The Nix(201)

The reason the heartbeat monitor is not beeping is because heartbeat monitors in real life do not beep, Samuel decides. That must be a Hollywood affectation, a way to report to the audience what’s going on inside the patient’s chest. The heartbeat monitor attached to Pwnage just slowly prints a jagged line onto a narrow piece of paper that’s spooled up like something inside a cash register.

“So unbeknownst to us,” Axman says, “while we’re gathering on the cliffs above Mistwater Cape, the orcs are hiding in a cave to the north. And right in the middle of our ceremony, which I should stress was, with the exception of the guy who was break-dancing and then later took off all his clothes and jumped around a lot, really somber and beautiful and quiet, right in the middle, right as I’m making a speech about what a great guy Pwnage is and how we’re all hoping he gets better soon and urging people to write get-well cards to him and giving out the address of the hospital so that they can write actual real paper cards, all of a sudden all these orcs rush out of the trees and start murdering us.”

The attractive medical student seems to be chewing on her pencil either to suppress the smile or outright giggle generated by eavesdropping on this particular conversation. Or because she’s a smoker and that’s one of those oral-fixation unconscious-tic things that smokers tend to do. The doctor’s head has the buffed quality of a new bowling ball still wrapped in its protective sheath.

“So all of our orc alarms start going off and we all turn around to fight them,” says Axman. “Only we can’t fight them. Do you know why we can’t fight them?”

“Because you’re all holding candles?”

“Because we’re all holding candles.”

That the doctor does not even have eyebrows or eyelashes is an unsettling quality it takes Samuel a few minutes to identify. Before that, it was like the guy looked off for a reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“So this orc starts fighting me,” Axman says, “and I instinctively swing at him and hit him, but of course I hit him with a candle, which does like zero damage and causes him to ROFL over and over. So I open my control panel and select the character screen and select the candle and then locate my sword in my inventory screen and then double-click to switch them and the game says Are you sure you want to trade items? and all this time the orc is chopping me in half slowly with his ax, swinging away casually and I’m just standing there like a tree totally helpless to stop him, and I’m all like to the game Yes I want to trade items! Yes I’m f*cking sure!”

At Axman’s sudden outburst the doctor and the students look over with these expressions of disdain that communicate how quickly he’d be thrown out of here had he not saved the life of the patient they’re going to write a quirky journal article about.

“So anyway,” says Axman, quieter now, “I ultimately don’t have time to even switch weapons because I’m fully dead way before I get through the process. And so my ghost resurrects at the nearest graveyard and I run the ghost back to my body and respawn and you know what happens?”

“The orcs are still there.”

“The orcs are still there, and I’m still holding a goddamn candle.”

“—and lactic acidosis,” says the doctor, stronger now, trying to talk over Axman, “and hyperthyroidism, urinary retention, croup.” The doctor’s allover hairlessness is beginning to seem clinical and not aesthetic, like he suffers from a genetic disorder the kids probably made fun of throughout his childhood, which makes Samuel feel a little guilty for staring.

“And this happens maybe twenty or thirty times,” says Axman. “I get back to my body, respawn, and get killed within seconds. Rinse and repeat. I wait for the orcs to get tired of it, but they never do. I finally get so angry I log out and post a pretty big rant on the Orcs Only forum where I say the behavior of the orcs who crashed our vigil was reprehensible and immoral. I said all their accounts should be banned and they should personally apologize to everyone in our guild. This ignited a pretty big debate.”

“What’s the consensus?”

“The orcs said their maneuver was accurately orc-like. They said killing us during our vigil was in keeping with how orcs are supposed to act in the game world. I said sometimes the game world and the real world overlap in certain places where the real world should take precedence, like during a quiet vigil where friends are mourning for their seriously ill raid-leader buddy. They said their orc avatars don’t know what this ‘real world’ is that I’m talking about and for them the Elfscape world is the only world that exists. I said if that’s true then they would never have known about the vigil in the first place because they don’t have orc laptops from which to access the Elves Only online forums, and even if they did, they could not comprehend what was written there because orcs cannot read English.”

“This all sounds very complicated.”

“It opened up this big metaphysical problem about how much of the real world you’re bracketing when you’re playing Elfscape. Most of our guild is taking the week off from raiding to think about the problem.”

“Did you ever log on again?”

“Not yet. My elf is still on that cliff. Dismembered.”

The doctor is saying, “I swear to god this is the first time I’ve ever seen a pulmonary embolism be the least bad thing wrong with someone. Compared to everything else going on here, the anticoagulant we administered for the embolism was an easy fix.”