by Andrew Pyper
The two of them are the only ones who remain below now, a little over a hundred yards short of where the slope levels and falls away into forest. It is close enough that Miles can see the individual fingers of grass at the top bending against the rush of heat. The fire will have burned the same blades to black wicks before they get halfway to touching them.
It is close, but Miles has noticed how his pace has slowed almost to a standstill, and the final ascent is far steeper than any other section of the hill. The other men have a chance of making it, so long as the fire is delayed on the crest. But even if they had wings it’s too late for Miles and the kid.
Miles lunges forward and grabs the kid’s arm, stopping them both. Without explanation, he slips his hand into his pack and pulls a fusee out. He lip-reads the kid’s voiceless words—Don’t stop! Don’t stop!—but only raises his hand in reply. Miles ignites the fusee with the lighter he takes from his pocket. When it flares to life, he bends to touch its spitting mouth to the straw around them.
An escape fire. A small burning of grass lit before the main fire hits, so that the burned area—the ‘good black’—can be stepped into and, with their heads buried in the ashes, the worst of the fire may pass around them. It is a technique Miles has only read about. He remembers stories of turn-of-the-century natives saving themselves and any pilgrims who would join them, far out on the Great Plains lit up like a prairie inferno. But there is no mention of escape fires in any of the current training materials, and for good reason. Miles knows that more men have burned in the good black than have been saved by it. But they will die if they run on, and die if they stand where they are. Miles decides for himself and for the kid. They will be an experiment.
Miles steps into the circle, the stalks still snapping and sending live sparks up his pant legs, and waves at the kid to join him. Just ten feet away, the kid stays where he is. Staring at Miles in an uncomprehending palsy of disbelief. Why is his foreman starting a fire when there already is one, a huge one, coming right at them?
For a moment, the two men meet each other’s eyes through the smoke spiralling off the grass. The kid’s effort to see the sense in what Miles has done plays visibly over his face. His throat seared shut, leaving all his questions to sit, heavy as marble, in his chest.
The kid is so close that Miles could grab him and try to pull him in. If the kid resisted, both of them would be caught outside the good black as the main fire hit. Still, if he holds on to the kid’s wrist and falls back, it might be enough for them both to tumble down into the smoking ash and breathe. That’s what Miles would tell the kid if he was lying next to where he is now. Breathe and stay low and bury your face in the charred soil where the pockets of oxygen might be and wait—
Behind them, the fire screams.
A shattering, human sound that sends the young firefighter scrambling a few feet higher up the slope. Though his voice doesn’t reach his own ears, Miles can feel his shouts splitting his throat open.
He lifts his head from the ground to plead with the kid to come back and feels the first swipe of fire across the side of his face, tearing the shirt from his side.
I’m burning, Miles thinks.
A realization so simple it precedes understanding, precedes pain. But he doesn’t lie down. Opens his mouth again to utter another wordless command and hears only the plasticky pop of his own skin.
He can only watch as the boy runs on. That, and make one last attempt to be heard. But before Miles can close his lips around his name, the kid is consumed by the rushing curtain of fire.
They keep him away from mirrors. Anything that can cast a reflection is hidden by the nurses. The chrome kettle in his room is removed, the curtains drawn at twilight when the glass surface begins to send back images of whoever may be trying to look outside. Even his cutlery is replaced with plastic knives, forks and especially the spoons, which, depending on the side turned to him, threaten to balloon or collapse the already distorted features of his new face.
For the first several days, the drugs keep him from knowing when they’re taking off his bandages or peeling away dead layers of his skin. Morphine delivers him to a place well beyond the hospital room’s beeping, bleach-reeking reminders that he is on a bad-news ward. The drip into his arm prevents him from caring about his injuries, how he might look if he ever gets out, about anything. Yet he remains aware of the events around him. The terrible food. A distressedlooking Alex with her hair tied in a bun (he hates it that way and thinks of asking her to let it down, but doesn’t want to trouble her). His wish for something better to be on TV. Even the fire. He remembers trying to pull himself up the slowmotion slope, the unfamiliar sound of his own screams, the sight of the kid sucked back into the furious waves. He remembers it all, but it nevertheless feels second-hand, fictional, like the memory of a film seen years before.
The morphine leads him to a beautiful indifference. He loves the morphine. The days pass in rolls of gauze. Delicately applied and removed, the nurses forcing smiles, nearly constantly asking him Are you okay? He has no idea what okay would be under the circumstances, or what it ever was. Yup, he says. The last thing he wants is to hurt anybody’s feelings. He just yups his way through his first three weeks in the burn ward, and holds Alex’s hand with the one he can still move, all without a clue as to what might follow from here.
They pull back the sheet and leave him bare between dressings for a while now, to ‘get a little air on the business,’ as one of the nurses puts it. Although he’s told not to, it allows him to feel the shape of the burn. From beneath his skin a shell emerges, rough as the edge of an empty tin. Not all of him, though. He has been split in two. The left side of his face is as he remembers it, but the right is a Halloween mask, all hardened latex and stray, unconvincing hairs. His hand continues down his neck, and he discovers that the half-mask comes with a half-bodysuit too. He strokes his chest from one side to the other. The line between the burned and unburned skin comes up hard against his fingertips, abrupt as the intrusion of the Rockies on a continental map. The east of him is smooth flatlands. The west, rows of jagged teeth.
Without warning, they pull the morphine out of his arm and replace it with a pair of Tylenol 3s on his breakfast serviette. The first thing he does is cry. It’s the sight of the puny albino pills that does it. These are to be his new friends? He bawls so hard he can’t catch his breath. Coughs himself out of bed, starts bawling again. The emergency bell that attaches his thumb to the nurses’ station rings without pause, so that they close the door on him and let him wail himself to sleep. Even through his tears he’s ashamed of himself, and makes some attempts at self-control, but then the image of the white pills returns to him, and it’s all over.
When it comes, sleep is no better than waking. What’s worse than the pain are the dreams. They start at different places, but all of them end with Miles running. There is no fire. What he runs from is invisible but explicit, human and not human, a creature with unfair advantages. A vampire, the voice-over of his dream tells him. One that pursues him through a grid of dark streets. Miles knows that he will lose the race but he rushes on, rounds another corner, hoping to find an avenue of light that never appears. Then, when the undead thing comes up next to him, Miles turns to see that it’s the kid. Teeth bared, ravenous. The kid wrapping his mouth over Miles’s neck. Ripping and swallowing.
When they release him from the hospital, the doctor gives Miles a pharmaceutical loot bag to take with him: tranquilizers, Tylenol 3s, steroid cream. Alex holds him by the arm on his good side, his steps slow and frail, head swimming. He can’t tell whether the sensation of being helped along by his girlfriend makes him feel pathetically young or pathetically old.
They are asked to stay in town for a few days to participate in the coroner’s inquest into the kid’s death, although it’s obvious to all that it’s really Miles’s trial. Fire is fire, and people who fight them get hurt from time to time. But the kid is different. His foreman stopped running fro
m a fire to build one of his own and the kid had carried on up the hill. One rational decision, one irrational. If common sense determined rightful outcomes, the wrong man died.
The panel includes two of the managers who sent his team into the valley, and Miles tries to mentally hammer nails through their eyeballs as he listens to them ask their questions. They want to know how he could possibly justify his ‘grossly unorthodox defensive tactics.’ Miles calls it an escape fire. He calls it the good black. The managers call it unsound manoeuvres. His trial is one of semantics. They don’t allow themselves to forgive him, but he can feel them wanting to. One says, ‘You were a good firefighter, Miles,’ and the past tense reddens the scar on his cheek.
In the end they do him the favour of coming up with excuses on his behalf. Miles wasn’t much older than the kid himself, after all. The conditions were severe. Under the circumstances, it was hard to believe that only one man went down. Though his methods were well outside of acknowledged procedure, the investigators accept that Miles had done everything he could have done within his abilities and experience.
After, in a motel room in Salmon Arm with a NO ANIMAL SKINNING notice over the headboard, Alex and Miles lie side by side in the darkness, fully clothed, fingers locked over their chests like corpses. They talk about what they should do next. Neither of them can think of an option aside from what they would have done if the fire had never happened. They will leave in the morning for Toronto. Alex will take up her job at Arrowsmith’s, and Miles will enter first year of med school. They will start again. Neither of them mentions the promise of marriage that Miles had made the year before.
They drive through the mountains, onto the high ranges of Alberta, across the cruise-control prairies, and over the humped spine of Lake Superior, all in a brooding near silence. Alex never asks about the fire, but Miles can sense her aching to. There’s a buzz of vicious pleasure in refusing to help her open the topic, every hour of silence a greater punishment than anything he might think of to say to her. Behind the wheel, Miles takes an academic interest in his own anger. For instance, he would never have guessed he would resent Alex’s sympathy even more than her curiosity.
The sight of Toronto shrinks them in their seats. Even the lake seems to pull back from the downtown towers. Its waves reluctant, perfunctory, the water the mottled grey of desert camouflage. They drive straight to the apartment Alex has found, a basement one-bedroom on Shaw Street, the only thing reasonably close to both her work and the university that they could afford.
‘It’s not rue Rachel,’ Miles says, looking up and down the street, the tiny front yards blurred with wrought-iron fences.
‘It’s different here,’ Alex agrees. ‘It’s all different.’
They unload their minimal belongings and, after one walk through the apartment, Miles tucks himself under the sheets of the futon and stays in the bedroom for the next week until classes start. Even then, he skips his lectures as often as he attends them. Instead, he drifts through the streets of the new city and feels its eyes upon him. He plays the game of trying to catch people staring. Most of the time, his observers are quicker than he is. But when he snags slow ones, he sticks his tongue out and laughs like a serial killer and watches them scuttle away in what they think is fear, though he knows it’s really shame.
His refusal to speak doesn’t prevent Miles from tracing the growing shape of fury within him. Alex can see it too. It comes to the point that all she will allow herself to tell him is that she loves him, but even this gives offence. He interprets her simple, desperate words as a lie, something she repeats to convince herself of. It is impossible that Alex could feel the same about him as she once did. If he has been turned into a monster, won’t their love have been similarly deformed?
More and more, Miles fears that if he stays with her, something as bad as what happened to the burned boy will happen to Alex. There is also the newfound worry that he might hurt her himself.
They make love only once after the fire. From the morning Miles was released from the hospital, over and over Alex had invited him to her. She had worn only the clothes he had most liked to remove, suggested massage oil backrubs, whispered dirty in his ear. Every time, Miles had declined. Finally, after she grazed her tongue across the back of his neck as he stood before a crackling frying pan in the kitchen, he had turned to her and said, ‘Don’t you get it? I’m not interested in a mercy fuck,’ before returning to flip his eggs. She had not tried again after that.
What hurt her more than his rejection was the extent to which he was wrong about what she was asking of him. Mercy had nothing to do with it. It’s true that she wanted to bring them together, if only for a time, as the open talk that they used to find so natural had deserted them. But her desire was real.
On this night, though, it is Miles who reaches for Alex. Aware of the sound of their own breathing, each clinging to the cold edge of their opposite bedsides, he had rolled over to bring his lips to her shoulder. Both of them are amazed at how even this tentative kiss revives something in them. Miles stays next to her, folding himself over her side. He wants to say a sweet word. Anything plucked from the standard vocabulary will do. But the mere thought of uttering any of them hurts his throat, like a bone caught halfway down.
They surprise themselves with the energy they find, a ruthless yearning. Everything they do is lingered over, repeated, another moment won against the long night. Despite this, they can sense an absence in each other’s touch. The room’s wintry drafts find ways between them, licking around the borders of warmth their bodies create.
Afterwards, they watch the flashing blue light of a streetcleaner tumble across the ceiling. This time it is Alex’s turn to search for words and for everything she might say to strike her as laughably belated. It’s not the fire that has come between them, she thinks, but an awareness of themselves. They never used to be self-conscious around each other, and this nakedness brought them an easy honesty, the gift of speaking without gain or penalty. Now they censor their thoughts as though someone is in the room with them, judging their appropriateness, their timing, whether they actually believe what they say or not. The streetcleaner’s blue light retreats through the curtains.
Although she cannot tell Miles why she cries now, her back to him again, she knows it’s because of this. Not the loss of words. Alex weeps for what they have found, the terrible discovery of what love prevents us from seeing as obvious. They have never been one, always two.
By the end of October, Miles stops attending classes altogether, spending his days in the laundry-strewn darkness of the apartment. Although Alex stocks the fridge with T-bones and leaves Mason jars of homemade spaghetti sauce for him in the freezer, he lives on delivery pizza and Chinese, the smelly boxes growing into a cardboard tower outside the bedroom door.
One day that is otherwise the same as the fifty that came before, Miles hears Alex unlock the front door and knows that something is about to change. She drops her keys on the kitchen table and the sound rips through the apartment like a crack of thunder. The storm is breaking and Miles welcomes it. He wants to stand tall enough for the lightning to find him.
‘What’s your plan?’ Alex asks him, standing over the shadowy hump of his back under the sheets.
‘I’m a man with no plan.’
‘Really? You look like you’ve got your crashand-burn all figured out.’
‘No pun intended.’
‘I wanted to tell you something. If it makes any difference.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘I’ll never leave you.’
‘Hey! History’s most broken promise.’
‘It’s not history’s promise. It’s mine.’
‘You’re a good girl, Alex. But not that good.’
Alex crumples onto the end of the futon. She finds his cold foot sticking out and strokes the top of it, but it wriggles away at her touch.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she says.
‘You’re not the jud
ge of that.’
Alex leans forward and switches on the bedside lamp, which casts a tight circle of light out from under the shade. She can see Miles now. The covers pulled up to his chin, his hair a nest of greasy tosses and turns. His eyes blink against the forty-watt bulb as though he had just stepped into the midday sun.
‘I’m right here,’ she says.
‘You don’t have to be.’
‘I’m telling you I know you.’
‘You have my apologies.’
‘Just listen, Miles. Listen. Even if you don’t want to hear.’
‘Hear what, Herr Doctor?’
‘You’ve always blamed yourself for what your father did, and now you’re mixing that up with what happened in the fire.’
‘There’s a nice logic to that, I admit,’ he says, tapping his chin. ‘It even seems to make sense. The trouble is, it doesn’t. You keep looking for sense where there isn’t any.’
‘So tell me, then. Tell me the senseless truth of it.’
‘The kid died.’
‘And?’
‘The kid died.’
‘His name was Tim.’
‘I know his name.’
There is no gesture Alex can think of that Miles wouldn’t take as an insult. She disgusts him, although he assumes it is the other way around. If he said something first, something of his own, no matter how it might hurt her, it might be a way in. But he won’t. He will reply, but not confess, not accuse. Her frustration knots its way through her shoulders, seizing her into a sculpture of pain.
‘You’re so angry and you don’t even know it.’
‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Not at me. You’re angry at yourself.’ Alex pauses to take a new breath that will manage her next words at a lower register. ‘At your father.’