by Nathan Hill
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 mo
re 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 fo
od. 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.