Archive > Vol. 19 no. 1

D. Nurkse

March

1
Long before dawn we found our idling bus. Our names checked on a list. We left.

Even at that hour, lights of factories we once worked in, hospitals where our parents died, schools where our children suffered, burned brighter than we could imagine. Then they vanished.

The highway is its own nation. Buses like ours, always more, cruised beside us, behind and ahead, a school of barracuda. The drivers honked or waved at each other, then gave up and settled into silence.

It's a vast distance from our city to the capital. Or no distance at all. As a life passes: impossibly slow or in a single breath.

We arrived at a stadium lot, unfolded our legs and began walking — still just ourselves, not yet voices — through strangely empty streets.

We congratulated ourselves, a little shyly, on our signs, which tried hard to be funny or self- deprecating. They buckled upwards with the wind, as if we were larvae halfway through the process of molting into winged insects.

What to expect? Those streets so hushed. Georgian row houses with cornices, chipped marble stoops. A deacon stood in a church door and waved; there was a bathroom if we needed it.

Otherwise, no one. What kind of city is this? But then we noticed, carved in a maple, or a phone pole, the names of our leaders: Truth, Tubman, King, Malcolm, Moses. In one yard a child stood with a tray of dixie cups of water, and a small dish of peanuts, smiling hopefully, though we were far too many for that.

Too many to rest or stop for coffee. We pushed each other forward. We came to the first diners and bodegas, closed with steel shutters. The owners would have lost all control over clogged aisles: windfall or disaster.

We were locusts! And we had thought ourselves as solitary, ironic, introverted. As if by law our numbers swelled as the avenues broadened to boulevards and the chant began and we were folded into it, our breath, our desire, our intimacy, our freedom. It bounced off the high facades and seemed to echo from the statues.

The police stood in phalanx, with their batons, their see-through shields, but they were terrified like us, desirous as we were, they hated the new rule, they welcomed us — it made us dizzy — and parted to let us pass: the National Guard waited with cocked rifles but they stepped aside and whispered, good luck!

There was our government: a shaft of granite.

All day we gathered, no one hindered us, sometimes we could touch its smooth slightly oily wall and sense the blue veins. There were so many of us we had to march in place, shuffling our feet as in a gym lesson, and our demand was so loud we could not understand it: yet we organized ourselves; lines for the handful of port-a-potties snaked through the crowd in circles and spirals: mothers with toddlers, old men in wheelchairs, struggled to find their way to the end to wait their turn. Mediators materialized, to settle disputes between rival factions — were we that close to power? Nurses in white coats came from nowhere to tend to those who fainted from the crush, the circular wind of human breath, the noise and the silence.

Did we have leaders? Who could hear or see them? Orators, icons, celebrities, but only for the cameras: all we saw was each other: napes, elbows, chins, butts, moles, pores, peaked hats, sometimes a few letters of a motto.

When night came we parted with tears of grief and joy, and the last who looked back saw the streets paved with signs.

2
Now in our tiny room we watch the screen that shows a figure in a ski mask beating a fallen cop. A silhouette with a battering ram smashes the windows of a clinic (a huge sign reads CLINIC). The bland voice apologizes on our behalf: everyone respects the right to free assembly but.

All we want to know is: how many were we? We switch from channel to channel: no estimate: there was and shall be just one of us.