Nathan Hill: The Nix

“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.