The Nix

1

HER OWN ROOM. Her own key and mailbox. Her own books. Everything was hers but the bathroom. Faye hadn’t considered this. The dorm’s clinical foul-smelling community bathroom. Stale water, dirty floors, sinks strewn with hair, trash cans thick with tissues and tampons and balled-up brown paper towels. A smell like slow decay that reminded her of a forest. Faye imagined, beneath the floor, earthworms and mushrooms. How the bathroom bore the evidence of so much appalling use — soap slivers now fused to their trays, fossils. The one toilet that’s always plugged. The slime on the walls like a brain where the memory of each girl’s cleaning lived. She thought if you looked deep enough into the floor you could find there, embalmed in the pink tiles, the whole history of the world: bacteria, fungus, nematodes, trilobites. A dormitory was a hopeless idea. Whoever thought of encasing two hundred girls in a concrete box? The narrow rooms, shared bath, massive cafeteria — the comparison to prison was unavoidable. It was a dark and creepy bunker, their dorm. From the outside its concrete skeleton looked like some martyr’s flayed chest — all you could see were the ribs. All the buildings on Circle’s campus looked this way: inside out, exposed. Sometimes walking to class she ran her fingers along the walls where the concrete resembled acne and she felt embarrassed for the buildings, how an eccentric designer had taken their guts and put them on view. A perfect metaphor, she thought, for dormitory living.

Take this bathroom, where all the girls’ private fluids commingled. The big open shower with sour puddles of water like gray jelly. A vegetable smell. Faye wore sandals. And if her neighbors were awake they would know it was Faye walking down the hall by the flop flop flop. But they weren’t awake. It was six o’clock in the morning. Faye had the bathroom to herself. She could shower alone. She preferred it this way.

Because she didn’t want to be here with the other girls, her neighbors, who gathered nightly in their small rooms and giggled, got high, talked about the protest, the police, the pipes they passed to smoke with, the medicines they expanded their minds with, the electric songs they screeched along with: “Looks like everybody in this whole round world / They’re down on me!” they cried to the record player like it bled from them. Faye heard their wails through her wall, a litany to a terrible god. It seemed disallowable that these girls could really be her neighbors. Freaky beatniks, psychedelic revolutionaries who needed to learn to clean up after themselves in the bathroom, was Faye’s opinion, looking at a glob of tissue near the wall, now mostly liquefied. She took off her robe and turned on the spray and waited for the water to warm.

Every night the girls laughed and Faye listened. She wondered what made the girls able to sing so unself-consciously. Faye didn’t talk to them and looked at the floor when they passed by. They chewed on their pencils in class and complained about the teacher, how he only taught the old straight shit. Plato, they said, Ovid, Dante — dead men assholes with nothing to say to today’s youth.

That’s how they said it—today’s youth—as if college students these days were a brand-new species totally disconnected from the past and from the culture that spawned them. And as far as Faye could tell, the rest of the culture pretty much agreed. Older adults complained about them endlessly on CBS News’s nightly examinations of the “Generation Gap.”

Faye stepped into the warm water and let it soak her. One hole in the shower nozzle was clogged and sprayed out thinner and harder than the rest — she felt it like a razor on her chest.

In these first days of college, Faye mostly kept to herself. Each night she sat alone and did her homework, underlining key passages, writing notes in the margins, and next door she heard these girls laughing. The college brochures had said nothing about this — Circle was supposed to be known for its expectation of excellence, its academic rigor, its modern campus. None of this turned out to be exactly true. The campus especially was just an inhuman concrete horror: concrete buildings and concrete walkways and concrete walls that made the place about as comfortable and inviting as a parking lot. No grass anywhere. Concrete edifices scarred and ribbed to evoke the look of corduroy, perhaps, or the inside of a whale. Concrete bitten off in places to expose raw and rusted rebar. The same basic architectural patterns endlessly repeating in a faceless grid. No windows wider than a few inches. Bulky buildings that seemed to hang over the students carnivorously.

It was the kind of place that would be the only place to survive an atom bomb.

The campus was impossible to navigate, as every building looked like every other building and so directions were confused and meaningless. The elevated second-story pedestrian walkway that covered the entire campus and sounded so cool in the brochures—a pedestrian expressway in the sky—was in reality maybe the most horrible thing about Circle. It was advertised as a place for students to come together for community and friendship, but what usually happened is you were up on the walkway and saw a friend down below and you yelled and waved but had no easy way to actually talk. Faye noticed this daily, friends waving and then sadly abandoning each other. Plus the walkway was never the shortest path from anywhere to anywhere, and the places to get on and off were spaced such that the length of your walk doubled if you wanted to use it, and the midday August sun had a tendency to cook the concrete expanse to the heat of a pancake griddle. So most of the students used the sidewalks below, the whole student body trying to shoulder their way through narrow corridors made crowded and claustrophobic by the big concrete posts needed to hold up the walkway, all of it dark and shadowy because the walkway blocked the sun.

A rumor that the Circle campus had been designed by the Pentagon to instill terror and despair among students could not be entirely dismissed.

Faye had been promised a campus fit for the space age, but what she got was a place where every building’s surface evoked the gravel roads from back home. She’d been promised a hardworking and studious student body, and what she got instead were these neighbors next door, these girls less interested in academics, more interested in how to score dope, how to sneak into bars, get free drinks, how to screw, and they talked about this endlessly, one of their two favorite topics, the other being the protest. The upcoming protest of the Democratic National Convention, now only a few weeks away. A great battle would happen in Chicago, it was becoming clear, the year’s apotheosis. The girls talked excitedly about their plans: an all-female march right down Lake Shore Drive, a protest in the form of music and love, four days of revolution, orgies in the park, the perfect silvery human voice in song, we’ll touch the honky young, bring down the amphitheater show, shove a great spike in America’s eye, we’ll take back the streets, and all those people watching on TV? We’re gonna anti-America them, man. With all that energy, we’ll stop the war.

Faye felt far away from such concerns. She soaped herself, her chest and arms and legs, thickly. The lather made her feel like a ghost or mummy or some other generally white and scary thing. The water in Chicago was different from the water at home, and no matter how much she rinsed, the soap never came entirely off. A thin varnish lingered on her skin. How easily and smoothly her hands glided over her hips and legs and thighs. She closed her eyes. Thought of Henry.

His hands on her body as they lay on the riverbank her last night in Iowa. They were cold and hard, those hands, and when he reached under her shirt and pressed them to her belly it was like they were stones from the bottom of the riverbed. She gasped. He stopped. She didn’t want him to stop, but she couldn’t tell him without sounding unladylike. And he hated when she was unladylike. He gave her an envelope that night with instructions not to open it until she got to college. Inside was a letter. She had been fearing another poem, but what she found was a little couplet that knocked her over: come home / marry me. Meanwhile, he’d joined the army, just as he said he would. He had promised to go to Vietnam but had gotten only as far as Nebraska. He did riot-control exercises in preparation for whatever civil disorder was inevitably next. He practiced sticking his bayonet into dummies filled with sand and dressed like hippies. He practiced using tear gas. He practiced phalanxing. They would be seeing each other again at Thanksgiving, and Faye dreaded it. Because she had no answer to his proposal. She had read his letter once and hidden it like contraband. But she did look forward to meeting again on the riverbank, when they were alone, and he could try touching her again. She had found herself thinking about it these desolate mornings in the shower. Pretending her hands were someone else’s. Maybe Henry’s. Maybe more accurately the hands of some abstract man — in her imagination she could not see him but instead felt his presence, a solid masculine warmth pressing into her. She thought about this as she felt the soap on her body, the slippery water, the smell of the shampoo as she rubbed it into her hair. She turned around to wash it out and opened her eyes and saw, across the room, standing at the sink, watching her right now, a girl.

“Excuse me!” Faye yelped, for it was one of those girls—Alice was her name. Faye’s neighbor. Long-haired, mean-looking Alice, silver-framed sunglasses settled halfway down her nose so at this moment she stared over them directly and curiously and terribly at Faye.

“Excuse you for what?” Alice said.

Faye shut off the water and wrapped herself in her robe.

“Man,” Alice said, smiling, “you are too much.”

She was the craziest of them all, this Alice. Green camo jacket and black boots, wild brunette Buddha girl seen in the cafeteria sitting cross-legged on a table chanting gibberish. Faye had heard stories about Alice — how she hitchhiked to Hyde Park on weekend nights, met boys, scored drugs, entered strange bedrooms and emerged more complicated.

“You’re so quiet all the time,” Alice said. “Always alone in your room. What do you do in there?”

“I don’t know. I read.”

“You read. What do you read?”

“Lots of things.”

“You read your homework?”

“I guess.”

“You read what your teachers tell you. Get good grades.”

Faye saw her up close now, her eyes bloodshot, hair tangled, clothes wrinkled and reeking, that funky cocktail of tobacco, pot, and perspiration. Faye understood now that Alice had not yet slept. Six in the morning and Alice had just returned from whatever free-love odyssey these girls chased at night.

“I read poetry,” Faye said.

“Yeah? What kind?”

“All kinds.”

“Okay. Say me a poem.”

“Huh?”

“Say me a poem. Recite one. Should be easy if you read so much. Come on.”

There was a splotch on Alice’s cheek that Faye had never noticed before — a trace of red and purple gathered just beneath the surface. A bruise.

“Are you okay?” Faye said. “Your face.”

“I’m fine. Great. What’s it to you?”

“Did someone hit you?”

“How about you mind your own business.”

“Fine,” Faye said. “Never mind. I gotta go.”

“You’re not very friendly,” Alice said. “Are you down on us or something?”

Those lyrics again. “Down on Me.” They played that damn song every night. “Everybody in this whole round world!” They sang it four or five off-key times in a row. “They’re down on me!” As if the girls needed them — all these other people in the world — needed them to be down and thus give a reason for singing.

“No, I’m not down on you,” Faye said. “I’m just not going to apologize to you.”

“Apologize for what?”

“For doing my homework. Being good at school. I’m sick of feeling bad about it. Good day.”

Faye left the bathroom, flop-flopped back to her room, put on her clothes, and felt so full of poison and abstract anger that she sat on her bed and held her knees and rocked. She had a headache. She pulled her hair back and put on her big round glasses that looked to her suddenly like some elaborate Venetian disguise. She frowned into the mirror. She was gathering her books into her backpack when Alice knocked on the door.

“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “That wasn’t in the spirit of sisterhood. Please accept my apology.”

“Forget it,” Faye said.

“Let me make it up to you. I’ll take you out tonight. There’s a meeting. I want you to come.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“It’s sort of a secret. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Really, it’s okay.”

“I’ll be here at eight,” Alice said. “See you then.”

Faye closed the door and sat on her bed. She wondered what Alice had seen her doing, back there in the shower, when Fay had been thinking about Henry: his hands on her. What a treacherous thing a body was, how it so blatantly acted out the mind’s secrets.

Henry’s letter was hidden in her bedside table, in the bottom drawer, way in the back. She had tucked it inside a book. Paradise Lost.

2

THEY ASSEMBLED in the office of the Chicago Free Voice, a small, irregularly printed handbill that called itself “the newspaper of the street.” Into a dark alley, through an unmarked door, up a narrow set of stairs, Alice led Faye to a room with a sign at the entrance that read: TONIGHT! WOMEN’S SEXUALITY AND SELF-DEFENSE.

Alice tapped the sign with her finger and said, “Two sides of the same coin, eh?”

She had not made any effort to hide the bruise on her cheek.

The meeting had already begun when they arrived. The room, crowded with maybe two dozen women, smelled of tar and kerosene, old paper and dust. A warm mist of ink and glue and spirits hung in the air. Odors drifted in and out of perception — shoe polish, linseed oil, turpentine. The sting of solvents and oil reminded Faye of the garages and toolsheds of Iowa, where her uncles spent long afternoons fiddling with cars that hadn’t been driven in decades — hot rods bought cheap at auctions and slowly restored, part by part, year by year, whenever the uncles could find time and motivation. But whereas her uncles decorated their garages with sports logos and pinup girls, this office had a Vietcong flag on the largest wall, the smaller nooks covered with broadsides of past Free Voice editions: CHICAGO IS A CONCENTRATION CAMP said one headline; IT IS THE YEAR OF THE STUDENT said another; FIGHT THE PIGS IN THE STREET and so on. A fine dark soot coated the walls and floor, a sheath of carbon that turned the light in the room to a gray-green smog. Faye’s skin felt clammy and covered with grit. Her sneakers quickly stained.

The women sat in a circle — some on folding chairs, some leaning against the wall. White girls and black girls all wearing sunglasses and army jackets and combat boots. Faye sat down behind Alice and listened to the woman presently talking.

“You slap him,” she said, a finger pointed into the air, “you bite him, you scream as loud as you can and when you do you scream fire. You break his kneecaps. Box his ears to pop his eardrums. Stiffen your fingers and jab his eyes out. Be creative. Ram his nose into his brain. Your keys and knitting needles can be weapons if held tightly. Find a nearby rock and bash his head in. If you know kung fu, use your kung fu. It goes without saying that you should be kneeing him in the groin repeatedly”—and women in the circle nodded, clapped, encouraged the speaker with oh yeahs and right ons—“knee him in the groin and yell, You are not a man! Break his will. Men attack you because they think they can. Knee him in the groin and yell, You cannot do this! Don’t rely on other men to help you. Every man in his heart wants you to be raped. Because it confirms your need for his protection. Armchair rapists, that’s what they are.” And Alice shouted “Hell yeah!” and other women whooped and Faye didn’t know how to compose herself. She felt stiff and nervous, and she looked around at the women and tried to enact their casually bad posture while the speaker wrapped it up: “Since men have their potency and masculinity vicariously confirmed through rape, they will never do anything to stop it. Unless we force them to. So I say we take a stand. No more husbands. No more weddings. No more children. Not until rape is extinguished. Once and for all. A total reproductive boycott! We will grind civilization to a halt.” And to this the woman got great applause, the others standing and patting her on the back, and Faye was about to join the ovation when from a far dark corner of the room came a loud gnashing of metal. Everyone turned to look, and that’s when Faye saw him for the first time.

His name was Sebastian. He wore a white apron covered in pitch, smudged gray where he’d rubbed his hands, his shaggy bowl of black hair flopping in front of his eyes as he looked back sheepishly at the group and said, “Sorry!” He stood behind a machine that seemed built like a train — all black cast metal, shining with oil, silver spindles and toothy gears. The machine hummed and vibrated, the occasional tock of metal falling down chutes somewhere in its innards, like pennies dropped onto a table. The man — he was young, olive-skinned, a hangdog look — pulled a sheet of paper from the machine and Faye realized the contraption was a printing press, the sheet a copy of the Free Voice. Alice called out to him: “Hey, Sebastian! What’s cooking?”

“Tomorrow’s edition,” he said, smiling, turning the paper to the light.

“What’s in it?”

“Letters to the editor. I had a stockpile.”

“Are they good?”

“They’ll blow your mind,” he said, loading more paper onto the bed of the machine. “Sorry. Act normal. I’m not even here.”

And so everyone turned back and the meeting began again, but Faye kept watching Sebastian. How he fiddled with knobs and cranks, how he lowered the head of the machine to smash ink onto the paper, how he pressed his lips together in concentration, how the collar on his white shirt had been stained a deep, dark green, and she was thinking about how he looked like some beautifully sloppy mad scientist and how she felt connected to him in the way outsiders feel a certain kinship with each other when she heard someone in the group say something about orgasms. Faye turned to see who was speaking — tall woman, blond hair like a waterfall down to her back, a string of beads around her neck, a bright red shirt with a deep neckline. She was leaning forward and asking about orgasms. Can you have them only in one position? Faye could not believe she’d said such a thing with a boy in the room. Behind them, his machine punched at paper, throbbing like a heartbeat. Someone suggested that you could have orgasms in two and perhaps as many as three positions. Someone else said the orgasm was a fiction. It was invented by doctors to make us feel ashamed. Ashamed of what? That we don’t have them like boys do. People nodded at this. They moved on.

It was suggested you could orgasm on weed, and sometimes acid, but almost never on heroin. Someone said sex on the natch was best anyway. One woman’s boyfriend couldn’t have sex unless he was drunk. Another woman’s boyfriend had recently asked her to douche. There was a boyfriend who, after sex, spent an hour cleaning the bedroom with a mop and germicide. There was another boyfriend who named his dick Mr. Rumpy-Pumpy. Another only wanted blow jobs until marriage.

“Free love!” someone said, and everyone laughed.

Because despite what the newspapers said, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of free-love writing, when free love was widely condemned, rarely practiced, and terrifically marketed. Photos of topless women dancing in public in Berkeley were greatly criticized and distributed. News of the oral-sex scandal at Yale reached every bedroom in the country. Everyone had heard of the Barnard girl who was living with a boy she wasn’t even married to. The imagination was seized by the pelvic regions of university girls — stories of once-chaste daughters turned to deviants in only one semester. Magazine articles condemned masturbation, the FBI warned against clitoral orgasm, and Congress investigated the dangers of fellatio. Never before had the authorities been so remarkably explicit. Mothers were taught the warning signs of sex addiction, kids were counseled against criminal and soul-destroying pleasure. Police flew helicopters over beaches to catch bare-breasted women. Life magazine said slutty girls had penis envy and were turning real men into pansies. The New York Times said excessive fornication caused girls to go psychotic. Good middle-class kids were becoming queers, dopers, dropouts, beatniks. It was true. Heard it on Cronkite. Politicians vowed to get tough. They blamed the pill, permissive liberal parents, the climbing divorce rate, raunchy movies, go-go clubs, atheism. People shook their heads, appalled at youth run amuck, and then set out looking for more tawdry stories, found them, and read every word.

The barometer for the health of the country seemed to be what middle-aged men thought about the behavior of college girls.

But for the girls, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of awkward love, embarrassed and nervous and ignorant love. This is what nobody reported, how free-love girls gathered in these dark rooms and worried. They’d read all the stories, and believed them, and thus thought they were doing something wrong. “I want to be hip, but I don’t want my boyfriend fucking all these other women,” said many, many girls who found that free love was still tangled up in all the old arguments — jealousy, envy, power. It was a sexual bait and switch, the free-love trip not quite measuring up to its hype.

“If I don’t want to have sex with someone, does that mean I’m a prude?” said one of the women at the meeting.

“If I don’t want to strip at a protest, am I a prude?” said another.

“Men think you’re a hip chick if you take your shirt off at rallies.”

“All those nude girls in Berkeley holding flowers.”

“They sell lots of papers.”

“Posing with psychedelic paint on their tits.”

“What kind of freedom is that?”

“They’re just doing it to be popular.”

“They’re not free.”

“They’re doing it for men.”

“Why else would they do it?”

“There’s no other reason to do it.”

“Maybe they like it,” said a new voice, a small voice, and everyone looked to see where it had come from: the girl with the funny round glasses who had been unnaturally quiet up to this point. Faye’s face flushed red and she looked at the floor.

Alice turned around and stared at her. “What do they like about it?” she asked.

Faye shrugged. She’d shocked herself by saying anything, much less that. She wanted to take it back immediately, reach out and stuff it into her stupid mouth. Maybe they like it, oh lord, oh god, the girls looked at her and waited. She had the feeling of being a wounded bird in a room full of cats.

Alice cocked her head and said, “Do you like it?”

“Sometimes. I don’t know. No.”

She had forgotten herself. She had been caught up in the moment — all this talk of sex, all the girls so excited, and she imagined herself at home standing in front of her big picture window imagining some dark stranger walking by and seeing her, when this thing erupted, it just came out. Maybe they like it.

“You like putting on a show for men?” Alice asked. “Parading your tits so they’ll like you?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What’s your name?” someone asked.

“Faye,” she said, and the girls waited. They watched her. She wanted more than anything to run out of the room, but that would draw so much more attention. She sat in a tight ball, trying to think of something to say, and that’s when Sebastian stepped out from the shadows and saved her.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I have an announcement.”

And as he talked the group mercifully forgot about Faye. She sat there boiling and listening to Sebastian — he was talking about the upcoming protest, how the city hadn’t given them a permit to occupy the park but they were going to do it anyway. “Make sure to tell your friends,” he said. “Bring everybody. We’re gonna have a hundred thousand people or more. We’re gonna change the world. We’re gonna end the war. Nobody will go to work. Nobody will go to school. We’re gonna shut the city down. Music and dancing at every red light. The pigs can’t stop us.”

And at the mention of the pigs, the pigs themselves laughed.

For they were listening.

They were packed into a small office several miles south called the “war room” in the basement of the International Amphitheater, where the detectives listened through static to Sebastian’s exhortations, the girls’ inane chatter. They wrote on legal pads and remarked on the stupidity of college kids, how they were so trusting. The office of the Chicago Free Voice had been bugged for how long now? How many months? The kids didn’t have a clue.

Outside the amphitheater were the slaughterhouses — the famous stockyards of Chicago, where the police heard the screams of animals, the last wails of cattle and hogs. Some of the cops, interested, peered over fences and saw carcasses torn off the ground by hooks and trolleys, pulled to death, dismembered, floors covered in entrails and shit, men hacking tirelessly at limbs and throats — it all seemed appropriate. The butchers’ curved knives offered the police a kind of clarity, a kind of purity of intent that gave their jobs a helpful, if unspoken, guiding metaphor.

They listened and wrote down anything, any indictable threat, calls to violence, outside agitating, communist propaganda, and tonight they were given something special — a name, one never mentioned before, someone new: Faye.

They glanced over at the new guy, standing in the corner, legal pad in hand, recently promoted from beat cop to the Red Squad: Officer Charlie Brown. He nodded. He wrote it down.

The Red Squad was the Chicago PD’s covert antiterrorist intelligence unit that was created in the 1920s to spy on union organizers, expanded in the 1940s to spy on communists, and concentrated now on threats to the domestic peace posed by radical leftists, mostly the students and the blacks. It was a glamorous job, and Brown was aware that some of the other officers, the older officers, were skeptical of him and his promotion: He was young, nervous as all hell, had a brief career that as yet lacked distinction — he had, so far, mostly busted screwed-up hippie kids for minor infractions. Loitering. Jaywalking. Curfew. The vague statute against public lewdness. His goal as a beat cop was to become such an annoyance they simply gave up, the hippies, gave up and moved along to some other precinct or, better, some other city. Then Chicago wouldn’t have to deal with what was roundly agreed to be the worst generation ever. Easily the worst, even though it was his generation too. He wasn’t much older than the kids he busted. But the uniform made him feel older, the uniform and crew cut and wife and child and preference for quiet things like bars without too much music where the only thing you heard was the murmur of conversation and the occasional sharp thwack of billiard balls. And church. Going to church and seeing the other beat cops there: It was a brotherhood. They were Catholic guys, neighborhood guys. You slapped them on the back when you saw them. They were good guys, they drank but not too much, they were kind to their wives, fixed up their houses, built things, played poker, paid their mortgages. Their wives knew each other, their kids played together. They’d been living on the block since forever. Their fathers had lived here, grandfathers too. They were Irish, Poles, Germans, Czechs, Swedes, but now thoroughly Chicagoans. They had city pensions that made them a good catch for the neighborhood ladies looking to settle down. They loved each other, loved the city, loved America, and not in an abstract way like kids asked to pledge allegiance but way down to their core — because they were happy, they were doing it, living, being successful, working hard, raising kids, sending kids to goddamn school. They had watched their own fathers raise them and, like most boys, they worried about measuring up. But here they were, doing it, and they thanked God and America and the city of Chicago for it. They hadn’t asked for much, but what they’d asked for, they’d gotten.

It was hard not to feel personal about all this. When some new bad element moved into the neighborhood, it was hard not to take it personally. It was personal. Officer Brown’s own grandfather had moved to this neighborhood as a very young man. He was Czeslaw Bronikowski until he reached Ellis Island, where he was given the name Charles Brown, a name then bestowed on the family’s firstborn sons each generation since. And even though Officer Brown could have done without the teasing this name prompted when kids began reading that goddamn comic strip circa first grade, still he loved it — it was a good name, an American name, a consolidation of his family’s past and its future.

It was a name that fit in.

So when some out-of-town doper, some punk peacenik, some longhaired hippie freak sat on the sidewalk all day scaring the daylights out of the old ladies, it was, indeed, personal. Why couldn’t they just fit in? With the Negroes it was at least reasonable. If the blacks didn’t particularly appreciate America, well, he could wrap his head around that one. But these kids, these middle-class white kids with their anti-America slogans — what gave them the right?

And so his job was simple: Target and annoy the bad elements in the city as far as the law allowed. As far as he could go without risking his pension or publicly embarrassing the city or the mayor. And yeah, sometimes somebody appeared on TV, usually some East Coast idiot with no idea what the fuck he was talking about, who said the cops in Chicago were harsh or brutal or obstructing people’s First Amendment rights. But nobody paid much attention to that. There was a saying: Chicago problems, Chicago solutions.

For example, if a beatnik was walking through his precinct at two o’clock in the morning, it was a pretty easy matter to bust him for curfew violation. It was well known that most of these types did not carry any form of identification, so when they said “The curfew doesn’t apply to me, pig,” he could say “Prove it,” and they absolutely could not. Simple. So they spent an uncomfortable few hours in a holding pen while the message sunk in: You are not welcome here.

And that had been an acceptable job for Officer Brown — he was aware of his own talents and limitations, he was not ambitious. He was content as a beat cop until, almost by accident, he got to know and earn the trust of a certain hippie leader, and when he told his bosses that he had “made contact with a leading student radical” and now had “access to the underground’s inner sanctum” and asked to be assigned to the Red Squad — specifically the division investigating anti-American activity at Chicago Circle — they reluctantly agreed. (Nobody else on the force had been able to infiltrate Circle — those college kids could sniff out a fake easy.)

The Red Squad wiretapped rooms and telephones. They took covert photos. They tried to be as generally disruptive as they could be to the antiwar fringe. He saw it as a simple amplification of what he did on the street — annoying and detaining hippies — only now it was done in secret, using tactics that pushed the boundaries of what was, at face value, legal. For example, they raided the office of Students for a Democratic Society, stole files, broke typewriters, and spray-painted “Black Power” on the walls to throw the kids off. That seemed a bit questionable, yes, but the way he thought about it was that the only change between his old job and his new one was the method. The moral calculus, he figured, was the same.

Chicago problems, Chicago solutions.

And now he had been given the gift of a new name to investigate, some new fringe element recently arrived at Circle. He wrote the name down in his notebook. Put a star next to it. He would get to know this Faye very soon.

3

FAYE, OUTDOORS, in the grass, back leaning against a building, in the shade of a small campus tree, gently placed the newspaper on her lap. She smoothed its crinkles. She bent the corners where they’d begun to curl. The paper did not feel like ordinary newsprint — stiffer, thicker, almost waxy. Ink smeared off the page and onto her fingertips. She wiped her hands on the grass. She looked at the masthead—Editor in Chief: Sebastian—and she smiled. There was something both brazen and triumphant about Sebastian using only his first name. He had achieved enough renown that he was publicly mononymous, like Plato or Voltaire or Stendhal or Twiggy.

She opened the paper. It was the edition Sebastian had been printing last night, full of letters to the editor. She began to read.

Dear Chicago Free Voice,

Do you like hiding from the pigs and those other people that stare at us put us down? Because of our clothes and hair? I mean I used to but I don’t anymore I talk to them. Get them to like me and become friends and then tell them I smoke grass. And if they like you they might smoke it with you sometime and listen. You will help add one more of us to our ever growing number I think 50 percent of the USA is doing it and Narcotics Officers think we’re all mental patients haw haw.

It was hot today, and bright, and buggy: The gnats dove into her face, black dots between her eyes and the page, as if the punctuation marks were fleeing. She shooed them away. She was alone, nobody around; she’d found a quiet little spot on the northeast part of campus, a patch of grass separated from the sidewalk by a small hedge, back behind the brand-new Behavioral Sciences Building, which was roundly the most loathed building on the entire Circle campus. This was the one all the brochures talked about, designed according to the geometric principles of field theory, a new architecture meant to break the old architecture’s “tyranny of the square,” the brochures had said. A modern architecture that abandoned the square in favor of an overlapping matrix of octagons inscribed by circles.

Why this was better, philosophically, than a square, the brochures never explained. But Faye could guess: A square was old, traditional, antique, and therefore bad. It seemed to Faye that the worst thing on this campus, for both the students and the buildings, was to be square.

So the Behavioral Sciences Building was modern, many angled, which in practice made the place a bewildering mess. The interconnected honeycombs made no intuitive sense, hallways jagged and serpentine so you couldn’t walk ten feet without having to make some kind of navigational choice. Faye’s poetry class met here, and simply finding the correct classroom was an ordeal that taxed both her patience and her sense of spatial awareness. Certain stairs led into literally nothing, just a wall or a locked door, while other stairs led down to tiny landings where several other staircases intersected, all of them identical-looking. What seemed like a dead end actually opened into an entirely new area she never would have predicted was there. The third floor was visible from the second floor, with no obvious way to get up to it. That everything was built in circles and oblique angles pretty much guaranteed anyone would get lost, and indeed all who encountered this building for the first time had the same baffled expression, trying to navigate a place where concepts like “left” and “right” had little meaning.

It seemed less a place where students would study the behavioral sciences and more a place where behavioral scientists would study the students, to see how long the students could endure this nonsensical environment before going completely berserk.

So mostly the students avoided it, if they could, which made it a good place for Faye to be alone and read.

Do you people out there think you’re crazy? I mean you’re part of those 50 percenters right? I mean you all smoke grass don’t you? I do. And I work hard or almost as hard as anyone else at the post office. And all my fellow workers know I turn on I mean they’re always asking me if some box of tea smells like grass. Today I found one that did and most of them wanted to smell it. Then we wrapped it up and delivered it. That person who got it might have gotten it by now. He might be enjoying his package. He might be reading my rap. Hello friend.

Movement in the distance distracted her, and she looked up, worried. Because if any of her teachers saw her reading the Chicago Free Voice, if any of the college officials who administrated her scholarship saw her reading the pro-narcotic, pro-Vietcong, antiestablishment “Newspaper of the Street”…Well, they would think certain unfortunate things about her.

So her head popped out of reading at the first peripheral sight of the approaching figure, walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the hedge. And she gathered at a glance that he was no teacher, no administrator. His hair was too big for that. Moppy was the word going around, but his hair had gone well beyond moppy and into a kind of efflorescence. Wild growth. She watched him come, her head bent into the newspaper so it wouldn’t look like she was staring, and as he approached his features clarified and she realized she knew him. He was the boy from last night. At the meeting. Sebastian.

She pushed her hair back and wiped the sweat off her forehead. She lifted the newspaper to conceal her face. Pressed her back into the wall and felt thankful that the building had so many overhangs and corners. Maybe he’d walk by.

I’d rather smoke a joint with a pig than keep on running from him I mean wouldn’t you? I mean wouldn’t you like it if everybody did? No fights no wars! Just a bunch of happy people. Wild thought or is it?

Her head buried in the newspaper — she recognized this as a somewhat pathetic, ostrichlike maneuver. She could hear Sebastian’s footsteps in the grass. Her face felt ten degrees warmer. She felt the sweat on her temples and smeared it off with her fingers. She squeezed the newspaper and held it close.

How would you people, my people, like to all, and I mean ALL, get together? I mean at least 10 million people well maybe 9 million. I’d sure like to shake all you good people’s hands out there. All we need is someplace to have a huge Turn On Festival and let them know how many of us there really are!

The footsteps stopped. Then started again and came closer. He was walking toward her now, and Faye breathed and wiped the moisture from her forehead and waited. He approached — maybe ten feet away, maybe five. The paper blocked her, but she sensed him there. It would be absurd to pretend otherwise. She lowered the paper and saw him smiling.

“Hello, Faye!” he said. He bounced over and sat down beside her.

“Sebastian,” she said, and she nodded and smiled her most genuine-feeling smile.

He looked handsome. Professional, even. He seemed pleased she’d remembered his name. The mad-scientist lab coat was gone. Now he was in a proper jacket — neutral beige, corduroy — and a plain white shirt, thin navy blue tie, brown slacks. He looked presentable, acceptable, except maybe the hair — too long, too disheveled, too big — but good-boy material nonetheless, one that could be, in his current state, maybe even furnished to parents.

“Your newspaper is quite good,” Faye said, already working out how to be maximally likable in this moment, how to ingratiate herself to him: be supportive, be full of praise. “That letter from the man at the post office? I really think he has a point. It’s quite interesting.”

“Oh, lord, can you imagine that guy organizing a festival? Ten million people? Yeah, right.”

“I don’t think he really wants to organize a festival,” Faye said. “I think he wants to know he’s not alone. He just seems lonely to me.”

Sebastian gave her a look of mock surprise — cocked his head and raised an eyebrow and smiled.

“I thought he was nuts,” he said.

“No. He’s looking for people he can be himself around. Aren’t we all?”

“Huh,” Sebastian said, and stared at her for a moment. “You’re different, aren’t you.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She wiped the sweat off her forehead.

“You’re sincere,” Sebastian said.

“I am?”

“Quiet, but sincere. You don’t talk much, but when you talk you say what you mean. Most people I know talk constantly but never say anything true.”

“Thanks?”

“Also you have ink all over your face.”

“What?”

“Ink,” he said. “All over.”

She looked at her fingertips, blackened by the newspaper, and put it together. “Oh no,” she said. She reached into her backpack for her cosmetics. She flipped open the compact, looked into the mirror, and saw what had happened: dark black streaks across her forehead, cheeks, temples, exactly where her fingers wiped away the sweat. And this was the kind of moment that could wreck her whole day, the kind of moment that would usually summon the tightness, the panic: doing something foolish in front of a stranger.

But something else happened instead, something surprising. Faye did not have an episode. Instead, she laughed.

“I look like a Dalmatian!” she said, and she laughed. She didn’t know why she was laughing.

“It’s my fault,” Sebastian said. He handed her a handkerchief. “I should use better ink.”

She rubbed away the smudges. “Yes,” she said. “It is your fault.”

“Walk with me,” he said, and he helped her up and they left the shade of the tree, Faye’s face now clean and bright. “You’re fun,” he said.

She felt weightless, happy, a little flirty even. It was the first time in her life anyone had ever described her as fun. She said, “You have a good memory, mister.”

“I do?”

“You remembered my name,” she said.

“Oh, well, you made an impression. That thing you said at the meeting.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I just blurted it out.”

“You were right, though. It was an important point.”

“It was not.”

“You were suggesting that sometimes what people want sexually is in conflict with what they want politically, which made everyone uncomfortable. Plus that group tends to pounce on shy people. It looked like you were in trouble.”

“I’m not shy,” she said, “it’s just…” And she stopped to find the right word, the correct and comprehensible way to say it, then skipped the explanation altogether. “Thanks for speaking up,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

“It’s no problem,” Sebastian said. “I saw your maarr.”

“My what?”

“Your maarr.”

“What is a maarr?”

“I learned about it in Tibet,” he said, “visiting this sect of monks, one of the oldest Buddhist groups on earth, met them while I was abroad. I wanted to meet them because they’ve solved the problem of human empathy.”

“I didn’t know that was a problem needing to be solved.”

“Oh sure. The problem is, we can never really feel it. Empathy. Most people think empathy is like understanding someone else or relating to them. But it’s more than that. Real empathy is the actual corporeal feeling of someone else’s emotions, so that it’s experienced not only in the brain but also in the body, the body vibrating like a tuning fork to the sadness and suffering of another, as in, for example, you cry at the funerals of people you never even knew, you feel actual physical hunger when you see a starving child, you get vertigo when you watch an acrobat. And so forth.”

Sebastian glanced at Faye to see if she was interested. “Go on,” she said.

“Okay. Well, if we follow this to its conclusion, then empathy becomes like a haunting, a condition that is impossible since we all have separate egos, we’ve attained individuation, we can never really be another person, and that’s the great empathy problem: that we can approach it but cannot realize it.”

“Like the speed of light.”

“Exactly! Nature has certain boundaries — perfect human empathy being one of them — that will always be slightly beyond our reach. But the monks have solved the problem this way: the maarr.”

Faye listened in wonder. That a boy was saying such things. To her. Nobody had ever spoken to her this way. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and cry.

“Think of the maarr as the seat of emotions,” Sebastian said, “held deeply inside your body, somewhere near the stomach — all desire, all yearning, all feelings of love and compassion and lust, all of one’s secret wants and needs are held in the maarr.”

Faye placed her palm on her belly.

“Yeah,” Sebastian said, smiling. “Right there. To ‘see’ someone’s maarr means recognizing someone else’s desire — without asking, without being told — and acting on it. That last part is essential: The ‘seeing’ is not complete until one does something about it. So a man only ‘sees’ a woman’s desires when he fulfills them without being asked to do so. A woman ‘sees’ a hungry man’s maarr when, unprompted, she gives him food.”

“Okay,” Faye said, “I get it.”

“It’s this active sense of empathy that I love so much, the sense that one must do more than quietly relate to another human. One must also make something happen.”

“Empathy is achieved only by deed,” Faye said.

“Yes. So at the meeting, when I saw the group begin to criticize you, I turned their attention away, and in this way I saw your maarr.”

And Faye was about to thank him when they came to a clearing and, ahead of her, she saw people, heard chanting. She’d been hearing some slight noise during their walk, as they moseyed counterclockwise around the Behavioral Sciences Building, taking the zigzagging route necessary on a campus that had few direct paths from anywhere to anywhere. It had grown louder as Sebastian told his story of empathy and monks and seeing her maarr.

“What’s that sound?” she said.

“Oh, that’s the demonstration.”

“What demonstration?”

“You don’t know? There are posters up everywhere.”

“I guess I didn’t notice.”

“It’s the ChemStar protest,” he said, and they emerged into the courtyard of the monolithic University Hall, the tallest, most intimidating building on campus, by far. Whereas most of Circle’s buildings were squat three-story things, University Hall was a thirty-story monster. It was visible from everywhere, looming over the trees, fatter at the top than at the bottom — anonymous, boxy, tyrannical. It looked like a beige concrete exoskeleton had been scaffolded around a slightly smaller, slightly browner building. Like every other campus structure, this one had narrow windows too small to fit a body through. Except, that is, for the top floor. The only windows on the entire campus that looked big enough to jump through were located suspiciously, almost invitingly, on the campus’s highest point — the top floor of University Hall — and this fact struck some of the more cynical students as malevolent and sinister.

Here dozens of students were on the march: Bearded, long-haired, angry, they shouted at the building, shouted at the people inside the building — administrators, bureaucrats, the university president — holding signs that showed the ChemStar logo dripping with blood, that ChemStar logo Faye knew so well. It was stitched brightly on the uniform her father wore to work, right there on the chest, the logo’s interlocking C and S.

“What’s wrong with ChemStar?” she said.

“They make napalm,” Sebastian said. “They kill women and children.”

“They do not!”

“It’s true,” Sebastian said. “And the university buys their cleaning products, which is why we’re protesting.”

“They make napalm?” she said. Her father never mentioned this. In fact, he never talked about work at all, never said what he did there.

“It’s a benzene and polystyrene compound,” Sebastian explained, “that, when jellified and mixed with gasoline, becomes a sticky, highly flammable syrup that’s used to burn the skin off the Vietcong.”

“I know what napalm is,” Faye said. “I just didn’t know ChemStar made it.”

That Faye’s childhood and education were funded by paychecks from ChemStar was something she could not bear to tell Sebastian now, or ever.

Sebastian, meanwhile, watched the protest. He did not seem to notice her anxiety. (He had stopped seeing her maarr.) Rather, he watched the two journalists on the periphery of the mob — a writer and a photographer. The writer wasn’t writing anything, and the photographer wasn’t shooting.

“Not enough people showed up,” he said. “It won’t get in the newspaper.”

The crowd was maybe three dozen strong, and loud, and walking in a circle holding signs and chanting “Murderers, murderers.”

“A few years ago,” Sebastian said, “a dozen picketing people would get you a few inches on page six. But now, after so many protests, the criteria have changed. Each new protest makes the next protest more usual. It’s the great flaw of journalism: The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is. We have to follow the same trajectory as the stock market — sustained and unstoppable growth.”

Faye nodded. She was thinking about the ChemStar billboard back home: MAKING OUR DREAMS COME TRUE.

“I guess there’s one way to make sure it gets into the paper,” Sebastian said.

“What’s that?”

“Someone has to be arrested. Works every time.” He turned to her. “It’s been very nice talking to you, Faye,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, distractedly, for she was still thinking about her father, about the way he smelled when he came home from work: like gasoline and something else, some heavy and suffocating smell, like car exhaust, hot asphalt.

“I hope to see you again soon,” Sebastian said. And then he took off running toward the crowd.

Startled, Faye cried “Wait!” but he kept going, sprinting toward a police car parked near the mob. He bounded onto its hood, leaped onto the roof, and raised both fists into the air. The students cheered wildly. The photographer began shooting. Sebastian jumped up and down, denting the top of the car, then turned and looked at Faye. He smiled at her, and held her gaze until the police reached him, which they did quickly, and wrestled him down and put him in handcuffs and took him away.

4

WHEN SEBASTIAN LANDED on the police car, he landed hard. On his jaw. The police were brutal. Faye imagined him in jail right now, a lump of bruise. He would need someone to rub ice on that jaw, maybe change a bandage, massage a sore back. Faye wondered if he had someone who could do that for him, someone special. She found herself hoping he did not.

Her schoolwork was spread out across her bed. She was reading Plato. The Republic. The dialogues. She had finished the required reading, had swallowed everything about Plato’s allegorical cave, the allegorical people living in the allegorical cave and seeing only shadows of the real world and believing the shadows were the real world. Plato’s basic point being that our map of reality and actual reality sometimes do not match.

She had finished the homework and was reading the only chapter in the whole book the professor had not assigned, which seemed curious. But now, halfway through reading it, Faye understood. In this chapter, Socrates was teaching a bunch of old men how to attract very young boys. For sex.

What was his advice? Never praise the boy, Socrates said. Do not attempt romance, do not sweep him off his feet. When you praise a beautiful boy, he said, the boy is filled with such a high opinion of himself that he becomes more difficult to catch. You are a hunter who shoos your prey away. The person who calls an attractive person attractive only becomes more ugly. Better not to praise him at all. Better, maybe, to be a little mean.

Faye wondered if that was true. She knew every time Henry called her beautiful she tended to think he was more pathetic. She hated this about herself, but maybe Socrates was right. Maybe desire was best left unspoken. She didn’t know. Sometimes Faye wished she lived another life parallel to this one, a life exactly the same but for the choices she made. In this other life, she wouldn’t have to worry so much. She could say anything, do anything, kiss boys and not worry about her reputation, watch movies with abandon, stop obsessing about tests or homework, shower with the other girls, wear far-out clothes and sit at the hippie table for kicks. In this other more interesting life, Faye would live consequence-free, and it seemed beautiful and lovely and, as soon as she thought about it objectively for ten seconds, ridiculous. Totally beyond her reach.

Which was why today’s great success — her pleasant and honest embarrassment with Sebastian — was such a breakthrough. That she’d embarrassed herself in front of a boy and laughed about it. That she had smeared ink all over her face and didn’t react with horror, did not yet feel horror, was not obsessing over it right now, was not disgusted by it, was not replaying it, reliving it again and again. She needed to know more about Sebastian, she decided. She didn’t know what she’d say, but she needed to know more. And she knew where to go.

Alice lived next door, in a corner suite by the fire exit, a spot that had become a haven for far-out students, mostly women, mostly of the kind Faye had encountered at the meeting, who stayed up late screaming to the record player and smoking grass. When Faye peeked into the room (the door was almost always open), several faces swiveled to look at her, none of them Alice’s. They suggested she might be found at People’s Law, where Alice held an unpaid position keeping the books.

“What’s People’s Law?” Faye asked, and the girls looked at each other and smirked. Faye realized she’d embarrassed herself, that the question revealed she was square. This happened to her all the time.

“They help people arrested for protesting,” one of the girls explained.

“Help them get out of jail,” another added.

“Oh,” Faye said. “Would they be able to help Sebastian?”

They smiled again. The same way. Some new conspiracy. Another bit of the world obvious to everyone but Faye.

“No,” said one of the girls. “He has his own methods. You don’t have to worry about Sebastian. He gets arrested, he’s back out in an hour. No one knows how he does it.”

“He’s a magician,” another of the girls added.

They gave her the address of People’s Law, which turned out to be a hardware store crammed into the first floor of a creaky and hot two-story apartment building, a building that might have seen a previous existence as a resplendent Victorian home but had since been cut up into this live/work retail puzzle. Faye looked for some kind of sign or door, but only found shelves crammed with your typical hardware things: nails, hammers, hoses. She wondered if the girls had given her the wrong address, if they were putting her on. The wooden floor squeaked, and she felt how it rippled and sloped down toward the heaviest shelves. She was about to leave when the proprietor, a tall and thin white-haired man, asked if he could help her find anything.

“I’m looking for People’s Law?” she said.

He looked at her for an uncomfortable moment, seemed to inspect her.

“You?” he said at last.

“Yes. Is it here?”

He told her it was in the basement of the building, accessible through a door out back, via the alley. So Faye found herself tapping on a wooden door with a simple “PL” painted on it in an alley that was empty save for about half a dozen dumpsters cooking in the sun.

The woman who answered — probably no older than Faye herself — said she hadn’t seen Alice that day but suggested Faye could find her at a place called Freedom House. And thus Faye had to endure the whole ritual again, the admission that she did not in fact know what Freedom House was, the awkward look, the embarrassment at not knowing something everyone else knew, the explanation from the girl telling her that Freedom House was a shelter for runaway girls and that Faye was forbidden to give the location to any man ever.

So this is how Faye discovered Alice in an otherwise unremarkable three-story brick building, in an unmarked top-floor apartment, accessible only if you knew the secret knock (which by the way was Morse code for SOS), in a spartan living room decorated mostly with mismatched and obviously secondhand or donated furniture made more inviting and homey by various crocheted and knitted things, where Alice was sitting on the couch, her legs up on the edge of a coffee table, reading Playboy magazine.

“Why are you reading Playboy magazine?” Faye asked.

Alice gave her that impatient, withering stare that announced exactly how little she cared about stupid questions.

“For the articles,” she said.

The thing that made Alice so frightening was that she did not seem to care if she was liked. She did not seem to spend any mental energy accommodating other people, accounting for their wishes, expectations, desires, their basic need for decorum and manners and etiquette. And Faye’s opinion was that everyone should want to be liked — not out of vanity but because wanting to be liked provided an essential social lubricant. In a world without a vengeful god, the desire to be liked and to fit in was the only check on human behavior, it seemed to Faye, who wasn’t sure if she believed in a vengeful god but knew for a fact that Alice and her cronies were atheists to the bone. They could be as rude as they cared to be and not worry about retribution in the afterlife. It was disarming. Like being in the same room with a large and unpredictable dog — that constant latent fear of it.

Alice sighed heavily like this was going to be a huge mental burden, this talking. It was almost as if Alice expected Faye to waste her time, and it was up to Faye to prove otherwise.

“Look at this woman,” Alice said. She kicked her feet to the floor and laid the magazine on the coffee table and opened it to the centerfold. The photo, vertically oriented, took up three full pages. And once Faye got over the initial shock, that first somersault in her belly when she found herself looking at something she was sure she wasn’t allowed to see, the first thing she thought, tilting her head so she could see better, was that the young woman in the photo looked cold. Physically cold. She was standing in a swimming pool, her back turned at a slight angle to the camera, twisting at the waist so that her torso was in profile. She was standing in perfectly turquoise water and hugging a child’s inflatable swimming pool toy — a blow-up swan — hugging it around its long neck, pressing it against her cheek as if she might find warmth there. Of course she was nude. The skin of her butt and lower back appeared rough and coarse, a crocodile skin from the goose bumps popping up all over. Beads of water dribbled off her butt and upper thigh where she had dipped a few inches into the water, but no farther.

“What am I looking at here?” Faye said.

“Pornography.”

“Yes, but why?”

“I think she’s very pretty, this one.”

The centerfold girl. Miss August, it said in the corner. Her pink body was mottled a slight maroon in places where she was cold or where the blood showed under her skin. Water streaked down her back, a few drops clung to her arm, not enough to look like she’d really been swimming — maybe the photographer had spritzed her, for effect.

“There’s an ease to her,” Alice said, “a quiet charm. I’ll bet she’s capable, powerful even. Problem is she has no idea what she can do.”

“But you like her looks.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“I read somewhere that you shouldn’t compliment people’s looks,” Faye said. “It diminishes you.”

Alice frowned. “Says who?”

“Socrates. Via Plato.”

“You know,” Alice said, “you’re way strange sometimes.”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize for it.”

Miss August was not quite smiling. Rather, she had that mechanically forced smile of someone who’s very cold being told to smile. Her face was summer-freckled. Two drops of water hung from her right breast. If they fell, they would land on her bare belly. Faye could feel it, that chill.

“Porn is a problem for the whole project of enlightenment,” Alice said. “If otherwise rational, educated, literate, moral, and ethical men still need to look at this, then how far have we really come? The conservative wants to get rid of pornography by banning it. But the liberal wants to get rid of it too, by making people so enlightened they no longer want it. Repression versus education. The cop and the teacher. Both have the same goal — prudishness — but use different tools.”

“All my uncles subscribe,” Faye said, pointing to the magazine. “They leave it out in the open. They put it on the coffee table.”

“They say the sexual revolution is not really about sex but about shame.”

“This girl does not appear to be ashamed,” said Faye.

“This girl does not appear to be anything. It’s not her shame we’re talking about, it’s ours.”

“You feel ashamed?”

“By ours I mean the general we, the abstract we.”

“Oh.”

“The capital V Viewer. Capital L Looker. Not us in particular, you or I.”

“I feel ashamed,” Faye said. “A little, I guess. I don’t want to, but I do.”

“And why is that?”

“I don’t want anyone to know I’ve seen this. They might think I’m weird.”

“Define ‘weird.’ ”

“That I was looking at girls. They might think I like girls.”

“And you’re worried about what they think?”

“Of course I am.”

“That’s not real shame. You think it’s shame, but it’s not.”

“What is it?”

“Fear.”

“Okay.”

“Self-hatred. Alienation. Loneliness.”

“Those are just words.”

There was also the odd fact of it, the magazine, sitting there between them, its objectness. The creases in the photo, the undulations of the pages, the way the gloss of the magazine reflected the light, the curling paper’s sensitivity to humid air. One of the staples holding the magazine together erupted out of Miss August’s arm, as if she’d been struck by shrapnel. The windows in the apartment were open, a small electric fan whirred nearby, and the centerfold pages bounced and shimmied in the shifting air, animating it — it looked like Miss August was moving, twitching, trying to hold still in the cold water but not able to.

“The men in the movement say this shit all the time,” said Alice. “Like if you don’t want to fuck them they wonder why you have such big hang-ups. If you won’t take off your shirt, they tell you not to be so ashamed of yourself. Like if you don’t let them feel your tits you’re not a legitimate part of the movement.”

“Does Sebastian do that?”

Alice stopped and squinted at her. “Why do you want to know about Sebastian?”

“No reason. I’m curious, is all.”

“Curious.”

“He seems to be, you know, interesting.”

“Interesting how?”

“We had a nice afternoon together. Today. On the lawn.”

“Oh, lord.”

“What?”

“You dig him.”

“Do not.”

“You’re thinking about him.”

“He seems interesting. That’s all.”

“Do you want to ball him?”

“I would not phrase it like that.”

“You want to fuck him. But you want to make sure he’s worthy first. That’s why you came here today. To ask about Sebastian.”

“We simply had a pleasant conversation and then he was arrested at the ChemStar protest and now I’m worried about him. I’m worried about my friend.”

Alice leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees. “Don’t you have a boyfriend back home?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“But you do, right? Girls like you always do. Where is he right now? Is he waiting for you?”

“He’s in the army.”

“Oh, wow!” Alice said, clapping her hands together. “Oh, that’s rich! Your boyfriend’s going to Vietnam and you want to screw a war protestor.”

“Never mind.”

“And not just any war protestor. The war protestor.” Alice clapped, a mocking applause.

“Be quiet,” Faye said.

“Sebastian’s got a Vietcong flag on his wall. He gives money to the National Liberation Front. You know that, right?”

“This is none of your business.”

“Your boyfriend is going to get shot. And Sebastian will have supplied the bullets. This is who you choose.”

Faye stood up. “I’m going to leave now.”

“You might as well pull the trigger yourself,” Alice said. “That’s low.”

Faye turned her back to Alice and marched out of the apartment, her hands balled up in fists, her arms straight and rigid.

“Now this is it,” Alice called after her. “Shame. Real shame. This is how it feels, girly.”

The last thing Faye saw as she slammed the door shut was Alice kicking her feet back up on the coffee table and flipping the pages of Playboy magazine.

5

NO CAB FARE, no train tokens. Alice believed in freedom, free movement, being free — here, at five o’clock in the morning, walking in the purple and cool and damp light of Chicago. The sun was beginning to show over Lake Michigan and the faces of buildings glowed weakly pink. Certain delis were opening, and shopkeepers hosed off the sidewalks, where batches of newspapers tossed from trucks landed in heaps like sacks of grain. She looked at one and saw the headline — NIXON NOMINATED BY GOP — and she spat. She inhaled the early-morning scent of the city, its waking breath, asphalt and engine oil. The shopkeepers ignored her. They saw her clothes — her big green military jacket and leather boots, her ripped-up skintight jeans — and they saw her black rumpled hair, her unimpressed eyes leveled over silver sunglasses, and they assumed correctly she was not a paying customer. She carried no cash. She did not warrant being courteous to. She liked the transparency of these interactions, the lack of bullshit between herself and the world.

She didn’t carry a purse because if she carried a purse she might be tempted to put keys in the purse, and if she had keys she might be tempted to lock her door, and if she began locking her door she might be tempted to buy things that needed locking up: clothes purchased at actual stores rather than hand-sewn or shoplifted — that’s where it would begin — then shoes, dresses, jewelry, stockpiles of collectible doodads, then still more stuff, a television, small at first, then a bigger one, then another, one for each room, and magazines, cookbooks, pots and pans, framed pictures on the walls, a vacuum cleaner, an ironing board, clothes worth ironing, rugs worth vacuuming, and shelves and shelves and shelves, a bigger place, an apartment, a house, a garage, a car, locks on the car, locks on the doors, multiple locks and bars on the windows that would finally turn the house more fully into the jail it had long ago become. It would be a fundamental change in her stance toward the world: from inviting the world in to keeping the world out.

Tonight was one of those nights that would not have happened if she carried a purse, or keys, or money, or hang-ups regarding easy necking with motley strangers. She went looking for free kicks and found them so quickly, so easily: two men downtown who invited her up to their dirty apartment, where they drank whiskey and played Sun Ra records and she danced with them and swayed her hips and, after one of the men passed out, gave gentle kisses to the other until the weed was gone. The music was not hummable, was not really even danceable, but was excellent to kiss to. And it was fun until the guy unbuttoned his pants and said, “Would you do something with your mouth?” That the guy couldn’t even ask for it correctly, couldn’t even name the thing he wanted, was, she thought, pathetic. He seemed surprised when she said so. “I thought you were liberated,” he said, by which he meant that she should indulge all his various wants and like it.

Such were the expectations of the New Left.

She still felt the pot in her body, in her legs, the way her legs felt like stilts, harder and thinner and longer than normal sober legs. Step after westward step, through downtown and back to Circle, Alice walked a clownish walk that made her love her body, for she could feel her body working, could feel its various wonderful parts.

She was testing her legs when the cop saw her. She was hopscotching past an alley where his car was hidden and he called out to her: “Hey, honey, where ya going?”

She stopped. Turned to the voice. It was him. The pig with the ridiculous name: Officer Charlie Brown.

“What you been up to, honey,” he said, “out so late?”

He was large as an avalanche, a big pumpkin-faced enforcer of petty laws — panhandling, littering, jaywalking, curfew. The cops had lately been stopping them for minor infractions, stopping and searching them, looking for anything contraband, anything arrestable. Most of the pigs were idiots, but this one was different. This one was interesting.

“Come here,” he said. He leaned on the hood of his police cruiser. One hand on his nightstick. It was dark. The alley was a cave.

“I asked you a question,” he said. “Whatcha doing?”

She walked to him and stopped just out of arm’s reach, stared up at him, at the great imposing mountain of him. His uniform was a light blue, almost baby blue, and short-sleeved, too small for him. His chest was shaped like a keg and strained against the buttons. He had a light blond mustache that you couldn’t really see unless you were up this close. His badge was a five-pointed silver star directly over his heart.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just going home.”

“Going home?”

“Yes.”

“At five in the morning? Just walking home? Not doing anything illegal?”

Alice smiled. He was obeying the script she’d given him. One of the few things she admired about Officer Brown was his persistence.

She said, “Fuck off, pig.”

He lunged for her then, grabbed her neck and brought her to him, to his face, pressed his nose into her scalp and sniffed loudly right above her ear.

“You smell like weed,” he said.

“So what?”

“So I’m gonna have to search you now.”

“You need a warrant for that,” she said, and he laughed a laugh that was admittedly pretty fake-sounding, but she appreciated it, that he was trying. He spun her around and pinned her arm behind her back and walked her deeper into the alley, then forced her over the trunk of his cruiser. They’d been through this once before, only a couple of nights ago, and had gotten this far, bending her over the car, before Brown broke character. He had shoved her onto the car a little too forcefully — to be honest, she had let him shove her, had gone slack at the key moment — and when her cheek met the metal she was momentarily dazed, which is exactly what she wanted, a brief escape from her head.

But it had scared him, her face hitting the car like that. She bruised almost immediately. “Little piggy!” he had cried, and she admonished him for using their safe word, had to explain to him that their safe word was reserved for her only and it didn’t even make sense for him to use it. And he shrugged and looked at her penitently and promised to be better next time.

Here is what Alice had asked of Officer Brown: She wanted him to find her some random night when she didn’t expect it and act like he didn’t know her and certainly not act like they’d been carrying on a summer-long affair, just act like she was another hippie freak and he was another brutal cop and he’d take her into a dark alley and bend her over the trunk of his police cruiser and rip off her clothes and have his way with her. That is what she wanted.

Officer Brown was deeply perturbed at this request. He wondered why on earth she would want that. Why not have some more normal backseat sex? And she gave him the only answer that mattered: Because she had already tried normal backseat sex, but had yet to try this.

Her face against the car now, and Brown’s hand pressing hard against her neck — it seemed like he was going to go through with it this time, and she was not exactly enjoying it, but more like hoping she would enjoy it very soon, if he kept it going.

Officer Brown, meanwhile, was terrified.

Terrified of hurting her, but also terrified of not hurting her, or not hurting her in the correct way, not being good enough for her, terrified that if he wasn’t good enough at the weird kinky things she wanted from him that she’d up and leave him. That was the biggest terror of them all, that Alice would lose interest and go.

This was what it was like for him, every time. The more of these encounters Officer Brown had with Alice, the more afraid and paranoid he became about losing her. He knew this about himself. He could feel it happening, but he could not stop it. After each new encounter, the thought of no longer encountering her became more devastating and impossible to bear.

This is what he called them, privately, to himself, in his head: encounters.

Because the word sounded passive and almost accidental. You “encounter” a stranger in an alley. You “encounter” a bear in the woods. It sounded like it happened by chance and certainly not in the elaborately premeditated way the encounters actually occurred. The word encounter was a word that did not sound like he was aggressively on-purpose cheating on his wife, which of course he was doing. Willingly. And often.

When he thought about his wife discovering his secret, he was ashamed. When he imagined what it would be like admitting to his wife what he’d been doing and how he’d been doing it in such a well-thought-out, behind-your-back way, he felt full of shame and disgust, yes, but also a kind of recrimination and justifiable anger and a sense that he was beyond reproach and driven into Alice’s arms by a wife who, since the birth of their daughter, had changed.

Changed drastically and fundamentally. It began when his wife started calling him “Daddy,” and so he called her “Mommy,” and he thought it was a joke, a game between them, trying to get used to these new roles, like the way she called him “Husband” all through their honeymoon. It seemed so suddenly formal and exotic and strange. “Would you join me for dinner, my dearest husband?” she would ask each night for a week after they were married, and they would fall giggling onto the bed feeling much too young and immature for names like Husband and Wife. And so he figured in the hospital in the days after his daughter was born and they called each other Mommy and Daddy that it was similarly comic and temporary.

Only that was five years ago and she was still calling him Daddy. And he was still calling her Mommy. She never explicitly asked to go by that name, but rather slowly stopped responding to other names. It was weird. He’d call to her from the other room: “Honey?” Nothing. “Sweetie?” Nothing. “Mommy?” And she’d appear, as if that was the only word she could still hear. He found it creepy she’d refer to him as Daddy, but this remained, for the most part, unsaid, except for furtive suggestions here and there: “You don’t have to call me that if you don’t want to,” he’d say, to which she’d respond, “But I want to.”

Plus there was also the matter of sex, which was not happening, at all, sex between them, a fact he chalked up to the family’s now regular sleeping arrangement, which involved their daughter sleeping with them, between them, in their bed. He did not remember agreeing to this. It simply happened. And he suspected it wasn’t even for his daughter’s benefit, this arrangement, but for Mommy’s. That Mommy liked sleeping this way because in the morning their daughter would climb on Mommy and kiss her all over and tell her she was pretty. He got the feeling that Mommy did not want to live without this daily ceremony.

She had in fact trained their daughter to do this.

Not on purpose, not at first. But Mommy had definitely actively ritualized this behavior, which began innocently enough, their daughter waking up one morning and saying all puffy-eyed and bleary, “You’re pretty, Mommy.” It was cute. Mommy hugged her and said thank you. Innocent. But then a few mornings later Mommy asked “Do you still think I’m pretty?” and the daughter responded enthusiastically “Yes!” That wasn’t weird enough to say anything about — just enough to note, quietly, in his head. Then again a few mornings after that, when Mommy asked the daughter “What do we say to Mommy in the morning?” and the daughter said, reasonably, “Good morning?” And Mommy said no and this quizzing went on until the poor kid got it right: “You’re so pretty!”

That was kind of weird.

Weirder still the next week when Mommy actively punished the daughter for not saying she was pretty, withholding the pancakes and cartoons that were their Saturday-morning tradition and instead directing the daughter to clean her room. And when the daughter asked through her disappointed tears why this was happening and Mommy said “You didn’t tell me I was pretty this morning,” he thought it was very weird indeed.

(It goes without saying that when he told his wife she was pretty, she rolled her eyes and pointed out some new part of her that had lately become wrinkled or fat.)

He began working the night shift. To avoid the cascade of kisses and hollow compliments that had now become the normal and habituated way each day began. He slept during the day, the whole bed to himself. At night, he was on patrol, which is how he encountered Alice.

She was exactly like the rest, at first, memorable only because of the sunglasses she wore in the middle of the night. He found her out walking and asked her to produce identification. Predictably, she could not. So he cuffed her and pressed her against his car and searched her for drugs, which about one in three of these types usually carried, stupidly, right in their pockets.

But she carried nothing — no drugs, no money, no makeup, no keys. Homeless, he guessed. He took her to the lockup, dropped her off, and promptly forgot about her.

She was at the exact same spot the next night.

At exactly the same time. Dressed exactly the same: green military jacket, sunglasses worn most of the way down her nose. She wasn’t walking this time, just standing there on the sidewalk like she was waiting for him.

He pulled up and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Breaking curfew,” she said. She glared at him, stood stiff and straight, a pose of abstract anger and resistance.

“You want to go through this again?” he said.

“Do what you’re gonna do, pig.”

So again he cuffed her, pressed her against the car. Again she was carrying nothing. All the way to the lockup she stared at him. Most people slumped against the door, defeated, almost like they were trying to hide. Not this girl. It unnerved him, her stare.

The next night he saw her again, at the same spot, the same time. She stood leaning against the wall of a brick building, one knee up, hands in her pockets.

“Hey there,” he said.

“Hey, pig.”

“Breaking curfew again?”

“Among other things.”

He felt a little afraid of her. He was not accustomed to people reacting this way. The freaks and hippies were unbearable, of course, but they could be trusted to act rationally. They did not want to go to jail. They did not want to be hassled. But this girl, she emitted a kind of danger, a flirtatiousness and fierceness that he found alien and unpredictable. Maybe even thrilling.

“You gonna cuff me?” she said.

“Are you causing trouble?”

“I could. If that’s what it took.”

The next night was his night off, but he found someone to trade shifts. She was there again, same spot. He drove past her once, then again. She followed him with her eyes. She was openly laughing at him by the third time around the block.

The first time they screwed it was in the backseat of his police cruiser. Alice was at her usual spot, at the usual time. She’d simply pointed at the alley and told him to park the car there. He did. It was dark, the car almost completely hidden. She told him to get in the backseat. He did. He was not used to taking orders from girls, from hippie street freaks especially. He felt briefly resistant to the whole thing, but that evaporated as soon as she got into the backseat with him and closed the door and removed his belt, which fell loudly to the floor, holding as it was his radio and nightstick and gun. A great thud and clatter on the floorboards. And Alice didn’t even try to kiss him. She didn’t seem to want to, though he kissed her — it seemed gentlemanly, to kiss her, to stroke her face with his fingers, a gesture that he hoped conveyed thoughtfulness and human affection, that he wanted more than simply what was in her pants, except that what was in her pants was mostly what he wanted, at that moment very much so. She yanked at his slacks and all thoughts of his wife and the guys back at the station and the superintendent and the mayor and the slim chance of somebody walking by and seeing them, they were all obliterated.

They didn’t have sex “together” so much as Alice had vigorous sex with him while he lay there also participating.

Afterward, exiting the car, she turned and smiled her sly smile and said, “See you around, pig.” And for the rest of his shift he obsessed over what she meant by that. See you around. Not “See you next time.” Not “See you tomorrow.” Not even “See you later.” She’d said See you around, which was the least forward-thinking, most noncommittal thing she could have said.

Each encounter followed roughly the same basic emotional pattern: massive relief that Alice had returned, followed by ceaseless worry that she’d never come back.

And he needed her to come back. Desperately. Harrowingly. It felt like his chest and guts were held together by a single wooden clothespin that she could remove by simply not showing up. He imagined arriving at their usual spot and not finding her anymore and feeling his insides burst like a water balloon. The rejection would be terminal. He knew it. This led him to a morally questionable but, in his mind, totally necessary employment request: He asked to be assigned to the Red Squad.

After which his full-time job became to spy on Alice, which was really excellent because he could both keep track of where she was at all times and, even better, have a somewhat-plausible excuse if anyone found out about them. He wasn’t having an affair; he was undercover.

He bugged her room. He photographed her going into and out of various known subversive meeting places. And he felt more free when he screwed her. That is, until she asked him to do things to her that he found more than a little weird.

“Fuck me while I’m handcuffed,” she’d said that first time their lovemaking changed from standard-issue backseat sex to something kinkier.

He asked her why on earth she would ever want something like that and she gave him that withering, crushing, sarcastic face he hated so much. “Because I’ve never tried it in handcuffs,” she said.

But he hadn’t thought that was a very good reason. He could think of a million things he had never tried and had no interest in.

“Do you like balling me?” she’d asked.

He paused. He hated this, all this talking about himself and his feelings. One advantage to his wife’s post-child metamorphosis was that she had stopped asking personal questions completely. It occurred to him that he hadn’t had to express his feelings verbally in years.

Yes, he’d told her. He liked making love to her, and she laughed at that — the quaintness of a phrase like “making love.” He blushed.

“And did you ever think that you’d enjoy screwing a freaky beatnik like me?” she said.

“No.”

She shrugged, as if to say, Clearly I am right. She raised her hands to him, presented her wrists, which he reluctantly handcuffed.

The next time she asked for the handcuffs again.

“And try to be a little rougher,” she’d said.

He asked her to be more specific.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just don’t be so gentle.”

“I’m not entirely clear what that means in practice.”

“Smash my face into the car or something.”

“Or something?”

And this is how it went every time: Alice asked for something new and weird, something that Brown had never done before and maybe had never even considered before, something that gave him the creeps and made him feel all sorts of dread that he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to do it — or wouldn’t be able to do it to her standards—and so Brown resisted it until eventually his fear of disappointing Alice or losing Alice overcame his shame and panic and he muscled through with whatever sexual act she wanted, self-conscious the entire time, not exactly enjoying it but knowing the alternative was much, much worse.

“You got anything to show me?” he said now, pressing Alice’s belly into the car and pressing himself against her back.

“No.”

“Anything in those jeans? Best to admit it.”

“Honest, no.”

“We’ll see about that.”

She felt his hands in her pockets, front and back, turning them inside out, finding nothing but lint and old tobacco. He patted her legs, outside the thigh, then inside.

“See?” she said. “Nothing.”

“Shut up.”

“Let me go.”

“Shut your mouth.”

“You’re a fuckin’ pig,” she said.

He pressed her face harder into the cold metal of the cruiser. “Say that again,” he said. “I dare you.”

“Fuckin’ cockless pig,” she said.

“Cockless,” he said. “I’ll show you cockless.”

Then he leaned over her and whispered into her ear, in a tone about five octaves higher and full of tenderness and affection, “Am I doing this right?”

“Don’t break character!” she scolded.

“Okay,” he said, “fine.” And she felt him pull at her jeans and yank them down. She felt the slight buckle of the metal where he forced her cheek against the trunk of the cruiser. Then the feeling of the morning air as he exposed her, brought her jeans all the way off and kicked her legs apart so she was spread out and easily enterable. Then entering her, pressing at her until he worked his way in, and she felt him inflate inside her, thicken and fatten, before he began pushing. Whining and pushing, light little puppy yelps each time he bucked. No rhythm to it. A chaotic and spastic pulse that ended quickly, after only a minute or two, with a final catastrophic jab.

Then the quick diminishment. His body softening, his hands becoming gentle. He released her and she stood up. He handed her the jeans he’d removed. He looked at the ground sheepishly. She smiled and put her pants back on. They both sat down, behind the cruiser, leaning into each other and the bumper. At length he finally spoke.

“Too rough?” he said.

“No,” she said. “It was fine.”

“I was worried it was too rough.”

“It was good.”

“Because last time you said you wanted it rougher.”

“I know,” she said. She twisted her back, one way, then the other, felt the spot on her cheek where she’d met the trunk of the cruiser, the spot on her neck where his hand had been.

“Why you gotta walk alone all the time?” he said. “It’s not safe.”

“It’s perfectly safe.”

“There are dangerous people out here,” he said, and he gathered her up in his big arms and squeezed her right where it hurt.

“Ouch.”

“Oh, god,” he said, releasing her. “I’m a moron.”

“It’s fine.” She patted him on the arm. “I ought to get going.” Alice stood up. She felt the dampness in her jeans turning chilly. She wanted to go home. She wanted a shower.

“Let me drive you,” Brown said.

“No. People will see us.”

“I’ll drop you a couple blocks from the dorm.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“When will I see you again?”

“Yeah, about that. Next time I’d like to try something different,” she said, and his heart leaped: There would be a next time!

“Next time,” she said, “I’d like you to choke me.”

Brown felt his butterflies disappear. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You don’t have to actually choke me,” she said. “How about you put your hand there and act like you’re choking me.”

“Act like it?”

“If you also wanted to squeeze a little, that would be fine too.”

“Jesus!” he said. “I am not doing that.”

She frowned. “What’s your problem?”

“My problem? What’s your problem? Did I hear you right? Choke you? That’s going way too far. Why on earth would I do that?”

“We’ve been over this before. Because I’ve never tried it.”

“No. That’s not it. That’s a reason to eat teriyaki. That’s not a reason to goddamn choke you.”

“It’s all I have.”

“If you want me to do this, you need to explain yourself.”

It was the first time he’d really stood up to her, and he was immediately regretting it. He worried that she’d simply shrug her shoulders and leave. As with most dysfunctional couples, there was an imbalance between them regarding who needed the relationship more. It was an unspoken fact that she could leave at any moment with very little pain, whereas he would be devastated. A puddle of rejection. Because he knew nothing like this would ever happen to him again for the rest of his life. He would never again find a woman like Alice, and after she was gone he would return to the life she had revealed to be tedious and barren.

His response to Alice was really a response to the exigencies of monogamy and mortality.

Alice sat there thinking a moment, more reflective than he’d ever seen her. Part of her confidence was that she seemed to know exactly what she wanted to say at any given moment, so this pause felt unusual and out of character. She gathered herself up and looked at him above those dark sunglasses she always wore and breathed a heavy, somewhat exasperated sigh.

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “Normal sex with boys doesn’t really interest me. The usual stuff, I mean. Most boys treat sex like it’s a pinball game. Like it’s a matter of whapping the same levers again and again and again. It’s boring.”

“I’ve never played pinball.”

“You’re missing the point. Okay, different analogy: Imagine everyone was eating this cake. And they told you how good the cake was. And when you tried the cake, it tasted, you know, like paper and cardboard. It was terrible. And yet all your friends loved it. How would you feel?”

“Disappointed, I guess.”

“And crazy. Especially if they told you it wasn’t the cake’s fault. That the real problem was you. That you weren’t eating it right. I know I’m stretching the metaphor pretty thin.”

“So I’m a new piece of cake for you?”

“I just want to be made to feel something.”

“Have you told your friends about me?”

“Hah. No way.”

“I embarrass you. You’re ashamed of me.”

“Listen, in real life, I’m an antiauthoritarian anarchist. And yet, there’s this electric part of me that also wants to be dominated sexually by a cop. I prefer to go with it and not judge. But I don’t think my friends would understand.”

“All these things we’re doing,” he said, “the handcuffs, the rough stuff. Are they, you know, are they working?”

She smiled. She touched his cheek lightly, the most gentle touch she’d ever administered. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”

“Don’t say that. You know I hate that.”

She kissed him on the top of his head. “Go fight crime.”

She felt his eyes on her as she left. She felt his bruises on her neck and cheek. As she walked away, she felt a great cold glob of him sliding out.

6

IT WAS A WHISPER on campus, spread between one turned-on student and another. It was a secret not shared with the pro-war ROTC cadets, nor the fraternity jocks, nor the husband-seeking debutantes. Only the most committed, only the most sincere were allowed to hear it: On certain days, in a certain classroom, deep within the bewildering labyrinth of the Behavioral Sciences Building, for an hour at a time, the war was officially over.

Vietnam did not exist during this hour, in this class. Allen Ginsberg, the great poet newly arrived from the coast, led them, beginning each class with the same words: “The war is officially over.” Then the students repeated the words, then repeated them again, in unison, and the fact of their voices harmonizing made the words more real. Ginsberg told them how language has power, how thought has power, how releasing these words into the universe could begin a cascade that would make the words facts.

“The war is officially over,” Ginsberg said. “Say it until the meaning disappears and the words become pure physical things that erupt from the body because the names of gods used in a mantra are identical with the gods themselves. This is very important,” he said, raising a finger into the air. “If you say ‘Shiva’ you are not calling for Shiva, you are producing Shiva, creator and preserver, destroyer and concealer, the war is officially over.”

Faye watched him from the back of the room, where she sat, like everyone else, on the dusty linoleum floor — watched his swinging silver peace-sign necklace, his eyes blissfully closed behind horn-rimmed glasses, and all his hair, that scrum of black and tangled hair that had migrated from the now-smooth crown of his head down to his cheeks and jowls, a beard that shook as he shook, rocking and swaying during the prayer chanting like congregants did in the more exuberant churches, his whole body getting involved, his eyes closed, his legs crossed, he brought his own special rug to sit on.

“A body vibration like they do on the plains of Africa,” said Ginsberg, who with a harmonium and finger cymbals played the music they notched their chants to. “Or the mountains of India, or any place absent television machines that do the vibrating for us. We have all forgotten how to do this except maybe Phil Ochs singing ‘The War Is Over’ for two whole hours once, a mantra more powerful than all the antennas of the Columbia Broadcasting System, than all the broadsides printed for the Democratic National Convention, than ten full years of political speech yakking.”

The students sat cross-legged on the floor and rocked themselves to some private interior tempo. It looked like a room of spinning tops. The desks were shoved to the outer edges of the class. Someone’s jacket hung over the window on the door, blocking the view into the room, in case of passing administrators or campus security or some of the less-hip professoriate.

Faye knew that the war-is-officially-over chant would eventually give way to “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,” and then they would end their hour together with the sacred vowel: “om.” This was how each of their classes had gone so far, and Faye felt crushed that all she might learn from the great Allen Ginsberg was this: how to sway, how to chant, how to growl. This was the man who’d written poems that burned her right through, and sitting in her chair on the first day of class she was worried she’d be struck dumb in his presence. Then she saw him and wondered where the nice neat man from the author photo had gone. No more tweed jacket and combed hair — Ginsberg had fully embraced the counterculture’s most obvious emblems, and at first Faye felt disappointed at the lack of creativity this implied. Now her feelings were closer to plain annoyance. She wanted to raise her hand and ask “Are we ever going to learn about, you know, poetry?” if it weren’t such an obviously unwelcome question. For the students in this class didn’t care about poetry — they cared about the war, and what they wanted to say about the war, and how they were going to stop the war. Primarily, they cared about the war protest at the upcoming Democratic National Convention, now only days away. It would be a mighty thing, they all agreed. Everyone was coming.

“If the police attack,” Ginsberg said, “we must sit on the ground and say ‘om’ and show them what peace looks like.”

The students rocked and hummed. A few opened their eyes and exchanged looks, a kind of telepathy zapping between them that said, If the cops come, I’m not sitting, I’m fucking running.

“It will take all the bravery you can muster,” Ginsberg said, as if reading their thoughts. “But the only answer to violence is its opposite.”

The students closed their eyes.

“This is how to do it,” he said. “Let us practice. Do you feel it? Obviously it is a subjective experience, which is the only kind that matters. Anything objective is not really feelable.”

Faye held straight As in her other courses. In economics, biology, classics — she’d yet to miss a question on the weekly quizzes. But poetry? It did not appear that Ginsberg intended to grade them. And while most of the students found this liberating, it roiled Faye’s equilibrium. How was she supposed to act if she didn’t know how she was being measured?

So she tried to be as committed as she could to the meditating while also feeling acutely self-conscious about what she looked like meditating. She tried to chant and rock in a fully committed, one hundred percent way, to feel what Ginsberg said she should feel, a deepening of her soul, a freeing of her mind. And yet every time she began the meditating in earnest, a small thorny idea popped into her head: that she was doing it wrong and everyone would notice. She feared she’d open her eyes and the class would be staring at her or laughing at her. And she tried to bat the thought away, but the longer she meditated the stronger it grew, until she couldn’t even properly sit anymore because she was overwhelmed with anxiety and paranoia.

So she opened her eyes, realized that she was ridiculous, and then the whole process began again.

She vowed this time she would do it right. She would be in the moment without feeling inhibited and insecure. She would pretend she was totally alone.

Except that she was not totally alone.

Among the anonymous strangers in the room, about five paces to her left and up a couple of rows, sat Sebastian. It was the first time she’d seen him since his arrest a few days earlier, and now she was profoundly aware of his presence. She was waiting to see if he’d noticed her. Each time she opened her eyes, this is where they were drawn, to him. It did not appear that he’d seen her yet, or if he had seen her, it did not appear that he cared.

“How do you deepen your soul?” Ginsberg asked. “This is how: You feel your feelings truly, then repeat. You chant until the chanting is automatic and you feel what’s been lying underneath all this time. By ‘deepen your soul’ I don’t mean you add to it, like putting a room on a house. The house has always had that room. But this is the first time you’ve gone in it.”

She imagined what would happen if Ginsberg wandered into one of her uncles’ Iowa garages, with that big ridiculous beard and peace-sign necklace. They’d have a field day, her uncles.

And yet she was being persuaded, despite herself. Especially by his exhortation to calmness and quiet. “You have too much in your heads,” he said. “It’s too noisy in there.” Which Faye had to admit was true for her almost all of the time, all day long, her constant prickling worry.

“When you chant, think only about the chanting, think only about your breath. Live in your breath.”

And Faye tried, but if it wasn’t worry that brought her out of the trance, it was the impulse to glance at Sebastian, to see what he was doing, if he was succeeding, if he was chanting, taking this stuff seriously. She wanted to stare at him. In this group overflowing with the counterculture’s ugly flair — wiry beards, spit-flecked mustaches, sweat-stained headbands, torn jeans and jean jackets, dark sunglasses stupid-looking indoors, fucking berets, that smell of secondhand-store musk and tobacco — Sebastian was easily the good-lookingest guy in the room, Faye thought, objectively. Gentle hair carefully careless. Clean-shaven. That dab of infant cuteness. Toadstool head. The way he tightened his lips while concentrating. She gathered all of this and then closed her eyes and tried again at achieving perfect allover mental peace.

“Stop being so interested in yourselves,” Ginsberg said. “If you’re interested only in you, then you’re stuck with you, and you’re stuck with your own death. It’s all you have.”

And he tapped his finger cymbals and said “Ommmmm” and the students repeated it, “Ommmmm” they said, raggedly, discordantly, out of sync and tune.

“There is no you,” Ginsberg said. “There is only the universe and beauty. Be the beauty of the universe and the beauty will get in your soul. It will grow and grow there, and take over, and when you die, you’re it.”

And Faye was beginning to visualize (as instructed) the all-white pristine light of total awareness, the peace-nirvana when (as instructed) the body is no longer producing sound or meaning but rather perfect bliss-sensation, when she felt the presence of someone nearby, very close, sitting down annoyingly within her personal-space bubble, breaking the spell, lifting her once again to the mundane level of flesh and worry. So she breathed a heavy, passive-aggressive sigh and wiggled her body hoping to broadcast that her mental flow was indeed broken. She tried again: the white light, peace, love, bliss. And the room was saying “Ommmmm” when she felt her new neighbor draw even closer to her, and she thought she could feel a presence in the area around her ear, and she heard his voice, a whisper, saying, “Have you achieved perfect beauty yet?”

It was Sebastian. The shock of this realization made her feel like she was, momentarily, filled with helium.

She swallowed hard. “You tell me,” she said, and he snorted, a contained and muffled laugh. She’d made him laugh.

“I’d say yes,” he whispered. “Perfect beauty. You’ve done it.”

She felt a warmth spread across her face. She smiled. “How about you?” she said.

“There is no me,” he said. “There is only the universe.” He was mocking Ginsberg. And how relieved she felt. Yes, she thought, this was all very silly.

He drew closer, right up next to her ear. She could feel it, that electricity, on her cheek.

“Remember, you’re perfectly calm and at peace,” he whispered.

“Okay,” she said.

“Nothing can disturb your perfect calmness.”

“Yes,” she said. And then she felt him, his tongue, lightly lick the very tip of her earlobe. It almost made her yelp right there in the middle of meditation.

Ginsberg said “Think of a moment of instantaneous perfect stillness,” and Faye tried to compose herself by focusing on his voice. “Maybe in some meadow in the Catskills,” he said, “when the trees came alive like a Van Gogh painting. Or listening to Wagner on the phonograph and the music became nightmarishly sexy and alive. Think of that moment.”

Had she ever felt something like that? A transcendent moment, a perfect moment?

Yes, she thought, she had. Right now. This was that moment.

And she was in it.

7

WHAT USUALLY HAPPENED on Monday nights was that Alice sat alone in her room, reading. The girls who crowded in there with her most other nights and sang enthusiastically to the record player and smoked weed out of tall intimidating-looking hookah things were gone on Mondays, presumably recovering. And despite her public rhetoric, her general homework-is-a-tool-of-oppression stance, Alice used Monday nights to read. One of her many secrets was that she did her work, she was studious, she read books, whenever she was alone, consumed them with speed and vigor. And not the books you’d expect from a radical. They were textbooks. Books on accounting, quantitative analysis, statistics, risk management. Even the music coming out of the record player changed on these nights. It wasn’t the screechy folk-rock that was typical the rest of the week. It was classical, soft and comforting, little piano sonatas and cello suites, soothing and unthreatening stuff. She had this whole other side to her, sitting on her bed unbelievably still for hours, the only movement being a page-flip once every forty-five seconds. She had a kind of serenity in these moments that Officer Brown loved while he sat and watched her from a dark hotel room two thousand meters away, watching Alice through the high-powered telescope requisitioned by the Red Squad unit, listening to the music and the crinkly page-turns on his radio tuned to the high-band frequency of the bug he’d planted in her room a few weeks ago on top of the small overhead lamp, replacing the bug he had previously planted under her bed, the sound quality of which was unacceptable, all muffled and echoey.

He was still new at this, espionage.

He had been watching her read for about an hour when there was a loud, sharp knock at the door — a moment of disequilibrium for Brown when he didn’t know if it was a knock on his hotel-room door or Alice’s dorm-room door. He froze. He listened. Felt relieved when Alice leaped from her bed and opened the door. “Oh, hello,” she said.

“Can I come in?” said a new voice. A girl. A girl’s voice.

“Sure. Thanks for coming,” Alice said.

“I got your note,” said the girl. Brown recognized her, the freshman from next door with the big round glasses: Faye Andresen.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” Alice said, “for how I acted at Freedom House.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. I keep doing this to you. I should stop. It is not in the spirit of sisterhood. I should not have shamed you like that. I’m very sorry.”

“Thanks.”

It was the first time Officer Brown had ever heard Alice apologize or sound remorseful in any way.

“If you want to screw Sebastian,” she said, “that’s your business.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to screw him,” Faye said.

“If you want Sebastian to ball you, that is entirely up to you.”

“I wouldn’t really put it that way.”

“If you want Sebastian to pump the ever-living daylights out of you—”

“Would you stop!”

They were both laughing now. Brown noted this in his journal: Laughing. Though he didn’t know why or how this would be germane, later, whenever he came back to these notes. The Red Squad’s surveillance training was maddeningly brief and vague.

“So about Sebastian,” Alice said, “has he tried anything yet?”

“What do you mean ‘tried anything’?”

“Made a move? Been extra especially affectionate lately?”

Faye looked at her a moment, doing some calculation in her head. “What did you do?”

“So that’s a yes?”

“Did you tell him something?” Faye said. “What did you tell him?”

“I simply communicated to him your very special interest.”

“Oh my god.”

“Your singular fascination with him.”

“Oh, no.”

“Your special secret feelings.”

“Yes, secret. That was my secret.”

“I accelerated the process. I thought I owed it to you. After being such a prude at Freedom House. Now we’re even. You’re welcome.”

“How does this make us even? How is this a favor?”

Faye paced around the room. Alice sat cross-legged on the bed, enjoying herself.

“You were going to quietly suffer and pine,” Alice said. “Admit it. You weren’t going to tell him.”

“You don’t know that. I wouldn’t have pined.”

“He made a move. What was it?”

Faye stopped pacing and looked at Alice. She appeared to be chewing at the inside of her cheek. “He licked my ear during meditation practice.”

“Sexy.”

Brown noted this in his journal: Licked ear.

“And now,” Faye said, “he wants me to come over. To his place. Thursday night.”

“The night before the protest.”

“Yes.”

“How romantic.”

“I guess.”

“No. How insanely romantic. That’s going to be the most important day of Sebastian’s life. He’s heading off to a dangerous protest and riot. He could be hurt, injured, killed. Who knows? And he wants to spend his last free evening with you.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s so, like, Victor Hugo.”

Faye sat down at Alice’s desk and stared at the floor. “I do have a boyfriend, you know. Back home. His name is Henry. He wants to marry me.”

“Okay. And do you want to marry him?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“That kind of indifference usually means no.”

“It’s not indifference. I just haven’t made up my mind.”

“Either you want to marry him more than anything in the world, or you say no. It’s very simple.”

“It’s not simple,” Faye said. “Not at all. You don’t understand.”

“So explain it to me.”

“Okay, here’s what it’s like. Imagine you’re feeling desperately thirsty. Like insanely thirsty. All you can think about is a big tall glass of water. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“And you fantasize about this big tall glass of water, and the fantasy is really vivid in your head, but it does not actually quench your thirst.”

“Because you can’t drink the imaginary glass of water.”

“Right. So you look around and see this murky, oily puddle of water and mud. It’s not exactly the tall glass of water, but it does have the advantage of being wet. It’s real, whereas the tall glass of water is not. And so you choose the oily mud puddle, even though it’s not really what you’d prefer. And that’s roughly why I’m with Henry.”

“But Sebastian, though.”

“He, I think, is the tall glass of water.”

“Someone should really make a country-western song out of this.”

“So I really don’t want to mess it up with Sebastian. And I’m worried he’s going to want to, you know, maybe”—Faye paused, searching for the right word—“be intimate?”

“You mean screw.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. So?”

“So, I was hoping…”

Brief moment of heavy silence. Faye stared at her hands; Alice stared at Faye. They were both sitting on the bed now, perfectly encircled and framed by Officer Brown’s telescopic viewfinder.

“You want advice,” Alice finally said.

“Yes.”

“From me.”

“Yes.”

“About screwing.”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re assuming I’m an expert on this subject why?”

Brown smiled at this. She was such a tease, his hippie girl.

“Oh,” Faye said, her face falling. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Jesus, lighten up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s your problem. You want advice? You have to relax.”

“I’m not sure I know how to do that. Relax.”

“Just, you know, relax. Just breathe.”

“It’s not that easy. I had some doctors try to show me certain breathing techniques once, but sometimes I get really nervous and I can’t do it.”

“You can’t breathe?”

“Not correctly.”

“What happens? Something is going on in your head? You try to relax and breathe but you can’t do it. Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Tell me.”

“Okay, well, when I start my breathing techniques the first thing I feel is shame. I feel ashamed right off the bat that I have to practice breathing. Like, you know, like I can’t even do the simplest most fundamental thing right. Like it’s one more thing I’m failing at.”

“Okay,” Alice said. “Go on.”

“And then when I start to do the actual breathing I’ll start worrying that I’m not doing it right, that maybe my breathing is flawed or something. That it’s not perfect. That it’s not the ideal breathing technique, which I don’t even know what that is but I’m sure it exists and if I’m not doing it I feel like I’m failing. And not only failing at breathing but generally failing. Like I’m a failure in life if I can’t do this correctly. And the more I think about how to breathe, the more difficult the breathing becomes, until I feel like, you know, I’m going to hyperventilate or pass out or something.”

Brown wrote this down in his journal: Hyperventilate.

“And then I start thinking about if I do pass out then someone will find me and make a big fuss over it and I’ll have to explain why I spontaneously passed out for no reason at all, which is a stupid thing to have to explain to someone, because they’ll think they were being heroic, saving someone from a serious injury or heart emergency or something, and when they find out the only thing that’s wrong with me is that I freaked myself out breathing they get, well, you know, disappointed. You can see it on their face. They’re like: Oh, that’s it? And then I start freaking out that I did not measure up to their expectations of a quality sick or injured person, that perversely my problems are not bad enough to justify their worry, which they are now full of resentment about. And even if none of this actually happens, I see it all play out in my mind, and I get so anxious about the possibility of it happening that it might as well have happened. I feel like I actually experience it, you know? It’s like something doesn’t have to happen for it to feel real. This probably all sounds insane to you.”

“Keep going.”

“Okay, well, let’s say even if I’m able to achieve some feeling of peace and relaxation by miraculously doing the breathing techniques correctly, I’ll enjoy feeling happy and relaxed for maybe ten seconds before I begin to worry about how long it’s going to last, the good relaxed feeling. I worry that I won’t be able to maintain it long enough.”

“Long enough for what?”

“To, you know, be successful at it. To do it right. And every second I feel objectively happy is a second I’m closer to failing and returning again to being essentially myself. The metaphor I have in my mind of what this feels like is walking on a tightrope that has no ending and no beginning. The longer you stay up there, the more energy it takes not to fall. And eventually you begin to feel this melancholy and doom because no matter how good a tightrope walker you are, you will inevitably fall. It is only a matter of time. It is guaranteed. And so instead of enjoying the happy relaxed feeling while I’m having it, I feel this huge sense of dread about the moment I will no longer feel happy or relaxed. Which of course is the very thing that obliterates the happiness.”

“Holy god.”

“This is all going through my head more or less constantly. So when you say ‘Just breathe,’ I think it means something different to you than it does to me.”

“I know what you need,” Alice said. And she rolled across the bed and opened the bottom drawer of her nightstand and rummaged around what appeared to be several brown paper bags until finding the appropriate one and turning it over and shaking out what looked like two small red pills.

“From my personal inventory,” she said, which Officer Brown considered writing down but ultimately did not write down; he never logged anything she did that might be indictable. “Alice’s pharmacy,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Something to make you relax.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s not dangerous. It simply quiets the head a bit, lowers the inhibitions.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do. You’re like the Great Wall of Inhibitions.”

“No thank you.”

What were they, Brown wondered. The pills. Maybe psilocybin, mescaline, morning glory seeds? Maybe methedrine, DMT, STP, some kind of barbiturate?

“Listen,” Alice said, “would you like to have a pleasant evening with Sebastian?”

“Yes, but—”

“And do you think you could do that in your current mental state?”

Faye paused a moment and thought this over. “I could produce the appropriate outward appearance of it. I think Sebastian would think I was having a great time.”

“But really, on the inside?”

“Dread and panic that feels just barely bottled up.”

“Yeah, you need these. If you have any interest in having a sincerely good time. Not for him but for you.”

“What do they feel like?”

“Like a sunny day. Like you’re strolling along on a sunny day without a care in the world.”

“I have literally never felt like that.”

“Side effects are they make your mouth gluey. Also weird dreams. Mild hallucinations, but that’s really rare. You want to take them with food. Let’s go.”

Alice took Faye’s hand and they left the room, presumably down to the cafeteria, which would be mostly empty this time of night. The only available food would be breakfast cereal, probably, or the refrigerated leftovers of that day’s dinner. Meat loaf. Brown’s research was narrow but exhaustive. He knew the routines of this dorm as well as he knew those at his own house, where his wife would be waking up in about six hours to a slathering of kisses and compliments from their child. He wondered how much of her was able to sincerely enjoy these compliments, knowing she got them by intimidation and blackmail. He guessed nine-tenths. Almost all of her. But that other bit, he thought, would be throbbing.

He hoped, down in the cafeteria right now, that the girls were talking about him. He hoped Alice would reveal her burgeoning relationship with this cop and how, despite herself, she was falling for him. One of the more depressing things about his nightly surveillance was realizing how little she talked about him or even seemed to think about him when they were not together. Actually never, it would be more accurate to say. She never talked about him. Not once. Even after one of their encounters she’d usually come back and shower and if she did talk to anyone it was about mundane things: school, the protest, girl stuff. Lately the primary topic was the all-female march Alice was organizing for Friday — they planned to parade down Lake Shore Drive with no permit or anything, to stop traffic and walk as they pleased. Alice talked about this endlessly. Not once had she mentioned him. When he wasn’t around it was like he didn’t exist for her, which was painful because he thought about her almost all the time. When he shopped for clothes he wondered how to impress Alice. When he sat through daily Red Squad briefings he waited to hear anything that might involve her. When he watched the TV news with his wife, he imagined it was Alice there with him instead. He was a compass needle always pointed toward her.

He looked out past the dorm to the lights of the lakeshore, the vast gray expanse of Lake Michigan beyond them, a shimmering hot emptiness. The dots in the sky were planes coming into Midway, many of them now containing the advance teams for senators and ambassadors, various chairmen of boards, industry lobbyists, Democratic insiders, pollsters, judges, the vice president, whose itinerary was a secret the White House wouldn’t share even with the police.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It doesn’t feel like the real me.”

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

“I’m tired,” Faye said.

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

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

Alice laughed.

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

She turned to measure Alice’s reaction.

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

“I’m just listening.”

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

“You should take it back.”

“Back where?”

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

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

“Okay, here, I’ll help.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not just say boyfriend?”

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

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

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

And across the street Brown felt his insides plunge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He tried to pretend she was talking to him.

8

THE DAY BEFORE THE RIOTS, the weather turned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eat mangoes!” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So they built a barbed-wire perimeter around the amphitheater and filled the inside with plainclothes cops looking for troublemakers, demanding the credentials of anyone who didn’t seem in favor of the current administration. They sealed manhole covers. Got helicopters into the sky. Put snipers atop tall buildings. Prepped the tear gas. Brought in the National Guard. Requisitioned the heavy armor. They heard about Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of Prague that week, and a small, complicated part of them felt envy and admiration for the Russians. Yes, that’s how you fucking do it, they thought. Overwhelming force.

But our man from Sioux Falls could not have known any of this.

Or else he might have thought twice about pulling a gun out of his pocket. When the cop car drove past as he walked this night, this clear clean moment when he could see all the stars hanging over Michigan Avenue, and the car stopped and those two pigs got out in their short-sleeved baby-blue shirts, walking toward him with all manner of gadgetry bouncing on their belts, and they said something vague about curfew violation and did he have any identification, had he known what was happening all over Chicago right at that moment, he might have found it preferable to spend a few nights in jail for possession of an unregistered and concealed handgun. But he’d come all the way to Chicago on that horrific thirty-hour bus ride, and maybe he’d been waiting for this protest all his life, maybe this was some kind of turning point for him, maybe the idea of missing the whole demonstration was too painful, maybe he hated the war that much, and maybe he didn’t want to lose the gun, which might have been his only security, having spent a rough adolescence in the Dakotas, where he was different and alone. In his head, it went like this: He’d pull the gun out and fire a warning shot and while the cops ducked for cover he’d run down the nearest dark alley and get away. It was as easy as that. Maybe he’d even done this before. He was young, he could run, he’d been running all his life.

But as it turned out, the cops didn’t duck for cover. They didn’t give him the chance to get away. At the gun’s first report, they unholstered their own revolvers and shot him. Four times in the chest.

Word got around pretty quickly, from the police to the Secret Service to the National Guard to the FBI: The hippies were armed. They were shooting. This radically changed the stakes. A day before the protest began, this was, they all agreed, a very bad omen.

The students asked around their ranks to see if anyone was expected from Sioux Falls. Who was he? What was he doing here? Spontaneous candlelight vigils popped up for this young man who might have been a brother to them. They sang “We Shall Overcome” and wondered privately about whether they’d die for their cause. His protest, they thought, was greater than all the riots that whole long year — greater in its privacy, its intimacy, its stakes. He broke their hearts, dying in Chicago the way he did, before anyone even knew his name.

And when Sebastian heard the news he was in the office of the Chicago Free Voice giving an interview to CBS and the phone rang and he was told that someone had been shot, a drifter in from South Dakota. And Sebastian’s first impulse, the very first thing that rushed unwillingly into his brain, was how great the timing was. CBS News was right there. This was gold. And so he called up some outrage and announced to the journalists that “the pigs have murdered a protester in cold blood.”

Boy did that get their attention.

He ratcheted up the rhetoric with each new telling. “One of our brothers has been shot for the crime of disagreeing with the president,” he told the Tribune. “The police are killing as indiscriminately as the bombs in Vietnam,” he told The Washington Post. “Chicago is becoming the western outpost of Stalingrad,” he told The New York Times. He organized even more candlelight vigils and told the TV news crews and photographers where the vigils could be found, sending each outlet to a different gathering so that each of them thought they were the one getting the scoop. The only thing journalists liked more than getting a story right was getting it first.

This was his job, to add heat.

In the months before the protest, it was Sebastian who had printed those outrageous stories in the Free Voice about spiking the city’s water supply with LSD, about abducting delegates’ wives, about bombs going off at the amphitheater. That no such plans were ever actually considered was irrelevant. He had learned something important: What was printed became the truth. He vastly inflated the number of demonstrators expected in Chicago, then felt a surge of pride when the mayor mobilized the National Guard. The message was getting out. This is what he cared about: the message, the narrative. When he imagined it, he imagined an egg that he had to hold and protect and warm and coddle and nourish, one that grew to huge fairy-tale proportions if he did it right, glowing and floating above them all, a beacon.

It was only dawning on him now, on the night before the protest, the implications of all his work. Kids were coming to Chicago. They would be battered and beaten by the police. They would be killed. This was more or less inevitable. What had been up to this point all illusion and fantasy and hype, an exercise in the molding of public opinion, would tomorrow become manifest. It was a kind of birth, and he trembled at the thought of it. So here he was, alone, doing the last thing anyone would expect from brash, confident, fearless Sebastian: He was sitting on his bed in tears. Because he understood what was going to happen tomorrow, understood his odd role in it, knew that everything up to this point was done and unchangeable and set solid in the infuriating past.

He was a lighthouse of regret tonight. And so he was weeping. He needed to stop thinking about this. He remembered vaguely that he had a date. He splashed water on his face. He threw on a jacket. He looked at a mirror and said, Pull yourself together.

Which was exactly what a certain police officer was telling himself across town, sitting on the back bumper of his patrol car, parked in the usual dark alley, sitting next to Alice, who appeared to be breaking up with him. Pull yourself together, he thought.

Just like everyone else in the city, Officer Brown was hoping to get laid tonight. But when he met Alice, she did not get in the car and make any funky requests but rather sat heavily down on the trunk and said: “I think we should take a break.”

“Take a break from what?” he said.

“From everything. All of it. You and me. Our affair.”

“Can I ask why?”

“I want to try something new,” Alice said.

Brown thought about this for a moment. “You mean you want to try someone new,” he said.

“Well, yes,” Alice said. “I’ve met someone, maybe. Someone interesting.”

“So you’re breaking up with me for this new person.”

“Technically, to break up we would need something to break, a commitment to each other that, obviously, we do not have.”

“But—”

“But yes.”

Officer Brown nodded. He stared at a dog on the other side of the alley getting into the trash of a local diner. One of the city’s many strays, a bit of the German shepherd in it but muddled and runted by a swirl of other breeds. It pulled out a black garbage bag from the tipped-over bin, yanked it with its teeth.

“So if it weren’t for this new person, you wouldn’t be breaking up with me?” he said.

“That’s irrelevant, since there is a new person.”

“Humor me. Go with it. If this new person didn’t exist, you’d have no reason to end our affair.”

“Okay. Sure. That’s a fair assessment.”

“I want you to know I think this is a mistake,” he said.

She gave him that condescending look he couldn’t stand, that look communicating how she was the interesting and far-out one and he was the one stuck in a bourgeois middle-class hole from which there was no escape.

“What can this new person give you that I can’t?” he said.

“You don’t understand.”

“I can change. You want me to do something different? I can do that. We don’t have to meet so often. We could meet every other week. Or once a month. Or you want me to be rougher? I can be rougher.”

“This isn’t what I want anymore.”

“We’ll keep it, you know, loose. Informal. You can be with this new person and me, right?”

“That’s not going to work.”

“Why? You haven’t given me any good reasons.”

“I no longer want to be with you. Isn’t that a good reason?”

“No. Absolutely not nearly good enough. Because there’s no explanation. Why don’t you want to keep doing this? What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing. You did nothing wrong.”

“Exactly. So you can’t punish me like this.”

“I’m not trying to punish you. I’m trying to be honest.”

“Which is having the effect of punishing me. Which is not fair. I did everything you asked. Even the weird stuff. I did everything, so you can’t just up and leave for no good reason.”

“Will you please stop whining?” she said, and she jumped off the car and walked a few paces away. Her sudden movement caught the dog’s attention; it tensed, evaluated her intentions, guarded his scraps. “Will you please be a man about this? We’re done.”

“All those things we did together, all those strange things. They made a promise. Even if you never said it out loud. And now you’re breaking that promise.”

“Go home to your wife.”

“I love you.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“I do. I love you. This is me saying I love you.”

“You don’t love me. You’re just afraid of being alone and bored.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you. Please don’t leave. I don’t know what I’ll do. I said I love you. Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Would you please please stop it?”

To Alice, he seemed on the verge of something substantial: crying or violence. You could never be sure with men. Across the alley the dog seemed satisfied that she did not have designs on its food. It resumed eating the thrown-out burgers and cold limp french fries and coleslaws and tuna melts at a velocity both ferocious and probably vomit-inducing.

“Listen,” she said, “you want a good reason? Here’s the reason. I want to try something new. It’s the same reason I started things with you. I want to try something I haven’t tried before.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Girls.”

“Oh, give me a break.”

“I want to try girls. I feel very motivated to do this.”

“Oh my god,” he said. “Please tell me you don’t think you’re all of a sudden a dyke now. Please tell me I haven’t been screwing a dyke.”

“Thanks very much for the good times. And I wish you all the best.”

“It’s not the neighbor girl, is it? What’s her name. Faye, right?”

She stared at him, confused, and he laughed. “Don’t tell me it’s her,” he said.

“How do you know about Faye?”

“She’s the one you spent the night with. Monday night? Don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love with her.”

Everything about Alice now seemed to steel and harden at this moment. Whatever softness she had, whatever openness she ever felt with him, all at once disappeared. Her jaw clenched, her fists balled.

“How the fuck do you know about that?” she said.

“Please tell me you’re not leaving me for Faye Andresen,” he said. “That’s rich.”

“You’ve been watching me, haven’t you? You’re a goddamn psychopath.”

“You’re no dyke. I can tell you that for sure. I’d know.”

“We are done. I am never speaking to you again.”

“That is not going to happen,” he said.

“Watch me.”

“You leave and I’ll arrest you. I’ll arrest Faye too. I’ll make your lives hell. Both of you. That’s a promise. You’re stuck with me. This is over when I say it’s over.”

“I’ll tell all your cop buddies how much you liked screwing me. I’ll tell your wife.”

“I could have you fucking killed. Easy.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“Goodbye.”

She walked away from the squad car. Her back tingled in expectation of something — a chase, a nightstick, a bullet. She ignored the alarms inside her to turn around and see what he was doing. She heard her own heartbeat in her ears. Her hands were stuck in tight fists. She couldn’t unclench them if she wanted to. The road was another twenty paces away when she heard it: the sharp pop of his pistol.

He’d fired his gun. A gun had been fired. Something had been shot.

She turned around, expecting to see his corpse on the ground, his brains on the wall. But there he was, staring down at the trash can behind the diner. And she gathered what had happened. He didn’t shoot himself. He shot the dog.

She sprinted away. As fast as she could. And she was two blocks from the alley when his squad car screamed by. He passed her and sped west, in the general direction of the Circle campus, in the direction of the dorms, where Faye, cleaned, spritzed, floral-smelling, her makeup done, her fanciest clothes on, waited for Sebastian to arrive. Alice had given her two more of those red pills, and she’d taken them before her beauty routine. Now their warmth and optimism were spreading. Her excitement at this moment was unbearable. Lonely her whole life, expected to marry a man she didn’t really love, waiting now for this guy who seemed like a fairy-tale prince. Sebastian seemed like a kind of answer to the question of her life. The nervousness had passed and now she was thrilled. Maybe it was the pills, but who cared? She imagined a life with Sebastian, a life of art and poetry, where they debated the merits of movements and writers — she’d defend Allen Ginsberg’s early work; he, of course, would prefer the later — and they would listen to music and travel and read in bed and do all the things that working-class girls from Iowa never got to do. She fantasized about moving to Paris with Sebastian and then coming back home and showing Mrs. Schwingle who the real sophisticate was, showing her father how she was pretty damn special indeed.

It seemed like the beginning of the life she actually wanted.

So she was elated when her phone rang and it was the front desk downstairs saying she had a visitor. She left her room and flounced down the stairs to the ground-floor lobby, where she found that the visitor was not Sebastian. It was the police.

Imagine the look on her face at that moment.

When this big crew-cut cop put her in handcuffs. Led her out of the dorm in silence as everybody watched and she cried, “What did I do?” How could he bear it, her shattered heart? How could he shove her into the backseat of his squad car? How could this man call her a whore over and over for the entire ride downtown?

“Who are you?” she kept saying. He’d removed his badge and name tag. “There’s been some mistake. I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re a whore,” he said. “You are a fucking whore.”

How could he arrest her? How could he book her for prostitution? How could he actually go through with it? She tried to keep her face calm and defiant when they took her picture, but in the jail cell that night she felt an attack coming on so strong that she curled up in the corner and breathed and prayed she didn’t die here. She prayed to get out. Please, she said to God, or the universe, or anyone, rocking and crying and spitting into the damp cold floor. Please help me.