Nathan Hill - The Nix

This was so fucking unbearable. He couldn’t even shop correctly.

He went home and found a website that sold reusable grocery bags, some outfit that used the proceeds from all their bag sales to do something good in some rain forest somewhere. More important, this outfit’s logo was printed prominently on both sides of the bag so that when he gave the bags to the cashier she would see the logo and be impressed by it, since not only was he being a good environmentalist customer by bringing his own bags but the bags themselves also did good environmental things, making him twice as pro-nature as any of the other shoppers in the store.

He had the bags shipped, next day air. He went back to the store. He bought perishable fresh foods again, but only one of each kind — no overbuying one item and drawing attention to it, à la eggplant. He got in the line of the cute cashier girl with the square black glasses. She said “Hi,” but it was a generic greeting. She did not remember their connection. She scanned and tallied his groceries. She said “Did you bring a bag?” and he said, casually, like it was no big deal and totally something he did all the time, “Oh sure, I brought a bag.”

“Do you want to keep the rebate,” she said, “or donate it?”

“Do what?”

“You get a rebate for bringing a bag.”

“I know that.”

“Would you like to donate it to one of our fifteen approved charities?”

And here he reflexively said “No,” but it wasn’t because he was stingy and wouldn’t genuinely want a charity to have his rebate. It was because he knew he would have no idea how to choose among the fifteen charities, probably never having heard of any of them. So he declined because that seemed the smoothest, least embarrassing way to proceed and be done with the social encounter that, to be honest, had eaten up a lot of his spare brainpower all week, envisioning it, preparing for it.

“Oh,” said the cashier, surprised, “okay, well, fine,” with a kind of upturned lip and sarcastic eyebrow flare that conveyed something along the lines of Aren’t we being an asshole today?

She continued swiping his food across the scanner and weighing his fruits and vegetables in what he interpreted as a cold and mechanical manner. Her fingers flew over the register buttons quickly and expertly. She was so comfortable here, so at home. She did not feel one bit of anxiety about her lifestyle or opinions. She so easily judged and dismissed him. And he felt something inside him sort of break, something curdled and sour, a fury he felt all the way to his liver. And he raised the empty cloth reusable grocery bag over his head. And he held it that way for a moment, maybe waiting for someone to say something. But no one did. No one paid an ounce of attention to him. And this seemed like the worst insult of all, that he was standing in this theatrical pose of violence and passion and no one cared.

So he threw it. The bag. He threw it point-blank, right at the cashier’s feet.

And as he threw it, he made a war cry of wild anger — or at least he’d meant to. What actually came out was a garbled and low kind of gruff animal noise. He gruntled.

The bag struck the cashier sidelong in the hip region and she let out a sharp surprised cry and jumped backward as the bag crumpled and fell loosely to the floor. She stared at him with her mouth open and he stepped toward her and leaned over the cash register and opened his arms wide as a condor and yelled, “You know what?”

He did not know why he was opening his arms this way. He realized he didn’t have anything on tap, mentally, with which to follow that question. The store had suddenly gone terribly quiet, the usual register-area beeping noises having stopped at the cashier’s first shriek. He looked around him. He saw faces aghast — mostly women’s — staring at him scornful and outraged. He backed slowly away from the cashier. He felt he needed to say something to the crowd, to explain the offense that provoked him, to justify his outburst, to communicate his innocence and righteousness and virtue.

What came out was: “You have got to represent !”

He didn’t know why he said that. He remembered hearing it in that pop song recently. That Molly Miller song. He liked the sound of it, when he heard it in that song. He thought it was edgy and hip. But as soon as he said it out loud he realized he had no idea what it meant. He quickly left. Jammed his hands into his pockets and speed-walked out the door. He vowed never to return. That store, that cashier — you could never be good enough for them. There was no pleasing those people.

So item number one — Buy health food — that was a nonstarter.

There was still one thing he could check off his list on this Patch Day: Help Dodger. And to be honest this seemed like the most attractive option anyway, helping his guild mate, his brand-new friend, his irlfriend, was the term used among some Elfscape players, IRL being the community’s popular acronym for “in real life,” a place they talked about as if it were another country, far away. And he wanted to pretend the primary reason he found this option most appealing was because of some altruistic impulse to help friends in need. And that impulse might have been in there somewhere, part of the stew, but if he really thought about it he’d say the real reason was that his new friend was a writer. Dodger had a book contract, a publisher, access to the deeply mysterious book world that Pwnage needed because Pwnage was a writer too. And while he had been talking with his new friend that night at Jezebels he had trouble focusing completely because as soon as he discovered his new friend was a writer he kept thinking about his psychic-detective serial-killer novel, which he was sure was a million-dollar book. He’d begun the story in high school, in his junior-year creative writing class. He wrote the first five pages the night before it was due. The teacher had written that he’d done a “great job” and that he’d “captured the voice of the detective effectively” and in the margins during a certain scene where the detective had a vision of the killer stabbing a girl in the heart the teacher wrote “Scary!” and this confirmed that Pwnage could do very special things. He could ignite a real emotional response with something he wrote hastily in one night. It was a gift. You had it or you didn’t.

Helping his new irlfriend, he decided, would give him the motivation to finally do everything he needed to do, because Dodger would then owe him a favor, which he could cash in to find a publisher and receive his huge book contract, which would not only dig him out of the hole he was in mortgage-wise, and not only allow him the budget to buy actual organic health food and renovate the kitchen, but would also convince Lisa to come back, knowing as he did that one of her main complaints about him was his “lack of initiative and drive,” which she had spelled out with painful clarity in the Irreconcilable Differences portion of the paperwork that made their divorce agreement official.

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.