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

Again the baton rapping against the glass.

“I said down.”

The driver nodded. Professional-like. He passed the camera across the seat to his friend or whatever and rolled his window halfway down.

“Can I help you, Officer?” His voice was soft and smooth. As if he was used to talking to cops, as if he was used to conning dumb believing cops.

“You can’t film here,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You will be.”

“Sir?”

“The camera. Shut it down. You can’t fucking film here.”

He didn’t even flinch, and it wasn’t that it made him mad, but Park noticed. What kind of homosexual doesn’t flinch when a cop says fuck in his face?

“Officer, how can we help you?” the man said.

“What the fuck are you filming?”

“We’re Quaker witnesses. We have every—”

“Quaker what? What is that? Some kind of religious thing?”

“Officer, our lawyer specifically—”

“Step out of the car.”

He was trying to appear calm, but feeling, in fact, the exact opposite of calm, whatever that was. The law of respect. Did this guy just say lawyer?

The man paused. Looked him dead in the face.

“No,” he said. “We have every right to be here.”

He took the camera back from his friend and pointed it in Park’s face.

“Officer,” he said, “why did you cover your badge number? That’s illegal, you know.”

Gooks, Timmy. No-good fucking gooks. That’s how we ended up here.

Ju was halfway to the car, following Park, when he popped his pepper spray from his vest, leaned through the half-open window, and sprayed first the driver and then the passenger.

Ju frozen to the spot halfway in the street, halfway between the PeaceKeeper and the disaster unfolding before her eyes. Frozen in the street, which was against her training, yeah, and against her instinct, yeah, but she could not believe what she was seeing.

The interior of the car filling with mist.

Park turning away with a satisfied hitch to his belt as if to say job well done, congratulations, boy.

The doors opened and both men fell to the pavement on their hands and knees. Strangers rushing to help. The men howling with their hands all over their face and Ju knew, she took the pepper spray full-face once, an impromptu test at the academy devised by some asshole cadet who didn’t like her high proficiency scores, and the pepper spray, it’s just capsicum, like the pepper flakes you shake on your pizza, but man, about ten thousand times more concentrated, and when that spray hits, you feel the serious need to dig your eyes out with a spoon.

Park strolled over, wagging his baton happily.

“I told them they couldn’t film.”

“Park, what are you thinking? You need to get your butt back to MACC. Now.”

“You got no rank on me, Ju.”

“I’m calling it in,” she said.

“Good idea.”

He lifted his radio to Ju’s face and twisted the volume. A garbled roar of static and shouting voices.

Krrrrrchhh.

NINJAS ON SIXTH.

Krrrrrchhh. Peat. Did you say KRRCCHH.

She knocked the radio out of her face.

“Ju. You pissed or something?”

“Right now, Park?”

“Yeah.”

“Right now, I’m thinking about razor blades.”

He smiled sideways. “Razor blades?”

“Yeah.” She made a slashing movement across her face. Across where his scar would be. “Razor blades. Slice the offending flesh right off.”

He was silent for a long while.

“I didn’t want to hurt them,” he finally said. “I told them they couldn’t film, but they didn’t listen. That’s just the job.”

“Sure, sometimes that’s the job,” she said. “I know that’s the job.” She keyed her own radio. The same mess of static and panic greeted her. “But you don’t have to love it so fucking much.”

Before she died, Victor and his mom had played an unusual game. Maybe you could say she practiced an unusually obsessed form of spirituality. But Victor thought it was just something that had developed between them, a sort of game they played around the breakfast table, mother and son. It started out more as a joke. She was eating a banana one morning at breakfast. She peeled the sticker off and stuck it on his nose.

She said, “You’re a banana.”

He said, “I grew in the low-lying regions of Costa Rica.”

She leaned forward to investigate the sticker. “Peru, actually.”

This was when they still lived on the farm. Before she married his father.

“Peru,” he said. “I grew into a mature banana in the mountains of Peru. I am a banana from the Andes.”

He waved his cereal spoon around in the air.

“Wait,” he said, “do bananas grow in the mountains?”

“No. Potatoes grow in the mountains.”

“Where did I grow?”

The phone was ringing.

She picked it up and put it down.

“Where do bananas grow in Peru?” he said.

“They grow on the wet slopes of the Andes. On the eastern side. They take out the rainforest and put in banana plantations.”

He adjusted in his seat. Getting comfortable. It wasn’t their farm, but they shared it, a sort of co-op, and he liked nothing more than digging in the dirt with his mom by his side. That year of happiness.

“I am a banana from the rainforests of Peru.”

“Yes, the low-lying rainforests.”

“The Amazon!”

“You are yellow and soft and moist to the bite,” she said.

“I am not yellow and soft and moist to the bite. I am green and young and growing strong. I am hanging from a tree.”

“Do you hear any birds?”

“It just rained. I can hear water dripping from the branches.”

“The sun is breaking through the clouds.”

“Yes, and there is a bird that sounds like a rusty gate opening. Another one that sounds like breaking glass.”

“You are young and getting strong.”

“I am hanging in a bunch. A bunch of banana friends hanging from a tree.”

“Good food for a monkey.”

“There are no monkeys!”

“Good food for a boy.”

“Wait, wait, wait.”

He adjusted in his seat, turned to face out into the room, sort of looking out in the small middle distance, the thinking distance, this was the way he sat when he wanted to think about something that required some stretching of the imagination, the attempt to inhabit a banana.

“There is a creaky rusting noise.”

“Another bird?” she asked.

“No, there aren’t many birds on this plantation. It’s more like a factory. The trees are low and stretch as far as you can see. The ground is wet. There are ditches running between the trees. A percolation of milky blue water.”

She was now holding the half-eaten banana, the peels flopping loosely on her wrist. “Where did you learn that word? Percolation?”

He shrugged like Who knows where one learns the word percolation, Mom, one just learns it.

“Okay,” she said.

“The bananas are growing in blue plastic bags. They hang in blue plastic bags that contain the chemicals…”

“…the fungicide…”

“…the chemicals that kill the banana diseases or whatever.”

“There was a creaky rusty noise?”

“Yes,” he said. “There is a creaky rusting noise as the man comes to cut us from the tree. He carries a machete. There is a sound in the air. A kind of humming.”

“Insects,” she said.

“Machinery,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “Here comes the man with the machete. He wears a blue mesh shirt for the heat. Who knows where he got it.”

“One of those things you might expect a boxer to wear,” he said.