The Nix(185)

Faye and Sebastian. They lean against each other like lovers. Alice sits behind them. Ginsberg raises his camera to his eye.

The young man gives him a wry, sidelong smile that just about breaks his heart. The shutter clicks. Ginsberg stands and smiles sadly. He moves on, swallowed by the vast crowd, the incandescent day.





25


THE POET WALKS AWAY and Alice taps Faye on the shoulder and winks at her and says, “So did you two have a good time last night?”

Because of course Alice doesn’t know what happened.

And so Faye explains to her about the mysterious cop who arrested her and the night she spent in jail, how Faye doesn’t even know the cop’s name or what she did to deserve all that, how the cop told her to vacate Chicago immediately, and Alice is stricken because she knows right away it’s Officer Brown. Of course it’s him.

But she can’t tell Faye. Not right now. How could she possibly admit in the middle of this crowd of protestors throwing angry insults at the police that she’d been having a pretty passionate love affair with one of these very cops? There’s no way.

Alice hugs Faye tightly. “I’m sorry,” she says. “But don’t worry. Everything will be all right. You aren’t going anywhere. I’ll stick by you, no matter what.”

And that’s when the police gather on the edges of the park and announce via bullhorns: You have ten minutes to clear this area.

Which is a laughable request, because there’s like ten thousand people here.

“Do they really expect us all to leave?” Alice asks.

“Probably not,” Sebastian says.

“What are they gonna do?” Faye says, looking around at the great stubborn mass of humanity occupying the park. “Move us all by force?”

Turns out, this is exactly what they’re going to do.

It begins with a soft pop of compressed air, a gentle-sounding and almost musical burst as a canister of tear gas is launched into the park. And for those who watch it come, there’s a strange delay between seeing it and understanding what it means. It soars in its parabola up into a sky far too pretty to accommodate it, and it seems to hang in the air above them for a split second, a North Star to some of them, their compasses now pointing at this thing, this strange new flying fact, which then begins its descent, and the yelling and the screaming begin roughly now as the people in the projectile’s landing zone start to accept what is coming right at them and understand this is the de facto end of their sit-in. The canister is already leaking its contents, leaving this tail of orange gas, a comet on a collision course. And when it lands it thuds into the grass like a golf ball and kicks up the turf and ignites. It spins and spews jets of toxic smoke as more little pops are heard coming from the direction of the Conrad Hilton and one or two more flying bombs come hurtling into the crowd, and this is how fast relative peace and order can fall into madness. The crowd starts running and the police start running and almost everybody in the park is simultaneously crying. It’s the gas. The way it attacks your eyes and throat. How it feels like burning oil splattered right into your pupil, the way you can’t keep your red swollen eyes open without the pain, no matter how much you rub them. And the coughing as sudden and urgent as drowning, that reflexive hacking that bypasses all willpower. People are crying and spitting and running anywhere there is not gas, which presents a basic problem of volume: The gas was fired—purposefully or accidentally, it’s not known—so that it landed behind most of the crowd, which means the only way to avoid the misery of the gas is to run the other way, in the direction of Michigan Avenue and the Conrad Hilton and the vast police blockades, and so the volume problem is that there are way more people wanting to be on Michigan Avenue than there is currently space on Michigan Avenue for these people.

It’s your unstoppable force meeting its immovable object, the body mass of ten thousand protestors running headlong into the teeth of the Chicago PD.

And Sebastian with them, towing Faye by the hand. And Alice watches them and understands this is exactly the wrong way to go, that the only direction where there are no police is back into the tear gas itself, the cloud that hugs the ground like an orange fog. She calls out to them to stop, but her voice—raw and ragged from the earlier chanting and now blown to bits by the gas—cannot be heard above the roar and screams of the crowd, all of them running, bouncing into one another, scattering. She watches Sebastian and Faye as the crowd collapses around them and she loses them in the mass. She wants to go after them, but something holds her back. Fear, probably. Fear of the police, one of them in particular.

She will go to the dorm and wait for Faye, she decides. And if Faye doesn’t come back she’ll stop at nothing to find her, which is a comfortable lie she tells herself to get out of the immediate situation. She will, in fact, never see Faye again. She doesn’t know this yet, but she senses it, and she stops running. She turns back toward the protest, the park. And at that moment Faye is tugging on Sebastian’s arm because Alice isn’t with them. Faye stops and turns around. She looks back at where they came from. She hopes Alice’s face will pop out of the chaos, but between the two of them is an orange cloud of gas. It might as well be a concrete wall, or a continent.

“We need to go,” says Sebastian.

“Wait,” says Faye.

Faces fly by her, none of them Alice’s. People clip her shoulders, dodge her, keep running.