Deconstruction Crew
That was the day the splinter group started up the hill, all of
them carrying inflatable hammers—big unwieldy things,
a yard long and too bulbous to hold with just one hand;
they walked in single file, ascended the bluestone steps that
bisect the park and then headed north for twenty blocks;
far uptown now, they gathered beneath a disused highway bridge,
at which point each of eighteen or so people in the group raised
their pneumatic novelty toys to shoulder height and pretended to
drive home the enormous rivets dotting the bridge’s i-beams,
massive pieces of steel that had supported thousands of tons of
concrete since the last decade of the previous century;
the people who witnessed this processional pretended to know
why it was happening and what it symbolized; by then, you see,
even the cops and priests had discovered irony, and everybody
was very hip, or trying to be—boot heels were unreasonably large,
and the per capita mustache stats were nothing short of alarming—
so they weren’t about to ask what was actually going on;
the hammering, of course, didn’t make a sound, and if you
watched from a couple hundred feet away, you’d have seen
a comic farce of a construction project, its defining feature an
uncanny silence, for none of the participants said a word; though
this all happened before everyone had phones in their pockets
all the time, there was some footage of the proceedings, or so
I’ve heard, but the reels were destroyed, thrown into the Hudson
by a rival faction, after which the only store in the city that stocked
inflatable tools and other such novelty items burned to the ground
under suspicious circumstances; in the years that followed, people said
the events of that day would be explained in fine detail by
the splinter group’s official historian, a meticulous sort who had
previously published a limited run of handmade volumes documenting
the group’s guiding principles and early years; but the day after
the city council voted to enact strict limits on the use on the public
library’s fax machines and eject squatters, of which he was one,
from the roller rink, he was seen hurriedly stacking cardboard boxes
in the bed of his El Camino, then driving away a little before sundown
Kevin Canfield lives in New York City. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Cineaste and other publications.