The Virgin of Flames

by Chris Abani

  Then the mirrors were laid, one up and one down.

  “Finest craftsmanship. I should have ground them myself, but the Germans are so good I don’t need to,” he explained to Black. But Black had lost interest. He wanted ice cream and could hear the truck getting closer, but he knew his father wouldn’t spring for it and his mother hated sweets. When Frank finished he didn’t let Black anywhere near the telescope. He never would. The scratch, a never completely disguised scar, was like a wall between them.

  But this night, standing hand in hand with his father in the backyard, promised to be different. Frank handed Black his beer bottle while he fussed with the telescope, swinging it around in tight circles over a particular spot of sky, looking for something that was a mystery, while Black shivered in the slight cold, feeling the beer bottle’s chill. Finally Frank called to him.

  “Obinna, bia, come and see.”

  Black walked over. It was a nice telescope with a small eyepiece about three feet up its sleek black side, and Black had to stand on tiptoe to reach.

  “See?”

  Black felt his stomach fall away as he squinted through the telescope and saw an eye, all smoke and amber and blue fire staring back. Frank laughed when Black squealed.

  “Is that God?”

  “No, Son. That’s the Cat’s Eye Nebula.”

  “What’s a nebula?”

  Frank smiled and picked Black up, swinging him onto his shoulders.

  “Always asking questions,” his father said, smiling.

  “You’re just like me, you know? That’s what your name means. Obinna: his father’s heart.”

  “You’re silly, Daddy. I mean, sir,” Black said.

  Frank laughed and began to point out the stars in the night sky.

  “Over there, in the shape of a lopsided house, is Cepheus, though the house is really a man upside down.”

  “Who, Daddy?”

  “Cepheus was a king who sacrificed his daughter Andromeda to a sea serpent to save his people. But Perseus saved her and killed the serpent.”

  “I don’t like Cepheus.”

  Frank smiled in the dark and squeezed Black’s leg.

  “I don’t think Cepheus likes himself either. I always think he is upside down because he’s hanging his head in shame.”

  Black clapped happily.

  “That’s right, Daddy,” he said. “Just like me when I am naughty.”

  “Yes, just like that,” his father said, fighting the urge to tell Black to call him sir. “And that one,” he continued, “is the little dipper.”

  “Do the Igbo have names for stars?” Black asked.

  The question took Frank by surprise and he hesitated a moment before replying.

  “Of course. The little dipper is called the small drinking gourd. Over there is Draco, the dragon, which in Igbo is Ekeoku, the serpent of fire whose body is the endless darkness with the glowing jewel of fire on its head. If we ever meet that serpent the whole world ends.”

  “I’m scared, Daddy.”

  “Don’t be, Son. I’m right here,” his father said, tearing suddenly. He was glad Black was on his shoulders and couldn’t see his face. There was an uneasy silence between them, and then a shooting star arced past.

  “Quick, make a wish,” Frank said.

  Black closed his eyes tight and wished hard, his knees pressing into Frank’s face from the effort. When he opened his eyes, he said:

  “How come you know all the stars, Daddy? Are you a spaceman?”

  “No, Son. But I would love to fly away in a spaceship.

  See the universe. One day, I’m going to do it. Build my own spaceship. Right here in this backyard. Just fly away.”

  “Just fly away, Daddy,” Black repeated, giggling.

  When María came out to call them inside, warning against the cold, her voice was soft. Like she had been sleeping. Black wished now, as he had then, that there were more nights like that. He was stroking the plastic patch around his neck and he turned it over and over. He wasn’t sure why he wore it all the time, so close to his heart. Maybe it was an anchor to remind him that there had once been certainties in his life.

  Echefulam.

  Don’t Forget Me.

  The word unfurled on his tongue like an origami ball of paper opening into a flower with the wet of speech. The voice in his head was a breath on ice; faint, it resonated in him with all the timbre of a man’s voice. His father’s voice speaking as he left for a war that Black had just been born into. There were so many things he wanted to say to his father, but words were never his strength. At least not since the prayers his mother forced him to say before the Virgin, beating him when he resisted, when he got tired, beating him it seemed almost for the pleasure of doing it. But all that happened later. After his father didn’t come back from Vietnam. After they lost the small house in Pasadena when the bank foreclosed on it. After they moved to East Los Angeles. After. After. After.

  All he had now was this nameless and shapeless desire and the memory of strong hands, like his father’s, strong hands and black and a face rough with beard and soft with tears, and lips full with the knowledge, whispering: Echefulam. And his mother crying in the corner, crying and hurting in a way that held all possibility. Was it true? Or did he just invent it all? Wasn’t he too young to remember? But yes: there had been tears. Definitely: tears and strong hands and the rough of a beard.

  Rubbing his stubble thoughtfully, Black was glad the voice wasn’t a constant part of him. He heard it only when he reminisced about the past, about who he might have been. He returned to the present and the sprawling vista; he had an almost unimpeded view of downtown LA, parts of the 110 Freeway and the River. The city’s planners had forgotten this part of the city; anywhere else and he would have needed planning permission for the spaceship, but not here.

  He stood up, head sticking out of the skylight, and studied the city as he smoked. It was colder. He felt sure there would be rain. Between tokes his breath was faint on the near dark air. When he was ten, when he still lived in Pasadena with the River behind the house, there was a long cold spell and at dusk, mist, no stronger than a runner’s pant on the air, would come, and with it the fireflies. When he stood really still in the middle of the back lawn, they alighted on his body. Arms spread, festooned with blinking insects, he imagined that he was an airplane, or a rock star, the deeper beauty of the gift eluding him.

  seven

  flat.

  The roof of The Ugly Store lit by the early morning sun and Black, supine in the shade of the spaceship. This was a near daily ritual for him: a mug of hot tea and a cigarette here on the roof before his morning workout. From up here, the city fell away to one side, the river, the other. Black loved Los Angeles; the expansiveness of it, like a sneeze still tickling at the back of his sinuses, able to become anything, or nothing. He loved that. The feeling that he could become the person he always wanted to be, even though nothing in his life pointed to it.

  Finishing his tea, he placed his empty mug on the ledge carefully. Kicking at the pigeons roosting on the small green square of carpet he had hauled up here for his practice, he settled into a horse stance, hands in prayer pose in front of him, muscles rippling, veins waking slowly to crawl up and down his forearms like inquisitive worms. He took a deep breath and began the sequence of movements that made up his practice.

  A mixture of kung-fu katas, yoga and tai chi, the movements were meant to give him a dancer’s fluidity. But in these practice sessions he was anything but graceful. His near six-foot heavyset frame didn’t make him clumsy because when he walked, he moved with the ease of an animal. Ease, however, wasn’t grace.

  Mercifully, it began to rain.

  It was a painful sight: him leaping and cavorting, hissing and pointing open-palmed sabers into the air, eyes intense and glazed with pleasure and his body glistening from rain and sweat, and Gabriel, who appeared among the pigeons in his humanoid form, tut-tutted.

  “Why?” he asked.r />
  Black ignored him and continued moving awkwardly. The pigeons cooed sadly and looked away, embarrassed for him. Half an hour later, he made his way through the rooftop door, downstairs to his room. A couch pushed up against one wall and a bed against the other took up most of the room. Along the other wall were his old and heavy rolltop sewing machine and a worktable where he mixed paint and which held mounds of colored pigments in bowls. The only bare wall he used to hold canvases and it was splattered with paint. Next to it was the low cabinet that held the television, stereo system and the wig stand wearing the Mil Máscaras Luchador wrestling mask that Iggy had given him because she said it reminded her of him. He knew why. He had turned up on her doorstep one night, his face bleeding, his clothes torn. He didn’t know why he had come to her, to The Ugly Store. Perhaps he came because everyone in the neighborhood talked about her generosity. Maybe it was something else: she wasn’t a complete stranger to him. He had lived in the neighborhood since he settled down there at twenty, five years after he had run away to ride the trains across America. He’d seen Iggy many times as he went about his business, but he had never spoken to her or approached her until that night sixteen years before when he knocked on her door. She took him in without question and after cleaning his wound she gave him the back room on the condition that he begin to pay rent within the month. He never really knew what drove her to be the way she was, or why she had been so kind to him, but he knew she gave him the mask because he kept so much of himself hidden.

  “Like me, true mystery,” she’d said.

  He looked away from the mask to where the acoustic guitar he had never learned to play leaned against the couch. Next to the guitar, in a neat row, were three headless mannequin torsos that he sometimes used as models for the occasional more formal portraits that brought in good rates.

  A small fan hummed on the pattern-cutting table in the corner. It wasn’t that hot, but Black always liked it cool. Next to it was a small case, a valise that looked like the ones Hollywood makeup artists toted around. It was half open and bottles and brushes peeked out. It had everything. Same as with the pros. In the business it was called the temporary face-lift kit.

  Also on the desk, in piles on the floor around the room, crammed onto too-small cases, were books. In every imaginable binding and in every state—new, battered, hard-backs, paperbacks. Black loved books and he loved to read, but sometimes he loved books more than he loved to read. And sometimes, what he loved most about books was the space they left for him between the reading and the imagining. Sometimes he lived there more than anywhere else. He toyed once or twice with the idea of opening an antiquarian bookshop. He never did, because he imagined that in Los Angeles nobody would buy books. Perhaps, he joked, he could just sell carefully aged covers wrapped around suitably sized pieces of wood—or old videotapes.

  Scattered around the worktable were several articles of women’s clothing, collected at different times and places across the city: bikini tops and bottoms filched from Santa Monica Beach, sometimes from the women he initiated; G-strings and lacy bras from Charlie’s; a tank top and one blue garter of unknown origin, but found in the bins around the fashion district. When he took them he told himself it was for art. Parts of women he wanted to incorporate into paintings. He picked up the blue garter and toyed with it for a moment before putting it down.

  Pulling the Luchador mask on, he sat at the workbench and stared at the large sprawl of rice paper on the wall for the Virgin cartoon that Bomboy’s summons had interrupted. He approached it and with deft assured strokes, drew lines across the material in charcoal, neat straights and abrupt crosses. But instead of the Virgin, something else was forming or trying to form. A being both Virgin and not and closer to the profane than the sacred yet holding the two. The shape was elusive and though he rubbed out and resketched lines, it was unyielding. He paused. If he couldn’t find her body in his body on the paper, perhaps he would find it in the space where the paper had been. It didn’t make any real sense, but he knew that something had to give.

  He picked up a pair of scissors and weighed the reassurance of its heavy sharpness for a moment before letting the metal beak bite into the paper. He smiled at the satisfying crunch. Something about the weight of scissors and its bite filled him with lust. He hadn’t had sex in a while. God, I need to get over this obsession with Sweet Girl and find a real girlfriend, he thought. But for now, he had to do something. He looked at his watch: it was nearly one. If he left now, he could still catch the lunch special at Brandy’s. If she still offered it, that is. He hadn’t been there for so long. He found her name in the classified section of the LA Weekly years before. That first time she purred on the phone in a voice that made him feel like a schoolboy, making him sweat so much he showered twice before going round. He’d used his best cologne and stopped to buy her flowers. He was surprised to see that she wasn’t much older than he was. He hadn’t been able to get a hard-on, despite the blowjob she gave him that lasted for thirty minutes. And even though she’d charged him, she was kind and offered to share her crank with him, an offer he declined. And then when she got high, she stood on the coffee table in her modest living room and quoted Shakespeare at him: whole sections from Twelfth Night. Viola was her favorite character and as he watched her, he began to feel himself getting aroused. From then on, until he stopped going to her, she was Viola to him. That had been years ago. But he felt he needed her now. He stopped just before the door and lit a cigarette. Stepping out he took a deep breath and blew it out with some smoke.

  Los Angeles smelled like wet dog.

  Getting off at Ninth and Santee he walked up to Los Angeles Street and hanging a left, headed up to Sixth. On the way he passed the usual homeless crowd shuffling through the streets in the shadows of the skyscrapers. They ignored him as they picked through the discarded offal of the fashion district. He guessed he didn’t look like he had any spare change, or the propensity to spare it if he did. Prostitutes, mostly junkies pimped by the gangs that ran these streets, called softly to him from the shadows, careful to be ambiguous just in case he was working vice. He paused in front of the barbershop opposite Coles, under the sign that announced: NIGHT OWL BARBERSHOP, OPEN 24 HRS, which was of course a lie because in all the time he had been coming here, it had never been open. It was probably a prop left over from a movie shot here sometime in the past. This was a favorite location for gritty downtown shots and the walls in Coles were lined with autographed photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger and other stars, hanging out between takes, drinking and sampling the French dip sandwich that was Coles’s other claim to fame.

  He crossed the street, stepped over a fresh river of piss coming from a homeless drunk leaning against a bus-stop sign, and walking past Coles, went round the corner to a big metal door. It led to a hallway and an elevator that stopped at fashionable lofts on every floor. He buzzed Brandy.

  “Yeah?” Her voice sounded bored.

  Probably high, he thought.

  “Hey, Brandy. It’s Black.”

  The door clicked open.

  He had never fucked Brandy twice in one visit. He never had the heart for it. Shame made it hard to get it up more than once. But an hour later, she came three times, while he wasn’t relieved. Each time, visions of the Virgin would come as he thrust into Brandy and though they drove him wild, he could neither find relief nor stop the visions. Tired, he drank bottle after bottle of beer but nothing helped. Even with the windows completely open, he felt himself suffocating in the heat. Whether from the city or himself, he couldn’t tell. Still the Virgin’s smile filled his head, her eyes boring into him.

  And.

  Brandy was laughing, with pleasure or derision, he couldn’t tell at first. But her question made it clear.

  “What’s the matter? Did you take Viagra or something?”

  “What?”

  “Erections may last four hours or more?” she said, cracking up at her recitation of the television ad.

  “Shu
t up!” he said, rubbing his dick. He was still turgid. Inflamed.

  She pushed him off of her and rolled him onto his back. She straddled him and stuck her finger up his ass.

  “Do you want me to fuck you? Is that what you want?” she said.

  “Bitch!” he said, pushing her off of him violently. She fell onto the floor. He was on her in a second, fist raised. The laughter died on her face, replaced with something between fear and desire. He brought his knuckles down on the wooden floorboard by her head, splintering it and cutting himself. He pulled her up and threw her back on the bed muttering, “bitch,” over and over under his breath. With something like cruelty, he sweated between Brandy’s meaty legs, pounding himself to oblivion, but there was no release. Exhausted, he stopped, crawling off of her to collapse in a chair in the corner. With a contented smile, she rolled over and was asleep in an instant.

  He stared at Brandy, revulsion acrid in his mouth. He pulled his clothes on, threw some money on the nightstand and left. He walked for miles until he came to the main train track that ran alongside the abandoned docks on the River. This was where Bomboy’s illegal but very profitable Halal abattoir was.

  Standing there, under the rusty dinosaur skeletons of disused cranes and the cramped hope of empty warehouses, he lit a cigarette, sucking on it greedily. Melancholy filled him like a wave, like a dream of the sea, which was more real than the sea. He decided that when he finished the cigarette he would throw himself into the River. Heaving from the effort, he climbed up a crane, the rust coming away in flakes of dry blood. At the top he paused to catch his breath. He was about to edge out to the rim when he saw Gabriel alight there. Without looking directly at him, Black stood there screaming in frustration, his voice drowned by the passing trains. Spent, he began the climb down.

  God, he hated angels.

  eight

  there was something like a train.