The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  When before none of this had been needful. Just the two of us. “Very strange,” says the endocrinologist, but offers nothing more.

  I love the call and response between Freddie and the chorus, which is to say, between Freddie and his bandmates, and to some extent himself. Three singers, overdubbed to sound like hundreds.

  The song’s obsessive rerecording, repeating a chorus like a mantra, is part of what I respond to. It echoes the circling of my thoughts, the phases of the moon, the daily charting and noting and swallowing. Hermetic, breathless.

  I sing along as I drive down the road. If Freddie were still alive he would have turned sixty-eight this year. I sing along and at some point it occurs to me that I am tuning my voice against a ghost’s. Where will you be in twenty years? an interviewer asked him in the early ’80s. Freddie replied, I’ll be dead, darling! The darling a tic of his speech. You hear him say it again and again.

  Please help me, I start asking, but in different words. I write, That we could have a happy baby, on a piece of paper and fold it and put it unsigned in the wooden box for prayer requests at church. I light a candle. My friend knits me a model uterus and tucks a wee plastic doll inside; the last woman she did this for bore a healthy daughter.

  One hot summer night we walk downtown. People will try to witness to you there. We already have a church home, I say when they hand me a tract. I am used to this, I know what to do. But then there are two sweet-faced college boys standing in front of the newspaper building, holding handwritten signs that say FREE HUGS. I walk over and we embrace.

  And when the boy on the right says, Is there anything you would like us to pray for? it catches me off guard. I know exactly what I want but am ashamed somehow to say it out loud to these two strangers. We stare at each other for a second and then I step up close to the one on the right (blond hair, Abercrombie T-shirt) and whisper in his ear, I want a baby.

  I have always been fascinated by kinds of wind that make you insane. The Santa Ana, mistral, foehn, khamsin, sirocco. But there is another kind of weather, internal. Unpredictable and strong. The rawness of my need embarrasses me but I can find nothing to blunt it. On Sundays after communion I try to put words together but all I can arrow toward heaven is Help, help, help. God seems to be on vacation, or napping, or perhaps he is in the bathroom and cannot be disturbed.

  Okay, says the boy in the Abercrombie shirt. We’ll pray for that.

  The meds arrive in a silver bag the same bright Mylar of a space blanket, and I remember a night from long ago, on the first road trip David and I ever took together. Houston to Seattle, and this was the last leg; we drove through California all night, reading Walt Whitman aloud and listening to a call-in radio show about aliens. The Star People were the friendly ones. I suppose it was about two in the morning. Somewhere north of Eureka we rounded a curve and braked hard; traffic was at a dead stop. ROCK BLASTING ZONE, said the sign. PREPARE TO WAIT. Workers dressed in Mylar suits walked down the road under blaring klieg lights. Emergency flares burned on the tarmac. A masked man holding an acetylene torch turned to face us, and I looked over at David. Was this really happening? He was the only thing keeping it from being some weird dream.

  On that trip we fell in love—with each other, and with the last stanza of Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”:

  Camerado, I give you my hand!

  I give you my love more precious than money,

  I give you myself before preaching or law;

  Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

  Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

  And so it began.

  I’m sorry, I say in the doctor’s office, thinking back to those first delirious nights. You didn’t sign up for this.

  Yes I did, he says. I signed up for everything. I signed up for it all.

  Back then, we used to drive down to the refineries that lined the Houston Ship Channel and watch the scrubbers and flares burn at midnight. Black tar bubbled at the joints, and the air carried a sugary, chemical smell. Tunnel and maze, safety bulbs burning behind metal cages. I see it now in blown-out light, orange and gray, tank farms behind chain link, white globes with narrow staircases curving up their sides. Crude oil must be heated to specific temperatures to draw off naphtha, solvents, kerosene, jet fuel, sulfur, tar. If you could look inside the tanks as the crude boils, what would you see? Viscous pool shimmering with heat, intoxicating burn, tank walls sweating with beaded honey.

  Now come nights of complicated dreams in which I crawl through passageways no wider than my shoulders, dim rooms of shadowy treasure, reached by a narrow cave mouth dug in a sandy bank. I’m drawn back to the cave time and again but it could collapse at any moment, filling my lungs with dirt, and nobody knows I’m here or will know where to look once they realize I’ve gone.

  Other nights I dream a warren of windowless secondhand rooms, tables laid with dusty bric-a-brac, our daughter unwatched elsewhere. I run to where she ought to be and find her chair empty, door standing open to a crowded square and busy honking traffic; I scream her name again and again, running as fast as I can, lost. I wake choking, the air in my throat gone to sludge.

  “People tell me, ‘I don’t know how you can work where you do,’” the nurse says, drawing my blood, sitting so close to me our knees touch. “They say, ‘It’s like you’re playing God.’ I say, you don’t see the women that I see, the joy on their faces when I get to tell them they’re pregnant.

  “This one woman, I went in with another nurse to tell her, she thought it was bad news because there were two of us. ‘Congratulations,’ I told her, ‘you’re pregnant,’ and she started to cry, said how her husband had prayed over her every night, laid his hands on her belly and prayed she could have a baby.”

  Honestly, if I could play God, I would do some things differently. Like the couple who asked if giving the shots was like stabbing. If I could play God, they’d have their baby, a few months old by now and sitting on her own, a girl with curious eyes and a shock of black hair. And the woman who sat alone across the conference table. Twins she’d name Jonah and Josh. I bless the name of Tabitha, who answers the clinic phone with a sweet-voiced “just a moment” when I call every four weeks to leave the message that it didn’t work again this time. I bless the kind nurse who takes my temperature and says, I hope we get good news soon. I would change the news if I could. If I could play God.

  In spite of all the interviews and discographies, the appreciations and photographs and comic books and fan-club pins and Christmas cards and tour passes and ephemera, in spite of all the Queen research—which, let me tell you, is extensive—we still don’t know what it looked like when Freddie wrote this song, the one everyone says was his favorite out of the hundreds that he wrote. (Whitman, another prolific poet: “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end / But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.”) (Lorrie Moore: “A beginning, an end: there seems to be neither.”) Maybe it happened this way:

  A man with a felt-tip pen and a notebook. Face flat, not arranged for anyone’s view. Looking down at the sheet of paper, glancing from time to time out the darkened window. Safe bet that he’s smoking a cigarette—he goes through forty a day. Tries out a riff on the piano, shifts on the bench.

  That’s it. That’s the start, the spark that would grow large over the course of the band’s careful recording and rerecording in the studio, work by which Freddie would transform three voices into a gospel choir of 160. Of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” made using the same method, Brian May said, “The tape went through so many times it wore out. We got in a panic once because we held the tape up to the light, and we could see straight through it. The music had practically gone.” Still they saved enough to share.

  The “Pain Intensity Scale” taped to the examining-room wall is a list of numbers alongside cartoon faces. Zero, no pain, correlates to a smiley face. Three to four means mild pain (slight frown), seven to eight is se
vere (big frown), ten is very severe/worst pain (tears streaming from the dot eyes). Check yes or no: “Are you currently experiencing pain?” If yes, clinician should note location and numerical value of pain. A list of adjectives describes Pain Quality: Burning, Throbbing, Stabbing, Constant. Tingling, Radiating, Dull, Cramping. Check as many boxes as apply.

  When the endocrinologist says, prior to a particularly excruciating test, “Pregnancy rates go up to 20 percent during the cycle of procedure,” but shortly thereafter drop off to 2 to 4 percent, the average rate of pregnancy among infertile women.

  When the child says, most every day, I am the big sister. You have a baby, and I am the big sister.

  When I keep doing the math; if it works this time, we could have a May baby, a September, a Christmas. When ___ asks, “Have you thought about adoption?” When the endocrinologist hands me a brochure that says this costs $22,500, plus $10,000 for meds, but if you don’t take home a live baby (“‘live baby’ defined as a child born who lives more than seventy-two hours post-delivery”), you get some of your money back. When I realize that I am just past the age cutoff for this special offer. The brochure has a picture of a happy infant sitting like a smiling, damp boulder in a crib.

  Recently, a team of archaeologists discovered the gates to hell in southwestern Turkey, at the site of an ancient temple to Pluto. Poisonous gases stream out from clefts in a steep hillside. If you were a pilgrim in ancient days, the archaeologists say, you bought a pair of birds from a seller near the temple, and released them near the gaps in the rock, and when the birds flew into the fumes, they dropped dead.

  This is the kind of place I normally would dream of visiting, the good smell of hot dust, sweat, desert rocks with unfamiliar creatures hiding in their shadows. But as the months click past, I stop caring. Stromboli is a volcanic islet north of Sicily where you can bathe in radioactive mud sulfuric enough to eat through your bathing suit. Lake Natron is a soda lake in the Tanzanian desert so saturated with bacteria that its waters are red as blood. When birds fly into it, confused because of the lake’s strange reflective qualities, the calcium in the water turns the birds to stone. I stare at the photographs: CALCIFIED FISH HAWK, CALCIFIED SWALLOW, CALCIFIED HERON.

  Sometimes a dark thing grabs me by the foot and pulls. Do an inventory: “How many times in the past seven days have you: felt lonely, felt sad, had trouble sleeping, experienced spells of crying, been very distracted?” “According to the answers you provided in this quiz, you fall into the category of ‘severely depressed.’”

  Maybe it would be better if I died, I say to David. There would be the life insurance money. Knife, cement truck, R-O-P-E. You could have children with another woman, I say. Someone younger.

  “Try a pole-dancing class,” counsels the website.

  Don’t say that, he says. You can’t say that.

  From the corner of my eye I see movement (rat? beetle?) but when I turn my head there’s nothing. I watch as the wood grain in the hallway ripples and flows. I wake to see a column of light hovering beside the bed. Strange juices bathe my vitals, strange water (slipped under my skin with a hollow needle) pulses through my veins. If I slipped inside a dry hellmouth (in a windowless hospital room). Or (in a desert, cheek by jowl with other tourists). Doves piled in soft heaps on the ground. If I rowed a boat across a lake (of blood). If I crawled through a gap in the fence surrounding (any one of a number of abandoned pleasure grounds). Grinning cat’s mouth opening onto a tunnel in Spreepark Berlin. Jellied green water stagnant in the log flume. Bumper cars upended at Pripyat, three kilometers from Chernobyl. Every time a length of chain and a padlock tightens around a gate it is given me to feel it. Smell of piss and ozone, glint of needle, gauze pad the junkie rips free, ancient sugar in rusted candy-floss machine, weed tree splitting asphalt beside the fotomat (fixer’s sweetish chemical smell). Earwigs jostling inside the padded swing (cracked vinyl weeping phthalates), screak of dry chains, rust etching metal in powdery bloom. Waste can lidded with a clown’s gaping maw (FLIP OFF): sour water, drowned sparrows. Glaze of tea-colored ice. Plastic jewel dulled from cold. I see it all, I brush my open palm over the seized turnstile. I am the snake that races into the chickweed, the brown bat nesting inside the Tunnel of Love. Spirit myself up into a bulbous dangling car, or lean against a life-sized cement Christ at the eighteenth hole of Golgotha Fun Park. I wait (like a roe deer) unseen in the tall grass at Pripyat.

  Proverbs 30, verses 15 and 16: The horseleach hath two daughters, crying Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, It is enough. I crouch, silent, against the tunnel wall, waiting invisibly in the black. Flick your head to the side to see the movement you sense in your peripheral vision. Try to be quick but you won’t catch me. I want, want, want. You can see straight through me, and I’m closer now than you think. I’ll twist your mouth to fit the words I say.

  Our daughter. Squealing, happy, hair flying in the wind as her father carries her on his shoulders. Her face lit by a campfire as she devours a marshmallow I have roasted for her. Who wants more of this? I do, I do. More time, more love. Love is greed; three things are never satisfied. You can’t get enough of the beloved. You want more to a degree that embarrasses you, the smell of her neck, her fine downy hair. There is only this, only now. Sharp little fingernails and the way she tells me she wants to be a flamingo, because “they can stand on one foot better than persons can.”

  She likes to help me wash dishes. And sometimes “Somebody to Love” makes us want to dance, and we spin together on the scarred old heart-pine floor as the sun sets behind the back porch. Domesticity, I don’t know that Freddie ever wanted that. All I know is that lately this song is my life raft. Freddie and I might not want the same things, but we both want them bad.

  Because Brian May didn’t have the money to buy a factory-made guitar, he built the Red Special by hand with his father. They used a knitting needle, a knife, pearl buttons, a section of cast off mahogany mantelpiece. Memory of smoke from old fires, caught in the tight grain and coloring the notes, along with the sixpence he used for a pick. They shaped it together, chisel and file.

  Pearl buttons, repurposed, remade. From the (mother’s?) blouse they had held closed or let fall open. And earlier, the oyster shell they had been, calcium, flat leaves of bitter chalk. Earlier still, a float of life borne on the tide. He pressed his fingertips to their round faces, warming them.

  In the early days, Freddie and Roger Taylor kept a stall in Kensington Market, selling secondhand clothes. Years later, Brian May remembered “velvet jackets, filigree waistcoats from the 1920s . . . and some incredible tat. Freddie would pull a strip of cloth out of a huge bag and say, ‘Look at this beautiful garment, this is going to fetch a fortune.’ I’d say, ‘Fred, that’s a piece of rag.’ But he could sell it.” Even then Freddie could remake old scraps, recast them in his story. His mother used to put together baskets of food and send them to the boys’ flat once a week. She didn’t want her son to go hungry.

  Measures like rooms, empty until Freddie fills them. Some are spare but most are crowded; that’s how he likes it.

  Think how many rooms must wait now—empty, we say, if no people are in them. Not void, though. Chairs tucked under kitchen tables as the clock on the stove clicks past another number: TIME OF DAY. Chairs pushed beneath school desks, or balanced atop them at week’s end, for the janitor to vacuum underneath before punching out.

  Chairs in darkened waiting rooms. Chairs beside examination tables. Paper sheets spread across Naugahyde bumpers. Sign advertising stuffed animals for purchase, onto which you can record your unborn baby’s heartbeat. Lamb, bear cub, ducky.

  Rooms in Freddie’s old house, crammed with things he’d chosen. Persian rugs, Hepplewhite furniture, Dresden china. That Bavarian outfit he wears in the picture of him I like best. On anyone else it’d be absurd—is
a little silly even on him, honestly—but then again, why not? For a man from Zanzibar, or India, or West London. A man who named himself, shifting as the occasion called.

  Empty rooms shiver with I was here. Empty dressing rooms after the show, empty hotels. Warehouses in which stacks of lumber cure, waiting to be soaked and clamped and bent into piano frames. Thrift store full of other people’s clothes, releasing the smells of dry-cleaning fluid and haylike sweat. You glance over your shoulder, expecting someone to return.

  And in the suburbs, in the dark, a woman rises from bed, drinks a cup of coffee in the shadowed kitchen (TIME OF DAY, clicks the clock), and takes the local train to the pharmaceutical factory, where her feet will whisper across the gray-painted floor.

  One night I dream I’m free diving, deep, with no need for oxygen. Way down on the stony ocean floor I find an infant, his eyes open wide, watching me. He’s tucked into a hollow in a coral reef and I gather him in my arms, hold him to my chest, and kick hard until together we break the surface of the water.

  We have to find out who his parents are, David says. The process of decompression has not hurt the child; he is perfect, and his eyes are blue as all newborns’ eyes are blue.

  We have to find out who his parents are, David says again, and I will not let the child go.

  He’s ours, I say, as long as I hold on.

  When we sign the consent forms before another procedure, we learn that some of the carrier fluid is sourced from donated blood. Carefully screened, etc. Extremely low risk. But still. A whisper of another stranger, hidden now in the center of me. More and more my body is haunted. I carry with me traces of all the pregnant women and postmenopausal Italian nuns who helped supply the drugs I’ve taken, the children I have lost and who never were and the many selves they will never become. When I crack it open the fortune cookie says, You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough.