The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  Case in point: girls walking south in the middle of the street. This is action. This is news untouched. Especially now as a cop car rolls up and instead of dispersing like they ought to the girls actually attack the cop car! Jabbing at the siren with baseball bats! Breaking the windows with rocks! And the poor cop leaps out the other side of the car and holy cow is that boy running! And even though it’s only girls he’s running from there’s like a hundred of them and they mean business. Then the girls all gather on the car and it looks like a bunch of ants surrounding a beetle ready to devour it. And the leader horse-faced girl yells Heave-ho! and they actually tip over the police car! It’s the most amazing thing the uncles have ever seen! And the girls all cheer at their job well done and then continue marching and chanting and the cop car’s siren is still blowing but instead of at full volume it’s like a demoralized and sad siren sound. It moans and whines in this low, pitiful way. It sounds like an electronic toy whose batteries are just about dead.

  And now girls are yelling after the cop, yelling “Here piggy piggy! Oink, oink! Soo-ee!” And this is about the best thing the uncles have seen on television in a month.

  9

  THE CONRAD HILTON HOTEL is nowhere near the convention. The Democratic National Convention will happen at the International Amphitheater, down on the grounds of the Union Stock Yards, about five miles south of here. But the amphitheater is completely inaccessible: A barbed-wire fence surrounds it; National Guard troops patrol the grounds; every manhole cover has been tarred shut; roadblocks at every intersection; even airplanes are banned from flying over it. Once the delegates are inside the amphitheater, there would be no reaching them. Hence the protest at the Hilton, where all the delegates are staying.

  Plus there’s the matter of the smell.

  It’s all Hubert Humphrey can think about. His staff is right now trying to tell him how the peace-plank debate will go, but it’s like every time he turns his head he can smell it again.

  Whose idea was it anyway to hold a convention next to a slaughterhouse?

  He could sense them, smell them, hear them, the poor animals huddled and dying hundreds per hour to feed a prosperous nation. Trucked in as infants, trucked out as parts. He could smell the hogs insane with fear, the hogs hanging from hooks, their stomachs opened in cascades of blood and pig barf. The smell of bright raw ammonia used to clean the addled floors. Creatures in their death-fear releasing cries and stink glands, a terror both audible and olfactible. The chemical breath of a million aborted animal screams, aromatized and blooming into the atmosphere, a sour, meaty vapor.

  The perfume of slaughter is at once nauseating and fascinating. The way the body is tuned to another body’s loss.

  A pile of manure that rose even above the barbed-wire fences, fifteen feet tall, dropped tepee-shaped in a fit of copromania, sitting raw in the sun and cooking. Like some kind of ancient evil bubbling up out of the Pleistocene. An organic mud that tanged the air and locked itself in fabric and hair.

  “What kind of abomination is that?” Triple H asked, pointing at the shit cone. His security men laughed. They were the sons of farmers; he was the son of a pharmacist. His only encounter with this kind of biology came after it was processed and pulverized. He wanted to stuff his nose in his own armpit. The smell was more like a weight than a gas. It felt like the whole moral rot of the world taking shape and form right here, in Chicago.

  “Somebody light a match!” said one of the agents.

  The smell is on him still. The maid says the washroom is ready. Thank god. At this point a shower is more analgesic than anything else.

  10

  FAYE IS IN JAIL roughly nine hours before the ghost appears.

  She is kneeling, hands clasped, facing the far wall where shadows flicker by, and she asks God for help. Says she’ll do anything, anything at all. Please, she says, rocking, whatever you want. And she does this until she feels dizzy and she begs her body to let her sleep, but when she closes her eyes she feels like one big long plucked guitar string, all shaky and furious. And so it’s during this in-between state of being too exhausted to stay awake but too agitated to fall asleep that the ghost appears to her. She opens her eyes and senses a presence nearby and looks around and sees, on the far wall, illuminated by the window’s dull blue light, this creature.

  He looks like, maybe, a gnome. Or a small troll. Actually he looks exactly like the figurine of a house spirit her father gave her so many years ago. The nisse. He is small and round, maybe three feet tall, hairy, white-bearded, fat, caveman-faced. He leans against the wall with his arms crossed and his legs crossed and his eyebrows raised, looking at Faye skeptically, as if he doesn’t believe in her existence rather than the other way around.

  She might have otherwise panicked at this sight, but her body is so tired.

  I’m dreaming, she says.

  So wake up, the house spirit says.

  She tries to wake up. She knows the thing that usually pulls her out of dreaming is the realization that she’s dreaming, which has always frustrated her; dreams, she thinks, are best when you know they’re dreams. Then you can act without consequence. It’s the only time in her life that is worry-free.

  Well? the ghost says.

  You’re not real, she says, even though she has to admit this does not feel like a dream.

  The house spirit shrugs.

  You spend all night praying for help and when help finally arrives, you insult it. That is so typical of you, Faye.

  I’m hallucinating, she says. Because of those pills.

  Look, if I’m not wanted here, if you’ve got this situation under control, then best of luck to you. There are plenty of people out there who would appreciate my help. He points a stubby finger toward the window, the outside world. Listen to them, he says, and just then the big basement room is crashing with sound, the discordant and overlapping voices of people pleading for help, asking for protection, voices young and old, male and female, as if the room were suddenly a radio tower picking up every frequency on the dial all at once, and Faye can hear students asking for protection from the cops, and cops asking for protection from the students, and priests asking for peace, and presidential candidates asking for strength, and snipers hoping they won’t have to pull the trigger, and National Guardsmen staring obliquely at their bayonets asking for courage, and people everywhere offering whatever they can in return for safety: promises that they’ll start going to church more, that they’ll be better people, that they’ll call their parents or children soon, they’ll write more letters, give to charity, be kind to strangers, stop doing whatever bad things they are currently doing, quit smoking, quit drinking, be a better husband or wife, a whole symphony of kindnesses that might result if they are simply spared on this one ugly day.

  Then, just as quickly, the voices turn off, and the basement is silent again, the last noise to fade being the low deep thrum of someone chanting: Ommmm.

  Faye stands and looks at the house spirit, who is himself looking innocently at his own fingernails.

  Do you know who I am? he says.

  You’re my family’s house spirit. Our nisse.

  That’s one word for it.

  What’s another word?

  He looks at her, his eyes black and sinister. All those stories your father told you about ghosts that look like rocks or horses or leaves? Yeah, that’s me. I am the nisse, I am the nix, not to mention various other spirits, creatures, demons, angels, trolls, et cetera.

  I don’t understand.

  No, you wouldn’t, he says, and he yawns. You guys haven’t figured it out yet. Your map is just way off.

  11

  NOW THE GIRLS HAVE SWITCHED from “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” to “Kill the pigs! Kill the pigs!” and the uncles are glued to the television because the girls are full of confidence after their cop-car-tipping success and obviously feel indestructible right now because they taunt the various cops they see along their slow march south yelling “Hey piggy!” and “
Soo-ee!” and stuff like that. And the reason this is unswitchoffable television and why the uncles keep yelling Honey c’mere you’ve got to see this and why they are considering calling all their buddies to make sure they’re watching too is because the police? And the National Guard? They’re waiting for the bitches a couple blocks away. It’s like a trap. They’re to the west of the girls’ route waiting to flank them and drive into them and split open their wedge (ha-ha) and the girls have no idea this is about to happen.

  The uncles know this because of chopper cam.

  And right now they are just about as grateful to chopper cam as they are to their mother on their birthdays. And they wish there were some way they could record for all time what is about to happen and watch the chopper-cam footage over and over and maybe put it in a scrapbook or time capsule or shoot it into space on the back of a satellite to show the Martians or whoever the hell else is out there some pretty goddamn entertaining TV. And the Martians? The first thing they’ll say when they land their flying saucers on the White House lawn? They’ll say, Those girls had it coming.

  About a hundred cops in riot gear wait for the girls, and behind them a platoon of National Guardsmen in gas masks, holding rifles with fucking daggers attached to the barrels, and behind them this monstrous metal thing with nozzles on the front like some kind of terrible Zamboni from the future that the TV folks tell them the purpose of, which is gas. Tear gas. A thousand gallons.

  And they’re waiting behind a building for the girls to come to them, and the uncles feel really present and edgy and almost like they’re with the cops or something, and they think that this moment—even though the uncles are hundreds of miles away from it and all they’re really doing is sitting on a couch watching an electronic box while their food goes cold—might be the best thing that has ever happened to them.

  Because this right here is the future of television: pure combative sensation. Old Cronkite’s problem is he’s treating television like it’s a newspaper, with all of print’s worn-out obligations.

  Chopper cam provides a new way forward.

  Faster, immediate, richly ambiguous—no gatekeepers between the event and the perception of the event. The news and the uncles’ opinion about the news are flattened into a simultaneous happening.

  But the police are on the move now. Nightsticks out, riot helmets down, and running, sprinting, and when the girls understand what is about to happen their big march breaks apart, like a rock exploded by gunshot, pieces of it flying off in every direction. Some girls head back from the direction they came, only to be cut off by a paddy wagon and a squadron of cops who anticipated this very move. Others hop the barrier between northbound and southbound traffic and hightail it toward the lake. For most of the girls, the crowd is so thick there’s nowhere to run. And so they trip over each other and fall and flail like a litter of blind puppies, and these are the ones the police reach first, bringing down their nightsticks on the girls’ legs, the meat of their thighs, their backbones. The cops drop these bitches like they’re mowing tall grass—a quick thrust and the girls bend and fall. From above, this looks like those slides from high-school biology textbooks of the immune system wiping out a foreign agent, surrounding it and neutralizing it in blood. The cops pour into the crowd and everyone gets mixed up together. The uncles see the girls’ mouths moving and they wish they could hear the screams above the rotary noise of the chopper. The cops drag the girls to a paddy wagon mostly by their arms, some by their hair, some by their clothes, which gets the uncles momentarily jazzed up because maybe their hippie dresses will rip and they’ll catch a little skin. Some of these girls are bleeding rivers from their heads. Or dazed, sitting on the road crying, or passed out on the curb.

  Chopper cam looks around for that leader girl, Alice, but she took off south, toward Grant Park, to join with the rest of the hippies down by the Conrad Hilton, presumably. Which is too bad. That would have been fun to watch. The National Guard hasn’t even gotten involved yet. They’re watching and clutching their rifles and looking deadly as hell. The giant tear-gas machine, incidentally, is rumbling slowly south, toward the gathered masses at the park. The girls have for the most part dispersed entirely. A few run away on the lakefront beach, tearing ass across the sand in front of all these stunned families and lifeguards. Chopper cam is now heading south to cover whatever’s going on in the park, and that’s when goddamn CBS cuts back to old Cronkite, who looks all shaken and pale and has clearly been watching the same footage the uncles have been watching but has come to a radically different conclusion.

  “The Chicago police,” he says, “are a bunch of thugs.”

  Well fiddledeedee! How about that for bias? One of the uncles leaps out of his chair and places a long-distance call to CBS headquarters and he doesn’t even mind how much this is costing him because any amount would be worth it to give old Cronkite a piece of his mind.

  12

  OFFICER CHARLIE BROWN, badgeless, anonymous, is sweeping the crowd for Alice, knowing Alice will be here, in this particular all-girl march, and he’s swinging his nightstick and feeling, right now, as he connects with another hippie forehead, like Ernie Banks.

  Like Ernie Banks the instant after he hits another home run ball, and there’s that tiny interval before the crowd cheers, and before he trots the bases, before he even leaves the batter’s box, before anyone can locate the ball in the air and extrapolate its path and understand that it will clear Wrigley’s ivy, there must be this moment when the only person in the park who knows it’s a home run is Ernie Banks himself. Even before he looks up to watch it fly away, there must be a moment when his head is still down looking at the point in space where the baseball was a heartbeat ago, and the only information he has is the information that travels up the bat and into his hands, a percussion that feels just right. As if the ball has offered him no resistance whatsoever, so purely did he strike its exact middle with his bat’s exact middle. And before anything else happens there’s this moment where it’s like he has this secret he’s dying to tell everyone else. He’s just hit a home run! But nobody else knows it yet.

  Brown is thinking about this as he clunks hippies on the head with his nightstick. He’s pretending he’s Ernie Banks.

  Because it’s hard to get a square, solid hit every time. It’s a real challenge of athleticism and coordination. Brown figures three out of every four swings ends up a glancing blow, his nightstick vibrating complainingly. The hippies squirm. They cannot be trusted to stay still for a beating. They are unpredictable. They try to protect themselves with their hands and arms. They twirl away at the last second.

  Roughly three out of four swings are these, he guesses. Misses. He’s batting .250. Not as good as Ernie but still respectable.

  But sometimes things line up. He anticipates the hippie’s movements perfectly: the feel of the stick in his hand, the moist sound of the hippie’s head, that hollow watermelon-thumping sound, and that moment where the hippie suddenly doesn’t know where she is or what’s happening to her, when she literally does not know what just hit her as her brain is up there sloshing around, and soon the hippie will tip over like a rootless tree, topple down and vomit and pass out, and Brown knows this will happen soon but it has not happened yet, and he wishes he could live inside this moment forever. He wants this moment captured in a postcard or snow globe: the hippie about to fall, the triumphant cop above her, his nightstick having clunked the hippie and then kept going in its arc of perfect swinging technique, and the look on his face would be like Ernie Banks after crushing another one to dead center: that giddy and gratifying pleasure of a job well done.

  13

  FAYE IS EXHAUSTED. She hasn’t slept in more than a day. She’s leaning against the wall with her back to the room and trying to keep it all together and she’s just about crying from the effort.

  Help me, she says.

  The house spirit sits on the floor outside her metal cage. He picks at his teeth with a fingernail.

>   I could help you, he says. I could make all this go away. If I felt like it.

  Please, Faye says.

  Okay. Make me a deal. Make it worth my time. Entertain me.

  So Faye promises to be a better person, to help the needy and go to church, but the house spirit only smiles.

  What do I care about the needy? he says. What do I care about church?

  I’ll give money to charity, Faye says. I’ll volunteer and give money to the poor.

  Pbbth, the house spirit says, spit flecking off his lips. You’re gonna have to do better than that. Gonna have to leave some skin on the table.

  I’ll go back home, Faye says. Go to junior college for a couple years and come back to Chicago after all this blows over.

  A couple years at JuCo? That’s it? Seriously, Faye, that’s not nearly enough penance for how badly you’ve acted.

  But what have I done?

  Irrelevant. But if you’d like to know? Disobeyed your parents. Felt pride. Coveted. Thought impure thoughts. Plus, weren’t you planning on having out-of-wedlock relations last evening?

  Faye hangs her head, says yes, because there is no use lying.

  Yes, the answer is yes. Plus you’re high. Right now you are high. Plus you shared a bed with another woman. Do I have to keep going? Do you want to hear more? Do I even need to mention what you did with Henry on the riverbank?

  I give up, she says.

  The house spirit rubs his chin with a fat hand.

  I should forget about this whole thing, she says. Go home and marry Henry.

  The house spirit raises an eyebrow. Go on.

  I’ll marry Henry and make him happy and forget about college and we’ll be normal, like everyone wants.

  The ghost smiles, his teeth ragged and broken, a mouthful of stones.

  Go on, he says.