Nathan Hill - The Nix

This, finally, proves too much for the window to bear. This is well beyond its tolerances.

The window doesn’t even really crack so much as explode sharply everywhere all at once. And Faye and the cop and the great rush of protestors pushing themselves against it all collapse and tumble backward into the people and smoke and music of the Haymarket Bar.

THE DAY HAS THUS FAR BEEN so unusual that it takes a moment for the patrons of the Haymarket Bar to recognize something has happened that is even more unusual. The plate-glass window shatters and in tumble protestors and cops and great sharp shards of glass, and for a moment they simply watch this happening as if they’re watching the television above the bar. They are mildly fascinated. They feel drawn to it, yet also separate from it. They are spectators, not participants.

So for a few moments as the protestors and cops all wrestle around regaining their lost balance in this scrum of humanity on the black-and-white-tiled Haymarket floor, people in the bar watch with a passive interest, like: Wow.

Neat.

Wonder what’ll happen next?

What happens next is that the tear gas leaks in and the cops get extremely pissed off and pile through the new opening in the side of the bar and sprint from the lobby because the thing that was never supposed to happen in Chicago has now happened: The delegates and the protestors are in the same room, together.

Their orders were very clear on this point: The delegates were to be met at the airport, right as they stepped off the plane, taken in police cars to the Hilton, taken in big buses with military-grade escorts to the amphitheater and back — shielded, bubbled, cut off from the hippies because the hippies are trying to disrupt and threaten our democracy, which is what the mayor said every day in the newspapers and on television. (The protest leaders’ responses that a democracy has ceased to be democratic when its representatives must be shielded from the people they represent went for the most part unreported and for sure unanswered by the mayor or his press office.)

Anyway, here they come, the police, red-faced and running, moving as quickly as allowed by jangling heavy utility belts full of weapons. And this is about the time that things get very real for the patrons of the Haymarket Bar. Coughing and crying suddenly because of the gas, clipped by running police or errant billy clubs, they realize they are not really spectators to this event; they are now part of it. This is how quickly the reality outside the bar penetrates and obliterates the reality inside the bar: with a simple pop of glass. The bar is now an extension of the street.

The front lines have shifted.

How long, they wonder, before the lines shift further? How long before their hotel rooms are at risk? Their own homes? Their families? For many of them, the protest was mild street theater until this moment, when they themselves are getting gassed. They think of bricks perhaps someday flying through their own windows, or they think of their daughters growing up and getting seduced by bearded long-haired smoke-smelling men, and even the most pro — peace plank among them stand back and let the cops do their brutal work.

So it’s all chaos, in other words. Chaos and panic. Faye lands hard on her side and under several other bodies all clacking heads and jaws together and she’s seeing stars and fighting to regain the wind that was knocked from her when she landed on the floor. She tries to focus on little things, to see through the green-purple starry screen of her vision to the checkered floor, the bits and chunks of glass around her, some sliding like hockey pucks as they’re kicked and battered by the melee now occupying the bar. It all feels very far away. She blinks. She shakes her head. She sees the feet of police as they run toward her, the feet of patrons as they run away. She runs her fingers over her own forehead and feels a lump the size of a walnut growing there. She remembers the cop who was a moment ago coming after her, and sees him lying faceup, halfway in the bar and halfway out.

HE’S NOT MOVING. He stares straight up. What he’s seeing is the jagged edge of the plate-glass window — what’s left of it — about eight feet above him, an equator in his field of vision. North of it is the tin ceiling of the Haymarket Bar. South, the sky, a hazy vaporous dusk. When he fell, he twisted and turned and crashed down backward and felt a bolt of pain at the landing. He’s lying perfectly still and thinking about what he feels now. Nothing, is what he feels.

Around him, police jump through the broken window and into the bar. He feels like he needs to tell one of them something, though he doesn’t know what. Just that something doesn’t feel right here. And he doesn’t understand what’s going on but he senses that it’s important — more important than the delegates or the hippies or the bar. He tries to speak to them as they leap around him, over him. His voice comes out small and thin. He says “Wait,” but none of them do. They crash into the bar, where they yank hippies off the floor and eject them onto the street, where they club the hippies and maybe even a few delegates too because it’s dark in there and hard to tell the difference when you’re swinging like that.

SEBASTIAN HAS GOTTEN to his feet and finds Faye on the floor and yanks her up by the arm. She’s feeling light-headed, queasy, she would like nothing better than to sit down at one of the Haymarket’s comfortable-looking plush booths and sip some tea with honey and then maybe sleep — oh my god how she wants to sleep, even now, right here at the violent center of the world. She’s still seeing stars. She must have hit her head pretty good.

Sebastian pulls her and she is compliant. She lets herself be pulled. Not toward the front door, where several of the other protestors are running, and not back out onto the street, but deeper into the bar, back to the farthest corner, where there’s a pay phone and a pair of bathrooms and one of those silver swinging doors with the round window that leads into the kitchen. This is where they go, into the Hilton’s industrial kitchen, which is currently enfrenzied with room-service orders — the guests at the hotel being terrified to leave the grounds and so getting all their meals on-site, delivered — and dozens of white-aproned, white-hatted men stand over griddles that crackle with porterhouse steaks and filet mignon, over sandwich stations building hoagies of improbable height, over table services polishing wineglasses to a perfect smudgeless clarity. They see Sebastian and Faye and they don’t say a word. They keep on working. Not their problem.

Sebastian ushers her through the loud and busy kitchen, all the way past the grills with leaping fire and burners cooking sauces and pastas, past the dishwashing station and the dishwasher himself, his face in a cloud of steam, and beyond to the back door, through the door and into the trash area, the dumpster with its sharp sour-milk and old-chicken smells, and beyond that into the alley, away from Michigan Avenue, away from the noise and tear gas, and away, finally, from the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

OFFICER BROWN IS STILL on his back in the broken window well of the Haymarket Bar and he’s beginning to understand that he cannot feel his legs. He fell and he landed on something sharp and felt a stabbing pain near his kidney and now he feels nothing. A spreading chill, a numbness. He tries to stand but cannot. He closes his eyes and he swears he’s trapped under a car. That’s how it feels. But when he opens his eyes again there is nothing visibly trapping him.