“I’ve never told anyone that.” He said.
His grandmother was the last person he really touched or held. And that was the hug he gave her before he left for the airport. He remembered an ex-girlfriend once telling him they’d moved too fast. She felt suffocated. He laughed a little on the anchor. The whale in the back blew. The gray clouds stretched on forever. The ice went to the ends of the Earth where his family sat patiently in their icicle caskets. The scales of the fish migration made a sea serpent that stretched on and on in the wake of Joshua’s flame. He’d hated sleeping before, but now, nothing moved without him, so he didn’t feel like he was wasting time. And in his dreams, he could be with them, with her.
That’s why we have lighthouses, his Grandmother said, so we know which way is home. So that we don’t crash into the harbor or get lost way out there at sea.
The white arm of the lighthouse grasped past them in circular motions above and around the boat and swirling current. Joshua, as a child, stood on the deck with his Grandma. His Grandfather sat some ways away, staring at what glimpses he could catch of the lapping waves where the lights of the boat would randomly catch in foamy ripples. He didn’t talk much. Joshua remembered him as periods of content silence punctuated by boisterous, sometimes unexplained, but contagious, jovial laughter. He remembered what his thick winter coat smelled like. Heavy leather. He remembered asking him if he killed anyone at Normandy. His grandfather said he didn’t know, there was a lot of smoke.
His grandmother leaned intently against the chain that stretched across the only break in the deck where the passengers piled onto the ferry. She still had a gleam of her youth, then and always imparted an impression of overflowing to everyone she met. Life. Music. Laughter. Language. Bright jewelry. All overflowing. And when that chain snapped, she overflowed into the ocean. Joshua heard her splash into the water and was struck with paralysis watching the dark waves lap over her head. He heard a second splash and looked to where his Grandfather sat. Joshua’s eyes remembered the outline of his Grandpa’s body, spiritually imprinted on the space, but his body was gone now: over the railing and into the ocean after his wife. His Grandfather called her name and she gasped responses and he found her in a random reflection of light in her ruby red hair pin. He called her name and she kept her head above the water. Joshua awoke to the resounding memory in the back of his mind of some years later, when Joshua was older but still very young, his grandfather would fall in front of him and he’d pretend to be asleep while the man struggled back to his feet. He held his breath, rather than pretending to breathe heavily, as if he were sleeping, and it felt like drowning. Pretending to sleep out of fear. And fear of what? He was unsure at the time, when it happened. But it was something he was beginning to understand. The only thing you really need to know to be happy, his Grandfather told him, is that we’re all doing the best we can.
And some years later, a professor had said, the future is immersion into man’s own dreams. The final frontier is that of the mind.
When he woke up, just past his flames he was encased in a rage of bubbles and someone was tugging his arm toward the surface. He shook them loose and swam to the top. He had fallen into the water while he slept. When Kami pulled herself out of the water, she left a piece of her hand on the ladder rung, her body steamed and she was screaming.
Her arm had to be amputated. The yellow, smoldering skin began to fester. After they cut it off, gnawing through her black, pussing bone with a frost dulled saw, Joshua stepped on the ship and whalers suspended Kami over the spot and sizzled the wound shut where his foot had heated the steel floor. Joshua told the children to go below deck. She screamed until she passed out. They sedated her with old medication from the store closet and placed her in an above deck room at Joshua’s request so that he could watch her from a distance by balancing on the railing. But even when he sucked his flame in as best he could, he still had to squint to see her through the reflection of his thin blue sheet dancing on the window.
Over time, she began to heal. She’d lay awake when the pain was still unbearable and watch Joshua roar on the railing and she wondered how the boat was still moving forward if he wasn’t melting the ice. He’d leave every hour or so just for a moment and she’d hear the whalers singing from the deck, but he’d always come back, sometimes facing her and she’d pretend to be asleep, and other times looking off on the horizon. His back looked wasted. He was all skin and thin, tendony muscle and when she’d catch glimpses of his front, his stomach bulged out the way they do on the long starved.
When Kami was rested, Joshua had a whaler ask her to come out to the deck. He had a wry smile on his face.
There was a flood of them on deck—the men and the children, all watching curiously. Joshua was at the very tip of the ship. He turned his back to her and snuggled his waist into where the railing came to a point. She was an island between Joshua and everyone else.
It began very slowly, just two tongues lapping just a little harder off the tips of Joshua’s shoulders becoming recognizably longer than the others. They puffed calmly until they were two balls of fire that repeatedly dropped off his shoulders like two big drops of water and then quietly extinguish. Joshua raised his hands and they stopped. The whalers clapped and laughed. Joshua made a fist with his right hand and the flame around it grew into a thick ball and without moving his body the flame travelled down his arm, over his shoulders and off his scapula then back to the center of his back where it split again into the shoulder flames but this time they took off into the sky like fireworks. The whalers applauded and laughed, the children screamed with joy, their masks falling off their faces. Kami smiled. It was a magic show.
He could make his hand into a gun shape and shoot large fireballs off the deck. They’d arch like flares. He could juggle tiny flame balls. He could pop a tiny flame tongue into the air and catch it in his mouth and pretend to swallow it. He could fluctuate himself and walk slowly and roar like a monster and then jump back and forth, at one moment making a flame whip pretending to whip an imaginary him monster, and at another time being the him monster pretending to be whipped. He couldn’t make his flame comets burst like fireworks but he could shoot a slow, lazy one a hundred feet above their heads and launch a comet like, orange spear through it which would result in a supernova-esque combustion. And when he did, Kami loved to watch the shadows cast by the whalers brow bones spin clockwise and counter, washing their faces back and forth between skeletal seeming shadow—bagged and full faced before disappearing entirely into darkness. She watched the children catch sparks in their palms. And as his finale, Joshua raised both his arms, let his flame hang loose and ferocious on him and swung both arms like pendulums over himself, and for a second, he was completely naked, his flame totally extinguished, and the hull went dark and Kami could see all of Joshua: his sunken cheeks, his jagged ribs and knobbed knees, all behind pale spots of light as her vision fought to cling to the memory of his flame that followed her wherever she looked. But it was only for a second, and then he burst back into fire, gasping for air through his smile as if he’d just lifted a car off himself. He bowed deeply and everyone clapped. Then, everyone started to sing happy birthday to Kami.
Half way through, the whalers continued to howl joyously, but Joshua stopped and he and Kami locked eyes. He smiled. She smiled, even through her embarrassment. He walked over to her with his fingers pointing up and flames coming off his nails, extended to resemble candles, and when she blew, he sucked himself in, as if he’d been blown out.
Everyone drank and laughed until they fell asleep. The kids stopped wearing their masks over their faces, and now wore them on the backs of their heads as though they had two faces. At night, Kami and Joshua went to the side of the ship and looked at the snow falling.
“Let me touch you,” she said.
“I’ll burn you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Wait,” he said, walking away. He looked off over the starboard side. He wan
ted to feel her finger on him. He sucked and sucked himself in. He practiced a few times while she waited there. A few times she spoke, saying it was ok, that she could go, not to hurt himself. “Wait,” he said, each time. And she did. Until he pulled his flame to a thin blue line that covered his spine, and glowed darkly so that all either of them could see was the impressions of their forms, and their eyes, half lit.
He held for a minute and a half. The longest he’d ever gone. She reached her fingers and touched the top of his chest and lingered there. They both smiled. He whispered to her to run and she did. From behind the glass, she watched him blow pyres of flames off the starboard side that landed deep in the ice over the horizon and popped a temporary sunrise.
*
They passed around Cape Horn, dipped by Florida and crept up the coast. Kami caught one of the whalers trying to kill Kujira with a harpoon. Joshua burnt all the spears on the ship. He stood on the deck and felt himself grow angry at the cruelties of the former world, and felt, if he had any say in the defrosted one, he’d do away with unkindness and suffering—a task he knew was impossible. Kami was standing next to him, the whaler in question before him.
“I hug you, you disappear. Translate.” He yelled. She did. “This is not your world anymore! You ruined that one. This is mine now,” he kicked the guard rail four times and returned to his anchor. Kami didn’t translate that.
Despite being slightly wounded, the whale followed them: there was nowhere else to go. Joshua recognized nothing until he saw the frozen Ferris wheels of the Jersey Shore, and it began to feel like home as he imagined the gyms where the heartsick cuckolds were frozen in their hours of lifting their heavy hearts, and the ice cream shops nearby where the fat and comfortably in love froze while eating the vast weight of their emotions. The Statue of Liberty rose into their sight with icicles clinging to her emerald dress and eternally roaring torch and the big space in the skyline where the twin towers had crumbled was a curtain of gray sky. He remembered the Statue’s inscription: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
They crash landed the boat into Hoboken harbor, lodging it into a wall beneath the Stevens housing complexes where a silent wind dusted wisps in currents off the roof tops toward the white city.
Kujira puffed quietly and Joshua wished he could say he would be right back, but he didn’t know if he would. He hoped there were enough fish for him to eat, and he hoped that the harbor wasn’t too polluted for him to live there, and he hoped that even in an ocean capped in ice, that the whale could send its song echoing for miles in all directions and reunite with its own family. Joshua’s aquatic tail would finally have to disperse.
“My grandfather was a farmer in the hills outside Hiroshima. He was just a boy when the bomb was dropped,” Kami said when they’d stopped for the night.
There was a silence that followed where the vacuum of the conversation sprung a leak and the distant ghosts of American history that occupied an often forgotten realm of Joshua’s subconscious bubbled around he and Kami. He felt the guilt of the royal We: as if a part of him existed in each America: Past, present, and future tense.
“He said a dark cloud filled up the sky and the dust of his dead friends snowed on him the whole day.”
“My father hates the Japanese,” Joshua said. “He wasn’t alive when Pearl Harbor happened. But he doesn’t think anything has changed.”
“Changed?”
“Henkoo,” Joshua explained.
“Modification?”
“Yes.”
“My father died a long time ago, though, he liked America. He always said he wanted to take me. He really liked Mickey Mouse.” She smiled sweetly. “I’m glad I finally made it.”
The Antarctic exodus swept down the parkway to Joshua’s home. He stopped in front of it and looked back at all the frightened faces he’d gathered. The crew, the children, some New Jerseans they picked up along the way—all with nowhere else to go.
“Well… I’m going in now,” Joshua said. No one answered.
Icicles hung from the shingles of his home. They dripped more and more as he walked to the front door. He sucked in his flame as hard as he could until it was a sheet of blue washing in waves over his skin. Inside, his flame reflection danced in the picture frames that lined the walls or stood on any flat surface deemed inconvenient for anything but housing memories. Joshua creaked open a door and his family knelt around a bed with his beautiful, frozen Grandma lying fast asleep with her long, gray hair spread loosely on her shoulders and her ruby red hair clip on the side of her head. Like an ice princess. He unfroze his mother first. Then his father and brother. The wood was beginning to swell in the heat. His mother, father and brother all collapsed on the floor, gasping for air and spontaneously flopping their muscles back to life. He laid a hand on his grandmother and unfroze her but she never gasped or shuddered. Her skin was stiff and grey and her tongue swelled purple, out between her lips. Her eyes behind their lids looked deflated.
“Why won’t she wake up,” he whispered.
He looked at his mother. She was wide eyed, frightened, and her mouth was open. She took big gulps of air. His father was the opposite. His jaw was clenched shut but his nostrils kept snorting.
The splinters sticking out of the wooden floor began to spark. If he stayed any longer the house would catch flame.
Joshua carried his Grandmother like a child out the back of the house. Her clothes ashed away and he held her as the snow melted around them. Her red gemmed hairclip clung to her crackling silver hair as the fake plastic rubies melted onto her peeling scalp. Her blood bubbled under her hissing skin and her eyes popped and leaked out from beneath her charred lids. He watched her turn yellow, then scab black. He could smell it. He moved his hand slightly over her hair and strings of slime stuck to his fingers. He held her in his lap, and wrapped her in his flames like they were a blanket. You’re mine, now. Sleep. He ran his hand over her forehead, wanting to touch her brain: The small engine that housed her for eighty-six years and sparked a lifetime of instances projected like film on a conveyor belt that had, now, surely flown off into the very depths of infinity: out beyond the stratosphere, like a comet you catch in your stomach that lights you on fire for the rest of your miserable life, defrosting your world at light’s speed. Dancing. Laughter. So much hugging. Crying. Fear. Bigotry. Nights of madness and sick energy and dreaming yourself into being and collecting at once an identity from those you love who see you as far better than you see yourself.
Come back to me. I can’t do this without you.
The melting snow covered them in a curtain of steam, like when the winter frost finally evaporates from deep in the crust of the Earth—so it always smells like Summer. He cried over her. And when she was nothing but a frame of flake and ash, he kissed her skull and cast her away and she disappeared to blow freely across the world. Like snowflakes that don’t melt but burn with memories, attenuating and holding, for a moment, their vibration—as they bounce about, between buildings, in the Snow Globe Skyline.
Kami went to walk towards him.
“But then he left me,” Kami said, rubbing the stiff, carbon fiber flesh of her fake arm with her wrinkled, liver spotted hand. She’d gotten a new one. An artist had taken a prosthetic limb, heated it, and used his thumbs to wrinkle the flesh and make it look old to match her sagging face. She refused to wear it. “And he never came back.” She closed the book and looked out over the podium at the stuffed auditorium. Everyone wore white masks with gray lines painted on them. Behind her there was banner that said “60th Anniversary,” next to the crudely drawn image of a barely recognizable, thickly paint stroked man swallowing a star with a big smile on his face.
“But sometimes, long after the earth was melted, I’d walk at night, and see headlights coming over a hill, or the porch lights of distant hous
es shining through the woods, or the faint glow of a fireplace burning in a window, and I’d think, if only for a moment, that he had finally come back for me. That my Joshua was back for me.” She wanted to retell the whole thing, from beginning to end. She wanted to tell them about the night he told her that in the beginning of this whole affair, he’d fallen asleep and had a dream he swallowed a star that twisted his limbs into tongues of flame.
But, she didn’t say that. Instead, she buried it deep inside her and ended her anniversary reading with a simple line: “Everything leaves at some point. And you are all that happens next.”
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