The Virgin of Flames

by Chris Abani

  “It says: there is only one God and his name is Allah,” Bomboy said, pointing to the scroll.

  Black nodded.

  “But you’re not Muslim,” Iggy pointed out.

  “I know,” Bomboy said, “but this is business.”

  “Business?” Black asked.

  Iggy took the money Bomboy passed to her for the beer.

  “Well, guys, I think I am turning in. Black, lock up when Bomboy leaves,” she said.

  “Wait, Iggy,” Bomboy said. “I want your opinion.”

  “Fine,” Iggy said, sitting down. “But make it quick.” She was sick of the way men always came to her for validation, but never gave her even the most basic respect.

  “Listen,” Bomboy said, and pushed a button on the clock. The call to prayer filled the room in a high-pitched tinny whine, somewhere between chant and lament. Black listened to it for a few minutes then pushed the button, returning the room to silence.

  “You see?”

  Both Iggy and Black shook their heads.

  “This is an alarm clock that wakes you to the sound of the call to prayer,” Bomboy said.

  “Well, technically it’s not the call since it is recorded,” Iggy said.

  “Yes, but I am planning to take these back home and sell them. I get a good discount for bulk purchase.”

  “But I thought your people were Christians?” Iggy asked.

  “Yes, but the Tutsi are Muslims.”

  “But aren’t they . . .”

  “Yes, but it is peace time now.”

  “Ah,” Iggy said, with a slight shudder. “I wouldn’t buy one, but then I’m not a Tutsi Muslim with bad taste. What can I say?”

  “Black?”

  “I’m going to bed,” Black said, getting up.

  “I guess that means you have to go, Bomboy. Drive careful and be sure not to run over any of the faithful,” Iggy said.

  “Bloody Americans,” Bomboy threw over his shoulder as he left.

  twenty

  The room was dark when Black woke. It seemed like in the distance, bells were ringing, but he couldn’t be sure as he slipped in and out of sleep. He lay back in bed. He was so tired. So tired. But the telephone was ringing. He reached for it.

  “Black?”

  “Shit,” he swore under his breath. It was Sweet Girl. He wished he hadn’t given her his number after the lap dance. “Yes?” No point lying. She knew it was him.

  “Black,” she said again. And he heard all the loss and longing in her voice. It was unbearable. He didn’t know what to say so he hung up. He got up and washed his face.

  Fatima was calling.

  twenty-one

  google.

  It hardly seemed like a word, much less an explanation. But it was. That’s how Sweet Girl found him, she told Black.

  “I googled your telephone number,” she said. “And your address popped up just like that. I didn’t think you’d mind. I figured if you didn’t want to be found you’d have an unlisted number.”

  He stood in the doorway looking at her. It was late at night and he was still half asleep.

  “I was worried,” she said. “When you hung up. I was worried so I came.”

  “Why?”

  “To make sure that you are okay.”

  She had been crying. He could tell because her mascara had run and she hadn’t bothered to clean it. Her face was swollen too, puffy, but not from crying, he didn’t think, but more from drugs, or something like that. Maybe drink.

  “Aren’t you going to let me in?”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, stepping back from the door. She hesitated on the threshold for a moment. “Come,” he said. “Come in.”

  She walked in and he realized that she was wearing a raincoat and it was wet. She undid the belt and took it off. Turning to hang it over the hook by the door she paused. There was a wedding dress hanging there, and behind it, a tuxedo. She turned to look at him, catching him mid-yawn.

  “Long story,” he said, following her gaze and taking in the clothes hanging behind the door. He took her coat and headed into the bathroom, where he draped it over the shower rail. When he came back, she was standing by his worktable, staring at the mounds of pigment.

  “What are these?”

  “What I make paint with.”

  “You make your own colors?”

  “Well, technically paint has no color of its own,” he said. “It’s just a way to block all other parts of the light spectrum and reflect the one you want. I am finicky about my work, so I don’t rely on the paint alone for the color. There is the light, which depends on location, the base material I am painting on among other variables.”

  “Stop,” she said. “You’re making my head hurt.”

  He laughed and walked over to the kitchenette and came back with a half empty bottle of vodka from the freezer. All his alcohol was stolen from the bar downstairs. He held out a glass and Sweet Girl took it. He poured. She tossed it back in one gulp. He poured again. She sipped slowly this time as he poured one for himself.

  “So what’s up?” he asked. “You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “But your eyes are so sad. I mean, what have you seen?”

  “I am a Mexican transsexual. The question is what haven’t I seen.”

  He nodded and drank, refilling both their glasses.

  “Are you trying to get me drunk?” Sweet Girl asked.

  “Something is different about you,” he said, putting down his glass and walking over to where she stood by the workbench. He pulled out a stool. “Here, sit.”

  “What?” she asked, sitting and pulling him down onto the one next to her. He put out a hand to steady himself and it landed in the bowl of lapis, sending a blue cloud up.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, finishing the rest of her drink. But he waved her apology away.

  “I know what’s different,” he said. “Your accent is more American now. In the club you sound more Mexican, more like Salma Hayek.”

  She shrugged.

  “In the club people pay to see exotica, so I give it to them. I’m no less Mexican now.”

  He nodded, distracted by her perfume. He leaned into her and inhaled deeply.

  “What is that scent?”

  “Charlie,” she said. “Remember it? By Revlon.”

  “That’s the smell of my childhood,” he said. “I haven’t smelled that since the early eighties.”

  “My little joke,” she said, laughing, her eyes lighting up for the first time.

  “But . . .”

  “Tell me about this,” she said, indicating all the mounds of pigment with a delicate hand.

  “These pigments are what I make my paints from. It’s that simple; pigments and a glue to bind them, in my case, I use gum arabic,” Black said, rolling a couple of the large, clear crystals of gum arabic between his palms. He set them down next to the bowl of powdered lapis lazuli. Taking Sweet Girl’s hand, he buried it in it, making her run her fingers through it.

  “It’s easy to make paint,” he said. “First you choose your pigment, say lapis lazuli, or virgin blue . . .”

  “Why virgin blue?”

  “Because in the old days it was used to paint the blue robes of the Virgin Mary. It is the most expensive, most beautiful of all blues. An artist can always use azurite, which is almost the same color as the best lapis, but it can’t be ground as fine. There’s also smalt, which comes from ground cobalt glass . . .”

  “I get it, lapis is your favorite. What’s this?” Sweet Girl asked, grabbing a handful of red pigment like a baker about to toss flour to roll dough.

  “This is cinnabar, a mineral red, sometimes called vermilion. I had a hell of a time with my last batch of vermilion because it kept turning black for no apparent reason. This is carmine, made from an insect native to Mexico. These here are red ochre, yellow ochre and purple ochre, which are just clays,” he said, rubbing the coarser grains between his fingertips. She did t
he same thing, and then laughed.

  “It’s just colored sand,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, licking the ochre from his fingertips.

  “Oh, oh, green.”

  “Yes. The green is malachite, which is best coarse. This is terre verte made from moss and other substances. I use it mostly for underpainting flesh. This yellow is orpiment, but I enhance it with saffron or turmeric or sometimes curry. I get all my black from bones, here. Want to feel it? No? Don’t worry I’m not a serial killer, I just buy ready-made bone black.”

  “And for white?”

  “For white I use white lead. In the old days it was made by suspending plates of lead above vinegar or urine and scraping off the resulting corrosion. Now you can just buy it,” he said, placing clumps of pigment on a slab of porphyry. He wet it a little with the vodka. She arched her eyebrows and he smiled.

  “Makes the paint shinier,” he said. He stood behind her, handed her a muller, which was just a smooth stone, and placed her hands on it. He placed his over hers, his fingers tracing patterns on the back of her hands.

  “I found this stone in the sea off Big Sur. It just called to me. I use it to grind the pigment,” he said; voice no more than a breath over the hair on her neck, making her break out in goose bumps.

  “See? Next, we add a crystal of gum arabic to bind it. See?”

  “Yes, it’s like making Kool-Aid,” she said.

  Sweet Girl was smiling at the strange colored paste coming together on the stone. The color was like nothing she had seen outside of nature, like maybe the bottle blue of a fly or like the blue-tinged skin of fish. Black picked up a saucer and scraped some of the paste onto it.

  “It’s basically ready,” he said. “Would you like to paint something?”

  “Yes,” Sweet Girl said. She dipped a finger into the mixture, turned around and painted him on the face. He laughed and ran, and she picked up the saucer of paint and chased him around the room, both of them giggling harder than drunken teenagers. Exhausted they collapsed into bed, passing back and forth the bottle of vodka that one of them had retrieved as they circled the room. Finally it was empty, and they lay there staring at each other for a long time. Then Black leaned over and kissed Sweet Girl hard on the mouth. They lay lip-locked, fighting for air and loving every moment. Then Sweet Girl pulled away and kissed him lower and lower and lower. And as Black felt Sweet Girl take all of him into her moist mouth, he saw Gabriel watching from the fire escape. Fucking angel, he thought, then, Oh, God.

  Oh, God.

  twenty-two

  purple flame.

  Against the white wall, the bougainvillea was an alien. Like much of the flora of this city, it came from somewhere else: palm trees from the Canary Islands, eucalyptus from Australia, bougainvillea from Brazil, birds of paradise from South Africa. Nearly everything now native to Los Angeles came from somewhere else. That was perhaps its beauty, Black thought. That it never tired of reinventing itself, producing as many shades and nuances of being as a bougainvillea: pink, magenta, purple, red, orange, white and yellow.

  This city wasn’t a city. And if it was, it was a hidden city. There were several cities within it, and you had to yield to it, before it revealed any of its magic to you. It was a slow realization, but walking down Soto one hot dusty day, the smog layering the city in a mid-afternoon shimmer, he thought, I love this city. Los Angeles was a rambling maze that didn’t apologize for what it was. Instead it forced you to find the city within you. In that way it was a grown-up city. This was a silence that tourists and other outsiders would never know. This was not a postcard of Los Angeles, a city of joyful shallowness. And even in this city with no blizzards and a fiberglass mastodon pretending to drown in a tar pit, truth could be found on misty mornings.

  He was sipping a cup of coffee, looking out of his window. He was still tired. He wasn’t getting enough sleep and it was affecting him. At least he hoped it was the lack of sleep. Sweet Girl had left sometime in the night, leaving only the faintest hint of her perfume and a few blue lapis lazuli crumbs on the sheet. Black reached down and touched his crotch. He wasn’t hard. The pressure he felt was the ghost of Sweet Girl’s lips. Her mouth. His mouth. Whatever, he didn’t want to think about it. Must have been the vodka, he told himself, I must have been drunk because my head is pounding from this hangover.

  Everything sounded louder than usual: the ants crawling along the window ledge, dragging a crystal of sugar; a cockroach, out of sight in a crack, rubbing its antennae together; a bird landing on the roof of the spaceship, high up and invisible from here; a weed whacker buzzing away in the distance.

  When he finally slept last night, after tossing uneasily for a while, Sweet Girl snoring softly beside him, his dreams had been of blood. Of being stuck in the River and of blood in a flash flood washing him away and then, sailing toward him on an upturned wooden box, was the Virgin except when she got closer and reached out her hand, he saw it was Sweet Girl and then just as she was pulling him to safety, she turned into his mother and drowned him.

  He turned away from the window, and through the steam rising from his coffee cup watched the television: the news was on. The volume was low, but the image was of a large southland hill burning. The brush fires were relentless this year.

  Although he wouldn’t entirely admit it, he was disappointed with Sweet Girl. Having watched her from a distance for so long, having glorified and celebrated her, last night wasn’t the meeting he envisioned. He realized now, turning back to his window and the shanty of East LA, that she had become emblematic of his unspoken, even unknown, desire. Thinking about the image board in the spaceship he knew that she was linked to his obsession with the Virgin, but he wasn’t sure how. Maybe the Virgin was the light in him and Sweet Girl the darkness, the icon of the virgin of the damned. He chuckled at this thought.

  Something else bothered him.

  Her easy attraction to him, her reversal of the obsession. Perhaps it was karma, the stalkee becoming the stalker, but he knew that wasn’t it. It wasn’t even that she had been watching him all the time he was watching her, but that she seemed more able to lose herself in the moment of their consummation than he was. He wanted to be the one to do that. To melt into the desire of the moment while she resisted and that tug, that tension of the chase, would have been more delicious than the merging itself. He wondered if that was a thing only a woman could do. He was listless, not wanting to work today. Just before he left, he saw Gabriel’s wing droop over his window, filtering the sun in slats.

  Like a Venetian.

  twenty-three

  not always.

  But often enough, the spaceship on the roof took Black’s breath away. In this misty and moon-silver night it really did look extraterrestrial. He’d been working on the mural of Fatima for most of the day and into the early evening with only the moon and the orange and lemon light of a few desperate streetlights. Working quickly, he’d finished her musculature. Another day and night and he might have the whole picture, but only if he could maintain this pace. Maybe he would slow down, take a few days off. He needed to earn some cash to pay Iggy’s rent. He sat in the van, idling in front of The Ugly Store, and didn’t feel like going in, so he parked on the corner of Cesar Chavez and Mission, climbed onto the roof of his van and took in the panoramic views of East and Downtown Los Angeles. At night, like it was now, the lights made it look more beautiful than it actually was, leading to its nickname, Malibu el Barrio.

  In the distance a dog barked. Frank Sinatra was singing too loudly in someone’s living room, the sound spilling out into the street. “Gray skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face.”

  The blur of Ray-Ray’s reflective jacket was bright orange as he rode up on his bicycle; a child’s bicycle. Black took in the sticker on the rear wheel cover of the bicycle: SAFETY FIRST.

  “What’s up, Black?”

  “Nothing,” Black replied.

  “Pass me the beer, huevón,” Ray-Ray said.
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br />   Black tried to pass the can down, but it was fruitless. Laughing, he jumped down and handed Ray-Ray the can of beer.

  “Hey, fuck you,” Ray-Ray said, taking the can.

  “Where are you off to?” Black asked him.

  “Nowhere in particular. Just trying to get some exercise. Small man like me can have it rough in a gym.”

  “Exercise?”

  “What, mothafucker? I don’t look healthy to you?”

  “No, cabrón. You look like shit.”

  “Yeah? Well, fuck you,” Ray-Ray said, passing the can of beer back. Black took a swig.

  “Wanna ride?”

  “Where are we going?” Ray-Ray asked.

  “Wherever the road leads, man. Stow your bike in back and get in, amigo.”

  Ray-Ray stowed his bike and opened the door and got in. It took a while. They drove in silence. Swinging a left, then a right and another left, Black pulled up by the River. To the left, falling away in a valley below the culvert level was a train yard. Cargo cars sat rusting in the moonlight, silent as grave markers. To their right, they could make out the 4th Street Bridge. A girl was leaning over the ledge.

  She could have been an angel.

  Even the gun in her hand didn’t negate that possibility. Didn’t angels smite for God’s love? But it was her hair more than anything that decided it for Black. The way it blew back from her face in the cold night. Nothing more.

  From this distance, the gun going off sounded more like a firecracker. The angel wasn’t alone. An all-female host surrounded her. They were laughing loudly. The shots were interrupted when the host of helpers hurled a dark shape off the bridge. Whatever it was seemed silent and inanimate. Soon after, the shots began again.

  “Shit! Those bitches!” Black said.

  Ray-Ray, not understanding Black’s urgency, was slightly afraid because he knew Black was heading for the bridge.

  “Where are we going?”