The Nix(109)

If the cops attack, do not resist is the message from the protest’s organizers, the bullhorned woman at the front of the crowd. If a cop wants to put you in handcuffs, let him. If he wants to put you in a police car, ambulance, paddy wagon—no resistance whatsoever. If the cops come at us with clubs and stun guns, do not resist or panic or fight or run. This can’t be a riot. The message here is calm, level-headed, always be aware of cameras. This is a protest, not a circus. They have rubber bullets and they hurt like a motherf*cker. Think Gandhi, peace, love, Zen-like tranquillity. Please do not get pepper-sprayed. Please do not take off your clothes. Remember, somber. We’re carrying coffins, for god’s sake. This is our message. Stay on message.

You hold the coffin where the feet would be. Bethany is in front of you, holding the symbolic head. You try not to think of it in these terms: feet, head. You are holding a plywood coffin: empty, hollow. Ahead of you, somewhere, the enormous assembly is oozing slowly southward. Where you stand is the doldrums, coffins bobbing above a lake of stiffening arms. You are full of conflict here, full of competing impulses. You’re holding Bishop’s coffin and it feels awful. It ignites all your appalling guilt, the guilt you felt for not saving Bishop when you were young. And the guilt you now feel for trying to woo Bethany at what is essentially her own brother’s funeral. Oh my god you are such an *. It’s as if you can feel your desire physically crawl up into you and die. Until, that is, you look at Bethany again, her bare back, the sweat on her shoulders, the strands of hair that cling to her neck, the angles of muscle and bone, the nakedness of her spine. She’s reading the sticker they affixed to the coffin: Pfc Bishop Fall was killed in Iraq on October 22, 2003. He was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. He grew up in Streamwood, Illinois.

“Doesn’t really capture him,” she says, but not to you. Not to anyone really. It’s as if a passing thought had been vocalized by accident.

Still, you answer her. “No,” you say, “it doesn’t.”

“No.”

“They should have mentioned how good he was at Missile Command.”

A small laugh, maybe, from Bethany here? You can’t be sure; her back is still turned. You keep going: “And how all the kids in school loved him and admired him and were terrified of him. And the teachers too. How he always managed to get what he wanted. How he was the center of attention without even trying. You wanted to do anything he asked you to do. You wanted to please him, even though you didn’t know why. It was that personality of his. It was so big.”

Bethany is nodding. She’s looking at the ground.

“Some people,” you say, “go through life like a pebble falling into a pond. They barely make a splash. Bishop tore through life. We were all in his wake.”

Bethany doesn’t look at you, but she says “That’s true,” then stands up straighter. You suspect, but cannot verify, that she is looking away from you because, right now, she is crying, and she doesn’t want you to see.

The procession begins again, the coffins are moving, and the protestors start to chant. The leaders, bullhorned, and the thousands behind them, singing, raising their voices and fists in fiery unison: Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!

But that’s where the chant breaks down as the throngs are unsure what to say, then all the voices coming back together for the verse’s final line: Has got to go!

What has got to go? It is cacophony. You hear many things. Some people shout Republicans. Others, war. Others, George Bush. Dick Cheney. Halliburton. Racism, sexism, homophobia. Some people seem to have come from entirely different protests, are roaring against Israel (oppressing Palestinians), or China (oppressing Falun Gong), or third world labor, or the World Bank, or NAFTA, or GATT.

Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!

[incomprehensible gibberish]

Has got to go!

Nobody knows the words to use today. They are committed only to their individual furies.

That is, until they reach a certain spot near Fiftieth Street, where along their route a group of counter-protestors have arranged themselves to protest the protestors, which provides a clarity of purpose for all involved. The counter-protestors howl loudly and wave their homemade signs. The signs run the rhetorical spectrum from transparent simple sincerity (VOTE BUSH) to clever irony (COMMUNISTS FOR KERRY!), from verbal expansiveness (WAR NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING—EXCEPT FOR ENDING SLAVERY, NAZISM, FASCISM, AND THE HOLOCAUST) to verbal concision (image of NYC skyline overlaid with mushroom cloud), from invocations of patriotism (SUPPORT OUR TROOPS) to invocations of religion (GOD IS A REPUBLICAN). This is also the spot, not accidentally, where the news stations have chosen to set up their cameras, and so the entire event—the march from Central Park to Madison Square Garden—will be represented tonight on television by a quick clip where half the frame is taken up by protestors and the other half by counter-protestors, all of them behaving badly. They yell non sequiturs at each other, one side calling the other side “Traitors!” and that side retorting “Who would Jesus bomb?” The whole thing will just look very ugly.

This will be the protest’s most exciting encounter. The attack by the police that worried everyone will never come. The protestors will stay within their narrow Free Speech Zone. The cops will bemusedly watch them.

Oddly, when this becomes clear, some of the protestors’ vigor seems to vanish. As the march ebbs its way slowly on, you begin seeing coffins abandoned on the street—soldiers downed on the battlefield for a second time. Maybe it’s too hot. Maybe it’s too much to ask, carrying these boxes for this long. Bethany continues to silently proceed, block after quiet block. By now you’ve memorized the contours of her back, the outline of her shoulder blades, the small field of freckles at the base of her neck. She has a little curl to her long brown hair, a quick twist at the tips. She wears ballet flats that reveal small shoe-related cuts on her heels. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t chant—she simply moves forward in that extraordinarily upright and proper way of hers. She doesn’t even switch the hand she’s using to carry the coffin, which you’ve been doing every couple of blocks as one hand gets sore and cramped. The coffin’s burden does not seem to physically affect her—not the plywood’s rough edges, nor the weight, which did not at first seem all that demanding but after carrying the thing a few hours begins to feel considerable. The tendons in your hands lock up, the muscles of your forearms burn, a knot twists itself into the flesh behind your rib cage—all for this, this thin and empty box. Not heavy, exactly, but given enough time, any weight can become too much to bear.