The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  It was hard not to feel personal about all this. When some new bad element moved into the neighborhood, it was hard not to take it personally. It was personal. Officer Brown’s own grandfather had moved to this neighborhood as a very young man. He was Czeslaw Bronikowski until he reached Ellis Island, where he was given the name Charles Brown, a name then bestowed on the family’s firstborn sons each generation since. And even though Officer Brown could have done without the teasing this name prompted when kids began reading that goddamn comic strip circa first grade, still he loved it—it was a good name, an American name, a consolidation of his family’s past and its future.

  It was a name that fit in.

  So when some out-of-town doper, some punk peacenik, some longhaired hippie freak sat on the sidewalk all day scaring the daylights out of the old ladies, it was, indeed, personal. Why couldn’t they just fit in? With the Negroes it was at least reasonable. If the blacks didn’t particularly appreciate America, well, he could wrap his head around that one. But these kids, these middle-class white kids with their anti-America slogans—what gave them the right?

  And so his job was simple: Target and annoy the bad elements in the city as far as the law allowed. As far as he could go without risking his pension or publicly embarrassing the city or the mayor. And yeah, sometimes somebody appeared on TV, usually some East Coast idiot with no idea what the fuck he was talking about, who said the cops in Chicago were harsh or brutal or obstructing people’s First Amendment rights. But nobody paid much attention to that. There was a saying: Chicago problems, Chicago solutions.

  For example, if a beatnik was walking through his precinct at two o’clock in the morning, it was a pretty easy matter to bust him for curfew violation. It was well known that most of these types did not carry any form of identification, so when they said “The curfew doesn’t apply to me, pig,” he could say “Prove it,” and they absolutely could not. Simple. So they spent an uncomfortable few hours in a holding pen while the message sunk in: You are not welcome here.

  And that had been an acceptable job for Officer Brown—he was aware of his own talents and limitations, he was not ambitious. He was content as a beat cop until, almost by accident, he got to know and earn the trust of a certain hippie leader, and when he told his bosses that he had “made contact with a leading student radical” and now had “access to the underground’s inner sanctum” and asked to be assigned to the Red Squad—specifically the division investigating anti-American activity at Chicago Circle—they reluctantly agreed. (Nobody else on the force had been able to infiltrate Circle—those college kids could sniff out a fake easy.)

  The Red Squad wiretapped rooms and telephones. They took covert photos. They tried to be as generally disruptive as they could be to the antiwar fringe. He saw it as a simple amplification of what he did on the street—annoying and detaining hippies—only now it was done in secret, using tactics that pushed the boundaries of what was, at face value, legal. For example, they raided the office of Students for a Democratic Society, stole files, broke typewriters, and spray-painted “Black Power” on the walls to throw the kids off. That seemed a bit questionable, yes, but the way he thought about it was that the only change between his old job and his new one was the method. The moral calculus, he figured, was the same.

  Chicago problems, Chicago solutions.

  And now he had been given the gift of a new name to investigate, some new fringe element recently arrived at Circle. He wrote the name down in his notebook. Put a star next to it. He would get to know this Faye very soon.

  3

  FAYE, OUTDOORS, in the grass, back leaning against a building, in the shade of a small campus tree, gently placed the newspaper on her lap. She smoothed its crinkles. She bent the corners where they’d begun to curl. The paper did not feel like ordinary newsprint—stiffer, thicker, almost waxy. Ink smeared off the page and onto her fingertips. She wiped her hands on the grass. She looked at the masthead—Editor in Chief: Sebastian—and she smiled. There was something both brazen and triumphant about Sebastian using only his first name. He had achieved enough renown that he was publicly mononymous, like Plato or Voltaire or Stendhal or Twiggy.

  She opened the paper. It was the edition Sebastian had been printing last night, full of letters to the editor. She began to read.

  Dear Chicago Free Voice,

  Do you like hiding from the pigs and those other people that stare at us put us down? Because of our clothes and hair? I mean I used to but I don’t anymore I talk to them. Get them to like me and become friends and then tell them I smoke grass. And if they like you they might smoke it with you sometime and listen. You will help add one more of us to our ever growing number I think 50 percent of the USA is doing it and Narcotics Officers think we’re all mental patients haw haw.

  It was hot today, and bright, and buggy: The gnats dove into her face, black dots between her eyes and the page, as if the punctuation marks were fleeing. She shooed them away. She was alone, nobody around; she’d found a quiet little spot on the northeast part of campus, a patch of grass separated from the sidewalk by a small hedge, back behind the brand-new Behavioral Sciences Building, which was roundly the most loathed building on the entire Circle campus. This was the one all the brochures talked about, designed according to the geometric principles of field theory, a new architecture meant to break the old architecture’s “tyranny of the square,” the brochures had said. A modern architecture that abandoned the square in favor of an overlapping matrix of octagons inscribed by circles.

  Why this was better, philosophically, than a square, the brochures never explained. But Faye could guess: A square was old, traditional, antique, and therefore bad. It seemed to Faye that the worst thing on this campus, for both the students and the buildings, was to be square.

  So the Behavioral Sciences Building was modern, many angled, which in practice made the place a bewildering mess. The interconnected honeycombs made no intuitive sense, hallways jagged and serpentine so you couldn’t walk ten feet without having to make some kind of navigational choice. Faye’s poetry class met here, and simply finding the correct classroom was an ordeal that taxed both her patience and her sense of spatial awareness. Certain stairs led into literally nothing, just a wall or a locked door, while other stairs led down to tiny landings where several other staircases intersected, all of them identical-looking. What seemed like a dead end actually opened into an entirely new area she never would have predicted was there. The third floor was visible from the second floor, with no obvious way to get up to it. That everything was built in circles and oblique angles pretty much guaranteed anyone would get lost, and indeed all who encountered this building for the first time had the same baffled expression, trying to navigate a place where concepts like “left” and “right” had little meaning.

  It seemed less a place where students would study the behavioral sciences and more a place where behavioral scientists would study the students, to see how long the students could endure this nonsensical environment before going completely berserk.

  So mostly the students avoided it, if they could, which made it a good place for Faye to be alone and read.

  Do you people out there think you’re crazy? I mean you’re part of those 50 percenters right? I mean you all smoke grass don’t you? I do. And I work hard or almost as hard as anyone else at the post office. And all my fellow workers know I turn on I mean they’re always asking me if some box of tea smells like grass. Today I found one that did and most of them wanted to smell it. Then we wrapped it up and delivered it. That person who got it might have gotten it by now. He might be enjoying his package. He might be reading my rap. Hello friend.

  Movement in the distance distracted her, and she looked up, worried. Because if any of her teachers saw her reading the Chicago Free Voice, if any of the college officials who administrated her scholarship saw her reading the pro-narcotic, pro-Vietcong, antiestablishment “Newspaper of the Street”…Well, they would think certain unfor
tunate things about her.

  So her head popped out of reading at the first peripheral sight of the approaching figure, walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the hedge. And she gathered at a glance that he was no teacher, no administrator. His hair was too big for that. Moppy was the word going around, but his hair had gone well beyond moppy and into a kind of efflorescence. Wild growth. She watched him come, her head bent into the newspaper so it wouldn’t look like she was staring, and as he approached his features clarified and she realized she knew him. He was the boy from last night. At the meeting. Sebastian.

  She pushed her hair back and wiped the sweat off her forehead. She lifted the newspaper to conceal her face. Pressed her back into the wall and felt thankful that the building had so many overhangs and corners. Maybe he’d walk by.

  I’d rather smoke a joint with a pig than keep on running from him I mean wouldn’t you? I mean wouldn’t you like it if everybody did? No fights no wars! Just a bunch of happy people. Wild thought or is it?

  Her head buried in the newspaper—she recognized this as a somewhat pathetic, ostrichlike maneuver. She could hear Sebastian’s footsteps in the grass. Her face felt ten degrees warmer. She felt the sweat on her temples and smeared it off with her fingers. She squeezed the newspaper and held it close.

  How would you people, my people, like to all, and I mean ALL, get together? I mean at least 10 million people well maybe 9 million. I’d sure like to shake all you good people’s hands out there. All we need is someplace to have a huge Turn On Festival and let them know how many of us there really are!

  The footsteps stopped. Then started again and came closer. He was walking toward her now, and Faye breathed and wiped the moisture from her forehead and waited. He approached—maybe ten feet away, maybe five. The paper blocked her, but she sensed him there. It would be absurd to pretend otherwise. She lowered the paper and saw him smiling.

  “Hello, Faye!” he said. He bounced over and sat down beside her.

  “Sebastian,” she said, and she nodded and smiled her most genuine-feeling smile.

  He looked handsome. Professional, even. He seemed pleased she’d remembered his name. The mad-scientist lab coat was gone. Now he was in a proper jacket—neutral beige, corduroy—and a plain white shirt, thin navy blue tie, brown slacks. He looked presentable, acceptable, except maybe the hair—too long, too disheveled, too big—but good-boy material nonetheless, one that could be, in his current state, maybe even furnished to parents.

  “Your newspaper is quite good,” Faye said, already working out how to be maximally likable in this moment, how to ingratiate herself to him: be supportive, be full of praise. “That letter from the man at the post office? I really think he has a point. It’s quite interesting.”

  “Oh, lord, can you imagine that guy organizing a festival? Ten million people? Yeah, right.”

  “I don’t think he really wants to organize a festival,” Faye said. “I think he wants to know he’s not alone. He just seems lonely to me.”

  Sebastian gave her a look of mock surprise—cocked his head and raised an eyebrow and smiled.

  “I thought he was nuts,” he said.

  “No. He’s looking for people he can be himself around. Aren’t we all?”

  “Huh,” Sebastian said, and stared at her for a moment. “You’re different, aren’t you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” She wiped the sweat off her forehead.

  “You’re sincere,” Sebastian said.

  “I am?”

  “Quiet, but sincere. You don’t talk much, but when you talk you say what you mean. Most people I know talk constantly but never say anything true.”

  “Thanks?”

  “Also you have ink all over your face.”

  “What?”

  “Ink,” he said. “All over.”

  She looked at her fingertips, blackened by the newspaper, and put it together. “Oh no,” she said. She reached into her backpack for her cosmetics. She flipped open the compact, looked into the mirror, and saw what had happened: dark black streaks across her forehead, cheeks, temples, exactly where her fingers wiped away the sweat. And this was the kind of moment that could wreck her whole day, the kind of moment that would usually summon the tightness, the panic: doing something foolish in front of a stranger.

  But something else happened instead, something surprising. Faye did not have an episode. Instead, she laughed.

  “I look like a Dalmatian!” she said, and she laughed. She didn’t know why she was laughing.

  “It’s my fault,” Sebastian said. He handed her a handkerchief. “I should use better ink.”

  She rubbed away the smudges. “Yes,” she said. “It is your fault.”

  “Walk with me,” he said, and he helped her up and they left the shade of the tree, Faye’s face now clean and bright. “You’re fun,” he said.

  She felt weightless, happy, a little flirty even. It was the first time in her life anyone had ever described her as fun. She said, “You have a good memory, mister.”

  “I do?”

  “You remembered my name,” she said.

  “Oh, well, you made an impression. That thing you said at the meeting.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I just blurted it out.”

  “You were right, though. It was an important point.”

  “It was not.”

  “You were suggesting that sometimes what people want sexually is in conflict with what they want politically, which made everyone uncomfortable. Plus that group tends to pounce on shy people. It looked like you were in trouble.”

  “I’m not shy,” she said, “it’s just…” And she stopped to find the right word, the correct and comprehensible way to say it, then skipped the explanation altogether. “Thanks for speaking up,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

  “It’s no problem,” Sebastian said. “I saw your maarr.”

  “My what?”

  “Your maarr.”

  “What is a maarr?”

  “I learned about it in Tibet,” he said, “visiting this sect of monks, one of the oldest Buddhist groups on earth, met them while I was abroad. I wanted to meet them because they’ve solved the problem of human empathy.”

  “I didn’t know that was a problem needing to be solved.”

  “Oh sure. The problem is, we can never really feel it. Empathy. Most people think empathy is like understanding someone else or relating to them. But it’s more than that. Real empathy is the actual corporeal feeling of someone else’s emotions, so that it’s experienced not only in the brain but also in the body, the body vibrating like a tuning fork to the sadness and suffering of another, as in, for example, you cry at the funerals of people you never even knew, you feel actual physical hunger when you see a starving child, you get vertigo when you watch an acrobat. And so forth.”

  Sebastian glanced at Faye to see if she was interested. “Go on,” she said.

  “Okay. Well, if we follow this to its conclusion, then empathy becomes like a haunting, a condition that is impossible since we all have separate egos, we’ve attained individuation, we can never really be another person, and that’s the great empathy problem: that we can approach it but cannot realize it.”

  “Like the speed of light.”

  “Exactly! Nature has certain boundaries—perfect human empathy being one of them—that will always be slightly beyond our reach. But the monks have solved the problem this way: the maarr.”

  Faye listened in wonder. That a boy was saying such things. To her. Nobody had ever spoken to her this way. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and cry.

  “Think of the maarr as the seat of emotions,” Sebastian said, “held deeply inside your body, somewhere near the stomach—all desire, all yearning, all feelings of love and compassion and lust, all of one’s secret wants and needs are held in the maarr.”

  Faye placed her palm on her belly.

  “Yeah,” Sebastian said, smiling. “Right there. To ‘see’ someone’s
maarr means recognizing someone else’s desire—without asking, without being told—and acting on it. That last part is essential: The ‘seeing’ is not complete until one does something about it. So a man only ‘sees’ a woman’s desires when he fulfills them without being asked to do so. A woman ‘sees’ a hungry man’s maarr when, unprompted, she gives him food.”

  “Okay,” Faye said, “I get it.”

  “It’s this active sense of empathy that I love so much, the sense that one must do more than quietly relate to another human. One must also make something happen.”

  “Empathy is achieved only by deed,” Faye said.

  “Yes. So at the meeting, when I saw the group begin to criticize you, I turned their attention away, and in this way I saw your maarr.”

  And Faye was about to thank him when they came to a clearing and, ahead of her, she saw people, heard chanting. She’d been hearing some slight noise during their walk, as they moseyed counterclockwise around the Behavioral Sciences Building, taking the zigzagging route necessary on a campus that had few direct paths from anywhere to anywhere. It had grown louder as Sebastian told his story of empathy and monks and seeing her maarr.

  “What’s that sound?” she said.