John awoke to the burning.
* * *
The Sterno can had spilled flaming jelly across the floor, the bulk of it next to three exposed wooden structural studs.
The wood was porous and spectacularly dry. The flames licked at it, paused as if to gather strength, then ran upward to the ceiling beams and through an open airway to the third floor, where they encountered a five-foot-high stack of the Saturday edition of the Toronto Sun dated through 1981.
The flames relished it.
Awake now—dimly—John rolled away from the heat. A glowing ember flaked down from the ceiling and scorched the skin of his wrist. His lungs felt raw, sandpapered. He opened his eyes.
He saw the flames running across the ceiling in freshets, like water. Where the room had been dark, it was now bright with a sinister light. He lifted a hand to shade his vision.
His head hurt. When he moved, the pain was dizzying; nausea constricted his throat. The agony was so generalized as to seem sourceless; then he touched his head above his left ear and felt the pulpy texture of the skin there. The hair was matted and wet. His hand, when he pulled it away, glistened in the firelight. This wetness was blood.
Blood and fire all around him.
He remembered Roch.
* * *
The overheated air created by the flames was vastly lighter than the cold, stagnant air surrounding it. It shot upward almost volcanically, coursing through the abandoned building like a river cut loose from the restraints of gravity. Where stairways had fallen, it rose through the gaping spaces. It discovered flues and airways. It was merely warm by the time it reached the top of the building, but still hot enough to seek out an icy five-foot gap where the ceiling had collapsed and to rise, lazily at first, into the still afternoon air.
This was how Susan saw it from the Honda: a waft of almost pure white smoke.
It gathered strength.
* * *
John understood that something was broken inside him. That was the way it felt, and it might be literally true; Roch had hit him pretty hard. He was confused about this place and he was confused about whether he was “John” or “Benjamin”—or what these names implied—and just about the only thing he was not confused about was the urgency of getting out of the building. The building was on fire; it was burning; he could be trapped here. That much was clear.
He managed to stand up.
He saw the flashlight on the floor and picked it up. He could see well enough in the firelight but he might need this later. There was a thin veil of acrid smoke all around him—fortunately, most of it was still being drawn up by the rising heat. That might change, however. And even this faint haze was choking. Combustion products. Toxic gases. These words floated up from memory, briefly vivid in his mind: he could read them, like printed words on paper, in the space behind his eyelids. But the danger was real and imminent.
He staggered into the hallway, where Roch was waiting for hire.
* * *
Roch came forward in a lunge with the copper pipe extended, grinning hugely. John knew that Roch meant to kill him and leave him here where the fire would consume his body. He understood this by the expression on Roch’s face. There was nothing mysterious about it. Blunt, burning hatred. Once again he watched the slow ballistic swing of the pipe above Roch’s head and the arc it would follow downward: this was familiar, too.
The ballet of his own death.
But not yet, John decided.
It was not even a thought. It was a denial so absolute that it felt like a seizure. He took a step back, hefted the big hardware-store flashlight and threw it at Roch. The flashlight whirled as it flew, end over end, and it seemed to John that Roch was staring at it, perplexed and wholly attentive, as it impacted squarely against his forehead.
Roch teetered on his heels, lunging forward with the pipe-section for ballast. No good. He sat down hard on the concrete floor. A line of blood seeped out from the impact point on his forehead.
He looked at John with mute, angry amazement.
“Son of a bitch!” he managed.
Began climbing to his feet again, pipe in hand.
John turned and ran.
* * *
But who had thrown the flashlight?
This question occupied a brightly lit corner of his mind as he staggered down the increasingly dark and smoky corridor.
Because, he felt different.
Not John or Benjamin.
Some third thing.
It rose and shifted inside him even now. It was large and still wordless. It didn’t have a name; it had never had a name. Some new presence. Or maybe not: not new at all.
Maybe, John thought, it had been there all along.
* * *
Roch had cut him off from the ladder where he had climbed up to the second floor; John ran in the opposite direction.
The fire was large and potent now, able to leapfrog the stony breaks between oases of wood and insulation. No part of the building was safe. Already, on the floor above, two of the tiny wire-reinforced windows had been blown out of their frames by the pressure of the burning. Flame jetted from the empty spaces, a newly crowned infant king surveying his kingdom.
The fire created its own weather. Throughout the eastern half of the structure, air that had lain stagnant for years began to stir. Locked or boarded doors groaned against their restraints. Shuttered windows rattled. The sour dust of limestone and decayed animal droppings stirred and lifted. The fire drew in gusts of clean air from the winter afternoon, and for one paradoxical moment it seemed as if a kind of spring had come.
* * *
John felt the air on his face, a good sign. It meant he was moving away from the main body of the fire. He had decided there must be another way down; it was only a question of finding it. But the light had dimmed to a smoky nimbus; he had lost the flashlight and soon he would be groping on his hands and knees. And Roch was close behind him. He heard the footsteps, though he could no longer calculate direction and distance.
He understood, too, that the fire had grown large enough that it might encircle him. That if it did, he would be helpless.
Strange, he thought, to die without knowing his own name.
* * *
The darkness now was absolute, interrupted in rare moments by the flicker of Roch’s flashlight from behind. John toiled onward as quickly as he dared. But the air was warm and choking. He didn’t have much margin anymore, and he knew it.
When he saw a glimmer of light down the corridor he was afraid that it might be the fire circling around from the front. He slowed to a walk, groped ahead cautiously, then stood for a moment surrounded by this dim aurora before it registered as window-light.
The windows were tiny glass rectangles set in a wickerwork of framing. They rose from waist level to the ceiling, and they were so thickly crusted with grime that he hadn’t recognized them at first for what they were.
He pushed against one of the panes with both hands, but it didn’t yield. This was carpentry as old as the building itself, Victorian and hugely solid. He took away his hands and carried enough dirt with them that the prints let through a brighter beam of light, hand-shaped in the smoky air.
He looked around. He wanted a brick, a pipe like Roch’s, anything … but the corridor was bare.
Roch’s flashlight flickered behind him.
Sighing, John pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around his right hand. Bracing himself, he drove his fist directly into the thick glass.
It was like punching rock—bruising, even through the cloth. But the glass splintered and fell away, leaving a razor-toothed space where cool air came flooding in.
The panes of glass were maybe twelve inches square, and he knocked out ten of them so rapidly that there was no time to notice the shards that ripped through the lining of the jacket and pierced his hand and wrist. The pain was momentary and irrelevant. When the glass was gone, he kicked and ripped at the wooden latticework until there was a hole
big enough to fit through.
He heard Roch almost directly behind him now, but there was time to ascertain that he himself was directly above the old loading bay; that there was a roof below him, two-by-fours covered with lathing and tarry shingles, some of this eroded by the weather … not exactly a firm footing; time enough, too, to see that the fire had reached the west end of the loading-bay roof and was spreading wildly.
He turned his head and saw Roch running down the corridor toward him, his features clenched in a concentration so total that John was reminded of a master chess-player—the same all-consuming focus. The copper pipe-length was cocked at an angle, ready. John leaped forward and down onto the canted roof of the loading bay and then spread-eagled himself against it. The shingles were already warm where his cheek pressed against them. Something was burning down below. But the air was clean.
He began inching downward. With luck, he might make it to the edge before the flames caught up with him. Then he could swing down to ground level. If there wasn’t time—he could let himself roll and tumble, take his chances on what might be down below.
* * *
In the distance—already audible, though it escaped John’s awareness—the firetrucks howled their sirens.
The smoke that had drifted up lazily only minutes before was darker, and it boiled skyward in massive gouts. The roof of the building had drifted over with snow, but that was melting—a sudden waterfall developed where the roof sagged toward the southeast corner—while the snow nearest the flames was simply vaporized by the heat. The hissing was as loud as the crackle of the fire; Susan, running back down the tracks from the pay-phone and the Honda, was startled by the sound.
* * *
The makeshift roof over the loading bay was just twelve feet above the ground at the lowest point of its slope. What John had contemplated doing might have been safe: to let himself tumble down and hope the snow would cushion his fall. But he was transfixed by the sight of Roch stepping up into the frame of the broken window, a mist of smoke writhing after him; clinging to the frame to keep himself from falling, shards of glass piercing his hands as John’s hands had been pierced, the copper pipe fallen and rolling away—missing John’s head by three or four inches—over the roof and out of sight.
Hanging there, Roch looked down at John in a blaze of distilled hatred—and then across at the western edge of the roof, where the flames had begun to creep forward.
He braced his feet and took his hands off the window frame.
The roof was old and weathered. It had been designed to carry a calculated weight of snow—barely. In the years since it was erected, dry rot had invaded the studs; ice and water had pried up the shingles and rusted the nails. It could not support more than a fraction of its calculated load.
In particular, it couldn’t support Roch.
His left foot pierced the shingles first. Roch’s eyes widened as he slipped to thigh-level, like a man in quicksand, his right leg buckling under him and the shingles peeling away with sharp, successive snaps. His right knee penetrated similarly, and then he seemed to hesitate for a moment, straddling a joist, hands clawing at open air … and then the joist separated with a sound like a gunshot and Roch simply disappeared.
There was a sickening moment of absolute silence, then the thud as Roch impacted against the loading-bay platform below.
* * *
John raised his head.
He could see Susan running toward the building, Amelie not far behind her. Those two were safe. That was good.
He could have joined them. He knew what to do. Let go, tuck and roll, let his momentum carry him away from the loading dock and hope that the snowdrift would break his fall. He was aware of the beat of his heart and the onrushing eagerness of the flames—how could he do anything else?
But he felt himself inching forward, up the angle of the roof toward the hole Roch had made.
He braced his fingers against the shingles at the edge and looked down.
Roch was lying motionless, his hips at an unnatural angle and his eyes closed, the flames advancing from the western end of the loading bay and already hot enough to singe his eyebrows.
One more experiment, John thought.
Just one.
* * *
But maybe it wasn’t an experiment. Maybe it was something more important.
He felt himself straddling a cross-joist and wrapping his arms around it, then levering himself out over this high vacant space, swinging down toward Roch and the burning platform, and he understood with a sudden piercing clarity that he wasn’t John or Benjamin anymore. Some new being had grown into the vacuum of his skin, nurtured by his fever and the sudden desert heat of the flames—a fragment of self so fundamental that it had lurked undiscovered beneath all the latticework of words. It had existed even before he learned the word I; an uninvented self.
He let go of the creaking joist and dropped in a crouch next to Roch, feeling a sudden pain in his ankles and knees and spine but still able to stand.
His vision blurred in the smoke. He was aware of the blood on his hands, the cuts circling his wrists, the throbbing in his temple where Roch had struck him with the pipe. He was not sure he had the strength for this.
For this experiment.
He kneeled against the hot floorboards and slipped his arm around Roch.
Roch was not wholly unconscious. His eyelids flickered open as John lifted him up. Briefly, he struggled; but his legs dangled limp and useless and the pain of his injuries must have been excruciating—his eyes riveted shut again.
The flames closed in from the western edge of the loading bay and began to lick out from the warehouse doors. John glanced up and it was like staring into a furnace; his skin prickled and itched. Overhead, the joists were popping their nails with a sound like gunfire. Embers rained down all around him.
He should leave this burden and simply run—
But the thought was evanescent; it vanished into the tindery air.
Roch’s legs would not support him; it was like hefting a two-hundred-pound sack of sand. Roch opened his eyes once more as John hauled him up. He did not struggle; seemed only to watch, almost impassively … his eyes were fixed on John’s eyes and his face, now, was only inches away. His eyes seemed to radiate the single blunt message: “I’m not one of you!”—and John understood, in a final flash of inhuman insight, that Roch had willfully set himself apart; that when he looked at other human beings he saw protoplasm, bags of flesh, vessels that might contain the elements of hatred or contempt … but never anything of Roch.
Roch was only Roch, the only one of his kind, alone in his uniqueness. And across that vast escarpment there was no bridge or road or trail: the divide was as absolute as a vacuum. And John perceived that this was not some flaw of character or nurture; it was more profound, a trick of gestation, a stitch in the glial network … somehow, it was built in… My God, John thought, he’s not even altogether human. …
He pinned Roch’s arms in his own and dragged him toward the snow. Roch was stunningly heavy, a dead weight. But the fire was close enough to raise smoke from their clothes and John drew some strength from that. He pulled Roch along with his heels dragging against the steaming floorboards. He felt Roch’s breath against his neck. Roch opened his eyes again, now two blank wells of unimaginable hostility—and maybe something else.
Maybe a question.
“Because I don’t want to be what you are,” John said. The words came out punctuated by his gasping, overwhelmed by the roar of the flames; but patient, gentle. “Because I’m tired of that.”
* * *
He carried Roch away from the burning platform of the loading bay, into the steaming snow and beyond into the thick snow that had not yet melted and where the reflection of the fire was gaudy and strange.
In the end, he was only dimly aware of Amelie as she pried at his fingers. His embrace of Roch was fierce and hysterical. But he gave it up at last.
PART 4
RESULTS
31
Spring is the rainy season in Los Angeles, but today the air was cool and clean; the sky was blue; the smog had rolled away in a vast tide of Pacific air. Susan placed a wreath of flowers on her father’s grave and stood up, smoothing her dress. The sun picked out a fleck of mica on the headstone, like the winking of an eye.
Daddy, she thought, what do I do now?
She meant: about John.
For seven weeks after the warehouse fire John had been comatose in a Toronto hospital. Susan had visited him daily; she had helped to nurse him. It hurt to see him silent and still in his hospital bed, contained in a sleep so absolute that it was a fucker away from death. Sleep like another country, Susan thought; some place where he had retreated, miles and miles and miles away.
But it was not his sleep that had sent her fleeing to California. It was his waking up. “John is awake,” Dr. Kyriakides had said, and the announcement touched off in her a fierce, visceral panic. It was impossible to face the prospect of pushing through the door of his hospital room and finding him changed beyond recognition.
So she bought a ticket for the next available flight and stayed with her mother. She kept some secrets, told some lies, moped around in the fenced backyard while the ultraviolet burned her body brown. But there was no avoiding this ritual journey to the cemetery.
Daddy, what now?
The Divide Page 20