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

DON’T STOP.

SAY WHAT!?!

Their voices together a roaring wave careening down the alleys, cascading off the cordon of metro buses parked around the convention center and up through air vents of the Sheraton, voices reaching for the delegates hiding in their rooms on the upper floors. John Henry could see some of them gathered in the lobby of the Sheraton, two floors above the street, shadowed forms pressed to the floor-to-ceiling windows, hands on either side of their faces like kids at the aquarium watching the sharks make their dumb circles in the tank.

He saw the South Korean delegation with matching flags on their matching shoulder bags paused on the low wide steps of the Sheraton, standing there with newspapers over their heads for the rain and polite, puzzled smiles as if someone had just told them a joke that didn’t quite translate.

Here came a European-looking delegate in tasseled loafers. His hair was curly and white. His suit was gray and he was making notes in a leather-bound notebook, nodding and smiling as though he recognized something in the cityscape, like there was a shop that sold his favorite sweet, an indulgence he kept secret from his wife. An aide running after him with an opened umbrella.

AIN’T NO POWER LIKE

THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE

AND THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE

DON’T STOP.

“Say what?!” cried John Henry.

The American dream was dead. All those promises now just cold ashes between his people’s chanting teeth, sitting heavy on their tongues.

Instead they said, “Sustainable agriculture.”

They said, “Global solidarity.”

They said, “How beautiful is a seed, a tender green stalk of life.”

They wore hooded sweatshirts peopled with homemade patches. They wore bandannas slashed outlaw-style across the mouth, a triangle from nose to chin, knotted at the neck. They ate bread and cabbage looted from dumpsters because it was a form of political protest and he loved each one of them enough to die for them, if it came to that, which it would not.

He stroked his beard and heard them say, “People are more important than profits.”

“People,” they said, “are more important than profits.”

“ People. Are more important than profits.”

Their words had the quality of midnight prayer, deep from the depths of another sleepless night, as if the right words might call forth a future where they need march no more.

They said, “We’re going to shut those corporate motherfuckers down.”

John Henry heard their voices and knew this was no ordinary protest, this congregation in the streets. No, this was the new American religion. This desire which leapt continents. The longing of the heart to embrace a stranger and be unashamed.

They said, “A global nonviolent revolution.”

They said, “How beautiful and brave when a people rise for what is right.”

Six a.m. and he watched them swarming the streets of his city in a gauzy mausoleum light, a people’s army climbing from basement mattresses and garage apartments, the skyline of the city black-crowned and spooky at their back.

In their hooded sweatshirts and shin-high boots they looked like end-of-the-world penitents stretching into the dawn. Hip to the world’s saddest sins.

They said, “The future belongs to us.”

And maybe it did, but they looked so young, so young and fragile, and when the time came would they have courage — would they have the discipline to make it so?

Look with him at his people. This man who once preached from a pulpit, John Henry, who was wound up and weary with too much love, too much joy, too much rage. How many shelter cots that barely registered the man’s weight so light he was, the soft pillow of how many stone steps had cradled his head? John Henry, who had lost his church, look with him at his people. Look at his god made manifest in every form and shape of the broken world. Look with him at how they exit the church in an orderly fashion and tip their chins to the sky. Look at how they come from the darkness of their homes, backs stiff, stretching and tying the bandannas tight, checking one another’s faces for an idea of what violence this day might bring. Look with him at these wet American faces, ordinary and beautiful, and tell me you don’t feel more than a little bit afraid.

They wanted to tear down the borders, to make a leap into a kind of love that would be like living inside a new human skin, wanted to dream themselves into a life they did not yet know.

He heard them in the streets saying, “Another world is possible,” and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come.

Officer Timothy Park knocked his riot stick against the stiff polycarbonate of his armored leg, producing a hefty sort of clack and whack, which, right this second, he found immensely satisfying as he sucked a black coffee spiked with fifteen sugars and watched the way they walked, heads high, arms swinging, and thought: Why in holy hell do these people look so happy?

Surely they knew they were going to lose?

Welders greeting plumbers with flung-open arms; scrawny old guys with crooked backs and the kind of crappy cardigan his dad used to wear while raking leaves, they were shaking hands with society ladies strung with pearls, and Park grimaced as they hugged and helloed, threw their arms around one another’s necks, a grainy mist falling. Hugging? Why were they hugging? The last time Park had hugged someone had been at a funeral.

Park was standing beside the department’s armored vehicle — affectionately known as the PeaceKeeper — with his sometime riding buddy, Julia. The PeaceKeeper was some civilian version of an armored Humvee — a great metal duck painted matte black with tiny rectangles for the driver’s windows like the slits in hilltop bunkers and down below four fat tires which meant they could roll wherever they pleased. There were two swinging doors on the back, a hatch to pop your head from the top, and running boards on each side, and look at Ju there kind of lazing around like it was a cover shoot on some tropical isle, one hand resting idly on the butt of her department-issue pepper spray, the other resting against the side of the vehicle where the letters were painted huge and white:

SEATTLE POLICE DEPARTMENT

Call her Miss July, even though it was, in fact, November and a probable riot situation. But Park didn’t mind the riot gear, didn’t mind watching Ju’s body absorb the rough vibration of the idling truck. Call her Miss November Riots if you wanted — she was as lovely as a parade rifle that the kids spin and twirl — and watching her was his reward for the frustration of having to police a protest march. Protecting an anarchist parade, that was the kind of world we had come to, but Ju was beautiful and tough and what was the word? Willowy? Park didn’t mind the show at all. She was like a video game knockout is what she was and ever since he’d moved to Seattle and joined the SPD he’d been trying to get her out for a drink. The guys in the precinct all laughed — everyone wanted to sleep with Ju; that Mayan, almost Asian look she had going with her bronze skin and dark almond-shaped eyes, that razor-sharp tongue that could cut you a new one in two languages, the long hair tucked high in a ponytail the color of coal-black tar. The thing Park liked was her eyes. He thought she had brown eyes so bright they could have been used as lights in some kind of emergency operating situation. If the need arose.

When Park told his buddy Baker about his crush, Baker looked at him crosswise. “That one?” he said. “She looks at you and you feel like a bug waiting for the shoe, but, you know, like, pleased about the situation.”