Nathan Hill - The Nix

Bishop inhabited the farthest seat from the headmaster, arms crossed, feet under him, a tight little angry ball. He leaned so far back in his chair it seemed he wanted to physically dissolve into it. Bethany sat nearer the piano, perfectly upright, as she always did, on the edge of her chair, ankles crossed, hands in her lap.

“Back to it!” the headmaster said. He swiveled to face the piano and placed a hand on the keys. “Now don’t cheat.”

Bethany turned her head away from the piano and looked directly at Samuel. His chest seized, her stare carried such voltage. He fought the urge to look away.

The headmaster pounded a single note on the piano, a strong, dark, low note that Samuel could feel in his body.

“That’s an A,” Bethany said.

“Correct!” the headmaster said. “Again.”

Another note, this time near the top of the keyboard, a delicate plink.

“That’s C,” Bethany said. She still stared at Samuel, expressionless.

“Right again!” the headmaster said. “Let’s make it more challenging.”

He hit three keys at once, and what came out was dissonant and ugly. It sounded like what an infant might do bashing the piano incoherently. Bethany’s stare seemed to disengage for a moment — it was as if her consciousness receded, the way her eyes went glassy and remote. But then she came back and said, “B flat, C, C sharp.”

“That’s amazing!” the headmaster said, clapping.

“Can I go?” Bishop said.

“I’m sorry?” his father said. “What was that?”

“Can I go?” Bishop said.

“Maybe if you learn to ask correctly.”

And here Bishop finally raised his head and met his father’s eyes. They held each other’s gaze like that for an uncomfortable few seconds. “May I please be excused?” Bishop said.

“Yes you may.”

In the game room it was clear Bishop did not want to talk. He jammed Missile Command into the Atari. He sat stone-faced and quiet while he shot rockets out of the air. Then Bishop grew agitated and said “Fuck this, let’s watch a movie,” and he started a film they’d seen several times before, about a group of teenagers who defend their town from a surprise Russian invasion. They were about twenty minutes into the movie when Bethany opened the door and slipped in.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“Good.”

Samuel could not believe how much his stomach flopped whenever he saw her up close. Even now, when he felt seriously conflicted about his presence here, when Bishop transparently wanted to be alone and Samuel didn’t know what to do with himself and had been wondering if he should call his father and go back home, even through all this Samuel felt elated when Bethany entered the room. It was as if she erased every lesser thing. Samuel had to bat away his impulses to touch her, to muss up her hair or punch her in the arm or flick her earlobe or any of the other juvenile maneuvers boys do to terrorize the girls they love, maneuvers that were really meant to bring them into physical contact the only way they knew how: brutally, like little barbarians. But Samuel knew enough to know this was not a good long-term strategy, so he sat there heavy and still on his usual beanbag chair and hoped Bethany would sit next to him.

“He’s an asshole,” Bishop said. “A fat fucking asshole.”

“I know,” Bethany said.

“Why do they let him in the house?”

“Because he’s the headmaster. But also? Because he’s sick.”

“That’s ironic.”

“He wouldn’t be out walking around if he weren’t sick.”

“If there’s a word for that, it’s ironic. ”

“You’re not listening,” Bethany said. “You wouldn’t see him if he weren’t sick. ”

Bishop sat up and frowned at his sister. “Just what are you trying to say?”

Bethany stood there with her hands behind her back, chewing or biting the inside of her cheek the way she did when she was concentrating real hard. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail. Her eyes were so fiercely green. She was wearing a yellow sundress that gradually turned white at the bottom.

“I’m pointing out a fact,” Bethany said. “If he weren’t sick, he wouldn’t go for these walks, and then you wouldn’t have to see him.”

“I don’t think I like where this is going.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Samuel said.

“Nothing,” they said in twin-like unison.

The three of them watched the rest of the movie in an edgy silence, watched as the American teens successfully fought off the Russian aggressors, and the triumphant ending of the movie was not nearly as triumphant as it usually felt because the room was overflowing with some weird tension and unspoken conflict, and it felt to Samuel like he was back home having dinner with his parents while they were going through one of their moments, and when the movie finished the kids were told to get ready for bed, and so they washed up and brushed their teeth and changed into their pajamas and Samuel was led to the guest bedroom. And just before they were told to turn off their lights, Bethany softly knocked on the door and poked her head in his room and said, “Good night.”

“Good night,” he said.

She looked at him and lingered there a moment like she had something else to say.

“What were you doing?” Samuel said. “Earlier. With the piano.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Parlor tricks.”

“You were performing?”

“Sort of. I can hear things. People think it’s special. My parents like to show it off.”

“What things?”

“Notes, pitches, vibrations.”

“From the piano?”

“From everything. The piano is easiest because all the sounds have names. But really from everything.”

“What do you mean, from everything?”

“Every sound is actually many sounds put together,” she said. “Triads and harmonics. Tones and overtones.”

“I don’t get it.”

“A knock on the wall. A tap on a glass bottle. Birdsong. Tires on the street. The phone ringing. The dishwasher running. There’s music in everything.”

“You hear music from all that?”

“Our phone is a little sharp,” she said. “It’s awful, every time it rings.”

Samuel tapped on the wall, listening. “I only hear a thud.”

“There’s a lot more than a thud. Listen. Try to separate the sounds.” She knocked sharply on the doorframe. “There’s the sound made by the wood, but the wood is not a constant density, so it makes a few different pitches, very close together.” She knocked again. “Then there’s the sound of the glue, the surrounding wall, the hum of the air inside the wall.”

“You hear all that?”

“It’s there. You add it up and it sounds like a thud. It’s a very brown noise. Like if you melted all the colors in the crayon box, this is the sound you’d get.”

“I don’t hear any of that.”

“It’s harder to hear out in the world. A piano is tempered. A house is not.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Mostly it’s annoying.”

“Why?”

“Well, take birds. There’s this one bird, the tanager, that makes this sound like chip che-ri che-ri che-ri. Okay? It’s a summer bird.”

“Okay.”

“But I don’t really hear the che-ri. What I hear is a third and a fifth, in A-flat major.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s a C gliding into an E flat, which is exactly what happens in this one Schubert solo, and also in a Berlioz symphony, and also in a Mozart concerto. So the bird starts singing and it ignites all these phrases in my head.”

“I wish I had that.”

“No. It’s terrible. It’s all crashing around in there.”