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After work, at the barbershop, a woman with a wordlessly kind, toothy smile—whose body resembled a dented can—cut my hair. "Anything to help with this," I reiterated, pointing to my receding hairline. A middle-aged man with Down Syndrome wearing a neon pink polo and thick black sunglasses sat in front of me in a bright red chair, dancing enthusiastically to Coldplay. Then N dropped L and me off at the station.
At first, it was sound, and then sky. The train felt "Tarkovskian": screeching bumps like an irregular heartbeat; parking garages and high-rises. Human faces.
The rain became heavy and we stood beneath an awning to a dorm. I called an Uber, but right as the app indicated that the driver was arriving—I didn't see the black sedan materialize, though I expected to see it due to the moving blue dot on the screen—the ride was canceled. We decided to walk. The rain cleared.
L crouched on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, facing the Washington Monument—a long marble obelisk, the tallest free-standing stone structure in the world—waiting for the lightning to come back so he could capture it inside his phone. On Sunday, there would be seven fights on the White House lawn. Tonight was the press conference.
A plane sounded like ripping paper. A rushing waterfall of sky. The double rainbow disappeared and lightning streaked across the tarry dark like forearm veins.
N texted that the conference was delayed until nine.
It was a strange feeling, liminalling around in front of the Lincoln Memorial, flanked by giant screens telling us to seek safety,with nowhere nearby to actually go inside. An obese white man in a flat brim hat and a string bag told a guy in sunglasses that his sister was a flight attendant. A multigenerational Indian family asked L to take their picture, then demanded that he take it again, this time "higher," as they stood smiling underneath the changing sky. A black woman in a pink dress walked alone, occasionally standing on her tip toes.
The edited version of DMX's "X Gon' Give it To Ya" blasted across the National Mall. People flopped and jiggled. It was hard not to feel moved when I looked at their faces.
A tiny brunette in a bright red skirt took a selfie and smiled with tiny teeth. She put her phone in her small bag and absentmindedly said "dangerous-looking men" to the guy she was with, looking around and still smiling, but with pursed lips. Another couple passed and the girl said, "Do you have a hard time being short? Like, do you hate it?" to the guy, clutching his arm. Dark green trees with purple-blue tips looked like slushies and swayed in the semidistance. The sky kept changing color—black, dark purple, orange-yellow, red—a round cloud touched a flat cloud and it looked like a headboard in the sky. It felt like there were two or three skies. "Baller / shot caller / twenty inch blades / on the Impala" was loud, and people moved their bodies subtly, quietly singing along, as if to themselves, or moved their mouths uncertainly to make shapes that resembled the words they anticipated, performing memory.
"Maybe it's just vibes?" L said. "Is anything happening?"
Daniel Cormier's face replaced the weather warning on the screen. He was talking into a microphone, but no sound came out."Fix your mic," someone yelled. "Fuck fuck," yelled another. Cormier's voice became briefly audible, before the camera switched to an Asian woman, whose grin as she spoke seemed to grow upward into her eyes.
Nelly's "Ride Wit Me" came on, and I felt nostalgic for third grade, when I loved Nelly. I was like a stunned bird—feeling small and powerless beneath the sky—oscillating between disbelief and numb dissociation—thinking "This is crazy" repeatedly. A deep-fried celebration of the wealthiest, most militarily dominant, culturally influential country in the history of the world. I looked at my phone.
Only ten minutes had passed; it felt like forty-five. Time was moving more slowly in my body than in my phone. But my phone couldn't tell. My phone had never experienced time.
On the giant screen, Alex Pereira got out of a black sedan, and the crowd chanted "Chama Chama Chama." Cyril Gane got out of another, wearing a short black leather jacket. The crowd boo'd. Scattered chants of "Fuck France" dispersed across the crowd. But the moment the voices met in a unified chant, they petered out, and voices meekly dropped off into smaller and more disconnected units of sound.
“Click click boom”—shadows of snipers on the roof—an advertisement for America—"Greatness isn't only measured in the moment," an AI voice said, "but in how long the world remembers."
Navy guys in uniform formed two lines up the stairs to the Lincoln Memorial, holding guns which rested on their shoulders, pointing up. The fighters were announced individually, and they walked down the steps between the Navy men. Random-seeming people in brightly colored T-shirts accompanied the fighters on their descent, walking normally as the fighters raised their arms or pumped their fists or did something to try to hype up the crowd. At first, I assumed these people were the fighters' kids, but then, when multiple seemed to have some kind of visible "condition," or appeared older or clearly unrelated to the fighter in some hard-to-define way, I considered that they could belong to something like the "Make A Wish" Foundation. When I Googled later, the AI overview said that "Each fighter walked down…accompanied by children from the local area" and that, "Dana White had invited a 'mystery young boy' from the crowd onto the stage").
After the fighters made their entrances, Dana White approached the microphone, and said that there were two new sponsors; the Fight of the Night and Best Fighter awards would now be a quarter of a million dollars each. Dana was yelling, but his voice was muffled through the speakers, so the sound reached the crowd as if it had travelled somewhere far away, then back to us, delayed, and weaker.
The first question from one of the many journalists was for Alex Pereira, a kickboxer who'd joined the UFC in the Middleweight division and became world champion faster than any fighter had before. Pereira then moved up a weight class, and became world champion there too. The fight on Sunday was at heavyweight; if he won, he'd be the first fighter in UFC history to win the belt in three divisions.
A question was directed toward Cyril Gane, and a voice behind me shrieked "Fuck France," then paused. "It's not cool."
When the press conference ended, the sky was red.
*
On the way home, our Uber driver kept swerving, and missing turns. "This GPS does not work," he said in a thick Nigerian accent through an N-95 mask. "Doesn't work." Dramatic-sounding dialogue from a TV show in another language played through his phone speaker; on another Android screen, he scrolled Arabic text as he drove. Lincoln and I looked at pictures on our phones.
Then, mine started buzzing.
I was getting an Instagram video call from "humble__mf27," an account I encountered during the initial viral Kool Aid pineapple trend—my algorithm had been showing me videos of people buying jars of pineapples and adding Kool Aid packets, sugar, and sometimes alcohol into the jars, then selling them in public, often parking lots or parks, and filming their customers' immediate reactions as they bit into a pineapple spear—and noticed that the account was based in D.C.
I'd messaged the account days prior, but they didn't respond. Now, it was 11:30 PM, and humble__mf27 was video calling me.
I picked up.
Humble held the phone close to her face, so that only her chin and teeth were visible—when she shifted I glimpsed a braid—her voice was hard to hear—it sounded like a distant gurgle. I hung up and messaged her my phone number, suggesting that we meet at a gas station near my house. Humble video called me again, but when I answered, it was immediately disconnected. Then, L's phone started ringing, and for a moment I thought Humble was somehow calling him, but it was a Facetime from his brother, standing with a blonde woman in daylight, with her hand on his chest, which she then moved her hand toward the camera, displaying a diamond ring, shining through L's phone in the dark backseat of the car. After L told them congratulations, the car felt still.
When Humble called back, I was in my kitchen, and I put her on speaker phone. She asked what flavors I wanted. She had Green Apple, Dark Cherry, Watermelon, and "Blue." As I considered the flavors, I unintentionally said "mmmm."
"He said, Mmmmmmmm," Humble said, "Ha ha ha ha, Mmmmmmm, Mmm, I know that's right."
I said Watermelon.
"Are you all by yourself?" she asked.
"No," I said defensively. "I'm with my wife and friend."
"And they don't want any?" she asked.
"I'll get two," I said, not wanting Humble to think I had no money or friends, and feeling self-conscious about wanting her late night trip to feel "worth it."
"Hold on," I paused, looking to N and L for help, then ordered Dark Cherry.
At the Shell gas station, Humble leaned her body halfway out the window, wagged her finger at L's cowboy boots, and yelled "Oooooooh, he got on them lemon—peppa—steppaaaasss." I glimpsed thick, menacing thighs in the passenger seat. Humble reached into the back of the van with her whole body, and passed us two glass jars through her car window. Lincoln clinked them together on the drive home and smiled.
The pineapples looked like glowsticks, and tasted nauseating, and smelled bad, and we all laughed a little while eating them, and I felt old.
*
*"Ban Gane" is the prologue to "America 250."
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