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

The young staffer returned and offered Teddy a sheaf of folders, which he took and tossed on the table.

“But we are willing to work with you if you are willing to work with us. Here are the terms of the agreement, which include, as I’ve said, the proposed budget cuts. Sign and you begin Sri Lanka’s entry to the WTO. It’s as easy as that, my friend.” He smiled, open and full now. “Of course, as the lead negotiator on this deal, there would be a significant bonus for you personally.”

Charles looked at Teddy carefully, at the band of fat beneath his chin, at his wheelchair, at his rueful grin, and Charles thought of the house he would buy in the hills of southern England, the small touches his granddaughter would add, flowers on the windowsill, embroidered curtains. He thought of the walks he would take alone in his retirement, down the chalk cliffs to the shore, the sound of the crashing waves and the cold gritty sand between his toes, gulls wheeling and crying above in an English sky of English clouds, the perfect peace he had long dreamed of.

He thought of great slat-ribbed Tennyson, his mongrel dog racing him beside the water of the river Cam, tongue lolling like a madman, tail going like a whip. The happiness of that stupid dog. Tennyson’s inability to see the end whose coming was inevitable. You can only rise so high, Tennyson, before someone like me, someone that loves you, is forced to cut you down. Charles looked out the window. The scene was now completely enveloped in fog and cloud. Nothing to see. Nothing to feel. A hotel wrapped in gauze.

Teddy rolled back from the table and turned. “You take your time,” he said. “Take a moment to figure it out. Politics, Charles, is not for idealists. It is the art of the possible. You would do well to remember that. Maybe Martin here will offer some advice.”

And then he was gone, making his way in the wheelchair to the other tables. Charles looked at Martin, who earlier this year, Charles knew, had negotiated a third round of loans from the IMF. Charles saw for the first time how much the years had aged his friend. It was his eyes really that held the weight of all those years, all those compromises, and watching him now, Charles knew just what it had all cost him. He had the eyes of a man who has just been told his house burned down with his wife and children inside. Sad eyes that looked like they would never recover from the shock, had maybe not even yet allowed themselves to register the full weight of the news.

Martin smiled at him and gently patted his hand. “It will be all right, Charley. You’ll get used to it.” But Charles didn’t hear words of comfort. He heard, in fact, the echo of what he himself had said to poor old Tennyson all those years ago on the veterinarian’s steel table moments before they put the needle in him that laid him out forever.

Charles looked at Martin, saw the sky behind him, the cloud cover thick and gray. He heard the low chatter of the room, ice chiming in the glasses like little bells, the explosive laughter of Teddy banging above the heads. No, he thought, nothing is going to be all right.

All across the world they watched the TV. In their living rooms and dens. Gathering outside the café. Dozens in the street watching through the window. Their hands going to their mouths.

On the screen, they were running in the streets. They were jumping in the streets. They were running and screaming in the streets.

The TV news. Hurricane winds tossing the reporter’s hair, waves crashing behind her. A city in flames behind her. A war behind her. Everything always behind her.

When the Wall fell. The way people swarmed over the concrete. The way they took hammers and crowbars to it. Tore at it with their bare hands. Swarming. They wanted to hold a piece of history in their hands, to take it home with them. To hold it in their hands like a book. To put it on a shelf.

The reporter on top of her hotel in Baghdad, the rocket fire falling like stars to earth. Or incandescent earth rising in missile-shaped pieces through the Iraqi night.

What was it, ’91, ’92?

They called it the Gulf War.

On the TV black-hooded protesters threw a newspaper box into the window of a Starbucks.

The footage was on a loop. They smashed the window. They smashed it again.

Smash. Smash. Smash. They smashed the window.

They smashed it again.

What the TV did not show:

The convoy of twenty trucks rumbling through the streets, tarp-covered and flat green, headlights cutting weird and spooky shapes in the night. The eight hundred souls aboard, rocking and jostling, heads down, contemplating the bayonet, thinking this was the weirdest of missions, a convoy of twenty National Guard trucks rolling through an American city, American soldiers going armed into the American night, the loose edge of the tarp flapping in the running breeze.

The TV didn’t show Park in plainclothes humping two duffel bags down Sixth. Replacement tear gas canisters flown in from some sheriff’s office in eastern Washington rattling inside. Park’s straining arms, his sneakers, the sweat wetting his face and soaking through his softball league T-shirt. Ju shot somebody? Why did Ju shoot somebody? You were there. I was there. Did Ju shoot somebody? Did the Chief try to throw you off the truck? What in the heck happened?

He wasn’t interested in what happened. Or how. Only what was to happen. What was coming. He didn’t think about the past. He didn’t dwell.

He slowed at a knot of protesters gathered on a corner. They were blocking the street, unintentionally, or intentionally he thought as the faces turned toward him, the people clocking his clothes, the way he walked, the department-issue black duffels and his buzz cut. His disfigured face. A bulky blond man with a dried smear of blood across his forehead stopped Park with an arm to his chest.

“What you got there, my man?”

Park could feel then the loose emotion in the street, the anger, how it wanted to coalesce around him in his half-baked undercover getup and tear him apart.

The big guy looking at him skeptically and hands beginning to take the duffel bags from him when he stopped and said, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“No,” said Park.

“No, I do. On the TV maybe? You play ball?”

“No.”

“The weather or something?”

“No.”

“I’m sure of it,” the big guy said. He tilted his head and regarded Park. “Holy shit,” he said. “You’re that cop from Oklahoma City.”

“A fucking cop?!” said a guy in a black leather jacket. “Fuck that.”

“This guy saved thirty-five lives or something. Dragged kids out of there. I remember I saw him on the Today show or something.”

“Yeah? How the hell do you know that it’s him?”

“Check his face, shitbird.”

Park standing there, sweating while the small crowd of late-night vigilantes studied him. “You don’t end up with a face like that for nothing. Let the man through.”

“What do you mean let him through? He’s a cop.”

“Fuck yes, he’s a cop. The guy’s a goddamn hero. Let him through.”

The TV didn’t show Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe slumped in the sky bar of the Sheraton hotel, head buried in his arms.

“Martin, listen, how many of the African ministers are you in touch with?”

The two men — one brown, one black, one tall, one short — sitting at an abandoned table littered with plates and glasses and a folder with a pen atop that sat on the white linen in front of Charles’s arms and head.

“Martin, tell me, how many of the African ministers are you in touch with?”

Martin cursing under his breath. Charles suddenly sitting up.