by Nathan Hill
The bedroom door opened and closed and they were alone, Samuel and Bethany, alone together, finally, terribly. He sat rock-still.
“Now listen,” she said.
“Okay.”
He pointed his face in the direction of the noise and leaned in. The static was not a high-pitched trebly noise but a deeper kind. It was like a microphone had been suspended above an empty stadium—the silence had a fullness to it, a roundness. It was a substantial quiet. It wasn’t just the sound of an empty room but rather like someone had gone to great lengths to manufacture nothingness. It had a created quality to it. It felt made.
“There they are,” Bethany whispered. “Listen.”
“The people?”
“They’re like ghosts in a graveyard,” she said. “You can’t hear them the normal way.”
“Describe it.”
“They sound worried. And confused. They think they’re being tricked.”
“You can hear all that?”
“Sure. It’s the stiffness of the sound. It’s like those really short, tight strings at the top of the piano. The ones that don’t vibrate. The white sounds. That’s what these people sound like. They’re like ice.”
Samuel tried to listen for something like that, some high-pitched buzz inside the droning, persistent static.
“But it changes,” she said. “Listen for the change.”
He kept listening, but all he could hear was how the sound sounded like other sounds: escaping air from a bicycle tire, the whir of a small fan, water running behind a closed door. He heard nothing original. Only his own mental library bouncing back at him.
“There,” she said. “The sound gets warmer. Do you hear it? Warmer and fuller. The sound gets bigger and blooms. They are beginning to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Maybe they’re not being tricked. Maybe they’re not being mocked. Maybe they’re not outsiders. They’re beginning to get it. That maybe they’re part of something. They’re beginning to realize they haven’t come here to listen to music. They’re beginning to realize that they are the music. They are themselves what they’ve come here to find. The thought is exhilarating to them. Can you hear it?”
“Yes,” Samuel lied. “They’re happy.”
“They are happy.”
And Samuel felt himself believing he really could hear this. The same kind of voluntary self-hallucination he felt when he convinced himself, at night, in bed, that there were intruders in the house, or ghosts, and every sound the house made validated this delusion. Or on those days he couldn’t bear to go to school and told himself he was sick until he really became sick, felt actually physically ill, and he would wonder how the nausea could be real if he created it in his mind. It was like that, this thing he was hearing. The sound of static really did get warmer the more he thought about it; it really did become a happy static. The sound seemed to broaden in his mind, open up, and burn.
Was this her secret, he wondered. That she simply wanted to hear what no one else could?
“I can hear it now,” he said. “You just have to chase it.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”
He felt her hand grasp his shoulder and squeeze, then felt her move closer to him, felt the vibrations and swells in the mattress, the slight creaks of the bed frame as she swiveled around and came into him. She was close. He could hear her breathing, smell her toothpastey breath. But more than that he could feel her nearby, how she seemed to displace the air, had some kind of electricity around her, how you can sense the closeness of another body, the presence of some kind of magnetism, her heartbeat throttled up, all this coming at him as an impression in space, a map his mind made, an intuition, and then finally as actual solid matter, the flesh of her face now close enough to comprehend.
They were, he realized, going to kiss.
Or, rather, she was going to kiss him. This was going to happen. All he had to do was not screw it up. But in that moment, in those few seconds between realizing she was going to kiss him and the actual kiss, there seemed to be so many ways to screw it up. He felt the pressing and unexpected need to clear his throat. And scratch the back of his neck, at that spot where his neck joined to the shoulder, which always itched when he was nervous. And he did not want to move into the kiss, as it was dark and he could accidentally knock teeth with Bethany. But then in his desire to avoid knocking teeth he felt himself maybe leaning back and overcompensating and he worried that Bethany might mistake his leaning away from her as a desire not to kiss and she might stop. And then there was the matter of breathing. As in: Do it? His first impulse was to hold his breath, but then he realized if she approached slowly enough or if they kissed long enough, he would eventually run out of air and be forced to breathe mid-kiss and expel his lungs in a big poof right into her face or mouth. All of these thoughts happening roughly simultaneously in that brief moment before the kiss, Samuel’s most rudimentary actions, his body’s most automatic functions—sitting straight, being still, breathing—now turned crazily difficult by the prospect of the kiss, which is why when the kiss actually did successfully commence, it felt like a miracle.
Mostly what Samuel felt during the kiss was relief that the kiss was happening. And also that Bethany’s lips felt dry and chapped. This odd detail. That Bethany had chapped lips. It surprised him. In his imagination of her, Bethany seemed elevated beyond stupid earthly concerns. She did not seem to be the kind of girl whose lips ever chapped.
On the way home that night, he was surprised that everything looked exactly the same as it did before, with absolutely no signs that the world had fundamentally, radically changed.
10
THE FIRST BOOK Samuel ever wrote was a Choose Your Own Adventure story called The Castle of No Return. It was twelve pages long. He illustrated it himself. Its premise: You are a brave knight fighting your way through a haunted castle to save a beautiful princess. Pretty standard fare, he knew. He was sure he’d read something similar in one of the many Choose Your Own Adventure books that filled his bedroom shelves. He really had tried to come up with a better, more original story. He sat cross-legged on his floor and stared at the books before him and eventually decided they represented the full range of human possibility, the entire narrative spectrum. There were no other stories that could be told. Every idea that came to him was either imitative or stupid. And his book could not be stupid. The stakes were too high. Every kid was writing a book in an all-class contest where the winning author would have the book read aloud by the teacher.
So The Castle of No Return was derivative. So be it. He hoped his classmates would not be tired of the old tropes just yet. He hoped they would be comforted by the familiarity of the tale like they were comforted by the old toys and blankets they sometimes hid in their backpacks.
The next problem was plot. He knew Choose Your Own Adventure books forked this way or that, then forked again, and then again, and that each story was in the end a unified narrative whole—many stories in one. But his first draft of The Castle of No Return resembled more of a straight line with six short dead ends, with choices that would cause little debate or consternation: Do you want to go left or do you want to go right? (If you go left you die!)
He hoped his classmates would forgive these shortcomings—the plagiarized setting, the lack of multiple cohesive plots—if he could find really interesting and creative and entertaining ways to die. Which he did. Samuel had a talent, it turned out, for killing his characters interestingly. In one possible ending involving a trapdoor and a bottomless pit, Samuel wrote: “You are falling, and you fall forever, and even after you close this book and eat dinner and go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow, you will still be falling”—which just totally blew his mind. And he used the ghost stories his mother told him, all those old Norwegian stories that terrified him. He wrote about a white horse that appeared suddenly, offering a ride, and if the reader decided to mount the horse, terrible death quickly followed.
In another ending, the reader becomes a ghost trapped inside of a leaf, too bad to go to heaven, too good to go to hell.
He typed up the pages on his mother’s old typewriter, leaving room for illustrations, which he did in crayon and pen. He bound the book in cardboard and blue fabric and, using a ruler to achieve perfectly straight lines, he wrote “The Castle of No Return” on the cover.
And maybe it was the illustrations. Maybe it was the excellent blue binding. Or maybe—he left room in his mind for this possibility—maybe it was the writing itself, the creative deaths, the unity of his vision, that instead of “Prologue” he used the word “Prolegomenon,” which he found in a thesaurus and which he thought sounded awesome. He could not say for sure what swayed Miss Bowles, but swayed she was. He won. The Castle of No Return was read to the whole class and he sat at his desk trying not to burst.
It was the best thing he’d done in his life.
So when his mother came into his bedroom one morning and woke him and asked him, weirdly, “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” he still glowed with his literary victory, and so he said, quite sure of himself, “Novelist.”
The light outside was weakly blue. His eyes were still heavy and hazy.
“A novelist?” she said, smiling.
He nodded. Yes, a novelist. He had decided sometime in the night, as he relived his great success. How his classmates roared with pleasure when the princess was saved. Their gratitude, their love. Watching them navigate his story—surprised in the places he meant to surprise them, fooled in the places he meant to fool them—he felt like a god who knew all the answers to the big questions peering down at the mortals who did not. This was a feeling that could sustain him, that could fill him up. Being a novelist, he decided, would make people like him.
“Well,” said his mother, “then you should be a novelist.”
“Okay,” he said, bleary and half awake, still not quite comprehending how deeply strange this was, his mother fully dressed, carrying a suitcase, coming in here at dawn asking about his plans, his future plans, when she had never once asked about this before. But Samuel accepted it and went along with it, like how one accepts the premise of a strange dream whose strangeness only clarifies after it’s over.
“You write your books,” she said. “I’ll read them.”
“Okay.” He wanted to show his mother The Castle of No Return. He’d show her his drawing of the white horse. He’d show her that thing about the bottomless pit.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. And she was oddly formal about this, as if she’d privately practiced it many times. “I’m going away for a while. And I want you to be good while I’m gone.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to find someone,” she said. “Someone I knew a long time ago.”
“A friend?”
“I suppose,” she said. She put a cold palm on his cheek. “But you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to worry about anything. You don’t have to be so scared anymore. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Don’t be scared. Can you do that for me?”
“Is your friend missing?”
“Not really. We’ve just been apart for a long time.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes,” she said, and she paused, and she looked away from him, and her face crumpled.
“Mom?” he said.
“Sometimes you take a wrong turn,” she said. “Sometimes you get lost.”
Samuel started to cry. He did not know why he was crying. He tried to stop it.
She gathered him in her arms and said “You’re so sensitive” and rocked him and he pressed into her soft skin until his whimpering ceased and he wiped his nose.
“Why do you have to go now?” Samuel said.
“It’s just time, honey.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said. She stared at the ceiling with this hopeless look on her face, then seemed to gather herself. “Have I ever told you about the ghost that looks like a rock?” she said.
“No.”
“My father told me about it. He said you could find it on beaches sometimes back home. It looks like a normal rock, like a little stone covered with green fuzz.”
“How can you tell it’s a ghost?”
“You can’t, unless you take it out to sea. If anyone takes it onto the ocean, it’ll get heavier the farther you travel from shore. And if you’re really far, the ghost will get so heavy it’ll sink your ship. They called it a drowning stone.”
“Why would it do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s angry. Maybe something bad happened to it. The point is, it gets too big for you to carry anymore. And the longer you try to carry it, the bigger and heavier it gets. Sometimes it can get inside you and it gets bigger and bigger until it’s too much. You can’t fight it anymore. You just…sink.” She stood up. “Do you understand?”
“I think so,” he said, nodding.
“You will,” she said. “I know you will. Just remember what I told you.”
“Don’t be scared anymore.”
“That’s right.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, held him close to her and seemed to breathe him in. “Now go back to sleep,” she said. “It’ll all be okay. Just remember: Don’t be scared.”
He heard her footsteps disappear down the hall. Heard her wrestling with the suitcase down the stairs. He heard the car start, the garage door open and close. He heard her drive away.
And Samuel tried to obey his mother. He tried to fall back asleep and not feel scared. But this unbearable panic rose up in him and so he got out of bed and ran to his parents’ room and found his father still sleeping, curled with his back to the room.
“Dad,” Samuel said, shaking him. “Wake up.”
Henry squinted at his son. “What do you want?” he said in a sleepy whisper. “What time is it?”
“Mom’s gone,” Samuel said.
Henry lifted a heavy head. “Huh?”
“Mom’s gone.”
His father looked at the empty side of the bed. “Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know. She drove away.”
“She drove?”
Samuel nodded.
“Okay,” Henry said, and he rubbed his eyes. “Go downstairs. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“She’s gone,” Samuel said.
“I got it. Please go downstairs.”
And Samuel waited in the kitchen for his father until he heard a crash from his parents’ bedroom. He ran upstairs and opened the door and saw his father standing straight and rigid with the reddest face Samuel had ever seen. Faye’s closet door was open, some of her clothes strewn on the floor.
But it wasn’t the clothes Samuel would remember best, nor the crash, nor the broken pieces of a small vase that had been hurled at the wall, apparently with great force. What he would remember clearly, even decades later, was that color on his father’s face: a deep crimson, and not just in the cheeks but all over—neck and forehead and down into his chest. A dangerous-looking color.
“She’s gone,” he said. “And her stuff, it’s all gone. Where did all her stuff go?”
“I saw her leaving with a suitcase,” Samuel said.
“Go to school,” his father said, not looking at him.
“But—”
“Don’t argue.”
“But—”
“Just go!”
Samuel didn’t know what it meant, that his mother was “gone.”
Gone where? Gone how far? When would she come back?
During the journey to school, Samuel felt himself far away from his surroundings, like he was looking at the world through binoculars turned backward—standing at the bus stop, getting on the bus, sitting and looking out the window and not really hearing any of the kids around him, focusing on a water spot on the window glass, the passing landscape beyond all blurry and whizzing indistinctly by. Samuel felt a gathering sense
of dread, and narrowing his attention to something very small, like a water spot, seemed to keep the dread, for the moment, at bay. He just needed to get to school. He just needed to talk to Bishop, to tell Bishop what had happened. Bishop, he had decided, would keep him afloat. Bishop would know what to do.
Only Bishop wasn’t at school. Not at his locker. Not at his desk.
Gone.
Bishop was gone.
That word again: What did it mean? To be gone? Everyone was disappearing. Samuel sat in his chair examining the wood of his desk and didn’t even notice when Miss Bowles called his name, then again, then a third time, didn’t even notice the class nervously laughing at him, nor Miss Bowles walking up the row toward him, did not even notice when she stood directly above him waiting while the class chittered behind her. It wasn’t until she touched him, physically contacted his shoulder with her hand, that he flinched and broke away from what had become a really absorbing exercise in tracing wood grain with his eyes. And he wasn’t even mortified when Miss Bowles said “Good of you to come back to us” in her mocking way, to the class’s laughter. He didn’t even feel embarrassed. It was as if his misery overwhelmed everything else—all his normal worries were buried. Gone.
Example: At recess, he left. He simply marched away. He walked toward the most distant swing set and then walked on. He just didn’t stop. It had never occurred to him before that he could not stop. Everyone stopped. But in the face of his mother’s goneness, all the world’s normal rules fell away. If she could leave, why couldn’t he? So he did. He walked away and was surprised how easy it was. He walked along the sidewalk, didn’t even attempt to run or hide. He walked in plain view and nobody stopped him. Nobody said a word. He floated away. It was a whole new reality. Maybe, he thought, his mother also found it this easy. To go. What kept people where they were, in their normal orbits? Nothing, he realized for the first time. There was nothing to stop anyone from, on any given day, vanishing.
He kept going. For hours he kept going, staring down at the sidewalk, thinking Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, repeating this until he finally reached the copper front gates of Venetian Village, then slipping between the bars and not even looking at the security window, just walking right on through, and if the guard saw him he didn’t say anything, and Samuel briefly wondered if in the middle of everything he hadn’t in fact turned invisible, such was the oddness of this total lack of reaction from the world, his breaking all the rules and the world completely not noticing. And he was thinking about this and walking Via Veneto’s smooth asphalt and cresting the neighborhood’s gentle hill when he looked down at the street’s terminating cul-de-sac and saw, in front of Bishop’s house, two police cars.
