Chimney falls as lovers blaze – Thought that I was young
Now I've freezin' hands and bloodless veins, as numb as I've become
Neko Case
Fall 2010
Each gentle rock forward brought Marie’s heavy-lidded gaze closer to the covered moon peeking out under the sloping roof. Each sway backward was a release of muggy breath against the blanket, damp with sticky tears, nestled on her momma’s lap. The porch swing creaked along with momma’s airy tune, so soothing even what was left of Marie’s gasping hiccups had fallen into time. Momma hummed and stroked her thumb along the side of Marie’s grimacing face. Back and forth. Constant rhythms designed to lull her into forgetting.
When the moon slid fully out of the clouds, she let out a yowl in Soldier’s memory and kicked the armrest so hard she stubbed her toes. Momma grabbed at her legs – “Shush now, Anna Marie, you’ll hurt yourself” – but Marie didn’t stop flailing until, from inside the house, her daddy plunged them into darkness.
Loud as she got, her daddy never yelled. He switched off lights and locked doors and hid from her in the grocery store until she was frantic that he’d left her. Marie, ten years old and sweaty and spiteful, clung to her momma but glared at the clouds chasing the moon.
“I hate him.” She’d learned to associate that word with her daddy three states ago – “Don’t you walk out that door, Dale. This is my life, too! You can’t make all the decisions.” “If you were capable of talking to me like an adult, maybe I wouldn’t have to.” “I hate you sometimes.” “You’ve got no right. Not after all I did for you” – and the woman who’d taught her to do it let out a deep sigh.
“He’s a good provider. He can’t pass up this promotion, he’s been with Shaw Industries too long. And he found Soldier a beautiful new home, didn’t he? A farm is perfect for a dog. Virginia to Georgia was bad enough, he’s just too rowdy to take all the way to Texas. And Houston’s a big city. A dog like that needs room to run.”
“Soldier’s mine. Anything that ain’t his he just makes go away. He don’t care.” In her broken heart she added, Bet I’m next, but kept it to herself. She didn’t need that lecture again.
“‘Isn’t,’” was her momma’s only correction.
Marie kept on watching the moon running fast away. She squirmed when her momma tried to pull her closer. “It’s too hot.” It was always too hot, every place they moved to. And too crowded. There wouldn’t be another house for miles, but the humidity itself would pin her in. The moon broke free again, and Marie sat forward to catch a cooling breeze.
Momma put her hand over her daughter’s eyes. “Don’t stare at the moon like that, baby girl. Or someday you’ll get up to follow it and you won’t ever get to stop.”
Gloves flung into the nearest garbage, coat bunched up in her bag, shirt sleeves pushed high, Marie surges forward counter the flow of pedestrian traffic. She donates a twenty she shouldn’t spare to shake hands with a non-mutant IMRI activist. On the metro at rush hour, she stands with her arms high, flush against a hipster who plays along by steadying himself on her bared waist. A middle-aged mom in a cluster of hippies on their way to a protest lets Marie hug her toddler to her cheek. In Malcolm X Park, she links arms with demonstrators against mutant-on-mutant violence. She dares to strip down to her underwear for a guerrilla theatre production of Hair. An electric blue-skinned actor spins her around and around, singing that he’ll lay his mutated head at her feet. They kiss, her eyes open, her hands at her side. When the police break up the show, she runs her bundle of clothes in the opposite direction.
Every touch feels the same – the thrill of anticipation let down by dull sensation. Still, she wears a smile ready to happen. Maybe next touch, maybe in another hour. Give the cure time to settle. Be grateful no one’s dead, no one’s talking.
The crush of undisturbed humanity thins out under moonrise. Through a taxi’s open door, a woman mashes her face against a figure swallowed inside. Marie wants to be at school right now. Like that. With her boyfriend. Both of them all saliva and tears and ineloquent declarations. She wants to quit agreeing that they’re in love and start actually feeling it. With her foot, she activates a car alarm, jarring the happy couple. She keeps on walking.
As tall as the park walls are, they do nothing to insulate her from the sickening anger she has come to feel toward this city and the people in it. She’s touched them all, but none of them touched her. She expected warmth and giddiness and freedom and – and joy. She expected to be bursting with it. But here she stands. Trapped inside flesh that doesn’t even hurt right when she pinches it. Her fingers are stiff and blue, but she doesn’t remember feeling cold.
“Can – ”
Marie whips around at the first syllable, dread forcing her to realize her surroundings. Malcolm X Park after dark and more alone than she’s ever been. And afraid and off-guard. As if the Logan in her head has merged with her sense of self-preservation and with him she’s silenced all the fight-or-flight of X-Man Rogue. Leaving her dumbstruck and vulnerable.
But no more so than the person who startled her. He has his hands up like she’s pointing a gun. “No, uh…” He gestures at himself. “Talk. To you.”
Marie hugs her elbows in annoyed relief, recognizing the flyers and the small, bony guy holding them.
“I already picked a clinic,” Marie says, her voice hoarse with disuse.
“Don’t worry. It’s taking him a while to get used to it, too.”
She rubs her forearms. “’Him’ who?”
His face squishes in confusion. “Um, no him. Me. Cal.” He sticks out his hand.
Marie shakes it slowly, surprised at his skin’s newborn baby softness and reassured that she can feel the difference. “Anna.” A reboot from the beginning name. A don’t-find-me-until-I’m-ready name.
She stares without meaning to. Cal is less a cured mutant and more an alien not quite morphed to human. She can see the shape of his skull under his bald head. He lets go of her, and she searches for a way to ease the offense. But he just hands her a Polaroid of a hunched figure with bone-white skin and a skeletal face. In the picture, his teeth are bared. Marie glances back at Cal, sees that he meant it as a grin.
“Me, before. Better looking faster every day. Stick around. Might end up handsome.”
She tries to return his optimism with a smile. “Congratulations.”
Cal takes back his picture with one hand and threads his fingers through hers with the other. “You, too,” he says, rubbing her palm with his smooth thumb.
“How do you know – “
“A guess. Used to know. Could sense any mutant and track their powers, and teach other mutants to sense it, too. That was the nice part. Never feeling alone.”
Marie squeezes his hand, wanting a little of his good-natured assurance to flow into her –
She lets her fingers fall out of his abruptly, disgusted by her own screwed up notions of touch and intimacy. She’s gotten so used to using people, always wanting to take, take, take and clearly not hating herself enough for it.
Marie tilts back her aching, empty head. “Do you know some place I can lie down?” The sliver of the moon has hidden itself completely, and she wants to do the same.
Sliding her cell phone open and shut is an outlet for the agitation gripping her by the throat. The other cured mutants in the hostel common room have moved on. They’re no longer talking about the grainy video of the Phoenix laying waste to Alcatraz beside stock footage of Dr. Jean Grey addressing Congress. They aren’t debating the ethics of cure guns or cost-benefit of the mutant paramilitary contractors code named X-Men. They never even wondered about that lone soldier, the one reported to have “put an end to the violence” singlehandedly.
No, they’re back to talking about what texture their foreheads used to be or how many hours straight they once hiccupped bubbles. And Marie is lounging out in the open in shorts and a tank top, so how the hell is she any better?
Worse. She’s so much worse. Doesn’t take a master strategist to work out how a wham-bam combo of healing factor, metal plating, phasing – teleportation or super speed, if either were handy – and maybe a half-dozen cure shots could’ve saved Jean Grey’s life. Not that Marie harbors any delusions that she would have been strong enough, brave enough to take on the Phoenix by herself. But, God, how she’d like to think she could have been for Logan’s sake.
Marie flees the overheated common room in favor of the relative privacy of the fire escape. She can feel temperature again, almost too well. She imagines moonlight cooling her neck as she hangs her head over the rail.
Last night, while she was crying herself to sleep over the cruel irony of touchable skin gone numb, the X-Men were making good on the pledge she herself made once upon a time. They saved the world. Kitty and Pete and Bobby. And John, listed among the captured. On the wrong side, but in a way still more heroic than Marie.
Maybe she wouldn’t have made a difference. But at least she could have been there. Then she’d be with Logan now. If he’d let her.
Her cell phone buzzes, making her nearly drop it several stories. Another voicemail from Bobby. Reassuring but unnecessary. CNN would have said if one of the X-Men had been injured.
Bobby. She dreamed about him last night. In the dream, he called her Marie for the first time, and when he touched her he loved her enough for both of them. Only the cure didn’t last. He kept on kissing her as his veins turned black, and she couldn’t move at all except for her gasping eyes. Spectators judged her from over his shoulder. “She did that to me, too. Isn’t she awful?” David commented. Kitty said, “I think she could stop it, if she really wanted to.” John draped his arms around the two of them. “Nah. She likes it too much. She really does.” Then Bobby, on his dying breath, “Rogue!”
She woke up alone and trembling. Agonizing over close calls and prophetic words. Feeling sorry for herself over a stupid, obvious dream. Thinking she was the only one so afraid of the darker consequences of her powers, so controlled by them.
Not knowing she was wrong again. Not knowing that Logan already lived her nightmare.
Marie is clutching the phone so tightly her whole hand vibrates with it. The text she sent Logan has paid off. He finally found where she, in lieu of a tantrum, stashed his forgotten phone in plain sight.
His message is clipped and unsentimental enough to be the God’s honest truth. Nothing she could have done. Not for the team, not for him. Not then, not now. What she meant to write is that she’s sorry it had to be him who stopped the Phoenix. Sorry it had to be her to take the cure. Sorry there wasn’t a better way for either of them.
A few minutes later, Logan asks if she’s coming back. She turns off her phone.
Her breathing evens out under the moon’s impartial halo. The burden of regret doesn’t feel as heavy knowing that no one can see it. Inevitably, they – the ones who fought – will ask her – the one who ran – why she took the cure and whether it was worth it. There’s no going back until she can look them in the eye when she answers.