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

Because the girl was leaping, the girl was in the air, and she looked aglow with flame. This was not peaceful protest. This was grief in all its loss and fury. This was the world coming to kick down your door. To steal your family.

Ju unholstered her sidearm.

Then the girl landed on the hood of the PeaceKeeper, and Ju raised her department-issue.38 and still the girl was coming and she fired.

The bullet took her high in the shoulder, the dark blood flowering like a bruise and how funny, how weird and funny that she didn’t know about it yet even as the force of the bullet took her high above the heart. Ju raised her gun and fired and the girl stopped in mid-stride, trapped on the trajectory of the bullet like laundry hanging on a line, her face pure surprise.

Things moving slowly, very slowly, the noise narrowed to a tunnel, the chanting a whisper, the roar a soft sighing. Nothing but the shot and the girl.

It would repeat later in Ju’s mind on a loop she could replay at will, the shot, the shoulder, the dark blood, her arms pinwheeling, and the falling. Later Ju would think of the way it stopped her, the force of her violence, the way it threw the girl’s body in the street like something you kick, and it wasn’t really worth kicking in the first place, but now, now there was a hand on her leg, and she turned to see Park at the bottom of the PeaceKeeper.

Park’s hand on her leg. Park climbing up onto the PeaceKeeper at the sound of the shot. Park’s hand on her leg to help himself up and she was turning and there he was, her partner, a look in his face that she had never seen, saying, “Ju, what happened?”

“I went live.”

His face looking frightened and human.

“You did what?”

“Live. I went fucking live.”

She would think about it later, when she had time to think about it, what his face had looked like in that moment and what she had felt, she would remember and piece it together. Frightened and human. So scared. She was a trained police and what had she done? She wanted to tell Park she had done what she was trained to do. She had protected herself and her fellow officers. In the face of a clear threat, she had laid it down.

Look, there it was. Dirtying the street with its greasy blood.

The threat.

Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe

Intermission V

One Hour Late for the Meeting

A broad man in a tidy blue suit escorted him to the private elevator. He swiped a key card and the doors swished open pleasantly. They stepped inside. He swiped the card again, entered a few digits, a string of ten, and the doors shushed closed and they began to rise. The walls were made of glass. After two floors they were looking out into the night. The street looked like a battleground after a marauding army had passed through. Bodies everywhere. People passing and lying and sitting and the revolving blue and red lights of the police. The elevator rose with a barely audible hum. The sensation of motion was slight, a scant pressing of the feet to the floor as the elevator raced skyward.

Four floors down was the street. Charles recognized it as Sixth Avenue. The site of his confrontation with the protesters. How long ago that now seemed. Another life. Another man.

The elevator rose above the smoke like a plane finally clearing the clouds. Moving swiftly and surely. Up. Up. Up. The lights of the downtown area fell away. The windows of office buildings were lit and became clear. And then they too blurred in perspective as the elevator rose and the vista opened beneath them. The lights of the city, the famous lights of the city burning beneath them, white and yellow and red, but mostly orange like scattered embers of a city laid to waste.

The elevator rose and rose. Rose above the buildings and then some more. The hotel itself seemed to be shrinking to a point. The elevator’s trajectory bending backward and up, a curving of the metallic spine headed toward the top. The elevator man or security man or whoever he was drummed his fingers against the back wall. He offered Charles a stick of gum, which he refused. Why did he feel as if he were a prisoner at execution, riding to the gallows?

The elevator slowed and stopped. The pressure in his belly eased. The security elevator man put the gum in his pocket and gave him a little friendly nudge with his elbow. “Go ahead, sir. They’re waiting for you.”

* * *

Then he was in the clatter of the dining room, soft music overhead, dim lighting, the cool recycled air of the air conditioner, delegates of various nations huddled in groups of two or three, animated economic discussion, the light tinkling of ice in glass as they complained and argued in loud voices. Evidently they hadn’t appreciated being trapped inside their hotel all day. Across from Charles sat two of his oldest friends, Sir Edward Bancroft, Teddy to those that knew him, one half of the pair that made his only friends during those lonely years at Cambridge. Sir Teddy, in his tan suit and blue tie, in a wheelchair to which he’d been confined as long as Charles had known him. Sir Teddy. The Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

The other friend was Martin Oswego. Martin was from the Ivory Coast, the West African nation, and he, like Charles, had been a scholarship boy from a former colony.

Look at them now, financial ministers at the highest levels of power, drinking double martinis in a fancy American hotel.

Five minutes. In five minutes he had gone around the world. From victory to ignoble despair. And now skyrocketing back from despair to happiness, realizing all in an instant who had called for him, whose power had pulled him from that bus, given him a fresh change of clothes, a new suit which was a perfect fit, whose power and influence had snuck him through the employee entrance to the Sheraton in the loading dock, and sent him all the way up here to this hall in the sky.

“I was arrested, Teddy. They put me in jail.”

And here came Sir Teddy’s booming laugh.

“I know, Charley. You certainly did make a fucking mess of things.”

And here at the heart of everything, in the holy sanctuary of the Sheraton dining room — delegates only please — was the Director-General of the WTO laughing and saying fuck like he was a cowboy in a saloon, and not a single person surprised by the man’s manners.

“They canceled the meetings, Teddy. Those children. They canceled our meetings.”

“The meetings aren’t canceled,” Teddy said. “They were just delayed, that’s all. We’ll have our meetings tomorrow. Or the next day. Or next month. Fucking kids.”

“But Teddy, how can they be delayed? I had a meeting with—”

Sir Teddy cut him off with a chuckle deep in his chest. He patted the padded arm of his chair.

“I know who you had a meeting with, Charley. Sneaky bastard, good for you. But Charley, you didn’t miss your meeting. Clinton isn’t coming.”

A crushing wave of nausea passed over him.

“Clinton’s not coming?”

“No, Charley. Secret Service said it wouldn’t be safe.”

“But Teddy—”

Teddy wasn’t listening.

“Did you hear Fidel sent a delegation?” Laughing, shaking his head good-naturedly. “Can you bloody imagine? The Cubans? Here? What, trading cigars and rum?” He laughed. A great basso rumbling boom-boom-boom.

“You have to give it to the old man,” Teddy said. “He’s got a pair on him, eh? Jesus, god, the Cubans. Can you imagine it? You know, though,” he said, leaning in close, “I would have loved to talk with him. Fidel! What a leader!”

* * *

Charles drained the rest of his drink and raised his hand for another. His steak sat forlornly cooling on his plate, hardly touched. He had taken one bite — the blood rushing into his mouth — and nearly retched. In his increasingly inebriated state he tasted in its marbled veins of fat only his own frustrated hopes, his singed and bloody ambition.