Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Keep going.”

“Okay, well, let’s say even if I’m able to achieve some feeling of peace and relaxation by miraculously doing the breathing techniques correctly, I’ll enjoy feeling happy and relaxed for maybe ten seconds before I begin to worry about how long it’s going to last, the good relaxed feeling. I worry that I won’t be able to maintain it long enough.”

“Long enough for what?”

“To, you know, be successful at it. To do it right. And every second I feel objectively happy is a second I’m closer to failing and returning again to being essentially myself. The metaphor I have in my mind of what this feels like is walking on a tightrope that has no ending and no beginning. The longer you stay up there, the more energy it takes not to fall. And eventually you begin to feel this melancholy and doom because no matter how good a tightrope walker you are, you will inevitably fall. It is only a matter of time. It is guaranteed. And so instead of enjoying the happy relaxed feeling while I’m having it, I feel this huge sense of dread about the moment I will no longer feel happy or relaxed. Which of course is the very thing that obliterates the happiness.”

“Holy god.”

“This is all going through my head more or less constantly. So when you say ‘Just breathe,’ I think it means something different to you than it does to me.”

“I know what you need,” Alice said. And she rolled across the bed and opened the bottom drawer of her nightstand and rummaged around what appeared to be several brown paper bags until finding the appropriate one and turning it over and shaking out what looked like two small red pills.

“From my personal inventory,” she said, which Officer Brown considered writing down but ultimately did not write down; he never logged anything she did that might be indictable. “Alice’s pharmacy,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Something to make you relax.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s not dangerous. It simply quiets the head a bit, lowers the inhibitions.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do. You’re like the Great Wall of Inhibitions.”

“No thank you.”

What were they, Brown wondered. The pills. Maybe psilocybin, mescaline, morning glory seeds? Maybe methedrine, DMT, STP, some kind of barbiturate?

“Listen,” Alice said, “would you like to have a pleasant evening with Sebastian?”

“Yes, but—”

“And do you think you could do that in your current mental state?”

Faye paused a moment and thought this over. “I could produce the appropriate outward appearance of it. I think Sebastian would think I was having a great time.”

“But really, on the inside?”

“Dread and panic that feels just barely bottled up.”

“Yeah, you need these. If you have any interest in having a sincerely good time. Not for him but for you. ”

“What do they feel like?”

“Like a sunny day. Like you’re strolling along on a sunny day without a care in the world.”

“I have literally never felt like that.”

“Side effects are they make your mouth gluey. Also weird dreams. Mild hallucinations, but that’s really rare. You want to take them with food. Let’s go.”

Alice took Faye’s hand and they left the room, presumably down to the cafeteria, which would be mostly empty this time of night. The only available food would be breakfast cereal, probably, or the refrigerated leftovers of that day’s dinner. Meat loaf. Brown’s research was narrow but exhaustive. He knew the routines of this dorm as well as he knew those at his own house, where his wife would be waking up in about six hours to a slathering of kisses and compliments from their child. He wondered how much of her was able to sincerely enjoy these compliments, knowing she got them by intimidation and blackmail. He guessed nine-tenths. Almost all of her. But that other bit, he thought, would be throbbing.

He hoped, down in the cafeteria right now, that the girls were talking about him. He hoped Alice would reveal her burgeoning relationship with this cop and how, despite herself, she was falling for him. One of the more depressing things about his nightly surveillance was realizing how little she talked about him or even seemed to think about him when they were not together. Actually never, it would be more accurate to say. She never talked about him. Not once. Even after one of their encounters she’d usually come back and shower and if she did talk to anyone it was about mundane things: school, the protest, girl stuff. Lately the primary topic was the all-female march Alice was organizing for Friday — they planned to parade down Lake Shore Drive with no permit or anything, to stop traffic and walk as they pleased. Alice talked about this endlessly. Not once had she mentioned him. When he wasn’t around it was like he didn’t exist for her, which was painful because he thought about her almost all the time. When he shopped for clothes he wondered how to impress Alice. When he sat through daily Red Squad briefings he waited to hear anything that might involve her. When he watched the TV news with his wife, he imagined it was Alice there with him instead. He was a compass needle always pointed toward her.

He looked out past the dorm to the lights of the lakeshore, the vast gray expanse of Lake Michigan beyond them, a shimmering hot emptiness. The dots in the sky were planes coming into Midway, many of them now containing the advance teams for senators and ambassadors, various chairmen of boards, industry lobbyists, Democratic insiders, pollsters, judges, the vice president, whose itinerary was a secret the White House wouldn’t share even with the police.

He sat on the bed and waited. He risked some light to read the newspaper, the entire front page of which was devoted to either the convention or the protest of the convention. He poured himself a whiskey from the small bar knowing the hotel would provide it gratis, just like all the city diners provided cops with free coffee. This job had its perks.

He must have fallen asleep there because he woke up to the sound of laughter. Girls laughing. His face rested on the crinkled newspaper, his mouth was sticky. He clicked off the small reading light and lumbered over to his position behind the telescope, moving lopsidedly, his arms swinging, his feet scraping along the carpeted floor. He sat and shook his head a few times and tried to blink the sleep away. He had to rub his eyes roughly before he could see anything through the telescope. His stomach felt sour and empty. These night shifts were killing him.

The girls had returned. They were both on the bed, facing each other. They were laughing at something. There were sleep crumbs in his eyes that he had to pick out. The image through the telescope was out of focus, weirdly, as if while he slept their two buildings had crept slowly apart. He fiddled with the knobs. The picture of the girls bounced and bobbed as he did this, triggering a very mild kind of motion sickness that reminded him of sitting in the backseat of a car trying to read.

“There’s so much inside you,” Alice said, recovered now from the laughing fit. She lightly stroked Faye’s hair. “So much happiness.”

Faye was still giggling, softly. “No there’s not,” she said, batting at Alice’s hand. “This isn’t real.”

“You’re wrong. This is more real. You should remember this. This is the real you.”

“It doesn’t feel like the real me.”

“You’re encountering your true self for the first time. It’s bound to be foreign.”

“I’m tired,” Faye said.

“You should remember this feeling and find your way back when you’re sober. This is a map for you. You’re so happy right now. Why aren’t you happy like this all the time?”