Nathan Hill - The Nix

What happened with the headmaster.

The man whom everyone revered and loved. The headmaster. Bishop loved him too, and when, in fifth grade, he picked Bishop for tutoring, for extra weekend lessons that absolutely had to be kept secret because the other boys would be jealous, it made ten-year-old Bishop feel so special and wanted. Picked out of the crowd. Admired and loved. And how he shudders at it now, years later, that he was so easily tricked, that he never questioned the headmaster, not even when he told Bishop that their lessons would be about what to do with girls, because all the boys were terrified of girls and didn’t know what to do with girls, and Bishop felt really lucky he had someone to show him. It started with photographs from magazines, men and women both, together, separate, nude. Then Polaroid pictures, then the headmaster suggesting they take Polaroids of each other. Bishop remembers only fragments, images, moments. The headmaster gently helped Bishop out of his clothes and still Bishop did not think this was wrong. He did everything willingly. He let the headmaster touch him, first with his hands, then with his mouth, afterward telling Bishop how wonderful and handsome and special he was. The headmaster saying, after a few months of this, Now you try it on me. The headmaster disrobing. The first time Bishop saw him, red and swollen and strongly persuasive. Bishop trying to do on the headmaster what the headmaster had done on him, and doing so awkwardly, clumsily. The headmaster getting frustrated and angry for the first time when Bishop’s teeth accidentally got involved, grabbing Bishop by the back of the head and thrusting and saying No, like this and later apologizing at the tears that arrived when Bishop’s gag reflex engaged. Bishop feeling like this was his fault. That he would practice and do it better next time. Then doing no better next time, nor the next time. One day the headmaster stopping him halfway through and turning him around and leaning over him and saying, We’ll have to do this the way adults do it. You’re an adult, right? And Bishop nodding his head because he didn’t want to be bad at this anymore, didn’t want the headmaster to be angry anymore, so when the headmaster positioned himself behind Bishop and pushed himself in, Bishop endured it.

The horror of it now, these images cascading back to Bishop — so many years later and ten thousand miles away, in a desert, in a war. Bishop thinking how even this secret has another secret, a deeper and more devastating layer, the thing that made him sure he was evil and broken, which is that while the headmaster was doing what he was doing, Bishop liked it.

He looked forward to it.

He wanted it.

And not only because of how it made him feel wanted and special and unique and picked out of the crowd, but also because what the headmaster did to him, especially at first, felt good. It jolted his body in a way nothing else did. A way that he loved while it was happening and missed when it stopped, the headmaster abruptly canceling their lessons in the spring. And Bishop felt rejected and abandoned and realized all at once sometime in early April that the headmaster had taken up with a new boy — Bishop could tell by the looks they shared in the hallway, and how the new boy had recently turned sullen and quiet. And this made Bishop furious. He began acting out in school, talking back to the nuns, getting into fights. When he was finally expelled he was sitting with his parents in the headmaster’s office and the headmaster said I’m very sorry it came to this and there were so many layers of meaning to this that Bishop just laughed.

He began poisoning the headmaster’s hot tub the next week.

And this is the part that horrifies him most now. How he tried to get back at the headmaster like a jilted girlfriend. How he would have stopped behaving badly if the headmaster had only taken him back, invited him in. It’s horrifying because he can’t tell himself now that he was an innocent victim. He feels more like an accomplice in his own perversion. It was an evil that happened — and he wanted it to happen.

The full consequence of this didn’t reveal itself until later, in adolescence, at military school, where the worst thing in the world was to be a queer or faggot, and if anyone called another boy a queer or faggot or gaywad or homo he would routinely want to fight, and the way the boys showed everyone else they weren’t queers or faggots was to make fun of others for being huge queers and faggots, and to do so loudly. This became Bishop’s calling card. He was especially ruthless to his roommate sophomore year, a slightly effeminate boy named Brandon. Whenever Brandon walked into the communal shower Bishop would say something like, “Careful boys, don’t drop your soap.” Or before going to bed, he’d ask, “Do I have to put duct tape over my asshole tonight or can you behave yourself?” Things like that, the typical late-eighties jock-type harassment. Nicknames included “Ass Pirate” and “Daisy.” As in “Eyes forward, Daisy” when they were standing next to each other at the urinals. Brandon eventually left the school, which was a relief to Bishop, who had developed powerful longings for Brandon that had become almost physically painful. How he watched as Brandon undressed, watched him in class hovering intently and dutifully over his notes, chewing on a pencil.

But that was so many years ago, and in all this time he’s never told anyone. And he suddenly jolts up in his bed on this, the day that Chucky has died, and he decides he needs to write a letter. Because Chucky was killed with so many secrets still inside him that his dying wish was to let them out, and Bishop does not want to feel the same when his time comes. He wants to have more courage than that.

He decides he’ll write to everyone in his life. He’ll write his sister, apologizing for becoming so distant, explaining that he detached because he was damaged — because the headmaster must have flipped some switch inside him and now he felt so much rage, at the headmaster for doing this to him, and at himself for being so awful and perverted and deviant and unfixably broken. He was trying to protect her, he would tell Bethany; he didn’t want to break her, too.

And he’ll write his parents, and Brandon. He’ll track down Brandon and ask his forgiveness. Even mighty Andy Berg, whom he never saw again after trapping the poor kid in a stairwell and pissing on him. Even the Berg needs a letter. He’ll do one every night until all his secrets are laid bare. He fetches some army stationery, sits in the barren and concrete-walled break room lit fluorescently green. He’ll write to Samuel first, he decides. Because he knows exactly what he wants to say and it will be a short letter and already it’s very deep into the night and he has to be awake again in a few hours, so he begins, and in a flare of inspiration and focus he finishes the letter in under five minutes. And he folds it up and places it inside an official U.S. Army envelope and licks it closed and writes Samuel’s full obnoxiously hyphenated name on the outside and places it in his locker with all his other personal effects. He feels good about it, about getting that off his chest and out into the world, and he feels good about his new project, about letting go of the things that have been bundled up inside him all these years. He feels like he’s actually looking forward to writing the letters to his sister and his parents and the various friends he’s abandoned along the way, and he falls asleep feeling really good about these letters, not knowing that they will never be written, because tomorrow he will be out on patrol and he’ll be thinking about Julie Winterberry (who obviously also needs a letter) when a trash can will explode a few feet away from him, remote-detonated by someone watching from a second-story window way down the street, someone who doesn’t really see Bishop but rather sees only his uniform, who has stopped recognizing anyone wearing that uniform as anything remotely human, who if he could have heard what was going through Bishop’s head at that moment as Bishop tried to mentally compose a letter to a beautiful girl back home about a dead friend who loved her would have never exploded that bomb. But of course we can’t ever do this, hear these things. So the bomb exploded.