The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  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.”<
br />
  “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.”