bones, sinking like stones,
all that we fought for
homes, places we've grown
all of us are done for.

we live in a beautiful world,
yeah we do, yeah we do,
we live in a beautiful world.

-- don't panic
coldplay

---

(prelude)

In these days, you (who are ice) wake up dreaming of water, and she's floating just beneath the surface. Yes, she's carried by the river, twisted through the black ribbon trees, inevitably away from you.

Before you can think to ask here where she is going, she is gone. All that remains is light. You have the urge to freeze it into hard, sharp points; to shatter it under your foot. You've assumed the habits of destruction quickly; everyone has. It's how you all live.

The worst days are when you remember everything in detail. The name of every shade of nail polish she wore to class (names like Hard Candy, Biohazard, Steel Ice) and the after-taste of her lip gloss (Icescream) on the rim of your coffee cup when you took her to that poetry joint, and the frayed edges to her favorite pair of jeans. Such normal, mudane, boring details. How you wasted them. You remembers what came next: the shape of every bruise on her face or her arms, the hunger circles underneath the eyes. Life in the mansion before, during, and after those last days, right down to the end of it all, which was not by any script you'd read. So you improvised. You have never been very good at improvisation.

On normal days, you remembers fragments, as if the past is a collection of Polaroid snapshots with notes in handwriting that you've never been able to read in the morning. On...other...days, you can only remember this:

She exists.

So there is still grace.

There are also certain hard evidences: a black and white photo of a girl in a shirt that says THOUGHTCRIMINAL reading a book (The Blind Assassin) underneath a chestnut tree. A piece of paper with three words scratched in chunky block letters. Property Of Iceman. She used a safety pin to attach it to her belt, before the tattoo made it permanent. You've got one to match, across your shoulderblade, dipping just under the collarbone where she likes to put her hand. Property of Clare.

(Not her real name, an alias, you call her that because in an old language it means brightness, and that's all she is. Light caught in skin. Hers is the ability to reach into the air and pull out white hot energy; an effect like radiation. On occasion she's been known to glow the dark. You used to tell her you could use her for a night light, study your Tolstoy notes by the light of her forearm.)

Everyone in the old gang who survived got a tattoo; it was Johnny's idea, a challenge issued three bottles of tequila into Logan's private stash: if you were going to wear your identity on your skin for the rest of your life, what would it be? Johnny ended up with a mushroom cloud on the back of his neck. Jubilee chose Oriental lettering, a smooth beautiful character with a tip like a dagger along her shoulder-- now you often wonders this was intentional-- and Kitty, being Kitty, stuck with the predictable rose on the ankle. Marie wanted a man's name coiled around the small her back: L-o-g-a-n. Logan reversed the idea, only he preferred to wear her on his ribcage, just below the heart; and even though he was technically too old to be one of them, they made allowances. And you have to admire the man's resolve: the skin on the tattoo never lasts longer than a week, but he reapplies it before the letters can totally fade away. Fifteen minutes alone with a hot needle and a broken inkpen does the trick.

Scott objected. Look at it this way, Johnny said, it'll make it easier to identify the bodies when the time comes.

Two days ago, the mushroom cloud surfaced on the bank of the river, bloated and waterlogged; of course by then it was too late. They asked you if it was suicide, and you said no. Fire would never die a water death, no matter how desperate it was. But you were lying to protect him, after all, you were hiding the note in the bottom of your shoe. (I am already drowned. I am going to finish the job.)

After they buried him under a mound of spare auto parts in a nearby junkyard (the closest thing to a graveyard that's in the safe zone), you forgot the rules for restraint. You froze an entire alley. She was the only one who'd come close, and you expected her to say how childish, how foolish, but she held up four flattened-out tin cans and four pieces of twine, and then asked if you wanted to go ice skating. It was her way of handling things, she embraced them head on, and this included you even when your temperatures dropped to absolute zero.

You could have kissed her, and later, you did. She cried and you turned it to crystal drops on her face so you could hold it in your hand.

Is this how we're going out, she says, in pieces? One suicide at a time? We've survived a war, we've survived the aftermath of war, are we just going to give up and die on the streets?

Insert the kiss. An easy way out of the truth, but maybe too easy.

Where are you now? The gang-- minus one-- lives in a three room flat above a bar called Prufrock's that's been known to serve hash in the coffee; that's why you stick to water. You're afraid to drink anything harder because you remember how many empty bottles you found under Johnny's bed. No sense taking that risk. You don't plan to stay here forever; you've got big plans to head west, out into the desert where you've heard there's work in the shanty towns. No one cares, by now, if you're human or mutant just as long as you've got all your teeth and can last the year without dropping dead from one of the many diseases left over from that useless war.

So tonight's just like all the rest. Clare comes in late, crashes on the hammock. She's been drinking the laced coffee again; sooner or later you'll have to get her to stop. You don't have the energy yet. You sit on the floor on your half of the bedroom, leaving your shirt undone at the collar to let in air. The room is stifling; it's July and the tar on the streets outside is melting and all you can think for the first few moments is (would they care if I froze over the building?)

Johnny would love this kind of heat. He was the kind of boy who set his room on fire just to feel the radiation. He once dared Clare to turn her power up to high frequency and then put her arm around his waist. It left a scar for a month.

You turn your head; she's there. Perched on the window sill beside you, in that oversized t-shirt she stole from your closet two summers ago. She's pasted her own letters onto the front. Politically Incorrect. Underneath, a four-eyed yellow smiley-face. No one can say she's lost her humor.

"Hey, Iceman, do you ever wonder why they say ignorance is bliss?"

(Her fingers rubbing circles on the back of your palm, glowing the faintest pearl-ivory-bonewhite in the darkness. You can smell the coffee and its drugs still strong on her breath and wonder who's really doing the talking.)

"Why?"

"Because whenever there is a moment happiness...I mean true, complete happiness...it is spoiled by the knowledge that something will inevitably spoil it. So that's why it's good to be stupid. Really, freakin' stupid."

"Reality hits everyone sooner or later. Even the ignorant."

"Yeah, but they just keep right one coming from day to day believing they can be happy, that they can have friends and lovers and not have it it all go up in smoke. Or rather, river water."

"Clare--" A warning, of course she doesn't listen.

"Do you know that you only kiss me when distaster strikes? A death, the end of the world, as if you need permission. An excuse. Look, Iceman, certain hot places don't have to freeze over for you to put your arms around me. But no, we're so freakin' scared to live."

"We live."

"Think back and tell me if you remember the last time we've spent a day together doing anything besides running or fighting or scrounging for supplies or burying the dead? Anything normal?"

You don't have an answer; you remember the other things, the blood and dust on skin and never sleeping through the night. Of hands and fingers and arms tangled around each other but always in desperation. Always in selfishness or fear or need.

Fire under the skin, Johnny, the only way to go.

"So what would you do?" You slide back to look at her, brush the hair from her face; the bangs are getting long again. "If you were ignorant?"

A grin like a bent clothes hanger.

"Dance."

"Dance?"

You'd forgotten. She dances, of course; you've always known her grace, her quickness, but ever since the war you've viewed this in terms of skill in combat. You feel bereft, as if an entire segment of her personality has washed out from under you.

"When I dance, I'm free, baby." She leans her head against the wall, staring into the street. "No one holds me back or stops me, there's just the music flowing through every part of me, and then the song starts, and then I fly. And if I was ignorant, and if I didn't care about any of this, that is what I would do."

A pause.

"What would you do?"

You close your eyes, tighten your hands on the window pane. A tiny hard needle of ice shoots into the wood.

"I would make it like it was."

Then neither of you speak.

(interlude)

Sometimes, you (who are ice) wake up still dreaming of rain, or perhaps it is glass. Yes, she's walking to you on a glass river, and every time her foot hits the surface, there is flash. Like radiation. Like stars. It lights up the face of the boy trapped under the surface of the river....the one who cannot get out...

You wake up to find the wall behind you is ice. Something has to give here, something needs to break. Someone needs to punch through the glass water and let the air back into the room. Ignorance and bliss, she said.

That works.

You cross the room, shake her out of her hammock.

"Get up," you tell her, "find your dress."

"Are you a Nazi or something, it's not even noon yet..."

"We're going out."

"Where?" She stumbles toward the bathroom, kicks the door halfway shut.

"Just get dressed. I'll be back in an hour."

"Where are you going?

"To get Logan to help me steal a truck."

"Get a good one this time." A yell over the shower, followed by a yelp when the water comes out ice cold (again.)

"Okay."

"Something blue. With a cd player..."

"Don't push it."

A sudden panic: she is in there, alone, with all that water. What if this is just a front, what if she's got a belt to hang from the fan or a razor blade or a another one of those notes that you'll find in the middle of the floor...

You force yourself to breathe.

(Pull yourself together man.)

The idea of reassembling fragments.

Ten hours later-- after the sticky heat of a three hour car ride, the contained chaos of the city streets, the cool revival of dusty skin in a hotel shower, and the waiting for dark to fall-- you step into the Black Hole. (Logan's recommendation, a no-questions kind of place, fifty dollars a head to get in but worth the admission, hands down, he takes Marie twice a month).

One hundred dollars is nothing; she's going to dance and she's going to do it in the best place you can give her, and this is it. You've heard Marie talking about it, how there is something that sucks in you and lets you forget.

That's all you're after. Ignorance. Stupidity. Bliss.

The darkness hits you first: thick, wet-black, then a white flare in front of you, magnesium next to a match. She's glowing in the dark again. The lights from the disco ball (also silver, but harder and cooler than she is, more liquid) rain onto her skin and she converts it back to steam. Your hand on her bare shoulder, just over the tattoo, is beginning to grow warm, and you register it as a sign of life. It makes you feel alive. It makes you want to dare her to turn up the power and kiss you so that you'll have a one month scar too, in the shape of her mouth.

"If you don't like it," you whisper, your lips close to her ear so she can hear you under the pulse of the music, "We can leave."

She turns around, another burst of the strobe lights freezes her as if in slow motion, her eyes inside yours, her jaw resting against the corner of your chin.

"Shhhh." Not so much a word as an exhalation. "Don't talk, Bobby, don't talk. Let's pretend that we know nothing. Dance with me. Just dance." "And what if my feet are too heavy? I'm ice, remember, it's brittle. It breaks easily."

"I'll make sure we don't misplace any pieces."

The ceiling rains stars and it soaks you to the bone as she pulls you onto the dance floor, a hunger in fingers as they wrap around your wrist. She has the habit of randomly searching for your pulse; she claims she can know how much life is left in a man just by the tempo of his blood.

You move closer to her, fingers hovering inches above the slope of her shoulders; she doesn't just move, she shimmers. A fingertip out of reach and then a kiss on the eyelids. Her eyes wide upon, sightless, staring up into the explosions of light.

When I dance, I'm free, she said. But she dances like she's afraid she can't remember the way.

Your arms move around her waist, capturing her so that her head rests on your chest as her arms wrap around your neck.

"Slow down. It's not going anywhere."

"Promise me."

You lean forward to press shadow kisses on the back of both her hands,then on the side of the jaw. "I promise."

Her arms tighten around you and you spin to meet the next wave of silver together. Minutes pass, or hours, but neither of you acknowledge time. There is only an invisible ocean, buoying you up, carrying you to some dim unrecognizable beauty. Always chasing the light on the other side of the dance floor, always one step ahead of the darkness.

Her eyes flash up at you again. In raptures.

No, she was never human, you decide. She is light.

Eventually you have to stop, have to breathe. You call a waiter, let her choose the drinks. Margaritas, she says. Make them sweet.

Here's to Johnny, she says, that boy could dance like a bonfire once he got his feet going.

I need another drink, you say. Something harder.

No you don't, this is what you need.

And she pulls you across the table and kisses you with a one month scar kiss, although you know she's not really using her power. The burning is all in your mind, and deeper, you can hear the ice cracking under the heat. Melting.

"I'll never let you go, you know that?" You whisper, putting the words against her mouth. Making them hers. "So don't you dare try to leave me some note telling me why you couldn't make it. I'll follow you. I'll hunt you down to the bottom of rivers. You know that."

"I know."

"I hate Johnny. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. He had no right..."

"Shhh, baby, I'm not Johnny. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not."

This the part when your head sinks to her lap and you begin to cry, not ice, but hot salty water. Melted glaciers.

(postlude)

When you close your eyes, now, you see it very clealy in your mind, but shining and pale as if underwater. Memory is never crystal, but rather broken glass.

You remember it as Before, During, After.

Before: the note left on the table, or rather, on the ashes of the table. The paper yellowed by flame, the ink seared brown. A tightness in your chest, an inability to breathe, and then she's in the door and her face is the color of old ice. Oh, God, Bobby....I'm sorry...

During: the yellow washcloth over your hand as she washes the cuts from where you punched through the mirror, the pink flash of her tongue as she wets the thread to pull through the needle that will sew you up again. (You do this again, she says, I'll burn your top layer of skin off. You idiot. You idiot. You try this again and I'll kill you myself.) A pause. (Do you want some aspirin?)

After: her arms around your waist in another city, a place where no one would know your names if you didn't have them burned into your skin. (If you could have another identity, Johnny says, what would it be? Pick a noun to wear on your skin for the rest of your life, but you don't want an identity. You want to be erased, you want to dissolve into her. Property of Clare. Property of light.) Her mouth on your face, the slight scorch marks. The traces of frostbite you left on her lips. Weeping. Weeping.

In the next morning you, (still made of ice), wake up still dreaming of water. She's swimming upstream, against the current, twisting through the black ribbons of undertow that try to pull her beneath the surface. Inevitably toward you.

You could freeze the river, make sure she doesn't drown, but she'd be trapped in the ice. You can only wait, watch, stand at the shore and hold the towel that she'll need when she's finished. Who knows, you may even kick off your shoes and jump in with her. A careless, ignorant gesture.

(But without such carelessness, how would we live?)

You smile.

How else, indeed.