Blue Woman Burning

1

Blue Woman

August in Manhattan was unbearable. By eight a.m., people were already sweating, and by noon, heat smote the pavement like a hammer on an anvil. Fallon had gotten up to run in the cool of the morning, tepid though it was. After she graduated from college, she followed her college friends to Manhattan and picked up a waitressing job with the idea that she would make do while studying for the MCATs and apply to medical schools. Three years later, she had yet to take the test, and not one application had been made. 

After her mother spontaneously combusted on the Altiplano, Fallon had turned her head, and seen herself reflected, beautiful and male, in the face of her older brother, and known that through him, she could survive. Ovid, a child truly cast in the image of Eustacia’s mind, was the supreme architect of Fallon’s childhood, even more so than her mother. Only Ovid could open a space in the air and lead her into a land of his own invention. With fantastic words of his own derivation, he took her from a ship made of blankets and living room chairs to other planets. She could follow the quick flashes of his mind and magic anywhere for at least an hour before her brain tired from trying to keep up. His knowledge was not merely invented, for he had read their 20-volume encyclopedia from cover to cover when he was in Chile. His mind held onto facts in a way hers never had. Even when she was a baby, her head always turned to him, as though he was a sun that shone especially for her. 

But thirteen years later, her human mirror was always on the verge of collapse, leaving her own survival in question. Whenever she reached down into his emotional pit to raise him up, he’d pull her down into it, both emotionally and physically. Even before their mother dispersed, he had pummeled her with angry words and fists. But afterwards, his anger cooled to disgust and disdain, mitigated occasionally by fits of tenderness, which were almost worse. The period between when her family arrived home and now had been rocky, to say the least, and Fallon had escaped with her sanity barely intact.

They had never traveled as a family again. They barely talked for the rest of the drive home. In the first year of being home, whenever they tried to talk about Eustacia’s death or whatever it was, they would be collectively seized by a torpor so profound that they would all start yawning and have to sleep. In later years when they awoke from their collective shock, they argued, each one having a different story. The arguments grew so violent they never fully concluded, so the event, unmined, unmitigated, unnamed, became a rock around which they tried to flow onward, mostly unsuccessfully. 

When he turned eighteen, Ovid attempted and failed a variety of colleges and eventually returned home, ostensibly to take care of Walter. It was a fiction which Fallon and her father maintained by unspoken mutual consent. Terence turned heavily to marijuana smoking, dropped out of high school, and left home for California. When news of him arrived (rarely), there was always some hint of flimflammery. 

Fallon, the only one to successfully complete college, was sinking into s quicksand where medical school seemed less and less possible. For the last three years, feeling she wasn’t smart enough to become a doctor, she tried to think of something she could do instead. But absolutely nothing came to mind that truly mattered or even remotely interested her. Even though it took millions of people to run this city, she couldn’t imagine what they all did. It all seemed so meaningless. When she asked someone at the occasional party what they did, they gave her long, abstract titles that made her blood turn dry as chalk, answers like I'm Assistant to the Director of Administrative Service Marketing, or I'm Manager of First Option Subsidiary Rights Auctions. Their answers gave her tunnel vision and filled her ears with static. Yes, but what do you do? She wanted to ask. Actually. At your desk. In the morning? What difference does it make in the world?

She hated waiting tables. She felt degraded and useless. She told herself it was a good interim job until she entered medical school because it let her move, it was steady cash, and she was taking care of people in an elemental way. But it bored her, and boredom was a stasis more painful than sitting for too long. Nevertheless, she couldn’t make herself apply for the MCATs. Whenever she tried, thoughts of her mother’s and Ovid’s brilliance mutely unmotivated her.

Yesterday, frustration with her job peaked, and today, her first day off in weeks, she determined the sun would not set before she filled out the registration forms for the October MCAT. Running was her salvation, so she propelled herself out of bed before the heat of the day took hold. As usual, the first fifteen minutes of her run were groggy and out of sync as if she was running ten yards behind herself; her right foot scraped her inner ankle twice, and her hands doggy paddled tensely near her armpits.

By the time she reached the park, her shoulders relaxed, her fingers uncurled, and her hands carved vertical orbits to either side of her hips. Her body had always been smarter than she: her stomach ached before she recognized her stress, and it called for the right foods just when she needed them, like dark leafy greens and chocolate before her period. Now, she rose onto her toes so as to leave the ground more easily and barely came down before she left the ground again. Her lungs delivered air and her heart pumped blood in perfect symbiosis, and she could do anything, anything, anything, anything. Her body had won awards for her college track team after all, and she had graduated cum laude from a prestigious college. Everyone said she had a healing touch. Today she’d register for the test and begin studying.

She not only registered for the exam and ran the application to the post office before 10:30 but she pulled the study guide out from under the bed, wiped away all the dust, and plunged in. The first half hour, her brain resisted the abstract concepts, but an hour in, it clicked into gear. By noon she was absorbing material, maintaining focus, and feeling hopeful. That’s when the shrill notes of the phone shredded her concentration. 

When she answered it, she recognized the quality of the silence. A gasp for air between sobs. 

The sky is so high, Ovid said, and the clouds are so far away. He broke into the kind of dry, painful sobs only men make. Each beat of her heart tapped her eardrums and stabbed her temples. The air of the apartment lost its last bit of oxygen. Outside, the heat of the day pounded the city full blast, and inside, her tiny air conditioner gave up with a mechanical sigh.

She worked her way around the bulky furniture to pull the blinds against the summer blaze, and she collapsed onto the velveteen couch, searching for the right words to release him from his grief. What’s going on? 

I don’t know, he said and sobbed more. 

Connected to him like twins by an umbilical telephone line, she could picture him at home, his clean-shaven jaw, his olive skin, his hazel eyes turned green with tears, his disproportionately large hands making sweaty fists. He sounded high again.

She had experienced enough depression to know something of how he felt, but unlike him, she had always been able to function in the world. Sure, she procrastinated and felt plagued by the fact that she hadn’t graduated magna cum laude; sure, she was stalled at this dead-end job; but she at least provided for herself, whereas Ovid did not. 

"I just don’t know what to do with myself," he said. 

She knew the feeling too well. 

I keep seeing this blue woman dancing at the edge of the woods, he continued.

Fallon pushed herself out of the couch. She darted to the kitchen sink, wet a towel, and twisted it around her neck to cool off.

On our land? They owned a stone house on fifty acres in Oneonta, New York, inherited from their mother’s side of the family. Are you serious?

She’s like a piece of the sky come down to visit, he said. And I just want her to wait for me. But every time I run up the field to get to her, she vanishes.

He must be seriously high, Fallon thought as he rambled on. He had always leaned too heavily on marijuana, but he had never outright hallucinated.

It was some crazy neighbor performing one of those new age rituals that are becoming so popular. Lately, the whole country seemed to thirst for the lost magic religion used to offer. As he talked on, Fallon momentarily entertained the idea that the blue woman might be a piece of the magic from Chile reaching forward into the banal American reality that now characterized their lives. She shivered. Those things were only childhood perceptions, not possible in this heavily furnished apartment, this massive concrete city.

He collapsed into sobs again. 

Her love for him surged around her like a river to buoy him. She might not be as smart as he was, might never go to medical school, but she could serve the world by saving him, and in the process save herself. She said the first thing that came to her mind. Can you feel your feet? 

What? The word cracked across the line. 

She gripped the brown couch cushion and drew her feet up to sit yoga style. The cuticle of her pinky toe had all but swallowed the nail. She picked at it, drawing blood. 

Your feet. Can you feel them? Touching the ground, she said more quietly. 

Of course, I can feel my fucking feet. What kind of an idiot question is that? 

I just thought if you could ground yourself, it might help, she said.

 Don’t give me that new-age pablum! 

There it was again. His words hit her as his fists had that distant summer afternoon the last time their fight got physical. She had tried to walk away from it. He had walked behind her, punching her in the back. Finally, she had curled herself into a ball and his fists hailed down on her like ice. She made a mad dash for the house and called the police. When Walter got home and found the police in his driveway, he was furious with her. 

I was just trying to help, she said to Ovid, now. Shame washed through her. Why had she allowed herself to be lulled into a sense of false security by the flattery of him turning to her for help? She thought for a second that he might listen to her, might even admire her form of intelligence, so different from his and her mother’s. 

 I don’t know why I even bothered to call you, Ovid went on. You want to help? Come home and help me take care of the house.

A blowtorch of rage roared to life under her skin. Every time he felt the scales of power tipping in her direction, he slammed them back hard to his side, changing moods with a speed that gave her emotional whiplash. 

No one asked you to go home, she said. Dad can take care of the house himself.

He’s not strong enough, Fallon. You’ve got to face it. He’s getting old.

So? Sell the house.

Sell the house? Mom’s house? My God, you’re cold.

It’s just a thing. An excuse to avoid getting a job. The words were out before she could think better of them. 

"Oh, like you? Big time, successful waitress? Yeah. Wish I was more like you."

She’s not coming back, you know, she shouted.

How the fuck do you know? You never understood her. You don’t know what happened.

Nobody knows, but I’m not wasting my life trying to find an answer or waiting for her to return.

They shouted at each other for more than an hour, going around in circles, repeating the same things, arguing about what they had or had not said, unable to hang up or resolve anything. He launched into his usual litany of criticisms and she fought back as best she could. When she finally hung up, she had a full-blown migraine. Each beat of her heart sent knives into her eyes and the crown of her head. The MCAT study guide on the floor tore when she tripped over it on her way back to bed.

2

No Object is Solid

The next day, she spun and shapeshifted over the black-and-white tiled floors during the lunch hour rush at the North Star Pub. Commercial air conditioning blasted away the heat of summer, and her mind cut a path as sharp as glass. She remembered all her orders, even the incidentals. The shine off the thickly varnished bar expunged the taint of yesterday’s argument with Ovid. The room bustled with customers, and her ten tables were full. When she folded herself up like an umbrella to squeeze between people and unfurled to deliver ketchup or salt, nothing could touch her, not Ovid’s insults, not society’s dictates, not even her own expectations. She was a thing in motion, a thing that couldn’t be pinned down, a thing that could size people up in a split second and deliver whatever they so desired without the exchange of even one word. It was almost fun.

For you, I’d recommend the Stilton cheese platter with Branston Pickle, she’d say, or, Try the kidney pie. It’s not really made with kidneys, and it comes with gravy that is out of this world. She enjoyed their cries of delight when she turned out to be right. She knew intuitively which rude customer needed to be mollified, and which ones actually wanted to be abused in return. She swept the tips into her apron pocket without looking at them so that the amount didn’t spoil her mood. Spinning, she was momentarily free, momentarily happy. 

During a lull, two younger dark-skinned men who accompanied an elderly white man ordered Sambuca, not your usual drink for an Irish pub. The younger men lit the Sambuca for their elder and he warmed his pale hands over the blue flame. When she delivered their check, the old man said, We loved watching you. You’re so graceful. We couldn’t decide if you were a man or a woman. First, we thought, he’s just a feminine man. But you’d spin around, and we’d think, no, she’s a masculine woman. Beautiful. 

Warmth infused her, and inexplicably, she wanted to cry. She thanked them and twirled away.

It was a good day until she waited on the stockbrokers. Most of them were regulars. They usually took a table and kept it for hours. They ordered so many drinks she was amazed they could walk back to work, and yet they did. It gave her a new understanding of the stock market. People’s fortunes were made and lost on their gin-and-beer-soaked whims.

When one of the brokers grabbed her hands, she became acutely conscious that her hands smelled sour from the rag she mopped tabletops with.

Smile, he said with his perfect white teeth and coiffed hair. 

Her mood darkened like a thunderclap. She wanted to laugh, spray acid, and disappear all at the same time. She wasn’t paid to smile. She was paid to serve, and serve she did. She looked away, hoping the poison had not yet risen to her eyes. Now shame suffused her. Why was she so angry at a man who was only trying to be nice? Why did she hate this Wall Street broker? 

Because he was rich. Because he made loads of money shifting money around, creating nothing, and he was valued for it by society in a way she never would be, because she was his servant, and he therefore felt entitled to take her hands and command her expressions. 

She smiled at him anyway, let her hands go limp so that he dropped them, and twirled away. Now a giraffe from the Central Park Zoo, she stretched her body long so that she could hold her tray above the crowd and squeeze through without spilling. Back at her service station, she wondered how much longer she could stand living in this crowded city and working this useless job. Ovid’s words reverberated, "Oh, like you? Big time, successful waitress?" 

She knew she could be so much more, that somewhere inside resided the kind strength that caused her to leap at the chance to attend the boarding school Ovid had refused eighteen months after they returned from Chile. Walter insisted that Ovid needed boarding school where she didn’t , but he couldn’t be forced to go, and the deposit had been paid. She left home without a backward glance. No matter how crazy and depressed she got, her body’s decision propelled her all the way through college graduation.

There was a switch inside that made her adventurous, driven, and functional at times but she didn’t know where it was or how to turn it on or off.

Whew! Will, the head bartender, said in the resounding silence after the lunch rush was over, pursing his lips and making an exaggerated gesture of wiping his brow. The prissy look was so comical in contrast to his bushy beard and broad frame that it teased a smile from her in spite of herself. 

There’s the smile that makes it all okay, he said.

She made a face.

What’s wrong, beautiful? Will asked.

Nothing.

Will was the kind of man most people felt immediately comfortable with, a man who still wore a beard, a ponytail, and sandals, but who laughed at hippie jokes. He was ruggedly handsome, having spent a lifetime outdoors. Indoors, he was a wizard at organizing and strategizing. With his burly build and his knack for storytelling, he was often the center of a crowd of laughing men at the bar, but that didn’t prevent him from noticing when a customer left his food to visit the bathroom, so he’d cover it with a plate to keep it warm. That’s what drew Fallon to him. 

You hungry? she asked. 

Starved. 

I saved you a meat pie someone forgot they ordered. 

My favorite, he said.

I know. 

When Will ducked behind the bar to eat, and she stacked empty plates left over from the rush, the angst from yesterday’s fight with Ovid surrounded her like a mist. Ovid seemed to be going off the rails in a way he never had before. He’d always had bouts of depression that left him catatonic on the couch for weeks. He talked on occasion about ending it all, but he never hallucinated. What was going on? Had he gotten a batch of doctored pot? Was he on medication gone awry?

As always, when he’d expounded on all her intellectual and moral failings, her first reaction was to fight back, but when anger’s tide receded, it uncovered her own mirroring disgust with herself. Guilt about her selfishness tugged her. Maybe Ovid and Walter really needed her. Ovid was convinced that if only she would return and obey his every command, he could make the long defunct family farm generate some kind of income. She thought his ideas ludicrous, but if she was serious about helping him, shouldn’t she go home? 

A stubborn, wordless part of herself refused.

Sometimes she wished she could tear a hole in the fabric of the universe, step through, and disappear like her mother had. She didn’t want to die, exactly. She just wanted to stop for a while.

No object is solid, her mother told her one night during that fateful year in Chile. Eustacia Kazan was uncharacteristically tucking Fallon into her bed, which scraped against the red tile floor whenever she jiggled. Fallon lay under the blue wool coverlet absorbing the attention her mother usually reserved for Ovid, noticing how her mother’s face shone, still beautiful at the age of fifty, with a small brown mole at the exact center of the lower lash line of her right eye. She couldn’t remember her mother’s physical voice. Instead, she remembered her mother’s words as thoughts pressing through a veil straight into her mind.

There are those, Eustacia had said, who, if they look hard enough, can see the seething atoms, the electrons spinning around the nucleus, and all the space in between, more space than substance. More space than substance! She gave Fallon a little shake. The only reason objects feel solid is because the negative and positive charges of the electrons push off the electrons of neighboring atoms. She demonstrated with her hands squeezing emptiness between her palms, and they repel each other the way a magnet repels another magnet. This tension, like the skin of water holding up a paperclip, is what prevents us from falling through. 

So, if you can see the atoms spinning, all you have to do is figure out how to change the charge of the electrons to part them. You could pass through walls. Her mother sighed and looked at the ceiling, momentarily deflated. But perhaps this would require the genius of God. Fallon waited. Eustacia lit up, pointing to herself. Then again, I am a molecule of God, so it could be done. You have to be very smart, Fallon, very, very smart, like Ovid. Or like Eustacia, Fallon thought. And there is something about this country. I'm sure it will teach me finally how to command quarks and leptons.

Fallon felt closer to her mother that year in Chile than she had ever felt in her life. Eustacia’s eyes glittered brighter than usual that night, and the skin of her face was taut, as if the bones were trying to surface and dance for sheer joy at the idea of unravelling the molecular code of the universe and commanding the fabric of the physical. Eustacia wasn’t actually looking at Fallon. Instead, she was looking at the pillow beside Fallon's head as if the pillow’s atoms were, indeed, spinning, but it was close enough for Fallon to feel special. It’s a cipher, you see. Do you know what cipher means? It means both code and zero. Isn’t that fascinating? When she spoke, Fallon could almost feel the atoms spin inside her own head, feel both their complexity and their space. It terrified and exhilarated her. She wanted so much to be worthy of her mother’s love and admiration as only Ovid was. 

Wasn’t her shapeshifting some version of what her mother had talked about? Hadn’t the old man and his two dark-skinned lovers testified to her doing just that? If her mother parted the curtain and returned, would she recognize how much she was her mother’s daughter and applaud? She felt like she needed her mother’s blessing to go on, like she had been on auto pilot since her mother’s death – or whatever it was. But the autopilot light had gone out. She was grinding to a halt -- or rather, the stakes of adulthood demanded more than mere survival. The canyon of the unseen had to be negotiated, and she didn’t have a clue where to start. It hurt her head to think about it.

Her last table flagged her and signaled another round of drinks. She spun around and faced Will, who was rinsing glasses and scooping ice. 

What do you need? he asked. He still had crumbs from the meat pie in his beard.

She tapped the corner of her mouth to alert him.

I was saving those for later, but if you insist, he said, wiping them away. She smiled again.

"A gin martini, straight