No Man's Land

"Duck."

Another bottle sailed over my head. Two mobs threw bottles and rocks at each other in the street outside the legislature. We slipped into the lobby of a tall building. "What's the dispute?"
Sergei scratched his head. "It started a long time ago. Somebody wanted to pass a public works bill authorizing a four-lane bypass for MacArthur Avenue. But there was a dispute about the dimensions. And then more dispute about the wording. Some said there is a technical difference between a pedestrian and a civilian. So they got some experts to come in from the University and they testified. But that only muddied the waters."
"Really? How could they muddy it. I mean -" Twenty men overturned a bus. Twenty other men turned the bus back on it's wheels.
"Well, at first, they found out the units of measurement were flawed, shaved a centimeter or two, like a butcher's thumb on the scale. So they found a fall guy and fired him. He got a job working for the treasury. Somebody threw him out a window. Engineers said that the flawed units meant the bypass would end up at the foot of the Forgotten War Memorial. It would be a nice view. But some asked, 'where do we go to from here?'" He pressed his nose against the glass. "I can't see." He looked down the road at the plumes of teargas and the riot police that emerged from the cloud. His breath fogged the glass as he spoke. "Then somebody forged the data. Some lady took the blame for this one. She was transferred to a research lab somewhere. So that meant the bypass would run beneath the city, buried in the Ordovician strata - where we find trilobites and primitive sharks and evolutionary dead ends." He flinched as a man hit a woman with a placard that read "Save Our Data". "Hey, isn't she your aunt?" Another man arrived and swatted at the man with a placard that read, "Safety In Numbers." Then the woman picked up a placard and began hitting the man in the back. Placards waved in the air like street signs in a hurricane.
I reached into my pocket for a handkerchief. "I wouldn't recognize her anymore."
Sergei squinted. "Well, somebody loaded the data search with rhetorical queries and false dilemmas and cyclical logic and the data was completely skewed. At that point we began to doubt if anyone had actually proposed the bypass in the first place. And whether it was worth it. Maybe nobody needed it. And that's when they realized the bypass would be nearly six-dimensional. That's one huge public works project. Probably keep us all employed until, well, until the end of time. That's when the Army Corps of Engineers got involved."
The mobs were in hand to hand combat now, ripping, kicking, pulling, while riot police arrived and swirled in their midst, clubbing hairy men with truncheons.
Sergei looked at me, pulling his glasses down his nose. "So which are you, a pedestrian or a civilian?"
"Huh?"
"Well, which are you, a pedestrian or a civilian?"
"Well, I don't know. Both, I suppose."
"There you go, you might as well be out there throwing gasoline bottles around like the rest of them, swinging from lampposts, grinding your teeth."
"Wait - I mean, how do you mean?"
"Well, thousands are pouring in from across the country, to support one group or the other. This is who they are. They live for this. Look at the crowd." He pointed to the mobs. One side, ragged and frothy, the other side, ragged and frothy, each with posters and bottles and rocks and slogans and chants. One side beat the pavement with their fists. The other side jumped up and down shouting angry slogans. The other side replied with chants. They traded insults. They threw dust and stones at each other. Then they traded sides and then they merged, shredding each other with bare arms and slaps and fists and fingernails and loud voices, swinging with each other round and round, marching arm in arm, slugging, spinning, hollering.
I stood transfixed. "It's like they are living out a man's last request, like a square dance before an execution."
He nodded. "They said a pedestrian walks upright and a civilian walks orderly. That's just what they said. And then this." He gazed through the window. A mob pulled at the arms of a man while another mob pulled at his legs. Around the corner, a group of protesters squatted on the sidewalk, tending to their wounded, picking glass from their hair. Men scaled the side of buildings, throwing shoes and belts. Women ripped children from the arms of other women. And then, paramilitary soldiers descended from ropes from above and swung into the crowd, flailing.
I looked at my hands. "Is there a third option?"

"To this?"
"No, to us."