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

“Yeah, I know,” Park said, “but…”

“Like happy you’re gonna get squashed,” Baker said, laughing and walking to the vending machine. “Like you think it’s going to feel so good to get stomped.”

Park watched a group of young people taking over the intersection in front of him. They were a part of the crowd, and yet separate from it in a way he couldn’t define. One minute it seemed an undifferentiated mass, and then these young people materialized out of the chaos of bodies.

To his eye they were wearing stained and greasy jeans like some kind of junkie army risen from their mothers’ pullout couches, but there was an urgency to their movements, shuffling quickly like they were loonies five minutes escaped from the Harborview nuthouse on Ninth, and he sipped his coffee and laughed. There was a calm camaraderie, too, a sort of ease he recognized. As though they were an elite military unit — saying little, communicating instead out of seasoned memory, the easy gait of shared purpose.

He set his coffee on the ’Keeper and watched in total stunned astonishment as they sat down in a circle and then began locking themselves together with chains and PVC pipe.

Maybe as an officer of the law he should be doing something about that?

He turned to Julia and nodded toward the kids.

“I mean what’s going on here, Ju. Are they protesting the world?”

Julia — Ju — she looked at him in that way she had of looking at him. As if a thousand miles stood between her body and yours. Or so she wished. Aristocratic, was that the word?

“Are they protesting the world?” she said flatly. “That’s what you want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“Which one, Park?”

“Which one what?”

“Which world, pendejo? Yours or theirs?”

He turned away. The PeaceKeeper was parked in the zebra lines of the south crosswalk at Sixth and Union, its ass with the double doors pointing west toward a bank, its headlights and flat hood pointing toward a coffee shop, which was wisely, Park thought, closed and shuttered for the day. On the other side of the intersection, perpendicular to the wide side of the ’Keeper, beyond that mess of kids and hippies, a series of low wide steps fanned upward, creating a wedge-shaped plaza with the wooden benches at the bottom as the crust, which was funny, Park thought, because the plaza was not public, but private, narrowing and climbing as it approached the entrance, ending among potted ferns and the glass doors of the Sheraton lobby. Above the lobby, ivy-covered beige walls. Above that, gray glass rose a neck-craning thirty-five floors above the street. Pretty much your typical pretentious downtown bullcrap in the opinion of Park, who was feeling pretty irritated because he hadn’t eaten anything besides a banana and a power shake this morning and whose stomach was already growling despite that being only about two hours ago, when he woke at four a.m. to do abdominal crunches in the dust of the bare floor beside his bed.

A young mother in a thousand-dollar mountaineering jacket was circulating behind the PeaceKeeper. She was on the south side of Sixth, behind their lines, and Park saw her over the top of the PeaceKeeper distributing coffee and cupcakes from a tray. She seemed suburban and pleasant. Park noticed she had parked a baby stroller in the cedar chips of a municipal tree for which he could cite her if he chose, which he did not currently feel like doing, but as he reminded himself, he could if he wanted, which was the point. He stepped around the front of the PeaceKeeper and was pleased when Julia stepped down and followed him.

The lady approached them where they stood beside the PeaceKeeper.

She offered them the tray of fresh coffees and the paper-wrapped cupcakes, nodding toward the protesters chanting behind Park and Ju.

Her voice pitched conspiratorially, she said, “Aren’t they a pain? I mean, gosh, I thought the sixties were over. ” She released a bright laugh as if a little surprised at her own naughtiness.

“All those banners and shouting,” the lady said. “What are they doing? It’s almost Christmas!”

She was sort of whining now and Park, his back to the ’Keeper, asked her to please step away from the vehicle. The lady continued forward as if she hadn’t heard, offering the tray to them as if she were in her living room entertaining guests.

Park put on his gloves and flexed his fingers until the fit was tight.

“I just don’t know what they hope to accomplish sitting in the street like that,” she said.

“I asked you to step away from the vehicle,” Park said. And then he paused and added, “What’s the matter with you?”

The woman smiled in a neighborly way as if these were just morning pleasantries, as if a smile were enough because, after all, they were on the same side — the cops and a friendly patriotic young mother offering coffees — they were on the same side here, right?

“I just don’t know what they hope to accomplish,” she said again, a little less brightly.

And just like that, Park’s baton was in the air and quivering just above the tray of coffees, pointing to her throat.

The smile plastered to the lady’s face like a light someone forgot to turn off.

“Park,” Ju said.

Some of the other cops had stopped what they were doing and were watching good-naturedly even as they unwrapped the lady’s cupcakes and gnawed at the edges.

Ju stepped in front of him. Normally he would never have allowed another officer to intercede in his arrest, his encounter. But Christ, it was Ju. She placed her hand on the baton. He lowered it gently to his side.

Ju looked him in the face. The acknowledgment passing there. There would be other, better moments. He nodded, said to the woman, “Thank you for the coffee.” Then, gesturing with his chin at the stroller, he said, “But why don’t you get your kid out of here? You know?”

The woman’s smile hadn’t faltered. Her eyes had gone wide, face pink as a plastic doll, and still she went on smiling like a thousand-kilowatt idiot in her mountain-climbing jacket and her stroller parked next to a goddamn armored police vehicle.

She stumbled backward away from Ju, away from Park. The tray crashed to the ground. Cupcakes and coffee spilled across the concrete steps and a general groan of misfortune went up from the assembled troops.

Didn’t matter. The lady was already halfway down the street, stroller smooth and gliding before her.

The cops returned to their conversations.

Park racked his baton. “Ju,” he said.

“What?”

“Don’t ever freaking do that again.”

“Chief said we should take it easy, Park. Chief said they’re nonviolent.”

“Nonviolent. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Surgical, that was the word. Her eyes looked bright enough to be surgeon’s tools and Park sometimes liked to dream himself under the knife.

“Well, not for nothing, Julia,” he said, “but what does the Chief know? The Chief is as soft as butter on a picnic plate.”

Reports were coming in from all over the downtown, crackling through the radio clipped to his belt, and Chief Bishop knew he should be paying attention, but he felt distracted, a kind of tectonic drift of soul, as if something fundamental were loose inside, an oceanic plate going molten beneath the continent’s weight.

Tom-four-two.

This is Command. Go ahead.

Approximately seven thousand southbound. We see chanting and signs. Over.

Bishop listening to the radio chatter on his belt and looking over the growing crowd from a spot twenty feet above their heads in a cherry picker requisitioned from Seattle City Light. He felt a fondness for these people, a kind of love-struck nostalgia for his city. Americans marching in the rain. Their faces, failed and flawed — they were the faces of a part of American life that was passing away, if not already gone, the belief that the world could be changed by marching in the streets. Bishop perched like a bird on a wire watching the crowd from the cherry picker. He extended the crane to get above the bare branches of November trees, thinking he had protected these people for thirty years — first as a beat cop, and then as a captain going to the community meetings twice a week, which was where not incidentally he had met his wife, on and on up through the ranks, working the job, investing himself, practicing the profession of policing as he best knew, and now here he was their Chief, their leader — and, now, why now did they see the need to come marching like lambs to the slaughter?