by Cai Emmons
She feels the call for a plan. She hasn’t felt that before. First suppress the wind, then bring on the humidity, maybe rain. A strand of doubt has blown in, perhaps because of Matt’s watchful presence. He is a relative stranger, not an old friend like Lanny. Could she drop him off somewhere? Ask him to wait?
The path narrows and rises more steeply. Earth and sky seem to merge, both jaundiced and draped with a smoky haze. We’re fucked, he thinks. This is insane.
She barrels past a sign that bears a warning of some kind, but they’re moving too quickly for him to read it. He imagines he hears, beyond the motor’s roar, a rumbling that might be the fire. He has no idea how far away it is, but it bears down everywhere, imbuing land and sky with its eerie glow. Dread tunnels through his gut. He said he wouldn’t try to stop her, but maybe he should.
Under his fingertips her ribs are unbearably fragile, reminiscent of whorled shells, but she’s surprisingly strong, maintaining the vehicle’s speed over ground studded with divots and rocks. He came on this expedition thinking he would protect her, and yet he is well aware she doesn’t want protection. His back and shoulders ache as if he’s been welded here for days.
He thinks briefly of Lyndon Roos who has been hounding him with texts since they parted. She’s been asking what Bronwyn plans to do; she wants to be a witness, notify the press, and with the self-importance of a star she assumes she’s welcome. Bronwyn put her foot down. No press. Absolutely not. I don’t care if she’s a movie star. He’s in full agreement. What a disaster a press corps would be now, following them up here to god knows what.
Balloons of smoke rise like dozens of hyperactive parachutes, inflating and withering, swirling on the wind. The worm of dread in his gut has become flat-out fear. They’re close to the top now, not a mountain exactly, but a huge mound of inert brown earth draped before them like a reclining elephant. Without a single tree in sight the place is desolate and ugly, a landscape that has no use for humans.
She turns to him, her expression blank, then guns the last several hundred feet to the top where she turns off the ignition on a patch of flat dirt. They gaze south to where the fire has bridged the mountain’s saddle and begun to descend into a steep ravine. At the base of that ravine are thousands of endangered homes which are obscured by a wall of dark grayish-brown smoke. The view is stupefying: acres of unbridled chaos, lashing arterial flames, whorls of smoke, oily-looking currents of hot air, everything jitterbugging and pulsating in unstoppable motion. The sound is the thundering of an enraged universe. The entire spectacle makes him feel utterly helpless. He grabs stunted breaths. His eyes are smarting. The smell is worse than burning rubber.
Bronwyn dismounts and walks to where the hillside begins to slope down. Hair stashed under her baseball cap, pants slightly baggy, she looks very young and boyish. He doesn’t approach her, not yet, but he’ll need to make sure she doesn’t go closer. Whatever capabilities she has, she is still human and this is dangerous.
“Stay here,” she says, her voice low and hoarse, almost a growl. She skitters, bug-like, down toward the ravine, slipping and sliding on the gravel, covering distance far too quickly.
“Wait!” he calls. “That’s too close!”
She hears him and stops, turns. “I came for this,” she shouts back.
“Don’t be crazy—it’s not safe!”
“Go! Disappear for a while, please. I have to do this alone!”
“Are you kidding? I can’t leave you here.”
“Please,” she begs. Her body is bent into the hillside like a scimitar. Her pale face seethes, luminous, bent on its course.
“Shit,” he mutters.
She makes a gesture, pushing him away, and waits until he begins to trudge reluctantly back toward the ATV.
“Out of sight!” she calls.
He does as she says, taking a few more paces until he can’t see her. He kneels in the dirt coughing, sweating, shivering. One, one thousand, two, one thousand. He clenches his jaw against nausea. They’re both fucked.
He has never believed in imposing his will on others. As the youngest child in his family he was always being told what to do. The legacy of this is he believes in letting people alone, never presuming he knows best. But how the hell is he supposed to honor that credo now? She could die, for god’s sake. They both could. Even experienced firefighters die in circumstances like this. He stands and stumbles back to the lip of the hill where bursts of heat boil into his face. The sounds from the fire are erratic explosions, battle sounds. The smell is sickening.
She stands on a rocky promontory, legs spread, chest lifted, back straight, arms thrust out from the sides of her body as if she might take flight. Tiny and elfin, yet firmly planted there. He starts toward her, stepping cautiously but slipping nonetheless. A pair of helicopters passes overhead, distracting him, shooting jets of water that are blown laterally by the wind. He continues clumsily downhill, his attention fixed on Bronwyn who maintains her stance with the immobility of a statue.
He slips, falls hard on his coccyx, and sits for a second, stunned. As he tries to gather himself, something in her stance changes. She looks lighter, almost transparent, as if she might blow away. In the coming days he will review this image again and again, wondering if he saw it correctly, questioning whether he remembers it right. But this is what he will swear he has seen. It can’t be, but it is.
The flames are losing their bellicose swagger. Only minutes ago they were devouring everything in sight, but now they are almost asthmatic, desperate for oxygen and fuel, eviscerated as Custer’s troops at Little Bighorn, or Sherman’s troops at the end of their march. It might be an optical illusion, a hallucination, a dream.
He reaches for his phone and holds it up in movie mode, panning slowly from west to east, hoping the camera sees what he sees, this titanic inferno in sudden retreat. The spires of flame shrink to the ground; the front line recedes; the plumes of smoke that were taking over the sky now deflate and sink; the snarl abates to a whisper.
When his battery dies, the mountains both near and far look like a smoldering battleground, plundered, only a few small skirmishing flames remaining, all listless and about to expire. He coughs, erupts in a bout of sweating, shudders, spits, forces himself to standing, and runs downhill, stumbling and falling, toward Bronwyn.
Her cap has fallen off, releasing her braid which makes a bright tail against her back. When he arrives next to her she is wiping her face, spreading soot everywhere. She stares at him without apparent recognition, her eyes glassy.
“Oh my god,” he says. “Oh my god.” He sounds stupid. He feels stupid. “Let’s go,” he says.
She shakes her head, emits a guttural croak. “Not yet.”
“God, look—it’s out. You—”
“Not done. Go. I’ll get back on my own.”
Staring out at the blackened branches poking up from the scorched hillside like the grasping limbs of buried skeletons, he feels as if she and he are the last two alive. Civilization is gone. There’s nothing left to save. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”
She turns away from him, done with discussion, and slowly traverses the shank of the hillside, maintaining her altitude. After a moment he follows, careful to keep his distance. She makes her way uphill where she pauses at a crest that provides another view down over the ravaged wilderness. Smokes drifts overhead in long spiraling bands, confused about its allegiances.
What now? He waits, watches, wishes his camera were still working. She assumes the wide-legged stance again, staring out. A light rain begins to fall. Scarcely visible, it makes no sound, but it mists his face, pleasantly cool.
40
Her cottage sits beyond the reach of streetlights so as soon as her headlights go off it is sucked into darkness. Her eyes adjust slowly, picking out the edge of the driveway, the front steps. She stands on the stoop and sniffs the fecundity, the moist air, the pulsing of the river, traces of iron and sulphur and salt, and the decay of late summer.
She has missed these smells without knowing it.
Inside, the lights in the living room and kitchen have burned out. She drops her bag by the bedroom door and feels her way to the screened-in porch where she collapses on the couch, spent, hoping the sanctuary of home and the river’s current will work to restore her.
When her flight took off from Los Angeles this morning the rain was a mere whisper, as it had been all night, more mist than rain, but by the time she landed in Boston it had been pouring in LA for hours and every monitor she passed displayed images of flooded streets, people swimming from cars, piles of mud that had slumped down hillsides with houses in tow. Was this her fault? If so, she doesn’t know what went awry. She’d only meant for the rain to be light and brief, enough to rinse the atmosphere and restore the air’s freshness. But something went wildly out of control. All the water vapor that had been accumulating for days in the warm atmosphere above the city converged, and has come down not lightly as she intended, but with punishing force. It is more rain than the city has ever seen in one day, and the parched earth cannot absorb such a sudden overload of moisture. It has pooled and gushed and carved new riverbeds. It has barreled down hillsides, destabilizing the dirt, uprooting bushes and small trees, undermining houses. It has knocked out power stations and taken control of the surface streets and many of the freeways. Suddenly water, with its murderous power, is calling the shots.
At Logan Airport Bronwyn turned away from the monitors and hurried out to the parking lot to find her car. It was after dark and Boston was hot too, with smothering humidity, though not as hot as LA had been. She drove north fast. Maybe it wasn’t her fault. But maybe it was.
Matt has texted her several times. No doubt he’s been seeing the same reports. They left LA at the same time, he on a flight to New York where he plans to meet his old friend for a road trip. But he was reluctant to depart, wanted to discuss what had happened, wanted her to review the footage he’d taken with his camera, wanted to coax her to explain herself. She was too exhausted. Besides, she couldn’t explain herself even if she’d wanted to.
She goes inside and turns on the TV to watch her replacement, a buxom blonde named Ceci Bontemps—can that really be her name?—giving the day’s final weather report. Ceci confines herself mostly to the local weather, but shows a quick clip of LA’s plight, gloating a little in her commentary, as if the relatively benign weather of the east coast reflects the moral superiority of its inhabitants. It’s prurient really, Bronwyn thinks, this kind of disaster weather voyeurism. She hopes she hasn’t been guilty of it, though she suspects she has.
One person in LA has drowned, an elderly woman who was walking near a burst storm drain. There was a water surge and she didn’t know how to swim. No footage of the event was shown, thank god, but Bronwyn can picture it well enough—a frail woman stunned by the sudden gush of brown water—the thought is devastating. Maybe it isn’t her fault and maybe it is, but the fact is she now has no idea what she can and can’t do. Under these circumstances she shouldn’t be trying to do anything at all. Not if it leads to this. At best she’s no more effective than the boy who put his thumb in the dike. Okay, yes, she squelched the fires, but who’s to say more fires won’t start soon in some other part of that dry city or state, just like the tornado that took down Earl. In fact, it can most certainly be said that more fires will return.
She flips off the TV and goes outside and down the slope of charred grass, shuddering a little at the lingering sooty scent. Stars wink off the river’s flat black surface. The night is still and the moon has not yet risen. She wishes she’d never left this riverside home, this sheltering private piece of land that is, at least temporarily, hers. She hopes she never has to leave again. Minutes pass. How shockingly silent it is here. Where have the night creatures gone? Why is the river’s lapping current completely inaudible?
It’s the rush of her own blood that’s obscuring her hearing. Hush. Gradually her blood receives her instruction and subdues itself, ceding to the other sounds, bats rustling under the eaves, field mice stirring, chanting crickets, the river purling toward the sea. The volume of the polyphony amplifies, as if the landscape is reassuring her that it’s happy to have her home.
41
At first Diane thought she would go alone to get the results—she has never before gone to a doctor’s appointment accompanied by anyone, not as an adult—but when she imagines driving across the river, no doubt in heavy traffic, and parking in the dank hospital garage, then finding her way to the right building and the right elevator and the right corridor, everything institutionally drab and anonymous, all the doctors and nurses and technicians striding past her imperiously, pressed for time, blank-faced or stamped with patronizing smiles, trained to read people as always evincing some pathology, then arriving at her doctor’s waiting room where she would wait surrounded by people who would look perfectly ordinary, but whose brains would all be carrying invisible damage—tumors, or dementia, or some neurological condition that was about to impair their functioning and make them invalids and maybe usher in their premature demise—well, she couldn’t face it, the thought overwhelmed her, and she asked Joe, very quietly, if he would accompany her.
Of course he said yes. Dear Joe. He recast himself for service, came down from Maine, and put on the coat of command. He took the driver’s seat—she usually drives—and drove her along Memorial Drive in the early afternoon. They crossed over the Longfellow Bridge, and the traffic was not bad, and the river was a ribbon of sunlit gems and full of boat traffic, and things might be right with the world if you looked at them in a certain way. They were both quietly ruminative. In this attenuated moment of transit she told him about the Mexican man and his son, and Joe listened and nodded, and she was glad he felt no call to comment.
Dr. Sadaranghani is an elegant and lively woman who has retained the lilting, lightly English-inflected accent of her native India though she earned her medical degree here and has been practicing in Boston for fifteen years. Diane chose her not primarily because she was on several of the “top doctors” lists, though that was important, but because she took Diane’s request for a test seriously and did not make her feel the least bit ashamed.
The waiting room, which serves two other neurologists as well as Dr. S, is full, and Diane is surprised to see that the other patients are mostly middle-aged, or downright young. There’s a man of indeterminate middle-age with a turban, a fifty-something black couple clutching one another, an elderly white woman accompanied by her prim middle-aged daughter, a boy of not more than four or five with his parents, and a teenaged girl with her mother. Viewed from the outside everyone appears disease-free.
The turbaned man moves to allow Diane and Joe to sit side by side. They nod their thanks and seat themselves, and Joe takes her hand and, though the gesture embarrasses Diane, she doesn’t withdraw. He squeezes and she squeezes back. He scans the room, trying to be subtle, and she knows that when they emerge from here he will have made up a story about each grouping, their family circumstances, the problems that have brought them to this waiting room. He will have named and nicknamed them all, and assigned them ages and professions and obsessions. Some of what he’ll come up with will seem right to her, some of it will seem fantastical. It’s simply the way his brain works, he maintains, or how he has trained it to work. You mold your brain around science, he tells her, and this is my way.
If a single room can exude joy, Dr. S’s office is that room. It is a tarantella of color with a Persian carpet in shades of deep red and indigo, plump carmine arm chairs with saffron accent pillows, and adorning the walls are children’s drawings in the neon primary colors of PET scans. Also on the walls are various framed photographs of Dr. S’s two children and her doctor husband. Diane has never seen a physician’s office with such a joyous personal stamp and, though she has been here once before, it still takes her by surprise.
Dr. S wears her name badge on a stylish, pale blue linen suit. Her white coat hang
s on a hook on the door. Preoccupied as she was on the first visit, Diane missed how stunning this woman is, a slim forty-something woman with the glossy hair and burnished satin skin of a teenager, and perfectly symmetrical features, a perfection that isn’t precious and static, but active and playful. She shakes their hands and expresses delight at meeting Joe and they sit in the arm chairs, a slim monitor on the table to one side.
“Well, Dr. Fenwick,” says Dr. S, “I won’t keep you in suspense. Your brain is perfectly fine. There is no evidence of pathology at all.” She pauses and smiles almost teasingly. Perhaps it is rare for her to deliver good news.
Diane hears the words, but is slow to absorb them.
Joe pats her arm. “I told you! Didn’t I tell you?”
Dr. S laughs. “We all worry. It’s normal to worry sometimes, especially in times of stress. I consented to test you because it seemed to me you were more worried than most.”
“Oh, she was,” Joe says. “For no reason at all. Her brain is ten times as good as most people’s. Certainly better than mine.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Diane says. “Your brain is top notch.” She holds her breath, a recent tendency. There’s something more coming, a “but” hovering behind what’s been said that will change the story. “But that’s not all?”
“Your frontal lobe is larger than most, as is your inferior parietal region. That’s certainly no cause for worry—in fact it has been associated with a higher level of intelligence.”
Joe is raining laughter. He can’t seem to stop. “See, I told you!” Yes, he has been more worried than he let on.
“But what about the things I’ve been forgetting? What about the feeling that my brain is leaking knowledge at a terrible rate?”