As six a.m. nears, the crowd thickens around her, as though she has swum far out to sea on a notion and now land is out of sight. Isn’t this one of the consequences we accept when we step into an idea? That it will pull us into its riptide? Yes, the idea had begun as opportunism, but something else had held her here. People brush against her, taking her for one of them. And why wouldn’t they? Erin tugs Gael’s elbow. ‘Where’re all the cops?’
Gael scans the park’s perimeter. She has no intention of being netted. Some guy whose name she forgets says: ‘They got a load of Occupy Sesame Street and went back to bed.’ He nods at a kid piggybacking his dad, holding an umbrella over both of them. The skies break out anew in hammering percussive climax and a roar erupts from the crowd: a roar of some two thousand voices. A far cry from Occupy’s first day when the Wall Streeters had come onto their balconies with champagne buckets to pour down scorn on the city’s troops below: the piddling group of sweaty-crotched anarchists parading their puny dreams; being escorted by the NYPD to their third-choice destination.
A call-and-response begins: ‘We will position ourselves with our brooms and mops in a human chain around the park, linked at the arms. If the NYPD enters, we will peacefully, non-violently stand our ground and those who are willing will be arrested.’
Fingers wiggle in the air in silent approval. The Orientation Working Group are teaching the hand signals to a bunch of out-oftowners who’ve just flown in for this showdown and for tomorrow’s global day of solidarity. Washington Square Park and Times Square are on Occupy’s hit list.
A murder of black town cars approaches the Trinity Place entrance to the park. Some hurry towards them, but Gael hangs back. The crowd is denser now. It could be three thousand strong. The cars have pulled in and someone is being escorted through the mobs. Camera flashes light up a white collar and silk tie, polished as new money. Nina, who has returned from her visit to the LA occupation (as reported at last night’s general assembly), is handing out bananas. Gael takes two. Nina doesn’t recognize her in the dark. The rain has stopped, so she takes off the poncho and rolls it into a cylinder.
Judging by the heckling, it’s the mayor taking a walk through the park to get a read on things. One grouser shouts, ‘Billionaire Bloomberg, go to hell!’ while others vie for his handshake. ‘We love you, Mayor Bloomberg!’ He comes just a few metres into the throng, surrounded by bodyguards. Organizers thank him for his cooperation and offer him extra security. Bloomberg says he has plenty. Whatever else he says is unclear. The visit has lasted the duration of a teenage lay. It’s still pitch-black, but city business has already commenced.
Soon after, the human mic system restarts with the speakers standing on tables. ‘We have a proposal from Brookfield Properties …’ Because of where Gael stands, she gets the news a few seconds late, but the speakers’ faces are brightening with the sky – now navy-grey infused with yellow. The cleanup has been cancelled. The call-and-response doesn’t get past the first few phrases before cheers of jubilation erupt and arms fling around bodies. Someone squeezes Gael’s forearm and she can feel a smile cross her own cheeks, full of banana. ‘The People. United. Will Never Be Defeated,’ chants the crowd, again and again, laughing and clapping and punching the air with every stressed syllable, leaping on the spot. ‘We WON!’ Gael searches for anyone she knows, but all she can see are hands and cameras and hoods. She muscles through the crowd until she spots Erin’s white dreads going up and down as she leaps. She’s preaching Gandhi:
‘First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.’
Unable to echo this, Gael is reminded of being a kid at mass, before she took the first step out the church door by telling Jarleth she didn’t believe that Mary was a virgin; when she’d stopped saying the parts of the catechism she didn’t believe in. Each week, she’d say less and less, only uttering the parts that were demonstrably true until there was nothing left for her to say. For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever? No. That’s moronic. It wasn’t that she gave two shits about honesty – Jesus, if ever such a generous lover had lived, wouldn’t be so petty as to monitor lip-syncing during his hymns; it was that she knew that this small movement of the lips, disconnected from the brain, going going going along with things, was a gateway drug. Not to heaven, but to fools’ paradise. So her closed lips were a renunciation until she was ready to tell her mother she would never go again. ‘If you’re staying here, you can help me organize this sheet music into sections,’ Sive had said, as if her daughter had confessed to something so trivial as wanting to skip swimming lessons. That was when she knew that logistics had nothing to do with Sive’s ‘duties’ on Sundays.
However heartening the rhetoric, she can’t sing: ‘We, the ninety-nine per cent, are too big to fail.’ What planet are they on not to be able to look at the distribution of the world’s wealth, historically and now, to know this isn’t true? To look, even, at the one-percenters who’ve turned up here to speak: the commercially successful actors and celebrities. ‘I’ll write a cheque when everyone else does,’ one had said, standing north of Kanye West, standing south of their flock of gold-toothed guardians. To have wealth distribution, the one per cent would have to believe it would be better off if the ninety-nine per cent were better off too. The rich would have to believe in mutualism. Commensalism. That their wealth wouldn’t diminish by sharing it. That if they press the button, their peers would too. And the one per cent didn’t get to where they are by staking on relationships.
‘Earth to Libor,’ the guy says, tugging Gael’s sleeve as she wanders past in pursuit of coffee. ‘You coming?’
‘Dean?’ She finally remembers his name. Some New Jersey student of … bioengineering? An elastic string bifurcates his forehead from the Anonymous mask on the back of his head, loaning him a thinker’s wrinkle. His spectacles are all rained-on. How he can see her is a mystery. Though she’s been up all night, it’s still too early not to shield her eyes from his orange raincoat. He shakes her by the shoulders. ‘Wake up and smell the opening.’
Gael cringes. She beats him back with her rolled-up poncho. He smells not of Brie, but of Camembert. On oven-warm sourdough bread. ‘What a creepy line.’
‘Are you coming or not?’
‘Where?’
‘Wall Street. Where your beef ’s at.’
‘For food?’ Gael looks confused and checks to see if the spare banana in her coat pocket is smushed from people freeloading on her personal space.
‘Where-Your-Beef ’s-At, Libor. We’re marching on Wall Street. Now.’
He leads her through the crowd to the park’s perimeter where an unplanned celebratory march has already circuited and is coursing south on Broadway. They’re able to weave their way to the front, as it’s only a couple of hundred people and they see that the whole front line is wielding mops and brooms like a makeshift-weaponed mob.
The people who happened to be within earshot one drunken night last week nicknamed Gael ‘Libor’ because of her rant about the colossal financial scandal being exposed in the UK. She’d given a tutorial on how collusion to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate had affected them all. ‘No. It’s not “the same old shitshow”. It’s only got to do with the housing market collapse so much as it’s got to do with all money. Who here has a mortgage?’ No one spoke for a second, then someone said, ‘Nina, but she skipped town,’ and everyone laughed. It was days before Gael learned the No Income No Assets acronym for subprime mortgage holders. Nina was NINA. ‘Dumb question. You’re obviously all homeless.’ Someone flicked scrambled tofu in Gael’s direction. ‘Student loans then. Which idiot has one?’ A bunch of groans indicated nearly everyone and she poked the shoulder of a handsome Dutchwoman – tall, fair, limp-haired, cheeky-faced, rides-a-bike-posture – and said, ‘You got shafted.’ Then, the wind picked up and blew the Dutchie’s scarf to the side and Gael openly took in the outline of her breast. ‘My father …’ she’d started.
Truth was, she didn’t know exactly what role he had played – but that he’d headed up the relevant sector of the leading implicated bank and yet wasn’t undergoing trial. Since she’d found a topic that vaguely fit within the movement’s grievances (the way a parallelogram fits into a square if the latter’s large enough), she was finally able to let her mouth run and she got caught up in the relief of it. Also, she could openly seethe at everyone’s ignorance. What shut her up eventually was the Dutchwoman, Lotte, cutting her nails with a foldaway scissors while making eyes at Gael. Later, on an air mattress, beneath a tarp (cops stationed around them like the bulbs of a vanity mirror), they unzipped their sleeping bags and Gael drew Lotte’s bicycling leg back across her hip like a wheelbarrow handle. ‘Dark horse,’ Lotte said under her quaking breath and they tried to make their shuddering seem like the cold front besting their feeble female constitutions.
A few police on foot head in their direction now as the group marches past the graveyard of Trinity Church, where Gael has whiled away hours listening to podcasts and concerts to escape the vapid Panglossian hypotheses and to clear up the confused belief systems she’d been preached at about – Liberalism, Libertarian Socialism, Neo-Marxism, Voluntaryism, Mutualism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Insurrectionary Anarchism, I-should-be-better-off-than-my-folks-just-cuz-ism – arriving at the conclusion that there is no modern unifying theory the left is trying to ratify and that is its lemon. Cold days she’s spent inside the church, listening to world-class classical string quartets and charging her phone, returning to Occupy only when peckish. Though Sive is the true artist of the two, the quality of music in the church on any given lunchtime has reassured Gael that pushing Guthrie’s paintings had been the right decision.
‘Get back on the sidewalk, ma’am,’ an officer shouts, one hand to his radio.
Aided by skyscrapers’ acoustics, whoops get lifted up into the sky that still has a touch of the witching hour about it. The group isn’t marching so much as scurrying and no one’s chanting volubly, as if trying to slip by unnoticed. They dart out onto the road whenever scaffolding threatens to slow them; each time eliciting ‘Stay on the sidewalk’ yells from the NYPD – undeniably taken by surprise. ‘Do NOT obstruct traffic.’
‘How far behind are they?’ Dean’s on his phone to someone back at camp. ‘Broadway’s barred. We’re turning onto Exchange Place …’
Police have pulled out all the stops to block previous marches from reaching Wall Street proper, as if the movement’s two-finger salute to the system (albeit a peace sign) will be deflected as long as Wall Street itself remains – as it always has been – protected from the plebs. When the huge George Washington statue beneath the flags and white marble columns of the New York Stock Exchange come within torch-throwing distance and the police can be seen up ahead hastening to form a barricade, someone yells GO GO GO and they all break into a sprint.
‘Stay back!’ a policewoman calls from her post, shuffling behind the cordon at the Wall Street junction. Behind her, German shepherds sniffing vehicles for explosives burst into rabid barking at the two hundred sleep-deprived bodies closing in on them, smelling of salted tenderized meat.
A lone voice from the back of the group yells: ‘Tell me what democracy looks like!’ Anyone who can catch a breath answers, ‘This is what democracy looks like!’ Feet rushing on the slippery red cobblestones sound of a river in flood. Someone’s pushing Gael’s backpack to hurry her.
The front rows clatter to a halt against the blockade. Truncheons poke at them as though stoking a fire. The marchers get stacked up together, everyone panting and pivoting and readying their phones to take footage in case anyone’s heroic enough to flare forth. Despite whatever bruises form to suggest otherwise, Gael feels like a spectator still, reminded of the cat-and-mouse strategy game Jules the rueful banker had watched people play like flagitious porn. Though, Jules wasn’t watching just for entertainment’s sake, but to observe strategy. He had tremendous respect for the players. Gael hasn’t. Perhaps that’s what she’s been trying to discover.
Erin yells: ‘Who are you protecting?’
‘Take a step back, ma’am.’
‘The corporatocracy’s the felon!’
‘Stay back.’
‘If corporates run our government, what happens when the CEO’s a fascist?’ Erin leans into the barrier. ‘We surrender our democracy!’
‘You’re about to surrender your freedom.’
‘Exactly! This is yours, your children’s freedom we’re fighting for. Their rights.’
‘Do not push the barricade.’
‘These jerks used your taxes for bonuses. They’re the reason your retirement’s cut in half. Why are you protecting them?’
‘Forty per cent,’ the policewoman says. ‘Not half. Last warning.’
‘You don’t deserve that. Honest, hardworking people. You should march with us. Swap your baton for a broom. We’ve got spares. Help us clean this pigsty. Here–’
The cop Erin’s addressing withdraws for orders, then returns to carry the barriers backward so as to funnel the protesters towards the park. Horse hooves clatter up from behind and they have little choice now but to be shepherded. If need be, Gael will put her hands behind her head and retreat to the sidewalk asylum. Tonight is the exhibition opening and bruises won’t flatter the outfit she has in mind. She should get back to business. This has been worthwhile to behold – she is now clearer on cynic statistics.
But no. That isn’t it still. It isn’t purely mercenary or for entertainment or out of cold curiosity that she’s stayed until now. She’d wanted to hear them out. Her principled peers. To know if they have knowledge of the movement’s ineffectuality and are here anyway, or if they have real hope for reform; which, in its implications of bounded rationality, would depress Gael deeply. Erin had been the only one to call Gael out on her cynicism:
‘It’s because you’re not American,’ she’d said. ‘You can’t see how rare this is. Us coming together like this. Ireland’s tiny, right? So you can’t snub your neighbour without it getting awkward. Here, you absolutely can. We’re all atomized. We live in boxes. Work cubicles, huge cars, microclimates, TVs. We’re divided. Race, religion, class – any way you cut it. That’s by design. And those divides don’t go down the centre! So yeah, Occupy won’t change policy. But it’s got us talking. Face to face.’
Then Lotte had joined them, hooking her arm in Gael’s. ‘This is nice,’ she’d said, wearing her permanent gummy grin. ‘To hear so many voices. And to make quite some friends. But Erin, there is one divide that is going neat down the middle. Blue-red. This is why America becomes worse and worse. And also Britain, he has this system. Two parties is not enough of parties! Libor and me know it, heh? Little countries, a lot of parties.’ She then reached out to stroke Erin’s blonde dreadlocks. ‘It is not appropriate?’
Standing on tiptoes to see what’s going on, Gael now sees the group obeying the police and walking on, without griping further or losing anyone to cuffs. Some feign gratefulness for being funnelled out rather than kettled. But something’s happening out of sight. The more acquiescent they become, the more riotous the city around them. Car horns and incantations carry on the air all the way from the park. Gael looks around to see who’s chanting near her, but a horse exhales steamy reproval within smelling distance. Maybe they’ve cleared out the park after all. She wrestles to the front where the whispers get their rightful translation: caught out by the spontaneity of the action, most of the police force has been dispatched to a separate march on City Hall. Now there really is an opening that even the cops can smell.
When Gael turns onto Broadway, the noise reveals its source. The WHOSE STREET? rallying cry of another march farther south on Broadway coming towards Wall Street from the opposite direction. A merging of regiments would more than double their sum: too many for so few cops to coax back onto the pavements and to the park, meaning they might actually make it, if they run.
A whistle blows and
Gael finds herself barging with the pack like a delinquency of thieves through shop windows. Seagulls and pigeons batter their wings at the crest of this dubious wave moving too far into Lower Manhattan for it to cleanly tide out again. By the time they pass Bowling Green’s charging bull, they’ve nearly merged groups and no one looks back to see the glint of the bull’s fondled brass balls or the wink of riot shields. One-way traffic is headed straight for them, but it comes to a halt as protesters wag brooms at car bonnets. Just in front, a guy punches a placard into the air like the red hand of Ulster. The fortune on its palm reads:
MINIMUM WAGE = $16,000 PER YEAR.
CEO OF GOLDMAN SACHS = $16,000 PER HOUR.
Drivers squint at the hoard and their watches and some toot and one rolls down all its windows and blasts a Billy Bragg anthem from the radio. Gael barely hears it beneath the concussion of heckling, hooting white noise. She may well be concussed. Truly, she might just be … because no matter how she squints at it, the back of a sign up ahead reads ‘GAEL!’ She pulls her ponytail down and feels her skull for a lump through her greasy hair. It’s been five days since she’s showered, when she called in on Xavier to collect the remaining paintings, though she regularly makes a bath of public washroom sinks. Maybe someone wants her for a photograph? Every other person is filming. The media team always wants her. Over the week, she’s found so many lenses converging on her like flies, it’s all she can do to flick them from her skin. This morning, even pedestrians are filming. They see it’s not business-as-usual. The streetlamps are still lit like knobs of butter, though day has been cracked open and the white of the sky is congealing. Police call from bullhorns to keep to the kerb, but this street’s a narrow canyon. The road tapers to one lane – too tight for them and the parked cars – and Gael ducks around the green scaffolding like an obstacle course whose finish line is that sign, ‘GAEL!’ bobbing in and out of view. She doesn’t believe in signs and symbols like in the Nabokov story Harper described, about everything connecting back to her (Harper’s way of calling out Gael’s narcissism or solipsism or whatever), but she does trust her senses, against the philosophers’ advice, so it’s probably one of those fools who call her Friend, wrongly thinking she’s an arrestable. Scooters sound close behind her and she hurries down William Street, her bag thumping painfully on her back.
Orchid & the Wasp Page 26