The Phoenix Compound
September 31
The world ended at high noon today. It exploded not with a bang but a with whimper, not with a whimper but with a flash of crimson that momentarily blinded the sun and left invisible scorch marks across the surface of my eyes. Even through the veil, it burned. The light itself made no sound, apart from the hiss of panicked energy, but sound surrounded it. A hollow popping of bone, seconds before the explosion. Seconds after, a woman's scream.
Scott's bones. Jean's scream.
And that is how their love ceased to be blind, how the eyes were torn open. It is like a scene from a nightmare: everything is garish, stretched out of proportion and distorted beyond belief. Even the colors are twisted; all I remember is white and red and black. White turning red....she was taken. Red turning black....he was left in the dirt, bleeding.
I am gray; it is not my nightmare. All the colors belong to him. I cry for them both, but not in tears. In hot, liquid, silence.
/Silence like his white-lipped calm when I popped his shoulder back into its socket. My hands were on his muscles; I felt the spasm. The sudden pain. But I don't think it was enough for him. I think he wanted it to be worse. He craved the permission to scream./
William sleeps in the corner, in his tiny crib. The bed beside him is empty-- the mother is gone, and the father pushes his rage into the floor. Muscles in his back and shoulders quiver with each push-up. His body shifts to the right, punishing the weak shoulder, the Judas limb. The center of his visor glows a cold, dark red: the color of jewels. The color of stone. This much is revealed to me by the faded yellow lamplight. There are no stars tonight, no moon to soften the darkness.
I lie flat on my mattress, cocooned in my blanket so that no skin shows but my face, and I listen to a dead man talk. His teeth grind out each word like old coffee grains.
"Will the veiled sister pray for the children at the gate...."
The taste of his bitterness sours my mouth: sour meat, molded bread. His hate, his desperation seeps through the air like kerosene in the rain. I watch his body move up, down, up, down, and then we both close our eyes (or so I like to think) and, at length, allow our minds to replay the truth.
//Bones pop and the sky bleeds red. Scott roars but Jean screams.
"He cheats!" A bellow toward the Elder's platform. "The X-man used his power. He thinks he is better than the rules!"
"He's lying!" Scott's voice, but not so much in words as in short gasps distorted around sound. "He tore my visor away to throw the match."
"Ha! He lies to save his honor, but mine is secure! Why would I throw the match after I've broken his arm?"
Broken! I have to look up. Let them cane me.
Two men stand in the center of the square, streaked with dirt and sweat and blood. More sweat than dirt. Less sweat than blood.//
"Who will not go away and cannot pray..."
I shadow the words behind him. They are the words of Eliot, the author of hollow men and other disillusions. Scott never liked his poetry.
//One of the men is tall, a thick and gnarled dead oak, ugly with brute hate. His name is Levi. The only son of the Elder, and owner of four women. They all come to dinner with bruises, cuts, and sometimes even long, thin burns. Other nights they don't come at all.
This man holds a visor in his outstretched hand.
The man beside him is smaller, leaner, but hard enough to stay on his feet despite the fact that his right arm dangles uselessly at his side. His eyelids press into small lines of flesh, a mandatory blindness. It is the first time I have seen his eyelids. The shock is almost the same as if I had seen him naked. I wonder, briefly, if he thinks the same thing about my hands.
"My honor means nothing. I fight only for the honor of my woman."
Only I catch that he almost said "my wife."
"He defies the rules!"
"I obey them!"
The Elder raises his hand.
"The rules must stand. Voluntary use of a mutation in combat is strictly forbidden. Ownership of Bondmaid Jean passes to Levi until the next Challenge, or until the bond is extended by the creation of a child."
Scott curses, words that he used to tell Logan not to use, and stumbles forward in Levi's direction. But a blind man can't fight. Levi's kick catches him behind the knees. Another kick to the stomach, to the ribs. I wait for him to resist, but he does nothing.
He bites his lip and takes it all in. Stalling, I know, as long as he can.//
"O my people, what have I done unto thee?"
//"Levi.
Jean speaks, but not in a scream, this time, or a whisper, but with the cold flat calm of moonlight over a frozen lake. She moves, ice within the heat, rising to her feet. Ms. Sophia moves to subdue her, but Jean freezes the woman in place with one flick of her icicle wrist. I am stunned as much as the crowd; the idea of a bondmaid displaying her mutation in public equates a vulgarity. An obscenity. I should not be surprised. See, the veil has tainted me after all.
Logan, forgive me.
She holds her other hand toward Levi. The carnation falls between her fingers to the dust, a damp and wilted pile of petals.
Her veil moves with her breath like a mist of snow moves with the wind. The melting, however, starts quickly enough. A thin layer of wetness covers her next words.
"Enough fighting. Come, claim your bond. I'm waiting."
Levi recites the formulas and kisses her. She winces, but I'm not sure why-- the kiss of a stranger or the last surge of emotion she feels from her husband as she releases Ms. Sophia and follows Levi out of the square.
She could have stopped it.
I could have.
Even Scott could have, if he wanted it bad enough.
So that leaves the question, which one of us is to blame? Or more correctly, which one of us is not?//
A baby's wail interrupts the darkness between Scott and me. Will is awake and screaming as if he just now realizes that his mother is not there. What is a baby's idea of a mother, anyway? Is it one concrete image, or many different impressions of soft flesh, kind eyes, lullabies in the dark? Which one of those things is he crying for? Or maybe none of those things. Babies cry, Jean said. They don't always need a reason. Sometimes I envy that. He is the only one of us allowed the privilege to scream just for the sake of screaming.
The baby cries, but Scott has gone deaf. The rhythm of his Exercise never so much as skips a beat.
I am not a mother. The idea of a child terrifies me: something small and innocent depending on my arms for security when my skin could drain it of life it hasn't even lived. My gloves might not be enough; accidents could happen. I don't know lullabies, or the secrets of quieting a fretting little boy. But there is no one else.
Without a word to Scott-- though I watch him out of the corner of my eye-- I cross the room to Will. If I wrap him in my blanket, he should be safe. He protests this with squirming limbs and a red face. I can't blame him; it is a hot night. After baited breath and a few narrowly averted catastrophes, he is bound into a neat bundle in my arms. Like an Indian baby. My little orphaned papoose.
He quiets within moments, the squalling paled to half-hearted whimpering that reminds me of the kitten I had when I was seven. I decide to take him with me to watch the desert, tonight. Maybe I Will tell him one of those nice fairy tales about princesses and peas Or pumpkin coaches and glass slippers. Or maybe we'll just sit in Silence with the wind in our faces and wait for the ones we love to come home.
I pause at the door, turning back one last time to Scott.
Up-down. Up-down.
Sweat in his hair, along his shoulders, dripping down behind his visor into his eyes. Lips moving frantically, reciting thin scraps of poetry he always claimed he hated.
He is kerosene in the rain. Cold. Flammable. Waiting for a match.
Two weeks pass, slow and dry like bones bleaching under the sun, Life does not end after all, not even for Scott, but instead it mutates to allow survival. I learn how to tell a baby's need by his cry, even though I don't always get it right. My clumsiness shows up in backwards Diapers and spilled formula. Scott never complains. Sometimes I wish he would say something or do something besides smile and thank me for my effort. My effort, as if his own child is no longer his responsibility.
Wait, that's not totally fair to him. He does the best he can to be a father and friend, but he moves and talks in a delayed shock. It reminds me of the numbness I felt between the moment Magneto hooked me up to his machine and the moment the real pain started. You're tensed, waiting for the eruption. But he learns how to keep it inside. How to bury his anger when his wife comes to dinner with bruises on her skin, when she can't meet his eyes. He learns when not to look.
The three of us learn to subvert the machine keeping them apart. I see her at different times during the day, and use the opportunity to pass messages between her and Scott. I memorize poetry from him and recite it to her as we wash clothes or tend the gardens. One afternoon, she gives me her wedding ring. I wear it around my neck with Logan's dog tags to make sure Levi never touches it. I give her his promise to win.
She smiles too brightly and thanks me. It is her way of crying.
Words and paper and rings are not the only things I smuggle. Other things change hands-- small packages of birth control pills, a finger-sized bottle of Valium capsules. The contraceptives were my idea, but she asked for the drug specifically. One pill prevents mistakes; the other allows her to stay sane. Scott helps me arrange the bribes for the pills, but he doesn't know about the sedatives. Jean swore me to silence. Even if I could tell him, I wouldn't; we all measure our sanity by the illusions we keep.
And all of us-- Jean, Scott, myself-- learn to survive the only way possible. One day at a time.
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