Nathan Hill: The Nix

Anyway, the smartphone app analyzed the nutrients and metanutrients he consumed and compared them to FDA-recommended dosages of all the important vitamins, acids, fats, etc., and displayed the results in a graph that should have been a soothing green if he were doing it all correctly but was actually a panic-button red due to his alarming lack of really anything necessary for the maintenance of basic organ health. And yes he had to admit that lately his eyeballs and the ends of his hair had acquired a disconcerting yellowish hue, and his fingernails had become thinner and more brittle and had a tendency, when chewed, to suddenly split right down the middle almost all the way to the base, and recently his nails and hair had stopped growing completely and now seemed to recede in places or even curl back on themselves, and also he’d developed a more or less permanent rash on his arm at the place a wristwatch would go. So while he was typically far under his 2,000-calorie daily maximum, he understood that the calories he needed to consume in order to “eat better” were totally different kinds of calories, namely the organic fresh whole-food kind that were prohibitively expensive given the monthly credit card payments he was making on his smartphone and its associated text and data plans. And he grasped the paradox of this, that it was somewhat of an ironic bind that paying for the device that showed him how to eat right prevented him from having the money to actually be able to eat right, and yes he was putting all this on his credit card, the debt on which was painfully growing and his ability to pay it off fading away from him like a sort of continental drift. Ditto his mortgage payments, which also kept going up because a realtor had convinced him, years ago, before the town (and the nation’s real estate market in general) went to total shit, to refinance his house using some “negative amortization” instrument. This was a huge financial windfall at the time and allowed the purchase of an HD television and various elaborate video-game consoles and an expensive at-home computer workstation, but now was a huge financial drain as the mortgage payments kept jumping shockingly higher while his home’s value had, at last check, crashed and flatlined at such a confoundingly low number it was as if the house had suffered a catastrophic interior meth-lab explosion.

And this made him feel stressed, this coupled with all the other financial and budgetary problems, so stressed out that his heart was doing funny things, a kind of jumpy-twitchy thing that felt like someone mechanically palpating his thoracic cavity from the inside. And like Lisa said, “You don’t have anything if you don’t have your health,” which was how he justified his investment in things that helped reduce the stress, namely high-end electronics and video games.

Which was where he turned today. Before completing the chores required of his new diet, he decided he would finish his other chores, the ones waiting for him in Elfscape: the twenty tasks he completed every day that earned him seriously cool game rewards (like flying rideable gryphons and axes of an unlikely size and neat-looking formal jackets and trousers that made his avatar look dapper when he walked around in them). These quests — which usually involved slaying some minor enemy or delivering a message across treacherous terrain or locating some lost important doodad — needed to be completed every day without fail for up to forty days in a row to unlock the rewards in the fastest time mathematically possible, which itself was a kind of reward because whenever he was successful at it these fireworks went off and there was this blast of trumpets and he got his name on the public chart of Elfscape ’s Most Epic Players and everyone on his contact list sent him notes of congratulations and praise. It was like the game equivalent of being the groom at a wedding. And since Pwnage played with not just one character but enough characters to field a whole softball team it meant that as soon as he finished the twenty daily quests on his main character he then repeated them for his alternate characters as well, so that the number of daily quest completions required of him jumped to somewhere around two hundred, or more, depending on how many “alts” he was interested in leveling. This meant the whole daily-quest process took about five hours total — and while he knew that playing a video game for five hours straight represented the outside maximum tolerance most people had for playing video games, for him these five hours were simply the prerequisite to actually playing the game, a kind of warm-up for the real play session, something he needed to get out of the way before the fun could really begin.

So by the time he finished the daily quest grind today it was dark outside, and his mind felt so fuzzy and remote and sort of constipationally plugged up after five hours of rote tasks that he did not have the focus or drive or energy for difficult higher-order engagements, like shopping or cooking or a complicated kitchen renovation. So he stayed at his computer and recharged with a six-shot latte and a frozen burrito and kept on playing.

He played for so long that now, as he tries to sleep, he finds the Sparkles especially amped up, and there’s no way sleep is going to come anytime soon, and so the only thing Pwnage can really do is get out of bed and fire up the computers once more and check the West Coast servers and go on another raid. Then he joins the Australian servers, hours later, and attacks the dragon again. Then by four a.m. the hard-core Japanese players come online, which is always a windfall, and he teams up with these guys and kills the dragon a couple more times, until killing the dragon no longer feels triumphant but rather routine and ordinary and maybe a little tedious. And around the time that India appears, the Sparkles have morphed into more of a fleeting mushy luminescence, and he abandons the game and he feels all hazy, like his forehead is physically three feet away from his face, and he decides he needs some decompression time before going to sleep, so he pops in one of the DVDs he’s seen a million times (the thinking here is that he can let it play and zone out a bit, since he knows the film so well, not having to do any hard work brain-wise), one of his collection of apocalyptic disaster movies where the earth is destroyed in any number of ways — meteors, aliens, off-the-charts interior magma activity — and his mind begins to glaze over within the first fifteen minutes, at the point the protagonist figures out the secret the government’s been keeping all this time and now knows there’s some seriously heavy shit about to go down, Pwnage zones out and reflects on his day, remembers vaguely his eager and intense desire that very afternoon to start eating better, and maybe because he feels guilty that he did not, in fact, find it the right day to start eating better, he cracks open another Brazil nut, figuring maybe it’s best to kind of ease into these things, that the Brazil nut is a bridge between his current life and the eating-better life that is ahead of him, and he spaces out and stares at the television with an empty fishlike quality in his eyes and swallows the thick Brazil nut bolus and watches as the earth is destroyed and he sort of happily imagines a rock the size of California falling into the earth and in a skeleton-melting flash wiping out everything, killing everyone, annihilating it all, and he rises from the couch, and it’s almost dawn, and he wonders where the night went, and he stumbles into his bedroom and sees himself in the mirror — his white-yellow hair, his eyeballs red with fatigue and dehydration — and he gets into bed and he doesn’t so much “fall asleep” as he plummets into a sudden allover concussive darkness. And the thing he tries to hold in his mind in this near-comatose state is the memory of himself dancing.