The Virgin of Flames

by Chris Abani

  And he.

  “I am trying but she won’t come.”

  “Why? Have you been touching yourself in the naughty place?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “Liar!”

  Whack.

  “Please, Mom, please.”

  Whack.

  “Do you see her?”

  Whack.

  “Mom?”

  Whack.

  “Do you see my Lady?”

  Whack.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Where?”

  “Over there, see how the wind is blowing the curtain?” His mother looking to the window.

  “Yes?”

  “That’s the Lady’s robe brushing against it.”

  And his mother; falling to her knees.

  “Madre, Santa Madre.”

  Then looking across at him, a deliciously cunning smile on her face: “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, m’ijo?”

  Looking up through the skylight, Black snapped back to the present. He dropped the rosary beads on the floor and watched hovering planes winking like transient stars. He tried to think of them as fireflies hovering in the wet blackness, but knowing how big they were, his mind couldn’t make the leap. Outside, the drape of night was pinned to the ground by the flat spread of city lights. There was magic here beyond the desire this city wove in the confusion of Art Deco, Hacienda, Lloyd-Wright and ugly sixties Modernist architecture. He ducked back inside, stopping by the photographs of Sweet Girl.

  “The lights are pretty. They make everything look like Christmas,” he said to her frozen face, and smiled.

  Sitting on the floor, he opened up the makeup kit that he had lugged up and pulled out several tubes of lipstick, foundation, blusher, brushes, sponges, mascara and the white face paint with the touch of luminescence he had blended in. Laying them out on the polished wooden floor of the ship, he hummed a Madonna song under his breath.

  Grunting to his feet, he walked over to where Iggy’s wedding dress hung from a nail in the wall. It was still in the cleaner’s cellophane. He had put it back in the cleaner’s cellophane to store it, but he’d taken it out when he brought it home and adjusted the dress carefully to fit him. He had artfully sewn an extra hidden seam into the sides.

  He tore a careful hole in the plastic and put two fingers through to feel the fabric. The lace was rough, like the leaves of the strawberries he drove out to Fresno to pick once. He’d had the dress for months, collecting it from the cleaners. Howie, the Vietnamese owner of D & L Cleaners, knew him, so it wasn’t difficult.

  “Iggy send you?” Howie asked.

  “Yeah,” Black said. “She wants to sell it.”

  “Is a shame to sell your wedding dress. Bad luck,” Howie’s Persian wife said from the back, and it was hard to understand her through the sound of steam and whirring machinery.

  “Ignore her,” Howie said. Turning to his wife he shouted in bad Farsi: “Tow man kharam!”

  If Iggy ever wondered what happened to the dress, or if she knew, which she must, that he picked it up, she never asked. He had done it, he said to himself, because he needed it for the painting. But that wasn’t completely true. He had been collecting various women’s clothing for a while, everything but dresses. He chose the wedding dress because the only dresses he could wear were wedding dresses. Ever since he had first used his mother’s. Over the years he had used different ones but none of them felt right. Felt like his mother’s. He couldn’t use hers because that was what she was buried in. But Iggy’s dress offered the same feeling. He knew that even before he wore or set out to acquire it. He watched the dress in the window of the cleaners for almost a week until he couldn’t shake the haunting. Even then. A week before he plucked up the courage. It hung in the back of his closet all these months until tonight. He’d brought the dress up, along with a blonde wig and the makeup kit, because he wanted to wear it. The feeling was so overwhelming he just followed the impulse. Turning to the wig, he picked it up and brushed the cheap fake hair that snagged and pulled like a doll’s. He put it down.

  Still humming the Madonna tune, he returned to the makeup. Selecting a soft brush, he pulled powder across the roughness of his face. Pulled until his fingers told him that his face was as smooth as a silk stocking. Then he reached for the mascara. Carefully, because he was still afraid of the brush getting in his eye, he applied the thick black makeup. He couldn’t judge how much was too much and only stopped when he felt the mascara pulling his eyelashes together. The choice of lipstick took a long time. Ruby was too red, cherry too bright, pink too cheerleaderish, blue too Goth, peach and caramel were invisible on him. Finally, he selected a purplish burgundy. He liked it. His lips looked like they had been bruised from too much kissing. Turning to the Plexiglas, he stared at himself. He was still too dark. Maybe the dress will change that, he thought.

  He knew why he did this; dressed up in Iggy’s old wedding dress, in any dress. He wasn’t gay, he wasn’t. He was also sure he wasn’t a transvestite. That was Sweet Girl, not him. Black did it to feel safe. That was all, simple really when he thought about it. He did it to revive the magic of the white dress that had protected him from evil until he turned seven. Maybe if he’d continued to wear a dress his father would have come back and his mother wouldn’t have died in that living room in Pasadena when they came to tell her that his father was MIA, presumed dead. Died to be replaced by the woman who’d hurt him until she died, seven years later.

  Taking the dress down, he was careful removing the cellophane.

  “Work your magic,” he mumbled, like a spell into the stiff clean lace, saying a Hail Mary under his breath.

  He dropped the dress over his head, sweating with effort to pull it down without tearing the lace. Even with the adjustment it was still tight. With a final grunt, he reached behind and zipped himself up. Fluffing the wig one last time, he pulled it on. With a dramatic flair, he turned back to the Plexiglas. He wasn’t beautiful, but he was still stunned. He simply didn’t recognize himself; at least not as Black. He began to cry. He struggled against the melting mascara. Pulling himself together, he realized that his face looked even darker against the white dress and blonde hair. He reached for the luminescent face paint. He would need to apply the mascara and lipstick again, he thought, as he rubbed the thick paint on, but that didn’t matter. The result would be worth the effort.

  And it was.

  When he finished and looked up, he was aflame, as though he had become a thing divine. He was trembling so hard he needed a cigarette. Opening the skylight slowly, he scanned for Gabriel. No sign of him. Stuffing the pack of Marlboros and a lighter down his cleavage, he pulled himself out onto the roof of the spaceship. In the wedding dress it was no easy task and he almost tore it a couple of times. Finally he stood there under the moon, and though the rain had slowed to a slight drizzle, the air was still damp. Freedom at last, he thought, and lit his cigarette. A passing police chopper held him in its spotlight for a minute, then the spotlight cut off, replaced by a deeper darkness than before.

  Half blinded as he hurried back into the spaceship, Black didn’t see the people below on Cesar Chavez, kneeling in the middle of the street, staring in openmouthed wonder at the empty air where the apparition had been.

  ten

  dawn.

  A mongrel bird returned to a silent rooftop. A tired angel slept fitfully atop a spaceship, a once white wing hanging down the side, tipped with mud. In the barely darkness below, a lone police car fogged the street with a throaty exhaust. In clumps, like calla lilies waiting for the sun, white-garbed men hovered by the hardware store, not knowing, but believing that the day would bring work. The burrito van turned out its lights: McDonald’s golden arches flickered on. Between this changing of guards, in the gloom of the bus shelter, a persistent cigarette.

  Quiet happened.

  THE UNCONSOLED

  We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.

  —Antonin Artaud


  eleven

  rain.

  Black could hear it drumming on the roof. He woke reluctantly and reaching for the remote control lying on the floor next to the bed, he flicked on the television. On every channel the same breaking story: brush fires were threatening the suburbs and there was a real fear it could spread to LA. As he yawned he wondered why the rain didn’t seem to affect the fire that was consuming whole counties and showing no signs of abating. Probably not raining that far out, he reasoned. His thoughts were confirmed by the images on television: dry brown scrub, dry and on fire. Winter and the Santa Anas drove an evil wind through Southern California, fanning the flames.

  As he watched the perfectly manicured reporter call in her story, he thought it odd she had an umbrella up even though there was no rain. Then he realized it was raining, live embers falling in a drizzle like slow-dying fireflies. Ash. Covering Los Angeles and the Home Counties with the disapproval of a Catholic penance. There was always a fire in California, or a mud slide, or floods or an earthquake, and Black kept jumping channels, looking for something else, but the fire was on every station, each one playing James Taylor, his nasal voice soft under the clipped tones of the news anchors, as he sang: “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” while silent images played: people staring with a primordial fear as fire ate away at their homes.

  Black stretched and got out of bed, walking over to the stove. He cracked his knuckles as he set a saucepan of milk on to heat. When it was hot, he emptied it into a cup with a tea bag in the bottom. While it brewed, he thought how simple things brought him such comfort: a cup of hot tea on an overcast day, a street musician playing a plaintive melody on a flute, or even better, a cello, or the sound of rain chattering on concrete sidewalks. Carrying the mug up to the roof, he climbed the ladder, with difficulty, to the spaceship and sat in the open doorway, legs dangling over the edge.

  Falling away from him, houses spread down the hill like an undecided rash, brown lawns corroding like iron left out in the rain. The dust-heavy birds of paradise and the odd tree in the odd yard looked hopeful. The heat hadn’t arrived to beat everything into clapboard and dirt heat traps, but he knew it would. It was a fact of life here. It sucked.

  Los Angeles in the rain had a certain quality of light to it, a cerulean more atmosphere than presence, unusual for this town that bludgeoned you with everything. From where he sat, even the cars on the snake of the 110 Freeway floated past, hydroplaning in a graceful, silent swan dance. The red trail of their taillights marked every meander of the slow river of black, like fairy lights on a distant shore. This was the one time Los Angeles was honest, open and beautiful.

  Wishing he didn’t have to go out, he drank the last of the tea and snapped the bag out of the teacup onto the roof of The Ugly Store. It split and spread tea leaves in a rough heart shape. He stared at the pattern as it washed away in the rain, wondering if it was an omen. Gabriel fluttered down. Black saw him out of the corner of his eye and got up.

  “Hey, Gabe,” he said. He had taken to talking to Gabriel, though he still avoided looking at him. It was too frightening. “I was just leaving.”

  “Always running away, Black. Just like you did as a boy. You never had the patience to wait for your miracle.”

  “My mother’s miracle, not mine. And why don’t you go bother someone else?”

  “You prayed for me.”

  “I didn’t want you! My mother did!”

  “And yet here I am.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Whatever.” Gabriel sounded bored. “I see those misguided people are still down there,” he cooed.

  Black, thinking Gabriel had turned into a pigeon, looked at him. But Gabriel was still fifteen feet tall, and the hand dangling over his knee was easily the same size as Black’s head. He exclaimed in alarm. Desperate for distraction, he looked down at the street. Even though it had been three weeks since the Virgin was spotted on the roof of the spaceship, the faithful returned every day. Some never left, setting up camp on the street. It was a little disconcerting at first as the makeshift shelters and tents began to spring up along the sidewalk, making the area look like skid row. The local shop owners loved it as they were doing brisk business.

  Black’s attention was drawn to a dog so white it could have been a ghost dog, standing in a break in the crowd on the sidewalk, by a tree. Its head was cocked to one side and its dark eyes were fixed not on the crowd or the street before it, but up, on Black, making his breath catch in his throat, bringing back memories.

  As a thirteen-year-old in East LA, he had stumbled on a dogfight in an abandoned warehouse where he was painting a mural after school. Peering through a hole in the wall, he hadn’t seen much: a lot of men squatting around growling dogs that tore at each other, ripping flesh and fur. The smell was overpowering: the rust of blood and sweat from the cheering men, and something else he could never quite place. The sound they made held a peculiar joy: men cheering for the pain of something other than them, cheering from a place older than the shape it took now. When it was over and all the men had left, Black saw the dog that lost, not quite dead, but dying slowly in a pool of its own blood, whimpering. And Black remembered walking out to it, holding its warm body, feeling it growing cold. But it was the dog’s eyes; the way they wouldn’t let go of his gaze and the infinite sadness of them and something like gratitude. That—and the fact that several other dogs, wild dogs probably, gathered in yawning windows and doorways to watch as though witnessing Black witness the death. Or maybe they had gathered to eat the dying dog, he thought. He didn’t know what to do, so he sang to the dying dog. He sang in the nonsensical sounds he had heard his father sing when he was drunk.

  Leaving the spaceship, Black went back to his apartment, showered and changed into his paint-stained overalls. He scratched his head, a little torn that morning, unable to decide what to work on. He didn’t want to work and toyed with the idea of going to Echo Park, his local park. But with the rain Echo Park would be empty, the ground soggy, grass wet. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the park in the rain, he did. He loved to sit and read in the shade of a large umbrella, a large fifties style thermos of hot chai or coffee warming him. Taking a break he would put away the book, close the umbrella and take out an orange. Peeling it, the mist of citrus spicing the damp air, he would eat it slowly as the rain drenched him, alternating the bites of soft yellow flesh with a sip of the hot tea or coffee.

  “You’ll get pneumonia,” Bomboy said to him when he found out. “You’re not young anymore.”

  Black smiled and said, “It’s like worship. You let the rain wash over you. It’s like that.”

  “Stupid man,” Bomboy mumbled.

  But today, as he dressed, Black thought he should stay in and work. He could grind some dye for his murals. He mixed his own paint, from ground-up pigments and natural dyes like henna, sometimes adding a pinch of cooking spices to really bring out the color—curry or turmeric or saffron—all mixed into varying gum arabic bases whose secret compositions were so closely guarded, Black taught himself to forget them. At least that’s what he told everyone. The truth was he couldn’t remember them so he wrote them out, disguised as cooking recipes, and hid them in the pages of his Caribbean cookbook—the one least likely to be borrowed.

  Each color was designed specifically for a particular part of a particular mural that he might be working on at the time, and each had a different chemical consistency and density so that he could apply the paint in layers that never bled or dried into each other. Like LA, he thought, a segregated city that still managed to work as a single canvas of color and voices. It was a trick he claimed to have learned by studying books on the old fresco painters of Renaissance Italy. It didn’t matter if it was true or not. But he did it because this way, he could build up each mural from the skeleton, if it were a person, layering the musculature, flesh and skin and clothes on with different consistencies of paint. This allowed him to adjust mistakes from the inside out.
Or if he was painting a mural of a landscape or a collage of LA images, he began with the prehistoric, built up through the Gabrieleño and Chumash, through the rancheros and missions, the former slaves and on until he got to the layer he was working on.

  “Psychic history,” he called it.

  “A spell,” Iggy called it.

  They were in agreement.

  He ran his fingers through a pile of ground henna, rubbing the coarse grains together contemplatively. The trouble was that he mixed paint for particular murals, and since he wasn’t working on one, he couldn’t really do that today. He rubbed his hand along his trouser leg smearing henna all over it. Perhaps he would return to working on the installation piece he had set up in The Ugly Store. Covering one whole wall in the café, it measured eleven feet high (the height of The Ugly Store) and thirty feet long (the length of the wall) and was composed entirely of jokes (racist and sexist ones preferably) that he had collected over the years from the walls of men’s rooms in Los Angeles. That was the criteria. At first he had collected them himself but over time, as he had begun the installation, the community of The Ugly Store had started to collect them and pass them on to him. He was firm about their source, men’s public toilets, but flexible about the cities they came from. The best part for him was when women gave him the jokes and graffiti they had snuck into men’s toilets in restaurants and athletic clubs to jot down hurriedly. As Iggy’s fame grew among the Hollywood and “it” crowd, Black began to get them from celebrities.

  Paris Hilton gave him lines from the Hilton Hotel public restrooms across the globe, Aishwarya Rai from the men’s toilets in Mumbai and Bombay, Penelope Cruz from Madrid (all in Spanish), Morgan Freeman from the toilets of river boats, Sharon Osborne gave him a juicy one from Buckingham Palace and just a few days ago, Julie Warner had given him one from the men’s room in Spago’s.

  Running along the bottom of the installation was a border, six feet wide. Entered in like marginalia under the title An Attempted Index of Self-censorship was a list of all the places in the world the text had come from.