By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Click here for a Chapter Index.
Chapter Nine
June
16
P.M.
Like great wasps or huge cruel dragonflies, two helicopters hovered, ominously...predatorily...over the blocks ahead of us. Just the sound, the constant beating of the rotors frightened me, awakened some primal fear of being hunted, made me want to run, to hide or flee.
We were walking down 19th and as we approached Pennsylvania Ave., there were two lines of riot police in black body armor, capped with helmets that masked their faces. On their right arms were long clear shields that interlocked to form a clear plastic wall. In their left hands were long tubular black billy clubs held cocked and ready.
Between the lines, we walked the block to H Street. As other protesters arrived, maybe five hundred total, they assembled on the sidewalks in lines mirroring the lines of riot police, which ringed (or more accurately, squared) the huge giant-beehive-crossed-with-giant-barnacle World Bank building.
The helicopters made a low pass overhead, wind rings concentrically rippling from them like the water rings from stones thrown into still ponds. The constant drone drowned out a cop with a bullhorn who shouted barely audible instructions on where the protesters could stand, which if I was guessing correctly, was almost nowhere.
I looked at Jean. "Don't they realize that most of these protesters are about five minutes older than children?"
"Some of them aren't older than children," she said and we both turned to look back at some of the teenagers we had with us. I thought of them lying in heaps, their heads split. I imagined them spending nights in jail or trampled under hooves. It made my stomach cramp.
I hated each side equally; the loud barking of the cop; the girl who complained about the plastic bowls. I hated the shouting, the pickets, the plastic shields and the helicopters.
And I loved my camera and the warm day and Jean because she made granola for 30 strangers and Nell for her hunger for justice and fairness that drove all this and because all over the world there were humiliated and starving people who needed many Nells and had few.
But Nell's beautiful impulses had devolved. All the ripples and their cross-currents had become protesters barking at cops duty-bound to line up around this ugly beehive where the true decision-makers sat in leather chairs having coffee and melon served by white gloved butlers whom they talked to with grandiloquent and avuncular condescension when they talked to them at all.
"I guess this is where I get off," I said to Jean. "You guys be careful."
"You too."
Nell was yelling for the line to form up on the street across from the riot police. She had them chanting, "What do we want?...'Democratic Globalization!'...When do we want it?...'Now!'"
I moved back and forth between the two lines, protesters and police, crouching down to angle up at the police whose faces were obscured by the black helmets or at the yelling protesters, their faces distorted in (self) righteous indignation and fury. As I was pulled into the viewfinder, an adrenaline rush sucked the fear out of my head and my stomach felt okay again. As I tried to get every possible angle, to capture every action and reaction, the yelling, even the feeling of intimidation and danger, faded.
Nell, ran back and forth yelling for people to remain calm, to stand their ground, to keep from being provoked. A line of police on horses turned from Penn. Ave. and capped 19th street.
The protest at this point stretched for about a block and a half down 19th street and I walked to its right-most edge to get a photo that showed the full scope of what was happening. Then, from behind me, a small gang of maybe ten people appeared, wearing ski hats, black clothing and black bandanas tied over their lower faces,
They were holding rocks and stopped at the corner nearest me and hurled them at line of police who stood between the protesters and the World Bank. At first, the police did nothing, but then, after a bull-horned command, the line of them moved slowly forward, pushing the protesters further from the building. At the same time, the horse line across the top of 19th street, at the other end of the protest, moved down. It was very orderly. Perfectly practiced. Completely geometric. The two lines would meet, form a V-shape, and sweep the protest down the street in front of them.
But then a single rock in a low arc hit one of the horses in the head. The horse reared and charged forward. The cop riding it pulled desperately at the reins. Protesters grabbed his arm, pulled him from the horse and he disappeared into the crowd.
There were cutting shouts and protestors brandished their pickets and charged the police lines. Some stopped to pick up fallen rocks and hurl them at the police or at the vulnerable horses.
Nell, her face red as a tomato, yelled frantically. She ran out in front of the charging protesters so that she was between them and the police, but she couldn’t hold them back.
The protesters who had been at our house, the ones who knew Nell best, had held back and stood near me in a small knot that the charging police hadn't yet reached.
The black masks were now in amongst the protestors. They had pepper spray and bags of rocks. I watched one rock inch through the air, almost as slow as Dani's mirror had. Her mirror, that rock, like a ballet of in-between-moments, the white spaces between the panels of action in a comic book.
The rock was headed straight for a cop whose visor was up and hit him square in the face. One minute his face was normal and white and clean and the next it was a fireworks explosion of red blood. The cop doubled over and the man who threw it jumped up and down in some sort of victory dance, but Nell appeared in front of him and gave him a shove right in the stomach and hoarsely shouted, "You asshole, how could you? You're helping no one."
But there was no time to think about any of this. Tear gas was shot into the crowd now and as it drifted toward me, my eyes watered, my nose burned and my mouth was on fire.
The police, billy clubs raised, dissolved into a charge. I snapped away until I realized that the whole hellish mass... flailing arms, kicking legs, running teenagers, bobbing pickets, bleeding protesters, robot-faced police, frothy, manure-stinking horses, black-masked rioters, and the ever-rising, ever-falling billy clubs...were all moving straight towards me. I didn’t want to leave Nell or Jean, but I couldn’t decipher them from the mass, so I ran.
And around me, everyone was running. At first, it was blind animal panic. A small group of those who’d stayed at the house ran near me. Behind by only a few feet were police, yelling for us to stop and surrender. We’d run along H Street and turned down 22nd and then left onto G Street in the direction of the White House.
Only 3 protesters, two ahead of me, one behind, had taken this route and the cops had divided to follow; only two chased us. Up ahead, two more cops ran from an alley, aiming straight for the 2 protesters running ahead. One of them was tackled and, once on the ground, cuffed by an officer who bestrode him.
The other protester, followed by a cop, turned down an alley between two townhouses.
Behind me there was a thump and a yell for help and I paused and looked back to see the protester behind me flat on the ground. A voice in my head said, "Leave her,” but I was paralyzed with indecision. After a second, I turned and ran back. Not out of bravery. In my mind, I believed I could go back, help her up and both of us still get away from the police. In my mind.
I recognized her. It was Kerran's puppy, still holding her picket as the cops reached her. She rolled onto her back and started to hit one cop with it. There was a brief tug-of-war and the other cop ripped it from her hand. The first cop, the one she had hit, raised his long billy club and…stopped time.
His face, through the visor, was contorted in a weird grimace of glee as he brought the club down. She held her arms over her head to block the blow, but the cop swung over her arms and the club cracked hard against the top of her head.
He raised the club up again. She raised her arm again. I raised my camera. He brought the club down. I brought my finger down. The shutter release snapped. Her arm snapped.
Her
skin and hand crumpled and fell away but the arm didn't. For one second
it was one complete arm, the way a banana is complete before being peeled.
But then the peel fell away and the bone of her forearm was, in a spray
of blood, sticking out from just below where her upper forearm and hand
hung limp and stupid.
The world spun round and I doubled over and the glee and the bone were
mixed in my brain and I vomited homemade granola that scratched my throat
and nostrils, then I stood up and bent over and retched again, but nothing
came up.
"Holy shit, Bill," the non-attacking cop said, turning right
then left to see who might have witnessed this, then facing the other
cop. "What the fuck did you do? We're fucked. We've got to get out
of here." The attacking cop looked down at the girl who was turning
gray and sweating and said, "Fuck. You’re right. You’re
so fucking right” And they turned and ran back down G Street.
I
ran to the girl. Her face had turned gray and clammy. I put my arms under
her head and legs to carry her and she said, "Let me walk while I
eat. I know how to walk like a frog would walk.”
She was holding the arm up and I couldn't help but look...it was just
about my entire field of vision... at the white white bone and the red
blood. I swallowed another wave of bile and started to put her down so
I could vomit again, but her legs just never stopped giving way.
I lifted her more fully, turned around and ran for 23rd street. Her eyes started to close and I kept shouting at her. "Stay with me. Come on..." and the first time I shouted at her, I realized I didn't know her name. She could die in the arms of some guy who didn't even know her name. "What's your name?" I shouted at her. She opened her soft brown eyes and touched my face with her good hand and said, "Christina…but everyone calls me Tiny…"
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
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2004 Me Three