The Nix(183)

“It’s your basic jingoistic sucking up,” says Agent A——. “Your basic dezinformatsiya.”

Outside, a police officer strikes a bearded man wearing the Vietcong flag as a cape, strikes him with his rifle butt right in the middle of the cape, sending the guy sprawling forward like he’s diving into home plate, face-first into the Haymarket’s thick leaded windows with a dull crunch that is eaten up in the bar by Jimmy Dorsey’s sweet, sweet saxophone.

Old Cronkite is saying, “I have to compliment you, Mr. Mayor, on the genuine friendliness of the Chicago Police Department.”

Two cops descend on the bearded man at the window and clunk him on the head.

“That is the look of someone who’s given up,” says Agent A——, pointing at old Cronkite.

“Put him out of his misery, please,” says Agent B——, nodding.

“You want to see what a fighter looks like when he knows he’s lost? There it is.”

The bearded man outside, meanwhile, is dragged away, leaving a smear of blood and grease on the window.





20


SAY A SEAGULL, old Cronkite thinks. He recently took in a game at Wrigley and saw how, in the ninth inning, the seagull masses were drawn from the lake to the stadium. The birds were there to clean up the popcorn and peanut scraps left under the seats. Cronkite was amazed at their timing. How did they know it was the ninth inning?

If you saw the city from this view, seagull-view, way up high, what would it look like? It would be quiet and peaceful. Families in their homes, the blue-gray color of televisions flickering, a single golden light in the kitchen, sidewalks empty but for the occasional stray cat, whole motionless blocks, and he imagines soaring over it and noting that everywhere in Chicago that is not the few acres surrounding the Conrad Hilton Hotel is the most peaceful place in the world right now. And maybe that is the story. Not that thousands are protesting but that millions are not. Maybe to achieve the balance CBS is looking for they should take a crew to the northern Polish neighborhoods and western Greek neighborhoods and southern black neighborhoods and film nothing happening. To show how this protest is a pinprick of light in a much larger and gathering darkness.

Would this make sense to the TV audience? That a thing like a protest expands and draws everything into it. He wants to tell his audience that the reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that’s the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that’s the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that’s Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it’s his job to prevent this closure.

But how to say it right?





21


SEBASTIAN LEADS HER by the hand out of the small makeshift jail and into a completely gray and anonymous cinder-block hallway. A police officer hurries out of a room and Faye jerks back at the sight of him.

“It’s okay,” says Sebastian. “Come on.”

The cop walks right by, nodding as he goes. They pass through a set of double doors at the end of the hall and into a space decorated lavishly: plush red carpet, wall sconces emitting a golden glow, white walls with ornate trim that suggests French aristocracy. Faye sees a sign on one of the doors and understands that they’re in the basement of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

“How did you know I was arrested?” she says.

He turns to her and flashes a rascally smile. “Grapevine.”

He takes her through the belly of the hotel, passing police and reporters and hotel staff, all of them hustling to somewhere, all of them looking grim and serious. They reach a set of thick metal exterior doors guarded by two more cops, who nod at Sebastian and allow him to pass. And in this way they are delivered into a loading dock, and then into the alleyway, into the open air. The sound of the protest reaches them here as an indistinct howl that seems to be coming from all directions at once.

“Listen,” Sebastian says, cocking his ear to the sky. “Everybody’s here.”

“How did you do that?” Faye says. “We walked right by those cops. Why didn’t they say something? Why didn’t they stop us?”

“You have to promise me,” he says, grabbing her by the arms, “you’ll never mention this. Not to anyone.”

“Tell me how you did it.”

“Promise, Faye. You cannot breathe a word about it. Tell them I bailed you out. That’s it.”

“But you didn’t bail me out. You had a key. How did you have a key?”

“Not a word. I’m trusting you. I did you a favor, and now your favor back to me is to keep this a secret. Okay?”

Faye considers him for a moment, and understands that he is not the single-entendre student radical she had taken him for—he has mysteries; he has layers. She knows something about him no one else does, has power over him no one else can wield. Her heart swells for him: He’s a kindred spirit, she thinks, someone else whose life is hidden and vast.

She nods.

Sebastian smiles and takes her hand and leads her to the end of the alley and into the sun, and as they round the corner she sees the police and the military and the blockade and beyond the blockade, the great teeming mass in the park. No longer shadows on the wall, she sees them now in detail and color: the soft baby-blue police uniforms; the bayonets of the National Guardsmen; the jeeps whose front bumpers are coils of razor wire; the crowd moving as a surging beast presently surrounding and taking over the statue of Ulysses S. Grant opposite the Conrad Hilton, the ten-foot-tall Grant on his ten-foot-tall horse, the crowd climbing up the horse’s bronze legs and onto its neck and rump and head, one brave youth continuing up, climbing Grant himself, standing atop Grant’s huge broad shoulders, teetering but erect, raising his arms in double peace signs above his head in defiance of the police who are right now noticing this and are ambling over to pull him down. This will not end well for him, but the audience cheers anyway, for he is the bravest among them, the tallest thing in the whole park.