The Game

love?”
    He had AMOGed me again.

Ghosts.
    We were just phantoms, drifting invisibly through a putrefying house that hadn’t seen a maid or repairman in months.
    Mystery wasn’t talking to Herbal. Herbal wasn’t talking to Mystery. Papa hardly spoke to anyone. And for some reason Sickboy, Playboy, Xaneus, and all the other Real Social Dynamics worker bees had stopped interacting with Mystery and me. Even the junior PUAs who hung out in the house—Dreamweaver, Maverick, and other former students—didn’t say hello when I passed by. If I tried to engage them in conversation, they were curt. They wouldn’t even look me in the eye.
    The only person who spoke to everyone was Tyler Durden. But interacting with him was never a conversation; it was an interrogation, like someone might have with an actor who wanted to play him in a movie.
    “I really want to ask you something,” he said one afternoon as he emerged from the kitchen with Sickboy. I’d always liked Sickboy. Despite the name, he was a well-raised, mild-mannered New Yorker.
    “What do you have that enables you to get Lisa?” Tyler Durden asked. “Because I go out every night and work so hard on myself, and I know that I couldn’t get her as a girlfriend.”
    What was amazing about Lisa was that despite her toughness, she was one of the most generous women I’d ever been with. She’d make my bed every morning; she’d cook meals and bring them up to my room when I was working; and she rarely came over without a small gift—a tube of Origins face cleanser, a bottle of John Varvatos cologne, a copy of Henry IV, Part I I’d been looking for. Perhaps I had found my Caresse.
    “I guess I have life experience,” I told him. “All you do is sarge every night. You’re only working on one aspect of yourself. It’s like going to the gym every day and just doing bicep curls.”
    His brows knitted, and his mind began turning rapidly. For a moment, he appeared to take the advice to heart. Then he rejected it, and his eyes began to blaze. If it wasn’t hatred they contained, it was at least resentment.He resented me because I still didn’t see him as an equal, because he still wasn’t cool in my eyes, because he couldn’t pick apart the idea of coolness to a subset of behaviors he could model. Lisa dated me because, to her, I was cool. Tyler Durden would never be cool.
    He chewed my ear off for ten minutes about how good he was in the field now, and how he didn’t need routines anymore to get IOIs, and how celebrities always tried to get him to go to parties.
    Finally, he turned to walk up to Papa’s room. Sickboy remained behind, standing next to me. “Aren’t you coming?” Tyler asked Sickboy, nodding his head upstairs as if something important were occurring there.
    “I just want to say good-bye to Style,” Sickboy said.
    “You’re leaving?” I asked. I was surprised Sickboy was even acknowledging my presence.
    The door to Papa’s room slammed lightly overhead. Sickboy looked up nervously.
    “I’m out of this whole thing,” he said.
    “What whole thing?”
    “This house is toxic.” The words burst out of him, as if they’d been slowly forming inside like a blister. “There are so many cool things to do in L.A., and all anyone wants to do is sarge. I haven’t even seen the Pacific Ocean the whole time I’ve been here. These guys are losers. I wouldn’t introduce any of them to any of my friends back in New York.”
    “I know what you mean. Lisa can’t stand them.”
    “It’s a joke,” he continued. He sighed the tension out of his shoulders, as if relieved he’d found someone normal, someone who understood, someone who wasn’t entirely brainwashed. “They bring girls back to the house all the time, but the girls get creeped out and leave. Tyler Durden can hardly get anyone to return his calls. I don’t think he’s been laid in two months. Papa’s had sex with probably one girl in the last year. Mystery can’t hold onto a girlfriend to save his life. And when Xaneus came here, he was a cool guy. But now he seems fake. All he talks about is sarging. You’re the only guy I want to model. You have a great lifestyle, a good job, and a cool girlfriend.”
    Flattery will get you everywhere. “I’ll tell you what. I’m going to give Lisa a surfing lesson tomorrow. Why don’t you join us? It’ll be good for you to get out of the house and see the ocean.”

MSN GROUP: Mystery’s Lounge
    SUBJECT: Field Report—Life at