drilled for how to deploy as fast as possible. But in the real lobby, with milling employees and pursuing police, deployment isn’t pretty. The scuffle splits Mimi and Douglas. They end up across from each other in the ring. They have three seconds to lock down. Douglas sticks his left arm in the black bear and attaches the carabiner on his wrist cable to the steel post welded into the center of the tube. His companions do the same. Seconds later, the whole nine-node ring solidifies into something impervious to anything short of a diamond saw.
They sit cross-legged in a circle on the floor around a fat pillar. Douglas tilts to one side, and still can’t see her. He shouts “Meem,” and that round brown face he has come to associate with all the world’s goodness peeks around and grins. He shoots her a thumbs-up, before remembering his thumb is inside a steel cylinder.
ONE LONG TRACKING SHOT records each close-up. A tall, gawky man with a gap between his front teeth and long bushy hair pulled back in a ponytail starts to sing. We shall overcome. We shall overcome. There are snickers, at first. But by measure three the rest of the group is singing along. Five policemen tug at the demonstrators, but easy disentanglement is not an option. A uniformed man says, as if reading from a prompter: “My name is Sheriff Sanders. Your presence here is in violation of the penal code, section numbers . . .” Shouts from the ring drown him out. He stops, closes his eyes, and starts again. “This is private property. I order you on behalf of the state of Oregon to disperse. If you do not withdraw peacefully, you will be held for unlawful assembly as well as trespass with criminal intent. Any attempt to resist arrest will be considered in violation of the penal code sections—”
The gawky, gap-toothed man shouts over him. “You should be joining us down here.”
The officer recoils. Someone off-camera calls, “You’re all criminals. You just want to shit on other people!”
The ring starts chanting again. More police crowd the circle’s circumference. The sheriff steps forward again. His speech is slow, clear, and loud, like a grade school teacher’s. “Release your hands from whatever restraints . . . from inside your tubes. If you do not release yourselves within five minutes, we intend to use pepper spray to compel you to comply.”
Someone in the ring says, “You can’t do that.” The camera settles on a small Asian woman with round face and black bob. Off-camera the sheriff says, “We certainly can. And we will.” There’s shouting from the ring. The camera doesn’t know where to point. The round-faced woman can be heard saying, “It’s forbidden under United States law for any public official to use pepper spray unless he’s in danger. Look at us! We can’t even move!”
The sheriff consults his watch. “Three minutes.”
Everyone talks at once. A pan across the confused lobby cuts back to frightened close-ups. There’s a scuffle; a young man in the ring gets kicked in the kidney from behind. The camera swings and lands on the gap-toothed man. His ponytail whips back and forth. “She’s asthmatic, man. Bad. You can’t use pepper spray on an asthmatic. People die from that, man.”
Someone off-camera calls, “Do what the officer says.”
The gap-toothed man nods like his neck is broken. “Do it, Mimi. Unlock. Do it.”
The gray-haired woman shouts him down. “We all agreed to stay in this together.”
The sheriff calls out, “You are in violation of the law and your actions are damaging to the community. Please vacate these premises. You have sixty seconds.”
Sixty seconds pass in the same confusion. “I’m asking you again to unlock and remove your hands from those tubes and leave peacefully.”
“I won an Air Force Cross for being shot down protecting this country.”
“I gave the order for you to disperse over five minutes ago. You have been warned of the consequences, and you have accepted them.”
“I don’t accept them!”
“We will now use pepper spray and other chemical agents to get you to release your hands from your metal pipes. We will continue to apply these agents until you agree to release yourselves. Are you ready to release now, and avoid this application?”
DOUGLAS LEANS ONE WAY, then the other. He can’t see her. The pole is between them, and the ring is going nuts. He yells her name and she’s there, tilting her scared gaze into his. He shouts things she can’t