Page 64 of Life Out of Order

“A beer and two cigarettes and conversation are more than enough. Have a good night, Zach.” We shake hands and part ways.

When I get home, Alba is reading in bed. I hop in beside her. “Where have you been?” I ask her. “I missed you.”

“Twenty sixteen,” she says. “Consoling Isadora about David Bowie dying. Where were you?”

“The Empty Bottle. I was going stir-crazy. Hey, I met an interesting guy.”

“Yeah?”

“I spilled beer all over him. He was wearing a nice suit, too. He was cool about it, though. He claimed he’d shoplifted it, to make me feel better.”

Alba puts her phone on her nightstand, then turns on her side so I can spoon around her. “That was nice of him,” she says.

“He was very mysterious,” I tell her. “He thought the band was atrocious.”

“Nothing mysterious about that,” Alba says. “What was the band?”

“I don’t remember,” I say. “They were pretty bad.” I can feel the story going flat in the telling and decide to quit while I’m ahead. I guess I’ve been at home for so long that even a small interaction with a new human seems newsworthy. I reach over and turn off my bedside lamp, and Alba does the same. “Are you sleepy?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “I’m not sleepy at all. C’mere.” She kisses me. Her presence suddenly seems like a gift, and I am happy she’s home, so happy we are here together that nothing else matters; as long as Alba is with me, my world is all right.

Haymarket

Sunday, May 4, 2036 (Alba is 34, Zach is 35, Oliver is 31)

Zach: The day begins inauspiciously, with an early morning phone call from Gomez. Max broke his arm last night while skateboarding, so we are down one guy before we even get to tonight’s rally. It was a bad break and Max is still in the hospital. Gomez starts dictating a list of tasks that are now mine and Alba’s. “One sec,” I mumble, sitting up in bed, groping for my glasses, then for paper and a pen. When I get off the phone, Alba says, “What now?”

I explain. “We should cancel,” Alba says. She’s been saying this for months. She sits up, stands up, starts to put on her bathrobe.

“Gomez needs us, we can’t cancel,” I tell her.

“No, I mean cancel the whole thing. I have a bad feeling about it,” she says.

“It’s the sesquicentennial of the Haymarket Riot, we can’t cancel it. It’ll look terrible if Gomez doesn’t show, he’s the main speaker.”

“Yeah. But still.” Alba opens the curtains. The day is cloudy, but it’s going to be unseasonably warm. “I don’t like it.”

Despite Alba’s qualms, we get ourselves dressed and fed and out the door. We run a bunch of errands and eventually arrive at the 50th Ward offices around four o’clock. Rosa and Charisse are fretting over whether we have enough body armor. Gomez is giving an interview to a journalist who looks familiar, though I can’t place her. I stop and listen for a moment.

“These protections are hard-won,” Gomez says. “The speakers that night, the night of the Haymarket Riot, they were rallying support for the eight-hour workday. Nobody had called for a riot; it was a rally. When the violence started, it was raining; the crowd was going home. No one knows who threw the bomb, or why. The men who were arrested and hanged were later pardoned, but by then they were martyrs for the cause. Nothing ever gets solved by violence. You might think you’ve solved it, but it will always come undone. That’s why America never heals . . .” Gomez looks exhausted; he told me this morning that he and Charisse were at the hospital with Max most of the night.

Caralora, Joe and I pack our cars with leaflets, bottled water, snacks, first aid kits, signage, sunscreen, body armor. We leave early, to get strategic parking spaces. Gomez managed to get a permit for this memorial, but the police aren’t enthusiastic about it (it is, after all, a commemoration of a legendarily massive fuckup of the justice system, the kickoff event of international labor solidarity); the new mayor (no fan of Gomez’s) has warned us to “keep it positive—nothing provocative.” Yeah, right.

When we arrive at the site of the Haymarket Riot, on Des Plaines near Randolph, I’m struck again by the complete lack of any plaque or statue. In a city that’s famous for its public art, there’s nothing. There was once a huge statue honoring the police who died in the riot, but in 1927 a streetcar jumped its tracks and crashed into it; the driver said he was “sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised.” Until recently, there was a sculpture on the spot where the wagon used by the speakers as a platform had stood. It was evocative—workers on a wagon that seemed to be disintegrating around them—but last year after the mayoral election it disappeared completely, and now the site is just another sidewalk in front of an office building. If you didn’t know, it would seem ordinary, innocent, not hallowed ground for the international workers’ movement. The city covers up the spray-painted anarchist circles as soon as they appear, and removes the flowers people prop against the nearby lamppost.

Even though we’ve arrived early, it’s crowded. The police have the block barricaded against cars, but they let us drive in after Gomez rolls down his window and speaks to the sergeant for a few minutes. We park our cars in the lot across the street from the site.

“I don’t like this,” Gomez says as we’re unloading. Caralora and I look up to see what he means.

Alba says, “Let’s leave. Tell them you don’t feel well. Let’s go home.”

“What’s wrong?” Charisse asks. Gomez and Alba are shielding their eyes, looking over the crowd.

Gomez says, “I don’t know, people just seem—tense.”

Now I notice it. No one in the crowd is mingling. Everyone stands in groups, facing inward with space between the groups, like trees with crown shyness. I see people we know, people from our ward, friends of Caralora’s from Ann Arbor, a bunch of union organizers and mutual aid group friends, friends from Critical Mass and the food bank. People look over their shoulders, then quickly turn back to their friends. I spot a guy who used to work for us in the ward office, Griffin Moffat, who’s standing near the speaker’s platform, arms crossed, watching the crowd. I jog over to him. “Hey, Griff. What’s going on?”

“Hey, Zach. I’m not quite sure. Do you know those folks, over there, by that doorway?” He’s pointing across the street. It takes me a second to see who he’s talking about: a group of five white men of various heights and builds, dressed in khakis and polo shirts, some wearing baseball caps; they look like they got lost on their way to Wrigley Field. Griffin hands me a pair of fancy binoculars. It seems like an odd thing to happen to have, till I remember that he’s a birder. I adjust the binoculars and peer at the men.