Smoke Will Follow You

by VANESSA MICALE

David Bowie sits atop a liquid gold throne in a myriad of clouds and silver stars. He plays his guitar with his mind. He wears no makeup and exists in all ages, all facets, a diamond turned in the sunlight, whole, of the earth. He sweats and looks through a photo album of the future. His technology screen limit is almost up for all of eternity. A panic swells to his throat. He eyes the stack of pens and notebooks and never-out-of-tune guitars. The smoke lifts up through the atmosphere, through outer space. He presses play on a livestream video of the apocalypse. This is the last transmission he receives from Earth.

I hold onto my umbrella, feet planted firmly on the black asphalt of my elementary school, eyes squeezed tight. The Santa Ana winds sweep the playground of the suburb where I live. I slowly lift up into the sky. I lift up into the air just in time to escape the monster that pummels towards me with clawed hands. I hope it isn’t Freddy Krueger chasing me, but I know that to remember him is to empower him. My flying umbrella carries me farther and farther away from the ground I once stood on. I tighten my grip around the handle. I join a flock of geese in formation. I ask them how far to South America. We don’t speak the same language. They give me the side-eye, but allow me to migrate south with them. “I’m trying to find my family,” I say. We avoid border checkpoints. We soar above. Days pass. We have icicles forming around our eyes. My umbrella fabric is torn in places. The geese have patched it with their feathers. I become more like them every day. I learn new sounds, inflections of my throat. A deep “om” thrums from my throat, velvet, guttural, just as easily as the squawks and honks warble out. They do not call my language broken. I rest with the geese in Machu Picchu. We observe the majestic ruins. We observe in silence, jaws and beaks agape under the sheen of moonlight.

The melatonin pills that I took startle my eyes open in the middle of the night. I am awake, yet unable to speak or move, halfway stuck in a dream state. I see my lover next to me. My arms play possum, glued to my bed, stuck like stupid tongues on the slab of a frozen lake. Just a few hours ago, I was fully awake and naked, restrained, willing, with soft cuffs around my wrists and ankles, a silk bandana tied across my eyes. We passed a joint back and forth, flicked our tongues like snakes, our throats dry with smoke. A feather and a switch traced my thighs. The texture, the wetness, the cold leather, the spit, the ridges of ribs, the imprints of fingernails and hands.

David Bowie composes an album of a guitar solo inspired by the viral wails of koalas on fire that scream for help while being filmed on Facebook Live. The angels have empty wallets and can’t buy the album, so they burn bootleg copies of the album for each other. There is no way to copyright the sound of nature’s pain. The album summons the dream demons. The psyche of pop culture back on earth seethes with jealousy as the album is unavailable for mortal download. It is covered in blood and hot to the touch. In order to listen to it, you have to wear a thick vinyl suit resistant to the heat of the sun. If you get too close, turn it up too loud, you will combust like a moth in flames. Angels of the underground BDSM community have been edging too close, and combusting by the thousands. The ecstasy of vicariously absorbing the pain of the end of the earth is too great to bear.

The geese and I part ways. I have farther to go so I keep flying. The generosity that the geese have shown me, to allow me to fly by their side without knowing me, without speaking my language, is greater than any human has shown me. Their interspecies compassion saved my life. By now feathers cover my whole body. When I arrive to the shores of Montevideo, I realize that I will be unrecognizable to my family. I may frighten them. Or worse, I may have taken too long to come home this time. I place a rose at my grandmother’s grave. I place a rose at my tía’s grave. I place a rose at my father’s grave. I don’t know where my grandfather is, so I throw a rose into the ocean. I lift up into the sky for one last journey. Thick smoke hits my lungs as the fires burn in the Amazon below me. I feel the quiver of souls flit past me like so many orphaned monarch butterflies. Medicine in nectar, brilliant blooms of flowers, frogs, birds, human guardians who lived, loved, and protected the land, animals that tried to burrow into the ground, run, slither, step, swim, leap, climb, fly, move in every way to escape the devastating heat. My flying umbrella lifts me higher and higher. I “om” over and over and over until I find him.

I have a gift for David Bowie. I have black eyeliner that I stole from the mall in the suburb of Southern California that was once my home. That was before the apocalypse, the fires, the Santa Ana winds that swept me up into the sky with a flying umbrella. When I breech through the clouds with my tattered umbrella and feather-clad body, David Bowie turns. I hold out the eyeliner to him. He takes the eyeliner, makes pristine lines around his eyes without a mirror, sighs. In this place, there is no makeup, no mirrors. If not already dead, he would be bored to death until this moment on the cusp of a performance. He is about to take the stage atop clouds at sunrise, throngs of angels waiting. The angels salivate in anticipation. Freddy Krueger koalas drag their tender claws across the stage of pillowed clouds. The koalas were hired as David Bowie’s backup dancers for this, the only concert he will give. Their claws tear into the soft purple-pink hues of marshmallow clouds, slice the clouds like cake.

I cannot move, arms against my body. I strain my ears. I hear a fax machine in the kitchen. Someone I love is trying to reach me. I used to run home after school to not miss the phone call that might come from thousands of miles away from several hours into the future. If the answering machine blinked red, it meant I was too late. The message was already in the past and my loved ones were already sleeping. The crimson glow, the archaic technology, the beeping rhythm arrests my heart with the sorrow of nostalgia, of arriving too late. I wait for the pills to wear off, for my lover to wake and see me pinned to the bed, for the koalas to pad down the hallway with mournful melodies. I wait for dawn.

David Bowie shreds the guitar. The koalas shred the clouds. The angels who get too close to the stage weep and combust. When David Bowie strums the final chord, he collapses. His eyeliner smudged, his heart reverbs, quivers the heavens. The koalas begin a somber haloed descent back to earth. They return as dream demons to transmit the wailing guitar solo. Clouds hang in shreds at sunrise, where gold light melts into the ragged edges, where the scarlet-orange dawn fizzles flat, muted by lack.