The Nix(167)

Of course, it’s not like the graffitists wrote anything important. Just their own names, over and over, bigger and louder and more colorful. Which come to think of it was the same strategy used by fast-food chains on billboards across the country. It was just self-promotion. It was simply more noise. They weren’t writing because something desperately needed to be said. They were advertising their brand. All that sneaking around and risk-taking to produce something that only vomited back up the dominant aesthetic. It was depressing. Even subversion had been subverted.

“Did you talk to him?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Samuel said. “I was really only intending to watch. I was collecting information. It was purely a stakeout. But he saw me.”

“And is it possible this conversation has anything to do with the new charges this morning?”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“You suppose it’s possible you got me charged with domestic terrorism. That’s what you’re saying?”

“Maybe.”

They had reached her block. He could tell they were almost home by the buildings that looked stuck in some sci-fi time warp—their first floors from the future, their upper floors from the past. Crumbling and windowless buildings sitting atop gleaming new empty storefronts of modern-looking green-blue glass and slick white plastics typical of information age electronics. The city’s usual pullulation had given way to her neighborhood’s great round silence. An empty plastic grocery bag bounded down the street, pushed by the wind that came off the lake.

“There’s something you need to know,” Samuel said, “about the judge.”

“Okay.”

“He’s the one who arrested you. In 1968.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The cop who arrested you, the night before the protest. That was Charles Brown, the judge. Same guy. He arrested you even though you’d done nothing wrong.”

“Oh my god,” Faye said, looking at him and grabbing his arm.

“He said you put him in that wheelchair. He said it was your fault he’s disabled.”

“That’s ridiculous. How do you know all this?”

“I tracked down Alice. You remember her? She was your neighbor? In college?”

“You talked to her?”

“She told me all about you, when you were at Circle.”

“Why are you talking to these people?”

“Alice said you should leave the country. Right now.”

They rounded a corner, came into view of her building, and saw a strange clump of activity up ahead: a large police van with big block letters on the side—SWAT—was parked next to Samuel’s car, towering over it like a bear guarding dinner. Police were exiting Faye’s building and leaping into the van’s open rear door—they were dressed in black, militarily bulletproofed, helmeted, goggled, machine guns strapped tightly to their chests.

Samuel and his mother ducked back around the corner.

“What is going on?” Faye said.

Samuel shrugged. “Is there another way in?”

She nodded and he followed her down the block, into an empty alley, to a rusted red door next to several garbage bins. They were quiet as they ascended the stairs, quiet as they listened, from the stairwell, to the last of the police exit her building. They waited another ten minutes to be sure, then exited the stairwell and walked down the hall to her apartment’s front door, which they found in pieces, lying at an angle on the floor, connected to the wall only by the bottom hinge, which was twisted and bent.

Inside her apartment, the furniture had been tipped over and torn apart. The cushions on the couch were in tatters. The bed mattress lay on the floor, a long rip down the middle where the stuffing had been yanked out, an incision from top to bottom as if it hadn’t been searched but rather autopsied. Mattress fluff all over. Books that had been on the bookshelves were now scattered and bent. The kitchen cabinets were open, everything inside either knocked down or broken. The trash can overturned and dumped on the floor. Slivers of glass crunching under their shoes.

They were looking at each other, bewildered, when a noise came from the bathroom—a whoosh of water, a faucet turned on and off. Then the door opened and there emerged, wiping his hands on his tan slacks, Simon Rogers.

He saw them and smiled. “Well hello there!”

“Simon,” Faye said, “what happened?”

“Oh,” he said, with a wave of his hand, “the police were here.”





3


TODAY WAS THE DAY he would quit Elfscape.

Today he would stop playing forever, is what Pwnage resolved yesterday, actually, when he sat down vowing to quit Elfscape but then found several matters that needed addressing in order to settle his affairs, as it were, before sending his excellently geared avatars into digital oblivion, primarily among these was saying goodbye to the dozens of guild mates who over time he’d come to think of very fondly and feel a responsibility and paternalistic affection for, rather like how a summer camp counselor might feel for the kids in his charge, and Pwnage knew that if he disappeared without saying goodbye they would feel a sharp and personal betrayal and a sense of loss without closure and a shock to their sense that the world was predictable and understandable and for the most part good and just and fair (a few of these guildies, incidentally, really were the age of summer camp kids, and he felt an especially strong impulse not to betray or wound them in any way), and so he decided pretty early on in the play session that began yesterday morning that he could not quit and delete his account until he’d personally privately chatted with and said goodbye to the many regular Elfscape players that he’d played with for roughly twelve hours a day for the last couple of years, which required him to write a heartfelt note of gratitude to each player and an explanation that he no longer had the time to play World of Elfscape since he was now turning his attention to a brand-new career, that of being a famous detective mystery novelist, and he explained to his colleagues that he would have a big-time New York publisher just as soon as he finished a first draft of his novel and so he needed to turn his efforts to book-writing in a full-on, hundred percent type of way, which meant giving up Elfscape because his normal Elfscape schedule interfered with writing—the daily quests especially, the hundreds of daily quests he completed every morning on all his various avatars in a punishing five-hour grind, after which he’d vow to skip the daily quests the next day and instead use that time to make some serious progress in his detective novel, figuring he could probably write about two pages an hour (which was a reasonable number according to various online novel-writing self-help websites) and thus about ten pages a day, and at this clip he could finish the detective novel in a month using only the time he usually spent on Elfscape dailies, and this feeling of determination and resolve would hold pretty strong until the following morning, when he would try to write his novel but instead find himself thinking about all the daily quests that were now unlocked and newly available again, and he’d make an agreement with himself that in order to get the quests off his mind and really be able to focus on the novel-writing he’d take a break and do the quests on his main character only, and if his various secondary characters could not ultimately have access to all the excellent rewards, well, so be it, that was the price he’d have to pay for becoming a famous mystery-thriller writer—but then after finishing the twenty quests on his main avatar he’d get that disconcerting mental fatigue that felt as if his brain had been kneaded like bread dough, squeezed and pressed and soft and certainly not in the state to produce great literature, and so he went ahead and did all the daily quests on all his alt characters too and five hours later he felt that same bitter disgust with himself he’d felt the day before, vowing again that the next day he would skip the daily quests and work on his novel all day long, a feeling that never seemed as powerful the following morning, when the cycle would repeat, until eventually he had to admit that the only way the novel was going to get written was if he quit the game completely and deleted all his characters in an apocalyptic move there was just no going back from, but of course not before saying goodbye to all the people who were friends with him, people who, when he told them he was quitting in order to spend more time with his book, usually responded at first with “NOOOOO-OOOOO-OO!!!!!-!!!!!-” (which, if he was being honest, was delightful), followed by an expression of confidence that they knew the book would be a huge best-selling hit, and even though they didn’t know anything about the novel or even Pwnage’s real name, still he very much liked being told of his inevitable future success, which kept him sitting in his chair for many hours waiting on each of his Elfscape friends to log on one by one so that he could tell them the news and have a version of the same conversation he had already had about two dozen times, during which he’d been sitting in exactly the same position with one leg tucked under his body for so long that his leg skin was deeply imprinted with the lines of his faux-leather plastic chair, while meanwhile he was developing inside his leg what doctors would call a deep vein thrombosis, or in other words a blood clot, which was causing redness and swelling in the leg, as well as a slight ache and tenderness and warmth and pain that he might have felt had the leg not already gone way beyond the pins-and-needles stage and into complete and almost anesthetic numbness due to the prolonged compression it endured while he said goodbye to friends and explained his upcoming account deletion and often did one last quest or dungeon run with these friends for, as they said, “old time’s sake,” and he was surprised how nostalgic this made him feel (this by the way being one of the reasons he’d forgotten to move his legs or stand or stretch or in any way get the blood circulating in the lower trunk or anywhere but the thumbs and digits strictly necessary for effective video-game operation), nostalgic that his friends wanted to revisit scenes of former triumph with the same verve that some people really looked forward to their high-school reunions, and so with each friend he’d repeat some adventure they’d shared weeks or months ago, and this gave Pwnage the idea that he wanted to visit all of the spots on the immense Elfscape map that he was fond of or had some important memory about or were in any way significant to his development as a serious gamer, a kind of “farewell tour” of the places he’d come to know and adore, and which of course would take, seriously, like hours and hours (the game’s developers made a lot of hay about the huge size and scale of their virtual world, saying that if the Elfscape world were real it would literally be about the size of the moon), and so he visited the Silverglade Forest (site of his avatar’s first death, at level eight, due to lurking panthers) and the Caves of Jedenar (close scrape with a pack of demons) and the Shrine of Aellena (because of the awesome sound track that played while in the shrine) and the Wyrmmist Strand (where he encountered his first dragon) and the Gurubashy Ruins (where he murdered his first orc) and so on, just loving all these weird place-names, and he flew from spot to spot on his ultrafast flying gryphon, then remembered how interesting it was when he was new to the game and had not earned any flying or riding animals yet and had to walk through the countryside and really take it in and enjoy the way one ecosystem gave way to another and he longed for the simplicity and na?veté of those days and so he parked his gryphon on the northern tip of the world’s largest continent and began walking south, first through the white snowy tundra of the Wintersaber Glaciers, over the Timberfrost Mountains and down into Frost-Thistle Gorge, happening upon only a few occasional charging wildebeests or polar bears, through caves controlled by a semi-sentient race of ice yeti he was friendly with, and on south, walking and occasionally taking screen grabs the way tourists take photographs, and seeing orc players who ran like hell from him because they knew his name and he had a badass reputation, and by this time the online message boards were lighting up with the news that the game’s most dominant and elite player was retiring, and Pwnage kept getting all these private messages asking if it was true and pleading with him to change his mind, messages that were actually having the effect of changing his mind because he was suddenly aware that he was possibly way more popular and supported and loved as an Elfscape avatar than he ever would be as an in-real-life real human being, and this made him feel sad and sort of panicky, and he remembered the anxiety of this last Patch Day when he couldn’t log on to Elfscape for almost an entire day and he walked circles around every room in his house and stared at the mailbox for hours, and so as he now walked south through the vast Elfscape terrain he felt a crushing and excessive stress and dread that if he went through with the whole quitting-video-games thing then every day would be like the last Patch Day, and the realization of this washed over him like a cold rain and he felt his willpower and commitment to the plan erode and he decided that the only way he’d ever be able to bring himself to really quit Elfscape was if his characters were no longer the elite and super-cool characters that earned everyone’s love and support, and the only way that would happen was if he got rid of all the treasure he’d worked tirelessly for, the thinking here being that he might be less roundly loved and popular and elite and therefore more likely to quit if he didn’t have all his epic loot, plus it would be so frustrating to go back to the bottom of the totem pole after being on top for so long, so annoying to earn all that loot back again, so pointless that he would prefer to quit, and so he announced to his guild mates that he was giving away all his possessions and if they came to find him on his long walk south he would give them something really cool and valuable, and soon he was followed by a pack of lesser players in a kind of parade—at this point, it’s important to note, the deep thrombus in his leg had shaken free at the moment he reached his epiphany and announced the news to the guild and switched from sitting on one leg to sitting on the other leg, and the clot was now slowly making its way up his circulatory system, a small hard glob about the size of a marble pushing through his body that registered occasionally as a tightness and sometimes a shooting pain, which frankly did not separate itself from the biologic human noise Pwnage felt mostly all the time, pain stemming from near-constant exhaustion and immobility and surviving on a diet consisting mostly of caffeine and frozen microwavable processed food things, a condition that caused regular shooting pain all over his body and meant the shooting pain that was now caused by his newly mobile blood clot made no impression on him as anything out of the ordinary, since he felt some kind of stabbing pain almost all the time and anyway the stabbing was blunted by the fact that he rarely actually remembered the stabbing pain as his brain’s frontal lobe and hippocampus had been severely atrophied from sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and exposure to computer screens at a volume that seems to be dangerous in a way scientists don’t even understand yet, so that each time he felt the stabbing pain his overtired, morbidly taxed brain promptly ejected the information so that the next time he felt the shooting, stabbing, awful pain it was like he was feeling it for the first time, duly noting it and thinking that if it happened again he’d definitely seek some kind of help from some manner of health professional within probably the next week or so maybe—and as his friends all gathered around him he began giving away first his gold, the many coins of gold, silver, and copper that he’d looted from the dead bodies of slain orc players and gathered from treasure chests guarded by dragons and earned on the server’s auction house, where he’d learned to manipulate the various raw-material exchanges and leverage his wealth into far greater wealth by exerting near-monopolistic control of the Elfscape supply chain, and he was aware that all this gold had real-world value, that some people sold their Elfscape gold on real-world auction sites to other Elfscape players for real American dollars, and he was aware that a Stanford economist had even invented a WoE-gold-to-dollar currency converter that, if correct, meant that he could sell his gold and make at least as much money as he did when he worked at that copy shop, a thing he would never do because Elfscape was fun and he knew from experience that jobs were not (except if he really thought about it he’d say his Elfscape game experience was not one hundred percent fun, since each day’s playing began with five hours of the same rote daily quests completed over and over until they achieved the monotony typical of manual labor, which was of course not very fun but which unlocked rewards that would allow him to have fun later, when he used them, except when he finally earned the rewards the game’s developers would by that time have issued a new patch that made available new rewards that were slightly, incrementally better than the old rewards, and so even as he earned these rewards he knew they were already devalued because better rewards were right there on the horizon, and if he thought about it really hard he’d say that most of his Elfscape game experience involved him preparing to have fun but never really having it, the fun, except in those raids when, working together with his guild, he took down some importantly evil enemy and won some cool loot, but even then it was only fun the first couple of times they succeeded, and after that it became just a repeatable exercise that no longer provided fun, per se, and which actually caused a great deal of stress and rage when the guild failed some week where they had succeeded the week before, and so most raid nights were less about having fun and more about anger avoidance, and so he concluded the fun must have been happening elsewhere, maybe not even in the discrete game moments themselves but in the general, abstract state of playingness, because when he was logged on to Elfscape he felt a deep sense of satisfaction and mastery and belonging that he felt nowhere in the real world, and this feeling might be what he would interpret as “fun”), all of which is to say that Pwnage had a vast fortune indeed, and when he began giving away his wealth in 1,000-gold-coin increments it still took many dozens of players coming to collect before the purse was depleted, which made Pwnage feel something like Robin Hood walking through the forest giving away fortunes to the needy, and when his fortune was gone he began giving away his gear, clicking randomly on people in the very large crowd around him and giving them his weapons, his longswords and broadswords, his cleavers, claymores, rapiers, daggers, dirks, sabers, sickles, scimitars, shivs, axes, cudgels, hatchets, hammers, tomahawks, maces, picks, staves, polearms, pikes, spears, halberds, and one mysterious weapon he didn’t even remember obtaining called a flammard, and when he had no more weapons to give he gave away his body armor, the various pieces of chain mail and plate metal he’d won and plundered, the kick-ass pauldrons with the spikes all over them, the greaves covered in razor wire, the awesome helmet with bull’s horns that made him look like the goddamn minotaur (already this bounty was becoming legendary, as several players were taking video footage of Pwnage’s long walk south and posting it online with captions like “EPIC PLAYER GIVES AWAY ALL HIS LOOTZ!”), and at first Pwnage felt sharp pangs of regret giving away his stuff because he loved his stuff and also because he knew how much time and effort went into acquiring every item (the bull’s-head helmet alone took like two months to win), but that feeling soon gave way to an unexpected sense of calm purpose and spiritual goodness and generosity and even warmth and peace (this might have been the exhaustion talking, as he’d been playing Elfscape at this point for thirty hours straight) as he shed all his possessions and he was followed now by his many admirers and he was feeling like he was maybe inspiring these people and should maybe say something important and wise and he wondered whether there was a Buddha story like this, or maybe it was Gandhi, or Jesus, a story about giving everything away and walking—this all sounded really familiar—and Pwnage eventually thought of this whole episode not as a last-ditch desperate effort to quit a game he did not seem to have the willpower to quit but rather as an altruistic and spiritual journey of renunciation, like he was doing something good and important, charity-wise, being a role model for all these people, and this feeling held pretty strongly and pleasantly until the crowd began to thin, which it did when it was clear he had no more loot to give away and people began to private-message him asking “Is that it? Is there any more?” and he realized they were not there to join him on his long metaphysical journey but instead they simply wanted cool new toys to play with, and Pwnage felt angry at their crass materialism until he remembered that this was the point of the whole giving-away-all-his-possessions maneuver in the first place, that he would be abandoned and therefore not tempted to continue playing Elfscape due to his drastically diminished popularity, but now that it had happened, now that he actually had been abandoned, now that he was walking through the big open country without weapons or armor or gold or friends, just an elf in a loincloth, pathetic-looking, weak, he still did not feel much like quitting, and so he kept walking south until he reached the bottom of the continent, a rocky plateau that looked out over the ocean, and he knew he’d reached the end of his journey and knew it was time to log off and delete his account and begin living his real-life life and writing his novel and becoming successful and winning Lisa back and starting his diet and doing the all-around radical change that was necessary to live the way he wanted to live, and even though he could no longer think of a single excuse to stay in the game, and even though there was literally nothing his avatar could do now in its state of total poverty and nakedness, still he could not log off, still he stared out at the digital ocean, still the thought of abandoning the game and returning to the real world filled him with dread, a dread more powerful than anything most normally functional human adults ever experience due to the serious problems of brain physiology and neural microstructure reorganization that had gone down inside his cranium during his addict-level Elfscape binges, which had, along with the inevitable physical tolls like weight gain and muscle waste and back fatigue and a semipermanent knot on the back of his rib cage that seemed correlated with repetitive right-handed mouse usage, also severely degenerated the tissue of his rostral anterior cingulate cortex, an area in the front of the brain that acts as a kind of recruiter engaging the other more rational brain areas to aid during conflicts (think of a very impulsive and distraught person calling more level-headed friends to get some perspective and objective advice) and is necessary for proper cognitive and impulse control, except in Pwnage this area had begun to shut down completely, like a house that took down all its Christmas lights, just deactivating, which was what happened in the brains of heroin-dependent individuals when presented with heroin: their anterior cingulate cortexes shut down and they got no decision-making input from the quote-unquote smart parts of their brains and their brains offered them literally no help with overcoming their most basic, primal, self-destructive impulses, impulses with which they needed the most help to overcome, which was precisely what was happening to Pwnage as he looked out at the sea: he functionally remembered the desire to quit Elfscape, but there was no part of his brain actively telling him to do so, plus there was the problem of decreased gray-matter volume in several clusters of the orbitofrontal cortex—responsible for goal orientation and motivation—this atrophy resulting in a brain that was aware of the existence of a goal but did not offer any aid achieving that goal, instead idly seeing the goal on the horizon and noting the goal the way Midwestern farmers note the weather (“Yep, rain’s comin’?”), which was another of Elfscape’s neurobiological traps, that the more he played Elfscape the more his brain was unable to compute any but the most short-term and proximate goals, which happened to be the goals of Elfscape itself—the way the game was designed to reward players every one or two hours with some cool new piece of loot or a new level gained or achievement accomplished, which was accompanied by a horn fanfare and fireworks animations—and becoming habituated to these kinds of insidious, small, near-future goals made any long-term goals that required substantial planning and discipline and mental fortitude (like writing a novel or starting a new diet) seem, for the brain, literally unfathomable, not to mention the problems happening deep inside his brain’s internal capsule, posterior limb, the only part of Pwnage’s brain to have strengthened during his massive, unyielding addiction to Elfscape, where the primary motor cortex sent its axons that controlled fine finger movements, and Pwnage had excellent fine finger agility, clicking with his right hand on his many-buttoned mouse and with his left hand a full 104-key Western keyboard, keeping a mental map of all of this so that he could press any one of these hundreds of keys and buttons in a split second without even looking at them, this behavior having changed the actual physical structure of his brain and greatly thickened the axons in the internal capsule, the problem here being that such giant finger-control fibers were never, in an evolutionary sense, strictly necessary (there’s no equivalent in our human ancestry to a fifteen-button electronic gaming mouse), and so the area available within the capsule was limited and not very accommodating to unexpected growth, meaning that Pwnage’s giant finger-related white matter was crowding out other essential brain tissues, primarily communication tracts between the frontal and subcortical brain regions, which governed executive decision-making and which, among other things, helped inhibit inappropriate behaviors, which may have explained Pwnage’s actions at the organic health food store specifically and his actions over the last year more generally, his slow wasting away in front of his computer, his lack of sleep, his diet, his delusions of grandeur about becoming a famous author and winning Lisa back, the partial mini seizures he didn’t even know were happening, the seizures caused either by sleep deprivation or flashing computer lights or severe nutrition-related chemical imbalances (or all three of those things together, probably) that presented physically as a loss of sensation in various limbs and the sudden need to pick at his own skin and seeing sparkly things at the edge of his vision, symptoms that Pwnage might have gotten a medical opinion about if his dorsolateral prefrontal cortex weren’t completely shut down, this brain area being responsible for decision-making and emotion control and which went dormant in the brains of heavy multitaskers during what might be called “information overload,” which in the event of dormancy the emotion centers of the brain took over executive control in the neural equivalent of giving the keys to a forklift to a six-year-old, and Pwnage’s mind was overloaded indeed, as his computer screen was jammed with the various boxes of add-on software that gave him real-time and constantly in-flux feedback on his opponent’s health, his own available moves, various countdown timers that let him know when other moves would be available again, the attacks that would at that moment inflict the highest damage mathematically possible, the status of each of his raid members, the full party’s damage-per-second output, an overhead bird’s-eye view of the fight’s layout with principal actors color-coded depending on their roles in the fight, all of this happening in addition to the actual game also happening behind all the flashing and glowing boxes, and Pwnage monitored not only everything happening on this screen—which itself would be enough to drive your basic slow-living eighteenth-century peasant to near psychotic breaks—but since he usually played while “multiboxing” several characters at once, he monitored the events on six different computer screens simultaneously, such that he was ingesting way more information per second than all the air traffic controllers at O’Hare put together, making that very sensitive and logical brain part essentially wave the white flag and hide, allowing his emotion centers to easily shut down whatever was left of his logical, rational, disciplined mind, which meant, to put it simply, that the more Elfscape he played the more impossible it felt to stop playing Elfscape, and this went way beyond simply kicking a bad habit and into problems of brain morphology and a kind of fundamental neural disfigurement so complete that Pwnage’s mind literally would not allow him to quit Elfscape, which was what he was realizing standing on the southern edge of the continent wondering what to do next and not coming up with anything and so just standing there, until finally one of his enemy-proximity alarms went off and the game’s camera auto-flipped to reveal an orc player behind him spying from a great distance, and what he would usually do in this moment would be to charge the orc and slam it with his shield and then hack at it with his ax of unusual size until it was good and dead, and even though he currently had no shield or ax or really anything with which to attack the orc, he reflexively went to attack it—except that he couldn’t, something was preventing it, he felt hazy and nauseous and light-headed and found he couldn’t move his arms or, come to think of it, breathe (it should be mentioned here that the blood clot that had formed in his leg was by now a full-blown pulmonary embolism that was currently blocking blood flow to the lungs and which caused substantial chest pain whenever Pwnage breathed combined with a desperate desire to breathe more, Pwnage registering this mostly as a quick dimming of the light, almost as if the sun had gone down all at once, skipping twilight and plunging directly into nocturnal darkness), and when Pwnage did not attack the orc player, the orc player moved closer, gaining confidence, a step or two at a time, testing him, ready to run, until the orc was in melee range and Pwnage desperately wanted to attack it except that he couldn’t move under the weight of what felt like an anvil on his chest, and when Pwnage did not move the orc player removed from his belt a small dagger and—after a brief moment where he was probably wondering if this was a good idea and not a put-on by the server’s most famous elf warrior—the orc stabbed him, then stabbed him again, then again, and Pwnage’s loinclothed elf stood there wobbling and taking it while alarms went off everywhere and his health bar dropped and he sat there watching in horror unable to move as the darkness closed in and his field of vision narrowed and he lost all control of his motor functions and his lips and fingertips turned blue and his elf warrior eventually, after so many wounds, dropped down dead, and Pwnage watched the orc dance on his own fallen corpse and the last thing he saw before the lights went off completely was a message from the orc-player saying ZOMG I PWNED UR FACE ROFLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!! and Pwnage resolved that he would earn all his treasure back and become twice as powerful as before just so he could hunt down this one f*cking orc and kill him over and over and over, and he would start doing that as soon as he could move his legs and arms again, and breathe, and for that matter see, and even as all his systems were in a cascading and catastrophic failure his brain told him his number one priority right now was killing this orc, which he would never be able to do, because today was the day he was quitting Elfscape, and since his mind would not let him do it, his body had to do it for him.