by C.G. Banks
Chapter 10: Phoenix
Tomas awoke screaming into the darkness of his bedroom. He sat up ramrod straight, his eyes wild and staring, fighting to find the flames of his nightmare, the acrid smell of smoke drifting yet in the room. But there was nothing. The house silent as a tomb. No washing roar of flames licking to the ceiling, no choking suffocation bringing him down.
This didn’t happen often, had not in fact happened for the better part of three years. But now, entire, that day with the lawyer’s flunky, it descended around him. All at once in a sickening wave, the man with his Italian suit and shoes, the self-confidence of a shark wafting off in waves. And with it came the memory of the Fire, the residue of the nightmare. He worked himself off the bed and stood up. Made his way to the kitchen and the icebox. Pulled it open and rooted out a beer. The pop-tab made a sound like breaking glass in the silence. He downed half the beer with his first gulp, the rest with his second. His hair was wet and slick with the heat pulsing through the house. He walked over to the trashcan and threw the empty away. Ghosts were alive in the air around him. He left the kitchen and sat down hard in the chair before the television, the remote waiting at his right hand. But he left it alone, tried to climb away from the tension that screwed at his bones.
The Fire.
It never really left. Though each time he told himself it was surely the last, that time would beat it in the end; it was always right there in the darkness of sleep, waiting to claim him and finish the business that had been left undone so many years before.
And so close to where he now sat. He couldn’t forget that. He questioned himself sometimes on the point of his attraction. A bug drawn to a light on some forbidden and unthinkable quest. Because, now, that’s all his life had ever seemed: a quest. For what, he had no idea, but a quest nonetheless. The feeling only sharpened over time. The remote hit the floor and he looked down, noticed his hands were shaking. He brought them together in his lap and clasped them tightly. Saw how they were the same, unchanged mirrors to that day with the flunky. He tried to smirk in the darkness and failed miserably. No…face it, he thought. The days are a countdown.
He absently found himself fingering the depression in his right palm. Even in the pitch darkness he knew exactly what he’d find. His badge of remembrance. It had come just before Meeta, his “mother” (at least that’s what he remembered calling her) had grabbed him and his “sister” in her arms and hustled them outside. But only when the flames had gotten so intense that remaining was impossible. The scar had grown as his hand matured, spreading from its quarter shape to now the size of a half dollar. If he’d been working hard with his hands under a hot sun, if the blood really set right, the faint outline of a face, and underneath it, a date. His birth year. The scar from the quarter he’d picked up off the floor right before they’d vacated the conflagration. Even now he remembered first catching site of the thing lying placidly on the floor a couple of feet away. Being drawn to it (again, like a moth), and then reaching, grabbing it up in his palm. And, of course, the scorching pain. He’d thought he dropped it, had had no doubt really, until he found it (nice and preternaturally cool) in the pocket of his smoky jeans later, as untarnished as if it’d been minted that very day. And, also, the scar. His hand had hurt damnably for the better part of a week, the skin of his palm growing red and enflamed though he’d tried to hide it from the strangers who were suddenly so proliferate.
But the brand had always remained.
He tried to find his lost childhood in these moments, adrift in the cool dark of the night. Any night. Nothing ever seemed that far away, but nothing solid ever came either. Of that lost childhood. Of anything, really, of a time before the Fire. That had been, and continued to be, the defining moment of his life, though for what reason he could secure no answer. He’d learned of Colombia through the file he’d been given. Like reading the history of a stranger, nothing was familiar. He remembered riding a bicycle with his “sister” (even now her name evaded him), sitting around a dinner table and eating with his eyes pinned to the food on his plate, the wash of conversation around him meaningless in a language he’d not understood. But the flames had been real, the heat, the roar, the smoke. As real as the scar on his palm. As real as the monster Eduardo. As real as the liquid the man had taken from below the kitchen sink and poured in small amounts into the old man’s food day in and day out. That had struck him as strange: the fact that the old man’s food was prepared differently from his own. With Meeta always close at hand and a willing accomplice while Eduardo whispered in her ear, toyed gently with his hand on her ass as she went about preparing lunch or dinner. And running alongside, the old man’s sickness, his gagging coughs and the spattering of blood on the table before him, on his shirt and pants. He realized now the two had poisoned the old man, but again, the reason eluded him. The Old Man had been Meeta’s father and she’d gone about her days as if she truly cared for him. But the knowledge was there, always in the back of his mind.
They’d killed him as purposefully as if they’d placed a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. This was gospel, unchangeable. His death had been planned. And so, it seemed, had the Fire.
Over the years he’d brought back pieces of the disaster. Eduardo’s wild obscenities before he’d taken out the rifle and shot the trooper. Meeta’s silent capitulation when he’d told her to gather more ammunition. Tomas remembered the cans of gasoline that had stood lined in the garage like regimented soldiers. Ten of them (he recalled counting in his new language) filled and capped in the sweltering shade against the wall near the freezer. He remembered as the man Meeta had called “honey” had torn the carport door wide and raced inside; he’d been watching from the same corner where he’d seen the quarter as Eduardo uncapped two of the ten and begun spilling their contents across the concrete floor, against the walls; the pungent smell of the gasoline as it made its way through the doorway to the living room, before the maniac tossed it around in there as well. Meeta standing before him with her hands out, daring him to come near the children, her eyes on fire even before the real flames started.
And then the breaking glass and Eduardo’s screaming challenge to the force gathered against him. All of these things were etched in his brain like the grooves of a record. Even now he saw the flame kick up and away from the lighter Eduardo had held in his hand, the flesh catching immediately. The man had never stopped his rampage even when his whole arm was engulfed. The room had gone up like a Molotov cocktail; one second there was nothing but the choking smell, and the next a huge blanket of heat and sound as the gas came alive like a thing incarnate. Tomas had imagined Hell many times in his life but never with as much fear. He’d been there and survived, suffered only to carry the brand of a quarter on his hand. He recalled Meeta’s screams and his “sister” bunched up around him, her tiny hands tearing at his clothes as the rush of fuel built a hurricane around them.
And then his real life began, or so he had always assumed. Now, however, he was not so sure. Fingers of remembrance were beginning to stir, little things in the lost corners of his mind that begged release. Edgy things, a bizarre momentum that threatened to break free. Because as he now saw it, he had died a sort of death in the Fire, but equally strange, he’d also been reborn to this new life. The life that had drawn him irrevocably here to the scene of his initial death, his subsequent rebirth. Never before had he felt it so keenly, his nerves filed down to razor points. It had not been there when he’d come back to Louisiana years before; it had not really suggested itself when he rode the highway and noticed the new construction; and, stranger still, it hadn’t even been there when he signed the purchase agreement on the house. All that time something in the back of his mind suggested it was mere circumstance; perhaps a twinge of longing for what he’d lost years before. But now he saw things differently. Had done so ever since he’d seen the woman in the hardware store a couple of weeks before. No, it had always been a vague suggestion up until that point. But after that d
ay it had been something else. For the past few nights it had begun to build, taking form in the slow darkness of the empty house.
Now it was a pestilence, a warning.
Now it was his destiny.
He sat still in the chair, clasping and unclasping his hands, working his finger over the old scar, breathing hoarsely in the silence of the house.
In his soul he felt his life, his purpose, had just begun.