Not on Fire, but Burning

by Greg Hrbek

  “Are you trying to upset her?”

  “No.”

  “But you know you are.”

  “The reason why—”

  “Don’t start that again,” his father says. “We’ve been through all of this. You promised, Dorian.”

  “All I said is, I had a dream.”

  His father stares at him. Not seeing him clearly, Dorian knows. Seeing a blur; general shape of a son. Then he puts the glasses back on, takes a deep breath, and says: “All right, tell me the dream.” And Dorian realizes he doesn’t want to tell it. Hasn’t brought it up for any good (or, as Dr. Beltran would put it, “forwarding”) purpose. He knows perfectly well that his desire is to move the family backwards, back to the time, last autumn, when he had accused his mother and father and brother of hiding everything from him, everything—and, after they’d responded with a show of ignorance and confusion, had felt justified in going totally nuclear on them. That’s what he wants to do now. Because when he had shouted and cried and demanded they tell him the truth, the pressure, wherever it was coming from, had lightened a little.

  Now his father says: “Tell me. I want to hear.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. I want to help, Dodo.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  But he does. He does need help. Just not the kind they are offering. If I keep this up, I’ll wind up in that doctor’s office again. So he says he’s sorry, there was no dream. “I don’t know what my problem is. I’ll say sorry to Mom.” And he walks upstairs. The bathroom door is open a crack and his mother stands before the mirror drawing a dark line along the ledge of her lower eyelid. Faint scent of perfume in the air. He says nothing. He goes into his room and clicks the door shut. Sits on his bed and turns on his pad and waits for her to at least knock, poke her head in and say goodbye so he can ignore the farewell, or make a sound indicating that her departure means nothing to him. But she doesn’t knock. He can see the end of the driveway from his window: the car turning onto the curve of the cul-de-sac and arcing out of sight.

  He has fitted the pieces they’ve hidden from him, the ones he has found in dreams, to the open spaces in the pictures he knows. They left California when Dorian was three: six months after the attack. No one denies this. But they didn’t move because his father found a new teaching position and they were afraid of radiation blown on the winds and settled into the soil. They moved because she had died. Because his parents couldn’t bear to live in the same place where she had been born and had grown up. The way he remembers it is— Well, he doesn’t. He was only three and you don’t really remember anything from that early time. You hear stories and you look at pictures and become convinced over time that things retold and recorded are your own true memories. What if no stories are told and all images are deleted? When they left California, what happened is: They stopped talking about her. Gave away her old toys and her clothes, school notebooks and artwork. Purged her from the photo folders on the family desktop. He has been through them many times: no image of her; nor any image within an image, such as a photograph in a frame on a shelf in the background, or a grade-school collage on the refrigerator with her name printed in a corner. He had zoomed such pictures and found nothing. Yes, they had done a very thorough job. Left absolutely no evidence. Allowed a silence to grow up around her death, unnatural and supernaturally dense, like fairy-tale brambles around a castle in which she slept under the power of an evil spell. He must have asked about her at first—but after a time (say, a year), stopped asking, wondering if perhaps all she’d ever been was an imaginary friend beyond whom the time had come to move. Then he must have started to forget. But you never really forget, do you? It’s always there, deep down. But that’s not where it is. These memories are very high up, saved in a kind of cloud that moves across the sky in your dreams.

  Evening of the emergence. After sunset. Dorian is with Plaxico at the park downtown. Of all his friends, this is the only one who knows about his sister. They’ve been best friends since kindergarten. This past year, in the course of a school geneaolgy project, Plaxico learned of a lynching in a distant branch of his family tree—after which he decided he wanted to change his name in honor of that murdered forefather, and his parents let him. So his name is legally Zebedee. But Dorian (and only Dorian) still calls him Plaxico.

  “I dreamed about her the other night.”

  “Her …?”

  While they sit against the black slab of the war memorial, the cicada nymphs advance in the twilight to the trunks of trees and crawl up to the leafy branches, making a sound like faraway whispers.

  “I thought that was over,” Plaxico says.

  “No.”

  “It never was?”

  Dorian shakes his head. “I just said that to get out of therapy.”

  “Now what.”

  “Yeah, now what.”

  “You have to figure out her name,” Plaxico says. “If you knew her name—”

  “I think I do actually.”

  “You do?”

  “Skyler.”

  “What happened … when you searched it?”

  “I found two Skyler Wakefields. One was a flute player in a orchestra in Boston fifty years ago. The other is a eight-year-old boy who had a art project displayed last year in a county fair in Indiana.”

  “Okay, so that’s obviously not her name, bro.”

  Dorian shrugs.

  “How would they do that,” Plaxico says. “Erase everything.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Look, D. I’m trying to be open-minded over here. But you can’t erase everything.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “The attack,” Dorian says. “The whole truth about the attack got erased.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How.”

  Plaxico says: “You know how.”

  They sit in what is now the total gray of twilight against the memorial and the carved names of murdered civilians. In the sky, no evidence of sunset remains. No star strong enough to show itself. The announcement comes on, broadcast from the top of the civic center. Fifteen minutes to curfew. Plaxico gets up, a rule-bound kid who has a streak of three straight years without a tardy on his report card, much less a curfew violation.

  “In the new day,” Plaxico says.

  “Later.”

  From the park to his driveway by bike takes seven minutes. Only when the clock on his phone reads 8:54 does Dorian start home.

  Your friend has a point. It isn’t possible, is it, to completely strike a person out. Certain hyperlinks can be purposely broken, certain pages removed, but not all. If it really is her name, you would’ve found some trace. Words spoken to a reporter at a protest march (Seventeen-year-old Skyler Wakefield from Sebastopol, California, said she was concerned about …); or an announcement of a prize won for creative writing (SHORT STORY, FIRST PRIZE: “THE LISTENING VESSELS,” Skyler Wakefield, Laguna High School), or Sonoma Valley Academy, or one of a score of other private schools within an hour’s drive of the old house, every one of which Dorian had already contacted long ago to ask if there had been any female students between the years X and Y with the surname Wakefield. There had been twelve. None of whom turned out to be her. Although it had seemed briefly that one, a Maya Wakefield, might be—because the reply from the headmaster of the school mentioned a tragic death, and included a link to a memorial website; and as Dorian clicked, the feeling that came over him was of a door about to be thrown open. Then the page appeared. And he saw a girl who looked nothing like the one in his dreams, from a family not his own. She had drowned in the ocean, taken from a beach by a sleeper wave …

  Plaxico is right. San Francisco is one thing, your sister is another. A hacker working for jihadists or domestic anarchists, or a cyber-specialist under orders from the government—someone like that could erase everything: every video taken from the ground that had clearly shown a passenger plane being stee
red into the bridge, a plane with the words AIR ARABIA on the fuselage crashing into the bridge and then exploding. But your parents … When he gets home, Dorian types the name in again. SKYLER WAKEFIELD. And combs through the results. And finds nothing more than he did before. A dead flautist from the Boston Symphony and a third-grader from Indiana. Can’t be the right name. But he knows it is. Her name is Skyler. Dorian saw it very clearly at the end of the dream:

  He was in a windmill and there was a kind of door and a fog swirling in the doorway through which he could see another place, a different room, where a little boy was bent over a board game.

  What’s your name?

  Noah.

  The boy rolled two red dice and one came up a four and one came up a one and he moved the old-fashioned race car five spaces to Luxury Tax. Through a window, Dorian could see what he understood to be the Golden Gate Bridge, though in the dream it was not a thing made of iron painted blood red, but a kind of drawing made of innumerable iron shavings that seemed to be trembling under the power of an atmospheric magnet.

  I’m looking for my sister, Dorian said.

  Skyler?

  Where is she?

  As he counted out make-believe money, the boy named Noah pointed; and Dorian crossed into the next room. Thinking: Skyler, Skyler. A laptop computer was asleep on a table; a chair was empty. Dorian waved a finger over the touchpad. The computer woke up and the document came to life—and when he saw the title (THE LISTENING VESSELS) and the name (SKYLER WAKEFIELD), what was happening did not feel like a dream anymore. It felt like something else.

  The next morning, Dorian can’t remember having any dream about her. He had gone to bed feeling on the verge of new and damning proof. Her name was like a key brought into sleep. Skyler. His mind would fit it into a lock, the door to a palace inside of which he would find one truth after another. In fact, he did dream about a palace (images downloading all of a sudden from subconsciousness), but his sister had not been inside it. The dream had nothing at all to do with her. Something about an Arabian palace. One of those opulent superstructures from the Second Abbasid Caliphate that the Coalition wasted in Gulf War III. Though Dorian understood, as he walked through it—a labyrinth of halls, chambers, rotundas, and grand staircases overspread with rubble and glass—that he wasn’t in Arabia, but somewhere in the Territories: Nebraska or Montana. In one room, a huge throne room, there was the weirdest thing—one entire wall was a mural of Mount Rushmore made from ears of dyed corn. Trying to remember: Where is Mount Rushmore? Dakota?

  He gets out of bed.

  Has to pee, but it’s summer and he sleeps in tighty-whiteys, and recently he’s become self-conscious about his morning erections. He could put on pants but he’s too lazy. So he paces the room waiting for the thing to go away, which it won’t, because there seems to be a direct correlation between the fullness of a bladder and the duration of a boner. It’s 7:47. Strong possibility his mother will be in the main bathroom, blow-drying her hair, and his father will be in bed reading …

  He cracks his door.

  The door to his parents’ room is open. He peers around the jamb. Sure enough, here is his father (a man who literally wears pajamas), drinking coffee with a book in one hand, a pencil perched in the crook of his ear.

  “Who’s in your bathroom?” Dorian asks.

  “M-O-M.”

  “Cliff’s in the other one?”

  “What do I look like,” his father says, “a surveillance narc?”

  He goes down the hall and tries the knob.

  “Morning, nitwit.”

  “I have to pee.”

  “Uh-huh,” his brother says. “And I have to shit out half a Chinese buffet.”

  He returns to his room, pulls on cut-off jeans and walks outside, planning to take a leak in the little woods behind the gazebo. Barefoot across the dewy grass. He is already going, the pee slapping into last autumn’s leaves, when he realizes they are all around him, on the trunks and branches of the trees. The Great Eastern Brood. Each insect perfectly motionless; as if glued to the bark. But each one also moving. Dorian shakes off the last drops and zips. Overhead, the leaf canopy shifts in the wind and there’s a pulse of morning sunlight. There must be hundreds of them on each and every tree, every cicada both still and not—or maybe the way to describe it is: each moving within its own stillness. He studied this in school. The insect is molting. Shedding an outer layer: the nymphal exoskeleton. But what he’s watching here is less like science than magic. What’s happening is: They are coming out of themselves. They are freeing themselves from themselves. Old self splits apart, dehisces down the back, a divide so clean it looks like the work of a surgeon; and a new one—white and waxen and winged—pushes through the gap. The head breaks open next. Dead eyes diverge. The new eyes, the living sighted ones, are blood red and wide with astonishment, as if the creature itself can’t believe the change.

  2

  A drive this long. Couldn’t make it without music. I am into the old, old stuff. I’m talking the Prophets of Grunge. The things you loved as a boy, you want them around you when you’re an old man. The Marvins, Black River, Dreamgarden. There was a lot of genius in that sound before it became the ear candy of the masses, and my pod is crammed full of it. Enough to get me all the way to Dakota.

  I was out here once. I was probably eight or nine. Way before any of this shit came to pass, back when the interstates were free and open roads, my grandpa took me to the Badlands and the Black Hills to see Mount Rushmore. Along the way, we got off the highway and drove a frontage road and turned onto a rural route and there in the middle of a flat green plain was this thing like an empty lot surrounded by a chain-link fence with a sign: NO TRESPASSING—USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED. We walked right up to the fence. “There’s nobody here,” I said.

  “They’re underground. Maybe two members of the USAF.”

  “Can they see us?”

  “Dunno.”

  “What’s that,” I said, pointing to a metal dome that looked like the access hatch of a submarine.

  “That slides open,” my grandpa said. “Before launch.”

  “So the missile is under there.”

  “Correct.”

  He had a book with maps that showed where all of them were. In the car, on the way west, I paged through it. The black spots symbolizing the silos were everywhere, spread all over the Territories; and in each of those places, buried under the ground and waiting for a time to emerge, was a weapon powerful enough to set an entire city on fire. That day, we made it to Mount Rushmore in time to see them turn on the lights. It was dusk. In the gray-shaded distance, you could just barely make out the outlines of the monument. Then the spotlights came on and the four faces on the mountain took on the complexions of gods.

  He is about four hundred miles shy of Dakota, just west of the Quad Cities when a National Guard Humvee overtakes him. He pulls patiently to the shoulder of westbound I-80 and turns down the music and waits while a soldier in desert camouflage approaches the window, cradling his M-16 like a newborn …

  “Where you going, sir?”

  “Dakota Reservation.” He hands the passport, last stamped at Crossing No. 6, through the window.

  “Dakota Res.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now why the fuck would you wanna go there?”

  “I’m adopting a detainee.”

  The reservist looks at him. “William Banfelder,” he says, reading from the passport.

  “That’s me.”

  “You’re seventy years old.”

  “Seventy-one.”

  “I’m going to have to run you through the system.”

  Will smiles.

  “Something funny about that?”

  “Third time since yesterday. But it’s all right, I understand. I ran convoys in Gulf War III.”

  The soldier’s eyes go skeptical. But then he asks Will, in a tone of respect, to sit tight for a minute. Recedes in the side view mirror. On either side o
f the highway: post-harvest Iowan fields; flat as the world was once believed to be; no less brown and bleak than the deserts of the Middle East. Here and now, on this highway, the sun is ahead of him, lowering in the west, as it often had been on those highways, there and then—when you would blink as you drove into the fire of it, flipping down the tinted lenses of the sunglasses that every merc in-country swore by but seemed only to obscure and blur detail, like an advent of glaucoma, so you felt you weren’t seeing as sharply as necessary, like the time in the Forbidden Zone when you missed something at your ten o’clock which, only after the rocket had buzzed over the port bow of the Suburban, did you realize had been jihadists behind a berm with a shoulder launcher. So if you had been driving one mile per hour faster, if the berm had been ten meters closer … which is why later, drunk in that shithole of a base on the edge of the Zone, you had left that message (“I almost died today, Emm”), knowing she wouldn’t pick up and yet believing that she would call back; and when, day after day, she didn’t, your imagination supposed, The grenade actually hit us and you’re dead and hell is being in this war forever and thinking you can leave whenever you want and in truth you never will …

  “Sir, you’re good.”

  “Thanks,” Will says, taking his passport.

  “You have a weapon?”

  Will pulls back the curtain of his jacket. The Glock is holstered left of his heart. The reservist nods, and says: “You be careful out here.”

  “I shall.”

  “Don’t drive over anything.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Including roadkill. Other day, at the off-ramp for Iowa City, we found an old TS-50 in a prairie dog.”

  And then he’s on his way again. North by northwest. Into the middle of nothing, through the dusty buttes that look so much like that Middle Eastern desert across which, forty years ago, he escorted the supply trucks of the coalition. He has thought long and hard about those days. About what happened over there and about his original intentions, which had been good; and yet what had come to pass—the things he got involved in, the things he did … Well, I have another chance now. Not that I’m trying to erase the past. No, that’s not the point. You hurt people, okay. The point is, can you bring things into balance before time runs out … Sun setting. On the passenger seat lie the papers, approved by Homeland Security and the Internment Authority. The boy’s photo is clipped to one corner. His name is Karim. Twelve years old. Hurricane of black hair; angry accent mark eyebrows. Born in Kerkook, Arabia. Family emigrated legally when he was three. A year later, the attack; and a few months after the attack, after the formal declaration of war, he became one of the million relocated to the wastes of the Territories: Nebraska and Montana and here, Dakota. His family was Sunni, and each member thereof—mother, father, sister—is listed as a casualty of sectarian conflict. Bullshit. A hundred thousand people dead on the reservations in the last seven years. A hundred thousand! Don’t tell me a hundred thousand dead by car bombs and suicide bombs and blood feuds. The whole thing has been systematic. Drone strikes and who knows what else. American government killing its own citizens … He has been eating sandwiches out of a cooler since the Proclamation Line, because highway food gives him the runs. But when he hits Sioux City, what does he see a sign for? A druggie-force craving hits him. Tendersweet Fried Clams and an Orange Sherbet. He curves along the exit, turns at the light, and there it is, all lit up in the gloaming, roof as orange as sherbet, perfect as a mirage: Howard Johnson’s.