by Nathan Hill
So, shit.
You revise the plan and tell your father you are not going to Juilliard but instead somewhere in New York City.
“Maybe Columbia,” you say, because that campus looked very close to Juilliard on the map of New York you found in the high-school library. “Or NYU?”
Henry, who at that moment is testing the consistency of a new-concept “quiche” frozen dinner by swishing the eggy liquid batter around in his mouth and making notes on a fifteen-step flowchart, stops for a moment, swallows, looks at you, and says, “Too dangerous.”
“Oh come on.”
“New York City is the murder capital of the world. No way.”
“It’s not dangerous. Or if it is, at least the campus isn’t dangerous. I’ll stay on campus.”
“Listen. How do I say this? You live on Oakdale Lane. There isn’t a single Oakdale Lane in New York City. It is nothing at all like this. You will be eaten alive.”
“There are lanes in New York,” you say. “I’ll be fine.”
“You’re not catching my symbolism. See? This is exactly my point. There are people from the Street. And, other side of the spectrum? There are people like us, from Lanes.”
“Stop it, Dad.”
“Besides,” he says, returning to his quiche, “it’s way too expensive. We can afford public, in-state. That’s it.”
Which is where you end up, and where you discover this thing called e-mail, which all the students use now, and in your next letter from Bethany she gives you her e-mail address and you send her an e-mail and after that the paper letters stop forever. The upside here is that you and Bethany can write each other much more often, even weekly now. E-mail is so immediate. This seems great until about a month in, when you realize the downside is the lack of any physical object, any actual thing that Bethany has touched, which in your teenage years often soothed you, holding the thick paper she used, covered with her neat cursive—Bethany was a thousand miles away but this thing could fill in for her. You could close your eyes and hold the letter and almost feel her touches on the paper, her fingers running across each page, her tongue licking the envelope. It was an act of imagination and faith, a Christlike transubstantiation, this thing becoming, for a moment, in your mind, a body. Her body. Which is why after the e-mails start and you write each other all the time, you feel more lonely than ever. Her physical embodiment has disappeared.
As has the “Love you.”
At college, at Juilliard, the “Love you” at the end of her correspondence switches quickly to “Love ya,” which stings. “Love ya” seems to be what happens to real love when its formality and dignity are amputated.
The other problem is that despite the fact that Bethany is no longer under her parents’ rule, her letters do not substantially change. The best way to describe their tone is informational. Like a guide on a campus tour. Given the chance to finally express her true feelings, Bethany falls back into the familiar patterns, giving updates, sharing news. It is like, after nine years of writing this way, she has written herself into a rut. It is so familiar it becomes the only way she can converse. And no matter how much news you get—that some classes are easy (like Ear Training) and some classes are hard (like Diatonic Harmony), that the cellist in her chamber group is really talented, that dorm food is bad, that her roommate is a percussionist from California who gives herself regular migraines from cymbal practice—there is a quality to this information that seems to lack warmth or humanity. It lacks intimacy. It is romanceless.
And then Bethany starts telling you about boys. Flirty boys. Brash boys at parties who make her laugh so hard she spills her drink. Boys, usually brass players, usually trombonists, who ask her out on dates. Further, she says yes. Further, the dates are fun. And you boil inside your skin that you’ve been pining for this woman for nine years and suddenly these guys, these strangers, have more success with her in one night than you’ve had your whole life. It’s unjust. You deserve better, after what you’ve been through. This is about the time that “Love you” turns to “Love ya,” which then turns to “Love,” which eventually becomes “xoxo,” and by then you realize that something fundamental has shifted in the nature of your relationship. Somewhere along the way, you missed your chance.
This is, incidentally, an essential step in becoming a famous writer. This failure. It gives you a rich inner life, fantasizing about all the ways you might not have screwed it up, and all the ways to win Bethany back. Top of the list: Beat the trombone boys. Method: Writing deep and pseudo-intellectual and artsy and important literary fiction. Because you are not a person who can make Bethany laugh until she spills her drink. You cannot compete with the trombone boys on this front. Because you always become deadly serious and formal when you think about her or write to her. It’s like a religious response, becoming solemn and official in the face of that which could annihilate you. When it comes to Bethany, you are utterly without humor.
And so you write humorless stories about Big Social Issues and you congratulate yourself because the funny trombone boys wouldn’t touch Big Social Issues with a ten-foot pole. (“Ten-foot pole” being a cliché that the trombone boys would use unthinkingly but you, as an artist who does all things originally, would not.) You believe that the point of being a writer is to show Bethany how much more unique and special you are than the same-feeling, same-doing masses. You believe that becoming a writer is the life equivalent of wearing the most creative and interesting Halloween costume at the party. When you decide to become a writer—this is in your early twenties, when you do that really important-seeming thing where you go to grad school to study “Writing, Creative”—you throw yourself into the lifestyle: You go to artsy readings; hang out in coffee shops; wear black; build a whole dark melancholic wardrobe that might best be described as postapocalyptic/postholocaust; drink alcohol, often late into the night; buy journals, leather-bound; pens, heavy and metal, never ballpoint, never clicky; and cigarettes, first the normal kind, the brands that everyone buys at the gas station, then fancy European numbers that come in long flat boxes that you can find only at special tobacco stores and head shops. The cigarettes give you something to do when you are out in public and feel like you’re being examined and appraised and judged. They serve the same function the smartphone will in about fifteen years: a kind of social shield, something to pull out of your pocket and fiddle with when you feel awkward about yourself. Which you feel pretty much all the time, and for which you blame your mother.
You never write about this, of course. You typically avoid all introspection. There are things inside you that you prefer to ignore. There is a molten mass of anguish and self-pity way deep inside you and you keep it pressed down there by never looking at it or acknowledging it. When you write, you don’t write about yourself. Instead, you write dark and heavy and violent stories that get you the reputation that maybe you have secrets. Maybe some really brutal shit went down in your past. You write a story about an abusive alcoholic plastic surgeon who gets drunk every night and rapes his teenage daughter in unimaginably cruel ways, a horror that continues through most of her high-school years until one day the girl comes up with a plan to murder dad by slipping huge amounts of botulinum toxin pilfered from his Botox stores into the maraschino cherry supply, so that after several old-fashioneds the father is reduced to total paralysis, whereby the daughter invites this brutal gay psychopath she met under shadowy circumstances to rape the father repeatedly while the father is totally conscious to experience all of it, and then after getting his proper comeuppance he is killed when the daughter cuts off his genitalia and allows him to bleed to death slowly over a period of seven days down in the basement where no one can hear him scream.
In other words, you write stories that have nothing to do with your life or really anything you know anything about.
And while you write these stories, all you care about is what Bethany will think reading them. The stories are really just a large ongoing performance that has a s
ingle goal: To get Bethany to feel certain things about you. To make her believe you are talented, artsy, brilliant, deep. To make her love you again.
The paradox here is that you never show her any of these stories.
Because even though you hang out with the writing crowd and take the writing classes and dress like a writer and smoke like a writer, ultimately you have to recognize that your writing isn’t very good. It earns a lukewarm reception in classes, unenthusiastic feedback from teachers, loads of anonymous form rejections from the editors you query. The worst is when a teacher asks in an unusually intense office-hours visit, “Why do you want to be a writer?”
The subtext here being, of course, maybe you shouldn’t.
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer” is your pat response. An answer that is not altogether true. You didn’t always want to be a writer but rather wanted to be a writer ever since your mother abandoned you, at age eleven, and because life before that feels like an altogether different person’s life, it might as well have been always. You were, essentially, reborn on that day.
This is not something you tell your teacher. This is something you carry on the inside, in a cavity filled with every true thing about you so that there is nothing true left on the outside. The morning your mother disappeared, especially, is stuffed way down deep, your mother asking you what you wanted to be when you grew up. And you said a novelist, and she smiled and kissed your forehead and said she’d be reading whatever you wrote. And so becoming a writer was the only communication you’d have with your mother, a one-way communication, like prayer. And you thought if you wrote something really great that she’d read it and, by some strange calculus, it would prove to her that she should never have left.
Problem is, you can’t write anything near this level of quality. Not even close. Despite all the training, there is an elusive element missing.
“Truth,” suggests your teacher in the end-of-year meeting, when you are called into the office because you have one more story to write before graduation and so your teacher wants to impress upon you in a last-ditch way that you absolutely have to “write something that’s true.”
“But I write fiction,” you say.
“I don’t care what you call it,” the teacher says. “Just write something true.”
So you write about one of the only true things that ever happened to you. A story about a pair of twins living in the Chicago suburbs. The sister is a violin prodigy. The brother is a troublemaker. They sit tensely at the dinner table under the imperious gaze of their stockbroker father, then are released into the night where they have adventures, among them the slow poisoning of the Jacuzzi belonging to their neighbor, the headmaster of their elite private school. The manner of poisoning is simple: pesticide overdose. But the explanation? Why does the brother want to poison the headmaster? What has the headmaster done to deserve it?
This one is easy to answer, but difficult to write.
It all clicked a few years ago. You finally connected the dots you were unable to connect when you were eleven. Why Bishop seemed to know things beyond his years. Sexual things. Like at the pond that final afternoon together when he pressed himself into you in exactly the correct position for sex—how did he know that? How did he know to do that? How did he know to seduce the principal to avoid a paddling? Where did he get all that pornography, all those creepy Polaroids? Why was he acting out? Becoming a bully? Getting expelled from school? Killing small animals? Poisoning the headmaster?
The moment you grasped this and suddenly understood it you were in high school, walking to school one morning, and you weren’t even thinking about Bishop or the headmaster or any of it when suddenly it came to you all at once, like in a vision, like your mind had been putting it together all this time beneath the surface: Bishop was being abused. Molested. Of course he was. And the headmaster was doing it.
And the guilt washed over you so hard you staggered. You sat down right in someone’s front yard, dizzy, dumbfounded, astonished, and missed the first three periods of school. You felt like you’d broken open right there on the lawn.
Why hadn’t you seen it? You’d been so wrapped up in your little dramas—your crush on Bethany, buying her a gift at the mall, which at the time seemed like the biggest problem in the world—so wrapped up that you didn’t see this tragedy happening right in front of you. It was an immense failure of perception and empathy.
Which is maybe why you decide finally to write about it. In your story about the twins, you describe how the brother is being abused by the headmaster. You don’t tiptoe around it; you don’t evade it. You write it the way you think it happened. You write it true.
Your classmates are, predictably, bored with it. They are by this time weary of you and your subject matter. Yet another child-abuse story, they say. Seen it before. Move on. But your teacher is unusually enthusiastic. He says there is a different quality to this story, a measure of humanity and generosity and warmth and feeling that was missing from your earlier efforts. Then, during another private chat, the teacher mentions that a bigwig New York publishing guy named Periwinkle has been asking around, trying to find new young talent, and could he, the teacher, send him this story?
This is the final step in becoming a famous writer. This is the final step in fulfilling the ambition you’ve had since your mother walked out: impressing her from afar, winning her approval and praise. And this is the last thing you need to do to get Bethany to notice you again, to see the very special qualities that the trombone boys can’t compete with, to get her to love you the way you should be loved.
All you have to do is say yes.
To say yes, go to the next page…
You say yes. You don’t even think about the long-term consequences of this. You don’t once consider how Bethany or Bishop might feel about this violation of their privacy. You are so blinded by your desire to impress and dazzle and awe the people who left you that you say yes. Yes, absolutely.
So the teacher sends the story to Periwinkle, and things happen pretty fast after that. Periwinkle phones the next day. He tells you that you’re an important new voice in American letters, and he wants you for a new imprint featuring only the work of young geniuses.
“We don’t have a name for the press yet, but we’re thinking of calling it The Next Voice,” Periwinkle says, “or maybe Next, or maybe even Lime, which many of the consultants seem really fond of, weirdly.”
Periwinkle hires a few ghostwriters to smooth out the story—“Totally normal,” he says, “everyone does it”—then works to get it placed in one of the huge taste-maker magazines, where you are declared one of the five best writers under twenty-five in America. Periwinkle then leverages that publicity to finagle a ridiculous contract for a book that hasn’t even been written yet. This gets into the papers along with all of the other good news of early 2001: the information superhighway, the New Economy, the nation’s engine humming powerfully forward.
Congratulations.
You are now a famous writer.
But two things keep you from enjoying this. The first is that there is no word from your mother. Instead, there is just a wretched silence. There is no evidence she has even seen the story.
The second is that Bethany—who absolutely does see the story—stops writing. No e-mails, no letters, no explanation. You write her wondering if something is wrong. Then you assume there is definitely something wrong and you ask to talk about it. Then you assume that the thing that’s wrong is that you completely stole her brother’s story and profited immensely from it, and so you try to justify this move as a writer’s prerogative while also apologizing for not clearing it with her first. None of these letters are answered, and eventually you understand that the story you hoped would win Bethany back has, perversely, killed any chance you may have had with her.
You don’t hear from Bethany for years, during which time you do no writing whatsoever, despite monthly encouraging phone calls from Periwinkle, who is eager to see a
manuscript. But there is no manuscript to see. You wake up every morning intending to write but you don’t, ultimately, write. You can’t really say what exactly you spend your days doing, except that it is not writing. The months fly by, filled with not-writing. You buy a big new house with all your advance money and you do not write in it. You use your bit of fame to snag a teaching job at a local college, where you teach students about literature but make no literature yourself. It’s not that you’re “blocked,” exactly. It’s simply that your reason to write, your primary motivation, has melted away.
Bethany does eventually send another e-mail. On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an e-mail that she sends to about a hundred people that says, simply, “I’m safe.”
Then in the early spring of 2004, on a day that is otherwise completely insignificant, you see in your in-box a message from Bethany Fall and you read the first paragraph about how she has something very important to tell you and your heart is popping because the thing she needs to confess, you decide, has to be her deep lifelong enduring love for you.
But that’s not it at all. You realize this when you come to the next paragraph, which begins with a sentence that cracks you open all over again: “Bishop,” she writes, “is dead.”
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.