The Nix(186)

Alice is on the other side of the gas now. She can see the lake. She runs to it and splashes her face to calm the sting of the gas, and she slinks northward along the shore, where to avoid drawing attention to herself she ditches her favorite sunglasses and army jacket in the sand and pulls her hair back and tries to look for all intents and purposes like a normal bourgeois law-abiding kid, and this effectively puts an end to her protest career forever.

“We need to go now,” says Sebastian.

And so Faye agrees, for Alice is gone.





26


HUBERT H. HUMPHREY in the top-floor presidential suite shower digs under his fingernails with the hotel’s complimentary bar of Dove soap, which during his lengthy shower has slivered down from its original kidney-shaped girth.

The agents keep popping their heads in: “You okay in there Mr. Vice President sir?”

He understands there’s much to do and little time to do it and taking a ninety-minute shower was not exactly on his campaign manager’s itinerary. Still, he would have been worthless had he not gotten that stink off.

His fingers are beyond pruned and into this supersaturated territory where his skin looks like an afghan draped loosely over his actual skin. The mirror is opaque and slate gray by now in the humid, dense air.

“Yes, I’m fine,” he tells the agent.

Only he’s not fine, he realizes, as he speaks. Because there’s a sudden tickle in his throat, a slight scratchy pain behind his Adam’s apple. He hasn’t spoken in an hour and a half and now that he’s spoken he feels it, that first leading edge of illness. He tests his throat—his precious and golden throat, his vocal cords and lungs, these bits of him that are all he has to give as he addresses the country and accepts the nomination for president in a few days’ time—he verbalizes a few notes, just a little solfège, a little do, re, mi. And sure enough he feels it, that spike of pain, that friction burn, that swelling on the soft palate.

Oh no.

He turns the water off and towels himself dry and robes up and crashes into the suite’s main conference area and announces that he needs vitamin C right now.

When the group looks at him funny, he announces “I may have a sore throat” with the kind of gravity a doctor might use to say The tumor is malignant.

The agents look at each other uncomfortably. A few of them cough. One of them steps forward and says, “Probably not a sore throat, sir.”

“How would you know?” Triple H says. “I need vitamin C, and I need it right this goddamn second.”

“Sir, it’s probably the tear gas, Mr. Vice President sir.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tear gas, sir. Your typical motivational weapon, sir, used to disperse crowds nonviolently. Irritating to the eyes, nose, mouth, and, yes, certainly sir, the throat and lungs.”

“Tear gas.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In my hotel suite.”

“It came from the park, sir. The police are using it on the demonstrators. And today, you see, we’ve got an easterly wind—”

“At about twelve knots,” adds another agent.

“Agreed, yes, thank you, a sturdy wind that pushed the gas back across Michigan Avenue and into the hotel and even, yes, up to the top floor. Our floor. Sir.”

Triple H can now feel his eyes watering and burning, that feeling like when you’re standing over chopped onions. He walks to the suite’s large front windows and looks out at the park, which is a chaos of running, terrified youths and pursuing cops and clouds of orange gas.

“The police did this?” he says.

“Yes, sir.”

“But don’t they know I’m up here?”

And this is almost the breaking point for poor Hubert H. This was supposed to be his convention, his moment. Why did this have to happen? Why does it always have to turn out like this? And suddenly he’s eight years old again back in South Dakota and Tommy Skrumpf is ruining his birthday party by having an epileptic fit right there on the kitchen floor, and the doctors take Tommy away and the parents take their kids home still carrying the unopened presents that were supposed to be Hubert’s, and a small ungenerous part of him broke open that night and he wept not that Tommy might die but wishing that he would. And then he’s nineteen years old and he’s just finished his first year at college, and he got good marks and he likes it, college, he’s good at it, and he’s made friends and found a girl and his life is finally shaping up and that’s when his parents tell him to come home because they’re out of money. So he comes home. And then it’s 1948 and he’s just been elected to the United States Senate for the first time and at that moment his father up and dies. And now here he is about to be nominated for president, and all around him is fighting and tear gas and butchers and shit and death.

Why does this always happen? Why does he have to pay for any triumph with sadness and blood? All his victories end in sorrow. In some ways, he’s still that disappointed eight-year-old thinking bad things about Tommy Skrumpf. He feels the sting of that day all the way to his marrow, still.

Why do the best things in life leave such deep scars?

Which is exactly the kind of self-destructive, negative-type thinking the management consultants were brought in to fix. He repeats his confidence mantras. I’m a winner. He cancels the order for the vitamin C. He gets dressed. Gets back to work. Sic transit gloria mundi.