The Game

freeze you out,” he said.
    “Who’s trying to freeze me out?”
    “Papa and Tyler Durden. They’re using tactics on you.”
    “What are you talking about? What do you mean by tactics?”
    “Wow, you really have no idea what’s been going on up in Papa’s room. Tyler Durden is telling everyone to ignore you. He wants you to think that everyone hates you. He’s trying to make you uncomfortable in the house.”
    “Why would he want to do that?”
    “He wants to take over. And he can’t have you here because you threaten him.”
    This explained the head games Tyler Durden was playing the other day, the reason he was trying to make me think everyone was against me. He was attempting to drive me out. He was running game on me.
    “He sees you as a threat to his power because he can’t suck you in. You’re not weak like Xaneus,” Playboy continued. “He sees you as a threat to his finances because you want him to pay rent. And he sees you as a threat to his women because you made out with that girl he picked up in Vegas. He thinks that if he lets his girls get near you, they’re going to lose attraction for him.”
    “He’s still upset about that?”
    “Yeah. But I think the main problem is that Tyler and Papa associate you with Mystery, and he’s their competition. They have a gang mentality. They think in terms of alliances. So they pushed Mystery out, and nowthey’re pushing you out. They want to make the whole house an office and dormitory for Real Social Dynamics.”
    “I don’t understand. How could they have pushed Mystery out? He dug his own grave.”
    “But don’t you see how they helped it along? How Papa invited Katya to sleep at the house and then brought her back after Mystery kicked her out? They were baiting him.” Each sentence Playboy spoke was like a strip of gauze being removed from my eyes. “Everything Papa said in his room during the house meeting, he was instructed to say by Tyler Durden. He’s a follower. And I made a mistake by going along with it too. If I could do it all over again, I’d vote for Mystery to stay. This house was his project. Even if his behavior was out of line, he had a right not to want his ex-girlfriend here.”
    I had played right into their hands. They were such masters of social manipulation that they had set up the meeting so I thought I was in charge. Papa even kept calling me the house leader. And thus, they’d managed to make it my decision to kick Mystery out. So much for the whole win-win idea.
    “They played me like a puppet,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.
    “They played me, too. That’s a large part of the reason I’m leaving. Tyler Durden can get those guys to do whatever he wants. He’s not motivated by girls. He’s motivated by acquisition and power.”
    How could I have been so blind? In Las Vegas, I had even told Tyler Durden point blank that he was the kind of person who liked to rise to the top of a situation by eliminating his competitors. And he had agreed.
    “All they do up in Papa’s room is hang out in the bathroom and plot,” Playboy elaborated. “Every word that comes out of Tyler Durden’s mouth is calculated. Every post he writes is to serve an agenda. That guy’s mind is all gears, turning and manipulating. He sees everything in life as a set. They even talk about ‘guy sets’ up in Papa’s room now. They have routines worked out to make students give their workshops better reviews and routines to control guys in the house. Every time someone new comes up to their room, they inoculate him against you.”
    We had created a dangerous precedent by studying how to control social situations in clubs. It had led to a mindset that everything in life was a game that could be manipulated to a player’s advantage with the right routines.
    But there was one thing I still didn’t understand. “If what you’re sayingis true,” I asked Playboy, “why was Papa avoiding me and Mystery before there was even a plan to freeze us out of the house?”
    “That came from Tyler Durden too,” Playboy said. “He didn’t want Papa representing Mystery’s business as well as his, so he turned Papa against Mystery as soon as you guys moved in. Then, once Mystery and Papa started bickering, he told Papa to avoid you guys completely and use the back door to enter the house.”
    So many connections were firing in my head as Playboy spoke. All the weirdness that had been taking place in the house since day one had