Nathan Hill - The Nix

“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. ”

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.

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.