The Virgin of Flames

by Chris Abani

  “Those Virgin sightings are something, aren’t they?” she asked.

  “There’s been more than one?”

  “Yep. She’s been appearing all over town. Seems strange to me,” she said.

  “Yeah?” He didn’t sound interested. “You’d think people would care more about the fires.”

  “I suppose,” she agreed.

  “Do you think there’s any truth to it?” he asked distractedly. He was sipping on his tea, scanning the street beyond the window, watching the faithful in their vigil.

  “Who knows?”

  “I have to go,” he said, getting up.

  It was raining again when he climbed into the spaceship, and a strong wind caused it to sway dangerously. Wrapping himself in the scratchy lace of the wedding dress, he thought:

  I’ll fix those loose screws in the morning.

  fourteen

  turgid.

  But not from the usual early morning rush of blood. He sat up and stared at his crotch, wondering if nature meant this as a way to remind early man not to leave the cave without his spear. He stretched, but it only exacerbated his discomfort. Why couldn’t he get off? He was sore from his own efforts and the skin was beginning to tear. Shit. What he wouldn’t give to be a woman right now.

  He skipped his ritual of tea at dawn in the spaceship, choosing to go down to his room and get straight to work mixing up paint for the mural. It was easier to be naked anyway. For the next couple of hours, he wore nothing except a bag of frozen peas tied around his penis with his robe’s belt. As he passed the mirror, he thought he looked ridiculous. He pulled off the bag of peas and stared at himself, remembering this from his childhood: standing in front of a mirror bending his penis back between his legs to make what he called a man pussy, the spreading swell of his balls resembling labia. As he did it now, he remembered his marvel at the smoothness. How much it looked like a vagina. If he were still distended by the time he left, he would have to do that. In the meantime, he reattached the bag of peas, flinching at the cold.

  Not red.

  The color Black was cooking up. A shade, the variation too subtle to be named, perceived only by his discerning eye. The only time he used store-bought paint was to whitewash; all other times, he made his own.

  “Like Leonardo,” he would tell everyone.

  This batch was for the new mural. He’d sketched out a cartoon for it on a ten-foot-wide sheet of rice paper and was considering trying it on a small segment of the river wall before transferring it to Bomboy’s warehouse.

  Black yawned and stretched. He hadn’t slept well. Dreams of Iggy’s wedding dress chasing him through a desert kept it fitful and restless. The desert floor was littered with the skeletons of sea horses, and the tiny bones cut his feet. That was when he realized that he was naked in the dream, and that the wedding dress was holding a meat cleaver. He decided to make some coffee, spooning too much into the machine. It would be bitter but it would wake him up. He set it on and returned to work on the paint. Surrounded by the warm smell of percolating coffee, the sharpness of turpentine and the gummy sweetness of the dyes, he drew different imaginary studies of Fatima. Unlike his usual murals, this time he knew there would be no layers below Fatima, other than those of her own body. This was freedom.

  This was love.

  Finishing with the mixture, he left it on the worktable to air. All his paints needed time to air, for the mixture to breathe. Even though he knew it was probably a purely scientific process, he liked to think it was mystical. He showered quickly, wincing as the water and soap stung the raw flesh around his penis, where his efforts at release had abraded the skin. It was still erect, but not as full and hard as when he woke up. Nonetheless, he had to wear a couple pairs of boxers, stuffing his penis back, bending it up to his ass. It was uncomfortable, like he was riding a half cucumber, though he thought half a cucumber was a slight exaggeration. Dressed, finally, he grabbed his keys, closed the door and headed downstairs. He wanted to go to Ravi’s. Pick up some more dye. There was almost no traffic, which in LA was spooky, but it did mean that he made good time to Ravi’s. He parked right under the pink and orange sign that said simply: RAVI’S.

  The smell of burning frankincense greeted him as he stepped into the store. It was small, and shelves running along the walls and in the middle of the floor cramped it even further. It seemed like the store sold everything. There were jars of pickles and chutneys made of every fruit and vegetable from innocent cucumber to lush mango, from mild to hot. Tins of beans, sardines and tomatoes hassled loose packets of curry, turmeric and chilies in every shade of green, red and yellow. Manioc roots and potatoes lounged next to onions and coconuts wearing brown husky shells in cardboard boxes on the floor beneath the shelves. There were magazines displaying women whose veils covered more than their scanty dresses did. Newspapers in scripts that curved away in mystery like road signs to nirvana, videotapes of Bollywood films, music tapes, Korans, malas and other prayer beads scattered through the shop. Next to the till and the statue of Ganesh, in an open cardboard crate, fresh naan breathed.

  As he searched for the kegs of pigment and powdered dye, he kept shaking one leg, like a dog, to ease the pressure in his pants. He wasn’t sure what set off his erection again, the smell of incense or the seductive eyes of the women on the Bollywood video covers. Shit, he thought, how do drag queens cope?

  He bought an ounce of powdered saffron for twenty dollars, and some pigments in blue, ochre, green and a color that looked like amber, listening while Ravi warned him against putting too much water into the mix. It was the same every time. At least since the time that Ravi, confusing him for Indian, asked: “Where are you from? I’m from Kerala.”

  “I’m not Indian, man,” Black said. “At least not your kind of Indian.”

  He got the feeling Ravi didn’t believe him. He figured the constant formality was his way of letting Black know.

  “Just a pinch, no more—otherwise it’ll be unusable, yaar?”

  “Sure.” God, my dick hurts, Black thought.

  “And for every cup of water, you need about one spoon of gum arabic or a cup of egg whites, although milk and honey will work too, yaar?”

  “Sure,” Black said, thinking, Am I mixing paint or making tea? God, he wanted to whip out his dick and beat Ravi to death. Maybe then I’ll get off, he thought, as he left, the frustration like grit in his eye. He rubbed at it, the memory of the man masturbating in the bathroom returning. Back at Bomboy’s warehouse Black mixed up a solution in a plastic drum at the base of the wall, the black paint for the skeleton. He dipped a metal pail into the drum, half filling it.

  On the floor, at the base of the wall, spread out like a picnic blanket, was the new cartoon of Fatima. Black lit a cigarette and sat there on the ground, metal pail beside him, staring alternately at the wall and then the cartoon. When it seemed like he had turned to stone, like he would never move again, he stubbed out the cigarette resolutely, grabbed the pail with his left hand and with his right swung himself up onto the wall.

  He hung on the vast white expanse of wall like a bug on a windscreen, hands moving fast, like a blur. One holding, one painting, alternating. Bomboy came out to watch him, blood dripping from the cleaver he held. Across the river, at the school, teachers and students pressed their faces against the chain-link fence, entranced by the spectacle.

  A fifty-foot-high skeleton in black emerged in a very short time. Black rappelled down from the wall every so often to fill up the metal pail from the drum. Finally he was done. He stood back from the wall and lit another cigarette.

  Though the skeleton was huge, it was delicate. In the gathering dusk, it seemed almost frail. Like the giant Brontosaurus skeleton in the Natural History Museum on Exposition. Like a sneeze could knock it all over. Black smiled happily, gathered his tools together and headed back for his van. It was parked on the lip of the bridge.

  fifteen

  there was an altar.

  Black could see
it from the bridge. It wasn’t an altar in the grand sense. It wouldn’t inspire the slaughter of a bull to Mithras, or the ripping out of young virgins’ hearts. It wouldn’t even make it in the side chapel of a Catholic church. Nor was it a cairn, that purposeful collection of stones the faithful leave on mountains. This altar was ordinary and commonplace.

  Black was curious. He had never seen an altar outside a church in East LA. Sure, there were bathtub Mary’s in people’s backyards, with the white and blue plaster Virgin garlanded in garish Christmas lights, and even the odd cluster of candles and flowers at scenes of shootings or car accidents, but never this deliberate concentration for its own sake. This was new to him. He decided to take a closer look.

  As he made his way down to where the bridge met the road, he wondered if the altar marked one of the Virgin sightings. It certainly fit the pattern that Iggy explained to him. Maybe there was something to the rumors, though he couldn’t quite imagine what the Virgin would do in East LA. It wasn’t that there weren’t enough devout followers; she probably had her largest constituency in Los Angeles right here. It was just that every time he tried to visualize her, he saw one of the plaster statues from his Catholic childhood in a church that wore a blue robe marked by poverty and bullet holes from drive-bys. There were fingers and even part of her nose missing where the plaster had been chipped from age and careless handling, leaving the rusting chicken wire frame exposed. That Virgin hadn’t inspired rapturous devotion, at least not in him. What he felt for her was a mild compassion, like the vague dismay he felt when he heard that his uncle William, whom he’d never met, had died.

  On his ninth birthday he’d received the call: in mass on Sunday. Already tired from two hours of praying at home before church. Two hours of kneeling on sharp pebbles, sackcloth under his nightshirt chafing with an infernal itch that he wasn’t allowed to scratch. Two hours of saying Ave María’s trying not to count them off as he progressed down the rosary because if he seemed too pleased that it was coming to an end, his mother would add an extra chaplet. Calling, calling, calling: but still no Virgin and no sign of an angel, just a fly buzzing annoyingly around his head, resting on his forehead to drink from his beads of sweat. Two hours of having hot wax from the fast melting candles dripped onto his skin, his arms, stomach and sometimes even his penis. Acts of contrition, his mother explained gently.

  He was tired from the sermon that had been going for nearly as long as his morning torture, it seemed; tired of this charismatic movement and the small fiery-eyed priest who was pounding on the pulpit, screaming, “To the Blood of Jesus! The Power of God! The Savior of the Heart!”; this priest calling for a miracle, for the “Holy Ghost to rain down Fire!; to show the unbelievers!; to rout Baal from the hearts of the congregation in Jesus’ Name!”

  At that exact moment, as the priest was thundering from the altar, clear as a bell, Black heard the Virgin call to him. Not just any Virgin though. Not the Fatima Virgin, or the Lourdes Virgin, but this white-faced, red-lipped crumbling plaster Virgin of indeterminate pedigree. A general Virgin, all Virgins as it were, for the price of one.

  She asked him to free her. Demanded. Ordered. Compelled. He didn’t believe it at first, thinking his mother’s dream to see the Virgin was making him see a live one in a plaster statute. But the voice was real enough, as was his plan to free her.

  His mother was on her knees, eyes closed, pounding out the act of contrition on her chest, oblivious to the world when he snuck away. Stopping in front of the statue, Black lifted one of the votive candles and placed it behind her, by the old parchment dry robes she wore and snuck back to his place next to his mother. The flame caught just as the priest was yelling at Jesus to come to his aid and show the congregation a sign, “to come like Yahweh to Elijah,” in a voice all fire.

  So.

  She became the Virgin of Flames.

  Perhaps it had been a miracle.

  Black turned off the road and doubled back under the bridge. The area was mostly full of warehouses and abandoned train tracks, bounded on one side by the river. He walked to the water and stood on the concrete lip of the culvert. Built in the thirties by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to control the floods, the river fought its concrete prison, changing course every few decades. Even now, looking down, he noted the slight curve and sway in the culvert wall, as though the river were an overfed python turning sluggishly to digest its prey. From above, it looked like one straight concrete line, but up close, it was possible to see the slight variations. This River was alive, this River was here before anyone knew this was a River, before anyone saw it and said, River. And its personality shaped this city. Was this city.

  Black turned his attention back to the altar. The front yard of the disused factory was haunted by dust and the acrid smell of piss. Black stood by the gate, which was listing on its side, hesitant. He approached the rusting metal drum that was the center of the altar. On the top, in the dust that sheathed it, was the clear imprint of two feet, and he wondered if the Virgin left footprints. Someone had spray painted the side of the rusting metal drum: Ave María. The drum was attended by a couple of candles in tall glass sheaths wearing images of the Virgin and Jesus of the Sacred Heart. They had burned down to a puddle. A bouquet of flowers was wilting in the heat.

  Pulling up a small wooden crate, he sat down in front of the altar. He didn’t know why, or what he was doing. He just sat. It was hot out, even in the gathering dusk. He began sweating. A slight unease settled over him. But he sat. And on, and on. And then he realized he had been here before. Years before. There wasn’t an altar then, but he had been here. The memory that came flooding back was so vivid, so real.

  “What the fuck!?”

  Black spun round straight into the mouth of a gun barrel. There were many ways to describe the moment. He would find all of them later. Catalog them, classify them, analyze them, name them. Terror, fear, life flashing before his eyes, certainty, tunnel vision: all of these and more. But right then, all he could think was how cold the metal felt on his nose as he turned into it. How cold on such a hot day. He knew then that death wasn’t just a metaphor. And there was another thought. How much he had loved bananas as a boy. Part of him studied the face of his aggressor, searching perhaps for any sign of leniency, of compassion. There was none. Then the two parts came back together with the suction of a vacuum cleaner and suddenly he felt himself rushing down a dark tunnel. Then he was back by the altar, feeling the persistent, insistent pressure of the gun barrel.

  “Please,” he said. It was barely a sound.

  The gun was held by an overweight young man with a shaved head. From the baggy shirt over a white T-shirt, baggy jeans, Timberland boots and the tattoos on his arms and the bandana around his neck, Black guessed he was a gangbanger. His eyes were obscured by dark glasses.

  “Shut the fuck up, puto!” Bandana said.

  That he hadn’t been shot yet was a good sign, a reassuring one. Black knew that if the young man meant to kill him, he would be dead already. And yet in many ways this situation was just as dangerous. He had clearly stumbled into some gang territory or on to some drug site, but if the worry were about business, he would have been executed already. This was more a pissing contest, or as Iggy would say: “Willy waving.” He had to be careful, though.

  “Please,” he said, tone as quiet as possible. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t nobody care about that, cuño,” Bandana said, slapping Black across the face with the flat of the gun barrel. Black grunted as he felt the metal cut his lip.

  “Take off your belt,” Bandana said.

  Black’s trousers, liberated from their belt, fell to the ground. Bandana smiled.

  “Take out your dick,” he said.

  Black hesitated. Bandana picked up the discarded belt and whipped Black across the face, the heavy buckle drawing blood.

  “Your dick, puto, now!”

  Black pulled his dick through the gap in his Y-fronts. He had a partial erection.r />
  “Please,” he said.

  Bandana kicked him and he fell over, curling up into a fetal position, coughing.

  “Get up.”

  Black struggled to his knees. He was looking straight at the young man, but the only detail that stood out vividly was the bandana. He started to sob as Bandana loosened his belt and pulled his fully erect dick out. He waved Black closer with the gun barrel. Still on his knees, Black shuffled over.

  “Closer,” Bandana said.

  Black shuffled forward.

  “Closer.”

  Black could smell the musk from Bandana’s dick.

  “You know what to do, cabrón,” Bandana said.

  When Black opened his mouth to receive Bandana, he heard the priest in his imagination: body of Christ. Amen, he said aloud.

  “I knew you was a fag,” Bandana said, thrusting into Black’s mouth.

  Mushrooms, Black thought in spite of himself. It tastes like mushrooms. And also the red ants he would burn with matches as a child, their acrid scent furring the roof of his mouth like guilt. And he wanted to gag, and he wanted more. Like the wood of the cross his mother would force into his mouth to make him have visions, Black could feel Bandana hardening in his mouth. It felt like home, and he lost himself until the sting of the gun on his cheek.

  “Watch your teeth, mothafucker.”

  He pulled away. Stared at the wet hardness swaying before him. Bandana smiled.

  “You like that, eh?” he said, pushing Black down roughly, onto his back on the concrete floor. A piece of glass from a broken bottle dug into his back and he relaxed into the pain, protecting himself from the stab of Bandana. He didn’t feel him going in, just the cool run of tears down his face and the abrasive rub on the inside, a burning, which felt right. He was going to hell anyway. Bandana was sweating over him, pushing, straining with a desperation near tears. Then Black’s left hand, with no help from him, began to stroke Bandana’s hair. And Bandana was coming in spasms that seemed to shake the very foundations of the bridge. He lay slumped over Black for a few minutes, then pushing the snout of the gun into the ground he pushed off and up. He straightened his clothes. Looking down at Black, who was still naked, he smiled.