by Nathan Hill
But she insisted that her house spirit appeared only to her, only she was haunted, and Samuel was perfectly safe. He could go into the basement unharmed.
He began to cry. A soft and light whimper, because either there was a cruel ghost living in the basement watching him at this very moment or his mother was a little crazy. He shuffled his feet along the concrete floor and kept his attention narrowly focused on the beam of light in front of him. He tried to be blind to everything but that circle of light. And when he finally did see the fuse box on the other side of the room, he shut his eyes and walked as straight as he could. He shuffled forward and stuck the flashlight out in front of him and continued in this manner until he felt the flashlight’s face bump into the wall. He opened his eyes. There was the fuse box. He threw the breaker and the basement lights came alive. He looked behind him and saw nothing. Nothing but the ordinary basement junk. He stayed a moment to collect himself, to stop crying. He sat on the floor. It was so much cooler down here.
6
IN THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS of the school year, Bishop and Samuel fell into an easy alliance. Bishop would do whatever he wanted, and Samuel would follow. These were simple roles for the both of them. They never even discussed or acknowledged it, but fell into their positions like coins falling into their slots in a vending machine.
They’d meet in the woods for war games near the pond. Bishop always had a scenario ready for their games. They fought Charlie in Vietnam, the Nazis in World War II, the Confederacy in the Civil War, the British in the Revolutionary War, the Indians in the French and Indian War. And with the exception of their one confused attempt to play War of 1812, the wars always had a clear objective, and they were always the good guys, and their enemies were always bad, and the two of them always won.
Or if they weren’t playing war, they’d play video games at Bishop’s house, which was Samuel’s preference because then he might run into Bethany, whom he loved. Though he probably wouldn’t have called it “love” just yet. It was rather a state of heightened attention and agitation that manifested itself physically as a smaller vocal dynamic range (he had a tendency to shut down and become penitent in her presence even though he did not mean to or want to) and an intense desire to touch her clothes, between his thumb and forefinger, lightly. Bishop’s sister exhilarated him and terrified him. But she usually ignored them. Bethany seemed unaware of her influence. She practiced her scales, listened to music, closed her door. She traveled to various music festivals and competitions, where she won solo violin ribbons and trophies that eventually went up on her bedroom wall, along with her various posters of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and a small collection of those porcelain masks representing comedy and tragedy. Dried flowers too, from her many recitals, when afterward she was given big bouquets of roses that she carefully dried and then affixed to her wall, above her bed, an efflorescence of pastel greens and pinks that exactly matched her bedspread and curtains and wallpaper color scheme. It was such a girl’s room.
Samuel knew this bedroom because he had, two or three times, spied on it from a safe position outside, in the woods. He left his house right after sunset, under a deepening violet sky, came down to the creek, and made his muddy way through the woods, behind the houses of Venetian Village, past the gardens where roses and violets were closing up for the night, behind the odorous dog kennels and greenhouses that smelled of sulfur and phosphorous, behind the house of the headmaster of Blessed Heart Academy, who could sometimes be found this time of night relaxing in his custom-built outdoor saltwater Jacuzzi, and Samuel would move cautiously and slowly and watch out not to step on twigs or piles of dead leaves while he kept one eye on the headmaster, who from this distance looked like an indistinct white blobby thing, the many parts of him—belly and chin and underarms—notable only for their heavy sag. And on around the block, through the woods, down to the street’s stubby end, where Samuel took a position among the tree roots behind the Fall house, perhaps ten feet from where the lawn met the forest, dressed entirely in black, with a black hood pulled down to within an inch of the ground so that the only bits of body that he showed the world were his eyes.
And there he watched.
The yellow-orange glow of lights, shadows of people as they migrated through the house. And when Bethany appeared within the frame of her bedroom window, a bolt of anxiety cracked in his belly. He pressed into the ground harder. She wore a thin cotton dress, which is what she always wore, always a little classier than anyone else, like she was returning from a fancy restaurant or church. The way the dress lightly swung as she walked, and then the way it so softly came to rest against her body when she stopped moving, gliding back down to her skin, like watching feathers fall elegantly through the air. Samuel could drown in that fabric, happily.
All he wanted was to see her. Just a confirmation that she did, in fact, exist. That’s all he needed, and, upon seeing her, he would soon leave, long before she changed clothes and he could be accused of doing something dishonorable. Just this one thing—seeing Bethany and sharing this quiet, private moment with her—could calm him, get him through another week. That she attended Blessed Heart and not the public school, that she spent so much time in her room and so much time traveling, struck Samuel as unfair and unjust. The girls the other boys loved were always present, right there in front of them in class, right there next to them in the cafeteria. That Bethany was so inaccessible meant, to Samuel, in his head, that he was justified in occasionally spying on her. He was owed.
Then one day he was at their house when she walked right into the TV room while Bishop played Nintendo and collapsed into the same extra-large beanbag chair Samuel was at that moment sitting in. She sat in such a way that a small portion of her shoulder pressed against a small portion of his shoulder. And suddenly he felt that all the meaning in the world was concentrated in those few square inches.
“I’m bored,” she said. She wore a yellow sundress. Samuel could smell her shampoo, rich with honey and lemon and vanilla. He held himself still, afraid that if he moved she might leave.
“Want a turn?” Bishop said, shoving the controller toward her.
“No.”
“Want to play hide-and-seek?”
“No.”
“Kick the can? Red rover?”
“How could we play red rover?”
“Just throwing out ideas here. Brainstorming. Spitballing.”
“I don’t want to play red rover.”
“Hopscotch? Tiddlywinks?”
“Now you’re being stupid.”
Samuel felt his shoulder sweating where Bethany’s shoulder pressed into him. He was so rigid it hurt.
“Or those weird games girls play,” Bishop said, “where they fold up pieces of paper to find out who you’re going to marry and how many babies you’ll have.”
“I do not want to do that.”
“Don’t you want to know how many babies you’ll have? Eleven babies. That’s my guess.”
“Shut up.”
“We could play dare.”
“I don’t want to play dare.”
“What’s dare?” Samuel said.
“It’s truth or dare without the bullshit,” Bishop said.
“I want to go somewhere,” Bethany said. “For absolutely no reason. I want to go somewhere just for the point of being there and not here.”
“The park?” Bishop said. “The beach? Egypt?”
“For no other reason than to be at a place for no reason.”
“Oh,” Bishop said, “you want to go to the mall.”
“Yes,” she said. “The mall. Yes I do.”
“I’m going to the mall!” Samuel said.
“Our parents won’t take us to the mall,” Bethany said. “They say it’s cheap and vulgar.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing those clothes,” Bishop said, puffing his chest out and doing his best impression of his father.
“I’m going to the mall tomorrow,” Samuel said. “Wit
h my mom. We have to buy a new dishwasher. I’ll get you something. What do you want?”
Bethany thought about it. She looked toward the ceiling and tapped her finger on her cheekbone and thought about it hard and long before saying, “Surprise me.”
And all that night and into the following day, Samuel thought about what he could buy for Bethany. What gift would capture everything he needed to let her know? The gift needed to distill his feelings for her, give her in one small package a quick potent shot of his love and commitment and total helpless devotion.
So he knew the gift’s parameters, but he could not see the gift itself. Somewhere in the mall’s million billion shelves, the perfect gift almost certainly waited for him. But what was it?
In the car, Samuel was quiet and his mother was agitated. She always got like this on their trips to the mall. She loathed the mall, and so her critiques of what she called “suburban mall culture” grew severe and brutal whenever she actually had to go there.
They navigated out of the subdivision, onto the wider arterial road that looked like any arterial road in any American suburb: a franchise hall of mirrors. This is what you get in the suburbs, his mother said, the satisfaction of small desires. The getting of things you didn’t even know you wanted. An even larger grocery store. A fourth lane. A bigger, better parking lot. A new sandwich shop or video-rental store. A McDonald’s slightly closer than the other McDonald’s. A McDonald’s next door to a Burger King, across the street from a Hardee’s, in the same lot as a Steak ’n Shake and a Bonanza and a Ponderosa all-you-can-eat smorgasbord thing. What you get, in other words, is choice.
Or, rather, the illusion of choice, she said, all these restaurants offering substantially the same menu, some slight variation on potatoes and beef. Like at the grocery store, when she stood in the pasta aisle looking at the eighteen different brands of spaghetti. She couldn’t understand. “Why do we need eighteen spaghettis?” she said. Samuel shrugged. “Exactly,” she said. Why did we need twenty different coffees? Why did we need so many shampoos? It was easy to forget when looking at the chaos of the cereal aisle that all these hundreds of options were actually one option.
At the mall—the tremendous, bright, vast, air-conditioned cathedral of a mall—they were looking at dishwashers, but Faye was distracted by various other home appliances: something that made it easier to store leftover food; something that made it easier to grind it up; something that prevented food from sticking to the pan; something that made it easier to freeze food; something that made it easier to warm it up again. When she looked at each item she clucked a surprised Huh! and inspected it, turned it over in her hand, read the box, and said, “I wonder who thought of this?” She was wary around these things, suspicious that someone else had created a need in her or had identified a need she didn’t know she had. In the home-and-garden section it was a self-propelled lawn mower that got her attention, bright and macho-big and fantastically shiny red. “I never even thought I’d have a lawn,” she said, “and yet I suddenly want this very badly. Is that wrong?”
“No, it’s not wrong,” she said later, in one of the mall’s other kitchen stores, picking up the conversation as if she’d never stopped talking. “There’s nothing wrong with it at all. But, I don’t know. I feel like…” She paused, held some white plastic object in her hand, stared at it, some device that achieved perfectly julienned vegetables. “Doesn’t it seem absurd? That I can just buy this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is this really me?” she said, staring at the thing cupped in her hand. “The real me? Is this who I’ve become?”
“Can I have some money?” Samuel said.
“For what?”
Samuel shrugged.
“Don’t just buy something to buy it. For the point of buying something.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t have to buy something, is my point. Nobody really needs any of this stuff.”
She reached into her purse and produced a ten-dollar bill. “Meet me back here in an hour.”
He gripped the money in his hand and marched off into the mall’s blazing white light. The place was unknowably large. It was like a big, breathing animal. The sound of a child or children somewhere distant yelling or crying became part of the omnidirectional din: Samuel had no idea where it was coming from, where the child was, whether the child was happy or sad. It was simply a disconnected audio fact. It was inconceivable that there were not enough stores at the mall, but someone decided there needed to be even more, thus the small stand-alone kiosks that occupied the middle of every thoroughfare, selling specialized and sometimes gimmicky merchandise: little toy helicopters that the salesman demonstrated by flying them over the crowd’s worried heads; key chains with your name laser-engraved onto them; special hair-curler things Samuel couldn’t begin to understand; sausages in gift boxes; blocks of glass that appeared to have 3-D holograms inside; a special girdle that made you look thinner than you really were; hats embroidered with personalized messages while you waited; T-shirts laser-printed with your own photographs. With its hundreds of stores and booths, the mall seemed to make a simple promise: that here you would find everything you needed. Even seemingly esoteric things could be found here. Teeth whitening, for example, seemed like an unlikely mall purchase. Or Swedish massage. Or a piano. And yet you could find them all here. The mall’s overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream up your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you.
Trying to find the perfect gift in the mall was like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book when the choices were absent. He had to guess which page to turn to. The happy ending was out there somewhere, hidden.
Samuel walked by the candle store and breathed one or two lungfuls of its cinnamon odor. The nail salon gave him a momentary toxic headache. The candy store’s plastic bins of jawbreakers called to him, but he resisted. The mall’s music mixed with the music coming from each of the stores, the effect being like a car going into and out of radio coverage. Songs faded in, faded out. Earlier they were playing something happily Motown. Now they were playing “The Twist.” Chubby Checker. One of his mother’s least-favorite songs—a fact Samuel didn’t know how he knew. And he was considering the music and listening to the music coming out of the stores and he actually saw the music store across the food court before the idea finally struck, and he couldn’t believe it had taken him this long to come to it.
Music.
Bethany was a musician. He ran to the store and felt embarrassed that in all this time he’d been asking himself what he could give her without asking himself what she might actually want. And this felt egotistical and selfish and definitely something he’d have to work on personally some other time, when he didn’t have to find the perfect gift in like ten minutes.
So he ran into the store and was briefly disheartened when he saw that all the popular cassette tapes were around twelve dollars and thus outside his budget. But this despair did not last long because at the back of the store he spotted a bin labeled “Classical Music” and, below that, “Half Off,” which felt like providence. The cassettes here were six bucks and one of them—he was sure of it—was the perfect gift.
But as Samuel rifled through the clacking, disordered chaos of the clearance bin, he encountered a fundamental problem: He didn’t know any of this music. He didn’t know what Bethany would like, what she already owned. He didn’t even know what was good. Some of the names were familiar—Beethoven, Mozart—but most were not. Some were unpronounceably foreign. And he was about to go with one of the famous names he’d heard before—Stravinsky, though he couldn’t remember why he knew it—when he decided that if he’d heard of Stravinsky, then Bethany almost assuredly already owned every Stravinsky recording and was probably by now bored with them, and so he resolved to find something more modern, interesting, new, something that advertised his fascinating tastes and showed how he was different and independent and didn’t
follow the herd like everyone else. So he picked out the ten most interesting-looking covers. Nothing with the portrait of the composer, nothing with an old painting or a photograph of a stuffy-looking orchestra, nothing with a conductor holding a baton. He went for the conceptual stuff: splashy colors, abstract geometric shapes, psychedelic spirals. He brought them to the counter and piled them in front of the cashier and asked, “Which of these would no one ever buy?”
The cashier, a sensitive-looking thirtysomething assistant-manager guy with a ponytail, did not act like this was an odd question but rather looked through the cassettes dutifully and then, with an air of authority that made Samuel trust him, picked one and shook it and said, “This one. No one ever buys this one.”
Samuel put down his ten dollars and the cashier wrapped the cassette in a bag.
“This is really modern stuff,” the cashier said. “Really out there.”
“Good,” Samuel said.
“It’s the same piece recorded ten different times. Like, really weird stuff. You like this?”
“Very much.”
“Okay,” he said. He gave him his change and Samuel still had about four bucks left. He ran to the candy store. The perfect gift swung wildly in its bag and battered the back of his legs and his mouth puckered in anticipation of the jawbreaker he was going to buy and his head bounced to the mall’s music and his eyes fluttered with daydreams where he made the right choice every time and all his adventures had the very best and happiest endings.
7
BISHOP FALL WAS A BULLY, but not an obvious bully. He did not prey on the weak. He left them alone, the skinny boys, the awkward girls. He wanted nothing easy. It was the strong and confident and self-possessed and powerful who drew his attention.
During the school year’s first pep rally, Bishop took an interest in Andy Berg, resident champion of all things brutal, only member of the sixth-grade class to achieve dark growths of leg and underarm hair, local terrorizer of the small and shrill. It was the gym teacher who first started calling him “Iceberg.” Or, sometimes, just “the Berg.” Because of his size (colossal), speed (slow), and the way he moved (unstoppably). The Berg was your typical grade-school bully: vastly bigger and stronger than anyone else in class, and transparently externalizing some raging inner demons about his stunted mental abilities, which were the only things stunted about him. The rest of his body was on some kind of genetic sprint to adulthood. He was now, in sixth grade, taller than the female teachers. Heavier, too. His body was not one of those destined for athletic greatness. He was simply going to be thick. A torso shaped like a beer keg. Arms like beef flanks.