Smoke and Mirror. It smelled like my mother. I saw the remains of her face in the fragmented art-deco mirrors, now clouded with grime but that once turned daggers into her eyes. A beauty with her same caramel skin lounged at the bar, her limbs hung like they would pop right out of their sockets, slung across the counter, reaching desperately for the refreshing feel of frozen glasses overflowing with whisky and limes. Her silver sparkling dress looked cold like snow against the warm glow of her bronzed leg. She whined to the bartender, slowly and sensually twisting her leg, hopelessly; the bartender’s gaze was more often directed towards the smooth onyx cheekbones of the saxist.
She almost had my mother’s eyes though. Despite all the smoke and late nights my mother’s eyes were bright and brown and clear, flickering instantly from stimulus to stimulus, following my brother and I from game to game, always knowing what we were playing and all the rules we made up and broke. I felt sure her eyes were just as quick when she would nightly frequent the lounge in which I now stood. They would follow the music notes, knowing the rules but loving when they were broken, pursuing the tune from floor to ceiling to the bartender’s ear and up the dress of the soulful singer. She carried a tiny mirror in her fringed handbag (the one that once was covered in sequins that gradually fell away until only a single one still sparkled; we found them scattered around our apartment for years). The mirror was tarnished and distorted, but she would pull it out to pluck a stray eyebrow or line her cloudless eyes with black crayon, as if to underscore the consequence of her chocolate stare.
This caramel woman in the silver dress, though – her eyes were blue, an anomalous mark of white blood on burnt skin. They were blurred and bloodshot, the pupils like round, bloated whales, impaled and bleeding in the sallow froth along the shore. But beneath the film that protected her vision from reality, there was some painful knowledge, a faint twinkle composed of the same noble despair my mother embodied.
She was trying to hide it with her frail limbs sprawled towards the copper whisky and her red nails curled around the pennies she thought could pay for it. She was trying to look pathetic, and part of me ached to rip the sparkle from her and melt her skin to thick syrup, to mold a new body that would congeal into a stronger shape, slick and hard, and would clink when you tapped it until the warmth of your palm burned tiny holes in her shell. (And then she would let me lick the sticky soul that seeped out, her hand on my head, a caramel statue no longer letting us taste her for free). But she was trying to look pathetic, and she would look that way until she took all the syrup from you, leaving her bloated and repleted, full of all her men.
My mother had many men, but she would not fill herself up with them. She was hollow, and content in her emptiness. The men she took home sometimes thought she had filled them and brought her chocolates and wine and roses in attempt to return the favour. But the gifts moved right through her and after her hungry lovers left she would light a cigarette and laugh. We would laugh along. At the time we didn’t understand the joke, but now I know it’s because her lovers would never be sated; they would suck and suck but she was only hollow and dry, giving them nothing but a stomach full of air and maybe some of her blueberry pancakes. She would cook them naked, unashamed of her exposure because there was nothing to see or understand. Each man would think it was a special treasure, a privilege; that they were touching the outermost atmosphere of her heart. She would just laugh, wiping the sticky maple syrup from her fingers, for her heart beat only to get blood between her legs.
My name is Simon, but people call me Smoke because I smell of my mother. Andrew is my younger brother. People call him Mirror because he is like my reverse twin. He smelled like me and fished with me, and had my mother’s eyes, nose and lips like me. But his skin and hair were light as rain and he pattered while I thundered.
I learned the caramel woman’s real name was Mary, but once you entered the lounge you were baptized with a new name and a new meaning. Everyone called her Mel. It used to be Caramel but eventually she wasn’t worth more than one syllable, so she says. She was scared her name might soon be reduced to only a sound, like the short staccato swell on the saxophone. Mm.
This story isn’t about my mother. This story isn’t really even about me or my brother. This story – if you ask the general population – isn’t about the caramel woman, but her heart pumped to get blood to the brain and between the legs of this story. She was and was not my mother; she was and was not all our mothers. Her body lit our fire, and her eyes – the eyes of our mothers – cooled our hot faces. If her dislocated arms never reached and her soft body never devoured, I may never have met the true hero of this tale; none of us might have. And he, without her, might never have been able to fill her or us or anyone, and would not have left a mark of his existence.
Judy. My skin looks cold, but it is white hot. No one can touch me without being scarred with the remembrance. Mel eats you whole so that you sit like a mouse in a snake’s stomach, so huge she digests you for days. But I consume like fire. I bear no mark of my last meal except a temporary blue flame, only hot enough to last until my next repast. There is no evidence except the excrement of ashes, the disfiguring scar left on your lips. I am neither empty nor full; I am barely a substance. I am not the fire in your hearth, or the one you sing around, no; I do not provide warmth – only violent, scalding heat.
Perhaps Mel is not a snake, but rather a salamander. When my blaze met with her hunger, she did not curl into white cinder like a serpent. She swallowed me, so that she burned from the inside out, and the tiny holes some man had rubbed into her skin glowed orange and blue. I would have been frightened if she had not been frightened too; she was worried the burns on her organs would heal to make her so tough that men could no longer melt and mold her. I told her fire could forge her too, into any shape she pleased.
But no matter what form I shaped her into, when Jesse X was around she was absolute butter. I can’t remember if she introduced me to him or he introduced her to me, but my first known memory of both of them is the same. Mel wore a slinky, low-necked, silver dress, just barely covering the top of her thighs. She was twisting to the erratic sounds of the saxophone, weaving her arms in the air as though they were swimming through an invisible maze. Her blue eyes were wide and scared, though her body moved smoothly, as if it were part of the music-filled air. She was barefoot and slipped a little along the floor as she wiggled towards Jesse, waving her arms out and squeezing her fingers, a motion to join her that he didn’t seem to understand.
He was talking to two men I didn’t recognize; one was darker and the other lighter, but they had the same face and smell. They had the posture of newcomers to the Babylon lounge, and Jesse was pointing towards John, the saxist who was currently absorbed in a particularly frantic song. I figured Jesse was telling them to get fresh names from John, who was in charge of determining your fate in the Babylon if you planned to stay. Your new moniker became your identity; you could be a fisherman by day (and by the boys’ smell that’s what they were – and also heavy smokers) but if he called you a blacksmith that was your true essence. You would need to learn to manipulate my fire to hammer Jesse’s iron eyes, and the resulting hot poker would burn more holes in Mel’s skin. Mel was always at the end of our long line of communal labour; every product worked to build or destroy her, so that she was never quite complete and never quite ruined.
Jesse signaled to the bartender, Bart, for drinks for the two boys and returned his mind to the music and to Mel’s writhing figure, still beckoning to join her on the empty dance floor. She pulled and pulled at him, draping her liquid limbs all over his pale body in a way that made me feel sick. I nearly went to halt her humiliation and dance with her, but Jesse seemed to sense my intentions before I made a move. He dragged her hand onto the floor, as if it were he demanding the dance. I was angry – maybe because they both embarrassed me, maybe because I wanted them both, and maybe because the desire itself embarrassed me – but I was smoothed by the harmonious discord of their dance. His white limbs shone vibrantly against her muted glow of polished amber. His intensity and her softness seemed to be born from John’s saxophone as they twisted together and apart, never just one but never wholly two.
Of course, I knew them well before then but I couldn’t pinpoint our first meeting, just as we can’t remember the first time we met our mothers, or the first time we knew they were our mothers.
After the song ended, Bart cooled John off with a gin and tonic. The two new boys went to speak with John. I could hear them praising his saxophone skills, and after that I lost interest. Jesse and Mel were still meandering across the floor in a way that seemed aimless but was certainly paired with some music they both heard and understood. Jealousy panged me, and Bart, seeing the tinge of green on my cheeks, poured me more red wine.
“On the house, Judy,” he smiled.
“You’re too good to me.” I lit a cigarette. Bart grinned weakly, looking at my glass of wine as if it were a regret.
The new boys approached me, walking with the same awkwardness with which we all entered the Babylon. They told me John had called them Smoke and Mirror, but that their real names were –
“It doesn’t matter what you were,” I said. “Your parents were blind. You were a bouncing baby, a bundle of fleshy joy with a soft skull that softened your parents’ minds. They didn’t know who you were or who you would become. They only knew themselves, and you cannot live by that label.”
Of course, this was John’s creed, not mine, though I thoroughly believed it. If I didn’t believe it I’d tell you what my parents named me.
“But, John isn’t us either,” the one called Smoke said. I stared at him with dull incredulity.
“Not everyone gets a name, you know,” I examined my nails as if I wasn’t interested, but I was angry. “John isn’t you, and he isn’t me – but he’s part of the stuff that surrounds us. He can communicate with parts of you that you can’t even conceive of. Now you have your name, and now you are part of us.”
Smoke and Mirror didn’t seem to understand.
“You cannot turn back now,” I said, trying to dumb down John’s words. “So you must learn to understand John – or understand at least that you cannot understand him but he can understand you.”
“What about Jesse X?” Smoke asked again. Mirror was so quiet and his eyes were so empty I thought maybe he was blind.
“If you are patient, there might be parts of Jesse he’ll let you understand. But no matter what, you’ll always think you know him; that you’re kindred spirits,” I laughed softly with perhaps too obvious a tang of bitterness. “He doesn’t belong to this world.”
They nodded soberly, pretending to make a mental note of it. But I knew soon they’d want to swap best friend charms with Jesse, whose perfect face would make them feel the friendship was real.
“What do you want from me anyway?” I asked sourly. “A grand tour?”
They looked so ridiculous, so small against the cramped vastness of the Babylon. Suddenly their clothes looked many sizes too big, like starched hand-me-downs from giants. It was as if their new names had truly shrunk them back to the disproportions of infancy, their naïveté hanging from them like bulging dirty diapers. I bit my lip as I contemplated Smoke’s insolence; perhaps John did merely reduce us back to our voiceless births, our tiny, incapable fingers unable to take hold of our identities. I mentally shook my head, displacing the thought from my brain so that the particles of it drifted like dust in my skull. If I kept moving my head, they would not settle.
“Much will be expected from you,” I said viciously, as if wishing to scare Smoke and Mirror into expanding to fill their silly, huge garments. They only seemed to shrink further. I sighed, wanting at once to help them and to hurt them.
“But don’t worry,” I tried to sound reassuring. “You’ll be given the resources and encouragement to fill out your names and your destiny here. We’re family.” I almost patted them on the back, but refrained. I shuddered at what it would feel like to touch their baby skins in the shell of their large, crispy clothes.
John had started his music again and Mel began wiggling with increasing passion. Her red lips touched Jesse’s neck. She was either too intoxicated or too possessed by the music to form a proper pucker, so she just continually pressed her mouth against Jesse, leaving a trail of pink patches. Whether it was the music or the whiskey sours, she looked helpless and I felt like vomiting again at the sight of him being touched by her, and her wanting to touch him.
Smoke eyed me as if he wanted to dance, but even if I hadn’t felt so sick he and Mirror just looked like children to me, and I couldn’t overcome my belief that they reeked of baby shit.
Fortunately, I made it to the washroom before I finally retched.
Smoke and Mirror. The Babylon was unlike I had imagined it to be when I was a child. My mother would come home flushed and hyper, the usual solemn glint in her eye polished to an intense, joyful shine nearly reaching the luminosity of hope.
My first impression of the Babylon was that it did not sparkle like the joyous luster it seemed to give my mother. The hole in the ground the Babylonians inhabited was not dirty; there were no rats, no dust, and while the mirrors were tarnished they were evidently regularly washed. But somehow it emitted an aura of filth that, despite their clean skin and sparkling garments, coated its patrons with an invisible grime.
Or perhaps the grime came from the patrons themselves, because it seemed as though each Babylonian had their own dirt and as they danced and drank and fucked with each other it would rub off, leaving each with an intangibly physical history of their nightly interactions. A golden aura of dirt meant Caramel, while a harsh blue meant Judy. Jesse was iridescent; the hard, metallic taste of iron or blood mixed with something black and smooth, at once seductive and safe, like the smell of vanilla. Perhaps all their filth got muddled up together and rubbed into the surface of the Babylon, mixing into a dull, muddy brown.
I wondered what my mother contributed to the dirt of the Babylon, envisioning her as sparkling silver that lured you in like a lost moth. I figured I was thick, heavy grey, more a smell than a substance. And Mirror – he wouldn’t leave a trace if he ever had the chance to touch somebody.
Whether the dirt was a product of Babylon or the Babylonians, it was there and didn’t seem capable of producing the fresh life force that hung around my mother anytime she returned from its depths. I pictured the Babylon as water rather than earth, returning its inhabitant to their sea creature origins and continually refreshing them so that they could evolve into something superior, stronger.
Jesse was the first face I distinguished out of the dirty chaos, and he seemed to perceive my doubt in reaching land instead of sea.
“Have faith, Simon,” he said. He placed his hand on my shoulder; it felt both delicate and tough and that’s when I first noticed the vanilla and blood that came from his hand, and – though less powerful – the gold shimmer on his neck and the harsh blue on his ear and various other colours covering his body.
He smiled at Mirror, then known to me only as Andrew. Andrew’s eyes were a green that would have been radiant, had a different soul occupied them. Instead, they showed nothing, not even a reaction to the Babylon or the blood between the teeth of Jesse’s smile. If he had already been named by John, perhaps I would have known that Andrew didn’t understand or judge, he merely reflected the world back onto itself.
“Your mother said you would come one day,” Jesse said, still smiling though its tone seemed to have changed and I wondered if the memory of my mother was a good or a bad one, until I realised Jesse must have been around thirty, and never would have met my mother. For some reason – maybe the aroma of black vanilla – I now felt the faith he asked of me too strongly to question his ability to know her entirely. I felt not only that he knew her thoughts, but also ours, and that his empire in the Babylon was built strictly in anticipation of our arrival predicted by some ancient prophecy, that we had come to fulfill some unfathomable gap in Jesse’s ultimate plan, though at that time I was not aware there even was a plan.
“I am glad that you did,” Jesse said warmly, though the metallic tang of blood still hovered around his words. “We never felt complete without your mother’s sons. Don’t let us down.”
I felt my chest swell with a pride that resembled patriotism. It was as if I had been assigned some grand mission and I was certain the ancient prophecy was what Jesse’s soft words referred to. Andrew still looked like a mirror, and Jesse’s clear blue eyes scanned him with something I thought was suspicion. In an instant, however, the warmness returned.
“If you’re serious, after this set go see John, the saxist,” Jesse pointed to a man as dark as the vanilla Jesse radiated playing passionately on the saxophone. “He’ll give you your names and you’ll begin your new life here.”
My visions of a watery Babylon suddenly seemed so inconceivably foolish and I marveled at my innocence; dirt was certainly the only means of renewal. Water might physically cleanse, but I knew the filth of the Babylon would teach me to live with the muck of the world, somehow bring myself above it in the midst of it and teach me to use the dirt for something larger than any of the elements. I felt the surge of joyous brilliance almost touching hope and knew I would not let Jesse or the Babylon down. I only hoped Andrew wouldn’t.
Jesse was finally dragged away by the caramel women, who he briefly introduced to us as Mel. We watched them dance until the song was done, and then approached John. He held up his hand to us in a motion telling us to wait while the bartender wiped his brow and John gulped down a gin and tonic. He introduced Bart and then waved him away. I started to speak, but he held his enormous hand up again.
“Jesse has told me. Just wait.” His eyes were small and looked as if they were in a permanent squint. Later, as I began to understand the immensity of his knowledge I believed he was indeed permanently squinting to see the small particles of spiritual intelligence the average human could not. It was if he saw the smoke hovering around me as I stood there and as if he truly saw his own reflection in Mirror’s muted face. He cleared his throat.
“Smoke,” he said, touching my head firmly but gently. “Mirror.” He did the same to Andrew, now Mirror. “Take them, learn them and soon you will understand them.” He said this mechanically, as if it were something he said in every baptism, but somehow I felt that it was an intimate moment, never before enacted. We stood for a moment – I basking, Mirror merely standing – in the new filth of our names. John stared at us quizzically, as if he had never before witnessed a rebirth. He waved his hand toward Judy – though we did not know she was Judy yet – and gulped down another gin and tonic. We turned around and looked at Judy, who was casually smoking a cigarette looking a dissonant combination of bored and passionate.
“Should I rename you Dumb and Dull?” John asked viciously. “You’re not one of us yet, so go talk to Judy.” We shuffled away, embarrassed. As we approached, her expression barely changed, except that her eyes – the same hue as Jesse’s – shifted towards us and perhaps a bit more boredom entered their stare as they laid themselves upon us.
After lecturing us, teaching us an ambiguous lesson about Jesse, and performing what seemed like a strained attempt to comfort us, she resumed her observation of Jesse and Mel. I eyed her quietly, wondering why she seemed so frightened of us, and was about to ask her more about the Babylon when she ran to the washroom in a hurry.
When she returned she smelled faintly of vomit. She asked Bart to bring her something to eat, and he returned with a few slices of bread and a small plate of various cheeses. It looked elegant and fresh, something I would not have suspected from the muddy innards of the Babylon. I glanced around again, though, and the Babylon seemed not to hang with imaginary dirt any longer, or rather the dirt didn’t seem as repugnant.
Bart refilled Judy’s glass of wine as she gracefully ate a slice of bread topped with brie. She pushed the plate towards Mirror and me, and gestured us to take some. I said I had no money and she looked as if she were about to laugh.
“I suppose Jesse and John haven’t taught you anything about the Babylon?” she asked rhetorically after swallowing a mouthful of bread and cheese. I looked at Mirror, who was reaching for a piece of cheese. Judy laughed, seeming significantly cheered by our ignorance. I felt ashamed.
“Well,” she started, as if preparing to tell an epic tale. “John and Jesse will collect your fees monthly. When you come here, you are welcome to all the food and drink you can handle, and can stay the night when you can’t face the outside world. And believe me; once you enter the Babylon the outside world is never satisfying and most often unbearable. But what you will gain here will make up for what you have lost in what you once called reality.”
Around two in the morning, the Babylon began to empty. John, however, continued playing and a handful of individuals including Jesse, Judy and Mel did not look inclined to leave soon. Bart cleared away the abandoned empty glasses that scattered the joint and wiped down the surfaces viciously. Jesse whispered something in his ear and he nodded. A few minutes later he went in behind the bar and reappeared with a few bottles of dusty red wine and another plate of bread and cheese, this time along with cold slices of meat, a couple bowls of plump olives and a platter of smoked fish. John’s saxophone wailed its last note, and the handful of people who remained chatted in hushed voices while the band packed up. The Babylon was eerily quiet, as if all the noise and hubbub of the usually crowded music lounge served to disguise some immense secret. As John signaled to the band to go, Mirror tugged on my sleeve and tilted his head towards the door, implying we had overstayed our welcome. I turned to leave with him when Jesse clamped us both on the shoulder.
“Stay and eat and drink with us,” Jesse said. “We want to get to know our new recruits – and I’m sure you have lots of questions.”
His grin was so welcoming I again felt childish at having believed the food and wine weren’t brought out solely in honour of our arrival. Jesse took a seat in the middle of the table, and the others – except for John who remained leaning on his saxophone case – sat on either side of him. Mel, falling clumsily onto a stool, beckoned to me (or perhaps Mirror, I suppose) to sit near her. Jesse began to distribute wine and food, and soon the life of the Babylon returned to the room as everyone laughed and drank and talked together. When we had eaten our fill, Jesse poured more wine and stood as if to propose a toast.
“I would like everyone to meet our two new members, Smoke and Mirror,” he held his palms out in our direction and there was a murmur of greetings. I hoped they knew which of us was which. “They are the children of Magda.” I did not recognize the name; of course our mother did not go by her Babylonian name when at home.
“While it would not be a disadvantage to judge them on their basis of their beautiful mother, I ask that you receive them without any preconceived notions,” Jesse continued and then turned to address us. “We hope you will learn lots from us, and that we will likewise learn from you.”
Mirror and I both bowed our heads awkwardly, unsure of how to respond. Jesse then went along the bar, re-introducing Bart, Judy, Mel and John and naming the new faces.
“So what do you two do for money?” Bart asked. I looked to Mirror, attempting to give him a chance to speak and establish himself in their presence. He merely stared back.
“We’re fishermen,” I answered, unsure of whether it was an acceptable profession in their eyes. “A next door neighbour was kind enough to give us employment as boys when we were hard up for money and we haven’t found a reason to leave.”
Everyone nodded silently. I felt a combination of relief and disappointment; none of them seemed disapproving of fishermen, though none of them looked impressed either. They asked us a few other questions about our family and lovers and seemed satisfied to hear we had none. They talked of Magda a little, until Jesse told them that the past is gone, in a tone that implied he had reminded them of the same many times before. They quieted after that, and there were a few moments filled only with the soft sipping of wine until John announced he was leaving, asking Bart to come with him. Everyone filtered out shortly after, each embracing Jesse as they left. By the time we departed, Jesse and Mel were the only ones left behind, Mel tugging at Jesse’s shirt and humming an unidentifiable tune in his ear.
Something I’m working on, finally feeling productive. Comments welcome, if anyone reads.
