Sunil Yapa - Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

The pipe itself, to break the locked circle, had to be cut with a diamond-tipped saw, very carefully or you were likely to slice off an arm. The cops hated the lock-boxes. They hated having to cut so carefully. They hated that they could not force you to release.

John Henry loved the lock-box because it said everything. One PVC pipe was not enough. It was only working in concert that the lock-box became something special. Eight people in a circle; eight people with each of their arms in one of the prepared pipes. Eight people willing to lock themselves together in an unbroken circle, to sit on cold pavement, totally immobile and vulnerable, waiting for the loggers to come to reclaim their tree, for the cops to come to reclaim their city.

John Henry himself wanted to be in lockdown because it was neither their tree nor their city. But they had agreed to come as medics. That was the plan at least. Less risk for King with the Vail thing hanging over her head, although he thought that a needless worry on her part. Still, man, just standing there in the warehouse earlier this morning in the gray light of half-dawn watching those women in their cuts-offs and boots and T-shirts, watching those strong women slinging chain and preparing the pipes, he felt the nervous excitement thrumming in his blood. He felt a growing icy thrill in the pit of his stomach that was the beginning of his body’s preparation for the confrontation with the police — the hours of sitting, the facing of his own fears and doubts. He had watched the girls and his heart was singing. His soul felt coiled like a spring. They needed to be medics. Fine. But John Henry, he was a man that when the spirit came a-calling, he answered. Whatever the language. Whatever the price. The words of Mahatma Gandhi inked blue-black across his chest for how many years now:

Rivers of blood may have to flow

before we gain our freedom,

but it must be our blood.

Victor watching the woman who had saved his ass — King she was called — saying, “Okay, people, the cops want us to move. Are we going to move?”

“Hell no!”

“The cops have asked me to clear the street. They would like to bring their delegates through this intersection. Are we going to let those delegates make it to the convention center?”

“Hell no!”

“Are we going to clear this intersection?”

“Hell no!”

“What are we going to do?”

“Shut the motherfucker down!” they said in unison. Everyone laughing.

Victor drifting and listening to the beautiful girl with olive skin and green eyes and the muscles of a rock climber. After stashing his backpack in the nearest dumpster and telling him he could come back for it later, but first she wanted him to meet some people, she’d brought him to the group. And the way she looked at him, he knew he didn’t have a choice. He marked the dumpster in his mind and then followed her. King introduced him all around and he raised a hand in a half-enthusiastic greeting. The guy they called the Doctor had pulled him in a wide-armed hug and pressed him tight, saying, “Welcome, brother!” but really what he was thinking of wasn’t the hello, or this new strange group, what he was drifting and thinking of was the moment he’d seen the cop approaching, not the cop with the fucked-up face, but the other one, the Chief of Police, which was when he had given up on the backpack and put the horse between himself and the man. What he was thinking is that when the Chief started talking it was the first time in three years that he had heard his father’s voice.

Five feet on the other side of a fucking horse saying, “I need you to clear this intersection.”

Saying, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

His father close enough to extend a hand. Almost close enough to kick.

“Okay, people,” King was saying, “here’s the situation. The Portland Liberation Front is one short for lockdown and they’ve asked for our help. Is anyone willing to join their lockdown?”

The others were looking at each other.

“There’s a good chance you’ll be arrested,” King said.

“King, we’re here as medics,” one of the guys said. A guy with a red stringy beard and chunky black glasses, a pinched cowboy hat perched on his head. “Shouldn’t we stick to the plan?”

Victor broke in. “How do you know you’re only going to get arrested?” he said. “They look ready for war.”

“You’ll have to trust me,” King said.

“I wouldn’t trust those cops as far as I could spit. How can you be so sure they’re not just going to beat everyone senseless. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Because,” King said, “John Henry met with the police and negotiated a mass arrest.”

Then Victor was turning with an incredulous look on his face to the red-haired fucker with the long beard. “You met with the cops? Wow. It must be nice to be white.”

There was a stunned sort of silence.

“Look, Victor,” John Henry said, pulling on that beard, “we’re all glad you’re here, we’re glad you care. But that is not how we go about this. If you want to be a part of this, then you need to learn there are some rules. We don’t interrupt. We don’t swear. We don’t—”

“If I want to be part of what?” Victor said, interrupting again. “Getting my ass whupped?” He was laughing good-naturedly now. He didn’t need a fucking lecture from this guy. “And who said I care?”

King looked at her friends laughing and talking on the cold concrete, laughing in the shadow of the hotel, talking while the cops nervously fingered their tear gas, sitting and laughing in a small circle that contained all the love you could ever hope to contain among four people sitting cross-legged at the corner of an intersection in a dying city, and she was surprised to feel a hitch in her throat.

Here they were, one short for lockdown, and which one would it be?

The youngest of them, the nineteen-year-old they called the Doctor, who lived on a garlic farm and went around everywhere barefoot.

“A thousand years from now,” the Doctor was fond of saying (ecological apocalypse being one of his favorite subjects), “we’ll all be walking barefoot. All of us. Walking barefoot through the wreckage; barefoot through the swishing grass.”

Grinning while he spoke, the Doctor in overalls, with his blond hair the color of cornstalks hanging neat to his OshKosh buttons, he was serious and self-mocking and there wasn’t much in the world that could make her laugh like one of the Doctor’s rants. They were exaggerated and informed and passionate and a joke and she believed it and half-believed it — ecological apocalypse — she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t feel it looming, and yet weirdly that was what made her laugh.

Six months ago, the Doctor and a team of climbers had scaled the Golden Gate Bridge. They had climbed forty stories in the whipping wind while the cops watched and swore below. The fire department tried to reach them with their longest ladder trucks, but they were far too high for that, clinging to the cables. Finally they revealed the purpose of their climb. They dropped a sixty-foot banner for the cops and the firemen and Bay Area commuters to quickly read. For the news helicopters to linger on. The words of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatistas. It showed him in his black ski mask with his signature pipe protruding from the mouth hole. It read:

WE SEEK A WORLD IN WHICH THERE IS ROOM

FOR MANY WORLDS

Not the Doctor. He might be a bad-ass climber, but he wouldn’t make it in lockdown.

Edie? Could it be Edie? Edie who didn’t make King laugh — she made her believe it might all be possible. Another world. Another way to live.