But then Fiona pointed up, and then everyone started pointing up: Five guys were climbing out a window and onto a ledge of the County Building. They quickly affixed their banner below the state flag: “WE DEMAND EQUAL HEALTH CARE NOW!” Asher started jumping up and down, shouting their names. He said to Yale, “They were in straight drag! They had on button-downs!” Now they wore ACT UP shirts.
It must have been a full minute before the police appeared behind the men and dragged two of them away. The three that remained pumped their fists to the chanting. The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! And although Yale couldn’t imagine it was true—would this really earn more than a thirty-second spot on the news?—it felt good to shout it. When the cops came back, those last three clung to the very edge, the flagpole, the banner itself. They looked ready to scale the entire building like Spider-Man. Fiona buried her face in Yale’s shirt. Yale wanted to look away too, but he made himself watch as the police dragged them in by the legs. They got the last one in a twisted headlock.
Down here the Mounties paced, pushing everyone back. It was time, apparently, to sit down in the street. Asher said, “You can get out of here. You want to go?” But he didn’t. Fiona didn’t want to either. Asher said, “You’ve got a support person?” Yale nodded, didn’t mention that Gloria was home in her apartment, not out here ready to follow him to jail.
They say get back! the crowd was shouting. We say fight back!
He only hoped his stomach would hold out. He took the Imodium out of his backpack and swigged. Way too much, but he could deal with the consequences later. They sat, part of a Red Rover line of twenty stretching across the street: Asher on one side of Yale, Fiona on the other, and Teddy on the other side of her. Behind them people stood and chanted and filmed and shouted at the cops.
The horses were way too close, and it was hard to tell what was going on, hard to see and hard to hear. A rumor spread down the line that someone had already been kicked in the head by a horse, that one of those sirens a minute ago had been an ambulance. The cops were constantly turning the horses backward, so their hind legs were a foot away from people’s faces. They were close enough to smell. When their hooves hit the pavement, Yale felt it shake.
An organizer ran down the row. “If they arrest you, go like this!” he called, crossing his wrists. Yale asked why, but no one answered. “Don’t go limp!” the guy said. “They’ll drop you on your head!”
“Are you afraid?” Yale shouted in Fiona’s ear.
She shook her head, her curls in her face. “I’m too angry to be afraid! I’m too fucking angry! Are you?”
“Yes! But I was dying anyway!”
Someone kept shouting No violence!—but it was just one voice, not a chant.
The cops swarmed closer. They picked a woman off the end of the line and carried her, screaming, to a police truck. They came back for the man next to her, and the man next to him. They wore blue plastic gloves. One wore a paper face mask.
There were cameras still, but the news crews had all moved to the side; the people dashing through the front lines with camcorders were protestors recording this for posterity. One stopped in front of Teddy. “Say something!” he called, and Teddy shouted, “Their gloves don’t match their shoes!”
The crowd took it up, an old favorite: Your gloves don’t match your shoes! You’ll see it on the news!
The camera moved down to Yale. “Say something!” the guy said. “What are you feeling?”
It was perhaps the least like Yale Tishman he’d ever felt. If he’d had the rest of his life ahead of him, he might have considered it the first moment of something new, the moment when he finally learned who he was supposed to become. But because he didn’t have that, he recognized it for what it was: a spike of bravery and adrenaline that might never be equaled in his remaining time on earth. He unlinked his arm from Fiona’s and he turned toward Asher, and he grabbed the back of Asher’s head and kissed him. Whether Asher was just showing off for the camera, Yale didn’t care, but Asher fully returned the kiss, his fingers in Yale’s hair, his tongue on Yale’s. Yale could taste the salt on his lips, felt Asher’s thick stubble against his own smoother chin even as the entire city fell away around them.
When they finally pulled apart, he became aware of Fiona shrieking in delight, of Teddy whooping and applauding. Asher grinned at him, held his gaze, but then the cry went down the line to lie down.
Yale flipped his backpack to the front and linked arms again and lowered his back and head onto the cool asphalt. He closed his eyes and braced himself. He didn’t want to get up and walk to the paddy wagon. He wanted to lie still, a passive corpse to be transported, the way people farther down the line had done. Light as a feather, stiff as a board.
The shouting got closer, and the whistles got closer, and the screams got closer.
He heard Fiona scream when Teddy was taken away, and then a minute later he felt her arm torn away from his. He reached for her, and she was gone. He kept his eyes shut.
When they picked him up, it was by his clothes. By his shirt collar, by the backpack, by the waist of his khakis, by the shoes. He tried not to be limp, but he was.
He looked at the darkness behind his own eyelids. He thought about how next weekend, he was supposed to help Teresa clear out the old apartment. He was supposed to take whatever he wanted of Charlie’s and anything of his own that had languished there for four years. This weekend he’d do this, next weekend he’d do that. This was probably easier.
It was like being a child and falling asleep on the couch, flopping when your mother carried you to bed.
But he landed on the ground, hard, his wind gone, and they flipped him over, his ribcage on the backpack, his cheek against the asphalt, a knee in his back. There were so many voices around him shouting. They yanked his arms behind him and they tightened something around his wrists, and he couldn’t move at all, couldn’t breathe well, but still they knelt on him.
He heard Asher’s voice, but he couldn’t tell how far away it was. “Why are you doing that to him? Sir! Sir! Why are you doing that!”
“He resisted.”
“He didn’t resist! Sir, he did not resist!”
He opened his eyes to a horse hoof and the brown fur above it, close enough that he might have stuck out his tongue and licked it. He closed his eyes again.
He felt a shoe on his head, holding him to the street. He felt the Imodium bottle in the backpack, ramming into his left lower ribs way too hard. He felt something snap there. A searing, liquid pain.
“Sir, this is unnecessary! Sir, he did not resist!”
He wanted them to hurry up. He wanted to be in the wagon with Fiona already. He wanted to be home with an ice pack already. He wanted to know his bowels would hold out. He wanted Asher to keep shouting, wanted to keep hearing his voice.