The Nix(69)

Pwnage nodded. “I see.”

“Now I need something from her and I don’t know how to get it.”

“What do you need?”

“Her story. I’m writing a book about her, but she won’t tell me anything. All I have is a photograph and a few sketchy notes. I know nothing about her.”

Samuel had the photograph in his pocket—printed out on copy paper and folded up. He opened it and showed it to Pwnage.

“Hm,” Pwnage said. “You’re a writer?”

“Yeah. My publisher’s going to sue me if I don’t finish this book.”

“You have a publisher? Really? I’m a writer too.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah, I have this idea for a novel. I started it in high school. A police detective with psychic abilities on the trail of a serial killer.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“I have it all mapped out in my head. At the end—spoiler alert—there’s an epic showdown when the trail finally leads to the detective’s own ex-wife’s daughter’s boyfriend. I’ll write it as soon as I find the time.”

The skin of his cuticles, and the skin around his eyes, and the skin around his lips, and really the skin at all the intersections of his body had a deep and aching redness. A scarlet pain wherever one thing turned into another. Samuel imagined it hurt him to move, or blink, or breathe. Pink splotches on his scalp where tufts of white hair had fallen out. One eye seemed to open wider than the other.

“My mother is the Packer Attacker,” Samuel said.

“The Packer what?”

“The woman who threw rocks at that politician.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, I missed it too at first. I think it happened the same day as our raid. The one against the dragon.”

“That was an epic win.”

“Yeah.”

“Elfscape can actually teach us a lot about living,” Pwnage said. “Take this problem with your mother? Easy. You only need to ask yourself what kind of challenge she is.”

“What do you mean?”

“In Elfscape, as in every video game, there are four kinds of challenges. Every challenge is a variant of these four. It’s my philosophy.”

Pwnage’s hand hovered over the nacho rubble, searching for any chip that still retained its structural integrity, many of them having gone flaccid in the cheese-and-oil swamp that gathered on the bottom of the pan.

“Your philosophy came from video games?” Samuel said.

“I find this is also true in life. Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

“Okay.”

“So you all you have to do is figure out which kind of challenge you’re dealing with.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Depends. Say they’re an enemy? The only way to defeat an enemy is to kill them. If you killed your mother, would it solve your problem?”

“Definitely not.”

“So not an enemy then. That’s good! Maybe she’s an obstacle? Obstacles are things you have to find your way around. If you avoided your mother, would it solve your problem?”

“No. She has something I need.”

“Which is?”

“Her life story. I need to know what happened to her, in her past.”

“Okay. And there’s no other way to get this?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Aren’t there historical documents?” Pwnage said. “Do you not have family? Can you not do an interview? Do writers not do research?”

“Well, my grandfather, on my mother’s side. He’s still alive.”

“There you go.”

“I haven’t talked to him in years. He’s in a nursing home. In Iowa.”

“Mm-hm,” Pwnage said. He was using a spoon to lap up the remaining nacho sludge.

“I should go talk to my grandfather, is your advice,” Samuel said. “Go to Iowa and ask him about my mother.”

“Yes. Figure out her story. Piece it together. It’s the only way you’ll solve your problem, if indeed it’s an obstacle-type problem and not in fact a puzzle or a trap.”

“How can you tell the difference?”

“You can’t at first.” He discarded the spoon. The nachos were, for the most part, entirely consumed. He dabbed his finger into a spot of cheese, then licked it clean.

“You have to be careful,” Pwnage said, “with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone’s a puzzle until you realize they’re a trap. But by then it’s too late. That’s the trap.”





4


HERE’S A MEMORY: Samuel is riding in the backseat on a summer trip to his parents’ hometown in Iowa. Mom and Dad are up front, and he’s avoiding the side with the sun, and he’s staring out the window at the passing scenery, the terrifying traffic of Chicago and the brick-and-steel girth of the city giving way to the more predictable ebb of the prairie. The DeKalb Oasis is the last tendril of civilization before the surrounding farmland begins. Huge open sky that’s all the more huge because there’s nothing to interrupt it: no mountains, no hills, no topography at all, just flat green endlessness.