2016, Chicago — Dora, my Uber driver, called me at 5:45 just as I saw the police close down the turn into the street in front of my hotel. A blue sign made of what looked like an old wood picket fence stenciled with “Police Line Do Not Cross” and underneath “Chicago Police Dept.” Dora couldn’t get to me, she said. They had just closed her turn, three or four blocks away from my hotel. I lied to her and told her I’d meet her there. I hung up and canceled my Uber trip. “Movie’s in eighteen minutes. I’ll just walk.”
After Dr. Strange, things were about to get stranger. I left the theatre after sleeping through the last 20 minutes of the movie and rode the long escalators down to Michigan Avenue. The air was cold, but it felt good. I was running on less than three hours of sleep and over five hours of airplanes. Advil and toothpaste were next, at the Walgreens on the way to my hotel. I walked past what’s now become the familiar homeless man — Daniel — with his dog and noticed that Michigan Avenue was empty. I saw a Starbucks and a $2.19 later I felt the familiar burn of caffeine and half-and-half warm me up. Cold outside but nothing different on the sidewalks — same sidelong glances, same blonde women with sleek dark coats holding on to stubble-faced thirty-somethings, same cutthroat rhythm crosswalks—when I saw something that had caught my eye on the way to the theatre, over two hours earlier. A single helicopter hovering above the old Chicago News building, pinned static onto the blue sky. It was high, much higher than the building’s spire, but it just buzzed unmoving like an enormous metallic hummingbird.
Now, walking back to the hotel, I saw its eye — a glaring streak surveying Michigan Avenue beamed from the same helicopter, buzzing above the same building.
A large, pudgy kid running, finger pointed at something behind me. “They’re coming toward us,” he said to his friend in an excited voice with a stereotypical lisp and a distinct Latino plume in his vowels.
A block away I saw a group of hoodied skaters walking on the concrete median separating the two sides of Michigan Avenue. Boards in hand, yelling with spent, hoarse voices, jumping around and onto the median, and scurrying back into the street. Just past them came the rest of the students. Piercings, signs, and iPhones all over the place. “We want a President, not a fucking racist,” started somewhere in the sea of people, but a few seconds later was replaced by “Fuck Donald Trump.”
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