Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Most people go through life not paying attention to the small details,” Peter says, his arm around Bethany, leg kicked up on the coffee table, the three of you sitting on the leather sectional sofas that take up the center of the astoundingly sunlit apartment. “But I can’t imagine going through life that way. You know? I mean, what’s the difference between your average violin player and Bethany here? It’s the small details. I think that’s why she and I understand each other so well.”

He gives her a squeeze. “That’s right!” she says, smiling at him.

“So many people live their life so fast and never slow down and enjoy themselves and be thankful. You know what I believe? I believe you should live in each season as it passes. Breathe the air. Drink the drink. Taste the fruit. You know who said that? Thoreau said that. I read Walden in college. I realized, yeah, live life, you know? Be in the world. Anyway”—he checks his watch—“I gotta go. Meeting in D.C. in a couple of hours, then London. You hippies have fun at your protest. Don’t overthrow the government while I’m gone.”

They give each other brisk kisses before Peter Atchison throws on a suit jacket and rushes out the door and Bethany looks at you in this, the first moment you are alone together. And before you can ask What do you mean pen pal? she says “I guess we should get going! I’ll call the driver!” in this manic way that blunts any thought of actual conversation. And you hope to have a real one-on-one, heart-to-heart kind of experience with her maybe in the car on the way to the protest, but when you climb into the back of the Cadillac Escalade and get under way Bethany spends most of the time making small talk with the driver, an older and intensely wrinkled man named Tony, who is Greek, you learn, and whose three daughters and eight grandchildren are all doing fine, just fine, you learn, after Bethany insists he go through them all one by one giving little updates for each of them: where they are, what they’re doing, how it’s all going, etc. This takes you roughly to Thirty-Fourth Street, whereby the Tony conversation naturally runs its course as Tony runs out of progeny to talk about, and there occurs a blip of silence before Bethany turns on the Escalade’s overhead television screen and turns it to a news channel already very deep into its daily coverage of the Republican National Convention and associated protests, and she says “Can you believe what they’re saying about us?” and spends the rest of the trip either complaining about the news or typing messages on her cell phone.

The news is, it’s true, dismaying. Reporters saying you and your ilk are all marginal protest types. Coming out of the woodwork. Malcontents. Provocateurs. Clouds of marijuana. Playing footage from Chicago, 1968: some kid throwing a brick at a hotel window. Then speculating on the protest’s effects on heartland swing voters. Their opinion? Heartland swing voters will find it all rather distasteful. “Your average Ohio voter is not going to respond to this,” says one guy who’s not the anchor and not a reporter but rather some middle-type person: the opinion-haver. “Especially if it gets violent,” he continues. “If what happened in Chicago in ’68 happens here, you can bet it will once again help the Republicans.”

All this time Bethany clicks at her device, her violin fingers whirring over the tiny keypad, the little sound it makes like listening to a tap dancer through earmuffs, so engrossed in this she doesn’t notice you staring at her — or doesn’t acknowledge it, anyway, your staring — looking at her profile and then looking at the knot on her neck where her violin sits while she plays, a gnarled cauliflower callus there, the only not-smooth part of her, discolored dark brown spots amid the pale white scar tissue, this ugly thing barnacled onto her, the effect of a lifetime’s musicianship, and it reminds you of something your mother once said, not long before she left. She said, The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst. And as you reach your destination — the meadow in Central Park that serves as the staging ground for today’s march — and as Bethany slaps her BlackBerry into her purse and leaps out of the vehicle, and as you realize there is just no way you’re going to get the intimate-type moment with her that you wanted and your heart sinks and all you really want now is to leave New York and hide for like a decade, you understand that your mother was right: The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them.

To follow Bethany into the park, go to the next page…

The coffins are finished and waiting for you.

In the great bowl of the Sheep Meadow, there they are, about a thousand of them, maybe more, set out in a grid in the scruff of the long and tufted lawn.

“What is this?” you say, looking at the whole disquieting scene, all those hundreds of coffins with American flags draped over them, and people walking between them, many of them taking pictures, or talking on their cell phones, or playing hacky sack.

“Our march,” Bethany says, like there’s nothing at all weird about this.

“This isn’t quite what I was expecting,” you say.

She shrugs. She pushes past you and into the crowd, into the park, toward the coffins.

And the downright oddity of seeing normal park behavior around all these coffins. A man walking his dogs seems inappropriate here, even unseemly — how the dogs pull toward a coffin to sniff it and everyone watching is preemptively horrified because is he going to let them pee on it? Turns out he is not. The dogs lose interest and do their business elsewhere. A woman with a bullhorn in some official organizing capacity is asking everyone to remember that these aren’t just coffins, they’re bodies. To think of them as bodies. Bodies of real soldiers who really died in Iraq so please have a little respect. Murmurs that this message is a not-so-subtle dig at those who came too festively costumed: a troupe in colonial garb dressed as the Founding Fathers with plaster-of-paris heads about twelve times the size of real heads; or a team of women dressed in flamboyant red, white, and blue wearing giant strap-on dildos in the shape of intercontinental ballistic missiles; or lots of George Bush Halloween masks with drawn-on Hitler mustaches. The coffins all have American flags on top of them so that they look like the coffins you see on TV coming out of the backs of planes bringing dead soldiers to that one air force base in Delaware. The woman with the bullhorn says everyone can have a body, but if you want a specific body, come talk to her, she has a spreadsheet. People were instructed to wear black for the day and many of them have followed this instruction. Somewhere someone is playing drums. Along Eighth Avenue, brightly logoed news vans are parked with rooftop transceivers extended into the sky like a line of lodgepole pines. Popular signage today includes STOP BUSH and ARREST BUSH and various puns on the word “bush” that involve gardening or genitalia. Two girls out sunbathing in bikinis are not successfully convinced to join the cause. Guys are walking through the crowd selling bottles of water, selling various anti-GOP buttons and bumper stickers and T-shirts and mugs and baby onesies and hats and visors and illustrated children’s books identifying monsters that hide under kids’ beds as Republicans. Someone is definitely smoking marijuana or has just smoked marijuana nearby. SMITE BUSH FOR HE IS AN ABOMINATION UPON THE EARTH among the oddly evangelical signs that make folks in this particular crowd a little uncomfortable. A man dressed as Uncle Sam walking on stilts, for some reason. Hacky sack is kicked an average of three times before plopping on the ground. FREE LEONARD PELTIER.