by Sonya Taaffe
“I didn’t kill him.” Her fingernails had the iridescent, unpainted gloss of a beetle’s back. Her irises were soaking green, the luminous color that Vetiver’s contacts only tried to approximate. Resinous tears welled up, knuckled away into snail tracks on her clove-colored skin; her voice had darkened like a woodwind, tuned to her regret. “I held him until he died.”
There should have been a point where cold became numb: all faded into unsurprise. Out of reach. Vetiver’s mouth opened on a shout—Who the hell are you? How the fuck did you know Demetre?—but there was still music in the chapel, Tom Waits’ “Barcarolle” and all memorial solemnity, his mother and his niece and all the people who needed the words and the silence before the world would start again, and she could not break that ritual. Not for answers as pointless, in the end, as how far autumn fell.
This close, the woman smelled like leaf-must and new bread. The sweet, stagnant perfume of rotten flowers in her hair. As gingerly as though she were touching razors, as fiercely as though the stranger were Demetre’s own death, Vetiver reached out and took hold of her arm. “Don’t,” she said gently. Because she should have been afraid, terrified out of her mind, and she was only calm, as Demetre might have been in the last moments: under the cold and turning winter stars, his head in the earth’s lap. “I can see you.”
Through well-worn leather and the heavy cloth of her shirt beneath, the woman felt no more and no less than mortal: then she moved against Vetiver’s grasp, an unexpected strength in the slight bones, the ball-and-socket twist of her elbow and the sliding hinge of her wrist, and Vetiver breathed, “Shit,” and let her go. Down the sunlit corridor, Tom Waits had changed for 3 Doors Down. Here without you, baby…. The woman might have smiled, wry and wounded, like a goddess for the damned.
“With both eyes.” Her braids whispered against one another like willow leaves; her fingers were at her wood-drowned eyes, at Vetiver’s mouth, and she pressed the honey of her tears onto Vetiver’s tongue. “Oh, lady. Oh, lady, keep all your madness away from my home. Go inspire others. Go make them mad.”
The words that should have sounded familiar, that were nothing she had heard before. The sweet and bitter sting of apples and pine tar and wormwood in her mouth, that Demetre had never tasted. Alone in the foyer with a dead man’s lifetime of art, Vetiver bent forward and cried, only salt, only sorrow: the service was over and Robert come out to find her; no one would ever finish Demetre’s autumn, and the abyss could see her now.
**
So I think that in the making and in the understanding of a work of art, and the more easily if it is full of patterns and symbols and music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be far beyond it, without knowing that we have ever set our feet upon the steps of horn or of ivory.
—William Butler Yeats, The Symbolism of Poetry
LITTLE FIX OF FRICTION
Her hands were shaking as she tried to strike a light, and after a while he took the matchbook from her. Two matches the wind snuffed before Blake could cup one hand protectively around their minute flames, inexpert with cold fingers and the raw, rainily biting wind that hollowed itself beneath the overpass like the cars rushing above their heads, the sizzling hiss of tires over wet asphalt. Stillborn scraps of fire that showed him no more of the sloping pylons of concrete, the girders overhead streaked white with pigeon shit and the gnawing corrosions of time, than the streetlights’ washed-out pools that the raindrops turned to sodium static; but the third caught and she muttered, “Thanks,” before she bent forward to the flame he held.
In the ragged handful of light, her face looked more whittled than grown: nicks of the knife-tip for cheekbones and mouth, deep-set eyes notched out beneath parenthetical brows and her straight lines unbent only where her hair slid down past her shoulders, ginger-flecked as a fox’s pelt; a sketch in spiky pen-lines, nib scratches and spattered ink. Her eyelids, lowered, were as finely veined as a crocus bell. Then the match flared out and Blake swore at the sting in his fingertips; no blisters where the flame had doused itself in his skin, but she looked at him over the live-coal tip of her cigarette that she held between languid fingers like a film noir femme fatale, a gesture he guessed she had learned young and never abandoned. “You all right?”
“I’ll live.” Blake smiled wryly, closed and unfurled his fingers to demonstrate. Rain had speckled his glasses with refraction; he pulled them off and wiped the rectangular lenses on a corner of his sweater, a baggy beige-colored thing that he might have picked up at a thrift store and might only have bought new and worn into antiquity. His hair was crumpled brown as dead leaves, short enough that it stood up straight when dry. Behind his glasses, or over them, his eyes were dark enough that iris became distinguishable from pupil only very close up: Niko teased, Because you’re all a black hole inside, that’s why you’re so skinny.
Rain gusted under the overpass, cold as hail. The sky was the color of damp charcoal, smeared with city light. Over on the far side of the chain-link fence that glittered wetly in the dusk, the railyards raised struts and cables into a skeletal framework of communication where no trains ran. The bus was almost forty-five minutes late.
She said, in response to nothing, “It means fire, you know?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Purify.” Smoke spilled consonantal from her mouth, clouds of breath and nicotine vowels and her voice quickened, yearning. Her jeans were white at the knees, their cuffs thready; under an incongruous, unbuttoned navy peacoat, she wore what looked like a men’s white undershirt and nothing else. The shadowy slices under her eyes might have been bruises, or insomnia, or the wan and unkind light. “Cleanse through fire. Burn all the dross away—albedo, nigredo. Did you know?”
Although he did, he still answered, “No,” for the sudden tip of uncertainty in her voice as though she expected him to slap her down, brutally correct her: a cowed alchemist. “Where did you learn that?”
“I don’t remember.” Dull again, as sulky as she usually sounded, “Not in church.”
The first time he had spoken with her, when she asked him for a smoke at this bus stop beside the overpass and he had no cigarettes anywhere on him, she had worn nothing heavier than the same white T-shirt against the frost-snap air, twilight blue as burning brandy with winter. Blake’s skin fledged with sympathetic gooseflesh, but she seemed not to notice. Before her bus came and she left him, he watched her play absently with the Zippo she had fished out of her back pocket as they talked, flicking a fingernail spurt of fire on and off with her thumb through all their pointless, requisite strangers’ interchanges; and each time, before the flame streamed out, he had seen the white and worm-pink scars tangled like drift nets down the insides of both bare arms.
He said now, lamely, “That’s still neat. Is it from the Latin?” but she only shrugged and exhaled smoke more ghostly than the sky.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s only a word.” The car that went past, tires audible in the sharp turn, headlights slashed electric-white over cement and asphalt slick as ridged obsidian, funneled gutter water up over the pocked, gum-scraped pavement and Blake watched the girl with the cigarette take the chill spray across her shins, unmoving. Her hand still shook, scribbling smoke on the sodium-sallow air. All the sharp, gouged lines of her face came together to form no expression at all. “They don’t mean anything. Your bus’s here.”
No one got off; rain peppered Blake’s hair as he walked the fifteen feet to the bus, nailhead drops that had no smell but cold and damp, a taste on his lips like skyscraper stone. Shoulders hunched against the chill, he looked back at the girl still smoking under the arch of concrete and steel: maybe to wave to this stranger he saw every day, say something kindly meant and useless, to show that she had not opened up to him, however stingily, for nothing. But she was not even looking in his direction, one hand jammed in her coat pocket and the other poised with its cigarette, fog-breath and heavier smoke pluming from lips and nostrils as though she burned inside.
<
br /> Her eyes whose color he did not know were closed. He remembered the crushed fragility of her eyelids; something that was entirely unlike desire clenched in his throat and he blinked through his rain-blurred glasses. Her eyes opened, or the shadows across her face changed with the shift of wind and furling rain. Cool as a film star’s close-up, she raised the cigarette to her mouth and drew one last red-iron flare from the tip, and stubbed out the cigarette against the coral meat of her tongue.
**
Niko burned incense that smelled like cedar shavings and green tea, cattail-brown sticks upright like quills in the back of a potbellied iron frog he had inherited from one of his grandmothers, and Blake’s clothes and hair always carried his scent like a hazy caress when he left the apartment. If nothing else, it kept off the pulpy smell from the paper mill on days when the wind blew the wrong way. The first night he had come home with Niko, rose-scented candles had flickered on the sill in thick cups of red and clear glass, but the nearest pane had cracked with the heat, crazed the height of the window in a branching, crystalline scythe. They mended the break with masking tape, while Niko swore up and down to his landlords that a bird must have flown into the window, and after that settled for flameless sweet smoke and the warmth of one another’s flesh.
Between the aftermath of desire and the steady drumroll of rain on shingles and panes, anticipation building for so long that it dissipated into comfort, Blake was almost asleep when Niko got up to relight another stick of incense, settled back onto the mattress beside him. “I’m fantasizing the streets will flood,” he remarked into the half-darkness, all the bedroom lights out and only halogen light from the living room slanted in through the open door, “and you won’t have to leave for work tomorrow morning.”
Blake made a noise that was mostly agreement, turned his head on the pillow enough to see Niko over the bunched-up sheets, blue and purple zebra stripes faded to some hazy twilight bleed. Sprawled back on the bed, one arm folded under his head with Blake’s shirt wound around his forearm for a pillow, Niko looked a little like a debauched icon: dark-lashed eyes and a mouth that was not fashioned for mourning the world, his long-nosed, elegiac face and rumpled black-olive hair. All his musculature was spare as a statue, some adolescent gawkiness left over in his height and reach; the gold chain around his neck still carried a saint’s medal, that had slid up against his collarbone when he lay back, and a pair of cobalt glass beads black-dotted like eyes. Faintly, under the shadow of his hair—perceptible only if Blake traced carefully with fingertips and tongue—old scars crushed the skin white and tooth-marked.
A stray, surfacing curiosity nudged up underneath Blake’s relaxation and he surprised himself by asking, “Who’s the woman who killed herself by swallowing coals?”
“Well, that was relevant.” Niko yawned, elaborate arch of his back and his tongue visible like a cat’s between his teeth. “Someone’s been talking to Spooky Cigarette Girl, has he?”
“Oh, come on. Don’t call her that,” half-heartedly, because he had seen Niko jealous only once: when he described her, the ginger-haired girl who smoked like a chimney, with whom he had shared fragmentary conversations each evening for the last two or three weeks, and Niko stopped him mid-word with a kiss so devouring that Blake literally lost his breath. You want her more than me? Niko had whispered against his teeth. You want me to set you on fire? and Blake understood that he was joking and it made no difference. They made love that night as though Niko were marking and mapping every inch of him, staking out flesh and spirit against intruders, all of Blake that his arms could encompass or his mouth tattoo. Now he leaned up on one elbow and raised a dark eyebrow, arch as an actor, and Blake felt his skin over his cheekbones flush as though he were clumsily covering for some adultery. He pulled himself upright, cross-legged in a pair of blue plaid boxers. “It’s somebody from Shakespeare, that’s all. I was trying to remember all today.”
Niko’s mouth twisted at the corner, eased. “Portia.” He made the name a sigh, already bored with proof of knowledge. “Brutus’ wife. The freaky one who stabs herself in the thigh to prove her constancy. And, her attendants absent, swallow’d fire. You see, I do remember something from freshman English beyond that grad student who lectured on Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus. The blond, who kept breaking the chalk. He was gorgeous.” His hand lifted, crossed the breathless distance between them and stroked gently over Blake’s lips; his fingertips were callused and the heat in Blake’s face burrowed inward for his bones. “Not half so beautiful as you. You think I’m joking.”
“No.” Smiling against Niko’s touch, “I think you’re trying to change the subject. But not joking.”
“Well, thank God you’ve learned some arrogance at last.” Laughing, Blake braced both hands among the ransacked sheets and bent over to kiss, upside-down, Niko’s mouth and the quirked corner of his lips, the finial round of his cheekbone, one eyebrow like a skidding brush-stroke before he pressed his lips into the wiry satin of Niko’s hair; inhaling these familiar scents of his lover, sweat-salt on his tongue, a smoke of incense in his mouth. Rain streaked the windows silver and black, and he was not thinking of fire.
**
In the cloud-cleared sky, the moon was palely cratered as handmade paper and the last remnants of afternoon ran like gilt over the edges of skyscrapers and warehouses, struck dry as champagne from the mirrors of passing cars. The eastern horizon had already faded to an unblemished blue, luminous with the night stacked behind it. Blake was checking his watch for the third or fourth time when she looked over and said, “It is from the Latin. You were right.”
For a moment he stared at her—a week’s worth of small talk to page back through, the weather and bus schedules and silence always falling back into place between them—drew a blank until he remembered dead languages and fire. “You looked it up?”
“Yeah.” She was wearing a different T-shirt, thin white cotton exchanged for streaked grey with a black trinity of barbed circles interlocked across her shallow breasts; hair pulled back in a makeshift ponytail with a flesh-colored rubber band, and she leaned her shoulders against the stained concrete as she flipped the top off her lighter, closed it with a dry click, flicked it back again. For all the color in her voice, she might have been commenting on cracks in the asphalt or the graffiti tags on the other side of the overpass. “And some Greek word. That’s where pure comes from. Like you’re not clean until—” and she lifted one shoulder in a very slight, indifferent shrug.
Blake’s temples felt pinched with headache; too many hours staring at small print under fluorescent buzz and flickers, peering into his computer screen until his shoulders gnarled with tension and his spine no longer remembered what straight felt like. More acidly than he meant, he replied, “I thought words didn’t mean anything.”
Her eyes lifted, looked him over flatly, returned to her lighter. This time, when she took the pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket, she did not ask him for a light before she blew a pale cloud of smoke that drifted slowly away in the cool, edged air. “Words don’t leave any marks.” He wondered if her tongue had scarred, healed; she sounded no different. “You can’t protect yourself with words.”
Blake said, frankly and exasperated, “Why are you talking to me?”
Again her shrug, as though nothing mattered less than his question, her answer. Where the sleeve of her coat had fallen away from her raised wrist, cigarette propped at its usual unruffled angle, fresh scar tissue showed almost the color of her lips.
“You smell like burning.”
**
“Do you think scars are memories or armor?”
“Say what?” Niko blinked at Blake over his shoulder, one hand on the freezer door and the other dangling a bag full of frozen stubs of corn. Mid-morning sun made an untidy, inverse halo out of his uncombed hair, laid bare all the fine planes of his face; his black T-shirt swirled with the luminous, crackling Catherine’s wheels of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and he looked, even
after two hours walking to the supermarket and back in the brisk sunlight, as though he had just fallen out of bed. “What kind of question is that? Pass me the broccoli.”
Blake rummaged through groceries with a rustle of brown paper and plastic, came up with two plums and a box of spaghetti that rattled like a rainstick when he put it down beside the sink. “We didn’t buy any broccoli, remember? Have a block of spinach.” He chunked the brick-hard package into Niko’s hand and added, “It’s a theoretical question. You can say neither.”
“Jesus. I don’t know.” Magnetic poetry littered the refrigerator’s off-white doors, free-associating in loose strands: star my skin with milk rain chants; all bitter whispers your winter craves; immaculate plunge; never ocean flower. Niko picked off a word, turned it over in his fingers like something he might have considered eating, stuck it back onto the end of another phrase. His eyes were paler than Blake’s, in most lights. “Dare I ask?”
Under the measuring distance of Niko’s gaze, patrician assurance that had changed between heartbeats from a familiar stance to something that might have been, in the right light and less love between them, a challenge not to step any further out on this fine glaze of ice and uneasy seams, the words tangled against his teeth and Blake took off his glasses, so as not to see Niko any more clearly than he had to. Matches that she held until their flames burned out against her fingertips; the sound of a half-smoked cigarette, crushed out casually against her palm. Her shadowed eyes and ungiving mouth and the bruise nestled in the stark hollow of her collarbone; the confidences she threw down between them like trash, as though neither of them should care, and he did not know why he did. He put his glasses back on, fingers nervous as he adjusted the wire earpieces, and Niko said into his intake of breath, “Just tell me this isn’t about suicide or alchemy.”
