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

Bishop, the delegates. They need to be at the convention center. Where are the delegates? I got Secret Service breathing—

Bishop keyed his radio.

Mr. Mayor, the delegates are safe. I have instructed them to stay inside the hotel.

Sixth and Seneca. Over.

Please stay off the command.

Bishop, I need that street clear for the opening ceremonies. We need to get the delegates to the convention center. Do you copy?

Seattle Command, this is Three-five-one. 11–40 at Eighth and Seneca.

Bishop’s radio hung in front of his mouth like a forgotten forkful of supper. 11–40. That was a request for an ambulance. And then the Mayor’s voice was so clear a shiver went spilling dark and cold down the Chief’s spine.

Bishop.

Sir?

I don’t care what you do to get it done.

Sir?

Bishop, clear that fucking street.

Victor marched and moved with the crush, nodding his head to the syncopated beat. He checked out the hippie chicks in rain-soaked fairy wings, the punk chicks with pierced lips, and he laughed and did a sort of high-necked slouch strutting and bouncing down the street. His jeans were belted around his skinny waist and the extra loop of leather wagged loose from the buckle like a tongue.

He was high as shit.

For three years he had wandered the world and he remembered seeing burning cars on the streets of Managua; he remembered a man in India who would not eat; he remembered a line of women in their bowler hats and long skirts standing atop a hill on the high border between Bolivia and Peru, each with a stone in their hand silently waiting for the police. Protest. Globalization. Victor carried the two lines deep within him. He saw the secret and not-so-secret threads that connected his body in the here and now to worlds three continents away.

The dark sky above him like the dark sky above Shanghai where he had hardly seen the sun, people walking with surgical masks as if that would protect them from the fleets of particulate matter flying their skies like endless flocks of blackbirds bound for the rich nations of the West.

Victor pierced by clues and impressions gathered from the wind like pollen. It was like a radio dial between stations, the way they chanted and cried. The overlapping voices like whispers of other realms — come in, London, come in, New York, come in, Paris, France. Yes? Give China back her sun.

Doing the strut past Banana Republic, past Old Navy and the Gap. Beneath Niketown he stopped. The lights were on and people were in the stores doing their holiday shopping. People were drifting leisurely through the aisles, comparing prices. What were they doing behind that glass? Buying pants? He hammered against the window with a closed fist. A woman who was placing folded garments in a bag looked at him with a face like murder.

Whatever.

Trying to sell to a union man — that had been stupid.

He was smarter than that.

Since then Victor had made three more attempts. He tried a girl in a sundress who, when he offered, looked at him like he was diseased.

He tried an old man banging a goatskin drum. The old man closed his eyes, hands going full tilt, lost in the rhythm of his own making, and the way he smiled Victor figured he was already stoned.

He tried a kid in black boots and suspenders wearing a Rage Against the Machine shirt. The kid showed him a large X razored into the back of his hand. Victor had said, “Okay, but what about the weed,” and the kid just shook his head and told him to go fuck himself, he was straight-edge. Victor almost threw the weed at him, bounced it off his ugly fucking mug, but then he thought better of it and moved off, shaking his head, sliding the weed back into his zippered pack.

If only someone would buy a goddamn bag. At least an eighth .

People were looking at him funny, and he knew why. The pair of loose-tongued Nikes. Yeah, white Nikes with a red silhouette of a black man who could fly. Go ahead and look. He wanted that, he needed that, the edge, the distance, the fuck you. Wearing a pair of sweatshop shoes to a sweatshop protest — well, he wanted to say, what the fuck do you think you’re wearing? I wear my Nikes and they remind me I am small and the world is large and who are you to judge me for a thing like that? The world is large and I am small. The first thing he thought when he woke up. The thing he had thought at her grave just two days ago. Four years to the date. The last thing he thought every night when he went to bed in his tent with the waves bellowing and the cars chugging like ships passing through the port, every night since he had returned to Seattle three months ago, returned to his father’s house on the hill, busted the latch he had always busted, crawled in the basement window he had always crawled into (or out of), and retrieved the shoes in their box from the closet of his room.

So hell yeah, go ahead and look, people. They’re my lucky sneaks.

And then he saw them. The perfect boomer couple. Victor decided to go for the woman, she was wearing gold earrings in some Native design, attractive and kind of hip-looking in a funky hat. She was with her husband and a little girl who was stuffing carrots in her mouth.

Victor sidled up and went into a monologue, improvised on the spot, about marching for Native rights.

The woman’s eyes lit up. She began nodding enthusiastically, wisps of brown hair lifting in the breeze. “We’re marching with the Nature Conservancy,” she announced, something mildly apologetic in her voice. “Working on the turtles.”

“Freedom riders in ’64,” the husband said.

“Wow,” Victor said, “far-out.”

The note of pride in the guy’s voice contained something Victor suspected he was supposed to relate to, being a brown man with two thick braids, but he couldn’t guess what.

“Listen,” Victor said, trying to read their faces, feeling this might be his last and only shot at making some cash.

“You guys are some pretty cool heads,” he said. “Should I call you Mary Jane?”

Blank looks all around. He searched desperately for the perfect word.

“Reefer. Do you guys puff the reefer?”

“Wait a second,” the man said. “What are you trying to do?”

“Grass? Dope?”

“Are you trying to—?”

“Skunk? Dank? Pack a pipe of the kind bud?”

“Are you trying to sell me marijuana?” the man said.

Victor smiling huge, clapped once, glad they could finally connect. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s it, exactly.”

“Jesus Christ,” the man said.

The lady picked up her little girl and put her on her hip like a sack of groceries.

The husband was suddenly not so friendly. He was irate. Righteous-looking. “They put stoned Indians in jail is where they put you,” he said. “You know that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Victor said, “I read something about that once.” He back-stepped into the heat of the crowd, looking at the little girl still shoveling carrot sticks into her mouth like trees into a mill. He wanted to tell her: Don’t grow up. Nothing but assholes.

They were mad and happy and Victor, he felt suddenly tired. Flat-out exhausted. He climbed a bench and sat with his feet on the seat, letting the people flow around him, feeling low, the self-pity and bile building in his throat. Fucking protest march.

Was that what you called this shit anyway?

A protest march?

When you take to the street to chant the chants, to stomp your feet and rhyme the rhymes?

And all the energy you spend, all the outrage and disgust, is not for you, no, not some sort of personal draining of the pus-filled guilt, but an expression of your compassion for a sad desperate people in a country far away?