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

“There is a complicated system to haul the bananas out.”

“Not so complicated. An iron rail that runs through the trees like an elevated train track. The cart runs on a single wheel on the rail.”

“The man pulls the cart along the rail.”

“The machete is in the other hand,” he said.

“Swish, swish,” she said. “The sound of a machete swiping at grass.”

“ Thwack. The sound of machete entering a tree trunk at lunch.”

“Lunch is a small helping of beans and rice.”

“Thwack,” he said. “The sound of machete splitting a coconut.”

“Not enough really, but it is what they have.”

“ Thwack. The sound of a machete splitting open the boss’s head.”

“Victor!”

“Sorry.”

“The creaky rusty squeak of the wheel as the man pulls the cart along the rail, his machete in the other hand. You are ready to be cut.”

“I’m ready to enter the world.”

“The world awaits.”

“I’m young,” he said.

“And green,” she said.

“And strong,” he said.

“And you’re ready to enter the world. The man stops his cart at the first row of trees.”

“He is ready to cut me.”

“Does he need a ladder?”

“No. He is extremely talented. He is the fastest cutter in the crew. The fastest worker on the whole plantation. Maybe in the whole of Peru,” he said. “He works without a ladder.”

“Young and strong.”

“The best.”

“His reward for his talent…”

“His reward…”

“His reward for his talent,” his mother said, “is they tell him when the plane will fly over spraying pesticides.”

“The others have to jump in the ditch,” he said.

“While the plane buzzes them,” she said.

“They put their hands over their heads and the plane buzzes them and the chemicals kind of drift down over them like water from a sprinkler.”

He paused, then said, “It doesn’t help if they cover their heads though, does it, Mom?”

She looked at the banana. Flipped the peel back and forth.

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

Look at the tear gas falling like little pills. High-arcing moon shots which seemed to touch the sky. Gravity-bound cans which returned to Earth to tumble across the black asphalt, spitting steam. Look at the cops picking their way through the crowd like dancers, stepping daintily as though on ice.

And Victor’s father saying, Son, have you ever asked yourself why Buddhist monasteries are built in remote mountains with walls thirty feet high? Love and compassion for the entire world, six billion selfish souls, Victor. Are you man enough? Know where you’re going when you sign up, son.

Victor’s mother who used to say, sitting in the kitchen, “In your dreams everyone is you.”

Victor watched a woman on her knees being attended to by a medic. Her hands were clasped in prayer. He saw a mist of blood from a riot baton. Blood exiting in a fine spray from a man’s shaved scalp.

The cops stepping like ballerinas. Testing the ground as if they might fall through.

Compassion for every living blade of grass, and yet walls thirty feet high, six feet thick from within which you meditate on the unity and beauty of all beings. Son, does this make my point?

There was a stiff wind blowing from the Sound. The smoke making pictographs in the street. Cuneiform letters of clay that drifted and cut. People moved around him like ships in a fog. He saw a shoulder, a swatch of neon jacket. The flash of a blue sneaker, then it was gone, sucked into the cloud. The wind shifted and the gas swirled and suddenly Victor was enveloped in a smoke so thick it was as if he’d been buried alive. He saw only gray, heard only the slap of running feet, the soft thump of batons striking flesh.

What terror does to your body and brain. Victor had discovered the threat of imminent pain had a way of focusing your attention. A week, a day, an hour — these were units of time no longer within Victor’s ability to contemplate or feel. The day had shrunk to a morning. Then an hour of street battle. Then fifteen minutes of withering brutality.

Noon was like a foreign country.

Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.

John Henry in his duct tape glasses and cowboy hat. He was chanting with the crowd, and Victor envied John Henry his belief. He wanted to believe in something. Wanted to get pulled down into it, absorbed and lost in the rhythm of the words.

If I could chant, maybe I wouldn’t be so shit-scared.

But it was embarrassing to chant. It was embarrassing to believe.

Victor, who wandered the world, who had been wandering since he was sixteen years old, who now only wanted to be brave, to sit in strength and witness like his friends were doing — the more he saw the more it hurt. The more he felt the need to do something to ease the pressure building in his chest.

Victor, careful now, there are wisdoms of the East and practicalities of the West. Tibet, yes, the power of compassion, and what became of her? Son, there is a lesson to be learned in the case of Tibet.

A face loomed out of the fog, a woman wincing in the gas. She was running; panicked. She almost slammed into him, then reversed direction at the last moment and disappeared and Victor saw not a body, just a rag to a face, the hand-claw, arthritic then gone, the smoke clinging to her retreating feet cartoonishly as if her boots were on fire and leaking smoke.

At the age of seventeen, Victor had run into an American girl begging for change on the oil-stained concrete of a long-distance bus station in Bolivia. She’d been wearing a traditional poncho so cracked and bug-infested it might have been on loan from the Sundance Kid. She had a dog on a frayed piece of rope and a hand-lettered sign leaning against the dog’s plastic bowl.

“Spare some change, brother?” she’d said in English. It was the dog that did it. Or the English. It made him want to kick her in the head. Or maybe it was her expression, eyes narrowed, lower lip protruding, some air about her that was both self-righteous and proud, this American girl with parents and bank accounts, who was begging for change on a bus station floor as if that somehow made her real.

This was in the El Alto bus terminal, the city above La Paz, coughing on the smoke of newspaper and trash, a drift of fine white ash coming to rest on your shoulder, and what was she doing up here and, more important, what the hell was she thinking?

He wanted to kick her in the damn head. But instead he knelt beside her and unzipped his pack. The dog barely lifted its snout. The dog could have been dead, and he looked at her and he looked at the dog and he read her sign.

TENGO HAMBRE

And it was because of the dog, or the sign. How pathetic and stupid and sad. That skinny pup lying dull-eyed at the end of its rope, panting in the exhaust. He took out his wallet and handed her the last of his money left in the world, a green twenty-dollar bill, seeing himself later that night looking out the window of his bus into the darkness asking himself why the fuck he did it even as he did it.

Son, in life there are winners and losers. Your choice is which side will you be on? Don’t back the losers, son. They’ll never let you go.

Victor breathed. He counted. He needed something, but what it was he didn’t know. He was never going to survive.

John Henry said you had to believe. Sure, no problem.

But what were you supposed to believe?

Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe

Intermission II

Six Hours Until the Meeting