Krakow Melt

by Daniel Allen Cox

  “So people should constantly be spitting out their thoughts?” I said, suddenly not finding him very attractive. “They should speak without timing?”

  “Of course not. But I’m ready to know.”

  I showed him my brand-new video camera.

  “We’re making a YouTube piece,” I said.

  “Actors?”

  “You.”

  “Just me?”

  “No, but you’re the star.”

  “Pay?” He double salted his egg.

  “Fame. I hope there are no zits on your ass cheeks.”

  “You can just pop them,” he said. “You’re pretty good at getting under the skin. Should I have brought condoms?”

  “No.”

  We watched the countryside roll by.

  “Thanks for the book,” he said.

  We got off in Gdask and had a cup of herbatka at the station restaurant. Then we pushed through the usual crowd of hooligans that clogged public places when school was out for the day, past juvenile comments about the size of my breasts and about Radek’s nail polish. You know, “Who’s the wife?” and other such childish remarks. Of course, I was the one who answered back, “Go fuck a pencil sharpener,” because if Radek had said it, they would’ve beaten him up on the spot. You can’t outrun a pack of kids on a 4 pm sugar high.

  We caught our tramwaj to the beach. The weather was gorgeous. On our way to the bluffs, we passed a cluster of people setting up their picnic and arguing about the best way to get sand out of a cell phone. After we cleared them, Radek got naked immediately—even before I did—and I took it as a sign that the shoot would go well.

  While we were walking through the bluffs to find a cozy spot, we came across patches of blood in the sand. People apparently had violent sex out here to a soundtrack of the sea ... I guess the water brings out something different in everyone.

  We continued a little further and eventually settled on a bank of white sand flanked by reeds on three sides. We sat facing the beautiful, blue Baltic, at peace despite the broken shells and dead hermit crabs that poked through our towels and into our skin.

  I leaned over to Radek, kissed him on his cherry lips, and then fell into his naked, cross-legged lap. He hovered over my face for a few seconds, inhaling my hair, and then he buried his tongue down my throat. Searching. He was always looking for something, this boy. We made out for a few minutes, then picked sand out of our mouths.

  “Wow,” he said. “Your molars taste metallic.”

  “That’s because I have fillings. You’re not supposed to notice.”

  That did it. My pussy was wet. Please understand, dear reader, if I need to use Radek’s vulgar, Americanized English to explain what happened next.

  He sniffed a noose around my neck and then turned idiot. He turned theoretical.

  “Poland may learn to accept gays and lesbians in the coming decades, but it will take centuries for it to accept—”

  “Be quiet,” I interrupted. “I need your face near my pussy.”

  Radek obeyed. He lay on the sand in front of me, planted his face in my pubes, and took a deep whiff. His nostrils flared. This was about the body—our bodies—and not about “us,” so I wasn’t upset that he avoided eye contact with me. I preferred that sentimentality didn’t ruin our session.

  You see, Radek thinks I’m a nice girl, but I’m really an animal.

  Who whitewashes a city of all tampon advertising for some guy’s funeral? My vagina wasn’t going to stand for invisibility. I lurched forward and fucked Radek’s nose, smothering him with my labia. Ekstra, I thought. His tongue knows what to look for and doesn’t take long to find it.

  His tongue, in fact, was radically fudging up the gay community’s spit-shined image of boy-on-boy, girl-on-girl. Bisexual stigma, lost right up my cunt.

  I should’ve been enjoying these precious moments with Radek— the wind in his hair, the sun bronzing his pale ass, his tongue unleashing months of pent-up energy in me. Instead, I was thinking them to death.

  “I almost forgot,” I said, setting up the camera on a book beside us. “Let me just turn this on.”

  I rolled him over on his back and tried to quickly brush the sand off his cock, but it clung stubbornly to his moist foreskin. So I picked and picked. Then, when I thought it was clean, I pulled the skin back and found even more. The pee-hole is so interesting.

  His erection grew in my hand, long and thick. Forcing my fingers apart. This was what I had been waiting for. Can a virgin be queer? Can a virgin be anything? I decided not to tell him this was my first time, in case it would spook the roughness out of him.

  I straddled Radek’s body, lifted up his heavy dick, and slowly impaled myself on it. This girl’s tummy got very full, very fast. Anatomy doesn’t make any sense when it’s being turned inside out. Radek’s face became a pool of pleasure, and then he throbbed, pulsing into me. I daydreamed his cockhead would erupt on his strongest throb, pushing blood into my deepest recesses.

  I was silly with lust. Since when do I drool?

  Then he flipped me on my back and pumped my pussy raw. Bits of shell were digging into me, but I didn’t care.

  Radek thought that nothing had changed, but that’s not true. We had changed, and our bodies told us so.

  “Fuck,” I said. “You feel that?”

  “Yeah, I’m in your fornix.”

  And with those words, I came and came and came, and squeezed the cum out of sweet Radeki, as orgasm deformed his face against a sky of squawking seagulls.

  He collapsed beside me, then after a few minutes of rest, threw my ankles over my head and ate my ass out like a fucking pig. My anus was Queen of Poland for five minutes, and I came again.

  Sigh.

  Radek laid his head on my stomach and faced the water.

  “You know what’s hotter than a gay guy who knows where the fornix is?” I asked, the last full sentence I spoke to him that day. “A gay guy who can reach it.”

  He looked happy. I wanted so badly to go clean up in the sea with him, and then swim and play all day, but I was too tired to move.

  “What does this have to do with the Internet?” Radek said.

  I had forgotten all about the video camera. It was still recording.

  “I’m going to post this online, with the caption ‘If he’s not afraid of pussy—’”

  And that’s when we saw the skinheads kicking their way through the bluffs, threshing the reeds with iron chains and laughing. It could only be one thing, the worst thing: They were on a faggot hunt.

  I can still hear the swish of their track suits. It was the most terrifying sound ever.

  But Radek was with me—a naked woman who smelled of sex—so I was sure he was safe.

  The skinheads saw us, and the short, wiry one threw down his beer can. A stream of gold spilled into the sand and meandered toward us.

  “What’s up, bitch?”

  “I’m with my boyfriend.”

  “This pedał?” he said, holding up Radek’s hand. “Only women and perverts wear nail polish.”

  Radek froze, like a sculpture. I was expecting a little more fight in him, but he was naked and vulnerable. I forgive him.

  “We just had sex,” I said, and showed him Radek’s cum leaking out of me.

  “Who cares. He’ll always be a faggot.” He twisted Radek’s wrist backwards for a few seconds and then threw his hand down. Not a yelp from my baby.

  In any other situation, I would’ve agreed with the skinhead, because he was right. Radek was a free spirit who could identify however he wanted, and one fuck wasn’t going to change that. But Radek’s life, I realized, was now in my care.

  “Why don’t you leave him alone, and just fuck me.”

  “Does it look like we want AIDS?” the other thug said, fitting himself with a set of brass knuckles.

  “If he’s not afraid of pussy, then he’s not afraid of you,” I said desperately.

  That was supposed to be the video caption.
/>   And then Radek took off, dashing naked down the beach with these two monsters running after him.

  I forgive him.

  It was going to be like old times, I thought, starting with a franchissement, then a passe muraille, followed by an acrobatic roulade into the water. I was certain Radek would kick gravity in the nuts, and transform into the superhero he was always meant to be.

  But that’s not how it went. He got a few hundred yards, then tripped in the sand and fell. The skinheads caught up with him. One of them held Radek down by pressing a boot on his neck, while the other fetched a nearby conch shell. Together, they pried opened his mouth, and gently placed the spire in the back of his throat.

  I wish I had never seen that shell.

  Parkour only works when there are obstacles to overcome. The beach is a horribly barren place.

  I forgive him.

  That’s where the video ends, because I turned off the “record” function. This was only supposed to be a porn shoot, a picnic, a bonding experience. Unfortunately, it turned into so much more, especially after the short skinhead, the one with the venom in his leg, gave the first banana kick.

  There’s no way I can ever forgive Radek.

  GAUZE

  Dr Krzysztof Mazurkiewicz, emergency surgeon at Pomorskie Centrum Traumatologii:

  5:15 pm

  The patient arrived in an extremely fragile state, with a hole in his palate, and his gums riddled with bits of shell. Blood flow and swelling was obstructing his breathing, so I ordered an immediate endotracheal intubation.

  5:17 pm

  One of the nurses called the police to report the hate crime.

  5:19 pm

  We tilted the head back into sniffing position to align the oral, pharyngeal, and laryngeal axes. We pressed down on the patient’s mandible to open the mouth as wide as possible. I inserted the laryngoscope blade past the right side of the tongue and down the throat. A gust of warm breath confirmed its position. Once the metal tip was in the vallecula, I pulled the handle forward to reveal the epiglottis, and slid the tube down to twenty-three centimetres, the standard insertion for an adult male. There is blood everywhere.

  5:20 pm

  The patient breathed by ventilator while we prepared for the tracheostomy, continuing to clean his mouth. We removed the shrapnel by hand and the blood via suction vacuum. Because of the extensive blood loss, the patient was at severe risk for circulatory shock. We administered a clotting agent by injection, and the blood team took serum samples to find a type match, in case a transfusion became necessary.

  5:22 pm

  I took my gloves off temporarily, and held a finger against the patient’s nose. Incidental breath is so beautiful, especially when you can barely feel it.

  5:24 pm

  We had just identified the Jackson’s triangle and were about to perform the first tracheal incision when the patient’s temperature and systolic pressure fell. The nurse called the police once again, and she spoke to the patient’s friend in the waiting room (the one who had called for the ambulance), explaining that we couldn’t perform the tracheostomy until his vital signs stabilized.

  5:30 pm

  Diastolic plummeted. The police still hadn’t shown up to investigate, and I grew frustrated. I snapped at the nurses and told them to get lost, but they stuck around. So professional. Wish I could say the same for myself.

  5:35 pm

  Fuck this.

  5:36 pm

  It was against all training, all advice, all common sense to start the tracheostomy when the patient’s vital signs were shit. It could throw his body into a tailspin and reduce his temperature to a chill. But something told me this kid needed to breathe, not through a ventilator, but through his fucking neck. Yes, I had to rip another hole into his body. Yes, I had to kick him when he was low and expose his insides to a roomful of bacteria. This was murder and this was saving him. I was confused, and I longed to feel more of his breath. The Hippocratic oath was supposed to distinguish killing from curing, but this was definitely a grey area.

  5:38 pm

  The nurse went to the waiting room again to give the patient’s friend an update. The woman tried to fight her way into the OR, but security kept her out. Good thing, too. This was my boy. My boy. He looked exactly like Elvis. This tracheostomy meant so much more to me than the Pope’s.

  5:39 pm

  No cops. Screw the cops, the homophobic bastards. I know what you’re thinking: “I’m never going to the hospital again.” Ha. Just wait. You will.

  5:41 pm

  The nurse brought me a can of orange Fanta. It helped.

  Now pay close attention, because you’ll probably have to perform this on yourself one day. I’m willing to bet money that someone out there wants you dead and that the bottom of their boot is the exact width of your throat. Treads matching wrinkles, even.

  We made an incision between the suprasternal notch and the cri-coid cartilage, then dissected the tissue with a cat’s paw retractor. Once the tracheal rings were visible, we made another incision between the second and third rings, and injected a two percent silocaine solution into the windpipe to prevent cough.

  5:47 pm

  I inserted the tracheostomy tube, and held a piece of gauze in front of the nozzle to confirm its position.

  This was the test.

  The patient’s breath would flutter the gauze with every inhale and exhale, strongly if he was going to make it. The systolic could lie, the diastolic could bluff, and the pulse could fluctuate wildly from minute to minute. But the patient’s breath would animate the gauze, in movements that could not be denied.

  That is, if we had gauze.

  You see, I made this last part up, because I wanted so badly for it to be true. This was Gdask, not Rome. Hospital standards are shit in former Communist countries. In Gdask, they didn’t think to check the OR’s gauze supplies. We had none.

  In Gdask, there were no steel bars to stop crazed women from trying to break in through the window while a surgery was in progress.

  EKSTRA

  Dear Magpie, I have something to tell you. There are several people in my life who question your motives. They think you’re trying to use me, and at first, I wondered if they were right. I’ve come to realize, however, that they’re all assholes. I know you love me, because I can feel it. But even more than that, I think you and I were meant to be together.

  How does one believe in destiny without believing in God? I apologize for being such a contradiction.

  One more thing. In my first letter to you, I wrote about how the smell of smoke will never leave you. My description was accurate, but incomplete.

  I hope you never have to feel the carbon molecule creep, the coughing, the tiny black mushrooms floating in your lungs, sucking your oxygen, raining acrid choking soot, dust, and the dry burn of ash in the nose, blackness with not a sunny patch of grey, everything spirited to smoke that has weight, buckets of fumes that crush you, eclipsing all light, pinching your nostrils and taping your face shut, parts of the world now living inside you, under your eyelids, in your rasping and charred throat, stealing more oxygen so you can’t breathe in, burning plastic singeing, killing cells, turning you into a piece of smoke, coughing, choking, absorbing the physical world one element at a time, blinding tears that taste like wood, making memories, building sediment cakes inside you, making memories, can’t exhale because more smoke will come in, flavouring your hair, making memories, staining you the colour of all things, raking heat through your chest, feels like gravel and baked blood, killing tissue, this horrible synthesis of elements forcing you to grow as a person, to change, the most wonderful thing there is ... how could you have missed it all this time?

  Dear Magpie, smoke is the gift of memory. A fire at St Mary’s would give us so much to remember. Think of the altarpiece burning for days, plumes and plumes of gold paint blackening the sky over all Kraków. It would be such a sight, or as you say, it would be “ekstra.” How else could we po
ssibly preserve all that we’ve been through?

  How would it live on?

  Please reconsider the plan.

  That’s all for now. Sorry you got this letter so late. I didn’t have a stamp.

  Your Radeki

  THE SMOK WAWELSKI

  I had finally found a cave that suited me, but no matter which way I crawled in the darkness, the drops kept hitting me in the head. The worst part is that they smelled like gasoline. I’m a girl who doesn’t need gas in her hair. Not even painful twists of the spine could manoeuvre me out of the way. Less flash-blind, and I would’ve been able to see.

  I wasn’t yet feeling right in my skin, in the bones of the new creature I knew I was becoming.

  I did not leave Radek lying on a hospital gurney in Gdask. I had taken him with me—inside me—and he would live as long as my pH balance didn’t snuff out the last of his embers.

  But it was in that cave, the unlit concrete hollow beneath where the Dbnicki Bridge leaves land to span the Wisła River, where I first began to lose him. Feeling the crags in the nape of the steel anchorage, looking for the can of barszcz soup and the tin of ledz´ I’d picked up running away from the Stare Miasto and past the Sheraton Kraków, I couldn’t even picture his face.

  If I hadn’t been so rushed, I could’ve found a better hiding place. At first, I ran away from the town square towards Wawel castle, certain I could find a derelict stone corner full of piss and anonymity. But there were too many tourists with cameras, so I ran toward the Wisła, guided by the fading glow in the sky.

  Kraków became strange to me. This was not my city anymore, even though I’d just transformed part of it into a more inhabitable space. Then again, if I had ever been in love with Kraków, I wouldn’t have touched a single brick.

  I am writing this so you will understand why I did it.

  My hiding place under the bridge wasn’t as secure as I had originally thought. I could feel air sluicing through invisible holes in the ceiling, and I reached up to feel them. I slid my bony fingers up through the embrasures, the spaces between the interlocking metal teeth that reinforced sections of the asphalt deck. Such a small detail that you’d never notice it.