Nathan Hill - The Nix

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.