Ulysses on Fire

         It was hard to say when the drums had first started, or why, but they’d been beating steadily for almost two weeks when he opened his eyes, sat up in bed, and watched the shadows play in strange shapes on the far wall. Sweat beaded his forehead and ran down his temple, skirted the delicate bones of his throat, matted coarse, black chest hairs and curved along his breastbone to his navel where it gathered, cooling on his stomach. The old ceiling fan hadn’t worked for years, now, and the hot, humid air was thick enough to catch in his throat. Sometimes he would dream of drowning, and of roiling, wine-dark water, and salty, churning surf. Sometimes he would wake screaming; more than often, now, he didn’t.
         “Bad dreams, again?” Her voice raised the hairs along the back of his neck – he felt her shift in the dim darkness, roll over, press her hip against his, and glancing down he realized her eyes were open and that she was watching him. He felt something clench painfully in his chest at the sight of her: the way the blanket fell away just beneath the curve of her slightly uneven breasts, the way her spine knuckled out just far enough from her back, little knobby bumps from her neck to her buttocks, to throw the rest of her skin into shadow there, the twist of hair lying across one ear as she, with her head turned, watched him with those dark green eyes, unsmiling.
         “Yeah,” he didn’t elaborate, but then she didn’t ask – he knew it wasn’t because she didn’t care, because she did, but because she couldn’t do anything for him to stop the feeling, that feeling, that he didn’t belong here. However much she loved him, she’d numbed herself to his night terrors; she rolled over, something pained to those beautiful green eyes, and he watched her drift back off to sleep. It was only then that he pushed out of bed, the night air sticking to his naked skin, and padded barefoot out of the room.
         It was a small house – one bedroom, a bathroom, tiny kitchen and a cramped, cluttered living room – but it always seemed bigger in the night than in the day: corners lost their harsh angularity and became ambiguous, rounded off indistinctly in shadow. The carpet beneath his feet was scratchy-soft and without colour; the hallway was a stunted, gray-walled tunnel. In the living room, the TV blinked over and over without sound, playing Food Network in loops. It was exactly as he had left it before going to bed four hours ago, but everything was strange now in the night. He didn’t live here. He couldn’t live here. He couldn’t have ever lived here in this tiny little house on a tired little street with a darkly green-eyed woman asleep, warm, in the room behind him, strange to him, but achingly – certainly – his.
         “Shit,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, caught at the back of his throat, and moved over to where his jeans had been draped, neatly, over the back of an old, thread-bare recliner. He fished through one pocket, felt his fingers slip on the cool metal jacket of the lighter, turned the pocket inside out pulling it free, then snagged a crumpled, half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray on the coffee table before the dim-lit television screen. He collapsed, still naked, on the couch and felt the cool, faux leather cushions grab at his back and thighs, molding around his skin. The edge of his thumbnail razored between the lid of the lighter and its base – one of those old sorts you flipped open to light, and flipped shut to extinguish. It was heavy, that sort of heaviness that signified worth.
         Flick. Shut. Flick. Shut.
         Flick.
         The flame was brighter than everything else around it, and flickered in the humid room. It licked the top of his hand when he held his palm, just out of reach, over it and it shuddered when he drew his hand away again. The little flame seemed to suck in everything around it until it was all his eyes could bear to look at: just that little, bright, searing burn on his retinas in the darkness of the living room, with the hot air pushing at him, crowding him from all sides, and with the cool cushions of the couch a balm to his sweaty skin.
         Shut.
         Sometimes he felt like he was someone else.
         “Shit,” he whispered again, to the darkness, and the rumpled tip of the cigarette glowed as he sucked in, and sputtered blue smoke as he exhaled, slowly. Somewhere, drums were beating. Eventually, he thought, they would have to stop. In the mean time he could wait.
         Flick.

         When he was little he’d go to his aunt’s house “up north” for Thanksgiving almost every year. One year there was no snow, but the ground was still hard and frozen and the dirt was icy, and the grass was yellow-dead and brittle. He played Cowboys and Indians with his older cousin while the adults gossiped and he was always the Indian, hiding in the bushes and behind trash cans, warming his hands between his legs while his cousin called out “I’m gonna get you, you dirty scalpin’ red!” He was a good Indian, too. He could scream like nobody else, pow-wowing his hand over his perfect O of a mouth until it hurt, and ran like lightning skipped across the ocean, leaping logs and ruts and stumps in the backyard.
         He’d started crying once, though, while they played, and had sat down in the cold dirt and started bawling his eyes out. His cousin had turned and looked back, puzzled, then loped over. His cousin had been all elbows and knees, tall and lanky, and looked nothing then like the man he would one day grow into.
         “You hurt or something?”
         No, he had said. He wasn’t.
         “So why are you crying? I ain’t done nothing.”
         It was hard to explain then to his cousin just what it was he had felt that cool November day, sitting in the dirt, but he had tried and he’d failed. I’m dead. He had said, sniffling and hugging his knees. I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead.
         “No you ain’t.”
         He remembered the look his cousin had given him. It was the same look they’d given his father just before he left, before his mother went quiet and pale and shaky, thinking about it, and it was the same look that in later years he’d see sometimes in those quiet, dark green eyes when he woke up, thrashing. That look hadn’t stopped him, though.
         I am dead. He had tried to explain, those tears running again, his nose dripping, unable to help but feel suddenly, incredibly depressed – as young as he was notwithstanding: I am dead. I’m the Indian and the Indian is dead.
         “We don’t always kill the Indian. Sometimes he scalps us.”
         But the Indian is dead. He had continued, adamant. There aren’t any Cowboys or Indians anymore. They’re all dead. All the Indians that ever lived are dead. And when his cousin had pointed out, smirking and dismissing it all as kid’s stuff offhand, that there were Indians still around, living ones, that worked in casinos and drank themselves to death, he’d corrected himself fiercely, feeling that weight on his shoulders settling, settling. No real Indians, anymore. They all died out like the dinosaurs. And the cowboys. And one day they’re gonna be playing games like Matthew and John, and they’ll be pretending to be us, and chase each other around, and we’ll be dead, too. His cousin had looked at him. His voice, always wheedling, had dropped to a soft, conspiratorial whisper:
         “I’m gonna tell Aunt Linda you’re nuts.”
         He had stopped crying then, his face burning hot at the remark, had made his cousin promise not to tell – all he could see was his mother standing quietly by the fireplace, her shoulders heaving, as they took his father away – but ever since, Matthew had had the distinct feeling that he wasn’t himself all the time. Sometimes he thought he was an Indian.
         Shut.

         She hated it when he smoked in the house. It had never stopped him, and never would, but watching that blue-gray smoke curl up in lazy drifts he couldn’t help but feel sorry. She deserved better than him: sprawled out naked, afraid, smoking in the dark while Rachel Ray talked about, he presumed, the quickest way to roast a duck. Her hands moved in wide, exuberant arcs – her eyes widened, her shoulders hunched; she leaned forwards against the table, and then back again, baring perfectly white, straight teeth. With the sound off, he imagined that her laugh was manic, and fierce.
         His thoughts wandered.
         The lighter was cool in his palm. He curled his fingers about it, save for the thumb, and shifted, leather sucking in protest as he pushed to his feet, peeling away from his back like old skin sloughing off. Straightening, he stood, punch-drunk and with his shoulders squared, and glanced about the room, thought a moment. He could hear the drums, beating like blood in his ears, flooding his head with sound and purpose – he was halfway into his blue jeans before he realized he had started to dress, and paused a moment, ashamed at having been so easily manipulated. Fucking drums.
         “You going out?” She stood in the doorway of their bedroom, watching him from that end of the short hallway. He hadn’t noticed her until she spoke; she might as well have been the placid calm of a pond somewhere up in Canada, where reflected in the waters were wolves and bears, shambling along, and where crisp snowdrifts blanketed pine cones and shabby green needles. But, turning his head, he noticed her, and that she wore one of his old shirts, the one with the words TUNE UP TIME? printed across the front in big, bold blackface.
         “Yeah,” he murmured, privately acknowledging that watching her watch him made him sheepish. He fumbled with the zipper of his jeans, added, “Gonna head into work early I think.”
         “Oh.”
         He watched her eyes do that subtle tick, the one where she glanced over all of him at once, and felt that clutch in his chest again when her green eyes met his. There was nothing to indicate she was upset, nothing at all, nothing but her words – her face was cool, her eyes shadowed, and she wore that funny half-smirk she was wont to. He didn’t think she meant it, though. He could almost taste what was coming. The lump forming in his throat tasted like salt, which had always been and would always be synonymous with ‘sad.’
         “You don’t have a job.”
         “Oh,” he said it exactly as he imagined it might have been written – very small, very quiet, and very humble. It made perfect sense, after all. In the background, Rachel Ray brayed through the fuzz-soft static of white noise. The ache in his chest was tighter. He finished buttoning up his pants, because it seemed like the thing to do at the time, and considered the floor afterwards, his bare feet – stubby, pink toes in the carpet like pigs hunting truffles somewhere in a dark, primeval wood. “I think,” his eyes skirted her face an instant, then his toes again, “I’m gonna go out, then. I need some fresh air.”
         She said nothing. She turned, her eyes as unreadable as ever, and shed his shirt as she disappeared into the darkness of their bedroom. She left the door open. Like the tail of a comet, his thoughts chasing after bigger things, he wondered for an instant if that wasn’t the only way she knew how to beg, how to ask him to stay. But then the drums were in his head again, pounding against his temples, and he turned.
         Barefoot and bare-chested, he unlocked the front door, opened it, and ducked out onto the street.
         He didn’t bother closing it.
         The street was quiet save for the gentle, lulling chirp of crickets, and the steady, low hum of street-lights thrumming like bug-lanterns. Occasionally, like their bug-zapping brethren, they too would snap and flicker, blinking off and on again in rapid fire succession. Walking past them, his bare feet rasping on the rough pavement – still warm from the day before, when the sun had beat down mercilessly – he was reminded of gun fire at each flicker-flash: alone in the dark somewhere on an alien world, crouching in the warm dirt of a woodland marsh, watching the horizon light up as a machine gun rattled off in the distance. He was as much there, watching the sky brighten in uncertain intervals with red flares and white-hot tracers, as he was on the quiet street.
         As he passed beneath a street light, outlined a moment in that yellowy halo, his bare feet scuffing cement, the bright flickered -
         flick
         
         And the man standing beside him died.
          “Get down, get down, gettafuckdown!”
         He was the first to hit the dirt, cheek pressed into the mud – the taste of it on his tongue and gritted between his teeth and in his eyes and nose. The others followed him like dominoes. Elbows, knees, arms and legs all jabbed into his side and back – bent strangely, stinking of fear, while above the mud red-hot and jagged metal streaked, looking for soft things to mangle.
         It was always the same. On the ground, like this, he would close his eyes and pretend he was somewhere, and someone, else. Sometimes he was an Indian, crouching in the mud and brush, watching through the striped green trees a deer wallow past. She would stir the shallows of the pool with her delicate nose, not quite drinking, and he knew she was waiting for him. Her ears would slash back when he obliged her – shifting his weight off the balls of his feet, the soft, airy soft, rustle of leaves – and he would watch her flanks go tennis racket tight, bunched, coiled, ready to spring. Always the same fantasy, he would rise – the motion fluid, but delayed, as if he were watching everything second-hand, something lost in the signal static. The sun would glint in through a gap in the canopy, reflect painfully off the water. He would not squint, but faced the glare.
         The wind in the trees, the smell of her, the cry of a bird far above, circling –
         “You dead, Matt?”
         He lifted his head, startled, then immediately ducked, pressing back into the mud as close as he ever had any girl. Someone snickered; at that, he raised his head again – cautiously – and glanced up.
         A drop of mud hit him smack in the face.
         It had fallen from the ratty, gray sleeve of the man standing before him. The man was not tall but still had that unhealthy lankiness to him tall folk sometimes got; he was holding his arm out, expectantly, and mud kept drip-dripping off the sleeve. Punctuating each fall, the words: You. Dead. Yet?
         “Nah, m’alright.” Using that ratty, gray-sleeved man’s arm as leverage, he pulled to his feet and stood there shakily, glancing about again. The land was torn and dead, but at least it was quiet now. A few ballsy men barked off in the distance, iron glinting on their collars, while others milled about like cattle – or sheep – and scattered uneasily at every far off burst of light or sound. On occasion, the distant jump of gun fire, or a tree exploding, caused him to turn his head – not towards the sound but away from it, and to squint his eyes shut, terror rationalizing what he could not: if I don’t look at it, it can’t hurt me. This was as fundamental a truth as any other.
         The lanky man had not left. He squinted, pursed his lips, and hrrumed ominously.
         “Yeah, you sure?”
         “Yeah,” he shrugged lamely, realized his eyes were shut again, and opened them. The lanky man was watching him still. The lanky man’s eyes were brilliantly dark green, but inexpressive, and for a moment he felt something like fear seize in his balls. They crawled up into his throat. “Something isn’t right.” He hadn’t meant to speak those words aloud but must have, for the lanky man cocked his head and his beautiful green eyes narrowed a bit.
         The lanky man scowled.
         “Don’t get me started.”
         “No, I mean – I’m not really here.”
         That drew a laugh, sharp and mocking.
         “Shit. Laying it on a bit thick, ain’t you?”
         He had shrugged defensively in return, thinking, laying what on a bit thick? and watched the ratty man turn, watched him saunter off, and frowned. Spindly trees stretched for miles, shattered and broken, leaning in on one another or against nothing but the wind. Dead men bloated like sausages, tangled in spools of barbed wire, and what looked like a massive camera flash lit up the horizon for a moment, one big, fabulous ‘wish you were here!’ Ramshackle buildings rose up out of mud, or parts of those buildings did, behind him. Men lounged in shady spots, smoking, or like lizards in the sun. Some were dying more quickly than others, like it was a game they were dead-set on winning, while the rest laughed, their faces hollow, and dealt from decks of shabby, corner-fold cards.
         “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
         A branch nearby snapped.
         He flinched, shut his eyes.
         
         He wasn’t always an Indian. He had spent most of university, for instance, as himself – save for a few uneasy moments in the dark of a stifling dorm room, watching flies on the far wall, thinking of oceans and mud and of the sickly sweet stink of rotting oranges. But for the majority of his time there he had been brown-haired and dark-eyed, and had been fairly good-looking in that unapproachable sort of way: his face always sort of slack, his eyes always a bit too focused, his tanned shoulders screw-ball tight. He’d been normal – an average student, uninspiring, quiet, withdrawn. People assumed he thought more than he did.
         He didn’t.
         His room mate had been all that kept him from flunking out of college, not because his grades weren’t enough, because they were tolerable, but because his room mate had had an old drum – the sort you found in pit orchestras, the ones that made that deep, resounding thrum, the sort that echoed, rattling around in your bones a bit – and had beat it steadily every night, his greasy hair flying, his lank face leering at things he couldn’t see, the entire building vibrating in time to that thrum-thrum-thrum until the RA had charged in, all rules and regulations, and made him stop.
         “Mattie-boy,” he had said after a particularly bad night, the RA’s fist bruising blue beneath an eye, “Boy-o. Buck. See – See society, it’s all, everything, it’s a symptom of – we’re all sick. Look at the government. Look at this university. My rights are being stifled here. I’m being stifled.” He had flashed a yellowy grin, one canine chipped, and flicked a fingernail against the drum’s tightly wound surface. It had hummed, softly. “But, Mattie, you gotta realize this isn’t all there is, either. There’s – innumerable, all of ‘em – these other worlds, parallel and stuff, but all at ninety degree angles – to ours, yeah? And in each one I’m a little different, like maybe I got one in on that bastard tonight somewhere, or maybe I was that bastard somewhere, or I didn’t have a drum, or it was a guitar. You know?
         “And maybe,” his room mate had continued, watching him carefully for the response that never came, “it isn’t just things but people, too. Like – I’m, in some world, if everything’s changed, maybe I’m a black guy. Or maybe I don’t even got balls, you know? Hell, maybe I’m a dyke. But then like, man, I was thinking. I was thinking if this was going on since things started, then maybe I’m some Legate back in Caesar’s legions, you know, or some wild-eyed Celt or Gaul or something. I mean, I could even be some Indian back in Custard’s day, stringing my bow, singing my hunting songs, like wolf-totem or bear-claw or something. And I could be the poor bastard himself, too. Custard, I mean. You figure?”
         “I don’t think it works like that.” His own words had been soft, whisper soft, and he’d felt suddenly sick to his stomach, and unable to have even told anyone why, just Indians and Indians and the quiet-steady-quiet-steady sound of the drum, even silent, still ringing in his ears.
         The cry of a bird far above his head, wafting above the canopy, and her head jerked up and her ears swiveled in alarm. Too late, he thought, you’re too late. The deer sprang forwards into the water with all the grace of a Russian ballerina, throwing up a flock of birds that had been roosting nearby, and their screeching filled the air – wings beating around his head and their orange-ringed, black eyes blinking in stupid, terrified trepidation. He ignored them. He felt his arms go taut, the muscles straining, flexed the bow backwards, felt the string kiss his cheek. He exhaled, slowly, his breath a foggy mist in a cloud of feathers, and let go.
         “What the hell do you know, anyway?”
         His room mate rolled over, facing the wall, and that was that.
         
         The street light was fogged over on the inside when it flickered back on, with dewy droplets of rainwater clinging to its plastic cover, and puddles gathered alongside the road, washing into gutters. The sounds of Katydids had intensified, like they do sometimes after a rainstorm, and they croaked into the thickets with gusto – she did she did she did.
         He was rain-damp and dribbles of water ran from his matted hair, down his neck, around his shoulders, and across his chest to his navel. His stomach lurching, feeling sick, he thought of the pictures he’d seen in the papers, of those ghastly corpses, bodies twisted – a headline reading: THREE DEAD IN HOUSEFIRE OFF THIRTY-SECOND, and of how hot rain and hot blood felt so much the same on clammy, bare skin.
         But then he thought of her green eyes and felt that clutch in his chest, turned around and started back down the raspy pavement. It wasn’t a long walk and each flicker of a street light, now, was just that – more proof of a city swirling down the drain. But at least it was quiet.
         The door was still open, just as he had left it.
         He reached back, scraping his muddy feet off on the carpet, she hated that – she did she did she did – and grasped the door handle, pulled it
         shut

         “…your eyes,” she finished, her voice soft but stern and entirely serious.
He blinked furiously against the scratchy blindfold, running ragged about the ends, and saw through frayed, thread-bare cloth the outline of her as she reached over, lifting her arms, to untie the knot at the back of his head. He could feel the inside of her elbows against either of his temples, and could almost taste her perfume despite the overlying sun-cooked smell of her skin. He loved that, the smell of her.
         “Okay.”
          “They’re shut?”
         “Nah.”
         She elbowed his side, laughed indignantly when he made a wild grab for her, and twisted away – he saw her shadow against the blindfold, drifting backwards, and had felt that clutch in his chest for the first time: not laughter, not love.
         “You’re gonna leave one day.” He murmured, trying to follow her with his eyes, without his eyes. “You won’t even mean to, but you’ll wake up with your bags packed and you’ll start walking, and you won’t know why. And you’ll go back home and you’ll tell them I’m everything my father was.”
         She’d been quiet, and he’d felt those green eyes sizing him up – blindfolded, half-naked, one shoe kicked off and the other already sockless – and he’d heard her quiet sigh, felt the bed shift as she rose, heard the steady-quiet-steady-quiet pad of her feet on the floorboards as she took to pacing. It was hardly even sound at all. It was a quality to the air.
         “And what’s that, Matt?”
         He hadn’t said anything at first. He had reached back and, one finger moving at a time, had picked apart the knot behind his head. He had grasped the corners of the blindfold in either hand, caught delicately between his thumb and forefinger, and had inhaled slowly – felt the fabric pull in tight against his mouth, a wash of warmth.
         “I think,” he began, blinded as he drew the blindfold back – all searing yellow light, and her shape blocking out the source, “a time traveler.”
         He flicked the blindfold to the side, wondering if she’d catch it.
         She didn’t.
         
         She was asleep when he stepped into the bedroom, the blankets drawn up to her chin, and he could see on the sheets those damp, ugly blotches that meant she’d been crying again, hard, waiting for him to come back. She didn’t move when he crawled into bed, still rain-damp, and she was utterly still – as still as, he thought, one of those white-tailed deer, tense, an instant of immobility before the leap – when he reached over to drape an arm across her hip.
         But then she pressed back into him, her body cool in the sticky heat, and he listened to her choke on the words:
         “I worry about you sometimes.”
         He said nothing.
         He shut his eyes and watched an arrow streak off into the woods.