Nathan Hill - The Nix

Sebastian and Faye are in there somewhere. He’s squeezing her hand so hard it hurts, but she doesn’t dare let go. She feels herself caught in this moving human river and pressed at all sides and sometimes even lifted off her feet for a moment and carried, a sensation like swimming or floating, before being dropped again, and the thing she’s thinking about most right now is keeping her balance, staying on her feet, because these people are panicked and this is what ten thousand panicked people look like: like wild animals, huge and insensate. If she falls she’ll be trampled. The terror she feels about this goes way beyond terror and into a kind of calm clarity. This is life or death. She squeezes Sebastian’s hand harder.

People run with handkerchiefs on their faces, or with their shirts wrapped around their mouths. They cannot stand the gas. They cannot stay in the park. And yet it’s becoming clear to them now that this was a mistake too, going this way, because as they get closer to the safety of the dark city beyond Michigan Avenue, the spaces they can fill are getting smaller and smaller. They are being funneled by heavy equipment and fencing and barbed wire and lines of cops and National Guardsmen thirty deep. And Sebastian tries to get to the Hilton’s front doors but the crowd is too thick, the current too strong, and so they end up off target, carried to the side of the building instead, and up against the plate-glass windows of the Haymarket Bar.

That’s where Officer Brown sees them.

He’s been watching the crowd, looking for Alice. He’s standing atop the back bumper of a U.S. Army troop carrier, several feet above everyone else, looking at the crowd, the baby-blue helmets of the Chicago PD, en masse, like a colony of agitated poisonous mushrooms, it looks like, from up here. And then suddenly a face pops out of the crowd, over by the bar, a woman’s face, and he feels a surge of optimism that it’s Alice, because it’s the first time all day he’s had any flash of familiarity, and the film that’s been running in his head — that Alice sees him clubbing hippies and thus recognizes him for the brutal man she’s always wanted him to be — starts running again until the face resolves itself and he realizes with crashing disappointment that it’s not Alice he’s seeing, it’s Faye.

Faye! The girl he arrested just last night. Who should be in jail right this moment. Who is the very reason Alice left him.

Fucking bitch.

He leaps into the crowd and unholsters his club. He presses forward, shoves his way toward the plate-glass window Faye is trapped against. Between him and her are several lines of cops and a mass of stinking hippies trapped and flapping like tuna in a net. He shoulders his way through the crowd, saying, “Coming through! From behind!” And the cops are glad to let him go because that’s one more guy between them and the front line. And he’s getting closer to the boundary between the cops and the protestors, a boundary visible by the nightsticks in the air coming down fast like a typewriter getting all jammed up in itself. The closer he gets, the harder it is to move. Everything seems to heave, like they are all part of one great, sick animal.

And at that moment a squad of National Guardsmen — one of them carrying an actual flamethrower, though, thankfully, not using it — carves through the protestors on Michigan Avenue, effectively flanking them, cutting them off from the rest of the herd, and so this small group by the Conrad Hilton finds itself trapped: police on one side, National Guard on the other, hotel walls behind them.

There is nowhere for them to go.

Faye is crushed against the plate-glass window, her shoulder pressed hard into it. Any harder, she thinks, and it’ll pop, the shoulder. She’s looking into the Haymarket Bar, through the window that seems to wobble and creak, and she sees two men in suits and black ties staring back at her. They sip their drinks. They seem to have no expression at all. Around her, protestors squirm and duck for cover. They get clubbed in the head, get jabbed in the ribs with the blunt end of a nightstick, and as they go down they are dragged to paddy wagons, which seems to Faye preferable. Between a knock to the head and going to the paddy wagon, she’ll take the wagon. But she can’t even turn here, much less go to the ground, such is the tightness of the bodies pressing into her. She’s losing hold of Sebastian’s hand. There’s someone between them now, another protestor between Faye and Sebastian doing exactly what they’re doing, which is to say trying to flee, putting off the beating as long as possible. This is simple and irrational survival kicking in. There’s nowhere to flee, yet they flee anyway. And Faye has to make a choice right now because if she keeps holding on to Sebastian’s hand like this, her elbow might break where this guy is pressing into it. Plus she’s such an easy target like this, her back to the cops. If she turned around maybe she’d be able to duck out of the way of their wild swinging. So she makes the decision. She lets go of Sebastian’s hand. She lets his sweaty fingers slide away, and as she does so she feels him grasping for her harder, really clamping down, but it’s no use. She’s free. Her arm snaps back to her and the man between them collapses into the plate-glass window — which trembles at the impact, and sounds a sharp crack like boots on ice — and she turns around.

The first thing she sees is the cop bearing down on her.

They lock eyes. It’s the cop from last night, who arrested her at the dorm. His is the first face she sees in that way someone’s face seems more illuminated when they’re staring right at you. That face, that awful man who last night wouldn’t look at her as she cried in the backseat of his police cruiser and she pleaded with him and urged him to let her go and she stared at his reflection in the rearview mirror and he didn’t say anything except, “You are a whore.”

And how he found her again, here, now.

His face is psychotically calm. He swings his club quickly and emotionlessly. He looks like someone out trimming the grass, feeling nothing about it except that it needs to be done. And she looks at his big brutal body and the strength with which he swings his nightstick, its speed as it dashes into heads and ribs and limbs, and she knows her plan to avoid a police beating by athletically dodging it was both naïve and impossible. This man can do whatever he wants. She can’t stop him. She is powerless. He is coming.

And what she does here is try to get really small. It’s the only thing she can think of. To become the smallest target she can. She tries to shrink into herself, draw in her arms and duck her head and bend at the knees and waist to get below the level of the people in front of her.

A posture of supplication, it feels like. All her alarm bells are going off, and she feels the panic attack starting as it always does, with that iron weight in her chest like she’s being squeezed from the inside. She thinks Please not now as the cop continues to punish whoever happens to interrupt his path to Faye. And the protestors yell “Peace!” or “I’m not resisting!” and they hold up their hands, palms out, surrendering, but the cop clobbers them anyway, in the head, the neck, the belly. He’s so close now. Only one person stands between him and Faye, a young wiry man with a big beard and camo jacket who is very quickly getting the message and trying his best to squirm away, and Faye’s lungs are locking up and she’s feeling that head-rush dizziness that makes her all trembly and unsteady, and her skin feels cold and wet, and the sweat erupts out of her, so quickly is her forehead damp, while her mouth is chalk-dry and gummy so that she can’t even tell the cop not to do whatever he’s going to do — all this happening as she watches him shove aside the camo-jacket guy and press into the crowd so that he’s within range of Faye, and he’s trying to angle his body so he can get to her, trying to raise his weapon in all that human chaos, when from behind them they all hear two pops, two light pops that sound like someone’s hand beating the open end of an empty bottle. And before today a sound like that would have had no meaning, but now the protestors are all veterans at this and they know: that sound means tear gas. Someone behind them has fired more tear gas. And the crowd reacts to this — the sound and then the inevitable smoke cloud that erupts a second later — predictably: They panic and surge away from it, a wave of bodies that reaches Faye just as the cop lunges for her, and all of them at the same time crash into the plate-glass window together.