The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “This is of course your choice. But if you don’t put your name on that book, then we proceed with the court action against you, and your mother remains a fugitive. Notice that I’m not telling you what to do here, just illuminating two paths, one of which I hope is the obvious choice if you are not totally insane.”

  “But the book isn’t true.”

  “And that should matter to us why, exactly?”

  “I feel like it would keep me up at night. I feel like we should resist printing outright false things.”

  “What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”

  “This sounds awful.”

  “We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”

  “I’ll need to give this some thought.”

  “Maybe literally the last thing you should be doing right now is thinking.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Samuel says, standing now.

  “The very worst thing you could be doing right now is examining the situation and trying to decide what is right.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Listen, Samuel, really, voice of experience here? It’s a terrible burden, being idealistic. It discolors everything you’ll do later. It will haunt you constantly for all time as you become the inevitably cynical person the world requires you to be. Just give up on it now, the idealism, doing the right thing. Then you’ll have nothing to regret later.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

  4

  OUTSIDE PERIWINKLE’S BUILDING, the sidewalks howl. The new concern for those currently occupying Zuccotti Park is that the police are threatening to enforce city ordinances that prohibit occupying parks. Police stand at the edges of the park and watch as protestors gather in a general assembly and talk openly about the pros and cons of obeying the police. So it’s a tense day. Plus there’s the thing about the drumming: People are complaining about it, the ceaseless drumming way into the night, neighbors mostly, families who live in the area and have kids with early bedtimes, and local businesses who up till now have been pretty cool about letting protestors use their bathrooms but are about to become way less cool unless the drumming stops pronto. On one end of the park is the drum circle, on the other end is the multimedia tent and speaker’s platform and library and general assembly in what seems to be the superego to the drummers’ id. Someone is discussing the matter of the drumming right now, a young man in a vintage-looking sport coat who says a few words and stops while those words are shouted by people closest to him, which are then again shouted by those in the next zone back, and so on in a great wave, a sound that begins quietly and then is quickly amplified and amplified again, like an echo traveling back in time. This is necessary because the protestors do not have microphones. The city has banned sound-amplification devices, citing public nuisance laws. Why they have not yet arrested the drummers is anyone’s guess.

  The speaker is currently saying he totally supports the drummers and thinks the protest should be an inclusive, big-tent, come-one-come-all type of affair and he understands that people express themselves politically in different ways and that not everybody feels comfortable up here talking rationally and democratically into the “people’s microphone” and some people prefer their message take on a more let’s say abstract quality than the policy proposals and talking-points papers and multistep manifestos this group has heroically written through a painstakingly slow consensus-approach apparatus and under incredible duress that includes constant police surveillance and media scrutiny and also talking above the sounds of the drum circle, he might add, but that’s all fine and they should embrace diversity in all its forms and be thankful that so many different kinds of people have joined their protest but he’s submitting a proposal that the collective occupying group ask the drummers if they’d knock it off at like maybe nine or thereabouts, nightly, please, because people have to sleep and everyone’s on their last nerve out here and it’s hard enough sleeping in tents on the concrete without the goddamn drumming all goddamn night. He submits this to the general assembly for consensus. Many hands are thrust into the air, fingers atwirl. In the absence of outright opposition, the motion seems to pass, until someone suggests they haven’t heard from the drummers yet and we have to hear from the drummers because even though we might disagree with the drummers it’s important to get everyone’s perspective here and everyone’s point of view and not be like fascist about it and quote-unquote jam it down their throats or something. Groans from many quarters. Nevertheless, an emissary is sent to the drum circle in search of a representative.

  Samuel watches all this in a kind of dispassionate daze. He feels so separate from what’s happening here, so alone and hopeless. These people seem to have a sense of purpose that he has completely lost. What do you do when you discover your adult life is a sham? Everything he thought he’d accomplished—the publication, the book deal, the teaching gig—he’d only gotten because someone owed his mom a favor. He’d never earned any of it. He is a fraud. And this is what being a fraud feels like: emptied out. He feels hollow. Gutted. Why don’t any of these people notice him? He longs for someone in the crowd to see the haunted expression he’s sure is playing all over his face right now and come up to him and say, You seem to be experiencing overwhelming pain, how can I help you? He wants to be seen, wants his hurt acknowledged. Then he recognizes this as a childish desire, the equivalent of showing your mom a scratch so she can kiss it. Grow up, he tells himself.

  “On the matter of the police,” says the speaker, switching topics while they wait for a drummer to stop drumming and speak to them.

  “On the matter of the police,” the crowd repeats.

  Samuel wanders away, up Liberty Street, walks the two blocks to Bethany’s old apartment building. He stands there staring up at it. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. The building looks unchanged in the seven years since he was last here. He thinks it’s disallowable that the places of life’s most important moments continue going on looking like themselves, unaffected, simple facts that resist the imprint of the stories happening around them. The last time he was here, Bethany was waiting for him in her bedroom, waiting for him to break up her marriage.

  Even now, he can’t think about this without that familiar flood of bitterness and regret and anger. Anger at himself, for doing what Bishop wanted him to do; anger at Bishop, for asking him to do it. Samuel has relived that moment so many times, fantasized so often about it: He had read Bishop’s letter and then placed it heavily on the kitchen counter. He had opened the bedroom door to find Bethany sitting on her bed waiting for him, her face dancing with the shadows cast from three bedside candles, their little amber glow the only light in that whole big room. And in his dreams, he goes to her and embraces her and they are together at last and she leaves the awful Peter Atchison and falls in love with Samuel and, for Samuel, everything about these last seven years changes. Like one of those movies about time travel where the hero comes back to the present to find the happy ending that was always impossible in his previous life.

  When Samuel was a child reading a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, he’d keep a bookmark at the spot of a very hard decision, so that if the story turned out poorly, he could go back and try again.

  More than anything he wants life to behave this way.

  This
is the moment he would bookmark, finding Bethany all beautiful and candlelit. He would make a different decision. He would not do what he actually did, which is to say “I’m sorry. I can’t,” because he felt it was his duty to honor Bishop, who was dead and therefore in need of honoring. It wasn’t until much later that Samuel realized it wasn’t Bishop he was honoring, it was Bishop’s most disfiguring wound. Whatever had happened between Bishop and the headmaster, whatever haunted Bishop as a kid, it went right on haunting him overseas and into a war, and this was what compelled that letter. Not duty but plain old hatred, self-loathing, terror. And by honoring it, Samuel had failed Bishop once again.

  Samuel didn’t realize this until much later, but he had sensed it at the time, sensed he was making the wrong choice. Even as he took the elevator down, even as he walked away from the building at 55 Liberty Street, he kept saying to himself, Go back, go back. And even as he found his car and drove out of the city and drove all night through the Midwest darkness, he kept saying it: Go back. Go back.

  The story had appeared in the Times a month later, on the wedding page, the marriage of Peter Atchison and Bethany Fall. A finance guru and a violin soloist. A nexus of art and money. The Times just ate it up. They met in Manhattan, where the groom worked for the bride’s father. To be married on Long Island, at the private residence of a friend of the bride’s family. The groom specializes in risk management in precious-metal markets. Honeymoon planned involving sailing and island-hopping. The bride is keeping her name.

  Yes, he’d like to go back to that night and make a different decision. He’d like to erase these last several years—years that, as he sees them now, are long and indistinguishable and monotonous and angry. Or maybe he’d go further back than that, back far enough to see Bishop again, to help him. Or to convince his mom not to leave. But even that wouldn’t be far enough to recover whatever it is he lost, whatever he sacrificed to his mother’s brutal influence, that real part of him that was buried when he started trying to please her. What kind of person would he have become had his instincts not been screaming at him that his mother was moments from leaving? Was he ever free of that weight? Was he ever authentically himself?

  These are the questions you ask when you’re cracking up. When you suddenly recognize that not only are you living a life you never intended to lead but also you are feeling assaulted and punished by the life you have. You begin searching for those early wrong turns. What moment led you into the maze? You begin thinking the entrance to the maze might also be the exit, and if you can identify the moment you screwed up then you can perform some huge course correction and save yourself. Which is why Samuel thinks that if he can see Bethany again and resurrect some kind of relationship with her, even a friendly platonic one, then he might be able to recover something important, that he might be able to set himself aright. This is the state he’s in, that this kind of logic makes sense, that he thinks the only answer right now is to go backward, to essentially hit the reset button on his life—a scorched-earth maneuver he is beginning to understand urgently needs to happen as he stands outside Bethany’s building and his phone buzzes with a new e-mail from his boss that sends his spirits tumbling even further when he reads it—I wanted to let you know that your office computer has been confiscated, as it will be presented as evidence in the Faculty Affairs trial against you—and he hears Bishop’s voice in his ear on that day Samuel’s mother left and Bishop told him this was an opportunity to become a new person, a better person, which is something Samuel wants to be, very much so right now. Better. He walks into the building at 55 Liberty Street. He tells the guard in the elevator lobby to please get a message to Bethany Fall. He leaves his name and number. Says he’s in town and asks if she would like to meet. And about twenty minutes later as he’s walking aimlessly north on Broadway past the clothing boutiques of SoHo that leak dance music onto the sidewalk along with their air-conditioning, he gets a message from Bethany: You’re in town. What a surprise!

  Turns out she’s in a rehearsal that lets out soon and would he like to meet for lunch? She suggests the Morgan Library. It’s close to her, in midtown. There’s a restaurant inside. She’d like to show him something.

  Which is how he finds himself on Madison Avenue in front of a palatial stone mansion, the former home of J. P. Morgan, American titan of banking and industry. Inside, the place seems designed to make visitors feel small—in stature, intellect, and pocketbook. Rooms with thirty-foot ceilings elaborately muraled with images inspired by Raphael’s at the Vatican, the saints replaced here by more secular heroes: Galileo, for example, and Christopher Columbus. All surfaces are either marble or gold. Three stories of shelving for the many thousands of antique books—first editions of Dickens, Austen, Blake, Whitman—visible behind the copper lattice that protects them from being touched. A Shakespeare first folio. A Gutenberg Bible. Thoreau’s journals. Mozart’s handwritten Haffner Symphony. The only surviving manuscript of Paradise Lost. Letters written by Einstein, Keats, Napoléon, Newton. A fireplace about the size of most New York City kitchens, above which hangs a tapestry titled, appropriately, The Triumph of Avarice.

  The space feels designed to intimidate and diminish. It makes Samuel think that the folks protesting the superrich at Zuccotti Park are about a hundred years too late.

  He’s staring at a life cast of George Washington’s actual face when Bethany finds him.

  “Samuel?” she says, and he spins around.

  How much do people change in just a few years? Samuel’s first impression—and this is the best way he could explain it—is that she looks more real. She is no longer glowing with his fantasies about her. She looks like herself, in other words, like a normal person. Maybe she hasn’t changed at all, but the context has. She still has the same green eyes, the same pale skin, the same perfectly erect posture that has always made Samuel feel a little slumpy. But there is something different about her, the way her face has creased about the eyes and mouth that does not suggest time or age but rather emotion, experience, heartache, wisdom. It’s one of those things he recognizes in a blink but could not point out specifically.

  “Bethany,” he says, and they hug, stiffly, almost ceremonially, like how you might hug someone you used to work with.

  “It’s good to see you,” she says.

  “You too.”

  And because she probably doesn’t know what to say next, she looks around the room and says, “Quite a place, isn’t it?”

  “Quite a place. Quite a collection.”

  “Very pretty.”

  “Beautiful.”

  They spend a useless moment staring at the room, looking at everything but each other. Panic surges up in Samuel—have they already run out of things to say? But then Bethany breaks the silence: “I’ve always wondered how much joy all this stuff really brought him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He has the big names—Mozart, Milton, Keats. But there’s no evidence of real fire. It’s always struck me as an investor’s collection. He’s building a diverse portfolio. It doesn’t say love.”

  “Maybe there were a few pieces he loved. He hid them from everyone else. They were only his.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe that’s even sadder, that he couldn’t share them.”

  “You wanted to show me something?”

  “This way.”

  She leads him to a corner where, displayed under glass, are several handwritten musical scores. Bethany points to one: the Violin Concerto no. 1, by Max Bruch, written in 1866.

  “The first concert you heard me play, I played this,” Bethany says. “Do you remember?”

  “Of course.”

  The yellowed manuscript pages look like chaos to Samuel, and not because he doesn’t read music. Words have been written and then scribbled over, notes have been erased or x-ed out, there seems to be a first layer of pencil under the ink, and stains on the pages from what might be coffee or paint. The composer had written allegro molto at the top, but then
crossed out molto and replaced it with moderato. The title of the first movement, Vorspiel, is followed by a lengthy subtitle that extends more than half the page and is completely obscured by squiggles and lines and doodles.

  “That’s my part,” Bethany says, pointing at a clump of notes that seem barely contained by the five-line staff underneath. How this mess could turn into the music Samuel heard that night seems like a miracle.

  “Did you know he was never paid for this?” Samuel says. “He sold the score to a couple of Americans, but they never paid him. He died poor, I think.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Something my mother told me. At your concert, actually.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Very well.”

  Bethany nods. She doesn’t press.

  “So,” she says, “what’s new with you?”

  “I’m about to be fired,” he says. “What’s new with you?”

  “Divorced,” she says, and they both smile at this. And the smile grows into a laugh. And the laughing seems to melt something between them, a formality, a guardedness. They are together with their disasters, it turns out, and over lunch at the museum’s restaurant she tells him about her four-year marriage to Peter Atchison, how by year two she’d begun saying yes to every international gig offered to her so she wouldn’t be in the same country as Peter and therefore did not have to acknowledge what had been plain to her from the beginning: that she was very fond of him but did not love him, or if she did love him she did not love him in that particular way that sustains the years. They were good to each other, but they were never passionate. In their final year of marriage she was finishing a monthlong tour of China and dreaded going home.

  “That’s when I finally had to end it,” she says. “I should have done it much earlier.” She points her fork at him. “If only you hadn’t left that night.”

  “I’m sorry,” Samuel says. “I should have stayed.”

  “No, it’s good you left. That night, I was looking for an easy way out. But the hard way out was better, ultimately, for me, I think.”