The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “Yes you may.”

  In the game room it was clear Bishop did not want to talk. He jammed Missile Command into the Atari. He sat stone-faced and quiet while he shot rockets out of the air. Then Bishop grew agitated and said “Fuck this, let’s watch a movie,” and he started a film they’d seen several times before, about a group of teenagers who defend their town from a surprise Russian invasion. They were about twenty minutes into the movie when Bethany opened the door and slipped in.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “Good.”

  Samuel could not believe how much his stomach flopped whenever he saw her up close. Even now, when he felt seriously conflicted about his presence here, when Bishop transparently wanted to be alone and Samuel didn’t know what to do with himself and had been wondering if he should call his father and go back home, even through all this Samuel felt elated when Bethany entered the room. It was as if she erased every lesser thing. Samuel had to bat away his impulses to touch her, to muss up her hair or punch her in the arm or flick her earlobe or any of the other juvenile maneuvers boys do to terrorize the girls they love, maneuvers that were really meant to bring them into physical contact the only way they knew how: brutally, like little barbarians. But Samuel knew enough to know this was not a good long-term strategy, so he sat there heavy and still on his usual beanbag chair and hoped Bethany would sit next to him.

  “He’s an asshole,” Bishop said. “A fat fucking asshole.”

  “I know,” Bethany said.

  “Why do they let him in the house?”

  “Because he’s the headmaster. But also? Because he’s sick.”

  “That’s ironic.”

  “He wouldn’t be out walking around if he weren’t sick.”

  “If there’s a word for that, it’s ironic.”

  “You’re not listening,” Bethany said. “You wouldn’t see him if he weren’t sick.”

  Bishop sat up and frowned at his sister. “Just what are you trying to say?”

  Bethany stood there with her hands behind her back, chewing or biting the inside of her cheek the way she did when she was concentrating real hard. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail. Her eyes were so fiercely green. She was wearing a yellow sundress that gradually turned white at the bottom.

  “I’m pointing out a fact,” Bethany said. “If he weren’t sick, he wouldn’t go for these walks, and then you wouldn’t have to see him.”

  “I don’t think I like where this is going.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Samuel said.

  “Nothing,” they said in twin-like unison.

  The three of them watched the rest of the movie in an edgy silence, watched as the American teens successfully fought off the Russian aggressors, and the triumphant ending of the movie was not nearly as triumphant as it usually felt because the room was overflowing with some weird tension and unspoken conflict, and it felt to Samuel like he was back home having dinner with his parents while they were going through one of their moments, and when the movie finished the kids were told to get ready for bed, and so they washed up and brushed their teeth and changed into their pajamas and Samuel was led to the guest bedroom. And just before they were told to turn off their lights, Bethany softly knocked on the door and poked her head in his room and said, “Good night.”

  “Good night,” he said.

  She looked at him and lingered there a moment like she had something else to say.

  “What were you doing?” Samuel said. “Earlier. With the piano.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Parlor tricks.”

  “You were performing?”

  “Sort of. I can hear things. People think it’s special. My parents like to show it off.”

  “What things?”

  “Notes, pitches, vibrations.”

  “From the piano?”

  “From everything. The piano is easiest because all the sounds have names. But really from everything.”

  “What do you mean, from everything?”

  “Every sound is actually many sounds put together,” she said. “Triads and harmonics. Tones and overtones.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “A knock on the wall. A tap on a glass bottle. Birdsong. Tires on the street. The phone ringing. The dishwasher running. There’s music in everything.”

  “You hear music from all that?”

  “Our phone is a little sharp,” she said. “It’s awful, every time it rings.”

  Samuel tapped on the wall, listening. “I only hear a thud.”

  “There’s a lot more than a thud. Listen. Try to separate the sounds.” She knocked sharply on the doorframe. “There’s the sound made by the wood, but the wood is not a constant density, so it makes a few different pitches, very close together.” She knocked again. “Then there’s the sound of the glue, the surrounding wall, the hum of the air inside the wall.”

  “You hear all that?”

  “It’s there. You add it up and it sounds like a thud. It’s a very brown noise. Like if you melted all the colors in the crayon box, this is the sound you’d get.”

  “I don’t hear any of that.”

  “It’s harder to hear out in the world. A piano is tempered. A house is not.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Mostly it’s annoying.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, take birds. There’s this one bird, the tanager, that makes this sound like chip che-ri che-ri che-ri. Okay? It’s a summer bird.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I don’t really hear the che-ri. What I hear is a third and a fifth, in A-flat major.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It’s a C gliding into an E flat, which is exactly what happens in this one Schubert solo, and also in a Berlioz symphony, and also in a Mozart concerto. So the bird starts singing and it ignites all these phrases in my head.”

  “I wish I had that.”

  “No. It’s terrible. It’s all crashing around in there.”

  “But you have music in your brain. Mostly what I have is worry.”

  She smiled. “I just want to be able to sleep in the morning,” she said. “But there’s this tanager right outside my window. I wish I could turn him off. Or turn my head off. One of the two.”

  “I have something for you,” Samuel said. “A present.”

  “You do?”

  “Something from the mall.”

  “The mall?” she said, confused. But her face brightened as she registered the connection. “Oh! The mall! Right.”

  Samuel rummaged through his backpack and produced the cassette. It was shiny, still wrapped in tight plastic. It struck him now that it was such a small thing—about the size and weight of a deck of playing cards. Too small, he thought, to be as meaningful as he needed it to be. He was seized with panic about this, and so he handed it to her quickly, jammed it at her fast and hard, so he wouldn’t chicken out. “Here’s this,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s for you.”

  She took the cassette in her hand.

  “It’s from the mall,” he said.

  In the daydreams he’d been having, Bethany would, at this moment, smile brightly and wrap her arms around him and express her disbelief and wonderment that he’d chosen such an exactly perfect gift, how he must understand her on a deep level and really get what’s going on in her head and have a similarly interesting and artistically fulfilling inner life himself. But the expression now forming on Bethany’s face was not that. The creases around her eyes and on her forehead—it was like how people squint when they’re trying to understand someone with a thick and frustrating accent.

  “Do you know what this is?” she said.

  “It’s really modern stuff,” he said, repeating the cashier at the mall. “It’s really out there.”

  “I can’t believe they made a recording of this,” she said.

  “They made ten recordings!” he said. “It’s the same pie
ce recorded ten times.”

  Bethany started laughing now. And it was a laugh that made him understand that, for reasons he was not aware of, he was an idiot. There was an essential bit of information he was missing.

  “What’s so funny?” he said.

  “This piece,” she said, “it’s sort of a joke.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s all, well, it’s all silence,” she said. “The entire thing is just…silence.”

  He stared at her, not really comprehending this.

  “There are no notes in the score,” she said. “It was actually performed once. The pianist sat at the piano and did nothing.”

  “How could he do nothing?”

  “He just sat there counting the beats. And then he was done. That was the piece. I can’t believe they made a recording.”

  “Ten recordings.”

  “It was sort of a put-on. It’s very famous.”

  “So this whole cassette,” he said, “is blank?”

  “I guess that’s part of the joke.”

  “Shit.”

  “No, it’s great,” she said, clutching the tape against her chest. “Thank you. Really. It’s quite thoughtful.”

  Quite thoughtful. Samuel kept thinking about the way she said this, long after she’d left and he’d turned out the lights and covered his whole body and head with blankets and curled up and lightly cried. How quickly his daydreams had given way to this merciless reality. He thought bitterly about his expectations for the night, and how everything had gone so very wrong. Bishop didn’t want him here. Bethany was indifferent. The gift was a failure. This was the price of hope, he realized, this shattering disappointment.

  He must have fallen asleep like that, because he woke up hours later, under the covers, curled, hot and sweaty, in the darkness, as Bishop shook him and said, “Wake up. Let’s go.”

  Samuel followed him groggily. Bishop told him to put on his shoes, told him to climb out the first-floor TV-room window. Samuel did all this in a half-awake stupor.

  “Follow me,” Bishop said when they were outside, and they walked up Via Veneto’s gentle slope in the total darkness and silence of the night. It must have been two in the morning. Maybe three. Samuel wasn’t sure. There was such an odd stillness at this time—no sound, no wind, there was barely even weather. The only noises were the occasional click of a sprinkler head turning on, and the low groan of the headmaster’s hot tub. Automated, mechanical noises. Bishop walked with purpose, maybe even arrogance. This was a different walk than when they played war games in the woods, and Bishop hid behind trees and dove between bushes. Now he walked in plain view, right down the middle of the road.

  “You’ll need these,” he said, and handed Samuel a pair of blue plastic gloves, the kind people use for gardening. The fit was loose—they must have been Bishop’s mother’s. The gloves came up to Samuel’s elbows, and each finger had an inch or so of floating empty space.

  “Over here,” Bishop said, and he led them to a spot near the headmaster’s house where the lush, thick lawn met the wild forest. There stood a metal post, about as tall as the boys themselves, on top of which was a block of white salt, its surface smooth and spotted with brown specks. On top of the salt block was a copper disk. Bishop reached for the disk and pulled at it, trying to twist it off.

  “Help me with this,” he said, and they yanked at the cap until it finally budged. Up close like this, breathing hard, Samuel could smell the feral animal scent coming from the contraption, but also something else, something like sulfur, that rotten-egg smell, coming from the salt itself. At this range, he could read the sign affixed halfway up the post: DANGER. POISON. KEEP AWAY.

  “This is what kills the deer, isn’t it?” Samuel said.

  “Grab your side.”

  They slid the block off the post. It was surprisingly heavy and dense. They carried it toward the headmaster’s house.

  “I don’t think I want to do this,” Samuel said.

  “We’re almost there.”

  They walked slowly, the big gray block between them, around the headmaster’s pool and up the two steps to the hot tub, which was steaming, gently circulating, a small light at the bottom shining blue.

  “In there,” Bishop said, pointing his chin at the hot tub.

  “I don’t think I want to.”

  “On three,” he said, and they heaved forward, then back, once, twice, three times, and then let go. They tossed the block into the water, where it was swallowed with a splash, followed by a low thud as it landed at the bottom of the tub.

  “Good job,” Bishop said. They watched the block come to rest down there, its image distorted by the shimmering water. “That’ll dissolve by morning,” Bishop said. “No one will know.”

  “I want to go home,” Samuel said.

  “Come on,” Bishop said, and taking him by the arm, they walked back down the street. When they reached the house, Bishop opened the TV-room window, then stopped.

  “You want to know what happened in the principal’s office?” Bishop said. “Why I didn’t get spanked?”

  Samuel was holding back tears, wiping his runny nose with the sleeve of his pajamas.

  “It was actually really easy,” Bishop said. “The thing you have to understand is that everyone is afraid of something. As soon as you know what someone fears most, you can make them do whatever you want.”

  “What did you do?”

  “So he had his paddle, right? And he told me to bend over the table, right? So I took off my pants.”

  “You did what?”

  “I unbuckled my belt and took off my pants and my underwear and everything. I was naked from the waist down and then I said, ‘Here’s my ass. You want it?’ ”

  Samuel stared at him. “Why would you do that?”

  “I asked him if he liked my ass and wanted to touch it.”

  “I don’t understand why you would do that.”

  “He got pretty weird then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He stared at me for a long time and then told me to put my clothes back on. Then he took me back to class. That was it. Easy!”

  “How did you even think to do that?”

  “Anyway,” Bishop said. “Thanks for your help tonight.” He climbed through the window. Samuel followed and padded through the dark house, returning to the guest bedroom, getting into bed, then getting out again and finding a bathroom and washing his hands three, four, five times. He could not decide if the burning sensation in his fingers was from the poison or if it was in his mind.

  9

  THE INVITATION APPEARED in the mailbox, in a square envelope of heavy, cream-colored paper. Samuel’s name was written on the front in very precise girl handwriting.

  “What’s this?” Faye said. “Birthday invite?”

  He looked at the envelope and then at his mother.

  “Pizza party?” she said. “At the roller rink?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Who’s it from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should open it.”

  Inside was an invitation printed on expensive card stock. It shimmered, as if flecks of silver had been added to the pulp. The writing looked like it was pressed in gold leaf, a swirling, swooping cursive that said:

  Please join us at the Blessed Heart Academy Cathedral

  as Bethany Fall performs

  the Bruch Violin Concerto no. 1

  Samuel had never been invited to anything in this manner: lavishly. At school, the invitations to birthday parties were generic, slipshod affairs, cheap thin cards with animals on them, or balloons. This invitation felt actually physically heavy. He handed it to his mother.

  “Can we go?” he said.

  She studied the invitation and frowned. “Who’s this Bethany?”

  “A friend.”

  “From school?”

  “Sort of.”

  “And you know her well enough to get invited to this?”
>
  “Can we go? Please?”

  “Do you even like classical music?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I don’t know.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Mom.”

  “The Bruch Violin Concerto? Do you even know what that is?”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m just saying. Are you sure you can appreciate it?”

  “It’s a very difficult piece and she’s been practicing for months.”

  “And you know this how?”

  Samuel then made an angry, abstract sound meant to convey his frustration and unwillingness to further discuss the matter of the girl, which came out something like “Gaarrgh!”

  “Fine,” she said with a satisfied little grin. “We’ll go.”

  The night of the concert she told him to dress nice. “Imagine it’s Easter,” she said. So he put on the fanciest things in his closet: a stiff and itchy white shirt; a black necktie bound noose-tight; black slacks that popped with static electricity when he moved; a shiny pair of dress shoes that he shoehorned himself into, so granite-hard they removed a layer of skin on his heel. He wondered why adults felt they needed to be at their most uncomfortable for their most cherished events.

  The Blessed Heart Academy Cathedral was already buzzing when they arrived, people in suits and flowery dresses filing into the large arched doorway, the sounds of musicians practicing audible even from the parking lot. The cathedral was built to mimic the great churches of Europe, at about one-third scale.

  Inside, a wide central aisle was flanked on both sides by pews made of heavy and thick and ornately carved wood, polished and shining wetly. Beyond the pews were stone columns with torches attached about fifteen feet above the crowd, each lit with glowing fires. Parents chatted with other parents, the men giving soft platonic kisses to the cheeks of women. Samuel watched them, these small pecks, and realized the men weren’t really kissing the women but instead miming a kissing action into the area around their necks. Samuel wondered if the women were disappointed about this—they’d been expecting a kiss and all they got was air.