The Nix(190)

Sebastian pulls her and she is compliant. She lets herself be pulled. Not toward the front door, where several of the other protestors are running, and not back out onto the street, but deeper into the bar, back to the farthest corner, where there’s a pay phone and a pair of bathrooms and one of those silver swinging doors with the round window that leads into the kitchen. This is where they go, into the Hilton’s industrial kitchen, which is currently enfrenzied with room-service orders—the guests at the hotel being terrified to leave the grounds and so getting all their meals on-site, delivered—and dozens of white-aproned, white-hatted men stand over griddles that crackle with porterhouse steaks and filet mignon, over sandwich stations building hoagies of improbable height, over table services polishing wineglasses to a perfect smudgeless clarity. They see Sebastian and Faye and they don’t say a word. They keep on working. Not their problem.

Sebastian ushers her through the loud and busy kitchen, all the way past the grills with leaping fire and burners cooking sauces and pastas, past the dishwashing station and the dishwasher himself, his face in a cloud of steam, and beyond to the back door, through the door and into the trash area, the dumpster with its sharp sour-milk and old-chicken smells, and beyond that into the alley, away from Michigan Avenue, away from the noise and tear gas, and away, finally, from the Conrad Hilton Hotel.





32


OFFICER BROWN IS STILL on his back in the broken window well of the Haymarket Bar and he’s beginning to understand that he cannot feel his legs. He fell and he landed on something sharp and felt a stabbing pain near his kidney and now he feels nothing. A spreading chill, a numbness. He tries to stand but cannot. He closes his eyes and he swears he’s trapped under a car. That’s how it feels. But when he opens his eyes again there is nothing visibly trapping him.

“Help,” he says to no one, to the air, at first quietly but then with more urgency: “Help!”

The bar has been cleared of hippies by now, and the guests have all retreated to their rooms. The only people who remain in the bar are two Secret Service agents, who amble up to him now and say “What seems to be the problem, officer?” with a kind of lighthearted chumminess that disappears as soon as they try to help him get up and can’t and their hands come away bloodied.

At first Brown thinks they’ve injured themselves on the broken glass beneath him. Then he realizes the blood is not theirs. That’s his blood. He’s bleeding. He’s bleeding a lot.

But he can’t be bleeding.

Because nothing hurts.

“I’m okay,” he says to the one agent who has sat down next to him, one hand pressing firmly on Brown’s chest.

“Sure thing, buddy. You’re gonna be fine.”

“Really. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Uh-huh. You stay right where you are and don’t move. We’re getting you some help.”

And Brown notices the other agent now speaking into a walkie-talkie about an officer down, send an ambulance immediately, and it’s the way he says the word immediately that makes Brown squeeze his eyes shut and say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” not to the agent above him but to God. Or the universe. Or whatever karmic powers are out there right now deciding his fate. He apologizes to all of them—for his encounters with Alice, for cheating on his wife, for cheating on his wife in such an ugly way, in the dark, in alleyways, in his car, he’s sorry he didn’t have the will to stop it, nor the discipline, the self-control, he’s sorry for this, and sorry that he’s repenting only now, after it’s too late, and he’s aware of the spreading coldness in his lower half and he senses (though he cannot feel) the sharp shard of plate-glass window currently penetrating his spinal cord, and he’s not sure what exactly has happened to him but feels that whatever it is, he is sorry—that it happened, that he deserved it.





33


CHURCHES ACROSS CHICAGO have opened their sanctuaries, as sanctuaries. Youths arrive teargassed and beaten. They are given water, a meal, a cot. After the violence of the day, some of them almost weep at these small kindnesses. Outside, the riot has splintered, broken down into fragmented fighting and scuffles in the street, a few cops chasing kids into bars and restaurants, into and out of the park. It’s not safe to be out there right now, and so youths show up in ragged pairs at places like this: old St. Peter’s on Madison Street downtown. They don’t even gossip with the other protestors, all of them having endured roughly the same day. They sit penitently. Priests give them bowls of warmed canned soup and they say “Thank you, Father” and they really mean it. The priests give them warm washcloths for their eyes, red from the gas.

Faye and Sebastian sit in the front pew quiet and uncomfortable because there’s so much to say and they don’t know how to say it. They stare at the front altar instead, the elaborately inscribed stone-and-wood altarpiece of St. Peter’s in the Loop: stone angels and stone saints and a stone Jesus hanging on a concrete cross, his head looking straight down, two stone disciples below him, just under his armpits, one looking up at him with a face of anguish, the other looking at his own feet, ashamed.

Faye touches the lump on her head. It has stopped hurting, for the most part, and now feels simply fascinating, this strange alien growth, this hard marble under her skin. Maybe if she plays with this thing she can resist asking the questions she is dying to ask, questions that have begun forming these last twenty minutes, as they’ve sat here, out of danger now, as she’s collected her thoughts and begun looking at the evening rationally and logically, these questions have settled upon her.