Mobile Command Monolith

There is a San Francisco Police Department Mobile Command Station on the east side of Union

Square.

It is dense. Immense like the grime of the city as it monitors the glass jewelry box of the apple

store. Yet so ignored by the public as the lone stationary force in their timelapse city views.

The light refracts through the china cabinet store windows into my eyes as I stand so close to

the glass that my breath fogs in a perfect circle.

I am watching the eerie grimey monolith back.

Outside stands guard a man so thickly shrouded in violence, that I do not know where his form

terminates beneath his Kevlar shell, body amorphous under its constraining weight.

He holds a cup of steaming liquid, pale and watered down like his sandy brown hair, dark

enough to invoke neither deep penetrating warmth nor pleasantly satiating flavour.

Cheap diner coffee kept far too hot for too long scalds my throat and curdles my tongue in

ephemeral sympathy, and I imagine for a moment that his beverage tastes the same.

In memories cast in winter morning light, my grandfather says, over a plastic tablecloth, at a

cracking bench seat, “They’re having problems in the tenderloin with all those drug addict

homeless”

Reflexively my lips form, in soft, stillborn protest, every antiracist platitude that I have recited like

the national anthem so much that they feel like blinking, breathing, swallowing.

The pig in Kevlar makes eye contact with me,

Smiles at me like one of his own bland children

I can see him smiling at his wife in an overpriced San Francisco apartment just like mine,

shaking his head at replacement costs for the curved glass windows of his built in victorian

liquor cabinets.

I try to see him as Theo George, 70s moustache, back broken in service to the public good (he

told his commanding officer the car was collapsing, but who better to send in than the man the

cops wanted to push out).

I try to see him holding a pan of Pastitsio and complaining about his aches and pains over smile

lines familiar like home and kouklitsa mou,

I try to see him as the man who raised my father.

I fail to see him, like my uncle, doing this job so his big sister never has to feel dirt dig into her

forearms from her hiding place under the porch.

I fail to see him going home to a house that is cramped and poor and cheerful and smells of

kolarakia and fresh bread.

The sunlight so bright in Union Square is so absent from this cop’s form, from the void of his

vest and gun, and I find that I cannot relax the thread of anxiety in my shoulders.

This cop does not sing hymns in Greek and grit his teeth and grin while his new partner on the

force asks, “Zahropos? What is that, a disease?”

From the command unit, the cop has become focused on my scowl, on the way my eyebrows

reveal my displeasure and ethnic background.

He nods, a test, a challenge, a threat,

and I pull my jaw taut, my face distorting to a soft smile (‘white girl tears are our weapon, Ella’)

and my head dips in diminutive greeting.

The cop smiles broadly and turns to his partner to say something. They both laugh and glance

back to me, the mannequin in the shop window.

I stumble back, the cop never leaving his cemented spot in my vision, his smile never dropping

into something excusable.

I need to leave.

Out of this jewelry box, false safety, uncanny shelter

Out of the cop’s unfamiliar curdling coffee smile, malicious gaze, false protection

Out of this eerie facade of security and this prism of distortion

Out.

I flee, and the San Francisco Police Department Mobile Command Station on the east side of

Union Square remains.