The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “Where is it?”

  “You need to promise. You won’t tell.”

  “Fine, I promise.”

  “Say it with feeling.”

  “Just show me.”

  Bishop raised his hands in an I-give-up gesture, then pointed at the stairwell below him. “Down there,” he said. “I keep them down there, hidden in the dirt, bottom of the stairs.”

  The Berg dropped the page he was looking at and opened the gate to the stairwell and rushed down. Bishop looked at Samuel and nodded: the signal.

  Samuel leaped off the loading dock down to the spot where the Berg had been standing. He walked over to the gate and very slowly shut it, just as they had practiced. He could see the Berg at the bottom of the stairs, his long horrible rattail, the fat expanse of his back as he huddled down and swept away the dirt and leaves and discovered the plastic bag that Bishop had planted there.

  “In here? In the bag?” the Berg said.

  “Yep. That’s it.”

  When the gate shut, it did so with a small and trivial click. Samuel slipped the heavy padlock between the bars and closed it. The snap made by the lock’s internal metal mechanism felt substantial and satisfying. It felt final. Irrevocable. They had done it. There was no going back.

  A few feet away, fluttering in the wind, was the page Bishop had given the Berg. It spun in the eddies the breeze made around the loading dock, folding over itself at the creases made when it was pressed into eighths. Samuel grabbed it. Opened it. And the immediate impression the photo gave, before all its shapes resolved themselves into recognizable human forms, the dominant textural feature, the thing that seemed to define the photo and would later be pretty much the only thing Samuel remembered about it, was hair. Loads of dark, curly hair. Around the girl’s head, a jet-black cascade that looked physically heavy and difficult to bear, hair in tight curls that reached all the way down to the dirt she sat on, the flesh of her butt smooshing out beneath her like bread dough, one arm behind her and supporting herself with her elbow in the dirt, the other hand reaching down to her crotch, opening herself up with two fingers in a gesture that looked like an upside-down peace sign, revealing this plump and mysterious bright-red spot amid another outbreak of dark black hair, hair that was thick and curly where it almost reached her belly button, but became wispy inside her pimpled thighs, where the hair resembled the desolate attempts teenagers make at mustaches and beards, hair that kept creeping down beneath her to the spot where she contacted the ground, where she sat in some anonymous tropical forest scene, Samuel seeing this and trying to gather all of it simultaneously and trying to make sense of it and trying to enjoy it the way Andy Berg seemed to enjoy it but achieving only this abstract sense of curiosity combined with maybe a mild revulsion or horror that the adult world seemed be a terrible, appalling place.

  He folded the page into small squares. He was trying to forcibly forget what he’d just seen when, from the bottom of the stairwell, the Berg suddenly boomed: “What the fuck?”

  And at that moment a bright white flash popped. Bishop held a Polaroid camera, and it buzzed and clicked and ejected a white square of film.

  “What the fuck!” the Berg said again. Samuel climbed the ladder onto the loading dock and ran to the edge where Bishop stood overlooking the Berg and flapping the photo and laughing. The Berg had several pictures around him, presumably having upended the bag and let them all flutter out. And almost all of them, Samuel could see now, were close-ups of large, erect penises. Adult penises. Adult and very manly and horribly engorged and darkly empurpled and some of them dribbling and wet. Penises, some of them from glossy magazines, some actual real Polaroid pictures, whitely lit, softly focused, close-up anonymous disembodied cocks emerging from shadows or from beneath the folds of someone’s sagging belly flesh.

  “What the fuck!” Andy Berg could not seem to find any other words but these. “What in the fuck?”

  “See? I knew it,” Bishop said. “You’re freaking out.”

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “You’re not quite mature enough.”

  “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

  “You’re not quite there yet, developmentally speaking.”

  The Berg took the stairs two at a time. He was so big and he moved so destructively that it seemed impossible to contain him. Had they really trusted a stupid little padlock to keep them safe? Samuel imagined it snapping in half. He imagined the Berg erupting out of his cage like an insane circus animal. Samuel took a step back and stood behind Bishop, put a hand on Bishop’s shoulder. The Berg ran to the top of the stairs and reached his arm forward to push open the gate. Only the gate did not budge. And the force of the Berg’s huge momentum met the solid metal gate, and the only givable thing between them—the Berg’s arm—gave.

  His wrist bent back and his shoulder torqued wildly with this crunching, snapping sound, this horrible liquid pop. And the Berg bounced backward and landed hard on the stairs and slid down a few of them until he came to rest near the bottom, clutching his arm, moaning, crying. The gate vibrated against the lock.

  “Oh my god,” the Berg wailed. “My arm!”

  “Let’s go,” Samuel said.

  “Wait,” Bishop said. “One more thing.”

  He walked along the edge of the loading dock until he was just above the Berg, roughly six feet over him.

  “See, what I’m going to do now,” Bishop said over the Berg’s feeble crying, “is I’m going to take a leak, and you’re not going to do anything about it. And you’re not going to fuck with anybody ever again. Because I’ve got this photo.” Bishop waved the Polaroid at him. “You should see it. There you are with all that faggot porn. You want this photo to show up in every locker in school? Taped under every desk? Slipped into every single textbook?”

  The Berg looked at him and, for a moment, the actual sixth-grade mind that was trapped in his giant adult body broke through, and he looked astonished and hurt and pathetic and sad. Like an animal stunned in disbelief at having just been kicked.

  “No,” he spat out through the crying.

  “Then I expect you’ll start behaving,” Bishop said. “No more picking on Kim. No more picking on anyone.”

  Bishop undid his belt and unzipped his pants and pulled down his underwear and released a long strong jet of urine right at Andy Berg, who wailed and turned around to hide from it and screamed. He curled up while Bishop splattered onto his back and shirt and rattail.

  Then the two boys gathered their things and left. They didn’t speak at all until they parted ways, at the spot where Bishop cut through the woods to Venetian Village and Samuel continued the other way to his own home. Bishop rapped him lightly on the arm and said “Be all you can be, soldier,” then dashed away.

  That night, the heat wave finally broke. Samuel sat at his bedroom window and watched the thunderstorm drench the whole outside world. The trees in the backyard whipped violently and the sky flashed with lightning. He imagined Andy Berg out in the storm, still trapped, soaking wet. He imagined him shivering and cold and injured and alone.

  In the morning, the air had that chilly first feeling of autumn. Andy Berg was not in school. The rumor was that he hadn’t come home last night. The police were called. Parents and neighbors went out looking. He was finally located in the morning, wet and sick, in the stairwell behind the school. Now he was in the hospital. Nobody mentioned anything about the Polaroids.

  Samuel guessed the Berg had caught a cold, maybe the flu, from the rain. But Bishop had another theory. “He’d have to get rid of the porn, right?” he said at recess that day. “I mean, he wouldn’t want to be found with those pictures.”

  “Yeah,” Samuel said. “But how?”

  They sat on the swings not swinging, watching a game of tag under way across the playground, a game that included Kim Wigley, which was rare, as Kim tended to avoid recess, or really any public space with a high Berg-bullying potential. Now he played in unself-conscious joy and
delight.

  “The Berg’s in the hospital now,” Bishop said. “Probably poisoned, I think.”

  “Poisoned how?”

  “He ate them. The photos. That’s how he got rid of them.”

  Samuel tried to imagine eating a Polaroid picture. Chewing that hard plastic. Swallowing those sharp, heavy corners.

  “He ate them?” he said.

  “Absolutely.”

  Across the playground, Kim glanced at them and offered Bishop a feeble wave. Bishop waved back. Then he laughed and said “Hooah” and ran over to join the game, actually almost skipped over there, barely even touching the ground as he went.

  8

  THE BLESSED HEART ACADEMY HEADMASTER could be seen lately taking short, plodding walks along Venetian Village’s lone street, usually around sunset, shuffling his great heft carefully and gingerly, as if his legs could, at any moment, shatter. The cane he walked with was a recent acquisition, and the headmaster seemed to enjoy how regal it made him look. It was actually pretty incredible how his stooped body and painful-looking limp could be improved so much by the simple addition of a cane. Now he seemed nobly impaired. Like a war hero. The cane’s shaft was made of oak and stained to a rich ebony. A pearl handle was attached to the top by a pewter collar etched with patterns of fleur-de-lis. Neighbors were relieved at the addition of the cane because it made the headmaster’s pain not quite so visibly obvious, and so they did not feel required to ask him how he felt, and thus they did not have to endure yet another conversation about the Sickness. This was a topic that had frankly run itself dry in the last six months. The headmaster had by now told all his neighbors about the Sickness, the mysterious affliction that no doctor could diagnose and no medicine could cure. The symptoms were well-known up and down the block: tightness in his chest; shallow breathing; profuse sweating; uncontrollable salivation; abdominal cramps; blurry vision; fatigue; lethargy; general allover weakness; headache; dizziness; loss of appetite; slow heartbeat; and an odd involuntary twitching and rippling of the muscles just under his skin that he would horribly show to neighbors if it flared up while they were talking. The spells came either in the middle of the day or in the middle of the night, lasting roughly four to six hours before magically ceasing on their own. He was shockingly candid and personal about the details of his condition. He spoke in that manner of people experiencing catastrophic illness, how the illness eclipsed previous gentlemanly notions of modesty and privacy. He told people how confusing it was, priority-wise, when he needed to vomit and diarrhea at the same time. The neighbors nodded and smiled tightly and tried not to betray how awful this was to listen to, because their children—and indeed all the children of Venetian Village—attended Blessed Heart Academy, and it was widely known that the headmaster could pull some serious strings. One phone call from him to the dean of admissions at Princeton or Yale or Harvard or Stanford could improve a child’s chances by about a thousand percent. Everyone knew this, so they suffered the headmaster’s long and vivid descriptions of medical procedures and bodily effluence because they thought of it as a kind of investment in their child’s education and future. So yes, they knew about his many trips to various expensive specialists, allergists, oncologists, gastroenterologists, cardiologists, his MRIs and CT scans and unpleasant organ biopsies. He made the same joke every time about how the best money he’d spent so far was on his cane. (It was, as canes go, breathtakingly beautiful, the neighbors had to agree.) He maintained that the best medicine was being active and outdoors, thus his evening walks and twice-daily soaks—once in the morning, once at night—in his backyard saltwater hot tub, which he said was one of the few joys left in his life.

  Some of the less charitable neighbors insisted privately that the reason for his evening walks wasn’t health but the opportunity to complain for an hour like the goddamn sympathy-seeking tyrant he really was. They would not tell this to anyone else, maybe a spouse but that’s it, because they knew how selfish and insensitive and callous it sounded, that the headmaster was genuinely sick with a mysterious illness that caused a terrific amount of pain and mental anguish, and yet they were the ones who felt like victims, they were the ones who felt aggrieved, because they were forced to listen to it. And sometimes on these nights they felt under siege, attending to the headmaster for sixty tedious minutes before getting rid of him and retiring to their entertainment rooms to try to squeeze some enjoyment out of what was left of the evening. They turned on the television and saw some news story about another goddamn humanitarian crisis, another goddamn civil war in some godforsaken place, and saw images of wounded people or starving children and felt a bright, bitter anger at the children for invading and ruining the only moments of relaxation and “me time” the neighbors had all day. The neighbors would get a little indignant here, about how their own lives were hard too, and yet nobody heard them complaining about it. Everyone had problems—why couldn’t they just quietly deal with them? On their own? With a bit of self-respect? Why did they have to get everyone else involved? It’s not like the neighbors could do anything. It’s not like civil wars were their fault.

  Of course, they would never say this out loud. And the headmaster never suspected they thought this. But some of his most proximate neighbors had taken to leaving the lights off and sitting around in the dusky darkness until they saw him pass by. Others arranged early dinners out at restaurants at prime headmaster-walking times. Certain homes down the block had perfected a system of total avoidance, which was why the headmaster sometimes made it all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac and knocked on the Fall household door and asked to come in for some coffee, which was what happened the first time Samuel was allowed to spend the night at Bishop’s house.

  His first sleepover. Samuel’s dad drove him and was plainly stunned when they pulled up to Venetian Village’s large front copper gates.

  “Your friend lives here?” he said. Samuel nodded.

  The security guard at the gate asked to see Henry’s license, asked him to fill out a form, sign a waiver, and explain the nature of his visit.

  “We’re not going to the White House,” he told the guard. It was not a joke. There was venom in his voice.

  “Do you have any collateral?” the guard asked.

  “What?”

  “You have not been preapproved, so I’ll need some collateral. To insure against damages or violations.”

  “What do you think I’m going to do?”

  “It’s policy. Do you have a credit card?”

  “I’m not going to give you my credit card.”

  “It’s only temporary. Like I said, for collateral purposes.”

  “I’m just dropping off my son.”

  “You’re leaving your son? Okay, that will do.”

  “For what?”

  “For collateral.”

  The guard actually followed them in a golf cart, and Henry delivered Samuel to the Fall house with a brief hug, said “Be good” and “Call me if you need me,” and then glared pure hatred at the security guard as he got back into his car. Samuel watched as both his father and the golf cart disappeared up Via Veneto. He held his backpack, which contained some overnight clothes and, at the bottom, the cassette tape he’d bought at the mall for Bethany.

  Tonight he would give her the present.

  They were all there—Bishop, Bethany, their parents—they were all waiting, in the same room, which Samuel had never seen before, all of them inhabiting the same space at the same time. And another person too, at the piano, Samuel recognized him: the headmaster. The same headmaster who had expelled Bishop from Blessed Heart Academy now sat taking up all the space on the bench in front of the family’s Bösendorfer baby grand.

  “Hi there,” Samuel said, to nobody in particular, to the aggregate mass of them.

  “So you’re the friend from the new school?” the headmaster said.

  Samuel nodded.

  “It’s good to see he’s fitting in,” the headmaster said. This remark was m
ade about Bishop, but it was made to Bishop’s father. Bishop sat in an upholstered antique wooden chair and looked small. It was as if the headmaster’s large presence had colonized the room. He was one of those men whose body exactly matched his disposition. His voice was big. His body was big. He sat bigly, his legs far apart and his chest puffed out.

  Bishop inhabited the farthest seat from the headmaster, arms crossed, feet under him, a tight little angry ball. He leaned so far back in his chair it seemed he wanted to physically dissolve into it. Bethany sat nearer the piano, perfectly upright, as she always did, on the edge of her chair, ankles crossed, hands in her lap.

  “Back to it!” the headmaster said. He swiveled to face the piano and placed a hand on the keys. “Now don’t cheat.”

  Bethany turned her head away from the piano and looked directly at Samuel. His chest seized, her stare carried such voltage. He fought the urge to look away.

  The headmaster pounded a single note on the piano, a strong, dark, low note that Samuel could feel in his body.

  “That’s an A,” Bethany said.

  “Correct!” the headmaster said. “Again.”

  Another note, this time near the top of the keyboard, a delicate plink.

  “That’s C,” Bethany said. She still stared at Samuel, expressionless.

  “Right again!” the headmaster said. “Let’s make it more challenging.”

  He hit three keys at once, and what came out was dissonant and ugly. It sounded like what an infant might do bashing the piano incoherently. Bethany’s stare seemed to disengage for a moment—it was as if her consciousness receded, the way her eyes went glassy and remote. But then she came back and said, “B flat, C, C sharp.”

  “That’s amazing!” the headmaster said, clapping.

  “Can I go?” Bishop said.

  “I’m sorry?” his father said. “What was that?”

  “Can I go?” Bishop said.

  “Maybe if you learn to ask correctly.”

  And here Bishop finally raised his head and met his father’s eyes. They held each other’s gaze like that for an uncomfortable few seconds. “May I please be excused?” Bishop said.