Where the hell had that bandana come from? How had she been so prepared? I suddenly resented her for not telling me to bring one. All I had was a thin plaid fleece scarf from H&M tucked into my pea coat. I pulled it out from under my collar and tied it around my mouth just as the protestors and SWATs collided like two storm systems. Ana and I were knocked to the ground. When I managed to stand back up I was crushed up against a SWAT shield before slipping back into an opening in the crowd. I looked around for Ana but couldn’t see her. I heard the crack of shattering glass and saw a man in black throwing a pylon through a bus shelter. Two young women beside me were shouting at him to stop when suddenly I saw the orange contrails of three tear gas canisters zip over the crowd, casting a bile-coloured haze over the chaos. People started screaming, and two men with dreadlocks began dousing everyone’s scarves with clear plastic squeeze bottles of vinegar, the kind you might find in a diner. One of them squirted some straight through my scarf and into my mouth. I started to cough. And just as I started retching, the presidential convoy whizzed past, a blur of shiny black SUVs not more than ten metres away behind the wall of SWATs. The crowd roared and surged forward. That’s when I realized all I had really wanted in the first place was to see Bush. In that moment I couldn’t quite fathom that he was an actual person with a body. Sentient and corporeal. He seemed like a television character, or some kind of omnipresent manifestation of American hegemony. I wrenched my neck upwards and stood on my tiptoes, trying to catch sight of him through the SWATs. But all of the cars’ windows were tinted.