The Nix(191)

“Faye, listen—” says Sebastian.

“Who are you really?” she says, because she cannot resist asking, no matter how fascinating her bump feels.

Sebastian smiles a sad smile. He looks at his shoes. “Yeah. About that.”

“You knew your way around those buildings,” Faye says. “How did you know that? And that key. You had the key to my cell. And how did you know those cops in the basement? What is going on?”

Sebastian sits there like a child being scolded. It’s like he can’t even bear to look at her.

Behind them, Allen Ginsberg has now found his way to this church. He walks quietly in and goes from tired body to tired body blessing people in their sleep and placing his hand on the heads of the conscious and saying Hare Rama, Hare Krishna and shaking his head the way he does, so his beard looks like a tight shivering mammal.

A month ago, a Ginsberg appearance would have drawn a lot of attention. Now he’s become part of the scenery of the protest, one of the protest’s many colors. He walks around and the kids give him weary, exhausted smiles. He blesses them and moves on.

“Are you working for the police?” Faye asks.

“No. I’m not,” Sebastian says. He leans forward, clasps his hands as if in prayer. “More like with the police. It’s nothing official. Actually I’m not even working with them. It’s more like we work alongside each other. We have a certain understanding. A certain accommodating relationship. We both understand a few simple facts.”

“Which are what?”

“Primarily, that we need each other.”

“You and the police.”

“Yes. The police need me. The police love me.”

“What happened out there today,” Faye says, “did not look like love.”

“I provide heat. Drama. The police want reasons to crack down on the radical left. I supply those reasons. I print that we’re going to kidnap delegates or spike the drinking water or bomb the amphitheater and it makes us look like terrorists. Which is exactly what the police want.”

“So they can do what they did tonight. Gas us and beat us up.”

“In front of the TV cameras, with people cheering them on at home. Yes.”

Faye shakes her head. “But why help them? Why encourage all this…”—she waves her hand around at the bloodied youths now occupying the sancuary—“all this madness, this violence?”

“Because the more the police crack down,” Sebastian says, “the stronger our side looks.”

“Our side.”

“The protest movement,” he says. “The more the cops beat us up, the more our argument seems correct.” He leans back into the pew and stares blankly forward. “It’s actually pretty brilliant. The protestors and the police, the progressives and the authoritarians—they require each other, they create each other, because they need an opponent to demonize. The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.”

Behind them, Ginsberg is walking up and down the many pews of St. Peter’s, quietly blessing those who are sleeping there. Faye can hear his monotonous voice singing Hindu songs of praise. She and Sebastian stare at the altarpiece, the saints and angels in stone. She does not know what to think about him. She feels betrayed, or maybe more accurately she feels like she should feel betrayed—she has never thought of herself as part of Sebastian’s movement, but there are many people who do, and so she tries to feel betrayed on their behalf.

“Faye, listen,” Sebastian says. He puts his elbows on his knees, breathes heavily and looks at the floor. “That’s not entirely the truth. The truth is, I couldn’t go to Vietnam.”

The lights in the sanctuary are dimming now, the trickle of protestors through the front doors has stopped. All over, people fall asleep in twos and threes and fours. Soon the church is lit only by candles on the altar, a soft orange glow.

“I told everyone I was in India this summer,” Sebastian says. “But I wasn’t. I was in Georgia. At boot camp. They were going to send me to Vietnam until a guy came offering this deal. An official at the mayor’s office, who could pull some serious strings. He said print these certain kinds of stories and we’ll get you out of the army. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to war. So I took the deal.”

He looks at Faye, his face pinched. “I’m sure you hate me now,” he says.

And, yes, maybe she should hate him, but she feels herself softening to him instead. They are, she realizes, not that unalike.

“My dad works at ChemStar,” she says. “Half the money that sent me to college came from making napalm. So I guess I’m in no position to judge.”

He nods. “We do what we have to do, right?”

“I probably would have taken the deal too,” Faye says.

They stare at the altar until a thought crosses Faye’s mind: “So when you said you saw my maarr?”

“Yes?”

“You said you learned that word from Tibetan monks.”

“Yes.”

“While you were in India. But you weren’t in India.”

“I read about that in National Geographic. It wasn’t Tibetan monks. I think the article was about an aboriginal tribe in Australia, now that I think about it.”