Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

by Sunil Yapa

  The way a woman ate from a ceramic bowl sitting along the seawall in Havana. The way her hands moved as she argued with a friend.

  Burning cars blocking the winding road which crossed the border between Peru and Bolivia—a protest against rising gas prices—and Victor opened his pack and sat and shared his crackers and talked with the young men, with the women in their bowler hats, and did they let him through because of his brown skin or because of his Spanish, bad as it was? Or did they just appreciate the talk, the crackers, the companionship and interest and salt.

  Conversations wandering the back streets of cities so large he could have walked forever and never reached the end of every lane, seen the end of every shop.

  A old man in pajama pants pushing his bicycle through the back lanes of Old Shanghai. Across the river, a young man working a backhoe in a new office park, sitting high and formal in the cab wearing a blue suit and tie.

  People’s fucking faces. He watched and lived and he felt a million distinct and separate truths beginning to accumulate within his chest like a murmuring crowd. It was an ache inside a need, a white-hot expansion of memory and intuition.

  A blind girl begging change in Delhi, flies around the empty sockets of bunched flesh.

  Further north, in a tiny mountain town, playing chess and drinking tea, while young guys stood around in sunglasses, watching the game beneath a movie poster, sharing a cigarette among them, lighting the next from the coal of the last.

  In Chile, Victor for hours on a cliff, hours watching the endless succession of waves crashing against a continent’s edge. Hours spent watching and waiting for what? It was so easy to forget what he had come for. And just a kid without a system, without a political framework, the more he saw, the less he understood. A million singular truths accreting inside him. A million strands. A needle moving so fast he couldn’t see it, could only feel it, inking a new face, a new line, a new story. Just woke in the morning with a new tattoo he could never see, could never share. Just felt it deposited like crushed color beneath the skin.

  Victor searched the crowd. Americans by the thousands, angry Americans in the rain, their faces round and wet. And he heard them chanting and he wanted to believe it was true. Yes, he envied them their belief and he wanted to feel it, whatever energy was passing back and forth between the seated chanting thousands.

  But he couldn’t.

  He looked at John Henry next to him, searching for the source of his courage, but all he saw was his mouth working above those crooked teeth, his glasses misting and the way he held his head, the way he chanted as if those words held all his fear, all the lonely rain-soaked hope that brought him here to this spot, to this morning, to this 40-by-40 stretch of wet asphalt, chanting in the rain.

  Victor knew suddenly that he couldn’t do this. Knew it as deep as any knowing goes. And he felt like a coward, but he knew he couldn’t do this. His heart was hammering triple-time and he knew. He had to get out.

  The wind struggled and whipped. He saw shoes and jeans. Knees and legs and feet moving in a jerking fashion as if puppets on a smoky stage. Caught on a sudden updraft, the smoke rose and corkscrewed between the buildings and he saw the Doctor in his overalls and top hat out in the intersection motioning for people to sit, sit, sit as the canisters dropped and smoked. He was wearing a hand-lettered sign taped to his chest.

  One Human for Humanity

  A nail of fear driven into his heart as he watched the cops identify the Doctor. They circled him like wolves and then knocked him on his ass. Victor winced as he watched one cop work a baton against the Doctor’s upper body. The cop stood over the Doctor’s fallen body, working that baton in long strokes from the shoulder like the Doctor’s spine contained some stubborn rock he was trying to remove by pickax.

  The Doctor in his overalls and flip-flops, still somehow narrating his beating from the ground.

  “Police brutality. You are practicing police brutality.”

  One cop hitting him with the baton. Another cop knelt beside him on the pavement, punching him in the throat. Thump. Thump. Thump. A sound like a fish flopping in a boat that Victor would never forget, hard blows to shut him up, to close his windpipe, and still he went on.

  “You do not need to use force. I am a peaceful protester, I am willing to be arrested.”

  The cops answered succinctly with their batons and fists.

  Thump.

  “You don’t need to put your knee on my neck. I am not resisting arrest.”

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Victor wanted to have the strength to watch, to witness the brutality and be strong enough to tell the world about it. He wanted to witness it and by witnessing make it real, unable to be forgotten; he wanted this horror seared into every pale pink fiber of his skull. But he was afraid. The batons rising and falling like pistons in an engine Victor didn’t want to know about. Victor’s arms were two pieces of wood shivering in the pipes. He counted; he breathed; but he didn’t chant.

  He watched as the Doctor lurched to his feet. Victor knew what was coming, but he wouldn’t look away. He would witness this. The Doctor was turned around, disoriented for a moment, and in the mayhem he stumbled backward into a cop. The cop came low and fast with his baton. A sharp clip to the shin that crumpled the Doctor’s leg and sent him tumbling to the pavement, where the cop was already on him, tearing off the sign

  One Human for Humanity

  and throwing it into the wind. The cop hit him across the face and the Doctor’s hands flew to his teeth, still narrating, mumbling through the blood. “Police brutality. You are practicing police brutality.”

  Oh god, Victor was so scared.

  In that other life, things made more sense. He ran out of money, he went home. He worked trucks in New Orleans. Graveyard shifts unloading sofa beds and plasma TVs. He saw a quarter on the oil-stained floor and he picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he was gone again, looking for something he couldn’t name, but which he felt inside like a saw blade spinning in the hollow space beneath his ribs.

  “Lawyer,” the Doctor slurred through his broken bloody mouth. “I want a lawyer, you fuckers.”

  The Doctor tried to cover up as the furious cop stood above him, thrashing him with the baton like he wanted to beat him back to a single-celled state.

  The Doctor had stopped moving. His body lay motionless in the street not twenty feet from where Victor sat counting his breaths and sweating. One cop sat on the Doctor’s neck; the other bound his wrists in plastic.

  Lying there at night in his tent, thinking of all he had seen and known and not understood. Waking in the morning and shivering on the pier, feeling a weird black hole, a sort of hole inside a confusion inside a need, the immensity of the world, the unbelievable hugeness of it all, reduced to a scrap of newspaper a woman uses to wipe her mouth after a meal.

  Sat there on the pier wrapped in his sleeping bag, shivering and watching the ships move from port to sea, carrying the things that fill a life: five-dollar umbrellas and paper towels and plastic chairs. Sitting there thinking of all he had seen, remembering the faces of all the people he had met, sat there feeling an ache inside a love inside a need, thinking of all the voices and complaints and smiles, all the stupid jokes and dreams. What did it all add up to? What did it mean?

  Two cops dragged the Doctor away by his pretty blond hair. And here came other cops, swinging those fire extinguishers back and forth, letting the pepper spray soak the seated heads. Moving closer to where he and John Henry sat. Two minutes, Victor thought, and here he was, his arms locked in PVC pipe, totally immobile on the cold damp pavement, too scared to call it off, too scared to chant, asking himself what the hell he was doing even while he was doing it while the cops shuffled in a line, tap-tap-tapping their billy clubs.

  Two minutes and here they’ll be, he thought, the fear shaking his chest like thunder rattling windowpanes. Whether I believe or doubt or chant or die.

  He had never felt so alone in his life.


  22

  King wading through the crowd—making her way toward where Victor and John Henry sat in lockdown—watched four cops go after a kid wrapped in an American flag. The kid—whoever he was—was out front of the cop lines, right in their faces, flashing them the peace sign. The cops came at him hard and knocked him to the ground and he was lost in the black underwater shine of their riot gear.

  The scene in front of the Sheraton was chaos. Not what she had expected. Not what any of them had wanted. The line of cops was in tatters and she saw the hooded faceplated forms cutting wildly through the crowd with their riot sticks. The mass surged and collapsed. She watched as two cops kicked a young woman with feathers braided into her hair. An Asian girl with glasses received a blow to the knee. She felt sick. No one was fighting the cops. There they sat, supplicant and chanting, a huddled mass at the center of it all in lockdown, while the tear gas swirled around them like incense around the shaved head of a monk. And yes, they were practicing nonviolence, but how could you be nonviolent in the face of this? The rules had changed and the cops appeared to have gone temporarily insane. Or were these their orders? That was even worse to imagine. That the Mayor, or the Governor, or Clinton himself—whoever was in charge of this mess—had willingly let loose the dogs of war. Sent them armed and furious into a wall of peaceful protest.

  She saw the kid trying to crawl out from between their legs. She watched as a baton came high from the circle of bodies and she thought of a small room in southern Mexico. Remote mountains where rebels and outlaws and a people’s army went to hide. Chiapas. Her room, bigger than a cell, but perhaps the air of a quiet nun’s corners. A place to cook. A place to read in the sun. A place to sleep in the cool nights. A place not without a sort of quiet hideout contentment. The outward reaches of the barrio where the neighborhood gave way to scrubland. Out there past the last of the buzzing sodium streetlamps, there was a quiet air of desolation, some twilight feeling of blue abandonment that seemed to cut her to the core.

  Goddamn it, why had she not just stayed with John? Stayed in their off-the-grid paradise, their nation of two? Why had she gone to Mexico in a fit of anger?

  Yes. She had been scared to go. Scared and yet angry enough with John Henry to sneak across the border under the radar in the guise of a tourist with her sunscreen and camera and her zip-off pants, safely using an old friend’s driver’s license for ID. Crossing from California into the loud clamorous wrack of Tijuana. Scared and angry enough to not fully consider just how she would get back home when and if the time came. It was never meant to be forever—nothing was—maybe a year or two, but then you get down there and how do you get back. Because going back, going north, it turned out, was nothing like being a fucking tourist. It was about as far away from being a tourist as you could get.

  The cops charged and down the kid went again. King heard the scrape of riot boots on concrete and she looked at John Henry and Victor in lockdown. Two faces, two bodies in a circle of eight people sitting cross-legged, facing out into the intersection. Beneath them were pieces of cardboard, torn blankets, anything to protect their sitting butts from the coldness of the pavement. Their arms—their arms were the thing—held aloft and rigid, at right angles to their bodies. Their arms encased in white PVC piping. And helpers wiping their mouths, and helpers holding the pipes in the air. An unbroken circle. Yes, a circle of people sitting in an intersection locked together at the arms with PVC pipes and the cops rampaging on the other side of the crowd. How long before they made it to Victor and John Henry? And look at them. Totally vulnerable. Those cops would massacre them when they finally got here.

  They had calls in to every newspaper and TV station and media outlet in the metro area, some national, too. Some of the reporters hung up. Some of the reporters apologized, saying it was not a story. And some of the reporters came down with their cameras and stood in front of protesters locked to each other with chains, and asked, “How do you feel?” “What brings you down here?” “Is this a revolution?”

  Despite everything the media might say, and despite what her own wary weary heart might counsel, King knew that what they were doing was important and right. And she believed that if Americans saw what pain their way of life caused in the world they would respond. Americans were a good-hearted people.

  So they sat in the street and they chanted and they made witness with their bodies.

  Woman’s body for bearing babies. Man’s body for bearing loads.

  American bodies no longer on the line. No longer employed in the so-called manufacturing sector. American bodies too expensive for work so they find cheaper bodies to feed the machine.

  They were arranging their bodies in circles and lines. They were linking arms. They were enduring overwhelming violence. They were making message with their bodies.

  Wasn’t it just a new kind of slavery? Was a cheap pair of socks really worth doing that to a child? People had to see that. The basic wrongness. They knew. But nobody was talking about it because it was hidden. They would have you believe it was the only way the world could be. And the WTO. The organization which makes it all legal and turns it to law? How legitimate could the WTO be if they are forced to beat innocent citizens in the street to protect their own meetings?

  She watched and she wanted to believe that the cops would stop. Let it be enough.

  She wanted to believe that the media—the reporters with their shaky mikes and gas masks—would pay attention and send this message to the world.

  She wanted to believe the police wouldn’t kill any one of the gentle strong people she had brought here.

  But she did not.

  Not for one beautiful fucking second.

  Because how deep the darkness of the heart which longs for control.

  Suddenly the kid was on his feet again. Somehow scrambling out from the circle of cops and stumbling away. He had lost his shirt and his American flag. King watched as he stood in the middle of the street, a skinny kid with a concave chest who seemed intent on personal destruction, and he had his fists up, though not to punch, pumping his fist and pumping his fist and pumping his fist, standing in the middle of the street pumping his balled fist, while the cops came charging after him with their batons and pepper spray.

  Pumping his fist as if he had won something.

  23

  The Chief did not look good. His sandy hair lying damp on his forehead and his glasses askew and his face gone pale beneath the tan. They were chanting and they were singing and they were sitting linked arm in arm and they were not clearing the street. So he grabbed one of the dispensers and let the pepper spray go streaming over their seated dripping bodies. He released the spray to drift down in a fine webby mist.

  He pushed his way to the front where two of his men were trying to extricate a boy in an army jacket from the chain-link of arms.

  He reached down between his men and removed the boy’s bandanna in one easy motion. He hit him in the face with the pepper spray. His head was shaved. He wore loops of leather and beads around his neck. A purple crystal pendant on a silver chain.

  The boy gagged and fell forward, still trying to chant. Bishop blasted him again.

  “Sorry, kid,” he said.

  People packed between the buildings; people spilling from the sidewalks and up into the potted ferns and cedar chips. People dangling from lampposts and dancing in the crosswalks. He shot the spray hard into their faces, two spots of rough red spreading outward from his bright blue eyes, his thin-lipped mouth. This was the face of a man on the edge of cardiac arrest.

  Screaming now. The boy was arm in arm with two girls on either side and now they were screaming and screaming and screaming and he couldn’t believe how angry it made him as these kids sat unmoved in the mayhem and continued to chant.

  Bishop laid his baton across the soft meat of the boy’s back. Bishop himself had said in the MACC, he had said it again in the street, “Don’t get out of control.”

  He wasn’t ou
t of control.

  But he wanted very badly for this crowd to disperse. He wanted to clear a way through. He wanted to protect his city. He wanted the Mayor to quit shouting at him over the radio. He wanted his goddamn city back.

  Bishop. KRRRCHHH

  Anarchists seen headed north on Seneca.

  KRRRCCCCCHH

  Flammable liquids. Over

  …soft platoon! Who can go hats and bats?

  It seemed like everybody was talking on the same channel, and he felt a despondent anger, a helpless sort of rage as he keyed the radio and pressed it to his mouth.

  Bishop here. Did not copy. Please repeat.

  Chief! Chief!…KRRRCHHH

  Fourth and KRRCCCHH

  BishKRRCHH.

  Bishop here. Did not copy. Please repeat.

  Urine. Over.

  Paper bags of crap. Over.

  He stepped to the side. Kicked one of the girls in the leg, then stepped back and kicked the other one in her ribs. Kicked at their linked arms trying to break them apart.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  People stumbling from the intersection, choking, heading north or east, away from the gas.

  He had ordered his troops to fire on American citizens and they had fired and now he could not take it back no matter how much he might have wished it to be so.

  BishopKRRRCHHH

  Need assistance at Fifth and Pike.

  Fifth and Union. Repeat please.

  Volley after volley of gas until the intersection was so choked with gas he couldn’t see the hotel on the other side. Couldn’t see the streets behind him. They waded through the crowd, breaking apart bodies as if breaking ice in an icebound harbor. He wedged his heel between their arms and tried some sort of leverage. He smacked each girl with the back of his open hand.