The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  Haven’t I listened with all my strength and heard no answering word?

  Haven’t I prayed for a vision so that seeing, I might understand?

  What means the beast with seven heads? What means the flying thing with a tail like a scorpion, with which he does hurt? What means this, the clear shape cut from water? A tiny heart ticked and went still. A closed mouth. Make sense of this. Fit this to your story. Tell me what comes next, how I’ll get what’s coming to me. Waters turned to blood and a third of the creatures living there do die. My marriage bed spread with sackcloth of hair. And time shall be no more.

  Or match this to your shining vision. To crystal sea and gates of pearl, add pain bereft of use or profit. What good comes of it? What lesson ought I learn, being taught it again and again, habitual? That my dear hope means nothing? Pearl of great price buried in a field. You sell all you have to buy that ground. But when you uncover your treasure to rejoice in it, you find it gone to dust. It craved the touch of your skin for life and now it is gone, vanished, and your grief, too, must be silent. What can you say? Don’t bother, even the well-meaning advise. So you stop your own mouth.

  But there is another way.

  The coal touched to your lips. If no angel comes to you in the night with such a brand, you may kindle a fire and pluck from there a searing word for yourself.

  ANGER IS A GIFT.

  —Graffiti, Ketchikan, Alaska

  We take black to be the color of mourning. I wore it every day and said not why, and nobody asked. The Victorians knew how to dress for grief, their women draping strands of onyx around their necks, or jet, hard coal that takes a high polish and can be cut to catch the light. Or guttapercha, rubber molded into elaborate black curls and lace and very lightweight; you can wear chandelier earrings made of gutta-percha and they will not pain your lobes; the gutta-percha pendant will warm from the skin covering your breastbone but leave no mark.

  But before that the grieving had worn white. White linen, white silk, a string of pearls like those worn by the wax woman they call Venus. At the pearl’s core lies a swaddled pip, sometimes the oyster’s own egg. It lodged in the smooth-walled room. Opalescent water bathed it again and again until it smothered round and dry.

  Time passes. You find yourself aware of the date, a hot landmark in the year, grim birthday. Observe from the corner of your eye how this date (unremarked by others, unknown and unspoken) appears, recedes, then approaches again. A red coal tucked between other days, radiating.

  Walk out the door of the Mütter Museum and see the sign that reads:

  HARRY’S SPIRITUAL SUPPLIES

  SINCE 1918

  OUR AIM IS TO HELP LIGHT A TORCH FOR THE GOOD

  CROSS SWORDS AGAINST EVIL

  Walk out the door of the charnel house in Rome and see the woman holding an alms cup, hear sycamore leaves clattering along the sidewalk in a gust of hot wind breathed out by the city bus.

  Walk out the door. Of the room in La Specola that smells of old birds and iron nails, holding the hand of the woman they call Venus. Steady her as she rises from the table, leaving the puddle of silk behind; help her as she makes her slow way down a dark street to the riverbank. Sometimes swallowed needles will pass through the gut and work their way out of the body on their own, silver quills rising from calf and throat. When this happens, pluck them free and wipe clean the beads of blood, and if you unhook a safety pin from the back of your throat, use it to hold yourself together. If you find a pair of toy opera glasses, peer through them and see a wee ship, tied with silk thread to the far bank. Press a drop of oil to my forehead and I will do the same for you, will hold your hand while you pass your hour with death.

  Walk out the door of the house and hear the mockingbird in the maple tree calling, “ten-year T-note, ten-year T-note.” The mourning jewelry I choose is obsidian, black and shining and keen-edged. Lava when it cracks to cool in seawater, or lightning when it blasts the sidewalk into spatters of glass. Of course the Victorians’ favorite mourning jewelry was made of hair, preferably from a deceased loved one. You worked over your grief by twisting the locks with a hooked needle and pinning the loops tidy under glass. I have seen hair woven into cuff-link covers, hair knitted into chains for eyeglasses, rosettes of gray hair in clavicle pendants. Something about this feels morbid to us today, part of the larger taboo we hold against the deceased. What does it mean that for four weeks I could sense no difference between living and dead?

  Not love that fooled me, but my own desire.

  And there was something in the mortal body’s kinship with death that tricked me. Something about the still form that my quick body recognized.

  Tonight there is only one heartbeat pounding inside me and nobody shares my blood.

  Listen. Listen hard.

  Why do I strain my ears for something more? Fancying a beat of that tumtumtumtum will make itself known. They stop listening soon as they’re born. Stop listening. Stop.

  But there beside the bed the dark figure stands.

  I rise from bed and step into her. Shadow self, familiar shape of my own dying body.

  We are bound, soul to clay, myself to my lost child to the one my mother lost, to her mother, to hers, hanks of light and dark, a braid reaching back. And forward.

  So I rise from bed and walk alone down the hallway, securing the house in the dark hour.

  Remember I care about you.

  —Folded note found in a secondhand copy of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again

  Let’s say “him,” though I can’t know for sure. He had been the same age as mine. The midwife had him in a glass jar in the refrigerator, waiting to take him away and bury him, I think, though I didn’t ask. Pray over him, maybe, speak his name if he had one. Eyespot cold and dim. Shape of head and wee club of arm. Now when I think of mine I think of hers, lost child of a woman I’ve never met. I can give her the mercy I denied myself.

  Listen.

  You held him close and never left him alone. With him night and day.

  And even though you didn’t know it, your steps as you walked rocked him gentle across the river.

  He must have loved you. Love yourself back.

  Somebody to Love

  If something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

  —Freddie Mercury

  He sings the first note like a prayer. The actual word, “can,” hardly matters. He sings it past language, sings it like want.

  The sound swells in his mouth, a globe, compressed yet large enough to grow a world of need. Nobody invites you inside. I woke one day and found myself there.

  The MRI machine is bolted to the floor of a windowless room. Take a cotton blouse from the nurse and fit yourself to the narrow board; she locks you down, wrist and ankle. You must not move. Maybe a bump on your brain, the reproductive endocrinologist had said, microadenoma, nothing to worry about per se, but it might be causing your infertility. As a mask of clear Plexiglas shields your face, the machine swallows you tight, then bangs and whoops. You can’t get out. Try to breathe. If your throat closes, if panic presses hard on your chest, if you can’t say how much time has passed, if you flinch—you must begin again.

  Begin again. Freddie sings the first note alone. Then the chorus comes in, rich and harmonized, and the piano starts up with a sound like a church basement. Dust in the carpet, faded pictures on the walls.

  The first time I read Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” I was glad not to be in on the joke, to be excluded from close personal knowledge of that period of elevators and waiting rooms. At one point, the narrator calls her friend from the children’s hospital, who says, “You’ve got to have a second child. . . . That’s what we did. We had another child to ensure we wouldn’t off ourselves if we lost our first. For a while, until our second came along, I had it all planned.”

  “R-O-P-E,” the friend says.

  Once our daughter was born, I got the joke.

  You can say I’m greedy, a
nd I won’t argue with that. I loved carrying her, wanted again that knot and swim, kicks like happy nerves, myself growing large and fecund and elemental.

  And the force of our attention on her. Think: tractor beam. Think: unblinking Eye of Sauron. Love her so that it seems too much for one small body to bear. We wanted to give her a brother or sister, and thought that agreeing to the idea would be enough to bring it into being.

  Factories produce glass vials with cunning rubber stoppers designed to be pierced with a syringe. Two needles per shot, one to mix and one to inject. In the how-to class, we sit around a conference table with other sad-faced people and learn how to mix effectively, leaving neither clump nor air bubble. Don’t shake. Roll between your hands. David’s ring clicks against the glass as he rolls the powder and purified water into a solution. If you hit a vein, do not panic. Pull the needle back and try again in a different location. If you see blood, do not panic. This is what the gauze pads are for. We practice injecting a cube-shaped sponge with water.

  “Like stabbing?” the man next to us asks.

  “Yes,” the nurse says, “like stabbing. Don’t worry if I go over medications you don’t have this cycle. Maybe you’ll never have to learn how to use them, but we’ll be here if you do.”

  About this time, I start listening to a fair amount of Queen, especially “Somebody to Love.” At first, I can’t say exactly why it pulls me. It’s an old story, the speaker searching for love and questioning a seemingly absent God, but Freddie’s vamping and begging turns it into something more.

  I read that Freddie meant for the song to sound like gospel music, that he admired Aretha Franklin so much he wanted to emulate her. Just the same I see something in Freddie I’d steal if I could. I love the way he pushes the limit. It’s almost a joke, the way he stretches into that upper register, and you think he can’t mean it—until you hear his voice catch. That sincerity moves the song beyond camp into a kind of secular hymn. It raises the hairs on my arms as I listen.

  Queen goes gospel—who would have expected it? But this is rock-and-roll gospel, amp and sweat. Grappling with God seems always to have this flavor of the flesh. Remember Jacob wrestling all night with the angel. Who touched Jacob on the hip socket with enough force to put it out of joint, and still would not reveal his name.

  If you vomit (blood) or (a substance that resembles coffee grounds), seek immediate medical attention. If you notice (vision changes that turn out to be permanent). If you fall asleep without warning (perhaps while driving). If you are exposed to cold, this medication increases the chance of frostbite. This medication is a clever mimic, it throws its voice into cadences remembered from early pregnancy (nausea, exhaustion, tender breasts.) May cause a (false) positive pregnancy test. May cause mood swings, hot flashes, slurred speech.

  May cause bruising at site of injection. Pinch skin between fingers for subcutaneous, stretch skin taut for intramuscular. Beware interactions with other ergot alkaloid medications (LSD the best-known ergot alkaloid). May cause hallucinations. May cause believing in things that are not true.

  All of these things are true: This medication is made from the urine of pregnant women. This medication is made from the cells of Chinese hamster ovaries. This is a powerful medication; do not take more than the dose your physician recommends.

  FLIP OFF says the vial lid, a gray plastic coin that snaps in place. The hypodermic’s lancet point, a triple-beveled alloy recommended for use where beauty is preferred, arrives in an efficient hard-shell case covered with tamperproof, color-coded red. Neat hash marks stripe the barrel, and a drop of purified water clings to the tube’s inside. Code marks the ergot-alkaloid pill, sans-serif characters graven on bitter chalk.

  I research the Belgian pharmaceutical factory. Somehow it helps to think of someone taking the train to work, walking inside the windowless building, going through the “air bath” that is the first line of defense against outside contaminants, zipping herself into the first white suit and then the second, pulling the hood over her head. The white covers on her shoes whisper as she treads the enameled factory floor.

  Note that “Somebody to Love” is far more complex than most rock songs. It contains more chords, and arranges them in surprising progressions. The song knows your desire and manages it, setting you up to long for a particular note from the key signature, the bedrock the song is built upon until the climactic “to,” a high E-flat Freddie hits right before the final coda. The song’s key signature is four flats: one for Freddie, one for Brian May, one for Roger Taylor, one for John Deacon.

  One reason the song works so well is because it follows a pattern, though not too strictly, of making you want something—a chord progression, say—and then fulfilling that want. But if the system worked the same way every time, you’d tire of it. So the occasional 6/8 bars Freddie tucked here and there, usually before a repeat of the chorus, serve not so much as a stutter-step but as extra room, just enough for a flourish, a more expansive turn around the stage. Those bars keep you off balance.

  The song works with traditional characteristics of gospel music: call and response, handclaps, even the pleading nature of the speaker’s need. But there is something more. Every time Freddie sings the word “Lord,” he pairs it with the highest note in the phrase, ramping up to it. “I’ve spent all my years in believing you / But I just can’t get no relief, Lord”—that “Lord” is an upward look written into the music. No answer comes. The next note drops down, back into the mortal realm:

  Somebody (somebody)

  Somebody (somebody)

  Can anybody find me.

  If “Lord” looks up, “Somebody” looks squarely around at the other bodily, flawed, present humans, the ones crowded around the piano in the studio version, or dispersed across the stage—and in the stands—when Freddie performs it live.

  He built the song’s strangest section, the bridge, on a different framework from the first half of the song. These chords are a circle-of-fifths progression, and they move steadily down the register, underscoring the feeling of struggling in deep water expressed by the lyrics in this passage.

  I try and I try and I try

  But everybody wants to put me down

  They say I’m going crazy

  Say I’ve got a lot of water in my brain.

  The rhythm of the words, the way Freddie sings them, also feels off-kilter here. He’s deploying this struggle for effect, yet singing it with such absolute commitment that it’s easy to forget that this is a revised reenactment of pain. It just feels like frustration, albeit with a pleasing shape and a thundering drum line and a host of other voices singing along.

  And something surprising happens during the song’s final build. At first, the instruments cut out, leaving nothing behind but a chanting unison of voices. Find-me-somebody to love, Find-me-somebody to love. From that chant, Freddie folds in new textures one at a time to create a river of sound: first a new vocal harmony, then handclaps, then drums, then bass guitar, all the different runnels and flows braiding together to make one cresting, flooding, smashing thing. Something big’s coming, and even if you know the song very well, you can’t help but tense up during this section.

  A shiny tangle of needles crams the sharps box. I lie on the acupuncturist’s table, a string of cloth birds dangling from the ceiling over my heart. The acupuncturist is a stylish, sandalwood-smelling person with long dark hair tied in a knot. I credit her with special powers, and I want her to like me. She slips needles under the skin of my wrists, shins, feet, belly, scalp, and forehead, and trains heat lamps on me that glow redly in the gloom. Later, when she takes the needles out, quick quick quick quick, I ask, How many? Twenty-two this time, she says, and after she leaves I peek into the sharps box and stare at the bristling nest inside.

  Summer comes and I am on the road, teaching extra classes to help pay for all of this—it’s like carrying a second mortgage—and must make alternative arrangements for delivery. Someone must be available to sign for
and refrigerate the meds. Someone must provide a valid credit card number, security code, expiration date.

  Standing, lost, beside a gravel road in Iowa. There’s a duffel bag of meds in the trunk, clean syringes, K-Pack needles, swabs. Outside an abandoned schoolhouse sheltering an old upright piano, I meet a woman I’d say is in her seventies. “I’m infertile,” she tells me, holding an orange sheet of paper in her hand. What? What? “I’m in Fertile,” she repeats. RESIDENTS OF FERTILE is printed on the sheet of paper. So, okay, she lives in a town—a real town—named Fertile.

  I have to laugh at that and it lets the air in, heat and gravel and great rafts of cow-manure smell. I take photographs of the Fertile Post Office, the Fertile Hardware Store, and the defunct Fertile diner. I take photographs of the abandoned school and the old piano. I stand underneath the town water tower, whose huge white belly is in the process of being repainted. Faint sweet smell of paint. High-pressure hoses lying flat on the ground. The belt of words around the tower’s wide middle reads FERTILE. I pick up a little rock, chalky as an old tooth, and slip it in my pocket, then run away like I’ve stolen something.

  Lunaception is when you synch your ovulation with the full moon by sleeping with the blinds open. Strawberry Moon, Wild Ricing Moon, Falling Leaves Moon, I am synched, I am ready. An Ojibwe healer advises red jasper against my skin and a tea made from raspberry leaves. Friends pick leaves from their berry canes and put them in a paper bag with holes razored out so the leaves will dry properly. Chinese herbs, bitter and brown. Straw-colored vitamins. When I find a knob of jasper on the beach at Lake Superior, I hide it under my tongue.