7
AND WHERE THERE LOOKS to be an oval-shaped cavity in the crowd is actually the spot where dozens are sitting. They’re watching Allen Ginsberg or joining him in his ommmming, his head-bopping, clapping, his face uplifted like he’s receiving messages from the gods. To the anxious and terrified crowd, his chanting is barbiturative. In its monotony and resolve and purpose, it is the verbal equivalent of being held tenderly by a nurse who really cares. Those who join him singing Ommmm feel better about the world. This is their armor, the spoken sacred Syllable. Nobody would strike someone sitting on the ground singing Ommmm. Nobody would gas them.
Around Grant Park, this calm, this peace has rippled out to the far borders. Protesters standing there lost in the crowd screaming at the cops and maybe digging up chunks of sidewalk to throw at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in a spasm of loose rage and wildness because they’re just so angry at all of it when someone touches their shoulder from behind and they turn to find these gentle soothing eyes made tranquil and serene because they themselves were touched by the person behind them, and they in turn by the person behind them, one long chain leading all the way back to Ginsberg, who’s powering this whole thing with his chanting’s great voltage.
He has enough peace for all of them.
They feel part of his song pour into them, and they feel its beauty, and then they are its beauty. They and the song are the same. They and Ginsberg are the same. They and the cops and the politicians are the same. And the snipers on the roofs and the Secret Service agents and the mayor and the newsmen and the happy people inside the Haymarket Bar bopping their heads to music they cannot hear: all of them are one. The same light threads through them all.
And thus a calm comes over the crowd in a slow circle around the poet, moving outward from him like ripples on water, like in that Bashō poem he loves so much: the ancient pond, the still night, a frog jumps in.
Kerplunk.
8
GIRLS STILL MARCHING SOUTH. White girls, black girls, brown girls. Close-ups on their faces now. Chanting, yelling. There are, in the uncles’ opinion, three kinds of girls: long horse-faced girls, and wide muffin-faced girls, and bulging bird-faced girls. This girl at the front of this march, this Alice person, has a lot of horse in her, they think. (Ha-ha, a horse in her, ha-ha.) Mostly horse, but a bit of the bird too. What they can see of her face, anyway, that part of her not covered by sunglasses or ratty hair. Two parts horse face, one part bird face is where they’d plot her on the 3-D map of girl faces.
Except she is carrying a weapon, which puts her in a whole other category. Girl faces just look different when they’re all violent like that.
Actually almost all the girls in the crowd are carrying weapons: two-by-fours, some with these evil-looking rusty nails sticking out of the swinging end; and rocks and chunks of pavement; and iron bars and bricks; and bags with unknown contents, but their guess? Shit and piss, plus menstrual blood. Gross. The TV says there’s rumors of radicals buying huge amounts of oven cleaner and ammonia, which sounds like bomb-making material even if the uncles are not a hundred percent sure of the chemistry of this. But if anyone would be carrying oven-cleaner explosives it would be one of these girls because, they figure, girls have routine access to such things.
CBS has cut away from old Cronkite for a moment and is just showing all this live and unedited. And most people tune in to CBS to hear old Cronkite deliver his assessment about things, but the uncles’ opinion about it? About not seeing Cronkite right now? They think good. The guy’s gotten a little soft lately, a little lefty too, and arrogant, all these puffed-up pronouncements from the top of Mount Journalism or something. They prefer their news from the source, undiluted.
Case in point: girls walking south in the middle of the street. This is action. This is news untouched. Especially now as a cop car rolls up and instead of dispersing like they ought to the girls actually attack the cop car! Jabbing at the siren with baseball bats! Breaking the windows with rocks! And the poor cop leaps out the other side of the car and holy cow is that boy running! And even though it’s only girls he’s running from there’s like a hundred of them and they mean business. Then the girls all gather on the car and it looks like a bunch of ants surrounding a beetle ready to devour it. And the leader horse-faced girl yells Heave-ho! and they actually tip over the police car! It’s the most amazing thing the uncles have ever seen! And the girls all cheer at their job well done and then continue marching and chanting and the cop car’s siren is still blowing but instead of at full volume it’s like a demoralized and sad siren sound. It moans and whines in this low, pitiful way. It sounds like an electronic toy whose batteries are just about dead.
And now girls are yelling after the cop, yelling “Here piggy piggy! Oink, oink! Soo-ee!” And this is about the best thing the uncles have seen on television in a month.
9
THE CONRAD HILTON HOTEL is nowhere near the convention. The Democratic National Convention will happen at the International Amphitheater, down on the grounds of the Union Stock Yards, about five miles south of here. But the amphitheater is completely inaccessible: A barbed-wire fence surrounds it; National Guard troops patrol the grounds; every manhole cover has been tarred shut; roadblocks at every intersection; even airplanes are banned from flying over it. Once the delegates are inside the amphitheater, there would be no reaching them. Hence the protest at the Hilton, where all the delegates are staying.
Plus there’s the matter of the smell.
It’s all Hubert Humphrey can think about. His staff is right now trying to tell him how the peace-plank debate will go, but it’s like every time he turns his head he can smell it again.
Whose idea was it anyway to hold a convention next to a slaughterhouse?
He could sense them, smell them, hear them, the poor animals huddled and dying hundreds per hour to feed a prosperous nation. Trucked in as infants, trucked out as parts. He could smell the hogs insane with fear, the hogs hanging from hooks, their stomachs opened in cascades of blood and pig barf. The smell of bright raw ammonia used to clean the addled floors. Creatures in their death-fear releasing cries and stink glands, a terror both audible and olfactible. The chemical breath of a million aborted animal screams, aromatized and blooming into the atmosphere, a sour, meaty vapor.
The perfume of slaughter is at once nauseating and fascinating. The way the body is tuned to another body’s loss.
A pile of manure that rose even above the barbed-wire fences, fifteen feet tall, dropped tepee-shaped in a fit of copromania, sitting raw in the sun and cooking. Like some kind of ancient evil bubbling up out of the Pleistocene. An organic mud that tanged the air and locked itself in fabric and hair.
“What kind of abomination is that?” Triple H asked, pointing at the shit cone. His security men laughed. They were the sons of farmers; he was the son of a pharmacist. His only encounter with this kind of biology came after it was processed and pulverized. He wanted to stuff his nose in his own armpit. The smell was more like a weight than a gas. It felt like the whole moral rot of the world taking shape and form right here, in Chicago.
“Somebody light a match!” said one of the agents.
The smell is on him still. The maid says the washroom is ready. Thank god. At this point a shower is more analgesic than anything else.
10
FAYE IS IN JAIL roughly nine hours before the ghost appears.
She is kneeling, hands clasped, facing the far wall where shadows flicker by, and she asks God for help. Says she’ll do anything, anything at all. Please, she says, rocking, whatever you want. And she does this until she feels dizzy and she begs her body to let her sleep, but when she closes her eyes she feels like one big long plucked guitar string, all shaky and furious. And so it’s during this in-between state of being too exhausted to stay awake but too agitated to fall asleep that the ghost appears to her. She opens her eyes and senses a presence nearby and looks around and sees, on the far wall, illuminated by the window’s dull blue light, this creature.
He looks like, maybe, a gnome. Or a small troll. Actually he looks exactly like the figurine of a house spirit her father gave her so many years ago. The nisse. He is small and round, maybe three feet tall, hairy, white-bearded, fat, caveman-faced. He leans against the wall with his arms crossed and his legs crossed and his eyebrows raised, looking at Faye skeptically, as if he doesn’t believe in her existence rather than the other way around.
She might have otherwise panicked at this sight, but her body is so tired.
I’m dreaming, she says.
So wake up, the house spirit says.
She tries to wake up. She knows the thing that usually pulls her out of dreaming is the realization that she’s dreaming, which has always frustrated her; dreams, she thinks, are best when you know they’re dreams. Then you can act without consequence. It’s the only time in her life that is worry-free.
Well? the ghost says.
You’re not real, she says, even though she has to admit this does not feel like a dream.
The house spirit shrugs.
You spend all night praying for help and when help finally arrives, you insult it. That is so typical of you, Faye.
I’m hallucinating, she says. Because of those pills.
Look, if I’m not wanted here, if you’ve got this situation under control, then best of luck to you. There are plenty of people out there who would appreciate my help. He points a stubby finger toward the window, the outside world. Listen to them, he says, and just then the big basement room is crashing with sound, the discordant and overlapping voices of people pleading for help, asking for protection, voices young and old, male and female, as if the room were suddenly a radio tower picking up every frequency on the dial all at once, and Faye can hear students asking for protection from the cops, and cops asking for protection from the students, and priests asking for peace, and presidential candidates asking for strength, and snipers hoping they won’t have to pull the trigger, and National Guardsmen staring obliquely at their bayonets asking for courage, and people everywhere offering whatever they can in return for safety: promises that they’ll start going to church more, that they’ll be better people, that they’ll call their parents or children soon, they’ll write more letters, give to charity, be kind to strangers, stop doing whatever bad things they are currently doing, quit smoking, quit drinking, be a better husband or wife, a whole symphony of kindnesses that might result if they are simply spared on this one ugly day.
Then, just as quickly, the voices turn off, and the basement is silent again, the last noise to fade being the low deep thrum of someone chanting: Ommmm.
Faye stands and looks at the house spirit, who is himself looking innocently at his own fingernails.
Do you know who I am? he says.
You’re my family’s house spirit. Our nisse.
That’s one word for it.
What’s another word?
He looks at her, his eyes black and sinister. All those stories your father told you about ghosts that look like rocks or horses or leaves? Yeah, that’s me. I am the nisse, I am the nix, not to mention various other spirits, creatures, demons, angels, trolls, et cetera.
I don’t understand.
No, you wouldn’t, he says, and he yawns. You guys haven’t figured it out yet. Your map is just way off.