by Nathan Hill
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.
| PART EIGHT |
SEARCH AND SEIZURE
Late Summer 2011
1
JUDGE CHARLES BROWN WOKE before dawn. Always before dawn. His wife slept in bed beside him. She would stay sleeping there another three hours or more. It had been this way since they were first married, when he was still a Chicago beat cop working the night shift. Their schedules rarely overlapped back then, and it stayed that way all these years—habituated, normalized. Recently he’d been thinking about it, for the first time in a long time.
He climbed out of bed and into his wheelcha
ir and rolled over to the window. He looked out at the sky—dark navy blue, but gathering color. It must have been four o’clock, four fifteen, give or take. It was trash day, he saw. The bins were out on the street. And beyond the bins, parked at the curb, right in front of his house, there was a car.
Which was odd.
Nobody ever parked there. It couldn’t be a neighbor. His neighbors were too far away. One of the reasons he bought here, in this particular subdivision, was its facsimile of private woodsy living. Across the street from his house was a small grove of sugar maples. The distant neighbors were hidden behind two rows of oak trees—one row on his side of the property divide, one on theirs.
He looked at the screen next to the bed where he’d installed the controls for the home’s elaborate security system: no open doors, no broken windows, no movement. The feeds from his various video cameras showed nothing unusual.
Brown chalked it up to teenagers. Always a good scapegoat. Probably a boy secretly visiting a girl down the block. There was some passionate and quick deflowering happening somewhere in the neighborhood tonight. Fair enough.
He took the elevator to the first-floor kitchen. Pressed the button on the coffeemaker. Dutifully it bubbled and spurted, his wife having prepared it the night before. Their ritual. One of the few ways he knows he’s really living with someone. They see each other so rarely. He’s off to work before she wakes, and she’s off to work before he comes home.
It’s not that they avoid each other on purpose—it’s just how things worked out.
When he quit the police and decided to go to law school—this was about forty years ago now—she took evening shifts at the hospital. They were raising a daughter then; it was the compromise they made so someone would always be home with her. But even after the daughter grew up and moved out, their schedules did not change. It had become comfortable. She’d leave a plate of something for him to eat. She’d fix up the coffeemaker at night because she knew he hated fiddling with the filter-and-grounds apparatus, which always struck him as too much to ask of a person at four o’clock in the morning. He was grateful she still performed these small kindnesses. On weekends, they saw each other more, provided he wasn’t in his study all day poring over various documents, precedents, opinions, journals, law. Then they’d catch each other up on the independent and totally separate lives they were living in parallel to one another. They made vague promises about all the things they’d do together in retirement.