ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Operation Blindfold

Vignette - Operation Blindfold
Not Kosher.
Dramatis Personae Tag
In Absentia	2013-06-19 Tag strikes back...with art.
Location <NYC> Essex Street Market - Lower East Side
Colorful banners flutter over the red brick facade of the Essex Street Market. Workers on break smoke outside the white double doors and early evening shoppers chat on the sidewalk in the shade of leafy ash trees. The striking angular bulk of the Blue building on Norfolk Street looms over the entire block like an alien ship ready for liftoff. Tag walks down briskly toward the subway station, hands shoved deep into the pockets of navy canvas pants with yellow lightning bolts where blood stripes would go. The sleeves of his oversized black t-shirt--adorned with overlapping technicolor explosions as if he had been used as target practice with a paintball gun--reach almost all the way down to scraped and scabbed elbows. The corner of a baby blue bandana peeks out from beneath the shirt on his right flank. His jagged hair is spiked with pomade and stark white like his sneakers. He wears sunglasses with red frames and a pink-lavender mirror finish on the lenses. Two NYPD patrol cars are parked in front of the market--one in the unloading zone and the other in front of a fire hydrant. Four uniformed officers are clustered beside the leading vehicle, chatting and drinking from styrofoam cups. Tag sucks in a long, trembling breath and stays the course that will bring him within arms’ reach of the milling cops. The first sign that something bizarre is happening is the rear windshield of the trailing police car--the farthest one from Tag--frosting over on the inside until the glass looks almost solid white, but still glossy on the outside. Then the same happened to its rear windows, front windows, and finally front windshield. One cop actually drops his coffee and gawks, while the others look from the windows to the milling crowd on the sidewalk. Some of that crowd also stops to stare, especially when the windowpanes on the other patrol car also white out in the same order. “Stand back, everybody, /stand back!/” one of the officers shouts. His partner is talking to the radio on his shoulder frantically. Tag reaches the edge of the group. Many of those gathered are some flavor of East Asian and speaking either Mandarin, Cantonese, or Korean. He shoulders his way with numerous apologies to get a better view. “...affirmative, but I don’t think it’s /actually/ ice,” the cop tells his radio, touching a window ginger as if he expects to be electrocuted on contact. Even as more gather to witness the spectacle, the windshield of the lead car dims as an image blots out the white like a Polaroid developing. The resulting picture is a decent reproduction of Delacroix’s painting, /Liberty Leading the People/. As the new image is out of the officers’ line of sight, they only take notice when a wave of admiring murmurs draw their attention to it. As soon as they rush to examine the apparition, the windshield of the other car starts changing, too. Less than a minute later, it is displaying the famous photograph of an unknown protester standing in front of a column of tanks during the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989. This draws a much stronger reaction from the gathered citizens, especially the ones speaking dialects Chinese. “Jesus Christ,” says one of the cops, slowly reaching for his sidearm. “It coulda been anyone here. We should just arrest everyone...” suggests the one who is now wearing coffee on his trousers. This is evidently the wrong thing to say. The crowd reacts immediately, though not uniformly. Some make to leave at once, while others remain nervously in place and yet others raise their voices in objection. “But we have done nothing!” cries a well-dressed middle-aged man. “In America, we have rights!” “Do you think we cannot speak English?” demands an old woman dragging what looks like her own body weight in groceries. While the officers scramble to contain the crowd, another pair of images--this time identical to each other--appear on the rear windshields of their vehicles. The words “Operation Blindfold” arc over a personification of Justice, sword in one hand and scale in the other, lifted from the state seal of New York. In the chaos, Tag slips into the market building along with others who deemed it more prudent to be elsewhere. He emerges on the other side of the block and resumes his journey to the subway station. There are plenty of other patrol cars in Manhattan.