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

Victor searched the crowd. Americans by the thousands, angry Americans in the rain, their faces round and wet. And he heard them chanting and he wanted to believe it was true. Yes, he envied them their belief and he wanted to feel it, whatever energy was passing back and forth between the seated chanting thousands.

But he couldn’t.

He looked at John Henry next to him, searching for the source of his courage, but all he saw was his mouth working above those crooked teeth, his glasses misting and the way he held his head, the way he chanted as if those words held all his fear, all the lonely rain-soaked hope that brought him here to this spot, to this morning, to this 40-by-40 stretch of wet asphalt, chanting in the rain.

Victor knew suddenly that he couldn’t do this. Knew it as deep as any knowing goes. And he felt like a coward, but he knew he couldn’t do this. His heart was hammering triple-time and he knew. He had to get out.

The wind struggled and whipped. He saw shoes and jeans. Knees and legs and feet moving in a jerking fashion as if puppets on a smoky stage. Caught on a sudden updraft, the smoke rose and corkscrewed between the buildings and he saw the Doctor in his overalls and top hat out in the intersection motioning for people to sit, sit, sit as the canisters dropped and smoked. He was wearing a hand-lettered sign taped to his chest.

One Human for Humanity

A nail of fear driven into his heart as he watched the cops identify the Doctor. They circled him like wolves and then knocked him on his ass. Victor winced as he watched one cop work a baton against the Doctor’s upper body. The cop stood over the Doctor’s fallen body, working that baton in long strokes from the shoulder like the Doctor’s spine contained some stubborn rock he was trying to remove by pickax.

The Doctor in his overalls and flip-flops, still somehow narrating his beating from the ground.

“Police brutality. You are practicing police brutality.”

One cop hitting him with the baton. Another cop knelt beside him on the pavement, punching him in the throat. Thump. Thump. Thump. A sound like a fish flopping in a boat that Victor would never forget, hard blows to shut him up, to close his windpipe, and still he went on.

“You do not need to use force. I am a peaceful protester, I am willing to be arrested.”

The cops answered succinctly with their batons and fists.

Thump.

“You don’t need to put your knee on my neck. I am not resisting arrest.”

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Victor wanted to have the strength to watch, to witness the brutality and be strong enough to tell the world about it. He wanted to witness it and by witnessing make it real, unable to be forgotten; he wanted this horror seared into every pale pink fiber of his skull. But he was afraid. The batons rising and falling like pistons in an engine Victor didn’t want to know about. Victor’s arms were two pieces of wood shivering in the pipes. He counted; he breathed; but he didn’t chant.

He watched as the Doctor lurched to his feet. Victor knew what was coming, but he wouldn’t look away. He would witness this. The Doctor was turned around, disoriented for a moment, and in the mayhem he stumbled backward into a cop. The cop came low and fast with his baton. A sharp clip to the shin that crumpled the Doctor’s leg and sent him tumbling to the pavement, where the cop was already on him, tearing off the sign

One Human for Humanity

and throwing it into the wind. The cop hit him across the face and the Doctor’s hands flew to his teeth, still narrating, mumbling through the blood. “Police brutality. You are practicing police brutality.”

Oh god, Victor was so scared.

In that other life, things made more sense. He ran out of money, he went home. He worked trucks in New Orleans. Graveyard shifts unloading sofa beds and plasma TVs. He saw a quarter on the oil-stained floor and he picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he was gone again, looking for something he couldn’t name, but which he felt inside like a saw blade spinning in the hollow space beneath his ribs.

“Lawyer,” the Doctor slurred through his broken bloody mouth. “I want a lawyer, you fuckers.”

The Doctor tried to cover up as the furious cop stood above him, thrashing him with the baton like he wanted to beat him back to a single-celled state.

The Doctor had stopped moving. His body lay motionless in the street not twenty feet from where Victor sat counting his breaths and sweating. One cop sat on the Doctor’s neck; the other bound his wrists in plastic.

Lying there at night in his tent, thinking of all he had seen and known and not understood. Waking in the morning and shivering on the pier, feeling a weird black hole, a sort of hole inside a confusion inside a need, the immensity of the world, the unbelievable hugeness of it all, reduced to a scrap of newspaper a woman uses to wipe her mouth after a meal.

Sat there on the pier wrapped in his sleeping bag, shivering and watching the ships move from port to sea, carrying the things that fill a life: five-dollar umbrellas and paper towels and plastic chairs. Sitting there thinking of all he had seen, remembering the faces of all the people he had met, sat there feeling an ache inside a love inside a need, thinking of all the voices and complaints and smiles, all the stupid jokes and dreams. What did it all add up to? What did it mean?

Two cops dragged the Doctor away by his pretty blond hair. And here came other cops, swinging those fire extinguishers back and forth, letting the pepper spray soak the seated heads. Moving closer to where he and John Henry sat. Two minutes, Victor thought, and here he was, his arms locked in PVC pipe, totally immobile on the cold damp pavement, too scared to call it off, too scared to chant, asking himself what the hell he was doing even while he was doing it while the cops shuffled in a line, tap-tap-tapping their billy clubs.

Two minutes and here they’ll be, he thought, the fear shaking his chest like thunder rattling windowpanes. Whether I believe or doubt or chant or die.

He had never felt so alone in his life.

King wading through the crowd — making her way toward where Victor and John Henry sat in lockdown — watched four cops go after a kid wrapped in an American flag. The kid — whoever he was — was out front of the cop lines, right in their faces, flashing them the peace sign. The cops came at him hard and knocked him to the ground and he was lost in the black underwater shine of their riot gear.

The scene in front of the Sheraton was chaos. Not what she had expected. Not what any of them had wanted. The line of cops was in tatters and she saw the hooded faceplated forms cutting wildly through the crowd with their riot sticks. The mass surged and collapsed. She watched as two cops kicked a young woman with feathers braided into her hair. An Asian girl with glasses received a blow to the knee. She felt sick. No one was fighting the cops. There they sat, supplicant and chanting, a huddled mass at the center of it all in lockdown, while the tear gas swirled around them like incense around the shaved head of a monk. And yes, they were practicing nonviolence, but how could you be nonviolent in the face of this? The rules had changed and the cops appeared to have gone temporarily insane. Or were these their orders? That was even worse to imagine. That the Mayor, or the Governor, or Clinton himself — whoever was in charge of this mess — had willingly let loose the dogs of war. Sent them armed and furious into a wall of peaceful protest.

She saw the kid trying to crawl out from between their legs. She watched as a baton came high from the circle of bodies and she thought of a small room in southern Mexico. Remote mountains where rebels and outlaws and a people’s army went to hide. Chiapas. Her room, bigger than a cell, but perhaps the air of a quiet nun’s corners. A place to cook. A place to read in the sun. A place to sleep in the cool nights. A place not without a sort of quiet hideout contentment. The outward reaches of the barrio where the neighborhood gave way to scrubland. Out there past the last of the buzzing sodium streetlamps, there was a quiet air of desolation, some twilight feeling of blue abandonment that seemed to cut her to the core.