Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (12 page)

Civilization. That faraway thing at the center of it all. That bright candle guttering in the boundless dark.

The young man in sandals and socks—Charley said to him and to the gathered crowd, “I'm not a rich man. I don't love money, I love my people and I want to change the system just as much as you do. But you have to change it from the inside. Will you let me do that? Will you let me through, so that I can go to work?”

The young man considered, while Charles waited with a small humble smile, his hands resting palms together. He was as surprised as anyone when the young man put down his camera and wrapped him in a clinching heartfelt hug.

They swayed in the rain.

And then the air exploded.

A series of deafening reports which blew apart the day. He instinctively hunched and covered his head. Flash memories of 1983. City buses flying to pieces. Air filled with ball bearings and nails. But this wasn't Colombo and this wasn't 1983 and this wasn't a civil war and this wasn't suicide bombs.

Was it?

He risked a glance at the police. They were pointing strange guns at the sky. He turned back to the crowd and saw blossoms of smoke sprouting from the ground. People with bandannas to their mouths, coat sleeves pressed to their faces, eyes and nose sunk into the crook of their elbows.

This was tear gas. It took more than a moment for him to realize it. He looked to the cops. Looked to the crowd. Looked back to the cops, the glass entrance of the convention center beckoning behind them, staff, janitors, and such, watching.

Blasts punctured the air. The police had not calculated the wind before they fired. And now it was gusting strongly from the west, was blowing the gas straight back into their ranks. Charles saw it not rising above the crowd, but moving low and fast, close to the ground, a roiling fog of gray smoke sailing through the crowd and past him, as if being sucked into the convention center by a vacuum, and still they were firing. Explosions tore at the air. Canisters crashed into the ground. He felt the poison drift collecting in his clothes. Tasted the grit of it on his teeth, his tongue. Away from the convention center. And even now he wanted to resist, wanted to stay.

Even now he thought he could still get in. He could still make the meetings.

His ears ringing, he bent and ran toward the line of cops. One of the skyward guns descended level with his chest.

“I Am. A. Delegate!”

Shouting in the roaring air like shouting in a train tunnel with the train passing over your face.

“I Don't. Give. A Fuck.”

Charles pointing at the center, point, point, pointing, and waving his badge.

“I. Need. To Go. In. There.”

Like trying to talk inside an airplane engine.

“You Are. Not. Going. In. There.”

“I. Have. Meetings.”

Like popping the door of a plane at thirty thousand feet and trying to conduct a conversation on the wing.

“Return. To. Your. Hotel.”

And now the man's gun was at his side, and his baton was in his hand. He jabbed Charles in the gut, a beautiful shot to the solar plexus, perfectly aligned with button and tie.

Charles went to his knees. Sucking air and still trying to talk his way in.

“I. Have. Very. Important. Business.”

And it seemed the cop, too, had very important business, because the baton which had poked him was now rising to strike him down. The convention center a mere twenty feet away, and yet impossible, closed to him and his desires. He turned from the glass then, from the steps and the police, his heart already plunging in his chest, his eyes watering, and he fell. Landed hard on cold pavement. Felt the shock through his knees. The rawness of his palms.

Someone took him by the elbow and helped him to his feet.

It was the young man in socks and sandals. The young man who seemed to think he was out here to save the Third World. He had Charles's hand and was leading him away from the police. First they walked. And then they ran.

Arm in arm. Hand in hand over the slippery streets.

And already, even as he ran, jacket flapping, hair wild, already he was thinking, Canceled? God help me, did this boy say my meetings are
canceled?

Victor breathed
and counted his breaths and focused on the rise and fall of his chest. The low pounding of the chant was like a blood beat in his temple. The gas an opaque cloud blanketing the intersection, radiating weird light. His heart was racing, each breath bursting from his mouth like a small explosion, the hot shame like a stone held on his tongue because he was afraid. Fear had taken over his being and he knew if he could chant he wouldn't be so shit-scared, but he just couldn't do it.

Victor had been on the road for three years, had circled the globe, east to west, and north to south. El D.F., Tegucigalpa, San Salvador. Shanghai and Hong Kong. Bangkok and Delhi. He trusted small signs, the ordinary language of everyday things. He grew a beard and lost weight. His skin took on odd fragrances. He ran out of money. He found a way back home where he could earn in dollars: he worked potatoes; he worked apples, stretching as tall atop an apple ladder as his skinny frame would allow. He tried waiting tables and only lasted a week. Couldn't take it. He liked to be outside where he could hear the birds and the banging trucks, watch the planes trailing overhead, sleep under a tree during his lunch break if he wanted, the crunch of leaves beneath his head reminding him that he was still just an animal on a planet spinning through space. He liked to remember that. It was important to remember that. One fall he worked the wheat harvest, mucking and cleaning and moving north. Soon as he had enough money, he was off again.

He traveled because he knew he did not belong. The home where he had been born was not his home. Something was missing. From him or from his home, he didn't know, and so he wandered. He roamed and tramped and traveled, looking for what he didn't know. Tierra del Fuego to the Atacama and the Andes. From the Ganga to the high Himalaya. Victor remembered a meal of lentils and rice in Kathmandu overlooking a narrow lane where women gathered to sell nuts and buffalo milk. That was the day he saw the body burning on a pyre of six-foot logs, the white-hot flames licking at the arms and legs and head, the flakes of ash drifting like bits of leaf over the river.

He had wanted a knowledge born not from any school or teacher, but from his own eyes and ears. From his own brown body alone in the world. An experience and knowledge woven from every person he ever talked to, every bus station and hostel, every meal he had ever eaten squatting against a mud-stained wall, the hundreds of faces of the people he had met, the creased smiles, the yellow teeth, the bloodshot eyes. Where did he belong? To whom did he belong? He didn't know. He liked to walk. Sometimes he just wandered a city, trying to enjoy the feeling of being lost, the feeling as if he were a satellite thrown open to every channel.

The way a woman ate from a ceramic bowl sitting along the seawall in Havana. The way her hands moved as she argued with a friend.

Burning cars blocking the winding road which crossed the border between Peru and Bolivia—a protest against rising gas prices—and Victor opened his pack and sat and shared his crackers and talked with the young men, with the women in their bowler hats, and did they let him through because of his brown skin or because of his Spanish, bad as it was? Or did they just appreciate the talk, the crackers, the companionship and interest and salt.

Conversations wandering the back streets of cities so large he could have walked forever and never reached the end of every lane, seen the end of every shop.

A old man in pajama pants pushing his bicycle through the back lanes of Old Shanghai. Across the river, a young man working a backhoe in a new office park, sitting high and formal in the cab wearing a blue suit and tie.

People's fucking faces. He watched and lived and he felt a million distinct and separate truths beginning to accumulate within his chest like a murmuring crowd. It was an ache inside a need, a white-hot expansion of memory and intuition.

A blind girl begging change in Delhi, flies around the empty sockets of bunched flesh.

Further north, in a tiny mountain town, playing chess and drinking tea, while young guys stood around in sunglasses, watching the game beneath a movie poster, sharing a cigarette among them, lighting the next from the coal of the last.

In Chile, Victor for hours on a cliff, hours watching the endless succession of waves crashing against a continent's edge. Hours spent watching and waiting for what? It was so easy to forget what he had come for. And just a kid without a system, without a political framework, the more he saw, the less he understood. A million singular truths accreting inside him. A million strands. A needle moving so fast he couldn't see it, could only feel it, inking a new face, a new line, a new story. Just woke in the morning with a new tattoo he could never see, could never share. Just felt it deposited like crushed color beneath the skin.

Victor searched the crowd. Americans by the thousands, angry Americans in the rain, their faces round and wet. And he heard them chanting and he wanted to believe it was true. Yes, he envied them their belief and he wanted to feel it, whatever energy was passing back and forth between the seated chanting thousands.

But he couldn't.

He looked at John Henry next to him, searching for the source of his courage, but all he saw was his mouth working above those crooked teeth, his glasses misting and the way he held his head, the way he chanted as if those words held all his fear, all the lonely rain-soaked hope that brought him here to this spot, to this morning, to this 40-by-40 stretch of wet asphalt, chanting in the rain.

Victor knew suddenly that he couldn't do this. Knew it as deep as any knowing goes. And he felt like a coward, but he knew he couldn't do this. His heart was hammering triple-time and he knew. He had to get out.

The wind struggled and whipped. He saw shoes and jeans. Knees and legs and feet moving in a jerking fashion as if puppets on a smoky stage. Caught on a sudden updraft, the smoke rose and corkscrewed between the buildings and he saw the Doctor in his overalls and top hat out in the intersection motioning for people to sit, sit, sit as the canisters dropped and smoked. He was wearing a hand-lettered sign taped to his chest.

A nail of fear driven into his heart as he watched the cops identify the Doctor. They circled him like wolves and then knocked him on his ass. Victor winced as he watched one cop work a baton against the Doctor's upper body. The cop stood over the Doctor's fallen body, working that baton in long strokes from the shoulder like the Doctor's spine contained some stubborn rock he was trying to remove by pickax.

The Doctor in his overalls and flip-flops, still somehow narrating his beating from the ground.

“Police brutality. You are practicing police brutality.”

One cop hitting him with the baton. Another cop knelt beside him on the pavement, punching him in the throat.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
A sound like a fish flopping in a boat that Victor would never forget, hard blows to shut him up, to close his windpipe, and still he went on.

“You do not need to use force. I am a peaceful protester, I am willing to be arrested.”

The cops answered succinctly with their batons and fists.

Thump.

“You don't need to put your knee on my neck. I am not resisting arrest.”

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Victor wanted to have the strength to watch, to witness the brutality and be strong enough to tell the world about it. He wanted to witness it and by witnessing make it real, unable to be forgotten; he wanted this horror seared into every pale pink fiber of his skull. But he was afraid. The batons rising and falling like pistons in an engine Victor didn't want to know about. Victor's arms were two pieces of wood shivering in the pipes. He counted; he breathed; but he didn't chant.

He watched as the Doctor lurched to his feet. Victor knew what was coming, but he wouldn't look away. He would witness this. The Doctor was turned around, disoriented for a moment, and in the mayhem he stumbled backward into a cop. The cop came low and fast with his baton. A sharp clip to the shin that crumpled the Doctor's leg and sent him tumbling to the pavement, where the cop was already on him, tearing off the sign

and throwing it into the wind. The cop hit him across the face and the Doctor's hands flew to his teeth, still narrating, mumbling through the blood. “Police brutality. You are practicing police brutality.”

Oh god, Victor was so scared.

In that other life, things made more sense. He ran out of money, he went home. He worked trucks in New Orleans. Graveyard shifts unloading sofa beds and plasma TVs. He saw a quarter on the oil-stained floor and he picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he was gone again, looking for something he couldn't name, but which he felt inside like a saw blade spinning in the hollow space beneath his ribs.

“Lawyer,” the Doctor slurred through his broken bloody mouth. “I want a lawyer, you fuckers.”

The Doctor tried to cover up as the furious cop stood above him, thrashing him with the baton like he wanted to beat him back to a single-celled state.

The Doctor had stopped moving. His body lay motionless in the street not twenty feet from where Victor sat counting his breaths and sweating. One cop sat on the Doctor's neck; the other bound his wrists in plastic.

Lying there at night in his tent, thinking of all he had seen and known and not understood. Waking in the morning and shivering on the pier, feeling a weird black hole, a sort of hole inside a confusion inside a need, the immensity of the world, the unbelievable hugeness of it all, reduced to a scrap of newspaper a woman uses to wipe her mouth after a meal.

Sat there on the pier wrapped in his sleeping bag, shivering and watching the ships move from port to sea, carrying the things that fill a life: five-dollar umbrellas and paper towels and plastic chairs. Sitting there thinking of all he had seen, remembering the faces of all the people he had met, sat there feeling an ache inside a love inside a need, thinking of all the voices and complaints and smiles, all the stupid jokes and dreams. What did it all add up to? What did it mean?

Two cops dragged the Doctor away by his pretty blond hair. And here came other cops, swinging those fire extinguishers back and forth, letting the pepper spray soak the seated heads. Moving closer to where he and John Henry sat. Two minutes, Victor thought, and here he was, his arms locked in PVC pipe, totally immobile on the cold damp pavement, too scared to call it off, too scared to chant, asking himself what the hell he was doing even while he was doing it while the cops shuffled in a line, tap-tap-tapping their billy clubs.

Two minutes and here they'll be, he thought, the fear shaking his chest like thunder rattling windowpanes. Whether I believe or doubt or chant or die.

He had never felt so alone in his life.