by Nathan Hill
All this time Bethany clicks at her device, her violin fingers whirring over the tiny keypad, the little sound it makes like listening to a tap dancer through earmuffs, so engrossed in this she doesn’t notice you staring at her—or doesn’t acknowledge it, anyway, your staring—looking at her profile and then looking at the knot on her neck where her violin sits while she plays, a gnarled cauliflower callus there, the only not-smooth part of her, discolored dark brown spots amid the pale white scar tissue, this ugly thing barnacled onto her, the effect of a lifetime’s musicianship, and it reminds you of something your mother once said, not long before she left. She said, The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst. And as you reach your destination—the meadow in Central Park that serves as the staging ground for today’s march—and as Bethany slaps her BlackBerry into her purse and leaps out of the vehicle, and as you realize there is just no way you’re going to get the intimate-type moment with her that you wanted and your heart sinks and all you really want now is to leave New York and hide for like a decade, you understand that your mother was right: The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them.
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.
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 motherfucker. 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 Bi
shop 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 asshole. 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.
And finally this, the end of the march. Those who have carried their coffins from Central Park now deposit them at the foot of Madison Square Garden, where the Republicans are holding their nominating convention. The symbolism here is easy to parse: The Republicans are responsible for the war; they should also be responsible for the war dead. And there is something upsetting about the way the coffins pile up. One hundred coffins cover the avenue. Two hundred coffins begin to look like a wall. Then it gets too tall and the marchers begin heaving the coffins up to places they cannot themselves reach and the coffins are stacked atop one another like children’s blocks, balancing perilously, sliding off the pile and landing at oblique angles. The whole thing begins to look like an impromptu roadblock that you associate with Les Misérables. By the time they get to about five hundred coffins the scene has a mass-grave quality that’s downright disturbing, no matter how hawkish one might be. The marchers add their coffins to the pile and then offer some choice words to the Republicans, shaking their fists and yelling in the direction of the giant ovoid arena just beyond the line that demarcates the end of their march as per the permit recently approved by city hall, a line that is recognizable for the massive security buildup—steel fencing and armored trucks and riot police standing elbow to elbow—in case you forget where your Free Speech Zone ends.
When you and Bethany add your coffin to the pile, you do so gently. No throwing. No yelling. You place it quietly on the ground and then listen to the commotion around you for a moment, the many thousands who showed up today, a good turnout for a protest, but a number that is dwarfed by the audience watching you on television right now, on a certain cable news outlet that’s using the live feed from the end of the march as B-roll footage to play in a box on the left side of the screen next to a few smaller boxes on the right side of the screen where pundits’ heads debate whether the protest you’ve just finished will backfire on you or be merely useless, whether you are a traitor or merely giving comfort to the enemy, and underneath your image is a bright yellow headline that reads LIBERALS USE SOLDIER DEATHS FOR POLITICAL GAIN. The protest turns out to be a great triumph for this particular news show, as it will notch its highest post–September 11 ratings today, clocking in at 1.6 million viewers, which is itself dwarfed by the 18 million households that will tune in for tonight’s network broadcast of a reality singing show, but it’s a pretty good score for basic cable nonetheless, and will allow them to bump their ad rates next quarter by a tenth of a percent.
Meanwhile, Bethany looks at you for the first time in hours. She says, “Let’s go home.”
To go home with Bethany, go to the next page…
This might not
seem like a Choose Your Own Adventure story yet, because you haven’t made a choice.
You’ve been with Bethany for an entire day—you listened to her intolerable fiancé and allowed her to drive you to the protest and followed her into the park and all the way through Manhattan and now she hails a cab and you follow her into it and you ride silently south back to her extravagant apartment and you have not made a single significant decision. You’re not choosing your own adventure; the adventure has been chosen for you. Even the decision to come to New York in the first place wasn’t really a decision so much as a reflexive and impulsive yes. How could it be a “decision” when you never considered saying no? The yes was there already, waiting for you, inevitable, the sum of all those years of pining and hoping and obsessing. You never even decided your life would be this way—it’s simply the way life has become. You’ve been carved out by the things that have happened to you. Like how the canyon can’t tell the river which way to shape it. It just allows itself to be cut.
But perhaps there’s one choice you’re making, which is the constant minute-by-minute low-level tacit choice to act more or less normally and not exclaim in a fit of passion “What the fuck is wrong with you?” or “Don’t marry Peter Atchison!” or “I still love you!” Maybe bolder and more romantic men would do this, but to you it seems impossible. It goes against your nature. You’ve never been able to assert yourself like that. Your greatest dream has always been to fade from view completely, become invisible. You long ago learned to tuck away your biggest emotions because those are the things that trigger the crying, and there is nothing worse than that, the blubbering, in public, in front of people.
So you don’t try to shake Bethany out of this quiet and distant and infuriating stupor she’s in, you don’t proclaim your love for her, and you’re not even really aware that this is a choice. You’re like the ancient cave painter drawing 2-D animals before the invention of three-point perspective: You are incapable of working in anything but your narrow dimensions.