Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
Again, the ruin of a red sofa; again, curled up in the lap of a demon. My tears felt like they had lasted for eons, that centuries had passed between each sobbing breath. At some point, Mephisto had gathered me up in his arms, gently, and sank into the couch. He didn’t let me go, hadn’t since I had started crying. The weeping had robbed me of my reason, now the aftermath was robbing me of my energy; I lay bonelessly in Mephisto’s arms, still with my hands curled into fists around his lapels, staring listlessly at nothing, neither here nor there nor anywhere.
“’Pray tell me, these fading satellites,’” the demon murmured, running a lock of my hair through his fingers, idly. “’Across the silken night, are they not falling? From our view and from our hearts. And ’tis there we must start, for while agony is calling, time will not flow on back to you.’”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. Mephisto smiled.
“It’s poetry, so I believe what it is meant to mean could be many things.”
“Did you write it?” He didn’t seem like the poetry type. But again, assumptions…
“No. A young man possibly your age or thereabouts did so. I had the brief pleasure of speaking to him for some years. He wrote many poems…but for some reason, that one is the one I remembered.”
“Is he famous now, for his poetry?”
“No. I believe he is a lawyer, these days.”
“That’s screwed up,” I said. “Screwed up. ‘Pray tell, these fading satellites…’” I rolled the words over my tongue gently, as if to taste. What fading satellites had the poet been talking about? Shooting stars? Or something a little more metaphorical?
“The world is screwed up,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Mephisto said, simply.
“And it’s not even the drinking and smoking and screwing and losing money that does it. It’s…it’s just…that’s just the way things are. And it shouldn’t be. Falling, fading satellites.” I paused. “Lives. The poet meant lives, didn’t he? Fading satellites. Lives of people who nobody cares about. Or few enough.”
“I can’t say for certain,” the demon replied, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Poets…”
“I should have been there. I should have been awake. She just…maybe she was mad. So what? All of us here are. So what? She knew it was possible…she wasn’t mad after all. I became a song. And it was too late. And I wasn’t even there when she…”
“Hush, now,” Mephisto said, stroking my brow.
It would never have happened to Nutmeg, I thought. Whatever was haunting Nutmeg, she would have bared her teeth and snarled at it, gone down hissing and spitting and scratching and fighting. Even when up against her own demons, she regarded them with such haughty animosity that I could hardly imagine her on the roof of the hotel, ready to jump. If Nutmeg had fallen, it would have been an accident, possibly on someone else’s part. She might have been pushed. But she never would have died. With a sharp word, she would have ordered the breeze to bear her down gently, gracefully landing on her feet. She would have commanded the hard concrete to become as soft as feathers ice-cream cotton wool, to break her fall as easily as letting an eyelash float off the tip of a finger. Or she would have turned into a riotous, diaphanous cloud of gold butterflies only seconds before meeting the ground, whirled upwards and gathered to form herself again, stepping lightly onto the ground. Utterly disdainful, undefeated.
Jeremy, Book, Vincent, Killian. How would they have dealt with it, the sudden falling? Jeremy, I had no doubt, would have flung his arms out wider than the wings of eagles, disappeared from this life with a huge grin. In the end, Jeremy would win, even if he was dead. Whether he would have any idea of what he was truly doing at the time, I couldn’t say – he might think he could grow wings and suddenly fly. Book was harder to think of. She was so shy, so terrified of any contact outside herself, all wrapped up and bound tightly inside the shell of herself, solely because a demon stalked through her mind. Vincent: lovely, sad, freefalling. It would be a split second decision, with him. He would leave with his daughters’ names falling from his lips as he fell.
Killian?
Summer.
What is it like when summer dies?
And me? What of me? Would I have jumped?
The tenth floor…
From the tenth floor, the roof of the hotel, it seemed like you could see the whole city. I had been up there several times, although only on days when I was absolutely certain that a sudden gust of wind wasn’t going to pick me up and hurl me maliciously against the wall of the high-rises next door. Last summer – no, no, wrong, two summers ago, or three – I had cultivated a small container garden. No set theme, just any plants or flowers I found interesting. There was a squat little succulent the same colour as an evergreen fir, spikier than a pineapple, that would grow a single long stalk out from the middle of itself, ten twenty thirty times taller than its rotund, pointy little base. The stalk was the colour of the sinking sunlight at the end of the day, and grew small, scentless flowers at its very tip. That little plant fascinated me to no end, I was always amused to see the strange stalk growing taller and taller each time I came up to water the plants.
It, and the others I had, had died, though. A mood had ghosted around me for a few days, then attacked with a viciousness I’d forgotten the swings could have. I couldn’t leave my apartment for four weeks, I had gotten Vincent to collect my mail and Nutmeg to negotiate with Wender for me. By the time it was over, I could barely remember the little garden. I let another resident have the soil in the container pots, I think.
There was the evening I danced on the roof, as well. That was also summer.
The light was fading, but slowly and reluctantly, as if the sunset wanted to drag itself out for as long as was possible before giving in. Purple and orange and pink and dark blue, I think, in general, are not colours that go together well. But when the sky turns them into dusky amethyst hues, softsweet sherbert, pale soft blushing fever roses and deep quill pen ink, suddenly the combination looks more natural, more beautiful than any palette that even the most talented artist could come up with. The stars come out early, as well – yes, even in the city, with its forever light. Strategically placed diamond drops on the technicolour watercolour dreamcolour sky.
I had on my soft white cotton skirt, which was Indian made and so light I could hardly tell I was wearing it. It flared out so wildly when I spun pirouettes in it inside the apartment, that had it been made of anything heavier than angel breath cotton, it probably would have sent things on tables crashing into the floor. I had secured it around my hips with a silk scarf I had borrowed from Ruby (or perhaps Krystl) and forgotten to give back before I moved out of home. In the knot of the scarf, I tied my mp3 player (a weird little rectangular thing no longer or wider than two fingers). I secured the headphone buds in my ears, pressed the on button, and raised my arms.
The music began to play, silent to all the world except for me, and I started to dance.
I had never really had dance lessons. Perhaps a handful of ballet classes when I was very young, but I couldn’t tell fifth position from third position from a banana in my ear, when it came down to it. But the dance had always been in me, nameless and faceless and without category. Roaring through my blood and pounding through my heart. I was infused with a never ending beat, and I had to let it out, or I’d go mad.
Well. I went mad, anyway. But there is always madder than me…
The sound of the music pulsed into my ears like a heart pulsing blood out to circulate through the body. I raised my arms, twisted my hands around each other without letting them touch, tracing delicate whorls of nothingness in the evening air. The beat began, snap of snare, tick-tick of tom-tom, the great bass heartbeat. It awoke in me, shot upwards from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair. I was away, I was whirling, shimmying, I was dancing, I was the dance.
The orbit of my hips, rushing through the falling evening to a glorious noise that only I could hear. Balanced on the balls of my feet, whirling in elation, my skirt fanning out around me, then wrapping itself around my legs as I would stop, abruptly, and let my arms do the moving for a moment – then back to the entire body, moving moving moving becoming being shining. This was a hymn sung by my body, to the evening colours and the farsparkle stars and even to the heavy city air, glorifying summer and praising its every movement and hue and magic.
I was slicked with sweat, strands of hair clinging to the back of my neck and forehead, perspiration stinging my eyes, but the song hadn’t ended – it wasn’t time to stop, not yet. My t-shirt clung to my skin, as wet as if I had jumped fully clothed into the ocean. With one movement, I lifted it over my head, threw it onto the ground, and danced a shimmying circle around it as I caught the earbuds that had been pulled out of my ears by the move, slamming them back in. The beat never paused, the sound flowed on and on and on.
I didn’t care that, to the people in the highrises around me, spending a warm summer evening out on their balconies or simply gazing out their windows, I must have looked as mad as I actually was, for once in my life. Skin glistening, my only concession to decency being a black bra with a hole in the band, my hair and skirt flying, arms whirling, flashes of feet and legs. I stretched tautly, snapped back by an elastic band, shot from one end of the roof and back again in a glorious, swirling fury and laughter. Dance, dance, dance, dance, don’t ever stop, this is who you are, this is how you pray, this is how you love the world! Dance!
You aren’t mad!
The song, of course, came to an end. If there’s a song that never ends, then I don’t know about it, but had I gotten my hands on it before that evening, I probably would have danced myself into merry oblivion. But the song ended, a crash of cymbals that sounded like a handful of stars hurled at a stone wall with all of someone’s might. I stopped, arching my back, staring up at the sky, one arm raised upwards as if I someone was about to reach down and lift me out of my body. I stayed in that position for a count of five, then collapsed in a heap of cotton and sweat and aching limbs and slick hair, staring up at the rapidly darkening sky. I was gasping for breath, my lungs screaming and my heart pounding like a frightened jackrabbit.
But I wasn’t frightened. Exhausted, yes. Frightened, or anything resembling fear? Not in the slightest. I was alive, alive, alive. Not wearing a shirt and collapsed on the roof of a somewhat seedy apartment complex in one of the slightly more interesting areas downtown, but I was alive. Nothing mattered that evening, as I grinned up at the stars maniacally, chest heaving as the night fell down and kissed my lips, left indelible marks on my body and soul. Not madness, not screaming, not the dark, not the shattered wine bottle, nothing. Nothing except being free, whole, alive.
It was like magic. Hell, it was magic.
Could I have thrown myself off the roof?
I had moments where I wanted to die. Not as much lately, on account of being fairly insane. There would have been times when I could have pushed the blade a little further into and under my skin, and then decided to take a warm bath. There had been times when I had counted up pills and calculated with cold precision how quickly too many of them would kill me. There had even been times when I walked a little too far off the footpath, too close to the road, ready to throw myself out onto it. So I knew…I did know. I couldn’t blame Amaranth. How can you blame someone for a malfunctioning machine? I wouldn’t, and couldn’t blame her.
But I could never jump off the roof, not when I had danced skin to skin with the evening and the city on the top of it, not since then.
Indelible marks, indelible memories. Whatever had been taken away from me in the last eighteen months, at least I could still remember dancing.