A Chemical Fire (4 page)

I lost track of time. Standing in the heat and listening to the Eye’s movement just beneath the screams of children, I stood centered, only moving when I had to, feeling the pull of the Earth telling me just how far I was from everything I knew, how much rock, water, animal and insect made up that wall that blocked me from everything that defined me. But I stood firm. I held my place at the very back of the line with my head out, a statue myself.

Then a man was tapping me, an employee of the Eye. Before I could regain myself he started moving me into it, and either my state or his accent made his words all unmatched syllables. I got in anyway, took in the insides as a second person was ushered in with me. She looked as unsure as I did. Then she saw me, eyes scraping around the angles until they rested on her. Her hair brown and black like pointillism, her face photo-realism.

And England disappeared.

The capsule moved along, bringing the two of us up into the air, away from the Earth and the water below. The view was washed-out white and sun-flares. If we could see anything anymore, we would see Big Ben stopped dead. We would see black cabs and red buses stuck in time like a mudslide to be x-rayed and catalogued eons from now. We were two passengers on an empty ship. Words died in the vacuum as the silence formed around us, outside moving while our own two movements locked.

I looked down and tried to see what she did. When I made out the water I searched for something to say. All I could come up with was, “Did you know the Thames is made of both fresh and saltwater?”

“Really,” she said, her voice genuine.

I didn't know what else to talk about, so I continued. “It starts with freshwater in the west and becomes salt the further you go east. The mixture makes for a great variety of fish.”

“You’d never know from above.”

“Trust me, there’s everything from pike to flounder to seahorses swimming in and out of the garbage down there. They live along the river depending on their specific needs. Then of course you have the salmon, who can live in both types of water.”

“Of course,” she poked.

“It’s actually very rare in marine life,” I assured her. “They’re born in freshwater and then migrate to the salt. They return years later to spawn in the freshwater, and when they do they're almost unrecognizable.”

“Is it the makeup or the shiny pants?"

I laughed. “Their body mass shrivels and they grow a hump and sharp teeth and wide jaws, and they go from silvery blue to plain, muddy colors.”

She said nothing, envisioning ugly fish.

“But,” I said, realizing I was losing her, “it’s believed that after spending years in the ocean, swimming thousands of miles and avoiding a thousand deaths, a salmon returns to the exact spot it was born to reproduce.”

“Why does it do that?"

“No one knows. It may not even be true, it’s something of a myth. But if I had to guess, maybe it just feels like home.”

It wasn’t until the ride ended that England and the rest of the world rushed back in through our windshield, as if our had ship crashed; the glass cracked, the water coming in to fill the capsule. She stepped out, in movements of grace.

And she said, “Gala.” My eyes moved to the statues. “You know your Dali. That’s good, John, if we’re to be married we should have something in common.”

My hand took hers, naturally, as if it had performed the action for years and built a muscle memory of it. Then we walked, the river crashing against the shore. As we went we talked easily about things with weight, about private things with no holding back. There was no effort, no hiding, and we talked across bridges and past shops, down fast streets and small ones.

I looked down. Sure enough it was obvious. “Wait, why are you checking out my pants?" She laughed, and I felt the vibration of it in my stomach, my ribs, my marrow. “As you can probably tell I’m backpacking.”

“I’m a stranger like you. At the moment I’m playing violin for a production of Faust. We’re touring through Europe a bit, about eight or nine weeks or until the road bottoms out.”

Act Two

The City Gates

With Him Comes The Stench

The fire was real, taking everyone with it.

For a day I walk, my throat dry as the heroin leaves me. I crunch over glass and weave between car wreckage, alone for as far as I see. There’s no sense to the destruction; some buildings are caved in, others aren’t touched. Maybe the fire had to try harder to reach into some. It sounds insane but maybe insanity makes sense. How else to explain waking up untouched in a fire-gutted town.

I walk through kitchens and living rooms, in and out of libraries and delis and liquor stores. Stumble through banks. Standing in gas stations, I see fires burning and lawns choked with debris, but no people. Only squirrels and dogs and birds and even they seem low in numbers. The flies and mice seem unaffected, though, and the ants and spiders and caterpillars feeding on plants and each other.

When I’m thoroughly drained I find a supermarket and go in, sliding the metal gates down to keep out the cars whose drivers are piles of ash. I breathe down aisles and get behind the meat counter to make a sandwich, then walk around the empty store eating it. Through the push doors and into the back, past boxes of cereals and detergents, I find the manager’s office crammed into a corner of the stockroom. The desk drawers open and come apart until a key shows, small and thick to lock the gates, and a gun, which I leave. Back up front I lock the gate then find a good aisle to make a bed in. I build it out of diapers and other sanitary things. Then I crawl in with a magazine, open to find it filled with ghosts, and put it down.

They have a pharmacy so this is home. I swallow what it takes.

Halfway through the night my stomach shouts alive with toilet pains, getting me out of the diapers and onto my feet. The blood in my legs has gone mad. It's bouncing me off displays of water and potato chips, down through the store at sharp angles like bowling with meat. I find the saloon doors and go back and slap-feel the walls to the employee bathroom door and go in.

I walk in on someone using the bathroom. I say, “Sorry, sorry,” backing out. The backroom is dark aside from the light coming through a vent. I wait for the stranger to finish up, feeling embarrassed for rushing in without knocking.

A thought straightens my spine. “Wait.” My hand, heavy with poison-sweat, opens the door slowly and the heart goes quickly. Whatever I took has me finger-dizzy but I need to know who this is, and so there they are, no dream but someone standing at the toilet in the dim light of the nighttime emergency lights, swaying slightly at the shoulders. Definitely not a pile of ash and so definitely alive. From a city block away my mouth says, “Thank God, I thought I was the only one.”

No reaction. Only the shoulders and shifting shadows. I ask if they’re okay and get nothing back, so I reach out and hit the switch. Then the smell makes sense.

When I used to go camping, my favorite thing about campfires was watching how different things burn. Newspaper went right to ash, cardboard plates seeped yellow and brown before flames overtook the layers. But Styrofoam cups, they were the best. They went synthetic glory; bubbling and twisting and exhaling carcinogens before crumpling inward in decrepit implosions.

Whoever this man is standing in the bathroom, this is his skin. Melted and twisted from the fire. Globbed and mutilated. Then he turns and his eyes are like two blackbirds that took nest in matching wounds.

We both stumble the same direction, me backward and him toward me; me like a moth and him like an electrograph as I swirl for direction and he keeps to one in coughs of movement. His teeth reaching for me. No, I'm saying, No, terror-clawing through the stacks of boxes and over to the office, him always just behind, close then far, close then far. I find my way in and find the drawer and pull it open and take the gun and aim at the shape of him and squeeze and squeeze and it explodes in my hands each time, until I can’t feel them as much as I can’t feel anything else, and he finally drops, a puppet with its strings cut.

Whatever I’ve gotten myself into is only getting worse. I’ll stay here until the food goes to rot, then go home. Wherever that is.

Strepsiptera

Under feet of echoes the dead town sags. Walls burnt, cars rusting, everything breaking down in distances of half-lives and termites.

I feel my fingers across the brick; oven-fired pieces holding back the rain and wind. Holding in the insects, the pupae cowering in the cold of the hidden side. Bugs that mate and birth until something is born different and better. Something to take over.

I walk around puddles because all this breakdown means more than anti-freeze and dust; it’s skin, it’s polymers. No more construction, the Age of Rot is on the Earth to slowly take it back. What burns will burn as rain, what doesn’t will know centuries of slow disintegration.

Something shifts in the day and I finger the trigger. Turn everything into sound, that's the way. Wait and hear and decipher. All that’s left now is hands and guns. The sound passes, the moment gone, and I put it back to sleep in my pocket.

The shop glass breaks, spraying the floor. Again I listen and then I step, a crowd of cigarettes watching over a pool of tickets and gum. Like most buildings now the air inside is damp from things decomposing and growing. Expiration dates on packages like lame jokes, the shelves they sit on hiding abandoned nests, the room corners made of animal shit and seed husks. I get behind the counter and collect what I need, dried meat and pistachios first, for protein, and then the breads.

As I bend down footsteps shuffle-step past the store and I start to sweat pills and canned fishes. A sour smell moves through the hairs and sinuses and I wait three full minutes before I even scratch an itch, five and I move onto the bottled water and beer. The pack feels better now, heavier but not too much because pounds equal seconds when you’re running hard.

All this because the Fire Realm didn’t want me.

The Layer of Porn

Blurred by all sorts of things, I check the house before kicking in the sliding door around back. The fall of the shards is quieted by the white carpet and I step through to find that, like the last eight places, no one’s home. I start unlocking escape doors, the click of the locks sounding off empty walls. As always I don’t know if I’ll find piles of ash in here so I move around carefully, smelling for it in each room, finding one in the kitchen. It feels so strange to step into the ashes, knowing what they’re made of, so I do everything to avoid it.

The house is white paint and grey furniture and just enough color elsewhere. The doors unlocked, I go past the Christmas tree and find pictures in the hallway- all framed, hung picture to picture, so many of them the walls are hardly there. Every photograph is posed and filled with teeth and eyes frozen under vacation suns and birthday skies. The hallway is clogged with these photographs, a gauntlet of smiling dead people. The rest of the house is bare. Nothing hanging on the walls. No décor. The hallway keeps it all.

The best I can tell, the couple who lived here was old. The music in their collection, the food in their freezer, the coats in their closet point that way. This is a good thing if I’m supposed to find any pills.

I find the bathroom door closed but not locked and I open it. Inside is a bathtub halfway filled with dark-grey mud. From the clothes hanging up, it was the old man. The fire must have killed him during his bath, turning him to ash like the others. Then the water slowly evaporated and left behind this clay mixture clogging up the bathtub. Dark, waxy, not nice-looking now but a decent death at the time. I think of him: loose skin, face relaxed, the smell of the bath in his nose as he lets go a heavy and clean sigh a second before the fire snuffs him out. I smile at the thought. It seems nice.