“It’s okay,” Joshua said. He analyzed the scene. The child was taking baby steps towards him, his shadow cast long over the line of children and that man. Between the boy and the line was a strip of snow, there were icicles hanging from the fire escapes and another, large mound of snow just against the building to his right. He looked back at Kami and said, “Tell them to close their eyes.” She did. Then, he jumped into the snow.
A curtain of steam rose like an apparition before them. The children froze. The man pushed them aside and began shooting pot-shots, covering his eyes and yelling. A flaming hand came from between a seam in the fog and gripped the man’s face and held, for a moment, his burning mouth.
“That’s enough,” Joshua said, releasing him. The man dropped the gun and called Joshua “Gaijin” under his breath which he always understood to be an equivalent of white devil. He’d been called that before, by some of his students, even, and his only response was a polite: come on guys, that’s not very nice.
Joshua said, “Don’t move.”
The man looked up and stood, frozen in fear. He whimpered, watching his shadow dance as the flame grew closer to him, and yelling as the flame began to burn his face. Joshua left his hand print burnt into the man’s cheek and walked away while he writhed on the ground. If he stayed close to them any longer, their blood would boil and they’d all die.
“Where are you going?” Kami yelled after him, carrying her folded clothes in a bundle she clung tight to her stomach.
“Making my way to the shore. I need to find a steel ship.”
“But what about them?” she said. Joshua turned around. The kids were following her. They all still had their masks on, some reaching their tiny fists behind them to rub their teary eyes.
Joshua sighed, putting his hands on his hips, “Well, come on, I guess.”
When they reached the docks, they stood in the dim shadows of frozen titans: ice sculptures that feigned the shape of shipping vessels. Across the frosted wiring, icicle spears threatened the ground. They decided to stop for the night as the clouds above them grew darker. Kami heated cans of frozen soup some ten feet from Joshua’s foot, while the kids slept like rolled socks in a circle around him. He never found himself to be hungry, though he imagined his body must be growing more and more like the pictures of holocaust victims he’d seen in history books in high school. If he saw himself in a mirror, he imagined that beneath the flames, his rib cage clung tightly to his skin and his spinal bumps protruded Jurassically on his back. But he didn’t have any mirrors, all the ice melted away from him and all the glass cracked if he got too close, so from a blurry distance, or in the surface of heat agitated water, he saw himself, a flaming blob, dark and unclear where his body ended and fire began. What a thing, he thought. To not eat but to burn. And in that to feel as though he were full. To feel fulfilled.
If he didn’t actively keep himself awake, the soothing sound of his woofing flame would stroke his eyelids shut, and he’d be off again, into the prism of his memories.
A bead of sweat ran from his Grandfather’s scalp down the side of his face and over the brown birthmark that surrounded his right eye, leaving a small line tracing its path, as digletts do when they dig in the Pokemon games Joshua used to play…still plays. His temperature was spiking and a fifteen year old Joshua could see his Grandfather’s hospital gown swamp against the bony leg as it soaked with perspiration. Joshua was eating ice cream and his grandfather turned his rhinoey leather face toward him.
“What are you eating?” Joshua’s grandfather was diabetic.
“Carrots.” A diabetic who hated carrots.
His Grandfather raised a suspicious eyebrow. When Joshua was done eating, he stood next to his grandfather’s bed with the Beginner Magician’s Deck of Cards his Grandma had gotten him for his birthday. Love Grandma and Grandpa was written on the deck box in his Grandma’s handwriting. He wasn’t a huge fan of the pick-a-card tricks, but even though at first he thought he was too old for this shit, he grew to love making cards disappear. His Grandpa turned his head to watch as Joshua flipped and snapped a card over his index finger, sliding it with his middle digit where it would instantly disappear into his sleeve. Jack of Hearts, Queen of Spades, King of Diamonds. The royal cards, he recognized, produced more drama when they fwapped into thin air.
The doctor was talking to Joshua’s mother outside. “Well…he won’t like it. Can you sedate him?” Joshua caught the tail end of his mother’s sentence. No, said the doctor. It would skew the temperature. It’s very routine; you can stay in the room. That’s something doctor’s say. Joshua’s Grandmother was coming back with ice and she kissed his Grandfather’s forehead, her red gemmed hair clip catching sparkling cubes of fluorescent hospital light. The doctor and two powerful male nurses came in with a machine and a long tube. We’re going to take your temperature, so just roll on your side, please. We need to do it rectally, she yelled. He’s not deaf he’s just old. He also refused. He was ruled incapable of deciding for himself. You’re burning up, we need to take an accurate temperature. The sweaty hospital gown flapped soggily off his grandfather’s body as Joshua watched the tan old man flail his bony fists at the male nurses. He’d never seen his Grandfather’s penis before but it looked like a dying slug that someone had poured salt on as the men turned him on his side and pressed his legs together, lifting his right ass cheek.
No! It’s not right! Grandpa screamed as they inserted the thermometer tube into his rectum. Joshua looked at his mother. Tears welled in her eyes on the ends of the crow’s feet of her fake, defensive smile. His Grandfather’s weak arms shook to resist the hands around his wrists, hogtied and wrinkled and tough like elephant skin and his voice crackled when he yelled but you could see the defeat creeping in his face, and perhaps, the realization that he never imagined something like this would happen—not as a young boy, not in the war, at Normandy, not on his wedding day or when he first swaddled his daughter, kissing her head with his well mustached lips: not ever. Joshua picked at the cards in his sleeve with his fingernails.
It’s not right! His grandfather screamed one last time.
It’s not right, he echoed sleepily.
It’s not right. Joshua woke himself up. Kami was staring at him and said “The fire moves when you sleep. It looked like a nightmare.”
Joshua unfroze the nearest ship while Kami waited on the dock looking at his footprints burnt into the boardwalk. She made a game of it for the children, marching them through his steps. He unfroze the whole crew. Kami explained the situation to them.
“They are whalers,” she said to Joshua, who told Kami to instruct them to hang the anchor over the front of the boat. A whaler’s boot melted on a part of the steel floor where Joshua had stood. It left a sticky circle of fragmented boot prints that cataloged the whaler’s panicked attempt to find cool steel. The kids came on board.
“They can take those masks off,” Joshua said.
“They’re scared,” Kami said, “I think the masks help.”
“Huh,” Joshua said, shrugging his shoulders, smiling as the whalers greeted the children.
When the anchor was in place at the front of the ship, Joshua climbed down and sat on it. As the ship drifted away from the dock, the ice receded and he cut a path for him, Kami, and the rest of his companions. “To New Jersey,” he told them and they obeyed. They called him “Hitodama,” which Kami explained meant: wandering soul of the newly deceased.
That night, Joshua slept, sprawled and secured, across the three hooks of the anchor. And while the whalers cooked spitted hot dogs and pots of boiling noodles over him, and the children threw snow into his fire, watching it hiss and steam, his dreams took him once more across the ocean to his Grandmother. But as he looked in the window on her, in her bed, on the phone, he knew that in this particular flashback, the real him was even further from her than he was now.
“I miss you so much,” she said weakly, raising her voice so that it almost sounded like a qu
estion, like she couldn’t remember if it was the right thing to say. He heard his mother weep in the background. And now, as he peered through the window, he saw her weeping.
“Just wait for me, Grandma. I’m on the next flight out.” He mouthed at the window, recalling what he said, his spirit breath fogging the glass.
“So long,” She whispered before hanging up. Dream Joshua found his way back to his burning body, limp on the anchor and it was morning. The sun rose somewhere hidden behind the clouds. Even concealed, it still spun somewhere at the center of this system, out there in space, hydrogen and helium condensed through gravity so intense it splits atoms, igniting nuclear fusion. And there it burns in isolation at a rate of 3.8 X 10^28 Joules—about the equivalent of six trillion Hiroshima bombs per second. The outward thrust of the explosion and the inward pull of gravity creates an equilibrium that stuffs all that energy into a ball, and spins our solar system like cream into softly stirred coffee.
Joshua noticed, that as he breathed, his flame would sometimes fluctuate or recede. To fight the vast boredom of the frozen skyline, he’d spend hours isolated on the anchor, trying to focus on crafting a mental nozzle of sorts that he could use to willfully make himself recede into the subtlety of a thin blue sheet or explode into the violent roar of a full blown pyre that leapt from him in tongues, licking aggressively at the eternal, winter air. He also found that when he flicked his finger, tiny, sparking tinder tongues would momentarily wisp in unpredictable currents, and with further practice, in what felt like a few hours, but very well may have been a few weeks, he spent his down time taking pot shots at the tips of the tallest, halted, cresting waves.
Kami hung her face over the railing to warm herself. Joshua looked up. Then, he climbed up to her.
“I’m learning a lot about it,” he said, “I think it talks to me when I sleep. It shows me images and memories. When I wake up it’s always acting funny. It’s like a pet. I think I can train it. And I do it with my imagination. If I really focus and think of an image, it takes that shape.”
“Do you remember how it happened?”
“Not really. But when I think of it I picture a flaming fast ball blasting down the alleys of the city. And me, in catcher's stance. Then, I catch it and swallow it and now he’s here. That’s probably how it happened. Cooler than what probably actually happened.”
“How do you know it’s a he?”
“I don’t.”
“Maybe it’s a girl.”
“That would explain a lot,” he said.
She went to hit him playfully but it wasn’t worth burning her hand off.
“Good for something,” Joshua said.
They spoke most of the day. He asked her about her life. She told him she’d like dating intelligent and dangerous men—she knew those two often went hand in hand. They kept her close to the stuff she called “it.” They threatened the veil she knew cloaked reality in a blanket of manners and doubt. She knew that living is the back of a motorbike in Tokyo traffic—lights, bumpers, twisting metal and people passing in hyperspace. Life is persistent seconds from death. And, she said, smiling, that even when the men thought they were most in control, she was in true control—the master of her own feeling and exposures—and above all—she knew she could reinvent herself endlessly, and at any moment, vanish.
“I’ve never felt like I belonged. I like this world, though. It feels critical.”
Joshua thought to himself: Well, she’s in luck. I’m both dangerous and intelligent.
The frozen ocean, for the most part, was flat with random sharp peaks where the wake must have been chopping when the world cracked into immobility. So, when Joshua saw what looked more like a mounting hill on the horizon, his curiosity was tickled. They pulled closer to the snowy hill and stopped the ship. Joshua hopped to some ice and quickly sprinted to the hill, leaving a hole wherever he lay his feet. He made it to the hill and leapt onto it. As the ice began to melt beneath him, he realized he stood atop a frozen whale. The whalers scrambled about the deck for the harpoon cannons before Joshua stayed them with his hand in the air and laid on the whale’s back. The ice was thick but it melted quickly and before long, the putrid smell of burning whale fat informed him that he accidentally branded the outline of his body into the whale’s thick, black flesh, just behind its dorsal fin. When he saw what he’d done, he moved quickly, slipping, on the mucusy skin and into the ocean.
Kami gasped, watching his flame vanish from sight. The water began to bubble and boil around the frozen whale and soon the whale’s blowhole erupted and it creaked and cracked the ice that secured it and descended beneath the water, returning from time to time to blow air out its top and suck in a fresh supply. When Joshua emerged, his flame remained lit and he continued to burn as he drew himself back onto the anchor.
“No one touches him,” he yelled up to Kami. She said they’d all agreed.
The days felt as if they grew longer and the sea of solid ice seemed endless. The boat creaked on as the star-swallowed Joshua melted a path. The whale followed their ship, blasting air in their wake. Unlimited supply of freshly unfrozen fish to snack on and warm waters was enough of an explanation for why the whale didn’t leave, but Kami told Joshua that the whalers thought something more spiritual of the whole event: something of a good omen. The whalers would cast their nets off the side of the ship and scoop up some thawing fish and cook them over Joshua and feast the same as the whale did. And they drank the ship’s store of spirits and celebrated their new companion. They’d all line up and pee off the side of the deck, grunting in their hoarse voices to try to see who could pee the furthest and with the most powerful stream. Joshua and Kami watched on and laughed, the children singing songs and naming the fish and making whale noises.
One dark night, when the crew had gone to sleep, Kami leaned over the bow and let Joshua’s flame heat her face until it became too much and she leaned back a bit with tears in her eyes.
“Does it hurt?” she called down to him.
“I think it did at first. But I can’t remember. And it just doesn’t now. It’s strange. You imagine much of your feeling comes from feeling the temperature of things. But I can’t feel temperatures anymore. All I feel is solid or liquid or air, I suppose.” Joshua spoke too fast and Kami didn’t really understand him. He’d obviously thought a lot about it when he was alone at night, passing his incandescent hand in front of his eyes, trying to pinpoint what he felt.
“Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“Your home?”
“Yes.”
“Are we almost there?”
“Still a world away, I feel sometimes.” There was a pause. Joshua was dozing off. “Your name means paper. In Japanese,” he continued.
“Is that silly in English?”
“I suppose, for someone travelling with a man who’s on fire.” He laughed to himself, it was a stupid joke.
“What does Joshua mean?”
“Nothing…as far as I know.”
“Are you sure it doesn’t mean bald boy?” she laughed.
“Am I bald?”
“Not one single hair,” she said, snorting.
“God damn it! I knew it!” he said, rubbing the smooth spot where his eyebrows should have been, and looking down at his penis, and his completely hairless surrounding crotch.
They played with his flame for a while. When he was happy, it looked happy too. And it took shapes reminiscent of things he loved: Owls, horses, billbugs. He felt they were friends and no control was necessary.
They were making for California. That seemed the easiest way to navigate. Abandoning the boat and continuing on foot felt foolish to Joshua. So, when they saw the frozen coast of California, he opted that they should head for Panama and make their way around the belly of America. He remembered that Panama was man made and would likely be impossible to operate so they’d have to go further south. They’d have to pass around the tip of Cape Horn, through the Drake Passage,
where currents crashed into massive waves of water, peaks and valleys, and looked like an enormous city of its own, melting as they passed.
We just have to follow the coast until we see the Empire State Building, he thought. He knew the way from there. Kami would often spend the long nights just out of sight behind the railing of the bow. She taught him the Japanese names of all the fish they unfroze in their path. The children named the ship’s whale Kujira: whale in Japanese. Kujira couldn’t eat all the fish they unfroze and before long they gathered a tail of migrating marine life. Kami told him their names: maguro, buri, sake, same, tobiuo. And the children recited the names after her, forming a circle and sometimes pressing their faces into her waist. He found himself wishing he could hold her: something that was, of course, impossible. She would flake in his arms and float away. She would boil.
After a time, he gained some control over his flame. Without even thinking about it, he could suck it in to a dull layer over his body the way you’d suck in your belly to fit into your pants. He practiced sucking himself in, in secret. And one night he snuck onto the deck and into the cabin. He sucked himself in as far as he could and went to where Kami was sleeping. He felt like he’d been holding his breath for an hour, but forced his flame into himself. He drew near to her as she lightly snored but she soon awoke, frightened at his dull, blue figure. She yelled and he hadn’t realized it before but the ends of her hair were beginning to spark. Joshua ran to the deck and let his metaphoric flame belly hang loose and the fire blasted out from him with an intense ferocity at first that soon returned to its normal, soft woofing. Kami came to him after he’d returned to his anchor.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was you. I thought I was having a nightmare. Can we try again?”
“No,” he said “thanks. That was as low as I could make it.” There was thirty seconds of awkward silence before Joshua just couldn’t take it anymore.
“One time, my Grandma sat on the toilet, but a bee had flown in, so her butt trapped it in there and so it stung her on the butt. She screamed and it was a funny story she told, but for a long time, I’d always check the toilet bowl before I went to the bathroom.” Joshua laughed to himself, stuttering out the story. Sometimes, he liked to tell Kami stories really quickly because he knew she wouldn’t be able to follow them.
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