“Holy shit!” said Bishop, and both of them, as if moved by the natural impulses of hunted animals, ran.
They ran down Via Veneto, the neighborhood’s lone street, which followed roughly the same curvature as a path that deer had made when this place was still a nature preserve, a path that ran between the small man-made pond to the north and a large drainage ditch to the south, these two bodies of water being enough to sustain a modest deer population even through the Illinois winter, a herd whose offspring still lingered in Venetian Village and terrorized various carefully tended flowering plants and gardens. The deer were so annoying that the residents of Venetian Village paid quarterly fees to a deer exterminator who left salt licks laced with poison on posts high enough for adult deer to reach (but, importantly, too high for any of the neighborhood’s twenty-five-pound-and-under dogs to accidentally ingest). The poison was not immediate but rather bioaccumulated in the deer’s body, so that when the animal’s death instincts kicked in, it tended to wander far away from its herd and die, conveniently, somewhere else. And so along with the standardized gondolier-themed mailboxes and front-yard water features, Venetian Village’s other major repeating architectural items were posts with salt licks on them and signs saying DANGER. POISON. KEEP AWAY in a very tactful and elegant serif typeface that could also be found on the Venetian Village official stationery.
The neighborhood should never have existed but for a loophole that was exploited by three Chicago investors. Before Venetian Village, there was the Milkweed Nature Preserve, named after the plant that grew in great abundance here and drew huge numbers of monarch butterflies in the summer. The city was looking for a private organization—preferably nonprofit and/or charitable—to tend the preserve and its various paths and general health and biodiversity. The covenants the city drafted stated that the buyer of the land could not develop the land, nor could the buyer sell the land to anyone who would develop it. But the agreement said nothing about whom that buyer (i.e., the second one) could sell the land to. So one of the business partners bought the land, then sold it to another of the partners, who quickly sold it to the third partner, who immediately formed an LLC with the other two guys and went to work knocking down the forest. They installed a thick copper fence around what was once the Milkweed Nature Preserve, and advertised to high-end Sotheby’s-style clients, one of their catchphrases being: “The intersection of luxury and nature.”
One of the three founding partners still lived in Venetian Village, a commodities trader with offices at both the Chicago Stock Exchange and Wall Street. His name was Gerald Fall. He was Bishop’s father.
Gerald Fall, the only person on the block, save for the two boys themselves, who saw the stone strike the headmaster’s house, who watched as Bishop and Samuel ran down the soft slope of the road toward the low end of Via Veneto’s terminating cul-de-sac, where he was standing in the driveway, the door of his black BMW open, his right foot already in the car, his left foot still on the driveway he’d had expensively done in high-gloss cobblestone. He was leaving when he spotted his son throw the rock at the headmaster’s house. The boys did not see him there until they were upon the driveway themselves, where they squeaked to a halt on the polished stone, the sound like basketball players on a gym floor. Bishop and his father considered each other for a moment.
“The headmaster’s sick,” the father said. “Why are you bothering him?”
“Sorry,” said Bishop.
“He’s very ill. He’s a sick man.”
“I know.”
“What if he’s sleeping and you just ruined it?”
“I’ll be sure to apologize.”
“You do that.”
“Where are you going?” Bishop asked.
“The airport. I’ll be at the New York apartment for a while.”
“Again?”
“Don’t bother your sister while I’m gone.” He looked at the boys’ feet, wet and dirty from the woods. “And don’t track mud in the house.”
With that, Bishop’s father dove fully into his car and shut the door hard and the engine purred to life and the BMW circled out of the driveway, its tires making this noise on the smooth stones like something screaming.
Inside, the Fall household had a formality that made Samuel not want to touch anything: bright white stone floors, chandeliers with crystal things hanging off of them, flowers in tall and thin and easily tippable glass vases, framed abstract artwork on the walls lit by recessed bulbs, a thick wooden display hutch with about two dozen snow globes inside it, the tops of tables buffed to a mirrorlike clarity, kitchen counters of white marble similarly shined, each room and hallway defined by a wide arch set atop Corinthian columns that were so intricately detailed at the top they looked like muskets that had backfired and been torn apart.
“This way,” Bishop said. He led them to a room that could only be called the “TV room” for the big-screen television that Samuel felt dwarfed by. It was taller than he was, and wider than his own wingspan. Below the television were strewn various cords and wires for video-game consoles stacked clumsily in a small cabinet. Game cartridges lay haphazardly about them like spent artillery shells.
“Do you like Metroid or Castlevania or Super Mario?” Bishop said.
“I don’t know.”
“I can save the princess in Super Mario without even dying. I’ve also beaten Mega Man, Double Dragon, and Kid Icarus.”
“It doesn’t matter what we play.”
“Yeah, that’s true. They’re all pretty much the same game. Same basic premise: Go right.”
He reached into the cabinet and produced an Atari all tangled in its own cords.
“I actually prefer the classics,” he said. “Games made before all the clichés were established. Galaga. Donkey Kong. Or Joust is one of my favorites, even though it’s weird.”
“I’ve never played it.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty weird. Ostriches and stuff. Pterodactyls. There’s also Centipede. And Pac-Man. You’ve played Pac-Man, right?”
“Yes!”
“Pretty fucking amazing, isn’t it? Here’s one.” Bishop grabbed a cartridge called Missile Command and jammed it into the Atari. “You watch me first, then you’ll know how to play.”
The point of Missile Command was to protect six cities from a ceaseless hail of ICBMs. When a missile landed on one of the six cities, it did so with an ugly plosive noise and a little splash that was probably supposed to be a mushroom cloud but looked more like a small pebble or frog breaking the surface of a still pond. The game’s sound track was mostly an eight-bit digital conversion of an air-raid horn. Bishop positioned his targeting reticule out in front of the incoming missiles and pressed his button and a small trace of light shot up from the ground and slowly climbed to the targeted spot, where it collided with a falling nuke. Bishop didn’t even lose a city until around level nine. Samuel lost track of levels eventually, so by the time the sky was packed with missile trails falling fast and thick, he had no idea how many boards had been conquered. Bishop’s face through all of this was utterly calm and fishlike and blank.
“Want to see me do it again?” Bishop said as the screen flashed GAME OVER.
“Did you win?”
“What do you mean, win?”
“Did you save all the cities?”
“You can’t save all the cities.”
“So what’s the point?”
“Annihilation is inevitable. The point is delaying it.”
“So people can escape?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
“Do it again.”
And so Bishop was onto level six or seven in his second game, and Samuel was watching Bishop’s face instead of the game—how his face was so focused and undisturbed, even while missiles crashed down around his cities, even while his hands jerked the controller this way and that—when, from outside the room, Samuel heard something else, something new.
It was music. Clean and clear and not at all like the scrat
chy and digitized sounds currently coming out of the television. Musical scales, a solo string instrument going up and down a scale.
“What’s that?”
“That’s my sister,” Bishop said. “Bethany. She’s practicing.”
“Practicing what?”
“Violin. She’s going to be a world-famous violinist. She’s really outstandingly good.”
“I’ll say!” Samuel blurted out maybe too enthusiastically, a bit out of proportion to the actual conversation. But he wanted Bishop to like him. He was trying to be agreeable. Bishop gave him a brief and curious look before staring forward again, blankly, onward to levels ten, eleven, while the music outside changed from a basic scale to real actual music, a soaring and densely noted solo that Samuel could not believe was coming from a person and not the radio.
“That’s really your sister?”
“Yep.”
“I want to see,” Samuel said.
“Wait. Watch this,” Bishop said as he annihilated two nukes at the same time with one shot.
“Just for one second,” Samuel said.
“But I haven’t even lost a city yet. This could the highest scoring game of Missile Command ever. You could be watching something historic.”
“I’ll be right back.”
“Fine,” Bishop said. “Your loss.”
And Samuel left to find the source of the music. He followed the sounds through the main vaulted hallway, through the gleaming kitchen and to the back of the house, to an office where he slowly wrapped his nose around the frame of the door and peeked inside and saw, for the first time, Bishop’s sister.
They were twins.
Bethany had Bishop’s face, the same check-mark eyebrows, the same quiet intensity. She looked like an elven princess on the cover of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel: immortally young and beautiful and wise. The sharp angles of her cheeks and nose fit her better than they did Bishop. Whereas Bishop looked angry, she looked stately, statuesque. Her long and thick auburn hair, thin eyebrows crinkled in concentration, long neck and delicate arms and erect posture and the careful way she sat in a skirt, a kind of propriety and elegance and ladylike maturity that just killed Samuel. He loved the way she moved with her violin, the way the whole apparatus of her head and neck and torso seemed to glide with the movements of her bow. This was in sharp contrast to the kids in his school’s orchestra, who forced sound out of their instruments mechanically and abusively. Her playing was so effortless.
He didn’t know it then, but this would become his template for beauty for the rest of his life. Any girl he ever met from now on would be compared, in his head, to this girl.
She finished on a long note where she did that amazing thing where the bow kept moving back and forth and yet there was no break at all, just a prolonged, liquid sound. And she opened her eyes and looked directly at him, and they stared at each other for a terrifying moment until she brought the violin down into her lap and said, “Hi there.”
Samuel had never felt such uncomfortable longings before. This was the first time his body tingled like this: Cold sweat gummed up his armpits, his mouth suddenly seemed too small, his tongue all of a sudden huge and arid, a panicky sensation in his lungs as if he’d been holding his breath for too long, all of these things coalesced in his body as a kind of hyperawareness, a strange magnetic pull toward the object of his fancy that departed significantly from the way he tried to ignore or hide from most people.
The girl waited for him to say something, her hands in her lap, resting on her violin, her ankles crossed, those penetrating green eyes—
“I’m Bishop’s friend,” Samuel finally said. “I’m here with Bishop.”
“Okay.”
“Your brother?”
She smiled. “Yes, I know.”
“I heard you practicing. What are you practicing for?”
She looked at him quizzically for a moment. “To get the notes under my fingers,” she said. “I have a concert coming up. What did you think?”
“It was beautiful.”
She nodded and seemed to consider this. “The double-stops in the third movement are really hard to play in tune,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“And the arpeggios on the third page are rough. Plus I have to play in tenths, which is weird.”
“Yes.”
“I feel like I’m falling all over it, that third movement. Stumbling the whole way.”
“It didn’t sound like that.”
“It’s like I’m a bird stapled to a chair.”
“Right,” Samuel said. He was not comfortable with this topic at all.
“I need to relax,” she said. “Especially in the second movement. There are these long melodic lines in the second movement, and if you play them with too much gusto it ruins the musicality of the whole piece. You have to be calm and serene, which is the last thing your body wants when you’re playing a solo.”
“Maybe you can, I don’t know, breathe?” Samuel said, because that’s what his mother told him during his uncontrollable Category 4s: Just breathe.
“You know what works?” she said. “I imagine my bow is a knife.” She held it up, the bow, and pointed it at him with false menace. “And then I imagine the violin is a stick of butter. Then I pretend I’m drawing the knife through the butter. It should feel like that.”
Samuel just nodded, helpless.
“How do you know my brother?” she said.
“He jumped out of a tree and scared me.”
“Oh,” she said, as if this made perfect sense. “He’s playing Missile Command right now, isn’t he?”
“How’d you know that?”
“He’s my brother. I can feel it.”
“Really?”
She held his stare for a moment, then giggled. “No. I can hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“The game. Listen. Can’t you hear it?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“You have to concentrate. Just listen. Close your eyes and listen.”
And so he did, and he began to hear the various sounds of the house separate themselves, break from one buzzy collective hum into individual details: the air conditioner working somewhere within the walls, the whoosh of air through vents, the wind outside brushing against the house, the refrigerator and freezer, and Samuel recognized these things and pushed them out of the way and felt his concentration extend back into the house and snake from room to room until, all at once, there it was, popping out of the silence, the faint and muffled air-raid sirens, missile explosions, the pew-pew sounds of rockets fired.
“I hear it,” he said. But when he opened his eyes Bethany was no longer looking at him. She had her face turned away, toward the big window that looked out onto the backyard and the forest beyond. Samuel followed her stare and saw, outside, through the twilight, at the tree line, maybe fifty feet away, a large adult deer. Light brown and spotted. Big black animal eyes. And as it moved, it hobbled and staggered, fell down and recovered and got up again and kept going, swaying and bucking.
“What’s wrong with it?” Samuel said.
“It’s eaten the salt.”
The deer’s front legs gave out again, and it pushed itself along on its belly. Then it recovered momentarily, only to twist and crane its neck so that it could move only in circles. Its eyes were wide and panicked. A pink foam dripped from its nose.
“This happens all the time,” Bethany said.
The deer turned toward the forest and made its way into the trees. They watched it go, tumbling forward, until they could no longer see it through the foliage. Then all was quiet, except for the faint sounds from the other end of the house: bombs dropping out of the sky and flattening whole cities.
4
AS THE SCHOOL YEAR BEGAN, this new thing started happening: Samuel would be sitting in class and taking faithful and meticulous notes about whatever Miss Bowles was teaching that moment—American history, multiplication, grammar—and sinc
erely thinking about the material and really trying to understand it and worrying that Miss Bowles could at any moment call on him and ask him pop-quiz questions about the material she’d just covered, which she often did, mocking those kids who answered incorrectly, suggesting for the next hour or so that perhaps they belonged in fifth grade rather than sixth, and Samuel paying attention closely and carefully and absolutely not letting his mind wander and not thinking about girls or doing anything regarding girls and yet this thing happened. It began as a kind of warmth, a tingle, like that feeling when someone is about to tickle you, that terrible anticipation. Then a sudden awareness of a body part that up until now was obscured, was among all those feelings that happened beneath what he paid attention to: the fabric on his shoulders, the fit of his socks, what his elbow was at any moment touching. Most of the time the body fades away. But lately, for no reason, more frequently than Samuel would like, his prick had become assertive. In class, at his desk, it would announce itself. It pushed against his jeans and then against the unforgiving metal underside of the school’s one-size-fits-all desk. And the problem here was that all this rising and swelling and pressing was mortifying, but also, in a purely physical way, it was really pleasant. He wanted it to go away, but then again, he also didn’t.
Did Miss Bowles know? Could she see it? That daily some of her boys went starry-eyed and glassy as their nervous systems took them somewhere else? If she did, she didn’t say anything. And she never called on any of the boys in such a state and demand they stand while giving their answers. This seemed, for Miss Bowles, unusually merciful.
Samuel looked at the clock: Ten minutes till recess. His pants felt too tight. He felt wedged into his seat. Then his mind flashed involuntarily with visions of girls, his mental inventory of images accidentally caught here and there: cleavage seen when a woman at the mall bent over; a snip of leg and crotch and inner thigh glimpsed as girls in class sat down; and now a new vision, Bethany, in her room, sitting up straight, knees together, in a light cotton dress, violin at her chin, looking at him, those green catlike eyes.