by Chris Abani
“I could tell when I seen you, your dick was small,” she said as she worked. “Big men usually have small dicks. Otherwise it would feel like a bull fucking you. God don’t want nobody getting hurt, honey.”
Carefully she tore a bigger piece of tape and applied it. Black laughed. His dick had disappeared. He was free. He stood up.
“Is it too tight?” Sweet Girl asked. “You need the blood to flow.”
He stood there. It was strange, but he could feel his penis in the empty space where it once was at the same time as feeling an incredible void. An emptiness. He wanted to cry. To laugh. He didn’t know what he wanted.
“Here, honey,” Sweet Girl said, passing him her panties. “Put these on.”
He did. Without a murmur, without a thought. He just did. A part of him wondered whether his lack of a penis made him more gentle, acquiescing? Is this how women felt? This is not the time to ask those questions, he thought. Not now, when nothing was clear. Not when he could barely wrap his head around it. He took a deep breath.
The tape pinched. The feeling was hard to describe; like the pull of nearly healed stitches. Not painful, but tender. The remembrance of flesh. He was afraid of this feeling, but couldn’t stop enjoying it. Like when he picked at the scab of the wound on his face. The way the dried blood and new skin had pulled, before opening with a sting, fresh blood beading the rawness.
“How do you feel?” Sweet Girl asked.
He wanted to say something. Say, Help, I can’t breathe. I am suffocating. I am claustrophobic. I can’t feel my penis. Get this tape off me. It has gone for good. Who am I? What am I? He wanted to scream, to push against this feeling like a small death. The way he imagined spilt honey spreading over a dying ant must feel, bliss, breathlessness and the onset of terror. He swallowed hard, dug his fingernails into his palms and looked in the mirror. He was a girl. He began to cry. Sweet Girl clapped her hands and laughed.
“You look hot,” she said. She got up, her dick swinging between her legs and walked over to the door. Okay, maybe not swinging, he thought, but definitely punctuating like a fat period. She came back with Iggy’s wedding dress and helped Black put it on. Black slipped the blonde wig on. Then Sweet Girl slipped into an old suit of his. They stood side by side in front of the mirror.
“I guess you’re my bitch now,” Sweet Girl said.
There it was again. The mocking.
“I knew you wanted to be a woman. I knew it from the moment you walked into Charlie’s,” she said.
He could feel the tide coming in, the waves wrapping over his head, so near yet so far away. He took a deep breath against the drowning. He wanted Sweet Girl to shut up. He wanted to make her shut up. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to be her bitch. He loved her. He despised her.
“Come,” she said. “Sit.”
He sat and she began to apply makeup to his face: blue eye shadow, pink rouge, black eyeliner and red lipstick. Below them in The Ugly Store, Damian’s band had struck the opening chords to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. He loved that song, loved the way Damian covered it. He knew it was their signature end piece, and he guessed it was all building to a head.
“Ta-da!” Sweet Girl said, holding up her compact for him to see. He looked like a 1940s German whore from a bad B movie. He hated her. He hated himself. He couldn’t differentiate. How did she end up as the man, dick swinging in his pants, while he was now the bride, her bitch?
And she was smiling. The same smile from the club. And he knew he would never find this thing, this becoming that he wanted. It was a grace far beyond anything he had in the face of it. He had nothing to give to the dark angel of it. Nothing. And they all knew it: Bomboy, who didn’t know what it was he knew; Iggy, who knew things about him he couldn’t even guess at himself; Gabriel, an androgynous pigeon-angel; Sweet Girl, this man who was more woman than he would ever be. Watching her now, in his suit, it dawned on him that she was more man too.
Raul, below, on piano was already off to a spirited solo, while someone banged on a tambourine. Black seemed to watch his left fist hit Sweet Girl, even as part of him registered the music. He knew it was him, but it wasn’t. He felt rather than saw her surprise, her shock, her fear. Then he was hitting her again and again. She was a small woman and his blows had her on the floor. She wasn’t crying out, though, she wasn’t begging. Tight-lipped and grunting, she was fighting back; each move between them punctuated by Rakim’s harmonics on the sax like a hundred Pharoahs, Sanders that is; nails raking across his face, legs kicking at his crotch, but Black was safely out of reach beneath the tape. She, on the other hand, wasn’t, and his knee to her dick caused her to double up. As she went down on her knees, she staggered back.
“Black,” she gasped. “Why?”
Aaaaaaaaawwhhhh, Rakim’s horn screamed.
But Black could only hear the roar of the blood in his head. Sweet Girl got to her feet just before he reached her and fell back against the worktable with all the pigments, sending a rainbow-colored cloud up in the air. As Black closed the distance between them, she scrabbled behind her for anything she could use to defend herself. Her fingers closed around a can and without looking she swung at him. It held turpentine and the liquid caught Black in the face and chest, and he screamed from the sting to his eyes. He backed off and wiped furiously at the liquid, the chemical dripping all over the dress. Squinting to try to see, Black took another swing at Sweet Girl, but his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He’d never faced anything in his life and this time would be no different. Sweet Girl dodged the blow easily, but still afraid, she ran to the worktable. Black approached, half-blind, arms held open in a gesture of peace, of surrender, but Sweet Girl swung at him, the tip of the heavy sewing scissors she had found on the table sinking into his chest, just above his heart. She wasn’t strong or determined enough to do much damage, although when she pulled the scissors out the wound bled; one jet that sprayed her in the face, then a slow leak down the front of his dress. She was crying as she watched the turpentine diluting the blood into a red blur. Black was crying too, tears and deep soul-wrenching moans. His makeup had run, and when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror he shrank back from the hideousness of it. I’m a monster, he thought, and it reminded him of that night he had been raped under the bridge.
And Walter was off on a percussion solo, the rest of the band silent, only the fast rhythm of the heart-sounding congas. Each slap and smack on the tight hide hitting like a punch against night, each beat winding it all up.
“Black, baby, I’m sorry,” Sweet Girl said, coming toward him, scissors still in hand. He backed away and crashed through the door, out into the corridor. Sweet Girl followed, calling for him, still holding the scissors like a vampire stake. Stumbling down the corridor toward the staircase that led to the roof, Black looked like a deranged and psychotic Miss Havisham, dragging a long train of white death behind him, the gossamer hide of a dead angel.
Once on the roof, he stumbled toward the ladder that led to the spaceship. He was still bleeding, though not too badly, and was half-blind from the turpentine. Grabbing hold, he relaxed against the rusting metal as his body pulled itself up, almost from memory, the climb feverish.
“Black!” Sweet Girl screamed from the roof, finally dropping the scissors, watching with fear as the wind whipped the cocktail sausage of a spaceship around like it would tear it up and throw it into the darkness and the River. Inside the spaceship, Black lit a cigarette and blew smoke out. He spotted the board with Sweet Girl’s pictures on it.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God.”
And Damian’s voice was back, singing softer than a cat running across a wooden floor, the crowd in the bar, the crowd outside the bar, all quiet, all holding their breath.
Black couldn’t stand to be in the spaceship with her another moment, so he popped the skylight. He didn’t care if Gabriel was there. He was too far gone to be afraid anymore. It was really dark and he didn’t want to be alone; the dark and the
swirling ash made it look like the sky was alive with ghosts. He hesitated for a moment then stepped out onto the roof of the spaceship.
The spotlight from a helicopter picked him up.
The crowd of the faithful gathered below screamed in ecstasy. There she was, the queen of heaven, perched on the roof of the spaceship.
Below, in the club, the music had risen in volume, Damian’s voice tapering off as Rakim blew his horn again, as though calling down the walls of Jericho, blew that horn in octaves too high and too low for human ears, blew harmonics like he was speaking another language.
The wind was whipping the train of Black’s dress in every direction, and fluttering in the wind the way it did, the train made him look like he was flying, or rather, hovering, above it all.
And below, Taylor’s bass thumped the chorus behind Rakim, throbbing with the excitement of a heart about to explode with all that joy and all that wonder, throbbing, A Love Supreme, A Love Supreme, A Love Supreme. Picking up the note as Rakim’s sax died, Damian’s voice called the changes with just the bass now, his voice holding all the water that had flowed across this land and all the water to come. A Love Supreme, A Love Supreme.
Outside The Ugly Store, below Black, in the street, the faithful picked up Damian’s call, hundreds of voices chanting: A Love Supreme, A Love Supreme, a few calling: “Mother, mother,” all of them beholding their queen in the pure light of the helicopter’s spotlight, too far away to see the blood, too blinded by faith. Behind the Virgin, the night sky was a mixed hue of reds and pinks. Her face, glowing in the light from the helicopter searchlight, was ghostly, haunting.
The singing was growing louder and louder and pilgrims kept coming to join the crowd, swelling their numbers. Black, looking down, thought that the River of the street would soon be overflowing with people. The wind, growing even wilder, attempted several times to snatch him from his perch and dash him to the ground, at the feet of the adulating crowd. The faithful kept coming and coming, as though blown there, like the ash. He could make out Iggy in the street below. She was looking up at him and he knew she recognized him. An old woman, face awash with rapture, grabbed on to her arm.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she shouted. “She brought us this miracle, you know,” the woman went on, one hand collecting the falling ash. “Snow in Los Angeles.”
Black could hear her; he could hear everything; feel everything: the heartbeat of the faithful, the band in The Ugly Store, Sweet Girl on the roof screaming. He was sobbing and he raised his hands to rail against the night. The faithful in the River below cheered and began to sing another song. The police helicopter circled, washing him in a halo of light that seemed only to increase his appeal. He saw Bomboy come up to Iggy. He was pointing at Black and whispering. Iggy shook her head and said something to him.
It was all dance.
And wind: howling through the city, tearing souls from their moorings and casting them into the primordial swirl of making and unmaking. The crowds ran first this way and then that. The police arrived in droves and in well-rehearsed synchronized movements herded the crowd first this way and then that, clubs and boots reinforcing old lessons.
And the city burning with the red of flames held in a sky black with love and ash, and the wind, the wind.
“Oh, God!”
He wasn’t sure if he had said it or if it was coming from the crowd, or if Damian was calling from the bar, but he could see several people pointing up at him, their expressions a mix of awe and fear and he wondered if Gabriel had appeared behind him. No. He smelled the burning and looking down realized that he’d dropped the still lit cigarette and it had caught on an edge of the turpentine-soaked dress. He stamped his feet trying to extinguish the fire, but the turpentine was an accelerant, and the flames enveloped him.
A woman on fire.
And the wind tore at the train of the wedding dress until it became a billowing sheet of flame trailing away behind Black, until it ripped the burning cloth free. The floating train hovered in the ash-heavy air for a moment, like a phoenix, all flight and fire, even as Black flailed dangerously close to the edge of the spaceship. Another up-draft caught the train of lace and it sailed away, still burning. Set free it floated over the crowd, heading for the River. It sank from view.
Adrift on night’s River.
benediction
Leavened.
This blue light here and trembling with knowledge beyond measure; also love: perhaps. It falls with the sense of a wingspan, but is gone just as soon leaving only the memory of it; and like this River, it is never the same twice.
Last night’s regretful rain is now only ash.
And maybe this too.
Here, on the edge of morning, perched on the lip of a bridge, hunched in the solitary sadness of a gargoyle, a woman picks petals from a flower, dropping each into that endless flow, her whispers holding it all like prayer: he loved me; he loved me not. In the river below, an angry dog barks as it swims for safety unaware of the petals falling like gossamer, like promises not kept. But there are no scriptures here in this city of angels where every moment is a life lived too fast, where the spines of freeways, like arteries, like blood, circle in hope. Permanence is this River and with piety’s conviction we make a home here.
There will never be no more River.