by Sunil Yapa
King knew she would remember, drifting toward sleep some day far removed, the solid thump the wood made falling upon him. It was the sound of the true heartbeat of the world, and once it had been heard, there was no way to stop hearing it. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. And what was it in that long and prolonged instant—what was it that told her this pain would go on forever? What was happening there was no erasing. There would be no apologies, no forgetting, no reconciliations. Just the opening to the pain that is your friend dead or shot or starved or beaten. Disappeared into the place where the disappeared die. She saw six cops standing over him and there was something in the way their fists rose and fell that made her heart want to stop. Like a clock that had run out of time. King could see it in every crunch and shuddering shock. Something in the way they stood over the boy working their sticks. Heard it in every hoarse burst of air. Something in the way they raised their batons, feet spread for balance as if gathering strength from hip and leg. The way they paused before swinging as if measuring the blows.
And King knew exactly what John Henry would say. John Henry would say look at how they are forced to hit him. We have won. Look at what they are forced to do to save themselves.
And tell me is what they protect worth a man’s life? Free trade? This is something we all want and need? Why must they beat a man in the street if the answer is yes?
Victor was bleeding now and King heard the wet slap of the clubs on flesh. She thought nonviolence. She thought I will witness this. Victor scared like an animal on the pavement, his hands covering his head, and she said to herself, I will witness this. I will witness this and I will remember this and wasn’t this exactly what John Henry said would happen?
Yes, it was. But it wasn’t supposed to be Victor. And who, John Henry might have said, had guided him to this moment? Tell me, King, who put Victor in lockdown?
They rolled him onto his back. Two cops bent and pried his arms from his face. You could glimpse some clue of it in their arms and shoulders. The force behind their blows, the desperation of their fury, the angry and frightened look in their eyes—it was the ancient terror of a police whose mission it was to control people who were unafraid of their violence.
If you are not afraid of dying.
She saw a kid dancing with a can of lighter fluid ablaze and Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on someone’s battered boom box, and there was a time when she thought she knew the feeling that had brought them here, these people who were now in the street joyfully burning the city. She had thought she understood it on some level, what brought them out, what thrill there was. No, not thrill.
Just say it.
If you are not afraid of dying, then what freedom you fucking feel. What freedom there is to burn and wreck. To stand in the middle of a city street, a street with the lights to go and the lights to stop and the taxis passing and the buses passing and the limos passing, and the lights that told you when to go and when you had to stand there on the corner looking helpless and lost; the cops and the cameras and the people with their lives lived behind walls that you see in the eyes and what a stupendous devastating freedom to stand in the middle of a street like this and torch the motherfucker. What a cold excitement in the chest to break a barricade and burn a dumpster. To put a crowbar, yes, through a bank window.
That intoxication of ignition, the sweet smell of fuel, the way the paper rose in the heated air light as tissue, burnt and torn messages rising to a god you did not believe in—yes, there had been a time when she thought she understood this.
The world doesn’t give you what you want?
Burn it down.
Now, watching their bodies taking the blows, she saw it for what it was.
Because where have you arrived when you take your piece of pavement, your glass bottle, your stone, to go to war with a modern military? When all you have left is your body, or the body of your son, and that is what you throw in the street. That is your final roadblock to occupation.
Jesus Christ, look at them. Attempting to take a city with nothing more than their bodies and whatever currents might run inside.
No, revolution was not glamorous. Revolution was a sacrifice. A desperation. The last insane leap to some future where you might have the room to breathe. Except there was nothing there when you landed but a wall running east to west.
Or was it the most clearheaded sanity—this last leap? The final decision you would have the power to make. Which would it be? Hurry now, the tanks are rolling in the street, the troops are at your door. Time to choose. Slavery or suicide? Surrender or fight?
But this time, no. She would not let her rage overcome her. Neither her despair. She would not meet violence with violence. She believed in the transcendent power of love, the overwhelming force of nonviolence, and it was love that had saved her long ago when the anger had burned her to nothing. Love that showed her another person to be, love that taught her how to recognize the rage and not be consumed by it.
Victor. Did she have enough love to include Victor?
Victor, who was now covered up on the pavement, leaking blood, while four cops stood above him beating his prone body with batons and measuring their blows as if what they needed to control the situation was more pain.
If only they could apply more pain.
A woman on the edge making soul-struck cries with every blow.
The way they measured the shots. The way those motherfuckers stood and lifted and paused and measured. The way they paused and calculated before driving their batons into his back. The way they stepped back to make room for the others who came rushing to join as if it were a form of sport.
How bright blood is when it leaves the body. How quickly it pools on the pavement. How it comes streaming out from the tiniest hole, comes out so fast it’s as if it was waiting to leap out of your body since you were born and bawling in your mother’s arms.
What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving within the limits where it belongs, to stay at home.
Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home.
But restless thing that it is, your blood, it leaps into the world.
And the thing seemed prolonged, the seconds stretching out into eternity as they stood in a group and hammered at his face, smashed Victor where he lay huddled on the pavement, and King watching and witnessing and then she was running again. But not away. Running toward it this time. Running toward it as surely and swiftly as she once moved her arms in that small backwoods pond where her mother had taught her how to swim. The crowd chanting.
WHAT DOES DEMOCRACY LOOK LIKE???
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!
There was nothing in her mind save the batons falling and her body running. She could have been anywhere. Any dust-choked square on earth. Any running girl, running to save a friend. Look at her go. Headed straight for that fucking armored truck and the mangled motherfucker from this morning. The asshole who made the shot that took him down.
WHAT DOES DEMOCRACY LOOK LIKE???
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!
She dodged three officers, took two steps, one foot grabbed the front bumper of the armored vehicle and then she lifted into the air. The few scattered cops who were protecting the PeaceKeeper moved back in alarm. And then she was flying up toward the hood of the thing and there could have been nothing more surprising than what she saw before her.
The cop with the fucked-up face was not on the hood. He had suddenly disappeared with the Chief and who she saw in his place was a brown-skinned woman with a gun. Her body heavy with armor. King thinking, How did that happen, as she landed and saw her own body mirrored there. A body braced and armed.
WHAT DOES DEMOCRACY LOOK LIKE???
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!
She saw her own boots and her own legs and her own face mirrored in the boots and legs and face of this cop. Her hands. The long fingers. The chewed-to-the-nub fingertips. Yes, a mirror of her own scared and t
rembling hands. Except this cop was holding a gun.
And King was not.
38
The first baton went straight to the head, a stereophonic boom that seemed to blow out his ears. Victor tried to crawl away, but someone kicked him and flipped him on his back and then stepped onto his flailing hand. Time seemed to slow. He felt the boot pinning his upturned palm to the pavement, felt the pinch of gravel against his skin, and he felt the beginning of a knowledge. They were working on his body, but he was just a hand turned to the sky. He felt where the tread was worn and thin, felt where the sharp edges dug into his fingers as the cop bore down, felt in his palm every impress and contour of the hard rubber sole. It was as if his hand were the centering essence of his fluid being, he felt it wholly as if he were not a man and a body, but only a hand cradling a boot, open to receive a sky swollen with cloud.
He was both boot and hand. Black boot and brown man’s hand. His hand, skin the color of strong tea, the hard knobby knuckles pressed to the pavement. The warm pulse of blood in the veins, the lined white palm with his creased fortunes and folds. He looked at the storm clouds, blackness within blackness, and he felt something sliding from him.
Cops coming a-running to join in the fun.
The cop lifted his foot, releasing the pressure for a moment, and then smashed the boot down hard to stomp Victor’s hand where it lay on the pavement.
The sound was the crush of shovel on gravel that was the bones in his hand shattering.
Victor screamed. He couldn’t help it. He pulled his destroyed hand to his chest and felt it coming over him fast now, an ache inside his chest that he had felt forever and never named. He didn’t want to die. Simple things this young man loved. The color of the leaves in bright morning, how the green seemed lit from within and the sky so endlessly blue. The smell of woodsmoke high in the mountains. The mottled brown-gray of a river in flood. An open window and whatever sounds might drift through. The song of the world, taxicabs, laughter, birds. Just one bird washing herself in the rain gutter beneath his open window. The quality of attention, to idly watch a bird flutter and preen, to hear the soft whirr of her wings, to hear her whistle.
He did not want to leave this place yet, this planet of mountains and seas, the human body, the blood-heat of a hand pressed against your own. He felt a terrible sadness sweeping over him. There was something about meeting her, perhaps not apparent at first, but which revealed itself slowly, the way that a bell will strike and the awareness of it comes after the fact of the ringing, so too it came over you gradually while spending an afternoon with her digging in the veggie garden, or perhaps you spent your summer Saturdays from grade school on up working down in Beacon Hill, constructing those simple wooden frame houses that had not existed before her arrival, yet which were after such a part of the neighborhood, such a part of the character of the neighborhood and what the neighborhood thought of itself, that it could be said that perhaps she had not organized the men and women and materials, not cleared the lots, not spent every Saturday there with hammer and nails in her dark hands, but instead had arrived with the wooden frames already intact and existing fully built and had only set them down along the avenue in the same manner that she had arrived in Seattle with her young son and climbed the steps to their room and set down their suitcases.
Victor’s mother.
Perhaps you spent a cold and shivering morning opening the soup line, from the time you were eight on up, in the early morning hours before the first school bell, fed the men who would spend all morning, perhaps all day, shivering in their thin clothes from warmer weathers and waiting for a job to come by in the form of a pickup truck and a wave and a whistle. Not so different from the whistle of her own childhood, she had once said to him, the steam-kettle shriek that had called his grandfather to the factory. Maybe you spent a cold morning with her offering these men hot soup and rolls, so that they would have some food in their stomach to sustain the wait, something even to sustain the work were they lucky enough to get it.
Maybe it was a hundred cold mornings you spent with her. Even a thousand would not have been enough.
Maybe you were with her one of these many cold mornings with the steam rising from the pots, and it would have come over you slowly, as you passed the hard rounds of day-old bread, as you listened to the way she spoke with the men there, noticed the way they joked with her as a friend without any trace, large or small, of self-consciousness or shame or even deference, the way the men were grateful for the hot food yet accepted it only as one might pass a plate down a family table. God bless the beautiful necessity of food and flesh. And a certain funny feeling stealing over you because how do you see your mother as a person separate from yourself, a person necessary to other people, and loved, and yet Victor had, he had seen and understood that if tomorrow the order were reversed and these men, warmly clothed, handing the food to his mother, to himself, then it would be unchanged. He had seen and known, yes, this boy, with the uncanny sense that were it he in his thin clothes, shivering, blowing the steam from the soup, wondering about work but talking about other things, then all eyes would still be clear, there would still be the low murmur of a joke in the thin air and the food still passed from hand to hand with a nod and a word of gratitude, and whether he knew its name or not, this was all of life that Victor really would ever need to know. All of them, finally, eating, his mother, this black woman with earrings of hawk feathers, and Victor slurping soup from his bowl in the cold morning, talking and nodding with the men, and they treated him, too, as one of them, as a boy, but someone worthy of talking to, and Victor chewing and listening, eyes bright, and when had he ever in his life felt so at home as in this moment, among these men, and his mother’s guidance that allowed him to see it, that allowed him to be, and it finally clear to him that he was in the presence of something which he did not completely understand but which he knew to be great.
When that is taken from you, there can be no giving it back. No getting back to where you might once have been. God knows he had tried. Had traveled the world up and down and not come upon it again, the feeling of standing there in the cold mornings, and his life with some purpose. And it was as simple as this. Feeding a few hungry men before they went to work. That was all, and it was both the largest, most important thing to be done, and the smallest, and Victor didn’t want to go. Not yet. All the people he would never meet. To sit and talk, to waste time together, to eat beans from a bowl, to pass nothing more than a few cans of beer, to watch their faces as they laughed. He felt the baton blows raining over his body like fistfuls of packed dirt and felt for the first time how nearly unbearable the power of human life, the unbelievable fragility—there were times with people, touching them hand to shoulder, walking, singing, the human voice, there were times when he was with people that he could hardly stop himself from crumbling, just falling to pieces. What was that? Not sadness. Goddamn this place. It had been with him forever and did he just now know? Why now should he know just how much he loved this dark fucked-up place. A baton smashed his mouth bloody and he thought I don’t want to go. I don’t want to die. I will join you, one day, but please just one more day here, one more hour with these people. I just started. Let me see one more face. One more moment in this place. How fucked-up it is. But I don’t want to leave.
He felt a tooth work loose. He felt the batons battering him like hail, a shot to the kidneys that exploded like a star. He choked back a laugh that wanted to become a sob. He was glad to have done what he had done. To have wandered the world. To have loved his mother while she was alive. Even to have joined the people here today, it was nothing, so insignificant, but he had raised his voice to a good and true human pitch, that was what he had done, but now he knew all along it had been this. This had been the plan. To stomp the breath from his belly until he breathed no more. They wanted to erase him and all that he was from the face of the earth.
And he was going to let them.
39
; Ju saw the girl coming before the girl even knew she was coming.
When Park and the Chief had gone spinning off the side of the PeaceKeeper, Ju had climbed down to the hood. She was alone, but she felt calm. The kids were shouting stuff up into her face, but she wasn’t worried, no, she was holding them back with the baton leveled at their chests and looking around, and waiting for some help. Not wildly looking, because it was important to remain calm, to retain the appearance of calm.
Ju wanted to remember they were human, these screaming mouth shapes beneath her, but she already had everything, both arms and face and the way you stand and how you respond to stress and the way you carry yourself, engaged in trying to hold them back.
Because that is what it meant to do the job. To be a well-trained police officer and not an angry hippie punk protester with a face full of metal and the privilege of getting pissed off whenever you felt like it.
Beneath her armor sweat was sliding down her back, gathering in the crack of her ass. Her hands were clammy without her gloves. She was armed, of course, with her pepper spray and her service weapon in a positive retention clip, but her bullets she preferred in her clip and her clip on her belt. The weight and heft of violence—an officer with a gun on the hip—were under ordinary circumstances enough to calm and quell. It was how you carried it—the ineffable it-ness of you in the world. The threat of force, the ability to dispense death and immediate pain—this she preferred over that force unleashed.
If she had had time to think, she would have thought there will be time to think about all this later. Time aplenty to contemplate and look at the day from different angles. Time enough to consider her actions and what had led to what and how it had all come undone. Time to let the guilt or shame or pride take up residence in head and gut, but later, because now she was a police officer in this city by the sea, this shining beacon of democracy and freedom and there was a threat.