by Sunil Yapa
Oh, Dad. How I’ve fucked things up.
COURAGE
COURAGE
COURAGE
Resonating in the cold morning damp, a chord composed of a thousand trembling voices rising and humming.
COURAGE
COURAGE
COURAGE
Then, with the solid kick of a bass drum, a thump that seemed to displace air, the cops fired. Above their heads the first cans rose in an arc and still he could not chant, could not even open his mouth. Just sat there and watched the canisters climb. They reached their zenith and began the descent, tumbling end over end like some strange satellites returning to Earth, trailing smoke. Falling straight toward him as if meant for him and him alone. Yes, Victor saw and he knew.
COURAGE
COURAGE
COURAGE
Here they came tumbling out of the sky with a message meant just for him, he could actually hear it, hear the voice in the smoke, in the canisters descending, the canisters that in about two seconds were going to reach their earthbound destination. About one second from now they would be landing in Victor’s lap, and he heard the message the smoke wanted to tell him, heard it as clearly as if his father knelt there on the cold concrete beside him, whispering in his ear.
“Son,” the smoke said, “care too much and the world will kill you cold.”
Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe
Intermission I
Twelve Hours Until the Meeting
Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe stepped from the noise of the terminal into the quiet of the cabin. A tall man, he bowed slightly to clear the door, gave a small smile to the business-class stewards. He was shy at times with the luxuries of importance, and so carried only his usual briefcase and overcoat. Uncomfortable with the insulation his diplomatic status conferred upon him, he refused to travel with staff, not even an assistant. “When I get too old to carry my own cases,” he had said five years ago when the negotiations began, “then it’s time to surrender.”
And yet, this year, turning seventy, the weight of the travel had begun to register somewhere beneath his skin, the negotiations softening the tough muscle of his heart, pulling on his bones with a whisper. Just once he would like to perform a miracle on a par with Gandhi’s. He will swim the island’s length and width, circumnavigate the coast, keep going until they all sign the bloody TRQs, the subsidy reductions, and then the final document itself. At a steady pace he will swim the sun down, he will swim the sun up, until they grant Sri Lanka’s entry to the WTO.
A stewardess stood at his elbow.
“Welcome, Minister,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”
“Just a cup of tea, please.”
Of course he was fantasizing about the swim: Sri Lanka’s coast was more than a thousand and a half kilometers. An island nation the size of Maine. He would not ever be swimming its length and breadth.
The stewardess took his overcoat and slid his briefcase into the closet. With the help of her outstretched arm, he lowered himself slowly to the seat.
“We’ll be in the air soon, Minister.”
Good. Still so much work to be done, even here so close to the final leg.
Five long years he had been at this, taking the meetings, slowly gathering the signatures. Forty countries in five years. Thirty-nine signatures. He wouldn’t have believed it himself had he not been there to witness it. To live it. To survive it. The flights close to three times a week for five years straight; the memories still humming through his body like a running river. He felt sometimes as if he had lived enough in the intervening years to account for another life, a second go-round. At his age a small miracle. The world, it seemed, was full of them. His life included. From colonial subject to globe-trotting minister. The tall brown man with mahogany skin and snow-white hair—he was recognized and welcomed by presidents and prime ministers. Chirac, Yeltsin, Blair. Juan Carlos the King of Spain, and his prime minister, María Aznar. He knew their faces all too well. The food-flecked chins, the jowls, the tired eyes. Like a tribe of people capable of manufacturing charm at will. And their leader, the elder brother of the toothy clan—Clinton, who he was set to meet tomorrow afternoon in Seattle. President Clinton—the very last signature he needed.
But god he feared that “no.” Export and trade. Making things to sell to the West. This was how Sri Lanka would feed its people in the new century, in the bright new age of the global economy.
They must open that door. Or I fear we will end up starving on its doorstep.
He sighed and warmed his hands on the tea the stewardess had brought him. He sipped from the cup and settled into the most recent batch of reports with a kind of tired, worried excitement: something about fuel oil tariffs from the Dutch. Another from the American State Department warning of possible protests. He scanned it and moved on, idly puzzling why anybody would want to protest the millennial meetings of the WTO.
* * *
Thirty thousand feet above the Pacific, finished with his reports for now, he was flipping the pages of a magazine, not really looking, just killing time, when he realized the woman he was looking at in the pages of the magazine was the same as the woman seated next to him.
He almost spilled his fourth cup of tea.
He couldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t look at her.
He looked at her.
She was asleep, or feigning sleep, beneath a blue blanket embossed with gold feathers and an eye mask of the same.
He tried to recline his seat, turn it into a bed of his own. He’d take a nap. Close his eyes and avoid the embarrassment. There was a panel of control buttons to his right, but he couldn’t get the thing to go back even an inch. He fumbled. He didn’t get where he was by being flummoxed by every beautiful woman that ever sat down next to him. Goddamn it, man, why won’t this thing go back?!
He glanced again. Still asleep.
Don’t make a bloody fool of yourself.
He could smell her.
He looked again at his magazine. Devouring the details. She was an actress, young but not in her first youth. A string of romantic comedies. A failed action flick. A failed marriage to a Hollywood star.
She stared at him from the pages with a clear-eyed gaze.
You are the Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning. Get ahold of yourself.
Then she was out of her own bed and leaning across him, blanket falling from her long cat’s body, revealing a sari of all things. Stretched across him, pushing the proper button to make the seat recline.
“These things…,” she said with a smile.
Stretched across him. God help him, were those her breasts pressed against his shoulder? Her famous breasts?
He looked at her in alarm as she returned to her bed and curled into it, legs tucked childlike beneath her.
“Thorry,” she said, and removed a piece of plastic from her teeth. She wrapped the plastic thing in a napkin and set it in a plastic container beside her.
“I wear this retainer? For my teeth? Stupid, I know.”
“No, no, no,” he said.
“A grown woman. I mean where’s my teddy bear? Where’s my blankie?” Blankie. She said the word philosophically, slowly, as if throwing it out into the world to see what deeper meanings would come echoing back and he liked her immediately—her presence, her humor, the honesty with which she presented herself.
The stewardess passed back through the cabin with the tray of champagne glasses and she was stretched across him again, a pale powdery flowery smell and was it necessary to stretch across him like this? She took the champagne flute and said to the stewardess, “And a little Chambord, too, please, if you have it.”
He was fully reclined, staring straight at the molded ceiling. His spine rigid. He rolled his neck to and fro, caught her eye. She nodded at the tray, as if to say go on, and he reached and gently took a flute of his own.
“Cheers,” she said.
“Cheers.”
They lay talking in their seats, pleasant
ly fuzzed, drinking their Kir Royales, the name of which of course he had just learned. Lovely drink. How lovely to drink it in bed. Why had he never tried this? What part of him loved this? They were a world of two, and he was a grandfather and a diplomat, a widower alone with his work, at peace with his business, his solitude; he had three grown children, two girls and a son, and he had experienced domestic bliss, or something like it, the warm encumbrance of a happy home, but he had never experienced anything like this.
“So, Dr. Wickramsinghe. Is that right? Is that how you say it?”
“Call me Charley. Please.”
He perhaps enjoyed the pleasures of the West a little too much. A good scotch. The tenderness of a filet, medium rare. Why was it a steak in Sri Lanka never quite tasted like a steak grilled in the States? And the women. He had always loved Western women, their beauty and ferocity, and yet they were a reminder of the foolish young man he once had been, when he had found fair skin to be more beautiful than brown. More beautiful than black. How strange.
“Charley. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but where are you from? Originally, I mean.”
“I was born in Sri Lanka.”
A little happy shriek from her red mouth and heads in the business cabin were turning.
She stared back. Oh, the authority of a glance, he thought. The power of a famous face. The other passengers looked away.
“You’ve heard of it?” he said. “A small island in the Indian Ocean?”
“Heard of it?” She leaned over and squeezed his arm. “I love Sri Lanka. I was in Sri Lanka earlier this year. Oh, how lucky you are,” she said. “What a paradise.”
He nodded, and yet he didn’t know what to say. He was thinking of 1983. The riots. The war which had been raging for fifteen years since with no sign of abating. He thought of his house in Colombo behind two lines of concrete wall and wire. Of the two armed guards who manned the gate, M16 rifles at the ready. He thought of his neighbors’ homes which had burned in the rioting. Thought of his neighbors’ daughters who had burned in the rioting. A paradise, she says. What kind of paradise was this where young girls burned?
She was looking at him intently, her hand on his arm, and he liked her attention. An intelligent woman. God knows she was beautiful, and powerful, too, her opinion mattered, her good opinion of Sri Lanka as valuable as any tourist brochure, but perhaps it was better to tell the truth. “It is an extraordinary country in many ways,” he said. “We have much to be proud of. But paradise is not always what it seems.”
She was silent for a moment. But then she nodded, saying, “I know I’m not an expert. I put on a shirt and the tag says: Made in Sri Lanka. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just put the shirt on and go on my way. I know where Sri Lanka is, of course, but do I know what it is?”
He nodded and under the spell of an intuition, placed a hand on her blanket above the ankle.
“I know you probably think I’m just another self-absorbed celebrity. But I’m not. I’m a human being. I have thoughts. I have feelings just like anybody else. I know what the world is.”
He nodded and gently squeezed. She bent toward him, forgetting for the moment perhaps that she was wearing a sari. A shawl of blue and gold silk wrapped around her shoulders and across the chest, which left her stomach exposed. She moved her hand to brush hair from her face, and the effect was not so much erotic as evocative, the soft swish of the silk was a light whisper in his mind, a long echoing memory, and the years dropped away, and he was once again a boy in a musty schoolroom shaded by spindly palms, chalk dust in the air, and his schoolteacher, a nun from England, pondering aloud, upon seeing his mother and the other ladies waiting for their children outside the schoolyard gate. The nun clucking her tongue disapprovingly and saying, “Look at those bellies. Tell me, children. Have your mothers no shame?”
And the star student, the brilliant child understanding for the first time what the nun might mean. Feeling for the first time the shame of those exposed stomachs, the ridiculousness of how his mother dressed. What had they been trying to accomplish, those nuns, those English bureaucrats and their sprawling empire of oranges and tobacco? Two decades of education. Forever molded to be English, and yet not English at all because that was not possible. Like clay cast in an inferior mold, the products were forever breaking, forever found wanting. Forever cracked.
She pulled the blanket to her neck and smiled at him. She was more beautiful still, vulnerable and raw, looking him full in the face, searching his eyes.
“Charley,” she said, “2.9 billion people are going to make less than two dollars today. Do you know how much I made for my last movie?”
He held her gaze, her eyes two impossibly blue bowls of ice above the embroidered rim of the blanket.
“Millions, Charley, millions and millions of dollars. And today twenty-two thousand children will die from things as stupid as malaria, and starvation and whooping cough.”
She paused. “Do you want to know why I was really in Sri Lanka, Charley?”
He waited silently.
“To adopt a child. I make millions of dollars pretending to be other people. I have a beautiful home in the hills. I have an ex-husband who is dating a twenty-three-year-old and what do I want? I want a child. So I fly to another country. What kind of world is this, Charley?”
And Charles sat there silent because he didn’t know the answer. He wanted to answer her, but he didn’t know how, and yet he couldn’t look away. The cool humming of the circulated air enveloping them.
“Blankie,” she said. “Whooping cough.”
He pulled his hand away from her ankle, wishing he had a report to read.
“An adopted child to hug and hold,” she said. “That is what I want.”
15
Rising above the mist-shrouded city, the sound of the rotor thumping above them, Seattle’s downtown geography spread beneath him like the emptying half of an hourglass, wide at the top, tapering to a narrow valve in the south—Chief Bishop was taking a ride with the Mayor in Guardian One.
Downtown was bounded by the water to the west, the interstate to the east. The early morning traffic on I-5 snaking south and north, he saw people in their cars on their way to work, and he imagined them listening to the radio, drinking coffee with the day’s first cigarette, applying lip liner and mascara and rouge. Did they still use rouge? He watched the glitter of brake lights from on high and thought of his son and salmon and death.
“What do you estimate, Chief?” The Mayor’s voice scratchy in his ear.
They were talking on the headsets.
Bishop made the crowd at thirty to forty thousand and he felt a migraine coming on. A blinding headache that would require cool towel and empty room from whose darkness he did not dare stir. He had scheduled nine hundred officers. He had turned down offers of reinforcements and help from the FBI, the Secret Service, the Washington State Patrol, and the King County Sheriff’s Office.
Why?
Because it was his city. And he would protect it. Look at it there turning slowly beneath him as the helicopter banked in another slow sweeping arc. In the southern section of downtown the towers of black glass reflecting gray sky like a city rising directly from the water. Like a city climbing hand over hand from the dark depths of the Sound. The tallest towers of a labyrinthine city whose work was buried deep beneath the waves, a society too complicated and brutal to exist in the light.
What was he talking about?
He had noticed this in himself. The drifting thoughts. Of late, a certain inattention.
When exactly did his city get so damn tall?
Where in the hell had he left his coffee this time?
There was the Space Needle standing alone. A structure Bishop had always loved despite himself. Erected for the ’62 World’s Fair, some architect’s vision of the future, it looked like a plate balanced on two chopsticks, wavering improbably six hundred feet in the air, something beautiful but faintly ominous about the whole thing. Maybe he
loved it because now here he was, a living breathing creature in the year 1999, an inhabitant of the future, and that future, the one they had imagined in 1962 when he had been a youngster dreaming, now seemed antiquated and quaint.
A relic that had once been relevant.
There was Elliott Bay to the west, shedding light off the waves—his love for this was uncomplicated: the dark water of the Sound where he had once taken his son fishing every fall while the whales moaned and sang.
“You see that clump, Chief? Ten o’clock.” Christ. The Mayor again. “Looks like they’re trying to block the freeway.”
Spawning salmon climbing the river’s ladders to breed and die. Every year the same thing. Breed and die. Breed and die. Breed and die. Salmon were an interesting thing to think about.
Bishop saw them. He looked down through the bubble and saw the crowds massing. In the red square at the University of Washington; at Pine and Fourth; at the Seattle Community College on the northeastern corner; Pike Place Market to the west; a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands—all on the move.
Chief Bishop was scrunched into the jump seat, his knees around his chin, the laundry smell of his pressed duty blues tickling his nose. It was, quite frankly, too early for this horsecrap, and he was looking out the bubble and feeling his eyes start to pound.
Retirement. It had a sweet sort of ring to it.
The helicopter dipped and did another slow sweeping turn over the city.
“Chief, this is not under control,” the Mayor said.
“It’s under control.”
“I’m calling the Governor. We’re bringing in the National Guard.”
Bishop rubbing his rough cheek and thinking that’s what he would do: find his son, retire from this crapola, and set up shop on a ranch somewhere in Idaho. Not Idaho. Idaho was Aryan country, wasn’t it? Montana, then. He would look into it. Was Montana friendly to persons of brown and black complexion? Could his son make a home there, quit all his wandering? Bishop almost laughed. It was friendly if you were a chief of police. If you were the kind of man capable of making rank and holding it. If you were the kind of man governed by the forces of compassion, strength, and the rare and strange ability to gather round you and somehow focus the dispersed chaos of personalities called a police department in a medium-sized American city. A man who was a natural leader. A man called Chief.