Nathan Hill - The Nix

The big rumor about the Berg this year — one propagated by the Berg himself — was that he was, by all accounts, the first member of the sixth-grade class to have sex. With a girl. With, he said, a former babysitter who, quote, can’t get enough of my dick. This of course was unverifiable. Either the high-school girl in question or her interest in the Berg’s anatomy, unverifiable but also unchallenged. Nobody in the locker room within earshot of the Berg’s boasting was willing to risk personal injury by stating the obvious: There was no way a high-school girl would be interested in a sixth grader unless she was mentally disturbed, wicked ugly, or emotionally broken. Or all three of these things. There was just no way.

And yet.

There was something in the way the Berg spoke about sex that made the boys wonder. It was the specificity of the details. The exact and totally unglamorous particulars. That’s what gave the boys pause, kept them up at night wondering and sometimes falling into private rages that maybe he was telling the truth, maybe he really was banging a high schooler, and if this was true it was the only proof they needed that the world was unjust and that God did not exist. Or if God did exist, God must hate them, for nobody in the school deserved sex less than Andy fucking Berg. Every gym class they endured it, how he had to smoke one of his dad’s cigars to cover the smell of pussy, how he wasn’t getting laid this week because the girl was on the rag, how one time when he blew his load, the condom he was wearing exploded because he was just that horny. These visions gave the boys nightmares, these and the larger tragedy that the repellent Andy Berg was having robust sex while most of them had only very recently had “the talk” with their parents and the whole idea of sex with a girl still seemed terrifying and gross.

It might have been the way the Berg taunted Kim at the pep rally that prompted Bishop to act. He would have thought it was too easy, too obvious — the way Kim didn’t fight back, how his passive and slumped-over body revealed his hundred percent acceptance of the hierarchies at work here. Kim stood there reflexively prepared to be bullied. The shooting-fish-in-a-barrel nature of this probably outraged Bishop’s odd sense of justice, his soldier’s desire to protect the weak and innocent via disproportionate violence.

As all the students filed out of the gymnasium, Bishop tapped the Berg on the shoulder. “I heard a rumor about you,” he said.

The Berg looked down at him, annoyed. “Yeah? What.”

“That you’ve had sex.”

“You better fucking believe it.”

“It’s true, then, the rumor.”

“I get so much pussy you don’t even know how much.”

Samuel trailed carefully behind them. He was not usually comfortable being this close to the Berg, but with Bishop between them he felt safe. Bishop’s personality tended to direct all attention to him. It was as if Bishop blocked Samuel from view.

“Okay,” Bishop said, “I have something for you.”

“What.”

“It’s something for people who are a little more mature. Such as yourself.”

“What is it.”

“I don’t want to say right now. Someone might hear. And this is very juicy, really illegal stuff we’re talking about.”

“What the fuck are you saying?”

Bishop rolled his eyes and looked around as if to check if anyone was eavesdropping before leaning closer to the Berg and beckoning him with his fingers to lean down so that his giant head wasn’t so far away and Bishop whispered, “Pornography.”

“No way !”

“Quiet down.”

“You’ve got porn?”

“A massive stash.”

“Seriously?”

“I’ve been trying to decide who here is grown-up enough to see it.”

“Rad!” the Berg said, roused. Because for kids his age, for kids hitting adolescence in the eighties, in those days before the internet, before the web made pornography easily accessible and therefore banal, for this last generation of boys for whom porn was primarily a physical object, possessing pornography was like having a superpower. One that made you immediately legitimate and popular among the other boys. This happened roughly once per semester, some obscure boy locating his father’s collection of dirty magazines and suddenly finding himself elevated socially for as long as he didn’t get in trouble, which might take a day to several months, depending on the constitution of the boy. The ones who were transparently desperate and begging for attention and craving to be liked tended to steal the whole pile in exchange for a one-time flash of celebrity, bright stars who burned out in a day when their fathers noticed the disappearance of all their pornography and put two and two together. Other boys, the ones with more impulse control and less desperation for approval, were more judicious in their porn approaches. They might remove only one magazine from the pile, say the second or third from the bottom, an edition that had presumably been perused, enjoyed, digested, and abandoned. They brought that one magazine to school and let everyone look through it before replacing it in the pile a week or two later, then removing another edition from near the bottom, and then repeating the pattern. These boys maintained a consistent popularity for, sometimes, months before a teacher noticed a group of boys sitting still in a huddle on the playground and came to investigate, because when grade-school boys weren’t running around like spazzes it meant something was definitely wrong.

It was always temporary, in other words, the boys’ access to porn. Which was why it so piqued the Berg’s interest.

“Where is it?” he said.

“Most of these kids would freak out,” Bishop said. “They wouldn’t understand what they’re looking at.”

“Let me see it.”

“You, on the other hand. I think you could handle it.”

“Damn right.”

“Okay, meet me after school. After everyone’s left the building. At the stairwell behind the cafeteria, by the loading dock. I’ll show you where I hide it.”

The Berg agreed, then pushed his way out of the gymnasium. Samuel tapped Bishop on the shoulder.

“What are you doing?” he said.

Bishop smiled. “I’m taking the fight to the enemy.”

Later that day, after the final bell, after the buses had come and gone and the building had emptied, Bishop and Samuel waited behind the school, that part of the school not visible from the road, all concrete and asphalt. It had the look of a regional high-volume shipping facility, industrial and mechanical and automated and apocalyptic. There were massive air-conditioning units whose fans spun inside aluminum shells crusted and emblackened with sooty exhaust, roaring like a squadron of attack helicopters readying for, but never quite managing, takeoff. There were scraps of paper and cardboard blown by the wind into corners and crevices. There was the industrial trash compactor: solid metal, the size of a dump truck, painted that forest-green color typical of waste-disposal vehicles, covered all over with a scum of sticky trash residue.

Just next to the loading dock was a stairwell that led down to a basement door nobody ever used. Nobody even knew where it led. The stairwell was enclosed on one side by the concrete wall of the loading dock, on the other by tall unclimbable vertical bars. There was also a gate at the top of the stairs. This stairwell was a riddle for anyone who bothered thinking about it long enough. The bars obviously communicated a desire to keep people out, except that even if the gate were locked it would be a simple matter to leap down into the stairwell from the loading dock above it. But the basement door at the bottom of the stairs was one of those that opened only from the inside and didn’t even have an exterior handle. So the only real function of the gate was to trap people in, which seemed at least architecturally odd and at most an extreme hazard in the event of fire. Anyway, the amount of dirt and dead leaves and thrown-away plastic wrappers and cigarette butts in the stairwell indicated that it hadn’t been used in years.