Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (23 page)

And she had broken everything she had ever built, smashed it to pieces, and even still she had watched Victor beaten, and watched a man bleed to death in the sand, and the light of a single candle glowing from inside their homes of salvaged wood and tin and she with her home of food and electricity and there was a warmth coming from his eyes as he held her hand and said, “You're going to live.”

She felt the warmth and smoothness of his palm encircling hers as he said, “It's going to hurt like hell, darling, but you're going to live.”

That wasn't what the TV showed. It didn't show him holding her hand or the siren wailing or the machines beeping or the singing of the tires on the asphalt as they raced her to the hospital and it didn't show all she knew or all she believed and it didn't show how she might in some way live in this world the way it was.

This is
what the TV showed:

An airplane.

A big white thing eating light. A white and blue Boeing 747 customized in the USA to ferry its precious cargo from shore to shore, flying high above dangerous seas. Recognizable to all who watched with its bald hump behind the nose and its glassy eyes and a white moveable stairway pushed to its side where was embossed the great official seal. The camera framed the oblong portal that was the door. And there standing on the threshold at the top of the stairs, pausing before descending to the tarmac and whatever waited beyond, the TV showed a man. There he was with his beautiful smile in the door of
Air Force One,
his white hair spectral like a halo. The President of the United States of America.

And this is what the TV showed: The President waving for all the world to see. The President standing at the door of an airplane, waving and grinning his reassuring grin. The President of the United States giving the world who watched a big thumbs-up.

Below him on the TV a scrolling banner read:

And then the TV cut to a commercial of a family eating hamburgers in their car.

They looked so happy.

The darkness
came in slow and gentle and the wind as it rose carried the smell of bays and beacon lights, the sound of a mast rope snapping against metal, voices calling low across the water.

Evening fell on the estuaries and inlets and bays. It caught a great blue heron in perfect silhouette and it snuck among the twilight feathers of an egret standing brilliant white among the marshy reeds. Dusk settled on the ferries and the yachts and the small boats rocking on the waves, caressed the men and women sliding on the deck in their yellow slickers, their hands and faces bright dabs of light in the deepening dark.

Quietly, it fell in the surrounding country, on the garlic fields and the apple orchards and the fallow fields planted in winter rye where it was broken only occasionally by the light of a swinging lamp or the sweep of head beams running in a field. A small fire smoking in the cold.

The rush of night reached the city and seemed to settle for a moment atop the buildings, paused and built among the concrete helipads, the radio towers and their blinkered red lights, the colonies of parabolic antennas gathered there like a forest of white-dished ears listening to mystics muttering in the sky. It settled and then seemed to step from the flat-topped roof of the city like a woman stepping from a parapet into empty space and her body, plummeting like a falling needle, piercing the thin skin of ice and then disappearing, and the night now a river in flood cascading down the steel and glass facades of the office towers and insurance buildings, the multinational banks, its darkness curling and sliding, puddling in the street, beginning to gather around the huddled figures at Sixth and Pine. The prone body of Victor. His father, the Chief, who had fought his way through. And here in the lamplit black a man holding his son. Here in the neon night a woman who had done the right thing, who had stopped her fellow officers from beating an innocent man—she was being led away in cuffs. But Victor didn't know about any of that. He only saw his father's face here above him. Saw him through the haze of blood. And had he ever really looked at his father's face? His father holding him, gently. Had his father ever really held him?

“Beautiful, isn't it?” Victor said.

And his father's breathing was slow, his voice shaky as he said, “What's that, Vic?”

“The sky.”

It was from Victor's vantage point, there in the shelter of his father's arms, a low cloudy canvas made of gray and the reflected orange of the city's lights. But his father didn't look. Instead he said, “Vic, you hang on. Okay?”

“Sometimes I wish it weren't.”

“Weren't what, Vic?”

“So fucking beautiful.”

And there was nothing to say to that because it was true. Sometimes he wished it weren't. And Victor reaching for his father's hand. With his one good hand reaching up for his father's hand, feeling the roughness of his skin where it sat upon his chest curled into a fist.

With his one good hand, Victor took hold of his father's fist and uncurled the callused fingers, one by one. One by one by one by one.

And he wanted to say, I found what I was looking for, Dad. Here we are. Here it is in my hand. And that feeling beyond the rage, beyond the sorrow, the one I always felt and couldn't name? I know its name now, Dad, that emptiness in my chest.

Victor heard himself breathing and felt the blood everywhere on his face. He wanted to say all this and more to his father, but the most wonderful sensation was taking over his body. He could not resist its sweetness. It felt as though the entire crowd was climbing inside his body, as though they had scaled the ladder of his spine, and taken residence in the various parts of his body, heels clacking on each bone-white rung as if climbing the steps of an apartment building that now belonged to them.

People coming and going and climbing the steps to their own apartments, people loving and complaining, people entering and putting their shopping down and putting their keys down and entering the bedroom where they removed their shoes and sat on the bed for a moment and massaged their feet, looking at the wall and imagining what? He felt them taking residence in his body. His body teemed with life and dreams, the apartments growing and stacking, his awareness expanding with each shallow breath. And here was one last apartment, lit by the glow of a shaded lamp. His mother, how long dead, lived here. She was waiting for him like always, with dinner on the table, watching him with bright glassy eyes, head rested in her hand, and her eyes slipping shut, a light snore drifting from her throat, sitting there, his mother, in her robe and slippers, the slippers he bought with his savings, his savings from the community garden where he carried lemonade for the men and women, well, truthfully the slippers he stole from the department store at the mall because his mother's slippers were worn out from the daily friction of feet and floor, but that was all right, because there was his mother, he felt her there, living and waiting peacefully inside him, for whenever he cared to get up off his butt and join her, waiting for him by the lamp, waiting for her son to finally come home so that they could sit down together and eat.

And here in the darkness a father holding his son. The night caressed their cradled forms, snuck beneath their clothes, pooled in the whorled flesh of their ears, and Bishop felt not relief, not anger or shame, but fear. Bishop was suddenly afraid. Because his son was looking at him, not alarmed, not as if Bishop were a coward or a bully or a liar, just looking at him calmly, a small smile beginning to light Victor's battered face, coming from his eyes that could hardly open. And something about that look as if he understood exactly what his father had done, how blind he had been, before and before and before that, too, understood perhaps not the facts but the feeling, the sadness and fear that had been wrapped around his father's heart, squeezing his throat and his courage and his life, and how did his son know?

How could he
know?

And yet there he was, his son, looking and smiling through his half-opened eyes, not a look of concern, but as if he understood in some way, the sometime knowledge of what this is, the knowledge of the whole ugly beautiful thing, the knowledge of the courage it takes to move into fear and to fuck up and to go on living, knowing that sometimes it is two people alone and some small kindness between them that is not even called family, or forgiveness, but might be what some, on the good days, call love.

Writing can be a lonely art, but (fortunately) no book is ever truly a solitary undertaking. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have made such friends and family along the way; compadres all over the world,
mil gracias
.

I want to thank:

My mom, in Florida, for your patience and love, and for always picking up the phone. The time we got to spend together while I was writing this, all the meals shared and the cross-island walks—all of it was truly a gift.

My father in Pennsylvania, for your integrity, your commitment to justice, and your love, for your couch and your cooking, for all of the million kitchen conversations, I am so deeply grateful.

P. J. Mark and Marya Spence, at Janklow & Nesbit, for taking a risk, for taking the time, for your incredible insight and your unwavering support. It wouldn't have been possible without you.

Lee Boudreaux—your belief, your brilliance, your friendship and fire.

The incredible team at Lee Boudreaux Books and Little, Brown and Company, Reagan Arthur, Keith Hayes, Peggy Freudenthal, Miriam Parker, Carina Guiterman, Julie Ertl, and, most especially, rock star publicist Nicole Dewey, who is simply the best in the biz. I'm lucky.

The Hunter College MFA, my people, for telling the truth, and kicking my butt, Peter Carey, Colum McCann, Claire Messud, Nathan Englander, and Patrick McGrath. For all the conversations and all the books and all the early reads, Bill Cheng, Scott Cheshire, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Brianne Kennedy, Carmiel Banasky, Alex Gilvarry, Noa Jones, Liz Moore, Jessica Soffer, Anna Bierhaus, Victoria Brown, Lauren Holmes, Phil Klay, Vanessa Manko, Jason Porter, Jeffrey Rotter, and, most especially, Tennessee Jones, who read this manuscript more times than I can count.

Ellis Freeman at the London Film School, who rearranged my brain and showed me the way, thank you.

For your continued friendship and love of what we do, from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, Chitra Divakaruni, Emily Fox Gordon, Coert Voorhees, Matthew Siegel, Giuseppe Taurino, Oindrila Mukherjee, Nina McConigley, and Tiphanie Yanique.

This book was a long time in the making and over the years there were many countries, many homes, and many friends who gave me shelter in the storm. Forgive me if I've forgotten to name a few. You know who you are.

In Culebra, Aibonito, Oakland, and elsewhere, Dr. Héctor Sáez. Thank you, my friend. In the West Village and Woodstock, Peter Hirsch and Cusi Cram. For your friendship, energy, and the incredible gift of four months in Sifnos, Greece, Elaine Moore Hirsch. In New Orleans, Dan Packard. For the house in Hobart, many thanks to Will Packard. For the best pasta in Montreal, Mylène Bayard. In Woodstock, Noa Jones and Eva Huie. For her reads near and far, Shivani Manghnani. At the Center for Fiction, Gordon Lish, Robb Todd, and May-Lan Tan. For putting gas in the car and money in the bank, Jesse Placky, owner of Condorcam. In Purulhá and DUMBO, Isabel Carrío. In Seattle, Peter Mountford, Dean Spade, and my cousin Calen Yellowrobe. In Santiago, Puerto Varas, and Maitencillos, Chile, Francisca Cifuentes, Anthony Esposito, and Derek “Che” Way. Living the dream, brother.

My deepest gratitude to the Hunter College Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund for their support; Susan Hertog, whose generosity makes possible the Hunter College Hertog Fellowship; the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference; the Norman Mailer Writers Colony; the Asian American Writers' Workshop; and the Elaine M. Hirsch residency in Sifnos, Greece.

For insight as to what actually happened during those five days in Seattle, I'm indebted to the following books, films, and audio recordings:

For access to their archives of written, visual, and audio material, many thanks to WTO History Project at the University of Washington, the Seattle Police Department, and the City of Seattle.

And of course to the 50,000 and beyond who made it happen. As Arundhati Roy writes, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”

Sunil Yapa holds a bachelor's degree in Economic Geography from Penn State University and an MFA from Hunter College. While at Hunter, Yapa was awarded the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship, was selected as the
Esquire
fiction intern, and was a Hertog fellow. The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa has lived in many places around the world, including Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, China, and India, as well as London, Montreal, and New York City.