The Nix(152)

“Stop being so interested in yourselves,” Ginsberg said. “If you’re interested only in you, then you’re stuck with you, and you’re stuck with your own death. It’s all you have.”

And he tapped his finger cymbals and said “Ommmmm” and the students repeated it, “Ommmmm” they said, raggedly, discordantly, out of sync and tune.

“There is no you,” Ginsberg said. “There is only the universe and beauty. Be the beauty of the universe and the beauty will get in your soul. It will grow and grow there, and take over, and when you die, you’re it.”

And Faye was beginning to visualize (as instructed) the all-white pristine light of total awareness, the peace-nirvana when (as instructed) the body is no longer producing sound or meaning but rather perfect bliss-sensation, when she felt the presence of someone nearby, very close, sitting down annoyingly within her personal-space bubble, breaking the spell, lifting her once again to the mundane level of flesh and worry. So she breathed a heavy, passive-aggressive sigh and wiggled her body hoping to broadcast that her mental flow was indeed broken. She tried again: the white light, peace, love, bliss. And the room was saying “Ommmmm” when she felt her new neighbor draw even closer to her, and she thought she could feel a presence in the area around her ear, and she heard his voice, a whisper, saying, “Have you achieved perfect beauty yet?”

It was Sebastian. The shock of this realization made her feel like she was, momentarily, filled with helium.

She swallowed hard. “You tell me,” she said, and he snorted, a contained and muffled laugh. She’d made him laugh.

“I’d say yes,” he whispered. “Perfect beauty. You’ve done it.”

She felt a warmth spread across her face. She smiled. “How about you?” she said.

“There is no me,” he said. “There is only the universe.” He was mocking Ginsberg. And how relieved she felt. Yes, she thought, this was all very silly.

He drew closer, right up next to her ear. She could feel it, that electricity, on her cheek.

“Remember, you’re perfectly calm and at peace,” he whispered.

“Okay,” she said.

“Nothing can disturb your perfect calmness.”

“Yes,” she said. And then she felt him, his tongue, lightly lick the very tip of her earlobe. It almost made her yelp right there in the middle of meditation.

Ginsberg said “Think of a moment of instantaneous perfect stillness,” and Faye tried to compose herself by focusing on his voice. “Maybe in some meadow in the Catskills,” he said, “when the trees came alive like a Van Gogh painting. Or listening to Wagner on the phonograph and the music became nightmarishly sexy and alive. Think of that moment.”

Had she ever felt something like that? A transcendent moment, a perfect moment?

Yes, she thought, she had. Right now. This was that moment.

And she was in it.





7


WHAT USUALLY HAPPENED on Monday nights was that Alice sat alone in her room, reading. The girls who crowded in there with her most other nights and sang enthusiastically to the record player and smoked weed out of tall intimidating-looking hookah things were gone on Mondays, presumably recovering. And despite her public rhetoric, her general homework-is-a-tool-of-oppression stance, Alice used Monday nights to read. One of her many secrets was that she did her work, she was studious, she read books, whenever she was alone, consumed them with speed and vigor. And not the books you’d expect from a radical. They were textbooks. Books on accounting, quantitative analysis, statistics, risk management. Even the music coming out of the record player changed on these nights. It wasn’t the screechy folk-rock that was typical the rest of the week. It was classical, soft and comforting, little piano sonatas and cello suites, soothing and unthreatening stuff. She had this whole other side to her, sitting on her bed unbelievably still for hours, the only movement being a page-flip once every forty-five seconds. She had a kind of serenity in these moments that Officer Brown loved while he sat and watched her from a dark hotel room two thousand meters away, watching Alice through the high-powered telescope requisitioned by the Red Squad unit, listening to the music and the crinkly page-turns on his radio tuned to the high-band frequency of the bug he’d planted in her room a few weeks ago on top of the small overhead lamp, replacing the bug he had previously planted under her bed, the sound quality of which was unacceptable, all muffled and echoey.

He was still new at this, espionage.

He had been watching her read for about an hour when there was a loud, sharp knock at the door—a moment of disequilibrium for Brown when he didn’t know if it was a knock on his hotel-room door or Alice’s dorm-room door. He froze. He listened. Felt relieved when Alice leaped from her bed and opened the door. “Oh, hello,” she said.

“Can I come in?” said a new voice. A girl. A girl’s voice.

“Sure. Thanks for coming,” Alice said.

“I got your note,” said the girl. Brown recognized her, the freshman from next door with the big round glasses: Faye Andresen.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” Alice said, “for how I acted at Freedom House.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. I keep doing this to you. I should stop. It is not in the spirit of sisterhood. I should not have shamed you like that. I’m very sorry.”