Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

by Sunil Yapa

  Teddy rolled back from the table and turned. “You take your time,” he said. “Take a moment to figure it out. Politics, Charles, is not for idealists. It is the art of the possible. You would do well to remember that. Maybe Martin here will offer some advice.”

  And then he was gone, making his way in the wheelchair to the other tables. Charles looked at Martin, who earlier this year, Charles knew, had negotiated a third round of loans from the IMF. Charles saw for the first time how much the years had aged his friend. It was his eyes really that held the weight of all those years, all those compromises, and watching him now, Charles knew just what it had all cost him. He had the eyes of a man who has just been told his house burned down with his wife and children inside. Sad eyes that looked like they would never recover from the shock, had maybe not even yet allowed themselves to register the full weight of the news.

  Martin smiled at him and gently patted his hand. “It will be all right, Charley. You’ll get used to it.” But Charles didn’t hear words of comfort. He heard, in fact, the echo of what he himself had said to poor old Tennyson all those years ago on the veterinarian’s steel table moments before they put the needle in him that laid him out forever.

  Charles looked at Martin, saw the sky behind him, the cloud cover thick and gray. He heard the low chatter of the room, ice chiming in the glasses like little bells, the explosive laughter of Teddy banging above the heads. No, he thought, nothing is going to be all right.

  40

  All across the world they watched the TV. In their living rooms and dens. Gathering outside the café. Dozens in the street watching through the window. Their hands going to their mouths.

  On the screen, they were running in the streets. They were jumping in the streets. They were running and screaming in the streets.

  The TV news. Hurricane winds tossing the reporter’s hair, waves crashing behind her. A city in flames behind her. A war behind her. Everything always behind her.

  When the Wall fell. The way people swarmed over the concrete. The way they took hammers and crowbars to it. Tore at it with their bare hands. Swarming. They wanted to hold a piece of history in their hands, to take it home with them. To hold it in their hands like a book. To put it on a shelf.

  The reporter on top of her hotel in Baghdad, the rocket fire falling like stars to earth. Or incandescent earth rising in missile-shaped pieces through the Iraqi night.

  What was it, ’91, ’92?

  They called it the Gulf War.

  On the TV black-hooded protesters threw a newspaper box into the window of a Starbucks.

  The footage was on a loop. They smashed the window. They smashed it again.

  Smash. Smash. Smash. They smashed the window.

  They smashed it again.

  41

  What the TV did not show:

  The convoy of twenty trucks rumbling through the streets, tarp-covered and flat green, headlights cutting weird and spooky shapes in the night. The eight hundred souls aboard, rocking and jostling, heads down, contemplating the bayonet, thinking this was the weirdest of missions, a convoy of twenty National Guard trucks rolling through an American city, American soldiers going armed into the American night, the loose edge of the tarp flapping in the running breeze.

  The TV didn’t show Park in plainclothes humping two duffel bags down Sixth. Replacement tear gas canisters flown in from some sheriff’s office in eastern Washington rattling inside. Park’s straining arms, his sneakers, the sweat wetting his face and soaking through his softball league T-shirt. Ju shot somebody? Why did Ju shoot somebody? You were there. I was there. Did Ju shoot somebody? Did the Chief try to throw you off the truck? What in the heck happened?

  He wasn’t interested in what happened. Or how. Only what was to happen. What was coming. He didn’t think about the past. He didn’t dwell.

  He slowed at a knot of protesters gathered on a corner. They were blocking the street, unintentionally, or intentionally he thought as the faces turned toward him, the people clocking his clothes, the way he walked, the department-issue black duffels and his buzz cut. His disfigured face. A bulky blond man with a dried smear of blood across his forehead stopped Park with an arm to his chest.

  “What you got there, my man?”

  Park could feel then the loose emotion in the street, the anger, how it wanted to coalesce around him in his half-baked undercover getup and tear him apart.

  The big guy looking at him skeptically and hands beginning to take the duffel bags from him when he stopped and said, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “No,” said Park.

  “No, I do. On the TV maybe? You play ball?”

  “No.”

  “The weather or something?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sure of it,” the big guy said. He tilted his head and regarded Park. “Holy shit,” he said. “You’re that cop from Oklahoma City.”

  “A fucking cop?!” said a guy in a black leather jacket. “Fuck that.”

  “This guy saved thirty-five lives or something. Dragged kids out of there. I remember I saw him on the Today show or something.”

  “Yeah? How the hell do you know that it’s him?”

  “Check his face, shitbird.”

  Park standing there, sweating while the small crowd of late-night vigilantes studied him. “You don’t end up with a face like that for nothing. Let the man through.”

  “What do you mean let him through? He’s a cop.”

  “Fuck yes, he’s a cop. The guy’s a goddamn hero. Let him through.”

  The TV didn’t show Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe slumped in the sky bar of the Sheraton hotel, head buried in his arms.

  “Martin, listen, how many of the African ministers are you in touch with?”

  The two men—one brown, one black, one tall, one short—sitting at an abandoned table littered with plates and glasses and a folder with a pen atop that sat on the white linen in front of Charles’s arms and head.

  “Martin, tell me, how many of the African ministers are you in touch with?”

  Martin cursing under his breath. Charles suddenly sitting up.

  “How many, man?”

  “All of them I suppose.”

  “And do they trust you?”

  At this Martin paused again. He regarded Charles for a moment and then said, “Yes, they do.”

  “Good. We need to get them together.”

  “What are you planning to do with that?” Martin gestured toward the folder with his eyes.

  The TV didn’t show their conversation, these two economic ministers of small Third World nations, Charles talking, Martin nodding, the two of them suddenly laughing, nor the new light which gathered in their faces as they stood up, nor the embrace they shared there in the restaurant that had a solidity to it which had not been present in some forty years, these oldest of friends, these newly minted comrades. Charles clapped Martin on the back and together they made their way to the elevator.

  Charles hit the street, holding the folder and thinking he wasn’t just going to refuse their offer. No, he was going to shut down the entire round of meetings and make sure they didn’t start until they started on fair terms. Just as he had once flown the world gathering signatures, now he was going to gather people. He was going to gather enough of the African ministers, the Latin American ministers, the Asian ministers, and together they were going to make the meetings fair and transparent. Environmental regulations. Labor laws. These would be included, or the meetings would not continue. What was it he had heard in the street so many times today? Fair trade, not free trade. Well the big boys—the developed countries—couldn’t have either, if none of the former colonies agreed to participate. No factories for their clothes, no mines for their minerals, no markets for their subsidized rice and corn. Nobody to trade with, if that’s what you wanted to call it. Charles was going to make sure they didn’t go another round. He straightened his suit and stepped from the back door of the Sheraton. He looked do
wn the block to where those city buses were parked. But first he was going to get some people out of jail.

  John Henry had watched the bullet throw King in the street like a doll made of rags and sticks. Her legs kicked out from the force of the blow, and he watched her, King, his friend and lover, bent into a geometric construction of body he would have never thought possible and John Henry thinking of the anti-nuke demo where they had first met, thinking about the desert, about the gate guards, and the scientists, and the regular staff. The janitor that wore a blue zip suit and a radiation badge and made, like, seven bucks an hour. Quiet John Henry and rage-filled King, how many years ago, and the janitor that brought them water there in the desert, tipping it to their mouths because they could not use their arms; telling them how everyone was talking about these eight crazy people chained together in front of the facility, how nobody in the entire place knew what to do—geniuses and generals alike—and John Henry remembering how King’s face had burned, how they had sat together for five days without food; how their lips had cracked and split as they grinned in dusty lockdown, how the janitor who watched from behind the chain-link fence had started crying and could not stop until he had left the confines of the fence and brought them the little plastic pail of water, turning it to their swollen mouths in the heat and the light.

  But that was not what John Henry remembered most. What he remembered most was that man telling him how they had looked like corpses out there. How they scared him. How he looked at them, eight sitting corpses turning to mummies in the desert heat, and knew that he would never work in this facility again. How he could not continue, not after seeing their bodies like that. And how King leaned from the truck, leaned into the desert air, and kissed the man gently on the cheek and said, “Thank you.”

  John Henry thinking how King was unafraid of fire because made of fire herself. And the lights of the ambulance trying to push its way through the intersection. And the stretcher which they slid beneath her and dropped the wheels, the stretcher to roll her to the vehicle when it could not make its way through the crowd.

  And John Henry moving now, too, moving toward the PeaceKeeper. The noise of the people that remained rising to a nearly unbearable pitch. My people. Moving toward the cops stationed there, toward the black patch of paving that stood at their feet. My people. And John Henry knew he could not save King, already taken away on that stretcher, and he could not save Victor, who was still on the ground surrounded by angry sweating cops and their batons, Victor a small thing lost in that circle of rage, so John Henry knelt. Kneeling because he could not save King, praying because he could not save Victor. Lying down in front of the PeaceKeeper because if he could not save them, then he could join them.

  John Henry stretched out, his head against the cool concrete, his single human body at the foot of the cops, his body on the ground in front of their slow-rolling machine. And they could move him, they could beat him, they could spray him or gas him or cuff him or kick him, but for now, for this one moment, as long as it lasted, he would lie right here on the city’s bloodied ground—one man alone—and he would breathe and not be moved.

  Out of the chaos, he heard a groan. Not a sound of pain, but something familiar, a sound from his childhood, from a million dinners with his family and his father, it was the easy familiar groan his father made lowering himself to his chair, and John Henry looked up to find an older black man easing himself down onto the pavement, creaking and groaning, yes, as he lowered his body to the ground, his hand raised to his wife, who was on one knee, and then, too, lowering herself to the pavement beside the two of them.

  Their three bodies stretched side by side on the pavement. Breathing evenly. The man reaching for John Henry’s hand. His dusty dry fingers so surprisingly strong.

  The TV didn’t show Bishop in the swarm of cops, trying to throw them off with little success. Didn’t show his face or his body or his baton which he would not use. Pulling at men with his hands, nothing but his hands, while they hammered at his son.

  And the TV didn’t show Ju atop the PeaceKeeper. Her tired feet, or the familiar ache in her lower back, or how she wanted nothing more than to go home and see her sister’s kids, let them play xylophone on her tired spine, except that they were in Guatemala, four thousand miles to the south, on the wrong side of two borders, and here she was geared up for civil war and she had just shot someone, discharged her weapon in the course of duty, which was legal and allowable and exactly what she was trained to do, except she had realized as soon as the gun fired and she saw the woman’s body crumpling in the street that legal or not she wanted nothing to do with it. That wasn’t the job.

  But then, time went a little funny and when she looked in the street, she didn’t see the girl. What she saw were bodies. Bodies upon bodies lined side by side. More lying down with every passing moment. People lying in the street like corpses, head to toe, and arm to arm. Bodies clothed in blue and red and green. From her vantage point there atop the PeaceKeeper, what Ju saw were human bodies lying in the street as far as the eye could see. A line of corpses from here to the horizon line. The smoke drifting lazily over them, bright where it passed beneath the streetlamps. The black buildings reflecting faces without names, bodies whose families would never know, and soon the priest would come, soon the words would be said which closed one door forever and opened another. Soon the mothers would come, clutching photos to their chests, come to look one last time for what they knew was here but could not find. Then, finally, the cupped hand throwing dirt. The sharp grunt of the shovel in stony soil. Then the grass. Then the cold morning dew which did not care. Then the daisies growing in white bunches from their bellies, flowers in yellow from the new earth of their eyes and hands and mouths.

  Twenty feet away the sounds floating from the circle of cops. The boy a bloodied thing beneath them. And the Chief in the pile, trying to pull cops from the circle. Ju stepped down from the PeaceKeeper. Her legs were shaking. She was going to do what she should have done since this whole thing started. What she should have done all those years ago when rage ran loose in the streets of L.A. and the cops spurred it on. What she should have done and what she had always wanted to do. She was going to stop it.

  She lifted her foot and placed it carefully. She began to walk among the breathing, steaming dead. Began to walk toward that sound, picking her way among the bodies, walking toward that ring of men who were grunting and growling like dogs on a deer. Because how do you stop a pack of men who have been wounded in the fight, who have scented blood on their adversary and are closing in for the kill? How do you stop a pack of dogs who have lost their minds in fear and rage? You remember that they are not dogs, but men. Frightened and angry human beings.

  The TV didn’t show the hospitals or schools or prisons. The smell of ammonia and blood, that certain sterile smell King associated with death in modern corridors. The clinical light which dimmed, or the pain which ripped through her shoulder as King tried to lift her right hand and found it handcuffed to the gurney, the pain which went all the way inside her muscles and liver and kidney as if she had been sliced open from head to toe and then roughly cut into as many pieces as each organ would allow.

  The TV didn’t show her being whisked through the twilight city by efficient forces beyond her control, handcuffed in an ambulance while the sirens cried and the cars pulled to the shoulder so they could pass, and King thinking, all she had done, and all she had become, and every rule and code she had broken, and everything she had believed and burned. How many of her friends, beaten, broken, in jail serving sentences for trying to break the spell? Everything she had tried to live and failed.

  The ambulance and the EMT and King suddenly tearing at the tubes, using her free hand to rip at the IV lines in her arm, to tear at the tube that wound down her throat. The sudden rush of activity in the small space which was filled with his moving body and the warning tones which monitored her life and her head bucking and the lines whipping back and forth as sh
e tore them free and the medic’s weight against her body, trying to hold her down, and King croaking into his face, “Let me fucking die.

  “Please just let me die.”

  The man who took her hand in his, not an effort of restraint, but holding her hand and looking into her face, and in his eyes she saw not the state, not institutionalized evil, not modern medicine and all its chemical compromises, not the death of human connection, not a servant of that state which built prisons for you at every turn, no, what she saw in his eyes, in his face, was nothing more than simple human concern, the sudden affection of one human being for another.

  And she had broken everything she had ever built, smashed it to pieces, and even still she had watched Victor beaten, and watched a man bleed to death in the sand, and the light of a single candle glowing from inside their homes of salvaged wood and tin and she with her home of food and electricity and there was a warmth coming from his eyes as he held her hand and said, “You’re going to live.”

  She felt the warmth and smoothness of his palm encircling hers as he said, “It’s going to hurt like hell, darling, but you’re going to live.”

  That wasn’t what the TV showed. It didn’t show him holding her hand or the siren wailing or the machines beeping or the singing of the tires on the asphalt as they raced her to the hospital and it didn’t show all she knew or all she believed and it didn’t show how she might in some way live in this world the way it was.

  42

  This is what the TV showed:

  An airplane.

  A big white thing eating light. A white and blue Boeing 747 customized in the USA to ferry its precious cargo from shore to shore, flying high above dangerous seas. Recognizable to all who watched with its bald hump behind the nose and its glassy eyes and a white moveable stairway pushed to its side where was embossed the great official seal. The camera framed the oblong portal that was the door. And there standing on the threshold at the top of the stairs, pausing before descending to the tarmac and whatever waited beyond, the TV showed a man. There he was with his beautiful smile in the door of Air Force One, his white hair spectral like a halo. The President of the United States of America.