By the time she covers the two blocks to Wall Street, the sign is lost to chaos again. It had just been a piece of cardboard, scrawled with black marker, and she can’t be sure it hadn’t read GRAIL, for example, with HOLY on the flipside – she wouldn’t put it past her father to have bequeathed to her astigmatism. Police cars line the pavements and the mob slips around one of the bronze bollards that look like sculptures but are there to prevent car bombs from getting onto the street. Everyone’s climbing over the ramps raised to stop traffic, though there’s space on either side to scoot round them. It feels better to scale them and slide down the metal grilles. It’s fun! And they’re here. On Wall Street. Coffee-cart owners look on in dismay. Police scooters are lining up ahead, as if for a drag race, forcing protesters to move around them. They’re stationary, but the engines are on. There isn’t even the semblance of control. Who’s going to give an order to tear-gas Wall Street?
Some people sit down on the road but most form a human chain, standing off with the scooters. Gael makes her way to the front. She won’t link elbows but she wants to see the line between non-violence and resilience.
‘Get it out of my face,’ a cop tells a newscaster, shoving his camera back by the lens. ‘You’re interrupting police operations, sir. You got that?’ Those on scooters wear helmets with face shields. Those on foot cross their arms in a bouncerly manner, chewing gum so that you can count their fillings. The pessimists hold their batons. Gael scans the officers in view and decides she’ll volunteer for an all-body pat-down if it doesn’t come about naturally.
A kid kneeling before a scooter in an aspect of prayer is cuffed and carried off by his armpits. The righteous calls start:
‘Shame on you!’
‘He’s not resisting!’
‘What’s your name, brother?’
‘We love you. You’re a hero!’
‘Police brutality! Police brutality!’
Just then, looking back at the group from the right-side fringes, Gael catches sight of a pane of dented cardboard in the front row: held not as a shield against the forces, but as a mirror turned towards her.
‘Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all my ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’
– Yeats, bitches
Harper. Blood must be rushing into Gael’s head because there’s a thumping, slaughterous sensation. Basked in the headlights of scooters is Harper. It’s Harper, here, shouting something Gael can’t make out. Clinging to the shoulder straps of her bag as if to a seat belt, Gael tries to move through the crowd without losing sight of her, but the horns blare in unison and the scooters are now driving directly at people in an attempt to split them up. ‘MOVE! MOVE!’ they shout, and drive into the front line in short bursts. Some try to walk backwards and filter round the sides. Someone’s foot will be run over. Back up Back up Back up. Screams as they shove and swipe at anyone in their way, but the crowd clusters in response all around the scooters – over them, almost, like ants around sugar lumps. When reinforcement arrives, the drivers resort to dismounting their bikes and battering people back. ‘On the sidewalk. Let’s go.’
‘The whole world is watching!’ the crowd calls, as people are dragged off and kneeled on by cops. Camera flashes make an unlikely disco of the Friday morning business district and everyone still standing holds up peace signs for lighters. ‘Anyone obstructing traffic will be arrested!’ Gael hears from a voice closer to hand than she’d like.
‘Harper?’ she cries, having lost her in the crowd, slipping and bubbling like lava. She had deleted so many unread emails, subject lines ALL IN CAPS. So many calls and voicemails, hindrance to the fore and thus unwelcome. But those distant petitions were easy to ignore and to be firm in that; the body, not.
‘Don’t push!’
‘Everyone relax.’
It wasn’t just the body’s lure – it was the body’s being here. Its insistence. The mind in tow, with Harper. The rationality unbounded and unbending. That was the core of her oddness: her way of being in the world was internally consistent.
‘GAEL.’
She pivots round. Where is she?
Pressure meets the side of her head, then her mouth. The milky coffee taste of her lips, hot wet in the middle where they part; the rubbed feel of their flesh; rapt concentration like finding where you stand on a topographical map and not wanting to lose the spot for anything – pressure so sure and square that their noses bunch and the high of their smiling cheeks skim. Harper pulls back to take Gael in, holding her by the sides of her head. They’re both laughing and jumping stupidly now and Harper draws Gael close enough to break her ribs and then makes up for her roughhousing by kissing her eyelids and chin and cheekbones and forehead and shoulder and the crown of her head. Not her neck. Not her sternum. Not here. Not again. The endorphin-flooded feeling has all the weakness of addiction and Gael hasn’t trained all her life to deny this vice for no good reason. She hasn’t. The sudden conformist twitch in herself; the want to bond to someone, which is the same as to be bound. But no. No. There is no such need to admit.
‘Tell me you love America enough to wanna marry me,’ is the first thing Harper says.
Gael runs her palm across Harper’s breast-compressing dungarees, which are probably designer, which would make her the entire world market for designer dungarees. ‘Depends,’ Gael shouts over the ruckus and points to Harper’s crotch. ‘Can the cameltoe have babies?’
‘Hey!’ Harper yells. ‘I’m just happy to see you.’
Gael takes the smushed banana from her pocket. ‘Well, I just had a banana in my pocket.’
They gawp for a second at the slimy mangled mess in Gael’s hand, like a teenage boy’s sock, and the laughter that follows is the tear-streaming kind reserved for jet lag and sugar lows and being dangerously relaxed for one’s circumstances. They collapse into each other in hysterics as they’re turned and heaved hither-thither by the riotous masses. A fast waltz is what they’re dancing and Harper calls too loud into Gael’s ear as they whirl, ‘I swear-to-god wet my pants when I saw you on Occupy livestream. I mean, I knew you were in the city. You called me from friggin’ customs. But I–’ They get jerked backward as the scooters are at it again, cleaving the group like a blunt knife.
‘Sorry I never replied to your emails,’ Gael says. ‘Or called back. It’s just–’
‘No! Don’t sorry me!’ Harper says. ‘You fried my sunny-side-up heart for breakfast and then ate a Pop-Tart instead. You don’t get to say sorry.’
‘I knew you’d be mad, but sometimes it’s better just to–’
‘Irish!’ Harper says. ‘Cut it out! You’re here.’ She holds Gael by her hands and the pupils in her hazel eyes dilate. ‘Of all the gin joints.’
How they got from this moment to cuffed in the back of a police van – Gael with an aching vulva from where Harper cuntpunched her; Harper with a swelling to match the natural bruise of her eye socket from Gael’s headbutt – is a bit of a blur. Gael had perhaps made it too clear that she was only at this joint because the gin was free. ‘Don’t let the cleanup fool you,’ she had said. ‘They’re all still basting in their own stupidity.’
The van is on the move, finally. They’re sharing it with two women who were actually arrested for protesting: one public high school science teacher from Brooklyn called Brandi and another unresponsive white lady of middle age with a bandana on her head and closed eyes. She seems to be doing breathing exercises, judging by the long, steady wafts of broccoli.
‘Nice tan,’ Gael tells Harper, after they’ve both recovered from being stunned and hurt.
‘Mom’s boob cancer’s back.’ Harper looks out the metal grid window.
‘What?’
‘So I spent the summer in Vegas.’ Handcuffed, Harper twists around on herself to move the strap of her plastic SpongeBob SquarePants watch to reveal her tan line. The plaid mustard and grey shirt she wears beneath the black denim du
ngarees is rolled to the elbows and she has a blue denim jacket tied around her waist. Gael watches her profile: her swollen eye, level with her brow and upper cheek, partly curtained by her outgrown fringe; her nose flattish and buttony with mathematically circular nostrils and a pepper-kernelsized scar where she must have taken a nose ring in and out and in and out so neurotically it got infected. No jewellery or makeup or balm on her downturned mouth.
‘Shit,’ Gael says. ‘That’s awful.’
‘She’ll live. She won’t let me off that easy.’
‘I’ll pray for your moms,’ Brandi offers suddenly – the cuffs effecting semi-automatic prayer.
Harper glances over and says thanks. She keeps her eyes trained away from Gael, but not her words. ‘She wants to meet you.’
‘Your mum?’ Gael asks, shocked.
‘She got duplicate bills from my therapist and pharmacist. Wants to give em to you in person along with a piece of her mind.’
Gael asks, ‘What’s her name again?
‘Kendra.’
‘That’s it. Kendra. Did the gemstones not protect her, then?’ Gael remembers Harper slagging off her mother’s New Age ways, back in London.
‘“I let the rose quartz go totally flat,” she told me. Literally, that’s her explanation for stage three lymphoma. She forgot to recharge her crystals.’
Gael frowns. ‘I didn’t know gemstones had batteries.’
‘No, you gotta put em out under a full moon. Like on your roof. Higher up the better.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Not Jesus. Hekate. Zeus. Taco Bell. Anyhow,’ Harper sighs, ‘at least she doesn’t talk crap all day long anymore. It’s been good for us, her being sick. I mean, it’s not like we’re debating the great American novel or anything, but she’s talking to me for real. Like: “Harper, what did I do so wrong?”’ She’s doing an impression of an even louder voice than her own. ‘Like: “Most of everyone I know’s not in love. They’re just accustomed to their spouse. They like em and that’s all there is. In that way I’m glad I never liked your father. We still got a shot at love, if he’s ever home again while I’m conscious. So get in the car, will you, and pick me up a wig. A nice red one with layers and a loose wave.”’
To get the impression right, Harper’s had to direct it at Gael and now they’re looking at one another again. It’s her best aspect: straight-on. Gael wants badly to clear out the van and see what they can do while cuffed, but instead she winces in pain as they come to a sudden halt. Harper had thrown the first punch to the pelvis. Gael head-butted her back, but not forcefully, as she’d found it hard to get her footing. They had only managed to get one blow in each before they were on their stomachs on the ground with a ridiculous quantity of police hands on their bodies, feeling around for their rights. By the sound of it, they’ve arrived at whatever station is having them and bandana lady’s breathing is now accompanied by tears silently dripping from her jowls to her jersey.
‘Art’s with Mom on this one. That you should pay my deductible,’ Harper adds, just as the van doors are being unlocked.
‘Art?’ Gael says.
‘Yeah.’
‘Art as in … my mum’s partner, Art?’
‘Art as in my BFF,’ Harper says. ‘I don’t understand half of what he says, with that accent, but he’s a damn good listener. Usually he has me call the landline. But even still it’s the cheapest therapy I ever had.’
The van doors open and a small army of cops have come to escort the four slight women inside. They seem intent on separating Gael and Harper, so they have to be on best behaviour to be put in the same cell. Calmly, Gael asks why the hell she thinks it’s cool to have started up a friendship with her dad-in-law thing, to which Harper explains that she was calling for Gael every other day and Art just eventually let her talk at him.
‘I’ve got OCD, Gael. You know this about me. I’ve reminded you once an hour since I’ve known you.’
‘Right. So surely obsessing over me isn’t healthy. And I wasn’t exactly encouraging you.’
‘It’s a compulsion. O-SEE-DEE. If I try to not compulsively do something, it gets worse. It’s better for me to work through an obsession rather than tryna act like it doesn’t exist. That does not work. Trust me. House pets taught me the hard way. I killed Cleopatra the Chihuahua, Terry the arrogant ferret and at least three rats before my shrink changed tactics.’
‘Ladies,’ a cop says, puckering her brow at that last snippet of conversation. ‘This way.’
Gael keeps her voice down, but she’s riled at the thought of it. ‘You call me nine million times and clog my inbox and contact my family and–’
‘I’m sorry I got a condition!’ Harper says. ‘You can get a restraining order while we’re locked up, Gael, as just another way to say you love me and that’ll solve everything. Then you won’t have one single sad friend on the planet. Well done. Ku-friggin-dos, amigo.’
Their belongings are taken from them, but they don’t have to change into jumpsuits, as Gael had imagined. They’re put in a cell with Brandi. A small holding cell, with an unflushable metal toilet smelling as if it’s been retched in besides everything else. Though she begged, the guard wouldn’t let Harper open and close and open and close the cell door, but he said that he would look into retrieving her medication from her bag. The bench is not quite big enough for the three of them and Brandi suggests they sit down in rotation, but Harper says she’ll stand because of tetanus. Her mom believed that if she avoided vaccines, Harper’s social skills might balance out with all the other kids. Brandi shakes her head, as if she knows all about it.
‘So we’re clear,’ Harper speaks to Brandi, ‘when I said amigo earlier, I’m aware it shoulda been amiga, but I was making a point about my friend’s dumb philosophies about gender.’
‘¿Oh? Dime todo acerca de sus filosofías.’
The next several minutes are a telenovela. Gael had no idea Harper spoke Spanish (though she sounds the same in both languages) or that Brandi’s folks were from the Dominican Republic or that either fact would matter. She gets up and rests against the iron, looking out at the cement-wall view. There’s some relief from the stench in the centimetre her nose protrudes through the bars. Surely if one person hits another person in public and neither of those people press charges, there can’t be any indictments – they’d just be let out? If the arrest actually counts, coming back to America will be difficult from here on out and, to Gael, the world would feel a whole lot smaller without the land that puts tuna in opportunities.
‘Es porque sería una carga para ella …’
‘Qué egoísta! ¿Quién no tiene equipaje?’
‘Trust me enamorarme de un sociópata misógino.’
Gael can feel fingers wagging at her back. But she tunes the pair of them out. Something’s going on down the corridor. There’s a voice Gael recognizes. Two, if she’s not mistaken. Footsteps louden. ‘Lotte?’ Gael calls out. But it’s Nina whose bespectacled mug appears through the bars. She’s being led into the adjacent cell. She resists the officer’s tug so as to take Gael in for a moment. She frowns, trying to recall that face. ‘Git to your cell!’ The officer yanks Nina’s arm and she disappears from Gael’s view.
‘Is dat Libor?’ Lotte says.
‘Yeah,’ Gael calls. ‘Hey!’
‘I don’t believe that you are captured,’ she says. ‘It’s a crime to put those hands in cuffs!’ A squeak escapes her throat, as must follow all jokes in a second language.
‘Who’s that?’ Harper’s now clinging to the bars, caution to the wind vis-à-vis tetanus.
‘Lotte,’ Lotte declares, like the opposite of a safe word.
‘Lotta?’ Harper looks sideways at Gael. ‘Seriously?’
Gael shrugs and says beneath her breath, ‘The ninety-nine per cent are too easy to fuck.’
Brandi gasps behind them. ‘¿De verdad dijo eso?’
‘I doubt it,’ Harper says. ‘Did we just hear you right? Gael?’
Gael glances back at Brandi who is stroking the phantom groomed beard on her chin. She’s short. Takeable. Facing out again, Gael tries to think. She’s missing something obvious here: there’s some fucking iteration of events she’s missed. She’s meant to call in on the gallery to approve the placements this morning. Even if she’s kept here for twelve hours, she should still have time to shower before the opening. She’ll phone them, when she gets her stuff back. It will hardly come down to the make-one-call thing. There’s mutterings in the next cell. The word pretzel suggests Nina has remembered the face.
‘What they pick you up for?’ It’s Nina who asks. She sounds hostile.
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