Nathan Hill - The Nix

And the force of the bomb propelled Bishop into the air where for a moment everything was quiet and cold and the feeling of being inside the bomb’s blast was like being inside one of his mother’s snow globes, everything around him moving as though through thick liquid, hanging there, suspended, in its way beautiful, before the bomb shattered everything inside him and all his senses went dark and Bishop’s body — no longer containing in any meaningful way Bishop himself — crashed into the street many meters away, and for the second time that week someone died while thinking about Julie Winterberry, who was ten thousand miles away at that moment and probably wishing that something exciting would finally happen to her.

The army collected his things and sent them to his parents, who found the letter addressed to Samuel Andresen-Anderson and remembered that was the strange name of their daughter’s childhood pen pal, and so they gave the letter to Bethany, and she struggled many months before deciding she would finally give the letter to you.

And so this is how the letter traveled from a classified village somewhere in Iraq to this kitchen counter in downtown Manhattan, where it looks spotlighted by one of the kitchen’s overhead recessed lights. You pick it up. It’s almost weightless — a single page inside, which you remove. He’s only written a few paragraphs. You sense that your big decision is approaching. It’s a decision that will shape you and go on shaping you for years. You read the letter.

Dear Samuel,

The human body is so fragile. It’s ruined by the smallest things. You can put twenty bullets into a camel and it will just keep coming for you, but half an inch of shrapnel is enough to kill us plain little people. Our bodies are the thin knife’s edge separating us from oblivion. I am beginning to accept this.

If you’re reading this, then something has happened to me and so I have a favor to ask. You and I did a terrible thing together that morning by the pond. The day your mother left, the day the police came. I’m sure you remember. What we did that morning, to each other, is terrible and unforgivable. I was corrupted, and I corrupted you too. And this corruption, I’ve discovered, does not go away. It stays with you and poisons you. It’s with you for life. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

I know you love Bethany. I love her too. She is good in a way I have never been good. She’s not broken the way we are. I’d ask you to keep it this way.

This is my dying wish. The only thing I ask of you. For her sake, for my sake, please, stay away from my sister.

And so you’ve arrived. It’s finally the moment to make your choice. To your right is the door to the bedroom, where Bethany waits for you. To your left, the elevator door and the whole great empty world.

It’s time. Make a decision. Which door do you choose?

PWNAGE OPENED THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR, then closed the refrigerator door. He stood in his kitchen trying really hard to remember the reason he came in here, but he couldn’t come up with it. He checked his e-mail. He tried logging on to World of Elfscape but could not; it was Tuesday. He thought about going outside to the mailbox to get the mail but did not end up going outside because the mail might not have been delivered yet and he didn’t want to make two trips. He looked across his front lawn at the mailbox, trying to judge whether there was mail in it by staring. He closed the door. He felt like something needed his attention in the kitchen but did not know what. He opened the refrigerator and looked at every item in the fridge, hoping one of them would serve as a kind of trigger for the thing he was supposed to remember about the kitchen. He saw the jars of pickles and plastic squeeze bottles of ketchup and mayonnaise and a bag of flaxseed he bought once in a moment of diet optimism but had not yet opened. There were five eggplants on the bottom shelf, clearly mushening from the inside, slowly collapsing in on themselves, five little purple pillows with small pools of biscuit-colored juice gathering under them. In the produce drawer, his various greens were brown and wilted. So were the cobs of corn on the top shelf, which were a sickly ecru, every kernel having lost its ripe, yellow puffiness and shriveled into roughly the shape of a diseased human molar. He closed the refrigerator door.

What happened on Tuesdays was that the World of Elfscape game servers were taken offline for most of the morning and sometimes part of the afternoon for regular maintenance and bug fixes and whatever genius-level technical things were required of computers that otherwise ran twenty-four hours a day and hosted ten million game players simultaneously with almost no network lag using some of the most ruthlessly secure encryption on the planet, servers so fast and efficient and mighty that they put to shame the machines now being used by the space program, or in nuclear missile silos, or in voting booths, for example. How a country that made World of Elfscape servers could not make a functional electronic voting machine was a question often posed on Election Day Tuesdays on the Elfscape message boards, while the gaming community patiently waited for the servers to come back online and, sometimes, also voted.

Some of these Tuesdays, though, were very special and particularly agonizing Tuesdays known as “Patch Days,” when the engineers added some kind of game update so that the next time players logged on there would be new things to do —new quests, achievements, monsters, treasure. Such patches were necessary to keep the game fresh and interesting, but of course Patch Days had the longest game downtime because of the elaborate things being done to the game’s servers and coding. It was not unheard of for the servers to be down all morning and all afternoon and sometimes, to the dismay of the game community, into the early evening. And this was happening today. The game was being patched. It was Patch Day.

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.