Not on Fire, but Burning

by Greg Hrbek

  •

  In B39 – R61, Karim Hassad has cut the throat of a dog. This action is repeated on many other pathways, though the cutting of the dog’s throat is by no means a constant, any more than is the issuing of a terrorism advisory alert three days later. On many pathways, random chance has precluded the cutting of a dog’s throat—for example, through antecedent events that lead Karim to a point other than the barn on the afternoon of 07.06.2038 and from that point to other points, none of which ever coincide in spacetime with the barn (not to mention the fact that on certain pathways the dog was never captured and imprisoned in the barn, and on one notoriously malfunctional path, which has been under review for some time by the appropriate RS subcommittees, the barn was never built in the first place). While on many other pathways, free will as exercised by Karim has deselected the option of the cutting of the dog’s throat, a choice that will lead, on some pathways (though by no means all), to future events and fates radically different from those in B39 – R61.

  But.

  The possibilities are infinite; and we could easily lose our way at this point (and could have long before now) by considering endless variations: which is to say, we could incapacitate ourselves with thoughts of what we might have done, what might or might not have been and what might be, if only we had done this or not done that. Such differences can concern us only insofar as they inform (and potentially impact) events on B39 – R61: a path on which Karim Hassad does cut the throat of a dog and on which a terror alert is issued on 07.09.2038; where Dorian Wakefield is riding his bike through a rain he fears is poisoned, where Kathryn Wakefield is mired in a vehicular exodus from a city specifically targeted, and where the possibility of Skyler Wakefield once existed but where Skyler Wakefield herself does not exist.

  All that concerns us now—and it is arguably the only thing that ever concerns any of us—is what happens next on the path.

  Is a dirty bomb (hidden, let’s say, in the falafel truck that parks every day alongside the very plaza that Kathryn Wakefield was gazing down at a few short minutes ago from an upper story) about to be detonated? Or is a blistering rash even now appearing on the skin of Dorian Wakefield? Are we fated to lose forever the ones we love? Or will the long-lost, in the end, be miraculously returned to us?

  •

  What happens next is not much. By dinnertime, the Wakefields are all together, safe and sound (though the car is scratched and dented on the passenger side and the cheap thermoplastic bumper is cracked, Kathryn isn’t hurt), and nowhere in the country has anything happened yet. There was no chemical in the rain (Dorian feels stupid for fearing there could have been, something he saw on a television show probably); and the storms are wheeling off to the northeast, the harmless precipitation welled like tears in the flower petals of gardens and dripping tear-like from the rounded and pointed margins of leaves, while the clouds break apart, light of a setting sun pulsing through the fissures, a phenomenon you could describe as a kind of molting; and with the end of the rain, the cicadas, a few at first but soon all the millions of them, are once again singing their weird requiem.

  It’s a Tuesday.

  Family dinner night. And if there is one cliché Mitchell and Kathryn Wakefield can get behind, it’s that terrorism should not disrupt our way of life. Or, in the words (more of less) of their older son: A hundred years ago, people collected scrap metal; today we do our part by sitting down to eat, in a calm and civilized fashion that sends a clear fuck you to the enemy, a bacon-wrapped meatloaf.

  “You’d rather have bread and water,” his father says.

  “Uh-uh.”

  Dorian (looking down at the apportionment of meat, potato, and vegetable on his plate): “Thanks, Dad.”

  “You’re welcome, Dodo.”

  It’s an exchange that Cliff notices and finds curiously sincere, and that Kathryn is aware of, too, through only obscurely, through a mood darkening by the hour like a day coming to an end. Earlier, when she got broadsided on the highway, pushed over the rumble strip of the shoulder and onto the grass of the median, she had sat there for a half hour. Now she is expected to use a fork; and the idea of a meatloaf made of veggie burger crumble expressly for her is too sad to bear …

  “Kate,” Mitch says.

  “Mm.”

  “Should we serve you? Here—”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Dorian (picking up the carving knife): “It’s veggie, Mom. Just for you.”

  She gives a kind of smile. “I appreciate that,” she says. “But please don’t guilt-trip me right now.”

  “It’s not a guilt trip,” Mitch says. “It’s dinner.”

  “I said thanks.”

  Silently, Dorian puts down the knife. Feels his lip trembling. Goddammit, if you cry now. Well, what do you want out of me. I want you to cut the baby shit. She could’ve died. But she didn’t, did she. She hates me … Too strong a word, and inaccurate. Hate is that cross that burned the other night. Hate is whatever is coming next, might come at any moment, but probably after we’re asleep—after struggling to keep our eyes open and we just can’t anymore, then it’ll come, because they want us to be dreaming about it when it happens. But this. This not-touching, this not-looking—this is something else: harder to understand, more frightening even than hate.

  After dinner, Mitch goes up to the safe room in the attic. Earlier in the day, right after the alert, he had come up here and checked the taping along the sill, frame, seams, and joints of the one window, and then covered the window with fresh sheeting and sealed the sheeting to the wall. Pinned to a corkboard on a different wall is a list of supplies. Check list against items stacked and stored: Ten gallons of clean water, first aid kit, box of safety matches, four N95 particulate respirators … For chemical or biological, nothing else to do. The main thing is an upper floor and no cracks. As for nuclear. There are people (some of them friends) who dug up their backyards after 8-11 and had a 7′ x 8′ x 30′ box made of plate metal buried underground. Last semester, a student told him that all through her childhood she’d hosted sleepovers in a five-room underground bunker complete with a digital home theater … flashlight, twelve rolls of toilet paper, hand sanitizer gel … Of course, he and Kate had discussed it when they moved here, how they’d be living thirty miles from the capital and on the outskirts of a major tech corridor. What if the very worst were to happen? It wasn’t a question of money (they could have financed it like anything else, a house or a car), but there was another kind of cost to be weighed against the benefit. Living with that thing in your yard. Your children grow up playing on top of it. You trim the grass around the blast door. A cold form of comfort. If we need it, it will always be there—and always it will be there, reminding us that, at any moment, we might need it. There it will be, hidden but never invisible to the mind’s eye, a kind of coffin to step into of our own volition … hand-crank radio, pack of playing cards … So, if the very worst happens: the fallout shelter at the high school, a five-minute drive, though who knows how long when half the people in the district have the same destination.

  Mitchell Wakefield has always said to himself: We can’t be that kind of family. The kind that lives in fear. But what are we living in now, if not fear? (Every heartbeat a knifethrust.) We can’t live any other way.

  •

  Has she ever felt this far away? As if all of reality has telescoped out to the edge of a horizon and is going down like a sun into a dark ocean while she, alone on a shore that doesn’t exist, watches it disappear.

  Kathryn is alone in bed. Her bed is the shore. Even her thoughts are distant, though she knows what she’s thinking about: How one night, eight years ago—while to the south the city burned and smoked and sickened—when he was still small enough to be held in her arms, she held him in her arms under the stars and comforted him, and then laid his sleeping body down in the same room where her older son was already asleep; and then—(as she tries to remember, she herself is falling asleep, not quite unconsc
ious but experiencing a déjà vu of the coming dream in which her phone is ringing and a wave of pain crashes against her heart at the sight of the contact photo and the name.

  Answer.

  And there her daughter is. Crying. Eyes wide and glassy. The night sky behind her like the sky in a medieval painting of hell. Howl of emergency vehicles. Mom, she says. Oh, god, Mom. Please help me.)

  14

  I had promised him something. I didn’t know what exactly. But the next morning, when I woke up and saw the news: SUICIDE ATTACKS IN BOISE, HELENA, AND CONCORD— Well, like everyone else, the first thing I felt was relief. It hadn’t been much at all. Small planes (light-sport, single-engine aircraft) carrying conventional explosives flown in the middle of the night into three pretty much empty Greek revival and neoclassical structures that had housed the legislatures of the Territories of Idaho and Montana and the Colony of New Hampshire … I had been the last to wake up. I came into the family room and found my parents and brother there, with the television split-screened so they could see a live-feed of smoking ruins at the same time that they were watching video footage of the crashes (in Idaho, a direct hit to the dome) while also listening to an argument between two pundits about whether the danger was now over or only just beginning.

  I got a bowl of cereal.

  Pretty soon, the next wave of news broke. Mosques on fire in the Republic of Texas and the Florida Territory—and as I watched the revenge take shape, I thought of Jon-David, and how I had agreed after that meeting to let him drive me home, because I’d lost track of time and it was nearly curfew …

  “So,” he said. “Are you with us?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Jackson can be kind of corny. All that stuff about dinosaurs and asteroids. But he’s right, you know. Our country is going extinct.”

  The windows were down. Cool night air flowing through the car. On the dashboard, a dead cicada. The way the wings were trembling, it looked like the insect was about to come back to life.

  “I’m worried—”

  “About what? The future, or your neighbors? I know perfectly well why you came tonight. To buy the old man some time. Well, let me tell you, he doesn’t have much. People are upset.”

  “He’ll go to trial,” I said.

  “There won’t be any trial. He hasn’t even been arrested. The old man knows his shit. He fired the shots from within a legal radius of his front door. So the hands of the state are tied. Again. And I say ‘again’ because this isn’t the first time he’s gotten away with murdering an American. He did it in Gulf War III. I found a guy from the company he worked for. He shot another PMC. Blew his head off. And then skipped out of country with a bank account full of blood money.”

  Suddenly, we were at the intersection of Cherokee and Poospatuck. He parked and we sat there, the engine idling.

  “It’s been a pleasure,” he said.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Yeah but what, Dorian? Let me assure you of something. What the old man did will not stand. Stay out of it. I’m warning you. Don’t get involved. As for the Muslim kid. He’s a very dangerous type. He’s got nothing to live for, but he could have plenty to die for. Common sense dictates: Don’t wait and see. But for you I’m willing to wait. If you promise me something in return.”

  “Promise. What?”

  Staring through the windshield into the darkness, he said: “Promise you’re with me when the time comes.”

  It is (to the mind of Will Banfelder) not an irony, but more like a trick from up the sleeve of an asshole god, that no sooner does a kid get rescued from the surreal margins of war than he is swept up in the mainstream of its terrors. Ethically speaking (just his opinion, of course), the camps were nothing short of malignant neoplasms on the body politic. But despite the myriad injustices of the institution (to say nothing of its especial dangers and horrors), it did have the one fringe benefit, resultant of bumfuck geographical location, of at least keeping innocent children safe from some of the sicker shit that people plan and perpetrate in the name of their asshole gods. I mean, seriously: Tell you what, kid. We’re going to let you out now (no hard feelings), we’re going to make the fence and the psychopathic flying machines disappear (mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho), but, be forewarned, it has been determined that freedom can be hazardous to your health and may result in death, permanent disfigurement, emotional trauma (or all of the above) by explosion, poison, and/or pathogen. Rest assured, however, that when intelligence and law enforcement agencies determine that the communication between those sons of bitches who seek such outcomes becomes so active that projected dangers rise to the level of imminent probabilities, we will send you a convenient alert via home screen widget synched directly with the national advisory system that sounds as follows … When Will heard it yesterday, he was drinking a beer and streaming a replay of the game from the night before, a classic pitchers’ duel which (to his mind) was worthy of a second viewing, in the same sense that great books should be read more than once. He touched the screen of his phone and skimmed the text, then went directly upstairs, where he found Karim on his bed with his phone in his hands and the signal still sounding.

  Will said: “Do you know what this is?”

  Karim nodded.

  “I don’t want you to worry about it. Okay?” (Taking the phone from his hand and silencing the screeching.) “This happens all the time. They’re always raising the level and then nothing happens …”

  Next morning, upon discovering what did happen (not nothing, but for all intents and purposes nothing), Will feels pretty good about his handling of the crisis so far. He told the perfect lie, the type of lie a father tells for the good of his child (happens all the time, nothing to worry about), which is not a lie so much as a calculated exaggeration of the unlikelihood that things will be anything but all right in the end, which is what kids, and maybe all of us, need to hear and want to believe as long as circumstances allow for the believing. So, now here they are, father and adopted son, at the breakfast table, watching coverage of the crashes on the little flatscreen mounted on the kitchen wall where once upon a time there hung a clock with hour, minute, and second hands, when the doorbell rings. Get up and check it out. Slide your hand inside your unbuttoned shirt and feel for the gun in the holster. Peer through the window panel. On the porch are two people. Of Arabic descent. The kid Karim met at the mosque and his uncle.

  Through the window: “Marhaban, effendi.”

  He opens the door.

  Whereupon the guy takes him by the shoulders and kisses him two times on each cheek, as the kid says: “Marhaban, eboo Karim. Is he ready to go?”

  “Go where?”

  “Have you forgotten, effendi?”

  And the uncle goes on to remind him that it had been arranged last week that the boys would play again today, we were to come here and collect him and they would once again spend the day together—and although, while the man is speaking, there is a thought in Will that something is off about his eyes (like he’s blinking without closing them, as if there’s a third lid as with certain species of birds and reptiles, a kind of shield that doesn’t jibe with the fondness for honorifics and the predilection for cheek kissing), the idea gets lost in the illogicalities of the issue at hand.

  “The playdate, right. Slipped my mind, but given the current state of emergency, don’t you think …”

  Touching the boy’s shoulder, the uncle says. “Ebnee, why don’t you go say hello to your friend. May he, effendi.”

  “Na’am.”

  Then, after he’s out of earshot: “Best to not discuss this matter in front of the boy. He knows, of course, but why dwell on it.”

  “You’re out in public,” Will says. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

  “No?”

  “They’re firebombing mosques. A guy got dragged behind a truck in Texas.”

  The uncle looks away and manages a smile. “You are … a good man. But this is not Texas, sadiqi. Even
if it were, I would not hide inside my house for fear of what might be done to me. As for my nephew, he has spent enough of his life living like an animal inside a pen. But forgive me …”

  But the thing is: Will Banfelder doesn’t disagree, not in principle, not in his heart. Not that there isn’t a counterargument founded on concepts like caution and forbearance, the integrity of which he recognizes. But this current state of affairs could go on for days, even weeks. Are you going to watch over the boy every moment? And doesn’t the therapist feel that this relationship (with a friend whose personal history so closely parallels Karim’s own) is one to encourage, one that will facilitate both the processing of grief and the adaptation to a new life and world? End result: You let him go. You agree to allow him to get in a car with a man you don’t really know the first thing about. Not entirely comfortable with the situation, but accepting of its discomforts, although, as you walk them to the car (which you notice is not electric or even a hybrid, but runs entirely on fossil fuel), you feel oddly troubled by the fact that Karim didn’t say anything this morning (such as, it’s almost ten, they’ll be here soon), as if he, too, had forgotten, yet saying a few minutes ago that, no, he had not forgotten, and yes, he still wants to go, though there was something unusual about the way he said so. And now, at the car, something more than unusual. You say: “See you soon, bud.” And he, standing by the open back door as if at a threshold, pauses. Then steps suddenly back toward you. The way he does it is awkward and hurried, and the action itself is incomplete. But what he’s doing is clear. He is putting his arms around you. Then the door is closing and your son of three weeks is on the other side of the door, the car is backing away, the man glancing at you through his window, and you imagining again, as you make eye contact with him, that strange blink, that drawing-across the eyes of a translucent shroud as in creatures inhuman … Despite these portents, you let him go.