by Melanie Tem
The smoke made huge talons and crooked fingers across the sky. Or holes, he thought dazedly; maybe they were holes. He glimpsed twisted spires of blue metal from exploded machinery, flying pieces of pavement, balls and bubbles and bells of fire.
He looked away, looked back. The sky was flying apart before his eyes.
Finally he found the kite, draped over a silver maple tree as if a piece of the sky had, indeed, charred and fallen. Afraid to move, he stood where he was and tugged gingerly on the string, but the kite was stuck, tangled among the leaves and branches of the pretty little tree.
Stuart took a step forward and jerked on the kite string. The kite just settled more securely over the tree, wings covering it nearly to the roots, snout gaping as if hungry for more.
He ran to the tree and thrust his hands up and under the dragon. Finding its wing slimy, warm, and moving as if with breath, he snatched his hands back, repulsed by its touch, even though he knew it was part of himself.
Then Eliahedron’s gravelly voice sounded in his ear. No, he realized. It was in his head, his throat, his heart. “Imagine, Stuart! Don’t stop now!”
The dragonkite lifted its wing and pulled Stuart under it. He gasped and cried out. The ragged wing of his dragon tented over him like another sky; from so close under it he could see that all the colors it had drawn into itself to make black were still distinguishable, scarlet and cerulean and royal purple and silver, pulsing at his fingertips and behind his eyes.
Eliahedron’s voice skittered around inside this new bell, now close on his left, now more distant on his right, now seeping like smoke through rents in the kitewing, now coursing like blood just under the surface of his skin.
Stuart threw his arms around the vibrating trunk of the tree. He shut his eyes tight and imagined.
Almost at once, the dragon-wing sky over him softened and shrank. Colors faded, became ordinary: red, yellow, blue feathers tousled his hair, brushed away his tears. For a fleeting moment his world looked familiar and lovely again from under the wing of the bird-of-paradise, but the wings kept retracting until they had folded themselves neatly and Stuart could lift the pretty little kite up out of the tree. The tree was dead.
Tucking his toy under his arm, Stuart started for home. He thought Eliahedron was with him, but when he looked he was alone. He thought Eliahedron was chasing him, but when he risked glancing over his shoulder he saw only Abby Sanchez, yelling his name in a loud scared voice, and Michael Bartholomew, crying. There were dark circles under their eyes, and their hands were over their ears, their mouths; as Stuart hurried past them, he thought they looked more than just scared. They looked ashamed. They were hurrying, too, trying to keep up with him, and all along the path bushes exploded into flames and dark strange shapes flew.
Stuart ran faster, as fast as he could. As he raced down the last hill toward his home, he stumbled over something in the grass.
It was a body. An old man, or maybe an old woman. Somebody Stuart had never seen before.
He stopped, crouched, peered at the body, poked it with one forefinger. The mouth was open and empty of teeth. The eyes were closed. Confusedly, Stuart wondered how anybody could sleep through all this noise.
Then he saw the smoke stains, and the slits in the old man’s or old woman’s body. They looked like the rips his dragonkite had made in the surface of the sky. Soft things peeked out of the slits. Suddenly Stuart simply could not imagine it, and he pulled away, stood up, started again toward home.
All around him, bodies were raining from the smoky holes in the sky, drumming against the grassy slope, crashing onto the trees, breaking through the pastel roofs of the houses. He could hardly see. He barely avoided the falling bodies. The sky was darkening now, as if for night, and Stuart had to get home.
Stuart’s parents were waiting for him in the front yard. He could tell by their faces, by the way they waved their arms, by the terrible sound of their voices crying his name that he had done something wrong. That the coming-apart of his world and their world was his fault. He was sorry. He was scared. But he was also more excited than he’d ever been in his life.
His father grabbed him and half-pushed, half-carried him into the house. “What were you doing?” his father was yelling, holding him close and then pushing him away hard. “You’ll let everything in!”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Stuart yelled back.
His mother was singing to him, reaching under his father’s arms to stroke his hair. Her own sad face was wet with tears.
His father thrust him into his mother’s arms. He was too big for her and by now he was struggling, but she was strong and she held on. “Get him to bed!” his father shouted, turning to punch at the control pad. The door locked just as a rain of heavy blows pummeled the outer shell of the house. Stuart was worried; the shell had been designed to be attractive, but he had no idea whether it was strong. Through the screens, through his mother’s hair falling across his face, he saw dark shadows, like pieces of a phantasmagoric kite tail, contorting, writhing, tearing apart.
Quickly, Stuart got ready for bed. He didn’t entirely want to, but he didn’t know what else to do. His mother sang to him the whole time, her voice straining, trying too hard, the cheerful songs nonsensical and off-key. She kept crying. Finally she gave him his pills—three of them this time—and almost with the same motion reached to tuck him in. He stowed the pills under his tongue. She didn’t check. He pulled the covers up under his chin, smiled up at her, closed his eyes. When she kissed him, he felt the tears on his eyelids.
Outside he heard thunder and other bright noises. Deep inside his head he heard Eliahedron calling his name. Without opening his eyes, he set about imagining Eliahedron’s face—multicolored, angled and planed in wondrous ways—into the darkness of his world, his house, his room, his mind.
“It’s wonderful!” Eliahedron cried, and Stuart understood that it was. “Bravo, Stuart!”
Stuart shook his head furiously and imagined Eliahedron away. Then he got out of bed. Shakily he stood up and stared at his wall, thinking suddenly that he’d really been hearing Eliahedron’s voice inside his head all his life. Until Eliahedron had taken form and become his friend, it had been a secret, dangerous voice telling him about all the things he wasn’t supposed to know, reminding him every time he tried so hard to forget. The voice of a demon, he’d secretly thought, since he wasn’t supposed to know anything about demons. The voice of a god, equally out of reach. One of his own many voices.
It took a very long time, but eventually Stuart imagined a tunnel through his wall, through the outer shell, into the dark and multicolored outside. The tunnel had demons and gods in it, but he knew they didn’t mean him any harm. Their hands were all Eliahedron’s hands as they reached out to help him, and he recognized all their voices as beacons telling him the way.
They should have told us, Stuart kept thinking as he made his way through the compound that was unraveling into the night.
He’d thought, when he’d dared to think about it at all, that night would be one blackness, one continuous absence of light and color. But this night land had shades and textures, places where the darkness seemed thicker and deeper than others, stretches that felt more dangerous and more alluring than the rest.
And it wasn’t still. It moaned and sighed and cried out—in pain, Stuart understood, and in ecstasy. He wasn’t supposed to know either of those words, but he did, and he understood the ideas behind them, too. The night land shuddered and swayed with the passage of many feet, many wings.
Thousands of dragons filled the jagged sky; thousands more were plummeting in through the flaws in the heavens, which Stuart now couldn’t see because of the dragons’ wings and tails. Crimson dragon-mouths spat smoke and fire. Long crooked tails dragged the ground, making fissures across the once-perfect surfaces. Everywhere people ducked and screamed and rolled on the ground, but they couldn’t get out of the dragons’ path and so were torn apart.
“Yo
u didn’t tell us!” Stuart wailed, desperately wondering if anyone was left to hear.
He knew dragons better than anybody; he knew that, once you’d seen a dragon and it had seen you, you couldn’t escape. So he stood, finally, in one place, not knowing where he was because the whole compound was in rubble and the bell was torn away, and let the dragons come. Some of them were kites, and some were machines and not-machines, great strange objects that he had no names for. They swooped at him, threatening to lift him out of himself. They roared and sang.
Abby Sanchez came up beside him with her mouth wide open, keening or singing back to the sky full of dragons. Michael Bartholomew danced in an elaborate, exquisite, grotesque rhythm across the park, which had thrown itself up, turned itself inside out. Another boy whose face Stuart couldn’t quite see came at them with a huge shiny gun, laughing and howling as if he didn’t know who he was. Other children wandered out of their tidy little houses. They walked the broken paths of the compound with hungry eyes stretched open, as if filling them for the first time.
“You can imagine a kite as easily as a gun,” Eliahedron said softly. “With all this, you can imagine peace as well as war. Not everybody can, Stuart, but you can. You’re good. You’re the best I’ve ever seen. Don’t stop now.”
Stuart was moving now, stumbling through the dreams of his elders: Pineapple beetles crawled over tortured bodies, splitting their shells and spilling out floods of rich yellow soup that absorbed the bodies a limb at a time. The many beaks of great green birds tore open the backs of the dead and extracted the spines, for use as combs to clean the blood out of their dazzling feathers. Hundreds of tiny rats’ heads were tethered to luminous cords that guided them to anything still warm and breathing. Broad fishtails, equipped with insect eyes like sequins among the scales, swept and scraped the ground a layer at a time, exposing the newly-dead for quill-headed dogs to devour. Blind cats’ skulls trotted the broken paths, now and then stopping to taste delicately of the smoked flesh before padding on.
These were his parents’ dreams. They didn’t have to be his. Stuart stopped and stood still again.
One by one, the other children joined him. Abby, still singing. Michael, still dancing. The boy with the enormous gun. A girl with a knife as big as she was, mirroring her and the others in its variegated blade. The children made a tight circle and held each other to watch the fecundity of their parents’ imaginations play out around them.
Stuart spoke first. “Beautiful!”
“Wonderful,” someone else said.
“But they stopped. They didn’t go far enough,” Stuart said, and his friends nodded, and they opened up their circle.
For a very long time the children of the compound walked the ravaged earth. They talked their parents’ nightmares out of the smoky sky, out of dark feeding holes and armored nests. They laid their hands on hideous forms and made them their own.
“Wonderful, but wrong,” they said.
By morning, a flock of new kites soared lazily through the opened and many-hued sky.
THE TENTH SCHOLAR
He answered the door himself. I was disappointed that it wasn’t his aide-de-camp; the term had always made me think of tents and marshmallows and songs around a fire and two weeks in the country, where I’d never been. “A woman,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
We looked at each other. I knew I couldn’t let him stare me down; I had experience on the streets, and I’d thought about this a lot before I’d come here, practiced looking tougher than I really am. You had to keep a balance. I’d always had to do that. Out on the streets it was important to look tougher than you were, and talk dumber than you were. If you talked too smart, then people got it into their heads that you were all head and weak everywhere else. But with him, I knew I just had to look tough, but I couldn’t let him think I was dumb. His eyes were green and he had really long white eyelashes. “A very young woman,” he said.
“Not as young as you think,” I shot back, but that wasn’t true. I was sixteen and pregnant, and I looked like a twelve-year-old who hadn’t lost her baby fat.
His thick white eyebrows rose a little, and he said, “Interesting.” During the next months I would hear that comment from him countless times. It was the only compliment he ever paid any of us, and it always surprised me how often he used it, how many things he still genuinely found interesting, after all the years he’d lived and all the years he knew he still had coming.
“I saw your ad,” I told him.
He nodded and stepped back, bowing slightly and making a welcoming gesture with one hand. I remember thinking that his hands were elegant, long and pale and thin, except that they were so hairy. “Come in, my dear.”
“ ‘My dear’?” I laughed. I’d figured he would talk like that, and I wanted him to know right away that it didn’t impress me.
Except, of course, that it did. Not so much his fancy accent or old-fashioned language, but the way he noticed me, the fact that he really did seem to think it was interesting that I was there. That was new for me, and as soon as I got a little of it I wanted more. I went in, noticing the gold dragon under the gold cross on the door.
Against the bright, trendy pastels of this penthouse office suite, he looked like something out of a black-and-white movie. The only colors on him were his green eyes and the red of his mouth, so red I thought he might be wearing lipstick. He was dressed in crisp, creased black, although he wasn’t wearing a cloak; I’d been expecting a cloak, and that threw me a little. His face and hands were so white that I wouldn’t have thought anything could be whiter, but then I saw the tips of his teeth pushing out over the edge of his lower lip. His curly hair went past his shoulders—black, when I’d imagined it would be white—and his moustache was as white as his eyebrows, so that I could hardly see them across his skin.
“Sit down, my dear.” When he soundlessly shut the door, it was as if we were the only two creatures in the world. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m answering your ad,” I repeated stubbornly. I didn’t like it when people made fun of me, and I heard mockery everywhere. I’d punched people out, scratched their green eyes, for less. “I’m applying for the school. The ad didn’t say you needed an appointment.”
I wished I could think of things to say that sounded more intelligent. People on the street were easy to impress; even Oliver didn’t take much. Though at first I’d thought he would. But this guy would be a real challenge; I’d known that before I came. He’d be like my grandmother, only more so—able to see who you really were and what you really wanted when even you didn’t know. I sat down on the gigantic couch that took up one whole wall of the room. The couch was that peculiar yellow-green color they call chartreuse, and the walls and carpet were mauve. Who’d have thought that mauve and chartreuse would go together? Who’d have expected this guy to be an interior decorator? But then, he’d already lived long enough to be anything he wanted.
The guy had power. Once you had power, nobody could hurt you. I’d learned that much on the streets. And before. Power might have kept my grandmother alive. It didn’t really matter how you got it, because once you had it nobody much cared about the how. I’d been around the powerful people in my life—my mother, a social worker or two, PDs and DAs and juvenile court judges, Oliver. But they were little fish. They had power only in relation to utterly powerless people like me. This guy had real power, and he could teach me how to have it, too. So I could pass it on to my baby.
I shivered in appreciation, then stiffened my body to still it and hoped he hadn’t noticed. He had, of course; I saw the amusement in his eyes.
My jeans were dirty and smelled of the streets. It pleased me to think I might be soiling the fancy upholstery. I squirmed on the couch, moved my butt around a lot, just to make sure.
“Pregnant,” he observed. He was standing too close to me, and he was really tall. I hated it when people, especially men, towered over me like that; too many times,
at home and in juvie and in foster homes and on the street, some guy had stood too close to me like that and had ended up fucking me over.
I wasn’t about to let him know he was making me nervous; you didn’t dare let them know. I yawned, hoping my breath smelled as bad as it tasted, and put my filthy tennis shoes up on the arm of his elegant sofa. “So,” I demanded, looking up at him as insolently as I could, “what do I have to do?”
He sat down in the enormous armchair that faced the couch. He crossed his legs, meticulously adjusted his pant leg. He wasn’t a very big man; he was as thin as anybody I’d ever met under a bridge or in a shelter, as if, like them, he was always hungry—though I doubted it was because he couldn’t afford food. For some reason, I’d thought he’d be bigger. I wondered what Oliver, who thought he knew everything there was to know about him, would think of him in person. “I ain’t smart enough to go to some hot-shit yuppie school,” Oliver had sneered. “You’re the schoolgirl. You go, and then you come back and tell us.” But I was never going back. I hadn’t loved Oliver; I just let him think I did. He wasn’t very powerful; for awhile he could keep me safer than I could keep myself, but now I was ready for more.
There was a long silence. I noticed that I couldn’t hear anything from the street or from the rest of the building, only his breathing and mine. Wondering about that, I pressed the back of my fist against the wall over my head; the wall was spongy and gave a little, like living tissue, and before I could stop myself I’d gasped and jerked my hand away.
He saw me do that, too, of course, and I knew he was keeping score. This was some creepy kind of exam. He sat there quietly with his thin white hands looking very thin and white against the wide chartreuse arms of the chair, and he looked at me calmly without saying anything. I was used to that. There was this chick in a doorway up across from Columbia who looked at you that way; you knew she saw everything about you and kept a list in her head, but I’d never heard her say anything, even the night she came after me with her nails and teeth and stole my sandwich—whole, still wrapped in wax paper—that I’d found on a table in a sidewalk cafe that lunchtime and been saving all day. The next day I went to her doorway and just sat on the stoop beside her and stared at her, to see what she’d do. She didn’t do anything, so finally I gave up.