The Nix(108)
To follow Bethany into the park, go to the next page…
The coffins are finished and waiting for you.
In the great bowl of the Sheep Meadow, there they are, about a thousand of them, maybe more, set out in a grid in the scruff of the long and tufted lawn.
“What is this?” you say, looking at the whole disquieting scene, all those hundreds of coffins with American flags draped over them, and people walking between them, many of them taking pictures, or talking on their cell phones, or playing hacky sack.
“Our march,” Bethany says, like there’s nothing at all weird about this.
“This isn’t quite what I was expecting,” you say.
She shrugs. She pushes past you and into the crowd, into the park, toward the coffins.
And the downright oddity of seeing normal park behavior around all these coffins. A man walking his dogs seems inappropriate here, even unseemly—how the dogs pull toward a coffin to sniff it and everyone watching is preemptively horrified because is he going to let them pee on it? Turns out he is not. The dogs lose interest and do their business elsewhere. A woman with a bullhorn in some official organizing capacity is asking everyone to remember that these aren’t just coffins, they’re bodies. To think of them as bodies. Bodies of real soldiers who really died in Iraq so please have a little respect. Murmurs that this message is a not-so-subtle dig at those who came too festively costumed: a troupe in colonial garb dressed as the Founding Fathers with plaster-of-paris heads about twelve times the size of real heads; or a team of women dressed in flamboyant red, white, and blue wearing giant strap-on dildos in the shape of intercontinental ballistic missiles; or lots of George Bush Halloween masks with drawn-on Hitler mustaches. The coffins all have American flags on top of them so that they look like the coffins you see on TV coming out of the backs of planes bringing dead soldiers to that one air force base in Delaware. The woman with the bullhorn says everyone can have a body, but if you want a specific body, come talk to her, she has a spreadsheet. People were instructed to wear black for the day and many of them have followed this instruction. Somewhere someone is playing drums. Along Eighth Avenue, brightly logoed news vans are parked with rooftop transceivers extended into the sky like a line of lodgepole pines. Popular signage today includes STOP BUSH and ARREST BUSH and various puns on the word “bush” that involve gardening or genitalia. Two girls out sunbathing in bikinis are not successfully convinced to join the cause. Guys are walking through the crowd selling bottles of water, selling various anti-GOP buttons and bumper stickers and T-shirts and mugs and baby onesies and hats and visors and illustrated children’s books identifying monsters that hide under kids’ beds as Republicans. Someone is definitely smoking marijuana or has just smoked marijuana nearby. SMITE BUSH FOR HE IS AN ABOMINATION UPON THE EARTH among the oddly evangelical signs that make folks in this particular crowd a little uncomfortable. A man dressed as Uncle Sam walking on stilts, for some reason. Hacky sack is kicked an average of three times before plopping on the ground. FREE LEONARD PELTIER.
“There’s a body for each of us!” says the woman on the bullhorn, and people are finding their bodies now, lifting coffins. A body for the guy dressed as Castro, and the guy dressed as Che, and the guy with the sign that says LENNON LIVES! A body for the LGBTQ delegation with T-shirts that say “Lick Bush.” For each of a busload of Young Democrats of Greater Philadelphia, a body. A body for every sign-waving member of Jews for Peace. A body for the plumbers of UA Local No. 1. For members of the CUNY Muslim Student Association. For the several women who came today in matching pink prom dresses, questions (“Why?”) and a body. A body for the skater kid. The Rasta man. The priest. The 9/11 widow, especially for her. For the one-armed army vet in camo fatigues: a spot up front, a body. And for you and Bethany, a body in row thirty, according to the bullhorned woman’s spreadsheet, where, sure enough, you find a coffin with a sticker on the side that says “Bishop Fall.” Bethany does not seem to have any reaction to this except to touch it, lightly, as if for luck. She looks at you as she does this and offers a small, sad smile, and this might be the first true moment you’ve shared since you arrived.
And it’s over just that quickly. All of you lifting your bodies now. In teams of two or three or four you raise them up. The sun is luminous and the grass is green and the daisies are abloom and the colossal field is dotted with black coffins. A thousand rectangular black wooden coffins.
They alight onto shoulders. You begin your march. You are all pallbearers.
It’s thirty or so blocks to the Republican National Convention, and in Central Park the coffins are on the move. The chanting begins. The woman on the bullhorn shouts instructions. The marchers surge out like magma, past the baseball fields, onto the avenue, past the skyscraper with its silver world-conquering globe. They are wearing black and they are baking in the sun but they are bright with excitement. They are shouting, cheering. They roll out of Central Park, into Columbus Circle, and they are promptly stopped. The police stand there ready—roadblocks, riot gear, pepper spray, tear gas—a display of force to dampen the protest’s vigor before it begins. The crowd halts, looks down the channel of Eighth Avenue, the perfectly geometric view to downtown, the wall of buildings on both sides like a sea parting. The police have reduced the street’s four lanes to two. The crowd waits. They look up at the obelisk in the middle of the circle, the statue of Columbus on top, dressed in flowing robes like a high-school graduate. The usual northbound traffic on Eighth Avenue is shut down today, and all the signs that face the protestors say DO NOT ENTER and WRONG WAY. To many of them, this seems to epitomize something important.