The Secrets of a Fire King (25 page)

The Secrets of a Fire King

else but heart and spine. This capacity was within us once, and so it is only a matter of remembering.

I dive so deeply. By the time I surface the sun is high, fl ashing whitely off the beach where my family has gathered. I see them in the distance, sand sprinkled across the warm feet and long legs of my daughters, their hair moving like young wheat in the breeze. I see my husband, too, his face dark with sorrow and cleft like a rock. He gazes helplessly in my direction, but the green of my hair, the whiteness of my skin, make me seem like just another wave from where he stands. I am not concerned for him. He will grieve, but he is a man of purpose. In a few days he will take action, and everything belonging to me will go. Staggering from the house with metal tubs, he will release those fish into the shallows, and he will stand astonished, amazed and also horrified, as they twist against the wet sand, flipping this way and that in an agony of wanting, and then turn to look at him with their startled eyes, their human eyes, their bright limbs flashing in the light. They will stand, naked and trembling, but his own eyes will drift past them to the sea.

My three daughters search now as they will search forever, shading their eyes against the sun. Their yearning will travel far across the water, and it will swell like a dark sky in my throat. At night they will stir from dreams, restless and yet soothed, believing that they have heard my voice rising from the sea. I linger here, drinking in the sight of them, but I will not return. Waves rush against the shore, one moment, and sand shifts beneath their force, another, and I am the fire in the emerald, the light behind the clouds, I am this song.

Sky Juice

Let me tell you, then, how it began: My only brother attracted the wrath of the heavens and stumbled into a fatal encounter with a cow.

The first time I told this story the man who was listening to me broke out in laughter. He did not see the great grief I carried with me, ugly and clumsy, a clay pot heavy with water, a perpetual weight. And so he laughed, blue eyes disappearing in his mirth. His teeth, as white and straight as small bones, were brilliant in his face. I stopped speaking. Even in that place I was shocked. But they had trained me well, and the smile never left my lips.

“A cow,” he said, still laughing. “Unbelievable.”

“No,” I told him, pulling my hand away. “This story is the truth. You must not laugh at the memory of my brother.” He finished his beer and waved for another one. Then he re-captured my hand. “Whatever you say, honey.” He was a cheerful man, round and good-natured, and he squeezed my fi ngers
164

The Secrets of a Fire King

to prove his sincerity. Nonetheless, from across the room, watchful eyes glanced against my skin like the feet of a fly. I pulled my chair closer, smiled at the man. I knew the rules. But I could not stop my tongue.

“My brother,” I began, and the memories were such that I did not heed the reluctance on the round man’s face. I told him about my brother as a boy, the thick hair that fell flat against his smooth brown skin, his long fingers tugging at my arm until I followed him. Whenever it rained we went outside, chasing the chickens until they fled to the dry earth beneath the house. My mother came to the windows, warning us of fever, but he stayed outside and I stayed with him. One monsoon, many years ago, we tore off all our clothes and ran naked through the falling water, trying to catch the rain in our mouths. Sky juice, my brother called it. The sky was full of water fruit, a lush fruit that spilled juice, soaked through the clouds and fell to us. We were dripping with sky juice, sky juice slid cool on our tongues, ran rivers on our arms and legs. My mother called more urgently, warm in her dry dress, warning us, but we were never sick.

And there was more: When my brother fell into the swollen river, fell into deep water that carried him downstream, past two villages and through the long pipe that led to the sea, he did not drown. He swirled through the froth, bumped against bloated frogs and the carcasses of birds, skinned his hands on chunks of speeding wood, but he did not drown, and this filled us all with awe because he had never learned to swim.

Remembering this miracle, celebrated by a hundred candles burning in my village, I forgot where I was. I spoke dreamily, and told the stranger that I sometimes thought my brother was a saint.

The man put down his beer undrunk and looked at me. I blushed, because in that place we seemed what we were not. My dress was pale silk with a high mandarin collar, the blue cloth cut away from my shoulders to reveal my petal skin. My hair could reach my knees in those days. It had never been cut. I spent hours with it every morning, dressing it elaborately with tinsel jewels and falling sprays of fl owers—the wedding style. I resembled a
Sky Juice

165

bride, but of course I was not a bride. The room was fi lled with smoke and the scent of champagne, and upstairs there were other rooms, small or large, simple or opulent, depending on the wallets of the men. The other girls joked about it, and ran a contest to see who would be the first to have been taken to every room. I laughed with them, in those days, and placed bets on a girl named Nangka who was both beautiful and very bold, and who was always chosen. We were like factory workers, or dreamy rich girls, seeking to relieve the long tedium of our days. We were like many things, but of course we were only one thing. This is what the man next to me had known all along.

“A saint,” he said. “Imagine that.”

He leaned so close to me I could feel his breath. His hand stroked my neck and fastened on the chain there, which he pulled up so slowly I felt every tiny link brush my skin. And then the small cross appeared, pure gold, hanging from the knobby ends of his fingers. His eyes were bright and mocking now, and I was suddenly afraid.

“Are you a religious man?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he answered.

“You are?” I tried to stroke his wrist but he shrugged me away. I felt the fly feet dancing on my neck again.

“Yes,” he said. “And I’ll bet you pray too, don’t you? On your knees all the time, I bet. What do you pray for, sugar?” I thought of many lies, all dangerous. And I thought of my mother, pinching my arm and telling me my tongue would cause me great trouble someday. So I looked him in the eyes and told him the simple truth.

“I pray to leave this place,” I said. “I pray to be forgiven for these sins.”

His hand twisted on the chain. I thought he meant to break it. Instead, he let it go, abruptly. The man we all feared was standing beside me, rubbing the place on my neck where I had felt his insect gaze, the small insistent feet of his power and lust.

“This one,” he said to the man. “She is being good to you, yes?” His fingers pressed my neck so that I had to bend my head, as if in supplication, as if in prayer. The sounds of the bar, voices,
166

The Secrets of a Fire King

falling glass, drew closer. Through them I heard the man speak, I felt the brutal edges of his smile.

“This one?” he said. “Why, she’s a regular little saint.” There are saints, I have seen them, hanging bright and tor-mented on the high walls of the district church. They have smooth stone skin, slender fingers cupped and held to the sky, tears of glass on cheeks as cold as mountain earth. We went each year to watch them emerge, carried in the ancient way on cano-pied platforms. They swayed, floating above the torch-lit city streets. The men who carried them were hidden beneath, under folds of velvet cloth, so that the saints, trembling against a smoky sky, turned and seemed to move unaided. The sisters scuttled like black birds and held us back. Do not touch, they whispered.

Pray, pray, for today their tears are real.

There are saints, and when my brother died I prayed to be like them, to be a woman rescued from my life, risen into the sky on a slender shaft of light, my body left behind, a lovely husk of shell and stone and glass. Day after day I prayed, until my knees were raw, my fingers numb, and I grew weary of saints. One evening I left the church and went to the wise woman of our village. She was skilled in the future, she took me to her home and rubbed my palms with ash. I had no tears, or if I did they were solid within me by that time. The trouble I was in, you see, it was very serious. My mother was dead, having caught the fever she seemed to sense around us always. My brother had used our few savings to buy a motorbike. I swear it was not from vanity or greed. We had a plan. My brother would deliver eggs and vegetables to the villagers. I would learn to weave. We would save, and when I was ready we would buy a loom. We were so young, and we did not imagine anything that could keep us from our dreams.

I tell you it was not pride, not at first, but I think that day when my brother died he was overcome. By speed, by the force of the wind in his hair. This is what I imagine. He drove so fast that the tears gathered in his eyes. He turned, just for a moment, to brush them away, to see who might be watching, and when he
Sky Juice

167

looked back it was too late, he was already lifting in the air. The cow screamed, he heard it as he soared over the road and into the dry river, empty now, hard as concrete beneath that beating sun.

The bike rode on, riderless, and crashed at last into a tree. The cow lay for three weeks where it died. I saw its body bloat, a bal-loon of skin taut against the stink of death, then later still, withered to the bone. My brother landed on his head. When they brought him to me there was blood coming from his ears. Within a day he died.

So I knew what must happen to me. The funeral costs, the cow to replace, the motorbike reduced to a twist of torn bright metal. I was young, but no one in the village would marry me now, a girl of ill luck, weighed down with debts and grief. The wise woman knew it too. She looked at my hands, gray with ash, shaking her head at what she saw. Pain and cold. I shuddered at this, thinking death, but she said no, not death, only cold. She told me there were places where it is so cold that for months there is no rain.

“No rain,” I repeated.

“What comes from the sky there falls like dust,” she said. “I have not seen it, but I know that it is so cold it burns you like fi re.

You must be strong. I see you in this place. You must prepare.” She would say no more. Her fingers, stained brown with herbs, placed the things I would need in a small cloth bag. Pre-cautionary things, medicine to make me invincible, a barrier around me that would let nothing in. She asked me if I knew what to expect and warned me that the first time was painful, but prized by many. Then she gave me his name, and the address of that place.

“Go to him,” she said. “he is not kind, but he guards his own.” She must have known, when she sent me. She must have seen it.

They put me in a small white room, and for many hours I was alone. Once I tried to leave, and then they took my clothes away and sent me back. One door. One window. A single bed.

No food, for hours, only a sink. I drank water until I imagined myself rinsed clean inside. Sitting by the open window, looking
168

The Secrets of a Fire King

at the flat gray wall of another building, I drank and cried for my brother and my mother and myself. Then I closed my eyes and tried to imagine them, tried to reach them. I was gone then, too.

I was floating, halfway to another world.

Then the men came. I was very still, somewhere outside myself, watching them from the blank space. And so it was not painful. I did not scream or bleed. More men came, and more, and I was so far away, so distant and so cold, that I did not even count or mark the ways they differed from each other. The next morning I was given a new room, the room I was to live in. Two other girls were there. One, a tall woman applying bright red lipstick, had strong bones, her hair cut to her shoulders and pulled back severely. Nangka. The other was called Dahlia; she was slight and pale, and her hair was longer than my own.

“So fast,” Dahlia said when I came in. She was disappointed; the room was crowded with three of us. Nangka turned from her mirror and walked over to me. She held my chin with her long fingers, her hard lacquered nails. She examined my arms.

“No bruises,” she declared, dropping my arm with disgust.

“She didn’t fi ght.”

“What good would it do?” Dahlia asked, already bored.

“What good would it do, to fi ght?”

I kept myself apart, and they did not like me. It’s true that I joked with them, I placed my bets, but inside I kept myself separate in a pure place, an arrogance of silence, and they hated me for it. Pale Dahlia ignored me, the bold Nangka was my tor-ment. She piled her jars and lotions on my table, and dug her fingers into my arms when I complained. Her nails were bright, razor-sharp, the color of the blood she drew. What good would it do, she said, mocking me, to fi ght?

We had three white walls, three beds in a row, a small table by each bed and a wardrobe for our clothes. Our working clothes.

Bright, like bird plumes or the scales of parrot fish. Silky, so that worn they seemed a second flesh, warm against the skin, luxuri-ous. We washed out lipstick, the smell of smoke. We ironed away the wrinkled evidence of sweaty palms, the spilled froth of
Sky Juice

169

drinks. This was by day, that we washed. We did each other’s hair, compared the craziness of men. What they wanted us to say, what they asked us to do. But never what we said. Never, never what we did. I spoke and heard myself speaking from where I sat in the purest part of my brain. Nangka was rough and coarse, she spoke like the city she came from, a voice full of choking fumes and wild unexpected sounds. Dahlia was like me, quiet, from the country. We did not talk about the past, but I knew this about her. I recognized her hesitancy, understood her silence.

One day when I had been there three months, Nangka was doing my hair, piling it on my head and poking it with pins like daggers. Dahlia moved through the room, stepping in and out of the scope of the mirror. The sky was clear that morning, the sun moved in a square on the floor, and I, far away inside myself, was almost content. The night was a distant future. My skin was clean.