3
FAYE, OUTDOORS, in the grass, back leaning against a building, in the shade of a small campus tree, gently placed the newspaper on her lap. She smoothed its crinkles. She bent the corners where they’d begun to curl. The paper did not feel like ordinary newsprint—stiffer, thicker, almost waxy. Ink smeared off the page and onto her fingertips. She wiped her hands on the grass. She looked at the masthead—Editor in Chief: Sebastian—and she smiled. There was something both brazen and triumphant about Sebastian using only his first name. He had achieved enough renown that he was publicly mononymous, like Plato or Voltaire or Stendhal or Twiggy.
She opened the paper. It was the edition Sebastian had been printing last night, full of letters to the editor. She began to read.
Dear Chicago Free Voice,
Do you like hiding from the pigs and those other people that stare at us put us down? Because of our clothes and hair? I mean I used to but I don’t anymore I talk to them. Get them to like me and become friends and then tell them I smoke grass. And if they like you they might smoke it with you sometime and listen. You will help add one more of us to our ever growing number I think 50 percent of the USA is doing it and Narcotics Officers think we’re all mental patients haw haw.
It was hot today, and bright, and buggy: The gnats dove into her face, black dots between her eyes and the page, as if the punctuation marks were fleeing. She shooed them away. She was alone, nobody around; she’d found a quiet little spot on the northeast part of campus, a patch of grass separated from the sidewalk by a small hedge, back behind the brand-new Behavioral Sciences Building, which was roundly the most loathed building on the entire Circle campus. This was the one all the brochures talked about, designed according to the geometric principles of field theory, a new architecture meant to break the old architecture’s “tyranny of the square,” the brochures had said. A modern architecture that abandoned the square in favor of an overlapping matrix of octagons inscribed by circles.
Why this was better, philosophically, than a square, the brochures never explained. But Faye could guess: A square was old, traditional, antique, and therefore bad. It seemed to Faye that the worst thing on this campus, for both the students and the buildings, was to be square.
So the Behavioral Sciences Building was modern, many angled, which in practice made the place a bewildering mess. The interconnected honeycombs made no intuitive sense, hallways jagged and serpentine so you couldn’t walk ten feet without having to make some kind of navigational choice. Faye’s poetry class met here, and simply finding the correct classroom was an ordeal that taxed both her patience and her sense of spatial awareness. Certain stairs led into literally nothing, just a wall or a locked door, while other stairs led down to tiny landings where several other staircases intersected, all of them identical-looking. What seemed like a dead end actually opened into an entirely new area she never would have predicted was there. The third floor was visible from the second floor, with no obvious way to get up to it. That everything was built in circles and oblique angles pretty much guaranteed anyone would get lost, and indeed all who encountered this building for the first time had the same baffled expression, trying to navigate a place where concepts like “left” and “right” had little meaning.
It seemed less a place where students would study the behavioral sciences and more a place where behavioral scientists would study the students, to see how long the students could endure this nonsensical environment before going completely berserk.
So mostly the students avoided it, if they could, which made it a good place for Faye to be alone and read.
Do you people out there think you’re crazy? I mean you’re part of those 50 percenters right? I mean you all smoke grass don’t you? I do. And I work hard or almost as hard as anyone else at the post office. And all my fellow workers know I turn on I mean they’re always asking me if some box of tea smells like grass. Today I found one that did and most of them wanted to smell it. Then we wrapped it up and delivered it. That person who got it might have gotten it by now. He might be enjoying his package. He might be reading my rap. Hello friend.
Movement in the distance distracted her, and she looked up, worried. Because if any of her teachers saw her reading the Chicago Free Voice, if any of the college officials who administrated her scholarship saw her reading the pro-narcotic, pro-Vietcong, antiestablishment “Newspaper of the Street”…Well, they would think certain unfortunate things about her.
So her head popped out of reading at the first peripheral sight of the approaching figure, walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the hedge. And she gathered at a glance that he was no teacher, no administrator. His hair was too big for that. Moppy was the word going around, but his hair had gone well beyond moppy and into a kind of efflorescence. Wild growth. She watched him come, her head bent into the newspaper so it wouldn’t look like she was staring, and as he approached his features clarified and she realized she knew him. He was the boy from last night. At the meeting. Sebastian.
She pushed her hair back and wiped the sweat off her forehead. She lifted the newspaper to conceal her face. Pressed her back into the wall and felt thankful that the building had so many overhangs and corners. Maybe he’d walk by.
I’d rather smoke a joint with a pig than keep on running from him I mean wouldn’t you? I mean wouldn’t you like it if everybody did? No fights no wars! Just a bunch of happy people. Wild thought or is it?
Her head buried in the newspaper—she recognized this as a somewhat pathetic, ostrichlike maneuver. She could hear Sebastian’s footsteps in the grass. Her face felt ten degrees warmer. She felt the sweat on her temples and smeared it off with her fingers. She squeezed the newspaper and held it close.
How would you people, my people, like to all, and I mean ALL, get together? I mean at least 10 million people well maybe 9 million. I’d sure like to shake all you good people’s hands out there. All we need is someplace to have a huge Turn On Festival and let them know how many of us there really are!
The footsteps stopped. Then started again and came closer. He was walking toward her now, and Faye breathed and wiped the moisture from her forehead and waited. He approached—maybe ten feet away, maybe five. The paper blocked her, but she sensed him there. It would be absurd to pretend otherwise. She lowered the paper and saw him smiling.
“Hello, Faye!” he said. He bounced over and sat down beside her.
“Sebastian,” she said, and she nodded and smiled her most genuine-feeling smile.
He looked handsome. Professional, even. He seemed pleased she’d remembered his name. The mad-scientist lab coat was gone. Now he was in a proper jacket—neutral beige, corduroy—and a plain white shirt, thin navy blue tie, brown slacks. He looked presentable, acceptable, except maybe the hair—too long, too disheveled, too big—but good-boy material nonetheless, one that could be, in his current state, maybe even furnished to parents.
“Your newspaper is quite good,” Faye said, already working out how to be maximally likable in this moment, how to ingratiate herself to him: be supportive, be full of praise. “That letter from the man at the post office? I really think he has a point. It’s quite interesting.”
“Oh, lord, can you imagine that guy organizing a festival? Ten million people? Yeah, right.”
“I don’t think he really wants to organize a festival,” Faye said. “I think he wants to know he’s not alone. He just seems lonely to me.”
Sebastian gave her a look of mock surprise—cocked his head and raised an eyebrow and smiled.
“I thought he was nuts,” he said.
“No. He’s looking for people he can be himself around. Aren’t we all?”
“Huh,” Sebastian said, and stared at her for a moment. “You’re different, aren’t you.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She wiped the sweat off her forehead.
“You’re sincere,” Sebastian said.
“I am?”
“Quiet, but sincere. You don’t talk much, but when you talk you say what you mean. Most people I know talk constantly but never say anything true.”
“Thanks?”
“Also you have ink all over your face.”
“What?”
“Ink,” he said. “All over.”
She looked at her fingertips, blackened by the newspaper, and put it together. “Oh no,” she said. She reached into her backpack for her cosmetics. She flipped open the compact, looked into the mirror, and saw what had happened: dark black streaks across her forehead, cheeks, temples, exactly where her fingers wiped away the sweat. And this was the kind of moment that could wreck her whole day, the kind of moment that would usually summon the tightness, the panic: doing something foolish in front of a stranger.
But something else happened instead, something surprising. Faye did not have an episode. Instead, she laughed.
“I look like a Dalmatian!” she said, and she laughed. She didn’t know why she was laughing.
“It’s my fault,” Sebastian said. He handed her a handkerchief. “I should use better ink.”
She rubbed away the smudges. “Yes,” she said. “It is your fault.”
“Walk with me,” he said, and he helped her up and they left the shade of the tree, Faye’s face now clean and bright. “You’re fun,” he said.
She felt weightless, happy, a little flirty even. It was the first time in her life anyone had ever described her as fun. She said, “You have a good memory, mister.”
“I do?”
“You remembered my name,” she said.
“Oh, well, you made an impression. That thing you said at the meeting.”
“I wasn’t thinking. I just blurted it out.”
“You were right, though. It was an important point.”
“It was not.”
“You were suggesting that sometimes what people want sexually is in conflict with what they want politically, which made everyone uncomfortable. Plus that group tends to pounce on shy people. It looked like you were in trouble.”
“I’m not shy,” she said, “it’s just…” And she stopped to find the right word, the correct and comprehensible way to say it, then skipped the explanation altogether. “Thanks for speaking up,” she said. “I appreciate it.”
“It’s no problem,” Sebastian said. “I saw your maarr.”
“My what?”
“Your maarr.”
“What is a maarr?”
“I learned about it in Tibet,” he said, “visiting this sect of monks, one of the oldest Buddhist groups on earth, met them while I was abroad. I wanted to meet them because they’ve solved the problem of human empathy.”
“I didn’t know that was a problem needing to be solved.”
“Oh sure. The problem is, we can never really feel it. Empathy. Most people think empathy is like understanding someone else or relating to them. But it’s more than that. Real empathy is the actual corporeal feeling of someone else’s emotions, so that it’s experienced not only in the brain but also in the body, the body vibrating like a tuning fork to the sadness and suffering of another, as in, for example, you cry at the funerals of people you never even knew, you feel actual physical hunger when you see a starving child, you get vertigo when you watch an acrobat. And so forth.”
Sebastian glanced at Faye to see if she was interested. “Go on,” she said.
“Okay. Well, if we follow this to its conclusion, then empathy becomes like a haunting, a condition that is impossible since we all have separate egos, we’ve attained individuation, we can never really be another person, and that’s the great empathy problem: that we can approach it but cannot realize it.”
“Like the speed of light.”
“Exactly! Nature has certain boundaries—perfect human empathy being one of them—that will always be slightly beyond our reach. But the monks have solved the problem this way: the maarr.”
Faye listened in wonder. That a boy was saying such things. To her. Nobody had ever spoken to her this way. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and cry.
“Think of the maarr as the seat of emotions,” Sebastian said, “held deeply inside your body, somewhere near the stomach—all desire, all yearning, all feelings of love and compassion and lust, all of one’s secret wants and needs are held in the maarr.”
Faye placed her palm on her belly.
“Yeah,” Sebastian said, smiling. “Right there. To ‘see’ someone’s maarr means recognizing someone else’s desire—without asking, without being told—and acting on it. That last part is essential: The ‘seeing’ is not complete until one does something about it. So a man only ‘sees’ a woman’s desires when he fulfills them without being asked to do so. A woman ‘sees’ a hungry man’s maarr when, unprompted, she gives him food.”
“Okay,” Faye said, “I get it.”
“It’s this active sense of empathy that I love so much, the sense that one must do more than quietly relate to another human. One must also make something happen.”
“Empathy is achieved only by deed,” Faye said.
“Yes. So at the meeting, when I saw the group begin to criticize you, I turned their attention away, and in this way I saw your maarr.”
And Faye was about to thank him when they came to a clearing and, ahead of her, she saw people, heard chanting. She’d been hearing some slight noise during their walk, as they moseyed counterclockwise around the Behavioral Sciences Building, taking the zigzagging route necessary on a campus that had few direct paths from anywhere to anywhere. It had grown louder as Sebastian told his story of empathy and monks and seeing her maarr.
“What’s that sound?” she said.
“Oh, that’s the demonstration.”
“What demonstration?”
“You don’t know? There are posters up everywhere.”
“I guess I didn’t notice.”
“It’s the ChemStar protest,” he said, and they emerged into the courtyard of the monolithic University Hall, the tallest, most intimidating building on campus, by far. Whereas most of Circle’s buildings were squat three-story things, University Hall was a thirty-story monster. It was visible from everywhere, looming over the trees, fatter at the top than at the bottom—anonymous, boxy, tyrannical. It looked like a beige concrete exoskeleton had been scaffolded around a slightly smaller, slightly browner building. Like every other campus structure, this one had narrow windows too small to fit a body through. Except, that is, for the top floor. The only windows on the entire campus that looked big enough to jump through were located suspiciously, almost invitingly, on the campus’s highest point—the top floor of University Hall—and this fact struck some of the more cynical students as malevolent and sinister.
Here dozens of students were on the march: Bearded, long-haired, angry, they shouted at the building, shouted at the people inside the building—administrators, bureaucrats, the university president—holding signs that showed the ChemStar logo dripping with blood, that ChemStar logo Faye knew so well. It was stitched brightly on the uniform her father wore to work, right there on the chest, the logo’s interlocking C and S.
“What’s wrong with ChemStar?” she said.
“They make napalm,” Sebastian said. “They kill women and children.”
“They do not!”
“It’s true,” Sebastian said. “And the university buys their cleaning products, which is why we’re protesting.”
“They make napalm?” she said. Her father never mentioned this. In fact, he never talked about work at all, never said what he did there.
“It’s a benzene and polystyrene compound,” Sebastian explained, “that, when jellified and mixed with gasoline, becomes a sticky, highly flammable syrup that’s used to burn the skin off the Vietcong.”
“I know what napalm is,” Faye said. “I just didn’t know ChemStar made it.”
That Faye’s childhood and education were funded by paychecks from ChemStar was something she could not bear to tell Sebastian now, or ever.
Sebastian, meanwhile, watched the protest. He did not seem to notice her anxiety. (He had stopped seeing her maarr.) Rather, he watched the two journalists on the periphery of the mob—a writer and a photographer. The writer wasn’t writing anything, and the photographer wasn’t shooting.
“Not enough people showed up,” he said. “It won’t get in the newspaper.”
The crowd was maybe three dozen strong, and loud, and walking in a circle holding signs and chanting “Murderers, murderers.”
“A few years ago,” Sebastian said, “a dozen picketing people would get you a few inches on page six. But now, after so many protests, the criteria have changed. Each new protest makes the next protest more usual. It’s the great flaw of journalism: The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is. We have to follow the same trajectory as the stock market—sustained and unstoppable growth.”
Faye nodded. She was thinking about the ChemStar billboard back home: MAKING OUR DREAMS COME TRUE.
“I guess there’s one way to make sure it gets into the paper,” Sebastian said.
“What’s that?”
“Someone has to be arrested. Works every time.” He turned to her. “It’s been very nice talking to you, Faye,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, distractedly, for she was still thinking about her father, about the way he smelled when he came home from work: like gasoline and something else, some heavy and suffocating smell, like car exhaust, hot asphalt.
“I hope to see you again soon,” Sebastian said. And then he took off running toward the crowd.
Startled, Faye cried “Wait!” but he kept going, sprinting toward a police car parked near the mob. He bounded onto its hood, leaped onto the roof, and raised both fists into the air. The students cheered wildly. The photographer began shooting. Sebastian jumped up and down, denting the top of the car, then turned and looked at Faye. He smiled at her, and held her gaze until the police reached him, which they did quickly, and wrestled him down and put him in handcuffs and took him away.