Nathan Hill - The Nix

“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.”

“Never mind.”

“And not just any war protestor. The war protestor.” Alice clapped, a mocking applause.

“Be quiet,” Faye said.

“Sebastian’s got a Vietcong flag on his wall. He gives money to the National Liberation Front. You know that, right?”

“This is none of your business.”

“Your boyfriend is going to get shot. And Sebastian will have supplied the bullets. This is who you choose.”

Faye stood up. “I’m going to leave now.”

“You might as well pull the trigger yourself,” Alice said. “That’s low.”

Faye turned her back to Alice and marched out of the apartment, her hands balled up in fists, her arms straight and rigid.

“Now this is it,” Alice called after her. “Shame. Real shame. This is how it feels, girly.”

The last thing Faye saw as she slammed the door shut was Alice kicking her feet back up on the coffee table and flipping the pages of Playboy magazine.

NO CAB FARE, no train tokens. Alice believed in freedom, free movement, being free — here, at five o’clock in the morning, walking in the purple and cool and damp light of Chicago. The sun was beginning to show over Lake Michigan and the faces of buildings glowed weakly pink. Certain delis were opening, and shopkeepers hosed off the sidewalks, where batches of newspapers tossed from trucks landed in heaps like sacks of grain. She looked at one and saw the headline — NIXON NOMINATED BY GOP — and she spat. She inhaled the early-morning scent of the city, its waking breath, asphalt and engine oil. The shopkeepers ignored her. They saw her clothes — her big green military jacket and leather boots, her ripped-up skintight jeans — and they saw her black rumpled hair, her unimpressed eyes leveled over silver sunglasses, and they assumed correctly she was not a paying customer. She carried no cash. She did not warrant being courteous to. She liked the transparency of these interactions, the lack of bullshit between herself and the world.

She didn’t carry a purse because if she carried a purse she might be tempted to put keys in the purse, and if she had keys she might be tempted to lock her door, and if she began locking her door she might be tempted to buy things that needed locking up: clothes purchased at actual stores rather than hand-sewn or shoplifted — that’s where it would begin — then shoes, dresses, jewelry, stockpiles of collectible doodads, then still more stuff, a television, small at first, then a bigger one, then another, one for each room, and magazines, cookbooks, pots and pans, framed pictures on the walls, a vacuum cleaner, an ironing board, clothes worth ironing, rugs worth vacuuming, and shelves and shelves and shelves, a bigger place, an apartment, a house, a garage, a car, locks on the car, locks on the doors, multiple locks and bars on the windows that would finally turn the house more fully into the jail it had long ago become. It would be a fundamental change in her stance toward the world: from inviting the world in to keeping the world out.

Tonight was one of those nights that would not have happened if she carried a purse, or keys, or money, or hang-ups regarding easy necking with motley strangers. She went looking for free kicks and found them so quickly, so easily: two men downtown who invited her up to their dirty apartment, where they drank whiskey and played Sun Ra records and she danced with them and swayed her hips and, after one of the men passed out, gave gentle kisses to the other until the weed was gone. The music was not hummable, was not really even danceable, but was excellent to kiss to. And it was fun until the guy unbuttoned his pants and said, “Would you do something with your mouth?” That the guy couldn’t even ask for it correctly, couldn’t even name the thing he wanted, was, she thought, pathetic. He seemed surprised when she said so. “I thought you were liberated, ” he said, by which he meant that she should indulge all his various wants and like it.

Such were the expectations of the New Left.

She still felt the pot in her body, in her legs, the way her legs felt like stilts, harder and thinner and longer than normal sober legs. Step after westward step, through downtown and back to Circle, Alice walked a clownish walk that made her love her body, for she could feel her body working, could feel its various wonderful parts.

She was testing her legs when the cop saw her. She was hopscotching past an alley where his car was hidden and he called out to her: “Hey, honey, where ya going?”

She stopped. Turned to the voice. It was him. The pig with the ridiculous name: Officer Charlie Brown.

“What you been up to, honey,” he said, “out so late?”

He was large as an avalanche, a big pumpkin-faced enforcer of petty laws — panhandling, littering, jaywalking, curfew. The cops had lately been stopping them for minor infractions, stopping and searching them, looking for anything contraband, anything arrestable. Most of the pigs were idiots, but this one was different. This one was interesting.

“Come here,” he said. He leaned on the hood of his police cruiser. One hand on his nightstick. It was dark. The alley was a cave.

“I asked you a question,” he said. “Whatcha doing?”

She walked to him and stopped just out of arm’s reach, stared up at him, at the great imposing mountain of him. His uniform was a light blue, almost baby blue, and short-sleeved, too small for him. His chest was shaped like a keg and strained against the buttons. He had a light blond mustache that you couldn’t really see unless you were up this close. His badge was a five-pointed silver star directly over his heart.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just going home.”

“Going home?”

“Yes.”

“At five in the morning? Just walking home? Not doing anything illegal?”

Alice smiled. He was obeying the script she’d given him. One of the few things she admired about Officer Brown was his persistence.

She said, “Fuck off, pig.”

He lunged for her then, grabbed her neck and brought her to him, to his face, pressed his nose into her scalp and sniffed loudly right above her ear.

“You smell like weed,” he said.

“So what?”

“So I’m gonna have to search you now.”

“You need a warrant for that,” she said, and he laughed a laugh that was admittedly pretty fake-sounding, but she appreciated it, that he was trying. He spun her around and pinned her arm behind her back and walked her deeper into the alley, then forced her over the trunk of his cruiser. They’d been through this once before, only a couple of nights ago, and had gotten this far, bending her over the car, before Brown broke character. He had shoved her onto the car a little too forcefully — to be honest, she had let him shove her, had gone slack at the key moment — and when her cheek met the metal she was momentarily dazed, which is exactly what she wanted, a brief escape from her head.

But it had scared him, her face hitting the car like that. She bruised almost immediately. “Little piggy!” he had cried, and she admonished him for using their safe word, had to explain to him that their safe word was reserved for her only and it didn’t even make sense for him to use it. And he shrugged and looked at her penitently and promised to be better next time.

Here is what Alice had asked of Officer Brown: She wanted him to find her some random night when she didn’t expect it and act like he didn’t know her and certainly not act like they’d been carrying on a summer-long affair, just act like she was another hippie freak and he was another brutal cop and he’d take her into a dark alley and bend her over the trunk of his police cruiser and rip off her clothes and have his way with her. That is what she wanted.