The Nix(142)

“Okay,” Faye said, “I get it.”

“It’s this active sense of empathy that I love so much, the sense that one must do more than quietly relate to another human. One must also make something happen.”

“Empathy is achieved only by deed,” Faye said.

“Yes. So at the meeting, when I saw the group begin to criticize you, I turned their attention away, and in this way I saw your maarr.”

And Faye was about to thank him when they came to a clearing and, ahead of her, she saw people, heard chanting. She’d been hearing some slight noise during their walk, as they moseyed counterclockwise around the Behavioral Sciences Building, taking the zigzagging route necessary on a campus that had few direct paths from anywhere to anywhere. It had grown louder as Sebastian told his story of empathy and monks and seeing her maarr.

“What’s that sound?” she said.

“Oh, that’s the demonstration.”

“What demonstration?”

“You don’t know? There are posters up everywhere.”

“I guess I didn’t notice.”

“It’s the ChemStar protest,” he said, and they emerged into the courtyard of the monolithic University Hall, the tallest, most intimidating building on campus, by far. Whereas most of Circle’s buildings were squat three-story things, University Hall was a thirty-story monster. It was visible from everywhere, looming over the trees, fatter at the top than at the bottom—anonymous, boxy, tyrannical. It looked like a beige concrete exoskeleton had been scaffolded around a slightly smaller, slightly browner building. Like every other campus structure, this one had narrow windows too small to fit a body through. Except, that is, for the top floor. The only windows on the entire campus that looked big enough to jump through were located suspiciously, almost invitingly, on the campus’s highest point—the top floor of University Hall—and this fact struck some of the more cynical students as malevolent and sinister.

Here dozens of students were on the march: Bearded, long-haired, angry, they shouted at the building, shouted at the people inside the building—administrators, bureaucrats, the university president—holding signs that showed the ChemStar logo dripping with blood, that ChemStar logo Faye knew so well. It was stitched brightly on the uniform her father wore to work, right there on the chest, the logo’s interlocking C and S.

“What’s wrong with ChemStar?” she said.

“They make napalm,” Sebastian said. “They kill women and children.”

“They do not!”

“It’s true,” Sebastian said. “And the university buys their cleaning products, which is why we’re protesting.”

“They make napalm?” she said. Her father never mentioned this. In fact, he never talked about work at all, never said what he did there.

“It’s a benzene and polystyrene compound,” Sebastian explained, “that, when jellified and mixed with gasoline, becomes a sticky, highly flammable syrup that’s used to burn the skin off the Vietcong.”

“I know what napalm is,” Faye said. “I just didn’t know ChemStar made it.”

That Faye’s childhood and education were funded by paychecks from ChemStar was something she could not bear to tell Sebastian now, or ever.

Sebastian, meanwhile, watched the protest. He did not seem to notice her anxiety. (He had stopped seeing her maarr.) Rather, he watched the two journalists on the periphery of the mob—a writer and a photographer. The writer wasn’t writing anything, and the photographer wasn’t shooting.

“Not enough people showed up,” he said. “It won’t get in the newspaper.”

The crowd was maybe three dozen strong, and loud, and walking in a circle holding signs and chanting “Murderers, murderers.”

“A few years ago,” Sebastian said, “a dozen picketing people would get you a few inches on page six. But now, after so many protests, the criteria have changed. Each new protest makes the next protest more usual. It’s the great flaw of journalism: The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is. We have to follow the same trajectory as the stock market—sustained and unstoppable growth.”

Faye nodded. She was thinking about the ChemStar billboard back home: MAKING OUR DREAMS COME TRUE.

“I guess there’s one way to make sure it gets into the paper,” Sebastian said.

“What’s that?”

“Someone has to be arrested. Works every time.” He turned to her. “It’s been very nice talking to you, Faye,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, distractedly, for she was still thinking about her father, about the way he smelled when he came home from work: like gasoline and something else, some heavy and suffocating smell, like car exhaust, hot asphalt.

“I hope to see you again soon,” Sebastian said. And then he took off running toward the crowd.

Startled, Faye cried “Wait!” but he kept going, sprinting toward a police car parked near the mob. He bounded onto its hood, leaped onto the roof, and raised both fists into the air. The students cheered wildly. The photographer began shooting. Sebastian jumped up and down, denting the top of the car, then turned and looked at Faye. He smiled at her, and held her gaze until the police reached him, which they did quickly, and wrestled him down and put him in handcuffs and took him away.