The Game

wildest expectations when I’d first joined the community that I just lost it. I couldn’t hold out any longer. And I never got to have sex with Barbara.
    This is what the PUAs call a quality problem.
    Over the last year and a half, I’d spent a lot of time working on my appearance, my energy, my attitude, and my state. Yet now, when all those qualities were at their lowest—when I looked and felt like shit—I’d had the most sexually decadent two days of my life. There was a lesson here: The less you appear to be trying, the better you do.
    The next day, Herbal and I sat in the living room with a bowl of ice cubes, which we rubbed on ourselves every few minutes to shock our systems into staying awake. The sleep adjustment process was proving to be more difficult than we had imagined. I began to worry that we were wasting our time. After all, this whole sleep diet hadn’t even been scientifically proven.
    “There better be a rainbow at the end of this tunnel,” I babbled to Herbal. “I mean, we’re chasing after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And we don’t even know if it’s there, or if the rainbow even has an end.”
    Herbal looked startled; I’d snapped him out of a microsleep. “I had a dream about gummy worms,” he slurred. “Someone was chopping up gummy bears to make gummy worms.”
    After another two nap cycles, my head began to hurt and my eyes refused to raise any higher than half-mast. We bathed in cold water, we slapped ourselves in the face, we ran around the living room chasing each other with brooms. But nothing worked.
    When I felt my teeth to check my braces, I knew I’d passed over the edge of reason. I hadn’t worn braces since junior high.
    “I’m going to sleep,” Herbal finally said.
    “We can’t,” I told him. “If you go to sleep, I won’t make it by myself.”
    “Watch out for the toothpicks,” he said.
    We both started cracking up. He’d just had a microsleep. Dreams and reality were blurring.
    “Just try to make it through one more sleep cycle,” I told him.
    But after the next twenty-minute nap, I couldn’t get Herbal out of bed. He refused to even open his eyes. I couldn’t continue on my own, so I dragged my feet upstairs and drifted into the sweetest slumber of my life. And though I had failed the sleep experiment, I’d reached a new plateau in my game.
    I know I should be humble about the dual-induction massage and pretend like it was another step down a degrading path. But discovering the secret to threesomes was like finding the Rosetta Stone of pickup. Once the dual-induction massage routine was developed and shared, PUAs all over the world started having threesomes. It was like breaking the three-minute mile. The dual-induction massage would ultimately ensure my ranking as the number one PUA on Thundercat’s list for a second year running.
    Project Hollywood was already a success.

And then Tyler Durden arrived.
    He looked like he’d been spray-tanning. “I know I didn’t make a good impression in L.A.,” he said. He shook my hand. He even looked me in the eye for a microsecond.
    He wore a trendy black-and-white shirt with ropes hanging from the rib cage area like a corset. It wasn’t peacocky; it was the kind of shirt I would have bought. “Social intelligence is something that hasn’t come easy for me,” he continued. I think he was apologizing. “I’m still working at it. I can come across as self-centered when I slip. Not cool. I suppose I should be more equipped to, as Mystery always tells me, learn how to sarge guys.”
    It was humble of him. He’d done dozens of workshops since we’d met, and I’d been watching his progress online. His students said he now rivaled Mystery in his pickup prowess. I was willing to give him a second chance: maybe he really had done some serious work on himself. That’s the idea This community was predicated on, after all. Since we would both be going to Las Vegas to wing one of Mystery’s workshops that weekend, I was looking forward to seeing if the stories about his prowess in the field were true.
    Tyler slung his bag over his shoulder and walked up to Papa’s room. Between Papa’s newfound passion for business and Tyler Durden’s quest to be the community’s best pickup artist, they made a perfect team.
    Our house now had the most admired PUAs in the game. Of course, to the best of my recollection, Tyler Durden had never been approved as a resident. There wasn’t room for