The Nix

1

THE CONRAD HILTON ground-floor bar is separated from the street by panes of thick, leaded, plate-glass windows that muffle all but the closest sirens or screams. The Hilton’s front entrance is guarded by a phalanx of police officers, who themselves are being watched over by a great many Secret Service agents, all of whom are making sure anyone coming into the Hilton is registered and unthreatening: delegates, their wives, candidate support staff, the candidates themselves, Eugene McCarthy and the vice president, they’re here, as are some minor artist-type celebrities, Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer being the two that at least a couple of the cops recognize. The bar itself is full of delegates today, and the lights are appropriately low to accommodate the privacy needed to lubricate the political process. Small packs of intense-looking men in booths talk quietly, make promises, trade favors. Everyone has a cigarette and most have martinis and the music is jazz and big-band stuff — think Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey — at a volume great enough to obscure nearby conversations but not so loud that anyone needs to shout. Television over the bar tuned to CBS News. Delegates walking around the bar and seeing friends and slapping hands and backs because roughly the same people come to these things every time. Ceiling fans twirl just fast enough to draw the cigarette mist up and scatter it.

Outsiders to the political process sometimes complain that real decisions happen in dark smoky rooms, and this is one of those rooms.

Two guys at the bar that absolutely no one approaches or fucks with: mirrored sunglasses, black suits, obviously Secret Service, off duty, watching the news and sipping glasses of something clear. The buzz in the room dies down momentarily when a hippie breaks through the police line and sprints down Michigan Avenue and gets himself tackled right outside the plate-glass windows of the bar, and all the patrons inside — everyone but the two Secret Service guys — stop and watch the scene made wavy by the leaded glass as the police officers in their baby-blue uniforms descend on the poor guy and club him on his back and legs while inside the bar nobody can hear a thing except maybe sometimes old Cronkite talking on CBS and Glenn Miller playing “Rhapsody in Blue.”

2

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 haunted 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 in.

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.

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.

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 from 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. Maybe 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.

“Listen,” Sebastian says, cocking his ear to the sky. “Everybody’s here.”

“How did you do that?” Faye says. “We walked right by those cops. Why didn’t they say something? Why didn’t they stop us?”

“You have to promise me,” he says, grabbing her by the arms, “you’ll never mention this. Not to anyone.”

“Tell me how you did it.”

“Promise, Faye. You cannot breathe a word about it. Tell them I bailed you out. That’s it.”

“But you didn’t bail me out. You had a key. How did you have a key?”

“Not a word. I’m trusting you. I did you a favor, and now your favor back to me is to keep this a secret. Okay?”

Faye considers him for a moment, and understands that he is not the single-entendre student radical she had taken him for — he has mysteries; he has layers. She knows something about him no one else does, has power over him no one else can wield. Her heart swells for him: He’s a kindred spirit, she thinks, someone else whose life is hidden and vast.

She nods.

Sebastian smiles and takes her hand and leads her to the end of the alley and into the sun, and as they round the corner she sees the police and the military and the blockade and beyond the blockade, the great teeming mass in the park. No longer shadows on the wall, she sees them now in detail and color: the soft baby-blue police uniforms; the bayonets of the National Guardsmen; the jeeps whose front bumpers are coils of razor wire; the crowd moving as a surging beast presently surrounding and taking over the statue of Ulysses S. Grant opposite the Conrad Hilton, the ten-foot-tall Grant on his ten-foot-tall horse, the crowd climbing up the horse’s bronze legs and onto its neck and rump and head, one brave youth continuing up, climbing Grant himself, standing atop Grant’s huge broad shoulders, teetering but erect, raising his arms in double peace signs above his head in defiance of the police who are right now noticing this and are ambling over to pull him down. This will not end well for him, but the audience cheers anyway, for he is the bravest among them, the tallest thing in the whole park.

Faye and Sebastian slip by the mayhem and into the anonymity of the crowd.

22

OFFICER BROWN CONTINUES to bust heads and around him the cops have removed their badges and name tags. They have pulled the visors of their riot helmets over their faces. They are anonymous. The news is not happy about this development.

Police are beating people with impunity, the journalists say on CBS News. They demand transparency. Accountability. They say the police have removed their badges and hidden their faces because they know what they’re doing is illegal. Comparisons are made to the Soviets rolling into Prague earlier this year, running down and overwhelming the poor Czechs. The Chicago PD is acting like that, the journalists say. It’s Czechoslovakia west. Czechago is a word it does not take long for someone clever to make up.

“In America, the government is accountable to the people, not the other way around,” says a constitutional law scholar sympathetic to the antiwar movement on the subject of the anonymous police.

Officer Brown is whaling away, the most excited among all the cops to really clunk the hippies in vital and deadly places: the skull, the chest, even the face. He was the first to appear minus a badge or a name tag, and all the officers around him have lowered their visors and removed their name tags too, but not because they want to join him in his frenzy. Rather the opposite. They see he’s going a little nuts now and they can’t really stop him and the cameras are clicking away, attracted as they are to any moment of police brutality, and so all the nearby officers tuck away their badges and lower their visors because this fucker is asking to lose his pension, but they sure as shit won’t lose theirs.

23

CRONKITE KNOWS this is his punishment for editorializing. Doing this interview with the mayor and serving up these cream-puff questions. It’s because Cronkite called the Chicago police “a bunch of thugs,” and he did it live, on the air.

Well, that’s what they are! And that’s what he told his producers, who said he’d made a judgment, which was wrong, since it was up to the viewers to decide whether the police were or were not thugs. He countered that he’d made an observation, which is what they paid him for: to observe and report. They said he’d expressed an opinion. He said sometimes an observation is inseparable from an opinion.

This was not convincing to his producers.

But the police were out there cracking open skulls with nightsticks. They were taking off their badges and name tags and lowering the visors on their riot helmets to become faceless and unaccountable. They were beating kids senseless. They were beating members of the press, photographers and reporters, breaking cameras and taking film. They even punched poor Dan Rather right in the solar plexus. What do you call people like that? You call them thugs.

His producers still were not convinced. Cronkite thought the police were beating innocent people. The mayor’s office told them the police were protecting innocent people. Who was right? It reminded him of that old story: A king once asked a group of blind men to describe an elephant. To one of them, he presented the head of the elephant, to another he presented an ear, a tusk, the trunk, the tail, and so on, saying, This is an elephant.

Afterward, the blind men could not agree on what an elephant really looked like. They argued with each other, saying, An elephant is like this, an elephant is not like that! They fought each other with their fists, and the king watched the whole spectacle, and was delighted.

Probably as delighted as the mayor is right now, old Cronkite imagines as he lobs him another softball question about the well-trained and heroic and completely supported by the public Chicago PD. And the gleam in the mayor’s eye is just about the most insufferable thing old Cronkite has ever seen, that sparkle the mayor gets when he’s beaten a worthy opponent. And Cronkite is a worthy opponent indeed. One imagines there were lengthy phone calls between the mayor’s office and the CBS producers, much debating, many threats, some kind of compromise was reached, and thus old Cronkite stands here extolling the virtues of men he called thugs not three hours ago.

You gotta eat a lot of shit in this job sometimes.

24

NEAR THE END of the day, just before sunset, there’s a lull in the trauma. Police hang back sort of stunned and shamefaced. They have stopped raising their nightsticks and raise their bullhorns instead. They ask the protesters to please leave the park. The protestors watch them and wait. The city has the feeling of an injured child. A toddler will knock its head and, after a slight delay during which all the chaotic sense-signals resolve into pain, it begins to wail. The city is inside that delay now, between injury and lamentation, between cause and effect.

The hope is that the lull will persist. This is Allen Ginsberg’s hope, anyway, that once the city gets a taste of this peace it won’t want to fight again. Grant Park is calm now and he’s stopped his chanting and ommmming long enough to move about the beautiful crowd. In his bag he always carries two things: The Tibetan Book of the Dead and a silver Kodak Retina Reflex camera. It’s the Kodak he reaches for right now, the thing he’s used to document all the luminous moments of his life, and this moment is luminous indeed. The gathered protestors all sitting and laughing and singing songs of joy and waving homemade flags with their cleverest slogans hand-painted on them. He wants to make a poem out of it all. His Kodak is a worn-out secondhand thing, but it’s sturdy, its guts still sound. He loves its metal girth in his hand, the black grips rippled like alligator skin, the mechanical gear-noises as he advances the film, even the Made in Germany sticker stamped so confidently on the front. He snaps a photo of the gathered crowd. He walks among them, their bodies parting for him, their faces open to his. And when he sees a familiar face he stops and kneels: one of the student leaders, he remembers. The olive-skinned pretty one. He’s sitting with a pleasant young girl with big round glasses who rests her head on his shoulder, exhausted.

Faye and Sebastian. They lean against each other like lovers. Alice sits behind them. Ginsberg raises his camera to his eye.

The young man gives him a wry, sidelong smile that just about breaks his heart. The shutter clicks. Ginsberg stands and smiles sadly. He moves on, swallowed by the vast crowd, the incandescent day.

25

THE POET WALKS AWAY and Alice taps Faye on the shoulder and winks at her and says, “So did you two have a good time last night?”

Because of course Alice doesn’t know what happened.

And so Faye explains to her about the mysterious cop who arrested her and the night she spent in jail, how Faye doesn’t even know the cop’s name or what she did to deserve all that, how the cop told her to vacate Chicago immediately, and Alice is stricken because she knows right away it’s Officer Brown. Of course it’s him.

But she can’t tell Faye. Not right now. How could she possibly admit in the middle of this crowd of protestors throwing angry insults at the police that she’d been having a pretty passionate love affair with one of these very cops? There’s no way.

Alice hugs Faye tightly. “I’m sorry,” she says. “But don’t worry. Everything will be all right. You aren’t going anywhere. I’ll stick by you, no matter what.”

And that’s when the police gather on the edges of the park and announce via bullhorns: You have ten minutes to clear this area.

Which is a laughable request, because there’s like ten thousand people here.

“Do they really expect us all to leave?” Alice asks.

“Probably not,” Sebastian says.

“What are they gonna do?” Faye says, looking around at the great stubborn mass of humanity occupying the park. “Move us all by force?”

Turns out, this is exactly what they’re going to do.

It begins with a soft pop of compressed air, a gentle-sounding and almost musical burst as a canister of tear gas is launched into the park. And for those who watch it come, there’s a strange delay between seeing it and understanding what it means. It soars in its parabola up into a sky far too pretty to accommodate it, and it seems to hang in the air above them for a split second, a North Star to some of them, their compasses now pointing at this thing, this strange new flying fact, which then begins its descent, and the yelling and the screaming begin roughly now as the people in the projectile’s landing zone start to accept what is coming right at them and understand this is the de facto end of their sit-in. The canister is already leaking its contents, leaving this tail of orange gas, a comet on a collision course. And when it lands it thuds into the grass like a golf ball and kicks up the turf and ignites. It spins and spews jets of toxic smoke as more little pops are heard coming from the direction of the Conrad Hilton and one or two more flying bombs come hurtling into the crowd, and this is how fast relative peace and order can fall into madness. The crowd starts running and the police start running and almost everybody in the park is simultaneously crying. It’s the gas. The way it attacks your eyes and throat. How it feels like burning oil splattered right into your pupil, the way you can’t keep your red swollen eyes open without the pain, no matter how much you rub them. And the coughing as sudden and urgent as drowning, that reflexive hacking that bypasses all willpower. People are crying and spitting and running anywhere there is not gas, which presents a basic problem of volume: The gas was fired — purposefully or accidentally, it’s not known — so that it landed behind most of the crowd, which means the only way to avoid the misery of the gas is to run the other way, in the direction of Michigan Avenue and the Conrad Hilton and the vast police blockades, and so the volume problem is that there are way more people wanting to be on Michigan Avenue than there is currently space on Michigan Avenue for these people.

It’s your unstoppable force meeting its immovable object, the body mass of ten thousand protestors running headlong into the teeth of the Chicago PD.

And Sebastian with them, towing Faye by the hand. And Alice watches them and understands this is exactly the wrong way to go, that the only direction where there are no police is back into the tear gas itself, the cloud that hugs the ground like an orange fog. She calls out to them to stop, but her voice — raw and ragged from the earlier chanting and now blown to bits by the gas — cannot be heard above the roar and screams of the crowd, all of them running, bouncing into one another, scattering. She watches Sebastian and Faye as the crowd collapses around them and she loses them in the mass. She wants to go after them, but something holds her back. Fear, probably. Fear of the police, one of them in particular.

She will go to the dorm and wait for Faye, she decides. And if Faye doesn’t come back she’ll stop at nothing to find her, which is a comfortable lie she tells herself to get out of the immediate situation. She will, in fact, never see Faye again. She doesn’t know this yet, but she senses it, and she stops running. She turns back toward the protest, the park. And at that moment Faye is tugging on Sebastian’s arm because Alice isn’t with them. Faye stops and turns around. She looks back at where they came from. She hopes Alice’s face will pop out of the chaos, but between the two of them is an orange cloud of gas. It might as well be a concrete wall, or a continent.

“We need to go,” says Sebastian.

“Wait,” says Faye.

Faces fly by her, none of them Alice’s. People clip her shoulders, dodge her, keep running.

Alice is on the other side of the gas now. She can see the lake. She runs to it and splashes her face to calm the sting of the gas, and she slinks northward along the shore, where to avoid drawing attention to herself she ditches her favorite sunglasses and army jacket in the sand and pulls her hair back and tries to look for all intents and purposes like a normal bourgeois law-abiding kid, and this effectively puts an end to her protest career forever.

“We need to go now,” says Sebastian.

And so Faye agrees, for Alice is gone.

26

HUBERT H. HUMPHREY in the top-floor presidential suite shower digs under his fingernails with the hotel’s complimentary bar of Dove soap, which during his lengthy shower has slivered down from its original kidney-shaped girth.

The agents keep popping their heads in: “You okay in there Mr. Vice President sir?”

He understands there’s much to do and little time to do it and taking a ninety-minute shower was not exactly on his campaign manager’s itinerary. Still, he would have been worthless had he not gotten that stink off.

His fingers are beyond pruned and into this supersaturated territory where his skin looks like an afghan draped loosely over his actual skin. The mirror is opaque and slate gray by now in the humid, dense air.

“Yes, I’m fine,” he tells the agent.

Only he’s not fine, he realizes, as he speaks. Because there’s a sudden tickle in his throat, a slight scratchy pain behind his Adam’s apple. He hasn’t spoken in an hour and a half and now that he’s spoken he feels it, that first leading edge of illness. He tests his throat — his precious and golden throat, his vocal cords and lungs, these bits of him that are all he has to give as he addresses the country and accepts the nomination for president in a few days’ time — he verbalizes a few notes, just a little solfège, a little do, re, mi. And sure enough he feels it, that spike of pain, that friction burn, that swelling on the soft palate.

Oh no.

He turns the water off and towels himself dry and robes up and crashes into the suite’s main conference area and announces that he needs vitamin C right now.

When the group looks at him funny, he announces “I may have a sore throat” with the kind of gravity a doctor might use to say The tumor is malignant.

The agents look at each other uncomfortably. A few of them cough. One of them steps forward and says, “Probably not a sore throat, sir.”

“How would you know?” Triple H says. “I need vitamin C, and I need it right this goddamn second.”

“Sir, it’s probably the tear gas, Mr. Vice President sir.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tear gas, sir. Your typical motivational weapon, sir, used to disperse crowds nonviolently. Irritating to the eyes, nose, mouth, and, yes, certainly sir, the throat and lungs.”

“Tear gas.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In my hotel suite.”

“It came from the park, sir. The police are using it on the demonstrators. And today, you see, we’ve got an easterly wind—”

“At about twelve knots,” adds another agent.

“Agreed, yes, thank you, a sturdy wind that pushed the gas back across Michigan Avenue and into the hotel and even, yes, up to the top floor. Our floor. Sir.”

Triple H can now feel his eyes watering and burning, that feeling like when you’re standing over chopped onions. He walks to the suite’s large front windows and looks out at the park, which is a chaos of running, terrified youths and pursuing cops and clouds of orange gas.

“The police did this?” he says.

“Yes, sir.”

“But don’t they know I’m up here?”

And this is almost the breaking point for poor Hubert H. This was supposed to be his convention, his moment. Why did this have to happen? Why does it always have to turn out like this? And suddenly he’s eight years old again back in South Dakota and Tommy Skrumpf is ruining his birthday party by having an epileptic fit right there on the kitchen floor, and the doctors take Tommy away and the parents take their kids home still carrying the unopened presents that were supposed to be Hubert’s, and a small ungenerous part of him broke open that night and he wept not that Tommy might die but wishing that he would. And then he’s nineteen years old and he’s just finished his first year at college, and he got good marks and he likes it, college, he’s good at it, and he’s made friends and found a girl and his life is finally shaping up and that’s when his parents tell him to come home because they’re out of money. So he comes home. And then it’s 1948 and he’s just been elected to the United States Senate for the first time and at that moment his father up and dies. And now here he is about to be nominated for president, and all around him is fighting and tear gas and butchers and shit and death.

Why does this always happen? Why does he have to pay for any triumph with sadness and blood? All his victories end in sorrow. In some ways, he’s still that disappointed eight-year-old thinking bad things about Tommy Skrumpf. He feels the sting of that day all the way to his marrow, still.

Why do the best things in life leave such deep scars?

Which is exactly the kind of self-destructive, negative-type thinking the management consultants were brought in to fix. He repeats his confidence mantras. I’m a winner. He cancels the order for the vitamin C. He gets dressed. Gets back to work. Sic transit gloria mundi.

27

OLD CRONKITE LISTING to his right, leaning on his desk in a manner that plays on TV as serious contemplation and the strong-willed constitution of a man whose job it is to deliver bad news to the country, leaning like this and cocking his head and staring into the camera with a pained look on his face, a kind of father’s this-is-going-to-hurt-me-more-than-it’s-going-to-hurt-you look, and saying, “The Democratic convention is about to begin”—then a long dramatic pause here for this next part to really sink in—“in a police state.”

Then adding “There just doesn’t seem to be any other way to say it” for the benefit of his producers, who he can imagine are right now shaking their heads in the control van at his blatant editorializing, again.

But something needs to be said for the benefit of the viewers who are at home and plainly not getting it. The CBS switchboard has been going nuts all day. The most calls they’d gotten since King was shot. Well sure, Cronkite said, people are mad, the police are out of control.

Yes, people are mad, his producers told him, but not mad at the police. They’re mad at the kids, they said. They’re blaming the kids. They’re saying the kids are getting what they deserve.

And it’s true that certain protestors are not entirely, let’s say, easy to like. They try to offend your sensibilities. They try to push your buttons. They are unkempt, unclean. But they are only a tiny part of the mass gathered right now outside the Hilton. Most of the kids out there look like normal kids, anybody’s kids. Maybe they’d gotten themselves into something they didn’t understand, swept up in something larger. But they aren’t criminals. They aren’t deviants. They aren’t radicals or hippies. They probably just don’t want to be drafted. They are probably just sincerely against the Vietnam War. And, by the way, who isn’t these days?

But it turns out that for every poor kid shown getting his head drubbed by a nightstick, CBS gets ten phone calls in support of the cop who held the stick. Reporters got gassed in the street and then came back to HQ to find a telegram from a thousand miles away saying the reporters didn’t understand what was really happening in Chicago. As soon as he heard this, old Cronkite knew he’d failed. They’d been covering the radicals and the hippies so much that now his viewers couldn’t see past them. The gray areas had ceased to exist. And old Cronkite had two thoughts about this. First, anyone who thinks television can bring the nation together to have a real dialogue and begin to understand one another with empathy and compassion is suffering a great delusion. And second, Nixon is definitely going to win this thing.

28

IT IS BAD PLANNING on the part of the police to demand that protestors leave the park but give them no obvious way to do so. It is no longer legal to assemble in the park, but it is also illegal to cross a police barricade, and the park is barricaded on all sides. So it’s your classic double bind. Actually, the only place not barricaded is a spot on the eastern edge of the park, by the lake, exactly where the tear gas landed, stupidly. So here they come, the protestors, because they have no other choice; there’s nowhere else to go. The first of them flow onto Michigan Avenue and into the walls of the Conrad Hilton like runaway waves. They splash onto the concrete and brick and they’re pinned there as the police recognize that something has shifted in the rhetoric of the day. The stakes have changed. The protestors — with their numbers and their new desperation — now have the upper hand. And so the police push back, crush them into the walls of the hotel, and swing away.

Sebastian and Faye are in there somewhere. He’s squeezing her hand so hard it hurts, but she doesn’t dare let go. She feels herself caught in this moving human river and pressed at all sides and sometimes even lifted off her feet for a moment and carried, a sensation like swimming or floating, before being dropped again, and the thing she’s thinking about most right now is keeping her balance, staying on her feet, because these people are panicked and this is what ten thousand panicked people look like: like wild animals, huge and insensate. If she falls she’ll be trampled. The terror she feels about this goes way beyond terror and into a kind of calm clarity. This is life or death. She squeezes Sebastian’s hand harder.

People run with handkerchiefs on their faces, or with their shirts wrapped around their mouths. They cannot stand the gas. They cannot stay in the park. And yet it’s becoming clear to them now that this was a mistake too, going this way, because as they get closer to the safety of the dark city beyond Michigan Avenue, the spaces they can fill are getting smaller and smaller. They are being funneled by heavy equipment and fencing and barbed wire and lines of cops and National Guardsmen thirty deep. And Sebastian tries to get to the Hilton’s front doors but the crowd is too thick, the current too strong, and so they end up off target, carried to the side of the building instead, and up against the plate-glass windows of the Haymarket Bar.

That’s where Officer Brown sees them.

He’s been watching the crowd, looking for Alice. He’s standing atop the back bumper of a U.S. Army troop carrier, several feet above everyone else, looking at the crowd, the baby-blue helmets of the Chicago PD, en masse, like a colony of agitated poisonous mushrooms, it looks like, from up here. And then suddenly a face pops out of the crowd, over by the bar, a woman’s face, and he feels a surge of optimism that it’s Alice, because it’s the first time all day he’s had any flash of familiarity, and the film that’s been running in his head — that Alice sees him clubbing hippies and thus recognizes him for the brutal man she’s always wanted him to be — starts running again until the face resolves itself and he realizes with crashing disappointment that it’s not Alice he’s seeing, it’s Faye.

Faye! The girl he arrested just last night. Who should be in jail right this moment. Who is the very reason Alice left him.

Fucking bitch.

He leaps into the crowd and unholsters his club. He presses forward, shoves his way toward the plate-glass window Faye is trapped against. Between him and her are several lines of cops and a mass of stinking hippies trapped and flapping like tuna in a net. He shoulders his way through the crowd, saying, “Coming through! From behind!” And the cops are glad to let him go because that’s one more guy between them and the front line. And he’s getting closer to the boundary between the cops and the protestors, a boundary visible by the nightsticks in the air coming down fast like a typewriter getting all jammed up in itself. The closer he gets, the harder it is to move. Everything seems to heave, like they are all part of one great, sick animal.

And at that moment a squad of National Guardsmen — one of them carrying an actual flamethrower, though, thankfully, not using it — carves through the protestors on Michigan Avenue, effectively flanking them, cutting them off from the rest of the herd, and so this small group by the Conrad Hilton finds itself trapped: police on one side, National Guard on the other, hotel walls behind them.

There is nowhere for them to go.

Faye is crushed against the plate-glass window, her shoulder pressed hard into it. Any harder, she thinks, and it’ll pop, the shoulder. She’s looking into the Haymarket Bar, through the window that seems to wobble and creak, and she sees two men in suits and black ties staring back at her. They sip their drinks. They seem to have no expression at all. Around her, protestors squirm and duck for cover. They get clubbed in the head, get jabbed in the ribs with the blunt end of a nightstick, and as they go down they are dragged to paddy wagons, which seems to Faye preferable. Between a knock to the head and going to the paddy wagon, she’ll take the wagon. But she can’t even turn here, much less go to the ground, such is the tightness of the bodies pressing into her. She’s losing hold of Sebastian’s hand. There’s someone between them now, another protestor between Faye and Sebastian doing exactly what they’re doing, which is to say trying to flee, putting off the beating as long as possible. This is simple and irrational survival kicking in. There’s nowhere to flee, yet they flee anyway. And Faye has to make a choice right now because if she keeps holding on to Sebastian’s hand like this, her elbow might break where this guy is pressing into it. Plus she’s such an easy target like this, her back to the cops. If she turned around maybe she’d be able to duck out of the way of their wild swinging. So she makes the decision. She lets go of Sebastian’s hand. She lets his sweaty fingers slide away, and as she does so she feels him grasping for her harder, really clamping down, but it’s no use. She’s free. Her arm snaps back to her and the man between them collapses into the plate-glass window — which trembles at the impact, and sounds a sharp crack like boots on ice — and she turns around.

The first thing she sees is the cop bearing down on her.

They lock eyes. It’s the cop from last night, who arrested her at the dorm. His is the first face she sees in that way someone’s face seems more illuminated when they’re staring right at you. That face, that awful man who last night wouldn’t look at her as she cried in the backseat of his police cruiser and she pleaded with him and urged him to let her go and she stared at his reflection in the rearview mirror and he didn’t say anything except, “You are a whore.”

And how he found her again, here, now.

His face is psychotically calm. He swings his club quickly and emotionlessly. He looks like someone out trimming the grass, feeling nothing about it except that it needs to be done. And she looks at his big brutal body and the strength with which he swings his nightstick, its speed as it dashes into heads and ribs and limbs, and she knows her plan to avoid a police beating by athletically dodging it was both naïve and impossible. This man can do whatever he wants. She can’t stop him. She is powerless. He is coming.

And what she does here is try to get really small. It’s the only thing she can think of. To become the smallest target she can. She tries to shrink into herself, draw in her arms and duck her head and bend at the knees and waist to get below the level of the people in front of her.

A posture of supplication, it feels like. All her alarm bells are going off, and she feels the panic attack starting as it always does, with that iron weight in her chest like she’s being squeezed from the inside. She thinks Please not now as the cop continues to punish whoever happens to interrupt his path to Faye. And the protestors yell “Peace!” or “I’m not resisting!” and they hold up their hands, palms out, surrendering, but the cop clobbers them anyway, in the head, the neck, the belly. He’s so close now. Only one person stands between him and Faye, a young wiry man with a big beard and camo jacket who is very quickly getting the message and trying his best to squirm away, and Faye’s lungs are locking up and she’s feeling that head-rush dizziness that makes her all trembly and unsteady, and her skin feels cold and wet, and the sweat erupts out of her, so quickly is her forehead damp, while her mouth is chalk-dry and gummy so that she can’t even tell the cop not to do whatever he’s going to do — all this happening as she watches him shove aside the camo-jacket guy and press into the crowd so that he’s within range of Faye, and he’s trying to angle his body so he can get to her, trying to raise his weapon in all that human chaos, when from behind them they all hear two pops, two light pops that sound like someone’s hand beating the open end of an empty bottle. And before today a sound like that would have had no meaning, but now the protestors are all veterans at this and they know: that sound means tear gas. Someone behind them has fired more tear gas. And the crowd reacts to this — the sound and then the inevitable smoke cloud that erupts a second later — predictably: They panic and surge away from it, a wave of bodies that reaches Faye just as the cop lunges for her, and all of them at the same time crash into the plate-glass window together.

This, finally, proves too much for the window to bear. This is well beyond its tolerances.

The window doesn’t even really crack so much as explode sharply everywhere all at once. And Faye and the cop and the great rush of protestors pushing themselves against it all collapse and tumble backward into the people and smoke and music of the Haymarket Bar.

29

THE DAY HAS THUS FAR BEEN so unusual that it takes a moment for the patrons of the Haymarket Bar to recognize something has happened that is even more unusual. The plate-glass window shatters and in tumble protestors and cops and great sharp shards of glass, and for a moment they simply watch this happening as if they’re watching the television above the bar. They are mildly fascinated. They feel drawn to it, yet also separate from it. They are spectators, not participants.

So for a few moments as the protestors and cops all wrestle around regaining their lost balance in this scrum of humanity on the black-and-white-tiled Haymarket floor, people in the bar watch with a passive interest, like: Wow.

Neat.

Wonder what’ll happen next?

What happens next is that the tear gas leaks in and the cops get extremely pissed off and pile through the new opening in the side of the bar and sprint from the lobby because the thing that was never supposed to happen in Chicago has now happened: The delegates and the protestors are in the same room, together.

Their orders were very clear on this point: The delegates were to be met at the airport, right as they stepped off the plane, taken in police cars to the Hilton, taken in big buses with military-grade escorts to the amphitheater and back — shielded, bubbled, cut off from the hippies because the hippies are trying to disrupt and threaten our democracy, which is what the mayor said every day in the newspapers and on television. (The protest leaders’ responses that a democracy has ceased to be democratic when its representatives must be shielded from the people they represent went for the most part unreported and for sure unanswered by the mayor or his press office.)

Anyway, here they come, the police, red-faced and running, moving as quickly as allowed by jangling heavy utility belts full of weapons. And this is about the time that things get very real for the patrons of the Haymarket Bar. Coughing and crying suddenly because of the gas, clipped by running police or errant billy clubs, they realize they are not really spectators to this event; they are now part of it. This is how quickly the reality outside the bar penetrates and obliterates the reality inside the bar: with a simple pop of glass. The bar is now an extension of the street.

The front lines have shifted.

How long, they wonder, before the lines shift further? How long before their hotel rooms are at risk? Their own homes? Their families? For many of them, the protest was mild street theater until this moment, when they themselves are getting gassed. They think of bricks perhaps someday flying through their own windows, or they think of their daughters growing up and getting seduced by bearded long-haired smoke-smelling men, and even the most pro — peace plank among them stand back and let the cops do their brutal work.

So it’s all chaos, in other words. Chaos and panic. Faye lands hard on her side and under several other bodies all clacking heads and jaws together and she’s seeing stars and fighting to regain the wind that was knocked from her when she landed on the floor. She tries to focus on little things, to see through the green-purple starry screen of her vision to the checkered floor, the bits and chunks of glass around her, some sliding like hockey pucks as they’re kicked and battered by the melee now occupying the bar. It all feels very far away. She blinks. She shakes her head. She sees the feet of police as they run toward her, the feet of patrons as they run away. She runs her fingers over her own forehead and feels a lump the size of a walnut growing there. She remembers the cop who was a moment ago coming after her, and sees him lying faceup, halfway in the bar and halfway out.

30

HE’S NOT MOVING. He stares straight up. What he’s seeing is the jagged edge of the plate-glass window — what’s left of it — about eight feet above him, an equator in his field of vision. North of it is the tin ceiling of the Haymarket Bar. South, the sky, a hazy vaporous dusk. When he fell, he twisted and turned and crashed down backward and felt a bolt of pain at the landing. He’s lying perfectly still and thinking about what he feels now. Nothing, is what he feels.

Around him, police jump through the broken window and into the bar. He feels like he needs to tell one of them something, though he doesn’t know what. Just that something doesn’t feel right here. And he doesn’t understand what’s going on but he senses that it’s important — more important than the delegates or the hippies or the bar. He tries to speak to them as they leap around him, over him. His voice comes out small and thin. He says “Wait,” but none of them do. They crash into the bar, where they yank hippies off the floor and eject them onto the street, where they club the hippies and maybe even a few delegates too because it’s dark in there and hard to tell the difference when you’re swinging like that.

31

SEBASTIAN HAS GOTTEN to his feet and finds Faye on the floor and yanks her up by the arm. She’s feeling light-headed, queasy, she would like nothing better than to sit down at one of the Haymarket’s comfortable-looking plush booths and sip some tea with honey and then maybe sleep — oh my god how she wants to sleep, even now, right here at the violent center of the world. She’s still seeing stars. She must have hit her head pretty good.

Sebastian pulls her and she is compliant. She lets herself be pulled. Not toward the front door, where several of the other protestors are running, and not back out onto the street, but deeper into the bar, back to the farthest corner, where there’s a pay phone and a pair of bathrooms and one of those silver swinging doors with the round window that leads into the kitchen. This is where they go, into the Hilton’s industrial kitchen, which is currently enfrenzied with room-service orders — the guests at the hotel being terrified to leave the grounds and so getting all their meals on-site, delivered — and dozens of white-aproned, white-hatted men stand over griddles that crackle with porterhouse steaks and filet mignon, over sandwich stations building hoagies of improbable height, over table services polishing wineglasses to a perfect smudgeless clarity. They see Sebastian and Faye and they don’t say a word. They keep on working. Not their problem.

Sebastian ushers her through the loud and busy kitchen, all the way past the grills with leaping fire and burners cooking sauces and pastas, past the dishwashing station and the dishwasher himself, his face in a cloud of steam, and beyond to the back door, through the door and into the trash area, the dumpster with its sharp sour-milk and old-chicken smells, and beyond that into the alley, away from Michigan Avenue, away from the noise and tear gas, and away, finally, from the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

32

OFFICER BROWN IS STILL on his back in the broken window well of the Haymarket Bar and he’s beginning to understand that he cannot feel his legs. He fell and he landed on something sharp and felt a stabbing pain near his kidney and now he feels nothing. A spreading chill, a numbness. He tries to stand but cannot. He closes his eyes and he swears he’s trapped under a car. That’s how it feels. But when he opens his eyes again there is nothing visibly trapping him.

“Help,” he says to no one, to the air, at first quietly but then with more urgency: “Help!”

The bar has been cleared of hippies by now, and the guests have all retreated to their rooms. The only people who remain in the bar are two Secret Service agents, who amble up to him now and say “What seems to be the problem, officer?” with a kind of lighthearted chumminess that disappears as soon as they try to help him get up and can’t and their hands come away bloodied.

At first Brown thinks they’ve injured themselves on the broken glass beneath him. Then he realizes the blood is not theirs. That’s his blood. He’s bleeding. He’s bleeding a lot.

But he can’t be bleeding.

Because nothing hurts.

“I’m okay,” he says to the one agent who has sat down next to him, one hand pressing firmly on Brown’s chest.

“Sure thing, buddy. You’re gonna be fine.”

“Really. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Uh-huh. You stay right where you are and don’t move. We’re getting you some help.”

And Brown notices the other agent now speaking into a walkie-talkie about an officer down, send an ambulance immediately, and it’s the way he says the word immediately that makes Brown squeeze his eyes shut and say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” not to the agent above him but to God. Or the universe. Or whatever karmic powers are out there right now deciding his fate. He apologizes to all of them — for his encounters with Alice, for cheating on his wife, for cheating on his wife in such an ugly way, in the dark, in alleyways, in his car, he’s sorry he didn’t have the will to stop it, nor the discipline, the self-control, he’s sorry for this, and sorry that he’s repenting only now, after it’s too late, and he’s aware of the spreading coldness in his lower half and he senses (though he cannot feel) the sharp shard of plate-glass window currently penetrating his spinal cord, and he’s not sure what exactly has happened to him but feels that whatever it is, he is sorry — that it happened, that he deserved it.

33

CHURCHES ACROSS CHICAGO have opened their sanctuaries, as sanctuaries. Youths arrive teargassed and beaten. They are given water, a meal, a cot. After the violence of the day, some of them almost weep at these small kindnesses. Outside, the riot has splintered, broken down into fragmented fighting and scuffles in the street, a few cops chasing kids into bars and restaurants, into and out of the park. It’s not safe to be out there right now, and so youths show up in ragged pairs at places like this: old St. Peter’s on Madison Street downtown. They don’t even gossip with the other protestors, all of them having endured roughly the same day. They sit penitently. Priests give them bowls of warmed canned soup and they say “Thank you, Father” and they really mean it. The priests give them warm washcloths for their eyes, red from the gas.

Faye and Sebastian sit in the front pew quiet and uncomfortable because there’s so much to say and they don’t know how to say it. They stare at the front altar instead, the elaborately inscribed stone-and-wood altarpiece of St. Peter’s in the Loop: stone angels and stone saints and a stone Jesus hanging on a concrete cross, his head looking straight down, two stone disciples below him, just under his armpits, one looking up at him with a face of anguish, the other looking at his own feet, ashamed.

Faye touches the lump on her head. It has stopped hurting, for the most part, and now feels simply fascinating, this strange alien growth, this hard marble under her skin. Maybe if she plays with this thing she can resist asking the questions she is dying to ask, questions that have begun forming these last twenty minutes, as they’ve sat here, out of danger now, as she’s collected her thoughts and begun looking at the evening rationally and logically, these questions have settled upon her.

“Faye, listen—” says Sebastian.

“Who are you really?” she says, because she cannot resist asking, no matter how fascinating her bump feels.

Sebastian smiles a sad smile. He looks at his shoes. “Yeah. About that.”

“You knew your way around those buildings,” Faye says. “How did you know that? And that key. You had the key to my cell. And how did you know those cops in the basement? What is going on?”

Sebastian sits there like a child being scolded. It’s like he can’t even bear to look at her.

Behind them, Allen Ginsberg has now found his way to this church. He walks quietly in and goes from tired body to tired body blessing people in their sleep and placing his hand on the heads of the conscious and saying Hare Rama, Hare Krishna and shaking his head the way he does, so his beard looks like a tight shivering mammal.

A month ago, a Ginsberg appearance would have drawn a lot of attention. Now he’s become part of the scenery of the protest, one of the protest’s many colors. He walks around and the kids give him weary, exhausted smiles. He blesses them and moves on.

“Are you working for the police?” Faye asks.

“No. I’m not,” Sebastian says. He leans forward, clasps his hands as if in prayer. “More like with the police. It’s nothing official. Actually I’m not even working with them. It’s more like we work alongside each other. We have a certain understanding. A certain accommodating relationship. We both understand a few simple facts.”

“Which are what?”

“Primarily, that we need each other.”

“You and the police.”

“Yes. The police need me. The police love me.”

“What happened out there today,” Faye says, “did not look like love.”

“I provide heat. Drama. The police want reasons to crack down on the radical left. I supply those reasons. I print that we’re going to kidnap delegates or spike the drinking water or bomb the amphitheater and it makes us look like terrorists. Which is exactly what the police want.”

“So they can do what they did tonight. Gas us and beat us up.”

“In front of the TV cameras, with people cheering them on at home. Yes.”

Faye shakes her head. “But why help them? Why encourage all this…”—she waves her hand around at the bloodied youths now occupying the sancuary—“all this madness, this violence?”

“Because the more the police crack down,” Sebastian says, “the stronger our side looks.”

“Our side.”

“The protest movement,” he says. “The more the cops beat us up, the more our argument seems correct.” He leans back into the pew and stares blankly forward. “It’s actually pretty brilliant. The protestors and the police, the progressives and the authoritarians — they require each other, they create each other, because they need an opponent to demonize. The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.”

Behind them, Ginsberg is walking up and down the many pews of St. Peter’s, quietly blessing those who are sleeping there. Faye can hear his monotonous voice singing Hindu songs of praise. She and Sebastian stare at the altarpiece, the saints and angels in stone. She does not know what to think about him. She feels betrayed, or maybe more accurately she feels like she should feel betrayed — she has never thought of herself as part of Sebastian’s movement, but there are many people who do, and so she tries to feel betrayed on their behalf.

“Faye, listen,” Sebastian says. He puts his elbows on his knees, breathes heavily and looks at the floor. “That’s not entirely the truth. The truth is, I couldn’t go to Vietnam.”

The lights in the sanctuary are dimming now, the trickle of protestors through the front doors has stopped. All over, people fall asleep in twos and threes and fours. Soon the church is lit only by candles on the altar, a soft orange glow.

“I told everyone I was in India this summer,” Sebastian says. “But I wasn’t. I was in Georgia. At boot camp. They were going to send me to Vietnam until a guy came offering this deal. An official at the mayor’s office, who could pull some serious strings. He said print these certain kinds of stories and we’ll get you out of the army. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to war. So I took the deal.”

He looks at Faye, his face pinched. “I’m sure you hate me now,” he says.

And, yes, maybe she should hate him, but she feels herself softening to him instead. They are, she realizes, not that unalike.

“My dad works at ChemStar,” she says. “Half the money that sent me to college came from making napalm. So I guess I’m in no position to judge.”

He nods. “We do what we have to do, right?”

“I probably would have taken the deal too,” Faye says.

They stare at the altar until a thought crosses Faye’s mind: “So when you said you saw my maarr?”

“Yes?”

“You said you learned that word from Tibetan monks.”

“Yes.”

“While you were in India. But you weren’t in India.”

“I read about that in National Geographic. It wasn’t Tibetan monks. I think the article was about an aboriginal tribe in Australia, now that I think about it.”

“What else have you lied to me about?” Faye says. “How about our date? Did you ever really want to go on our date?”

“Definitely,” he says, smiling. “That was the real me. I really wanted that. Promise.”

She nods. Then shrugs. “How would I know?”

“But there’s one thing, actually, one more little lie.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not technically a lie I told you, per se. More like a generalized lie I told everyone.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Sebastian is not my real name. I made that up.”

Faye laughs. She can’t help it. The day has been so ridiculous that it seems proper to add one more lunacy on top of it. “This is what you think of as a little lie?” she says.

“Call it a nom de guerre. I took it from Saint Sebastian. You know, the martyr? The police needed someone into whom they could shoot their arrows. I supplied that target. I thought it was apt. You don’t even want to know my real name.”

“No, I don’t,” Faye says. “Not yet. Not right now.”

“Let’s just say it’s not a name that would rally the troops.”

Ginsberg has reached them now. He’s crisscrossed the entire sanctuary, gone up and down all the pews, and he finally comes to them. He stands before them and nods. They nod back. The church is so quiet, all noise coming from the poet himself, his metal necklaces scratching and banging together, his murmurs and blessings. He places a hand on their heads, a soft warm hand, a gentle touch. He closes his eyes and whispers something incomprehensible, like he’s casting a secret spell on them. When he stops he opens his eyes and removes his hands.

“I just married you,” he tells them. “Now you’re married.”

Then he shuffles off, humming quietly to himself.

34

“PLEASE DON’T TELL ANYONE what I’ve told you,” says the man she knows as Sebastian.

“I won’t,” she says, and she knows this is a promise she can keep, because she’s never going to see any of these people again. She will, as of tomorrow, no longer live in Chicago, no longer study at Circle. The knowledge of this has hardened around her during the day. She’s not aware of having made a decision; it’s more like the decision has been there all along, already made for her. She does not belong here, and all that has happened in the last day proves it.

Her plan is simple: She will leave at dawn. While everyone sleeps, she will slip out and leave. She will stop at her dorm. She will walk up to her room and she will discover her door wide open, the lights on inside. She will find Alice sleeping in her bed. Faye will not wake her. She will tiptoe to her bedside table, very slowly open the bottom drawer, and take out a few books and Henry’s proposal letter. She’ll quietly leave, stealing one last glance at Alice, who without her black sunglasses and combat boots looks human again, and gentle and vulnerable and even pretty. She will wish good things for her, in life. Then Faye will leave — Alice will never even know she was there. Faye will catch the first bus back to Iowa. She’ll stare at Henry’s letter for about an hour before exhaustion finally takes her and she sleeps the rest of the way home.

This is the plan. She will escape at first light.

But that’s still hours off, and here she is in Chicago, with this boy, in what is feeling like a moment outside time. The dark and quiet sanctuary. The glow of candlelight. She doesn’t want to know Sebastian’s real name because, she thinks, why ruin it? Why ruin the mystery? There’s something delicious about his anonymity. He could be anyone. She could be anyone. She knows she will be gone tomorrow, but she is not yet gone. Tomorrow will be full of consequences, but this moment is consequence-free. Whatever happens right now will happen without repercussion. It feels delicious, being on the edge of abandonment. She can act without worry. She can do what she wants.

What she wants is to take his hand and lead him into the shadows behind the altar. What she wants is to feel his warm body on hers. What she wants is to be impulsive — impulsive like she was with Henry on the playground that night that seems a lifetime ago. And even as she does this and presses her mouth to his and he resists a little and whispers “Are you sure?” and she smiles at him and says “It’s okay, we’re married now” and they collapse on the tile floor together, she’s aware that she’s only partly doing this because she genuinely wants to. She’s also doing this because she wants to prove something to herself, that she’s changed. Because after you go through a trial by fire aren’t you supposed to come out a changed person? A different and better person? And this day was indeed trying, and she would prefer not to be the same person she was before, with the same petty worries and doubts. She wants to prove that she’s gone through the terror of the day and now she’s stronger and better, even though she doesn’t know if she really is. How can one tell when one becomes a stronger and better person? Through action, she decides. And so this is her action. She takes off his jacket, then hers. They sit yanking off their shoes and giggling because there is no way to remove tight shoes in a manner that’s sexy. This is her great demonstration, to herself and to the world — she is changed, she is a woman, she is doing womanly things and she is doing them fearlessly. She unbuckles his belt and slides down his pants until he is poking nicely out of them. And even the posters from her high-school home economics class have no power over her now, because she can feel the grit on her skin, and this man’s smell right now is a mixture of sweat and smoke and body musk and tear gas, and her feeling about this is that she wants to devour him, and he wants to devour her, and if she’s really honest it feels delicious and liberating rolling around dirty together on these sparkling clean and smooth floors, God’s floors, where if she looks up she can see the stone Jesus directly above her, his head hanging so that at this angle it seems like he’s looking right back at her, her terrible God disapproving at what she’s doing in his holy house, and she loves it, loves that it’s happening right here, and she knows that tomorrow she’ll return to Iowa and return to being Faye, old Faye, she’ll come back to her real self like a soul that’s been traveling outside its body, and she’ll say no to college and yes to Henry and she’ll become a wife, a strange new creature who will keep locked within herself the knowledge of this night. She will never speak of it, even though she will think of it daily. She will wonder how she is capable of being such different people: the real Faye and the other one, the brash and aggressive and impulsive Faye. She will long for this other Faye. As the years mount and her days become cluttered with chores domestic and infantile, she will think about this night so often that it will begin to feel more real to her than her real life. She’ll begin to believe that her existence as wife and mother is the illusion, the façade she’s projecting to the world, and this Faye who came alive on the floor of St. Peter’s, that’s the real one, the authentic self, and this belief will hook so deeply inside her, will pierce her so completely that eventually it will take over. It will become too powerful to ignore. And by then it will not seem like she’s abandoning her husband and child; it will seem like she’s retrieving the real life she abandoned in Chicago many years ago. She will actually feel good about this, about being true to herself, her real self. It will feel like she’s found the one true Faye — at least it will feel like that for a while, until she begins to long for her family and all the confusion returns.

In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind — it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.

For Faye, the larger truth, the thing that holds up every important episode in her life like a beam holding up a house is this: Faye is the one who flees. The one who panics and escapes, who fled Iowa to avoid disgrace, who will flee from Chicago and into marriage, who will flee her family and who will eventually flee the country. And the more she believes she only has one true self, the more she flees to find it. She’s like someone trapped in quicksand whose efforts to escape only make her drown faster.

Will she ever understand this? Who knows. Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

These thoughts are far away from her now. Now everything is simple: She is a body in congress with another body. And his body is warm, and pressing all over into hers, and the taste of his skin is like salt and ammonia. At dawn she will begin using her head again, but for now it is this simple — as simple as taste. She is a body perceiving the world, and all her senses are filled.

35

THE ONLY OTHER PERSON in the church who knows what they are doing is Allen Ginsberg, who is sitting cross-legged, leaning against a wall and smiling. He could see them duck behind the altar, could see their candlelit shadows, could hear the familiar jangle of a belt undone. This makes him happy, these kids enjoying their exhausted and soiled flesh. Good for them. It reminds him of that sunflower poem he wrote so long ago — what is it, ten years? Fifteen? No matter. We’re not our skin of grime, he had written, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset…

Yes, he thinks. And as he closes his eyes and lets sleep come, he feels satisfied and delighted.

For he knows he was right.