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

She told John Henry she wanted to cross the border. Not forever. For a few months. A year. Just until things calmed down a little with the FBI. And she wanted John Henry to go with her. To be with her. To be together.

But John Henry, who believed that courage and compassion were everything, said he had no desire to go to Mexico. He said what you sacrificed in the struggle was nothing compared to what you got in return — a sort of blazing personal heat. You transcended your own history to become the person you needed to be. You stood apart. You transformed yourself. No more double life. It didn’t matter the inconsistencies in your life, this is what John Henry dared to say to her — no more lies permitted in the sacred ground of your heart.

This was a man she loved to the point she would forsake all other men, forswear sex and violence. Be good. For him. Because he asked.

He said she was unduly worried. Said she needed to grow up. Almost said she was being hysterical, but caught himself and said instead their work was here, but still she saw the ugly accusation in his look.

She went to her knees before a gray-haired woman who had caught pepper spray in the face. The woman was on her knees on the pavement as the throngs swarmed and buzzed and people went running by, pursued by cops in flapping black. King held her eyes open with one hand and poured from the bottle with the other. The woman on her knees with her head tilted back, totally vulnerable and blind, mumbling and moaning as if awaiting execution while her hand played with the buttons of her coat.

King steadied her head. Her long fingers pulled at the woman’s eyes. She poured the solution of water and Maalox and whispered words of reassurance as the woman’s eyes searched back and forth in a panic, flashing helplessly in her head. She was trying to communicate some message but what it was King didn’t know.

John Henry’s mouth was a wound that leaked language — disclaimers and apologies. But she was tired of talking about how her work was nothing. Her worry was nothing. Tired of feeling judged. Days passed when she was all ease and control, as delicate as a perfumed wrist, as fragile as an armed bomb. She listened to him talk at her and she smiled and reached for his cigarettes, nodding.

The effects of pepper spray include: temporary blindness lasting 15 to 30 minutes.

But he would not budge. So she went alone.

Upper-body spasms lasting 15 to 20 minutes.

And at first it was glorious. In the evenings the first appearance of a darkening sky, swallows dipping and swooping above the desert floor. Jackrabbits daredeviling through the dust. A group of deer she spooked drinking from a trickle at the bottom of a dry creek. At first it was wonderful, yes, but how quickly it became lonely, and then she was lost in a nightmare of homesickness, of feeling foreign and utterly apart.

A burning sensation of the skin lasting 45 to 60 minutes.

One day, out of the blue, John Henry emailed and asked her to come back. Said they were planning a big one. It was going to be the direct action of the century. They were going to shut down the goddamn World Trade Organization and the whole world would be watching and he was sorry for being an ass, but now he needed her. They all needed her.

Direct close-range spray can cause serious and lasting eye damage. What is known as the needle effect.

She wrote back and agreed to come, still not understanding just how difficult it would be to make her way north, to sneak illegally back into her own country. She remembered Guadalajara. The twilight street, light spilling from the curtains which hung in the open doors. An open shop with the grille half-raised, people inside browsing American movies on pirated discs and she remembered her own feet like the feet of a stranger passing through white cones of light where the shadows of bats spun and fell across her boots as if her head were attached to a stranger’s body, her ruck on some stranger’s back. Two girls lounged against the wall, slogans painted behind them, movie posters glued to the wall, and she felt it with a suddenness she had not felt since she was a child — the strangeness of what she was doing, the vulnerability of who she was, a woman traveling alone through these half-deserted streets. She finally had to admit. She did not know what she was doing. Had no idea how she would actually cross the border.

So she bought a gun. And she found a guide, a man and his son, who were also going to make the attempt to cross illegally into the United States.

Opening the eyes will cause a temporary increase in pain, 30 to 45 minutes.

And then it all went wrong and she did what she did. And what she did was she shot a man on the border and watched him bleed just as she had once broken a man’s pinky and ring finger and watched him weep.

Difficulty breathing or speaking: 5 to 15 minutes.

Park was leaning against the PeaceKeeper, on the opposite side as Julia, totally bored, looking around Pike Place Market. There was absolutely nothing happening here — except for the small knot of outraged people beginning to gather around the car where he had pepper-sprayed two Quakers or whatever — and he was beginning to think it was a knucklehead idea to join Ju on the ’Keeper in the first place.

“You know,” Ju said, “we had a word for these kind of people back in L.A.”

Neither of them had said a word in at least half an hour.

“Yeah?” Park said. He clocked silver pails of silver fish. Fish, blind and dead and wrapped in newsprint.

“Listen,” she said, “I didn’t mean anything by the razor blade thing. That was an unfortunate comment on my part.”

He shrugged like what razor blade thing.

“No, really, I’m sorry, Park. I got carried away.”

“What’d you call them?”

“What’d we call what?”

“These people, Ju,” he said. “Back in L.A., what did you call them?”

“Hot dogs.”

“Hot dogs I don’t process.”

“Yeah, hot dogs in a plastic pack. All feet and mouth and asshole.”

And that was the thing someone said on the back lot, the thing that was so stupid and true and twisted it made you shake your head and spit a laugh into your Styrofoam cup and forget the human mess you were witness to.

And suddenly Park was shaking and laughing in his riot gear and grinning from every shiny corner of his fucked-up face.

“Assholes and lips,” he said.

“Walking talking shit on a bun,” Ju said.

“They had it tough?”

“Totally screwed,” she said.

Both of them cracking up like a couple of maniacs.

“Hey, check this guy out,” he said, feeling good.

“Who?”

“That smart-aleck protester in a suit.”

“You think?”

“Heck yeah.”

Park watched him coming down the rows of fish and fruits. Foreign-looking guy, sweating and something in the way he walked like he owned the city. Park just knew. Guy was bullcrap.

They stopped him in the market between the tomatoes and the fish. Asked him to raise his hands.

“I’m a delegate,” the man said.

Ju spread his legs, patted his fancy suit. Park reaching for his plastic zip cuffs, noticed Ju touching the guy’s soft suit, patting his legs and such. Why did she need to touch him so much? That wasn’t necessary.

“What’s in the briefcase?” Park said, taking it from the man and throwing it away.

“He’s clean,” Ju said.

And what was this, the Indian motherfucker freeing his arm and reaching into his jacket. Park and Ju. They reacted like a team, like they’d been partners for fifteen years, and Park, damn he was feeling good. Just the way they lifted the man by his arms, lifted him like a team, reacting instantly, hands in his armpits and lifting him away and up and then slamming him together into the table that held the tomatoes.