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

Twenty feet away the sounds floating from the circle of cops. The boy a bloodied thing beneath them. And the Chief in the pile, trying to pull cops from the circle. Ju stepped down from the PeaceKeeper. Her legs were shaking. She was going to do what she should have done since this whole thing started. What she should have done all those years ago when rage ran loose in the streets of L.A. and the cops spurred it on. What she should have done and what she had always wanted to do. She was going to stop it.

She lifted her foot and placed it carefully. She began to walk among the breathing, steaming dead. Began to walk toward that sound, picking her way among the bodies, walking toward that ring of men who were grunting and growling like dogs on a deer. Because how do you stop a pack of men who have been wounded in the fight, who have scented blood on their adversary and are closing in for the kill? How do you stop a pack of dogs who have lost their minds in fear and rage? You remember that they are not dogs, but men. Frightened and angry human beings.

The TV didn’t show the hospitals or schools or prisons. The smell of ammonia and blood, that certain sterile smell King associated with death in modern corridors. The clinical light which dimmed, or the pain which ripped through her shoulder as King tried to lift her right hand and found it handcuffed to the gurney, the pain which went all the way inside her muscles and liver and kidney as if she had been sliced open from head to toe and then roughly cut into as many pieces as each organ would allow.

The TV didn’t show her being whisked through the twilight city by efficient forces beyond her control, handcuffed in an ambulance while the sirens cried and the cars pulled to the shoulder so they could pass, and King thinking, all she had done, and all she had become, and every rule and code she had broken, and everything she had believed and burned. How many of her friends, beaten, broken, in jail serving sentences for trying to break the spell? Everything she had tried to live and failed.

The ambulance and the EMT and King suddenly tearing at the tubes, using her free hand to rip at the IV lines in her arm, to tear at the tube that wound down her throat. The sudden rush of activity in the small space which was filled with his moving body and the warning tones which monitored her life and her head bucking and the lines whipping back and forth as she tore them free and the medic’s weight against her body, trying to hold her down, and King croaking into his face, “Let me fucking die.

“Please just let me die.”

The man who took her hand in his, not an effort of restraint, but holding her hand and looking into her face, and in his eyes she saw not the state, not institutionalized evil, not modern medicine and all its chemical compromises, not the death of human connection, not a servant of that state which built prisons for you at every turn, no, what she saw in his eyes, in his face, was nothing more than simple human concern, the sudden affection of one human being for another.

And she had broken everything she had ever built, smashed it to pieces, and even still she had watched Victor beaten, and watched a man bleed to death in the sand, and the light of a single candle glowing from inside their homes of salvaged wood and tin and she with her home of food and electricity and there was a warmth coming from his eyes as he held her hand and said, “You’re going to live.”

She felt the warmth and smoothness of his palm encircling hers as he said, “It’s going to hurt like hell, darling, but you’re going to live.”

That wasn’t what the TV showed. It didn’t show him holding her hand or the siren wailing or the machines beeping or the singing of the tires on the asphalt as they raced her to the hospital and it didn’t show all she knew or all she believed and it didn’t show how she might in some way live in this world the way it was.

This is what the TV showed:

An airplane.

A big white thing eating light. A white and blue Boeing 747 customized in the USA to ferry its precious cargo from shore to shore, flying high above dangerous seas. Recognizable to all who watched with its bald hump behind the nose and its glassy eyes and a white moveable stairway pushed to its side where was embossed the great official seal. The camera framed the oblong portal that was the door. And there standing on the threshold at the top of the stairs, pausing before descending to the tarmac and whatever waited beyond, the TV showed a man. There he was with his beautiful smile in the door of Air Force One, his white hair spectral like a halo. The President of the United States of America.

And this is what the TV showed: The President waving for all the world to see. The President standing at the door of an airplane, waving and grinning his reassuring grin. The President of the United States giving the world who watched a big thumbs-up.

Below him on the TV a scrolling banner read:

VIOLENT PROTESTERS CLASH WITH POLICE.

And then the TV cut to a commercial of a family eating hamburgers in their car.

They looked so happy.

The darkness came in slow and gentle and the wind as it rose carried the smell of bays and beacon lights, the sound of a mast rope snapping against metal, voices calling low across the water.

Evening fell on the estuaries and inlets and bays. It caught a great blue heron in perfect silhouette and it snuck among the twilight feathers of an egret standing brilliant white among the marshy reeds. Dusk settled on the ferries and the yachts and the small boats rocking on the waves, caressed the men and women sliding on the deck in their yellow slickers, their hands and faces bright dabs of light in the deepening dark.

Quietly, it fell in the surrounding country, on the garlic fields and the apple orchards and the fallow fields planted in winter rye where it was broken only occasionally by the light of a swinging lamp or the sweep of head beams running in a field. A small fire smoking in the cold.

The rush of night reached the city and seemed to settle for a moment atop the buildings, paused and built among the concrete helipads, the radio towers and their blinkered red lights, the colonies of parabolic antennas gathered there like a forest of white-dished ears listening to mystics muttering in the sky. It settled and then seemed to step from the flat-topped roof of the city like a woman stepping from a parapet into empty space and her body, plummeting like a falling needle, piercing the thin skin of ice and then disappearing, and the night now a river in flood cascading down the steel and glass facades of the office towers and insurance buildings, the multinational banks, its darkness curling and sliding, puddling in the street, beginning to gather around the huddled figures at Sixth and Pine. The prone body of Victor. His father, the Chief, who had fought his way through. And here in the lamplit black a man holding his son. Here in the neon night a woman who had done the right thing, who had stopped her fellow officers from beating an innocent man — she was being led away in cuffs. But Victor didn’t know about any of that. He only saw his father’s face here above him. Saw him through the haze of blood. And had he ever really looked at his father’s face? His father holding him, gently. Had his father ever really held him?

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Victor said.

And his father’s breathing was slow, his voice shaky as he said, “What’s that, Vic?”

“The sky.”

It was from Victor’s vantage point, there in the shelter of his father’s arms, a low cloudy canvas made of gray and the reflected orange of the city’s lights. But his father didn’t look. Instead he said, “Vic, you hang on. Okay?”