The Virgin of Flames

by Chris Abani

  “Don’t thank me.”

  And he was gone. In this memory, Black lay in the dark, on the floor for hours. Around his head, a fly buzzed with the insistence of a guardian angel. The angel spoke.

  “Relax,” he said.

  “If any of your limbs should offend, cut if off and throw it away. It is better to enter life crippled . . .” something else said. Something inside him.

  “Than to have both hands and feet and be cast into eternal damnation. Matthew,” Black said. And he made his way up, to the top of the bridge. Climbing the balustrade that hung over the River, Black hung there for a long time.

  “Jump,” the thing inside him said.

  “Rest,” Gabriel said.

  “Die,” the thing inside him said.

  “Live,” Gabriel buzzed.

  Black swiped at the fly that was Gabriel. He put his hand in his pocket, felt the knife. A limited edition original Spirit of the Navajo knife by the Franklin Mint. He folded the blade out. It was thin and perhaps two inches long; no more. On one side in English was the word: Freedom. On the other, in Navajo: A-zeh-ha-ge-yah. Which really meant escape, but Black didn’t know that.

  “Forget,” Gabriel said.

  But Black tottered on the edge of the bridge, unbalanced. To pull himself back, he pressed the blade hard against his face and felt the blood, like tears run down. The pain pulled him back, gave him back his name.

  “I am Black,” he said. “I am Black!”

  He climbed back over the side of the balustrade, pulling himself with both arms, and stood leaning over the bridge.

  “I am Black,” he said.

  But still he tottered, able to fall over into the void at any moment. Then he felt a soft, but rough, wetness on his palm. He looked down. A black-and-white mongrel was licking his palm, whimpering softly. Black bent to the dog. Bent and fell back onto the concrete of the bridge, and the dog was licking his face.

  “I am Black,” he said to the dog.

  “But not your heart,” Gabriel buzzed.

  That buzzing pulled Black back to the present, to Gabriel, as a fly, buzzing around his head. Black shuddered. He had gone for years without having to face the memory of that night. He let out a high-pitched scream that followed him as he stumbled up Cesar Chavez, past the fortress of the County Prison with its arrow slit windows and past Union Station. By the Pueblo on the corner of Alameda he ran into a crowd surrounding a maríachi troupe. The crowd was large and covered the sidewalk, spilling into the street. He hated maríachi music. Pushing through the crowd, his eye caught a young girl standing off to the edge of the crowd. There was nothing special about her except her eyes, which burned like two coals, and the space her aura made in the crowd around her. He stopped to stare at her, suddenly oblivious of the crowd and the people jostling him. Something made him want to save her. No, he wanted her to save him. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  She stared straight back at him.

  sixteen

  no crow dies alone.

  That’s what Gabriel told Black when he asked him why he wouldn’t leave him alone.

  “The others don’t help. They just gather to watch. To sing it along the dark path.”

  Black was sitting on the rail overlooking the 101 North. Gabriel could tell Black wanted to jump, and he couldn’t care less, but this was his job: to make a perfunctory attempt at saving humanity from itself. He was perched on the rail next to Black, wearing his pigeon disguise. Anyway, deep down Gabriel knew Black wouldn’t jump. If he was going to, he would have by now. All these years of carrying the darkness like a perverted torch. All these years and still searching. He sighed, thinking humans always did things the hard way.

  “Some comfort,” Black said. The metal rail was cold and hard against his still turgid dick. Every time he shifted, he winced because he pinched his balls.

  “What do you want from me? I’m a fucking pigeon.”

  “That’s another thing. Why do you appear as a pigeon to me?”

  “Only sometimes, though, right? I mean that’s the caveat. Only sometimes.”

  “Still, it’s doubtful Mohammed or Mary would have taken you so seriously if you’d appeared to them as a pigeon.”

  Gabriel shrugged. At least Black thought he shrugged, but he couldn’t be sure. He was a pigeon.

  “To each his own hallucination,” he said.

  “Oh, watch it there, buddy! That’s blasphemy.”

  Gabriel cooed. Black lit a cigarette. The night sky was a navy blue sheet with the freeway for a seam.

  “Do you want to see what I showed the old prophets?” Gabriel asked, after a while.

  Black shrugged.

  “Sure.”

  “Follow me then,” Gabriel said, his words nearly lost in the flutter of wings. In the distance, the moon trembled on the lip of the Hollywood sign.

  seventeen

  angels Walk.

  Black and Gabriel on a quest unfolding like a rosary. And these were the stops. The beads unfolding in sweat-grained piety. These were the stops, not the steps, the careful measure of each, the small steps in which it was done and undone, the subtle movements that made and unmade a life, like the constant seismic tremors of this land, this city. No, these were the major stops; the steps were a different measure. Each stop was a mystery: The Ronald Reagan Building. Biddy Mason Park. Bradbury Building. Victor Clothing Company. Million Dollar Theatre. Grand Central Market. Angels Flight. Hotel Inter-Continental, Los Angeles. Museum of Contemporary Art. Watercourt at California Plaza. Wells Fargo Center. Wells Fargo History Museum. ARCO Center. Ketchum YMCA. Westin Bonaventure Hotel. Bunker Hill Steps. Library Tower. One Bunker Hill. The Gas Company Tower. Regal Biltmore Hotel. Pershing Square. Jewelry District. Oviatt Building. Pacific Center. Los Angeles Public Library and Maguire Gardens. Macy’s Plaza. Fine Arts Building. Home Savings of America Tower. Seventh Street Metro Center. Citicorp Plaza. Seventh Market Place. Visitor Information Center. Union Station/Gateway Transit Center. Olvera Street. All the stops, when connected, traced the outline of a plump bird on a branch. A dove? Or vermin? Say, a pigeon?

  Stop.

  The Joyful Mysteries.

  Step. In the Alley on Santee, plump Armenian matrons sorted through clothes they only dreamed about fitting into. Pausing in a cosmetics store, they passed around a small mirror, and tubes of lipstick they would not buy. Tired, they went to the Starbucks and sucked on ice-cold caramel frappuccinos. Step. A dog. Alone. Bit down on a flea. Shook itself. Trotted off. Nothing more. Step. A man with no teeth called notes through gummy lips on an imaginary bass that his fingers plucked in the air, forgotten by the world, forgotten and forgetting everyone and everything but the music and the full-bellied curvaceous belle he had maybe plucked once. Step. A girl outside the public library on Fifth, in the garden of water and concrete, bent over a book spread like an eagle’s span, discovered wonder. Step. That trout was plentiful in streams an hour from the city. Step. That sometimes the clouds were near enough to touch. Step. The simple pleasure of a hummingbird flying round and round the light on a porch. Step. The way an old Victorian house in green wood leaned against a fence barely holding back a strip mall. And the trees on this street, thick and shady, said that once somebody had loved this place, paid attention, and in that moment, even here, there was hope for the eternal. Step. A Winchells donut shop where women sat and nursed cups of coffee and where men, pretending they were long lost friends or family, bought the fourteen-doughnut Winchell’s dozen and picked up these prostitutes. Sweets for my sweet. Sugar for my honey. Step. Lavender jacaranda blossoms like mauve gossamer falling. Step. And step, the boundless joy of a cold Coca-Cola on a hot day, or the freedom of children playing in a park, and all of it, every bit, weaving into a tapestry of promise.

  Stop.

  The Luminous Mysteries.

  Step. That the light here was rumored to be the same light everywhere: a Hanoi sunset seen from the prow of a canoe casting fishing nets into a vast ocean; sun
rise over a stubbly hill in eastern Nigeria and rays that shredded the clouds in a crown of fire; the mid-afternoon Coppertone on an old wall bringing back a rare yet sunny New England autumn; harsh noon sunlight on Broadway’s traffic melting tarmac to New York licorice, and a lazy Santa Monica evening where a day weary sun sighed into an ocean that could be off the coast of Kenya. Step. That men came here with all the greed for gold but stayed for the honey of rich earth, oranges and sun. Step. That brilliant and hungry fires lit up night skies. Step. That the taste of fruit here was the taste you had always imagined. Step. That architecture here was no more than child’s play and time was the sea washing it away. Step. The earnestness of the Staples Center’s searchlights raking the endless night for a Clippers victory. Step. The twin searchlights of the Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen’s Club pulling men off the 10 like sirens singing ancient ships to wreck. Step. That the endless stretches of freeways were new rivers carrying this city’s angst out to sea, their names echoing with the vibrational power of old Hebrew: 405 North, 110 South, 101 North, 405 South, 110 North, 5 South, 5 North, 60 East, 710 South, 60 West, 605 West, 710 North, 605 East; like the longitude and latitude of a treasure map, and that Angelenos scurried around looking for their dream of themselves. Step. And another step, all light, all miasma, all luminescent freeway signage paint, no more than car headlights cutting faintly through an early morning mist wrapping the spires of downtown in mystery like Avalon.

  Stop.

  The Sorrowful Mysteries.

  Step. A meat-faced policeman fished deep inside a prostitute for the drugs they both knew were not there. And she, face like the old stone wall behind her, dirty, tired and adorned with graffiti-like makeup, blew smoke into the night. Blew shame. Step. A stain on the sidewalk on Main, under a tree, by the closed metal shutters of another failed mercantile dream. This stain was like any other here and yet unlike any other. This stain was not gum, or spilt alcohol, or feces spread by a homeless beggar too far gone to the other side of the river to know, to care. This stain was where a nameless Black boy shot a nameless Brown girl even as she smiled at him, even as he closed his eyes in terror and squeezed his fear out in metal. This stain was a medal. Step. A discarded shoe, lying on its side, heel grouting the crack in the sidewalk. Lost perhaps as someone ran for a bus. Or from the police. Or from a mugger. And did he make it? And was it a he because it was a workman’s boot? And how much of personality can truly be shaped by the feet? Step. And there was a woman known sometimes as Epiphany Love, sometimes as Sweet Black, who stared at him from behind eyes that had tired of tearing. The crescent scar on her nose was more like a question mark, one that was still forming the question. But it was the casual strength of her hands and the way they hung limp at her sides, yet coiled like mambas. And he knew these hands had wrung more than clothes on a washday. Step. A young man lounged with his compás, smoking weed, laughing loud and grabbing crotch in the swagger that was all the power of the young and yet his eyes said: Please, I just want to go home, please. Step. Mildred, the bard of Union Station, crooned a song of fractured syllables in a language too old to have formed yet, held tender between lips like the cooling of lava on the edge of a lake, bitten off by teeth broken by life, while placing flowers curbside for a dead man, or woman or child that no one wanted to remember. Step. The guard outside the INS building on Los Angeles Street hassled fellow Chicano immigrants waiting in line. They said nothing, looking instead with eyes riddled with questions and questions and the guard’s eyes said, We don’t go there. We don’t. Step. The Mexican woman who owned the bench in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion knew that this land was hers and her mother’s before her. She crocheted, a way to grind down the white man’s clock, stitching and unstitching a scarf she would never wind around all the land that was hers and her mother’s and her mother before that. Step. A man in a pink fluffy bunny suit on a hot Los Angeles afternoon handed out leaflets for the new fried chicken restaurant behind him, a slow-burning cigarette dangling from one pink paw, fed intermittently through the gap in the pink neck to his mouth. Step. Face like old leather, eyes cold and dark as a window in the night, the young Sierra Leonean, not much older than a boy, sat at the bus stop waiting. To go from one job to another. Waiting. For the new life promised here to begin. Waiting. To forget the blood. Waiting. He studiously licked a pencil and underlined his dreams in a torn Jackie Collins novel. Step. This woman, hair falling in lush ringlets of dark, smelling of oil and lost dreams, trod cautiously to the cheaper jewelry stores around Broadway and Seventh. She picked through these streets on heels not meant for the cracked and broken sidewalk. She sucked on mints and wished for a distant sun where her language rang out with the cadence of fire from an affluent house on the Caspian Sea. And even here, she despised the poor. And yet what everyone held in common was a unique poverty. Step. Found here in the trash can by Temple, a woman’s severed head. Step. And here, a woman who had never been to prison, but was born Catholic, born guilty, so like a snail, she carried the burden of her penance with her everywhere she went. Night was her biggest fear because then the faces of the children she killed, her children, three of them, before losing her courage, came to her. What a terrible thing; to lose courage in the face of this act. It wasn’t their anger she feared, but the fact that each small crying face in her nightmares forgave her. Step. A torn flyer desperately clung to a parking meter on Santa Fe begging for information. Telling the world that the search for the missing María was forty-two days old. Two days longer than Christ’s fast in the desert. Step. And step. And step. Each one driving the nail of grief deeper, the rivet of sorrow.

  Stop.

  The Glorious Mysteries.

  Step. Sometimes rain, but not especially. Step. And light and light and light. Step. Sometimes it was too bright to see. Step. And step. And step. And nothing, or maybe everything.

  Stop.

  Black, standing on an outcrop of concrete on Bunker Hill, looked down. And Gabriel beside him, like the devil, offered it all. It was evening and a gentle wind was playing through the streets. Below, in bright lights, there it was. The jewel.

  El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula.

  Soledad.

  Para.

  IDOLATRY

  What is divinity if it can come

  Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

  —Wallace Stevens

  eighteen

  oscillating.

  Swathes of light cut by the spaceship on its slim pole high above The Ugly Store swinging in the wind like a lantern on the prow of a ship. Rain threatened in slow-paced drops that were blown lazily into a slant by the wind and felt like cool pebbles against the skin. In these moments of wind and rain, Los Angeles revealed its kinship, he thought. What was otherwise a large garbage pile left to compost in the heat pulled its sleeves back and demonstrated the trick of its becoming; a city constantly digesting its past and recycling itself into something new. The red glow against black storm clouds wasn’t the sun being slowly consumed by the heavens, he realized, but the reluctance of the brush fires to give up their gluttony.

  It had taken Black a while to walk the distance from Olvera Street where he left Gabriel, to the corner of Mission and The Ugly Store but he only paid little attention to the buildings lining the Cesar Chavez that looked out of place in Los Angeles. Two-, sometimes three-story brick buildings that leaned on rusty metal fire escapes that would have been more at home in New York, and he could understand why this street, built up by migrant Jews from the East in the early twenties, used to be called Brooklyn Street.

  He passed Lolita’s Bridal, and the clothing store next to it with a four-foot-wide by ten-foot-long sign that said STETSONS in bold white letters that sold everything but Stetsons. The crooked windows of the Zapata Shoe Store, which did sell Stetsons, but in white only, made it look like it was leaning up against STETSONS like a tipsy date. The 99 Cents store further down sold the best ice-cream cones in East LA. On the opposi
te side of the street was a panaderia displaying cakes in various shapes from generous breasts in pink frosting to masked Zapatista rebels. Next to that, a Pupasena wrapped round the corner and in bright orange graffiti on its wall was the message: Jesus Saves. Another tag artist had added, in a bright blue, the phrase, At Washington Mutual. Right beside it, before the corner, a KFC hustled the LUCY Laundromat, which pushed up against a check-cashing establishment, which did its best business on Mother’s Day, the local euphemism for the Mondays, every fortnight, when the mothers on welfare cashed their checks.

  Turning at Soto, he made his way back toward Mission and The Ugly Store. Hanging a left on Mission, he walked past all the auto scrap yards, past the twenty-foot-high statue of a lumberjack looming out of the darkness that reminded him of Paul Bunyan. He soon came up to the old Mission. Once the center of civilized Los Angeles with the Spanish garrison to one side and the Pueblo across the river at Alameda, it was now no more than a glorified tourist attraction that attracted almost no tourists. It had long since lost out to Six Flags fun parks and Universal Studio’s theme park. It looked sad, not in the way of a rejected wallflower, but more in the commonplace shame of a community center. A place kept open by a grudging love.

  He stared at the statues of long forgotten Mexican generals and the early rancheros, and wondered if their ghosts still haunted the area, caught between the Mission and the grassy roundabout where they stood, hemmed in by traffic.