by Sunil Yapa
“The blindness of the heart which capitalism demands,” John Henry was saying.
“Alienation,” Edie said. “This is our enemy.”
Victor nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Me, too.”
Then he looked at King. “I’ll do it.”
“You’ll do what?”
“Lockdown,” he said. “I’ll be the one.”
13
Bishop gathered his troops behind the PeaceKeeper. Massed them on the south side of Sixth and Union. On the north side, on the east and the west, thousands of protesters were bunched and surging. He needed to get the delegates north through that mess.
From the back of the ’Keeper they were putting on the riot gear, the hats and bats. An officer was handing out the tear gas guns—military-style weapons that reminded Bishop of Apache attack helicopters.
“Let’s go over it again. I don’t want any screwups.”
He surveyed the assembled troops, saw one about to speak and raised his hand, palm forward. “Wait until I’m done.”
This tanned widower in spectacles who had summited Mount Rainier this summer, one year before his sixtieth birthday. Chief Bishop. Who believed in community policing, who despite the Mayor’s weak protests led the efforts to rid the department of the racism in their rank and file, who, six months ago, on a warm summer’s day marched in solidarity in Seattle’s Gay Pride Parade, who had a heart full of loss and a head full of doom.
This man, the Chief, he said, “We are going to clear this intersection.”
He paused, collected the stray scraps of attention with his strongest look.
“But ladies and gentlemen, I want restraint and I want strength. We are the law and we are proud and we are peaceful. Any questions?”
A voice from the back. “Yeah. We going to have to pay for parking?”
The assembled fell into laughter. Bishop frowned. “Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir, I’m just curious if we’re going to have to pay for parking while we’re being proud and peaceable.”
“Yeah. Cuz I had to put my Caddy in a garage and that’s like twenty-five for the day.”
The cops putting on their gear and chuckling—the helmet and mask, the belt and spray.
Bishop adjusted his glasses.
“Gentlemen, I’m sorry about the parking. That’s a question for the Mayor when all this is over. For now let’s focus. Anything else?”
“What’d I hear about some city buses?”
Bishop’s eyes went bright. The buses had been his idea.
“There will be ten to twelve metro buses parked at the corner of Eighth and Seneca,” he said. “The buses will be both a barrier and a temporary detention facility. You need to make an arrest? You cuff them; you put them on the bus.”
“And do the buses have to pay for parking?”
They erupted into laughter. Bishop waited patiently for it to die down. They were just blowing off some steam and he understood it and he let them, because he felt some element in the air. Something that wasn’t there before they saw the crowds. Something that wasn’t there in the days and weeks and months they had been preparing. He was confident, but there was something in the street, some rogue undercurrent in the way they muttered and shifted and adjusted their gear, the bitterness of their joking that wasn’t exactly joking. He thought his boys and girls might be afraid.
Bishop cleared his throat and collected them in his gaze.
He had about one hundred and fifty delegates stashed in the lobby of the Sheraton. The Mayor himself was with them, had left his sheltered spot in the MACC and was waiting for the signal. The all-clear that would mean Bishop had done his job.
“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get something straight. We are police in the greatest nation in the world. We are professional and we are prepared. There are five thousand protesters just across that intersection. But we are going to clear this intersection, and then we are going to clear the next, and then the third one after that, and we are going to get those delegates to the convention center. Is that understood?”
A chorus all around. “Yes, sir!”
They were in their gear now, smacking the armor and feeling good.
Then another hand raised.
Bishop sighed. “Yes, Sergeant?”
“Sir, some of these protesters. I don’t think they want to go.”
A few chuckles.
“Sir.”
“Sergeant?”
“If they don’t want to go…?”
Behind his troops he saw a caramel-colored kid weaving his way through the crowd on a unicycle. He had to shake his head. No, that is not your son, you fool. Three years his son had been missing. His beautiful, brilliant, mixed-up son. But missing wasn’t exactly the word, was it, because his son who had run away three years ago, who had disappeared into the gaping maw of the world at the age of sixteen—he wrote his dad postcards. Nothing periodic, mind you, six months could pass easily before his son deemed him worthy of a missive, and nothing indicating his whereabouts besides a postmark, or his safety, as if that were even possible to indicate. And yet, how could he, the Chief of Police, notify anybody, let alone file a missing person report? Hadn’t his sixteen-year-old son left with a dislocated shoulder and an arm black and blue with fingermarks? That would have required filing an altogether different report. And so, Bishop had let him go without a word.
Postcards. For three fucking years. The last one had featured a black man without a shirt sitting cross-legged in an intersection. A black man skinnier than any man Bishop had ever seen. A postcard of a black man on a hunger strike, his ribs protruding, his chest so narrow it was nearly concave. His skin dusty from the street, his face gaunt. Straw somehow caught up in his hair. He was a portrait of cheekbone and eye socket and dirty beard, his eyes two brilliantly bright watch dials marking the time. On the back Vic had written: Dad, does this man love the world?
And he had wanted to say, Son, stop caring about people you don’t know and have never met. Just stop caring. It hurts too much. For three years his son had been gone and nothing more than postcards. It made Bishop, frankly, want to strangle the kid. Where had he gotten a postcard of a hunger strike anyway? Who made something like that?
“Sergeant,” Bishop said, “these are our streets. Don’t ever forget that.”
“But what if they don’t clear the street when we tell them to?”
“Sergeant.” Bishop grimaced. “You are holding a tear gas dispenser. If those protesters don’t want to move…”
“Yes, sir?”
Bishop leaned forward to gather their attention, but he didn’t need to. Everybody was listening.
“Then, Sergeant, you fucking light them up.”
14
The sound of the chain against the plastic was a hollow kind of knocking like the sound of Victor’s heart whomping in his chest.
The Chief was striding back and forth through no-man’s-land, a megaphone to his mouth. A line of police at his back and the mostly seated crowd before him. Thirty feet of black pavement between them. The Chief—Victor watched him through the forest of people between himself and the front line. He looked at the Chief’s polished helmet which reflected the passing clouds, white streams of smoke growing long and then disappearing over the curve. Victor lost sight of him as the crowd milled and yelled.
And then saw him again. He looked at his round glasses and remembered the ring of keys that hung from his belt. Looked at the line of black-suited cops standing behind him like a SWAT team preparing a home invasion and he thought, Dad, what are you doing? Dad, don’t do it.
“Citizens,” his father said through his megaphone, “it is time to clear this street.”
Behind him the cops were sliding on their beetle-masks. They were loading their guns with tear gas and locking them tight.
“Citizens,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Victor breathing and trying to will himself into whatever transcendent state it was that would ease hi
s pounding heart.
His father spoke slowly and carefully. He wasn’t wearing riot gear—no polycarbonate faceplate, no chest protector, no elbow pads, no knee protectors, no riot shield—just the stiff blue shirt, the creased pants, the stars climbing his lapel.
“Citizens, if you do not disperse within two minutes,” he said, “we will deliver pain and chemical compliance.”
Victor thinking, Chemical what? Chemical compliance? Is that what he said?
“Citizens,” his father said, “don’t make me start now.”
A chant began among the seated and the standing. It was a simple call and response.
Whose cops? a voice asked.
OUR COPS!!! the crowd roared back.
Whose cops?
OUR COPS!!!
John Henry sat to Victor’s left, a girl he didn’t know sat to his right, both with their arms locked in PVC pipe perpendicular to their bodies and connected to Victor’s own. Both with their faces raised to the rain. Both chanting their damn hearts out. And Victor thought If I could chant. If I could just chant maybe I wouldn’t be so shit-scared.
He studied his sneaks. Not so lucky anymore. The light rain fell on his downturned head, gathered in his braids, ran in streams down his face. They were locked together in a circle at the corner of Sixth and Pine. Eight of them sat in a circle, facing out, locked on the pavement in front of the Sheraton. He could feel the locking mechanism above his hand in each pipe. He felt the chain running through the pipe. He felt the ache beginning deep in his shoulders as he held the pipes aloft. Above him the traffic signal turned red. Beneath his down jacket, his shirt was soaked in a cold sweat.
WHOSE COPS?
OUR COPS!!!
WHOSE COPS?
OUR COPS!!!
Victor closed his eyes and listened to the howling, heard the voices bouncing off the buildings, the discordant symphony of a thousand voices chanting and shouting and he thought, Shit, man, what did I do? Our cops? Did they really believe that? The police protect money and power. They protect the few from the violence of the many. Do you have to be black or brown to know this? No. Maybe it helps. Shit, our cops? The police, they pickle the world, preserve it the way it is. They are guard dogs keeping us afraid and obedient. They—
John Henry’s voice interrupted Victor’s panicked train of thought.
“Victor, how you doing? You feel all right?”
Victor nodded. Took a breath. What had he been saying?
“Because you’re looking a little pale.”
Victor smiled. Forced himself to speak, willing his voice not to tremble.
“I’m good.”
John Henry studied him as if he were a talking exhibit in the Museum of Bullshit.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“What’s all right?”
“It’s all right to be scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
“You’d be crazy to not be scared.”
Victor looked down.
“Try chanting,” John Henry said. “The chanting helps.”
Victor listened. He closed his eyes and listened. A thousand voices hoarse with fear and rage. A thousand voices joined in rhythm. It was a primal sound, a roar like a waterfall, a thousand voices becoming for the briefest of moments one voice, one roar, threaded through with frustration and yearning, their desperation to break through to another plane. One where the city belonged to them and they had no reason to be afraid.
He listened. He even moved his mouth. But he couldn’t do it.
“Victor, listen. That is the power of the human voice at its most profound. This is Ayahuasca chanting in the Amazon. This is incantation. This is the power of the spirit as formed and shaped by the human voice. Do you hear it, man? Do you feel it? You got to chant, buddy. It’ll make you feel better. It’s the communal ritual of the thing. The tie-back to older times. The chanting is the thread that links us to every people’s movement in this country that ever rose up for what was and for what is and for what will come. They chanted, Victor. That’s what they did. They chanted. I mean wow.”
“I hear it.”
“Look at the cops, Victor. They hate the chanting. Look at them there squirming. You think they fidget like that in their squad cars? No. They feel the power of our chanting in their boneless limbs. Ten thousand voices. They feel the power of it in their sparrow hearts. Look at them dancing in their jackboots, Victor.”
And what was it? Chanting with your friends on the cold concrete, chanting in the face of a line of pissed-off cops. Chanting in the street and waiting for those cops to come break open your stupid head like an overripe melon. What was it Victor heard in John Henry’s voice, what impish spark that suggested in some not-so-secret part of his heart John Henry thought this the purest fun known to man?
“Try to feel it, Victor. I know you didn’t get trained. But I’m here with you. We’re all here with you. You got to chant, buddy. Try a little one. This is the human music. This is how we shape the fear; it’s how we possess it and make it ours. The chanting, Victor. It’s how we hold the fear in our mouths and transform it into gold.”
“I told you I’m not afraid.”
“Victor.”
“Seriously.”
“Victor.”
“I told you I’m not fucking afraid.”
John Henry just shaking his head and turning away from him.
There were white Christmas lights strung in the trees.
There were thousands sitting in the drizzle and mist.
There was the Chief of Police with the megaphone, his father’s amplified voice echoing over the sea of bobbing heads.
“If you do not clear this intersection, you will be the subject of pain and chemical compliance.”
And Victor saying under his breath, “Don’t do it, Dad. Don’t do it.”
There was the crowd, the thousands of bodies packed between the buildings, some standing, some sitting, some, like Victor and John Henry, in lockdown in the center of the intersection.
And there was the cold fear crawling up his spine; his hands trembling in the chains. If he could only chant. Join their shaking roar.
“Head down, won’t you, brother?”
A woman in black jeans and a white T-shirt with a gas mask around her neck was kneeling before him.
“It’s easier if your head is down, Victor.”
He lowered his head, realizing in the same moment that it was King. The sudden sight of her made him want to cry. He had the overwhelming urge to say something, to do something, but what? To ask her for a hug?
She leaned over and soaked Victor’s pink bandanna—the one he’d gotten from the girl—in apple cider vinegar, and then lifted it to his nose and fixed it tight.
“King,” he said, his voice muffled. The smell of vinegar burning through his nostrils.
She bent to John Henry.
“King,” he said again.
On her knees in front of John Henry, did she hear him? Or did she just not care? She poured vinegar in the bandanna and then knotted it carefully around John Henry’s nose and mouth. Neither of them looking Victor’s way—in fact they were staring at each other, King and John Henry, lost in each other’s gaze, something passing there between them, and for all it mattered, it was as if Victor, although only inches away, had ceased to exist.
“He shouldn’t be here, King.”
She laid her hand against the side of his face.
“He’ll be fine.”
“He’s not trained and he’s not chanting and he will not be fine.”
And the crowd now chanting just one word, two syllables drawn out and forcefully expelled.
COURAGE
COURAGE
COURAGE
King turned back to Victor. She laid a hand upon his knee. He knew it was meant to be reassuring, but what he really wanted was her arms around him, pulling him tight, and it felt cold and perfunctory, the sort of nice little pat you give a stranger’s crying child.
/> “He’ll be fine,” she said. “Won’t you, Victor?”
He found himself dumbly nodding as if that were an answer to something. She watched him and then drew a pair of swimming goggles from a pocket. She slipped the band over his hair. Fastened the plastic fishbowls to his eyes.
“When the gas goes off,” she said, “don’t breathe too deep.”
And then she was gone, disappeared back into the crowd, tilting her bottle of vinegar into bandannas and tying them around people’s mouths and noses. Behind the Chief the cops were fondling their six-chambered tear gas launchers. Victor looked at his father there in front of the line taking a deep breath and he whispered beneath his bandanna, “Don’t do it. Please don’t do this.”
There was a can of pepper spray passing back and forth between his father’s hands and Victor wanted to ask him if he felt this same gaping emptiness opening beneath his throat, but he didn’t speak to the man. Three years and not a word.
COURAGE
COURAGE
COURAGE
The police raised their tear gas guns like a line of archers. Black barrels angled skyward at forty-five degrees. Victor watched his father finally remove his glasses and pull a black gas mask down over his face. He was a hundred feet out, and yet Victor imagined his father’s eyes were shiny behind the faceplate as if blinking back tears and Victor’s chest suddenly opening to a grief and loss he had never known existed.