Nathan Hill - The Nix

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 more 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.”