WHEN the fire engines first begin screaming up Niwot Street, the man whose name I have forgotten is inside me. He pumps away with workmanlike intensity as the sirens jangle the quiet. The hair on the back of my neck goes prickly and damp. Inside, it feels like a ball of cold the size of a fist is jabbing the wall of my uterus.
Tommy? Billy? One of those names that ends in a Y and sounds boyish, even if the owner is a portly carpet salesman with a capped smile and a wedding band.
Johnny? Jimmy?
No matter.
He grunts and bucks. I arch beneath him, so aroused that the rutting is painful, like trying to swallow water through swollen lips. So close to coming, to stilling the awful cold, that I can feel the twitch and pulse of an impending orgasm all the way up into my belly, but I can't make it, can't quite let go and thaw myself in this stranger's arms, and the sirens scream closer and closer, and I think, "This time they're coming for me."
They know.
But they don't, of course.
Not yet.
Not this time.
The man whose name I have forgotten heaves himself between my legs one final time, like one trying to break through a rawhide-tough hymen. I feel the shuddering squirt of his semen.
Then I'm off the bed and up so fast that his cock pumps out those last few drops onto the blue motel sheets and cum runs down the inside of my thighs.
"Jimmy," I say. I can tell by the look on his face that I've guessed the wrong name. "I have to go. This was a mistake. I don't even know you. I'm sorry."
A few minutes later, I'm dressed and running to my car. Another fire engine passes, its siren like a strike of lightning along my spine, and I jump into the Volvo, peel away from the curb, and race in pursuit.
The fire engine leads me to a used bookstore in a rundown block of East Colfax. I can see the smoke, a furry plume shaped like a dust-bowl tornado, long before we arrive.
And then the flames. They lick and peel and crackle out windows and from fallen sections of wall. The fire is chewing and swallowing the building from the inside out, and every place it licks and laps collapses black and charred. I leave the car and approach as close as the firemen allow me, close enough that I can feel the heat rippling in the air like the bars of a molten cage. Enthralled, I watch this gorgeous gutting, the building getting fucked by the flames, and I long to be consumed entirely, reduced to ash and rubble.
By the fire.
By a man.
By desire that will gut and burn, devour me. "Heat," I whisper, and it's both prayer and plea.
Heat.
The other day I was doing my friend Shawna's hair, dying it that deep copper color that her husband, Robbie, likes, and I started talking about heat. What it feels like, what it can make you do, the men who've made me feel it. There've only been three such men in my whole life, among hundreds of lovers, and I've known it every single time, within the first ten seconds that I set eyes on them, when our auras intersected, our pheromones collided and entwined, when all was hot stars and sizzle.
Shawna laughed at my overblown description. She said, "It sounds painful. How do you put it out?"
I told her you never really put it out, you just commit a hari-kari of the heart, tamp down your burning insides, and go cold and empty for a time until you meet another man who makes your skin flame when he touches you and you start to burn again.
Shawna shook her head at that and spattered dark red droplets of henna dye. She said, "This kind of heat—I've never felt it."
I'm still amazed by that. It was as if Shawna had confided to me she was blind to color and saw rich crimson and plush purple and indigo and amber and jade all as dull shades of gray.
Heat—how could one live never having felt it? And not to feel it—how could one continue to live?
What it feels like—it feels like you've touched something live and electrical or accidentally injected a drug that's part hallucinogen, part poison. Your mind unravels. Your body feels limp, but you don't fall down because lust juices up your muscles, causes synapses to fire wildly, like a multiplicity of orgasms, while heat smolders in your belly and spreads down into the groin and up to twine around the heart like a kind of flaming kudzu.
It's been a long time now since I've felt that heat. My heart's going into hypothermia. I'm parched and achy and chill. I drive from Denver up to Boulder, watch the men stroll and prowl and saunter on the Pearl Street Mall, dozens, hundreds of them, all types and shapes and sizes, and some are all pumped lats and abs and some marathon-runner lean and others solid, amply padded, but I feel nothing—their cocks would be like rain-soaked straws, their touches tepid, they would give me nothing but impatience and frustration and grief.
I long for what I had before, the heat that surges and destroys, that consumes the soul and melts the heart so that it runs down, liquid, scarlet, to settle hotly in my pussy.
In my dreams lately, I see the fire turn into a man. Blazing and roaring, he bears down on me, seizes me in a searing kiss. Then I awaken in my bed alone.
From his tiny room up the hall, I can hear Colin tapping, tapping on his keyboard. The Famous Writer who simply hasn't been discovered yet. The austere and celibate artiste.
My God, how did we come to this?
How did we who used to smolder come to be so cold?
Three times in my life I've felt heat. The first time was a professional boxer named Zeke, all sinew and steel draped in sleek skin the color of smoky quartz. He was married to a woman down in Colorado Springs and had four children, but we fucked as if we were the last two people on earth and set up housekeeping in an apartment Zeke rented for me on Zuni Street.
The day the plastic surgeon told me it would take two operations to repair the damage Zeke had done to my cheekbones and nose, I packed a bag and moved in for a while with Shawna.
The second was Neal, an Italian model whom I seduced briefly into heterosexuality by proving I could fuck as wildly, with as savage an inventiveness, as any pierced and tight-rimmed hustler.
I left Neal because he came to love drugs more than me and because he snored and because he left the towels on the bathroom floor in steamy piles like pale blue turds and because I didn't like his aftershave and because I came home one night and found a teenage boy in my bed, a naked boy with an erection that reached all the way to his navel, and the only kind of cock I had to offer Neal was the one that had already pierced my heart.
The third is Colin.
Colin is different from Zeke and Neal. Colin is the only one who abandoned me before I could walk out on him.
Oh, he still lives in our apartment on Pascal Street. He's still there at breakfast and he always straggles home, even after getting drunk in one of those establishments where the clientele has literary pretensions, but he no longer shares my bed. He sleeps instead in the room he calls his office, a tiny coffin-shaped space which he's got filled with old magazines and newspapers and letters. Colin fancies himself a writer. He's always researching, taking notes, hoarding them away like a chipmunk storing up winter berries. So many books and newspapers and reams of paper, there's barely room for the cot he's pushed over into one corner of his cramped, cluttered nest.
Late into the night, which we used to fill by making love, I hear the peck-peck of the keyboard, like a psychotic hen. He writes of love but doesn't make it, describes passion but has lost the capacity to feel it. The writing has stolen his soul.
We used to be great lovers, Colin and I. Such great lovers that at first we seldom even resorted to the games that Zeke loved and upon which Neal insisted—the threesomes, the trolling for fresh flesh willing to be fucked by both of us, and then the toys—the polished leather whips, the cuffs, the gold chains affixed to nipple rings. It was almost a year before I even asked Colin to start hitting me, before I begged him to put his hands around my throat and choke in rhythm to his thrusts, but when we did those things— when we finally began to spice passion with pain, it was like someone throwing kerosene upon a fire. We were incinerated by it, we let go of work and friends, we withdrew from the outer world, lived only in the one of our own creating.
And that was when Colin drew away from me.
When he decided that writing was incompatible with passion, that art and sex were natural enemies. That was when I began to follow fire trucks and yearn to feel the flame.
"The funniest thing happened today," I tell Colin, peering into his cluttered little nook where he sits scrunched before his Apple. "I met a man in a bar on Colfax. We went to a motel and fucked and then I forgot his name. I didn't even make him use a condom. I wanted to have his cum still inside me when I came home to you."
Colin's eyebrow rises, but nothing else. He stares at what he's written, leans forward to make some correction, strokes his chin.
"You bring me your promiscuities like a cat coming home with a mangled bird in its jaws. You may think it shows affection, but it only turns my stomach."
I lean up against the doorjamb, rub my hip against it so my silky dress slithers up.
"It didn't turn your stomach when you watched me fuck that man I found over in the Crosstown Bar. Or how about the woman we brought home that night from Larimer Square? Or your dear friend Luke from college? Or your ex-girlfriend? How sensitive we've gotten in our celibacy, my dear."
"Please leave," he says with chilly calm. "You've said what you came to say. Now go."
"I'll go," I say, "but you won't be able to write for wanting me. You'll imagine me in that stranger's arms, and you'll want me so much you'll want to carve out my heart with a dessert spoon. You'll want to kill me."
Curse said, spell cast, I sulk my way into the living room to light a fire.
I sit before the fireplace in the living room and watch the flames curl up like the orange pinion feathers of some exotic macaw. I strike a match and watch it burn down until it sears my fingers.
I was this flame, one time. I burned with just as fierce a heat, and Colin along with me. How could one relinquish that for any other mistress, muse? How could one come to fear the flame?
Colin fears it.
I remember waking up on the sheepskin rug before the fireplace and seeing Colin sobbing. "Thank God, thank God, I thought I'd killed you. Oh, Jesus, I just lost track… it was like blacking out… and I was so close, I was coming and I just kept choking you and then I finally realized you'd stopped moving and… oh, God, I thought you were dead."
I tried to comfort him, but he drew away.
And that was the last time he touched me.
A few weeks later, he admitted what I'd already guessed—that his terror came not so much from forgetting what he was doing, but from the fact that he didn't forget, that he was choking me and he wanted to choke me more, that for an awful moment as he felt my pulse grow weak beneath his hands, he longed as much to kill me as to come, that death and orgasm commingled in an overpowering lust.
He had fought it off, though, and I had lived.
Nor was he ever able to understand why I wasn't grateful.
What keeps me sane, if sanity is what this is: long masturbatory sessions and prowling for men to pick up, take to a motel or into a park, and fuck.
And I go to fires. There's a fire station only a half mile away on Wilson Street. Sometimes if I'm quick enough I can follow the last departing engines to the blaze. There is a strange seductiveness to the writhing, licking of the flames. I wonder if the firemen feel it, if, unknown to any but themselves, they bring erections to the blaze.
Over time, I watch the burning of a department store, a warehouse, a private home, imagining that it was I who lit the flame, that it isn't lust that crazes me, but simple madness, fire love.
And then I wonder if it isn't the same thing.
Sleep is yet another kind of scalding.
The man whose face is made of fire turns my dreams to tinder.
He's Zeke and Neal and Colin, he touches that part of me that's never touched, that even when I'm fucked past the screaming point, never ignites, the cold core of my being. His cock is a torch reaching my heart. I long for him to burn away my insides.
The whips, the blows, the sweet and painful kisses of fist and lash, these were always an attempt to thaw that cold part, to reach the frozen, icy center.
But not just any man will do. Only those three, my personal erotic Trinity. Only those men whose fire somehow ignites my own, who burn at the same level of heat that I do. With these few men I fuck with heart and mind and soul and pussy. With the others it was just a brief insertion of cock into cunt, tab A into slot B, shake well and stir, and close the door on your way out, thank you, sir.
The fire in the grate goes cold.
And Colin keeps on tapping, tapping. Late into the night I can still hear his fingers on the keyboard.
A week later, I go at night to an abandoned building I've passed many times on my way to and from Colfax. I park around the corner, slip inside. In the daytime this place is hideous, a rubble-strewn eyesore in a neighborhood to match. In the dark, however, there's a weird, unnatural beauty to this monstrosity. The moonlight weaves an eerie luminescence through broken windowpanes, off cracked and peeling walls. It reminds me of an underwater temple, ruined and abandoned, yet full of mystery and leftover grandeur.
It will burn like a piece of cardboard soaked in kerosene, which is what I use to start the blaze.
I stay as close as I dare, retreating only when I hear the sirens.
The building dies in minutes, its fragile walls collapsing, tumbling in.
What have I done?
While the firemen put out the remaining hot spots, I am left as before, shivering in the shadows, the dark place in my belly sheeted over with ice, the cold a hard lump in my belly like a dead child.
I go home.
Thinking somehow I must change Colin's mind. I must make him want me. Make him burn.
Colin greets me at the door with a drink in his hand and these unpardonable words:
"I've thought it out. I'm leaving."
"You can't! What have I done?"
"Nothing. Everything." He looks exhausted. "Ever since you told me about the man in the motel, the man whose name you couldn't recall, it's like you hexed me. I can't write about anything but you. With him. With other men. It's an obsession that blocks out everything else. I have to get away from you."
"No!" I pull him to me, and for one melting instant he clings to me and I can feel his hardness, but when I reach for him, he pushes me away.
"You're drunk," I say.
"Not drunk enough."
"And angry at me."
"Yes."
"Then let me feel your anger. Hit me. Anything you want. Just make me feel something."
"Tomorrow," he says, and for just an instant I have hope. But I've misunderstood. "I'm leaving," he says, "tomorrow. Just as soon as I get some sleep."
And he staggers to the cot and falls across it.
Glacial cold, intolerable.
While Colin snores, I dribble gasoline across the piles of newspapers, the manuscripts, the newspapers that I scatter at the door. Then I step back and light the match.
And throw it.
There is a roar, which I wasn't expecting, and an almost instantaneous leaping erect of the flames. Colin's shirt ignites at once. He roars and flails to his feet, slapping frantically at his burning clothes.
He looks up and sees me just as I slam the door in his face.
It's only for a few seconds that I'm able to hold the door shut against Colin's panicked assault, but that is all it takes. The newspapers must have blazed at once, the cot, the manuscripts. He's trapped in a book-lined oven.
I can feel the heat behind the door and Colin's blows, less powerful now. He's screaming something—my name?—and I step back from the door, fling it wide.
Inside the flaming furnace, the man made of fire whirls. He gyrates and high-steps, he thrashes and writhes—he's an off-kilter, blazing gyroscope, a flaming top with carrot hair. His clothes, his hair, whole hunks of his anatomy, are gorgeously ablaze.
I watch this hideous spectacle, this dance of agony, and I realize suddenly that I'm still ice inside. Worse now than ever. That nothing in this world can ever warm me again.
Except the flame.
My cold heart feels like shattered glass. With every beat, shards slice into my throat, my lungs. The hair on my arms starts to singe, but I'm freezing next to the fire.
I cannot bear the cold. Not for another moment.
I hurl myself through the doorway, into the embrace of the man made of fire.
I want him inside me. Now.