by Nathan Hill
“The soup can,” Bishop says, “must have been a decoy. So we let our guard down.” And he turns to Chucky and knows right away by Chucky’s look of terror and panic that something is wrong. Chucky holds his hands over his belly, clutching the wound. Bishop pulls the hands back and doesn’t see anything.
“There’s nothing here, Chuck.”
“I felt it. I felt something go in.” He is already turning pale. Bishop sits him in the belly of the Bradley and pops open his jacket to reveal the body armor underneath and still sees nothing.
“Look. You’re all armored up. You’re fine.”
“Trust me, it’s there.”
And so he pulls off the armor with Chucky moaning and peels off his undershirt and there it is, exactly where he said it would be, a few inches above his belly button, a dime-size spot of blood. Bishop wipes it away and sees the small cut underneath—maybe the size of a large splinter—and laughs.
“Jesus, Chucky, you’re all worked up about this?”
“Is it bad?”
“You dumb motherfucker.”
“It’s not bad?”
“It’s tiny. You’re fine. You’re an asshole.”
“I don’t know, man. There’s something wrong.”
“There’s nothing wrong. Shut the fuck up.”
“It feels like there’s something very not right here.”
So Bishop stays with him insisting everything is okay and suggesting he stop being such a pussy while Chucky keeps saying that something doesn’t feel right, and they stay like that until they hear the thumping of the helicopters, at which point Chucky says, very quietly, “Hey Bishop, listen, I have something to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“You know about my girlfriend? Julie Winterberry?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. I made that up. She doesn’t even know who I am. I only talked to her once. I asked her for her picture. It was the last day of school. Everyone was trading pictures.”
“Oh man, you’re going to be sorry you said that.”
“Listen, I made it up because every day I think about not talking to her.”
“This is good info. This might be new-nickname worthy.”
“I regret it so much, not talking to her.”
“Seriously, you are never going to hear the end of this.”
“Listen. If I don’t make it—”
“You will be taking shit for this literally nonstop forever.”
“If I don’t make it, I want you to find Julie and tell her how I really feel. I want her to know.”
“Seriously, it will last the rest of your life. I will call you when you are eighty years old and make fun of you about Julie Winterberry.”
“Just promise.”
“Fine. I promise.”
Chucky nods and closes his eyes until the medics come and take him on a stretcher and into the helicopter and they all disappear into the dull-copper sky. Then the rest of the convoy continues its loud, slow journey.
What happens that night is that Chucky dies.
A piece of shrapnel only about half an inch long and as thin as the straw on a juice box had clipped the artery feeding his liver, and by the time doctors figured it out he’d lost too much blood and was in full-blown acute liver failure. Baby Daddy is the one to tell them, the next day, right before going out in sector.
“Now forget about it,” he says when it becomes clear the news is going to interfere with their concentration on the upcoming patrol. “If the army wanted us to have emotions, they would have issued us some.”
And it’s a quiet and subdued and uneventful evening, and the whole time Bishop feels angry. Angry at Chucky’s senseless death and the fuckers who planted that bomb, but also angry at Chucky, at Chucky’s cowardice, that he could never say what he needed to say to Julie Winterberry, that a man who could rush into dark rooms where people with machine guns wanted to kill him was unable to talk to a stupid girl. These two kinds of courage seem so different they ought to have separate words.
That night, he can’t sleep. He broods. His anger has twisted so that he is no longer angry at Chucky but rather angry at himself. Because he and Chucky are no different. Because Bishop has terrible things inside him that he cannot bring himself to tell anyone. The great evil secret of his life—sometimes it feels so big it’s like he needs a new inner organ to contain it. The secret sits inside him and devours him. It devours time and grows stronger as time passes, so that now when he thinks of it he cannot separate the event itself from his later revulsion of it.
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 h
ot 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.
And the force of the bomb propelled Bishop into the air where for a moment everything was quiet and cold and the feeling of being inside the bomb’s blast was like being inside one of his mother’s snow globes, everything around him moving as though through thick liquid, hanging there, suspended, in its way beautiful, before the bomb shattered everything inside him and all his senses went dark and Bishop’s body—no longer containing in any meaningful way Bishop himself—crashed into the street many meters away, and for the second time that week someone died while thinking about Julie Winterberry, who was ten thousand miles away at that moment and probably wishing that something exciting would finally happen to her.
The army collected his things and sent them to his parents, who found the letter addressed to Samuel Andresen-Anderson and remembered that was the strange name of their daughter’s childhood pen pal, and so they gave the letter to Bethany, and she struggled many months before deciding she would finally give the letter to you.
And so this is how the letter traveled from a classified village somewhere in Iraq to this kitchen counter in downtown Manhattan, where it looks spotlighted by one of the kitchen’s overhead recessed lights. You pick it up. It’s almost weightless—a single page inside, which you remove. He’s only written a few paragraphs. You sense that your big decision is approaching. It’s a decision that will shape you and go on shaping you for years. You read the letter.
Dear Samuel,
The human body is so fragile. It’s ruined by the smallest things. You can put twenty bullets into a camel and it will just keep coming for you, but half an inch of shrapnel is enough to kill us plain little people. Our bodies are the thin knife’s edge separating us from oblivion. I am beginning to accept this.
If you’re reading this, then something has happened to me and so I have a favor to ask. You and I did a terrible thing together that morning by the pond. The day your mother left, the day the police came. I’m sure you remember. What we did that morning, to each other, is terrible and unforgivable. I was corrupted, and I corrupted you too. And this corruption, I’ve discovered, does not go away. It stays with you and poisons you. It’s with you for life. I’m sorry, but it’s true.
I know you love Bethany. I love her too. She is good in a way I have never been good. She’s not broken the way we are. I’d ask you to keep it this way.
This is my dying wish. The only thing I ask of you. For her sake, for my sake, please, stay away from my sister.
And so you’ve arrived. It’s finally the moment to make your choice. To your right is the door to the bedroom, where Bethany waits for you. To your left, the elevator door and the whole great empty world.
It’s time. Make a decision. Which door do you choose?
| PART SIX |
INVASIVE SPECIES
Late Summer 2011
1
PWNAGE OPENED THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR, then closed the refrigerator door. He stood in his kitchen trying really hard to remember the reason he came in here, but he couldn’t come up with it. He checked his e-mail. He tried logging on to World of Elfscape but could not; it was Tuesday. He thought about going outside to the mailbox to get the mail but did not end up going outside because the mail might not have been delivered yet and he didn’t want to make two trips. He looked across his front lawn at the mailbox, trying to judge whether there was mail in it by staring. He closed the door. He felt like something needed his attention in the kitchen but did not know what. He opened the refrigerator and looked at every item in the fridge, hoping one of them would serve as a kind of trigger for the thing he was supposed to remember about the kitchen. He saw the jars of pickles and plastic squeeze bottles of ket
chup and mayonnaise and a bag of flaxseed he bought once in a moment of diet optimism but had not yet opened. There were five eggplants on the bottom shelf, clearly mushening from the inside, slowly collapsing in on themselves, five little purple pillows with small pools of biscuit-colored juice gathering under them. In the produce drawer, his various greens were brown and wilted. So were the cobs of corn on the top shelf, which were a sickly ecru, every kernel having lost its ripe, yellow puffiness and shriveled into roughly the shape of a diseased human molar. He closed the refrigerator door.
What happened on Tuesdays was that the World of Elfscape game servers were taken offline for most of the morning and sometimes part of the afternoon for regular maintenance and bug fixes and whatever genius-level technical things were required of computers that otherwise ran twenty-four hours a day and hosted ten million game players simultaneously with almost no network lag using some of the most ruthlessly secure encryption on the planet, servers so fast and efficient and mighty that they put to shame the machines now being used by the space program, or in nuclear missile silos, or in voting booths, for example. How a country that made World of Elfscape servers could not make a functional electronic voting machine was a question often posed on Election Day Tuesdays on the Elfscape message boards, while the gaming community patiently waited for the servers to come back online and, sometimes, also voted.
Some of these Tuesdays, though, were very special and particularly agonizing Tuesdays known as “Patch Days,” when the engineers added some kind of game update so that the next time players logged on there would be new things to do—new quests, achievements, monsters, treasure. Such patches were necessary to keep the game fresh and interesting, but of course Patch Days had the longest game downtime because of the elaborate things being done to the game’s servers and coding. It was not unheard of for the servers to be down all morning and all afternoon and sometimes, to the dismay of the game community, into the early evening. And this was happening today. The game was being patched. It was Patch Day.