by Sunil Yapa
They were screaming and crying and chanting.
They didn’t understand—there were pressures, circumstances beyond his control.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m so so sorry.”
He hit the boy with the baton, a half-swing with power, aimed for the fragile bend of his elbow.
He popped him in the pressure point of the throat. Knocked him behind the ear which was a mistake because then the blood started to flow.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m so very sorry.”
Finally the kid fell away from the two girls on either side and his officers moved in and began to pull their bodies apart. The back of the kid’s head was split open and his neck was smeared with blood. Bishop watched as his officers tried to carry the boy’s body, neither of them wanting to get near the mess that was his face.
One officer was headed west with his arm; the other had one leg gripped by the foot and was moving east. The Chief watched in dumbfounded dismay. He thought for a moment he was going to be sick in his hat, but then the moment passed, and he turned and moved on to the next seated pair.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
24
King roamed the edges. She knelt among the fallen, feeling overwhelmed and lost. She lifted a face and poured Maalox and water into its upturned eyes and she dragged the wounded from the intersection and the entire time she was fighting the voice that wanted to tell her: This is your fault.
They talked until they agreed, it was that simple. They made decisions together, or not at all. Consensus was the political heart of what they did and who they were. It was the process by which they channeled their anger, used their sorrow and outrage, their deep sense of separateness, toward a higher purpose. And she loved it.
She loved the discipline, the community, the sense that they themselves had created an independent republic of eight hearts and minds governed by the purest expression of democracy that could be had. Conversations that went around and around until every point had been discussed and dissected and deconstructed. Years ago, if you had described this process to her she would have laughed. How did anything ever get done? It sounded like you’d still be debating, deeply mired in your democratic process, when the cops came to kick in your teeth. But now, in the thick of things, it was sometimes magical, as if joined by a common devotion to the process, they shared the same consciousness, eight solitary souls holding steady like one orange-tipped compass needle quivering at dead north.
So why did she let it happen? Why did she make it happen?
“I’ll do it,” Victor had said. “Lockdown. I’ll be the one.”
And she had swallowed hard, knowing it was wrong, but knowing, too, that the cops were coming and they needed to get people into lockdown if they were going to keep this intersection. So she ignored the lump in her throat and nodded, knowing it might be the move that saved them, that saved this intersection, but knowing in her heart it might also be the beginning of the unraveling of all they had built, all they believed and had fought for.
Even as she tried to remember the swirl of words from The Black Cross Medical Field Guide, the dark voice told her: Did you see that boy? That is your fault. All yours. The dark current that wanted to suck her under and never let go even as she touched and poured. Your fault.
A bottle with a squirt cap is ideal for the eye flush.
A man in a tan suit vomiting into his hands and when King reached him with the bottle he was blind and had no idea where to look.
“Here, I’m here,” she said.
Before Mexico, she had told John Henry she wanted hard truths. There was something in the armed conflict of the Third World that drew her. A certain starkness, the solid reality of black-and-white lines that was unavailable to her in America.
She said this to John Henry, John Henry the alchemist, who had taught her how to transform her sadness and confusion into a strength as dependable as steel.
John Henry who said you must use your body. You must use your hands and spirit and mind. John Henry who taught her if you didn’t do the work, then you wouldn’t survive the work. You’d be left, in the end, with nothing but your own obsessed turbulence.
A solution of half Maalox (plain or mint) and half water works best to clear the eyes.
An older black man who had gone down to one knee and was holding his head to the sky.
King saying, “Don’t touch your face,” and reaching for her water bottle.
John Henry and King had lived in a box on top of a hill. The box was a recycled shipping container once corresponding to the ISO regulation size of 53 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 20 feet high. Together they designed windows and a rooftop garden, working by lamplight through the long summer evenings; later she cut the steel with an acetylene welding torch. From the top of the hill they could see the purple-black waters of the Sound. The dorsal fins of dolphins, orcas, breaking the surface. On a clear day they could see as far as the snow-covered slopes of Rainier. The perfect cinder cone volcano dormant over the city and valleys below.
A bandanna soaked in apple cider vinegar and tightly tied around the nose and mouth is far better than nothing, but still a last resort.
A middle-aged woman in a red rain slicker pawing at her face. King let the water run down her face like milk and held her while she sobbed.
King didn’t know where she was most needed, where she could best help, and she looked at cops and the spiraling gas and felt a sort of frustration rising in her throat. She couldn’t get to everybody. And she couldn’t stop the cops from firing. She fought the urge to just turn and run. There were bodies lying everywhere, the police wading through the pileup, three or four cops walking with spray bottles that looked like small fire extinguishers, the spray looping over them in an arc. King kept her head down. She kept her hands clean as she tried to remember what John Henry had taught her.
The best protection is a gas mask. However, we can no longer recommend the Israeli gas mask as the lenses have been known to shatter on impact.
The canisters dropped and sputtered. Thick fumes smoldered in the air. People stumbled among the bodies, coughing and blind.
King saw a woman on her knees in the middle of the intersection. Her hands clasped in prayer, her face a mask of running blood.
Of course the locals thought they were crazy. But on their hill they had no neighbors. On a clear day, a hundred, two hundred miles of vision. Sight lines in every direction. No neighbors who could see like this.
And then came news of the first arrest. A man she had known as Billy the Kid. William Garrison, the paper said, eco-terrorist, conspiracy charges. Mastermind of an attack on the Vail ski resort in Colorado.
When she got in her truck and drove into town to check her email, the message boards were lit up with it. Billy—she still could not think of him as William—arrested in New York City, five years after the fact. It was unprecedented. The FBI had found other fugitives over the years, of course, but they had never pursued environmental activists with such vigor. Nor prosecuted them so hard.
Eco-terrorism.
It was a message and King heard it loud and clear.
Three more from Vail went down within the month. She began making plans for Mexico. She had friends there. It wasn’t running or hiding out. It was a trip. It would be a productive time. Write some essays. Make a film. Take photos. She was so terribly frightened, but she didn’t dare tell a soul.
A tremendously fat bald man who cried into King’s shoulder as she worked to clean his face. The man repeating the words “thank you” as if they were a prayer, clutching her arm and then collapsing against her. Her arms around him as he shook.
She told John Henry she wanted to cross the border. Not forever. For a few months. A year. Just until things calmed down a little with the FBI. And she wanted John Henry to go with her. To be with her. To be together.
But John Henry, who believed that courage and compassion were everything, said he had no desire to go to Mexico.
He said what you sacrificed in the struggle was nothing compared to what you got in return—a sort of blazing personal heat. You transcended your own history to become the person you needed to be. You stood apart. You transformed yourself. No more double life. It didn’t matter the inconsistencies in your life, this is what John Henry dared to say to her—no more lies permitted in the sacred ground of your heart.
This was a man she loved to the point she would forsake all other men, forswear sex and violence. Be good. For him. Because he asked.
He said she was unduly worried. Said she needed to grow up. Almost said she was being hysterical, but caught himself and said instead their work was here, but still she saw the ugly accusation in his look.
She went to her knees before a gray-haired woman who had caught pepper spray in the face. The woman was on her knees on the pavement as the throngs swarmed and buzzed and people went running by, pursued by cops in flapping black. King held her eyes open with one hand and poured from the bottle with the other. The woman on her knees with her head tilted back, totally vulnerable and blind, mumbling and moaning as if awaiting execution while her hand played with the buttons of her coat.
King steadied her head. Her long fingers pulled at the woman’s eyes. She poured the solution of water and Maalox and whispered words of reassurance as the woman’s eyes searched back and forth in a panic, flashing helplessly in her head. She was trying to communicate some message but what it was King didn’t know.
John Henry’s mouth was a wound that leaked language—disclaimers and apologies. But she was tired of talking about how her work was nothing. Her worry was nothing. Tired of feeling judged. Days passed when she was all ease and control, as delicate as a perfumed wrist, as fragile as an armed bomb. She listened to him talk at her and she smiled and reached for his cigarettes, nodding.
The effects of pepper spray include: temporary blindness lasting 15 to 30 minutes.
But he would not budge. So she went alone.
Upper-body spasms lasting 15 to 20 minutes.
And at first it was glorious. In the evenings the first appearance of a darkening sky, swallows dipping and swooping above the desert floor. Jackrabbits daredeviling through the dust. A group of deer she spooked drinking from a trickle at the bottom of a dry creek. At first it was wonderful, yes, but how quickly it became lonely, and then she was lost in a nightmare of homesickness, of feeling foreign and utterly apart.
A burning sensation of the skin lasting 45 to 60 minutes.
One day, out of the blue, John Henry emailed and asked her to come back. Said they were planning a big one. It was going to be the direct action of the century. They were going to shut down the goddamn World Trade Organization and the whole world would be watching and he was sorry for being an ass, but now he needed her. They all needed her.
Direct close-range spray can cause serious and lasting eye damage. What is known as the needle effect.
She wrote back and agreed to come, still not understanding just how difficult it would be to make her way north, to sneak illegally back into her own country. She remembered Guadalajara. The twilight street, light spilling from the curtains which hung in the open doors. An open shop with the grille half-raised, people inside browsing American movies on pirated discs and she remembered her own feet like the feet of a stranger passing through white cones of light where the shadows of bats spun and fell across her boots as if her head were attached to a stranger’s body, her ruck on some stranger’s back. Two girls lounged against the wall, slogans painted behind them, movie posters glued to the wall, and she felt it with a suddenness she had not felt since she was a child—the strangeness of what she was doing, the vulnerability of who she was, a woman traveling alone through these half-deserted streets. She finally had to admit. She did not know what she was doing. Had no idea how she would actually cross the border.
So she bought a gun. And she found a guide, a man and his son, who were also going to make the attempt to cross illegally into the United States.
Opening the eyes will cause a temporary increase in pain, 30 to 45 minutes.
And then it all went wrong and she did what she did. And what she did was she shot a man on the border and watched him bleed just as she had once broken a man’s pinky and ring finger and watched him weep.
Difficulty breathing or speaking: 5 to 15 minutes.
25
Park was leaning against the PeaceKeeper, on the opposite side as Julia, totally bored, looking around Pike Place Market. There was absolutely nothing happening here—except for the small knot of outraged people beginning to gather around the car where he had pepper-sprayed two Quakers or whatever—and he was beginning to think it was a knucklehead idea to join Ju on the ’Keeper in the first place.
“You know,” Ju said, “we had a word for these kind of people back in L.A.”
Neither of them had said a word in at least half an hour.
“Yeah?” Park said. He clocked silver pails of silver fish. Fish, blind and dead and wrapped in newsprint.
“Listen,” she said, “I didn’t mean anything by the razor blade thing. That was an unfortunate comment on my part.”
He shrugged like what razor blade thing.
“No, really, I’m sorry, Park. I got carried away.”
“What’d you call them?”
“What’d we call what?”
“These people, Ju,” he said. “Back in L.A., what did you call them?”
“Hot dogs.”
“Hot dogs I don’t process.”
“Yeah, hot dogs in a plastic pack. All feet and mouth and asshole.”
And that was the thing someone said on the back lot, the thing that was so stupid and true and twisted it made you shake your head and spit a laugh into your Styrofoam cup and forget the human mess you were witness to.
And suddenly Park was shaking and laughing in his riot gear and grinning from every shiny corner of his fucked-up face.
“Assholes and lips,” he said.
“Walking talking shit on a bun,” Ju said.
“They had it tough?”
“Totally screwed,” she said.
Both of them cracking up like a couple of maniacs.
“Hey, check this guy out,” he said, feeling good.
“Who?”
“That smart-aleck protester in a suit.”
“You think?”
“Heck yeah.”
Park watched him coming down the rows of fish and fruits. Foreign-looking guy, sweating and something in the way he walked like he owned the city. Park just knew. Guy was bullcrap.
They stopped him in the market between the tomatoes and the fish. Asked him to raise his hands.
“I’m a delegate,” the man said.
Ju spread his legs, patted his fancy suit. Park reaching for his plastic zip cuffs, noticed Ju touching the guy’s soft suit, patting his legs and such. Why did she need to touch him so much? That wasn’t necessary.
“What’s in the briefcase?” Park said, taking it from the man and throwing it away.
“He’s clean,” Ju said.
And what was this, the Indian motherfucker freeing his arm and reaching into his jacket. Park and Ju. They reacted like a team, like they’d been partners for fifteen years, and Park, damn he was feeling good. Just the way they lifted the man by his arms, lifted him like a team, reacting instantly, hands in his armpits and lifting him away and up and then slamming him together into the table that held the tomatoes.
A team, reacting almost instantly, like they shared a brain, which felt amazing, to tell the truth, but the guy had gotten whatever it was he was reaching for and was now offering it delicately, pinched between his fingers.
“Officers,” he said, “I am a delegate.”
Park lifted the man’s chin with the end of his riot baton. His fancy suit was fruity with tomato guts. Put his baton under the chin and lifted.
The guy was holding out a business card.
Park took it. Ju looking over his should
er. There was a tiny lion holding a sword on the card’s ivory face. Embossed in gold letters the card read:
DR. CHARLES WICKRAMSINGHE
DEPUTY MINISTER OF FINANCE AND PLANNING
THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF SRI LANKA
Park crumpled it in his fist and let it fall to the sawdust floor of the market. “Socialist what?” he said.
God, he was feeling frickin’ great.
Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe
Intermission III
Three Hours Until the Meeting
When he imagined the names: the World Bank; the International Monetary Fund; the World Trade Organization. The Kennedy Round, the Uruguay Round. NAFTA, MAI, and the GATT.
When he imagined the economic ministers in headphones and suits sitting at long brown tables; voices translating Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin, negotiating the tax on French cheese; British beef imports; how many Toyotas will be assembled in Ohio.
When he imagined the great container ships cruising the seas, saw the steel hulls riding the ocean swells, the rough burlap of bagged coffee, the netted mounds of bananas; crates of strawberries grown fat under the summer sun of the southern hemisphere. When he imagined the container ships sailing from port to port, when he imagined the cables spanning the ocean floor, the twenty-four-hour financial markets, the satellites in orbit—why would someone want to stop this? It was free trade; it was global capitalism; it was the world.
Canceled? How could the meetings be canceled? It was catastrophic. It was impossible. He hadn’t thought this ragtag army of malcontents could organize themselves long enough to get a cricket match going. Let alone shut down the most important global financial meetings of the decade. But they had. They had managed to cause enough confusion and chaos that the meetings were canceled. It was impossible.
And now here Charles found himself wandering around a bloody fish market.
Somewhere in his running he had gotten separated from the boy who had saved him, the boy in sandals and socks who was going to protect the Third World from the corporations of the world. And his running had taken him downhill, down Seattle’s steep streets five blocks to Pike Place Market where, now, Charles, alone, studied the rows of fish on ice, fish on newsprint. He watched men in knee-high yellow boots heaving silver bodies from hand to hand. A man and woman working side by side, amiably removing the alien heads of jumbo shrimp.