The Nix(200)

A doctor in the room, thoroughly bald, explaining the case to a group of medical students. “Patient’s name, unknown,” he says. “An alias he goes by is, um, let’s see, Puh-wan-edge?”

The doctor looks to Samuel for help.

“Pwnage,” Samuel says. “Two syllables. Rhymes with ownage, but with a p.”

“What’s ownage?” says one of the students.

“Did he say orange?” says another.

“I think he said porridge.”

The doctor tells the students they are lucky to be here today because they may never see a case quite like this again, and indeed the doctor is considering writing an article about this patient in the Journal of Medical Oddities, which the students would be invited to co-author, of course. The students look at Pwnage with the same bemused appreciation they might have for a bartender preparing them an elaborate drink for free.

Pwnage has been sleeping for three days straight. Not in a coma, the doctor has pointed out. Sleeping. The hospital is nourishing him intravenously. And Samuel has to admit that Pwnage looks better, his skin less waxy, his face less bulbous, the splotchy rashes all over his neck and arms now faded to more or less normal human textures. Even his hair seems healthier, more (and this is the only way Samuel can think of describing it) well-attached. The doctor is listing the various medical conditions the patient presented upon admission to the emergency room: “Malnutrition, exhaustion, malignant hypertension, kidney and liver malfunction, dehydration so far along that frankly I’m not sure how the patient wasn’t hallucinating more or less all the time about water.” The students write this down.

The doctor’s head and face and arms have achieved a really impressive sharklike hairlessness. The medical students carry clipboards and they collectively smell like antiseptic soap and cigarettes. A heartbeat monitor connected to Pwnage by a series of wires and suction cups is not beeping. Samuel stands with Axman and keeps looking at him with these quick sidelong glances that he hopes Axman won’t notice. Samuel has heard Axman speaking over the computer hundreds of times from their many raids together but has never met him in person, and he’s feeling that dislocation you feel when the visual does not match up with the aural, like when you see a radio personality’s face for the first time and you think: Really? Axman’s voice has that whiny, nasally quality that makes him seem, online, like he must be one of those ninety-pound bepimpled nearsighted sissies who are the very quintessence of the online gamer stereotype. His reedy voice is the phonic equivalent of a punch that does not hurt. The kind of voice that makes it sound like his mouth was stuffed into his sinus cavity a long time ago by bullies.

“—and cardiac arrhythmia,” the doctor is saying, “diabetic ketoacidosis, diabetes, which he probably didn’t even know he had and which he definitely was not managing in any way and which made his blood about the same thickness and consistency as instant pudding.”

The real-life Axman turns out to be stylish and dashing—his tight-shorts-and-tank-top combo, and his tanned arms that are muscular but not gaudily so, and his sockless boat shoes, and his moderately curly hair begging to be playfully tussled, it all seems like he dressed from some instruction manual given only to young hip gay men. Pretty soon he’s going to discover sex and then he’ll wonder why he ever spent so much time playing video games.

“So we were all there,” Axman is saying, “on the cliffs above Mistwater Cape. You know the place?”

Samuel nods. It’s a spot on the Elfscape map, the southernmost point of the western continent, the place Pwnage apparently had his near-terminal medical crisis. That’s where Axman found him, his avatar, naked and dead, and he noticed Pwnage’s prolonged AFK status, which stands for “away from keyboard,” which Pwnage almost never was, Axman knew, away from his keyboard. So Axman called the real-life authorities, who went to investigate and saw through the front windows Pwnage slumped unconscious before his computer.

“I told everyone to meet at Mistwater,” Axman says in a semi-whisper so as not to interrupt the doctor. “I posted it online. ‘Candlelight vigil for Pwnage.’ We had a pretty good turnout. Maybe thirty people. All elves, of course.”

“Of course,” Samuel says. He has the feeling one of the attractive female medical students is right now eavesdropping on their conversation, and he feels that embarrassment he feels whenever someone from the real world discovers this is what he does with his spare time: plays Elfscape.

“All these elves standing there with our lit candles. And except for one guy in the back who was break-dancing and not really taking part, it was a somber and beautiful and mournful scene.”

“—and a rash on his arm that looked alarmingly similar to, but thankfully was not, necrotizing fasciitis,” says the doctor. The dome of his bare head shines. It makes the room feel bigger in the same way a large mirror might.

“But so here’s the thing,” Axman says, and he’s now gripping Samuel’s shirt and pulling lightly at it to keep Samuel’s attention and to express his own agitation. “I posted plans for the vigil online, in the Elves Only forum. But it turns out there were some trolls who saw it too.”

“Trolls?”

“Yeah, orcs.”

“Wait, trolls or orcs?”

“Orcs who were trolling. You know what I mean. Some orc-playing players saw the news about the candlelight vigil and reposted it in the Orcs Only forum, which of course I didn’t see because I don’t read their forums because I’m honorable like that.”