And What Got Made Was Broken Too

Palace Players I: Introducing Palace Players

Palace Players II: Some Peculiar Fix, The Two of Us

Palace Players III: Turn Out the Lights as We Planned

Palace Players IV: You’ve Got To Get Back Up Yourself.

Palace Players V:

I woke to the sound of fire alarms shouting at me. She was also hitting me on the arm, probably as hard as she could. From the ceiling a mist fell on my face and on the back of her head. In my newday delirium, I thought it pleasant, but I was on the fringe of the output range of the overhead fire-sprinkler system. If I wasn’t so far from my side of the bed I would have been sopping wet and much more unhappy. She was soaked, her hair all a mess, and she yelled at me in one language after another.

I snapped fully awake when her open hand met my face. I shouted and shook my head, leapt out of bed, and grabbed my backpack. Like shaken champagne we blew out the hotel room door into the night. Six shots rang out from two handguns and I stopped moving immediately. She did not stop, and with one leg she lifted the man on the left into the ceiling of the hotel hallway. In the same motion she yanked me down the hall by my wrist. The man on the right trained his gun on her but she shouted some terse Spanish word at him and it fell into the carpet at his feet. His head immediately led him across the width of the hall before it slammed into the door for room 329. She wasn’t looking his direction at the time because she probably already knew what was happening. Her eyes were dead ahead and she kept me on my feet, pulling us towards the stairwell.

Under our bare feet the pavement outside was wet, a layer of moisture just thick enough to give the ground a shiny coat that reflected parking lot lights. Above our heads, smoke billowed out of the third floor. Men with machine pistols sprayed bullets at us from the balcony of a room. We were sleeping in that room forty-six seconds ago.

“Don’t stop for anything, songbird.” I turned the key in the ignition, thinking about when she started calling me that.

So our car howled and slid out of its parking spot, two wheels making steam out of the water on the blacktop. As we flew towards the parking lot exit, two black cars flew toward us with their brights on.

“Don’t stop,” she said, “Go faster.” I didn’t ask what her plan was.

As we approached the two black sedans they left the ground violently, maybe like paper footballs under the fingernail of a giant. I don’t know where they landed, but we were out from under them before they hit the top of their flight path. As we left the parking lot two more followed us, but there was no competition between our acceleration and theirs. Disregarding stoplights and lane directions we went through gear after gear, gales of exhaust noise escalating and settling in predictable fashion.

“Get us out of France. I don’t care how.”

When we fled Barcelona several months ago I had never driven this car before. I could not adjust the seats and I could not turn off the radio. Tonight I knew the peak of each gear’s power curve and I knew exactly how much pressure I could put on the rear tires before they would lose traction. Like in Barcelona, she looked out through the tiny back window to see down the street behind us. Our pursuers were already far behind. She turned around in her seat to face me.

“So. I was unimpressed by ‘Chez Fonfon.’ The people were not nice and the food was not exceptional.”

I disagreed, “My food was excellent!”

“Good, I’m glad.”

“Yeah I had some delicious creamy pasta thing with breadcrumbs and fish.”

“I feel like you get creamy pasta a lot. Did your mom make that often in your youth?” Good question.

“Actually yeah.”

“Well if you’re ever in Marseilles again and you take a lady there, don’t order the veal parmesan.”

I laughed, not at her elite absurdity but at her suggestion of me dining out with another girl. “Who else am I ever going to Marseilles with?”

“You never know! Some sweet little American girl with sparkly glittery skin?”

“Wait, glittery skin?”

She nodded, “They have that lotion there with the sparkles in it. Don’t ask me why they do. Turn left up here and you’ll hit the A50.”

With a hint of anger from her previous comment about taking someone else to dinner, I entered the turn with too much speed. Flying immediately out of control, the car spun twice across the intersection, connecting squarely with a construction barrier. Lifted into the air, the engine compartment behind our heads intersected with a traffic light pole, abruptly adjusting our flight path. We spun in the air and then we spun across the ground. We spun into a gas station parking lot, landing right-side up.

I just sat there for a moment, looking out of a perfectly shattered windshield across the hood of a perfectly totaled Pagani roadster. The light pole in front of me looked like it had been kicked over by Godzilla. Next to the pole was a body, small and docile, crumpled next to the cracked construction barrier. At some point during our flight she must have been ejected from the car. The seatbelt that should have been tight across her chest was coiled up neatly in its little holder like it had never been worn before anyway.  The fabric roof of the car was torn above her seat as if it had been clawed through by a panicked tiger.  There seemed to be no sound for a few moments as I scrambled to get out of the car and onto my feet, running straight into the intersection towards the girl.

The grey light of the morning choked and fled and I scooped her tiny frame up into my arms. Traffic flew by on the highway over our heads, earlybird commuters with no idea who was shaking in my arms below, taking shallow breaths and tensing up every few seconds. It took little effort to move her from the intersection to safety, laying her in front of the convertible while thinking about what to do. Minutes ago she was manipulating gravity and tossing cars in the air but here she was, tossed from a car, fallen to the ground as a subject of gravity, now moving only infinitesimally and with great effort. I tried to ask her what she wanted me to do, but there was no sound. If I took her to a hospital they would come there to kill us and it would be easy.

Regardless, I would kill her twice? First I injure her severely with her own car and then I refuse to take her to a hospital for fear? That would be both carelessness and cowardice, leading to the end of the only perfect relationship I had ever experienced. I knew how that sounded. I was ill-equipped to fight anyone in comparison to her, but maybe that was what I needed to do. Maybe she could intervene even in her sleep.

Considering all my options, I found her purse in the car and found her phone inside the messy maw of it. I held the big middle button down with all my might and shouted, “NAVIGATE TO HOSPITAL” at its voice control interface. A calm female voice responded, kindly showing me the path to the nearest hospital, several miles away. The phone then intelligently asked me if this was an emergency. I said yes, so it asked me if I wanted to call an ambulance or the police. I thought for a second. They would aresst me on sight for my reckless driving and the public property damage, but they would also see me with this internationally excellent actress and they might go easy. That was promising. Maybe she would make it okay.

From the ground, she said, “Ambulance.”

Malachi/Morning

The cold percussive rimshot crack turned every head in the city. A tower that hangs flags out its windows burst into flame, blue and green and yellow. Far above the streets of the city, the building’s infrastructure began to give way in the heat. Steel and glass fell hundreds of feet to the soft floor of the business district while everyone but the media fled the skyscraper block as fast as they could.

Drawing everyone’s attention immediately, the smoke flexed in the sky like a strong arm, spelling out in capital letters “I HAVE LOVED YOU.” As the people on the streets read the words in the sky, they put down their camera phones and stopped their running cars. Shouting together over the noise of the inferno and the firetrucks, everyone said together, “In what way have You loved us?” The fire grew immediately stronger, causing the people to shield their faces from the heat. The smoke-words cleared from the sky as all across the building, window after window gave out to the backdraft pressure of the livid air outside. When a window lost it’s integrity completely, it would explode inward as a gout of fire bled outward and down the face of the building. Some windows stayed in tact, but the fire-blood from the ones that didn’t formed enormous, handwritten words like calligraphy across the tower. “RETURN TO ME. I WILL RETURN TO YOU.” Like they already knew He was going to say that, the furious city responded with one voice, throwing debris and stomping their feet and jumping in the air.  On command they shouted, “In what way shall we return?”

So the fire left the building and consumed itself early in the morning light. Glass pieced itself together again to make whole panes and steel beams became one again with the frame of the tower. The articles of debris that lay thick on the streets were lifted back into the spaces they left at the coercion of the blast. In a matter of moments the building stood again whole, as if nothing ever happened. The smell of fire had even vanished from the air. People turned their heads back to their phones and the news crews gave their sign-off lines to their respective cameras. Men in suits flagged down cabs and baristas in coffee shops went back to pulling shots of espresso. The city hummed again, the same tone it did every morning at that time.

But one girl, maybe fifteen years old, stood on the corner of an intersection. She held her face in her hands, sobbing and sobbing. The words were hard to understand, but to herself she mumbled through tears, “I know. I know. I love You. I need You.” There was a sudden silence around her for about five minutes until a quiet, soft voice said, “Little dove, to you who fears My name, the Sun of Righteousness will arise with healing in His wings.” She took a deep breath and nodded, turning her tear-red eyes to the sky. With a funny kind of strength she replied: “Okay, my Heart.”

Music Boxes/Ace-High

There’s a blog you need to read regularly.  Judging by the fact that when Lydia linked to my blog yesterday I had more traffic than ANY normal day, way more people probably read hers, and this a funny post.  Nevertheless, two recent pieces of her’s stand out to me enormously.

First, read this one on femininity/gender-free trait attribution.  Her words are so beautiful and eloquent, yet they are immediately functional from the first line.  You can read it here: Some Music Boxes Play Led Zepplin. A snippet:

The fluidity of God’s image fills up our human shells and flows back and forth between the two; His Nature is a beautiful and varying mixture diversely exemplified from soul to soul. The “masculine” in me does not change my identity. It does not hurt my womanhood nor harm my function as female.

And later:

If I hear of a white horse, I want my own fair mount riding alongside of it: my desire is to battle alongside one, not rest in the protection which could be afforded me.

Okay that is marvelous.

Also, she recently wrote a piece for the Palace Players series that H and I have been writing.  Whereas mine operates from the perspective of a “normal” man experiencing relationship with the “impossible perfect” woman, and H’s explores a “normal” or standard woman experiencing relationship with the “impossible perfect” man, Lydia’s pieces is written about a normal man experiencing an impossible perfect woman, yet viewed through the eyes of the man but written by a woman.  Basically, her piece is about how she might see a normal man viewing and encounter with a impossible perfect woman.  Her writing style in incredible and feminine, and as explored in the post I just block quoted, her ability to write about gender is really neat.  I really enjoyed her piece! You can read it here: Ace-High Fandango.  A sample:

I started fumbling through some sort of uncomfortable hello but before even three discomfited words got out, she had already evacuated her stool, smile sliding on her face, hips charging my direction in classic style: vixen variety.

I can’t remember what I said- I barely remember what she said, aside from introductions and the way she couldn’t quite pronounce “Christopher.” God, I’d give anything to hear that woman say my name. And then by some implausible stroke of fortune—or fluke—I was touring Socorro with the living, breathing materialization of a desert flower… in a Taurus, no less.

So yes, please read these blog posts if you haven’t already.  Thanks and that’s all.

You’ve got to get back up yourself.

Palace Players I: Introducing Palace Players

Palace Players II: Some Peculiar Fix, The Two of Us

Palace Players III: Turn Out the Lights as We Planned

Palace Players IV:

“This may be the most splendid Shiraz I have ever enjoyed.”

Earlier she said we needed to not draw attention to ourselves.  She then proceeded to park the Pagani convertible in a handicap spot facing everyone on the beach.  We hide behind large sunglasses, ordering foolishly expensive beverages in the daytime.

I shake my head at her drink selection. “We are in France. You ordered wine from Australia?”

“But you don’t know that it’s from Australia! Maybe it’s French? The French invented Shiraz, but we call it something different.”

“Do you call it Chianti?”

She gags on her food dramatically, causing everyone to look over at us. “No. Chianti is totally different, we call Shiraz ‘Syrah’ here. Chianti is more dry, but Americans just drink beer so I don’t fault you for this.”

“Ha! Wow how gracious of you.”

She kicks me under the table. “I have a good-developed taste,” she says.

“Yes but your English could use some work, you say ‘well-developed taste’ instead of ‘good-developed’. Just a little grammar thing. Those words aren’t necessarily interchangeable.”

“Sorry, I only speak FOUR languages. You speak how many?”

“One and a half.”

“No.” She reaches over the table and adjusts the collar on my shirt.

“If I was European I’d know more languages. I blame it on the American school system for how much ‘Spanish’ they taught me.”

She laughs and nods in agreement, pulling a pack of Parliaments from her enormous purse.

I lean over the table to light her cigarette, lighting mine next. “We should smoke less of these” I say, words muffled by the one between my lips.  She shrugs at my suggestion.

In her company I’ve become accustomed to the lingering smell of smoke on my clothing, although of course her clothes always smell brand new. Resting my cigarette on the edge of the table, I poke at the penne pasta in front of me, pondering the disappointingly small “lunch-size” portion. Whenever we’ve eaten together, no matter where, she consumes roughly half of the food she ordered and takes the rest home in a to-go box. I eat everything on my plate in a matter of twenty minutes and finish whatever is in her to-go box when we get home.

Sitting across from me, she sips her completely full glass of wine and clears her throat, “If you smoke less than a pack a day it can be good for you actually.”

“No, no way in hell.”

“Don’t swear! No really, I asked my doctor.”

“Your doctor told you that smoking was healthy so long as you smoked less than twenty a day?”

She nods, exhaling. “Reduces blood pressure.”

I shake my head.  He would probably tell her anything to have her remember him.

We’re down the beach from a luxury hotel and every four minutes or so American tourists walk by, speaking English to each other. Some sound Southern, others are from the midwest. She asks, “Are Americans born with cameras in their hands? I have never seen an American without a camera.”

“You have never seen me with a camera! I am an American.”

“That’s true! Do you even own one? How, then, are you an American?”

“I think I had one once but I left it in Las Vegas when I was in college. Hey are we safe in the open?” I ask, changing the subject, “Two days ago we were actually dodging bullets.”

She shrugs again, practically ignoring the question. “They don’t know we’re here.”

“They won’t see your car?”

“There are a lot of cars like mine in France. They are French I think.”

“Okay let’s pretend your car isn’t Italian, or, like one of 10 like it in the whole world. Wouldn’t these people know your license plate number?”

With a quick laugh she puts the cigarette to her lips. Holding the smoke in her lungs for a couple seconds, she soon exhales in a white column. It dissipates into the canopy of our table’s umbrella as the cigarette gets put out on the edge of the table cloth. “Why would I have a registered car, admirador? I cannot afford the taxes.”

I finish my drink; wiping disbelief on my face. “ Never mind.”

Palace Players V: And What Got Made Was Broken Too

This short story is the fourth in a series.   The sister series, written by my dear friend H, can be read at areasonabledistance.wordpress.com.