Thank You For Being Here
By Zachary Gwynn
Damien’s mother insisted that it wouldn’t be worth it. His friends reminded him that it would be dangerous. His brother said that it would accomplish nothing. “Protests only worked back in the seventies. Now those people are in power. They know the game; they reworked the system.”
But when the moment came, Damien was swept away on an electric pulse like the pause preceding the first frenetic chords of a show. The crowd absorbed him. He marched down streets he used every day, and streets whose existence he had never before noticed. Together the mass rolled like loud molasses through the city’s main artery, surrounded on all sides by honking horns and flashing lights. Bounded by lines of stationary figures—tall blue-shelled beetles. The protestors raced the sun to the horizon, and didn’t spill out onto the yellow grass of a neighborhood park until its setting sent streaks of pink and purple across the sky. By then Damien’s throat was sore from shouting. He was flush with the feeling of victory.
It was only much later that he would learn of the precise, purposeful timing of what happened next. As the chanting died down and everybody turned to congratulate one another, sharp whistles sounded in the distance. Rows of horses in thick plastic body armor encircled the park. Their riders bore translucent riot shields, bean bag shotguns, and wicked smiles. The mounted police had arrived. That was 7:50 PM.
Without warning the police feinted forward, and drew back. Feinted forward, and drew back. Under this duress the protestors fragmented into smaller groups, and Damien broke along with them. He was shoved along, taking the only course left available by the incessant half-charges of the cavalry, and found himself standing on the lip of a stone bridge spanning the reflective waters of the Mississippi.
There, the police halted and arrayed themselves across their chokepoint. One of them produced a megaphone. “You are unlawfully assembled,” he said. “Please disperse, or you will be detained.” That was 8:01 PM, one minute past curfew.
Shouting once more filled the air. Not the slogans of the protest, but disparate pleas and threats. Damien felt hot with anger, as he imagined the rest of them must, but his nerves were past shot. He needed to leave. When he turned to cross the bridge toward home, he understood that it was not rage at the threat of arrest which prompted the renewed clamor. Another line of policemen were standing on the hill on the opposite end of the bridge, blocking their escape. “This is a warning. You must disperse. This is a warning. You must disperse,” the officer with the megaphone repeated.
Damien couldn’t think. Couldn’t feel his hands. He spun in a circle, and saw young children around him. Old couples. Already a man was on the ground, cradling a toddler in his arms. When Damien stopped spinning, the world went on without him.
There were pops, and then hisses. More whistles. Panicked footfalls. Hooves clattering on stone. Plaintive screams. Smoke blanketed the area, bending and blurring the pink and purple and yellow light. Through it Damien saw a bloody face. Tears. A woman, recoiling as though from a blow, collided with the railing and tumbled over, falling—until a fellow protestor grabbed her, and dragged her to the ground.
He moved as part of the mindless, reactive whole, and they were like blood in a constricted vein. Back and forth, left and right. Up and down. They were still, and then they were rushing. Yes, everyone still standing was rushing forward. He only realized in the second before impact that they were about to break against the police. By then it was too late to do anything else. Might as well make the best of it.
Shoulder first into the line. Damien hit something hard, and was flung backward, where he hit something soft. He stumbled to the side. He was pushed forward, and this time the hard thing hit back. A flash of white, then black, and pain blossoming over the top of his head. He tried to go limp. People kept pushing him.
When finally he managed to fall, it was as though gravity stopped working. His hand, outstretched, fell well below where his brain thought the ground should be. Vertigo took him. With stomach-lurching certainty he knew that he was going over the side of the bridge.
Then he hit damp earth, and toppled down the length of the hill. He rolled until he came to the bank of the river, and there settled to a stop in the mud by the smoky water. A yawning inside of him told him that he was done. It was over. But he heard other people falling down the hill, as he just had.
Damien opened his eyes. There was a woman not far away. She held one hand in front of her purpling face, and the other arced through the air as she rolled. The open palm of that hand swung perilously close to the visor of an officer who had pursued her. Perhaps pushed her. He knelt above, stable in the sliding muck, raising a black-gloved fist.
Without meaning to, Damien was screaming again. He was on his feet. There was a stick in his hand. The officer looked up, and paused. Maybe they saw each other, in that moment, as two estranged pairs of eyes. Two human beings, without uniform and without support. Reason and logic washed away in the sweat of crashing bodies.
The officer unclenched his fist and dropped back, to be subsumed in some other drama unfolding behind the veil of rolling smoke. Damien ran to the woman’s side. “Thank you. Thank you,” she sobbed, taking him by the collar and tearing at his shirt. “Thank you for being there. Thank you for being there. Thank you for being here.”
THE END