The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  So lay out the hoard, the sacrifice this demands. Cold lab rats in tidy ranks. Vials of violet dye, of saline, Betadine, photostatic water; vials of my blood, stoppered with rubber. Vials that click, gleam, rattle. Hanks of flexible plastic tubing. Rolls of stretchy orange tape, tin-lidded canisters of cotton swabs. DublSoft tissue boxes. A well-washed blouse printed with filigrees. Its tented form recalls the shape of a ritual garment, something to be draped over the celebrant’s shoulders. A cape.

  Take needle and thread. Stitch one at a time each metallic sharp to the cotton blouse. Acupuncture needles thin as hairs, knobbed on the shank. Heavy-gauge needles for mixing. Hollow triple-beveled needles for injection. Secure each with a tight overhand stitch. Cover the shoulders with glinting ridges blunt on one end, sharp on the other. Double row of needles, triple row. Bristling shoulders corduroyed with silver. See how they shine under the infrared lamp, feel how the heat warms them. Remove the round tops from the vials containing photostatic water and hand stitch them in a whorl, tin coins with blue centers. Sequin, sickbed, tinfoil flash. Heavy as you take it from the form. Lift it carefully onto your shoulders and shake its folds true.

  Weighty and gorgeous, wicked blister. You bear it all in your body. If you can’t keep your feet under you (medication may cause dizziness), well, don’t let that stop you from dancing to your favorite tune. Step into the light and see the needles glow, everybody watching as the fringe throws off sparks of frantic gold.

  Disrobe quickly; the nurse is waiting. The clinic isn’t the red-light district—far from it, dear!—but the fluorescent-light district. Hang your clothes inside the locker stamped DRESSING NOOK. You need a song to help you through. A mantra to help you remember who you are, mojo to remind you why you care, an antidote to the grimness. A sense of humor, for God’s sake! You need Queen Rock Montreal.

  Freddie loved fabulous costumes—kingly robes in ermine-trimmed velvet, studded leather biker gear, that famous white satin bodysuit (holding, as critic Jonh Ingham wrote, “a bulge not unlike the Sunday Telegraph”; or, better, a “rope in repose, barely leashed tumescence, the Queen’s sceptre”; for “never has a man’s weaponry been so flagrantly showcased,” leading Ingham to sigh, “Oh to be that hot costume, writhing across the mighty Fred!”).

  But tonight his clothes are simple. White Levi’s, tight but not, you know, Robert Plant-tight; red sweatband on his wrist; white tank with Superman logo—that’ll come off by the second half, tucked into his belt like a painter’s rag.

  On the piano top, go-cups and bottles of Heineken, lemon-honey tea, a scrawled set list.

  Can . . . Freddie sings. Can . . . anybody find me. He’s glazed with sweat, riffing on the piano, giving himself a breather. You could almost believe he’s making it up as he goes along. The crowd’s in shadow; he’s all you see. At one point he glances up, looks the camera straight in the eye. Looks at me.

  Whitman: “I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face.” Somebody. Mmmm, somebody. Piano filigree. “Leaving it to you to prove and define it, / Expecting the main things from you.” Somebody to love.

  Okay, he says, let’s do it. When he plays the song’s opening riff, the crowd recognizes it and cries for joy.

  I envy them. They don’t know, Freddie doesn’t know, what I do. (Says the doctor to me: “I don’t want to run out the clock.”) Exactly ten years from tonight, Freddie Mercury will die in a curtained room at his home in Kensington.

  Before the end, his friends—the men onstage with him now, playing their hearts out on his song—will lie to the reporters (“vultures”) to protect him, closing ranks to shelter what privacy he has left. “Without them,” Freddie had said, much earlier in his life, “I would be nothing.” During his memorial service, at his request, they will play a recording of Aretha Franklin. Grains of her voice shading their grief.

  Freddie takes on the sorrow that all the audience members know and sings about it with everything he’s got, even if that vulnerability makes him look foolish. So what? You could have, say, prominent teeth and a background nobody understands, kids could tease you in middle school, and you could still grow up and write terrific songs (in the bathtub!) with indelible lyrics and melodies, thereby becoming a huge rock star and an international sex symbol with a ton of disposable cash to spend on fabulous old antiques at bazaars and flea markets all over the world. We’re all damaged. We all need love. So say what you want; say it again. The 12/8 comes to feel like your heartbeat, in rhythm with thousands of others. Accept your flaws, own them. This brokenness, this too-short life.

  Because Freddie knows: you don’t always get the happy ending. Doesn’t he know that better than anyone? Sometimes your body lets you down. But he also knows: you want what you want. So give me Freddie, full of yearning he can tell chapter and verse. Give me power and sex and energy and going too far, camp and joking and blood pounding through the veins on his temples. Closes his eyes like he’s fighting back tears.

  If I could play God, I’d make it so he never had to endure the awful pain at the end; I’d give him peace, strength, a hundred happy years. I’d make it so his mother (holding him as an infant in another photograph, her eyes warm with joy) never had to mourn him.

  Start with the chant of need. By this late date it could be plea or demand. This want undertows my days and my night hours shudder and keen, yet this is not all there is. As I reread Leaves of Grass, I’m struck by the way Whitman directly addresses the reader: “When you read these I that was visible am become invisible.” I can’t quite believe Whitman’s gone; a whisper of his voice whistles between my teeth even now.

  Now it is you, compact, visible, reading my poems, seeking me,

  Fancying how happy you were if I could

  be with you and become your comrade;

  Be it as if I were with you.

  (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)

  That’s why the moment when Freddie looks directly into the camera—into the future—jolts me. Listen, his look says. Don’t miss anything. Remember this. Remember me.

  Remember, too, that where the capacity for sorrow is large, so is the capacity for joy. Blush to read Whitman singing the body electric, of “love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, / Limitless limpid jets of love, white-blow and delirious juice,” of the “well-made man,” whose vitality shows “in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him”—Sunday Telegraph and the white satin leotard?—

  The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and the broadcloth,

  To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,

  You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

  I linger to watch David walk past in Levi’s, tight but not, you know, Robert Plant-tight. I linger to watch him hoist our daughter onto his shoulders for a walk to the garden. I linger to watch (again) the footage from Queen Rock Montreal, marveling at how the song builds toward its big finish. I write disposable pop songs, darling, Freddie used to say, but don’t believe it. What lasts? This wanting (beyond language!) (more than language can tell!) (a heartbeat!) outlasts the singer, outlasts us all.

  You could find yourself in a desert, swooned in a poison cave. Could be consumed by the brimstone you drove yourself to find. Could be delirious enough to fly down instead of up, purblind in the glare, and drown in blood before turning to stone.

  Or you could write yourself a mantra, a password, a way out. You could put your hand in your pocket and draw out the key to an abandoned hotel. All its ghosts belong to you now. Fit your key (bit, shank, barrel) to the lock and hear the tumblers click.

  Now I think Freddie summoned the crowd into being by writing their part. Find (clap clap) me (clap clap) somebody to love, find (clap clap) me (clap clap) somebody to love. (“I sing to the realists,” Aretha said. “People who accept it like it is.”) Handclaps like a steady pulse. You
feel it, don’t you? Even just reading the words?

  So sing it with me, with all the invisibly present people in the arena that night, as Freddie leaps up from the piano and strides out into the middle of the stage, the mike in his hand sending off little screams of feedback. Let yourself go, repeating the words again and again until they turn hypnotic, like the sound of quick breathing or pleasure or sobs, as sweat streams down his neck, as the klieg lights shine, as Roger slams along on the drums, as the crowd pounds its feet—

  I want it all. Paper cup of lukewarm tea, crowd chanting in a sweaty muddle. Pearl buttons and knitting needle transformed into music, into glory. There is only this, only now, keep it going, Freddie stretching out the vamp, little horse-gallop across the stage, a breath of wind passes over your face, almost more than you can take, Can anybody find me—

  And he slides onto the piano bench, hands the mike stand to a roadie, takes a swig from the cup—

  Somebody to—the note vaults way up to the ceiling, above the piano and the band and the crowd, all of us holding our breath, savoring this moment we’ve waited so long for—

  All of us on borrowed time, all of us needing someone. Child, I searched for you everywhere, I haunted the caves, my hand pushed the empty swing and set it crying. I thought I spoke to God but now I know I was praying to you to show yourself. (Be it as if I were with you.) Would that I could hold you, could touch for the first time your wrinkled, glowing face—

  Love.

  Don’t feel you have to make conversation, Freddie said to his friends at the end. It’s enough just to have you here.

  When it’s too much to take, dare to pray for this: the chance to speak your grief so plain that anyone listening can sing along. You’re not alone.

  I can do this, I can make this work, part of me dancing unseen in the shadows in my flashing silver cape; I can drop it here onstage, with the love letters and cigarettes and phone numbers and knickers, appointment-reminder cards and temp charts, perfume of sandalwood and rubbing alcohol, empty prescription bottles tinted stage-light amber. Earthy offerings, and dear, darling. No need to carry them any further.

  FINALE

  The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power,

  The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades—

  These I saw.

  Look ye also while life lasts.

  MOTTO OF MARGARET AND OLAUS MURIE, BIOLOGISTS

  AND CONSERVATIONISTS WHOSE MIGHTY EFFORTS HELPED

  ESTABLISH THE ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

  Some Memory of Daylight

  1. HAIRY JOHN AND THE PUMPKIN FARMER

  Little Greenbrier Cove, Tennessee

  We forget the sons, even though there had been four of them. We forget the mother, who appears in none of the photographs; maybe she thought such things were foolish. We remember the seven sisters—especially Margaret Jane—and their father, known locally as “Hairy” John Walker for the impressive beard he wore.

  He must have been grateful to live to grow that white beard. In the War Between the States, he fought on the Union side—as many mountain people did—and was captured after a month of service and sent to Andersonville as a prisoner of war, where he nearly starved. One night a Southern farmer threw pumpkins over the fence, and he ate them and was saved.

  I wonder about this story. If the pumpkins were ripe, it must have been late fall, likely nighttime, because what the farmer was doing went against local practice. It gets chilly during those damp nights in early November, and the farmer’s old horse would have steamed from nose and flanks, standing beside the fence palings, waiting. The farmer must have been old himself, or he would have been pressed into service. Was he halt, maimed? Soft in the head? For some reason, he took pity on these men, even though he and his family, if he had one, must have been hungry, too.

  Surely some of the pumpkins split from the fall, but John ate them anyway, from flesh to rind to the fibrous stub that had been the vine. He tried to hold back, to press one yielding yellow chunk at a time between his teeth. No good to try to stash some for later, although some of the men did, gray floss of rot spreading across the surface of the meat. John might have saved a seed or two, his little audacity, to plant once he returned home. A wager he made on himself though he wouldn’t have called it that. He’d have called it faith.

  2. THE BEST-LOOKING POSSUM IN THE WORLD

  American Museum of Natural History, Manhattan

  Just look at that full coat of white-tipped fur. Body solid and shapely through haunch and rump, clever paws curled around the perch. On his face, an expression of thoughtful interest; in his eyes, a lively gleam. Two teeth snaggle out from his mouth, giving him a mischievous smile, and even his naked, ratlike tail looks pink and healthy. No flaking skin, no sores. Must be rubber.

  He’s nothing like the possums I’ve seen in real life, and I’ve seen my share. Flattened ones on the roadside, matted with old blood, or worse, the newly dead, bellies tight with trapped gas, paws held beseechingly to the sky. Live ones are hardly better, nosing through bowls of cat food in city backyards, mangy coats swarmed by bluebottle flies. (And hard as I try, I can’t bring myself to call them “opossums.” The “o” is wrong to my ear, vestigial, branching off from the true name “possum” as does—follow me here—the forked penis of the male, built to suit the female possum’s forked vagina, entirely appropriate in that case but so beyond my own ken that I cannot fathom it.)

  The best-looking possum in the world resides in this diorama, Gray Fox and Opossum, in the Hall of North American Mammals. Behind the glass, it’s October in the Smokies, the sky a hard blue, wrinkled mountains painted with crimsons and golds. For the first time ever, the star of the show is a possum. He looks down from his branch at a clueless fox frozen in the act of poking through bushes in search of persimmons. A hearts-a-bustin’ plant frames the scene, nubby pods splitting open to reveal bright orange seeds. Real or fabricated? Museum artists replicated anything that could shrivel, so these sourwood leaves—red, as sourwood always is in October—must be very good fakes.

  I’ve always been fascinated by dioramas, and these are the best in the world. For decades, a deep bench of artists poured their lives into recreating specific scenes from near and far in the niches that line the Museum’s vast halls. And the best of them all was James Perry Wilson, whose double-grid system for transferring paintings to walls became the gold standard of the discipline. His backgrounds shoehorn vast stretches of land into spaces no bigger than a closet; he was a magician, an engineer, a figure of mystery. I think of him with awe.

  As I lean up against the wall, taking notes, other visitors stream past. “Awesome! It’s a possum!” a little boy says. “Okay, gray fox,” says another, not breaking stride. And why would you when there’s so much else competing for your attention? The other dioramas feature lions and okapi, musk oxen and timber wolves, and if that’s not your speed, you can examine meteorites, gemstones, or enormous dinosaur skeletons. The walls of the fabulous Hall of Biodiversity are covered with jars full of rare worms and soft-bodied anemones, glass cases of brightly colored beetles, shark skeletons suspended from hooks, and a double helix of seashells that runs from the floor to the ceiling. A giant clam rests on its very own stand. Its sign reads: DO NOT SIT IN THE CLAM SHELL.

  But the longer I stand here, the more I like this diorama, one so quiet that even the curators seem to have forgotten it. Inside are animals and plants I recognize, rooted in a rumpled landscape that looks like home. As I walk away, an old man says, “Hey! Look at that fox!” to nobody in particular. Chewing his lip, he stops a spell before moving on to the next attraction.

  3. HUNTING THE CHIMNEYS

  I stood with my sister on the side of the road, sucking down the sticky air. July in the Smokies—halfway to noon and already the air shivered with heat. We’d grown up just south of here, but this was the first time we’d ever visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Never felt the need. The mountains we had a
t home were just as good, probably better, because they weren’t as crowded. At the trailhead, where a college kid rubbed sunscreen on his girlfriend’s thighs, I spotted a pile of recent bear scat, studded with seeds that looked like plastic but proved to be Solomon’s seal. Someone threw a Coke bottle into the varmint-proof trash can and slammed it shut with a clang.

  Just then, a mother and son staggered up the trail. “Don’t hike it!” the boy said. “It’s a death trap!” His T-shirt read, NOBODY IS PERFECT, and then, in smaller print, I AM NOBODY.

  “We only went, like, a mile,” his mother said. “Don’t be dramatic.”

  “Light, beautiful light!” the boy cried. “I haven’t seen you in so long!”

  But we weren’t there to hike. I was hunting the painted background I’d seen in the Museum. In 1952, a team of artists and scientists traveled from Manhattan to Tennessee to research the park for a new diorama. The result of that work, the Gray Fox and Opossum display, was the twenty-ninth and final scene installed in the Hall of North American Mammals. I wanted to compare that time-capsule image of the Smokies to the actual site on which the diorama had been based.

  Even in the Museum pictures I’d saved to my camera, the mountains were hard to make out. But standing here on the side of the road, I couldn’t find the horizon line at all—too many tulip poplars and beeches in the way. And then, turning around one last time, I saw it. The Chimneys! The bump on the mountain ridge matched up exactly with the background I’d seen. It only worked if you leaned against the stone wall at the trailhead; James Perry Wilson must have set up his easel right here.

  I could see why he’d chosen this scene. The hillside drops off sharply—“It’s a death trap!”—and that steep slope is the perfect way to hide the tie-in, the seam where the three-dimensional foreground shades into the two-dimensional painted background.