Nathan Hill - The Nix

“The Chicago police,” he says, “are a bunch of thugs.”

Well fiddledeedee! How about that for bias? One of the uncles leaps out of his chair and places a long-distance call to CBS headquarters and he doesn’t even mind how much this is costing him because any amount would be worth it to give old Cronkite a piece of his mind.

OFFICER CHARLIE BROWN, badgeless, anonymous, is sweeping the crowd for Alice, knowing Alice will be here, in this particular all-girl march, and he’s swinging his nightstick and feeling, right now, as he connects with another hippie forehead, like Ernie Banks.

Like Ernie Banks the instant after he hits another home run ball, and there’s that tiny interval before the crowd cheers, and before he trots the bases, before he even leaves the batter’s box, before anyone can locate the ball in the air and extrapolate its path and understand that it will clear Wrigley’s ivy, there must be this moment when the only person in the park who knows it’s a home run is Ernie Banks himself. Even before he looks up to watch it fly away, there must be a moment when his head is still down looking at the point in space where the baseball was a heartbeat ago, and the only information he has is the information that travels up the bat and into his hands, a percussion that feels just right. As if the ball has offered him no resistance whatsoever, so purely did he strike its exact middle with his bat’s exact middle. And before anything else happens there’s this moment where it’s like he has this secret he’s dying to tell everyone else. He’s just hit a home run! But nobody else knows it yet.

Brown is thinking about this as he clunks hippies on the head with his nightstick. He’s pretending he’s Ernie Banks.

Because it’s hard to get a square, solid hit every time. It’s a real challenge of athleticism and coordination. Brown figures three out of every four swings ends up a glancing blow, his nightstick vibrating complainingly. The hippies squirm. They cannot be trusted to stay still for a beating. They are unpredictable. They try to protect themselves with their hands and arms. They twirl away at the last second.

Roughly three out of four swings are these, he guesses. Misses. He’s batting.250. Not as good as Ernie but still respectable.

But sometimes things line up. He anticipates the hippie’s movements perfectly: the feel of the stick in his hand, the moist sound of the hippie’s head, that hollow watermelon-thumping sound, and that moment where the hippie suddenly doesn’t know where she is or what’s happening to her, when she literally does not know what just hit her as her brain is up there sloshing around, and soon the hippie will tip over like a rootless tree, topple down and vomit and pass out, and Brown knows this will happen soon but it has not happened yet, and he wishes he could live inside this moment forever. He wants this moment captured in a postcard or snow globe: the hippie about to fall, the triumphant cop above her, his nightstick having clunked the hippie and then kept going in its arc of perfect swinging technique, and the look on his face would be like Ernie Banks after crushing another one to dead center: that giddy and gratifying pleasure of a job well done.

FAYE IS EXHAUSTED. She hasn’t slept in more than a day. She’s leaning against the wall with her back to the room and trying to keep it all together and she’s just about crying from the effort.

Help me, she says.

The house spirit sits on the floor outside her metal cage. He picks at his teeth with a fingernail.

I could help you, he says. I could make all this go away. If I felt like it.

Please, Faye says.

Okay. Make me a deal. Make it worth my time. Entertain me.

So Faye promises to be a better person, to help the needy and go to church, but the house spirit only smiles.

What do I care about the needy? he says. What do I care about church?

I’ll give money to charity, Faye says. I’ll volunteer and give money to the poor.

Pbbth, the house spirit says, spit flecking off his lips. You’re gonna have to do better than that. Gonna have to leave some skin on the table.

I’ll go back home, Faye says. Go to junior college for a couple years and come back to Chicago after all this blows over.

A couple years at JuCo? That’s it? Seriously, Faye, that’s not nearly enough penance for how badly you’ve acted.

But what have I done?

Irrelevant. But if you’d like to know? Disobeyed your parents. Felt pride. Coveted. Thought impure thoughts. Plus, weren’t you planning on having out-of-wedlock relations last evening?

Faye hangs her head, says yes, because there is no use lying.

Yes, the answer is yes. Plus you’re high. Right now you are high. Plus you shared a bed with another woman. Do I have to keep going? Do you want to hear more? Do I even need to mention what you did with Henry on the riverbank?

I give up, she says.

The house spirit rubs his chin with a fat hand.

I should forget about this whole thing, she says. Go home and marry Henry.

The house spirit raises an eyebrow. Go on.

I’ll marry Henry and make him happy and forget about college and we’ll be normal, like everyone wants.

The ghost smiles, his teeth ragged and broken, a mouthful of stones.

Go on, he says.

NOW OLD CRONKITE is interviewing the mayor, the fatly jowled and thuggish dictator of Chicago. Cronkite is asking him questions live on the air but really the journalist’s mind is elsewhere. He’s barely paying attention. It doesn’t matter. The mayor is as professional as they come. He doesn’t need a journalist’s questions to hold forth on whatever he wants to talk about, which is currently the extraordinary threats to the police and to ordinary Americans and to our democracy itself posed by outside agitators, the out-of-town radicals causing trouble in his law-abiding town. He really seems to want to stress the “out-of-town” stuff. Probably to emphasize to hometown voters that whatever problems his city is currently having are not his fault.

And anyway, even if old Cronkite were concentrating real hard and asking penetrating, difficult questions, the mayor would just perform that politician’s maneuver where he doesn’t answer the question you asked but instead the question he wished you had asked. And if you pursue this too much and insist that he did not answer the question, then you’re the one who looks like a jerk. At least that’s how it plays on TV. Badgering this very charismatic fellow who’s been saying lots of words that at least seem related to the question. This is how it seems to the viewers anyway, who are splitting their attention between Cronkite and children running around and cutting the Salisbury steak at the center of their TV dinners. If you keep pestering the politician, you look like a pest, and America does not tune in to watch pests. It’s a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear.

So he’s ostensibly interviewing the mayor but he knows that his only real job here is to stick a microphone under his mouth so CBS News can seem balanced by providing a counter-narrative to the images of police brutality they’ve been showing for hours. So old Cronkite isn’t really listening. He’s watching, maybe. The way the mayor seems to hold his head as far back on his neck as possible, in the manner of someone avoiding a bad smell, and how this makes the part of his chin that on a rooster would be called a wattle press out and jiggle while he speaks. It is impossible not to stare at this.