Matt, in a sweated-up white shirt, tries to keep his head, his vision blurring, throat raw and tormented as if he has swallowed razor wire. He stops to dampen his handkerchief at a water fountain and is just rolling it up to hold over his nostrils.
Crossing the clotted street toward the Hilton, where the gas is thinning but the bodies closely packed make the atmosphere viscous, it takes a while to realize that they’re surrounded by cops, hundreds of cops, pressing in from three sides, no exit. A few yards behind them, a forest of billy clubs is flailing. One cop winds up like a pitcher on the mound before smashing downward. Matt scrambles not to lose his footing as he’s pressed steadily forward by the great crowd beast, inch by inch toward the big window of the Haymarket Lounge in the Hilton, waits for something to happen to avert the inevitable crush—will he be trampled?—hears the loud crack of glass smashed, as if in slow motion, sees a young man in a cowboy hat pushing his way inside, or being pushed, it’s hard to tell, and now cops like mad bulls are charging into the Haymarket Lounge, so that he has no choice but to let himself get shoved inside, too, taking a glancing blow on his shoulder from a club. Inside, people lie on the floor bleeding from head wounds, whether from broken glass or billy clubs is not clear, and shrieks ricochet as if they are ripples in one unrelenting scream, so as time resumes, goes regular again, he clambers out of the lounge and through a thinning crowd of demonstrators mixing with delegates and delegates’ wives and tourists and God knows who else, into the lobby, where thinning wafts of tear gas are joined by something more putrid—stink bombs set off by the radicals, he will later learn. Everyone looks bewildered and panicky, no one more than the well-dressed Democrats.
He scrambles back out onto Michigan Avenue and flees to the left, northward. The air is less viscous here, more like oxygen, easier to breathe, but Matt has to blink a lot, trying to see straight. The window of the Haymarket Lounge is completely shattered, people are writhing inside, there are occasional screams. He keeps running.