Krakow Melt

by Daniel Allen Cox

  Triangle 3: An oxidizer, like oxygen, chlorine, iodine, or peroxide.

  Make sure, unless you’re prepared to accept the consequences, never to smoke when you’re bleaching your hair.

  Triangle 4: Chain reaction. Bingo. A catalyst has to bring these three triangles together, or else they’re useless. The catalyst must be insistent—ergo, human—to ensure continuity, to press for a truly destructive flame. Someone has to flick the lighter, light the match, match the fire’s intensity with their own will to keep it going. It’s an act of violence, sure, but also of creation.

  I feel so grounded at the bottom of this pyramid.

  With this foolproof formula, fire doesn’t need much time to accomplish its magic. The Great Chicago Fire lasted just twenty-seven hours, and managed to cut a swath of charred land across eight square kilometres of urban development and 120 kilometres of road.

  I think I’m going to start with the Aragon Ballroom. It’s a rectangular box relatively easy to re-create. Let’s double up the popsicle sticks for thickness, to soundproof the walls. Big bands bray, and the brass section is a nightly riot. With surgical scissors, I can make everything fit.

  There’s a well-known legend about how this fire started. Perhaps you’ve heard it: Catherine O’Leary’s milking cow kicked over a lantern in a hay-filled barn. The journalist who originally published this story later recanted, confessing that he made up the livestock angle to give the story some juice. But is it possible that O’Leary’s cow actually had set Chicago ablaze, and that the confession was the attention grabber? What do you think?

  At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I’d like to stab this from a few angles, if you will permit.

  The past and present members of Pink Floyd, I’m now certain, believe the cow story. Just look at the cover art for Atom Heart Mother. A Holstein cow is standing in a field—perhaps the band’s vision of farm heaven—looking back inquisitively, as if to say, “Did I do that?”

  Sure, sure, no direct link to Chicago. But when you probe a little deeper, it’s clear that Pink Floyd are a bunch of pyros. Originally, before it was renamed, the title track on Atom Heart Mother was “The Amazing Pudding.” Is it mere coincidence that the Great Fire of London in 1666 started in the bakery of Thomas Farynor on Pudding Lane?

  And do you think the triangle on the Dark Side of the Moon album cover could be anything other than an homage to the fire tetrahedron? Please.

  Chicago now needs my attention. I’ll roll out the rest of my evidence a little later.

  Before I put the roof on the Aragon, I’ll need to make sure the bucket seats are lined up properly. And I’ve discovered that the glue warps the wood when it dries, so I’ll need to prefabricate the seats with a C-clamp from now on, and then drop them in by finger crane just before showtime. The audience needs thumbnails of foam, of course, or they won’t be entirely comfortable.

  The Aragon marquee, in the 1:50 scale that I’m using to recreate this fire, is the exact size and shape of a single popsicle stick. I’ll be able to paint the letters on a smooth, uninterrupted surface, and that brings me shards of peace. My fingers are infinitely happy. The tingle moves up.

  It’s kind of silly. Ever since humans learned the art of fire—yes, it’s an art, not an obsession or a crime—we have been trying frantically to put it out. We’re confirmed as the fourth triangle of an inseparable pyramid, yet some will spend their last kilojoule denying it, refusing to see that the only way to grow is to lose what’s precious. Fire, bless its blue and white heart, does not choose indiscriminately. It wheedles out the weakest elements in the societies we build and forces us to do it better the next time. It’s intelligent.

  Nothing is fireproof. Anything will burn, if the fire is hot enough. And as long as it stays that way, we’ll always be improving.

  From the Chicago Herald Tribune, the week of the fire: “Cheer up! In the midst of a calamity without parallel in the world’s history, looking upon the ashes of thirty years’ accumulation, the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that Chicago shall rise again with vigor.”

  It did. The city bounced back, a frightening tangle of steel, glass, and concrete, each building striving not to be the weakest. By the time Chicago hosted the World’s Fair just twenty-two years later, all the wood was gone. Lumber yards, elevated plank sidewalks, tinder bungalows packed with firewood—vanished.

  One dude, however, failed to learn the beautiful lesson the fire had taught, calling his hotel the World’s First Fireproof Building.

  That really gets my sheep.

  The record has finished, and I’m listening to the tinny thump of the inner groove. Now that I’ve finished the Aragon Ballroom, I have a confession to make: it was built in 1926, long after the Great Fire. Still, I couldn’t resist putting it in my maquette.

  Here’s why.

  The Ballroom was big-band headquarters for many years until a fire in a cocktail lounge next door—much smaller than in 1871, I assure you—forced Benny Goodman and other greats to play elsewhere. The theatre had a few false resuscitations after that, and eventually gained full strength as a rock venue. The apex? Pink Floyd played the Aragon Ballroom in 1970, the year they recorded Atom Heart Mother.

  Now do you see what I mean about their pyromaniac tendencies? It sends shivers up my spine.

  If you’ll excuse me, it’s getting late, and I have the rest of the city to erect.

  Oh yeah, one more thing: if you think “Comfortably Numb” is Pink Floyd’s best song, then you’re a lightweight, but it’s not your fault. Most people don’t understand that you can’t judge Floyd songs on their own, that concept albums don’t exist in pieces.

  THE LORD’S WORK

  Nowa Huta, with its concrete monoliths buffered by patches of soggy grass and swollen bushes, with its metal railings sidling around corners and out of eyeshot, was made for parkour.

  Built for a discipline that would come five decades later.

  I remember when I first heard about this martial art creeping into Poland. It was a ghost element of our gradual entry into the European Union, gliding in on passports that became increasingly useless until, one day last year, they didn’t need to be stamped anymore. I learned about parkour through a neighbour; more precisely, through the screams when his elbow shattered and bone fragments stuck into the grass, pinning his arm to the ground. I later learned that he had bent parkour’s non-competition rules and had paid the price.

  Quel dommage, as the French say.

  The doctor who treated him wasn’t very understanding of this new phenomenon because he forbade further practice. Even worse, the administracja installed barbed wire along the walls, railings, and concrete surfaces of Osiedle Sportowe, as if we were too stupid to injure ourselves elsewhere.

  As if people don’t eventually get what they want.

  A bunch of us guys from Sportowe shrugged off danger and followed the lead of our friend without an elbow, although we obeyed the rules of parkour more rigidly than he did. As we conquered the physical world and bettered ourselves as human beings, we often pointed out each other’s flaws: a flubbed lâché, a missed demitour, a downright embarrassing Underbar.

  Self-improvement should be fun, but it rarely is.

  The Underbar can go horrifyingly wrong. You start to pull yourself through a gap in the railing, but you get distracted. Perhaps it’s a Lot Polish Airlines jet tearing the sky a new set of buttocks, but more likely it’s the storming toward you with a rent cheque you remember signing, but don’t remember depositing enough money in the bank to cover.

  Either way, you’re screwed.

  You misjudge your descent by a centimetre or two, and the steel bar wallops your chin. Your incisors punch holes in your tongue and you can’t even pronounce the best cuss word in the language: kurrrrrrrva.

  In the end, I got what I wanted and acquired a few scrapes of my own. Parkour, like many other forces in Poland, cannot be stopped.

  But when the came running
after me, all red-faced and zagniewane and about to stuff a bounced cheque down my throat, I would run to the boiler room and lock myself in there, waiting for her to go away. Childish, yes, but parkour makes you a kid again.

  It can make you horny, too. I used to fuck in that boiler room.

  Karol, a hunk from my building, spent whole summers tempting me, walking around in a cut-off T-shirt that showed off his glorious armpit hair. Those puffs of pheromone candy beckoning me to sniff.

  We would do it in the dark. He would be sitting with his back against the wall, his long, hairy legs splayed out in front of him. I would be sitting on his knees, slobbering over him, tasting the stinging sweat on his shoulders and hurting my lips on his stubble, jerking him off with one hand and swirling his spaghetti hair with the other. Somewhere in my sexual history, I had conceived the idea of giving my lovers a multimedia experience. They had to feel like they were in an MTV music video or in a car commercial, or it simply wasn’t good sex. I still believe that.

  Inevitably, the smell of his crotch would get to me, and I’d root out his testicles like a rutting pig. They hung several inches away from him like loosely attached eggs, as if on display. I smelled, licked, and sucked them. A kind of gender worship, I guess. I imagined piercing through the skin when he was least expecting it, siphoning out his testosterone with illicit sips, and then waiting for his pubic hair to sprout magically through my cheeks so I could smell him all day. Me, the lusty and deluded Chia Pet.

  I am a swine, an alchemist, a human. I am a curious boy of twenty-five.

  One of those times, Karol was most rude.

  “Radek, I would like to see you naked.”

  “Je ne comprends pas.” I had already begun to speak the language of the revolution.

  “Don’t be coy when I’m horny,” he said. “That just makes me frustrated.” He put his hand behind my head, yanked it like a slot machine handle, and I went down. Choked on pre-cum. I loved the feeling of his cock head stretching the back of my throat. It changed how I spoke, ever so slightly, giving my vowels a hollow touch.

  “But I like it when you’re frustrated,” I said. “It makes you do things to me.”

  I stood up, shucked my shorts, and instantly heard the voice of the apostle Paul, residual ramblings from somewhere in my childhood.

  Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

  I was not made for the Lord’s work. I was built for fucking, and I had known that for many years. But these scriptures echo across the land, and it’s hard to tune them out completely, to escape even subtle pangs of guilt. I had Karol’s stinky pubes in my teeth, his fingers near my shitty hole, and the stain of dried DNA on my belly; I processed these stimuli through years of programming and filters that told me the body was an unclean organism that worms its way closer to hell every day. Fail, fail, fail.

  You cannot outrun echoes in Poland, but you can block them out. There are ways to loosen the church’s grip on your crotch.

  Karol cupped my ass, perhaps to catch my sway, perhaps to centre my asshole over his cock so it would be a clean pierce when I eventually squatted.

  I recoiled from his touch.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Maybe we can do it with my clothes on.”

  “Are you retarded?”

  “Don’t be a hater,” I said.

  “How is sex even possible with your clothes on?”

  In a way, clothing had protected me from sin though many sound fuckings: if my body was only a remote participant, then it wasn’t exactly sex.

  “My jeans have holes in all the right places.”

  I was ready to defy the apostle Paul with a striptease for the ages, but Karol was already zipping up.

  “Someday,” he said, “we’re going to need you to fuck openly.” He pulled an elastic band around his pony tail. “We might all have to fuck in the streets until people get it. No more hiding.”

  Sure. I was conquering the physical world, all right.

  DANISH BLUE

  Chicago hardly fit through the doors of Kraków’s No. 8 tramwaj, but the driver let me force it through and chip the corners where future suburbs would grow. He knew that the incredible level of detail would keep the kids from screaming for a few stops.

  I couldn’t reach the timestamp to validate my green transit ticket. This happens every now and then. Jaka szkoda. If the ticket-taker ever catches me, I’ll just bribe him with a free tour of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. I don’t know what the Communists were thinking, putting Polish trams on the honour system. As if we wouldn’t figure out, after all these years, how to ride with an unstamped ticket.

  An oak tree uprooted and fell off into a woman’s handbag without her knowing. She had such a stern face, I decided not to retrieve it.

  I got off at Stradom station and paid some guy two złotych to help me carry the maquette to the nearby Człowiek Obcy Gallery. My original gallery—the one that had commissioned this doomed artifact— had gotten nervous about my plans for the exhibition. They said I was zwariowany, but you have to be that way to make art that plants razor blades in the gums.

  That’s the thing. We all want art to hurt us, but only through the screams of others.

  In the space behind the gallery, the director had thoughtfully erected four cinderblock pillars waist-high on which I could lay Chicago. I prepared the materials I needed for my performance, and by the time I was done, the wine-and-cheese was in full roar. Danish blue cheese and cheap, Hungarian swill for wine. Nearly everybody was dressed in Dolce & Gabbana, looking like appetizers. The Jagielloski University crowd never missed a show at Człowiek Obcy, though they couldn’t care less who the artist was. This was their social mandate— to support non-university trouble-making, no matter what it was, so they could criticize the akademia with some credibility.

  They were most welcome to my show.

  A girl—you know what I mean, a woman—was reciting Czesław Miłosz to her friends. It’s easy to appear pretentious when quoting this writer, but she was choosing unknown passages, or at least ones not repeated to death. Her listeners didn’t applaud; they fell silent.

  Her hair was long and licorice black, her skin pale beneath the curls. Sarcastic eyes. Does that make sense? I liked her instantly.

  Clap, clap, clap. The director wanted our attention. He was dressed in a bow tie and smoking jacket, hair flattened with Brylcreem. You could tell it was meant to be ironic. I was wearing my favourite pair of blue overalls. My busted lip had more or less healed.

  “Uwaga, uwaga, panie i panowie! The artist is ready to commence the performance. Please give a hand to S. Mok Wawelski, and move outside to the courtyard.”

  I use an artist name. Gotta problem with that? Radek Tomaszewski is as ordinary as kielbasa and ywiec beer, and not destined to attract attention, so I had to choose something flashier.

  I stood on the east side of Chicago, where Lake Michigan would be, where many had jumped into the water to save themselves from the flames and smoke. The students gathered around, lazily drinking their wine and smoking West cigarettes.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said. “This is what Chicago looked like on the morning of October 8, 1871. You’ll see that everything was made of wood. They ate a lot of ice pops.”

  Laughter. Someone raised their hand.

  “How many people died?”

  “That depends on which account you believe,” I said. “Humans are always the most poorly documented factors in a tragedy. I could tell you three hundred, but that wouldn’t be counting paperless immigrants, the poor, or the homeless.”

  “Or queers,” lit girl said, smiling. Her teeth were stained red by wine.

  “True,” I said, and bookmarked her for later. This may sound strange, but I wanted to
see her take a piss. I occasionally get curious about women, and it’s usually precipitated by quirky behaviour like hers. “Now step back.”

  I picked up a can of butane.

  “Where’s the artist statement?” someone said.

  Sigh. Purists. I had been dreading this moment; I’ve never been comfortable summarizing my work. It’s so reductive.You can’t explain away a conflagration or what it means. Sky-high flames, searing heat, and suffocating smoke make different impressions on each of us. Fire alters your micro-climate in ways inexplicable to others.

  For my statement, I chose to stick to the facts.

  “Fireproofing is a myth,” I said. “The biggest one since ‘the immortality of the soul.’”

  I squirted streams of butane over the Gold Coast, the Loop, Streeterville, and a bunch of other neighbourhoods. The Chicago Water Tower was one of the few structures in the burn zone that remained standing in the fire, and I was determined to change that. After all, this was my chance to tinker with history.

  I lifted a fire extinguisher to the audience, who were getting noticeably nervous. Gulping their wine.

  “Take note that this extinguisher has been emptied. The waterworks broke down during the Great Fire. We will deal with a similar disadvantage.”

  Showtime. I stood back, lit a match, and threw it over the city. Orange and blue flames ignited in the downtown sky. Fire dripped down to the land and flowed like lava over the landscape until it was an even, vibrating carpet of light. Glue melted and poured into the streets, and popsicle sticks snapped and blackened. Wind blew the smoke northward into the faces of the guests, and many of them ran toward me where they could breathe. Some scampered into the gallery. The flames were almost as high as a nearby clothesline, three, maybe four metres, colouring the clouds from our point of view. It was a bit much.

  In the crackling, whistling wood, I could hear the echoes of human screams from 1871, drowned out by primitive fire alarms, bells rung by hand. Some sounds just seem to go together, or maybe it’s just me.