Nathan Hill - The Nix

Children with too much education have problems with the Syllable. Because they do their thinking with their minds and not their bodies. They think with their heads and not their souls. The Syllable is what remains when you get out of your mind, after you minus the Great You. Ginsberg sometimes likes to pair them up and touch his hands to the tops of their heads and say “You’re married” to make them think about what happens next, on the honeymoon; for all their talk of free love, they need desperately the debauch of other bodies. They need desperately out of their own brains. He wants to scream at them: You are carrying lead souls! He wants them to lob their haunted heads into bliss devotion. Here they are trying to murmur the Syllable and getting it all wrong. Because they treat it like a lab rat or a poem — break it apart, dissect it, explain it, expose the viscera. They think the Syllable is a ritual, figurative, a symbol for God, but they are wrong. When you’re bobbing in the ocean, the water does not symbolize wetness. The water is simply there, lifting you up. That is the Syllable, the universe’s deep bellow, like water, omnipresent, endless, perfect, it’s the touch of God in the loftiest place, the most exalted place, the eminent, the pinnacle, the highest, the eighth.

Ommmmm, he says.

AND ABOVE THEM ALL a helicopter screams north now at the news of some impromptu illegal cavalcade on Lake Shore Drive: a company of girls marching and shouting and raising their fists in the air and high-stepping it right down the middle of the road slapping their palms on the windshields of cars exhorting the drivers to join them on their procession south, which the drivers universally do not do.

The chopper reaches them and points its camera at them and people watching this on TV — people like Faye’s father and Faye’s several burly uncles, who are all gathered right now in a living room in her little Iowa river town two hundred miles distant from Chicago but linked to it via television — they say: They’re all girls?

Well, yes, this particular cluster of protesting student radicals are, sure enough, all girls. Or presumably so. Several are wearing handkerchiefs over their faces so it’s hard to tell. Others have these haircuts that make the uncles say, That one looks like a man. They’re right now watching on the best TV owned among them — a twenty-three-inch Zenith color console as large as a boulder that comes to life with an electric thwump —and they want their friends and wives to see what they’re seeing. To hear what they’re hearing. Because what these girls are yelling? They are yelling crazy shit! They are yelling “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” and stabbing their fists in the air at each syllable, just completely ignoring all the cars honking at them, not even moving for oncoming traffic, just daring these cars to run them down like bowling pins, which the uncles wish they’d do. The cars. Run the girls down.

Then they look at Frank sheepishly and say I’m sure Faye’s not there and Frank nods and everything is real quiet and awkward until one of the uncles breaks the tension saying You see what that chick is wearing? and they all nod and make various sounds of disgust because it’s not like the uncles think all women should dress like debutantes, but come on. These girls make those girls who protested outside Miss America look like Miss America. Because, okay, here’s an example: This leader girl that the cameras keep showing because she’s in front of the horde and seems responsible for the forward-moving progress of the horde, here is what she’s wearing: First? Army jacket, which the uncles agree is so low-down disrespectful, patriotism-wise, which is point A. Point B is that army jackets are not form-fitting or flattering for girls because they are made for a man. And this girl knew she’d be on TV and this is how she wishes to present herself? In a jacket inappropriate to her gender? Which leads them to point C, which is that she probably wants to be a man, secretly, on the inside. Which they think, okay, fine, draft the bitch like a man and send her to Vietnam like a man and let her hump it through the jungle on point duty watching for trip wires and unexploded ordnance and snipers and then we’ll see how much she’s loving on Ho Chi Minh.

Bet she hasn’t showered in days, one of the uncles says. How many days? Six days is where they put the over/under.

The news identifies this leader girl as someone named Alice who, the news says, is a well-known campus feminist, and the uncles huff and snort and one of them says That figures and they all nod because they understand exactly what he means by that.

THE CONRAD HILTON’S FIRST-FLOOR BAR is called the Haymarket, and this seems historically significant to at least one of the two Secret Service agents sitting at the bar right now nursing his nonalcoholic drink.

“Like, as in, the Haymarket Riot,” says Agent A—. “The Haymarket Massacre? Anything?” To which Agent B—, whose chin hangs over the glass of club soda he really wishes had bourbon in it, shakes his head. “Nope,” he says. “I got nothin’.”

“It was in Chicago? Eighteen eighty something? Workers striking at Haymarket Square? It’s pretty historic.”

“I thought Haymarket Square was in Boston.”

“There’s one here too. It’s northeast of us, about two clicks.”

“What were they striking for?” asks B—.

“An eight-hour workday.”

“God, I’d love one of those right about now.”

A— shakes his glass and the bartender fills it. His preferred off-duty drink is this thing involving simple syrup, lemon juice, and rose water. You can’t always find rose water in most places, but the Haymarket Bar, it turns out, is well stocked.

“What happened,” A— says, “is that they were demonstrating, the workers were, marching and picketing, and then the police showed up and attacked them, and then a bomb went off.”

“Casualties?”

“Several.”

“Perp?”

“Unknown.”

“And you’re bringing this up now because?”

“Because don’t you think it’s a coincidence? That we’re the in the Haymarket Bar? Right now?”

“Riot central,” says B—, pointing with his thumb behind them, toward the thousands of protestors currently gathered beyond the plate-glass windows.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“A real hedley-medley out there.”

Agent A— looks sidelong at his partner. “A real hugger-mugger, you might say?”

“Yep. Gone all topsy-turvy.”

“A sincere higgledy-piggledy.”

“Yessir, one hundred percent hurly-burly.”

“A pell-mell.”

“A ribble-rabble.”

“A skimble-skamble.”

They smile at each other and suppress a laugh. They clink their drinks. They could do this all day. Outside, the crowd churns and boils.

AND WHERE THERE LOOKS to be an oval-shaped cavity in the crowd is actually the spot where dozens are sitting. They’re watching Allen Ginsberg or joining him in his ommmm ing, his head-bopping, clapping, his face uplifted like he’s receiving messages from the gods. To the anxious and terrified crowd, his chanting is barbiturative. In its monotony and resolve and purpose, it is the verbal equivalent of being held tenderly by a nurse who really cares. Those who join him singing Ommmm feel better about the world. This is their armor, the spoken sacred Syllable. Nobody would strike someone sitting on the ground singing Ommmm. Nobody would gas them.

Around Grant Park, this calm, this peace has rippled out to the far borders. Protesters standing there lost in the crowd screaming at the cops and maybe digging up chunks of sidewalk to throw at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in a spasm of loose rage and wildness because they’re just so angry at all of it when someone touches their shoulder from behind and they turn to find these gentle soothing eyes made tranquil and serene because they themselves were touched by the person behind them, and they in turn by the person behind them, one long chain leading all the way back to Ginsberg, who’s powering this whole thing with his chanting’s great voltage.