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

He said, “I went, Dad, because it was the right thing to do.”

Except he said none of this. Just mailed him a postcard of California grapes postmarked Salinas.

He looked at John Henry from where he sat propped against the newspaper box, his new friend, this white man with the red beard and the black glasses and the cowboy hat, and what Victor wanted to say, simply, was thank you.

He looked across the street, and there was the armored truck. Two cops atop it firing concussion grenades into the crowd. And there beside them, his father.

And Victor taking this in, looking at his father standing there on the running board of the PeaceKeeper, really looking at him. He saw the heaviness of the man’s body, as if the bones were weighing him down. He looked at his back, at his shoulders and arms, at his father’s hands and he knew. This was the desperation he had always felt. This was the blindness he had fought so hard to be free of.

Victor nodding and thinking, The world will kill you cold? Maybe it was worth it. He turned back to John Henry, thinking of all the man had done for him, and Victor, he decided it was all of it worth it. All of it worth the possibility that he might end up cold, worth the possibility that he might get hurt. He smiled at his friend and handed him back the bottle of Maalox and water and climbed to his feet. He steadied himself on John Henry’s shoulder. And then he turned and stepped into the intersection. He pushed through the crowd and passed out of the mass and into a stretch of empty asphalt, a black stretch of road leading him from here straight to the PeaceKeeper. How it had taken him so long to realize, he didn’t know. He walked toward the PeaceKeeper. He could end this entire thing right now, if he could only speak to his father.

And that’s exactly what he was going to do. Go speak to the man.

Go speak to his father.

The Chief of Police.

King was running.

And then she wasn’t.

Because the knowledge had come pounding up through her feet as she ran. There is no way to take back a bullet. King. The most perfect American girl with only love in her heart — she had killed a man of eighty-some years. Why not admit it? She had put a bullet between his belly and his Cracker Jack badge and she had looked in the mirror every day since and nowhere in all her years had she ever seen the person she would become hiding there inside her face.

No way to take back a bullet. No way to ever go back to John Henry.

She slowed to a walk. On a side street, away from the action, a sort of loose-limbed group carrying backpacks leaned against a dumpster in various postures of total boredom and how fucking stupid is this riot. In their oversized black hoods, they looked like some sort of Judgment Day cult, monks risen from the radioactive mud of a burnt-out city. They squatted and stood and leaned against the dumpster, looking as though they were waiting for the signal to come alive, the command no one else could hear. A few had gas masks. Some had crowbars.

Two of the black-hooded monks disengaged from the dumpster and approached a bank window. A group of protesters — middle-aged men and women — had decided to organize themselves against what they thought was an act of vandalism. They were going to protect the bank.

The two lines were yelling philosophies in each other’s faces.

King had trained three hundred nonviolent revolutionaries in the desert, every one of them a good soul and King herself with only love for the millions of the Third World and she asked herself what was one man’s death — border patrol agent or racist militiaman — against so many millions dead? She told herself the scales did not balance. One man’s death didn’t matter because there was the truck, and there was the CB, and she had dragged him among the dark trees to watch him die. It did matter and she knew it. The millions dead — they were exactly what made it matter. And yet there she had been, her, King, kneeling in the sand beside him, watching the odd sad way he clutched at the air as if there were something there in front of him which might save him if only he could catch ahold of it.

Two of the black-hooded youths casually kicked a newspaper stand into the street. And the violence of it, the anger toward a newspaper box — King slowed and stood watching.

“Stop!” one of the marchers said. “This is supposed to be—”

King noticed a crowbar leaning against a lamppost. She picked it up and tested the weight of it in her palm. It was extra long, a four-foot piece of metal designed for maximum wreckage. It felt good in her hand as she pushed through the crowd, using the handle to clear a way. This tall woman dressed in black pants and a white T-shirt splattered with blood as though a map of parts as yet unexplored, unconquerable lands far or near — the men and women looked at her face and then stepped aside because she was maybe one of the lunatic blessed, a radical personage willing to give her life, possibly infected with the disease or despair of those she touched.

And she felt it like a cold block of ice lodged in her chest, leaking slow cold into her veins and she knew exactly what she was doing, this twenty-seven-year-old woman who wanted to shut down the WTO, who wanted to end the suffering which was the world without end, this twenty-seven-year-old woman, who wanted to remember, but could not, a time when she had still been a little girl tugging on her mom’s hem in some innocent supermarket aisle.

And yet, no way to go back to the girl she’d once been. No way to go back to John Henry. No way to go back to the lie she had built.

She was a nonviolent revolutionary. She believed in the transcendence of suffering. The righteous power of pain, and yet no way to avoid prison of one kind or the other. The memories started coming. A small shudder in the drizzle and here it came, that familiar blinding comforting rage, the familiar anger sharp as any knife.

No way to undo the world where they lived in a shack made of loose boards, a family of six in a shack the size of a car on blocks, and in her life anytime she wanted she could sleep in an apartment where she turned hot water on and off and stepped from the shower and toweled dry thinking about what to eat for breakfast.

How easy to slip into that life where she had a closet for her clothes and a closet for food and how easy to believe this was somehow normal. That’s what got King. Because where was the logic in the thing? The gun in her hand and the man’s chest opening to the sweet smell of his blood among the sagebrush, a smell she would never be able to forget, to unremember, like a handful of pennies on a sweaty summer’s day. What could possibly connect that man’s breathing beating conflicted life to this singularity of blood in the sand? How could a human life, a thing so layered and vast it was a world unto itself, be reduced so quickly and completely to a cold corpse beneath the trees?

In Mexico she had seen shipwrecked houses lit by candlelight. Houses of cardboard and tin. Scavenged wood. Night fell and here came the little flames. Light spilling from the warped boards like a flood of little hands to grab at her face, her shirt, her heart. And she remembered how she had squatted there on her haunches in that concrete truck stop in McAllen, Texas, hitching to Seattle, how she had leaned against a cinderblock wall, the cracked pavement and twilight. She remembered washing her hands and face in the metal washbasin of the restroom, the water going pink and brown, and then outside the arc lamps, orange flowers blooming in a pot on the barred windowsill, how she had bowed her head, while her chest heaved and the full weight of what she had done came trailing its fingers along the smooth cavern of her chest. She had huddled against that wall and wept and let it come, trying to remember it all passes. Even this.