The Nix(123)

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 * dad.

So anyway, Pwnage sent Axman the photograph along with a quick note: “Spam the Chicago boards. I want to know who this woman is.”

And Pwnage sat back and felt really excellent about this. And even though it took him maybe a minute or two tops, he felt mentally exhausted by the effort: coming up with the plan, executing the plan. He felt spent, done for the day, stressed out. He tried logging on to Elfscape, but the servers were still down.

He looked out the front window at the mailbox. He sat down in a chair to decide what to do next, then stood and sat in a different chair, because the other one was sort of uncomfortable. He stood again and walked to the center of the room and played a quick little game in his mind where he tried to stand in the room’s exact middle, perfectly equidistant from all four walls. He abandoned this game before he got to the point where he felt like getting out the tape measure to verify his accuracy. He thought about watching a movie, but he’d seen them all before, his entire collection, many times. He thought about buying and downloading some new movies, but the effort of looking seemed like it would make him feel tired. He walked to the back of the house, then to the front, hoping something in the house would trigger a thought. There was something in the kitchen he needed to do, he was sure of it. He could feel the memory of it dancing beyond his grasp. He opened the oven, then closed it. Opened the dishwasher, then closed it. He opened the refrigerator, certain there was something in here that would remind him of the thing he was supposed to remember about the goddamn kitchen.





2


THE THING IS? Is that Laura Pottsdam had the feeling she was feeling a brand-new emotion. Like something she’d never felt before. Which was totally weird! She sat alone in her messy dorm room and fiddled with her iFeel app and waited for Larry to arrive and felt, for the first time, this new thing: doubt.

Doubt about many things.

Doubt right now about the iFeel app itself, which would not let her express her doubt, “Doubt” not being one of the fifty standard emotions available on iFeel. The app was letting her down. For the very first time, iFeel didn’t know how she felt.

iFeel Horrible, she wrote, then decided no, she did not feel that way. That wasn’t quite accurate. “Horrible” was what she felt after she hurt her mother’s feelings again, or after she ate. She did not feel “Horrible” now. She deleted it.

iFeel Lost, she wrote, but that sounded stupid and cheesy and definitely not a Laura thing to say. People who were “Lost” were people with no direction in life, and she had direction in life, Laura did: Successful future vice president of communications and marketing, hello? Successful business major? Elite college student? She deleted “Lost.”

iFeel Upset was wrong too, due to not seeming important enough. Delete.

The thing about iFeel was that she could broadcast how she felt at any given moment to her huge network of friends, and then their apps could auto-respond to her feelings with whatever message was appropriate given the emotion she expressed. And Laura usually loved this, how she could post iFeel Sad and within seconds her phone lit up with encouragement and support and pick-me-ups that made her feel actually less sad. She could select an emotion from the fifty standard emotion choices and post a little explanatory note or photo or both, then watch the support roll in.

But now, for the first time, the fifty standard emotion choices seemed, to Laura, limited. For the first time, she did not seem to feel any of the standard emotions, and this was really surprising to her because she’d always thought fifty choices were sort of a lot. And indeed there were some emotions she had never expressed feeling. She had not once ever written iFeel Helpless, even though “Helpless” was right there among the fifty standard emotions. She had never written iFeel Guilty or iFeel Ashamed. She had never written iFeel Old, obviously. She wasn’t quite “Sad,” nor was she “Miserable.” It was more that she felt a kind of doubt that what she was thinking and feeling and doing wasn’t exactly, totally right. And this was really uncomfortable because it contradicted the primary message of her life—that everything she did was correct and praiseworthy and whatever she wanted she should have because she deserved it, which was the more or less constant message from her mother, whom Laura called after the meeting with her Intro to Lit professor: “He thinks I cheated! He thinks I plagiarized a paper!”