A Pleasure to Burn (2 page)

“Kim!” you cry. “It is I!”

She says your name. She forms it with a numb mouth. Neither of you can hear it. She wants to run, but instead, at your insistence, she pulls up the window and, sobbing, you climb upward into the light. You slam the window and stand swaying there, only to find her far across the room, crucified by fear against the wall.

You sob raggedly. Your hands rise clean toward her in a gesture of old hunger and want. “Oh, Kim, it's been so long—”

 

T
IME IS NON-EXISTENT
.
For five full minutes you remember nothing. You come out of it. You find yourself upon the soft rim of bed, staring at the floor.

In your ears is her crying.

She sits before the mirror, her shoulders moving like wings trying to fly with some agony as she makes the sounds.

“I know I am dead. I know I am. But what can I try to do to this cold? I want to be near your warmness, like at a fire in a long cold forest, Kim …”

“Six months,” she breathes, not believing it. “You've been gone that long. I saw the lid close over your face. I saw the earth fall on the lid like a kind of sounding of drums. I cried. I cried until only a vacuum remained. You can't be here now—”

“I
am
here!”

“What can we do?” she wonders, holding her body with her hands.

“I don't know. Now that I've seen you, I don't want to walk back and get into that box. It's a horrible wooden chrysalis, Kim, I don't want its kind of metamorphosis—”

“Why, why, why did you come?”

“I was lost in the dark, Kim, and I dreamed a deep earth dream of you. Like a seventeen-year locust I writhed in my dream. I had to find my way back, somehow.”

“But you can't stay.”

“Until daybreak.”

“Paul, don't take of my blood. I want to live.”

“You're wrong, Kim. I'm not that kind. I'm only myself.”

“You're different.”

“I'm the same. I still love you.”

“You're jealous of me.”

“No, I'm not, Kim. I'm not jealous.”

“We're enemies now, Paul. We can't love any more. I'm the quick, you're the dead. We're opposed by our very natures. We're natural enemies. I'm the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It's just the opposite of love.”

“But I love YOU, Kim!”

“You love my life and what life means, don't you see?”

“I
don't
see! What are we like, the two of us sitting here, talking philosophically, scientifically, at a time when we both should be laughing and glad to see one another.”

“Not with jealousy and fear between us like a net. I loved you, Paul. I loved the things we did together. The processes, the dynamics of our relationship. The things you said, the thoughts you thought. Those things, I still love. But, but—”

“I still think those thoughts and think them over and over, Kim!”

“But we are apart.”

“Don't be merciless, Kim. Have pity!”

Her face softens. She builds a cage around her face with convulsive fingers. Words escape the cage:

“Is pity love? Is it, Paul?”

There is a bitter tiredness in her breathing.

You stand upright. “I'll go crazy if this goes on!”

Wearily, her voice replies, “Can dead people go insane?”

You go to her, quickly, take her hands, lift her face, laugh at her with all the false gaiety you can summon:

“Kim, listen to me! Listen! Darling, I could come every night! We could talk the old talk, do the old things! It would be like a year ago, playing, having fun! Long walks in the moonlight, the merry-go-round at White City, the hot dogs at Coral Beach, the boats on the river—anything and everything you say, darling, if only—”

She cuts across your rapid, pitiable gaiety:

“It's no use.”

“Kim! One hour every evening. Just one. Or half an hour. Any time you say. Fifteen minutes. Five minutes. One minute to see you, that's all. That's all.”

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!”

“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: