Volcanic

VOLCANIC

by Andrew Wilmot

Content Warning: suicide, pain under capitalism

Nora glared in worst-case-scenario. Her eyes were live wires, dancing. A threat of resolution. Acceptance.

Acquiescence.

“You can’t,” Ari said. “Please.”

Nora’s whole body trembled like she’d just been pulled from frozen waters. She can’t know this, Ari thought to themself. She can’t have the faintest idea what she’s suggesting.

“Please, Nor. Don’t.”

“Pop, pop, little bird. See you on the other—”

An explosion—a squelching report like a burst water balloon, and Nora was everywhere: ceiling; floor; the walls of the small twelve-by-twelve studio space she’d rented fifteen months earlier, promising herself one day she’d make use of it, make use of her degree, find her creative centre again.

On Ari, too, who hadn’t time enough to shield their eyes from the blast.

An exothermic reaction not one person alive yet understood, and Nora—all she ever was; all she ever dreamed she could, would, should someday be—painted the space in a stunning spectrum of chromatic gore. The chemical concoction of her hopes and dreams, the ordnance of her mind reduced to shrapnel.

Ari, still shaking from shock, slowly surveyed the room. Among the remains of their oldest friend oozing, clumping down the walls, dripping steadily from the ceiling, they saw fragments—pieces of still lifes and half-imagined portraits like splintered memories seen through fog; post-modernist abstractions that one day might’ve been studied, written about, admired and sought after, had they been allowed to be.

They felt their insides begin to squirm—a slight quake. The tremor started in their left hand and raced all too quickly up their arm, like a heart attack starting in the wrong direction. Immediately, they pulled two Xanax from the bottle they kept in their jacket pocket and dry-swallowed. Shut their eyes.

Prayed.

Gradually, the tremor stilled like a threat without the follow-through. They exhaled. Stood up and looked upon the whole—upon Nora, her personal ground zero.

Ari thought of taking a photo of the space. To commemorate Nora. To show the world what she could’ve been.

But didn’t.

Remembered, in the end, it’s not what Nora would have wanted. Ari had known her their entire life. Nora wasn’t a painting to be suspended in a gallery somewhere and forgotten about. She wasn’t establishment, and she never would have wanted such accreditation, no matter how much Ari believed her to be deserving of it.

She is—was—a disruption. A guerrilla installation erected overnight, under cover of dark. A trespassing. 

Wiping streaks of their friend from their eyes, leaving brush strokes of death and promise on their cheeks, Ari decided: They’d say nothing, do nothing. Leave, now, with Nora as a Joan Mitchell, a beautifully abstract stain upon the world as if paint shotgunned from orbit.

A memory, for someone else to find and deal with.

An artist who should’ve been.

•••

“Imagine, like, a bomb or something. Some . . . nuclear-fucking-planet killer that lights up the entire world at once. Blink of an eye, just like that”—Roxane snapped her fingers. “Only it doesn’t wipe us out; it shows us something instead.”

“What?” Ari asked, fidgeting with the hem of their black dress. They couldn’t sit still; they hadn’t worn it since their dad died. It hadn’t felt right then; it sure as hell didn’t feel right now.

“Ghosts.”

Ari failed to suppress a chuckle.

“No, listen, all right? What if this . . . this fire or light or whatever swept over everything and we could just . . . see.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re high then.”

“Will you shut the fuck up and listen to me?” she snapped. Ari sat back, waited. “Just . . . imagine seeing every spectrum at once, the visible, the invisible, the infrared—all of it. Picture the graveyard of our world laid bare, and every soul who ever walked its surface is just . . . there.”

“Doing what?” Ari asked.

Roxane slapped her thigh with her drink-less hand. “Shit, I don’t know, just hanging around!”

“Sounds like quite the party,” Ari said, sipping their beer. They glanced around. Behind Roxane, on the other side of the pub from their booth, they saw some of Nora’s friends and family commiserating over a sad platter of room temperature veggies and dip, and an even warmer meat-and-cheese spread. She would have fucking loathed this, Ari thought. The grief, the too-happy remembrances from people Nora had complained about, had tried to get away from for over ten years. Thank god she isn’t here; she would have wanted to explode all over again—she would’ve wanted to technicolour this entire drab-fucking-affair.

“You’re missing the point,” Roxane said, the slightest bit of a slur creeping between syllables. “That’s what’s happening, now. To all of us.”

Ari cocked an eyebrow. “We’re . . . ghosts?”

Roxane dismissed them with a half-hearted wave of her hand. “Forget it.”

“No, tell me.”

“Fuck off.”

“Roxy, come ooooonnnnnnnn . . .”

Roxane sighed. Leaned forward, head down. “When Nora . . . when she . . . I went there, Ari. After.” She looked up, a look of disingenuous awe on her face, like a mask she’d put on between scenes in a play. “I saw it.”

Ari wanted to roll their eyes. Yeah, me fucking too.

“It was everything I thought it’d be,” Roxane continued, an air of bullshit reverence about her. “It was what she could have been. It was like . . . seeing the phantom of her innermost desires.”

It wasn’t the first time Ari had heard that notion, but they nodded along anyway as if impressed—it was easier than dealing with a drunk, pissed-off Roxane. And the day had already been emotional enough.

A week earlier, Ari had walked home coated in the paint of their friend, feeling like they should have been more rattled than they were. They might’ve been, too, had it been their first time.

Their mom had actually been first. Not the first—best anyone knew that honour belonged to a man somewhere in Belgium, a former soldier who’d spent his life in the service of others who just . . . popped one day. Right in his own home, surrounded by his wife and kids and grandkids. When police arrived on the scene, they found a room, and several confused and horrified people, awash head to toe in icing and cake batter. He’d just exploded, his widow said, tearfully, while wiping marzipan and fondant from her eye—a concussive confectioning that blew out every window in their house with delicious fury.

Ari’s mom left them a year and change later, after months of unexplained deaths worldwide numbering in the tens of thousands. She’d simply gone upstairs complaining of a headache after finishing the laundry. Ari and their father heard the pop a moment later and hurried upstairs to find a mind prison detonated—encyclopedias’ worth of text adorning every possible surface. And on the bed where she’d lain before her untimely eruption, Ari saw a shallow indentation in the shape of a body and words pouring off the side of the bed, dripping and puddling on the carpet in a chaotic mess of nouns, metaphors, malformed ideas.

“She always wanted to write,” Ari’s father announced two nights later and three quarters of the way through a bottle of cheap vodka that Ari was convinced was actually just low-grade jet fuel. “She didn’t want this life, you know. She didn’t want to be tied down . . . She wanted . . .”

He’d passed out mid-thought. Ari took the bottle to the kitchen and left their father unconscious in his chair. They’d deal with him in the morning.

In their parents’ room again, they stared at the mess, the disaster still adorning the walls and carpet. Myriad sentence fragments and characters and some sincerely fucked-up visual concepts that, when they were able to piece them together, gave Ari pause. Made them wonder just what their mother had kept to herself all those years, bottled up and hidden.

So many ideas. Passions. Things forever unfulfilled.

•••

“A star?” Ari’s mother said, tucking her child in for the night.

Ari, all of six years old, nodded, grinned so hard their dimples were like quarter notes. They pointed to the end of the bed. “It was right there, I swear it! It came and visited me last night. It was so bright, Mommy, I couldn’t see myself.”

Ari’s mom returned her child’s smile as she finished tucking them in. “And then what happened?”

“I asked it what I should be.”

“Oh? And what did this star tell you?”

Incandescent, Ari recalled, many years later, the tender cataclysm of the star’s hum having haunted them for most of their life. Burn like creation. Birth destruction. Be volcanic.

To this day they weren’t sure if they’d simply dreamt the encounter or if they’d experienced some sort of hallucination. But what they remembered, with vicious clarity, was the way their mother’s smile faltered but did not fall when Ari told her what the star had said; how Ari saw, for the first time that night, what it was like when someone wore a mask.

•••

A social contagion.

Evolution gone awry.

An unforeseen mutation in humanity’s DNA.

There were still no answers by the time Ari’s father—shaken, trembling, barely able to hold himself together, he claimed, feeling as if he were literally bursting at the seams—took his own life with a .45 down his throat, rather than have his interiority exposed for what it was.

Even after searching through his files, his personal belongings, things kept hidden for all of the twenty-seven years they’d been a family, Ari realized they knew nothing about their father. He’d been a private man, something neither Ari nor their mother could stand. “There’s so much he doesn’t say,” she said once, when Ari was still in high school. An uncharacteristic moment of parental transparency. “He’s just too proud.”

It had enraged Ari to know their father preferred to die a mystery than let himself be revealed, even to his only child.

“Some people want to death-grip their privacy at all costs,” Nora said to Ari on the way back from his funeral.

“I just wish I could’ve known him,” Ari said. “The real him.”

“You know he loved you, little bird.”

“Do I?”

They walked together in silence the rest of the way to Ari’s house. At the door, Nora turned to leave, stopping halfway to the sidewalk. She turned and faced Ari again. Opened her mouth and closed it twice, searching for the right words. For what not to say. When she spoke, it was quiet, resigned.

“Some dreams are personal,” she said. “Some dreams are for you and you alone.”

•••

Which is exactly what they were—dreams. No one asked how or why it was happening; the world had moved on from such questions.

“It’s in our minds,” said every conservative and libertarian bloviator with their own podcast or YouTube channel and not two brain cells to rub together. “Our thoughts have been poisoned. We’ve been turned into living biological weapons!”

“It’s in our minds,” said every upper-middle class white woman with a health and wellness store who taught yoga or had a side business selling essential oils. “Our thoughts are polluted—we need to cleanse ourselves of our violent urges and selfish aims.”

“It’s in our minds,” said every nihilistic reality-denier with a Twitter account, desperate to write off what they were witnessing with their own eyes as a worldwide hoax. “It’s the deep state. They’re coming for us all!”

Ari had heard it all by this point. Nora had gone off on this seemingly never-ending torrent of bullshit in the weeks leading up to her death. She’d signed the studio lease near the start of the Great Combustion. Over the months that followed, she had grown increasingly annoyed at how little time she had to get in there, to start something new, anything—to just fling colours at the canvas to see what revealed itself. To really play again, like they had during undergrad, when the three of them—Ari, Nora, and Roxane—could mess around to their hearts’ content, making all manner of unbridled nonsense until whatever unholy hour of the morning. It was eating away at her, she said. She felt it. Soon she started whistling like a tea kettle, going red in the cheeks whenever she tried to discuss it. Boils started appearing on her hands and neck. She started smoking incredible amounts of weed to try and keep calm, to keep her frustrations at bay. She couldn’t do it, she said. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t focus. Couldn’t find the time or energy for anything but work and survival. And the more she thought about it, the more she started to crack like scorched pavement.

“How the fuck are we supposed to do this?” she cried into her phone that night—her last. “How are we supposed to be everything we are?”

Ari hurried to the studio. Made it there in time to see Nora hit her moment of clarity.

“I can’t hold on any longer,” she said. “I think I’m . . . I’m done, Ari. I’m going to . . . I’m going. Now.”

“You can’t,” Ari said. “Please.”

Nora’s whole body trembled like she’d just been pulled from frozen waters. She can’t know this, Ari thought to themself. She can’t have the faintest idea what she’s suggesting.

“Please, Nor. Don’t.”

“Pop pop, little bird. See you on the other—”

•••

A star is born of gravitational instability. It burns, bright and across generations, continuing on long after it’s shined its last. Its impact is life itself.

“To be and to want to create is to be godlike,” Ari’s mother said as Ari packed their beat-up hatchback for their first day of university. Ari had mentioned to her offhandedly that morning how afraid they were: that they wouldn’t be able to cut it, that they wouldn’t find their voice—or worse, that no one would even care what they had to say. Their mother had fallen silent after that, lost in thought while Ari finished breakfast and got to work piling the pieces of their life into the back of their car. “Remember that, sweetheart,” she continued “No matter one’s ambition, following it is to follow in a god’s footsteps, even the idea of a god—it’s to birth something from nothing. To take charge of your own life and body. To transform, transgress. To break all moulds. Nothing in this world exists as it once was, no matter what the fearful might tell you. Nothing exists in stasis—nothing can.” She hugged Ari tight.

“Never forget,” she said, “the star that you are.”

•••

A painter, Ari thought, wondering if their insides would be acrylic or oil.

A musician, thinking of all the years they’d spent playing the piano, imagining their eruption as the most discordant noise—an ear-splitting orchestral apocalypse. A symphony of unfinished ideas.

A writer, like Mom, imagining whatever universes were locked inside, splattering the world in incomprehensible plot mechanics and thinly sketched characters.

Their neighbour to the left, who’d dreamed of being a chef, detonated one night at three in the morning, filling the entire block with the most exquisite, potent curry, a scent that swept through every house in the subdivision. Her wife abandoned their home not long after, unable to deal with the revelation that the love of her life had died unfulfilled, had lied about how happy and content she was with what they’d built together.

Ari watched nightly for signs that another neighbour, another friend, had lost their battle. They popped pills and smoked and meditated to Tibetan throat singing and recordings of ocean waves, but still it grew—the sensation like an earthquake felt miles away, a trill in one’s insides that vibrated outward like concentric rings of indigestion.

They spotted a man one day, seated outside a bookstore with a coffee, every inch of him tattooed. Ari approached slowly, unable to look away. They eyed the man up and down as if attempting to decipher an ancient text.

“Names?” Ari said, staring at the chaos adorning his skin.

The man nodded. “Every friend I’ve ever known.”

Ari looked closer and saw small red X’s next to many of them. “Are they . . .”

He tapped one of the X’s. “Burst like a water balloon.”

“Why?” they asked, not meaning to sound as unsettled as they were. “Why do this?”

“To remind me: We don’t get anywhere in this life alone. Not you, not me, not anyone. Maybe we don’t always end up where we think we ought to, but we get where we get together.”

They stared at the man’s skin, thinking back to their mom’s room in the immediate aftermath of her death. Of what was left of her. They wondered how many people she’d known, how many of their stories had burst forth from her in her last moments and how many had stayed unknown, lost forever.

•••

That night, Ari found themselves trapped within a nightmare they’d had many times before:

They were at a dinner party, dressed elegantly in a black two-piece suit and tie, seated at the head of a long table. The others around the table—patrons of the arts, all—stood, one by one in their shimmering gowns and tailored suits, and made their way around to Ari, plates and utensils in hand. They spoke to Ari, whispered in their ear, told them their work was exquisite—like nothing they’d ever seen. What work? Ari asked over and over again as forks and knives poked and pulled and sliced off hunks of their flesh; as blood flowed freely over their shoulders and pooled in their lap while the patrons returned to their seats with their meals, smiling cheshirely. As Ari tried and failed to stand, and pitched forward, sprawling face-down on the table. What work? they moaned into the table cloth, wincing as they felt their bones, their vertebrae being cracked like the shell of a crab; their organs being removed and weighed and offered to the most eager set of teeth seated around the table, chattering conspiratorially.

What work? they cried—screamed—as they lifted their head from the table to find it empty now, suddenly, with only a medieval scroll of a bill in front of them and several plates full of unfinished Ari spread around—taken, tasted, and discarded. They managed to gradually push themselves to a seated position, atop the table, feeling what was left of their insides tumble out the open canyon of their back before slopping unceremoniously to the floor. They panicked at the sight of the bill, at an impossible number they did not even know how to process, and started grabbing at the pieces of them that had been left behind. Slapped them into place without looking, without being able to see where they fit, only to feel them fall to the floor with the rest.

They looked around. Scrambled. Called for help, but their voice made it no farther than the perimeter of black surrounding the table. 

They woke moments later, screaming, in their parents’ bed, exactly where their mother had died.

Ari sat up, gasping for air, and wondered if they could’ve helped more. If they could have tried to be what they each needed the other to be.

•••

It’s a noble thing, to give your life for a dream.

That was the letter Ari found taped to their front door, an R scribbled messily at the bottom, as if remembered after the fact.

They saw Roxane’s eruption later that night, on the news. Near the end of their time together at university, she had gotten swept up in environmental activism. Now, she and eleven others were filmed leaping out of an airplane over a protested logging site, each clutching themselves as they exited the plane as if moments away from uncontrolled obliteration. The footage followed them as they plummeted all the way to the ground; as one by one their un-parachuted bodies impacted the forest floor, immediately spawning new, massive redwoods—hundreds of them, as if each drop of blood had been a seed—spiralling up from the ground, punching through earth and rock and mountain like great, towering spears piercing the planet’s spine.

Across the world, acts of incredible sacrifice were witnessed while jobs and careers were abandoned in droves—people died birthing forests, gardens; erupting in war-torn squares, painting anarchy with their bodies; rewriting the faces of neighbourhoods and financial centres once deemed “pristine,” now abundant with art and music and movement and noise as if a skyscraper-sized Molotov cocktail had been lobbed into the centre of a gasoline-soaked city.

Ari saw, too, people on the streets, afraid their own fantasies, their own desires, would be their unmaking, shattering whatever facades they’d spent years crafting for themselves at the expense of either their dreams or the dreams of others. These terrified individuals walked around in body armour and old diving suits, wrapped top to bottom in bandages to try and keep themselves together at all costs. They wore ornate, mechanized face masks they never had to take off, gears opening and closing their eyes and mouths when necessary. They were emotionless, like sentinels guarding old world artifice. And more and more, they, the hesitant, the fearful, were met with the beautiful, compassionate, thunderously opulent viscera of a world, a species, a people overwhelmed with unrealized potential. With misplaced responsibility. A people lied to, told it had to be how it had always been, that it was what it was.

Ari felt it. Deep in their bones, like hairline fractures whispering chaos and revolution to them with every step they took; with every day they spent at home, alone, not working or creating or having any idea what to do with their life, but feeling it all the same, growing louder, insistent.

Their coping mechanisms stopped working. They listened, their bedroom window open, as screams and surprise and joy and heartache melded together, a glorious extinction of personal, utopic need.

Their body was primed. Set. They had nothing left to hide and only their life to give.

They breathed rapidly, in and out, imagining what anyone would find—if anyone would be left to find anything at all or if the rest of the world would soon follow suit. In their brain, Ari saw any number of ways they might erupt yet knew not what their impact might be. What damage would be done in their wake. What desolation their dreams might spawn. 

What glory the star of their fear and doubt might engender.

They swelled, feet tight in their shoes, their hips, stomach, breasts pushing against their clothes, tearing free from their constraints. They stared out the window, looking west, toward the dark of creation. They saw, racing through their mind, more possibilities than they’d dared allowed themselves to imagine.

And they knew then what Nora, what their mother, what so many stars before them had realized leading up to the moment of their inevitable collapse:

Whatever was inside of them.

Whatever they were supposed to be.

Ari’s death would be luminous, the event horizon of their ambition a boundary beyond which none could imagine. The singularity of their promise, their potential, would be devastating.