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

The necessary numbness, the cold core of watchfulness, and the problem of remaining a person yourself, a person who cares. A person who feels. A person who does not hate.

And then, as it sometimes happens, this man of good faith was given a gift. There was his mistake standing in the crowd. Standing there in black with a white T-shirt rolled to the shoulders and her hair piled atop her head. A black gas mask covered her face, but he knew who it was. The girl from this morning. He saw her singular presence, the singular mistake that started it all. Dear God, thank you. And he thought, I will fix this. Praise the Lord in his infinite goodness, and forgive me if I was wrong. But I will fix this. I see my mistake and there she is and I will wipe this mistake from the books.

I will get this day back on track.

A dignity they did not deserve — that was my mistake.

Look, there she is, he thought, and the anger seemed not the point at all anymore. “Thank you,” he said because the sight of her — his mistake standing there in the crowd — had filled his heart with a simple gladness. With a deep-welled gratitude.

If he couldn’t have his son, at least he could have his city back.

Victor was out. John Henry was out. They were both of them out of lockdown and Victor was still standing there rubbing his shoulders and wrists, feeling a surprising mixture of relief and pride, while John Henry stood arguing with King about something Victor didn’t understand. He didn’t mind. People weren’t pissed at him. In fact, just the opposite. They were gathered around him massaging his shoulders and legs. Men and women congratulating him. Looking at him in a way nobody had ever looked at him before. It was surprising how good it felt to be out. How good it felt to suddenly realize he wasn’t out; he was in. He had passed some test he hadn’t even known he was taking.

Standing there just feeling good when his father came stepping through the crowd like a nightmare come to life. A black poncho billowing around him like a shroud.

In his right hand, his father held a small can of pepper spray the size of a tube of toothpaste. His thumb resting on the trigger. He was looking at King and headed straight for her. He had the strangest look on his face, a look of such anger Victor wanted to run, wanted to heed instinct and flat out disappear, but that’s not what he did.

What he did was he lifted his feet to move — to step in front of his father — but his legs, weak from the hours of sitting in lockdown, buckled beneath him. He took one step and collapsed like a puppet suddenly without strings. A body falling toward the storm cloud that was his father.

“Hey,” Victor shouted as he fell. “Hey now! She’s a medic.”

The Chief didn’t even hesitate. Didn’t even look. Just let loose with the spray, and Victor falling, calling out, caught the spray in the face as he tumbled toward the ground. John Henry realizing what was happening in the same moment, in the air then, too. Trying to catch him, and his father, did his father just pepper-spray him? What did Victor expect? It was an automatic reaction of muscle memory and speed. But did he recognize me? I don’t know. I don’t know. He is a cop right now, not your father. But did he know it was me?

Victor’s eyes exploded. His whole face attacked by a wall of heat. He was on his hands and knees, blinded, hands reaching out for something, anything, and there seemed to be a pile of bodies. Everything was arms and clothes and legs. His eyes like hot coals in the cave of his sockets. He wanted to tear them out. He couldn’t see. His hands in front of him, the fucking pain, you are not prepared for it, the fucking suddenness of the heat, the intensity. Everything was pain and fallen bodies. He felt the armored boots of a cop. Pulling himself to his feet, his hands claws grabbing at the plastic of his father’s poncho. Twisting away the pain. Victor tried to call out, tried to let his father know that it was his son. But his throat was a wall of flame, no sound but the animal body crying out its pain.

Everything seemed to be moving slowly. He could hear with an almost supernatural clarity. His father grunted, surprised by this body groping at his feet. Victor could hear him breathing, a sound so familiar it just cracked him at the core, his father snoring in the other room, his father’s grunts lifting a bag of mulch for the garden, and oh god, who knew there was so much pain possible in the world? Victor heard his own hands twisting in the poncho, heard his hands grabbing at the plastic. He heard the scrape of his father’s boots on the pavement. He heard the creaking of his gear. And he wanted to say, Dad, Dad, it’s me, but his throat was closing down. He wanted to say, Dad, I have so much to tell you.

Dad, I’m here. Dad, stop.

Dad, I’m home.

The unbearable briefness of moments. The moment, in some ways, he had returned for, and here he was, mute. His throat was closing. He let go of his father’s poncho to claw helplessly at his own neck. Then, from the air above his head, he heard the thin high whisper of a baton. The baton of an officer who was protecting the Chief. The Chief being pulled away.

Dad, did you know it was me?

The baton collided with Victor’s body at the base of his neck. His head rocked back. Flung into the air, he heard the silence of the pavement waiting for his heavy idiot’s head.

And who was there to greet him in the darkness?

His mother, her feather earrings swinging to and fro and her arms outstretched?

No.

His father, off-duty wearing sweats and reading the paper at the kitchen table?

No. Not him either.

The American girl in Bolivia begging change with her bowl and her dog, the girl he had wanted to kick in the head?

Yes. There she was. The girl to whom Victor had given his last twenty dollars, the girl he had sat down next to on the oil-stained curb and together watched the passing traffic. The girl he had talked with until the lights of the buses were the only lights left sweeping through the darkened station, the girl whose body and dog he had slept between later that night in a dingy hostel with a brothel making the noises a brothel makes in the rooms above them.

His body connected solid with the ground. His head hit the pavement and grew dark as though punctured and leaking light, and Victor curled warm with her body at his back, and him drifting like a leaf on the breeze of the dog’s easy sleeping breath, his arm slung around its neck. A small moment of peace in what had been a long and stupid road. A family of sorts.

Of course, when he woke in the morning, everything was gone. Girl. Dog. His backpack and all its contents. His heart and all that might have once cared because, yes, he had finally learned it for himself. Care too much and the world will kill you cold.

King stood and watched as John Henry dragged Victor’s limp body through the intersection, his arms locked firmly around the boy’s chest. She had a sort of daydreamy feeling, this detached feeling you get when you see a car crash happening as you walk down the street. A slowing down of time as if she were somehow smaller than herself, standing just an inch to the left or right of her own body.

“John Henry,” she said.

Was it a story she could tell? How they had traveled for three days from Guadalajara, riding in the back of bouncing pickups with other migrants heading to the border, changing trucks in small towns, the small clustered houses where they took on food and water and gasoline, and she wanted to talk but the men were silent, and the closer they got the more difficult the journey, more difficult than she had ever imagined because the silence and the guilt and the fear, and because always, the growing knowledge of her own willful ignorance — her anger and arrogance. What had made her think this would be easy?