The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  He sat on the bed and waited. He risked some light to read the newspaper, the entire front page of which was devoted to either the convention or the protest of the convention. He poured himself a whiskey from the small bar knowing the hotel would provide it gratis, just like all the city diners provided cops with free coffee. This job had its perks.

  He must have fallen asleep there because he woke up to the sound of laughter. Girls laughing. His face rested on the crinkled newspaper, his mouth was sticky. He clicked off the small reading light and lumbered over to his position behind the telescope, moving lopsidedly, his arms swinging, his feet scraping along the carpeted floor. He sat and shook his head a few times and tried to blink the sleep away. He had to rub his eyes roughly before he could see anything through the telescope. His stomach felt sour and empty. These night shifts were killing him.

  The girls had returned. They were both on the bed, facing each other. They were laughing at something. There were sleep crumbs in his eyes that he had to pick out. The image through the telescope was out of focus, weirdly, as if while he slept their two buildings had crept slowly apart. He fiddled with the knobs. The picture of the girls bounced and bobbed as he did this, triggering a very mild kind of motion sickness that reminded him of sitting in the backseat of a car trying to read.

  “There’s so much inside you,” Alice said, recovered now from the laughing fit. She lightly stroked Faye’s hair. “So much happiness.”

  Faye was still giggling, softly. “No there’s not,” she said, batting at Alice’s hand. “This isn’t real.”

  “You’re wrong. This is more real. You should remember this. This is the real you.”

  “It doesn’t feel like the real me.”

  “You’re encountering your true self for the first time. It’s bound to be foreign.”

  “I’m tired,” Faye said.

  “You should remember this feeling and find your way back when you’re sober. This is a map for you. You’re so happy right now. Why aren’t you happy like this all the time?”

  Faye stared at the ceiling. “Because I’m haunted,” she said.

  Alice laughed.

  “I’m serious,” Faye said. She sat up and hugged her knees. “There was a ghost that lived in our basement. A house spirit. I offended it. Now I’m haunted.”

  She turned to measure Alice’s reaction.

  “I’ve never told anyone that,” Faye said. “You probably don’t believe me.”

  “I’m just listening.”

  “The ghost came with my father from Norway. It used to be his ghost, but now it’s mine.”

  “You should take it back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back where it came from. That’s the way to get rid of a ghost. You take it back home.”

  “I’m really, really tired,” Faye said.

  “Okay, here, I’ll help.”

  Faye spread herself drunkenly across the bed. Alice removed her glasses and set them carefully on the nightstand. She walked to the foot of the bed and unlaced Faye’s sneakers and pulled at them lightly until they slipped off. Took off Faye’s socks and balled them up and put them inside the shoes, which she arranged toes-out by the front door. She retrieved a thin blanket from under the bed and covered Faye with it, tucking the edges under her. She took off her own shoes and socks and pants and lay next to Faye, snuggled up against her, stroking her hair. It was the most gentle he’d ever seen Alice act. Certainly more gentle than she’d ever been with him. This was an entirely new side of her.

  “D’you have a boyfriend?” Faye said. Her words were slurring together now—she was stoned or on the verge of sleep or both.

  “I don’t want to talk about boys,” Alice said. “I want to talk about you.”

  “You’re too cool t’have a boyfriend. You’d never do something as square as have a boyfriend.”

  Alice laughed. “I do,” she said, and two thousand meters away Officer Brown let out an excited squeak. “Sort of. I have a gentleman friend I’m consistently intimate with, is how I’d describe him.”

  “Why not just say boyfriend?”

  “I prefer not to name things,” Alice said. “As soon as you name and explain and rationalize your desire, you lose it, you know? As soon as you try to pin down your desire, you’re limited by it. I think it’s better to be free and open. Act on any desire you feel, without thinking or judging.”

  “That sounds fun right now, but probably ’cuz of those red pills.”

  “Go with it,” Alice said. “That’s what I do. Like, for example, take this guy? My gentleman friend? I don’t feel anything particularly special for him. I have no commitment to him. I’ll use him until I no longer find him interesting. Simple as that.”

  And across the street Brown felt his insides plunge.

  “I’m always on the lookout for someone who’s more interesting,” Alice said. “Maybe it’s you?”

  Faye grunted a kind of sleepy reply: “Mm-hm.”

  Alice reached over Faye and clicked off the light. “All your worries and secrets,” she said. “I could do a number on you. You’d love it.”

  The bed squeaked as one or both of them stretched into it.

  “You know you’re beautiful?” Alice said into the darkness. “So beautiful and you don’t even know it.”

  Officer Brown turned up the sound on the speakers. He got into bed and wrapped his arms around a pillow. He concentrated on her voice. He’d been having new and terrifying thoughts lately, daydreams of leaving his wife and convincing Alice to run away with him. They could start a new life in Milwaukee, say, or Cleveland, or Tucson, or wherever she wanted. Crazy new daydreams that left him feeling both guilty and exhilarated. At home his wife and daughter would be asleep in the same bed. They would be doing this for years to come.

  “Please stay here,” Alice said. “Everything will be fine.”

  Before Alice came along, Brown wasn’t even aware he lacked an essential part of his life, not until he suddenly had it. And now that he had it, there was no way he was letting it go.

  “Stay as long as you like,” he heard Alice say, and he tried real hard to pretend she wasn’t talking to Faye. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right next to you.”

  He tried to pretend she was talking to him.

  8

  THE DAY BEFORE THE RIOTS, the weather turned.

  The grip of Chicago’s summer loosened and the air was springlike and agreeable. People got a good night’s sleep for maybe the first time in weeks. In the very early dawn there appeared on the ground a thin, slick dew. The world was alive and lubricated. It felt hopeful, optimistic, and therefore disallowable as the city prepared for battle, as National Guard troops arrived by the thousands in green flatbed trucks, as police cleaned their gas masks and guns, as demonstrators practiced their evasion and self-defense techniques and assembled various projectiles to lob at cops. There was a feeling among them all that so great a conflict deserved a nastier day. Their hatred should ignite the air, they thought. Who could feel revolutionary when the sun shone so pleasantly on one’s face? The city instead was full of desire. The day before the greatest, most spectacular, most violent protest of 1968, the city was saturated with want.

  The Democratic delegates had arrived. They’d been police-escorted to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where they assembled nervously inside the ground-floor Haymarket Bar and maybe had a little too much to drink and did things they wouldn’t do under less extraordinary circumstances. Regret, they discovered, was a flexible and relative thing. Those who would not normally engage in exuberant public drunkenness or casual sex found this particular setting encouraged both. Chicago was about to explode. The presidency was on the line. Their own fine America was falling apart. In the face of calamity, a few small extramarital affairs seemed like background static, too quiet to register. The bartenders kept the bar open well past closing. The place was busy, and tips were good.

  Outside, across Michigan Avenue, cops on ho
rseback patrolled the park. Ostensibly, they were there to find troublemakers and saboteurs. What they found were couples in the bushes, under trees, on the beach, youths in various states of undress slithering over each other so ensconced they didn’t even hear the horses’ hooves approaching. They were necking (or more), doing unspeakable things right there in the dirt of Grant Park, in the sand off Lake Michigan. The cops told them to run along, and they did, the boys waddling uncomfortably away. And the cops might have found this funny if they didn’t also suspect these very boys would be back tomorrow, yelling, fighting, throwing things, getting beaten by the cops’ own hands. Tonight, it was carnal. Tomorrow, carnage.

  Even Allen Ginsberg found a few moments’ relief from the melancholy. He sat naked in the bed of the skinny twentysomething Greek busboy he’d discovered that afternoon, at the restaurant, where he met with the youth leaders as they conspired and planned. They wondered how many people would be showing up for the protest. Five thousand? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? He told them a story.

  “Two men went into a garden,” he said. “The first man began to count the mango trees, and how many mangoes each tree bore, and what the approximate value of the whole orchard might be. The second man plucked some fruit and ate it. Now which, do you think, was the wiser of these two?”

  The kids all looked at him, eyes as blank as lambs.

  “Eat mangoes!” he said.

  They didn’t understand. The conversation moved along to the great crisis of the day, which is that the city had finally denied their applications to demonstrate downtown, to parade through the streets, to sleep in the park. Hordes of people were showing up tomorrow and they had nowhere to sleep but the park. Of course they were going to sleep there, of course they were going to demonstrate, and so they debated the likelihood of police intervention now that they lacked the proper permits and credentials. The likelihood, they decided, was a hundred percent. And Ginsberg tried to pay attention, but mostly what he noticed was how the busboy reminded him of a sailor he saw in Athens one night walking the old streets under the skeleton-white Acropolis and seeing this sailor plant his lips earnestly and tenderly on the lips of some young boy-whore, right there in the open, in the land of Socrates and Hercules and statuary everywhere all muscle-smooth and polished to solid cream. The busboy had that sailor’s face, that same hint of debauch. He got the busboy’s attention, got his name, got him up to his room, got him undressed: skinny boy with a huge cock. Isn’t that always the way? Now curled afterward under the covers and reading to the boy from Keats. Tomorrow there would be war, but tonight there was Keats, there was the window open for the pleasant breeze, there was this boy, there was the way this boy gripped his hand, lightly squeezing like he was inspecting fruit. It was all too beautiful.

  Faye, meanwhile, was scrubbing. She had purchased several teen magazines and something all of them recommended brides do before going all the way was to scrub vigorously and thoroughly and relentlessly with many different scrubbing media: soft cloths, porous sponges, emery boards, rough pumice. She spent most of her week’s food budget on things to make her allover smooth and invitingly fragrant. She’d been thinking about the posters in her high-school home economics classroom, the first time in months. They were no less horrifying even at this distance, now that she was the one going all the way. Sebastian would be here soon, and Faye was still scrubbing, had yet to apply certain strong-smelling unguents she worried would sting, jellies that smelled so powerfully of roses and lilacs that they actually reminded her of a funeral home, the way funeral homes set out flower bouquets to overwhelm that chemical death smell that was always there, underneath. Faye purchased perfumes, deodorants, douches, salts she was supposed to bathe in, soaps she was supposed to scrub with, alcohols minty and prickly she was supposed to gargle with and spit. She was beginning to grasp that she’d underestimated the time it would take to pumice, scrub, clean, shampoo, never mind squirting and applying her new solvents and salves. Her bedroom floor was littered with dainty pink cardboard boxes. She would not have time to do everything before Sebastian arrived. She had yet to polish her nails, spray her hair into place, choose the right bra-and-sweater combo. These things were not negotiable, not at all skippable. She finished work on her left-foot calluses. She decided to triage pumicing the right foot. If Sebastian noticed calluses on one foot and not the other, hopefully he would keep it to himself. She vowed to keep her shoes on until the last possible moment. She hoped he wouldn’t be paying attention to her feet by that time. Her stomach flopped when she thought about this, about actually doing this. She concentrated again on her brand-new beauty products, which helped to keep sex vaguely and safely abstract, a kind of marketing idea and not something her body would really do. On her date. Tonight.

  She had three different colors of nail polish, each of them some variation on purple: there was “plum” and “eggplant” and the more conceptual purple called “cosmos,” which was the one she eventually chose. She painted her toenails and did that thing with the cotton balls between each toe and walked around her dorm room on her heels. Hair curler was warming up. Little glass jars of cream-colored powders she dabbed on her face with a sponge. Cleaned out her ears with a Q-tip. Plucked a few eyebrow hairs. Replaced her white underwear with black underwear. Then changed back to white, and then back again. She opened the windows and smelled the city’s cool air and, like everyone else, felt hopeful, optimistic, sensually physical.

  All over the city, people were doing this. And there might have been a moment here, an opportunity that, if grasped, could have prevented all that followed. If everyone involved took a deep breath of that fertile springlike air and realized it was a sign. Then the mayor’s office might have given the demonstrators the permits they’d been for months requesting, and the demonstrators could have peacefully assembled and not thrown anything or taunted anyone, and the police could have bemusedly watched them from a great distance, and everyone could have said their piece and gone home with no bruises or concussions or scrapes or nightmares or scars.

  There might have been a moment, but then this happened:

  He had just arrived in Chicago on a bus from Sioux Falls—twenty-one years old, aimless drifter, probably in town for the protest but we’ll never know. Dressed in the ragtag fashion—old leather coat cracking at the collar, beat-up and duct-taped duffel bag, brown shoes bearing the scuffs of many miles, begrimed denim pants that bloomed outward at the bottom in the manner currently favored by the youth. But it would have been the hair that identified him to police as an enemy. Long and tangled, reaching down past the collar of his leather coat. He brushed it out of his eyes in a gesture that always struck the more militant conservatives as really girly-looking. Really feminine and faggoty. For some reason, this particular gesture caused them so much rage. He batted the hair out of his eyes, pulled at it where it caught like Velcro to his mustache and wiry beard. To the cops, he looked like any other local hippie. To them, his long hair was the end to a kind of conversation.

  But he wasn’t local. He didn’t have the local counterculture’s predictability. Say what you want about the Chicago left, at least they let themselves be arrested without too much fuss. They might call the cops some dirty names, but their general reaction to handcuffs was an annoying limpness, sometimes elevated to full-body flaccidity.

  But this young man from Sioux Falls was of a different idiom. Something had happened to him along the way, something dark and real. Nobody knew why he was in Chicago. He was alone. Maybe he’d heard about the protest and wanted to be part of a movement that must have seemed very far away in Sioux Falls. One can imagine the loneliness he might have felt, looking the way he did in a place like South Dakota. Maybe he’d been hassled, taunted, bullied, beaten up. Maybe he’d had to defend himself against the police or Hell’s Angels—those self-appointed defenders of love-it-or-leave-it culture—one too many times. Maybe he was exhausted by it.

  The truth is that nobody knew what had happened to h
im that made him hide a six-shot revolver in the pocket of his worn leather jacket. Nobody knew why, when police stopped him, he pulled the gun from his jacket pocket and fired it.

  He must not have known what was at that moment happening in Chicago. How the police were taking every idle threat seriously, how they were on edge, pulling double shifts, triple shifts. How the hippies threatened to give all of Chicago an acid trip by dumping LSD into the city’s drinking water, and even though it would take five tons of LSD to pull this off, still there were cops posted at every pumping station of the municipal water supply. How the police were already patrolling the Conrad Hilton with bomb-sniffing dogs because the hippies had threatened to blow up the hotel that housed the vice president and all the delegates. There was word that the hippies were planning to pose as chauffeurs at the airport in order to kidnap delegates’ wives and then get them stoned and have inappropriate relations with them, and so police were giving escorts directly from the runway. There were so many threats it was hard to respond to them all, so many scenarios, so many possibilities. How do you prevent the hippies, for example, from shaving their beards and cutting their hair and dressing straight and faking credentials to get into the International Amphitheater where they’d set off a bomb? How do you stop them from gathering en masse and turning over cars in the street, as they’d done in Oakland? How do you stop them from building barricades and taking over whole city blocks, as they’d done in Paris? How do you stop them from occupying a building, as they’d done in New York, and how do you extract them from the building in front of newsmen who knew that trumped-up claims of police brutality moved papers? It was the sad logic of antiterrorism that had them on edge: The police had to plan for everything, but the hippies only had to be successful once.