Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (17 page)

The bus door swung open with a pneumatic hiss and a cop pushed Charles through and up the steps and the door shut behind him. He stood at the front, looking down the rows. No cops on the bus. They were busy with more important things. Still sixty, maybe seventy protesters crammed into the seats. Their hands were cuffed behind them. Their faces bruised. Bloodied. Clothes torn. There was the strong smell of tear gas. The smell of urine. Charles counted at least fifteen other buses, stretching for blocks in the industrial lots behind the convention center, all filled with people's faces at the windows, and he didn't know, but he assumed that meant it was some sort of jail.

One hour until his meeting with President Clinton, and the American police had just thrown him in jail. And there he stood at the front of the locked bus and looked at seventy protesters who stared back at him like they wanted to rip him limb from limb.

A ripple of fear washed over him. And yet, what distinguished him, what made presidents and prime ministers call him friend, was his desire to talk to anybody, his ability to engage with any person's experience and opinion. The willingness to plunge off the cliff of who we think we are. That blind leap into another view.

He looked up and down the rows. He cleared his throat.

“My name is Charles Wickramsinghe and I am the Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning in Sri Lanka. I am a delegate and I am here for the meetings that you are trying so hard to shut down.”

A voice yelled from the back.

“That we did shut down!”

“Yes,” Charles said, “that you did shut down. And now I am here, with you, and well—” He paused. “And now I am here and I would like to hear your objections.”

There was a deep silence. He heard the wind throwing sand against the sides of the bus. And then they erupted in a great cheer, and suddenly they were up from their seats, grinning and cheering, having broken free of the plasti-cuffs and yet continuing to sit here while the hours wore on, and then they were helping him into a seat.

In groups of twos and threes they came to speak.

They told him about the Rainforest Alliance and the Ruckus Society, about the United Auto Workers and the Longshoremen.

They talked calmly, knowledgeably about the WTO, about Monsanto, about intellectual property rights, about pharmaceutical companies who wanted to stop the manufacturing of generic AIDS drugs in Africa which were saving millions of lives.

They talked about unfair American corn subsidies, explained how cheap American corn destroyed the Mexican agricultural economy, put Mexican farmers out of work, sent them from their farms in the hills to the capital, and when there wasn't work in the capital, pushed people farther north, across the border.

And they were not saying something he had just discovered, but there was something that mattered, some necessary feeling that needed to be spoken aloud, and maybe it was nothing more than finally here was someone that would understand, and if not understand, here was a man that would listen and consider.

They told him about the IMF, about the World Bank, about Third World debt. Did you know, they said, Nigeria pays more every year on the interest of their debt than they do on education and health? Did you know that because of debt repayments most Third World countries pay more to the First World countries than they receive?

Did you know Monsanto—a huge chemical company—was now marketing itself as an agricultural company, as a company that made food? Did you know they sell farmers seeds that make plants which don't produce new seeds? Did you know the farmers then have to buy new seeds from Monsanto every year? Telling him about the trade war between the European Union and the U.S. over hormone-treated beef. The Europeans didn't want to eat it; the U.S. wanted them to eat it and took them to court, to the WTO, which said, yes, the Europeans must import the hormone-treated beef. To stop it was an unfair trade restriction.

The seventy protesters in detention aboard this bus—the seventy John and Jane Does, intent still on practicing civil disobedience, and jamming up the jails—Charles looked at their faces as they talked. They were the faces of that part of the American character that believed not in American destiny, but in the promise of America itself, that same promise with which they had once welcomed dusty hardworking immigrants to their shores.

They were the last of the believers and Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, seventy years old and the Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning for Sri Lanka, who was born in a British colony where the frocked nuns laughed at his mother and smacked his hand with a ruler, Charles Wickramsinghe, who had owned a dog in his undergraduate days at the Royal College Colombo, a slat-ribbed stray he'd taken in and named on some lighthearted whim Alfred, Lord Tennyson—Charles Wickramsinghe was surprised to feel a widening respect. A respect with more than a pinch of regret. Because how wrong had he been? To think they knew nothing. To dismiss them. All these thoughtful young people striding toward the gates of capitalism—they had taken Gandhi's hunger strike and arrived at this. And as wrong as they were, as mixed up and incomplete their understanding of the economic issues, he had to admit it was protest and it was outrage and it was completely peaceful—the machetes and machine guns nowhere to be seen.

Two months ago Charles had done an interview with
Time
magazine. They were doing a feature on debt relief in the developing world. The Jubilee campaign for the Millennium. They had found him. Sri Lanka's little story. One man and his staff struggling to make gains in the world economy against the backdrop of a twenty-year civil war. Good copy. He had met the reporter in London, a luncheon at the London School of Economics. She wanted to know about the long run of five years. What did he hope to accomplish. What will entry into the WTO do for a small island nation like Sri Lanka. What do the developing countries want, she asked, as if he could speak for 150 of Earth's 190 nations. As if they wanted anything different than the rest of the world.

Refrigerators, he wanted to say. TVs and SUVs.

But Charles had a deep duty to believe in the system, and a reluctance to speak rudely to reporters. So he spoke of trade liberalization. Opening Sri Lanka's markets to the products and investment of the West. Of modernizing.

He could not speak of forcing Sri Lankan farmers to compete on the international market with multinational corporations who grew rice on 5,000-acre factory complexes in California and Texas. So instead he said, “What we need is to grow up. To develop. Our fishermen—can you believe it? They still fish from wooden boats. Those without a boat—and there are many, believe me—put a wooden post in the water and they fish standing
there
as if they were a
stork,
a sarong-wrapped bird fishing from a pole.”

The reporter chuckled.

“Roads, dams, bridges, great hydroelectric turbines turning in the night. Rice. Yes, we grow rice, but the rice farmers are worse even than the fishermen if that's possible. Completely
backward
. Farming as their fathers did. Farming as they have for decades, for
centuries
.

“Traditional, backward, undeveloped, not of the modern world. It does make for a lovely postcard,” he said, “I'll give you that. The terraced fields, the bright green of the paddy. A farmer in a colorful sarong, holding a hoe and looking toward the camera as if he were a museum piece, ankle-deep in mud. But do you know what we count as our greatest export?”

She shook her head.

“Servants. Our most successful product so far has been our daughters. We send our daughters to the Middle East where they work as maids.”

He said, “What kind of country are we? Who are we? We are postcards and maids. We are children who must grow up. Join the global economy. Modernize.”

Modernization. What did that even mean? Were there a people in the world who were not modern? Was Sri Lanka not modern? He liked what Gandhi himself had said when asked what he thought about Western civilization.

“I think it would be a good idea.”

And what of Gandhi? What would he say to the reporter? To the media? To these earnest souls gathered here in this makeshift jail? The man who broke British rule by refusing their cloth, their salt. We will make our own and be free, and so they did, and so they were. This man, the moral courage. The damned genius of it. Breaking an empire by refusing their goods. By spinning your own cloth. By marching to the sea to collect your own salt. And who could deny it—they had changed the hierarchy of the world. And yet, what was required now was not a leader like Gandhi, not a man of unbending principle and courage. No, what was needed was a duty-bound minister capable of compromise. Gandhi would not compromise. Going on a hunger strike to protest unfair trade restrictions. Can you imagine? Nowadays they would let him starve. No, what preceded success was not moral courage but moral compromise. That dubious promise of the riches that trade would bring—Charles believed it. He had to believe it. Development. Modernization. The Western way. It might be a path of suffering, but what other path was there?

Gandhi was the man that freed a nation, but it was Nehru—a man of compromise—that built it. It was Gandhi who freed a people; but it was Nehru—a politician—who gave them jobs. Which one should he choose? His doubts weighed against his duty. You cannot have prosperity without a nation of your own. And yet, what good is freedom if you are shackled to your hunger by chains as thick as any ever worn by slaves?

The door swung inward with a hiss and a cop climbed the steps and after looking up and down the aisles pointed to Charles in his black suit jacket and white shirt stained red and said, “You. You're the delegate?”

A dagger of dread in his chest.

The police officer consulted a piece of paper in his hand.

“You, are you Charles Something Something from Sri Lanka?”

Charles nodded politely. “Yes, I am the Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning for the Democratic Socialist—”

“Right,” said the officer. “Come with me.”

As a
younger happier man with long dark hair and an earnest smile, Bishop wore a beard, kept it neat and trim. His ma used to say, But Bill, you don't eat, you're so thin, don't those police feed you, and he rubbed his beard and grinned at his pops, who had his head buried in his plate who thought young Bill Jr. was wasting his life, but back then Bishop didn't know the feeling that when your son is wasting his life he is wasting
yours,
back then he didn't know that a son became a father, and he grinned at his own, loving the old man's grumbled incoherent unknowing. What a dinosaur!

But he was the dinosaur. The one out of touch with reality, out of contact with the world that lived around him.

Powerful explosions shook the windows of the buildings two blocks down, echoing and approaching through the narrow canyon of Sixth Avenue.

Bishop on the PeaceKeeper paused and turned to look.

Shredded groups unraveling through the streets. They weren't running but moving fast, bunching to talk and then scattering in loose clusters as another boom came rolling down the street behind them.

The sixties ended when Kent State. Ended when National Guardsmen opened fire on a college campus and killed four students. Do you think this was an accident or what? But whose fault? The men who pulled the trigger? Or the man who ordered them there with loaded rifles?

A no-parking sign lay in the street. Newspaper boxes stacked as a barricade in front of the Sheraton, crowds surging behind them, taunting the cops.

Bishop still astride the running board of the PeaceKeeper, directing the shots. Park was at his side taking out the targets. The rubber bullets flew. Another officer, a young Latina woman, stood on the other board, across the flat roof of the PeaceKeeper. The crowd was pressing against the vehicle and Bishop was thinking they would soon have to climb on top.

Maybe it was the bullet's fault. Poor bullet, just doing its job. Poor greased bullet punching holes in their pretty student bodies white as cream.

Another explosion. Bishop told them to aim high. A white-hot phosphorous flash that broke over their heads and rattled the windows in their metal frames.

And now here they came. A tired tattered band of protesters hurrying down the darkening street. They no longer had their signs. Another armored vehicle pushed them forward, out of the intersection, cops in wedge formation out front working their batons.

Bishop wanted to clean himself out, clear the bile, drop a nuclear bomb of astringent down his hatch, the rings of annihilation radiating from the hardened world-sick heart outward, flattening his doubt and disbelief like a concrete building gone to dust.

Because he had lost. Lost everything that mattered to him. Lost his wife, lost his city, lost his son. He had lost control of himself when it mattered most and now it was too late. Everything was lost.

It had come over the radio not ten minutes before. The Mayor had declared a civil emergency. The Governor had called in the National Guard.

And so Bishop would respond. It was his city. They were his people. And if he had to take away their rights to protect their rights that's exactly what he would do. Fuck the National Guard, and fuck the Mayor, too.

How do you win a battle against a force with endless reinforcements?

There was only one answer really.

He had declared the entire downtown core a protest-free zone. Then he told his officers to load their guns with rubber bullets and let them loose. He told them to use their batons and cuffs. They had run out of propelled tear gas for the moment, but he had whistled up the Sheriff's Office in Tacoma and told them to bring in more of everything, more gas, more pepper spray. They would clear these streets. He. Him, nobody else. Him, the Chief. He would fucking do that.

His radio saying

 

Bishop Bishop Bishop.

 

The chanting was dispersed, not chanting really, it had disintegrated into individual voices shouting, and Bishop listened to the layered scraps of noise. He watched the knots of people streaming past, groups of blue and green and red and yellow, their faces pinched and worried as they ducked their heads and ran-without-running.

A brightness above his head. He looked up and saw a tendril of smoke creeping around the corner of a building, high, eight, nine floors up. The sound seemed to begin there. There was another white flash and then that great concussive boom which banged glass all down the street.

He listened to the noise because it was a strange sound and in the back of his brain it signaled something, but what? The violent explosive booms like the rumble of separate lightning shots that came bouncing off the buildings. It was a tumbleweed of jagged sound caroming off the steel and glass, and it sounded the way a city being bombed sounded in his imagination. The way the noise came turning over itself, separate explosions linked in an overlapping chain, the weird echoing roar of dogs barking in a tunnel.

Another explosion which set the windows of the building directly beside the PeaceKeeper clattering and he fought the instinct to just open the hatch of the 'Keeper and drop right in.

Truthfully, Bishop hadn't been right in years. Your son disappears as though dead and you are supposed to be all right? He felt like he hadn't been able to breathe, hadn't taken a single full breath, since the day Victor disappeared.

Instead of whatever one does in the course of a life, Bishop wandered the supermarket in a daze, lingering over the bright boxes, amazed and confused. He spent hours in the vegetable aisle, the soft mist gathering on his brass buttons, wetting the arms of his uniform as he examined the leafy greens, turned bok choy in his hands grown suddenly old.

Shivering in the freezer aisle talking to the carcasses of headless frozen birds.

When Victor left it broke something off inside him and sent it into the world. His boy in the world and Bishop's heart like a shadow following him around all his days.

All his son's strange unknowable days.

In the supermarket wondering how was it that his hands knew how to grieve and he did not.

In the supermarket Bishop stared at the bananas from Peru. He plucked one from the bunch, peeled and ate it, the light mush trapped between his teeth and tongue.

Something went missing, the weight that tied him to the ground. The world tilted and his son disappeared and he walked on floors that leaned and pitched, rooms turned upside down.

Grief and its decaying orbit. He felt like a rocket gathering speed, inescapably caught in gravity, spiraling closer and closer to home, to return and death. The cool comfort of Earth's dark seas.

In the market, he gathered apples in his arms. Rubbed dirty potatoes with a thumb. Hefted the weight of a cantaloupe in his palm. The sticker said Product of Mexico. He nestled the fruit to his chest and did a slow shuffling dance to the gods of global produce there in the fluorescent light. He turned the melon to his ear and listened for his son's voice.

Product of Mexico.

The sudden unfamiliarity of familiar things. Was that what he had heard? The secret language of the ordinary world? Was that what had called him?

At home Bishop opened the refrigerator and stared. Again that strange frozen light. He opened and stared and felt as if he were somehow living in that light. His life squeezed and processed in a plastic tub. Here it was, another sweet advertisement for the good life, and goddamn it, it was the good life. He ate a piece of cold chicken. He spooned pasta salad into his mouth. He drank a diet soda from the can and cursed his ungrateful son.

He ignited a handheld tear gas canister and threw it overhand into a knot of people around the PeaceKeeper.

The canister came winging back.

He ducked and pointed. Park turned and fired into the crowd.