Nathan Hill - The Nix

THE BLESSED HEART ACADEMY HEADMASTER could be seen lately taking short, plodding walks along Venetian Village’s lone street, usually around sunset, shuffling his great heft carefully and gingerly, as if his legs could, at any moment, shatter. The cane he walked with was a recent acquisition, and the headmaster seemed to enjoy how regal it made him look. It was actually pretty incredible how his stooped body and painful-looking limp could be improved so much by the simple addition of a cane. Now he seemed nobly impaired. Like a war hero. The cane’s shaft was made of oak and stained to a rich ebony. A pearl handle was attached to the top by a pewter collar etched with patterns of fleur-de-lis. Neighbors were relieved at the addition of the cane because it made the headmaster’s pain not quite so visibly obvious, and so they did not feel required to ask him how he felt, and thus they did not have to endure yet another conversation about the Sickness. This was a topic that had frankly run itself dry in the last six months. The headmaster had by now told all his neighbors about the Sickness, the mysterious affliction that no doctor could diagnose and no medicine could cure. The symptoms were well-known up and down the block: tightness in his chest; shallow breathing; profuse sweating; uncontrollable salivation; abdominal cramps; blurry vision; fatigue; lethargy; general allover weakness; headache; dizziness; loss of appetite; slow heartbeat; and an odd involuntary twitching and rippling of the muscles just under his skin that he would horribly show to neighbors if it flared up while they were talking. The spells came either in the middle of the day or in the middle of the night, lasting roughly four to six hours before magically ceasing on their own. He was shockingly candid and personal about the details of his condition. He spoke in that manner of people experiencing catastrophic illness, how the illness eclipsed previous gentlemanly notions of modesty and privacy. He told people how confusing it was, priority-wise, when he needed to vomit and diarrhea at the same time. The neighbors nodded and smiled tightly and tried not to betray how awful this was to listen to, because their children — and indeed all the children of Venetian Village — attended Blessed Heart Academy, and it was widely known that the headmaster could pull some serious strings. One phone call from him to the dean of admissions at Princeton or Yale or Harvard or Stanford could improve a child’s chances by about a thousand percent. Everyone knew this, so they suffered the headmaster’s long and vivid descriptions of medical procedures and bodily effluence because they thought of it as a kind of investment in their child’s education and future. So yes, they knew about his many trips to various expensive specialists, allergists, oncologists, gastroenterologists, cardiologists, his MRIs and CT scans and unpleasant organ biopsies. He made the same joke every time about how the best money he’d spent so far was on his cane. (It was, as canes go, breathtakingly beautiful, the neighbors had to agree.) He maintained that the best medicine was being active and outdoors, thus his evening walks and twice-daily soaks — once in the morning, once at night — in his backyard saltwater hot tub, which he said was one of the few joys left in his life.

Some of the less charitable neighbors insisted privately that the reason for his evening walks wasn’t health but the opportunity to complain for an hour like the goddamn sympathy-seeking tyrant he really was. They would not tell this to anyone else, maybe a spouse but that’s it, because they knew how selfish and insensitive and callous it sounded, that the headmaster was genuinely sick with a mysterious illness that caused a terrific amount of pain and mental anguish, and yet they were the ones who felt like victims, they were the ones who felt aggrieved, because they were forced to listen to it. And sometimes on these nights they felt under siege, attending to the headmaster for sixty tedious minutes before getting rid of him and retiring to their entertainment rooms to try to squeeze some enjoyment out of what was left of the evening. They turned on the television and saw some news story about another goddamn humanitarian crisis, another goddamn civil war in some godforsaken place, and saw images of wounded people or starving children and felt a bright, bitter anger at the children for invading and ruining the only moments of relaxation and “me time” the neighbors had all day. The neighbors would get a little indignant here, about how their own lives were hard too, and yet nobody heard them complaining about it. Everyone had problems — why couldn’t they just quietly deal with them? On their own? With a bit of self-respect? Why did they have to get everyone else involved? It’s not like the neighbors could do anything. It’s not like civil wars were their fault.

Of course, they would never say this out loud. And the headmaster never suspected they thought this. But some of his most proximate neighbors had taken to leaving the lights off and sitting around in the dusky darkness until they saw him pass by. Others arranged early dinners out at restaurants at prime headmaster-walking times. Certain homes down the block had perfected a system of total avoidance, which was why the headmaster sometimes made it all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac and knocked on the Fall household door and asked to come in for some coffee, which was what happened the first time Samuel was allowed to spend the night at Bishop’s house.

His first sleepover. Samuel’s dad drove him and was plainly stunned when they pulled up to Venetian Village’s large front copper gates.

“Your friend lives here ?” he said. Samuel nodded.

The security guard at the gate asked to see Henry’s license, asked him to fill out a form, sign a waiver, and explain the nature of his visit.

“We’re not going to the White House,” he told the guard. It was not a joke. There was venom in his voice.

“Do you have any collateral?” the guard asked.

“What?”

“You have not been preapproved, so I’ll need some collateral. To insure against damages or violations.”

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

“It’s policy. Do you have a credit card?”

“I’m not going to give you my credit card.”

“It’s only temporary. Like I said, for collateral purposes.”

“I’m just dropping off my son.”

“You’re leaving your son? Okay, that will do.”

“For what?”

“For collateral.”

The guard actually followed them in a golf cart, and Henry delivered Samuel to the Fall house with a brief hug, said “Be good” and “Call me if you need me,” and then glared pure hatred at the security guard as he got back into his car. Samuel watched as both his father and the golf cart disappeared up Via Veneto. He held his backpack, which contained some overnight clothes and, at the bottom, the cassette tape he’d bought at the mall for Bethany.

Tonight he would give her the present.

They were all there — Bishop, Bethany, their parents — they were all waiting, in the same room, which Samuel had never seen before, all of them inhabiting the same space at the same time. And another person too, at the piano, Samuel recognized him: the headmaster. The same headmaster who had expelled Bishop from Blessed Heart Academy now sat taking up all the space on the bench in front of the family’s Bösendorfer baby grand.

“Hi there,” Samuel said, to nobody in particular, to the aggregate mass of them.

“So you’re the friend from the new school?” the headmaster said.

Samuel nodded.

“It’s good to see he’s fitting in,” the headmaster said. This remark was made about Bishop, but it was made to Bishop’s father. Bishop sat in an upholstered antique wooden chair and looked small. It was as if the headmaster’s large presence had colonized the room. He was one of those men whose body exactly matched his disposition. His voice was big. His body was big. He sat bigly, his legs far apart and his chest puffed out.