Seeing the President Come By

It was Tuesday, a very warm and blue day. It is unseasonal here, this April, not that I’ve been here in April before, but over the last few days we’ve had strange hot air, smells of summer, people in sandals. It powerfully recalls my first days here last summer and my first days here the year before. Fruit smearing and sweating, wanting water all the time. I don’t know how they do it, but some people, at the first gasps of summer, step into their pastels and pinks and sunnies as if they hadn’t for a moment slung them to the back of the cupboard and forgotten where they were. The West Village last weekend was a summer party of conversation and friendliness, with suntans and footlessness from I don’t know where. I take longer to get into the swing of spring, you know? I hold on to the colder months. This week I have been carrying a jumper rolled up in my bag, daring it all to end.

It was Tuesday. On the Sunday I had realised that I was scampering towards the deadlines for extending my paperwork and visas and some such. I don’t really know what I’m doing for the next stretch but there was no way it was going to be decided by some desk-slave immigration sergeant who didn’t like the look of my uncrossed i’s and t’s. So on Monday I knocked up some paperwork and had the Dean sign it as we sat in his office with the Boston marathon on the telly in the corner. It was hot in Boston too, and you could see the runners didn’t like it. Or could you see that? Maybe it was the marathon they weren’t enjoying. It was hard to tell. The Dean used to live very near the route and told me stories about it, he was grimly pleased to see that the leaders were starting the series of rolling hills and flats and declines and up-climbs that carry the last few miles of the race back into the city. People on the TV stood under trees in suburbia in comfortable clothes, as the spindly hot racers came by, the runners sweeping their hands along white tables to grab plastic cups of water and sugar, dousing themselves in it, slavering at their cheeks and then dropping the cups on the pale concrete. The Dean was enjoying it and occasionally turned the channel back to the baseball, so I left him to it.

The next day, at about two o’clock, I climbed out of Grand Central subway station and pushed open the heavy brass doors to Forty Second Street. I normally get disorientated when I come out of Grand Central, I can’t remember whether the Met Life building, which zooms up above the station, is north of me or south of me. Usually I stagger for a few steps, head upwards, trying to find the Chrysler building which I know is nearby, then, painfully, I do my points of the compass and find east, look along, see the monstrousness of Tudor City and the shoulder of the enormous cassette box shape of the United Nations, and then start walking towards the river. This time, I don’t know why, it was easier. And I clipped along outside the boring shops – the Duane Reades, the Staples, the Starbucks – and the forgettable diplomat hotels. I stopped at the lights which have lost their Walks and Don’t Walks in favour of a happy white walker and grim red hand staying do not come. When I got to UN plaza, the road that runs along outside the headquarters, I saw the blue blockades and the many policemen. The road was empty, five lanes or so very still under the warm sun. Along the sides of the road were barriers to hold back crowds, although there were no crowds, just dawdling people like me and suits and suits of people, with badges and passes around their necks. It is a peculiar corner of Manhattan, the streets around the UN. It is very serviced: all restaurants and carparks and hotels and United Nation’s dentists and travel agents. The businesses have grown up around this itinerant community of serious looking world-deciders who are too busy to cook or lay down roots in any one place on the planet. They must rush out for a tooth capping before rushing back in to vote or condemn something.

I stood and talked to a smiley cop whose canine teeth were just a little higher than the rest of the teeth along his upper jaw. I asked him who was coming, not expecting much, or at least, not much soon, and he said The President, and in a minute or so, any minute, this minute.

With the warmth, the early face of summer and the empty road, the air was a little milky above the concrete and so I was looking at that when I saw the silver forms of the motorcycle outriders swing round the corner and start heading down. Gunning, cruising on their slack-bellied dead stylish NYPD bikes, the outriders were mainly uncompromising-looking men, unafraid to have moustaches, slouched on their machines, old school helmets low on their brows, obviously reining in their bikes, full of power. There were probably about thirty of them, in two groups: the front group made a large arrow and the second group, of about seven or so, a smaller little pyramid behind.

Then the motorcade, a succession of black vehicles growing larger. Lincolns at the front then to something a little grander, with flags, and then a clutch of shiny SUV’s, full of men talking on phones, with fingers in their ears. Then, squashed in the middle, the raised limousine, its chassis surprisingly high above the surface of the street, and a glimpse, for me, through not so tinted windows, of profiles of men, bunched in facing each other, sheafs and papers making sharp silhouettes. My mind tells me I saw the beaky shape of Dubya’s face, and frames of Rummy’s glasses, but later that day I saw that Rumsfeld had been in the Pentagon all day, so maybe I was imagining a little too happily. After the limo, which looked more tough than swizzy, was another blitz of large black jeeps, whose passengers looked a little more focused and heavily armed than the ones who had come before. These men wore black, big helmets and large rifles diagonally across their laps. No false moves from me, I can tell you. And then the military style gave way to more cell phone chatterers and, finally, to a squad car and a relaxed pair talking to each other about lunch I suppose.

The policemen started taking down the barriers and more usual, unelected traffic started to creep out onto the empty road. From their little paused groups, the diplomats turned away from each other and headed off to read and write their briefings. I got my paperwork signed and went back to Grand Central by a different route.