Nathan Hill - The Nix

For Alice, the small true part of her was that she wanted something that deserved her faith and devotion. When she was young, she saw families retreat into their homes and ignore the greater problems of the world and she hated them: bourgeois cogs in the machine, unthinking sheeplike masses, selfish bastards who couldn’t see beyond their own property lines. Their souls, she thought, must have been small and shrunken things.

But then she grew up and bought a house and found a lover and got some dogs and stewarded her land and tried to fill her home with love and life and she realized her earlier error: that these things did not make you small. In fact, these things seemed to enlarge her. That by choosing a few very private concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded. That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty — because the movement required it of you — and loving something you actually loved. Love — real, genuine, unasked-for love — made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies.

Still, she could not help feeling stung when old movement friends said she had “sold out.” That was the worst of all charges because, of course, it was true. But how could she explain that not all sellouts are the same? That it wasn’t money she was selling out to? That sometimes on the other side of selling out there’s a compassion she’d never felt in her revolutionary days? She could not explain this to them, nor would they hear it. They still held to all the old principles: drugs, sex, resistance. Even as drugs began killing them one by one, and even as sex became dangerous, still this is where they turned for some kind of answer. They never saw how their resistance had begun to look comical. They were beaten by the cops and the public cheered. They thought they were changing the world and what they did was help get Nixon elected. They found Vietnam intolerable, but their answer was to become intolerable themselves.

The only thing less popular than the war in those days was the antiwar movement.

This truth was obvious, though none of them saw it, convinced as they were of their own righteousness.

She managed not to think about this too much, these ligatures to the past. For the most part she thought about her dogs, and mustard. Except when something popped up to remind her of her former life, like, for example, the son of Faye Andresen, coming to the dunes and asking questions.

“Were you close,” he said, “with my mother? Were you friendly?”

“I suppose,” she said. “We didn’t know each other very well.”

He nodded. He seemed disappointed by this. He was hoping for more. But what could Alice say? That Faye had indeed been on her mind all these years? That Faye’s memory was a small but constant and needling companion? For that was the truth. She’d promised to look out for Faye, but things got out of hand, and she failed. She never knew what happened to her. She never saw her again.

There is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure. She’d tried to bury it, along with all the other mistakes of her youth, out here in the dunes. And she would not dig these stories up now, even for this man who so plainly needed them. The subject of his mother seemed like a splinter he could not remove. She grabbed a small bunch of mustard and pulled — not too hard, and with a gentle spin to get the roots up. She had long ago perfected this technique. For a long quiet moment they stayed like this, the only sounds being mustard plants tearing free from the earth, and the whoosh of the nearby lake, and a certain bird whose call sounded like uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh.

“Even if you figure it all out,” Alice said, “what good will it do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Even if you know your mom’s story, it’s not going to change anything. The past is the past.”

“I guess I hope it’ll explain something. About all the things she’s done. Plus she’s in trouble and maybe I can help. There’s this judge who seems intent on putting her in jail. It’s like he came out of retirement just to torment her. The Honorable Charlie Brown my ass.”

Alice perked up at that, lifted her gaze from the mustard. She placed her half-full trash bag on the ground. She removed her gloves, her specialized rubber gloves that mustard seeds did not stick to. She walked over to where Samuel stood, taking the big awkward steps made necessary by her wading boots.

“That’s his name?” she said. “Charlie Brown?”

“Hilarious, right?”

“Oh, god,” she said, sitting down right there in the grass. “Oh, no.”

“What?” Samuel said. “What’s wrong?”

“Listen to me,” Alice said. “You have to get your mother out of here.”

“What do you mean?”

“She needs to leave.”

“Now I’m sure there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“I used to know him,” she said. “The judge.”

“Okay. And?”

“We were all sort of intertwined — in Chicago, in college — me and the judge and your mom.”

“That’s information you maybe should have led with.”

“You have to get your mom out of town, like immediately.”

“Tell me why.”

“Maybe even get her out of the country.”

“Help my mom flee the country. That’s your advice.”

“I wasn’t entirely honest about why I moved out here, to Indiana. The real reason was because of him. When I heard he was back in Chicago, I moved away. I was afraid of him.”

Samuel sat down with her in the grass and they stared at each other a moment, shell-shocked.

“What did he do to you?” he asked.

“Your mom is in trouble,” Alice said. “The judge will never yield. He’s ruthless and dangerous. You have to take her away. Do you hear me?”

“I don’t understand. What’s his grudge against her?”

She sighed and looked at the ground. “He’s like the most dangerous species of American there is: heterosexual white male who didn’t get what he wanted.”

“You need to tell me exactly what happened,” Samuel said.

About three feet past her left knee, she noticed a small and heretofore unseen patch of garlic mustard — first-year shoots, a smattering of clover hiding under the grass. It wouldn’t go to seed until next summer, but when it did it would race up above the surrounding plants and kill them all.

“I’ve never told this story,” she said. “Not to anyone.”

“What happened in 1968?” Samuel said. “Please tell me.”

Alice nodded. She ran her hands along the grass and the thin blades tickled her palms. She made a mental note to come prune this spot tomorrow. The problem with mustard is that you can’t just chop it down. The seeds can last for years. It will always come back. You have to cut it out completely. You have to cut it out by the roots.

HER OWN ROOM. Her own key and mailbox. Her own books. Everything was hers but the bathroom. Faye hadn’t considered this. The dorm’s clinical foul-smelling community bathroom. Stale water, dirty floors, sinks strewn with hair, trash cans thick with tissues and tampons and balled-up brown paper towels. A smell like slow decay that reminded her of a forest. Faye imagined, beneath the floor, earthworms and mushrooms. How the bathroom bore the evidence of so much appalling use — soap slivers now fused to their trays, fossils. The one toilet that’s always plugged. The slime on the walls like a brain where the memory of each girl’s cleaning lived. She thought if you looked deep enough into the floor you could find there, embalmed in the pink tiles, the whole history of the world: bacteria, fungus, nematodes, trilobites. A dormitory was a hopeless idea. Whoever thought of encasing two hundred girls in a concrete box? The narrow rooms, shared bath, massive cafeteria — the comparison to prison was unavoidable. It was a dark and creepy bunker, their dorm. From the outside its concrete skeleton looked like some martyr’s flayed chest — all you could see were the ribs. All the buildings on Circle’s campus looked this way: inside out, exposed. Sometimes walking to class she ran her fingers along the walls where the concrete resembled acne and she felt embarrassed for the buildings, how an eccentric designer had taken their guts and put them on view. A perfect metaphor, she thought, for dormitory living.