Not on Fire, but Burning

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Not on Fire, but Burning Page 22

by Greg Hrbek


  17

  In the ugly apartment: a table. On it, the suicide belts, which are more like vests, are laid out. On one wall: the flag of the Caliphate. What they are telling you to do is stand, one at a time, wearing one of the vests, in front of the flag, while holding an automatic rifle, and read something from a piece of paper while one of them points the eye of a smartphone at you and records you holding the gun and wearing the vest and reading what is written on the paper. The problem is, holding the paper leaves only one hand and arm for holding the rifle; and neither one of you is strong enough to hold an AK-47 in one arm. The uncle says, “So, let them sit in a chair.” The other (whom you seem to despise even more than the uncle, though he has done nothing special to warrant a greater resentment) says, “One cannot make a declaration while sitting down.”

  “Uncle,” Yassim says. “I know.”

  “You know.”

  “I mean, I just have an idea. Like if we were both in the video, I could hold the gun while Karim reads the paper. Then we switch.”

  For a moment, it seems the uncle is going to spit on him, and Karim thinks of when the uncle handed him the knife, and wonders what if, in a moment of spontaneously channeled violence, he had used the knife on man instead of dog. Why didn’t he? Karim was that close to him; close enough that, after taking the weapon in hand and turning to the dog, he could have reversed himself without forethought or warning and buried the long curved blade into the man’s belly and sunk it in by pushing with hands and arms while shouldering and running against the weight of his full-grown body, forcing him backward and floorward and falling with him and on top of him, maintaining a firm grip on the handle. And now a situation not dissimilar. The uncle having already put in Karim’s hands another (deadlier) weapon, though he had made a point, just before giving it to Karim, of ejecting the magazine and placing it on the table beside the vests, where it is lying even now, as the expression on his face is changing, or maybe staying the same but revealing itself to be something different than what it had seemed to be … In any event, he doesn’t spit. He says: “Not a bad idea.” The other (shrugging): “They will be smaller in the picture.” But the uncle is already taking the unloaded rifle off the table and giving it to Yassim, then lifting one of the vests from the table and telling Karim to come, and Karim doing as he says and offering an arm and the man slipping a sleeve over his shoulder. Telling the other: “Think outside the box, sadiq. It will be a message of solidarity, inspiring other young people to join with a friend in martyrdom.” And then to Karim: “Don’t you think, ebnee?”

  Ebnee.

  And you thinking: I am no son of yours. While thinking also of the man to whom you are in fact a kind of son, who must be sitting in that house now, in the room he made for you, on the chair in a room you will never return to, before the desk upon which you left that old battered book. Open. Open to the page with the blood smear and the words about Paradise. Which you left there deliberately, as if the verses of that sura would explain sufficiently where you have disappeared to. A world of gardens and fountains. And why you did what you are going to do. Because it was the only way to get there. The only way, jaddi … But how can you? How can you walk into that place called Urgent Care and pull the cord hanging from the front of the vest that you are now wearing (which your body is now registering the full weight of), igniting the explosive liquid in the tubes taped there, and propelling the ten pounds of nails, screws, and ball bearings toward the hearts and heads of a hundred (maybe more) sick and terrified people, some of whom, far from being inimical to you, might be nothing but sympathetic: who, if given a choice of helping or hurting you, would help, just as the old man seated at that desk, looking even now at the open pages of the book, had helped you … And while thinking all this, you are also speaking, though not any words that parallel your thoughts. You are reading from the paper while Yassim stands beside you holding the rifle and the second man points his smartphone, you reading though not hearing your own voice though you know a voice is coming out of you and being recorded and the voice which is yours but also not yours, saying: He ejected the magazine from the gun. But this vest you are wearing. What if you pulled the cord right now. Reached for the cord without apparent forethought and no warning and pulled. The explosive liquid would be ignited here. In this ugly room. And there would be no bombing in that hospital tonight. And the declaration of martyrdom now being recorded will never be uploaded and never viewed, and will never encourage any other boy to do what you are on the verge of doing—and so it might be said that at the end you did a good thing, Karim, a good thing at the end. To accomplish it you need only move your hand the space of a few inches, feel the cord and pull. Suddenly. Without premeditation. Without reasoning. For all thinking on this subject is nothing but instinct. An omen in the nerves and muscles a moment before the cerebellum sends the requisite command, which it is about to do, about to generate the action potential that will spread through the muscle fiber network and prompt the pulling of the cord when the sound comes through the wall behind you: the baby: crying again: so near, so clear, there might be no barrier at all.

  What is happening to Dorian Wakefield behind the closed shower door in the bathroom of his family’s safe room? Insofar as an “answer” to this question is relevant when so-called physical laws are in the process of being eroded (or perhaps a more accurate phraseology: when such laws are being, if not revised, than at least superscripted by the human mind), that answer might best be attempted through a process of historical comparison across the horizontal axis of the grid. At a distant point in the past, in Quadrants I or IV (say, x = −500), Dorian’s experience in the shower would almost certainly be considered supernatural, a mystical vision or a demonically induced delusion. At x = 0 (his present moment), a psychiatrist like the one he saw for two months back in the fall might diagnose a dissociative disorder, possibly an episode of depersonalization brought on by the panic caused by the fear of his mother dying and the fear of his own probable death. At future points on the axis, however (in Quadrants II and III: at, for example, x = 109), we know that what is actually happening is this: He is thinking of a point in the far reaches of the first quadrant—and that point, that summer from the past of a different pathway, is the very same one that his mother has been imagining-as-remembering while in the throes of a multisystem syndrome that is soon going to cause cardiovascular collapse. And the configuration of that point, that moment from another past, is so convincing and so longed-for (and we could say necessary in the context of a present situation moving rapidly toward total darkness), that Dorian is consumed by a sudden surety that the events transpiring here and now (at 0, 0) are not real at all.

  “Dodo,” his father says.

  “Mm.”

  “You all right in there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I open the door?”

  And the door opening and Dorian exiting the little enclosure, unsteady on his feet, a rush of disequilibrium in his head, which might be a symptom of disease, but feels to him more like a kind of physiological adjustment, as if he has been at a great depth of water and is returning now to a surface.

  “Dad. I’m going to tell you something. It’s important.”

  “Sure.”

  “It doesn’t really matter what you say back. It’s just important I say it, because it’s going to help us get out of this.”

  (Nodding.) “All right.”

  “She picked me up at school that summer.”

  (Still nodding.) “Who did, pal.”

  “Skyler. She was home that summer, not in the city. And you remember the firehouse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And remember that sign? It told you about the fire danger. Every day, I would explain it to her. Like, it’s red, red means high … I just remembered that.”

  “Listen, Dodo. I want you to put this in your mouth and hold it there until it beeps. Okay?”

  He does as told. Sitting very calmly and pressing his tong
ue down, keeping the thermometer steady. His father on his knees beside him, a hand resting nervously on his shoulder. And now beeping. And his father taking it and angling it in front of his eyes. Saying: Normal. 98.6. And then: “All right. Cliff, come here. Listen, guys.” And telling them to sit tight. “Stay in this room. Keep the radio on. I’m going to make sure Mom is taken care of and then I’ll be back. An hour at the most. Then I’ll be home.”

  And thinking to herself (as she is wheeled unconscious, strapped to a stretcher, out of the back of an ambulance by two EMTs in biosafe suits and through the in-patient entrance of the emergency room, into a scenario of suffering and panic and inadequate epidemiologic response: upwards of a hundred people, the sick mixed with the worried, half of them unmasked and half of those vomiting blood into sickness bags), that the reason she is thinking about all this—about that summer and how Skyler might have been in the city that day but wasn’t—is that she drove down into the valley earlier today, surrounded by the hills yellowed by sun and heat and lack of rain, and just as she was passing the firehouse and the fire warning sign (the arrow pointing to orange), she came suddenly, after a curve, upon a car driving slowly and cautiously, with a bumper sticker that said: 8-11 NEVER FORGET … Not that I ever do. Every single day, some part of me (if not concretely, then in the abstract) remembers what happened and what might have been and gives thanks (to whom or what I’m not really sure) for my family’s deliverance. Still, in the summer, it’s different. As we come closer to that date in August, the anniversary of a thing I guess we are just never going to understand, I feel the coming of it, like the fog that builds over the ocean, inevitable and integral, moving closer and massing overhead like memory. So, I was behind that car this morning, which was going far more slowly than the speed limit—and how could I know why. For all I knew, the driver (say, a woman like me: fifty, a mother) was thinking of that day and a child she lost, a daughter or son who was in the city on that day, whom she had not stopped (and saved) from being there, the way I stopped Skyler—and for all I know, she’s weeping right now behind the wheel, the landscape a blur of grief. And my mind starts doing something that it does sometimes, that once it starts I can’t bring a halt to, which is: darkly envisioning who I might be—what would be left of me—if she had been taken from me; if, on that day that the city was burned and turned to ash and sickened, my daughter had been there and I here, a hundred miles away, which might as well have been light-years of spacetime for the impossibility of reaching her and helping. And I see myself in the house with the boys. Waiting and hoping (and praying to a god I don’t even know) and trying to keep from Dorian what is happening; and waiting not only to know if Skyler will be all right but waiting for Mitch to get home from Mendocino; and trying not only to convince Cliff that Skyler will be all right but myself as well—and believing she will be because any credence given to the alternative is an acceptance of an unacceptable fate. (Breathing faster and more shallow now, central venous and arterial pressures falling.) Where was I? Coming into town. Yes. The car with the bumper sticker turning east. And instead of completing the errand I had come to do in avoidance of the brief I didn’t want to write, I took 116 west, along the river, all the way to the end, to the beach where the harbor seals birth and nurse their pups, though the seals are long gone by summer. The beach devoid of people, too, and I sat alone against a log, a section of tree which, having been washed long ago into the ocean, had come ashore in a new form, contours rounded by wave action and bark bleached to near whiteness by sun and salt, and I sitting against it now, holding my phone and slideshowing through photos of us stored in the cloud as waves rolled and beat heart-like against the sand, and getting to this one: taken here: of me and Mitch and Cliff (I wearing sunglasses with lenses the size of tea saucers): remembering that Sky, eight or nine then, had lain in the sand in front of us, having actually made a shallow cavity in the sand so she could point the camera up at us, though she had managed to bring the ocean into the frame as well as the rock formation in the middle distance: the arch with its archway like a gateway. Which I sent to all of them (the photo, I mean: to Mitch and Skyler and Cliff and Dorian) with a note reading: VISUAL EVIDENCE NOTWITHSTANDING, I SWEAR UNDER OATH I NEVER PUT ON ANY SUCH PAIR OF SUNGLASSES. And I there, losing my connectivity to time, staring out at the ocean and the rock and its archway: no living thing around me, nothing moving on the sand or in the air above, nor the air itself, and at last even the ocean seemed to be still.

  •

  They sit tight with the radio on. Hearing the same urgent message again and again. “Officials suspect that a Category A bioterrorism agent has been released in this area.” Their father gone to the hospital to make sure their mother is being cared for and not lying unconscious on a gurney in the midst of total chaos, forgotten because there aren’t enough nurses and doctors and no one to advocate for her and make demands in her interest. They sit tight, awaiting his return, for approximately forty-five minutes, at which time (9:22 p.m. EST) the next thing happens. The power goes out.

  Everything dark and quiet.

  They switch the radio to battery. Turn on the battery-powered lantern. Wake up their phones and learn that the electrical grid is offline—and not just New York according to some accounts, but everything east of the Proclamation Line and even up into New France, which means the system has been attacked. And now a report of a fire at a substation up north and speculation about a bomb in a tractor trailer or possibly a light aircraft; and an hour gone now and still he isn’t back, and he said an hour at most, and no call and no text either, so where is he, and a sense in Dorian that things are coming to an end: an unreal feeling from a dream in which you have glimpsed the fictionality of setting and event but are terrified nonetheless by a seeming realism.

  “You okay,” Cliff says.

  “I dunno.”

  “Here, take your temperature. It’ll still be normal and Dad’ll be here any minute.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do.”

  Dorian puts down the thermometer and walks to the closet, opens it and takes out the air rifle. The only gun in the house. Which is nothing really but a toy. Into the wooden stock of which his grandfather (at ten years of age, almost seventy years ago) had carved: 1962. No sooner is it in his hands than they both hear, through the one sealed window, the car in the driveway below. Through the cloudy plastic sheeting: an aurora of halogen light. “See.” Cliff says. “Like clockwork.” Leading Dorian out of the room. Cliff with the lantern and Dorian the gun. Into the hall, down the stairs. Intending to open the garage door manually from the inside—and downstream of consciousness, as they enter the garage, a suspicion struggling against the current of presumption (though too weak to stop the actions), so Cliff already pulling the release cord of the machine, then shining the light on the door handle and Dorian ducking first under the lifting door, stepping out into the night to find that the car idling on the driveway is not theirs and the man standing outside it, a shadow in the backlight, not their father, and also another man on the other side of the car, neither of whom is clear to see, and Dorian thinking suddenly of something from a few years back, a kid from a town far, far away who’d disappeared and they’d found the body finally but never the head, as a hand grabs him by the shirt and seizes the rifle as a voice he recognizes but can’t quite place (the pitch, timbre, and intensity allaying his extant fears while creating a new order of them) says: “Take it easy. It’s just me.”

  Meaning: the man Dorian met in Keenan Cartwright’s in-law apartment eight days ago; who called Dorian six nights ago while another man was dead on his lawn and whom Dorian hung up on and then called a day later in an attempt to stop a flow of violence that seems now so trivial as to be meaningless; whom Dorian told Keenan Cartwright four days ago to call and tell to stay away; and who asked Dorian, two days ago, to be there when the time came. So the time, it would seem, has come.

  “Who the fuck’re you,” Cliff says.

&nbs
p; “The cavalry.”

  “Well, just stay six fucking feet away from him.”

  “I’m not infected.”

  “Just move.”

  “Older brother,” Jon-David says. “Chill. We’re not here to sneeze on you.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  “You planning on shooting some squirrels?”

  “Just. Look …” (The belligerence vanishing from his voice.)

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Cliff.”

  “Okay. Cliff. Listen. We’re here to help. We’re not infected. None of us were anywhere near the zone. And just in case, back at my apartment, I have a thousand 100-milligram doses of Doxycycline. That’s the antibiotic for plague and that’s probably what those fucks released the other day and I’m going to give you some and I’m going to give your little brother the gun and all I want you to do first is see something.”

  “See what.”

  “What I have in the car.”

  “Look—”

  “No, you look.”

  Motioning at the car with the gun. Making it sound like an invitation, a dare, and a command all at the same time. For several seconds, Cliff standing still. Then going to the car. Peering through the front window. Then the rear one. And Dorian walking now across the driveway, looking into the same window and seeing him in the back. Omar. Who had called him the name and hit him in the stomach and then held him while Karim hit him in the face and later apologized via e-mail. Slumped now in the far corner of the seat. Eyes closed. To all appearances: Dead. “Not dead,” Jon-David assures them. Standing now between the brothers. “Here, I’ll show you.” Opening the door, still holding the air rifle. Now pointing the gun at the body. Now pulling the trigger. “See.” (The body twitching once, then shifting position.) “Not dead. Just extremely asleep.”

 

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