Nathan Hill - The Nix

And they were on their way out of the hall, and they were moving slowly with the surge of people also leaving, Samuel brushing against hips and sport coats, when from behind him he heard his name. Bethany was calling his name. He turned and found her wrestling through the crowd to catch up to him, and when she finally did she leaned into him, her cheek to his, and he thought he was supposed to give her one of those fake-kiss things he saw all the adult men doing, until she brought her lips all the way to his ear and whispered, “Come over tonight. Sneak out.”

“Okay,” he said. That warmth on his face. He would have agreed to do anything she asked.

“There’s something I have to show you.”

“What is it?”

“The cassette you gave me? It’s not just silence. There’s something else. ”

She pulled away. She no longer looked, as she had onstage, small. She had regained her normal Bethany proportions: elegant, sophisticated, womanly. She held his stare and smiled.

“You have to hear it,” she said. Then she dashed away, back to her parents and her throng of giddy admirers.

His mother looked at him suspiciously, but he ignored her. He walked right past her, out of the church and into the night, limping slightly in his rock-hard shoes.

That night he lay in bed waiting for the sounds of the house to disappear — his mother rattling around in the kitchen, his father watching television downstairs, then eventually the whoosh of his parents’ door opening as his mother went to bed. Then the television turning off with an electric chunk. The sound of water running, a toilet flushing. Then nothing. Waiting another twenty minutes to be sure, then opening his door, twisting and untwisting the knob slowly and tightly to avoid unwanted metallic clicks, walking lightly down the hall, stepping over the squeaky part of the hallway floor that Samuel could avoid even in total darkness, then down the stairs, placing his feet as close to the wall as he could, where there was less creaking danger, then taking a full ten minutes to open the front door — a small pull, a small tic, then silence, then another: tic —the door opening in fractions of an inch until the gap was finally wide enough to pass through.

And finally, once liberated, running! In the clean air, running down the block, toward the creek, into the woods that separated Venetian Village from everything else. His foot clomps and breathing were the only sounds in the whole big world, and when he felt afraid — of getting caught, of dangerous forest animals, of mad ax murderers, kidnappers, trolls, ghosts — he steeled his mind with the memory of Bethany’s warm, wet breath on his ear.

Her bedroom was dark when he arrived, her window closed. Samuel sat outside for several long minutes panting and sweating and watching, reassuring himself that all relevant parents were asleep and that no neighbors would see him creep through the backyard, which, when he finally did, he did so quickly, running on the tips of his shoes to avoid all ground sounds, then crouching below Bethany’s window and lightly tapping it with the pad of his index finger until, from out of the darkness, she appeared.

He could see only bits of her in the murky nighttime light: the angle of her nose, a toss of hair, collarbone, eye socket. She was a collection of parts floating in ink. She opened the window and he climbed in, rolling over the frame and wincing where the metal bit into his chest.

“Be quiet, ” said someone who was not Bethany, who was elsewhere in the darkness. It was Bishop, Samuel realized after a moment of disequilibrium. Bishop was here, in the room, and Samuel was both disheartened and grateful for this. Because he didn’t know what he would do if he were alone with Bethany, but also he knew he wanted to do it, whatever it was. To be alone with her — he wanted it very badly.

“Hi, Bish,” Samuel said.

“We’re playing a game,” Bishop said. “It’s called Listen to Silence Until You’re Bored out of Your Mind.”

“Shut up,” Bethany said.

“It’s called Be Put to Sleep by Cassette-Tape Static.”

“It’s not static.”

“It’s all static.”

“It’s not only static,” she said. “There’s something else.”

“Says you.”

Samuel could not see them — the darkness in here was total. They were more like impressions in space, lighter shapes against the blackness. He tried to place himself in the geography of her room, constructing a map from memory: the bed, the dresser, the flowers on the wall. There were glow-in-the-dark stars dotting the ceiling, Samuel noticed, suddenly, for the first time. Then the sounds of fabric and footsteps and the bed’s quick squeak as Bethany probably sat down on it, near where Bishop seemed to be, near the cassette player, which she often listened to at night, alone, playing and rewinding and playing again the same few moments from some symphony, which Samuel knew because of all his spying.

“Come up here,” Bethany said. “You have to be close.” So he got up on the bed and moved slowly toward them and felt around clumsily and grabbed something cold and bony that was definitely a leg belonging to one of them, he didn’t know which.

“Listen,” she said. “Very closely.”

A click of the tape player, Bethany leaning back into the bed, the fabric folding around her, then static as that brief dead space at the beginning of the tape ended and the recording actually began.

“See?” Bishop said. “Nothing.”

“Wait for it.”

The sound was distant and muffled, like when a faucet is turned on somewhere in the house and there’s that rushing sound from hidden, far-off pipes.

“There,” Bethany said. “Do you hear it?”

Samuel shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see the gesture. “No,” he said.

“There it is,” she said. “Listen. It’s under the sound. You have to listen below it.”

“You are making no sense,” Bishop said.

“Ignore what you can hear and listen to the other stuff.”

“Listen to what?”

“To them, ” she said. “The people, the audience, the room. You can hear them.”

Samuel strained to listen. He cocked his head toward the stereo and squinted — as if that would help — trying to pick out any kind of organized sound within the static: talking, coughing, breathing.

“I don’t hear anything,” Bishop said.

“You’re not concentrating.”

“Oh right. That’s the problem.”

“You have to focus.”

“Fine. I will now attempt to focus.”

They all listened to the hiss coming out of the speakers, Samuel feeling disappointed in himself that he also had not yet heard anything.

Bishop said, “This is me totally focused.”

“Will you shut up?”

“I have never been so focused as I am at this moment.”

“Please. Shut. Up.”

“Concentrate, you must,” he said. “Feel the force, you must.”

“You can go away, you know. Like, leave?”

“Happily,” Bishop said, scrambling away and leaping off the bed. “You two enjoy your nothing.”

The bedroom door opened and closed and they were alone, Samuel and Bethany, alone together, finally, terribly. He sat rock-still.

“Now listen,” she said.

“Okay.”

He pointed his face in the direction of the noise and leaned in. The static was not a high-pitched trebly noise but a deeper kind. It was like a microphone had been suspended above an empty stadium — the silence had a fullness to it, a roundness. It was a substantial quiet. It wasn’t just the sound of an empty room but rather like someone had gone to great lengths to manufacture nothingness. It had a created quality to it. It felt made.