Nathan Hill - The Nix

She might have otherwise panicked at this sight, but her body is so tired.

I’m dreaming, she says.

So wake up, the house spirit says.

She tries to wake up. She knows the thing that usually pulls her out of dreaming is the realization that she’s dreaming, which has always frustrated her; dreams, she thinks, are best when you know they’re dreams. Then you can act without consequence. It’s the only time in her life that is worry-free.

Well? the ghost says.

You’re not real, she says, even though she has to admit this does not feel like a dream.

The house spirit shrugs.

You spend all night praying for help and when help finally arrives, you insult it. That is so typical of you, Faye.

I’m hallucinating, she says. Because of those pills.

Look, if I’m not wanted here, if you’ve got this situation under control, then best of luck to you. There are plenty of people out there who would appreciate my help. He points a stubby finger toward the window, the outside world. Listen to them, he says, and just then the big basement room is crashing with sound, the discordant and overlapping voices of people pleading for help, asking for protection, voices young and old, male and female, as if the room were suddenly a radio tower picking up every frequency on the dial all at once, and Faye can hear students asking for protection from the cops, and cops asking for protection from the students, and priests asking for peace, and presidential candidates asking for strength, and snipers hoping they won’t have to pull the trigger, and National Guardsmen staring obliquely at their bayonets asking for courage, and people everywhere offering whatever they can in return for safety: promises that they’ll start going to church more, that they’ll be better people, that they’ll call their parents or children soon, they’ll write more letters, give to charity, be kind to strangers, stop doing whatever bad things they are currently doing, quit smoking, quit drinking, be a better husband or wife, a whole symphony of kindnesses that might result if they are simply spared on this one ugly day.

Then, just as quickly, the voices turn off, and the basement is silent again, the last noise to fade being the low deep thrum of someone chanting: Ommmm.

Faye stands and looks at the house spirit, who is himself looking innocently at his own fingernails.

Do you know who I am? he says.

You’re my family’s house spirit. Our nisse.

That’s one word for it.

What’s another word?

He looks at her, his eyes black and sinister. All those stories your father told you about ghosts that look like rocks or horses or leaves? Yeah, that’s me. I am the nisse, I am the nix, not to mention various other spirits, creatures, demons, angels, trolls, et cetera.

I don’t understand.

No, you wouldn’t, he says, and he yawns. You guys haven’t figured it out yet. Your map is just way off.

NOW THE GIRLS HAVE SWITCHED from “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” to “Kill the pigs! Kill the pigs!” and the uncles are glued to the television because the girls are full of confidence after their cop-car-tipping success and obviously feel indestructible right now because they taunt the various cops they see along their slow march south yelling “Hey piggy!” and “Soo-ee!” and stuff like that. And the reason this is unswitchoffable television and why the uncles keep yelling Honey c’mere you’ve got to see this and why they are considering calling all their buddies to make sure they’re watching too is because the police? And the National Guard? They’re waiting for the bitches a couple blocks away. It’s like a trap. They’re to the west of the girls’ route waiting to flank them and drive into them and split open their wedge (ha-ha) and the girls have no idea this is about to happen.

The uncles know this because of chopper cam.

And right now they are just about as grateful to chopper cam as they are to their mother on their birthdays. And they wish there were some way they could record for all time what is about to happen and watch the chopper-cam footage over and over and maybe put it in a scrapbook or time capsule or shoot it into space on the back of a satellite to show the Martians or whoever the hell else is out there some pretty goddamn entertaining TV. And the Martians? The first thing they’ll say when they land their flying saucers on the White House lawn? They’ll say, Those girls had it coming.

About a hundred cops in riot gear wait for the girls, and behind them a platoon of National Guardsmen in gas masks, holding rifles with fucking daggers attached to the barrels, and behind them this monstrous metal thing with nozzles on the front like some kind of terrible Zamboni from the future that the TV folks tell them the purpose of, which is gas. Tear gas. A thousand gallons.

And they’re waiting behind a building for the girls to come to them, and the uncles feel really present and edgy and almost like they’re with the cops or something, and they think that this moment — even though the uncles are hundreds of miles away from it and all they’re really doing is sitting on a couch watching an electronic box while their food goes cold — might be the best thing that has ever happened to them.

Because this right here is the future of television: pure combative sensation. Old Cronkite’s problem is he’s treating television like it’s a newspaper, with all of print’s worn-out obligations.

Chopper cam provides a new way forward.

Faster, immediate, richly ambiguous — no gatekeepers between the event and the perception of the event. The news and the uncles’ opinion about the news are flattened into a simultaneous happening.

But the police are on the move now. Nightsticks out, riot helmets down, and running, sprinting, and when the girls understand what is about to happen their big march breaks apart, like a rock exploded by gunshot, pieces of it flying off in every direction. Some girls head back from the direction they came, only to be cut off by a paddy wagon and a squadron of cops who anticipated this very move. Others hop the barrier between northbound and southbound traffic and hightail it toward the lake. For most of the girls, the crowd is so thick there’s nowhere to run. And so they trip over each other and fall and flail like a litter of blind puppies, and these are the ones the police reach first, bringing down their nightsticks on the girls’ legs, the meat of their thighs, their backbones. The cops drop these bitches like they’re mowing tall grass — a quick thrust and the girls bend and fall. From above, this looks like those slides from high-school biology textbooks of the immune system wiping out a foreign agent, surrounding it and neutralizing it in blood. The cops pour into the crowd and everyone gets mixed up together. The uncles see the girls’ mouths moving and they wish they could hear the screams above the rotary noise of the chopper. The cops drag the girls to a paddy wagon mostly by their arms, some by their hair, some by their clothes, which gets the uncles momentarily jazzed up because maybe their hippie dresses will rip and they’ll catch a little skin. Some of these girls are bleeding rivers from their heads. Or dazed, sitting on the road crying, or passed out on the curb.

Chopper cam looks around for that leader girl, Alice, but she took off south, toward Grant Park, to join with the rest of the hippies down by the Conrad Hilton, presumably. Which is too bad. That would have been fun to watch. The National Guard hasn’t even gotten involved yet. They’re watching and clutching their rifles and looking deadly as hell. The giant tear-gas machine, incidentally, is rumbling slowly south, toward the gathered masses at the park. The girls have for the most part dispersed entirely. A few run away on the lakefront beach, tearing ass across the sand in front of all these stunned families and lifeguards. Chopper cam is now heading south to cover whatever’s going on in the park, and that’s when goddamn CBS cuts back to old Cronkite, who looks all shaken and pale and has clearly been watching the same footage the uncles have been watching but has come to a radically different conclusion.