Nathan Hill - The Nix

WAY UP ABOVE THEM, on the top-floor suite of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey wants another shower.

This will be his third shower of the day, and his second since returning from the amphitheater. He tells the maid to run the water and his staff looks at him queerly.

They were at the amphitheater this morning so Triple H could practice his speech. His staff likes to call him “Triple H,” but the Secret Service agents refuse, usually calling him “Mr. Vice President sir,” which he prefers. They were at the amphitheater so he could stand at that podium and imagine the crowd and visualize his speech and think positive thoughts like the management consultants told him to do, to imagine the crowd in that vast space, that huge space big enough to hold every resident of his hometown plus many thousands more, and he was up there mentally going through his speech and savoring the applause lines and thinking positive thoughts and repeating “They want me to win, they want me to win,” but all he could really think about was that smell. That unmistakable smell of animal feces, with an under-sweetness of blood and cleaning agents, that cloud hanging over the stockyards. What a place to have your convention.

The smell still lingers on his clothes, even though he’s changed clothes. He can still smell it in his hair and under his fingernails. If he can’t get rid of this smell he thinks he’s going to go crazy. He needs another shower, to hell with what the staff thinks.

MEANWHILE, one story underground, Faye Andresen stares at shadows on the wall. This jail, it turns out, is not the official or permanent city jail but rather a makeshift holding pen that looks like it was quickly erected in a storage room of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. The cells are made not from iron bars but from chain-link fencing. She’s been sitting on the floor ever since the last of her panic attacks, which had consumed her for most of the night. She had been photographed and fingerprinted and dragged to this cell and the door was locked and she pleaded into the darkness that there’d been some terrible mistake and wept at the thought of her family discovering she was arrested (for, oh my god, prostitution ) and the terror quaked through her body and all she could do was curl up in a ball in the corner and feel her own rigid heartbeat and persuade herself she was not dying even though she was convinced that this is what it felt like, to die.

And after the third or maybe fourth attack, a strange calm came over her, a strange acceptance, maybe exhaustion. She was so tired. Her body rang from a night of spasms and tight dread. She lay on her back thinking maybe she’d sleep now, but she just stared into the darkness until the first dull glow of dawn slunk into the room through the basement’s lone egress window. It is a gray-blue light, sickly looking, like the light of deep winter, dispersed and faded and occluded by several panes of frosted glass. She can’t see the window itself, but she can see its light cast on the far wall. And the shadows of things that pass by. First a few people, then many people, then many people marching.

Then the door opens and that cop who’d arrested her last night — big crew-cutted guy who still is not wearing a badge or name tag or anything identifiable — walks in. Faye stands up. The cop says, “Basically you have two choices.”

“This is a mistake,” Faye says. “A big misunderstanding.”

“Choice number one: You leave Chicago immediately,” the cop says. “Or choice two: Stay in Chicago and go on trial for prostitution.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“Also you’re high. Right now you are abusing illegal narcotics. Those red pills you took. How do you think your daddy’s gonna feel when he finds out you’re a hooker and a doper?”

“Who are you? What did I do to you?”

“If you leave Chicago, this whole thing will go away. I’m trying to put this as plainly as I can. You leave, no harm done. But if I ever catch you in Chicago again, I promise you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

He gives the cage a shake to test its sturdiness. “I’ll give you the weekend to think about it,” he said. “See you when the protest is over.”

He leaves and locks the door behind him and Faye sits down and stares again at the shadows. Above her, the big parade is fully under way, is what she thinks seeing the forms cast on the opposite wall. Thin shadows that look like snapping scissors held upside down are almost certainly legs, she thinks. People marching. The city must have backed down, issued a permit. Then a rumbling and associated large window-blocking shadows she assumes are pickup trucks, their beds filled with student protestors, she imagines, waving their homemade peace flags. She’s glad for them, that Sebastian and the others got their way, that the biggest demonstration of the year — of the decade —is happening after all.

BUT THE SHADOWS ARE in fact not those of parading students. They are those of National Guard troop carriers filled with soldiers holding rifles tipped with bayonets. There is no parade. The city has not backed down. The shadows that Faye sees are cast by cops moving this way and that to contain the surge of screaming demonstrators massing across the street. In case any of them have designs on parading, the troop carriers have cages of razor wire attached to their front grills to show them just how unwelcome they are in the street.

They all gather in Grant Park, the many thousands of them, where Allen Ginsberg now sits in the grass cross-legged palms raised to the universe listening. Around him young people scream and revolutionize. They place their spit curses on police-state USA, the FBI, the president, petty materialist sexless soulless bourgeoisie killers, their bombs death-dropping on farmers and children a billion tons. It’s time to bring the war to the streets, says one nearby bullhorned youth. We’re gonna shut down Chicago! Fuck the police! And anybody who’s not with us is a bourgeois white honky pig!

Ginsberg trembles at this. He does not want to take these children to war, misery, despair, bloody police nightsticks and death. The thought barb-wires his guts. One cannot react to violence with violence — only a machine thinks like this. Or a president. Or a vengeful monotheism. Imagine, instead, ten thousand naked youths carrying signs that say

POLICE DON’T HURT US

WE LOVE YOU TOO

Or crowned with flowers sitting cross-legged waving pure-white flags chanting glory nirvana poems to their holy Maker. This is the other way to react to violence — with beauty — and Ginsberg wants to say this. He wants to say to the bullhorned man: You are the poem you are asking for! He wants to soothe them. The way forward is like water. But he knows it isn’t good enough, isn’t radical enough to calm the wild appetite of the young. And so Ginsberg strokes his beard, closes his eyes, settles into his body, and answers in the only way he can, with a deep bellow from the bottom of his belly, the great Syllable, the sacred sound of the universe, the perfection of wisdom, the only noise worth making at a time like this: Ommmmm.

He feels the hot holy breath in his mouth, the lifted-up music breath released from his lungs and his gullet, from his guts and heart, his stomach, his red blood cells and kidneys, from his gallbladder and glands and the long spindly legs he sits on, the Syllable issues from all these things. If you listen quietly and carefully, if you are calm and you slow down your heart, you can hear the Syllable in everything — the walls, the street, the cars, the soul, the sun — and soon you are no longer chanting. Soon the sound settles into your skin and you are simply hearing the body make the sound it has always made: Ommmmm.