Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  Not that they have touched him yet. They are in awe of his death. He looks impossibly thin; the hands ready to snap off at the wrists, the shoulders sharp and angular. Only his stomach is oddly distended, half spherical, as though ready to burst with undigested Soot. Charlie watches Livia study him. She lifts her hand once, as though to rearrange him, then lets it drop again.

  “He could have stepped through,” she says at last. “If his head fits, the rest would have, too. I wonder whether he realised.”

  She frowns, steps forward suddenly, and takes hold of one arm and shoulder. A shifting of the weight, a twist, and Julius’s right shoulder and chest slide through the bars; the arm splayed out ahead of him, hand spread, the skin oddly white underneath the fingernails. His movement leaves a trail of tar along the iron of the bar.

  They crouch down to him, Charlie and Livia. Thomas is behind them, a shadow watching from afar. Charlie wonders whether Livia wants to transport and bury her half brother; wonders, too, at the two other men lying beyond the barrier, out of reach. What she does, however, is unbutton Julius’s shirt. Charcoal skin, flaking off him; Soot and flesh fused. Charlie watches her touch Julius’s chest, recoil; pokes his own finger at the ribs, and feels it sink in to the knuckle.

  “It’s like he is made of sin,” she mutters. Then: “You would have thought Mother would have noticed it. But she wouldn’t look at him. And she was in pain, in shock. It’s funny, I suppose. Crying over her failure. The means to reverse it a dozen steps behind her back.”

  All at once, Charlie knows what she is thinking. It sends a shiver through him, gut-deep, of fear, of excitement; the burden of choice.

  Revolution.

  What young man has never dreamed of being its cause?

  ф

  Charlie stands, breathes. What is happening within him cannot be called thought. It has no words, for one thing, and knows no maths; does not calculate, but is simply the slow ascent of a decision already made, up from his centre to that sluggish organ that is his brain. He does not know how long it takes. His mouth, he notices, is full of Smoke.

  Then he acts. Bends down to Julius, takes hold of his armpits, feels the brittle flesh move under his grip. Twists and pulls, trying to line up the shoulders, then the stomach and hips; that potbelly sticking, like a wine bladder pert with mud. Livia does not help him with his labour. Neither does Thomas; stands watching behind. Only when Julius’s thighs (emaciated; sticks of bone and black, the trousers torn beneath both knees) come sliding through, does Thomas step close. He pulls Charlie out of his crouch, looks him hard in the eye.

  “What are you doing with him, Charlie?”

  “You know what.”

  Thomas stares at him, sniffs his breath.

  “It’s catching then,” he decides. “You said it to Grendel. ‘An angel playing at vice.’ Charlie Cooper is going to change the world.” Thomas puckers his lips as though to spit, swallows it instead. “Are you going to scrape it off him, or just sink him in the pool?”

  And Charlie stands there, listening to him, already connected to Thomas by fine tendrils of Smoke, chest to chest and hip to hip, his blood alive to a single truth. This is it, our duel. Who would have thought it would be like this? Me, kind, goodly Mr. Cooper, standing here, lighting the fuse. And he, the dark one, standing in my way. In another moment we will go at each other with our fists.

  A duel.

  Or else Livia will decide.

  “You are afraid,” Charlie taunts Thomas. “We can make a difference, and you are shaking in your boots. I can smell it in your every breath.”

  They are standing close now, have stepped into each other’s exhalations, too close even to throw a punch.

  “Tell him, Livia,” Thomas says without turning, “Tell him it is dangerous; madness. He loves you. He will listen to you.”

  They both start when she closes the gap and puts a hand on each of their arms.

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  Oh, how well she understands them both. Everything is written in their Smoke.

  Their friendship is in there. Charlie’s doubt and Thomas’s secret longing for the Smoke. She is there, too, flesh and blood, the things each wants to do with her; their focussed wonder at that body beneath her dress. It is as though they have all shed their clothes.

  “Tell him,” Thomas says again, exhaling the words into Charlie’s face.

  Then he appears to remember that it was she, Livia, who led them back to Julius’s corpse. The thought diminishes him, slumps his shoulders, pulls down his chin.

  “You too, then?”

  He does not wait for her nod.

  “How eager you both are,” he goes on, spiteful now, all alone, “to dance to milady’s tune. She blew you a kiss, Livia, and taunted Charlie about his father. And here you are ready to do her bidding. In the name of the people! Do you think the people want it, the chaos you’ll be starting for them here?”

  Before Livia can answer, Charlie does.

  “I want it,” he says, half in anger, half in wonder at himself. “I need it. Otherwise, Father will…” He trails off, catches himself, a hint of amusement lightening his Smoke. “That’s awfully selfish, isn’t it?”

  Thomas frowns and smokes and walks away.

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  He does not go far. Two steps. The no-man’s-land between Julius’s haggard body and the rim of the closest pool. Livia follows as he must have known she would, until she stands as close as she did before. It’s a choreography of sorts: some birds, her mother once told her, dance before they mate. Thomas is calmer away from Charlie, sadder.

  “We don’t know a thing about it, Livia. How long will it last? A few weeks, a month, your mother said, but how can she know? Not rape, she promised, not murder. Everyday sins. A fever of passion. All urges laid bare, all secrets shared.” He grimaces, winces when she takes his hand. “Even if your mother is right—if her dark fuse burns itself out in the lighting of a gentler fire; if the world does not choke on its store of anger; if we all bare our souls to one another and are not appalled by what we find…imagine it, Livia. A whole world letting go of reason. Chaos; confusion. Nobody working the fields.”

  “It’s winter, Thomas. The fields don’t need working.”

  “Still. A volatile world. Don’t underestimate its darkness. Every argument that draws a knife, every man beaten, every woman forced: it’ll all be our fault.”

  “Yes. And if we don’t: every child sewn into some apparatus; every prisoner made to roll cigarettes; every lie told from dawn till dusk; every year that passes without change or hope. That too will be our fault.

  “But it’s more than that,” Livia continues. “She loves me, you see. Mother. She watched me trying to become holy, all the while afraid I would go mad like Father.” She smiles, crooked, tender; a hint of flirtation in her words. “I’m angry with her. But it’s hard to resist love. Don’t you think?”

  Thomas winces, makes fists.

  “Charlie is right,” he says at last. “I am afraid.” He studies her, fiercely, like an enemy. “What if I get lost in all the Smoke? What if I go mad and turn into a beast?”

  She returns his gaze, at a loss how to answer.

  Then Charlie is there. He is smoking; repeats her mother’s gesture, cups Thomas’s face.

  “Then we will drink you and go mad together.”

  “Will you?” Thomas asks, more out of despair than doubt. “What ever happened to compromise, Charlie?”

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  Julius’s body floats gently on the water. Thomas expected it to sink. He was surprisingly heavy to carry, each withered limb a deadweight swinging on its joint. Once they lower him, however, the Soot is as though magnetised by him, dresses and shrouds him, like a sodden sheet, so that the whole pool becomes one with his lean figure. They leave Thomas to fetch the blood. Charlie is sitting on the pool’s edge, his hands and feet in the water, holding on to Julius and supporting his head as though it is important that he does not drown. Livia, in turn, has her hands on C
harlie’s shoulders, to reassure him and help him up, when the time comes. And so Thomas goes to retrieve the blood in its little beaker, swishes it around like wine in a glass. How easy it would be even now to hurl it across the room, let it shatter in a dirty corner; or stumble, fall, as though by accident, and crush it under his weight.

  They assemble at the pool’s edge. Charlie sitting, Livia hunched, Thomas upright. It would make a good picture, Thomas thinks; the black of the pool, the dull, pulsing light of the lamps overhead. Charlie’s expression has changed in the past few minutes. The fierceness is gone; there has been time to think. He has opened some door inside himself, it flashes through Thomas, and doubt has crept in. Perhaps, then, he will recant. Thomas is surprised to find he is disappointed as well as relieved.

  Charlie looks up at him, too honest to mask his doubt.

  “We can’t have it, can we? Just a little Smoke. Enough to make us human?” He pauses, frowns, corrects himself. “But that’s just it, isn’t it? How much is enough?”

  He moves his hand through the dun liquid, scoops some up, holds it next to Julius’s charcoal cheek. Thomas thinks he understands what troubles Charlie. It is wrong, somehow, that evil should be a question of proportion; that this much Smoke should be the weave of life, and that much produce murder; and that no Smoke at all should produce a cruelty of a different sort. Charlie has a tidy mind: he must feel there should be more system to life. All at once Thomas wants to comfort the friend he was ready to fight before.

  “Two, three weeks during which Smoke takes over the world,” he muses. “Maybe longer. A carnival of passions. Black rain and all that. Do you think, Charlie, this means we won’t have to go back to school?”

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  The smoking starts halfway through their giggles. It rises easily, naturally, articulates their tension, their fears, the feeling of standing on a precipice, toes in the void.

  We don’t know what we are starting.

  No. But we do know how things are at present.

  And after? When the Quickening has burnt itself out. What will the world be like then?

  But it is not like that, the Smoke, it has no use for words. It speaks in images instead, in feelings referencing memories that, recounted later, across a pillow in the dark, will appear both familiar and strange. In this wordless realm these whispers are not something yet, are but the possibility of thought; like a joy neither voiced nor performed, shapeless and real. And all the while the Smoke surrounds them, humming their melodies, sneaking its tendrils across the borders of their individual selves.

  Thomas’s Smoke is the darkest, raw and confused. It sings his fear—of Julius; of becoming like him; of being abandoned for his crimes—and the bliss of self-forgetting. His father is in his Smoke, cradling a pewter mug. Livia, too, her shirt wet and clinging to her chest. Charlie: befriending him on that first day of school. His mother dying; a bullet slamming into his head. A nurse’s kiss; a boxing bout; bones breaking under knuckles. Gypsy vagrants fighting, rutting in the dirt. A church floor, littered and noble; a drunken priest. Hope.

  Charlie’s Smoke is different, more marshalled and orderly, a procession of people sketched in white, tan, and grey. There is the woman in the woods, dressed in her shift and smoking as naturally as she is breathing. There are Renfrew and Eleanor, sewn into her harness of leather and steel. Thomas, Livia, flushed and beckoning; bare shoulders entangled under a linen sheet. His parents, stiff-backed, sitting in their ill-begotten house and wondering whatever happened to their son. A room of coachmen, huddled together on the floor against the cold. The tattoo of a mermaid, her bosom blinking with each movement of the coachman’s thumb.

  And threaded into their Smokes, unpredictable, at turns more controlled and more volatile than either’s, is Livia’s, in violet and green. Her mother, crying, in front of the cell she had built to make prisoners of little boys and girls. Her father strapped to his attic bed, staring up at her with fearful eyes. Francis the miner walks in, tugging a pony on bandy legs. Grendel, her killer angel, brandishing a snub-nosed gun; Mowgli hiccupping his first billow of Smoke. Thomas, half naked, holding out to her the black of the mask. Charlie, in darkness, tongue to her tongue.

  “Yes?” she asks into the Smoke, her eyes closed, a hand on each of the boys.

  “Yes,” says Charlie.

  “Yes,” says Thomas. He removes the stopper, tilts the beaker, and washes Julius’s head in blood. The next moment Charlie pushes Julius’s body to the centre of the pool; the Soot shifting with him, his bridal train, his burial shroud.

  Then they step back, Livia, Thomas, and Charlie.

  And run like hell.

  If thou art displeas’d with Lawes Divine, and Civil,

  I know not what will fit thee, but the Devil.

  “THE ANABAPTISTS”

  Then wonder not at them so black in skin

  But at your selves so foul, so black by sin.

  “THE BLACKAMORES”

  The liver doth contain unwholesome blood,

  And Melancholick, which is never good.

  Of this disease if you the Symptomes heed,

  The fundamental veins break forth and bleed.

  “THE HEMERRHOIDES”

  ROWLAND WATKYNS, FLAMMA SINE FUMO

  (SMOKE WITHOUT FLAME, 1662)

  THOMAS

  How do you start a revolution?

  You baptise a corpse.

  That’s what we will say when they ask us, years down the road. Oh, they will tell us that we did it for the wrong reasons. Charlie because he is ashamed of his privilege, and Livia because she wants to impress her mother. And I because I love them more than I fear myself. And because I could not stomach the thought of returning to school.

  Does anyone ever do anything for reasons better than these?

  We wait for the Smoke by the banks of the Thames. We are not alone. Crowds have gathered, are staring downriver at the storm front moving in. Others are fleeing the city. They are walking so fast they will be deep in the home counties before nightfall. A steady stream of vagrants, trampling on good folks’ lawns. Harbingers of change.

  We did not see very much before we left the sewers. No explosions; no fireworks. Something moved in the pools behind us, a shadow spreading in the water. That’s all. Out on the street all was quiet; a prisoner singing in the gaol adjoining the tobacco factory, a forlorn tenor, straining against the limits of his range. Charlie asked Livia whether she wanted to go to Grendel’s and find out how her mother was, but she only shook her head. Livia wants her mother’s love; is worried sick about her leg. But she is angry with her, too. So we kept to the streets.

  Dawn came slowly, us walking around, trying to stay warm. Without meaning to, we drew to our church just as the sun came up. The gates remained barred, the windows broken, but the cross on top caught the weak light. Brass. It is a miracle nobody has bothered to steal it.

  As dawn turned into morning, we started to get restless.

  “Maybe,” Charlie said, “maybe it did not work.” An odd note to his voice as though he did not know how to feel.

  “Maybe.”

  By ten o’clock we could see the river start to boil.

  It happened very quickly, deep under the surface, a darkness spreading, like a school of black herring hurtling upriver, forswearing the salt of the sea. The speed of a dark thought. On the surface, hovering an inch or two above the water, Smoke formed, shaping a second river, following its bend.

  The real change, though, happened far from us. Somewhere there, in the east of London, where the river widens and begins its journey into the sea, something blew up. I have no better way of saying it. A column of Smoke reaching up into the sky, its borders clean, defined near the ground then fraying into a thousand threads and dispersing into the clouds. God only knows what caused it. Perhaps that’s where Sebastian engineered the sewers to release the flood. Perhaps Julius drifted there, borne along by strange currents, and only there released the full brunt of his pyre. Or el
se the Quickening found a repository of Soot so rich as to make Sebastian’s pools look like puddles. Spit in the ocean. Out of the cloud, rain is forming. We are too far away to know whether it’s black.

  Charlie turns to me. At some point during the night he managed to smear Soot over his lip in precisely such a way that it looks like a moustache. It suits him. Soots him. I almost smile. His hands too remain stained from where he pushed Julius under the waterline. The devil, washed of his sins in infected blood.

  Charlie was his baptist.

  “We should run for the hills,” he says now. “Get above the cloud level. Wait the worst of it out.”

  I know he wants to protect me, that he is worried what might happen to me and my volatile blood. But I shake my head.

  “Above the cloud level? In England? No, Charlie, we made a choice. Pandora’s box. We opened it. Now we have to brave it out.”

  I take his hand again into my aching right one, take Livia’s into my left. We have been walking like this most of the morning. A storm is gathering. I may be headed for madness, the world for the abyss.

  I have never been happier in my whole life.

  Charlie, too, looks happy.

  “Do you know what theatre is?” he whispers, not really asking, musing aloud. “A boy at school told me about it. Grown people acting out a story. Love, revenge, the fall of kings. For more than two hundred years now, it has been banned.” He smiles, almost shyly. “Do you think there’ll be theatre again, after the Smoke?”

  And then he goes on, still smiling, but sadder now, thoughtful: “It won’t work, you know. It cannot work. Us three.”

  “Why?”

  I see him struggle to put it in words.

  “We are more than friends. We love one another. And when people love one another, there is Smoke involved. Here,” he raises the hand that joins him to Livia, “but also here,” he raises the hand that joins him to me. “Livia can’t marry both of us,” he adds shyly then is surprised when she stops him and tells him off.