The Nix

by Nathan Hill

WAY UP ABOVE THEM, on the top-floor suite of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey wants another shower.

  This will be his third shower of the day, and his second since returning from the amphitheater. He tells the maid to run the water and his staff looks at him queerly.

  They were at the amphitheater this morning so Triple H could practice his speech. His staff likes to call him “Triple H,” but the Secret Service agents refuse, usually calling him “Mr. Vice President sir,” which he prefers. They were at the amphitheater so he could stand at that podium and imagine the crowd and visualize his speech and think positive thoughts like the management consultants told him to do, to imagine the crowd in that vast space, that huge space big enough to hold every resident of his hometown plus many thousands more, and he was up there mentally going through his speech and savoring the applause lines and thinking positive thoughts and repeating “They want me to win, they want me to win,” but all he could really think about was that smell. That unmistakable smell of animal feces, with an under-sweetness of blood and cleaning agents, that cloud hanging over the stockyards. What a place to have your convention.

  The smell still lingers on his clothes, even though he’s changed clothes. He can still smell it in his hair and under his fingernails. If he can’t get rid of this smell he thinks he’s going to go crazy. He needs another shower, to hell with what the staff thinks.

  3

  MEANWHILE, one story underground, Faye Andresen stares at shadows on the wall. This jail, it turns out, is not the official or permanent city jail but rather a makeshift holding pen that looks like it was quickly erected in a storage room of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. The cells are made not from iron bars but from chain-link fencing. She’s been sitting on the floor ever since the last of her panic attacks, which had consumed her for most of the night. She had been photographed and fingerprinted and dragged to this cell and the door was locked and she pleaded into the darkness that there’d been some terrible mistake and wept at the thought of her family discovering she was arrested (for, oh my god, prostitution) and the terror quaked through her body and all she could do was curl up in a ball in the corner and feel her own rigid heartbeat and persuade herself she was not dying even though she was convinced that this is what it felt like, to die.

  And after the third or maybe fourth attack, a strange calm came over her, a strange acceptance, maybe exhaustion. She was so tired. Her body rang from a night of spasms and tight dread. She lay on her back thinking maybe she’d sleep now, but she just stared into the darkness until the first dull glow of dawn slunk into the room through the basement’s lone egress window. It is a gray-blue light, sickly looking, like the light of deep winter, dispersed and faded and occluded by several panes of frosted glass. She can’t see the window itself, but she can see its light cast on the far wall. And the shadows of things that pass by. First a few people, then many people, then many people marching.

  Then the door opens and that cop who’d arrested her last night—big crew-cutted guy who still is not wearing a badge or name tag or anything identifiable—walks in. Faye stands up. The cop says, “Basically you have two choices.”

  “This is a mistake,” Faye says. “A big misunderstanding.”

  “Choice number one: You leave Chicago immediately,” the cop says. “Or choice two: Stay in Chicago and go on trial for prostitution.”

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “Also you’re high. Right now you are abusing illegal narcotics. Those red pills you took. How do you think your daddy’s gonna feel when he finds out you’re a hooker and a doper?”

  “Who are you? What did I do to you?”

  “If you leave Chicago, this whole thing will go away. I’m trying to put this as plainly as I can. You leave, no harm done. But if I ever catch you in Chicago again, I promise you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

  He gives the cage a shake to test its sturdiness. “I’ll give you the weekend to think about it,” he said. “See you when the protest is over.”

  He leaves and locks the door behind him and Faye sits down and stares again at the shadows. Above her, the big parade is fully under way, is what she thinks seeing the forms cast on the opposite wall. Thin shadows that look like snapping scissors held upside down are almost certainly legs, she thinks. People marching. The city must have backed down, issued a permit. Then a rumbling and associated large window-blocking shadows she assumes are pickup trucks, their beds filled with student protestors, she imagines, waving their homemade peace flags. She’s glad for them, that Sebastian and the others got their way, that the biggest demonstration of the year—of the decade—is happening after all.

  4

  BUT THE SHADOWS ARE in fact not those of parading students. They are those of National Guard troop carriers filled with soldiers holding rifles tipped with bayonets. There is no parade. The city has not backed down. The shadows that Faye sees are cast by cops moving this way and that to contain the surge of screaming demonstrators massing across the street. In case any of them have designs on parading, the troop carriers have cages of razor wire attached to their front grills to show them just how unwelcome they are in the street.

  They all gather in Grant Park, the many thousands of them, where Allen Ginsberg now sits in the grass cross-legged palms raised to the universe listening. Around him young people scream and revolutionize. They place their spit curses on police-state USA, the FBI, the president, petty materialist sexless soulless bourgeoisie killers, their bombs death-dropping on farmers and children a billion tons. It’s time to bring the war to the streets, says one nearby bullhorned youth. We’re gonna shut down Chicago! Fuck the police! And anybody who’s not with us is a bourgeois white honky pig!

  Ginsberg trembles at this. He does not want to take these children to war, misery, despair, bloody police nightsticks and death. The thought barb-wires his guts. One cannot react to violence with violence—only a machine thinks like this. Or a president. Or a vengeful monotheism. Imagine, instead, ten thousand naked youths carrying signs that say

  POLICE DON’T HURT US

  WE LOVE YOU TOO

  Or crowned with flowers sitting cross-legged waving pure-white flags chanting glory nirvana poems to their holy Maker. This is the other way to react to violence—with beauty—and Ginsberg wants to say this. He wants to say to the bullhorned man: You are the poem you are asking for! He wants to soothe them. The way forward is like water. But he knows it isn’t good enough, isn’t radical enough to calm the wild appetite of the young. And so Ginsberg strokes his beard, closes his eyes, settles into his body, and answers in the only way he can, with a deep bellow from the bottom of his belly, the great Syllable, the sacred sound of the universe, the perfection of wisdom, the only noise worth making at a time like this: Ommmmm.

  He feels the hot holy breath in his mouth, the lifted-up music breath released from his lungs and his gullet, from his guts and heart, his stomach, his red blood cells and kidneys, from his gallbladder and glands and the long spindly legs he sits on, the Syllable issues from all these things. If you listen quietly and carefully, if you are calm and you slow down your heart, you can hear the Syllable in everything—the walls, the street, the cars, the soul, the sun—and soon you are no longer chanting. Soon the sound settles into your skin and you are simply hearing the body make the sound it has always made: Ommmmm.

  Children with too much education have problems with the Syllable. Because they do their thinking with their minds and not their bodies. They think with their heads and not their souls. The Syllable is what remains when you get out of your mind, after you minus the Great You. Ginsberg sometimes likes to pair them up and touch his hands to the tops of their heads and say “You’re married” to make them think about what happens next, on the honeymoon; for all their talk of free love, they need desperately the debauch of other bodies. They need desperately out of their own brains. He wants to scream at them: You are carrying lead souls! He wants them to lob their haun
ted heads into bliss devotion. Here they are trying to murmur the Syllable and getting it all wrong. Because they treat it like a lab rat or a poem—break it apart, dissect it, explain it, expose the viscera. They think the Syllable is a ritual, figurative, a symbol for God, but they are wrong. When you’re bobbing in the ocean, the water does not symbolize wetness. The water is simply there, lifting you up. That is the Syllable, the universe’s deep bellow, like water, omnipresent, endless, perfect, it’s the touch of God in the loftiest place, the most exalted place, the eminent, the pinnacle, the highest, the eighth.

  Ommmmm, he says.

  5

  AND ABOVE THEM ALL a helicopter screams north now at the news of some impromptu illegal cavalcade on Lake Shore Drive: a company of girls marching and shouting and raising their fists in the air and high-stepping it right down the middle of the road slapping their palms on the windshields of cars exhorting the drivers to join them on their procession south, which the drivers universally do not do.

  The chopper reaches them and points its camera at them and people watching this on TV—people like Faye’s father and Faye’s several burly uncles, who are all gathered right now in a living room in her little Iowa river town two hundred miles distant from Chicago but linked to it via television—they say: They’re all girls?

  Well, yes, this particular cluster of protesting student radicals are, sure enough, all girls. Or presumably so. Several are wearing handkerchiefs over their faces so it’s hard to tell. Others have these haircuts that make the uncles say, That one looks like a man. They’re right now watching on the best TV owned among them—a twenty-three-inch Zenith color console as large as a boulder that comes to life with an electric thwump—and they want their friends and wives to see what they’re seeing. To hear what they’re hearing. Because what these girls are yelling? They are yelling crazy shit! They are yelling “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” and stabbing their fists in the air at each syllable, just completely ignoring all the cars honking at them, not even moving for oncoming traffic, just daring these cars to run them down like bowling pins, which the uncles wish they’d do. The cars. Run the girls down.

  Then they look at Frank sheepishly and say I’m sure Faye’s not there and Frank nods and everything is real quiet and awkward until one of the uncles breaks the tension saying You see what that chick is wearing? and they all nod and make various sounds of disgust because it’s not like the uncles think all women should dress like debutantes, but come on. These girls make those girls who protested outside Miss America look like Miss America. Because, okay, here’s an example: This leader girl that the cameras keep showing because she’s in front of the horde and seems responsible for the forward-moving progress of the horde, here is what she’s wearing: First? Army jacket, which the uncles agree is so low-down disrespectful, patriotism-wise, which is point A. Point B is that army jackets are not form-fitting or flattering for girls because they are made for a man. And this girl knew she’d be on TV and this is how she wishes to present herself? In a jacket inappropriate to her gender? Which leads them to point C, which is that she probably wants to be a man, secretly, on the inside. Which they think, okay, fine, draft the bitch like a man and send her to Vietnam like a man and let her hump it through the jungle on point duty watching for trip wires and unexploded ordnance and snipers and then we’ll see how much she’s loving on Ho Chi Minh.

  Bet she hasn’t showered in days, one of the uncles says. How many days? Six days is where they put the over/under.

  The news identifies this leader girl as someone named Alice who, the news says, is a well-known campus feminist, and the uncles huff and snort and one of them says That figures and they all nod because they understand exactly what he means by that.

  6

  THE CONRAD HILTON’S FIRST-FLOOR BAR is called the Haymarket, and this seems historically significant to at least one of the two Secret Service agents sitting at the bar right now nursing his nonalcoholic drink.

  “Like, as in, the Haymarket Riot,” says Agent A——. “The Haymarket Massacre? Anything?” To which Agent B——, whose chin hangs over the glass of club soda he really wishes had bourbon in it, shakes his head. “Nope,” he says. “I got nothin’.”

  “It was in Chicago? Eighteen eighty something? Workers striking at Haymarket Square? It’s pretty historic.”

  “I thought Haymarket Square was in Boston.”

  “There’s one here too. It’s northeast of us, about two clicks.”

  “What were they striking for?” asks B——.

  “An eight-hour workday.”

  “God, I’d love one of those right about now.”

  A—— shakes his glass and the bartender fills it. His preferred off-duty drink is this thing involving simple syrup, lemon juice, and rose water. You can’t always find rose water in most places, but the Haymarket Bar, it turns out, is well stocked.

  “What happened,” A—— says, “is that they were demonstrating, the workers were, marching and picketing, and then the police showed up and attacked them, and then a bomb went off.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Several.”

  “Perp?”

  “Unknown.”

  “And you’re bringing this up now because?”

  “Because don’t you think it’s a coincidence? That we’re the in the Haymarket Bar? Right now?”

  “Riot central,” says B——, pointing with his thumb behind them, toward the thousands of protestors currently gathered beyond the plate-glass windows.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “A real hedley-medley out there.”

  Agent A—— looks sidelong at his partner. “A real hugger-mugger, you might say?”

  “Yep. Gone all topsy-turvy.”

  “A sincere higgledy-piggledy.”

  “Yessir, one hundred percent hurly-burly.”

  “A pell-mell.”

  “A ribble-rabble.”

  “A skimble-skamble.”

  They smile at each other and suppress a laugh. They clink their drinks. They could do this all day. Outside, the crowd churns and boils.

  7

  AND WHERE THERE LOOKS to be an oval-shaped cavity in the crowd is actually the spot where dozens are sitting. They’re watching Allen Ginsberg or joining him in his ommmming, his head-bopping, clapping, his face uplifted like he’s receiving messages from the gods. To the anxious and terrified crowd, his chanting is barbiturative. In its monotony and resolve and purpose, it is the verbal equivalent of being held tenderly by a nurse who really cares. Those who join him singing Ommmm feel better about the world. This is their armor, the spoken sacred Syllable. Nobody would strike someone sitting on the ground singing Ommmm. Nobody would gas them.

  Around Grant Park, this calm, this peace has rippled out to the far borders. Protesters standing there lost in the crowd screaming at the cops and maybe digging up chunks of sidewalk to throw at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in a spasm of loose rage and wildness because they’re just so angry at all of it when someone touches their shoulder from behind and they turn to find these gentle soothing eyes made tranquil and serene because they themselves were touched by the person behind them, and they in turn by the person behind them, one long chain leading all the way back to Ginsberg, who’s powering this whole thing with his chanting’s great voltage.

  He has enough peace for all of them.

  They feel part of his song pour into them, and they feel its beauty, and then they are its beauty. They and the song are the same. They and Ginsberg are the same. They and the cops and the politicians are the same. And the snipers on the roofs and the Secret Service agents and the mayor and the newsmen and the happy people inside the Haymarket Bar bopping their heads to music they cannot hear: all of them are one. The same light threads through them all.

  And thus a calm comes over the crowd in a slow circle around the poet, moving outward from him like ripples on water, like in that Bashō poem he loves so much: the ancient pond, the still night, a frog jumps i
n.

  Kerplunk.

  8

  GIRLS STILL MARCHING SOUTH. White girls, black girls, brown girls. Close-ups on their faces now. Chanting, yelling. There are, in the uncles’ opinion, three kinds of girls: long horse-faced girls, and wide muffin-faced girls, and bulging bird-faced girls. This girl at the front of this march, this Alice person, has a lot of horse in her, they think. (Ha-ha, a horse in her, ha-ha.) Mostly horse, but a bit of the bird too. What they can see of her face, anyway, that part of her not covered by sunglasses or ratty hair. Two parts horse face, one part bird face is where they’d plot her on the 3-D map of girl faces.

  Except she is carrying a weapon, which puts her in a whole other category. Girl faces just look different when they’re all violent like that.

  Actually almost all the girls in the crowd are carrying weapons: two-by-fours, some with these evil-looking rusty nails sticking out of the swinging end; and rocks and chunks of pavement; and iron bars and bricks; and bags with unknown contents, but their guess? Shit and piss, plus menstrual blood. Gross. The TV says there’s rumors of radicals buying huge amounts of oven cleaner and ammonia, which sounds like bomb-making material even if the uncles are not a hundred percent sure of the chemistry of this. But if anyone would be carrying oven-cleaner explosives it would be one of these girls because, they figure, girls have routine access to such things.

  CBS has cut away from old Cronkite for a moment and is just showing all this live and unedited. And most people tune in to CBS to hear old Cronkite deliver his assessment about things, but the uncles’ opinion about it? About not seeing Cronkite right now? They think good. The guy’s gotten a little soft lately, a little lefty too, and arrogant, all these puffed-up pronouncements from the top of Mount Journalism or something. They prefer their news from the source, undiluted.