Nathan Hill - The Nix

“What are you doing?”

“We’re twins. This is what she looks like.”

Samuel stared at Bishop’s body, his skinny torso, ribs showing through the skin, but rigid also, tense and solid. He stared at that triangle of skin between his legs.

“You can pretend I’m her,” Bishop said. He stepped toward Samuel and pressed his cheek to Samuel’s and whispered into his ear, “Just pretend.” Samuel felt Bishop’s hands on his waist, then felt them gently pulling down his underwear, felt the wet fabric plop against his feet, felt the tiny wobble of his own prick, withered by the cold.

“Pretend I’m Bethany.”

Then Bishop turned around and all Samuel could see was the small pale sweep of his shoulders and back. Bishop took both Samuel’s hands and guided them to his hips. He leaned forward, pressed himself against Samuel, who was having that feeling again, of dislocation, detachment, like at the bus stop this morning, as if he were seeing everything from a great distance. It looked absurd. It wasn’t even him, he thought, down there. Only an odd combination of parts that had never before been put together.

“Are you pretending?” Bishop said. “Is it working?”

Samuel didn’t answer. He was far away. Bishop pressed harder against him, then released, then again, finding a slow rhythm. Samuel felt like a statue, incapable of doing anything but holding this pose.

“Pretend I’m her,” Bishop said. “Make it happen. In your mind.”

Bishop pressed into him and Samuel felt that surge that happened so often in class, at his desk, that cascade of tension, that explosive nervous twitching warmth, then looking down, seeing himself rising and swelling, knowing that he should not be rising and swelling but doing it anyway, unstoppably, and how this seemed to clarify things, how it answered something important — about him, about what had happened to him this day — and being absolutely convinced suddenly that everyone knew what he was doing right now. His mother and father, his teachers, Bethany, the police. Samuel was sure this was true, and it would remain with him for years, the event of his mother’s departure locked in his mind with this moment in the woods, with Bishop, bonded in this way, pulsing against each other, Samuel not exactly liking it but not hating it either, thinking the whole time that his mother knew exactly what he was doing and she disapproved.

It was, he decided, the reason she had gone.

SAMUEL STOOD at the threshold of his mother’s apartment, his hand on the slightly ajar front door, readying himself to open it but not yet feeling able to. “Don’t be scared,” his mother had said. It had been more than twenty years since she last uttered those words to him, and ever since that morning he’d felt haunted by her, always imagining that she was around, spying on him from a distance. He’d check the windows at odd moments and scan crowds for her face. He lived his life wondering what he looked like from the outside, to his mother, who might be watching.

But she never was watching. And it took a long time for Samuel to remove her from his thoughts.

She had been a quiet sleeping memory until this moment, and he tried to calm himself and center himself by repeating some of the advice he’d found last night as he scanned those websites: Start fresh. Don’t insult each other. Maintain boundaries. Go slowly. Have a support network. And the number one thing, the big primary commandment: Be prepared for your parent to be radically different from the person you remember.

And it was true. She was different. Samuel walked into her apartment finally and found her sitting at a large wooden table near the kitchen, waiting for him like a receptionist. There were three glasses of water on the table. And a briefcase. There were three chairs. She sat looking at him — not smiling, not having any reaction at all to his presence, just simply waiting, her hands in her lap. The long brown mane of her hair had been replaced by a short cut of military severity, turned to such a silver that it looked like a bathing cap. Her skin was wrinkled in that way common to people who have lost weight — under her arms, around her mouth, near her eyes. He was not expecting these wrinkles, and realized that in his imagination he had not been picturing his mother aging. He had to remind himself that she was, by now, sixty-one years old. She wore a simple black tank top that revealed the bony knobs of her shoulders and her thin upper arms. He worried suddenly that she hadn’t been eating, then felt surprised to feel this way, worried.

“Come in,” she said.

There wasn’t any other sound. His mother’s apartment had a penetrating silence rarely found in the city. She stared at him. He stared back. He did not sit down. There was something unbearable about being too close to her right now. She opened her mouth as if to say something but then did not say it. His mind emptied completely.

A noise came from another room just then: a toilet flushing, a faucet turned on and off. Then the bathroom door opened and out stepped a man in a white button-down shirt and a brown tie and brown slacks that were not exactly the same shades of brown. When he saw Samuel, he said “Professor Anderson sir!” and offered a damp hand for shaking. “I’m Simon Rogers,” the man said, “of Rogers and Rogers? Your mother’s attorney? We spoke on the phone.”

Samuel looked at him for a moment, confused. The lawyer smiled pleasantly. He was a thin and short man with unusually broad shoulders. His brown hair was clipped close and arranged into the unartful and inevitable M-shape of early-onset male-pattern baldness. Samuel said, “We need a lawyer for this?”

“I’m afraid that was my idea,” he said. “I insist on being present any time my client is being deposed. It’s part of my service.”

“This isn’t a deposition,” Samuel said.

“Not from your point of view. But of course you’re not the one being deposed.”

The lawyer clapped his hands together and moseyed to the table. He snapped open his briefcase and produced a small microphone, which he placed at the table’s center. That his shirt fit his big shoulders but hung broadly on the rest of him made him look, Samuel realized, like a kid dressing in his dad’s stuff.

“My role here,” the lawyer said, “is to protect my client’s interests — legal, fiduciary, emotional.”

“You’re the one who asked me to come,” Samuel said.

“Indeed, sir! And the important thing to remember is that we’re all on the same team. You agreed to write a letter to the judge explaining why your mother deserves lenience. My job is to help with said letter and make sure you are not here under, shall we say, false pretenses?”

“Unbelievable,” Samuel said, but he wasn’t sure what was more unbelievable: that the lawyer suspected Samuel of deceit, or that the lawyer was right. Because Samuel had no intention of writing any letter to a judge. He had come today to satisfy his contract with Periwinkle, to gather dirt on his mother so that he could, eventually, malign her publicly for money.

“The purpose of today’s inquiry,” the lawyer said, “is primarily to understand your mother’s actions regarding her brave protest against the former governor of Wyoming. And, secondarily, to explicate why she’s a great person. Everything else, sir, is outside our strict scope of interest. Would you like some water? Juice?”

Faye remained sitting and silent, not participating but still taking up all the space in Samuel’s mind. He felt wary of her like he’d feel wary of a buried land mine he knew the approximate, but not exact, location of.