Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (13 page)

King wading
through the crowd—making her way toward where Victor and John Henry sat in lockdown—watched four cops go after a kid wrapped in an American flag. The kid—whoever he was—was out front of the cop lines, right in their faces, flashing them the peace sign. The cops came at him hard and knocked him to the ground and he was lost in the black underwater shine of their riot gear.

The scene in front of the Sheraton was chaos. Not what she had expected. Not what any of them had wanted. The line of cops was in tatters and she saw the hooded faceplated forms cutting wildly through the crowd with their riot sticks. The mass surged and collapsed. She watched as two cops kicked a young woman with feathers braided into her hair. An Asian girl with glasses received a blow to the knee. She felt sick. No one was fighting the cops. There they sat, supplicant and chanting, a huddled mass at the center of it all in lockdown, while the tear gas swirled around them like incense around the shaved head of a monk. And yes, they were practicing nonviolence, but how could you be nonviolent in the face of this? The rules had changed and the cops appeared to have gone temporarily insane. Or were these their orders? That was even worse to imagine. That the Mayor, or the Governor, or Clinton himself—whoever was in charge of this mess—had willingly let loose the dogs of war. Sent them armed and furious into a wall of peaceful protest.

She saw the kid trying to crawl out from between their legs. She watched as a baton came high from the circle of bodies and she thought of a small room in southern Mexico. Remote mountains where rebels and outlaws and a people's army went to hide. Chiapas. Her room, bigger than a cell, but perhaps the air of a quiet nun's corners. A place to cook. A place to read in the sun. A place to sleep in the cool nights. A place not without a sort of quiet hideout contentment. The outward reaches of the barrio where the neighborhood gave way to scrubland. Out there past the last of the buzzing sodium streetlamps, there was a quiet air of desolation, some twilight feeling of blue abandonment that seemed to cut her to the core.

Goddamn it, why had she not just stayed with John? Stayed in their off-the-grid paradise, their nation of two? Why had she gone to Mexico in a fit of anger?

Yes. She had been scared to go. Scared and yet angry enough with John Henry to sneak across the border under the radar in the guise of a tourist with her sunscreen and camera and her zip-off pants, safely using an old friend's driver's license for ID. Crossing from California into the loud clamorous wrack of Tijuana. Scared and angry enough to not fully consider just how she would get back home when and if the time came. It was never meant to be forever—nothing was—maybe a year or two, but then you get down there and how do you get back. Because going back, going north, it turned out, was nothing like being a fucking tourist. It was about as far away from being a tourist as you could get.

The cops charged and down the kid went again. King heard the scrape of riot boots on concrete and she looked at John Henry and Victor in lockdown. Two faces, two bodies in a circle of eight people sitting cross-legged, facing out into the intersection. Beneath them were pieces of cardboard, torn blankets, anything to protect their sitting butts from the coldness of the pavement. Their arms—their arms were the thing—held aloft and rigid, at right angles to their bodies. Their arms encased in white PVC piping. And helpers wiping their mouths, and helpers holding the pipes in the air. An unbroken circle. Yes, a circle of people sitting in an intersection locked together at the arms with PVC pipes and the cops rampaging on the other side of the crowd. How long before they made it to Victor and John Henry? And look at them. Totally vulnerable. Those cops would massacre them when they finally got here.

They had calls in to every newspaper and TV station and media outlet in the metro area, some national, too. Some of the reporters hung up. Some of the reporters apologized, saying it was not a story. And some of the reporters came down with their cameras and stood in front of protesters locked to each other with chains, and asked, “How do you feel?” “What brings you down here?” “Is this a revolution?”

Despite everything the media might say, and despite what her own wary weary heart might counsel, King knew that what they were doing was important and right. And she believed that if Americans saw what pain their way of life caused in the world they would respond. Americans were a good-hearted people.

So they sat in the street and they chanted and they made witness with their bodies.

Woman's body for bearing babies. Man's body for bearing loads.

American bodies no longer on the line. No longer employed in the so-called manufacturing sector. American bodies too expensive for work so they find cheaper bodies to feed the machine.

They were arranging their bodies in circles and lines. They were linking arms. They were enduring overwhelming violence. They were making message with their bodies.

Wasn't it just a new kind of slavery? Was a cheap pair of socks really worth doing that to a child? People
had to
see that. The basic wrongness. They knew. But nobody was talking about it because it was hidden. They would have you believe it was the only way the world could be. And the WTO. The organization which makes it all legal and turns it to law? How legitimate could the WTO be if they are forced to beat innocent citizens in the street to protect their own meetings?

She watched and she wanted to believe that the cops would stop. Let it be enough.

She wanted to believe that the media—the reporters with their shaky mikes and gas masks—would pay attention and send this message to the world.

She wanted to believe the police wouldn't kill any one of the gentle strong people she had brought here.

But she did not.

Not for one beautiful fucking second.

Because how deep the darkness of the heart which longs for control.

Suddenly the kid was on his feet again. Somehow scrambling out from the circle of cops and stumbling away. He had lost his shirt and his American flag. King watched as he stood in the middle of the street, a skinny kid with a concave chest who seemed intent on personal destruction, and he had his fists up, though not to punch, pumping his fist and pumping his fist and pumping his fist, standing in the middle of the street pumping his balled fist, while the cops came charging after him with their batons and pepper spray.

Pumping his fist as if he had won something.

The Chief
did not look good. His sandy hair lying damp on his forehead and his glasses askew and his face gone pale beneath the tan. They were chanting and they were singing and they were sitting linked arm in arm and they were not clearing the street. So he grabbed one of the dispensers and let the pepper spray go streaming over their seated dripping bodies. He released the spray to drift down in a fine webby mist.

He pushed his way to the front where two of his men were trying to extricate a boy in an army jacket from the chain-link of arms.

He reached down between his men and removed the boy's bandanna in one easy motion. He hit him in the face with the pepper spray. His head was shaved. He wore loops of leather and beads around his neck. A purple crystal pendant on a silver chain.

The boy gagged and fell forward, still trying to chant. Bishop blasted him again.

“Sorry, kid,” he said.

People packed between the buildings; people spilling from the sidewalks and up into the potted ferns and cedar chips. People dangling from lampposts and dancing in the crosswalks. He shot the spray hard into their faces, two spots of rough red spreading outward from his bright blue eyes, his thin-lipped mouth. This was the face of a man on the edge of cardiac arrest.

Screaming now. The boy was arm in arm with two girls on either side and now they were screaming and screaming and screaming and he couldn't believe how angry it made him as these kids sat unmoved in the mayhem and continued to chant.

Bishop laid his baton across the soft meat of the boy's back. Bishop himself had said in the MACC, he had said it again in the street, “Don't get out of control.”

He wasn't out of control.

But he wanted very badly for this crowd to disperse. He wanted to clear a way through. He wanted to protect his city. He wanted the Mayor to quit shouting at him over the radio. He wanted his goddamn city back.

Bishop. KRRRCHHH

Anarchists seen headed north on Seneca.

KRRRCCCCCHH

Flammable liquids. Over

…soft platoon! Who can go hats and bats?

It seemed like everybody was talking on the same channel, and he felt a despondent anger, a helpless sort of rage as he keyed the radio and pressed it to his mouth.

Bishop here. Did not copy. Please repeat.

Chief! Chief!…KRRRCHHH

Fourth and KRRCCCHH

BishKRRCHH.

Bishop here. Did not copy. Please repeat.

Urine. Over.

Paper bags of crap. Over.

He stepped to the side. Kicked one of the girls in the leg, then stepped back and kicked the other one in her ribs. Kicked at their linked arms trying to break them apart.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

People stumbling from the intersection, choking, heading north or east, away from the gas.

He had ordered his troops to fire on American citizens and they had fired and now he could not take it back no matter how much he might have wished it to be so.

BishopKRRRCHHH

Need assistance at Fifth and Pike.

Fifth and Union. Repeat please.

Volley after volley of gas until the intersection was so choked with gas he couldn't see the hotel on the other side. Couldn't see the streets behind him. They waded through the crowd, breaking apart bodies as if breaking ice in an icebound harbor. He wedged his heel between their arms and tried some sort of leverage. He smacked each girl with the back of his open hand.

They were screaming and crying and chanting.

They didn't understand—there were pressures, circumstances beyond his control.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm so so sorry.”

He hit the boy with the baton, a half-swing with power, aimed for the fragile bend of his elbow.

He popped him in the pressure point of the throat. Knocked him behind the ear which was a mistake because then the blood started to flow.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm so very sorry.”

Finally the kid fell away from the two girls on either side and his officers moved in and began to pull their bodies apart. The back of the kid's head was split open and his neck was smeared with blood. Bishop watched as his officers tried to carry the boy's body, neither of them wanting to get near the mess that was his face.

One officer was headed west with his arm; the other had one leg gripped by the foot and was moving east. The Chief watched in dumbfounded dismay. He thought for a moment he was going to be sick in his hat, but then the moment passed, and he turned and moved on to the next seated pair.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm so sorry.”

King roamed
the edges. She knelt among the fallen, feeling overwhelmed and lost. She lifted a face and poured Maalox and water into its upturned eyes and she dragged the wounded from the intersection and the entire time she was fighting the voice that wanted to tell her: This is your fault.

They talked until they agreed, it was that simple. They made decisions together, or not at all. Consensus was the political heart of what they did and who they were. It was the process by which they channeled their anger, used their sorrow and outrage, their deep sense of separateness, toward a higher purpose. And she loved it.

She loved the discipline, the community, the sense that they themselves had created an independent republic of eight hearts and minds governed by the purest expression of democracy that could be had. Conversations that went around and around until every point had been discussed and dissected and deconstructed. Years ago, if you had described this process to her she would have laughed. How did anything ever get done? It sounded like you'd still be debating, deeply mired in your democratic process, when the cops came to kick in your teeth. But now, in the thick of things, it was sometimes magical, as if joined by a common devotion to the process, they shared the same consciousness, eight solitary souls holding steady like one orange-tipped compass needle quivering at dead north.

So why did she let it happen? Why did she
make
it happen?

“I'll do it,” Victor had said. “Lockdown. I'll be the one.”

And she had swallowed hard, knowing it was wrong, but knowing, too, that the cops were coming and they needed to get people into lockdown if they were going to keep this intersection. So she ignored the lump in her throat and nodded, knowing it might be the move that saved them, that saved this intersection, but knowing in her heart it might also be the beginning of the unraveling of all they had built, all they believed and had fought for.

Even as she tried to remember the swirl of words from
The Black Cross Medical Field Guide,
the dark voice told her: Did you see that boy? That is your fault. All yours. The dark current that wanted to suck her under and never let go even as she touched and poured. Your fault.

A bottle with a squirt cap is ideal for the eye flush.

A man in a tan suit vomiting into his hands and when King reached him with the bottle he was blind and had no idea where to look.

“Here, I'm here,” she said.

Before Mexico, she had told John Henry she wanted hard truths. There was something in the armed conflict of the Third World that drew her. A certain starkness, the solid reality of black-and-white lines that was unavailable to her in America.

She said this to John Henry, John Henry the alchemist, who had taught her how to transform her sadness and confusion into a strength as dependable as steel.

John Henry who said you must use your body. You must use your hands and spirit and mind. John Henry who taught her if you didn't do the work, then you wouldn't survive the work. You'd be left, in the end, with nothing but your own obsessed turbulence.

A solution of half Maalox (plain or mint) and half water works best to clear the eyes.

An older black man who had gone down to one knee and was holding his head to the sky.

King saying, “Don't touch your face,” and reaching for her water bottle.

John Henry and King had lived in a box on top of a hill. The box was a recycled shipping container once corresponding to the ISO regulation size of 53 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 20 feet high. Together they designed windows and a rooftop garden, working by lamplight through the long summer evenings; later she cut the steel with an acetylene welding torch. From the top of the hill they could see the purple-black waters of the Sound. The dorsal fins of dolphins, orcas, breaking the surface. On a clear day they could see as far as the snow-covered slopes of Rainier. The perfect cinder cone volcano dormant over the city and valleys below.

A bandanna soaked in apple cider vinegar and tightly tied around the nose and mouth is far better than nothing, but still a last resort.

A middle-aged woman in a red rain slicker pawing at her face. King let the water run down her face like milk and held her while she sobbed.

King didn't know where she was most needed, where she could best help, and she looked at cops and the spiraling gas and felt a sort of frustration rising in her throat. She couldn't get to everybody. And she couldn't stop the cops from firing. She fought the urge to just turn and run. There were bodies lying everywhere, the police wading through the pileup, three or four cops walking with spray bottles that looked like small fire extinguishers, the spray looping over them in an arc. King kept her head down. She kept her hands clean as she tried to remember what John Henry had taught her.

The best protection is a gas mask. However, we can no longer recommend the Israeli gas mask as the lenses have been known to shatter on impact.

The canisters dropped and sputtered. Thick fumes smoldered in the air. People stumbled among the bodies, coughing and blind.

King saw a woman on her knees in the middle of the intersection. Her hands clasped in prayer, her face a mask of running blood.

Of course the locals thought they were crazy. But on their hill they had no neighbors. On a clear day, a hundred, two hundred miles of vision. Sight lines in every direction. No neighbors who could see like this.

And then came news of the first arrest. A man she had known as Billy the Kid. William Garrison, the paper said, eco-terrorist, conspiracy charges. Mastermind of an attack on the Vail ski resort in Colorado.

When she got in her truck and drove into town to check her email, the message boards were lit up with it. Billy—she still could not think of him as William—arrested in New York City, five years after the fact. It was unprecedented. The FBI had found other fugitives over the years, of course, but they had never pursued environmental activists with such vigor. Nor prosecuted them so hard.

Eco-terrorism.

It was a message and King heard it loud and clear.

Three more from Vail went down within the month. She began making plans for Mexico. She had friends there. It wasn't running or hiding out. It was a trip. It would be a productive time. Write some essays. Make a film. Take photos. She was so terribly frightened, but she didn't dare tell a soul.

A tremendously fat bald man who cried into King's shoulder as she worked to clean his face. The man repeating the words “thank you” as if they were a prayer, clutching her arm and then collapsing against her. Her arms around him as he shook.

She told John Henry she wanted to cross the border. Not forever. For a few months. A year. Just until things calmed down a little with the FBI. And she wanted John Henry to go with her. To be with her. To be together.

But John Henry, who believed that courage and compassion were everything, said he had no desire to go to Mexico. He said what you sacrificed in the struggle was nothing compared to what you got in return—a sort of blazing personal heat. You transcended your own history to become the person you needed to be. You stood apart. You transformed yourself. No more double life. It didn't matter the inconsistencies in your life, this is what John Henry dared to say to her—no more lies permitted in the sacred ground of your heart.

This was a man she loved to the point she would forsake all other men, forswear sex and violence. Be good. For him. Because he asked.

He said she was unduly worried. Said she needed to grow up. Almost said she was being hysterical, but caught himself and said instead their work was here, but still she saw the ugly accusation in his look.

She went to her knees before a gray-haired woman who had caught pepper spray in the face. The woman was on her knees on the pavement as the throngs swarmed and buzzed and people went running by, pursued by cops in flapping black. King held her eyes open with one hand and poured from the bottle with the other. The woman on her knees with her head tilted back, totally vulnerable and blind, mumbling and moaning as if awaiting execution while her hand played with the buttons of her coat.

King steadied her head. Her long fingers pulled at the woman's eyes. She poured the solution of water and Maalox and whispered words of reassurance as the woman's eyes searched back and forth in a panic, flashing helplessly in her head. She was trying to communicate some message but what it was King didn't know.

John Henry's mouth was a wound that leaked language—disclaimers and apologies. But she was tired of talking about how her work was nothing. Her worry was nothing. Tired of feeling judged. Days passed when she was all ease and control, as delicate as a perfumed wrist, as fragile as an armed bomb. She listened to him talk at her and she smiled and reached for his cigarettes, nodding.

The effects of pepper spray include: temporary blindness lasting 15 to 30 minutes.

But he would not budge. So she went alone.

Upper-body spasms lasting 15 to 20 minutes.

And at first it was glorious. In the evenings the first appearance of a darkening sky, swallows dipping and swooping above the desert floor. Jackrabbits daredeviling through the dust. A group of deer she spooked drinking from a trickle at the bottom of a dry creek. At first it was wonderful, yes, but how quickly it became lonely, and then she was lost in a nightmare of homesickness, of feeling foreign and utterly apart.

A burning sensation of the skin lasting 45 to 60 minutes.

One day, out of the blue, John Henry emailed and asked her to come back. Said they were planning a big one. It was going to be the direct action of the century. They were going to shut down the goddamn World Trade Organization and the whole world would be watching and he was sorry for being an ass, but now he needed her. They all needed her.

Direct close-range spray can cause serious and lasting eye damage. What is known as the needle effect.

She wrote back and agreed to come, still not understanding just how difficult it would be to make her way north, to sneak illegally back into her own country. She remembered Guadalajara. The twilight street, light spilling from the curtains which hung in the open doors. An open shop with the grille half-raised, people inside browsing American movies on pirated discs and she remembered her own feet like the feet of a stranger passing through white cones of light where the shadows of bats spun and fell across her boots as if her head were attached to a stranger's body, her ruck on some stranger's back. Two girls lounged against the wall, slogans painted behind them, movie posters glued to the wall, and she felt it with a suddenness she had not felt since she was a child—the strangeness of what she was doing, the vulnerability of who she was, a woman traveling alone through these half-deserted streets. She finally had to admit. She did not know what she was doing. Had no idea how she would actually cross the border.

So she bought a gun. And she found a guide, a man and his son, who were also going to make the attempt to cross illegally into the United States.

Opening the eyes will cause a temporary increase in pain, 30 to 45 minutes.

And then it all went wrong and she did what she did. And what she did was she shot a man on the border and watched him bleed just as she had once broken a man's pinky and ring finger and watched him weep.

Difficulty breathing or speaking: 5 to 15 minutes.