loose. In other words, a coincidence, if an unfortunate one. Afterward, she told Larry he was no longer welcome to come in her mouth, and he enthusiastically suggested other places to do his business. Her face, breasts, and butt were the expected targets. Expected because they had both ingested so many hours of internet pornography that they were simply acting out scenes that had become normalized, even banal. That Larry wanted to finish every sex act by splashing onto some part of her seemed like the customary way sex should end, raised as they were on porn’s ejaculatory clichés. But then Larry expanded the target zone: He wanted to come on her feet, her back, in her hair, on the bridge of her nose, he wanted her to wear glasses so he could come on her glasses, on her elbows, on that thin part of her wrists. He was remarkably specific! She had no opinion about this, that Larry seemed to have a mental checklist of body parts he wanted to ejaculate onto. No opinion except that occasionally this made her feel like the sexual equivalent of a bingo card.

  “What’s Professor Anderson hiding?” Larry said. “What’s on his computer?”

  “Something embarrassing. Maybe even criminal.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Definitely,” Laura said, and she was maybe about eighty percent sure this was true. Because who didn’t have something embarrassing on their computer? A dubious downloaded image, something questionable in the browser history. The odds were in her favor.

  “I’m only supposed to log in to someone’s computer if they ask me for help,” Larry said. “I can’t go snooping around.”