The Nix

Here we are abruptly dropped into the tumultuous day that rocked the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the nomination secure, frets in his hotel room over the smell of nearby slaughterhouses and the tincture of tear gas wafting up from the streets below; Allen Ginsberg sits cross-legged in the grass of Grant Park trying to stay calm while all around him agitated students begin to “scream and revolutionize” (607); CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite waxes philosophically over how little television cameras can actually show: “the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water” (635). Meanwhile, Officer Charlie Brown, off duty and now badge-less, prowls the chaos looking for Alice but taking wild and random swings at protestors with his nightstick, cracking heads, “pretending to be Ernie Banks” (624). 

As Faye sits for hours in county lockup for a bogus prostitution charge, she is visited by what she can only describe as a nix, a gnomish-looking troll that she assumes must be some dream who cruelly taunts her and the life choices she has made. Faye is unexpectedly sprung by Sebastian, whom she notes has a key for the jail cell.