And a Dow recruiter was trapped in Commerce Hall, listening to firecrackers, if that's what they were, going off outside the door to room 104, where he talked across the desk to a potential recruit.
There were trash fires on lower State Street.
There were rumors about Terminal Theater, a group that did not concede its own existence, and a student on a second-story porch on Mifflin Street turned up the volume when she saw police in riot gear moving in a double column down the street.
And over by the Library Mall members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, if that's who they were, kept turning up among the police, more or less suicidally, wearing whiteface and carrying panpipes and dressed in busker costume, quaint and ill-fitting mid-Victorian drag, with cricket caps, a dozen young men and women on the police side of the skirmish line, mimicking the gestures of the cops and getting dragged to a van and beaten.
People everywhere listened to the radio, to the dialogue between what was real and what was spliced and mixed and processed and played, and the speakers dealt out heavy metal and a woman on the air read the copy on package inserts of Dow products, speaking in a hushed and sexy voice.
The police began firing tear gas and students started running toward the gas out of a sort of rompish curiosity or because the gas carried a fragrance of apple blossoms, believe it or not, a fast-acting agent now being used in Vietnam.
Common Sense, Uncommon Chemistry. This was Dow's catchy ad slogan and the woman read it on the air repeatedly in a soft and sexy voice.
There were Dow interviews scheduled in three buildings but the sit-in was taking place at Commerce and that's where the recruiter sat trapped, with a hamburger going cold in a white bag.
Two squads of police formed a wedge.
He said to the potential recruit, 'So tell me about what happens between now and graduation day.'
The kid said, 'Someone had a live rat out there.'
'Let's, I think, stick to the issue,' the recruiter said, 'for our own, really, peace of mind.'
Or they ran toward the gas because they thought the moral force of their argument would neutralize the effect of the chemicals.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe was not supposed to be on the Library Mall. This was the interesting thing.
And affinity groups started fires here and there, or broke windows, small bands with names like the Mudville Nine, the members masked in bandannas soaked in baking soda and egg white, a folk remedy against the gas.
And smoke in white streamers rose from projectiles that came flopping down on the broad lawn in front of Bascom Hall. Students were running the other way now, moving in an agitated mass, some with dixie cups over their mouths or hankies out, and others strolled casually on the sidewalk between the squads of helmeted police and the thickening gas, which was beginning to roll in banks toward the columned hall, and a guy resting a guitar lengthwise on his head stood watching from the streetlight.
And the sexy voice on the radio repeated the Du Pont slogan now. Better Things for Better Living… Through Chemistry. The woman enjoyed the pause. She prolonged the pause. She moaned through the pause. She spoke urgently and excitedly up to the pause and then she paused and moaned slowly and then she finished reciting the slogan, finally, all sated and limp and moaned out, and then she started from the beginning again.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe was supposed to be in front of Old Chemistry This was the interesting thing. They were supposed to be passing out copies of Faculty Document 122, in front of Old Chemistry, which is exactly where they were, chanting Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students. This was interesting because it meant that the people in whiteface on the Library Mall must be members of Terminal Theater, the legendary factoidal group whose name, even, was subject to conjecture, or was an aspect, perhaps, of the group's borderline existence.
Rock-and-roll everywhere, serpentine twangs of feedback rolling from window speakers all over the campus and on nearby streets.
The police were coming down hard now, clubs out, cops acting without orders or against orders, inevitably, riding their own rampant highs.
The recruiter and the student waited to be rescued and they talked in the meantime about courses and professors as an affinity group entered the building with cherry bombs, lengths of pipe and size D flashlight batteries, the homemade makings of a mortar attack.
The radio reported that Lyndon Johnson was being dangled upside down from a towline on a helicopter, swinging in the breeze over the Primate Lab, right here in Madison, in the outright nude, after being kidnapped by parties unknown.
The radio reported that you could make your own napalm by mixing one part liquid detergent Joy with two parts benzene or one part gasoline. Shake vigorously.
The day-glo VW moved through the streets and Marian shut the window and turned on the radio and then went and flushed the cigarette down the toilet.
She began to understand that someone or some group had taken over the radio and as the day waned a man recited instructions for the manufacture of a fertilizer bomb. How to buy the nitrate, cheap, it comes bagged or bulk, from a farm-supply store, and how to add the fuel oil and what to do to ignite the mix.
There was an interval of static and a brief silence. Then the radio returned to its normal broadcast mode.
What was this?
Three voices chanting liturgically, a priest reciting the same line over and over and two altar boys delivering fixed responses.
Better things for better living.
Better things for better living.
Better things for better living.
She turned off the radio.
Then her father came home and was filled in by her mother and they all sat down to dinner with the poached bass and the baby's breath and her father said, 'What is he?'
Marian thought this was funny and maybe her father did too, a little. What could she say? She could say what he wasn't. This would take a fair amount of time. But concerning what he was, well, she could say he was an English teacher in a secondary school in Arizona. But she couldn't say a whole lot more because there wasn't much he'd told her.
Her mother talked about the broken bones of the demonstrators, the students with head wounds, clubbed, gassed, bleeding.
Her father said, 'Do you know what this means to me, the injuries of the students? What can I compare it with? Because I want to be fair to them. It's like the life and death of a fly, on a wall, in a village, somewhere in China. That's how much I care.'
He had a drained smile that no one liked to see.
'I guess that means you can't be a Buddhist. Because the Buddhists if I understand them correctly,' her mother said, and then let the thought drift toward the ceiling.
Marian sat in her room that night and dialed Nick's number. She told him about her day. There wasn't much to tell him because she left out the demonstration. She was feeling needy, moody and lunar and she didn't want distractions.
Then she told him she wanted to get married. She wanted to marry him and live with him, anywhere, wherever he wanted, and not have kids and not have friends and never go to dinner with her parents.
There was a silence at the other end that she could not read. A telephone silence can be hard to read, grim and deep and sometimes unsettling. You don't have the softening aspect of the eyes or even the lookaway glance while he ponders. There's nothing in the silence but the deep distance between you.
They finished the conversation in a halting and awkward manner and she was damn mad, angry at him and at herself, mostly herself, she decided, and she was determined to get back to the grind, to the work of hygiened
