The Nix(156)

Alice laughed.

“I’m serious,” Faye said. She sat up and hugged her knees. “There was a ghost that lived in our basement. A house spirit. I offended it. Now I’m haunted.”

She turned to measure Alice’s reaction.

“I’ve never told anyone that,” Faye said. “You probably don’t believe me.”

“I’m just listening.”

“The ghost came with my father from Norway. It used to be his ghost, but now it’s mine.”

“You should take it back.”

“Back where?”

“Back where it came from. That’s the way to get rid of a ghost. You take it back home.”

“I’m really, really tired,” Faye said.

“Okay, here, I’ll help.”

Faye spread herself drunkenly across the bed. Alice removed her glasses and set them carefully on the nightstand. She walked to the foot of the bed and unlaced Faye’s sneakers and pulled at them lightly until they slipped off. Took off Faye’s socks and balled them up and put them inside the shoes, which she arranged toes-out by the front door. She retrieved a thin blanket from under the bed and covered Faye with it, tucking the edges under her. She took off her own shoes and socks and pants and lay next to Faye, snuggled up against her, stroking her hair. It was the most gentle he’d ever seen Alice act. Certainly more gentle than she’d ever been with him. This was an entirely new side of her.

“D’you have a boyfriend?” Faye said. Her words were slurring together now—she was stoned or on the verge of sleep or both.

“I don’t want to talk about boys,” Alice said. “I want to talk about you.”

“You’re too cool t’have a boyfriend. You’d never do something as square as have a boyfriend.”

Alice laughed. “I do,” she said, and two thousand meters away Officer Brown let out an excited squeak. “Sort of. I have a gentleman friend I’m consistently intimate with, is how I’d describe him.”

“Why not just say boyfriend?”

“I prefer not to name things,” Alice said. “As soon as you name and explain and rationalize your desire, you lose it, you know? As soon as you try to pin down your desire, you’re limited by it. I think it’s better to be free and open. Act on any desire you feel, without thinking or judging.”

“That sounds fun right now, but probably ’cuz of those red pills.”

“Go with it,” Alice said. “That’s what I do. Like, for example, take this guy? My gentleman friend? I don’t feel anything particularly special for him. I have no commitment to him. I’ll use him until I no longer find him interesting. Simple as that.”

And across the street Brown felt his insides plunge.

“I’m always on the lookout for someone who’s more interesting,” Alice said. “Maybe it’s you?”

Faye grunted a kind of sleepy reply: “Mm-hm.”

Alice reached over Faye and clicked off the light. “All your worries and secrets,” she said. “I could do a number on you. You’d love it.”

The bed squeaked as one or both of them stretched into it.

“You know you’re beautiful?” Alice said into the darkness. “So beautiful and you don’t even know it.”

Officer Brown turned up the sound on the speakers. He got into bed and wrapped his arms around a pillow. He concentrated on her voice. He’d been having new and terrifying thoughts lately, daydreams of leaving his wife and convincing Alice to run away with him. They could start a new life in Milwaukee, say, or Cleveland, or Tucson, or wherever she wanted. Crazy new daydreams that left him feeling both guilty and exhilarated. At home his wife and daughter would be asleep in the same bed. They would be doing this for years to come.

“Please stay here,” Alice said. “Everything will be fine.”

Before Alice came along, Brown wasn’t even aware he lacked an essential part of his life, not until he suddenly had it. And now that he had it, there was no way he was letting it go.

“Stay as long as you like,” he heard Alice say, and he tried real hard to pretend she wasn’t talking to Faye. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right next to you.”

He tried to pretend she was talking to him.





8


THE DAY BEFORE THE RIOTS, the weather turned.

The grip of Chicago’s summer loosened and the air was springlike and agreeable. People got a good night’s sleep for maybe the first time in weeks. In the very early dawn there appeared on the ground a thin, slick dew. The world was alive and lubricated. It felt hopeful, optimistic, and therefore disallowable as the city prepared for battle, as National Guard troops arrived by the thousands in green flatbed trucks, as police cleaned their gas masks and guns, as demonstrators practiced their evasion and self-defense techniques and assembled various projectiles to lob at cops. There was a feeling among them all that so great a conflict deserved a nastier day. Their hatred should ignite the air, they thought. Who could feel revolutionary when the sun shone so pleasantly on one’s face? The city instead was full of desire. The day before the greatest, most spectacular, most violent protest of 1968, the city was saturated with want.

The Democratic delegates had arrived. They’d been police-escorted to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where they assembled nervously inside the ground-floor Haymarket Bar and maybe had a little too much to drink and did things they wouldn’t do under less extraordinary circumstances. Regret, they discovered, was a flexible and relative thing. Those who would not normally engage in exuberant public drunkenness or casual sex found this particular setting encouraged both. Chicago was about to explode. The presidency was on the line. Their own fine America was falling apart. In the face of calamity, a few small extramarital affairs seemed like background static, too quiet to register. The bartenders kept the bar open well past closing. The place was busy, and tips were good.