by Nathan Hill
31
SEBASTIAN HAS GOTTEN to his feet and finds Faye on the floor and yanks her up by the arm. She’s feeling light-headed, queasy, she would like nothing better than to sit down at one of the Haymarket’s comfortable-looking plush booths and sip some tea with honey and then maybe sleep—oh my god how she wants to sleep, even now, right here at the violent center of the world. She’s still seeing stars. She must have hit her head pretty good.
Sebastian pulls her and she is compliant. She lets herself be pulled. Not toward the front door, where several of the other protestors are running, and not back out onto the street, but deeper into the bar, back to the farthest corner, where there’s a pay phone and a pair of bathrooms and one of those silver swinging doors with the round window that leads into the kitchen. This is where they go, into the Hilton’s industrial kitchen, which is currently enfrenzied with room-service orders—the guests at the hotel being terrified to leave the grounds and so getting all their meals on-site, delivered—and dozens of white-aproned, white-hatted men stand over griddles that crackle with porterhouse steaks and filet mignon, over sandwich stations building hoagies of improbable height, over table services polishing wineglasses to a perfect smudgeless clarity. They see Sebastian and Faye and they don’t say a word. They keep on working. Not their problem.
Sebastian ushers her through the loud and busy kitchen, all the way past the grills with leaping fire and burners cooking sauces and pastas, past the dishwashing station and the dishwasher himself, his face in a cloud of steam, and beyond to the back door, through the door and into the trash area, the dumpster with its sharp sour-milk and old-chicken smells, and beyond that into the alley, away from Michigan Avenue, away from the noise and tear gas, and away, finally, from the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
32
OFFICER BROWN IS STILL on his back in the broken window well of the Haymarket Bar and he’s beginning to understand that he cannot feel his legs. He fell and he landed on something sharp and felt a stabbing pain near his kidney and now he feels nothing. A spreading chill, a numbness. He tries to stand but cannot. He closes his eyes and he swears he’s trapped under a car. That’s how it feels. But when he opens his eyes again there is nothing visibly trapping him.
“Help,” he says to no one, to the air, at first quietly but then with more urgency: “Help!”
The bar has been cleared of hippies by now, and the guests have all retreated to their rooms. The only people who remain in the bar are two Secret Service agents, who amble up to him now and say “What seems to be the problem, officer?” with a kind of lighthearted chumminess that disappears as soon as they try to help him get up and can’t and their hands come away bloodied.
At first Brown thinks they’ve injured themselves on the broken glass beneath him. Then he realizes the blood is not theirs. That’s his blood. He’s bleeding. He’s bleeding a lot.
But he can’t be bleeding.
Because nothing hurts.
“I’m okay,” he says to the one agent who has sat down next to him, one hand pressing firmly on Brown’s chest.
“Sure thing, buddy. You’re gonna be fine.”
“Really. It doesn’t hurt.”
“Uh-huh. You stay right where you are and don’t move. We’re getting you some help.”
And Brown notices the other agent now speaking into a walkie-talkie about an officer down, send an ambulance immediately, and it’s the way he says the word immediately that makes Brown squeeze his eyes shut and say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” not to the agent above him but to God. Or the universe. Or whatever karmic powers are out there right now deciding his fate. He apologizes to all of them—for his encounters with Alice, for cheating on his wife, for cheating on his wife in such an ugly way, in the dark, in alleyways, in his car, he’s sorry he didn’t have the will to stop it, nor the discipline, the self-control, he’s sorry for this, and sorry that he’s repenting only now, after it’s too late, and he’s aware of the spreading coldness in his lower half and he senses (though he cannot feel) the sharp shard of plate-glass window currently penetrating his spinal cord, and he’s not sure what exactly has happened to him but feels that whatever it is, he is sorry—that it happened, that he deserved it.
33
CHURCHES ACROSS CHICAGO have opened their sanctuaries, as sanctuaries. Youths arrive teargassed and beaten. They are given water, a meal, a cot. After the violence of the day, some of them almost weep at these small kindnesses. Outside, the riot has splintered, broken down into fragmented fighting and scuffles in the street, a few cops chasing kids into bars and restaurants, into and out of the park. It’s not safe to be out there right now, and so youths show up in ragged pairs at places like this: old St. Peter’s on Madison Street downtown. They don’t even gossip with the other protestors, all of them having endured roughly the same day. They sit penitently. Priests give them bowls of warmed canned soup and they say “Thank you, Father” and they really mean it. The priests give them warm washcloths for their eyes, red from the gas.
Faye and Sebastian sit in the front pew quiet and uncomfortable because there’s so much to say and they don’t know how to say it. They stare at the front altar instead, the elaborately inscribed stone-and-wood altarpiece of St. Peter’s in the Loop: stone angels and stone saints and a stone Jesus hanging on a concrete cross, his head looking straight down, two stone disciples below him, just under his armpits, one looking up at him with a face of anguish, the other looking at his own feet, ashamed.
Faye touches the lump on her head. It has stopped hurting, for the most part, and now feels simply fascinating, this strange alien growth, this hard marble under her skin. Maybe if she plays with this thing she can resist asking the questions she is dying to ask, questions that have begun forming these last twenty minutes, as they’ve sat here, out of danger now, as she’s collected her thoughts and begun looking at the evening rationally and logically, these questions have settled upon her.
“Faye, listen—” says Sebastian.
“Who are you really?” she says, because she cannot resist asking, no matter how fascinating her bump feels.
Sebastian smiles a sad smile. He looks at his shoes. “Yeah. About that.”
“You knew your way around those buildings,” Faye says. “How did you know that? And that key. You had the key to my cell. And how did you know those cops in the basement? What is going on?”
Sebastian sits there like a child being scolded. It’s like he can’t even bear to look at her.
Behind them, Allen Ginsberg has now found his way to this church. He walks quietly in and goes from tired body to tired body blessing people in their sleep and placing his hand on the heads of the conscious and saying Hare Rama, Hare Krishna and shaking his head the way he does, so his beard looks like a tight shivering mammal.
A month ago, a Ginsberg appearance would have drawn a lot of attention. Now he’s become part of the scenery of the protest, one of the protest’s many colors. He walks around and the kids give him weary, exhausted smiles. He blesses them and moves on.
“Are you working for the police?” Faye asks.
“No. I’m not,” Sebastian says. He leans forward, clasps his hands as if in prayer. “More like with the police. It’s nothing official. Actually I’m not even working with them. It’s more like we work alongside each other. We have a certain understanding. A certain accommodating relationship. We both understand a few simple facts.”
“Which are what?”
“Primarily, that we need each other.”
“You and the police.”
“Yes. The police need me. The police love me.”
“What happened out there today,” Faye says, “did not look like love.”
“I provide heat. Drama. The police want reasons to crack down on the radical left. I supply those reasons. I print that we’re going to kidnap delegates or spike the drinking water or bomb the amphitheater and it makes us look like terrorists. Which is exactly what the police want.”
&nbs
p; “So they can do what they did tonight. Gas us and beat us up.”
“In front of the TV cameras, with people cheering them on at home. Yes.”
Faye shakes her head. “But why help them? Why encourage all this…”—she waves her hand around at the bloodied youths now occupying the sancuary—“all this madness, this violence?”
“Because the more the police crack down,” Sebastian says, “the stronger our side looks.”
“Our side.”
“The protest movement,” he says. “The more the cops beat us up, the more our argument seems correct.” He leans back into the pew and stares blankly forward. “It’s actually pretty brilliant. The protestors and the police, the progressives and the authoritarians—they require each other, they create each other, because they need an opponent to demonize. The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.”
Behind them, Ginsberg is walking up and down the many pews of St. Peter’s, quietly blessing those who are sleeping there. Faye can hear his monotonous voice singing Hindu songs of praise. She and Sebastian stare at the altarpiece, the saints and angels in stone. She does not know what to think about him. She feels betrayed, or maybe more accurately she feels like she should feel betrayed—she has never thought of herself as part of Sebastian’s movement, but there are many people who do, and so she tries to feel betrayed on their behalf.
“Faye, listen,” Sebastian says. He puts his elbows on his knees, breathes heavily and looks at the floor. “That’s not entirely the truth. The truth is, I couldn’t go to Vietnam.”
The lights in the sanctuary are dimming now, the trickle of protestors through the front doors has stopped. All over, people fall asleep in twos and threes and fours. Soon the church is lit only by candles on the altar, a soft orange glow.
“I told everyone I was in India this summer,” Sebastian says. “But I wasn’t. I was in Georgia. At boot camp. They were going to send me to Vietnam until a guy came offering this deal. An official at the mayor’s office, who could pull some serious strings. He said print these certain kinds of stories and we’ll get you out of the army. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to war. So I took the deal.”
He looks at Faye, his face pinched. “I’m sure you hate me now,” he says.
And, yes, maybe she should hate him, but she feels herself softening to him instead. They are, she realizes, not that unalike.
“My dad works at ChemStar,” she says. “Half the money that sent me to college came from making napalm. So I guess I’m in no position to judge.”
He nods. “We do what we have to do, right?”
“I probably would have taken the deal too,” Faye says.
They stare at the altar until a thought crosses Faye’s mind: “So when you said you saw my maarr?”
“Yes?”
“You said you learned that word from Tibetan monks.”
“Yes.”
“While you were in India. But you weren’t in India.”
“I read about that in National Geographic. It wasn’t Tibetan monks. I think the article was about an aboriginal tribe in Australia, now that I think about it.”
“What else have you lied to me about?” Faye says. “How about our date? Did you ever really want to go on our date?”
“Definitely,” he says, smiling. “That was the real me. I really wanted that. Promise.”
She nods. Then shrugs. “How would I know?”
“But there’s one thing, actually, one more little lie.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not technically a lie I told you, per se. More like a generalized lie I told everyone.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Sebastian is not my real name. I made that up.”
Faye laughs. She can’t help it. The day has been so ridiculous that it seems proper to add one more lunacy on top of it. “This is what you think of as a little lie?” she says.
“Call it a nom de guerre. I took it from Saint Sebastian. You know, the martyr? The police needed someone into whom they could shoot their arrows. I supplied that target. I thought it was apt. You don’t even want to know my real name.”
“No, I don’t,” Faye says. “Not yet. Not right now.”
“Let’s just say it’s not a name that would rally the troops.”
Ginsberg has reached them now. He’s crisscrossed the entire sanctuary, gone up and down all the pews, and he finally comes to them. He stands before them and nods. They nod back. The church is so quiet, all noise coming from the poet himself, his metal necklaces scratching and banging together, his murmurs and blessings. He places a hand on their heads, a soft warm hand, a gentle touch. He closes his eyes and whispers something incomprehensible, like he’s casting a secret spell on them. When he stops he opens his eyes and removes his hands.
“I just married you,” he tells them. “Now you’re married.”
Then he shuffles off, humming quietly to himself.
34
“PLEASE DON’T TELL ANYONE what I’ve told you,” says the man she knows as Sebastian.
“I won’t,” she says, and she knows this is a promise she can keep, because she’s never going to see any of these people again. She will, as of tomorrow, no longer live in Chicago, no longer study at Circle. The knowledge of this has hardened around her during the day. She’s not aware of having made a decision; it’s more like the decision has been there all along, already made for her. She does not belong here, and all that has happened in the last day proves it.
Her plan is simple: She will leave at dawn. While everyone sleeps, she will slip out and leave. She will stop at her dorm. She will walk up to her room and she will discover her door wide open, the lights on inside. She will find Alice sleeping in her bed. Faye will not wake her. She will tiptoe to her bedside table, very slowly open the bottom drawer, and take out a few books and Henry’s proposal letter. She’ll quietly leave, stealing one last glance at Alice, who without her black sunglasses and combat boots looks human again, and gentle and vulnerable and even pretty. She will wish good things for her, in life. Then Faye will leave—Alice will never even know she was there. Faye will catch the first bus back to Iowa. She’ll stare at Henry’s letter for about an hour before exhaustion finally takes her and she sleeps the rest of the way home.
This is the plan. She will escape at first light.
But that’s still hours off, and here she is in Chicago, with this boy, in what is feeling like a moment outside time. The dark and quiet sanctuary. The glow of candlelight. She doesn’t want to know Sebastian’s real name because, she thinks, why ruin it? Why ruin the mystery? There’s something delicious about his anonymity. He could be anyone. She could be anyone. She knows she will be gone tomorrow, but she is not yet gone. Tomorrow will be full of consequences, but this moment is consequence-free. Whatever happens right now will happen without repercussion. It feels delicious, being on the edge of abandonment. She can act without worry. She can do what she wants.
What she wants is to take his hand and lead him into the shadows behind the altar. What she wants is to feel his warm body on hers. What she wants is to be impulsive—impulsive like she was with Henry on the playground that night that seems a lifetime ago. And even as she does this and presses her mouth to his and he resists a little and whispers “Are you sure?” and she smiles at him and says “It’s okay, we’re married now” and they collapse on the tile floor together, she’s aware that she’s only partly doing this because she genuinely wants to. She’s also doing this because she wants to prove something to herself, that she’s changed. Because after you go through a trial by fire aren’t you supposed to come out a changed person? A different and better person? And this day was indeed trying, and she would prefer not to be the same person she was before, with the same petty worries and doubts. She wants to prove that she’s gone through the terror of the day and now she’s stronger and better, even thou
gh she doesn’t know if she really is. How can one tell when one becomes a stronger and better person? Through action, she decides. And so this is her action. She takes off his jacket, then hers. They sit yanking off their shoes and giggling because there is no way to remove tight shoes in a manner that’s sexy. This is her great demonstration, to herself and to the world—she is changed, she is a woman, she is doing womanly things and she is doing them fearlessly. She unbuckles his belt and slides down his pants until he is poking nicely out of them. And even the posters from her high-school home economics class have no power over her now, because she can feel the grit on her skin, and this man’s smell right now is a mixture of sweat and smoke and body musk and tear gas, and her feeling about this is that she wants to devour him, and he wants to devour her, and if she’s really honest it feels delicious and liberating rolling around dirty together on these sparkling clean and smooth floors, God’s floors, where if she looks up she can see the stone Jesus directly above her, his head hanging so that at this angle it seems like he’s looking right back at her, her terrible God disapproving at what she’s doing in his holy house, and she loves it, loves that it’s happening right here, and she knows that tomorrow she’ll return to Iowa and return to being Faye, old Faye, she’ll come back to her real self like a soul that’s been traveling outside its body, and she’ll say no to college and yes to Henry and she’ll become a wife, a strange new creature who will keep locked within herself the knowledge of this night. She will never speak of it, even though she will think of it daily. She will wonder how she is capable of being such different people: the real Faye and the other one, the brash and aggressive and impulsive Faye. She will long for this other Faye. As the years mount and her days become cluttered with chores domestic and infantile, she will think about this night so often that it will begin to feel more real to her than her real life. She’ll begin to believe that her existence as wife and mother is the illusion, the façade she’s projecting to the world, and this Faye who came alive on the floor of St. Peter’s, that’s the real one, the authentic self, and this belief will hook so deeply inside her, will pierce her so completely that eventually it will take over. It will become too powerful to ignore. And by then it will not seem like she’s abandoning her husband and child; it will seem like she’s retrieving the real life she abandoned in Chicago many years ago. She will actually feel good about this, about being true to herself, her real self. It will feel like she’s found the one true Faye—at least it will feel like that for a while, until she begins to long for her family and all the confusion returns.