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

He held her gaze, her eyes two impossibly blue bowls of ice above the embroidered rim of the blanket.

“Millions, Charley, millions and millions of dollars. And today twenty-two thousand children will die from things as stupid as malaria, and starvation and whooping cough.”

She paused. “Do you want to know why I was really in Sri Lanka, Charley?”

He waited silently.

“To adopt a child. I make millions of dollars pretending to be other people. I have a beautiful home in the hills. I have an ex-husband who is dating a twenty-three-year-old and what do I want? I want a child. So I fly to another country. What kind of world is this, Charley?”

And Charles sat there silent because he didn’t know the answer. He wanted to answer her, but he didn’t know how, and yet he couldn’t look away. The cool humming of the circulated air enveloping them.

“Blankie,” she said. “Whooping cough.”

He pulled his hand away from her ankle, wishing he had a report to read.

“An adopted child to hug and hold,” she said. “That is what I want.”

Rising above the mist-shrouded city, the sound of the rotor thumping above them, Seattle’s downtown geography spread beneath him like the emptying half of an hourglass, wide at the top, tapering to a narrow valve in the south — Chief Bishop was taking a ride with the Mayor in Guardian One .

Downtown was bounded by the water to the west, the interstate to the east. The early morning traffic on I-5 snaking south and north, he saw people in their cars on their way to work, and he imagined them listening to the radio, drinking coffee with the day’s first cigarette, applying lip liner and mascara and rouge. Did they still use rouge? He watched the glitter of brake lights from on high and thought of his son and salmon and death.

“What do you estimate, Chief?” The Mayor’s voice scratchy in his ear.

They were talking on the headsets.

Bishop made the crowd at thirty to forty thousand and he felt a migraine coming on. A blinding headache that would require cool towel and empty room from whose darkness he did not dare stir. He had scheduled nine hundred officers. He had turned down offers of reinforcements and help from the FBI, the Secret Service, the Washington State Patrol, and the King County Sheriff’s Office.

Why?

Because it was his city. And he would protect it. Look at it there turning slowly beneath him as the helicopter banked in another slow sweeping arc. In the southern section of downtown the towers of black glass reflecting gray sky like a city rising directly from the water. Like a city climbing hand over hand from the dark depths of the Sound. The tallest towers of a labyrinthine city whose work was buried deep beneath the waves, a society too complicated and brutal to exist in the light.

What was he talking about?

He had noticed this in himself. The drifting thoughts. Of late, a certain inattention.

When exactly did his city get so damn tall?

Where in the hell had he left his coffee this time?

There was the Space Needle standing alone. A structure Bishop had always loved despite himself. Erected for the ’62 World’s Fair, some architect’s vision of the future, it looked like a plate balanced on two chopsticks, wavering improbably six hundred feet in the air, something beautiful but faintly ominous about the whole thing. Maybe he loved it because now here he was, a living breathing creature in the year 1999, an inhabitant of the future, and that future, the one they had imagined in 1962 when he had been a youngster dreaming, now seemed antiquated and quaint.

A relic that had once been relevant.

There was Elliott Bay to the west, shedding light off the waves — his love for this was uncomplicated: the dark water of the Sound where he had once taken his son fishing every fall while the whales moaned and sang.

“You see that clump, Chief? Ten o’clock.” Christ. The Mayor again. “Looks like they’re trying to block the freeway.”

Spawning salmon climbing the river’s ladders to breed and die. Every year the same thing. Breed and die. Breed and die. Breed and die. Salmon were an interesting thing to think about.

Bishop saw them. He looked down through the bubble and saw the crowds massing. In the red square at the University of Washington; at Pine and Fourth; at the Seattle Community College on the northeastern corner; Pike Place Market to the west; a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands — all on the move.

Chief Bishop was scrunched into the jump seat, his knees around his chin, the laundry smell of his pressed duty blues tickling his nose. It was, quite frankly, too early for this horsecrap, and he was looking out the bubble and feeling his eyes start to pound.

Retirement. It had a sweet sort of ring to it.

The helicopter dipped and did another slow sweeping turn over the city.

“Chief, this is not under control,” the Mayor said.

“It’s under control.”

“I’m calling the Governor. We’re bringing in the National Guard.”

Bishop rubbing his rough cheek and thinking that’s what he would do: find his son, retire from this crapola, and set up shop on a ranch somewhere in Idaho. Not Idaho. Idaho was Aryan country, wasn’t it? Montana, then. He would look into it. Was Montana friendly to persons of brown and black complexion? Could his son make a home there, quit all his wandering? Bishop almost laughed. It was friendly if you were a chief of police. If you were the kind of man capable of making rank and holding it. If you were the kind of man governed by the forces of compassion, strength, and the rare and strange ability to gather round you and somehow focus the dispersed chaos of personalities called a police department in a medium-sized American city. A man who was a natural leader. A man called Chief.

Then anywhere could rightly be called home because you took a place and made it yours.

Goddamn right.

Find his boy, then, and wrangle up a couple of horses, a herd of sheep. Sit on the porch with a can of pop in his hand like a silver dipper of ditch water and the two of them watching their herd come grazing over the hills like puffs of cotton.

Was that what you called them? A herd of sheep? No. A flock. A flock of sheep to shear come spring.

For a week the Chief had known his son was here. A routine sweep of the homeless in preparation for the various foreign dignitaries — really it was just for Clinton — had turned him up. They didn’t arrest the boy. Just a discreet call placed quietly to his office. Yes, of course he had known Vic was here for a week, had even gone to find him. He had asked the officer who first called him, a beat cop who worked the neighborhood beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct, to show him the encampment. He was a father, after all. He would bring his son home.

And so Bishop had found himself late one night after a shift following this young officer as he negotiated the blocky half-dark beneath the underpass. The blue tarps hung with clothesline, the crappy tents huddled in the grit with the trucks a constant pounding overhead like a galloping migraine. The cars green-bodied flies that whirred and buzzed above their heads. The concrete hollows lit by firelight and the blue hissing of the cookstoves. The low murmur of voices which disappeared beneath the sound of the nearby waves smashing against the seawall. He was frightened, and of course he said nothing, did not show this, how he was suddenly frightened of the dark, this dark, frightened by what might be out there and frightened by the sudden depth of the world and all he did not know. His son lived down here? In the darkness beneath however many tons of unstable concrete and rebar? He did not want this new knowledge of the world. He would stop at the first lighted corner and drop it in the nearest trash can. He would climb the hill and leave it on the street for someone to collect. Maybe as he walked it would simply fall from him as if this knowledge could be shed like dirt-stained clothes on the way to the shower.