A Pleasure to Burn Read online

  You bury your head in her limp, dead hands, and you feel the involuntary quiver shoot through her at your rapid contact. After a moment, she dares to move, slightly. She leans back, her eyes tightly closed, and says, simply: “I am afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “I have been taught to be afraid, that’s all.”

  “Damn the people and their customs and their old-wives tales!”

  “Talking won’t stop the fear.”

  You want to grasp, hold, stop her, shake sense into her, to clasp her trembling and comfort it as you would a wild bird trying to escape your fingers. “Stop it, stop it, Kim!”

  Her trembling gradually passes like movements on a disturbed water pool calming and relaxing. She sinks down upon the bed and her voice is old in a young throat. “All right, darling.” A pause. “Anything you say.” Swallowing. “Anything you wish. If—it makes you happy.”

  You try to be happy. You try to burst with joy. You try to smile. You look down upon her as she continues talking vaguely:

  “Whatever you say. Anything, my darling.”

  You venture to say, “You won’t be afraid.”

  “Oh, no.” Her breath flutters in. “I won’t be.”

  You excuse yourself. “I just had to see you, you understand? I just had to!”

  Her eyes are bright and focused now on you. “I know, Paul, how it must feel. I’ll meet you outside the house in a few minutes. I’ll have to make an excuse to mother and dad to get out past them.”

  You raise the window and put one leg out and then turn to look back up at her before vanishing. “Kim, I love you.”

  She says nothing, but stares blankly, and shuts the window when you are outside, and she goes away, dimming lights. Held by the dark, you weep with something not quite sorrow, not quite joy. You walk to the corner to wait out the time.

  Across the street, past a lilac shrub, a man walks stiffly. There is something familiar about him. You remember. He is the man who accosted you earlier. He is dead, too, and walking through a world that is alien only because it is alive. He goes on along the street, as if in search of something.

  Kim is beside you now.

  An ice cream sundae is a most wonderful thing. Resting cool, a small white mountain capped by a frock of chocolate and contained in glass, it is something you stare at with spoon poised.

  You put some of the ice cream in your mouth, sucking the cold. You pause. The light in your eyes embers down. You sit back, removed.

  “What’s wrong?” The old man behind the ancient fountain looks at you, concerned.

  “Nothing.”

  “Ice cream taste funny?”

  “No. It’s fine.”

  “Fly in it?” He bends forward.

  “No.”

  “You ain’t eating it?” he says.

  “I don’t want to.” You push it away from you and your lump of heart lowers itself precariously between the lonely bleak walls of your lungs. “I am sick. I am not hungry. I can’t eat.”

  Kim is at your left, eating slowly. At your sign, she lays aside her spoon, also, and cannot eat.

  You sit very straight, staring ahead into nothing. How can you tell them that your throat muscles will no longer contract efficiently enough to allow food. How can you speak of the frustrated hunger flaming in you as you watch Kim’s dainty jaw muscles close and open, finishing the white coolness of the ice within her mouth, tasting and liking it.

  How can you explain of the crumpled shape of your stomach lying like a dried apricot against your peritoneum? How describe that desiccated rope of intestine that is yours now? That lies coiled neatly, as if you heaped it by hand at the bottom of a cold pit?

  Rising, you have no coin in your hand, and Kim pays, and together you swing wide the door and walk out into the stars.

  “Kim—”

  “That’s all right. I understand,” she says. Taking your arm, she walks down toward the park. Wordless, you realize that her hand is very faintly against you. It is there, but your feeling of it is lost. Beneath your feet, the sidewalk loses its solid tread. It now moves without shock or bump below you, a dream.

  Just to be talking, Kim says, “Isn’t that a marvelous smell on the air tonight? Lilacs in bloom.”

  You test the air. You can smell nothing. Panic rises in you. You try again, but it is no use.

  Two people pass you in the dark, and as they drift by, nodding to Kim and you, as they gain distance behind, one of them comments, fading, “—Don’t you smell something— funny? I wonder if a dog was killed in the street today …”

  “I don’t see anything—”

  “—well—”

  “KIM! COME BACK!”

  You grasp her fleeing hand. It seems that it is this moment she has waited for in a tensed, apprehensive, and semi-gracious silence. The passing of the people and their few words are a trigger to thrust her away, almost screaming from you.

  You catch her arm. Wordless, you struggle against her. She beats at you. She twists, and strikes at your binding fingers. You cannot feel her. You cannot feel her doing this! “Kim! Don’t, darling. Don’t run away. Don’t be afraid!”

  Her brooch falls to the cement like a beetle. Her heels scuff the hard stony surface. Her breath pants from her. Her eyes are wide. One hand escapes and stretches out behind her as she leans back, using her weight to pull free. The shadows enclose your struggle. Only your breath sounds. Her face glows taut and not soft any more, breaking apart in the light. There are no words. You pull back, your way. She pulls in her direction. You try to speak softly, soothingly, “Don’t let people frighten you about me. Calm down—”

  Her words are bitten out in whispers:

  “Let go of me. Let go. Let go.”

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  Again the wordless, dark movement of bodies and arms. She weakens and hangs limply sobbing against you. At your touch she trembles very deeply. You hold her close, teeth chattering. “I want you, Kim. Don’t leave me. I had such plans. To go to Chicago some night. It only takes an hour on the train. Listen to me. Think of it. To eat the most elegant food across fine linen and silver from one another! To let wine lift us by our bootstraps. To stuff ourselves full. And now—” you declare harshly, eyes gleaming in the leaf-dark, “Now—” You hold your thinned stomach, pressing in that traitor thing lying dry and twisted as a paint tube there. “And now I can’t taste the cool of ice cream, or the ripeness of berries, or apple pie or—or—”

  Kim speaks.

  You tilt your head. “What did you say?”

  She speaks again.

  “Speak louder,” you ask of her, holding her close. “I can’t hear you.” She speaks and you cry out, bending near. And you hear absolutely nothing at first, and then, behind a thick cotton wall, her voice says,

  “Paul, it’s no use. You see? You understand now?”

  You release her. “I wanted to see the neon lights. I wanted to find the flowers as they were, to touch your hand, your lips. But, oh god, first my taste goes, then I cannot eat at all, and now my skin is like concrete. And now I cannot hear your voice, Kim. It’s like an echo in a lost world.”

  A great wind shakes the universe, but you do not feel it.

  “Paul, this is not the way. The things you desire can’t be had this way. It takes more than desire to insure these things.”

  “I want to kiss you.”

  “Can your lips feel?”

  “No.”

  “Love depends on more than thought, Paul, because thought itself is built upon the senses. If we cannot talk together, hear together, or feel, or smell the night, or taste the food, what is there left for us?”

  You know it is no use, but with a broken voice you argue on: “I can still see you. And I remember what it WAS like!”

  “Illusion. Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending. And we have no way to tend it if you cannot use your senses.”

  “It’s so unfair! I want life!”
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br />   “You will live, Paul, I promise that. But not THIS way, the impossible way. You’ve been dead over half a year, and I’ll be going to the hospital in another month—”

  You stop. You are very cold. Holding to her shoulders, you stare into her soft, moving face. “What?”

  “Yes. The hospital. Our child. Our child. You see, you didn’t have to come back. You are always with me, Paul. You are alive.” She turns you around. “Now I’ll ask you. Go back. Everything balances. Believe that. Leave me with a better memory than this of you, Paul. Everything will work for the best, eventually. Go back where you came from.”

  You cannot even cry. Your tear-ducts are shriveled. The thought of the baby comes upon you, and sounds almost correct. But the rebellion in you will not be so easily put down. You turn to shout again at Kim, and without a sign, she sinks slowly to the ground. Bending over her, you hear her few weak words:

  “The shock. The hospital. Quick. The shock.”

  You walk down the street, she lies in your arms. A grey film forms over your left eye. “I can’t see. The air does things to me! Soon, I’ll be blind in both eyes, Kim, it’s so unfair!”

  “Faith,” she whispers, close, you barely hear the word.

  You begin to run, stumbling. A car passes. You shout at it. The car stops and a moment later you and Kim and the man in the car are roaring soundlessly toward the hospital.

  In the middle of the tempest, her talking stands out. “Have faith, Paul. I believe in the future. You believe it too. Nature is not that cruel or unfair. There is compensation for you somewhere.”

  Your left eye is now completely blind. Your right eye blurs ominously.

  Kim is gone!

  The hospital attendants run her away from you. You did not even say goodbye to her, nor she to you! You stand outside, helpless, and then turn and walk away from the building. The outlines of the world blur. From the hospital a pulsing issues forth and turns your thoughts a pale red. Like a big red drum it beats in your head, with loud, soft, hard, easy rhythms.

  You walk stupidly across streets, cars just miss striking you down. You watch people eat in gleaming glass windows. Watch hot dogs sizzling juices in a Greek restaurant. Watch people lift forks, knives. Everything glides by on noiseless lubricant of silence. You float. Your ears are solidly blocked. Your nose is clogged. The red drum beats louder, with an even tempo. You long and strive and strain to smell lilacs, taste bacon, or remember what a mockingbird sounded like cutting pieces from the sky with the trilling scissors of his beak. All those wonderful memorious things you try to capture.

  Sour-sick, an earthquake of thought and confusion shaking you, you find yourself swaying down a ravine path in Elysian Park. The dead, the dead are walking tonight. They gather tonight. Remember the man who talked to you? Remember what he said? Yes, yes, you still have some fragments of memory. The dead are banding tonight, forming a unit to swarm over the homes of the warm living people, to kill and decimate them!

  That means Kim, too. Kim and the baby.

  Kim will die and have to grope and stumble and gabble like this, stinking and falling away from the bone and have dull ears and blind eyes and dry, eroded nostrils. Just like you.

  “No!”

  The ravine rushes on both sides and under you. You fall, pick yourself up, fall again.

  The Leader stands alone as you grope your way to him by the silent creek. Sucking hoarse breaths you stand before him, doubling your fists, wondering where the horde of the undead are, you do not see them. And now the Leader talks to you, explaining, shrugging angrily:

  “They did not come. Not one of those cold dead people showed up. You are the only recruit.” He leans wearily against the tree, as if drunk. “The cowards, the persecuted swine.”

  “Good.” Your breath, or the illusion of breath, slows. His words are like cold rain on you, bringing confidence and quiet. “I’m glad they didn’t listen to you. There must be some reason why they didn’t obey you. Perhaps—” you grope for the logic of it … “perhaps something happened to them that we can’t understand, yet.”

  The Leader makes a bitter move of his lips, shaking his head back. “I had wild plans. But I am alone. And I see the futility of it now. Even if all the dead should rise, they are not strong enough. One blow and they fall in upon their members like a fire-gutted log. We grow tired so soon. Above the earth our discrepancies are hastened. The lift of an eyebrow is slow, painful toil. I am tired—”

  You leave him behind you. His muttering passes away. The red pounding beats in your head again like horses’ hooves on soft turf. You walk from the ravine, down the street, and into the graveyard, with mute purpose.

  Your name is on the grave-stone still. The cavity awaits you. You slide down the small tunnel into the waiting wooden cavity, no longer afraid, jealous or excited. The complete withdrawal of your various senses has left you little but memory, and that seems to dissolve as the boxed satin erodes and the hard square wood softens. The wood becomes malleable. You lie suspended in warm round darkness. You can actually shift your feet. You relax.

  You are overwhelmed by a luxury of warm sustenance, of deep pink thoughts and easy idleness. You are like a great old yeast contracting, the outer perimeter of your old fetidness crumbling, being laved away by a whispering tide, a pulsation and a gentleness of moves.

  The coffin is now a round dim shell, no longer square. You breathe sufficiently, not hungry, not worried, and are loved. You are deeply loved. You are secure. The place where you are dreaming shifts, contracts, moves.

  Drowsy. Your huge body is washed down in movements until it is small, tiny, compact, certain. Drowsy, drowsy on a slumberous singing tide. Slow. Quiet. Quiet.

  Who are you trying to remember? A name plays at the rim of a sea. You run to get it, the waves pluck it away. Somebody beautiful you try to think of. Someone. A time, a place. Oh, so sleepy. Close round darkness, warmth, tiredness. Soundless shell. Dim tide pulsing. Quiet contraction.

  A river of dark bears your feeble body on a series of loops and curves, faster, faster and yet faster.

  You break into an openness and are suspended upside down in brilliant yellow light!

  The world is immense as a new white mountain. The sun blazes and a huge red hand binds your two feet close as another hand strikes your naked spine to force a cry out of you.

  A woman lies below, tired; sweet perspiration beads her face, and there is a wide singing and refreshened and sharpened wonder to this room and this world. You cry out into it with a newly formed voice. One moment upside-down, you are swung right side up, cuddled and nursed against a spiced-sweet breast.

  Amid your fine hunger, you forget how to talk, to worry, to think of all things. Her voice, above you, gently tired, whispers over and over:

  “My little new born baby. I will name you Paul, for him. For him …”

  These words you do not comprehend. Once you feared something terrifying and black, but what it was you do not know now. It is forgotten in this flesh warmth and cackling content. For but a moment a name forms in your thimble-mouth, you try to say it, not knowing what it means, unable to pronounce it, only able to choke it happily with a fresh glowing that arises from unknown sources. The word vanishes swiftly, leaving a quickly fading, joyous soon-erased after-image of triumph and high laughter in the tiny busy roundness of your head: “Kim! Kim! Oh, Kim!”

  Pillar of Fire

  HE CAME OUT OF THE EARTH, HATING. HATE WAS HIS FATHER; hate was his mother. It was good to walk again. It was good to leap up out of the earth, off of your back, and stretch your cramped arms violently and try to take a deep breath!

  He tried. He cried out.

  He couldn’t breathe. He flung his arms over his face and tried to breathe. It was impossible. He walked on the earth, he came out of the earth. But he was dead. He couldn’t breathe. He could take air into his mouth and force it half down his throat, with withered moves of long-dormant muscles, wildly, wildly! And with this little air he cou
ld shout and cry! He wanted to have tears but he couldn’t make them come either. All he knew was that he was standing upright, he was dead, he shouldn’t be walking! He couldn’t breathe and yet he stood.

  The smells of the world were all about him. Frustratedly, he tried to smell the smells of autumn. Autumn was burning the land down into ruin. All across the country the ruins of summer lay; vast forests bloomed with flame, tumbled down timber on empty, unleafed timber. The smoke of the burning was rich, blue, and invisible.

  He stood in the graveyard, hating. He walked through the world and yet could not taste nor smell of it. He heard, yes. The wind roared on his newly opened ears. But he was dead. Even though he walked he knew he was dead and should expect not too much of himself or this hateful living world.

  He touched the tombstone over his own empty grave. He knew his own name again. It was a good job of carving.

  WILLIAM. LANTRY

  That’s what the grave stone said.

  His fingers trembled on the cool stone surface.

  BORN 1898 — DIED 1933

  Born again … ?

  What year? He glared at the sky and the midnight autumnal stars moving in slow illuminations across the windy black. He read the tiltings of centuries in those stars. Orion thus and so, Auriga here! And where Taurus? There!

  His eyes narrowed. His lips spelled out the year:

  “2349.”

  An odd number. Like a school sum. They used to say a man couldn’t encompass any number over a hundred. After that it was all so damned abstract there was no use counting. This was the year 2349! A numeral, a sum. And here he was, a man who had lain in his hateful dark coffin, hating to be buried, hating the living people above who lived and lived and lived, hating them for all the centuries, until today, now, born out of hatred, he stood by his own freshly excavated grave, the smell of raw earth in the air, perhaps, but he could not smell it!

  “I,” he said, addressing a poplar tree that was shaken by the wind, “am an anachronism.” He smiled faintly.

  HE LOOKED AT THE GRAVEYARD. It was cold and empty. All of the stones had been ripped up and piled like so many flat bricks, one atop another, in the far corner by the wrought iron fence. This had been going on for two endless weeks. In his deep secret coffin he had heard the heartless, wild stirring as the men jabbed the earth with cold spades and tore out the coffins and carried away the withered ancient bodies to be burned. Twisting with fear in his coffin, he had waited for them to come to him.