Up, Out of Cities That Blow Hot and Cold

by Charlee Jacob

  He liked to sleep now, wrapped up in the cold and senseless. Maybe one night he would find a really deep cave where he could hide forever. Though how would he find such a place without a larger animal than he was to lead the way?

  ««—»»

  Mike felt the city erupt around him as he made haste down the street, trying—of course—not to look as if he was hurrying. It was pretty much the same every evening as he left work at the high school, when the night life came alive. The city was bad enough during the day but it was always worse when the sun went down. He could feel the seethe as he passed persons with violence shorting out the lights in their eyes, smell their acerbic perspiration in turbulent spices and madness vinegar. Even the buildings were slick as if sweating out the rage, the air rancid and humid, positively astringent with fury.

  He was feverish inside his heavy coat, amazed the outside temperature didn’t match the surrounding mood. A cracked window in a first-floor apartment let out chatter from a blaring radio.

  “…in this, the worst winter in the city’s recorded history. Another homeless man was found frozen to death in the park, making the twelfth since the storm on Sunday.

  “The body of a young woman was discovered in an alley, burned beyond recognition. Authorities believe this is another victim of the killer they have dubbed ‘The Christmas Torch’, the sixth in four days. Original theories had it that the burnings were possibly caused by a rare phenomenon called spontaneous combustion. Police have since ruled this out even though no one can yet determine what—if any—combustible fuel might have been used to set the six victims on fire.

  “In international news, French experts are suspecting metal fatigue in the collapse of the Eiffel Tower in Paris this morning. Witnesses report seeing the century-old structure twist, the observation tower folding up…”

  Mike observed the intensity in the slivers of eyes that swerved as he went past, looking back at him with mixtures of resentment and utter contempt. People who he didn’t know seemed as if they wanted either to kill him or to at least stick him under a rock for a while. It didn’t matter if they were of his race or not, of his gender or not, or what their ages were. Their emotions boiled, wanting to lash out at the weather—at the rumbling, smoke-belching cars that crackled across the icy streets until it sounded like bones breaking. Most of all they wanted to strike out at each other. The same way they had acted during autumn and the summer before that and the spring before that. Getting meaner and more frantic all the time.

  Carolers sauntered by and Mike barely noticed them. Until he heard the clank and ring, the resonance of metal. For a moment, he seemed to see them, not in their Dickensian eighteenth century garb but made from the city’s scrap heaps and construction sites. Steel cogs and 2 x 4 beams, aluminum wainscoting and the mechanisms from locks, electric cable hair. They looked about them furtively, suspiciously, with burning rivets for eyes.

  Mike hustled past a surly trio of burly gang members. Their collective eyes flitted from him to the comely but clearly annoyed woman who was trying to hang onto her dry cleaning in the wind. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, even beneath the muffler and thick collar he wore. The gang members began to follow her, heat visibly steaming off them as from the old type furnaces many of the buildings along the street had. Through the open curtains of a second-floor window he glanced up in time to watch a woman hit a child with her fist, ranting with pupil-bulging fury. Behind a dumpster, he saw a dog shake a cat to pieces.

  Mike put a gloved hand to his chest. Breathe! The hand slid down to his stomach which was roiling with nausea. Stop… This place was suffocating him, killing him with the constant neural ignition. Decent folks shouldn’t try to live this way. It was like trying to exist at the business end of a blowtorch. All he wanted was a little peace, some cooling comfort in sympathetic arms, a break out of this constant passion like a dangerous, wounded animal leaping for the throat.

  Even the skyline was rampant, talons of spires reaching to claw open the lowered, gray December heaven. And the canyons which ran between the buildings were deep-cut incisions, made from groin to throat in a coroner’s office. Except—if he were making some analogy with a cadaver—why wasn’t it chilled? Blizzard notwithstanding, it was so hot. Like pots of boiling oil, fiery stakes for penitents, and the screams of the damned.

  “Oh, God, please,” Mike mumbled aloud to himself, starting to step from the sidewalk into the street, his foot going down into semi-frozen slush in the gutter, soaking him up to the ankle. Yet even that couldn’t make him shiver, couldn’t cool him. He was never going to be anything less than blazing again. This place had done that to him even if no one could possibly ever understand it.

  He taught literature at the high school and now words from his favorite T.S. Eliot tumbled from his lips with no preamble of thought.

  “Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

  Spread out in fiery points

  Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.”

  Unexpectedly Mike turned from the street, going back down the way he’d come. The woman with the dry cleaning had beautiful hair, dark with red highlights which seemed to counterpoint the obvious angry fire inside her. Yes, he’d seen the boys go after her. It had flickered across his mind with no more significance than one popping among many in an insufferably hot fireplace. You can’t do that, can’t just ignore it. You MUSTN’T only rush on. The Fahrenheit never goes away.

  But the poem from THE WASTE LAND made it register, so that he realized he must go help her.

  Mike saw them in an alley, rippling like a mirage on an Arctic desert, the woman’s dry cleaning cast upon the dirty snow, two of the punks holding her down while the third knelt between her legs. For a split second, he imagined they were phantoms of a sacrificial persuasion, arisen from a metropolis of misanthropes. Because he’d seen things, lately.

  Mike pulled the pistol he kept in his coat pocket, saying to himself, do it, do it—but coolly, without frenzy, just defending the poor young woman, no true enmity toward them, only compassion for her.

  Compassion.

  As the thug was preparing to unzip, Mike fired one shot through the back of the guy’s skull. The bullet traveled out the front. One of the other two reached for a piece in his own coat, and Mike shot him, too, trying so hard to feel something like glaciation come over him, what ought to have been a natural shudder replete with goose flesh. But it wasn’t like that at all. It made him dizzy with a blur as the third kid (yes, they were kids, barely teenagers) got up and ran off down the alley. The second one with a large bleeding hole in his shoulder struggled to his feet and with a wobbly lurch fled, too.

  Mike put the gun back in his pocket and bent to help the woman. She sat up and slipped into his arms, sobbing as he stroked her wonderful long hair. He felt her trembling, teeth chattering, and it gave him a moment’s hope that he would finally feel some brumal numbing of his own pain.

  But then he sensed the entity that had a few days ago rushed at him through a crevice in the concrete, bubbling out through the asphalt and blacktop, like a shadow of a fever dream. Having found him as its perfect host, it would never let him go. He’d tried to kill himself since but it would overwhelm him with a flash of blistering heat until he gave in. Still he carried the gun, hoping to find a chance to use it on himself. Did it never sleep?

  He thought he heard the entire city as it would sound burning, with crackling marshmallow people jumping from the flames, lava boiling from the sewers, the sibilant hiss of downed power lines, broken mains, and then gasoline explosions blasting miles straight upward, a holocaust of terrifying thunder and screams.

  But only one person was screaming. The woman was on fire, hair going up like cheap polyester, yes, spreading out in fiery points. He let go and jumped, horrified, knowing it was the thing inside him turning loose all that roasting savagery it was the embodiment of. The red white yellow colors played across his face, seared his eyeballs, singed his e
yebrows. Except he hadn’t had eyebrows since the first young woman. He didn’t remember any particulars about them—some may have been prostitutes, one might have tried to rob him, a few might have just needed help—except for their shrieks of terror (and rage), the blackening ruination of their flesh, the flames virtually bursting out of their centers from some trigger he’d found, that it had discovered.

  Mike heard sirens. Someone had called for help. They’d probably called because they saw the punks follow her into the alley. Or perhaps they had heard the gunshots. And this had made them furious at yet another hideous disturbance of their lives. Millions of reasons every day and night to be enraged at the encroachment of fragile borders.

  Mike rushed from the alley and the immolation, the entity retreating through his veins and muscles in backdraft.

  He ran for blocks, slipping on the ice yet not falling more than twice. It melted under him, around him. When at last he stopped, he went down to his knees and scooped up handfuls of crunchy snow. He rubbed it into his hair, letting the crystals cut across his face, tossing it down beneath the coat and sweater. It turned to water; it didn’t help. Nothing could make him feel cool or clean.

  ««—»»

  Daria clicked off in her head each duty she performed for the young woman with the burns that the paramedics had just brought in. To ensure an open airway, she suctioned the nasopharynx and then made sure there was an endotracheal tube at hand so she could intubate in a hurry if the patient began to have trouble breathing. She used a Venti-mask to start humidified oxygen. Daria then began an I.V. with a large-bore catheter, giving an electrolyte solution and serum albumin. Next, she inserted a Foley catheter to measure the renal output, making certain there were no signs of black urine. She ordered a chest X-ray and then drew arterial blood for blood-gas studies. She monitored the vital signs to watch for cerebral depression. It hadn’t been necessary to cut the woman’s clothes from her for a full examination. The layers of winter clothing had been burned off to the skin.

  Daria paid no heed as, peripherally, metal gurneys bulged with some momentary semblance, an ice blue fist seemed to try to push through a computer screen, and she heard a positively bitter air current howl out from the shallow depths of a bedpan.

  Out of logic, she’d chosen nursing as a career. She’d really wanted to be a poet but that apparently took more passion than she could delineate. Yet words from her favorite poet, T.S Eliot, came unbidden with that ice blue fist and that howl.

  “…Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

  The wave cry, the wind cry…”

  She was just tired. If she’d seen and heard things often lately it was because a lot of people had suffered recent accidents, had been shot, or had tried to take their own lives. It was Christmas. It was the beginning of winter, a bad time traditionally for depression. That was all.

  Daria noticed the woman was conscious. Well, burn victims seldom lost consciousness and, if they did, it generally wasn’t because of the burns they’d suffered. Had she heard the poetry Daria spoke? Had Daria said it aloud?

  She was looking at Daria with shocked eyes, both red and swollen, filled with incrusted fluids. The nurse knew her own were dull, beyond shock, set into her face like cat’s eye marbles. She’d seen so many serious burns in her short career, especially in the last few days. From space heaters causing fires in low-income housing, catching people asleep in their beds. From the school bus that had slipped on the ice and crashed into a gas station. From the victims of the latest freak to run amuck in the city. The emergency room was full of walking wounded, slack-jawed and war-shocked until they couldn’t feel anything. And that was just the staff.

  “There, there.” she replied by rote, not meaning her voice to seem flat, pitiless. “I’m Nurse Collins. We’ll take good care of you here at Bon General, Candace.”

  Always call the patient by their name if you know it. And this time they did at least know who the victim was. The emergency team had brought in her purse. There had been a D.O.A. in the alley as well, some gangbanger with his brains blown out. No sign of the gun used to aerate him. And there was blood leading out across the snow like a trail of dribbled festive candies, indicating someone else might have been injured but had left the scene.

  All those folks on the street, seeing flames coming from the alley, but no one had gone in to roll the poor woman in the snow. Someone had phoned for help. Daria supposed that was something to be grateful for. But they had probably only done it because the woman’s screams were irritating. Damn, but it was such a cold city.

  Hear us tick? she thought, getting a picture of fancy high-rises and skulking lowrider cars filled with gleaming cyber metal. What makes us tick tick tick?

  Frigid as the nonlover. She could feel it when the doctors made their rounds, faces like masks of frost. The patients lying in their beds, apathetic to their own conditions and the conditions of those in the beds next to them, carved blocks of ice, already consigned to some gelid sepulcher.

  Daria caught herself, a couple days ago, actually pricking her finger with a hypo, just to see if her blood still flowed. It had, but slowly. Her gaze kept being drawn to windows, the snow falling beyond, wan light filtering in silver as rime.

  Silver as the frostbite on the homeless man who was being treated on the other side of the curtain from this burned woman. How similar their injuries looked, even if more severe on the female. Dead flesh, turning black or turning white, peeling away, sloughing like emotions the feeler has evolved past. Frostbite was numb at first, like a severe burn where the nerves have been destroyed. It didn’t begin to hurt until the affected area was warmed; then it felt like a burn. It blistered and could be bad enough that a lot of tissue could turn mephitic in a blink, necessitating amputation. A nurse had to warm up frostbite slowly. A nurse had to keep a burned patient warm, too, because the loss of the protective skin made it impossible for the patient to sustain any of their own body heat.

  Daria did not allow herself to be held in the patient’s stare. She didn’t make eye contact although training mandated she do so. You never wanted a victim to think they were too horrible to look upon. Why couldn’t she bring herself to return the gaze and smile? Where was her mercy?

  And why didn’t it frighten her that it was gone?

  Daria cleaned the woman’s eyelids with gauze soaked in sterile solution to soften the crusts for removal, then covered them with pads and promptly called an ophthalmologist.

  “There, there,” Daria repeated, although she wasn’t sure if it was to the patient or to herself. There, there, now you can’t look at me.

  “At least we won’t have to cut her hair,” Nurse Fremont said bleakly from the other side of the bed. “All of it was burned clean off to the roots. Probably never grow back.”

  Candace must have heard this because she began to cry. Except that she couldn’t with the scorched tear ducts. So, all she did was hitch and sob hoarsely, jerk and quiver.

  Daria shot the other nurse a withering look.

  Then she had a memory of herself, several days past, sticking that hypo into a nearby comatose patient just to see if their blood still flowed, too. It had oozed out in red sleet.

  “Need to tub her,” Fremont added briskly, “clean those scrapes out. No telling what was on the floor of that alley that might have gotten in there. Filth, glass, a million different kinds of bacteria.”

  Tub at body temperature, 99°F. A bit of surgical soap, pinch of salt…enough to make the water isotonic. Debris and loosened skin would come floating out and off until the patient sometimes seemed to be unraveling. A mummy whose wrappings were of one long, undone flesh bandage. Clinical facts whirred inside Daria’s head.

  Would the water freeze as soon as Daria touched it, as soon as Nurse Abominable Snowwoman breathed winter clouds into it? Would they be able to hear blue wind moaning, tittering through the hospital corridors? Another quote from T.S. Eliot came to Daria, bidden by this image.

  �
�But at my back in a cold blast I hear

  The rattle of bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.”

  Fremont mumbled a less-than-heartfelt there, there to the patient who was trying so hard to weep that she was practically having a seizure. Daria thought she would crack, making the sound of a semi-solid river as some hapless skater figure-eighted over a faultline. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be: uncaring, unfeeling, crystalized. Homeless dead spread on the ground in unmoving snow angels. Living (yet barely) residents peering out through smeared windows like hungry husks, seeking some blood which might finally flow with a little warmth.

  “Shut up,” Daria snapped.

  But to whom? Nurse Fremont? Poor Candace what’s-her-name? Who at least recently—this very silent night—had known more heat in a minute and a half than Daria had known since… when? Or had she said it to herself, expression like Siberia, limbs without sensation, thinking that if she could feel anything she would use it to wish for a grain of human fire?

  “Nurse Collins,” said a voice behind her, so cool it sent a shiver down the I.V. lines and fogged up the saline bottles. It was Dr. Rand, having heard her as he entered the curtained cubicle. “I do believe you need a break.”

  Daria bypassed the break room, coffee and cold-cut sandwich stenches as rancid to her as the smell of chemically-preserved TV dinner sweetbreads spilled onto an iceberg. She went down the hall, hearing whimpers and seeing a few faces streaked with tears but which were not even wet, the tears having formed solid icy balls, clinging to the cheeks like shrew-mouthed diamonds.

  She went out the emergency room doors and into the parking lot. People there didn’t look at her twice, just in her uniform whites, no coat, smelling of bitter barbecue with scrapped tidbits of overcooked meat clinging to her sleeves. She didn’t give them any more consideration but felt the snow touching her hair and brow, the city laughing its coldly murderous chuckle in distant highway sounds and callous, impersonal bustle. Even the violence she perceived was perpetrated by statues (upon other statues), the faces soulless, brutalizing sternly with the indifference of untouchables.