Nathan Hill - The Nix

It happened last October. In Iraq. He was standing next to a bomb when it detonated. She’s sorry she didn’t tell you sooner.

You write back begging for details. Turns out after Bishop graduated military prep school he went to college at the Virginia Military Institute, and after he graduated he enlisted in the army as a normal soldier. Nobody could figure it out. All his education and training entitled him to a commission and officer’s rank, which he refused. He seemed to enjoy refusing it, seemed to enjoy taking the more difficult, less glamorous path. By this time, he and Bethany weren’t really talking. They’d been growing distant for a while. For years they had only seen each other at rare holidays. He enlisted in 1999 and spent two uneventful years in Germany before September 11, after which he was deployed to Afghanistan for a time, then Iraq. They’d hear from him only a couple of times a year, in short e-mails that read like business memos. Bethany was becoming a seriously successful violin soloist, and in her letters to Bishop she’d tell him all the things that were happening to her — all the venues she played, the conductors she worked with — but she never heard back. Not for another six months, when she’d get a quick impersonal e-mail with his new coordinates and his typically formal sign-off: Respectfully, Pfc Bishop Fall, United States Army.

Then he died.

You spend a long time feeling miserable about this, feeling in some way that your brief friendship with Bishop was a test you failed. Here was a person who needed help, and you did not help him, and now it was too late. And you write a letter to Bethany expressing this misery because she is the only person who would understand it, and it’s probably the only letter you’ve ever sent her that is utterly without guile, without subterfuge or ulterior motive, the first time you aren’t self-consciously trying to get her to like you and instead just sincerely expressing a true emotion, which is that you feel sad. And this letter begins a thawing in your relationship with Bethany. She writes back and says she too is sad. And you both have this in common, this sadness, and you grieve together and the months go by and your letters begin to move on to other subjects and your grief seems to lift and then one day Bethany signs her letter — for the first time in years—“With love.” And all your guile and obsession ignites again. You think: I might still have a chance! All your love and neediness comes back, especially when she writes one day in the first week of August 2004 and invites you to New York. She asks you to come at the end of the month. There will be a march, she says, through the streets of Manhattan. The idea is a silent vigil honoring soldiers who’ve died in Iraq. It will happen during the Republican National Convention, which will be under way at Madison Square Garden. She wants to know if you’ll come march with her. You can stay at her place.

And suddenly your nights are sleepless and agitated as you fantasize about seeing Bethany again and you worry about not screwing up what is obviously your very last chance to capture her heart. It’s like you are living the plot of the Choose Your Own Adventure books you loved as a child, and it’s up to you to make the right choices. This is all you can think about until the very day you leave: In New York, if you do everything right, if you choose correctly, you can get the girl.

To go to New York, go to the next page…

You drive from Chicago to New York, stopping once in Ohio for fuel, again in Pennsylvania for sleep, checking into a shabby hotel you’re too amped up to actually sleep in. Next day, well before dawn, you drive the rest of the way and stash your car in a parking garage in Queens and take the subway into the city. You walk up the stairs from the subway station into the mid-morning light and crowds of downtown Manhattan. Bethany lives on one of the upper floors of the building at 55 Liberty Street, a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, which is where you are right now, at this moment, in 2004. Where the towers once stood is now a well-cleared and poignant hole in the ground.

You walk its perimeter, past street vendors selling falafel or candied nuts, guys hawking purses and watches laid out on blankets on the ground, conspiracy theorists handing you pamphlets about 9/11 being an inside job or seeing the face of Satan in the smoke of Tower Two, tourists on tiptoe craning their necks to see above the fence and holding their cameras aloft and checking the picture, then doing it again. You walk past all this, past the department store on the other side of the street where European tourists taking advantage of the weak dollar and surging euro load their bags with jeans and jackets, past a coffee shop with a sign that says NO FREE BATHROOMS, down Liberty Street where a mom tugging her two children asks “Which way to 9/11?” until you’re there, Liberty and Nassau, Bethany’s apartment.

You know all about this building. You’d looked it up before coming. Built in 1909 as the “tallest small building in the world” (due to narrow lot size), with a foundation going five stories down, unnecessarily deep for a building that size, but the architects of 1909 didn’t yet understand skyscraper construction, so they overdid it. Was built next door to the New York Chamber of Commerce, which has since been converted into the New York office of the Central Bank of China. Just across Nassau Street from the ass-end of the Federal Reserve Bank. Teddy Roosevelt’s law office was among the first tenants.

You walk through the front doors, past a wrought-iron gate, and into the golden lobby, tiled floor-to-ceiling with polished cream-colored stone slabs pressed so close together you can’t see the seams. The whole place feels airtight. You approach the guard desk and tell the man sitting there you are here to see Bethany Fall.

“Name?” he says. You tell him. He picks up a phone and dials. He stares at you while he waits. His eyelids look heavy from sleeplessness or boredom. It seems to take a long time for someone to pick up, long enough that the guard’s stare becomes uncomfortable and so you break eye contact and pretend to look around the lobby, admiring its austere tidiness. You notice the total lack of bare lightbulbs, as every light source has been cleverly hidden inside recesses and alcoves, making the space seem less like it’s lit and more like it’s being thoroughly glowed upon.

“Miss Fall?” the guard finally says. “Got a Samuel Anderson to see you?”

The guard keeps staring. He has no expression whatsoever.

“Okay.” He hangs up and does some motion under the desk — turns a key, flips a switch — something that makes the elevator doors open.

“Thanks,” you say, but the guard is staring at his computer, ignoring you.

To go up to Bethany’s apartment, go to the next page…

On the way up to Bethany’s apartment, you wonder how long you can reasonably wait in the hall before she’ll think you’ve gotten lost. You’re feeling like you need a minute to compose yourself. You’re having that hollowed-out nervous feeling like all your insides have fallen into your feet. You try to convince yourself that it’s foolish to feel this way, foolish to feel so nervous over Bethany. After all, you only really knew her for three months. When you were eleven years old. Silly. Almost comical. How could someone like this have any sway over you? Of all the people in your life, why does this one matter so much? This is what you tell yourself, which does very little to calm the riot in your belly.

The elevator stops. The doors slide open. You had been expecting a hallway or corridor, like at a hotel, but instead the elevator opens directly into a blazingly sunlit apartment.