Nothing is inflammable, p.16
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 16
“Don’t be ridiculous—remember what happened the last time.”
“That was weeks ago!”
“And you’re even jumpier now than you were then!”
“Only because you keep me locked up in here,” Ylena muttered under her breath. She stopped by the window, stared out.
Luca went to her and touched her arm but she snatched it away. “Locked up, bullshit. You’re free to go whenever you want, Ylena”.
“Fine. Then I will.”
She began to dress herself, pulling on her work boiler suit because it was still piled on the floor by the bed. Luca grabbed her wrist and she cried out in pain. Blood began to soak through the dressing.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, Ylena. I didn’t mean to . . . ”
She backed away from him, gripping her arm.
“I only want to help you. That’s all I ever wanted.”
“I’m going out,” Ylena said flatly. Slammed the door behind her.
The storms, like the skyscraper, would go on forever,—she knew that now.
Dark clouds choked the sky, unloading themselves in a heavy and constant stream of silvery rain. The air crackled with energy as she ran through the streets, just ran.
She kept her head down, quickening her pace as the sensation of somebody just behind her returned, a feeling of lurking intent, a weight. Her tears were lost amidst the rain.
Lightning flashed and she stopped suddenly as a figure was revealed ahead of her. The shape was described in flickering static, a TV ghost.
“Stop it . . . ”
She pressed at her head, turning and running off to her left and now wet footsteps chasing her, she screamed, legs burning with the exertion, stumbling into a dumpster that she recognized instantly. She looked up and saw the squat at the end of the block.
“Ylena . . . ”
She jumped, turned.
Nothing.
Running again, through the vicious rain falling like scalpel blades.
She pulled the key from the sole of her boots where she had kept it since moving in with Luca and unlocked the padlock on the fence. She jumped at the open window and felt something brush against her ankle as she pulled herself through as if something had tried to grab her. Then inside and the noise of the storm faded.
She lay on the floor for almost a minute, looking back up at the window and expecting to see someone climb through, before getting to her feet. She was soaked through, trailing water behind her as she made her way along the corridor.
The squat felt different this time, protective rather than threatening.
She climbed the stairs slowly, past the doors with the biohazard flowers and into the room beyond. Stopped and turned back.
The stenciled flowers were rough and had been scraped away in places, beneath them names etched into the woodwork.
YD+VN.
She traced the letters with her forefinger and it felt as if she were following a path she had taken many times before. There was familiarity there but nothing more. Her own breathing echoed in her ears.
She traced the letters over and over as if she were stroking a reluctant animal into trusting her, encouraging the marks to reveal themselves. Her hands began to shake, repeating the maneuver more frantically, again, again.
“Ylena.”
A crack of fierce lighting exploded outside, visible through the hall windows and she jumped.
A figure climbed the stairs and this time it didn’t shimmer, didn’t disappear.
“What are you doing here?” she asked it.
“I followed you. I knew you’d come back here.”
“Where else is there for me?”
“You know where,” the figure said.
“These initials . . . ” Ylena stroked them as she spoke. “I remember them.”
“They’re just initials.”
“My initials.”
“This is a squat—do you know how many people have been in here?”
“These are mine,” she insisted as the man climbed another few steps. “I remember knifing it into the door.”
“No you don’t. You think you remember. You want to remember. But the fall . . . ”
“Fuck the fall, Luca,” she snapped at the medic. “I remember.”
Luca hesitated at the top of the staircase, blocking it.
“Let me past.”
Luca held still, hands on balustrades on either side. “Please, Ylena, come back to my apartment. You’re not well enough for this yet. You need to calm down.”
“Let me past,” she repeated more insistently this time.
Luca didn’t move. “You’re still sick. Let me help you. You trust me don’t you?”
Another lightning strike cracked near the window, searing the rubble outside.
“Okay,” Ylena said, softening her stance, dropping her head. “Okay, I’ll come back with you.”
“Good. Good.”
As Luca reached to take her arm Ylena lashed out suddenly at him, striking him firmly across the temple with her elbow, knocking him backwards. He struggled for balance, grasping for the banister rail and just before he could grasp it Ylena struck him again, this time with one of her steel toe-capped work boots under his chin and he fell, fell, fell.
The thing was immense and skeletal, rising out of the spray of the rain, one hundred feet and more, jagged and painfully incomplete. She stared up at a length of girders towards the very top of it through the grimy window of the bus as they left the construction site. It looked like a finger, pointing.
The electrical storm had guided her once more, away from the squat and all the dregs of memories lingering there, untouched. Away from Luca and his bondage. Back to the start.
Static blurs had followed her all the way but she felt no threat from them anymore.
She climbed over the temporary fencing that had been erected around the building site, avoiding the places she knew the security guards would be patrolling and over to where Luca’s prefab treatment ward sat. It seemed to be sinking into the mud, its steel legs lost amongst grey murk. There were no lights on and the door was locked. She went around the side to the window she had once stared out of for hours at a time. The lock was still busted, just as she remembered it.
Pushed her way into the antiseptic prison.
Luca grunted as he got to his feet. His left leg sparkled with pain but it wasn’t broken.
Blood flowed from his forehead where Ylena had kicked him and he had to blink several times to clear his vision. He broke open the front door and chased her into the rain.
Across to Luca’s desk and the filing cabinets behind it.
The air was full of heavy crackling energy. Every hair on her body was standing on end.
The cabinets were locked but again from those wasted hours spent staring at nothing she knew the keys were in a secret drawer in the middle of the desk. She opened the cabinet drawer marked A-E.
Dudjekovic, Ylena.
YD+VN.
He sprinted up the access ramp that lead up towards the building site, glimpsing one of the night watchmen’s flashlights scanning an area to his left. Hauled himself over the boarding, landed in the soft, cold mud on the other side.
The folder was well-thumbed and had an odd scent to it. She opened it on the desk, flicked through the stack of medical notes and scan results. A photo of her wrist, flesh ribboned and bleeding. X-rays of her spine, arms and legs. Several of her naked torso as she lay unconscious on the gurney.
She scanned the handwritten pages, reading the list of her injuries, past them to the initial report on where she fell and how she was found.
She turned suddenly as she heard a noise behind her.
There was a light on in the medical suite as he approached it, his footsteps slopping in the mud. He reached for the door handle carefully and jerked his hand back as a small shock ran through him as if he had been bitten. Looked at his finger in the storm light and there was a puncture mark with blood leaking out of it so he pulled his sleeve down over his hand and tried the handle again.
Locked.
He took out his key and opened the door, ready to see Ylena charging towards him but instead glimpsing first his case notes scattered out on his desk and secondly her legs disappearing out through one of the rear windows.
“Wait!”
The sound of plastic sheeting flapping in the strong winds. The air tasting of iron shavings. The cold sting of the rain and the godlike rumble of the storm.
She used one of the temporary ladders to climb up onto the outer scaffolding that surrounded the lower few floors. She moved deftly, expertly.
Something blurred ahead of her as she ran towards another ladder and she slowed, her breath tumbling from her in blasts that were visible in the freezing air. The movement of a figure, static-distorted, flickering. Inside her chest, a warmth began to expand.
She walked slowly towards the figure and held out her hand. The figure took it.
Then climbing again, floor by floor, across gaping holes and pulling herself up poles and struts, through access tunnels and along safety ramps secured with nothing more than electrical tape.
This was how it was meant to be, Ylena realized, as she made the journey she had taken once already. Up and up and up. The feel of his hand around hers came and went as if reality couldn’t decide whether he was there or not. She did not look at his face because she knew there wasn’t really anything there—but she didn’t need to see it anyway.
She heard shouting as she hauled herself onto a platform that stuck out from the scaffolding, ignored it. He helped her up and there was warmth in that hand now.
Memories interlaced with each other and with the present like the lines on a TV screen, joining to finally bring into focus the images she had been unable to see clearly since the accident.
“Two more floors,” he said and so they climbed.
It had been raining that night too and Ylena wondered if that part was memory or reality or both or neither. How much was actually happening now? How deeply had she fallen into this replication?
The whole building seemed to shake as they reached the top floor. The sheeting that acted as a temporary roof had come partially loose in the angry winds, peeling away in one corner so that the planks that floored the area were soaked through.
His arms went around her as they stood at the edge, looking out over the city and its fractured silhouettes. Electricity crackled amongst the great shapes of the pylons, giving the impression of a battle between great gods taking place.
He squeezed her tight and she closed her eyes, wanting that feeling to go with her into whatever came next. That was how it had been. That was how it was.
The only thing that felt good amongst all the trash.
“Tighter,” she told him and he squeezed. Her breasts flattened, a sweet spike of pain shooting through her chest.
She was numb from the storm and more.
“I love you.”
The words, whispered into her ear as if the storm itself had spoken.
“I love you too,” she said.
And he began to fade, his arms, his warmth, fading again.
Ylena stayed calm however, for she knew where he had gone to.
She looked out over the edge of the skyscraper, down to the muddy ground far below. She could see his outline there, waiting for her.
She took one step forwards.
“NO!”
Luca, running towards her, stumbling across the unfinished flooring, almost falling through at one point. “Ylena, no!”
She ignored him, retaining her focus on the ground far below.
He grabbed her arm but she pulled it away, balance momentarily lost and she had to snatch at a scaffold pole to steady herself. It was only then that she realized how loud the wind was because she couldn’t hear herself when she said, “Leave me.”
“No. I won’t let you do this.”
“I have to.”
“You don’t!”
He looked ready to grab her again but seemed unsure of sending her over the edge. “I’m sorry, I should have told you. I know I should have but . . . ”
“We had said we would do it together. That was the pact.”
“I was only doing my job. I had to help you.”
“You didn’t help him,” she said flatly.
“There was nothing I could do! He was already dead when I found you both! When you awakened and couldn’t remember anything I delayed telling you because it thought it would be too much of a shock but then the more time that passed the more difficult it became to say anything. I wanted to tell you!”
“Bullshit. You didn’t say a thing because you wanted me to yourself and you knew that what he and I had you could never come close to.”
Luca said nothing, instead reaching into his pocket for something.
“Leave me alone, Luca. I have to be with him again.”
“I’m not leaving you,” he said.
A bolt of electricity lashed across the rooftop, stinging the air with hot energy.
In his hand, a small length of barbed wire.
And as she had stood on the very edge of the skyscraper, he had stood next to her and taken her hand. Their palms clutched together and he had begun to wind the wire around their wrists, binding them. This was what he had done and this was what Luca now did because that’s the way things were meant to happen.
“This is the wire you used,” Luca said, and then, “I don’t care if you don’t want me.”
The spikes of the wire pierced her dressing, then her skin, matching her existing wounds perfectly like a plug in a socket.
The wind buffeted them, pressing them towards the drop, urging them on.
Luca tugged on the wire, sinking it further into their flesh, binding them tighter, locking them together.
The air was fused with energy, sparkling with it.
One step each.
Now.
The ward wasn’t his but it was similar. If he was out of action the chances were that the on-site facility had shut down and he had been taken to one of the general hospitals in the city.
He was in a private room, the walls once white but now grey, the traction device that he was a part of gleaming in the glare of the strip lights. He studied the pins in his legs and arms as he had for several days already, these new little pieces of himself.
His neck was fixed in a brace that bit into his skin like an aggressive lover.
Vertebral fractures, spinal lesions, shattered tibias and fibulas, broken ribs, fractured jaw, more, more.
Broken heart.
He almost smiled.
When he closed his eyes he saw Ylena’s face blurring beside him as they fell, remembered the angry slicing of the barbed wire across his wrist. He remembered it all.
He listened to the electronic chatter of the machines that kept him alive and pain-free and thought none of this matters. He would sometimes seek out Ylena’s voice amongst it all although he had heard nothing so far.
She was there, however, between the grooves, inside it all. In the space between the raindrops, lingering. Waiting.
The doctors had given him three months to recover but he knew it would only take half that. Enough that he could stand and walk and climb. How many floors would have been added to the building by then? How far to fall?
All the way, was the answer.
All the way.
PRETTY
I pan out across the gathering before me, revealing around twenty people, a better turn-out than most of late I have been told. We’re in a scrap yard, dead automobiles walling us in between the crushing machines and splinters of metal. A stage has been constructed of aluminum sheets with bare light bulbs bolted to the sides, a strand of old wire connecting them and powering their weak yellow illumination. Music plays on a battered old CD player plugged into the lighter socket of one of the flatbed trucks parked to the side.
The girl I am here for, she thinks she has been here before, she forgets. Everything has begun to blur at the edges for her.
She stands awkwardly on the stage as if uncertain as to what she is supposed to do up there and the men watch her. Raoul, the man funding this job, barks for her to turn so she turns—awkwardly because of the heel of her left shoe that snapped a week or two back, repaired by hammering a six-inch nail through the sole thus leaving it free to spin around as she moved.
The men cheer, some of them moving around the stage to stare at her from different angles. “Dance,” Raoul tells her. She dances. I move around to the opposite side of the stage to stop one of the lights glaring behind her.
The temperature has dropped drastically since we arrived at the junkyard, the sky graying as if colors were being drained from the world and injected into the neon decorations the Splendor Collective had assembled.
XXX. Triple D’s Guaranteed. Come fuck your fantasy.
Torn from the strip joints and porn-barns they spent the rest of their time in.
Two of them, they move around the woman with black-market Sony digital cameras on their shoulders. I recognize some of them from jobs I’ve done in the past, rogues that have gone rogue, filling their time with either shitty exploitative gigs or big-time hardcore that most people couldn’t stomach. I listen to the whirr of their cameras, ten generations more advanced than mine, as they zoom in for close-ups on the woman’s hips, her breasts, her calves; her scars pixellating beneath their gaze.
The other contestants stand behind the men or lie in the back of the trucks. I’d assembled my collage shots of them earlier when I first arrived, planning to inter-cut them throughout the piece. There’s the African Queen, painted and wrapped in shiny see-through fabrics, heroin-eyes staring out across the rusted shells of old Cadillacs and people carriers imploded from the rear in freeway pile-ups. There’s the lobotomy blondes, standing stock still against each other like shapes cut out of an unfolding piece of paper, sharing a cigarette.
My girl, she steps down, waits for a few minutes as the men decide a winner. They huddle together, exchanging notes and money and drugs, joking with one another. Then she steps back up minutes later.
