by Nathan Hill
You will, eventually, have to make a choice. You’re approaching the choice—you’ve been getting closer to it ever since Bethany touched the coffin with her brother’s name on it and the manic person she’d been since you arrived shriveled and she became silent and introspective and very, very far away. So far away that when you return to her palatial apartment and she disappears into her bedroom, you assume she’s gone to sleep. Instead, she reappears a few minutes later having changed from one dress into another, from black to yellow, a thin smart summery thing. She has an envelope in her hand, which she places on the kitchen counter. She turns on a few lights and pulls a bottle of wine from the special wine fridge and says, “Drink?”
You agree. Outside, the financial district glows through the night, whole office buildings lit and empty.
“Peter works at that one,” Bethany says, pointing. You nod. You have nothing to say about that.
“He really is very highly regarded,” she says. “My dad can’t stop gushing about him.”
She pauses. Looks into her wineglass. You sip your drink. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was engaged,” she says.
“It’s not really my business,” you say.
“That’s what I told myself too.” She looks at you again with those green eyes of hers. “But that’s not entirely true. You and I, we’re…complicated.”
“I don’t know what you and I are,” you say, and she smiles, leans back on the kitchen counter, and breathes a big dramatic sigh.
“They say when one twin dies the other twin can feel it.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“It’s not true,” she says, and takes a big gulp of wine. “I didn’t feel anything. He’d been dead a few days when we found out and I didn’t feel a thing. Even after, even long after, even at the funeral, I didn’t feel what everyone thought I should feel. I don’t know. I guess we’d drifted apart.”
“I’d always meant to write him, but I never did.”
“He changed. He went to military school and became a different person. Stopped calling, stopped writing, stopped coming home at holidays. He disappeared. He’d been in Iraq for three months before any of us even knew he was there.”
“He was probably happy to escape your father. But I’m surprised he wanted to escape you.”
“We disappeared from each other. I don’t know who started it, but for a while it was easier pretending the other didn’t exist. I’d always resented how he used people and how much he got away with. He’d always resented my talent and the way adults gushed over it. Everyone thought I was the special one and he was the screwup. Last time we saw each other was at his graduation from college. We shook hands.”
“But he adored you. That’s what I remember.”
“Something came between us.”
“What?”
Bethany looks at the ceiling and tightens her lips and searches for the right words.
“He was being, well, you know. Being abused.”
“Oh.”
She walks over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and stares out, her back to you. Beyond her, the radiance of downtown Manhattan, quiet this time of night, like embers smoldering after the fire’s gone out.
“Was it the headmaster?” you ask.
Bethany nods. “Bishop wondered why he was targeted and I wasn’t. Then he started getting mean with me. Implying that I was happy about it. Like it was a competition between us and I was winning. Every time I had any kind of success he reminded me that life was so easy for me because I didn’t have to deal with the things he had to deal with. Which was of course true, but he used it as a way to minimize me.” She turns around to look at you. “Does this make any sense? It probably sounds horribly selfish.”
“It’s not selfish.”
“It is selfish. And I was mostly able to forget about it. He went to military school and we drifted apart and I felt relieved. For years, I ignored it. Like it never happened. Until one day—”
She lowers her face, gives you this look, and suddenly you understand.
“You ignored it,” you say, “until the day my story was published.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Reading your story was like realizing a terrible dream wasn’t a dream.”
“I’m really sorry about that. I should have asked your permission.”
“And I thought, my god, you only knew us for a few months. And if you understood so clearly what was going on, how awful am I? For ignoring it?”
“I only understood it much, much later. I didn’t know at the time.”
“But I knew at the time. And I did nothing. I told no one. And I was angry at you for dredging it all up again.”
“That’s understandable.”
“It was easier to be angry at you than to feel guilty, so I was mad at you for years.”
“And then?”
“And then Bishop died. And I just felt numb.” She looks down at her wineglass, traces its edge with her fingertip. “It’s like when you’re at the dentist and they give you some really serious painkillers. You feel fine, but you’re pretty sure underneath it all you still hurt. The hurt is simply not registering. That’s how life has felt.”
“All this time?”
“Yes. It’s made music pretty weird. After concerts people tell me how moved they were by my playing. But to me it’s just notes. Whatever emotion they hear is in the music, not me. It’s only a recipe. That’s how it feels.”
“And what about Peter?”
Bethany laughs and holds up her hand so the both of you can take a good long look at the diamond, sparkling in kitchen’s recessed lights, those million tiny rainbows inside.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
“It’s big,” you say.
“When he proposed, I didn’t feel happy about it. Or sad about it. I guess if I had to describe how I felt I’d say it was the sensation of having one’s interest piqued. His proposal felt really interesting.”
“That’s not exactly poetry, is it.”
“I think he proposed to snap me out of my funk. But it backfired. And the funk became more terrifying because it does not seem like something I am able to snap out of. Now Peter’s pretending it doesn’t exist, and spending a lot of time away. Hence London.”
Bethany refills her wineglass. Outside, the moon has risen over the jagged sweep of Brooklyn. Blinking lights in single file across the sky are aircraft descending into JFK from points south. In the kitchen there’s a very small framed drawing of a bull that might be an actual Picasso.
“Are you still mad at me?” you say.
“No, I’m not mad at you,” she says. “I’m not anything at you.”
“Okay.”
“Did you know that Bishop never even read that story of yours? I never told him about it. I was furious at you on his behalf, but he never read it. Isn’t that funny?”
You feel relieved by this. That Bishop never knew that his secret was not a secret to you. That he had his privacy, at least, till the end.
Bethany grabs the wine bottle by the neck and walks into the living room and plunks herself down on the couch, doesn’t even turn on a lamp or anything, just plunks herself down in the semidarkness so that you can’t really see the plunking so much as you hear the crackling of the expensive leather (alligator, you guess) as Bethany comes to rest on top of it. You sit across from her on the very same couch you were sitting on earlier today listening to a hyper Bethany and Peter simulate a happy relationship. The only light in the apartment comes from the two little spots in the kitchen, and the glow of the surrounding skyscraper windows—not nearly enough to see by. When Bethany talks, her voice seems to come out of the void. She asks you about Chicago. About your job. What your job is like. If you enjoy it. Where you live. What your home looks like. What you do for fun. And you answer all her small-talk questions and while you’re talking she pours herself another glass of wine, and then another, swallowing the win
e with the occasional audible gulp while saying “uh-huh” at the key moments in your stories. You tell her the job is fine except for the students, who are unmotivated; and the administrators, who are ruthless; and the location, which is suburban-drab; and come to think of it you don’t really like your job at all. You tell her you live in a house with a backyard that you never use and pay someone else to mow. Sometimes kids run through your backyard playing various games and you are fine with that and you see that as your contribution to community civics. Otherwise, you do not know your neighbors. You’re trying to write a book for which you’ve already been paid, which presents certain motivation problems. When she asks what the book is about, you say, “I don’t know. Family?”
By the time Bethany opens the second bottle of wine you get the sense she’s trying to gear herself up for something that requires courage and that the wine is helping her do this. She begins reminiscing, talking about old times, when you were kids: playing video games or playing in the woods.
“Do you remember the last time you came to my house?” she says. And of course you do. It was the night you kissed her. The last moment of real joy you felt before your mother left. But you don’t tell Bethany that part. You just say, “Yes.”
“My first kiss,” she says.
“Mine too.”
“The room was dark, like this one,” she says. “I couldn’t really see you. I could only feel you very close to me. Do you remember?”
“I remember,” you say.
Bethany stands—the couch announces it, the popping of the leather, the little suction sound releasing—and she comes over to you and sits next to you and she takes the glass from your hand and sets it on the floor and she’s very close now, one of her knees pressing into yours, and you’re beginning to understand about the lights and the wine.
“Like this?” she says, drawing her face to yours, smiling.
“It was darker than this.”
“We could close our eyes.”
“We could,” you say. But you don’t.
“You were about this far away,” she says, your cheeks almost touching now. You can feel the heat of her, the lavender smell of her hair. “I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “I pressed my lips out and hoped it was right.”
“It was right,” you say.
“Good,” she says, and she lingers there a moment, and you’re afraid to do anything or say anything or move or breathe, feeling like this whole moment is made of air and could scatter at the smallest agitation. Your lips are only a few inches from hers, but you do not lean in. The space between you is something she must resolve herself. Then Bethany says in a whisper, “I don’t want to marry Peter.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Can you help me not marry Peter?”
To help her not marry Peter, go to the next page…
And so you finally kiss her, and when you do you feel a great cascade of relief deep inside break through, and all your obsessing and pining and worrying and regret, and all the ways you’ve been haunted by this woman, and all the torture and self-loathing that you had failed to make her love you, they all seem to shatter on the ground. It feels like you’ve been holding up a wall of glass all this time and only now you realize it’s okay to let it fall. And fall it does, and it’s almost percussive the way it tumbles and breaks around you—you try not to flinch as Bethany kisses you, as she pulls at you with her hands and you have this powerful sense memory of kissing her when you were a child, how you were surprised that her lips were dry, that you didn’t know what to do except smash your face into hers, back when kissing was not a signpost along the way but rather the destination itself. But now you are both older and you’ve had all the relevant experiences and each of you knows exactly what to do with another body—which is to say you know that kissing is a kind of communication sometimes, and what you’re telling each other right now is that you both very much want more. And so you press into her and slide your hands around her waist and curl your fingers into the slight fabric of her dress and she tugs you closer by the collar and still you’re kissing—deeply, wildly, devouring each other—and you’re aware of your awareness of this, how you seem able to concentrate on everything and feel everything all at once: Your hands and her skin and your mouth and her mouth and her fingers and her breathing and the way her body responds to yours—these things don’t feel like separate sensations but rather like layers of a single greater sensation, that drift of consciousness that can happen when you’re entwined with another and it’s all going very well and it’s almost as if you know exactly what the other person wants and can feel her emotions as they shudder through her body as if they’re shuddering through your own, like your bodies have momentarily ceased to have edges and have become things without boundaries.
This is how it feels, this expansiveness, which is why it’s such a shock when Bethany jolts up and away from you and grabs your hands to stop their progress and says, “Wait.”
“What?” you say. “What’s wrong?”
“Just…I’m sorry.” And she pulls away from you and fully disengages and curls up on the other side of the couch.
“What is it?” you say.
Bethany shakes her head and looks at you with these sad, terrible eyes.
“I can’t,” she says, and inside you feel something you might call a plummeting.
“We could go slower,” you say. “We can just slow down a little. It’s okay.”
“This isn’t fair to you,” she says.
“I don’t mind,” you say, and you hope you don’t betray all the desperation you’re feeling because you know if you come this close and still fail with this girl it will break you. You will not come back from this one. “We don’t have to have sex,” you say. “We can, I don’t know, take it easy?”
“The sex isn’t the problem,” she says, and laughs. “The sex I can do. I want to do that. But I don’t know if you want to. Or will want to.”
“I want to.”
“But there’s something you don’t know.”
Bethany stands and smoothes her clothes, a gesture meant to signal calm levelheaded dignity, a very serious break from the theatrics on the couch.
“There’s a letter for you,” she says. “On the kitchen counter. It’s from Bishop.”
“He wrote a letter? To me?”
“We got it from the army, a few months after he died. He wrote it in case something happened.”
“Did you get one?”
“No. Yours was the only one he wrote.”
Bethany turns now and walks slowly to her bedroom. She’s moving in that careful way of hers again—perfectly straight, perfectly upright, all movements composed and purposive. When she pulls open her bedroom door, she stops halfway and turns to look at you over her shoulder.
“Listen,” she says, “I looked at the letter. I’m sorry, but I did. I don’t know what it means, and you don’t have to tell me, but I want you to know I read it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to be in here,” she says, nodding toward the bedroom. “After you’ve read it, if you want to come in, that’s fine. But if you want to leave”—she pauses a moment, turns around, drops her head, seems to look at the floor—“I’ll understand.”
She withdraws into the dark bedroom, the door closing behind her with a soft click.
To read the letter, go to the next page…
Private First Class Bishop Fall sits in the belly of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, his chin on his chest, asleep. His is the second vehicle in a small convoy—three Bradleys, three Humvees, a supply truck—driving single file to a village they don’t know the name of. All they know is that insurgents have recently kidnapped the mayor of this village and beheaded him on TV. It strikes the soldiers in the convoy as bizarre that the executions are televised, and also that they’re done in this particular manner: beheading. It feels like a kind of death from another era, a viciousness called up from the dark ages.
Three Bradleys and three Humvees can carry approximately forty soldiers. The supply truck carries two more, plus water and gasoline and ammo and many hundreds of boxes of MREs. Each MRE—or Meals Ready to Eat—has a densely syllabic ingredient list that makes many of the soldiers claim that, behind beheaders and IEDs, MREs are the biggest threat to their physical health out here. A popular game is to guess whether a certain chemical is found in an MRE or a bomb. Potassium sorbate? (MRE.) Disodium pyrophosphate? (MRE.) Ammonium nitrate? (Bomb.) Potassium nitrate? (Both.) It’s a game they might play during meals when they’re feeling complexly cynical, but not when they’re traveling via Bradley to a village an hour away. When they’re on the road like this, mostly what they do is sleep. They’ve been pulling twenty-hour shifts lately, so an hour in the armored belly of a Bradley is a little slice of what goes for heaven around here. Because it’s totally dark and it’s the safest place to be when they’re outside the wire and—because a Bradley at top speed sounds like a flimsy wooden roller coaster going Mach 2—they’re wearing earplugs, so it all feels real nice and cocooned. Everyone loves it. Everyone except this one guy Chucky, whose real name no one even remembers because he was nicknamed Chucky a long time ago for his tendency to vomit while riding in the back of a Bradley. It’s due to his motion sickness. So they nicknamed him “Up Chuck,” which was soon shortened to “Chuck,” which inevitably became “Chucky.”
Chucky is nineteen years old, short-haired, spindly muscled, fifteen pounds lighter now than he was at home, often forgets to brush his teeth. He comes from some kind of rural place no one has strong opinions about (maybe Nevada? Nebraska?). He’s a kid with very deep convictions that are unburdened by facts or history. Example: One time he overheard someone calling this whole operation in the Gulf “George Bush’s war,” and Chucky got all puffed up about it and said Bush was doing the best he could with the mess Bill Clinton left. And that started this whole fight about who actually declared war and whose idea it was to invade Iraq, and everyone was trying to convince Chucky that Clinton didn’t start the war and all Chucky did was shake his head and say “Guys, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about this” like he felt sorry for them. Bishop pressed him and insisted that it didn’t matter if he was pro-Bush or pro-Clinton or whatever, that who started the war was a simple neutral objective fact. And Chucky said he thought Bishop needed to “support our C and C” and Bishop blinked at that and asked “What’s a C and C?” and Chucky said “Commander and chief.” So this started a whole new argument where Bishop told him it’s not commander and chief, it’s commander in chief, and Chucky looked at him with an expression like he knew they were pulling a prank on him and he was determined not to fall for it.