The Virgin of Flames

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The Virgin of Flames Page 16

by Chris Abani


  “Why do you always act so shocked, Black?” Bomboy asked, also noting the expression on Black’s face.

  “He’s sensitive,” Iggy said.

  “Sensitive? You know he is an African, we don’t have time for that shit,” Bomboy said.

  “How is that African, and how is it that I am African?” Black asked.

  “Your father was African, and so therefore, you are African. Simple logistics.”

  “Logic,” Iggy said.

  “That’s what I mean. You know what I mean.”

  “What do you think, Black?” Iggy asked.

  “He can think what he wants, truth is truth,” Bomboy said smugly.

  “I don’t know,” Black said.

  “You’re getting repetitive.”

  “Sorry.”

  Even as he said it, a part of Black watched with an amused stare, wondering why he wouldn’t say the things he was thinking to Iggy or Bomboy. He hated the part of himself that ran away from confrontation. It was the same part that was constantly trying to reassure white people that he wasn’t out to mug them, wasn’t the criminal they expected he would be, should be. It was ridiculous, but he couldn’t rid himself of these tics. Like waving his ATM card around while waiting to use the machine, to reassure those in line before and behind him. Everything slowed down when he did it. The feeling was like tugging on a pair of wet jeans that were two sizes too small with cold, numb fingers.

  “Okay,” Iggy said, changing tack. “Who do you feel you are?”

  “I don’t know, I feel confused.”

  “So you are searching. Searching is good.”

  “Is it? My father was searching for something, but I have no idea what. I have often thought about him and the way he would talk about flying away on a spaceship, getting lost in the stars. I thought he was an artist at heart, or at least a scientist like Einstein: a dreamer. I thought that was why I have the same existential melancholy, that’s why I followed this River from the Pasadena arroyo where I was born to here.”

  “Oh, Black, such big words,” Iggy said, smiling. “And now?” she asked.

  “And now I’m not sure. I think that I have idealized my father’s discontent. Maybe it was something as simple as racism, maybe he couldn’t find fulfillment in his job, or with my mother.”

  “Those are not simple concerns,” Iggy said.

  “I know. But they lack the romance and magic I want. I’ve always felt like Parsifal or some other Knight of the Round Table on an eternal quest, a never-ending search,” Black said, voice wistful.

  “There is no search about it. Black is African, end of matter,” Bomboy said.

  “I think Black is talking about something a little more complicated.”

  “Like what?”

  “Should I?” Iggy asked Black.

  Black shook his head. “No, I will.” Taking a deep breath, he turned to Bomboy. “I have been wearing a dress, pretending to be the Virgin.”

  “What do you mean? How many times?”

  “Many. Including that night on the spaceship that started all this palaver.”

  Bomboy threw his head back and laughed hard. Iggy and Black were surprised by his reaction.

  “Black, you are very funny. What’s the scam here? How are we going to cash in on it? Merchandising? Selling miraculous souvenirs to the crowd outside? No? An exclusive for Entertainment Tonight?”

  “There is no cashing it in,” Black said quietly. “This isn’t a scam.”

  “Come on now. If you are pretending to be the Virgin it has to be a scam. Don’t tell me you are doing this for real.”

  “It’s not a scam or for real, it was an accident.”

  “I see.”

  “Good, because I don’t,” Iggy said.

  “That’s because like a true American you are looking for the cause of this. Maybe something happened to him as a child—”

  “But it did. He was dressed as a girl.”

  Black hung his head. It was no longer his life.

  “So?” Bomboy said. “I was naked and eating shit off the floor as a child. I’m not a dog now, am I? You people. Sometimes a thing is just what it is, a thing. In Rwanda when we see lightning killing people we don’t ask why, we just stay out of thunderstorms. That’s how come we have survived so long.”

  “More’s the pity,” Iggy said.

  Black laughed and then grew serious.

  “I wish I knew myself,” he said.

  “That there is the key, my friend. To know yourself. The story of your life, well, it’s just a story, you tell it and tell it and then you believe it. It’s not the same as your life, though. We are all the same in this, we find a story we can live with and just get on with it. In your case, you are most likely a homosexual,” Bomboy said. “When you have seen what I’ve seen you know these things. You shut off all this bleeding heart bullshit. You shut down and ginger up, there is life to live.”

  “Fuck you, hijo dela chingada!”

  Bomboy shrugged. “Homo! You know I’m right. The risk is that suffering too much shuts you down. I think you’re shut down.”

  “No, Bomboy,” Iggy said, shaking her head. “For Black, shutting down is not the risk. That’s obvious. Joy, joy, that’s the risk.”

  “Homo!” Bomboy repeated.

  “It’s not that easy. What if he’s wearing the dress as a way of getting back to a moment of safety when he could discover his parents and therefore himself?”

  “That’s just the problem,” Black said. “I don’t know if I wear that dress because I am looking for my father, myself, because I want to be a woman or simply because Sweet Girl is a lesbian.”

  “Sweet Girl? What has that person to do with this?” Bomboy asked.

  “You know Sweet Girl?” Iggy asked.

  Bomboy nodded.

  “She’s his girlfriend,” Iggy said.

  “Girlfriend or boyfriend?” Bomboy asked.

  “Black?” Iggy said.

  Black laughed uncomfortably and kicked George Bush.

  “When are we going to smash up this puto?” he asked.

  Iggy looked at him for a moment. He looked away. But in that brief exchange something had shifted in him, and they both knew it. Bomboy grabbed the piñata and hopped down into the culvert and splashed through the water to where a piece of rusted iron jutted out of the concrete. Bomboy hung George by his neck, and watched him turn in the wind, his inane smile never slipping. Black joined him. As the two men watched the swinging effigy, they remembered their shame, and the centuries of shame that they had inherited because of who they were, and even more, the shame of dancing to that shame, of fanning that shame, of falling short because of that shame, of becoming that shame. And the effigy swung in a hypnotic turn that was winding up to something. A release perhaps, or at least a temporary stay of the waters that threatened wet darkness. This was sacrifice.

  Iggy hesitated for a moment, then waded into the water herself. The current near the edge wasn’t too strong, but the water came up to her knees, although she was only a couple of inches shorter than Black. Bomboy had been rooting around and handed each of them a piece of wood or metal, as he found it. They stood, unsure at first, watching the paper doll dance giddy as a kite. Black noted that although Iggy was sensuously fleshy all over, her arms, probably from having to hold them in awkward positions for tattooing, were well defined. When the first blow landed, it wasn’t the soft tear of paper, but the crunching of bone and the fragility of ripping skin. The second blow tore a gash in the stomach, releasing a flutter of paper like offal. And then the blows came hard and fast and too many to separate into moments. There was just the beating. Blow by blow by blow the way rain cannot be broken into drops but is a sheet draped against the sky. When they were spent, George was nothing more than a wire frame with a shred of paper caught here and there. A tattered edge of a smile fluttered from the bent wire of the doll’s mouth. Iggy saluted. Bomboy and Black laughed and sank into the water. But they felt empty. The piñat
a had yielded nothing. Iggy had forgotten to fill it up with sweets.

  twenty-six

  Cemeteries.

  Iggy thought, like guilt, are not for the dead, but the living. Sometimes, but only for the lucky few, they are a way to remember love. She usually avoided cemeteries because she believed in the malevolence of ghosts. The dead always come back; she knew this. She also knew they never come back correct.

  But having left Black and Bomboy at the River with Fatima and the remains of George Bush, she felt the urge to get home as quickly as possible, and the cemetery offered a shortcut. Anyhow, this cemetery, especially in the day, seemed peaceful, welcoming. She whistled as she walked up the path, admiring the old headstones, imagining the lives now masked by the crumbling granite. In the distance a film crew was setting up and from the demon-costumed-actors she figured it was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  As she rounded an old tree, she saw a funeral party beside a grave. They were dressed in white. She guessed they were Chinese. She stared hard at them, trying to determine if they were for real or whether they were part of the Buffy shoot. She couldn’t spot any cameras or lights, and as she approached, she decided the Buddhist monk in brown and red robes chanting sutras wasn’t part of the shoot. She paused for a few moments before a grave marker. It was blank except for a figure spray painted on it. It was well done, depicting a woman who could have been Mediterranean, although her features seemed more Northern European. Wrapped around her waist, its head and neck dangling down between her legs like a grotesque appendage, was a python. Arched over her head was a banner that said: Mami-Wata, and in the corner were Black’s signature and a date. It was two years old. She didn’t know what to make of it but decided to ask him when she saw him. Turning away, she continued to the low wall bordering the street. Ignoring the tagger signs, she jumped over it. The Ugly Store was right across the street.

  When she got inside, she was surprised to see a gaggle of the faithful who had been camped outside in the café. They were surrounding something or someone who was on the ground, but Iggy couldn’t make out who it was.

  “What’s going on here?” she asked, striding forward.

  “The little man fell,” a woman said.

  Pushing her way through the crowd, Iggy gasped when she saw Ray-Ray lying on the floor. He seemed unconscious, and her first thought was, He is dead from an overdose. She bent down and picked his large head up, laying it gently in her lap. She stroked his face with one hand, while the other sought his pulse. It was there, but it was faint.

  “Call 911!” she shouted at someone in the crowd.

  “Someone did already,” another woman said.

  “Here,” a third one said, pressing a washcloth wrapped around ice into Iggy’s hand. She must have got it from the bar. Iggy pressed it to Ray-Ray’s face. Slowly his eyes opened.

  “Iggy,” he croaked.

  “You bastard!” Iggy sobbed. “You bastard, I thought you were dead.”

  Ray-Ray smiled.

  The paramedics never came.

  Black let himself into The Ugly Store. He couldn’t see anyone so he called out.

  “In here,” Iggy replied from her office.

  “What’s up with the dwarf?” Black asked Iggy, pointing to where Ray-Ray lay on the divan in the corner of her office, holding his stomach and groaning loudly. Needles stuck out of the side of his face as though he was slowly morphing into a porcupine.

  “Hey, Black. He’s trying to detox. We had a scare today. He passed out and I thought he was dead.”

  “So you thought you’d finish him off with the needles,” Black said and laughed. It sounded hollow.

  “The needles are there to help,” Iggy replied, punching him in the arm. Ray-Ray had been in and out of detox many times over the years. Black wondered what Ray-Ray was on now. As though reading his mind, Iggy said:

  “Wet.”

  “What?”

  “He’s addicted to wet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Joints soaked in formaldehyde, you know, embalming fluid. It gives a good, cheap high, but it’s dangerous because it atrophies your internal organs until it preserves you perfectly. Then one day your lungs stiffen up and you die. Or get stuck, as they say.”

  Black looked around the room. Ray-Ray groaned and Black’s attention returned to him. Seeing him wheezing on the divan, Black decided Ray-Ray didn’t really look like a porcupine; more like Pinhead from Hell Raiser.

  “What’s that smell?” he asked Iggy.

  Iggy sniffed.

  “Formaldehyde. It’s leaking out of his pores. Let’s talk outside, in the café,” Iggy said, leading Black out of her office.

  The café was empty. Iggy had closed the shop after the incident. Black glanced at his watch. It was mid-afternoon, her busiest time. The espresso machine was still humming. Iggy walked behind it and began to make herself a cup of coffee. As the steam hissed in the metal jug full of milk, Black sat opposite her. From the corner of his eye he saw someone had spray painted a bright blue burning heart in the middle of his mural. It hadn’t been there before and he wondered how the tagger had done it without being seen. He peered closer and decided he liked it. He noticed the goodoo dolls that Iggy had put in an old vending machine, the kind that let you slide a plastic door back to get your item. TEN DOLLARS A DOLL PER DOLL, a sign said. Not bad he thought.

  “They selling?” he asked.

  “Pretty well.”

  “Funny this.”

  “What is?”

  “You, an ascetic who pollutes her body with coffee.”

  She smiled.

  “And to think I was about to offer you one,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. Yes, please.”

  She filled two mugs with hot coffee and steamed milk, passing one across to him. Coming out from behind the bar, she walked over to a table, putting a chair down before sitting.

  “So I meant to ask you, I saw a painting you did of a woman on a gravestone. You wrote Mami-Wata on it, what is that, who is she?” she asked.

  “Lots of questions,” Black said. “What were you doing in the cemetery? I thought that place gave you the creeps.”

  “Some cemeteries, not that one. Anyway, answer the question.”

  “Mami-Wata is an Igbo sea and river goddess.”

  “Such authority in your voice, Black, but how do you know? You never even knew your father, let alone had access to your culture.”

  “I read about it, Iggy. Jeez, for someone who has so much of her own bullshit you sure do give everyone else a lot of crap. God!”

  “Why did you paint it?”

  “I don’t know. I read about it, she seemed cool. She’s a new goddess, early nineteenth century. I think some guy was walking on the beach one morning and saw a masthead of a mermaid washed up, probably from a slaver sunk by the Royal Navy and took it as a sign from the sea to start a cult.”

  “Why does she have a snake draped down her front like that?”

  “Don’t know. The book didn’t say, but I think it might be a fertility symbol.”

  “You think?”

  He suddenly caught on to her thinking, but didn’t see how the painting of Mami-Wata had anything to do with what he was going through just then.

  “No, it can’t be. That thing is almost two years old.”

  “Black, do you know what your murals remind me of?”

  “No, what?”

  “On Angel Island, after the main Chinese record building in San Francisco burned down, they would hold new immigrants for years sometimes before letting them come on to the mainland. In the buildings there, those people carved exquisite characters in the walls. Later they were found to be poems about home. Here they were, caught between the home they left and the one they had yet to make, and they carved marks for home in the shadows of those walls.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t you get it? When people are desperate they make these marks, these ways of inscribing themselves
on the world in a tangible way to make sense or to make real the things that are too frightening to contain in any other way.”

  “Is that what your tattoos are?” And though he said it like a question, he meant to mock her.

  “In some ways, yes. My clients come to me when they feel they have no place else to turn and I use the tattoos to anchor them, to hold them here while I read their lives. But it still doesn’t change the fact that you are desperate and have been for some time,” she said.

  “The only thing I am desperate about is the rent, Iggy,” he said. “And a way to get out of this town.”

  “This town or this situation? This becoming?”

  She had put her hand on his, one finger pointing out as though subtly leading the way.

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Maybe not, but you do have to face it.”

  “I’m trying to, Iggy. I wish I was better equipped!” His tone was sharper than he meant it to be.

  “In LA we are always becoming, and any idea of a solid past, as an anchor, is soon lost here. And I mean any, that’s why there is no common mythology here, that’s why people come here, to get lost or to be discovered, makes no difference. It’s the same coin. Other cities, like New York, have an overwhelming myth, and there is no you, as it were, without this—shall we say—New York state of mind. But here, there is none of that bullshit, there is just you and what you see and imagine this place and your life in it to be, moment by moment. If you can’t change, if you don’t embrace it, you destroy yourself. The only landscape in this city is in your mind. It’s very Zen,” she said.

  “Your theory has one flaw,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t come here. I am from here.”

  “I know, Black, and that’s what’s so tragic about it. The first change is always the hardest, but for most of us, that change is the move out here. For you it is worse because you have nothing to fight against, nothing to let go of, and so how do you become this if you can’t let go of that, see? That’s why there are no visible native Angelenos. Do you understand, Black?” she said, her finger on the back of his hand moving a little, tracing an imaginary tattoo, even after she’d finished speaking. “Ambivalence is the heart of this town. Not in spite of, but because of.”

 

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