The Nix(192)

“What else have you lied to me about?” Faye says. “How about our date? Did you ever really want to go on our date?”

“Definitely,” he says, smiling. “That was the real me. I really wanted that. Promise.”

She nods. Then shrugs. “How would I know?”

“But there’s one thing, actually, one more little lie.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not technically a lie I told you, per se. More like a generalized lie I told everyone.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Sebastian is not my real name. I made that up.”

Faye laughs. She can’t help it. The day has been so ridiculous that it seems proper to add one more lunacy on top of it. “This is what you think of as a little lie?” she says.

“Call it a nom de guerre. I took it from Saint Sebastian. You know, the martyr? The police needed someone into whom they could shoot their arrows. I supplied that target. I thought it was apt. You don’t even want to know my real name.”

“No, I don’t,” Faye says. “Not yet. Not right now.”

“Let’s just say it’s not a name that would rally the troops.”

Ginsberg has reached them now. He’s crisscrossed the entire sanctuary, gone up and down all the pews, and he finally comes to them. He stands before them and nods. They nod back. The church is so quiet, all noise coming from the poet himself, his metal necklaces scratching and banging together, his murmurs and blessings. He places a hand on their heads, a soft warm hand, a gentle touch. He closes his eyes and whispers something incomprehensible, like he’s casting a secret spell on them. When he stops he opens his eyes and removes his hands.

“I just married you,” he tells them. “Now you’re married.”

Then he shuffles off, humming quietly to himself.





34


“PLEASE DON’T TELL ANYONE what I’ve told you,” says the man she knows as Sebastian.

“I won’t,” she says, and she knows this is a promise she can keep, because she’s never going to see any of these people again. She will, as of tomorrow, no longer live in Chicago, no longer study at Circle. The knowledge of this has hardened around her during the day. She’s not aware of having made a decision; it’s more like the decision has been there all along, already made for her. She does not belong here, and all that has happened in the last day proves it.

Her plan is simple: She will leave at dawn. While everyone sleeps, she will slip out and leave. She will stop at her dorm. She will walk up to her room and she will discover her door wide open, the lights on inside. She will find Alice sleeping in her bed. Faye will not wake her. She will tiptoe to her bedside table, very slowly open the bottom drawer, and take out a few books and Henry’s proposal letter. She’ll quietly leave, stealing one last glance at Alice, who without her black sunglasses and combat boots looks human again, and gentle and vulnerable and even pretty. She will wish good things for her, in life. Then Faye will leave—Alice will never even know she was there. Faye will catch the first bus back to Iowa. She’ll stare at Henry’s letter for about an hour before exhaustion finally takes her and she sleeps the rest of the way home.

This is the plan. She will escape at first light.

But that’s still hours off, and here she is in Chicago, with this boy, in what is feeling like a moment outside time. The dark and quiet sanctuary. The glow of candlelight. She doesn’t want to know Sebastian’s real name because, she thinks, why ruin it? Why ruin the mystery? There’s something delicious about his anonymity. He could be anyone. She could be anyone. She knows she will be gone tomorrow, but she is not yet gone. Tomorrow will be full of consequences, but this moment is consequence-free. Whatever happens right now will happen without repercussion. It feels delicious, being on the edge of abandonment. She can act without worry. She can do what she wants.

What she wants is to take his hand and lead him into the shadows behind the altar. What she wants is to feel his warm body on hers. What she wants is to be impulsive—impulsive like she was with Henry on the playground that night that seems a lifetime ago. And even as she does this and presses her mouth to his and he resists a little and whispers “Are you sure?” and she smiles at him and says “It’s okay, we’re married now” and they collapse on the tile floor together, she’s aware that she’s only partly doing this because she genuinely wants to. She’s also doing this because she wants to prove something to herself, that she’s changed. Because after you go through a trial by fire aren’t you supposed to come out a changed person? A different and better person? And this day was indeed trying, and she would prefer not to be the same person she was before, with the same petty worries and doubts. She wants to prove that she’s gone through the terror of the day and now she’s stronger and better, even though she doesn’t know if she really is. How can one tell when one becomes a stronger and better person? Through action, she decides. And so this is her action. She takes off his jacket, then hers. They sit yanking off their shoes and giggling because there is no way to remove tight shoes in a manner that’s sexy. This is her great demonstration, to herself and to the world—she is changed, she is a woman, she is doing womanly things and she is doing them fearlessly. She unbuckles his belt and slides down his pants until he is poking nicely out of them. And even the posters from her high-school home economics class have no power over her now, because she can feel the grit on her skin, and this man’s smell right now is a mixture of sweat and smoke and body musk and tear gas, and her feeling about this is that she wants to devour him, and he wants to devour her, and if she’s really honest it feels delicious and liberating rolling around dirty together on these sparkling clean and smooth floors, God’s floors, where if she looks up she can see the stone Jesus directly above her, his head hanging so that at this angle it seems like he’s looking right back at her, her terrible God disapproving at what she’s doing in his holy house, and she loves it, loves that it’s happening right here, and she knows that tomorrow she’ll return to Iowa and return to being Faye, old Faye, she’ll come back to her real self like a soul that’s been traveling outside its body, and she’ll say no to college and yes to Henry and she’ll become a wife, a strange new creature who will keep locked within herself the knowledge of this night. She will never speak of it, even though she will think of it daily. She will wonder how she is capable of being such different people: the real Faye and the other one, the brash and aggressive and impulsive Faye. She will long for this other Faye. As the years mount and her days become cluttered with chores domestic and infantile, she will think about this night so often that it will begin to feel more real to her than her real life. She’ll begin to believe that her existence as wife and mother is the illusion, the fa?ade she’s projecting to the world, and this Faye who came alive on the floor of St. Peter’s, that’s the real one, the authentic self, and this belief will hook so deeply inside her, will pierce her so completely that eventually it will take over. It will become too powerful to ignore. And by then it will not seem like she’s abandoning her husband and child; it will seem like she’s retrieving the real life she abandoned in Chicago many years ago. She will actually feel good about this, about being true to herself, her real self. It will feel like she’s found the one true Faye—at least it will feel like that for a while, until she begins to long for her family and all the confusion returns.