Burning for Me

Bella Mauro

(Photo Credit: Bella Mauro)

I took the train to Seward two weeks ago. Again. It’s the only line around here, made especially for tourists. I only wait now for the bus to the airport. It took three hours, meandering through untouched mountains along coastal cliffs. The whole ride was cloudy and uncomfortable. My stomach ached in piercing nausea and dizziness came and went. Mothers cooed at their fussing babies and children ran between windows catching views of the wildlife. One woman was alone a few seats behind me with an infant and a suitcase. She huddled over the small child, humming lullabies and kissing her softly. I wondered where her partner was. Smoke from the brush fires drifted 200 miles from Talkeetna, where I left my hushed cabin with a view of Denali folding into screaming heat. No one knew if it was the dry branches that caught too much sunlight, or a cigarette butt apathetically thrown. The mountain burned before me.

Halfway through the ride when my eyes began to grow heavy, the conductor asked me if I’d be joining the meal car for a complimentary lunch. I said no, my appetite was lost in Georgia, and it felt weird to eat alone on a train full of families anyway. I left my things and walked to the last car to stand on the open part of the train. It shook and rattled along the rail and the air pinched my skin. I kept my sightlines directed outside the moving box, on mountains and rivers free-flowing as mother intended them to. Bits of green had begun to dampen into subtle hues, partially from the smoke, partially from the season. Hawks soared from tree to tree as game hastily scattered below. Visions materialized briefly and passed by me in shrinking compression. My sight filled with swaying violet at a slow curve; violet-pink like those magnolias outside the French Cafe on the corner of Means and Marietta. I spent four years of my life with a view of that cafe, waking up to a fresh cup of coffee already waiting when I made my way out the door.

I remember the smell of that old church attic apartment in Atlanta: sweet daisies and patchouli, sweat and tobacco. The floorboards creaked with every step and the window panes trembled during storm season. We kept the record player a constant drone in the background, and I’d snap back to reality when the needle hit the label. We had spent most of our savings on antique furniture, books, and old records, things to make a quiet home, I thought. The sun shone glimmering pebbles through the stained-glass window one late-May afternoon, the day before, warming the air to a damp, soft bed of breath. Eli lay on the couch, gazing up at the shreds of light on the ceiling. He had a sharp mind for the week, and I tried to keep it steady. I wondered why he never minded me living off change from the bar. Or how he was always so patient with me. Curls fell around his face like mangled bits of silk. I marveled at him often. Sometimes I thought he couldn’t be real. His face was angelic, carefully smoothed by time’s hand. His fingers carried unrest over blank sheets of paper. His eyes bore a sense of knowing when they paused on mine. As if he knew the whole plan, laid out to him, step-by-step, by God Himself. Or he knew his affliction, shooting spores up his legs until he was bound to suffocation. My jaw tensed and my stomach crinkled at the thought of maybe. I’d rather believe we carried ignorance to the end. Eli smiled at me, that tenacious smile, the look he always had when he knew he was right. His eyes drifted back to the ceiling and softly shut. His lips began mumbling the words to “Blue Sunday” under the scratching Morrison Hotel. I stood from my place on the floor, walked over to him, and kissed his sticky-warm forehead. Then I went to the kitchen to finish making what would be our last supper.

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The train came to a slow trudge in Seward, next to the marina by the tourist-ridden sealife center. They offer those five-hour boat tours to the Kenai-Fjords where you float through raw nature and learn what you can do to slow down the receding glaciers. It is actually beautiful if you have the money to spare. I took my sister on one for her birthday after Eli booked us a trip to Juneau when he came into some money from the first book. I didn’t want to take his money and I never asked for it. He insisted he was the main supporter of the house and if I wanted to do something nice for my sister and he had the means, then he wouldn’t be half a man if he didn’t provide. I remember standing in awe on the edge of that boat as the wind from the glacier whipped around my head and bit my skin. I wondered what it would be like to jump into the deep, teal bay. Would it be cold and sting like a million little hornet pricks? Or would the plunge paralyze my body and sink me to the ocean floor? I remember peering in disgust at the selfish onlookers gazing in vanity, begging the glaciers to cave, grabbing new plastic cups each time they hit the bar for a cocktail. Not even they could learn when face-to-face with mother on fire. She kept burning beneath me.

I was set to play at the Yukon Bar on 4th Avenue Friday and Saturday night to scruffy old locals and deadbeat young women search­ing for some solace—although I shouldn’t be quick to judge. I was approaching some fate of the sort. It only takes a little bit of time without someone before you begin to fall into the same habits that taught them to dread the waking. This was a gig I booked two months ago before I drove from the lower 48’s, fatigued and searing. I wasn’t sure if I’d be in Alaska by then, but they offered me an extra hundred dollars if I could guarantee that I’d make it. I got $450 cash, unlimited whiskey if I wanted, and a room at the local bed & breakfast. It was the most cash I had seen since Eli had his first novella published. Five months later the editor was blowing up Eli’s phone. He said it wasn’t really something he’d normally back, but the publishers liked it so it was time to get started on a second book. Eli was proud of it, he really was. He published some poems years before but he never wrote a story that made it through the fireplace. He liked the compression of novellas, said it required an often overlooked precision, a retreat into the depths of the soul to craft the most meticulous descriptions. He spent months, or was it years, studying The Pilgrim Hawk, Our Souls at Night, any short read he could get his hands on, and he sat, drinking and reading, reading and drinking day-in and day-out. One hand palm-down on paper, the other lifted above his mouth in desperate, freezing motion. Until one Tuesday evening when I got back from working at the restaurant and he had locked himself in the bathroom with a crayon, a notebook, and a half-drunk bottle of Maker’s Mark. An American Prayer was blaring on the Crosley and the loft was illuminated with seventeen candles sitting atop torn pieces of newspaper in various corners. The rug was slanted towards the bathroom door as if his legs had been tugging on the floor. On the kitchen counter was a page torn out of a book with some red magic marker chicken scratch:

June-bug, couldn’t pay the electric

Bought bourbon instead…

Letters in the middle of the page blurred into each other and stumbled about themselves. I could only make out that sad scribble at the bottom of slip that read:

Love always,

Eli

I held the paper for a moment in solemn contemplation before slipping it into my pocket. He was a quiet drunk, lonely. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and filled it to the brim with cheap Cabernet before walking back over to the bathroom. I put my ear to the door and caught Eli humming a tune to a song I had never heard before and scratching crayon like scissors on bone. He’d respond with slurry murmurs and wrinkling paper when my hand shook the doorknob. I sat in the armchair by the window and opened it to let the April air cool the damp slack of inebriation.

No eternal reward will forgive us now

For wasting the dawn…

Morrison’s voice faded to radio buzz beneath the echo of quiet in Atlanta at night. I can’t remember falling asleep, but I can remember waking up with a half-burned cigarette in the ashtray and Eli waving papers of purple smudges in front of my face. “It’s—it’s done, baby,” he kissed my cheek and lifted me into a clumsy embrace, “we’re gonna make ssssome money.” I held him tight away from gravity and sunk my face into his chest. His breathing grew slow and he began to sob.

But when the editor called and said it was time for a second story five months later, he promised ten thousand dollars if Eli could have it to him by the end of October. Ten thousand dollars. That night Eli sat down at the kitchen table with a legal pad and his fountain pen and started listening to Electric Ladyland. He flipped that record over five times a day until he was humming it in his sleep. And by the third week of the month, he sat at the table with one page of scribble and a crimson stripe on his forehead where his hand rested for too long. When I asked him how the story was going, he looked at me with bleeding eyes and said, “it’s not.”  He kissed me and disappeared for the weekend and came back Sunday night tripping and dazed. The legal pad was full to the cardboard and he told me this was it. If the editor didn’t take it he might as well burn the place down. We needed that ten thousand dollars, he said. The editor read it, and Eli revised it. The editor read it, Eli revised it again. The editor accepted it, and Eli asked when he would get the money. The editor sent it to publishing, Eli asked again. The book made double what the first one had by January, but we saw not half of it. The part we did see, for a while, went to paying bills and fancy dates, road trips and charities. Until it didn’t.

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Eli never took me here, not to Seward. Not to Anchorage, or Denali, or anywhere in Alaska. He took me wherever our car and a hundred dollar bill would take us. Those were the extent of our travel plans. Staring at the bay from my room at the b & b I felt a close detachment, an emptiness around the space I occupied. It was as if my space was haunted, but not cold. It was a hot hellfire, and I felt a growing closeness from within myself. I looked at the water, cool and shimmering in repeating motions. Haze settled over the rocky cliff edges just barely letting the earth peek through. I saw the woman from the train walking below my window with the infant in one arm and the suitcase trailing behind in the other. Her head jolted as she surveyed the landscape. Her hair fell in knots along her back and her steps grew heavier with each motion away from the window. I watched her approach a man, and it looked like she was asking for directions somewhere, or help. He turned his head with urgency and lit a cigarette in the opposite direction. The woman’s eyes drifted out to the bay and her hand delicately wrapped around the baby's head. I couldn’t shake this nausea building up inside my gut. I ran to the bathroom and let the emptiness of my stomach empty further in acidic bile. It wouldn’t stop. For a moment I would sit beside the toilet and my stomach would begin to settle. I’d raise my head to the ceiling and just when I was about to stand, a wave of repulsion would come over my being and my guts would empty once more. I thought I might cancel the gigs and take the next train back to Anchorage to catch a bus to the airport and roll into the arms of Atlanta. It felt like hours that I was sitting there, dry heaving over the toilet and then resting my head on the seat. Repeat. My head pinched at the temples and my lungs felt tar-stricken and gooey. After some time the dance between sickness and health turned syrupy and slow. I gagged once more before feeling a tiny fist puncture the air from my abdomen. Without thought my hand caressed my stomach and my eyes jolted downwards, wide and immobile. I had wondered why my belly grew firm these months. The air moved again slightly, this time caused by a dainty foot. I let out a squeal that didn’t feel like it was mine and my body was overcome by a shivering jubilation. My eyes rolled to the heavens:

Oh Lord if you are there please,

please

do not let this child be afflicted by the same vice.

Morrison was right; we live, we die, and death not ends it.

Amen

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Fireweed is the first plant to grow after a wildfire consumes the forest. It blossoms into beautiful pink and violet wildflowers and sways in the breeze like lavender. The sweet, astringent, asparagus-like shoots can be prepared in hearty dishes or eaten raw from June to September. The seeds are robust and procreative, they drift through the air miles apart and drop over ashes of grass. It’s toxic to livestock if consumed and can contaminate the milk of sheep and cattle. One can extract the sweet nectar to reduce pain and increase immunity. I learned this the first time I went to Alaska when I found fireweed nectar at a market near Talkeetna. I was positive the plant was native to the Yukon, until that wretched day in early June, when I decided to leave Georgia. I was walking through our attic apartment, looking for anything salvageable from the fire. The floorboards buckled beneath my cautious steps. An empty bottle of Maker’s Mark half sat hanging over the edge of the kitchen counter. The bathroom door was charred shut. Shards of glass glistened just outside it retracting back towards the small room. His leather boots sat, laces tangled, by the blackened armchair. A gaping hole in the ceiling refracted sunlight along the wall that the sofa was against until Eli had rearranged it. The smell of tobacco, bourbon and melting flesh stained the air and hung heavy, like August haze but bitter and dense. I stepped over crisp leaves of ripped, coffee-stained manuscripts and beat-up books into our bedroom. The mattress was thrown, and pages of journals laid strewn about the bed frame. Pieces of glass from shattered beer bottles had bounced off the wall and landed where our pillows used to be. I looked at the bed a moment, it was like a second home, a home within a home. We made love the night before the fire, some days ago, in a sober binge of intoxicating fervor. In the quiet echo of the city at dawn, he crucified my doubt in silken sheets and promised breadless breaths from a lucid mind. And a part of me believed him, really, really believed him. That the “sorrys” and “never agains” came from his head, this time. That the extra cash in the junk drawer would buy us take-out and a movie this week. That he had forgiven those who screwed him out of ten grand and was working to find a new publisher. I should have known in the sweet moans that escaped his lips lied a deeper desire for a fluid companion, one that I could never eclipse.

They said I’d be better off if I just ignored the bathroom when I went to collect our things. But I couldn’t ignore it, there was a hole in the wall just bigger than Eli’s fist and a streak of charcoal where the fire escaped. I walked up to it and touched its blackened edges, felt the heat resonating days after. I wondered if the drywall remembered the sound of the last shriek to leave his mouth before he escaped his burning body out the window. I didn’t want to know. I peered into the bathroom through the hole in the wall. Tiles had cracked and turned from seafoam to grey. The mirror laid in broken pieces on the floor beside a burgundy t-shirt. My lip began to tremble and my knees buckled. I never asked for all the details, but my imagination had grown out of control. I kept observing the space, the last space he occupied, for a moment before I caught a glimpse of violet in my peripheral. I directed my eyes towards the hole under the window and saw purple wheat-like leaves edging up. It was fireweed in June, in Georgia, where it should never belong.

Now in the Alaskan August heat, growing belly and kicking feet, retreating to safety, I can’t help but think of Eli alone at home while I was at work, locking himself again in the bathroom after throwing the loft upside down. I sit at the bus stop and think of him, drunk and burning, burning in his own bourbon cigarette fire. Burning for pleasure. Burning for art. Burning for fireweed. Burning for me.

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