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

Tear gas wafted around their ankles and climbed their legs. John Henry kneeling in the gutter, saying, “You’re going to be all right, kid. You’re going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right.”

She heard the sound of a bank alarm. An electronic wailing that wouldn’t quit. She heard grumblings of motorcycles and looked over her shoulder and saw cops navigating the crowd on black-and-white Harleys.

She was dreaming. She was in a dream. A woman praying a mixed-up Buddhist mantra going, “Jesus Lord Om God Help Us.”

“Jesus Lord Om God Help Us.”

“Jesus Lord Om God Help Us.”

Could she tell him what she had seen from where she hid?

Ignacio and his son on their knees in the dirt, the older man with his belly and scarred arms, his son looking like the boy he was, shivering in his wet briefs, fifteen feet away or more, and still she could see the water dripping from their hair, the look of terror in their eyes.

A lawn chair sat empty in the clearing, a pickup parked off to the side, illuminating them in the stark glare of its headlights. An old man stood halfway between the truck and where they knelt. He held a shotgun in his gnarled hands. It was leveled at their chests.

Could she tell him how the blood was pounding in her ears? How the shape of the gun was distinct through the plastic of her garbage bag?

How the old man stepped out of the light, opened the door of the truck and leaned in, and she heard the squawk of a CB radio and how for a moment he was just a dark form fumbling in the cab, the shotgun leaning against the door, and the man and the boy motionless, their kneeling bodies throwing long shadows across the dirt to climb distorted into the trees?

John Henry trying to clear Victor’s eyes.

“John Henry, I can’t stay. I can’t do this.”

Could she tell him the way the boy looked at his father in absolute fear? How she saw the question on his face? How Ignacio made a motion with his head, barely perceptible, as if to say, no, wait, and the way the boy turned and his eyes flicked to where she was rustling in the bushes and their gazes met, and she saw the knowledge of the gun so clear in his look, and then the truck door slammed and the old man was walking back into the light?

She watched herself watching herself as John Henry struggled to open Victor’s eyes, struggled to clear them with the Maalox solution from a water bottle, and she thought of John Henry and his alcoholic father. His stories of the factory where they had worked the line together. John Henry and his father, slicing hogs together, stepping through the blood together, wiping their faces with gut-soaked gloves, and talking Work, and talking God, and his father telling him he loved him and he had to get himself out of this factory — this man now supporting the boy’s head and trying to pour the milky solution that was meant to ease the burning.

John Henry.

A man who had been put to the test and come out on the other side a man of total nonviolence.

John Henry.

Who believed that suffering was redemptive. That suffering redeems us exactly at the moment when we invite it into our lives and endure it with love.

Of course she could not tell John Henry.

John Henry most of all whom she could never tell how she rose up from where she hid and inhaled and sighted and squeezed. How the gun did not tremble in the slightest.

John Henry, whom she could never tell that she thought it would be loud, the gunshot, a roaring that would never end, but that it was not loud at all.

“King, help me,” he said.

She felt like she was watching a movie, felt a cold unreality in her chest that was like a rope drawing tight. The claustrophobia of nowhere left to run because her anger was a thing that had followed her all her life, not anger, but a wild rage that wanted to hurt everyone and everything she had ever loved, and she had torched that ski resort, and done worse besides — she had entered the country in the worst of ways, crossed the border baptized in the blood of an innocent man, and if not today, then one day soon, someone was going to make her pay.

“I have to go,” she said to John Henry.

He stopped what he was doing to look at her.

“Then go, King,” he said. “Help me or fucking go.”

She turned from him feeling that quiet haywire stillness that prepares you for something awful and vast. She heard Victor cursing. She heard John Henry reassuring him. She took a step away from them both.

One step.

Two.

John Henry whom she would never tell about the sweet ache of violence and how it does not happen once, but loops in your body like a movie reel that is the sound of your breath and the roar of your own beating heart. John Henry most of all whom she would never tell how the shot was not loud at all, but was the most quick and final sound, a short sharp snap like a door slamming shut. Like the click and fall of a key tumbling a lock.

One.

Two.

Three strides and she was gone.

Look at her go. A running girl disappearing liquid down tear gas streets. While the man she loved knelt in the gutter, feet wreathed in smoke.

Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe

Intermission IV

One Hour Until the Meeting

The bus door swung open with a pneumatic hiss and a cop pushed Charles through and up the steps and the door shut behind him. He stood at the front, looking down the rows. No cops on the bus. They were busy with more important things. Still sixty, maybe seventy protesters crammed into the seats. Their hands were cuffed behind them. Their faces bruised. Bloodied. Clothes torn. There was the strong smell of tear gas. The smell of urine. Charles counted at least fifteen other buses, stretching for blocks in the industrial lots behind the convention center, all filled with people’s faces at the windows, and he didn’t know, but he assumed that meant it was some sort of jail.

One hour until his meeting with President Clinton, and the American police had just thrown him in jail. And there he stood at the front of the locked bus and looked at seventy protesters who stared back at him like they wanted to rip him limb from limb.

A ripple of fear washed over him. And yet, what distinguished him, what made presidents and prime ministers call him friend, was his desire to talk to anybody, his ability to engage with any person’s experience and opinion. The willingness to plunge off the cliff of who we think we are. That blind leap into another view.

He looked up and down the rows. He cleared his throat.

“My name is Charles Wickramsinghe and I am the Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning in Sri Lanka. I am a delegate and I am here for the meetings that you are trying so hard to shut down.”

A voice yelled from the back.

“That we did shut down!”

“Yes,” Charles said, “that you did shut down. And now I am here, with you, and well—” He paused. “And now I am here and I would like to hear your objections.”

There was a deep silence. He heard the wind throwing sand against the sides of the bus. And then they erupted in a great cheer, and suddenly they were up from their seats, grinning and cheering, having broken free of the plasti-cuffs and yet continuing to sit here while the hours wore on, and then they were helping him into a seat.

In groups of twos and threes they came to speak.

They told him about the Rainforest Alliance and the Ruckus Society, about the United Auto Workers and the Longshoremen.

They talked calmly, knowledgeably about the WTO, about Monsanto, about intellectual property rights, about pharmaceutical companies who wanted to stop the manufacturing of generic AIDS drugs in Africa which were saving millions of lives.