The Autobiography of Red (6 page)

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

 

SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING

 

is something you know

 

instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head

 

at sixteen. They painted this truth

 

on the long wall of the high school the night before departing for Hades.

 

Herakles’ hometown of Hades

 

lay at the other end of the island about four hours by car, a town

 

of moderate size and little importance

 

except for one thing.
Have you ever seen a volcano?
said Herakles.

 

Staring at him Geryon felt his soul

 

move in his side. Then Geryon wrote a note full of lies for his mother

 

and stuck it on the fridge.

 

They climbed into Herakles’ car and set off westward. Cold green summer night.

 

Active?

 

The volcano? Yes the last time she blew was 1923. Threw 180 cubic kilometers

 

of rock into the air

 

covered the countryside with fire overturned sixteen ships in the bay.

 

My grandmother says

 

the temperature of the air rose to seven hundred degrees centigrade downtown.

 

Caskets

 

of whiskey and rum burst into flame on the main street.

 

She saw it erupt?

 

Watched from the roof. Took a photograph of it, three p.m. looks like midnight.

 

What happened to the town?

 

Cooked. There was a survivor—prisoner in the local jail.

 

Wonder what happened to him.

 

You’ll have to ask my grandmother about that. It’s her favorite story
—

 

Lava Man.

 

Lava Man?
Herakles grinned at Geryon as they shot onto the freeway.

 

You’re going to love my family.

 

He did not know how long he had been asleep.

 

Black central stalled night. He lay hot and motionless, that is, motion

 

was a memory he could not recover

 

(among others) from the bottom of the vast blind kitchen where he was buried.

 

He could feel the house of sleepers

 

around him like loaves on shelves. There was a steady rushing sound

 

perhaps an electric fan down the hall

 

and a fragment of human voice tore itself out and came past, it seemed

 

already long ago, trailing

 

a bad dust of its dream which touched his skin. He thought of women.

 

What is it like to be a woman

 

listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence stretches between them

 

like geothermal pressure.

 

Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as lava. She listens

 

to the blank space where

 

his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can move as slow as

 

nine hours per inch.

 

Color and fluidity vary with its temperature from dark red and hard

 

(below 1,800 degrees centigrade)

 

to brilliant yellow and completely fluid (above 1,950 degrees centigrade).

 

She wonders if

 

he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep listening.

 

Geryon awoke too fast and felt his box contract.

 

Hot pressure morning. Houseful of tumbling humans and their languages.

 

Where am I?

 

Voices from somewhere. He made his way thickly downstairs

 

and through the house

 

to the back porch, huge and shadowy as a stage facing onto brilliant day.

 

Geryon squinted.

 

Grass swam towards him and away. Joyous small companies of insects

 

with double-decker wings

 

like fighter planes were diving about in the hot white wind. The light

 

unbalanced him,

 

he sat down quickly on the top step. Saw Herakles stretched on the grass

 

making sleepy talk.

 

My world is very slow right now,
Herakles was saying. His grandmother

 

sat at the picnic table

 

eating toast and discussing death. She told of her brother who was conscious

 

to the end but could not speak.

 

His eyes watched the tubes they were putting in and pulling out of him so

 

they explained each one.

 

Now we are inserting sap of the queen of the night you will feel a pinch

 

then a black flow,
said Herakles

 

in his sleepy voice that no one was listening to. A big red butterfly

 

went past riding on a little black one.

 

How nice,
said Geryon,
he’s helping him.
Herakles opened one eye and looked.

 

He’s fucking him.

 

Herakles!
said his grandmother. He closed his eyes.

 

My heart aches when I am bad.

 

Then he looked at Geryon and smiled.
Can I show you our volcano?

 

Geryon did not know why he found the photograph disturbing.

 

She had taken it herself standing on the roof of the house that afternoon in 1923

 

with a box camera. “Red Patience.”

 

A fifteen-minute exposure that recorded both the general shape of the cone

 

with its surroundings (best seen by day)

 

and the rain of incandescent bombs tossed into the air and rolling down its slopes

 

(visible in the dark).

 

Bombs had shot through the vent at velocities of more than three hundred kilometers an hour, she told him. The cone itself

 

rose a thousand meters above the original cornfield and erupted about a million tons

 

of ash, cinder, and bombs during its early months.

 

Lava followed for twenty-nine months. Across the bottom of the photograph

 

Geryon could see a row of pine skeletons

 

killed by falling ash. “Red Patience.” A photograph that has compressed

 

on its motionless surface

 

fifteen different moments of time, nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up

 

and ash moving down

 

and pines in the kill process. Geryon did not know why

 

he kept going back to it.

 

It was not that he found it an especially pleasing photograph.

 

It was not that he

 

did not understand how such photographs are made.

 

He kept going back to it.

 

What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava

 

has just reached his window?

 

he asked.
I think you are confusing subject and object,
she said.

 

Very likely,
said Geryon.

 

These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood.

 

His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders

 

like the little mindless red animals they were.

 

With a piece of wooden plank he’d found in the basement Geryon made a back brace

 

and lashed the wings tight.

 

Then put his jacket back on.
You seem moody today Geryon anything wrong?

 

said Herakles when he saw Geryon

 

coming up the basement stairs. His voice had an edge. He liked to see Geryon happy.

 

Geryon felt his wings turn in, and in, and in.

 

Nope just fine.
Geryon smiled hard with half of his face.
So tomorrow Geryon.

 

Tomorrow?

 

Tomorrow we’ll take the car and drive out to the volcano you’ll like that.

 

Yes.

 

Get some photographs.
Geryon sat down suddenly.
And tonight—Geryon? You okay?

 

Yes fine, I’m listening. Tonight—?

 

Why do you have your jacket over your head?

 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

 

Can’t hear you Geryon.
The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out.
I said sometimes

 

I need a little privacy.

 

Herakles was watching him, his eyes still as a pond. They watched each other,

 

this odd pair.

 

As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.

 

Herakles lies like a piece of torn silk in the heat of the blue saying,

 

Geryon please.
The break in his voice

 

made Geryon think for some reason of going into a barn

 

first thing in the morning

 

when sunlight strikes a bale of raw hay still wet from the night.

 

Put your mouth on it Geryon please.

 

Geryon did. It tasted sweet enough. I am learning a lot in this year of my life,

 

thought Geryon. It tasted very young.

 

Geryon felt clear and powerful—not some wounded angel after all

 

but a magnetic person like Matisse

 

or Charlie Parker! Afterwards they lay kissing for a long time then

 

played gorillas. Got hungry.

 

Soon they were sitting in a booth at the Bus Depot waiting for food.

 

They had started to practice

 

their song (“Joy to the World”) when Herakles pulled Geryon’s head

 

into his lap and began grooming

 

for nits. Gorilla grunts mingled with breakfast sounds in the busy room.

 

The waitress arrived

 

holding two plates of eggs. Geryon gazed up at her from under Herakles’ arm.

 

Newlyweds?
she said.