Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Help,” he says to no one, to the air, at first quietly but then with more urgency: “Help!”

The bar has been cleared of hippies by now, and the guests have all retreated to their rooms. The only people who remain in the bar are two Secret Service agents, who amble up to him now and say “What seems to be the problem, officer?” with a kind of lighthearted chumminess that disappears as soon as they try to help him get up and can’t and their hands come away bloodied.

At first Brown thinks they’ve injured themselves on the broken glass beneath him. Then he realizes the blood is not theirs. That’s his blood. He’s bleeding. He’s bleeding a lot.

But he can’t be bleeding.

Because nothing hurts.

“I’m okay,” he says to the one agent who has sat down next to him, one hand pressing firmly on Brown’s chest.

“Sure thing, buddy. You’re gonna be fine.”

“Really. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Uh-huh. You stay right where you are and don’t move. We’re getting you some help.”

And Brown notices the other agent now speaking into a walkie-talkie about an officer down, send an ambulance immediately, and it’s the way he says the word immediately that makes Brown squeeze his eyes shut and say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” not to the agent above him but to God. Or the universe. Or whatever karmic powers are out there right now deciding his fate. He apologizes to all of them — for his encounters with Alice, for cheating on his wife, for cheating on his wife in such an ugly way, in the dark, in alleyways, in his car, he’s sorry he didn’t have the will to stop it, nor the discipline, the self-control, he’s sorry for this, and sorry that he’s repenting only now, after it’s too late, and he’s aware of the spreading coldness in his lower half and he senses (though he cannot feel) the sharp shard of plate-glass window currently penetrating his spinal cord, and he’s not sure what exactly has happened to him but feels that whatever it is, he is sorry — that it happened, that he deserved it.

CHURCHES ACROSS CHICAGO have opened their sanctuaries, as sanctuaries. Youths arrive teargassed and beaten. They are given water, a meal, a cot. After the violence of the day, some of them almost weep at these small kindnesses. Outside, the riot has splintered, broken down into fragmented fighting and scuffles in the street, a few cops chasing kids into bars and restaurants, into and out of the park. It’s not safe to be out there right now, and so youths show up in ragged pairs at places like this: old St. Peter’s on Madison Street downtown. They don’t even gossip with the other protestors, all of them having endured roughly the same day. They sit penitently. Priests give them bowls of warmed canned soup and they say “Thank you, Father” and they really mean it. The priests give them warm washcloths for their eyes, red from the gas.

Faye and Sebastian sit in the front pew quiet and uncomfortable because there’s so much to say and they don’t know how to say it. They stare at the front altar instead, the elaborately inscribed stone-and-wood altarpiece of St. Peter’s in the Loop: stone angels and stone saints and a stone Jesus hanging on a concrete cross, his head looking straight down, two stone disciples below him, just under his armpits, one looking up at him with a face of anguish, the other looking at his own feet, ashamed.

Faye touches the lump on her head. It has stopped hurting, for the most part, and now feels simply fascinating, this strange alien growth, this hard marble under her skin. Maybe if she plays with this thing she can resist asking the questions she is dying to ask, questions that have begun forming these last twenty minutes, as they’ve sat here, out of danger now, as she’s collected her thoughts and begun looking at the evening rationally and logically, these questions have settled upon her.

“Faye, listen—” says Sebastian.

“Who are you really ?” she says, because she cannot resist asking, no matter how fascinating her bump feels.

Sebastian smiles a sad smile. He looks at his shoes. “Yeah. About that.”

“You knew your way around those buildings,” Faye says. “How did you know that? And that key. You had the key to my cell. And how did you know those cops in the basement? What is going on?”

Sebastian sits there like a child being scolded. It’s like he can’t even bear to look at her.

Behind them, Allen Ginsberg has now found his way to this church. He walks quietly in and goes from tired body to tired body blessing people in their sleep and placing his hand on the heads of the conscious and saying Hare Rama, Hare Krishna and shaking his head the way he does, so his beard looks like a tight shivering mammal.

A month ago, a Ginsberg appearance would have drawn a lot of attention. Now he’s become part of the scenery of the protest, one of the protest’s many colors. He walks around and the kids give him weary, exhausted smiles. He blesses them and moves on.

“Are you working for the police?” Faye asks.

“No. I’m not,” Sebastian says. He leans forward, clasps his hands as if in prayer. “More like with the police. It’s nothing official. Actually I’m not even working with them. It’s more like we work alongside each other. We have a certain understanding. A certain accommodating relationship. We both understand a few simple facts.”

“Which are what?”

“Primarily, that we need each other.”

“You and the police.”

“Yes. The police need me. The police love me.”

“What happened out there today,” Faye says, “did not look like love.”

“I provide heat. Drama. The police want reasons to crack down on the radical left. I supply those reasons. I print that we’re going to kidnap delegates or spike the drinking water or bomb the amphitheater and it makes us look like terrorists. Which is exactly what the police want.”

“So they can do what they did tonight. Gas us and beat us up.”

“In front of the TV cameras, with people cheering them on at home. Yes.”

Faye shakes her head. “But why help them? Why encourage all this…”—she waves her hand around at the bloodied youths now occupying the sancuary—“all this madness, this violence?”

“Because the more the police crack down,” Sebastian says, “the stronger our side looks.”

“Our side.”

“The protest movement,” he says. “The more the cops beat us up, the more our argument seems correct.” He leans back into the pew and stares blankly forward. “It’s actually pretty brilliant. The protestors and the police, the progressives and the authoritarians — they require each other, they create each other, because they need an opponent to demonize. The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.”

Behind them, Ginsberg is walking up and down the many pews of St. Peter’s, quietly blessing those who are sleeping there. Faye can hear his monotonous voice singing Hindu songs of praise. She and Sebastian stare at the altarpiece, the saints and angels in stone. She does not know what to think about him. She feels betrayed, or maybe more accurately she feels like she should feel betrayed — she has never thought of herself as part of Sebastian’s movement, but there are many people who do, and so she tries to feel betrayed on their behalf.

“Faye, listen,” Sebastian says. He puts his elbows on his knees, breathes heavily and looks at the floor. “That’s not entirely the truth. The truth is, I couldn’t go to Vietnam.”

The lights in the sanctuary are dimming now, the trickle of protestors through the front doors has stopped. All over, people fall asleep in twos and threes and fours. Soon the church is lit only by candles on the altar, a soft orange glow.