Like the Clash’s “Complete Control.” Some self-righteous people dismiss it as self-indulgent ranting about the band’s troubles with their label, but they’re just listening to the lyrics instead of paying attention to the song. That song is the apocalypse. It’s the sound of buildings crashing down that summer in New York City when every week another building would collapse at random. It’s the sound of water mains exploding, manhole covers shooting into the air, subways derailing, firecrackers blowing off somebody’s hand at the Hells Angels’ block party, taxi brakes squealing, crowds roaring, the sound of July Fourth when somebody’s turned the heat way up by accident, motorcycles flying up First Avenue, dykes on bikes gunning down Broadway, babies howling, cops shooting an African immigrant, mass civil disobedience down at One Police Plaza, riots in the park, teenagers fighting—it’s the sound of urban armageddon, of a city exploding with heat and anger and boredom. Strummer holds it together until about halfway through, but there’s nobody who can tell me that he’s making words after that. There’s nobody who can tell me that he’s even trying. He’s pouring out pure fury and that fury will shred his skin and eat him alive and whoever’s listening as well. You don’t need words for that. But it didn’t shred him or eat him alive. He came back to the words after the song was over, and I can’t come back. All I have is frightened, lost, self-doubting gibberish.
I think he could come back because he had the rest of the band keeping him together, winding out a skein of wool tied to his belt as he went into the labyrinth. He had Mick Jones and Paul Simonon and Topper Headon to throw him a lifeline, and the whole time he was using his voice like a five-alarm fire in a bad neighborhood uses gasoline Mick and Paul were chanting “TO-tal … C-O-N … control” over and over, and Headon was keeping the beat, so Strummer had something to come back to, someone staying steady and holding hard through the pummeling crashing lightning of the song.
I think I could talk to dogs, if there were any in here that I hadn’t already eaten. There aren’t, of course; no dogs jumping on displays, knocking things over, howling and barking, rolling over and writhing, but what’s still here is the Muzak constantly playing, and I wonder what it would be like to buy groceries in silence, what it would be like to curl up in the dark without the glare of fluorescent lights behind my eyelids and a blanket and warmth, and I can almost feel it when a cold damp tendril of Muzak oozes into my ear like a slug. It’s got to be something the Queen’s doing on purpose.
It’s “Career Opportunities.” The Clash.
I know why she made me solid again. I’m solid, but I can’t talk and I can barely think, and I’m growing hair and soon my ears will grow floppy and a tail will sprout from my ass and I’ll shrink right down into a dog and it’ll only be a matter of time before I’m skewered and set on fire.
I swing my shopping cart into a new aisle to get some cover while I think, and I push the cart right through Joe Strummer, who’s wearing a black T-shirt, black jeans, and motorcycle boots, and is lighting a cigarette. I’m annoyed that I walked right through him like that; I thought I was solid again. I test it out by kicking the only other person in the aisle, who flinches and scurries around the corner. I am solid. Strummer’s not.
What he is is annoyed. “Watch it, babe. Don’t walk through people. Feels weird.”
“You’re dead.” I’m still angry, but also relieved, because he’s come to lead me out of this mess, and that means I didn’t fuck everything up, not beyond hope, not beyond redemption, not beyond second chances, I didn’t screw up anything that can’t be fixed, I can be fixed, I’m not hopeless, not if Joe Strummer’s come back for me, come back from the dead to help me. He left me, he left me here and I didn’t know how to get out of bed and I didn’t know why to leave the house anymore but now he’s come back and all the grayness will go away again. I feel my ears twitch and start to grow, but I keep them human-shaped through an effort of will.
“So’re you,” he says. “Almost. Or you wouldn’t be here.” He takes a drag off his cigarette. “Want one?”
“Nah. I’ve got asthma,” I say, and I try not to cough because I don’t want to be an asshole about it.
“Drink?” He holds out a half-empty bottle of tequila, which I grab, even though tequila makes me sick, because I don’t want him to think I’m useless.
“You died, just when I was getting my shit together, you left me without any directions—”
“Look, I’m not staying here for long. This place gives me the creeps. So pay attention, ’cause I’m only gonna say this once.”
My voice cracks. “I can’t get out, I can’t find the door, but you—”
“You haven’t even fucking tried,” he interrupts, punctuating each word by stabbing the air in front of me with his cigarette. “Screw the door.” He pauses, ripples, and refocuses. “You’re, uh, you’re gonna need to kick it over,” he says. “There’s no tenderness here. She’s got nothing on you, nothing to hold over you. Just kick it over.”
He takes another drag off the cigarette. I love smoking. I always have. They can run all the PSAs they want, it doesn’t matter, smoking’s cool and that’s that. He blows smoke out his nose. “But, y’know, dress the part. You’ll never do it looking like that.”
He hands me a large package wrapped up in brown paper and a beat-up Louisville Slugger and starts to walk past me, up the aisle.
“Hey!” I grab for his hand, but my fingers go straight through.
“Piss off,” he growls.
“You can’t just walk away and leave me! Aren’t you going to get me out of here?”
“I’m not your fucking babysitter,” he says. “If you haven’t got the balls to get out of this yourself, with everything I’ve already done to help you, I’m not bloody well gonna take you by the hand.”
He goes on for a couple of steps and then stops. Without turning his head he says, “I’ll tell you one more thing. When you’re done, and you’re leaving, don’t look back. Don’t even turn your head, right? Got that?” Another drag off the cigarette. “Oh, and you can keep the booze, okay?”
I don’t say anything, just watch him take another five steps and vanish.
“Son of a bitch,” I finally say, after he’s gone and can’t hear me. I take two more swallows of the tequila. “Son of a bitch!” I yell, and hurl the empty bottle down the aisle after him. It smashes into a million pieces, which is very satisfying, and the speakers, which have been Muzaking “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” interrupt themselves in order to squawk “Cleanup in aisle 8002, cleanup in aisle 8002.” I hear a squadron of automated moppers massing around the corner, but that’s okay, I have a plan. I set my full cart up at the top of the aisle where anyone coming at full speed around the corner is sure to ram into it. I climb up onto the shelves and cling there like a deranged baboon. Those shelves are tall, they go up and up and I can’t even see the tops, they go all the way up like redwoods, like fire-truck ladders, like train tracks running vertically, the Super Chief to the sky, and I start to wonder, could I climb them? Could I get out that way, just climb up the shelves, up and up until I bust right through the ceiling?
But I don’t have any time for that—the automated moppers swing around the corner into my overbalanced cart and they go flying, falling over like empty water bottles. They roll around on their backs, their castors whirling frantically and their death rays firing randomly at the ceiling. I do a maniacal little victory dance, still clutching the shelves.
The death rays are firing randomly but not harmlessly. Chunks of the ceiling are cracking up and falling to the floor and some of them hit the shelves pretty hard, so I have to jump down because the shelves start shaking and cracking and the sky is falling. The Super Chief has derailed and that harmonic wave reaction is tearing up the tracks.
Before the automated moppers can recover themselves, I right my shopping cart and pull out a can of lighter fluid. I punch the can open and fling some of the contents on the moppers, who’re still lying on
their backs like overgrown water bugs. I rummage some more and find a box of kitchen matches, strike one, and throw it on the moppers, too. The fluid catches and burns and the moppers start to melt. The death rays stop.
The aisle’s a wreck, and the speakers are blaring out Muzak mixed with more cleanup announcements, and this time, they’re gutting “London Calling.” Back when I was a kid in the city and then in high school and still in college, I played outfield first in Little League and then on my high school’s softball team and then on my college’s women’s baseball team, and I played right field and left field and center field, any field, because I had a good arm. A great arm, and now I guess it’s time to see if I still have it. I fish a can of tomato paste out of my cart and hurl it at one pair of speakers. It’s been a few years, months, centuries since I last played, but the can crashes straight into the speakers, and they short out in a shower of sparks.
I head for the next aisle, and then the next, smashing speakers as I go. I’m out of practice, and my arm is getting sore, but that’s okay.
Finally there’s silence. Dead silence, and all I can hear is the fire I set crackling, and maybe the dying burbles of some of the automated moppers. I stop to catch my breath and look around. I’m standing in the middle of a mess, glass and plastic and cans and boxes tumbled all over the floors, a trail leading straight to me, but for the moment, nobody’s following it. I’m alone.
* * *
It seems like as good a time as any to open the stuff Joe Strummer gave me. The bat is my old bat, back from when I was a teenager playing in Central Park, black and battered. The sticker on it used to say GIRLS’ PIRATE ACADEMY, but now you can only read it if you already know what it says. I contemplate it for a little while, trying to figure out where he found it, before I give an experimental swing. It feels good in my hands, and I can’t help but admire the movement of the muscles in my shoulders and arms. I rip open the brown paper package and inside is my green skirt, my metal-studded goddess baby-doll T-shirt, a pair of fishnet stockings that I’d lost track of years ago—real fishnet stockings that cut your skin, not that stretchy cotton crap everybody has now, and my oxblood combat boots. Also some huge metal clips for my hair and my snake armlet. My clothing, my God, I’ve missed my clothing. It’s like gasoline, like a jet pack, like an electric halo helmet, a fire skin, I almost have an asthma attack from the shock. I start to glance around, and then I decide I don’t care if anybody’s watching, fuck them, and I strip off the boring old clothing I threw on to go shopping lo those many years ago and put on the stuff I love.
Picking up the bat, I face the wall of air fresheners—and I just don’t care what they smell like, they all smell like crap anyway. I mark my aim, bring the bat back, and then swing it forward in a steam-powered arc, unstoppable as the end of days, as a supernova, and I just maul the shit out of those shelves, swinging and swinging and swinging until I’ve smashed out a jagged dark hole to the outside. A chilly breeze comes from it.
I turn back for my cart, and when I face the hole again, the Queen of Hearts is standing between me and the way out. Behind her I can see the night sky and the glitter of the skyline in the distance. She is sixteen, she is sixty, she is every age in between. She wears camouflage, but her shoes have red hearts sewn into them, and she’s not fooling me.
“You can’t leave,” she says. “I made you solid again.”
I don’t bother to answer.
“You can’t take that cart.” She’s starting to sound anxious. “The cart’s supermarket property, it belongs here.”
I shove the cart at the Queen, hoping it’ll run her over. It doesn’t, of course. She catches it with one hand.
“Stay here,” she says. “Please.” But it’s not even a little bit tempting, not now.
I step out the back door, and I don’t turn around once, not even to see the Queen standing in her supermarket with the walls crumbling and the shelves crashing and the floor burning and the sky falling all around her. I’m looking straight ahead, at the city lights.
SWIMMING
1. THE HOUSE
Today Adam’s parents took us on a tour of their house, which is now larger and more ornate than the gaudiest of Oriental temples dreamed up in the fevered imaginations of barely repressed Victorian fantasists. It is for Adam, and now, for both of us.
They took especial pride in the first-floor dining room modeled on the courtroom of Louis XIV, the Sun King. There is a second dining room that is the whole of the second floor, simpler and rougher-hewn and to my mind all the more cold, majestic, palatial. The tables stretch unto infinity, world without end, and each place is marked with its own silver tankard. Leering, screaming demons are carved into the table legs, the backs of the chairs, the wooden rafters among which ravens soar jeering as if they can see into your very soul and are not at all impressed. And lounging on the table, wearing armor spattered with mud and blood, picking their teeth with sharpened slivers of bone and scratching their privates and flicking the dried or viscous secretions they find there at each other, are an infinite number of women, twice as large as I, toughened, leathery flesh spilling out between sections of armor. They are fat and thin, old and young, raven-haired and redheads. And they were all, every one, glowering at me, glowering and smirking.
Adam has asked me to marry him, and I have said yes, because I love him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him; I want to raise our children together. The only problem is his parents. They are still building this house; they are crazy; they want us to come and live with them.
Adam’s mother has the third floor and his father the fourth. Each has a bedroom, a study, a den, a bathroom, a dressing room. On the third floor his mother has a bird room. It is vast, with a brilliant skylight. There are ice floes for the penguins and gum trees for the kookaburras, salt water for the seagulls and peaches for the peacocks. The air is full of whirring brown wings, the smell of feather mites, and falling feces. They shriek and fight and peck each other until the blood comes. And all the time, Adam’s mother and father chattered as though their words were what sped the birds through the air.
I love them. I do not mind their madness. After my own family’s distance and isolation from one another I find soothing their unnatural chatter and loopy non sequiturs, their inability to allow a pause in the cosmic monologue they are both eternally engaged in delivering. Their fluttering talk floats through my inherited solitude and becomes a blanket covering me, preventing me from levitating indefinitely and steadily away from all that is human and recognizable.
I stared up and farther up, and on this day Adam’s parents’ words felt no longer like a blanket warming me but instead like white noise, white water, water running into the sink as I stand trying to fumble under the dishes for the sponge and the water level is rising, the water is rising and drowning out the music on the stereo, the water is rising and the waves are rolling in and I can no longer hear words; all I can see as I stare up is a blur as feathers blend into leaves but up and farther up is the ceiling because we are still in the terrible house. It is not a house at all, but a beast, a god, a toad-like Moloch-Baal squatting in the heart of Brooklyn devouring the offerings of labor, love, and material bounty my future in-laws offer up; they offer up their retirement, their sweat and dreams, in an orgy of joy and devotion. And see how it grows, fatter and fatter with each passing year, feeding on human life.
On the fourth floor is Adam’s dad’s model room, in which they plan each floor. The model is almost the size of the entire room, and leaves us only some inches to stand. Adam tells me what a glorious playhouse this was when he was a child. He thinks he can still fit through it if he crawls. And he does, easy as pie, so to show willing I go in after him. I am little more than halfway when I get stuck in his father’s dressing room and no matter how I turn I am wedged in so tightly and painfully with my arm out one window and my foot resting up in the chimney that I can barely breathe, let alone get out.
As I lie uncomfortably, tw
isted and all out of proportion, I envision layers of the house falling in upon me. There are voices outside—perhaps Adam whispering words of encouragement—but the water is rising and I cannot hear him. I wonder what would happen if I can’t get out. Will I just be shut in this box forever while the water rises and the waves roll in?
I could not shed my skin, but I did manage to inch off my skirt, which slimmed me down enough to slither out on my belly like a snake, and then I was out standing in my underwear but there was no shame in it. I put my skirt back on and examined the Ferris wheel on top of the model while Adam steadied me.
Years ago, so many years ago that it is long, long ago, though not far away at all, so many years ago that it is once upon a time, so long ago, and besides, the wench is dead, so many years ago that I have never been sure how old Adam’s parents are, whether they grew up in the last century or the one before that, when land in Brooklyn was undeveloped and cheap, they bought some and began building. Perhaps originally their plans were modest, who can say? And who can say when they went mad? They adopted Adam long after they completed the first two stories, and his earliest memories, so he tells me, are of being taught how to hold a hammer, how to use a wrench, how to spread cement for bricks.
I love Adam. But I do not wish to be consumed by that house.
I do not wish to raise my children as little builders, always anchored, dragged down to the seabed by some ever-growing weight in Brooklyn, a mass distorting space and time, energy and light. I do not wish to be sucked into this collapsed star, no, not even if it meant that I could travel in time, not even if it meant I could live forever.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 17