The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “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 a
gain. 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 magazi
ne 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.”