Not on Fire, but Burning

by Greg Hrbek

  While, in the ugly apartment, the salat reminder application on the uncle’s phone is playing the azan, and as the muezzin chants from the phone, the uncle, who is no semblance of a loved one, says to Karim: “Do you think you can pray this time without defiling yourself?” The other man, the bringer of the belts, wants to know the story behind the sarcasm. The uncle tells him. The other: “Well, that explains the odor in here.” “So, it is still in the air?” (Nodding): “I thought one of you had stepped in dog feces.”

  “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar.”

  And all through the prayers, the tears in his eyes as hard to hold in as the shit had been, and knowing (as he bows, kneels, prostrates, and a tear slips through a crack in a duct) that soon it will be so with everything, soon impossible to keep anything inside: shit, tears, blood, bone, brain … Forehead to the carpet and a baby crying in one of the other apartments, a long drawn-out seemingly eternal keening, like the sound of the homeless and orphaned cats that wandered the internment camp at night trying to find some relief for a feeling that had taken them by the heart and wouldn’t let go: a desire not so different in its ruthlessness from the desire in him, and which, like his desire, has one (and only one) means of satisfaction. To be again with those who have died, you yourself must die. There is no purpose whatsoever in resisting the logic. And to object, on grounds of unfairness, to the difficulty imposed upon you by the circumstances, only suggests that your desire is not as great as your fear; or worse, that your love for them is less than your love of life (which is ridiculous); and worse still, that your devotion to this world is greater than your devotion to God (which is not only apostatic but impossible, since God would never have put you on a path to martyrdom if He didn’t know that you would be thankful for the privilege of dying in His name and surrender completely without being afraid). So, this moment of doubt felt while holding your forehead to the carpet and looking at the stain made there because you aren’t strong enough to keep your tears in is nothing but a moment: passing and past; and once gone, something that might never have happened at all. “O, our Lord, grant us in this life and in the hereafter good things.” Remembering, even as he speaks the words, that time in Dakota (soon after they had died, before the dream-world of the drug) when he had set out with nothing but a backpack containing some food and a blanket, and his mother’s broken eyeglasses in the pocket of the jeans he’d gotten from the nuns, going who-knows-where across the flatness, walking all day, all the way to the fence, until the sun had set, setting same as now, meaning the time had come to take the blanket out of the pack and use it as a thing to kneel and pray on. Except he hadn’t done that. Only after the sun had gone completely down and the air had turned suddenly cold did he remove it and wrap it around himself and sit huddled there, making no excuse in either thought or speech (such as being exhausted after having made such a long journey to nowhere), nor promising that at dawn he would make up for the dereliction with a perfect du’a. He simply did not pray. And as the sky and air got darker and colder, he lay back and watched the stars appear one by one and saw one break from the others and fall in a straight white line and thought-as-felt: up there, beyond all that, that’s where Heaven is supposed to be. An idea that might have been an affirmation if not for the way it progressed into question: where it’s supposed to be; meaning, where they say it is, where I’ve always believed it to be, never thinking to not believe—but what if there are no rivers or gardens higher than the stars; what if there’s nothing but more dark space and stars falling never-witnessed and all of it only getting darker the farther you go? And if so, then this world is everything and should mean everything to us—and furthermore, if there be no praxis of reward, then what we choose to do (or not do) is far from meaningless; in fact, every action means more, not less, because what we do here and now can never be made to seem later—in a heaven bent upon falsifying, like a nation, the truth about actions taken in its name—anything other than what it honestly was … All of this the equivalent of a transmission sent by the self over light-years of cognition, sender-self long dead by the time the message goes its distance, yet heard now by the listener, who, staring down into the circular dimension of a prayer rug, is perhaps sensing, at the outer limits of awareness, a way to alter his path.

  What she understands is that she is moving—or, rather, being transported at an urgent rate of speed from one place to another. (Could it be between points on the grid, from one set of coordinates to another?) Certainly, she is no longer in the forest. This is some kind of small enclosure: walls, a ceiling, supposition of a floor; and she in the center, equidistant from the six sides of what is evidently a cube moving at high speed, though she herself (meaning: her body) is immobilized, as by some force being applied against her from all directions, as in a case of gravitational collapse … Think, Kate. What’s happening to you? I think I’m dying. Let’s not get overdramatic. I’m serious. This isn’t normal. Maybe it’s a dream. (Shaking her head while the tech in the back with her, whom she does not recognize for what he is—seeing nothing more than a yellow blur in partial occupation of the space of the cube—says, “I think she’s delusional,” to which the driver responds, “Shit, if this is viral.”) You could be dreaming. I’m not dreaming, goddammit, I’m dying. Okay, you’re dying, have it your way. But remember what the guy said: “Death is nothing but something that happens at one set of coordinates while life is happening at another.” Think about last night. You dreamed about Skyler. Remember, he told you the dream was actually a point on the grid: (−8, 1213). So? So think about another one. Another what. Another point. Same x, but a different y. How could I do that? Simple. Imagine it’s eight years ago but you didn’t let her move to the city. They tried to convince you, but you put your foot down and didn’t let her. Go ahead, close your eyes. They are closed. I mean your real eyes. All right. Now. The date is August 11, 2030. You’re at the house in California working on a legal brief, right? Yeah. Okay. Where is Skyler? How am I supposed to know? There are a million possibilities. Actually the possibilities are infinite. Just choose one. She was good with kids, right? Yeah. So, c’mon, Kate. All right. I’ll tell you what she did. She got a job as a camp counselor. At the Y in Forestville. Good. See? You just remembered another point on the grid. I didn’t remember anything, I just imagined it … Which is to say that, while strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance—body heat 101.6° F, blood cells escaping by the thousands from veins and arteries whose walls, under direct attack from the pathogen, are becoming increasingly permeable—she is feeling an emotion evocative of how she put her foot down that spring and said: “No, not yet, I didn’t have an apartment until I graduated and I’m not saying you have to wait that long but I am saying this is too soon, and if it ruins the rest of your life to not be allowed to live in the city with two other teenage girls after your freshman year of college, then you can hold me personally accountable and never let me forget it.” And all through the spring, her daughter giving her the silent treatment, and for a week after coming home, too, and Kate patiently waiting out the repudiation—until, one day, maybe a month into the vacation, she realized that the whole thing had blown over, and her daughter, far from angry about having to live the summer at home, was happy to be there (perhaps relieved to have been disallowed from doing something she could see, even in such limited retrospect, had been more a temptation directed at her than a desire born on the inside). Enjoying her days at the camp, her simple and soft authority over a group of six- to eight-year-olds called the Evergreens; and most days leaving that job (no more classifiable as labor than the story-writing she intended already to be her true and future work), leaving the camp and then—not out of any sense of familial duty, but rather because she wanted to, because doing it gave her personal pleasure—driving to Miss Izzy’s to pick up Dorian. It had been her school first, and Miss Izzy her teacher. Fourteen years earlier. And when Skyler walked through the doors of the building now, she experienced (not as memory, but more as a
shifting, a gentle subduction of muscles) some sense of the little girl she had been then; and there Miss Izzy would be, different but the same; and there, Dorian (three and a half now), standing at an easel with a paintbrush in his hand, or sitting cross-legged on a rug listening to a storybook, or in the sandbox outside cooking something made of sand on a plastic stovetop, and Skyler watching him, and Miss Izzy coming alongside her to say something like, “He’s so much like you,” or “He was talking about you today.” And then Skyler strapping him into the car seat and the two of them driving up out of the valley, past the firehouse and the wildfire sign, whose dial was set all through that summer of drought to orange or red, and she driving past it and looking at it every day, and her little brother naming the colors each afternoon from the backseat and explaining the significance of each and reporting to her which color the arrow was pointing to: attempting through a repetitive engagement with concrete elements (colors, an arrow: a thing he himself could move if he were allowed to touch it) to apprehend the abstraction that the sign represented, which was not fire itself, but the possibility of fire, the likelihood of danger. And when the day came, the eleventh day of the last month of that summer, the day that some force came hurtling out of the sky over the city, she (at the camp with ninety children, fifteen of whom she was personally responsible for) remembering (again, as a shifting, not a thought) not the sign itself, but the concept and purpose of it, which now seemed to have been to warn them of the possibility, the likelihood of a very different threat: a warning no one had understood and a threat therefore unprepared for, though the building did have a basement, which is where they took the children, out of the summer sunlight into a concrete cave, where she and the other counselors strove to maintain the fiction that there was nothing to be afraid of though half the campers, in the minute of confusion following the first reception of the news, had gone online and read that a meteor had crashed into the bridge and the city was on fire, entire districts burning out of control and further impacts imminent, or that it wasn’t a meteor, but rather a jet plane and within the plane had been a weapon, the type everyone had lived in fear of in the last century (her grandparents, her great-grandparents), but had always seemed to Skyler a menace as remote as medieval plague, a thing whose old dark promises—of incinerated cities, megadeaths, and nuclear winter—had become, over time (after decades of never being kept, and decades more of test ban treaties and reduction treaties and the dismantling of arsenals), not just unbelievable, but impossible. And yet now San Francisco was all at once on fire and she sheltering in a basement with little children, the youngest of them taking turns in her lap while she fielded phone calls from parents en route; and letting the campers go, one by one, until finally, her responsibilities fulfilled, she was able to get in her own car, and as she shut the door and turned the keys in the ignition, she realized: I am here because of my mother. If not for her, I would be there.

  And the father and his sons going into the house, understanding that no one is to enter that bedroom, which Dorian has of course already done, thinking now that his head hurts, thinking he feels both hot and cold, and knowing for a fact that there’s a sick feeling in his stomach, though he is aware that it may not be the bacterium or the virus giving him nausea and causing him to shake, but rather the terror they’ve started in him, infected him with—imagining their satisfaction at how very frightened they’ve made him, having made him see his mother bent over a toilet, hair viscous with sweat, blood dripping from her mouth, looking twenty years too old as if aged by black magic, and making him fear now that he will be next, looking from father to brother (both touching and scrolling on their phones), reasoning: in the bed I was less than six feet from her; if the incubation period is twenty-four hours, I’ll be vomiting blood in the morning; and Cliff saying:

  “Dad, here’s the thing.”

  “What.”

  “It’s spread through coughing or bodily fluids. So last night … Did you and Mom. I’m just saying. If you did—”

  “We didn’t.”

  “And you don’t have a headache or feel feverish.”

  “No.”

  “Or like you’re going to throw up …” And the voice in Dorian’s head going further: and I kissed someone tonight, and our tongues touched, and if I’ve got it then I gave it to her, and moving already, as if being pulled like something roped, across the safe room into the half-bath where he riffles through the medical supplies and finds a thermometer and puts it with trembling hands into his mouth, feeling a rush of heat in his face which he knows may not be due to the bacterium or the virus, but to a terrible sense of responsibility for what he’s done and embarrassment at how ill-fated he must be to have done it, imagining some survivor friend of the girl he kissed after all this has run its course and life gone back to normal (though not for him, and not for her, because they’re both dead)—hearing the friend saying in a near-whisper, standing by a row of school lockers, in a school decimated and in mourning: He had it and he kissed her and she died. She died because he kissed her. And someone else: Who was he. And the first: Who knows. Nobody. Just some boy. His mother was sick all day but he didn’t notice. Nobody did. And then he kissed her … By the time his father comes to the door, he’s taken the thermometer out of his mouth because he’s crying too hard to keep it in place.

  “Dorian, we’re going to be all right.”

  (Shaking his head.)

  “Dodo, listen—”

  “I slept in there, Dad.”

  Moving away and turning his face away, to protect his father from the spread of the disease … And Mitch thinking: God, that’s right. I went in there around dawn and there he was where I sleep (should have been sleeping) and years since he’d come into the bed and probably wouldn’t have if I had been in it … While Cliff in the main room is facing (as he has been for the better part of a calendar year) two doors, labeled GO and DON’T GO, and once the envelope comes with the notice inside it—ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION—he is going to have to open one of those doors and step through it, and thinking now that he needn’t be unsure anymore about which: fuck passive resistance and fuck fear of death, like you could sit on your ass now jerking off in some halfway house in New France while she lies buried here and a chance that, over there, you could kill someone who might be said to share some blame, however remote, for what is happening to her … As Dorian, having gone to his knees, is crawling into the shower stall and closing the door, telling his father to stay away, “I know I’ve got it so don’t come near me,” huddling against the wall and putting the thermometer back in his mouth, knowing he has it and has already passed it on, so I’ll be vomiting blood by tomorrow morning and she by tomorrow night, a fact his reasoning mind finds hard to accept: an hour ago, behind that hedge in the park, the two of us were just beginning, and already we’re over. Thermometer in mouth now, father speaking on the other side of the shower door, though you not listening, phone in your trembling hands, thumbs touching alphabet, backspacing against the errors, then deleting the message before sending or even finishing (hearing that voice again: And he didn’t even call her, he just sent her a text), closing his eyes, memory-touching his palm to her cheek and memory scripting a link using the scent of her skin as anchor—and in a new window of the mind: I am coming home from school on a summer afternoon in Northern California, the car (in the back of which I am seated) going up the dirt drive past the eucalyptus trees, through the shadows and the scent of them, closing my eyes and breathing through the open window the infused air (something like the smell of a girl I will kiss eight years in the future: narcotic, pheromonal) and remembering now, in the corner of the shower stall, how he would be painting at an easel or playing in the sandbox or listening to a story, and would turn or look up and there his big sister would be, come to take him home, and they would drive home together, past the firehouse (he telling her about the wildfire sign, what the colors meant and where the arrow was pointing) and then up the dirt drive through the trees
and the smell of the trees. Except for the day she did not come to collect him. The day that something out of the ordinary happened. The school closed early, right before the napping time, so I could hardly keep my eyes open in the story corner while a teacher was reading us a book about a boy and his pet dinosaur, and I remember turning and seeing my mother standing next to Miss Izzy and I took one last look at the book (the dinosaur tangled at the neck in telephone wires) and got up and walked to my mother, feeling like I was walking in my sleep, and almost instantly, as soon as she strapped me into my car seat, I was asleep, and when she saw in the rearview mirror that I was, she must have turned on the radio, and I must have been hearing in my sleep what was being said on the radio, because I was having a dream that something had happened in the city: the reason we’d gone home early was that something had crashed into the bridge and set the city on fire: and the reason Skyler hadn’t come to get me was that she was in the city: and I (even though I knew I was apart from her) was also in the city: and though I was myself, I was also another boy, an older boy, who lived in a house on a hill overlooking the bridge and we were in the house together: something had happened in the sky above the bridge only it hadn’t happened yet: and in the dream, I am looking through a window waiting for it to happen and knowing when it does that everything is going to change and life will never be the same again.