46 pages • 1 hour read
The Nix
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Part 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 8 Summary: “Search and Seizure”
In 2011, Faye awaits her arraignment. The judge, Circuit Judge Charlie Brown, confined to a wheelchair, decides to put off retirement to preside over Faye’s domestic terrorism trial. The national attention the trial is receiving as part of the ongoing presidential campaign pleases the Judge, but he sees a far more personal agenda: He blames Faye for being in a wheelchair. Going out his front door on his way to court, the Judge is accosted by a young man who does not identify himself. The young man advises the Judge to drop all the charges against Faye, indicating that he knows their mutual history and that back in Chicago the woman had done nothing to him, that she had not ruined his clandestine affair with Alice. Unimpressed, the Judge angrily responds, “I’m going to see her hang” (558). The young man is, of course, Samuel. After his unsuccessful confrontation with the Judge, he visits his mother, who, out on bail, shares with her son during a looping walk along Lake Michigan the story of her years in the 1990s when she worked with Chicago arts groups before going into teaching. When the two return to Faye’s apartment, they see that the police have ransacked it.
We then are submerged in the overloaded mind of Pwnage whose thought patterns reflect the crazy logic of the video games to which he is addicted. The internal monologue, an unbroken sentence that stretches for more than a dozen pages, reflects how torn he is between the sheltering refuge of Elfscape and the increasing pressures of the real-time world and the dwindling chances he has to complete his murder mystery and how, in the end, he knows he cannot abandon the fantasy world.
When Faye’s lawyer shows up at her ransacked apartment, he tells Samuel that he no longer needs Samuel to provide a character reference for Faye because Samuel’s college is pressing for an investigation into the “frankly shocking number of hours per week” (589) Samuel spent playing Elfscape in his campus office. Alerted by Alice, Samuel urges his mother to flee the country now. They two pack hastily and head to O’Hare to board a flight to London. Although Faye is cleared (the paperwork on her domestic terrorism arrest had not been received), Samuel is stopped—surveillance cameras back in Iowa had recorded Samuel taking photographs of the ChemStar factory, a facility protected by Homeland Security. Samuel tells his mother to go without him, that he would meet her in London as soon as he can clear up the misunderstanding. Faye departs: “And thus Samuel endured, for the second time in his life, the sight of his mother walking away, disappearing, and not coming back” (600).
Part 8 Analysis
In Part 8, Hill begins to chart a way through and out of moral darkness. At the airport scene that closes this part, Samuel evidences what he has never been able to muster: genuine concern for another and the willingness to sacrifice expediency and his own agenda in the interest of another, in this case the very person that he has, for more than 20 years, blamed for his emotional and psychological turmoil.
Part 8 begins in the same moral darkness that cloaks Part 7. We see the twisted moral character of Charlie Brown, ironically a judge, a figure that within a society is responsible for the administration of justice and fairness. The Judge’s nefarious motivation exposed, he will not relent—he maintains the grudge that he has nursed for decades. We are not sure at this point how the Judge was confined to a wheelchair (we find that out in the next part) but his bitterness and commitment to revenge work against a character we might otherwise be inclined to sympathize with.
Pwnage’s internal monologue immerses us within the claustrophobic mind of a boy-child whose addiction to the faux-reality and the inviting womb of video gaming has left him virtually helpless in the real-time world, uninterested in accommodating its difficult and tricky dimensions. He cannot abandon the elaborate self he has fashioned within a world of menacing and swooping dragons. It is his darkest moment as a character.
It is in the hesitating bond that begins to develop between Samuel and his mother that Hill moves us toward the possibility of both characters’ redemption. Faye’s honest recounting of her life on her own is rendered here without games and the Choose Your Own Adventure format. Rather, Faye shares with her son her difficult life of trying to find herself, of struggling for income, of experimenting with poetry and with art, of finding her niche in society, a woman on her own. Samuel listens. He is moved sufficiently to tell her about the judge and the danger she is in, Samuel’s first indication of any real concern for his mother.
The plot to get Faye to safety out of the country, however, collapses at the airport—ironically Samuel is stopped by Homeland Security—and in a moment we see as a turning point, the mother and son reenact once again the mother’s departure. This time it is Samuel who insists that his mother go. This time, he says goodbye: “Have a good flight” (598). Quietly, Samuel’s reclamation has begun.
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