The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(2)

“See yourself on fire,” Shaina says. “Let the flame dance. And then squelch it.”

She wipes a torch across my skin. My palm is alight. I immediately close my fist and kill the flame.

She hands me the torch.

I hold it in my right hand and dab it to my left palm, but it doesn’t catch. “Longer, firmer,” she says. I try again. I am okay getting the fire to my hand, but keeping it there, pressing it into the flesh, that’s the hard part. It’s also what distinguishes fire performers from children who run their fingers through candle flames. But watching fire rise from your own skin is distressing. Why shouldn’t it be? Evolution has trained us to flee from fire threatening our bodies.

We move on quickly. The next step is to wipe the flame along the top of the arm. “Do not wipe against the underside of the arm,” she tells us, rubbing the blue-veined underbelly of her scar-crossed arm.

Stilt Walker is short and very hairy. The moment he wipes the fire against his arm with a jerky, nervous spasm, a wide swath of hairs instantly coils and blackens, then disintegrates. “My hair!” he yells. “It’s burning!”

“Yes,” Shaina says calmly. “It is.”

He is wide-eyed and trying his hardest to fake a smile. I look down at my blond arm hair and imagine it growing back in thick black tendrils, like poison fairy-tale vines. I take a deep breath and wipe the torch across the top of my arm. Heat spreads as all the hairs take flame and are quickly singed.

“Let it burn!” Shaina yells as I suffocate the flame too quickly. I wipe my hand across my arm. Smooth as a baby’s.

“In Turkey,” Shaina tells us, “a barber singes his customer’s face after he shaves it for ultimate smoothness. They find it relaxing.”

I touch my arm again. I would not say this is relaxing, but there is something satisfying about how quickly we’re building intimacy with an element most people fear. With an element that, just twenty minutes before, I’d been scared of. But here I am. Letting it rise on me.

*

Next, it’s time for the tongue. Because he is a human with naturally developed survival instincts, Stilt Walker does not get the flame all the way to his tongue the first several tries. His tongue is stuck as far out from his body as it can go. I can see the muscles at the base of it quivering with effort. His neck is taut and the thin tendons protrude with strain. He turns the torch toward his mouth and lowers the flame. It is a foot away, six inches, four, then moves swiftly away from his face with a flame trail like a comet. He laughs nervously, shakes out his neck, and resumes his pose, head tilted slightly back, tongue out, a lizard midcatch. He begins lowering the flame toward his tongue again. Somehow, he’s trying to back his body away from the flame at the same time he is bringing the fire closer to his face. Again, it’s five inches, three, one inch away, and a retreat.

It’s not surprising. Shaina tells us nobody puts the fire right into her mouth, right onto her tongue. There are too many years of learned behavior in the way.

At the end of his turn, Stilt Walker has attempted five or six times and brought the flame very close. I’m impressed, though my stomach clenches a little each time, worried for his face.

“Your turn,” Shaina says.

I dip the torch in fuel and shake it out, and Shaina lights it. I’m sure I won’t get it all the way in. She has demonstrated the movements a few times. I replicate what she’s done. I widen my legs into a triangle, arch my spine, tilt my head back ninety degrees, bring the torch up above my face a foot or so and, with a dramatic turn of the wrist, beeline it right into my mouth.

I touch the torch to my tongue for one second and then pull it back out toward the sky.

“Jesus Christ,” Shaina says. My mouth tastes like camping. My lips tingle. “You just lit your tongue on fire!” she says, and this is the only time I can imagine that being a congratulatory exclamation. I bring the still-lit torch back above my head, angle my wrist, and bring it down straight into my mouth again.

“Wow,” Shaina says, laughing. “You don’t have many instincts for self-preservation.”

I consider telling her the whole story, then think better of it. The back of my teeth feel a little sooty on my tongue.

*

Oxygen feeds fire. If you succumb to impulse and attempt to blow out the flame as it nears your lips, you have forgotten about chemistry. An hour later, when I learn to swallow two torches at once, my desperate attempt to blow out the fire does not, in fact, succeed in extinguishing the flame but instead collects more oxygen that grows the torches into a huge fireball that engulfs my hands. It hurts. It burns. Shaina describes the most common types of burns—the kinds you get no matter what, no matter how careful you are in this line of work—as bad sunburns. I am now in a tradition of performers and mystics and childhood pyromaniacs; I will honor them by burning myself as infrequently as possible.

*

As soon as the class is over, I can tell my mouth is burned. Shaina says this is normal. Patches of my face and arms are reddish and tender. And there is cracked skin, almost like little dried-out blisters, on the corners of my mouth. I have a blind date after my class. It looks like I have herpes.

*

I avoid remembering this while I’m in the fire-eating class, but I used to be a chicken. My childhood memories are haunted by feeling too scared to do anything—from taking out the garbage at night to striking a match for incense. I watched all the other kids act brazen and bold, as I stood at eight years old, twelve, seventeen, upset with how much I did not want to be the person I was becoming. Later, I told people that I willed myself to stop being a fraidy-cat, but I think, as these things go, we develop personality traits when we need them.