Nathan Hill - The Nix

The neighborhood should never have existed but for a loophole that was exploited by three Chicago investors. Before Venetian Village, there was the Milkweed Nature Preserve, named after the plant that grew in great abundance here and drew huge numbers of monarch butterflies in the summer. The city was looking for a private organization — preferably nonprofit and/or charitable — to tend the preserve and its various paths and general health and biodiversity. The covenants the city drafted stated that the buyer of the land could not develop the land, nor could the buyer sell the land to anyone who would develop it. But the agreement said nothing about whom that buyer (i.e., the second one) could sell the land to. So one of the business partners bought the land, then sold it to another of the partners, who quickly sold it to the third partner, who immediately formed an LLC with the other two guys and went to work knocking down the forest. They installed a thick copper fence around what was once the Milkweed Nature Preserve, and advertised to high-end Sotheby’s-style clients, one of their catchphrases being: “The intersection of luxury and nature.”

One of the three founding partners still lived in Venetian Village, a commodities trader with offices at both the Chicago Stock Exchange and Wall Street. His name was Gerald Fall. He was Bishop’s father.

Gerald Fall, the only person on the block, save for the two boys themselves, who saw the stone strike the headmaster’s house, who watched as Bishop and Samuel ran down the soft slope of the road toward the low end of Via Veneto’s terminating cul-de-sac, where he was standing in the driveway, the door of his black BMW open, his right foot already in the car, his left foot still on the driveway he’d had expensively done in high-gloss cobblestone. He was leaving when he spotted his son throw the rock at the headmaster’s house. The boys did not see him there until they were upon the driveway themselves, where they squeaked to a halt on the polished stone, the sound like basketball players on a gym floor. Bishop and his father considered each other for a moment.

“The headmaster’s sick,” the father said. “Why are you bothering him?”

“Sorry,” said Bishop.

“He’s very ill. He’s a sick man.”

“I know.”

“What if he’s sleeping and you just ruined it?”

“I’ll be sure to apologize.”

“You do that.”

“Where are you going?” Bishop asked.

“The airport. I’ll be at the New York apartment for a while.”

“Again?”

“Don’t bother your sister while I’m gone.” He looked at the boys’ feet, wet and dirty from the woods. “And don’t track mud in the house.”

With that, Bishop’s father dove fully into his car and shut the door hard and the engine purred to life and the BMW circled out of the driveway, its tires making this noise on the smooth stones like something screaming.

Inside, the Fall household had a formality that made Samuel not want to touch anything: bright white stone floors, chandeliers with crystal things hanging off of them, flowers in tall and thin and easily tippable glass vases, framed abstract artwork on the walls lit by recessed bulbs, a thick wooden display hutch with about two dozen snow globes inside it, the tops of tables buffed to a mirrorlike clarity, kitchen counters of white marble similarly shined, each room and hallway defined by a wide arch set atop Corinthian columns that were so intricately detailed at the top they looked like muskets that had backfired and been torn apart.

“This way,” Bishop said. He led them to a room that could only be called the “TV room” for the big-screen television that Samuel felt dwarfed by. It was taller than he was, and wider than his own wingspan. Below the television were strewn various cords and wires for video-game consoles stacked clumsily in a small cabinet. Game cartridges lay haphazardly about them like spent artillery shells.

“Do you like Metroid or Castlevania or Super Mario ?” Bishop said.

“I don’t know.”

“I can save the princess in Super Mario without even dying. I’ve also beaten Mega Man, Double Dragon, and Kid Icarus. ”

“It doesn’t matter what we play.”

“Yeah, that’s true. They’re all pretty much the same game. Same basic premise: Go right.”

He reached into the cabinet and produced an Atari all tangled in its own cords.

“I actually prefer the classics,” he said. “Games made before all the clichés were established. Galaga. Donkey Kong. Or Joust is one of my favorites, even though it’s weird.”

“I’ve never played it.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty weird. Ostriches and stuff. Pterodactyls. There’s also Centipede. And Pac-Man. You’ve played Pac-Man, right?”

“Yes!”

“Pretty fucking amazing, isn’t it? Here’s one.” Bishop grabbed a cartridge called Missile Command and jammed it into the Atari. “You watch me first, then you’ll know how to play.”

The point of Missile Command was to protect six cities from a ceaseless hail of ICBMs. When a missile landed on one of the six cities, it did so with an ugly plosive noise and a little splash that was probably supposed to be a mushroom cloud but looked more like a small pebble or frog breaking the surface of a still pond. The game’s sound track was mostly an eight-bit digital conversion of an air-raid horn. Bishop positioned his targeting reticule out in front of the incoming missiles and pressed his button and a small trace of light shot up from the ground and slowly climbed to the targeted spot, where it collided with a falling nuke. Bishop didn’t even lose a city until around level nine. Samuel lost track of levels eventually, so by the time the sky was packed with missile trails falling fast and thick, he had no idea how many boards had been conquered. Bishop’s face through all of this was utterly calm and fishlike and blank.

“Want to see me do it again?” Bishop said as the screen flashed GAME OVER.

“Did you win?”

“What do you mean, win ?”

“Did you save all the cities?”

“You can’t save all the cities.”

“So what’s the point?”

“Annihilation is inevitable. The point is delaying it.”

“So people can escape?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Do it again.”

And so Bishop was onto level six or seven in his second game, and Samuel was watching Bishop’s face instead of the game — how his face was so focused and undisturbed, even while missiles crashed down around his cities, even while his hands jerked the controller this way and that — when, from outside the room, Samuel heard something else, something new.

It was music. Clean and clear and not at all like the scratchy and digitized sounds currently coming out of the television. Musical scales, a solo string instrument going up and down a scale.

“What’s that?”

“That’s my sister,” Bishop said. “Bethany. She’s practicing.”

“Practicing what?”

“Violin. She’s going to be a world-famous violinist. She’s really outstandingly good.”

“I’ll say!” Samuel blurted out maybe too enthusiastically, a bit out of proportion to the actual conversation. But he wanted Bishop to like him. He was trying to be agreeable. Bishop gave him a brief and curious look before staring forward again, blankly, onward to levels ten, eleven, while the music outside changed from a basic scale to real actual music, a soaring and densely noted solo that Samuel could not believe was coming from a person and not the radio.

“That’s really your sister?”

“Yep.”

“I want to see,” Samuel said.