Not on Fire, but Burning

by Greg Hrbek

  I could hear the doorbell through my phone and I could tell that Cliff was opening the door. What wasn’t clear were the first words spoken. Then my brother said: “Dorian, it’s for you.” And then, on my screen, I saw them. Mr. B was squinting, shading his eyes, leaning closer to the camera. “Dorian?” he said. Beside him: Karim. Wearing khakis and a polo shirt. “Dorian, we— I mean, listen, son. Well, here.” (Glancing at Karim.) “Karim has something—” Which was the last thing I heard. Because I had ended the call … Not in anger. Not because I refused to speak to him. At the time, I myself didn’t understand the reason. Now I know. That for the first time I was seeing myself in him. Marched to my house as I’d been dragged back to the mosque. We were to admit our wrongs, we children: from whom loved ones, futures, entire worlds had been stolen without apology. Somewhere deep inside, I was thinking: Why should either one of us be sorry.

  8

  That night, Karim Hassad does not sleep much. But around four in the morning, he has a dream of going back to the camp. Sent back because he attacked the boy next door. It unfolds realistically—like life, only in reverse. The old guy is driving him (not east to the Provinces, but west to the Territories); and instead of a dread of endless deprivation and sickness, Karim feels the promise—stronger with every passing moment (moments perceived by his dream-deceived mind as hours)—of the deep peace and amnesia of opium, which is itself a dream. And then the dream is over. Though dreams do not end so much as fade out of sight of the mind’s eye, as conversely they may fade back into sight when the other eyes, the ones made of veins and muscle and vitreous, are open. Which is what happens the next morning. Karim is awake in the bedroom given to him by the old guy out of the kindness of his heart. As he lies on the bed, staring at the ceiling¸ the lingering pain in his fingers makes him wonder how much pain the other boy is in, and the thought of the other boy acts like a rush of sunlight calling forth a shadow: the sudden memory of a dream of being taken back—a good dream, full of the simple feeling of going home.

  In the kitchen, Will Banfelder is making breakfast. He has cracked four eggs into a frying pan and the whites have joined together, creating the impression of one giant egg with four yolks. In a second pan, a dozen turkey sausages sizzle and tremble. He puts a glass lid on the pan and watches as the links of encased meat, of their own accord, start rolling around and bouncing into one another.

  “Salam, jaddi.”

  He turns and sees the boy. Who looks absolutely terrible, like he didn’t sleep a wink. Which would make two of them.

  “Tired, huh.”

  Karim cocks a shoulder and goes to the table, sitting in the same place as yesterday and the day before: They have settled naturally into this one small routine. He asks if he may drink the juice, and Will says, Of course. He drains the glass. Then refills it from the pitcher. Then returns it with exactness to the place mat.

  “I had a dream,” he says.

  “Tell me.”

  “I was going back to the camp. You were taking me back.”

  “Hey,” Will says. “Look at me. Karim, look at me. I would never do that. I told you yesterday …”

  “I know.”

  “Okay, then. So cut it with the dreams and make some toast.”

  The boy gets up and removes two slices of bread from the bag and drops them into the slots. Their shoulders are almost touching. It would be a simple thing for Will to put his hand on that shoulder. But same as yesterday—when, after the children had gone and he was sitting beside the boy, asking him to explain and then listening to his explanation (given in Arabic and broken by the arrhythmic breathing of a child holding back tears), and their bodies were very close—same as then, Will is scared to touch him now. Too soon for that. Do it too abruptly and you will startle him. Do it too freely and you cheapen the action. For now, on the subject of breakfast, the adoptive father simply says:

  “Over easy, or sunny side up?”

  The plan was to spend the night on Keenan’s grandmother’s couch—but every sixty minutes, the grandfather clock played Westminster Chimes and then tolled the hour; and finally at four o’clock Dorian had enough of it and slipped out the back door and walked in the darkness up the road to his own home. The cicadas were silent, not sleeping, he imagined; waiting wide-eyed for the sunrise. The door off the den (referred to by his brother as The Door of Stealth) was the one he entered through. He hoped to see, in the bathoom mirror, that the evidence of the fight had miraculously disappeared. Overall, however, he looked worse than yesterday. Though the swelling in his lip had gone down, the right eye was no less bloated, and the bruise was bigger and darker and ringed with a sickly yellow. He padded upstairs in bare feet, past his parents’ half-open door (through which he heard one of them turning and releasing a breath), then safely into his own room, where he lay on his bed and everything went black until a rude shaking and a shining of light—

  “Yo, nitwit.”

  “Stop.”

  “Time to face your doom,” his brother says. Then informs him that the rents are waiting in the kitchen.

  “So you explained it,” Dorian says.

  “I told them the party didn’t go so well.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I told them that, in my expert opinion, you are not to blame, and Mom said, Blame for what exactly.”

  “And then what.”

  “Then I came in here,” Cliff says. “And BTW. She’s got some serious post–date night stress disorder going on.”

  She is waiting in the kitchen, with a terrible hangover and a cup of coffee—for what, she is not sure. For some kind of bad news. In my expert opinion, her older son had said, he isn’t to blame. Blame for what, she said; and he said, He really is the victim here; and she said, Victim of what; and he, gesturing with a forefinger, said, I’ll go get him … So Kathryn is waiting, with a feeling like her brain is trapped under rubble, for the next wave of domestic drama. While she stands by the sink, her husband sits at the table. He looks worse than she feels. He removes his eyeglasses; they dangle from one hand as he stares into the astigmatic distance. Finally saying: “They’re not coming.”

  “Mm.”

  “They’re tying the sheets together and escaping through the window.”

  “Good luck to them.”

  He puts the glasses back on and gives her a little smile: “But last night, you did have a good time, right.”

  “Heck of a time.”

  “It’s just we’re not thirty anymore.”

  “We’re not forty either.”

  “Well, we aren’t fifty,” he says.

  It’s the kind of exchange that can turn, suddenly, stupidly, into an argument. She shrugs assent. Can’t say that, in the literal sense, he isn’t correct. And the truth is, she was having a good time last night. All through the first set (stretched out on the blanket, on the grassy hill above the amphitheatre), Kathryn had felt happy. Happier with every song and every drink of wine and every hit from the oldschool joints that Deven had brought: five of them expertly rolled and neatly lined up in an antique cigarette case. “Where’s it from?” she asked; and he answered, “Humboldt. But don’t worry, this farm took readings and tested the soil for years. It’s way north of the zone.” He started one and handed it to her. A while since she’d smoked anything other than a factory green: just one small hit brought everything around her into a sharper softer focus. The music started; the joint circled back. She felt like something adrift brought to shore on a breaking wave of applause. She lay back on the blanket. Saw one white star: like a faraway idea in the almost-dark sky. Not until intermission, when the music ended, did her mood begin to change … She was lying supine with her eyes closed, people conversing all around her, but their voices were a sound without signification, like wind in a forest. She was thinking of the pot farm in Humboldt—not far (a hundred-something miles north) of the old house in the river valley—and of what their friend had said about its distance from the radiation zone. Which made he
r think of the city. San Francisco. Most beautiful city in the New World. Place where she and Mitch had started loving each other, and where, also, she had come to know the other. (Don’t think his name; try to snuff it out as you would a flame.) Place also of unplanned pregnancy and of no baby. Whose beauty might have been for all time, but had instead been ruined in an instant, blasted and burned up and poisoned … On the hill above the amphitheatre, she was crying. Hearing the past speaking to her from a great distance. Despite the sounds all around her (the people talking to each other and the crickets calling to one another in the nearby woods), Kathryn Wakefield could hear very clearly a message of confusion, anxiety, and fear: Her own past coming to her across the reaches of space and time. And as she lay there under the stars of the future, a next wave of applause heralding the return of the musicians, she felt she was feeling an impossible sense of interconnection and dependence: as if not just her son’s fantasy of a sister, but even the death of that city where the fantasy had lost her life, had followed somehow from her.

  It’s like a movie he saw once, where a prisoner was going to get shot at dawn: His brother escorting him down the carpeted hallway which, through some trick of mental editing, seems longer than it can possibly be. Up ahead, on the right, is the kitchen. Inside, Mitch and Kathryn hear them coming—and they can tell when Dorian stops just shy of the doorway. “Can we get on with it,” Mitch says. Cliff takes his brother by the elbow and steers him across the threshold. At the same moment, they see him; and though each parent is viewing the same damage, only the father makes the correct inference. The mother is thinking: Stupid choice; skateboard; on a dare, maybe.

  “Oh, god,” Kathryn says. “Clifford, did you take him to the hospital?”

  “Me?” (The thought hadn’t crossed his mind.)

  “It’s just a black eye,” Dorian says.

  Kathryn (kneeling now): “Something could be broken or fractured.”

  “It’s not, Mom.”

  “Who did it?” Mitch says.

  For a few seconds, Kathryn’s mind, suffering the backlash of last night’s intoxicants, can’t catch up with the question. Then suddenly—

  “You got in a fight?”

  He looks away.

  “You got in a fight at that party.”

  “Kate,” Mitch says.

  Cliff (raising his hand, but not waiting to be called upon): “Mom, it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Did I ask you?”

  “Dorian,” Mitch says, “sit down, okay? Kate, please sit down and listen to him. Cliff, just don’t open your mouth.”

  “Do I have to be silent in a standing position?”

  “Sit.”

  He sits. Dorian is already in a chair. Kathryn looks at the three of them, all seated at the table now: a confederacy of males. Standing alone against the sink, she says: “I can listen from here.”

  She listened. She listened quietly to my whole story. Standing the whole time on the other side of the room. As if she didn’t want to be near me. I told the truth. That four other kids had been invited. All of them Muslim, though one not Arab. I said that everything had been fine for a while. We were swimming and the girl even wanted a picture with me and Plaxico. But there was this one kid, Omar. Who kept antagonizing me. Which didn’t bother me so much, and I didn’t say a thing back. But when he told the girl to shut up— (“And what was her name?” my father asked. “Who.” “The girl.” “Oh. Khaleela.” “Khaleela,” my brother said. “A lovely name.”) And I continued with the story, explaining how I told Omar to not be rude to her. And how he called me an Aryan. To which I didn’t say a thing. Just walked away. And then there was lunch. (“What’d you have?” my brother asked. “Shwarmas.” “Mm.”) And then after lunch, we all went out to play croquet. And I wasn’t saying anything. I was just playing the game and he started it again. Used that word like it was my name. And the girl (“Khaleela,” my brother interjected) told him to cut it out. And Omar told her to shut up again … My heart was beating fast now, you could hear it in my voice. I’d thought the emotions had died down, but they were still hot. Like with embers; if you blow on them, the fire starts again. (“Go ahead,” my father said.) And I told them that I told Omar that if he spoke to her like that one more time—(I took a breath and let it go)—I would knock the towel off of his head. (“And then,” my mother said, “he hit you.” “No.” “You hit him first?” she said, and my father said, “Will you let him talk, Kate?”) And then I told them that I never did hit him and he never hit me. Omar and his two friends held my arms. The one who threw the punches was Karim.

  As he finishes speaking, it seems to Dorian that his parents are separated by a vast distance. He is right—and also wrong. Because even as Kathryn and Mitchell Wakefield foresee the coming schism (we are not going to view this the same way; we will not agree on what to do about this), they are also bonded, as atoms are bonded by the sharing of electrons, by the unstoppable empathy of mothers and fathers: they both feel the same pain and shame—and, also, the same exact hostility. Mitch’s imagination is under siege by a vision of himself chokeholding an eleven-year-old orphan so Dorian can bust up his face without interference. And Kathryn wants a phone number. She wants a number to dial and someone to tell off. A voice in her head already rehearsing the diatribe: Who the fuck do you people think you are? But that’s not my voice, she thinks back. That’s not me.

  She says: “So you used a racial slur.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “In front of all those kids you said that.”

  “Mom,” Cliff said.

  “Did I ask you,” she said fiercely. “If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it. Goddammit, Dorian. What is wrong with you—”

  “Look,” Mitch says, “they ganged up on him.”

  “Three against one,” Cliff specifies.

  “Actually, four.”

  Their father (taking a deep breath): “We should probably report this.”

  “Report,” Kathryn says.

  “To the police.”

  “No way.”

  “Kate, they assaulted him.”

  “We are not calling the police. We are not going to get a kid from the camps mixed up with the police.”

  “What would happen,” Dorian says.

  But no one answers. None of them moves or says anything more for a long minute. Finally, Mitch gets up. To make some food. He lays a hand on Dorian’s shoulder. Then opens the refrigerator. At the sink, Kathryn has turned her back on them. She is looking out the window—and from the table, Dorian is looking at her. Both listening to the fragile shells of eggs being broken, one after another, against the rim of a bowl.

  What would happen.

  The question is on Will Banfelder’s mind, too. He has always been friendly with the Wakefields. When he crosses paths with one of them while driving on the cul-de-sac, he waves hello. In the autumn, when the lawns of the subdivision are overspread with red and orange leaves, should he see Mitchell with a rake and a bucket, he will walk across the road and start a conversation about the weather or the foliage further north. But maybe “neighborly” is the more accurate word for this kind of relationship. Truth is, he is not close with them. In a way, it could be said he doesn’t know them very well at all. So how can he blame them (any more than he can blame Dorian for ending that call yesterday) if they report this incident to the police. Put yourself in their shoes:

  What if Karim came home bloodied and bruised—and you found out that three white boys had held him still while a fourth …

  But that’s different. How? The two situations are not the same. Yes, they are: four kids versus one; you can’t argue with numbers. I’m not talking about numbers. What then. Power. Power. As in, who has it and who doesn’t. Right. The two situations are different because of the power dynamics. You learned nothing over there, did you. There wasn’t anything to learn. The war couldn’t teach you anything? It was senseless. You and your platitudes. Thirty years later and you’re no smarter now
than you were then. That’s why you’re still fighting, and there’s still no end in sight. I’m not fighting. Yes, you are. You’re all fighting, every one of you, every single day. On desert sand and in corporate boardrooms, in the blogosphere and in the sphere of memory and even in the sphere of dreams. You are fighting this war in your sleep … While, upstairs, Karim Hassad stands at the bedroom window. Holding a smartphone as if it’s a kind of buoy keeping him afloat. Twenty-four hours have passed—a whole afternoon, night, and morning—since his touching of the command: SEND. There has been no response from Abdul-Aziz. He must have done something wrong. Or perhaps the picture was lost and the sheikh received only the words:

  I DID THIS.

  This.

  A word referring to nothing: You did nothing.

  But I did.

  He is looking through the window at the place where he did it. Beyond the swimming pool. In the grass. Where the elements of the unfinished game—the little silver arches, the wooden balls and the mallets—are as motionless as objects in a painting. One mallet (mine, which I threw before hitting him) lies far away from the others. That is where. But maybe the sheikh received the pictures and the message made perfect sense. Maybe he understood what I did and why. But saw no worth in the action. You struck an infidel in the face. So what. What is this supposed to prove, Karim? (He can hear the voice, deep as the skies of Dakota.) It doesn’t change anything. You are no martyr. You are nothing but a boy with nothing … And yet isn’t this exactly what the sheikh had told them—Karim, Hazem, and Yassim—over and over again in the camp. That they were nothing, but there was no shame in this. For in their nothingness was a great power. It is hidden in each of you, he had said, this power—and he touched each of them in turn, touched a finger to the breastbone of each boy. You know about the atom and its energies. No? How particles of matter too small to even be seen, when properly influenced, can produce a power as strong as the sun. This is what God did on 8-11. It is said by the infidels that we used the power of the atom against them. My sons, do not believe that lie. There was no plane. There was no bomb. In a great explosion generated from nothingness by the will of the Almighty was that city of sin destroyed. As an example to us of the power of our own nothingness. Each of you is likewise an atom. And when you become a martyr, the power hidden within you will be released and you will become pure energy, the energy of God, and you will travel at the speed of the angels (which is fifty-thousand years to a day) along the celestial ladders, which the Qu’ran calls the ma’arej, feeling no pain, only a sensation like being carried on a wave, which will be a wave of pure and heavenly light, and the energy you have become will pass through the doorway held open for you and in this way, in a fraction of a second, you will find yourselves in another universe called Paradise.