The Nix

by Nathan Hill

The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike—wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged.

There is no place less communal in America—no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice—than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago.

To most of the students, the education they received at school was only an incidental thing. To them, the overwhelming point of school was to learn how to behave in school.

“The Nix used to appear as a horse,” she said, “but that was in the old days.” “What does it look like now?” “It’s different for everyone. But it usually appears as a person. Usually it’s someone you think you love.” Samuel still did not understand. “People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good,” she said. “They love each other because it’s easy. Or because they’re used to it. Or because they’ve given up. Or because they’re scared. People can be a Nix for each other.”

The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.

It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

Not heavy, exactly, but given enough time, any weight can become too much to bear.

What was screwing with her head today was this: What if she made it all the way through college never having done any actual college work? When she got her first very powerful publicity and marketing job, would she know what to do?

It struck her that she did not even fully comprehend what was involved in the word “marketing,” despite a low-level innate ability to recognize when someone else had done it well, to her.

“I was so happy she came back I didn’t want to jinx it. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you know? I let the matter drop. I thought I was being very modern and compassionate.”

And then billions of dollars would be spent to achieve what was already inevitable—that the whole election would come down to a handful of swing voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The electoral math pretty much ordained this. Democracy! Huzzah!

Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

“Those who can’t do,” she said, “administrate.”

Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all—just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.

So banks and governments are cleaning up their ledgers after years of abuse. Everyone owes too much, is the consensus, and we’re in for a few years of pain. But Faye thinks: Okay. That’s probably the way it ought to be. That’s the natural way of things. That’s how we’ll find our way back.