by Lauren Oyler
Resisting their dutiful objections I made them drop me off at some unknown corner so I could walk to meet Jeremy at a bar in Shaw. I wanted to sleep immediately, but we hadn’t seen each other in about two years so I would have to drink a beer and listen to him talk. The bar, stalwartly dingy despite the creeping cleanliness outside, was crowded, but I got seats for us by emphasizing my natural weariness and saying loudly, “I feel like I might pass out? I don’t know what it is. I mean, I definitely ate . . . ?”
Jeremy had recently started a militant group workout regimen and was, frankly, very hot to begin with; he arrived late to everything because no one had ever gotten mad about eventually seeing his face. In the past he’d occasionally slept with women, always a little mordantly I thought. Felix didn’t know that, nor did he know that Jeremy and I had made out three times over the course of our friendship, each one very fun if disorienting; I siphoned my deniability from the way Jeremy had, after moving to D.C. a couple of years before, become more straightforwardly homosexual, going to gay bars but no longer any queer spaces, confusing fewer and fewer people. He showed up twenty minutes after he texted that he was five minutes away and immediately began telling me about how his new boyfriend was accusing him of gaslighting him about his (the new boyfriend’s) cooking skills, by saying he didn’t have any. “But he can’t cook!” Jeremy said, seriously bewildered. “He even made a joke about it on Grindr! He almost poisoned someone!”
Occasionally he would ask me about some aspect of my life and I would say something equivocal—it was all fine—until he asked how things were with that guy and I was able to touch his hand conspiratorially and say, with a naughty smile, Bad, I’m going to break up with him on Sunday. I hadn’t planned on telling Jeremy, or anyone, about the Instagram account, but I suddenly realized I was bored of trying to care about something I did not care about. It didn’t have to make me look bad that I had dated such a person, I reasoned, so long as I spun it the right way; a laughing confidence would make anyone doubt their harsh judgment of my judgment. Besides, Jeremy wasn’t on any social media except for his wholesome Facebook account, where he posted photos of his rescue pit bull and shared news articles several days after they had been wrung dry of any interest on Twitter; he didn’t know Felix or anyone else who did. Following a compulsory moment of headshaking for the potential harm the Instagram account had inflicted on the country, the way it may have influenced voters or hoodwinked the gullible who would go on to hoodwink the more gullible, we laughed together as I showed him my favorites of Felix’s posts; since we knew or thought we knew the intention behind them, we analyzed them like they were works of art. We didn’t get home until one thirty, after stopping at Jeremy’s friend’s house to smoke a joint on the windy roof, which I resented intensely.
Felix stopped replying to my texts at around 11 p.m., when he said he was going to sleep and I told him we were going to the friend’s house and added an angry emoji, and when I woke up at seven to leave for the march, he still hadn’t sent me anything. I was annoyed but didn’t find it peculiar—he slept late and refused to see the advantages of certain relationship best practices, like ignoring your friends and surroundings in order to text your partner constantly. I reminded myself that I should be happy he didn’t text me because another minor annoyance on the pile would make the breakup that much easier.
In the days before the march, women’s websites had published clusters of articles on how to prepare: what you should wear, what you should bring, what you should know. The first type of article was ridiculed: yes, we’re women, so the most important thing for us when making a political statement is how we look? Very sexist. I thought the guides had a point—I spent a long time figuring out what I would wear, seeking both practicality in unpredictable weather and to give off a sense of intellectual purpose—but like almost all internet guides the articles were completely unhelpful beyond suggesting a fanny pack, which I borrowed from a friend’s boyfriend. Ultimately it doesn’t matter but I’ll tell you anyway, because it felt a little like a disguise: I wore loose jeans, a men’s work jacket I got at a vintage store, a baseball hat, the stocky Australian farm boots that had become trendy (unfortunately I didn’t buy them until after this development, so I can’t claim savvy), and the fanny pack. The website for the event had firmly explained that bags larger than six inches across would not be permitted and that the only backpacks allowed would be the clear kind we had been instructed to buy in fifth grade, after the Columbine school shooting. It was foggy and gray but not raining or cold.
As I made my way into a line for the escalator at the Metro station near Jeremy’s apartment I saw that most people had followed the rules, which we would soon learn could in no way be enforced, as well as worn the pussy hats. There were a lot of women, even there at that insignificant stop with a name I don’t remember, and as we waited under the sick mossy light favored by the D.C. transit authority we looked across the tracks at the empty platform for the trains heading away from downtown. More and more groups of women, mostly older, with short fluffy hairstyles and many-pocketed jackets, came to wait, and when our train arrived only about half the people standing on the platform could fit. Alone I was able to squeeze and once inside held onto an overhead bar, sweating, and laughed with all the people there who seemed like they had only ever used a subway on vacation, people who might have gotten lost if it weren’t for the compass of the crowd squinting at maps and asking other passengers if the train was going where they wanted to go, asking even though it was clear that that was where everyone else was going, too. At station after station no one got off, so no one could get on. I could feel my face flushing; the skin at the top of my forehead along the band of my hat began to itch. A man with a protest sign folded politely in half tried to get off a couple of stops early and when he couldn’t make it to the doors before they closed he could only chuckle and shake his head. Despite the large estimates and elaborate preparation, everyone had expected the city to look like it does when there’s a home game or big concert, noticeably more populated and obnoxious but not transformatively so. I didn’t pay attention to the names of each stop and got off with everyone else. The platform filled with women and as we glacially followed instructions by engulfed employees to keep moving, someone at the top of the far-off escalator began to cheer. Down the escalator and along the platform the feminine whoop carried, signs bobbing in the air, until the entire station was rooting itself on.
The streets of downtown D.C. were made up of lines, people waiting at coffee shops, people making their way from the subway to a square to another square, emerging from the underground at a rate that would remain steady all day. The sense of population was geometric and unsteadying: the area I was in was crowded with people, a number I couldn’t hope to estimate, and all around me radiating outward were identical areas crowded equally or more so with people. Later I would learn that this thought process could be applied not just to the square blocks of downtown D.C. but to towns and cities around the world, where only just fathomable numbers of people were congregating to protest something that was so multifaceted and specific that only general, sweeping words fit perfectly. In the weeks since Trump had been elected there had been a quick proliferation of vocabulary: authoritarian, strongman, autocracy, kleptocracy. There were working groups and organizers and various praises and critiques of black bloc tactics. It was as if everyone had taken Introduction to Political Philosophy and wanted to impress the hot professor, who had grown up in the Soviet Union. If everyone in the world could take Introduction to Political Philosophy I’m medium-certain we would have been in a better situation than we were, but as it was the language felt wrong, ripped from the past and pasted on the present, its rough edges visible and curling, though I couldn’t find a way to pin down getting educated as a bad thing.
I arrived downtown hoping to sit quietly in a coffee shop and eat breakfast before going to the National Mall, where a demonstration was being held before the march, but when I g
ot out of the Metro I found there was nowhere viable to do this; every café was full of people taking pictures and talking and laughing. After walking several blocks I stood in a line and bought a yogurt thing with granola and a coffee and a package of expensive beef jerky they were selling at the counter; I had been spending money somewhat frivolously because I was about to do something brave and honorable by dumping my boyfriend and needed to positively reinforce my decision. I went outside and sat on some concrete barricades, used the previous day for the sparse inauguration parade, and watched in dismay as a man, a little older than I, saw what I was doing and came over to sit on another one, within speaking distance. A pair of women I couldn’t name but believed I recognized as prominent feminists or intellectuals left the café and walked briskly down the sidewalk. I was asked if I was alone. I looked over right as he was taking a bite of an egg sandwich.
“No,” I replied. “It seems like there are thousands of people here.”
He laughed. He had ice-pick acne scars and spoke as if he had a single cotton ball inside each cheek—slightly impeded, a little wet—but his jaw was all joint and tendon, an illustration of the human body and its beautiful functionality. Since I was not yet agitated I kept talking to him. Felix would always tell people that strangers loved to talk to me, like really talk to me, not just say hey girl or whatever, and although I felt unnerved and imbalanced after most of these interactions I couldn’t help but reply when approached. I never understood why the strangers persisted; my discomfort made me a drag to talk to. As the guy ate his breakfast, he told me he had driven down from Philadelphia with his sister; they both thought it was important to come because their mother had grown up in an internment camp in California from ages two to six. I offered something paltry, “Wow,” and after he elaborated for a bit on how comparisons currently being drawn between Germany in the 1930s and the situation right now failed to consider the racist legacy of the United States (as well as the influence of social media), he asked what I was doing that evening, after the march. Until then I’d been happy to continue talking, impressed by his articulacy and admiring of his face, but I panicked at having to make a decision based only on what he’d told me—the mother, the sister, the deleteriousness of social media—so I told him I was going to a Planned Parenthood benefit concert with my boyfriend. Smiling with no teeth he left mid-sandwich, and I got yogurt on my pants. It took me longer than it should have to realize that I had just been hit on at a feminist protest, though I didn’t mind.
Turning the corner from Judiciary Square I joined a growing pack walking toward the Mall down a street that looked like what’s called a business park, the kind of complex where they sell cheap ideas of importance. The streets in downtown D.C. are too wide—empty, during nonbusiness hours, they looked especially too wide—but the crowd had covered the sidewalk, so many of us walked in the road now closed to traffic. The sky was watery but nonthreatening and no one seemed to notice as we passed a famous far-right conspiracy theorist shouting into an iPhone camera, sweat beading on his round tan head. I got close enough to do something to disrupt his shoot, push him or insult him, but all I did was look; I wanted to tell someone but there was no one to tell. There were many celebrities in D.C. that day, but the only other one I saw, later, was the now-former secretary of state walking his Labrador down Constitution Avenue as if he had been going about his day as usual and just happened to stumble upon a massive protest against his former employer. He smiled and waved and posed for pictures as he went, with rows of people filming from the sidelines and the most daring struggling to hold their phones aloft as they took videos of themselves walking alongside him.
The march wasn’t scheduled to start until the afternoon, but the organizers had planned a rally, a series of speakers that included Madonna and Angela Davis, that was about to begin. A conservative magazine editor would later write a piece criticizing liberals’ approach to stopping Donald Trump and use this supposedly alienating lineup as proof of their misunderstanding of the common man. “Look at this roster of speakers from the January 21 march,” he wrote. “What is Angela Davis doing there?” I felt these types of criticisms were rooted in the wrong assumption that organizers had thought ahead to achieving an elegant ideological ideal when really the march had originated because in the days after the election a couple of women (at least one white and living in Brooklyn) separately decided they would host—or decided to say they’d host—post-inauguration-day protests and initiated Facebook events that gained overwhelming support. As interest grew and people began asking about permits and diversity, a group of experienced activists had had to swoop in and save them: though a protest seems like it should be unwieldy by nature, developing spontaneously and out of passion, threatening for its unpredictability, it turns out you need permits.
As I walked down Constitution, I checked my phone and saw a missed call from a California number I didn’t recognize. Felix should have texted me by then, but my angst about it dissipated as I approached the Mall, where the crowd was getting denser and more determined. I felt the urge that comes at concerts to get to the front, though I had no idea what I wanted there. In the distance I could see the Museum of the American Indian, on the left, where tiny people were seated on buttresses watching the crowd form. I had no idea where it ended on any side, and several people on an elevated platform, including a young boy with a sign that said, “This is what a feminist looks like,” blocked my view directly ahead.
I reached the edge of the mass and began to haltingly make my way through, weaving past groups holding hands trying to stay together, girls who had miraculously spotted friends across the crowd and were now hugging with their mouths happily shocked open. I tried to memorize the signs and slogans, many of which featured female anatomy or mocked the new president for his small-handedness, small-mindedness, use of Twitter, and secret baldness, but figured there would be photo galleries online later if I wanted them as memories. Some of the messages were passive-aggressive—“Sisters, not just CIS-ters,” or “I’ll be seeing you white ladies at the next Black Lives Matter march, right?”—and others presented a forced sass: “NOPE.” In the days leading up to the march there had been disagreements on the official Facebook page for the event: A young black activist had written a post telling white women, “You don’t just get to join because now you’re scared, too . . . You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry.” A fifty-year-old white woman, Jennifer from South Carolina, told The New York Times that she found this unwelcoming and would no longer attend the march, adding, “How do you know that I’m not reading black poetry?” a comment for which she was mocked on Twitter. The young black activist’s comment didn’t seem to come from any real desire to educate except inasmuch as educating others allows one to exist on a higher plane—the idea that there was something to join, like a club or a group, with shifting gatekeepers of varying degrees of benevolence, was not an idea that men, being lone rangers, had ever had to overcome. If it seemed like there was something to join, it’s because it made someone feel important to portray it that way. Ultimately, though, Jennifer from South Carolina should have let it slide, because everyone knew she wasn’t reading black poetry.
I looked left and saw the misty Capitol building in the background of the sea of people, a fuchsia exhortation to RESIST a few feet in front of me. A pink and purple stuffed vagina the size of a Great Dane jounced top-heavily in the distance, apparently part of a headpiece. I maneuvered into my fanny pack for my phone—no messages, but no one had cell service, something I’d overheard more than one person say—and took a photo. To my right the Washington Monument faded into the air. The crowd was getting tighter, but I pressed forward, as if there were somewhere I had to be.
I reached an impasse near a traffic light that would cycle through its colors and signal the WALK countdown throughout the demonstration. Very occasionally I suffer
from sleep paralysis; I wake up stuck in bed and have to wrench myself past some shadowy barrier and into consciousness. Besides this, I had never in my life felt so physically unable to move. Although lines of protesters were able to snake through, led by people shouting that they “had a diabetic here!” or something similarly intended to invoke urgency, this rare movement seemed to intensify the fact of the mass; we were no longer a crowd of individual people but components of a single unit that none of us controlled. On the right an ambulance appeared—we were standing in the middle of what was usually a street—and people shouted to let it through, as if we couldn’t clearly see the large flashing vehicle alerting us to an emergency we were making worse. (A friend who’d found a space near the stage, which I would later learn was only about a block and a half away from where I was, told me that someone had had a heart attack.) There were no police anywhere, no barricades, no help. Later this would be determined to be the result of racism—because the march was predominantly white, the thinking went, authorities determined that a strong police presence wasn’t necessary—and I would feel guilty that I had in this moment wanted some authority to appear and herd us. I’d been watching a young, attractive priest act as a leader for a group of people, attempting to ferry older women back in the direction I’d come from, and he had only managed to travel a little sideways. People started nerdy chants and couldn’t get them to catch on (too many syllables, the rhythm was off); one woman tried to start “America the Beautiful” and failed, her warbly sentimentality chilling. My fears multiplied—pickpocketing, fire, broken toes, the fact that ISIS was lately encouraging followers to carry out acts of terrorism by procuring large trucks and plowing them through crowded public spaces—but like everyone around me I didn’t express anything but testiness, the temporary indignation of a person standing in a particularly inopportune spot on a crowded subway car when they need to get off at the next stop. I realized that if I stood on the balls of my feet I could see screens projecting the speakers’ faces, but there was no sound. A man farther ahead shouted, “Gloria Steinem is on!” and everyone cheered for minutes. Another ambulance appeared and although the mass’s ability to clear enough space for it to pass was reassuring, the swarm in its wake was not: people seemed to sprout out of each other to fill the space the ambulance had made. I felt suddenly that I had to get out, escape, go to the suburbs and never return, but in every direction people were packed as densely as we were. I looked at the group lounging on the steps of the Museum of the American Indian and envied them, though they would probably stay for the entire event, unwilling to give up their position, and I couldn’t imagine that—in addition to being scary it was also very boring. I reached for my phone and saw messages from a friend who had gotten on a bus in New York at 4 a.m. and was still on it, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and I tried to send her something in return—“It’s awful, trapped, can’t move, can’t see”—before I turned against the crowd and began trying to make my way out.
