Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (2 page)

John Henry
stood in the crowd inhaling them through every pore, perfectly at rest, perfectly at peace. My people. They smelled of onion and cigarette and sex, the human animal musk of sixty beautiful human bodies beneath their beautiful blue tarps and he raised his arms to the sky and breathed them deep. Around him they marched and they danced; they chanted and they sang. He felt their voices buzzing in his chest. People linking arms with strangers they had never met, hand in hand with people whose homes they had never seen, and he closed his eyes and felt the power of what they were doing coiling around him, some force inexorably gathering around them here at the edge of the millennium, one month from the end of the American century.

Look at him there, this forty-four-year-old man in a handwoven cowboy hat and chunky black Medicare glasses, his red beard long and wiry like some mountain monk's. This was a man with the days stitched into his skin. This was a man you could imagine in a dream of the Himalaya, high above the clouds where the granite falls away like glass and you turn a corner and there he is, spinning a prayer wheel. Not from the Himalaya, but from Detroit, Michigan. Holy man of the Rust Belt. Sacrament of iron and steel; blessed be these assembly lines; blessed be these tired hands. Look at his pierced ears and his crooked teeth. Look at his eyes shining behind those busted-up glasses, the frames more duct tape than plastic, but the repairs neatly done. Check him there among the densely packed bodies, feeling the heat and the human smell of them, a humid funk to spark the morning air, and know that if there was one place in the great, glorious dying world he wanted to be, this was it.

My people.

John Henry had at one time been a churchman, a storefront preacher, and, inevitably it now seemed, he had lost the church, but not the need, and here he was in the middle of it all, heart a broken clockspring in his chest, leading a chant.

Their voices together a roaring wave careening down the alleys, cascading off the cordon of metro buses parked around the convention center and up through air vents of the Sheraton, voices reaching for the delegates hiding in their rooms on the upper floors. John Henry could see some of them gathered in the lobby of the Sheraton, two floors above the street, shadowed forms pressed to the floor-to-ceiling windows, hands on either side of their faces like kids at the aquarium watching the sharks make their dumb circles in the tank.

He saw the South Korean delegation with matching flags on their matching shoulder bags paused on the low wide steps of the Sheraton, standing there with newspapers over their heads for the rain and polite, puzzled smiles as if someone had just told them a joke that didn't quite translate.

Here came a European-looking delegate in tasseled loafers. His hair was curly and white. His suit was gray and he was making notes in a leather-bound notebook, nodding and smiling as though he recognized something in the cityscape, like there was a shop that sold his favorite sweet, an indulgence he kept secret from his wife. An aide running after him with an opened umbrella.

“Say what?!” cried John Henry.

The American dream was dead. All those promises now just cold ashes between his people's chanting teeth, sitting heavy on their tongues.

Instead they said, “Sustainable agriculture.”

They said, “Global solidarity.”

They said, “How beautiful is a seed, a tender green stalk of life.”

They wore hooded sweatshirts peopled with homemade patches. They wore bandannas slashed outlaw-style across the mouth, a triangle from nose to chin, knotted at the neck. They ate bread and cabbage looted from dumpsters because it was a form of political protest and he loved each one of them enough to die for them, if it came to that, which it would not.

He stroked his beard and heard them say, “People are more important than profits.”

“People,” they said, “are more important than profits.”

“
People.
Are more important than profits.”

Their words had the quality of midnight prayer, deep from the depths of another sleepless night, as if the right words might call forth a future where they need march no more.

They said, “We're going to shut those corporate motherfuckers down.”

John Henry heard their voices and knew this was no ordinary protest, this congregation in the streets. No, this was the new American religion. This desire which leapt continents. The longing of the heart to embrace a stranger and be unashamed.

They said, “A global nonviolent revolution.”

They said, “How beautiful and brave when a people rise for what is right.”

Six a.m. and he watched them swarming the streets of his city in a gauzy mausoleum light, a people's army climbing from basement mattresses and garage apartments, the skyline of the city black-crowned and spooky at their back.

In their hooded sweatshirts and shin-high boots they looked like end-of-the-world penitents stretching into the dawn. Hip to the world's saddest sins.

They said, “The future belongs to us.”

And maybe it did, but they looked so young, so young and fragile, and when the time came would they have courage—would they have the discipline to make it so?

Look with him at his people. This man who once preached from a pulpit, John Henry, who was wound up and weary with too much love, too much joy, too much rage. How many shelter cots that barely registered the man's weight so light he was, the soft pillow of how many stone steps had cradled his head? John Henry, who had lost his church, look with him at his people. Look at his god made manifest in every form and shape of the broken world. Look with him at how they exit the church in an orderly fashion and tip their chins to the sky. Look at how they come from the darkness of their homes, backs stiff, stretching and tying the bandannas tight, checking one another's faces for an idea of what violence this day might bring. Look with him at these wet American faces, ordinary and beautiful, and tell me you don't feel more than a little bit afraid.

They wanted to tear down the borders, to make a leap into a kind of love that would be like living inside a new human skin, wanted to dream themselves into a life they did not yet know.

He heard them in the streets saying, “Another world is possible,” and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come.

Officer Timothy
Park knocked his riot stick against the stiff polycarbonate of his armored leg, producing a hefty sort of clack and whack, which, right this second, he found immensely satisfying as he sucked a black coffee spiked with fifteen sugars and watched the way they walked, heads high, arms swinging, and thought: Why in holy hell do these people look so happy?

Surely they knew they were going to lose?

Welders greeting plumbers with flung-open arms; scrawny old guys with crooked backs and the kind of crappy cardigan his dad used to wear while raking leaves, they were shaking hands with society ladies strung with pearls, and Park grimaced as they hugged and helloed, threw their arms around one another's necks, a grainy mist falling. Hugging? Why were they hugging? The last time Park had hugged someone had been at a funeral.

Park was standing beside the department's armored vehicle—affectionately known as the PeaceKeeper—with his sometime riding buddy, Julia. The PeaceKeeper was some civilian version of an armored Humvee—a great metal duck painted matte black with tiny rectangles for the driver's windows like the slits in hilltop bunkers and down below four fat tires which meant they could roll wherever they pleased. There were two swinging doors on the back, a hatch to pop your head from the top, and running boards on each side, and look at Ju there kind of lazing around like it was a cover shoot on some tropical isle, one hand resting idly on the butt of her department-issue pepper spray, the other resting against the side of the vehicle where the letters were painted huge and white:

Call her Miss July, even though it was, in fact, November and a probable riot situation. But Park didn't mind the riot gear, didn't mind watching Ju's body absorb the rough vibration of the idling truck. Call her Miss November Riots if you wanted—she was as lovely as a parade rifle that the kids spin and twirl—and watching her was his reward for the frustration of having to police a protest march. Protecting an anarchist parade, that was the kind of world we had come to, but Ju was beautiful and tough and what was the word? Willowy? Park didn't mind the show at all. She was like a video game knockout is what she was and ever since he'd moved to Seattle and joined the SPD he'd been trying to get her out for a drink. The guys in the precinct all laughed—everyone wanted to sleep with Ju; that Mayan, almost Asian look she had going with her bronze skin and dark almond-shaped eyes, that razor-sharp tongue that could cut you a new one in
two
languages, the long hair tucked high in a ponytail the color of coal-black tar. The thing Park liked was her eyes. He thought she had brown eyes so bright they could have been used as lights in some kind of emergency operating situation. If the need arose.

When Park told his buddy Baker about his crush, Baker looked at him crosswise. “That one?” he said. “She looks at you and you feel like a bug waiting for the shoe, but, you know, like, pleased about the situation.”

“Yeah, I know,” Park said, “but…”

“Like happy you're gonna get squashed,” Baker said, laughing and walking to the vending machine. “Like you think it's going to feel
so good
to get stomped.”

Park watched a group of young people taking over the intersection in front of him. They were a part of the crowd, and yet separate from it in a way he couldn't define. One minute it seemed an undifferentiated mass, and then these young people materialized out of the chaos of bodies.

To his eye they were wearing stained and greasy jeans like some kind of junkie army risen from their mothers' pullout couches, but there was an urgency to their movements, shuffling quickly like they were loonies five minutes escaped from the Harborview nuthouse on Ninth, and he sipped his coffee and laughed. There was a calm camaraderie, too, a sort of ease he recognized. As though they were an elite military unit—saying little, communicating instead out of seasoned memory, the easy gait of shared purpose.

He set his coffee on the 'Keeper and watched in total stunned astonishment as they sat down in a circle and then began locking themselves together with chains and PVC pipe.

Maybe as an officer of the law he should be doing something about that?

He turned to Julia and nodded toward the kids.

“I mean what's going on here, Ju. Are they protesting the world?”

Julia—Ju—she looked at him in that way she had of looking at him. As if a thousand miles stood between her body and yours. Or so she wished. Aristocratic, was that the word?

“Are they protesting the world?” she said flatly. “That's what you want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“Which one, Park?”

“Which one what?”

“Which world,
pendejo?
Yours or theirs?”

He turned away. The PeaceKeeper was parked in the zebra lines of the south crosswalk at Sixth and Union, its ass with the double doors pointing west toward a bank, its headlights and flat hood pointing toward a coffee shop, which was wisely, Park thought, closed and shuttered for the day. On the other side of the intersection, perpendicular to the wide side of the 'Keeper, beyond that mess of kids and hippies, a series of low wide steps fanned upward, creating a wedge-shaped plaza with the wooden benches at the bottom as the crust, which was funny, Park thought, because the plaza was not public, but private, narrowing and climbing as it approached the entrance, ending among potted ferns and the glass doors of the Sheraton lobby. Above the lobby, ivy-covered beige walls. Above that, gray glass rose a neck-craning thirty-five floors above the street. Pretty much your typical pretentious downtown bullcrap in the opinion of Park, who was feeling pretty irritated because he hadn't eaten anything besides a banana and a power shake this morning and whose stomach was already growling despite that being only about two hours ago, when he woke at four a.m. to do abdominal crunches in the dust of the bare floor beside his bed.

A young mother in a thousand-dollar mountaineering jacket was circulating behind the PeaceKeeper. She was on the south side of Sixth, behind their lines, and Park saw her over the top of the PeaceKeeper distributing coffee and cupcakes from a tray. She seemed suburban and pleasant. Park noticed she had parked a baby stroller in the cedar chips of a municipal tree for which he could cite her if he chose, which he did not currently feel like doing, but as he reminded himself, he could if he wanted, which was the point. He stepped around the front of the PeaceKeeper and was pleased when Julia stepped down and followed him.

The lady approached them where they stood beside the PeaceKeeper.

She offered them the tray of fresh coffees and the paper-wrapped cupcakes, nodding toward the protesters chanting behind Park and Ju.

Her voice pitched conspiratorially, she said, “Aren't they a pain? I mean, gosh, I thought the sixties were
over.
” She released a bright laugh as if a little surprised at her own naughtiness.

“All those banners and shouting,” the lady said. “What are they doing? It's almost Christmas!”

She was sort of whining now and Park, his back to the 'Keeper, asked her to please step away from the vehicle. The lady continued forward as if she hadn't heard, offering the tray to them as if she were in her living room entertaining guests.

Park put on his gloves and flexed his fingers until the fit was tight.

“I just don't know what they hope to
accomplish
sitting in the street like that,” she said.

“I asked you to step away from the vehicle,” Park said. And then he paused and added, “What's the matter with you?”

The woman smiled in a neighborly way as if these were just morning pleasantries, as if a smile were enough because, after all, they were on the same side—the cops and a friendly patriotic young mother offering coffees—they were on the same side here, right?

“I just don't know what they hope to accomplish,” she said again, a little less brightly.

And just like that, Park's baton was in the air and quivering just above the tray of coffees, pointing to her throat.

The smile plastered to the lady's face like a light someone forgot to turn off.

“Park,” Ju said.

Some of the other cops had stopped what they were doing and were watching good-naturedly even as they unwrapped the lady's cupcakes and gnawed at the edges.

Ju stepped in front of him. Normally he would never have allowed another officer to intercede in his arrest, his encounter. But Christ, it was Ju. She placed her hand on the baton. He lowered it gently to his side.

Ju looked him in the face. The acknowledgment passing there. There would be other, better moments. He nodded, said to the woman, “Thank you for the coffee.” Then, gesturing with his chin at the stroller, he said, “But why don't you get your kid out of here? You know?”

The woman's smile hadn't faltered. Her eyes had gone wide, face pink as a plastic doll, and still she went on smiling like a thousand-kilowatt idiot in her mountain-climbing jacket and her stroller parked next to a goddamn armored police vehicle.

She stumbled backward away from Ju, away from Park. The tray crashed to the ground. Cupcakes and coffee spilled across the concrete steps and a general groan of misfortune went up from the assembled troops.

Didn't matter. The lady was already halfway down the street, stroller smooth and gliding before her.

The cops returned to their conversations.

Park racked his baton. “Ju,” he said.

“What?”

“Don't ever freaking do that again.”

“Chief said we should take it easy, Park. Chief said they're nonviolent.”

“Nonviolent. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Surgical, that was the word. Her eyes looked bright enough to be surgeon's tools and Park sometimes liked to dream himself under the knife.

“Well, not for nothing, Julia,” he said, “but what does the Chief know? The Chief is as soft as butter on a picnic plate.”