The Virgin of Flames

by Chris Abani

  “Why?”

  “Madness, my friend. Madness.”

  “So why do we do it? I presume that you mean that we, you and I, attend our ghosts?”

  “Of course we do. That’s how we make art. We are the lucky, the haunted.”

  “How do you know that’s not all bullshit?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  Black sighed, relieved he wasn’t going crazy after all. He was an artist and this is what artists did.

  “However,” Iggy began, her eyes sad. “They must remain ghosts. In your case Black, they have crossed over. They have come looking for you.”

  He shivered.

  “Gabriel?”

  “I don’t know. Gabriel might be a good guy, you know, a spirit guide, who is trying to protect you from the haunting. I don’t know.”

  “He is scary.”

  “Yep,” she agreed. “That’s what angels are. Scary. Listen, I’m going to turn in soon,” she said.

  He nodded and got up.

  “Good night,” he said, turning to leave.

  “Going to the spaceship?” There was a chuckle under her words.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe Gabriel’s up there.”

  “To scare the shit out of me?”

  “No, to reveal it all to you.”

  The spaceship, which Black had built, was a squat metal blimp-like shape that hunkered above The Ugly Store like a half-deflated balloon, tethered by a forty-foot rusting metal pole. Swaying in the wind, it looked like a rotting cocktail sausage speared on a browning toothpick.

  “A giant suppository,” Iggy always said.

  “It never flew,” he told anyone who cared to listen.

  “That’s so Black,” Iggy would say, meaning both the spaceship and his announcements; and it was. The spaceship was his desire, in a sense, to become a thing of his own making. With an Igbo father and Salvadoran mother, Black never felt he was much of either. It was a curious feeling, like being a bird, he thought, swaying on a wire somewhere, breaking for the sky when night and rain came, except for him it never felt like flight, more like falling; falling and drowning in cold, cold water. When he felt the water rise, he would morph.

  “I’m a shape-shifter,” he told Iggy once.

  And he was, going through several identities, taking on different ethnic and national affiliations as though they were seasonal changes in wardrobe, and discarding them just as easily. For a while, Black had been Navajo, the seed race: children of the sky people, descendants of visitors from a distant planet. That was when he built the spaceship. It was the ethnicity that best suited his personality, their language the most like his memory of Igbo. But he gave it up because he never mastered the steely-eyed and clenched jaw look he saw in films. Besides, he didn’t like being a sidekick and after a while it felt like every Indian on TV or in the movies was Tonto. Except, of course, the crazy one in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He liked him, wanted to be him, but he couldn’t stay angry about anything long enough. Maybe he was Tonto after all. Fuck that, kemo sabe, he’d thought.

  Iggy understood. He knew people often said that—I understand—and it meant, Don’t tell me any more, I can’t hear you. But Iggy, he knew, really did. Time flies, he thought, time flies and you never know where it has gone. He was thirty-six with nothing, except a spaceship that didn’t fly and a bunch of paintings on the walls of the river to show for it. Murals of Montezuma at his local McDonald’s buying a Big Mac; mermaids draped on red couches, sometimes with legs and a mighty python wrapped around their waists and dangling down between their legs, sometimes with fish tails, with eyes of passion and fire, eyes that could undo a man. There was one of Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp heading off into the concrete horizon. In another, an Aztec priest held a young man bleeding to death while a car, gunfire spitting from its windows, sped away into the city. An Indian woman holding a gun and wearing a purple scarf stared defiantly from another. Hieroglyphs that he had created and whose meanings remained a mystery even to him ran between the murals like frames. It seemed that as fast as he could paint them, the army engineers (who’d built and maintained the river wall) covered them up; the army and the bloody city council. But somehow there were still many that managed to escape, and sometimes a homeless person riding a bicycle or pushing a cart down the channel from a distance looked like part of a painting, as though they had come to life; part of the river’s memories and dreams.

  The only way up to the spaceship was via a rickety metal ladder welded onto the side of the forty-foot-high rusting metal pole that the spaceship was impaled on, and Black stood on the flat roof psyching himself for the climb. It was cramped inside the spaceship. Made from salvaged and hammered metal and boards, it was about nine feet long, sloping down to two portholes at either end, each wearing different colored glass: green and purple. In that pinch there was only about a foot of headspace. It was spotless inside, with interior walls painted a warm yellow. The ceiling was only five feet high at its highest point, where it opened up into a skylight. The only way he could see any of the view without hanging out of the open door was to poke his head out of the skylight; like coming up for air. Of course there was always Gabriel to worry about, since the archangel had taken to roosting on the spaceship’s roof.

  In the muted purple light of one porthole, cramped into the small space, stood an equally small altar. He loved altars. Always had. This altar held a burning candle, an incense censer smoldering with hot coals and frankincense, a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a representation of his totem, a small but lifelike dog. And behind the altar, scratched into the wood of the ship were the words: Just Fly Away.

  “What is this spaceship thing?” Bomboy Dickens asked him once. “Why is this monstrosity so important to you?” Bomboy had a way of blurting out the thing everyone was thinking but was too polite to say. He also loved words like monstrosity, capacity, tantamount and awesome.

  “It’s my soul,” Black said. And he meant it, though the word yearning would have been more appropriate. Of course if hard pressed Black couldn’t say what it was exactly that he yearned for. The nearest thing he could say was that he didn’t want to be himself. Or maybe that he was looking for who he should be. But he had no idea who he wanted to, or should, be.

  As Bomboy had moved about inside it, the spaceship rocked.

  “It is unstable, this soul of yours,” he had said.

  “Fuck you,” Black said, afraid that Bomboy was right, even though he knew that some of the bolts and screws holding the craft to the four-foot-wide platform it was landed on were loose. As he bent over the candle to light the cigarette, the craft tipped ever so slightly. Shit, still haven’t fixed that, he thought, blowing smoke out of the open skylight. There was something in the way he held his cigarette. Something that pointed to a wish unfulfilled, perhaps.

  He paused by a pin board leaning against the sloping wall, next to the altar. It was divided into four diagonal grids by strips of colored ribbon and pins. With the long tapered forefinger of his right hand, the hand holding the cigarette, he scratched the side of his nose. Smoke curled up like a wraith around his head as he bent to examine the source of the itch in the grimy window. For the briefest moment, he was startled, as if a stranger was gazing back at him.

  Blowing smoke at his reflection, he straightened, scanning for Gabriel, before pushing his head out of the skylight. He felt a wet splat on his head and looked up. Rain. He ducked back inside and looked at the squared-off board. In the middle was a watercolor of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the edges of her face blotting into what could be a blue shawl, or perhaps just another Los Angeles twilight. He pressed his fingers in a kiss to his lips and laid them on the painting.

  “My muse,” he said. Breathless. Remembering the night that had inspired the painting. The apparition of the Lady reflected on the wall of a small house in East LA. Like everyone present, he hadn’t believed the rumor at first. Even when he saw it, he was still searching for the trick,
the illusion. He was skeptical until the woman whose house it was, opened and closed the Venetian blinds several times without disturbing the apparition.

  The Virgin was important to the people here. Not only as a symbol of the adopted religion of Catholicism, but because she was a brown virgin who had appeared to a brown saint, Juan Diego. She was also a symbol of justice, of a political spirituality. He had watched every year the procession to her, her effigy carried high through the streets of East LA starting from the corner of Cesar Chavez, held up, aloft, like a torch. That procession had been an annual event from the thirties, Iggy told him. He knew she had grown up here, the daughter of Jewish immigrants who had moved west in the twenties, but that was all she ever revealed about her childhood to him. The Virgin appeared here often, to reassure her people no doubt. In the Winchells donut shop on Fourth and Soto, hovering in the window for the longest time, transforming the tasty local treat into the most sought after cure for every ailment and malaise. In the law office of Tomás Alarcón, who was the most expensive and dishonest immigration lawyer in the whole area, but who, since the night he saw her shadow burned into the glass frame of his office door, had taken to not charging for his cases, accepting only whatever donations his clients could manage. His office soon became a rowdy barn when people paid him in goats, chickens and sometimes fish. And even though he fell behind on his rent, his Chinese landlord, though not a believer, was afraid of the black burn of Tomás’s eyes and so didn’t evict him.

  Rumors of these apparitions spread by word of mouth and fast. The news was wrapped in Big Macs and passed over counters, it filled buckets of KFC, was whispered in the hush of washing machines in the Laundromat, passed out on the street between passersby and even between the dealers and their clients. Black heard it from Bomboy who heard it from Pedro who owned the taco stand opposite The Ugly Store.

  The rest of Black’s board was covered in photographs, about thirty of them. Some were glossy, some grainy and fading on plain paper. The grainy photos had been taken by the cheap camera in his cell phone and run off Iggy’s printer.

  There were only two subjects.

  One was the Virgin. Statues, paintings, murals, posters, anything he came across in his travels of East LA; and he came across many. Each photo had a white name tag under it, labeling: 1st Street Underpass; Emil’s Mobil Station—South Wall; Underpass to INS building—Los Angeles Street; St. Sebastian’s—forecourt; Immaculate Heart Cemetery, tombstone—Breed; Rosa’s Panaderia—Cake.

  He lingered over photos of the second subject, stroking the glossies sensually and rubbing hard on the grainies, the cigarette held carefully away. These photos were of a young woman. In all the glossies she was dressed in variations of the same urban clothes: velvety sweats; pants; big shirts that drowned her, or small tummy-riding tight ones with faux-leather laces running halfway up the sides; sneakers; too much makeup; hair dark, near natty and streaked with blonde highlights. Beneath these, the labels read: Mercado—Flower Street; Westside Pavilion Mall—Pico; Kung Pao’s—Chinatown; Payless—Jefferson & Hoover.

  In the grainier shots, the same woman was naked. Or nearly naked. In lingerie. In a bra and panties. Panties and pasties. Plastic-cone-shaped pasties. Standing. Moving blurs. Squatting, facing the camera, eyes smiling, tongue licking her lips. These labels read: Charlie’s—May ’03; Charlie’s—April ’04; Charlie’s—Aug ’04; Charlie’s. Charlie’s. Charlie’s.

  “Sweet Girl,” he said, under his breath, and it was a song.

  six

  blue.

  This Los Angeles half-light as Black sat, feet dangling, in the open door of his spaceship above Cesar Chavez and The Ugly Store, staring out at the vista of downtown, smoking a cigarette. His left hand, the hand not holding the cigarette, was stroking the dirty plastic of what looked like a Catholic scapular on a leather thong around his neck. It wasn’t a scapular—one of those peculiar small squares of brown cloth with images of Jesus and the Virgin attached, and sewn under plastic for longevity—even though it did itch like a scapular and though there was a photo in it.

  He hadn’t been able to admit it to Bomboy, but Black was feeling a little lost. Bomboy’s bluntness had a way of hitting things squarely on the head: he wasn’t getting any younger and his life had no clear direction.

  “Fuck,” he said. He was still stroking the scapular that wasn’t a scapular. The photo it held was of a young child, maybe three or four years old in a white dress. Faded as it was, it was hard to tell if the child was a boy or girl. The photo was pressed against an envelope with a name written on it in slanted penmanship. Obinna; his name, the one he’d had in another life. Black liked it up here. It was high, his perch, and he remembered maybe a time when he had flown a kite as a boy, his heart soaring with the cheap colored paper—or maybe not. He was having trouble these days separating the real from the imagined. Like the words he could hear now, as clearly as if someone stood next to him, voice soft on the blue light.

  Don’t Forget Me.

  But the words were in a different language, all music. Echefulam. A language he hadn’t heard since his childhood, but one he knew was Igbo, as sure as if he had been born to it. And he had been. His father had been Igbo. At least that’s what he had always told Black. It was all so vague. He had only been seven when his father, Frank, was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam from Caltech where he had been doing postdoctoral research in the newly developed rocket propulsion lab that was subcontracted by NASA. His father had been so proud. Not to go to Vietnam, but to be working for NASA on a space project. Black remembered that much. Remembered his father coming home drunk one night, walking into his bedroom and waking the sleeping Black to tell him in slurred tones:

  “You should be proud, Son, eh. Proud. I am the first African to work on a NASA project. Back home I will be a big man. I na nnu, Obinna?”

  And his Salvadoran mother, standing in the bedroom door, a dark silhouette against the hall light, shouting: “Let the boy sleep, oye, let him sleep!” Retreating she mumbled: “NASA my foot, postdoc my ass, student with no money. What good is NASA with no money.”

  But Black’s father, Frank, reached into the bed and picked Black up and sat him on his knee.

  “Daddy, how come I have an Igbo name and you don’t?”

  “Sir,” Frank said. “Call me sir. You’re not a little boy anymore.”

  “But why?”

  “Little boys shouldn’t ask their fathers questions. America has spoilt everything,” his father grumbled.

  “Mira, leave the boy alone. America has been good to you,” Black’s mother shouted from the hall as she slammed into the bathroom. “Made you a big man.”

  “María, I am talking to my son. Man talk. If we were—”

  “Yes, if we were back in your jungle you would beat me. Fuck you, pendejo.”

  Frank stood up, swaying a little. He wanted to lunge at the bathroom door and scream at María, but instead he smiled unsteadily at Black and led him by the hand out into the back garden. In the darkness beyond it lay the arroyo and the Los Angeles River. Black hadn’t seen the river until he was older, but he knew it was there, because his father talked about it a lot. Complained about how the erosion was eating away at the land and how they would one day slide down the arroyo into the water and be carried off to the Pacific.

  “Lose everything down an endless pit, down that pathetic excuse for a river,” his father would mumble. But this night, as they stood in the back garden and Frank showed Black how to look through the telescope at the night sky, Black was especially excited. He had watched his father build that telescope.

  The main tube of the telescope was an eight-foot-long piece of fiberglass that Frank had made especially just that summer, a few weeks after Black turned seven. That birthday had been different from the others. His father seemed to relax, to let out his breath all at once.

  He talked while he worked, unpacking it onto the worktable he had built for it, the one they would use later for p
icnics, the table Black had lain on looking up at the sky after his father left and never came back.

  “You see, it is important to have everything made by hand. In the old days astronomers built their own instruments,” he said, using micro-calipers and an electric buffing cloth to smooth the fiberglass off just right, washing it in soapy water and drying it off at each stage. “Don’t believe your mother when she talks about God, Son. God is a superstition. The truth is we make our own God, and this is mine: science. Something you can trust, something that doesn’t need faith,” he went on.

  Black looked at him with a blank expression so Frank bent down and gave him a rag, showing him how to wash the telescope with him, how to get a good grip on the slippery tube, cautioning him to wash in one direction only, so that not even the micro-dust from the buffing could be dragged across it, scratching it. Black watched his father and remembered all the bath times Frank had missed because he was working late, or the times when he had been at home but wouldn’t leave his science shows on television, complaining when Black cried as his mother scrubbed a little too hard, getting soap into his eyes. He watched and remembered, and when his father turned away, he picked up a stone and scratched a deep groove in the tube, knowing he would be spanked and barred from the work, but not caring.

  Later, nursing a sore bottom, he watched as Frank tried to save the tube with putty and car filler, smiling at the tears in his father’s eyes. His revenge against his father made the beating he got bearable. He hung around, barred from helping, and watched Frank finish the telescope without him. Watched him build a frame for it from carefully selected pipes and an arc-welding iron he rented from a hardware store.

  “Close your eyes, Obinna,” his father called as he lit the arc-welder, pulling the mask down over his face, his excitement making him forgive Black. But Black didn’t close his eyes. He watched the metal melt into a liquid like hot butterscotch, feeling the sting of the sparks as their brilliance, like an exploding nova, burned.