The Handshake in the Rain

The rain fell in warm, heavy sheets on Sentosa Island. It pattered on the black umbrellas held by aides, slicked the red carpet laid between the columns of the Capella Hotel portico. At 9:04 AM, Donald Trump stepped out, his suit a dark blue. From the opposite side, Kim Jong-un emerged, in his customary black Mao suit. They walked toward each other, the sound of their footsteps lost in the rain and the shutters of hundreds of cameras. The world had seen their faces countless times, always in opposition, always as caricatures. Here, they were just two men getting wet. They shook hands for twelve seconds. Trump placed his left hand on Kim’s arm. Kim’s smile was tight. You could smell the damp wool of the suits, the ozone of the tropical storm, the faintly sterile scent of the hotel’s air conditioning bleeding out through the open doors. The moment was all sensation: the visual contrast of their forms, the auditory white noise of the weather, the tactile reality of the handshake itself. There were no grand speeches yet, no documents. Just the physical fact of proximity, a thing that had been, until that second, impossible. Inside, they would talk of denuclearization and sanctions. But the history was made outside, in the humidity. It was a meeting measured not in policy points but in millimeters of rain on two men’s shoulders.