Ephraim

Ephraim

Ice cubes for brains. Rattling around, clinking, and ultimately melting away in the face of the fire. I walk into the room freezing. Frozen. Cold-hearted. Dead. People stand around at the party. It is ten o’clock and quietly dark out. Inside, here, it is bright. Small conflagrations, burning footprints, smoking eyes and ears, but mostly flame-throwing conversations. Balls of fire spewing forth and sticking to this person’s shoulder or that person’s cheek. I try to be cool. The ice becomes water. Becomes gas. Leaks from my body, making me an airhead. My footprints are small puddles. A difference so obvious to me, yet clearly unacknowledged by others. What is wrong with me? I have no ambition, no drive. Just self-destructive recurrent patterns of embarrassing helplessness. No! The cancer won’t come back. Can’t come back. Don’t say this to me. My mind stops. All I hear is, “No, no, no, no…” washing out all of your words, your predictions, your admonishments for me to prepare to be alone eventually. No! Everyone is on fire. Fire! I am a block of ice, alternately melting, and then freezing again. Fissures and crevasses make it easy for your words to seep in and break me apart. Leaving me cubed and cracked, shaved and shattered. Can’t come back…can it? Frozen in time. Unable to move, to make, to be anything ever again. I don’t believe I ever was anything to begin with. I was born unsettled. I matured unstable. I am aging unsatisfactorily. They are on fire. I enter the party.

The bow. Ephraim, the bow of the twelve tribes. I am Ephraim. I am the bow. Never the arrow. Merely a stationary fulcrum. Launching other things and people. An ice sculpture of a bow. My parents were Ephraim. My mom said I was Ephraim too. So I am. People mill about. I prepare to launch cold from my bow to staunch the bleeding fire that they spread about the room. Maybe I should let them burn. No! It won’t come back! They are made of asbestos. They don’t need to be cooled, preserved, or slowed. I melt with a word, a touch, or a look. Why did I come here? I don’t leave my house anymore. I’ll be dead soon anyway…so why leave? If it comes back, and you die, then I die. It is that simple. I am waiting for the all-clear signal. I remain huddled under my desk doing exactly what I was shown. When an air raid, or atomic bomb attack happens, duck and cover children. I am under attack. I have been under my desk for so long that it has grown into my back. I walk hunched over supporting my flesh school desk. Forever waiting for the bright flash that will signify my evaporation. Under foot lay all the pretty pieces of my dreams. They trail away behind me indecipherable, to me or anyone else. Madly swaying against a wall, a drunken girl is laughing. She drinks as if the fire threatens her too. When she opens her mouth, first to pour more beer down her gullet, then to speak, I recognize her. She teeters on the edge. The lukewarm eddies create temperate zones vying for stability, swirling around her waist. Fire and freezer burn. I don’t recognize her after all. She is not of the tribe of Benjamin. She is not an arrow. She just toys with letting the fire lapse into a smoldering drunken smile. I am the bow.

My host turns with a smile and welcomes me. He doesn’t see that I have melted due to his invitation. My home is a deep freeze that I keep carefully controlled. Now, here, I have no control. Introductions made, names immediately forgotten, I trundle off to place the beer I have with me into an ice-chest outside. The yard rambles unexpectedly off around bushy dark corners. Above the chest a church key hangs from a wire attached to a hammock frame in the semi-darkness. I think of hanging myself. This brittle frozen neck cracking in two after bearing my middle-aged weight. My head rolls off down one of the garden paths that wind away from me as I open a beer. Between my ears I feel the congealing slush of my returning self.

Outside, here, in the shadows cast by the backyard porch light, I regain my specific gravity. No, I don’t want to talk. I just want to watch and listen from a safe distance. No, don’t get too close to me. No. It can’t come back. I wish my ears would melt off. “Oh yeah, sure, u-hm, fine, we’re fine, she’s fine.” A fine line. She’s a fine line. A line that I tether to my iceberg brain, towing her to safety in the freezer of my heart. I want us to be like a pair of Mammoths stuck in permafrost. Holding hands. Forever. Until we become food for some starving expedition that digs us up in a few thousand years. Cancer. She’s a fine line. Health or death. In between happiness and illness. Tattoo a harbor on my forehead and place her ship there so I can keep it safe. I am the bow. She is the archer. She is from an unknown tribe. Not one of the twelve. Not of my people. Not even of her own people. Her people just blindly coupled one day and she took the opportunity to start her creation. I’m still waiting for them to be reduced to ashes. To leave her alone with me. She has no tribe. She is unique. She is her own creation. A runaway adopted off the street. Self-created with rogue indifference to cells exuberantly multiplying in her body. She told me she is prepared for this creation, her self, to leave. No, no, not me. Don’t leave me. I am already so cold here. “Oh yeah, good to see you again.” I open another beer and smile at nothing and no one in particular.

Why did I come here? She left our house to go to the desert for the weekend. I am alone. Parties always emphasize exactly how alone I can be. Small talk has never come easily to me. But I have learned to make it seem so. Every word that I utter only exists because it has to follow the other words that somehow escape my mouth. Those words have no significance beyond their fear of losing each other. My tongue is a gatekeeper who sometimes sleeps with the gate key fully exposed. I say things I don’t mean. I say things in response to others out of etiquette as much as engagement. “No, she’s out of town.” And I am out of things to say. It happens that quickly. Plastic Fireball Man, fearful of aging, wants to tell me about playing music out of fakebooks. I don’t want to talk about playing music with this guy. He gives me the creeps. I’m not sure why. “No…I don’t play anymore.” My frozen head rolls out from behind a bush and winks at me. Doesn’t this man see that I am dead? That I am slushy and leaking? What is he looking at? I have no head. I almost point to the path down which my braincase has rolled. If you want to talk to someone, something, talk to my head Plastic Fireball Man. The drunken girl breaks something on the back porch. “No, we’ve never met. I’ve never been here before,” I say after she insists she knows me. She flips her Peggy Lee hair out of her eyes. I haven’t seen someone this wasted in years. My head rolls back to me and I place it on my neck. It dangles a little to the side. I need to get home, back to the deep freeze. “New Mexico?” Another girl says she is from New Mexico. She points to her less than sober companion and says they are both from New Mexico. Then she adds,“So is Mr. X in the living room.”

Mr. X. The Mr. X. I walk into the living room and reintroduce myself to Mr. X. He is a friend of a friend, and an unexpected event in flesh. Why did he come? Cars, dragsters, top fuel, men with tools, men with diminutive women who love men with tools, diminutive men who love women with tools. That’s why. This party is filled with gearheads. I am not one of them. I love tools, respect cars, but drag racing isn’t my thing. Just not part of the California I grew up in. I know others say that it is integral to Southern Cal culture, but most of them grew up somewhere else. As a matter of fact, the majority of gearheads I know are all from some other state. They moved here and found the link to the stock cars, dragsters, or matchbox toys of their youth, in the drag strips of Southern California. But I am from here. Just because I am frozen and inarticulate doesn’t mean that I don’t have bragging rights to my area. I know what I know. In my neighborhood, drag racing and car culture were for hicks and hardasses. Surfing, hiking, and horses were what I knew. Cars. Loud, smelly, and lowbrow. Mr. X, an artist who, like everyone else here, defies my overly judgmental assessment of car racing fans, is relaxed and nice. My recognition of this worthless prejudice against combustion shames me. I talk about our mutual friend, and other things, for a few minutes. Then he joins a discussion on the history of drag racing celebrities. The participants melt before my eyes. The kitchen floor is awash with greasy flames dancing about. The drunken girl, still smoldering away, is guided out of the house by her friend. I left too; leaving sodden trails careening around my friend’s house and yard. “Hey, thanks for having me. Bye.”

My feet slip along the brick pathway across the lawn. Ice patches appear in my wake. A bow is worthless without an archer’s hands to guide it's action. To give meaning to it’s potential. A concerted dance of finesse. A love affair of sinews. I may be Ephraim, but her tribe is new. Her ways reassemble known bits and pieces into a new territory. For me, she is the jewel of all archers. It is cold out as I make my way to my car. For this I am grateful. No fires to worry about. No melting. No heads cracking off. But, no one waits at home. Parties aren’t for me. I don’t have an interesting enough personality to go to them. I just freeze up. No, no, no, no, no. You won’t leave me alone here. Alone on this planet after all these years. I won’t let you go. Sure, go to the desert to thaw out. You deserve to warm a little every now and then. But my cold arms will keep you fresh. Keep the fire from exploding out of those strange cells you say you still carry around inside you. No. Never say that to me. Never say that I am going to eventually be alone after the cancer comes back and takes you away. Never say that I must prepare myself for such a thing. Never say we are separate, that we won’t go together. Never, I can’t take it, hear it, or feel it. I won’t let you leave without me. Without your hands, eyes, and steady nerves, my ice bow would only melt away. Or more likely, shatter. You are my true tribe. You are of the tribe of the Jewel. You are the only party I am comfortable at.