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

“Right,” said the officer. “Come with me.”

As a younger happier man with long dark hair and an earnest smile, Bishop wore a beard, kept it neat and trim. His ma used to say, But Bill, you don’t eat, you’re so thin, don’t those police feed you, and he rubbed his beard and grinned at his pops, who had his head buried in his plate who thought young Bill Jr. was wasting his life, but back then Bishop didn’t know the feeling that when your son is wasting his life he is wasting yours, back then he didn’t know that a son became a father, and he grinned at his own, loving the old man’s grumbled incoherent unknowing. What a dinosaur!

But he was the dinosaur. The one out of touch with reality, out of contact with the world that lived around him.

Powerful explosions shook the windows of the buildings two blocks down, echoing and approaching through the narrow canyon of Sixth Avenue.

Bishop on the PeaceKeeper paused and turned to look.

Shredded groups unraveling through the streets. They weren’t running but moving fast, bunching to talk and then scattering in loose clusters as another boom came rolling down the street behind them.

The sixties ended when Kent State. Ended when National Guardsmen opened fire on a college campus and killed four students. Do you think this was an accident or what? But whose fault? The men who pulled the trigger? Or the man who ordered them there with loaded rifles?

A no-parking sign lay in the street. Newspaper boxes stacked as a barricade in front of the Sheraton, crowds surging behind them, taunting the cops.

Bishop still astride the running board of the PeaceKeeper, directing the shots. Park was at his side taking out the targets. The rubber bullets flew. Another officer, a young Latina woman, stood on the other board, across the flat roof of the PeaceKeeper. The crowd was pressing against the vehicle and Bishop was thinking they would soon have to climb on top.

Maybe it was the bullet’s fault. Poor bullet, just doing its job. Poor greased bullet punching holes in their pretty student bodies white as cream.

Another explosion. Bishop told them to aim high. A white-hot phosphorous flash that broke over their heads and rattled the windows in their metal frames.

And now here they came. A tired tattered band of protesters hurrying down the darkening street. They no longer had their signs. Another armored vehicle pushed them forward, out of the intersection, cops in wedge formation out front working their batons.

Bishop wanted to clean himself out, clear the bile, drop a nuclear bomb of astringent down his hatch, the rings of annihilation radiating from the hardened world-sick heart outward, flattening his doubt and disbelief like a concrete building gone to dust.

Because he had lost. Lost everything that mattered to him. Lost his wife, lost his city, lost his son. He had lost control of himself when it mattered most and now it was too late. Everything was lost.

It had come over the radio not ten minutes before. The Mayor had declared a civil emergency. The Governor had called in the National Guard.

And so Bishop would respond. It was his city. They were his people. And if he had to take away their rights to protect their rights that’s exactly what he would do. Fuck the National Guard, and fuck the Mayor, too.

How do you win a battle against a force with endless reinforcements?

There was only one answer really.

He had declared the entire downtown core a protest-free zone. Then he told his officers to load their guns with rubber bullets and let them loose. He told them to use their batons and cuffs. They had run out of propelled tear gas for the moment, but he had whistled up the Sheriff’s Office in Tacoma and told them to bring in more of everything, more gas, more pepper spray. They would clear these streets. He. Him, nobody else. Him, the Chief. He would fucking do that.

His radio saying

Bishop Bishop Bishop.

The chanting was dispersed, not chanting really, it had disintegrated into individual voices shouting, and Bishop listened to the layered scraps of noise. He watched the knots of people streaming past, groups of blue and green and red and yellow, their faces pinched and worried as they ducked their heads and ran-without-running.

A brightness above his head. He looked up and saw a tendril of smoke creeping around the corner of a building, high, eight, nine floors up. The sound seemed to begin there. There was another white flash and then that great concussive boom which banged glass all down the street.

He listened to the noise because it was a strange sound and in the back of his brain it signaled something, but what? The violent explosive booms like the rumble of separate lightning shots that came bouncing off the buildings. It was a tumbleweed of jagged sound caroming off the steel and glass, and it sounded the way a city being bombed sounded in his imagination. The way the noise came turning over itself, separate explosions linked in an overlapping chain, the weird echoing roar of dogs barking in a tunnel.

Another explosion which set the windows of the building directly beside the PeaceKeeper clattering and he fought the instinct to just open the hatch of the ’Keeper and drop right in.

Truthfully, Bishop hadn’t been right in years. Your son disappears as though dead and you are supposed to be all right? He felt like he hadn’t been able to breathe, hadn’t taken a single full breath, since the day Victor disappeared.

Instead of whatever one does in the course of a life, Bishop wandered the supermarket in a daze, lingering over the bright boxes, amazed and confused. He spent hours in the vegetable aisle, the soft mist gathering on his brass buttons, wetting the arms of his uniform as he examined the leafy greens, turned bok choy in his hands grown suddenly old.

Shivering in the freezer aisle talking to the carcasses of headless frozen birds.

When Victor left it broke something off inside him and sent it into the world. His boy in the world and Bishop’s heart like a shadow following him around all his days.

All his son’s strange unknowable days.

In the supermarket wondering how was it that his hands knew how to grieve and he did not.

In the supermarket Bishop stared at the bananas from Peru. He plucked one from the bunch, peeled and ate it, the light mush trapped between his teeth and tongue.

Something went missing, the weight that tied him to the ground. The world tilted and his son disappeared and he walked on floors that leaned and pitched, rooms turned upside down.

Grief and its decaying orbit. He felt like a rocket gathering speed, inescapably caught in gravity, spiraling closer and closer to home, to return and death. The cool comfort of Earth’s dark seas.

In the market, he gathered apples in his arms. Rubbed dirty potatoes with a thumb. Hefted the weight of a cantaloupe in his palm. The sticker said Product of Mexico. He nestled the fruit to his chest and did a slow shuffling dance to the gods of global produce there in the fluorescent light. He turned the melon to his ear and listened for his son’s voice.

Product of Mexico.

The sudden unfamiliarity of familiar things. Was that what he had heard? The secret language of the ordinary world? Was that what had called him?

At home Bishop opened the refrigerator and stared. Again that strange frozen light. He opened and stared and felt as if he were somehow living in that light. His life squeezed and processed in a plastic tub. Here it was, another sweet advertisement for the good life, and goddamn it, it was the good life. He ate a piece of cold chicken. He spooned pasta salad into his mouth. He drank a diet soda from the can and cursed his ungrateful son.

He ignited a handheld tear gas canister and threw it overhand into a knot of people around the PeaceKeeper.