The Nix

by Nathan Hill

14

  NOW OLD CRONKITE is interviewing the mayor, the fatly jowled and thuggish dictator of Chicago. Cronkite is asking him questions live on the air but really the journalist’s mind is elsewhere. He’s barely paying attention. It doesn’t matter. The mayor is as professional as they come. He doesn’t need a journalist’s questions to hold forth on whatever he wants to talk about, which is currently the extraordinary threats to the police and to ordinary Americans and to our democracy itself posed by outside agitators, the out-of-town radicals causing trouble in his law-abiding town. He really seems to want to stress the “out-of-town” stuff. Probably to emphasize to hometown voters that whatever problems his city is currently having are not his fault.

  And anyway, even if old Cronkite were concentrating real hard and asking penetrating, difficult questions, the mayor would just perform that politician’s maneuver where he doesn’t answer the question you asked but instead the question he wished you had asked. And if you pursue this too much and insist that he did not answer the question, then you’re the one who looks like a jerk. At least that’s how it plays on TV. Badgering this very charismatic fellow who’s been saying lots of words that at least seem related to the question. This is how it seems to the viewers anyway, who are splitting their attention between Cronkite and children running around and cutting the Salisbury steak at the center of their TV dinners. If you keep pestering the politician, you look like a pest, and America does not tune in to watch pests. It’s a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear.

  So he’s ostensibly interviewing the mayor but he knows that his only real job here is to stick a microphone under his mouth so CBS News can seem balanced by providing a counter-narrative to the images of police brutality they’ve been showing for hours. So old Cronkite isn’t really listening. He’s watching, maybe. The way the mayor seems to hold his head as far back on his neck as possible, in the manner of someone avoiding a bad smell, and how this makes the part of his chin that on a rooster would be called a wattle press out and jiggle while he speaks. It is impossible not to stare at this.

  So a bit of old Cronkite’s mind is following this, watching the mayor’s Jell-O face wriggle. But mostly he’s thinking about something else: He’s thinking about, of all things, flying. He imagines he’s a bird. Flying over the city. At a height so great that everything is dark and quiet. This is occupying roughly three-quarters of Walter Cronkite’s mind right now. He’s a bird. He’s a nimble flying bird.

  15

  FAYE IS IN HER DARK BASEMENT CELL cringing in anticipation of another panic attack because the house spirit’s hot breath is right up next to her and he’s holding the chain-link fence and pressing his face against it and his black eyeballs are bugging out and he’s telling her exactly what he’s going to need from her, which is vengeance and retribution.

  But retribution for what?

  She wishes more than anything that her mother were here to stroke her forehead with a cold washcloth and tell her she’s not dying and hold her till she slept, and Faye would wake up in the morning blanketed and warm, her mother beside her having fallen asleep sometime in the night while watching over her.

  Faye could use that tenderness right now.

  Yes, but where was your father when you needed him, the ghost says. Where is he now?

  Faye doesn’t understand.

  Your father is a terrible, evil man. You must know this.

  Yes, I suppose. He kicked me out of the house.

  Oh, it’s all about you, eh? Jeez, Faye. Selfish?

  Okay, then he’s evil why? Because he works at ChemStar?

  C’mon. You know what I’m talking about.

  Faye’s impression of her father is that of a mournful silence. Sometimes staring off into the distance. A man who keeps everything locked up within. Always some slight melancholy, unless he was telling her stories of the old country, stories about his family’s farm, the only subject at which he seemed to brighten.

  Faye says: He did something back home, didn’t he? Before he came to the U.S.

  Bingo, the ghost says. And now he’s being punished for it, and you’re being punished for it. And your family will continue to be punished for it, to the third and fourth generation. Those are the rules.

  That’s not very fair.

  Hah! Fair? What’s fair? How the universe works and your sense of fairness are very different things.

  He’s an unhappy man, Faye says. Whatever he did, he’s sorry for it.

  Is it my fault that just about everyone on earth by now is paying for some evil committed by a previous generation? No. The answer is no. It is not my fault.

  Faye often wondered what passed before her father’s eyes when he stared into the distance, when he stood in the backyard looking into the sky for an hour. He was always so maddeningly vague about his life before America. All he’d talk about was that house, that beautiful salmon-red house in Hammerfest. All other details were forbidden.

  Alice told me something, Faye says. She told me the way to get rid of a ghost is to take it home.

  The house spirit crossed his arms. That would be rich, he said. I would love to see that.

  Maybe I should go to Norway. Take you back where you came from.

  Oh I dare you. I double dare you! That would be seriously entertaining. Go on. Go to Hammerfest and ask about Frank Andresen. See how well that works for you.

  Why? What would I find?

  Probably better if you didn’t know.

  Tell me.

  I’m just saying, there are some mysteries of the universe that ought to remain mysteries.

  Please.

  Fine. Fair warning? You won’t like it.

  I’m listening.

  You will find that you are as awful as your father is.

  That’s not true.

  You will find that you two are exactly alike.

  We are not.

  Go ahead. Try it. Go back to Norway. You’ve got yourself a deal. I’ll let you out of jail right now. And in exchange? You go find out about your dad. Have fun with that.

  And just then the door to the room pops open, and light from buzzing overhead fluorescent lamps spills in, and there appears, in the doorway, remarkably, Sebastian. With his bushy hair and baggy jacket. He sees her and comes to her. He has the keys to her cell. He opens the door and crouches down and takes her in his arms and whispers into her ear: “I’m getting you out of here. Let’s go.”

  16

  BY NOW THE MAYOR is practically lecturing at poor old Cronkite, who looks dispirited and withered and sad. There have been threats, is what the mayor’s saying. Assassination attempts against all of the candidates, bomb threats, even threats against himself, the mayor. Old Cronkite doesn’t seem to be looking at him but at a spot just past him.

  “That true?” asks Agent B——. “About the threats?”

  “Not true,” says Agent A——. “Nothing credible.”

  They’re watching in the Haymarket, on the television above the bar. The mayor is holding old Cronkite’s microphone for him and might as well be interviewing himself. He says, “Certain people planned to assassinate many of the leaders, including myself, and with all of these talks of assassination and it happening in our city I didn’t want what happened in Dallas or what happened in California to happen in Chicago.”

  The Secret Service agents feel bristly at him bringing up the Kennedys like that. They take small, measured sips from their mocktails.

  “He’s lying,” says Agent A——. “Nobody’s trying to assassinate him.”

  “Yeah, but what’s old Cronkite gonna do? Call him a liar on live TV?”

  “Old Cronkite doesn’t seem to have his heart in this one.”

  “Checked out, passion-wise.”

  Quick break fro
m the mayor’s interview to a shot of Michigan Avenue to show what appears to be a real full-size military tank rolling down the street. On television, it looks like something out of World War II footage, like the liberation of Paris. The tank is rolling right in front of the Hilton, and they begin to feel its rumble in their bellies, and the assembled politicos in the Haymarket Bar gather close to the plate-glass windows to watch it rattle hugely by—all save for the two Secret Service agents at the bar, who are not surprised by the fact of the tank (it had been mentioned in the many “eyes only” memos leading up to the event) and anyway the Secret Service always maintain in public an air of unflappability and total discipline and composure, and so they watch the tank roll by on TV, unimpressed.

  17

  FAYE HAS BEEN PRAYING all night for a rescue, but now that a rescuer has come she hears herself telling him no.

  “What do you mean no?” Sebastian says. He’s crouching on the floor with his hands holding her shoulders like at any minute he’s going to shake some sense into her.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind,” she says. Her brain feels fuzzy and swollen. She tries to remember what the house spirit had told her, but already it’s fading. She can remember the sensation of talking to the ghost, but she can no longer remember what he sounds like.

  She looks at Sebastian, at his worried face. She remembers they were supposed to have a date last night.

  “I’m sorry I stood you up,” she says, and Sebastian laughs.

  “Another time,” he says.

  The clenching in her chest is releasing, her shoulders loosening, the bile in her stomach seeping away. It’s as if her whole body is a spring after it’s sprung. She’s relaxing—this is what it feels like to relax.

  “What was I doing when you came in?” she says.

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  “Was I talking to someone? Who was I talking to?”

  “Faye,” he says, putting his palm gently on her cheek. “You were sleeping.”

  18

  ERNIE BANKS PROBABLY FEELS SOMETHING ELSE, too, whenever he hits a home run. Along with the sense of professional mastery, there’s probably this other, uglier feeling—what would you call it? Payback? Retaliation? Because isn’t one reason men are moved to greatness partly the need to respond in a grand way to the people who cut them most deeply? For Ernie Banks, it was the older and bigger boys who said he was too skinny. Or the white boys who wouldn’t let him play. The girls who left him for smarter guys, bigger guys, guys with more money. Or the parents who told him to do something better with his life. The teachers who said he wouldn’t amount to nothing. The beat cops who were leery of him. And because Ernie couldn’t defend himself then, he defends himself now: Each home run is his retort, each sprinting impossible center-field catch part of his ongoing vindication. When he swings his bat and feels that delicious thwack, he must feel a powerful sense of professional satisfaction, yes, but he must also think: I proved you fuckers wrong again.

  So that’s an essential part of it, too. That’s what’s going on in Officer Brown’s head right now. This is, in some ways, a reprisal. This is righteous.

  And he thinks of those nights with Alice, those encounters in the backseat of his police cruiser, and how she wanted him to be violent with her, to shove her around and choke her and grab her roughly and leave marks. And how he felt bashful about it, demure, shy. He didn’t want to do it. Felt himself incapable of it, actually. Felt like it required a different kind of man altogether: someone unthinking and brutal.

  And yet here he is now, clunking hippies on the head. It turns out he had deep reserves of brutality that were, up till now, unprospected.

  In a way, this makes him happy. He’s a fuller and more complicated man than he thought he was. He imagines himself in dialogue with Alice right now. Didn’t think I could do it, did you? he says as he clobbers another hippie. You said you wanted me to be rough, well, here you go.

  And he imagines that for Ernie Banks the best home run is the one when the girls who broke his heart are in the stands to see it. Brown imagines Alice is here watching him, right now, somewhere in the fray, observing his new vitality and strength and brute masculine dominance. She’s impressed. Or she will be, as soon as she sees him and sees that he’s changed, that he’s exactly what she needs him to be now: Of course she’d take him back.

  He clunks a hippie on the jaw, hears that pregnant crunching sound, and there’s screaming all around him and hippies running terrified and one of the other cops grabs Brown by the shoulder and says “Hey buddy, settle down a little” and Officer Brown sees that his own hands are trembling. They’re quaking, actually, and he waves them in the air like they’re wet. He feels ashamed of this and hopes that if Alice is indeed watching him right now she did not see that.

  He thinks: I am Ernie Banks rounding the bases—the very picture of calm, serene delight.

  19

  IT IS REMARKABLE how quickly extraordinary things turn ordinary. By now the patrons of the Haymarket Bar do not even flinch when some thrown projectile strikes the plate-glass windows. Stones, chunks of concrete, even billiard balls—all have made their way through the air, over the heads of the assembled police line, and whacked against the windows of the bar. People inside have stopped noting them. Or if they do note them, they do so condescendingly: “The Cubs could use an arm like that.”

  The cops are generally good at holding the line, but occasionally a wedge of protestors breaks through and a couple of kids get beaten up right in front of the Haymarket windows and dragged to a paddy wagon. This has now happened so many times that the folks in the bar have completely stopped watching it. They ignore it in that strained way they walk by homeless men on the street.

  On the television, the mayor is back with old Cronkite and the latter appears as penitent as ever.

  “I can tell you this,” the journalist says, “you have a lot of supporters around the country.” And the mayor nods like a Roman emperor ordering an execution.

  “It’s your basic jingoistic sucking up,” says Agent A——. “Your basic dezinformatsiya.”

  Outside, a police officer strikes a bearded man wearing the Vietcong flag as a cape, strikes him with his rifle butt right in the middle of the cape, sending the guy sprawling forward like he’s diving into home plate, face-first into the Haymarket’s thick leaded windows with a dull crunch that is eaten up in the bar by Jimmy Dorsey’s sweet, sweet saxophone.

  Old Cronkite is saying, “I have to compliment you, Mr. Mayor, on the genuine friendliness of the Chicago Police Department.”

  Two cops descend on the bearded man at the window and clunk him on the head.

  “That is the look of someone who’s given up,” says Agent A——, pointing at old Cronkite.

  “Put him out of his misery, please,” says Agent B——, nodding.

  “You want to see what a fighter looks like when he knows he’s lost? There it is.”

  The bearded man outside, meanwhile, is dragged away, leaving a smear of blood and grease on the window.

  20

  SAY A SEAGULL, old Cronkite thinks. He recently took in a game at Wrigley and saw how, in the ninth inning, the seagull masses were drawn from the lake to the stadium. The birds were there to clean up the popcorn and peanut scraps left under the seats. Cronkite was amazed at their timing. How did they know it was the ninth inning?

  If you saw the city from this view, seagull-view, way up high, what would it look like? It would be quiet and peaceful. Families in their homes, the blue-gray color of televisions flickering, a single golden light in the kitchen, sidewalks empty but for the occasional stray cat, whole motionless blocks, and he imagines soaring over it and noting that everywhere in Chicago that is not the few acres surrounding the Conrad Hilton Hotel is the most peaceful place in the world right now. And maybe that is the story. Not that thousands are protesting but that millions are not. Mayb
e to achieve the balance CBS is looking for they should take a crew to the northern Polish neighborhoods and western Greek neighborhoods and southern black neighborhoods and film nothing happening. To show how this protest is a pinprick of light in a much larger and gathering darkness.

  Would this make sense to the TV audience? That a thing like a protest expands and draws everything into it. He wants to tell his audience that the reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that’s the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that’s the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that’s Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it’s his job to prevent this closure.

  But how to say it right?

  21

  SEBASTIAN LEADS HER by the hand out of the small makeshift jail and into a completely gray and anonymous cinder-block hallway. A police officer hurries out of a room and Faye jerks back at the sight of him.

  “It’s okay,” says Sebastian. “Come on.”

  The cop walks right by, nodding as he goes. They pass through a set of double doors at the end of the hall and into a space decorated lavishly: plush red carpet, wall sconces emitting a golden glow, white walls with ornate trim that suggests French aristocracy. Faye sees a sign on one of the doors and understands that they’re in the basement of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

  “How did you know I was arrested?” she says.

  He turns to her and flashes a rascally smile. “Grapevine.”

  He takes her through the belly of the hotel, passing police and reporters and hotel staff, all of them hustling to somewhere, all of them looking grim and serious. They reach a set of thick metal exterior doors guarded by two more cops, who nod at Sebastian and allow him to pass. And in this way they are delivered into a loading dock, and then into the alleyway, into the open air. The sound of the protest reaches them here as an indistinct howl that seems to be coming from all directions at once.