Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Wait. Watch this,” Bishop said as he annihilated two nukes at the same time with one shot.

“Just for one second,” Samuel said.

“But I haven’t even lost a city yet. This could the highest scoring game of Missile Command ever. You could be watching something historic.”

“I’ll be right back.”

“Fine,” Bishop said. “Your loss.”

And Samuel left to find the source of the music. He followed the sounds through the main vaulted hallway, through the gleaming kitchen and to the back of the house, to an office where he slowly wrapped his nose around the frame of the door and peeked inside and saw, for the first time, Bishop’s sister.

They were twins.

Bethany had Bishop’s face, the same check-mark eyebrows, the same quiet intensity. She looked like an elven princess on the cover of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel: immortally young and beautiful and wise. The sharp angles of her cheeks and nose fit her better than they did Bishop. Whereas Bishop looked angry, she looked stately, statuesque. Her long and thick auburn hair, thin eyebrows crinkled in concentration, long neck and delicate arms and erect posture and the careful way she sat in a skirt, a kind of propriety and elegance and ladylike maturity that just killed Samuel. He loved the way she moved with her violin, the way the whole apparatus of her head and neck and torso seemed to glide with the movements of her bow. This was in sharp contrast to the kids in his school’s orchestra, who forced sound out of their instruments mechanically and abusively. Her playing was so effortless.

He didn’t know it then, but this would become his template for beauty for the rest of his life. Any girl he ever met from now on would be compared, in his head, to this girl.

She finished on a long note where she did that amazing thing where the bow kept moving back and forth and yet there was no break at all, just a prolonged, liquid sound. And she opened her eyes and looked directly at him, and they stared at each other for a terrifying moment until she brought the violin down into her lap and said, “Hi there.”

Samuel had never felt such uncomfortable longings before. This was the first time his body tingled like this: Cold sweat gummed up his armpits, his mouth suddenly seemed too small, his tongue all of a sudden huge and arid, a panicky sensation in his lungs as if he’d been holding his breath for too long, all of these things coalesced in his body as a kind of hyperawareness, a strange magnetic pull toward the object of his fancy that departed significantly from the way he tried to ignore or hide from most people.

The girl waited for him to say something, her hands in her lap, resting on her violin, her ankles crossed, those penetrating green eyes—

“I’m Bishop’s friend,” Samuel finally said. “I’m here with Bishop.”

“Okay.”

“Your brother?”

She smiled. “Yes, I know.”

“I heard you practicing. What are you practicing for?”

She looked at him quizzically for a moment. “To get the notes under my fingers,” she said. “I have a concert coming up. What did you think?”

“It was beautiful.”

She nodded and seemed to consider this. “The double-stops in the third movement are really hard to play in tune,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And the arpeggios on the third page are rough. Plus I have to play in tenths, which is weird.”

“Yes.”

“I feel like I’m falling all over it, that third movement. Stumbling the whole way.”

“It didn’t sound like that.”

“It’s like I’m a bird stapled to a chair.”

“Right,” Samuel said. He was not comfortable with this topic at all.

“I need to relax,” she said. “Especially in the second movement. There are these long melodic lines in the second movement, and if you play them with too much gusto it ruins the musicality of the whole piece. You have to be calm and serene, which is the last thing your body wants when you’re playing a solo.”

“Maybe you can, I don’t know, breathe?” Samuel said, because that’s what his mother told him during his uncontrollable Category 4s: Just breathe.

“You know what works?” she said. “I imagine my bow is a knife.” She held it up, the bow, and pointed it at him with false menace. “And then I imagine the violin is a stick of butter. Then I pretend I’m drawing the knife through the butter. It should feel like that.”

Samuel just nodded, helpless.

“How do you know my brother?” she said.

“He jumped out of a tree and scared me.”

“Oh,” she said, as if this made perfect sense. “He’s playing Missile Command right now, isn’t he?”

“How’d you know that?”

“He’s my brother. I can feel it.”

“Really?”

She held his stare for a moment, then giggled. “No. I can hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“The game. Listen. Can’t you hear it?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“You have to concentrate. Just listen. Close your eyes and listen.”

And so he did, and he began to hear the various sounds of the house separate themselves, break from one buzzy collective hum into individual details: the air conditioner working somewhere within the walls, the whoosh of air through vents, the wind outside brushing against the house, the refrigerator and freezer, and Samuel recognized these things and pushed them out of the way and felt his concentration extend back into the house and snake from room to room until, all at once, there it was, popping out of the silence, the faint and muffled air-raid sirens, missile explosions, the pew-pew sounds of rockets fired.

“I hear it,” he said. But when he opened his eyes Bethany was no longer looking at him. She had her face turned away, toward the big window that looked out onto the backyard and the forest beyond. Samuel followed her stare and saw, outside, through the twilight, at the tree line, maybe fifty feet away, a large adult deer. Light brown and spotted. Big black animal eyes. And as it moved, it hobbled and staggered, fell down and recovered and got up again and kept going, swaying and bucking.

“What’s wrong with it?” Samuel said.

“It’s eaten the salt.”

The deer’s front legs gave out again, and it pushed itself along on its belly. Then it recovered momentarily, only to twist and crane its neck so that it could move only in circles. Its eyes were wide and panicked. A pink foam dripped from its nose.

“This happens all the time,” Bethany said.

The deer turned toward the forest and made its way into the trees. They watched it go, tumbling forward, until they could no longer see it through the foliage. Then all was quiet, except for the faint sounds from the other end of the house: bombs dropping out of the sky and flattening whole cities.

AS THE SCHOOL YEAR BEGAN, this new thing started happening: Samuel would be sitting in class and taking faithful and meticulous notes about whatever Miss Bowles was teaching that moment — American history, multiplication, grammar — and sincerely thinking about the material and really trying to understand it and worrying that Miss Bowles could at any moment call on him and ask him pop-quiz questions about the material she’d just covered, which she often did, mocking those kids who answered incorrectly, suggesting for the next hour or so that perhaps they belonged in fifth grade rather than sixth, and Samuel paying attention closely and carefully and absolutely not letting his mind wander and not thinking about girls or doing anything regarding girls and yet this thing happened. It began as a kind of warmth, a tingle, like that feeling when someone is about to tickle you, that terrible anticipation. Then a sudden awareness of a body part that up until now was obscured, was among all those feelings that happened beneath what he paid attention to: the fabric on his shoulders, the fit of his socks, what his elbow was at any moment touching. Most of the time the body fades away. But lately, for no reason, more frequently than Samuel would like, his prick had become assertive. In class, at his desk, it would announce itself. It pushed against his jeans and then against the unforgiving metal underside of the school’s one-size-fits-all desk. And the problem here was that all this rising and swelling and pressing was mortifying, but also, in a purely physical way, it was really pleasant. He wanted it to go away, but then again, he also didn’t.