Nathan Hill - The Nix

“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.

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 back, 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.”