Heliotrope
It was the summer of my seventeenth year, and I was lying on the porch like a corpse set out to begin the embalming process. Above me, towering generals directed their infantries across broad, hazy plains while spies spelled out messages behind them. An elephant raised its trunk, herding its child away from the violence. Then the wind shifted, and the clouds mutated into other things. With it came the scent of ozone and rain, and I knew the coming storm would be beautiful. They always were this time of year. I rolled over, pressing my cheek against the cool shadows crawling across the wood. A shiny-backed beetle scratched its hesitant way up my outstretched arm. My heart beat. The sun inched across the sky. I could have been doing something worth doing. I could have been thinking something worth thinking. Instead, I was carelessly reciting the words of a song I thought I had forgotten and watching the clouds drift by in lazy droves, the constant breeze shoving them along like the suburban mother does her brood.

The agonizing peacefulness of that muggy August day was shattered by the groan of an engine. It rolled down the street, paying me no attention, something that barely passed for music pounding out bass from overworked speakers. My chest shook with the depth of the sound. I sat up slowly and watched it rumble into the driveway across the street, 11 N. Vale. The truck - if it could be called that - might have been new and sleek once. Now it was a rickety hunk of metal, rusted and chipped. As it whined to a stop a few slivers of black paint shivered themselves off the sides and ran away to go breed in the sewers. The door opened with a hiss and a shout, irritated to be disturbed.

The girl who stepped from its interior was not what I had expected. She should have been tall and pudgy, wearing her boyfriend’s too-small wifebeater and stained sweatpants. She should have had more metal in her face than on her fingers and more ink on her arms than in the packet of pens sticking out of her bag. She did not. This girl, this young woman was short, with broad shoulders and powerful legs and what looked like a hungry, sullen, but somehow still beautiful face. Her hair was short and dyed some ungodly shade of violet, and it stuck out from beneath a tattered sunhat like the angry spines of some violent sea creature. Her clothing looked expensive, carefully chosen to appear careless and well worn. She was an art school dropout goddess and I was entranced.

I could have called to her. I should have. Instead I sat on that cool shady porch and watched her with the eyes of a stranger.

In that state, it was a long time before I noticed the frayed blue sneakers seated at my elbow. My eyes followed the lines of denim up to knees, bent, crouched, and a white shirt with some athletics logo stitched across the chest to the oval little face with deep set blue eyes and a perpetually laughing mouth framed by sunny hair.

The corners of her mouth twisted wryly. “Whatcha doing, Alex?”

I groaned and flopped back down on the porch. “Wasting my youth.” She giggled and sat her uninvited self down next to me. “What do you want, Madeline?” I asked slowly, calmly, glaring up at her with my sideways eyes.

She stretched her arms up above her head and grinned even wider. “Oh, you know. Companionship. The usual. We’ve only been neighbors since we were like, eight,” Nine, I thought. “and pretty much all you ever do is sit around out here and mope.”

I shrugged. “So what? It’s not like it’s any of your business.” I’m not moping. I’m sitting.

“Of course it is. I’m your friend, aren’t I?” She smiled at me with her head cocked like a dog or some sort of horribly annoying breed of parakeet. A swift, warm breeze rushed under the porch roof, and mussed her hair, standing it up in great whorls and loops. Exactly like the crest of a cockatoo.

“You’re more like that annoying kid down the street who thinks we’re friends, even though we’re not at all.” I told her, edging away. Idly, I wondered where the beetle that had been crawling up my arm earlier had gone.

She pushed my shoulder, laughing. Her nails, that close to my face, had tiny crescents of dark, smudgy dirt beneath them, marring the crisp white of her manicure. “You’re so funny! You know, my mom says you have the driest sense of humor she’s ever heard. She’s completely right. You’re like, the undisputed king of sarcasm. I should make you a crown.”

I wanted to beat my head against the dark wood of the porch. Somehow, I managed not to. “Your mom needs to get you a puppy.” Or some Ritalin. Whatever works.

She stuck out her little pink tongue, puckering her little pink lips. “I’ve been saying that too. I’ll tell her you agree with me.”

“Fantastic. Can you go home now?”

She made some sort of strange grumbling noise with her teeth and her tongue that sounded like dripping saliva and stood up. “Fine. I get it. You’re a tortured soul. So I’m just going to leave you here to mope around in the rain - and yes, it’s going to rain - and listen to your sad emo music and cut your sad emo wrists. Meanwhile I’m going to be nice and warm and lightning-free in my house, watching a Die Hard marathon. Feel free to join me whenever you feel like being less of a jackoff.”

I shrugged at her back. “Don’t care.”

“Huh. You’re hard to get along with sometimes.” She told me as she skipped down the steps of my porch onto the careful white edges of my sidewalk. The sunlight filtering over the incoming cloud bank dazzled in her hair. I suppose someone might have thought she looked like an angel.

I thought she looked like a pigeon, caught in the first violent updrafts of a thunderstorm, careening out of control, the sun making it a burning comet, hurtling toward the ground.

That evening, the streets were flooded. It wasn’t a flash flood, not the kind of flood that killed people, but the kind of thin film of water that made the cracked asphalt seem like a bleak and endless ocean, rumbling and roaring and interrupting the traffic of rush hour commuters. The heavy drops fell from the heavy clouds and sunk beneath its depths with a little ripple and an inaudible plink that when sounded against hundreds of thousands of others screamed and echoed into the vaulted heavens. I sat there through the torrent, bare feet sticking out from under the hood of the porch roof, pruning in the cool water. From above it must have made a pretty picture; I wished that I could fly high above myself, climb the thick rope of lightning and look down at the little sodden place.

Then the lightning flashed away and I was left in the semi-twilight of a cloudy late afternoon. The skin of the Earth mottled in the gloom, and the shadows of rocks and hills and low, scrubby bushes rose up into the open air, rearing their primordial heads, their primal jaws gaping wide and wider still, cries lost to the blowing wind. They moved their stiff legs, shook off their dusty fur, and trampled off across the distant horizon. But that was high up on the mountain side, far beyond the cement cliffs of the highway, past the safe enclosure of housing developments that stretched only the tips their tentative fingers into the uncharted. Here, in the heart of the city, I was safe from that murky wilderness.

Another quick flash of molten plasma across the sky illuminated a pale face with low, dark eyes, staring into my soul. It was so close I could touch it. A stab of panic hit my heart, and I yelped and scrambled backwards, retreating to the interior of the porch, where the cool wall touched against my back and steadied my pulse. Slowly, in the darkening light, I noticed the oil-slick of hair running in rivulets down her cheeks and across her forehead blending seamlessly into the night. Pale hands floated below that pale head, two spiders suspended on tremulous threads, wobbling and wriggling in the weight of the rain on their frail shells. She stood there, soaked to the bone and dressed to impress the shadows, right at the edge of my lawn, where the grass and the cement met and made a funny little border between what was known and what was alien. The tips of the grass blades brushed tentatively against her pale, exposed toes, antennae trying to determine the intentions of this intruder.

Slowly, feeling like I was approaching a wounded wildcat, I edged back to the veil of rain between the inside and the outside. Her sharp eyes watched me with inhuman intensity, a steady clarity that drilled past my soul and down to something more. Something electric passed between us, bright against the backdrop of roiling clouds and murky lightning. Hi, I thought. The very ends of her lips curled upwards, the slightest weary hint of a smile playing through her eyes.

We stayed together until morning.

When I woke, I woke alone and burning with the cold, foggy fever-warmth of the sun’s gentle kisses on my cheeks. My clothes were wet, and clung to my skin with a desperation that irked me.The birds called bright into the brightening sky and the slender curls of mist that rose, halfway to being invisible, from my law marked out the places where the sun was hard at work, wiping away the last traces of the torrent’s existence. I was alone. Somehow, possibly for the first time I could remember, that quiet, broken sense of solitude bothered me. The intimacy that girl and I had shared seemed somehow deeper in the light of the dawn, like the elongated and elegant shadows that the sun stretched like a carpet in its path. Would it too, then, warp and fade, deform with the constant progression of hours into the sweet and hazy past?

For the first time in my life, there was a longing in the great empty bowl of my chest, and I had nowhere to stow it away.

My hair felt strange as I walked inside. Or, to be more precise, it felt like it belonged to a stranger. It felt like it lived and bred on the head of someone else at night and crawled back to my scalp at dawn to sleep. It disgusted me, and so I kept it as short as I could manage without being entirely bald. My mother hated it. She said it reminded her of the military, which she also hated. I think it reminded her of her past. In the mirror, my reflection laughed at me and I laughed back. The creature on my head had grown. It snickered quietly as I shifted, breathing lightly against the tips of my ears. I thought about the scissors in the drawer in the kitchen, and about how successful they would be at killing the beast. Then I left the bathroom. Theses things were best left of professionals. They have sharper tools and more potent poisons.

There was a time when I would have been concerned about the picture I presented. But the older I got, the less I cared about how I looked. My face was my face, my body just a body, regardless of how it was adorned. I suppose that made me the opposite of my peers, but I wasn’t particularly inclined to care. We all just went about life however we wanted, anyway. And those of us who didn’t know what we wanted just drifted along side, ghostly voyeurs pinned between the edge of the world and a thin sheet of glass.

The inside of my house was familiar, and yet somehow always strange to me. The edges were sharp and crisp, painted in clean whites and rich burgundy spills of wine that raced across the baseboards in a crazed attempt to be the first to bleed into the warm amber of the wood flooring and dance in speckles and whorls up the stairs. Rare furniture beasts lurked haughtily below the ceilings and grumbled with lazy complaints when sat upon. The glass sparked and murmured in the sun and the fans blew a constant coolness through the great, gasping rooms. And then there were the plants, perpetually green and thriving at the hands of my mother, climbing up the white walls, prickling around doors, clustering on tables, floating on spindly roots in the tiny fountain in the foyer. The attic had books. The garage had tools. My bedroom had its music. Each separate and walled in by the clear and hostile intentions of its residents.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to call us hostile. We were distanced by years of uncommon interests, but we all held the unbreakable bond of blood, the soul-deep calling that let us live together for so long. My father used to tell me that I would know my relations on sight, as if there were some mystical force that bred along side kindred and allowed them to sense one another’s shared genetics. He believed in the strength of the soul, and the inherent goodness of mankind with a naivete that appalled me. My father used to tell me a lot of things I have come to question. But he loved me, I knew, from the way he made me breakfast in the mornings, the way he kept the chains of the wicker swing on the porch oiled, even though I was the only one who used it. My mother kept her ever cleaning hands from my room, let them stray to my hand or my shoulder in kind affection instead. And I loved them, as much as I knew how to love anybody. We never spoke it, and I never knew how to show it, but we all knew, and with that our separation stemmed from mutual respect.

But even as it stood filled with the humming warmth and kindness of family, my home was strange and barren as the pitted surface of an alien world. I guess that I was probably the strange one. And now that I had something stirring the crater where my heart should have been, would my world feel solid under my fingertips? I glanced out into the world of the rising sun, the edges hazed and obscured by the gentle white curtains clothing the windows. High above, burning in the blazing blue sky, warring eternally with time, he held no answers for me.

Far below, among the crawling creatures of dirt mud and muck, with their eternal shadows and the vast, endless expanse of conscious existence, there was a flutter of curtains across the street, and the quick flash of movement ensnared my eyes with violet spears.

She was watching me.

While the sun rose to its sentinel post, ruminated, and began to slide drunkenly back into the horizon, I stayed by the the window, waiting excitedly. When I caught her shadow spread like oil across the glass, I felt my pulse jump into my throat, my hands growing weak and numb. When the dusty colors of her clothing peeked through the inch of space between the two swaths of pale blue cloth, I started, finding in my heart the strange desire to leap from my own house, cross that black road, knock on her door and what? Talk to her? Say hello? Somehow the brutal banality of conversation paled in comparison of what I had shared with her that night. We were an unspoken pair, conjoined by invisible organs and inviolable flesh. The charge of the lightning had cleaved us into one being; a new person had formed inside my thoughts.

Among these drifts of time in the walled world where we stand with eyes of lead and broken glass, out among the surf of the sea and the blowing sands and the hot sound of the sun, my soul was running free beyond the borders of all that I knew. Out among the warbling winds and pale clouds where the earth was long and wide and the horizon endless. It tread the paths familiar to it, and here, wallowing in the dank, hollow pit it had dug for itself in the depths of my chest, I was left behind. She had joined me there, in that wild and warm place, the homeland of my birth and the dreamland of my dying days. Out there, cavorting and careening when the fancy struck, when the time passed to be stern and solemn in the lonely grey storms of the cold cement city.

I don’t know how I spent those long days between the quick nights. Those long and gentle days that I would sit in the cool peace of my empty home with my empty heart and wait to see her eyes flash past mine. But the calling in my bones, the swirling rush of my blood past my lips and across my ears as I sat through my own silence broke me, molded me. It opened me to something I had never thought I could know.
We were the same.

When she came in the cool night with the stars on her back and the little shadows waddling in a line behind her heels, tears pricked my eyes as the pool in my chest filled and overflowed. With my hands, I could not contain it. With my feeble fragmented thoughts I could not explain it. In the clear, clean air, free of the muggy gloom of the rain or the burning acid smog of the sun, I saw her for the first time. I felt light, like bubbles, like dancers or runners in a dream. She came slowly forward, all the colors of the world striking at her and reflecting, leaving only her colors, sharp in the moonlight. Her skeletal fingers came forward, intruding over the barrier of my lawn. Clasped between their tips was a scrap of yellowed paper.
not a head
not a hand

but a piece of string that holds an ties things

in the heavens from which it descends
wrapped in the quiet arms of an enigma
below the walking sands
not here
not here

everywhere anywhere
not here
I looked at her, but by the time my eyes found the place where she had been standing, she was gone, the little chirping shadows scattered and befuddled, seeking refuge in the deep, dank cracks of the sidewalk, in the forgotten places between the blades of grass.

In the morning, I saw her eyes through the wall of my bedroom, felt their gentle caress come with the touch of the sun as I woke. I raced down the stairs to greet her. She waited in the window of her home, the soft fluttering fabric drawn open along the width of her body which stood cold and thin and hard under the weight of the warming air. Her slow moving hands clutched the edges of the curtains, drawing them wide, barring herself for my eyes.
The knuckle of her finger glinted quickly, light flaring across the surface then fleeing away. A ring maybe. Or a metal prosthetic. What would she have she lost it to, I wonder? “Chastity?” I mouthed at her. I could feel my eyebrow trying to run up my forehead, melting into my scalp. Rejoining its cousins. She grinned, as easily and quickly as the soft lamplight that placed warm curves on her lips and cheeks, and the sullen eyes lightened for just a moment. Then with the quick flick of her wrist the curtains were swinging shut. That wicked smile was the last part of her to disappear, abruptly similar to the terrifying Cheshire cat of my childhood.
There was a knock at the door.

Madeline didn’t seem to care about my disappointment. She didn’t seem to care about much at all as she dragged me away from my fascination and into the musty belly of her car.
“I don’t want to go.” I protested, but she just smiled knowingly and tugged harder on my wrist. I was powerless to resist.
“You don’t even know where we’re going, Alex.” she laughed, “Don’t start whining until we get there.”
“I had...things, I was doing, Madeline.” I said as she sat me down in her passenger seat and strapped me in like a child. It was comforting, in the ways it wasn’t humiliating. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
She snorted, and the sparkling in her eyes made them seem like two oceans, friendly and gentle with a warm summer breeze. “Sure, like creeping on that chick who moved in over there.” She clapped her hand on my shoulder as I tried to come up with some excuse. “Save it, hun. That’s one thing that doesn’t slip by me.”
I frowned. “Fine. Tell me where we’re going, Madeline.”
“God, stop calling me that, you sound like my grandmother! We’re going dune-buggying. It’s fun.” she assured me as she slammed the car door in my dismayed face.

When my feet hit the sand the world tilted for a moment, the horizon upended itself in my vision and I was running headlong into the dune. Then the sensation was gone and I was just falling.

The sand and grit embedded itself in my eyes and my ears and my mouth, scratching and burrowing into the pores of my skin like little fiery maggots, clogging and gagging and grasping at me with little claws. They might have gotten in my lungs. I rolled there, lips against the ground and hands ground against my burning eyes, waiting for something to save me. But in the true spirit of passivity, nothing happened, and I was forced to sit up, watering eyes and sore mouth and all, trying to wipe away the shame with a shirtsleeve. Bright laughter met my embarrassment and offered it a hand back to its feet.

“Sweet air, man.” He said. I coughed up half the weight of the earth and stared at him. He was every boy ever, halfway handsome with his short blond hair and big blue eyes and a smile a thousand volts brighter than the sun. His arms peeked through jagged holes in his shirt, warm with tanned flesh and soft, transient muscle. I brushed my grainy palm against my jeans and clasped his hand, rolling up from my knees to my toes. His help unbalanced me, and I wobbled. He had familiar eyes.

“It was a stupid idea.” I said, quickly releasing him. There was dirt ground into the fine cracks of his fingers, and it shone through the flaking layers of his nails. I examined my own hands, pleased to see that they had sustained minimal damage. “I shouldn’t have tried it.” I muttered, glaring at the stubborn speck of sand wedged beneath my right thumbnail.

He patted my shoulder amiably, and I tried not to shiver away. “Yeah, you don’t seem like you’ve got too much experience.”

I shook my head, subtly trying to edge away from him. “No. This is my first time in a buggy, actually.”

“No joke? Who dragged you all the way out here?” His fingers dug into the muscle of my shoulder.

“Uh.” I shrugged. No luck. “Madeline.”

“Maddie, really?” He barked out a surprised laugh. “You must be Alex, then.” I nodded slowly, feeling the beginning notes of apprehension play their opening measures in the pit of my stomach. “Jeeze, dude. What did you do to her?”

I swallowed. “Um. I don’t really -”

“She’s obsessed with you. Like. Obsessed. You date her or something?”

“No. She lives down the street.” I paused, feeling uncomfortable. “We’ve...known each other a while, I guess.”

He patted me again. “Yeah, well. Good for you, bro. You’re like, the only person who can put up with her, know what I mean?”

I snorted softly. “Right.” I scanned the sandy area with wary eyes, and, sure enough, there was Madeline, sitting solemnly alone on the hood of her truck watching me and my new friend with the face of a predator. Around her, kids and young adults swarmed up and down the sandy hillside, some watching the trucks and buggies race up and down the huge dunes, others hanging out of the vehicles, screaming with the ecstasy of youth. The sour, reedy smell of alcohol pressed the air heavily against my chest. The boy at my side bumped against me, and I caught another whiff of fermentation. “That explains a lot.” I murmured, casting my eyes down and away.

He laughed boisterously again. “Doesn’t it?” He clapped my shoulder one last time in a laughably desperate show of testosterone and general masculinity. “See you around, yeah?” He smiled brightly at me and sauntered off, calling jauntily to his friends at the top of the hill. There was suddenly another source of heat at my arm, and I turned to find Madeline’s face far too close to my own.

“Can’t believe it took you this long to talk to Matt.” She said, almost sadly.

I looked back at the boy who was leaving his drunken and crooked footprints behind him in the sand. “Who, that guy? Why?”

She punched my arm lightly. “He’s only lived across the street from you for, oh, I don’t know, like, forever.” She frowned. “Actually, you’d probably be pretty good friends, now that I really think about it.”

Almost involuntarily, I felt my hands run themselves back over my skull, the little brutalized stumps of hair pricking angrily at my palms. “And that...bothers you?” I hedged, more than a little confused.

She shook her head, cheeks coloring with splotchy little patches of warmth. “Yeah, no, I don’t know. It shouldn’t, but it just does, I guess.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t pretend to understand. I could barely even pretend that I cared. “Um, Maddie?” I asked, suddenly unable to find my usual place in the world, “ Can we go home now? Please?”

She smiled softly and took my hand, leading me gently to her truck through the thick sand and stringy bush and wild, cluttered people. It seemed to me like we were the only quiet place in the entire world.

The white carapace of her blank skin, of the pale line where her neck met her shoulder and descended into the endless depths of her midnight world danced in my daylight eyes. I could not drive her from my mind, could not banish her from my walking dreams, even if I had wanted to try.

I threw the thin wad of paper at the ceiling, wondering if it would defy gravity with the force of her handwriting, the delicate lines of the poem floating up beyond imagination. “Hey Madeline?” I asked quietly, my eyes tracing the path of the projectile, remembering the path of her hands as they swung up to hand it to me.

Madeline looked up from my dark eyes inside the pen drawing, her eyes careful around the disgruntled scrunching of her nose. “Yeah? You want to take a break?”

I shook my head. “I’m okay.” A breath passed between us. “Do you have many friends?”

The scratching of the pen stopped. A single premature cicada chirped hesitantly against the backdrop of the warm rush of the desert afternoon. The air conditioner in her car sputtered and guttered out. She shrugged. “Not really, why?”

“Oh.” I murmured, watching the little ball catch the slight wind and travel a few feet from my outstretched fingers. “I was just wondering...because Matt said that you...” The paper ball bounced once against the hard packed sand. “...talked about me. Sometimes. So I just thought that you must be friends.”

She snorted. “You don’t have to be friends to talk to someone, Alex.” She caught my confusion and smiled into my eyes. “You do it all the time.” The bitterness sweetening her tongue startled me, and I let the conversation lag, made my way out into the open desert to chase down the scrap of poetry blowing in the wind. The sun there was brutal, his angry fingers raking lifeless gouges into the trembling, endless earth. These were the flatlands, lying in the shadow where the mountains grew, where the filthy scrub was dry and thin and rattled like the brilliant warning of the diamondback hiding in the cool murk below grasping arms and where they sky stretched on past the edge of the earth and dropped into the shallow oceans below.

“Hey!” Madeline’s voice came screaming up behind me, racing into my ears, breaking the tense peace in my heart. I jumped.

“What? What’s wrong?” I cried, spinning to face her, and inexplicably finding myself yards away, and Madeline galloping towards me, long elegant strides carrying her swiftly over the hard earth. Gasping, she reached me, gripping my arm with clawed hands. Her hair streamed across her face, obscuring her eyes. She tossed her head like a horse.

“Don’t wander out here like that. You’ll get bitten by a rattler, and I am not going to suck out the poison.” She slapped my shoulder and dragged me back to our little camp where her sketchbook sat with it’s white pages fluttering in the wind.

Behind me, the poem rolled off into the distance.

That night she did not come.

The next morning I bolted to the window, crashing the blinds up into the ceiling in my haste. In the window of her room, there was a great white board, carefully inscribed with elegant, curling letters.
This is the dead land/This is the cactus land/Here the stone images/Are raised
It stayed there until nightfall, when it mysteriously disappeared just as I went to grab my dinner. I thought I saw a pale hand pulling down on it.

“Do you quote Elliot often?” I asked, voice loud even among the screaming lips of the clouds. She just smiled at me, a pale shadow drawn in icy tones by a master’s hand. She was so somber, so at home in the belly of the storm, that for a moment, the smallest, most inconsequential moment, I wondered if she was truly standing there before me, or if she was just some tragic hallucination dredged up from the bowels of my subconscious and given form by the idle hands of boredom and uselessness. And then she was solid again, enough so that I almost reached for her. But I didn’t want to smear the ever changing oils her face was painted in. Didn’t want to cast a shadow in that lovely light that burned the imprint of her flesh into my thoughts.

She smiled, the tight pallor of her lips corpse like in the low blue light. She jerked her head at me, shadows running in heavy streams along the lines of her body, beseeching me to follow as she walked away. I rose from the porch with a quiet reverence as I traced the footsteps of my messiah. She led me swiftly through the lonely streets, her feet silent like cat claws on the cooling cement. Above me the clouds rumbled and rolled in on the heels of giants, and outside, around, the cries of the night echoed in the blurry time before the rain. The clouds glowed in a hazy purple shelf across the sky.
The cold gaze of the pale mirror of the daylight world followed us as we walked out into the sleeping desert along the silent testimony of the morning’s savage wrath. This place was peaceful in the empty dark.
“This is the road from nowhere.” She said after we had walked a while, taking my hand.

“Where does it go?” I asked quietly.

She shrugged. “Somewhere interesting, probably.”

I smiled, twining my fingers in hers. “Somewhere exciting, maybe.”

She turned to me then, eyes wider and more animated than I had ever seen them, the normally fleeting smile warmer and more human than it had ever been. “Alex,” she said, “do you want to run away with me?”

That Saturday, I woke with the rising sun and the rattling of my front door. When I opened it, my bleary eyes were treated to the sight of the most beautiful face in the world smiling up at me from the pale blue shadows of the early dawn.

I smiled. “Just let me get my stuff.” I said as she stepped inside.