by Sunil Yapa
“Can I help you, Officer?” His voice was soft and smooth. As if he was used to talking to cops, as if he was used to conning dumb believing cops.
“You can’t film here,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You will be.”
“Sir?”
“The camera. Shut it down. You can’t fucking film here.”
He didn’t even flinch, and it wasn’t that it made him mad, but Park noticed. What kind of homosexual doesn’t flinch when a cop says fuck in his face?
“Officer, how can we help you?” the man said.
“What the fuck are you filming?”
“We’re Quaker witnesses. We have every—”
“Quaker what? What is that? Some kind of religious thing?”
“Officer, our lawyer specifically—”
“Step out of the car.”
He was trying to appear calm, but feeling, in fact, the exact opposite of calm, whatever that was. The law of respect. Did this guy just say lawyer?
The man paused. Looked him dead in the face.
“No,” he said. “We have every right to be here.”
He took the camera back from his friend and pointed it in Park’s face.
“Officer,” he said, “why did you cover your badge number? That’s illegal, you know.”
Gooks, Timmy. No-good fucking gooks. That’s how we ended up here.
18
Ju was halfway to the car, following Park, when he popped his pepper spray from his vest, leaned through the half-open window, and sprayed first the driver and then the passenger.
Ju frozen to the spot halfway in the street, halfway between the PeaceKeeper and the disaster unfolding before her eyes. Frozen in the street, which was against her training, yeah, and against her instinct, yeah, but she could not believe what she was seeing.
The interior of the car filling with mist.
Park turning away with a satisfied hitch to his belt as if to say job well done, congratulations, boy.
The doors opened and both men fell to the pavement on their hands and knees. Strangers rushing to help. The men howling with their hands all over their face and Ju knew, she took the pepper spray full-face once, an impromptu test at the academy devised by some asshole cadet who didn’t like her high proficiency scores, and the pepper spray, it’s just capsicum, like the pepper flakes you shake on your pizza, but man, about ten thousand times more concentrated, and when that spray hits, you feel the serious need to dig your eyes out with a spoon.
Park strolled over, wagging his baton happily.
“I told them they couldn’t film.”
“Park, what are you thinking? You need to get your butt back to MACC. Now.”
“You got no rank on me, Ju.”
“I’m calling it in,” she said.
“Good idea.”
He lifted his radio to Ju’s face and twisted the volume. A garbled roar of static and shouting voices.
Krrrrrchhh.
NINJAS ON SIXTH.
Krrrrrchhh. Peat. Did you say KRRCCHH.
She knocked the radio out of her face.
“Ju. You pissed or something?”
“Right now, Park?”
“Yeah.”
“Right now, I’m thinking about razor blades.”
He smiled sideways. “Razor blades?”
“Yeah.” She made a slashing movement across her face. Across where his scar would be. “Razor blades. Slice the offending flesh right off.”
He was silent for a long while.
“I didn’t want to hurt them,” he finally said. “I told them they couldn’t film, but they didn’t listen. That’s just the job.”
“Sure, sometimes that’s the job,” she said. “I know that’s the job.” She keyed her own radio. The same mess of static and panic greeted her. “But you don’t have to love it so fucking much.”
19
Before she died, Victor and his mom had played an unusual game. Maybe you could say she practiced an unusually obsessed form of spirituality. But Victor thought it was just something that had developed between them, a sort of game they played around the breakfast table, mother and son. It started out more as a joke. She was eating a banana one morning at breakfast. She peeled the sticker off and stuck it on his nose.
She said, “You’re a banana.”
He said, “I grew in the low-lying regions of Costa Rica.”
She leaned forward to investigate the sticker. “Peru, actually.”
This was when they still lived on the farm. Before she married his father.
“Peru,” he said. “I grew into a mature banana in the mountains of Peru. I am a banana from the Andes.”
He waved his cereal spoon around in the air.
“Wait,” he said, “do bananas grow in the mountains?”
“No. Potatoes grow in the mountains.”
“Where did I grow?”
The phone was ringing.
She picked it up and put it down.
“Where do bananas grow in Peru?” he said.
“They grow on the wet slopes of the Andes. On the eastern side. They take out the rainforest and put in banana plantations.”
He adjusted in his seat. Getting comfortable. It wasn’t their farm, but they shared it, a sort of co-op, and he liked nothing more than digging in the dirt with his mom by his side. That year of happiness.
“I am a banana from the rainforests of Peru.”
“Yes, the low-lying rainforests.”
“The Amazon!”
“You are yellow and soft and moist to the bite,” she said.
“I am not yellow and soft and moist to the bite. I am green and young and growing strong. I am hanging from a tree.”
“Do you hear any birds?”
“It just rained. I can hear water dripping from the branches.”
“The sun is breaking through the clouds.”
“Yes, and there is a bird that sounds like a rusty gate opening. Another one that sounds like breaking glass.”
“You are young and getting strong.”
“I am hanging in a bunch. A bunch of banana friends hanging from a tree.”
“Good food for a monkey.”
“There are no monkeys!”
“Good food for a boy.”
“Wait, wait, wait.”
He adjusted in his seat, turned to face out into the room, sort of looking out in the small middle distance, the thinking distance, this was the way he sat when he wanted to think about something that required some stretching of the imagination, the attempt to inhabit a banana.
“There is a creaky rusting noise.”
“Another bird?” she asked.
“No, there aren’t many birds on this plantation. It’s more like a factory. The trees are low and stretch as far as you can see. The ground is wet. There are ditches running between the trees. A percolation of milky blue water.”
She was now holding the half-eaten banana, the peels flopping loosely on her wrist. “Where did you learn that word? Percolation?”
He shrugged like Who knows where one learns the word percolation, Mom, one just learns it.
“Okay,” she said.
“The bananas are growing in blue plastic bags. They hang in blue plastic bags that contain the chemicals…”
“…the fungicide…”
“…the chemicals that kill the banana diseases or whatever.”
“There was a creaky rusty noise?”
“Yes,” he said. “There is a creaky rusting noise as the man comes to cut us from the tree. He carries a machete. There is a sound in the air. A kind of humming.”
“Insects,” she said.
“Machinery,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Here comes the man with the machete. He wears a blue mesh shirt for the heat. Who knows where he got it.”
“One of those things you might expect a boxer to wear,” he said.
“There is a complicated system to haul the bananas out.”<
br />
“Not so complicated. An iron rail that runs through the trees like an elevated train track. The cart runs on a single wheel on the rail.”
“The man pulls the cart along the rail.”
“The machete is in the other hand,” he said.
“Swish, swish,” she said. “The sound of a machete swiping at grass.”
“Thwack. The sound of machete entering a tree trunk at lunch.”
“Lunch is a small helping of beans and rice.”
“Thwack,” he said. “The sound of machete splitting a coconut.”
“Not enough really, but it is what they have.”
“Thwack. The sound of a machete splitting open the boss’s head.”
“Victor!”
“Sorry.”
“The creaky rusty squeak of the wheel as the man pulls the cart along the rail, his machete in the other hand. You are ready to be cut.”
“I’m ready to enter the world.”
“The world awaits.”
“I’m young,” he said.
“And green,” she said.
“And strong,” he said.
“And you’re ready to enter the world. The man stops his cart at the first row of trees.”
“He is ready to cut me.”
“Does he need a ladder?”
“No. He is extremely talented. He is the fastest cutter in the crew. The fastest worker on the whole plantation. Maybe in the whole of Peru,” he said. “He works without a ladder.”
“Young and strong.”
“The best.”
“His reward for his talent…”
“His reward…”
“His reward for his talent,” his mother said, “is they tell him when the plane will fly over spraying pesticides.”
“The others have to jump in the ditch,” he said.
“While the plane buzzes them,” she said.
“They put their hands over their heads and the plane buzzes them and the chemicals kind of drift down over them like water from a sprinkler.”
He paused, then said, “It doesn’t help if they cover their heads though, does it, Mom?”
She looked at the banana. Flipped the peel back and forth.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
20
Look at the tear gas falling like little pills. High-arcing moon shots which seemed to touch the sky. Gravity-bound cans which returned to Earth to tumble across the black asphalt, spitting steam. Look at the cops picking their way through the crowd like dancers, stepping daintily as though on ice.
And Victor’s father saying, Son, have you ever asked yourself why Buddhist monasteries are built in remote mountains with walls thirty feet high? Love and compassion for the entire world, six billion selfish souls, Victor. Are you man enough? Know where you’re going when you sign up, son.
Victor’s mother who used to say, sitting in the kitchen, “In your dreams everyone is you.”
Victor watched a woman on her knees being attended to by a medic. Her hands were clasped in prayer. He saw a mist of blood from a riot baton. Blood exiting in a fine spray from a man’s shaved scalp.
The cops stepping like ballerinas. Testing the ground as if they might fall through.
Compassion for every living blade of grass, and yet walls thirty feet high, six feet thick from within which you meditate on the unity and beauty of all beings. Son, does this make my point?
There was a stiff wind blowing from the Sound. The smoke making pictographs in the street. Cuneiform letters of clay that drifted and cut. People moved around him like ships in a fog. He saw a shoulder, a swatch of neon jacket. The flash of a blue sneaker, then it was gone, sucked into the cloud. The wind shifted and the gas swirled and suddenly Victor was enveloped in a smoke so thick it was as if he’d been buried alive. He saw only gray, heard only the slap of running feet, the soft thump of batons striking flesh.
What terror does to your body and brain. Victor had discovered the threat of imminent pain had a way of focusing your attention. A week, a day, an hour—these were units of time no longer within Victor’s ability to contemplate or feel. The day had shrunk to a morning. Then an hour of street battle. Then fifteen minutes of withering brutality.
Noon was like a foreign country.
Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.
John Henry in his duct tape glasses and cowboy hat. He was chanting with the crowd, and Victor envied John Henry his belief. He wanted to believe in something. Wanted to get pulled down into it, absorbed and lost in the rhythm of the words.
If I could chant, maybe I wouldn’t be so shit-scared.
But it was embarrassing to chant. It was embarrassing to believe.
Victor, who wandered the world, who had been wandering since he was sixteen years old, who now only wanted to be brave, to sit in strength and witness like his friends were doing—the more he saw the more it hurt. The more he felt the need to do something to ease the pressure building in his chest.
Victor, careful now, there are wisdoms of the East and practicalities of the West. Tibet, yes, the power of compassion, and what became of her? Son, there is a lesson to be learned in the case of Tibet.
A face loomed out of the fog, a woman wincing in the gas. She was running; panicked. She almost slammed into him, then reversed direction at the last moment and disappeared and Victor saw not a body, just a rag to a face, the hand-claw, arthritic then gone, the smoke clinging to her retreating feet cartoonishly as if her boots were on fire and leaking smoke.
At the age of seventeen, Victor had run into an American girl begging for change on the oil-stained concrete of a long-distance bus station in Bolivia. She’d been wearing a traditional poncho so cracked and bug-infested it might have been on loan from the Sundance Kid. She had a dog on a frayed piece of rope and a hand-lettered sign leaning against the dog’s plastic bowl.
“Spare some change, brother?” she’d said in English. It was the dog that did it. Or the English. It made him want to kick her in the head. Or maybe it was her expression, eyes narrowed, lower lip protruding, some air about her that was both self-righteous and proud, this American girl with parents and bank accounts, who was begging for change on a bus station floor as if that somehow made her real.
This was in the El Alto bus terminal, the city above La Paz, coughing on the smoke of newspaper and trash, a drift of fine white ash coming to rest on your shoulder, and what was she doing up here and, more important, what the hell was she thinking?
He wanted to kick her in the damn head. But instead he knelt beside her and unzipped his pack. The dog barely lifted its snout. The dog could have been dead, and he looked at her and he looked at the dog and he read her sign.
TENGO HAMBRE
And it was because of the dog, or the sign. How pathetic and stupid and sad. That skinny pup lying dull-eyed at the end of its rope, panting in the exhaust. He took out his wallet and handed her the last of his money left in the world, a green twenty-dollar bill, seeing himself later that night looking out the window of his bus into the darkness asking himself why the fuck he did it even as he did it.
Son, in life there are winners and losers. Your choice is which side will you be on? Don’t back the losers, son. They’ll never let you go.
Victor breathed. He counted. He needed something, but what it was he didn’t know. He was never going to survive.
John Henry said you had to believe. Sure, no problem.
But what were you supposed to believe?
Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe
Intermission II
Six Hours Until the Meeting
Nineteen eighty-three, when the war started, Charles was fifty-four years old and newly minted as the Assistant to the Deputy Director of Economic Research for the Central Bank. In July of that year, two months into his new post, a small band of Tamil rebels in the north attacked a police station. They killed thirteen Sinhala policemen.
And thus the Tigers were born. With rifles and mortars. And the sweet Buddhist citizens of Colombo, so famous for their politeness and gentle ways, went completely mad.
These were people Charles knew. People he had once worked with at the university. His neighbors. The woman who mended his shirts. The man who brought fresh fish from the market. The toothless man who sold kites on Galle Face Green. They took to the streets in gallant mobs; they paraded in the night armed with carpentry hammers, simple boards with protruding nails, tins of petrol. The brave mobs burned the city. They tore Tamils from their homes. Tamils who had lived peacefully in the city for generations. Tamil businesses burned; Tamil homes burned; Tamil daughters raped and burned. The mobs stopped lorries on the street and demanded petrol. The petrol was placed in an empty tire. The tire was placed around a Tamil’s neck. Someone lit a match and jumped back. They called it necklacing—that manifestation of human cruelty, mob madness.
Pinpricks of anxiety across his skin because now here he was how many years later, walking among a crowd of angry citizens.
He saw a father walking with his son, small steps so the boy could keep up. He saw a group of grandmothers carrying a cardboard coffin bobbing above their gray heads.
He heard drums and the chaotic piercing shriek of policemen’s whistles, but of course the police were not blowing whistles, the half-naked people dancing in the streets were.
He thought of the actress on the plane. They had said their goodbyes on the concourse before Customs. She had offered him a ride into the city, but he politely declined, exercising his customary restraint.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re very kind.”
But then the moment of goodbye and he was at a loss. A handshake? Lean in for a kiss on the cheek?
He had extended his hand and she had looked at it and laughed and then threw her arms wide and pulled him into a fierce hug.
“Good luck, Charles,” she said. “I hope you get what it is you want.” And then she stepped back and placed her palms together and bowed ever so slightly.
“Yes, same to you,” he said.
There seemed more to say, but what it was he didn’t know.