Not on Fire, but Burning

by Greg Hrbek

  5

  On the drive home from work, think of Dorian. The baby he once was; the boy he is now; and the person you are frightened he will soon become. It seems you spend half your waking life these days on the Northway, backed up in traffic, worrying about the person your son might become. A hateful one who will pay hate forward.

  Hate.

  A strong word. But isn’t it an accurate one? What he did on that school trip, at the mosque. Heart hurts at the memory of reading those words written in a hand undeniably his: FUCK ISLAM. What is that, if not hate? When all you’ve ever preached is love and respect for others, not through religion (you are not religious, though there was, when you first moved east, a brief flirtation with a Presbyterianism so open-minded it bordered on the agnostic), but in the socially progressive terms found in the messages of good books and the enlightened lessons of history. You cannot understand it, any more than you can understand why he sees a sister who never was; and though the two things—the emotion and the illusion—are surely interconnected, the question of which caused which is all but impossible to answer … Now this: A new boy across the street. When you heard the news, that your neighbor has adopted an orphan from the camps, you thought: That’s strange. Because it isn’t a thing you would expect from that man, whom you know and like well enough, but about whom you have heard … Well, nothing specific or definite; only that he was one of those men who went to the war for money, and who, regardless of any crimes he might commit there, was guaranteed through the corruptions of occupying power to never see the inside of an indigenous courtroom. That was three decades ago. Must be seventy years old now. A widower with no children. A man getting old alone—and now, suddenly, a guardian, a father, who in giving this boy a home will put a stop to the wrongs done him. Is this really so strange? If it seems so, it’s merely because the world has become so warped that any act of kindness makes us look automatically for some counterwork of cruelty. The more you think about it, the more brightly a feeling sparkles in you; it’s like a star appearing strong in a dark sky … Which brings us back to your son, who did not, in your opinion, learn anything from what happened back in the fall. After admitting to an act of vandalism, he served a two-day suspension from school. On the first day, you took him back to the mosque, where he apologized to the imam and then covered over what he’d written with a fresh coat of paint. On the second day, he attended a half-day tolerance workshop for tweens sponsored by the hate crimes unit of the police department. And it was just a few days later, in the course of a conversation intended to bring some closure to the incident, that Dorian lost his temper and said he knew he once had a sister, and though he had forgotten for a long time, just as you all had wanted him to, she was coming back to him in dreams, and you couldn’t hide it anymore. It had taken you quite a while to understand what in the world he was talking about—but as you absorbed the shock of the idea, you were thinking (not in words, but in a wave of feeling faster than words and more complete) that this claim was a deliberate invention, a way to deny responsibility and reflect blame back at you, as if you were the reason for his bad behavior and also the source of his prejudice. So he had learned nothing. In fact, he was only entrenching himself more completely in the kind of thinking that had to change.

  Dorian has been at Plaxico’s all afternoon and now, at about six forty-five, he’s sitting at the dinner table with the Hightowers eating Mrs. H’s pulled pork and mashed potatoes when he gets a text from his father, which reminds him that tonight is family dinner. “Shit,” he says. Mr. and Mrs. H both look at him. “Sorry,” he says, pushing back his chair, “I’m supposed to be home.” “Don’t you leave those dishes just sitting there,” Mrs. H says. He clears his plate and glass and utensils and shouts out a thanks as he exits through the front door. Into a sun that is knifing through the day’s last quadrant of sky. He sees his mother’s car in the driveway. Good, he thinks—or maybe he is wishing it wasn’t there. Was he trying to upset her? No. That was not the intention. All he’d said was: I had a dream about her. Is it his fault if a simple statement of fact is so upsetting? Of course, there is also the how and when of saying. But Dorian was not thinking of that when he spoke the other morning, and he isn’t thinking of such things now. He isn’t planning what to say—or how to speak—at the dinner table when the subject of the new kid is brought up. Instead, as he walks (under the two oaks whose green boughs are as heavy with insects as summer thunderheads with rain, the sound downpouring), his mind is thinking what it wants to think, which he doesn’t even want to be thinking: since the thing at the mosque, your mother has scarcely touched you.

  In the kitchen, his father is removing a roasting pan from the oven. Something horrific involving green peppers.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Next door.”

  His brother, pushing on a salad spinner as if trying to accelerate lettuce to the speed of light, says: “Set table, pinhead.”

  A few minutes later, the four are seated equidistantly at the square table; four plates with a stuffed pepper in the center of each.

  “What’s the problem,” his father asks them.

  “Nothing,” they say.

  “So eat.”

  “It looks like a dead frog,” Dorian says.

  “Have to agree, Dad. Ixnay on the epperpay.”

  His mother, as if introducing a mitigating factor, says: “Mine is tofu.” She pours wine and Dorian listens to the mouth of the bottle ring against the lip of the glass. “I hear there’s a new kid on the block,” she says.

  Cliff says: “Old news, Mom.”

  “Well, it’s new to me. Why don’t you give me a full report.”

  Cliff says: “Dorian …”

  “What.”

  “The general wants a full report.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Have you met him?” his mother asks.

  “Sort of.”

  “Meet is kind of vague,” Cliff says. “Ask him if there’s a pool party for prepubes on Saturday.”

  “He invited you?”

  Dorian nods—and his mother says, in a tone so calm and sincere that he feels compelled to look up at her, “That’s great, Dorian.” And she looking at him. There’s a freeze here. Expression on her face like a phrase written in a foreign language he can almost read. Then the words come out of him:

  “I don’t like pool parties.”

  And her eyes blink and the muscles of her face move and the meaning is gone. “Since when,” she says.

  “Yeah, since when, xenophobe.”

  “Keenan isn’t going. And neither is Dean. And neither am I.”

  “Your loss,” Cliff says. “ ’Cause it’s gonna be a blast. Do some cannonballs, drink some Kool-Aid, jam to some Arab death metal.”

  “Could you tell him to shut up.”

  “Both of you,” their father says. “Eat.”

  His brother picks up his silverware and proceeds to cut along the midline of the vegetable and scoop out the organs.

  Through the bay window, west-facing, a crepuscular beam of sun is about to slant into the room: Dorian can see it coming, through the boughs of the elm in the front yard. And as it finds the table—three, two, one, now—it makes of the wine in his mother’s glass (tapered glass half-full held in both her hands and she staring into it) a living color, sunlight blending with glass and liquid to create a red glow that might be a magic worked by the power of his mother’s mind. She is about to say something to you. When she says it, she will not be looking at you, but still into the glass which by then will have gone dead like a fire burned out because the planet will have turned a hundred miles on its axis and the sunbeam will be touching something else far away and until that moment unimagined. Not looking at you—you had that chance at contact and you lost it—and the color going out of the glass and the whole room losing color as she says:

  “What’s his name, Dorian.”

  It takes him a moment to contextualize the question. Thinking: Him. Th
e new kid. He thinks the name to himself, but in response to his mother only shrugs his shoulders.

  “I thought you met him,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what is his name.”

  Cliff raises his hand like he’s back in high school. “His name,” he says, “is Karim Hassad-Banfelder. But Dorian just calls him Camel Fucker.”

  “You’re excused,” their mother says.

  “What.”

  “I said, get out.”

  “I’m being ironic, Mom—”

  Dorian pushes back his chair. She tells him to sit down. He doesn’t. He is walking away and focused on his bike and how much time he’s got before curfew when she catches up with him and seizes him by the shirt collar.

  “I guess you’re not happy about all this,” she says. “Maybe you’d prefer it if this boy had been killed along with his family. Then you wouldn’t have to be bothered with his existence. Isn’t that right.”

  “No—”

  “Your life is one unfair trial after another, isn’t it. First you have to go on a school trip, then you have to accept consequences for breaking a law. Now, as if that wasn’t enough, you’ve been invited to go swimming for a couple of hours.” (She had let go of his shirt, but she grabs him again now, his arm, the bicep, touching him though not with any gentleness. He almost says, You’re hurting me. Starts to say it—) “I promised you last fall I wouldn’t let the next thing slide. Now here it is. That boy has lost everything, Dorian. He’s reaching out for a friend and I don’t care if no other kid on this street responds. You’re going to. Show some kindness. Or I will ground you in ways you can’t imagine. Do you get me? I will ground you back to the Stone Age.”

  •

  Karim did not want to have a party in a swimming pool or anywhere else for that matter; but the old guy had already conceived the event with such exuberance, to not assent would be to hurt the old guy’s feelings—and, for reasons difficult to articulate, Karim did not want to hurt his feelings. “I’ve got a genius idea,” the old guy had announced over dinner on the third day. “Pool party.” Which was a thing Karim had never heard of. So the old guy defined it. “First of all, you need a pool, which we’ve got. Second, you need a hot summer day, of which we have no shortage. You, as the kid with the pool at his house, are known as the host. Now all you need are some other kids …”

  “What kids,” Karim asked.

  “Well, mainly some kids from the mosque. I’ve been talking to a lady over there, Mrs. Mahfouz. She’s a volunteer with the local youth foundation. She already told the middle-school group about you, and the boys and girls from the group want to hang with you, so it’ll be easy to get some names and e-mail addresses. And then there are the boys you met yesterday, Dorian and Zeb, Dean and Keenan, who of course should also be invited”—and so on about making friends and how a pool party is a perfect way to break the ice until finally Karim said, “All right.”

  Stupid.

  Because the old guy’s feelings will only be hurt more later: after you call the phone number the sheikh gave you in Dakota and connect with the cell here in New York, after you have been guided towards your real purpose and have done your duty, at which time the old guy will think back on the pool party and how you went along with the idea and perhaps even seemed to enjoy the day while knowing all along that you never intended to become friends with anybody (you weren’t a friend, you were an enemy), and in the end you betrayed the kindness of a well-meaning person in the worst fucking way … All this understood by Karim as if in retrospect: as if all of it has happened already. Like he has done his duty and is looking back from the afterlife on his days in the world and contemplating the last thing he ever did—and rather than being proud and joyful, he’s full of regret. Of course, none of this has happened yet. It’s the night of the fourth day. He is in his new bedroom. The time so late it’s early. He was asleep but then he woke up; and now he lies awake, unable to find his way back to sleep. Smelling on his skin the minty soap washed with before bed while the central cooling system breathes down on him like a loving god, thinking all of this even as a voice only he can hear, his own voice but also independent of him, recites the ten digits of the phone number he has not yet called, the numerical code written by the sheikh on a scrap of paper back at the camp and memorized by Karim, an assignment completed without question, because back then, to Karim, everything beyond the camp was a void unknowable and what would he have there, in that empty meaningless darkness, if not the numbers.

  The time is one thirty-eight. Across the road, in the house with cream-yellow vinyl siding, Dorian Wakefield is dreaming. His imagination is making him believe he is with that boy who knew his sister. Noah. When the dream begins, Dorian and Noah are playing Monopoly. Aspects of the game not what they really are. Instead of battlefields from old wars, the green properties are named for internment camps: the one that should say Saratoga says Galaga, which Dorian understands to actually mean Dakota.

  Is my sister still writing?

  Mm-hm.

  What’s it about?

  What happens next, Noah says. But some is what she wished already happened.

  View from the doorway that leads to the next room: Skyler at the desk, intently focused on the screen of a laptop, fingers resting on the keyboard. She sees Dorian and smiles. I’m just going to call Mom, he says to her. Stay right there.

  Phone already in his hand and he dialing ten strange numbers. Answering voice: Dorian? It’s the middle of the night. Mom, he says. Come in here. Dorian, it’s the middle of the night, honey. Her bedroom is right down the hall. If she would just get up and come in here, she would see— As a shock of wind hits the house and the sound of every window breaking, of flying glass, of glass shards being rifled into walls and furniture, chiming against objects held together by metallic bonds, is like the music of the world please no glass god dream help now Mom Dad Cliff Skyler …

  It is not a nightmare that wakes Kathryn. More like a touch on her shoulder, or the passing of a hand over her face, smoothing of hair; her eyes open peacefully and unconsciousness ebbs. For a moment or two, she is in the old house in California. Confusion with precedent: it happens sometimes; in this unclaimed territory between sleep and waking, she will think she’s younger and lying in the four-post bed under the window that looked out on the eastern ridge of hills, until, coming fully to, she feels surprised by how far she and her family have drifted from that other place, that other life, and by how old she really is. The strange thing, tonight, is her aloneness in the room. No husband in the bed; no child standing beside it. Touched by no one. Then she feels that small familiar grasp—inside, at her own crux—like something rooted being pulled. She goes into the bathroom. In the dark, some blood drips out as she pisses. She doesn’t need any light. The cabinet just in front of her. Box on the second shelf. She pulls the paper strip and presses the pad into the crotch of her underwear. Still happening, this thing. Forty-five years old, and still the body going through the motions of menstruation. Nothing but an echo in the nerves. Back in bed. The old house echoing in her thoughts—and she, lying in the dark, seeing herself moving through it as she had on that day when she didn’t know what else to do but bring the boys home and listen to the news and wait … She waited all day for Mitch to call. By the time he’d heard what had happened, packed up, and driven into range of a tower, the shadow of day’s end was rising on the hills like the waters of a flood. Soon all the land would be under it. By nightfall, he still wasn’t home. While to the south the city burned and smoked and sickened, Kathryn carried Dorian outdoors to look at the stars. Clearest of nights. The galaxy overhead: a river of lights flowing into what some see as heaven … Now her eyes are closing and it seems she can feel her son breathing in her arms under that starry sky. In—his chest pushing on her; out—a warm puff on her cheek. Then something moves out by the windbreak.

  I heared something, Momma.

  Me, too.

  I can’t know it
.

  Maybe a deer, she says to him. Unable to tell if he is frightened. She is. Will be, she knows, for a long time to come, perhaps for as long as there is …

  For a long month he has done nothing but stare at the lines of a notebook, pen unmoving in his hand, or at the computer, on the screen of which a few purposeless lines will dead-end at the blinking cursor that in its appearing and disappearing is almost audible, like the ticking of a clock. Mitchell Wakefield has never been prolific. The words never come easy, and ideas (those worth pursuing and committing to the page) are like creatures that live countless leagues under the sea, rarely seen, and then only after thorough preparation and a long descent into the medium; and even if you make it to that dark quiet place where things luminous can show themselves and reveal forms theretofore unimagined, you might wait and wait and nothing will come visible. This is what he’s doing in the basement, in his study—staring at the computer screen in the dark, waiting (ears filled with streaming audio of the crashing of ocean waves and the voices of seagulls)—when suddenly his younger son is standing in the doorway as abruptly as a ghost.