by Sonya Taaffe
“No.” Perhaps he should have kept his glasses off, or his mouth shut. “It’s not.”
“Because between self-immolation and mnemonic scarification, you’re becoming morbid as hell lately. Let me think, did we talk about flowers last week? Not unless they were lilies for a cremation. How gothic we are in our old age.”
“Niko….” He sighed, frustration like steam between his teeth. “Forget it,” as he swung a cabinet door open, stuffed the spaghetti atop another box of pasta and closed the cabinet with exactly as much of a slam as he had intended. As a child, he had stamped down on the delicate skims of ice that formed in winter potholes, shattered the greyish panes underfoot and sometimes picked up the fragments to hold against the sun-smeared sky: nothing more than a slipperiness in his grasp, chill water bleeding through his gloves. “Forget I asked. It was just something I was thinking about. You don’t have to answer.”
“I don’t know why you bother to ask me, anyway. You want to talk scars and shit, go ask her,” such a stress of sarcasm on the pronoun that Niko’s mouth shaped it as beautifully as an obscenity. “I’m sure she’d love to show you all her homemade tattoos—”
“This is not about her!” If anyone ever shouted in their arguments, it was Niko: Blake’s throat stung from the sudden slam of breath and anger. These bare Saturdays and Sundays, groceries and laundry and precious time shored against their workweek schedules, all sliding like dirty water away; wasted. “For Christ’s sake, when did you get so paranoid?”
“Oh, let me see, only since you came home talking every day—fuck this, it’s no use.” Head tilted back to study either the light fixture or some water stains on the ceiling, anything that was not Blake, Niko drove the fingers of both hands through his hair and left it wilder than before. “Scars? Scars aren’t armor, okay? There is nothing beautiful or strong about some messed-up keloid in your flesh that you gave yourself. And they’re only memories if you’re old enough to remember them, unless of course you’re lucky enough to have people keep grinding the damn story into you every single time your family gets together. Oh, Niko, you’re looking so normal for a five-year-old, nobody would ever guess a German shepherd tried to tear your head off when you were three! What, Maria hasn’t heard the story? Has everybody here heard the story about how the Winstons’ dog tried to eat Niko when he was playing in their yard? Yes, the dog was sick. No, they didn’t put it down. Neighbors, really. But little Niko’s all right!” His voice dropped out of mincing falsetto, snapped, “But that’s probably not what you were asking, is it?” Before Blake could answer, Niko shouldered past him in the narrow kitchen, bare heels loud on linoleum and hardwood, muffled only slightly by the slaty carpet until Blake heard a door shut at the other end of the apartment. The plums in their tied-off plastic bag rolled off the counter and bounced solidly on the floor.
**
Curled on his side, a feather pillow folded in half beneath his head and a chill settling through the sheets around him, Blake watched bare-branched shadows sway and lengthen on the far wall, smoke pull itself upward from Niko’s incense like scarves from a magician’s hat. Moonlight through the cracked window traced an impossible rift down the plaster, as though Blake could slip a hand into its tactile shadow and ease sheetrock and beams aside like reluctant flesh, pare his way past fiberglass and sun-faded siding into somewhere less substantial than the stained-parchment streetlight, keener than the smolder of spices haunting the air. He pressed his eyes shut, opened them; the room was still empty, and the shadows still there.
A fuzz of bluish light limned the door, moonshine for the drowned, precipitously shifting; Niko could sleep anywhere, even through H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott. The stick of incense he had lit before dinner, when they were still talking in cautious, acerbic spells, had burned down almost to the frog’s black iron back.
The floor was cold as rough stone under Blake’s bare feet, furniture and framed prints around him rendered monochrome as a silent fi lm. Where the incense frog crouched, the top of the dresser was scattered with oddments, bits of memory: magazines in more of a heap than a stack, some stray condoms, a broken candleholder of blue and smoky green glass that Blake had promised to fi x months ago and forgotten, a packet of tissues and a rose of painted tin that Niko had brought home from a show, once, those first few weeks when all the world seemed to change at a sharp word, a smile, a brush of hands. A dry spray of baby’s breath; ticket stubs for movies. An undecorated silver ring, beside a box of matches. One hand held above the burning incense, threads of smoke coiling and parting around his outspread fingers, Blake imagined that Niko would come in and pull him gently away. But the television glow still flickered under the door, indifferent ghosts of narrative; and Blake closed his fingers until he could smell, along with the incense that meant Niko, the subtle heat and singeing of his own flesh.
**
Yesterday he had walked home through a late snow that fell as thickly as apple blossom in a sentimental film, powdered-sugar drifts gathering on the sidewalk with all the pristine glints of a storefront display: flakes of cellophane and tinsel, too pretty not to be swept into the trash once the season ended. The railyards gentled, steel tracks and concrete platforms smoothed to white-on-white abstraction. Graffiti effaced under winter’s unvarying, intricate signature; the overpass glossed into a bridge of cold and feathery stasis; even the fences, frosted, made a lacework against the sky no darker than its snow. In its unexpected snowglobe silence, Blake had waited for the bus alone.
Shoveled up onto either side of the pavement, salt-burned off the roads, the snow was already collapsing into crusted piles; slush as muddy as old engine oil crunched under Blake’s shoes as he crossed the street, head bent against the nipping wind. The cold got under his collar, noosed around his throat and made the inside of his nose ache, and his scarf was strung over the back of a folding chair in the apartment where he hardly ever slept anymore. Where he had crashed last night after three o’clock arguments and the pointless theatrics of recrimination that left him drained, ready to walk out for the sheer convenience; and the furnishings of his own bedroom might as well have been a foreign country, save that Niko’s bed no longer felt so much like home.
Squinting up at the sky as palely opaque as wax paper, he did not see her, a slight and concentric figure on the other side of the overpass, until she said quietly, “It doesn’t work.” This time, he walked over to meet her: back in her white undershirt, a dingy smear down its front that might have been grease, or blood, or chocolate, and her hair tangled forward to hide her face. Smoke pearled up from her cigarette, its tip a jittering ember. Blake said gently, “What doesn’t work?”
“Fire.” The word was halting, clotted. Nicotine leakage from her lips, as though breathing in and out were not worth the eff ort; the same dark stains on the shins of her jeans, like paint drips. “Not anymore. You understand,” and because he had never heard that thin split in her voice, like frayed steel strings—because he smelled like burning—he said, “Yes.”
Her face turned toward him, enough to bring her fine-scored profile out from her hair that looked now more dulled blond than ginger, and her eyes were blackened: no dark smudge of exhaustion, but bruises that swelled her skin as sickly taut as a plum. The thinnest crusts of blood rimmed her nostrils, had dried on the soft indentation of her upper lip. Blake said reflexively, “Jesus,” and her mouth tautened.
“We’re the only sacrifices that ever save ourselves.” Another drag on her cigarette, before she crumpled it angrily in her hand, bright ash and sparks scattering between her fingers, barely smoked. Her body was braced against nothing: Blake did not dare move toward her, or away. “But there’s always something more to cleanse. Nothing is ever pure. The world keeps touching you,” and he realized she was crying, salt slide over her battered cheekbones and dripping onto the pavement at her feet, spattered dots of herself given up to the world that kept prodding, despoiling, prying. “There’s no way to get clean.”
For the first time she held her arms out to him, tracked up and down with the congealed marks of fire and steel that were never protection enough. No embrace, though he could easily have taken her in his arms, as Niko might have held him in this extremity of pain: only proof.
“I don’t know,” she said simply, “what it takes now.”
Her arms folded, hugging herself close. Two or three times he stirred to speak: You should talk to someone. This isn’t right. Tell me what I can do. Words that held out a hand, but nothing that she would take hold of, and he remained silent and beside her. When she lit another cigarette with the Zippo that she kept like a talisman in her free hand even after paper and tobacco had caught, its brief blue-orange light only underscored the famine angularity of chin and brow and temple, bones in the shallow graves of her own flesh. Her wrists were tattooed with raw places as pink as flesh carnations. He wanted to take a handful of snow and wash the dry blood from her face, but there was none clean enough. Frozen slush under their feet and streetlight like jaundice on the snowbanks, the wind’s cold shoulder between them, they stood until Blake’s bus came; his burned hand in his pocket where she could not see, all her scars on view and no matter either way.
“You all right?” he asked before he stepped down into the street gritty with sand and granular ice, even though he knew the answer.
Smoke plaited the glacial shadows around her. Her bruised mouth was sullen. “I’ll live.”
Metal clicked behind him as he walked away, but he did not turn to see if the sudden harshness in the air was her doing, hair or skin, all interchangeable combustion, or only the paper mill’s usual miasma. Ashes, ashes…. Make it burn.
**
There were grey-blue sheets on the bed and a lumpen feather quilt that Blake had pulled up around his waist for warmth as he typed, back to the bare wall and his laptop balanced over his knees; none of Niko’s conscious bohemian clutter on shelves, desktops, windowsills where no candles ever burned and no scent of incense in the air. His rooms smelled as vacant as a hotel, a soft grain of dust that he wiped off the nearest flat surface with his sweater’s sleeve and grimaced, the staleness of long-closed windows and doors that not even chill rushes of air through the snow-stuck screen had dispelled. Flyspecks of icy water dotted the cream-colored paint of the sill. The burnt-black tang of coffee lay thickly on his tongue.
Niko said casually, around the door, “You never should have given me that key.”
“No. I probably shouldn’t have.” He closed the spreadsheet with a brief keyboard rattle, reached for the broken-handled mug on the sill and realized snow had blown in over his cellphone, keys, coffee. Tense as he might not have been a week ago, a month, whenever he lit her cigarette and she kindled fire inside him, he commented, “You bring winter.”
“Oh, better than drought.” A dismissive glance for Blake’s room, the desk lamp’s yellow splashes of light and the bookcase only half-filled with paperbacks stacked sideways alongside jewel-cased CDs, as though it were truly little more than barren desert. Snowmelt starred the dark tousle of Niko’s hair, the shoulders of his black overcoat, and he chafed his hands together as he spoke. “Though in all honesty, I’d rather I brought spring. Jesus, I’m freezing. Do you even have heat in this dump?”
“Only after it gets warm.” Blake smiled warily, but his mouth felt like melted plastic. Against the healing skin of his fingertips, tentative sheaths of flesh and restoration, the coffee-warmed ceramic was hot enough to hurt and he set the mug back down. “Niko, what are you doing here?”
“Well, when I didn’t see you for a few days, what was I to conclude but that Our Lady of Conflagration had finally torched you?” For all the deft bite to his voice, he was not looking at Blake; he put his hands on the back of the nearest chair and added, more quietly, “Or I fucked up worse than I thought. So, if you want, I’m here to return your key. Or you can offer me some coffee and I’ll stay…. Just, Blake, don’t talk about her.” Nothing iconic in his face now, for all its Byzantine fineness: Blake closed the laptop and laid it aside, watching him as intently as a lit match. “If you want me to stay. Don’t.”
The small of Blake’s back had knotted with cramp; as nonchalant as Niko at his best, he bent forward and stretched out his arms over the hummocks of dirty-white quilt, unkinking muscle by muscle. Our Lady of Conflagration—one of the lesser saints, perhaps, a branch of flames in her hand for a martyr’s palm. He had not seen her for two nights, though he waited until the wind turned to a slicing darkness and the late trains rumbled and clacked beyond the chain-link in its casing of ice. We’re the only sacrifices that ever save ourselves. He raised his head, handed the choice back to Niko. “Only if you answer a question of mine.”
“Oh, God.” Box springs squeaked as Niko dropped onto a corner of the bed, mouth pulling wryly to one side in apprehension and relief. “What?”
“Do I smell like burning?”
Sweater and shirt had ridden up when he leaned over and Niko’s hands across his bare skin felt like freezer burns, petroglyph prints of winter. Half-laughing between curses and catches of breath, he twisted to get away from the fingers sliding like dry ice down his spine, until he lost his balance and the creaking mattress was under his back for half a second before Niko’s weight slammed him sweetly across the hips.
“Of course you do,” Niko whispered into his ear, against his throat. Warm and amused above him, as Blake’s fingers tightened as possessively in his hair, “It means you’re mine.”
**
The sky is the color of cold cinders and the wind that paws beneath his clothes, flapping his jacket aside and rummaging through his ribs with a fistful of ice cubes and needle frost, tastes worse than the paper mill on its sourest nights, like arctic furnaces and crematoria steam. The brighter smudge in the clouds beyond the shadow of the overpass might be the sun, in its winding-sheet of sky: only another star burning out. Shivering, Blake wraps his arms around himself and watches her build, piece by patient piece, her nest of rebar and broken pine slats, plywood and newspaper smeared senseless by the rain, and gasoline smells sharper than the slag-heap wind.
For once, she has no cigarettes between unsteady fingers; her hands haul, unerringly, fragments of ruined machines and demolished architecture over the grimy cement, stacking and propping and sometimes kicking components into place. When he bends to help, she shoves him off with an angry shoulder, so thin beneath the white T-shirt that he could fold his entire hand around bone and muscle together. Her face looks crumpled like a Styrofoam cup, badly flattened out, the aftermath of long crying as fresh under her skin as blood in a bruise: but her eyes are pure and molten gold, as in a jeweler’s fine crucible, and the wonder of them holds him motionless.
The last half-crate dragged and dropped onto the pile, she straightens, pulls the heavy tangle of her hair back from her face; more stripped-wire copper than ginger in this hazy light. Over the wind, her voice reaches him as clearly as print, the only other sound all up and down the deserted street. No matter how long they wait here, he knows the bus will never come.
“There’s only ever one phoenix.”
He nods, because anything he could say will make as much difference, as little, as the lighter already in her hand. The wind tugs greedily at her hair, and the gasoline slick beneath her sneakers seeps slowly across the pavement toward him. Her scars are all the color of her eyes. “Do you think it remembers what it knew before it was reborn? Does gold remember lead?” Her voice is as hungry, as childlike and wondering, as when she first spoke to him of fire, dross, cleansing. Industrial odds and ends pile up around her, past her thighs. He should be running now, as much distance as he can put between himself and this gamine apocalypse, beneath this sky of spent ashes and sun that plays the ghost at its own funeral; but the bare need in her gaze has hooked into him and he answers, as honestly as he can, “I don’t know.”
He has never seen her smile before: bitter and wistful as smoke unweaving, as inextricable as anoth
er scar.
“I hope not.”
Under her thumb, the tiny wheel clicks and spins and the inferno that blossoms over them both, broiling skin, charring sight, so scorching it might be absolute zero, feels like her arms around him for the first and last time. His scream shocked silence into his mouth, brought him scrambling upright in bed as though he could climb out of his own flame-ridden flesh: plaster cool against his sweating spine, late moonlight in watery bars across the wicker-backed chair draped with his pants and Niko’s socks and somebody’s undershirt, and Niko in the darkness beside him, slow with sleep and sharp with worry, saying, “Blake? Blake, love. What’s wrong?”
“I had a bad dream.” His voice shook, a child with a nightmare; a child’s words, flinching from shadows in the corner, afraid to close his eyes for fear of the dark inside them. “Fuck. I had a really bad dream. Niko—”
But Niko’s arms were already around him, no questions and nothing like the ravening grasp of fire. The thin solidity of his body weighed against non-memories of her eyes flashing to blackened steam, her hair licked upwards in petals of fire; his own flesh marbled loose of the bones, falling to charcoal leaves. “I dreamed she—that I—” and he would have bitten his tongue out, but Niko only whispered into his hair, no words and all consolation. Sleepless together, he held Blake until the sun rose, a line of scalded metal spilling over in the east to burn the day bright.
