Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Fled? I didn’t flee. I left. I was done photographing. I never even saw security.”

“That’s exactly what I would say if I were fleeing,” the man said to Faye, who nodded.

“I know,” she said. “You’re exactly right.”

“Would you stop?” Samuel said. “So am I never going to fly again? Is that what this means?”

“It means you’re not going to fly today. But you can take steps to remove yourself from the list. There’s a website for that.”

“A website.”

“Or an 800 number, if you prefer,” he said. “Then an average wait time of six to eight weeks. I’m afraid I’m going to have to escort you out of the airport now.”

“And my mother?”

“Oh, she can do whatever she wants. She’s not on the list.”

“I see. Can you give us a second?”

“Oh sure!” the man said. Then he took one step beyond the purple tape and turned his back three-quarters to them and clasped his hands in front of him and began very slightly tilting back and forth like someone whistling and rocking to his own tune.

“Let’s forget about it,” Faye whispered. “Let’s go home. The judge can do whatever he wants. It’s not like I don’t deserve it.”

And Samuel thought about his mother going to jail, thought about his life returning to normal: losing his job, in debt, alone, passing through his days in a digital fog.

“You have to leave,” he said. “I’ll come find you, when I can.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Faye said. “Do you know what the judge will do to you?”

“A lot less than what he’ll do to you. You need to go.”

She looked at him a moment, wondering whether to fight him.

“Don’t argue,” he said. “Just go.”

“Fine,” she said, “but we’re not going to have one of those sappy parent-child moments, right? You’re not going to cry, right?”

“I am not going to cry.”

“Because I was never very good at dealing with that.”

“Have a good flight.”

“Wait,” she said. She grabbed his arm. “This has to be a clean break. If we do this, we won’t be able to contact each other for a while. Radio silence.”

“I know.”

“So I’m asking you, are you prepared to do that? Can you handle that?”

“You want permission?”

“Permission to leave you. Again. For the second time. Yes, that’s what I want.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know,” Faye said. “I’ll figure that out in London.”

On the television above them, the airport news network came back from commercials and into a segment on the Packer for President campaign. It looked like Governor Packer was out to an early lead in Iowa, they said. Looks like the attack in Chicago really boosted his peripherals.

Faye and Samuel looked at each other.

“How did we get into this?” he said.

“It’s my fault,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Go,” he said. “You have my permission. Get out of here.”

“Thank you,” she said. She picked up her bag, looked at him for a moment, then dropped it back on the ground and leaned into Samuel and wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest and squeezed. Samuel didn’t know what to do, it was such an out-of-character gesture. She took one long hard breath, like someone about to plunge underwater, then quickly let go.

“Be good,” she said, and patted him on the chest. She collected her suitcase and wandered back to the TSA agent, who let her through uneventfully. The man with the clipboard asked Samuel if he was ready to leave. And Samuel watched his mother, and felt a little tremble at her sudden embrace. His hand lightly touched the spot she’d pressed her head against.

“Sir?” said the clipboard man. “Are you ready?”

Samuel was about to say yes when he heard a name he recognized — a name that abruptly popped out of the airport’s ubiquitous and usually ignorable noise. It came from the television overhead: Guy Periwinkle.

Samuel looked up to see if he’d heard correctly, and that’s when he saw him, Periwinkle, on TV, sitting in the studio, talking to the anchors. Under his name it said Packer Campaign Consultant. They were asking him what drew him to the job.

“Sometimes the country thinks it deserves a spanking, sometimes it wants a hug,” Periwinkle said. “When it wants a hug, it votes Democrat. I’m hedging on it’s a spanking moment right now.”

“It’s time to go now, sir,” the man with the clipboard said.

“One second.”

“Conservatives tend to believe more than the rest of us that we need a spanking. Read into that whatever you want.” Periwinkle laughed. The anchors laughed. He was a natural on television. “Right now the country sees itself as a poorly behaved child,” he continued. “When people vote, what they’re really doing, way deep down, is externalizing some childhood trauma. We have reams of paper showing this.”

“It’s really time to go now, sir.” The man with the clipboard was getting impatient.

“Okay, fine,” Samuel said, and he let himself be escorted away from the television, toward the exterior doors.

But just before leaving, he turned around. He turned in time to see his mother collect her belongings on the other side of security. And she didn’t look for him, she didn’t wave at him. She simply gathered her things and left. And thus Samuel endured, for the second time in his life, the sight of his mother walking away, disappearing, and not coming back.

THE CONRAD HILTON ground-floor bar is separated from the street by panes of thick, leaded, plate-glass windows that muffle all but the closest sirens or screams. The Hilton’s front entrance is guarded by a phalanx of police officers, who themselves are being watched over by a great many Secret Service agents, all of whom are making sure anyone coming into the Hilton is registered and unthreatening: delegates, their wives, candidate support staff, the candidates themselves, Eugene McCarthy and the vice president, they’re here, as are some minor artist-type celebrities, Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer being the two that at least a couple of the cops recognize. The bar itself is full of delegates today, and the lights are appropriately low to accommodate the privacy needed to lubricate the political process. Small packs of intense-looking men in booths talk quietly, make promises, trade favors. Everyone has a cigarette and most have martinis and the music is jazz and big-band stuff — think Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey — at a volume great enough to obscure nearby conversations but not so loud that anyone needs to shout. Television over the bar tuned to CBS News. Delegates walking around the bar and seeing friends and slapping hands and backs because roughly the same people come to these things every time. Ceiling fans twirl just fast enough to draw the cigarette mist up and scatter it.

Outsiders to the political process sometimes complain that real decisions happen in dark smoky rooms, and this is one of those rooms.

Two guys at the bar that absolutely no one approaches or fucks with: mirrored sunglasses, black suits, obviously Secret Service, off duty, watching the news and sipping glasses of something clear. The buzz in the room dies down momentarily when a hippie breaks through the police line and sprints down Michigan Avenue and gets himself tackled right outside the plate-glass windows of the bar, and all the patrons inside — everyone but the two Secret Service guys — stop and watch the scene made wavy by the leaded glass as the police officers in their baby-blue uniforms descend on the poor guy and club him on his back and legs while inside the bar nobody can hear a thing except maybe sometimes old Cronkite talking on CBS and Glenn Miller playing “Rhapsody in Blue.”