The Nix(31)
“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 sincerely 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.