I mounted the knoll and ripped my lungs at the sky. Twilight eddied in blood and ochre dust from the far lip of vision to the dome high overhead, though lessening in distance as my knoll and I ascended screaming into that golden eye, the epicenter that I could with a daring finger reach for and gather along my cells and sinews, becoming the third pole touching earth to paradise, my body the synapse through which shot every dead on his way to judgment. Of each soul I asked a question, but not one has satisfied me that I too can pass into paradise. So I linger between the green and gold planes, hoping one day to meet my love among the coming souls, that we may ascend in each other’s arms and die as we deserved to live.

What’s happened to you? No matter. Let forever begin.

It would be lovely then to forget of this life and the people that seduced me to it—but only then. The present demands focus if I want to meet you, in a worthy place. You would have nothing against you for a warm bed in the afterlife, but I wouldn’t count on a threshold stoop to lay my head for all the trouble I’ve gotten in while you’ve been gone. Does it worry you how we ever could meet again? How we must be forbidden a second time, an eternity?

I could be pardoned and done with. But I am not strong enough to forget our sins and put aside reliving them. They recall you in all the flaws that endeared you to me, and I cannot renounce my love. You left me nothing else. I could not surrender you and survive, not even for mercy, not yet. It would grieve you that I cower like vermin from absolution, but you are not the one left behind, mourning with sticks of forsythia a granite slab. Your mother had it well done in jet stone with your name in proper order. It makes me smile how wrong she gets you, as if by tombing you under that stiff baptismal Alexandershe could rewrite you in the likeness of a better son. Can you blame her? You left her behind same as me, and we have what little we cling to, we’ve learned, not the other way around. So I need only live long enough, when death seizes hold, to confess and repent in the moment. I can let go a moment if it’ll take me to you.

Supposing I didn’t pass that threshold, though, would you sneak out your window and visit me like old times? Shouldn’t have asked, I know you would. But I don’t want to damn you like that. And the desperate yearning for refuge, dare I say comfort, was what drove us to sin in the first place. We had such grand inventions—but the mind’s eye spawns wretches in the oxygen of our world. Can you believe I was to be a singer? And we didn’t even make it to the mainland. No, I was waylaid at the club and you were trailing at the curb.

Is it strange that I feel closer to you? Before, we were passing each other by in the cogworks of livings. I was the night, you the day, the two of us together only in the mists between. But now I imagine you breathing life down my neck as I go through the motions, unbound now from your corporeal form—but a shame and torture to have watched it burn—as vast and surrounding as ever. I am stronger for it. That and my loneliness, my vengeance, make me formidable.

Still, I stick close by the church. Out of sight of the good Pastor Shimizu, as a criminal might tiptoe past grandmother’s house. We can’t let them know our disgrace. They would get over it, what had they expected anyway, while we carried indelibly the Mark of Shame. The little white church with its storybook arches, its bowtied elders playing bocci at coffee hour, was nowhere I could let ruin. I’d rather settle for a nostalgic drive by than walk the aisle tail between legs, knowingly savage, smearing the confessional with mud and ticks. There were other ways to pass a Sunday morning. Coffee, oranges, and a cockatoo I’ve had in mind to try.

Honolulu hasn’t changed. The volcanoes still don’t eat us, but I watch by the window. I won’t bother you with my omens, but you know I dream of conflagration: the colors that choke, the burning hair, tattoos dripping over an ocean on fire. Doesn’t matter smoke or water, we all drown on something. Sometimes, though, I hover above and think it is good, the thunder of ruins a pulse like wingbeats. And the dissolution of all raises us, renders us weightless insects in the mouth of the sky. In the warm, stinking black we go laughing.

And could I use a laugh for myself. But I had to save it every drop, make a reservoir, and let it in sensuous trickles only for those who paid. That was life, the transaction. I had always perceived it as a natural rule that human niceties had antiquated, a vulgar reality that perhaps still lurked in the stooped and shaded cities of a distant, other people. Once you give into the ugly truth, however, let it drizzle your shoulders in all its grotesquerie, you adopt the same vulgar realness. You are offensive to behold and remain, for the most part, unmolested. Better not associate, would be the townspeople’s verdict. Unless the only transaction you’re good for is passing through hands all night long. That’s what I did at the club, what I’d continue to do until my skin sagged too badly to grab onto.

I don’t have to tell you the reason of it, the security of a sordid yet failsafe profession, but even for all those nights you watched me and did the same in your own way you wouldn’t understand the coincident shame and triumph of the dance. I’ll start you onstage.

No matter how thick the music you could hear the slurp-up of crab legs as you puffed your hair, spread your legs, and puckered. You were their fantasy: the Barbie their mothers never let them fondle because it wasn’t manly for boys to play with dolls until now, in their jowled years, when it was the measure of manliness. You hated their cheeks, the sordid red sheen of sweat, dinner oil, and glitter of other girls, the stubble like steel wool on your softest parts. Aw, he likes you, you’d think as he panted and slavered. Rejoice! Or pretend, just get paid and pour yourself and your soul out to all the pigfaced men and their little green presidents.

It was Tuesday, so he saw me first. Tuesdays I danced for the Boss, some suit who brought other suits to my table. Names didn’t matter in nonverbal dealings. But some things I couldn’t help noticing—when they set down their drinks, when they reached in their pockets—as a customer service kind of girl. They thought me unusual because I danced each night like the first time: slow, sensuous, unspooling. Fallen, occupationally, yet virginal in the coy, supple motions and doe eyes. I was reluctant if they didn’t know better, but we all understood that money bought out its own limitations. So gyrate and roll in the riches of your own lawlessness. Bills and body, license and licentiousness—see if you’re really brave how much you’re worth. See if you don’t flinch at the sum.

Now you’re spinning to the music in a fog of cheap pink lasers, cigar smoke, and ethanol vapor, when your eyes meet his. I remember I got the feeling that I was looking up at him from the bottom of a well. That he would either cast me a rope and pull me to the light or brick me over. I didn’t care which, I just needed to know.

Vertigo was the name the lights spelled above me, but he never used that. He never waved bills, never made a sound. He watched like a rottweiler from the back booth, hunched over an ashtray, elbows jutting as if to declare his own imperviousness. He had a clean chin and eyes that you pierced like drill bits through the strobe, so commanding and dignified, you half assumed him some wishful figment because surely, surely, he wouldn’t have come to a dump like this.

I never found out his favorite drink, nor can I recall his ordering any. He would stay through my set in the middle morning hours, then walk out. It cut me that he watched what I did on stage, but even more that he didn’t stay long enough for me to bend his ear to a tale of woe and excuse. Not that I had any. I could be flipping burgers at the drive-through, but instead I chose this. It’s not the kind of performing I had envisioned when thinking to myself, When I grow up… but it pleased people all the same. And their adoration I could claim as my own, being a plaything they grabbed for between fits of boredom and self-loathing. I was their guilty idol, the addiction they hid from their wives, the entertainer simply earning her bread, la que peca por la paga, and they the wolfish mob, los que pagan por pecar.

But he never paid. Was it part of that Japanese stoicism that kept him from an untouchable like me? I dreamed sometimes of speaking to him in his father’s tongue, telling in those mesmerizing syllables what I couldn’t explain over the music, that I danced and died every night for him.

When my shift ended I would retreat to my little bulb mirror, clean what I could of myself, and quit the club in a tee shirt and sweats, a frumpy likeness of my stage self. Clear the premises quick, or else the customers might see the illusion burn out in daybreak’s scrutinizing eye.

But one morning I came out to some suits lighting up in the alley. Bowing my head, I thought they might overlook a hooded nobody. But one of them caught my arm—because who else but a dancer would come this way in shame, with a slight build like mine and a change-of-clothes duffel? He grabbed me and laughed as, for he first time it seemed, I resisted his touch. Slamming me against the wall, he breathed hot fog in my mouth, horribly intimate without my costume and makeup to shield me. Vertigo he could pay to fondle half-naked, but she was zipped up in the duffel, leaving me, six inches shorter and utterly exposed, to answer for her mischief.

Then I was coughing and sliding down the bricks, lacking the suit to pin me in place. He had disappeared in a scuffle of blows and grunts and in his place came two wet red hands returning my duffel to me, its contents having spilled. I couldn’t meet his eyes as I stuffed the sheet music back in my bag, but I knew their dark puncture sinking deep in my shoulder blades as I hurried to my car.

That night he didn’t show. I asked around, but no one gave me anything. Maybe he was a figment, a guardian angel.

Not yet. We met again in the grocery store parking lot. I didn’t know at the time that you had been waiting, stakeout as a state of living. Even so, I knew our meeting again wasn’t a coincidence. The universe is too particular for accidents. I let you carry the bag down the block and then we smoked on the steps in the omnipresent silver sunshine.

We agreed we looked younger under the blue sky, and I puffed letters at you, indistinguishable in the daylight, though you seemed to read them just fine. You called me the blue dragon, which put me in a decent rage beneath my smile. Blue? Was there anything sadder than a blue dragon? With horns and claws and inferno behind its sniggering jaws…and placid blue scales. The blue dragon puffed itself some fruit kebabs and flapped smiling into the noon sky. No slaughter, no vengeance, no apocalypse.

Maybe not, you grinned. But the blue dragon rose from the boundless ocean. Only she knew the planet’s hidden depths. Her fire came not from the volcano on high, but from the magma chambers of the black unseen, where she curled up in wait of a soul as fearless and potent to love. Until then her tears made the ocean bitter, her wake made it volatile, her agitations, deadly. Should no one come, she would stir her tail through the hot, black waters and send a great blue tsunami to consume the earth.

It took me a while to warm up to her. Red was the color I wanted and wore, but you saw through it the blue that I was.

From then on you met me outside the club. I liked that you no longer watched me dance, but I had to ask why. Because I don’t care for Vertigo. Perfectly adequate, just shy of true, but we’d coax it out of you one day: Because I don’t love her. You were reluctant to say it—you had already lost control. It was your turn to die nightly as I ran off to whore. But you understood the necessity of bad work and the nuisance of having to justify it. You of all people couldn’t judge or discourage me, dealing for suits and punks in the dead of night. You gave them a different sort of physical thrill. We probably had all the same clients—if only we had talked business together, we could have thrown a dinner party for all our friends!

Instead I’d come home to you and we’d nap on the sun-warmed couch, stinking the cushions with sweat, beer, and plastic-smell. And blood. You thought I liked you shirtless—and I did—but I also did the laundry, you stupid fuck, and even though you turned the clothes inside out the stains shone through and I knew that whatever you did was brutal.

Breakfast as the sun bled out and a cleansing shower to start the new workday. I would plug the drain and think on the blue dragon, letting the waters rise up my ankles and swirl with yesternight’s oils. And tonight, lather again. Helix the pole over the sweat-flecked stage and the upturned faces. There were moments of triumph, scintilla moments wherein the pounding of my veins and throat, the hot gusts of breath, achieved in me a sparkling awareness of my flesh self and its loveliness. My consciousness suffused my depths and extremities, and I truly inhabited my body, possessed and wasmyself, with a stir of my tail flooding the earth in blue oblivion…

Then a shout or a spank would retract me from my feeling, back into my eyes. I saw I was a girl before men in a dank red room.

What to tell your mother, I must have puzzled for days. You said, Stripper. Why would that bother her, when her son was a known thug? But I cared what she thought. You had her cheekbones, her jaw. I wonder she hasn’t flipped her mirrors now that you’re dead. It must be hell to glimpse teasing little bits of you all over the place. Even I haven’t worked up the nerve to stand the picture frames again. They’ve been facedown since before the call came for me to identify the body; I had heard the gunshot that killed you before the police even knew about it, but I couldn’t do a damn thing. I didn’t know who might come after me. You were a gentleman to hide me from your operations, but now I was alone and in the dark. An occupational hazard, your death came as no surprise; but I wasn’t prepared for any ensuing fallout. Can you forgive that?

You ensured that.

I carry on mostly as usual, but I dread the gunshot. In the club, especially, between flashes of strobe and shadow I imagine a muzzle poking through the bodies, sniffing mine out and spitting death into me. Not that it’ll save me, but I’ve taken up Sunday boxing lessons at the old gym. The trainer says I’m suited to it, that not a lot of folks realize the footwork and grace that goes into a good match. Guess if I’m made to perform offstage again, I can dance someone into a coma.

So that’s how I’m doing, slithering low under the clouds, nipping them now and again for word of you. Though I feel you at my side almost constantly. Go up, already. I’m sure I won’t be long. Your killer will find me if he hasn’t already, and I’ll end up riddled and sprawled over the flagstones. And in the blood that I choke on I will write my confession to you.