Part Twenty-Two

“You’re a clean slate,” I said, wrapping my arms around her.
She laughed and pushed me away. In the dim-glow saturating light of her flashlight I could not make out any details, but I could see that she still had something in her hand, some sort of canister. She brought it up when I noticed it and began to shake it vigorously. A loud but muted and rhythmic rattling filled the church with echoes. She shook the can with a quick jerking motion, but with a harder stroke down than up, such that the noise going down was louder than the one going up, making an impressive machine-gun iamb staccato about the walls. She stopped after a moment, watching my eyes.
“What is that?”
“It’s spray paint,” she shrugged. “I’m a tagger.”
I cocked my head to one side, curious. “A tagger?”
She moved out into the church, shaking her can out of habit, getting ready. “You’re probably wondering what a tagger is.”
“I am, I guess. I thought taggers were with gangs and all that.”
“Who said I’m not with a gang?” she asked, turning back toward me for a moment.
I shrugged. “No one, I suppose. You just don’t look the part to me, especially standing there naked and scrubbed pink.”
She pointed her finger at me, grinning. “That’s your fault.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be wearing gang colors or something?”
“You’re so old school.” She strolled to the back of the church, rattling her can of spray paint again but more slowly, pensively. On the doors that led from the foyer to the main body of the church she went suddenly and quickly to work. I could barely make out her figure from where I stood, but in that beautiful dimmed light she looked like a Jackson Pollock spider frenetically hovering before the doors with paint and spume flying about her as she worked. I moved toward her, more wanton now than I had ever been before.
As I approached her, she finished what she was doing and stood back, hands on hips, an artist admiring her work.
“A flower?” I asked.
She nodded. “Not just any flower. A black flower. My name is Melanie. It means ‘dark flower’.”
I scanned over her work with an admiring eye. The head of the flower looked much like a cartoon character’s head with wild, stringy lines coming off of it, but with no face within the circle. The body of the flower was more elegantly made, and seemed both like the stem of a flower with a bend in the middle and the classic two leaves on each side, and like the body of a woman standing with her hands on her hips. I glanced from the flower to Melanie and back – they held the same pose.
I had to stand there dumbfounded for the moment without a thing to say. Here was my counterpart, my universal parallel -- a woman who labeled as I did, but in symbols only. And I thought I was the only one. I wanted to take her, right there, right then, to couple with her this ideology we lived by. I moved closer to her, edging through the darkness to her side. She was breathing slowly and deeply, recovering from her frenetic burst.
“You’re thinking that you want me now more than you considered before,” she said between breaths. “You know there’s nothing to stop you, that my resistance would mean nothing to you. You wonder if I would resist at all.”
I put my arm around her waist and we stood gazing at her work like an old married couple at the museum, our skins cold and pressed together for warmth. She leaned her head over onto my shoulder as she had done on the bus, as if she sought comfort and soothing all of the sudden. “I wouldn’t resist,” she said.
I moved to embrace her fully, but she put her hand up to stop me, holding her spray paint can between us. “Wait. I want to do this right.” She nodded her head toward the altar and pushed me in that direction. I smiled down at her, and she smiled up at me, and we moved together toward the front of the church.
In each of my movements she guided me with a touch of her hand, situating me atop the altar until I lay flat on my back like an Old Testament sacrifice. She had that smug smile on her lips again. “You’ll forever be wondering what I’m up to. You’ll never be able to decide for sure.” She pulled herself up onto the altar now. “You’re probably feeling more open and exposed than you have ever felt in your life by now.” She leaned over me and kissed me with a deep pulling tug of her lips over mine. “Breathe. Stop shaking. You feel wonderful.” She traced her fingers over the letters on my chest, all the places she’d marked there before, her fingernail scratching into my skin. “You and I are one, we will be one,” she said, straddling me. “Close your eyes.”
I closed my eyes and felt her moving, situating her body on mine. Her skin had grown intensely warm. She stiffened and I opened my eyes. Above her head she held her spray paint can as if to strike me down now, and I winced in fear.