2020

Doorway

When Eugenie White moved him from the shadow of her bedroom, where she had been hiding him, to the brighter part of her apartment, first of all, he had a difficult time journeying there. The distance from there to there was minuscule, a dozen steps at most, but walking was still a challenge for Barry. On this tedious trip between rooms, he learned that he was able to see the world in a new way, as a series of things that could carry him. The shoulder of a friend, the corner of a night table, the rim of an armoire, the metal hinges of a door, the edge of the sink in the bathroom, the threshold an arched gateway, the strong back of a chair. He limped there with one hand stuck on his stomach and the other one holding on for dear life. He couldn’t land the complete sole of a foot on the left side and his shame about it was astronomical, but the pain in his belly quickly overcame the misery of his pride.

He was fully immersed into deploring his torments and cringing about Eugenie White’s typical teacher words of encouragement but, progressively, the light appeared and swelled in his field of vision. It was magnificent. Ms White’s bedroom felt like it had been furrowed into the gloomiest angle of the city center, like a hole into a block of cement; it barely opened on a courtyard that was itself shunned from the sun, allowing only a quick passage of the star above their heads every day, and the courtyard was obscured by all the tall buildings around it. Her sleeping quarters often felt light-less, possessing the dimmest of bulbs under thick lampshades and, she would later explain, it had been one of the criteria that had rushed her picking that flat among others when she had been flat-hunting a decade or so ago. Barry already knew that story, of course, but he would keep that information to himself, for obvious reasons.

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She liked the darkness, she needed to hide. She was a vampire, or Batman. Completely fine by him.

Progressively, the sunlight reached the tip of Barry’s fingers as he was looking at his hand, wondering if the bathroom commode he was clinging to was strong enough to support his crossing of the tiny cubicle it was. The bathroom led to the living room. And the sunlight caressed Barry’s hand and nourished him deeply as, opposite to Eugenie White’s character, he longed for the rays of the sun and bathing in them and rebooting his system from their warms and glows. That small twinkle flashing on his fingernails was a glimmer of hope, and hope was suddenly more alive than ever in Barry’s heart.

After some days, he knew not to press on too much, mourning some faster epoch when he would dash through the city like a knife slicing a pie, now forced to always re-calibrate down his impulses for velocity. Every rushed movement shook the cumbersome block of concrete lodged diagonally inside his abdomen, and that rock was still scorching, still ablaze. But millions of kilometers away, the center of the solar system where his home planet was floating, a yellow dwarf ball of a same fire was calling on to him, gently, taking him by the hand, telling him, no pressure, get here when you can. He marched on, ignoring Ms White and her insufferable cheer. There is fire and there is fire. All sorts of fires. Fire is the great alchemizer. Had humans ever been able to accomplish anything without the promise of something excellent in return? Probably not, he saw. Was something like sunlight sufficient enough to do the trick? It was very likely that the motivation of sunlight could be sufficient

When he moved to the living room and its intricate bizarrely-arranged space, it was kind of like a second birth for him.

Without fire, there cannot be any rising from those ashes.