The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “Was my mother in the movement?” Samuel said. “Was she, like, a radical hippie or something?”

  “I was a radical hippie,” Alice said. “Your mother definitely was not. She was a normal kid. She was dragged into it against her will.”

  Alice remembered her young, idealistic self, how she refused to own any possessions, refused to lock her door or carry money, crazy behavior she wouldn’t even consider now. What her younger self worried about were the hang-ups that came with possessions—the territoriality, the worry, the potential for loss, the way the world looked when you owned precious things: like one big threat always ready to take your stuff. And yes, Alice had purchased this home in the Indiana dunes, she filled it with her stuff, she put locks on all the doors, she built a wall of sandbags to contain the advance of the lake, she cleaned and sanded and painted, brought in exterminators and contractors and took down walls and erected new ones, and slowly this home came into being, bubbling up out of itself like Athena from the sea. And yes, it was true that all her former radical energies now poured into things like selecting the perfect pendant lamps, or achieving the ideal kitchen work flow, or constructing excellent built-in bookcases, or finding the most calming master bedroom color palette that ideally involved the same blue the lake took on when she looked out her window certain winter mornings, when the surface of the water was a slushy, shimmering mass that appeared—depending on the paint sample she used—like “glacier blue” or “liquid blue” or “bluebell” or a really lovely gray-blue called “soar.” And yes, occasionally she felt bolts of raw guilt and regret that these were the hang-ups that interested her, not the peace and justice and equality movements she intended to devote her life to when she was twenty.

  She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.

  “Who dragged her into it?” Samuel said.

  “Nobody,” Alice said. “Everybody. The events of the time. She got swept up. It was all terribly exciting, you see.”

  For Alice, the small true part of her was that she wanted something that deserved her faith and devotion. When she was young, she saw families retreat into their homes and ignore the greater problems of the world and she hated them: bourgeois cogs in the machine, unthinking sheeplike masses, selfish bastards who couldn’t see beyond their own property lines. Their souls, she thought, must have been small and shrunken things.

  But then she grew up and bought a house and found a lover and got some dogs and stewarded her land and tried to fill her home with love and life and she realized her earlier error: that these things did not make you small. In fact, these things seemed to enlarge her. That by choosing a few very private concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded. That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty—because the movement required it of you—and loving something you actually loved. Love—real, genuine, unasked-for love—made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies.

  Still, she could not help feeling stung when old movement friends said she had “sold out.” That was the worst of all charges because, of course, it was true. But how could she explain that not all sellouts are the same? That it wasn’t money she was selling out to? That sometimes on the other side of selling out there’s a compassion she’d never felt in her revolutionary days? She could not explain this to them, nor would they hear it. They still held to all the old principles: drugs, sex, resistance. Even as drugs began killing them one by one, and even as sex became dangerous, still this is where they turned for some kind of answer. They never saw how their resistance had begun to look comical. They were beaten by the cops and the public cheered. They thought they were changing the world and what they did was help get Nixon elected. They found Vietnam intolerable, but their answer was to become intolerable themselves.

  The only thing less popular than the war in those days was the antiwar movement.

  This truth was obvious, though none of them saw it, convinced as they were of their own righteousness.

  She managed not to think about this too much, these ligatures to the past. For the most part she thought about her dogs, and mustard. Except when something popped up to remind her of her former life, like, for example, the son of Faye Andresen, coming to the dunes and asking questions.

  “Were you close,” he said, “with my mother? Were you friendly?”

  “I suppose,” she said. “We didn’t know each other very well.”

  He nodded. He seemed disappointed by this. He was hoping for more. But what could Alice say? That Faye had indeed been on her mind all these years? That Faye’s memory was a small but constant and needling companion? For that was the truth. She’d promised to look out for Faye, but things got out of hand, and she failed. She never knew what happened to her. She never saw her again.

  There is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure. She’d tried to bury it, along with all the other mistakes of her youth, out here in the dunes. And she would not dig these stories up now, even for this man who so plainly needed them. The subject of his mother seemed like a splinter he could not remove. She grabbed a small bunch of mustard and pulled—not too hard, and with a gentle spin to get the roots up. She had long ago perfected this technique. For a long quiet moment they stayed like this, the only sounds being mustard plants tearing free from the earth, and the whoosh of the nearby lake, and a certain bird whose call sounded like uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh.

  “Even if you figure it all out,” Alice said, “what good will it do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Even if you know your mom’s story, it’s not going to change anything. The past is the past.”

  “I guess I hope it’ll explain something. About all the things she’s done. Plus she’s in trouble and maybe I can help. There’s this judge who seems intent on putting her in jail. It’s like he came out of retirement just to torment her. The Honorable Charlie Brown my ass.”

  Alice perked up at that, lifted her gaze from the mustard. She placed her half-full trash bag on the ground. She removed her gloves, her specialized rubber gloves that mustard seeds did not stick to. She walked over to where Samuel stood, taking the big awkward steps made necessary by her wading boots.

  “That’s his name?” she said. “Charlie Brown?”

  “Hilarious, right?”

  “Oh, god,” she said, sitting down right there in the grass. “Oh, no.”

  “What?” Samuel said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Listen to me,” Alice said. “You have to get your mother out of here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She needs to leave.”

  “Now I’m sure there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “I used to know him,” she said. “The judge.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “We were all sort of intertwined—in Chicago, in college—me and the judge and your mom.”

  “That’s information you maybe should have led with.”

  “You have to get your mom out of town, like immediately.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Maybe even get her out of the country.”

  “Help my mom flee the country. That’s your advice.”

  “I wasn’t entirely honest about why I moved out here, to Indiana. The real reason was because of him. When I heard he was back in Chicago, I moved away. I was afraid of him.”

  Samuel sat down with her in the grass and they stared at each other a moment, shell-shocked.

  “What did he do to you?” he asked.

  “Your mom is in trouble,” Alice said. “The judge will never yield. He’s ruthless and dangerous. You have to take her away. Do you hear me?”

  “I don’t unders
tand. What’s his grudge against her?”

  She sighed and looked at the ground. “He’s like the most dangerous species of American there is: heterosexual white male who didn’t get what he wanted.”

  “You need to tell me exactly what happened,” Samuel said.

  About three feet past her left knee, she noticed a small and heretofore unseen patch of garlic mustard—first-year shoots, a smattering of clover hiding under the grass. It wouldn’t go to seed until next summer, but when it did it would race up above the surrounding plants and kill them all.

  “I’ve never told this story,” she said. “Not to anyone.”

  “What happened in 1968?” Samuel said. “Please tell me.”

  Alice nodded. She ran her hands along the grass and the thin blades tickled her palms. She made a mental note to come prune this spot tomorrow. The problem with mustard is that you can’t just chop it down. The seeds can last for years. It will always come back. You have to cut it out completely. You have to cut it out by the roots.

  | PART SEVEN |

  CIRCLE

  Late Summer 1968

  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 wh
ite 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.