Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Bryan started with the extracurriculars (“Are we done?”), jumped to a SUNY Purchase catalog (“If I take the catalog upstairs, are we done?”) and then freestyled a passionate speech about his own work with OHB and how important it was to preserve the community. Bryan’s fingers massaged the kitchen table, as if he were smoothing Orient’s fields for future grandchildren. Pointing to the admissions requirements in the SUNY catalog, he suggested that Tommy could pitch in and help him with the Kiefer Nondevelopment Advocacy Initiative. “How good will that look on your application?” he encouraged. What he really meant was, How good will that feel to help your father with something he cares about. How good will that be for us, Tommy, spending time together on the streets where I used to carry you on my shoulders and race you along the beaches until my lungs hurt but I wouldn’t show you that I was tired because I wanted you to think I was strong?

  Tommy let go of the seat, slumping into its upholstery.

  “I might take a year off before going to college,” he mumbled into his palm.

  Bryan controlled himself. He spoke slowly, serenely, in the measured tone he used to convince older couples to install a security camera at their front door without scaring them about who they might find at night on their bedroom monitor.

  “Taking time off—that might seem exciting right now, but I swear to you, a college degree will take you all those places you’re imagining a whole lot faster. When we all go up to visit Lisa for Parents’ Orientation Weekend, you’ll see how exciting campus life can be.”

  Tommy laughed and hid a smile in his palm. Bryan hoped it was the first crack in his son’s tough exterior. “You don’t have much time left in this house,” he continued, “with your mom and me. I know you’re bored of it, but one day you’ll wish you’d treasured every last minute.”

  Tommy took a breath and stared at the table. “If I move into the city, would you pay for an apartment?”

  “Tommy . . .”

  “Just the amount you give Lisa for her dorm.”

  “Tommy, please . . .”

  “Or the money you spend on the rooms you rent for your own enjoyment.”

  Bryan’s hands shot off the table, shrinking into fists. His heart sent blood coursing through his chest, and when that blood reached his face it was very hot. SUNY Purchase suddenly seemed like an opportunity to send his son away rather than a means of keeping him close.

  “I work hard, every day—” Bryan didn’t know where he was going with this sentence. It didn’t have a direction; it was the language of covering the quiet, throwing carpets over floors, twisting radio knobs, tapping nails. “And business is getting tough, now with this added competition, and I can’t promise there will be money for Theo when it’s time for college, or Lisa if she decides to go to law school, and your mother wants to help her parents move to Florida. All of this pressure on me to make sure you’re provided for, and I work every single day . . .” This was Bryan’s oblique way of begging Tommy not to speak another word about what he might know, or maybe it was his attempt to explain himself. Either way, Bryan could no longer look his son in the eye.

  “How did it go?” Pam asked afterward. She was lying in bed, knees bent under the coverlet. Her blue sleeping pills sat beside a glass of water like two small boats waiting to be set adrift on her tongue.

  He unbuttoned his shirt and kicked off his loafers. He unfastened the leather strap of his watch and placed it on the bedside table. He sat down on his side of the mattress, his back to his wife, the white hair on his chest feathered against the droop of his muscles. “Not well. I don’t know what’s the matter with him. I don’t know what to do with a son like that.” You don’t have much time left in this house. You’ll wish you’d treasured every last minute. Before she took her sleeping pills, Pam did something that Bryan couldn’t remember her doing in years. She rolled onto her side and stroked his back.

  Bryan woke a few minutes after midnight to the sound of beeping. It roused him softly through his dreams. He had learned to love the perfect increments of those high-decibel beeps. They emitted seamlessly from machines that he had made his career installing: for twenty years that sound of electronic crickets, which signaled security and peace of mind. Metal badge-shaped Muldoon Security signs were staked in front yards all across the North Fork. And after thirty seconds, if the correct four-digit code was not punched into the keypad, wailing sirens overtook the beeping with an automatic call to the police department in Southold. Sirens wailed around him, and a second beeping reverberated through the hallway, louder and foreign, like cicadas at close range. It was the fire alarm.

  Bryan bolted awake. Smoke hung in the air, and something warm was spreading under the mattress, as if the cap on Pam’s water bottle had been dislodged. He shot his legs over the bed as he realized that the alarms were coming from his own house. His feet burned when they touched the floor.

  The house was on fire.

  Pam. The boys. Theo and Tommy, not Lisa, she was safe upstate.

  “Pam,” he screamed to the body next to him. He tried to shake her out of her drugged sleep before he ran toward the hallway. “Get up, there’s a fire!” The smoke thickened as he tried to hurry into the hallway, then left or right, one way Tommy, the other Theo. He’d go both ways—no, he’d go to one and then the other, first right to Theo, then left to Tommy, youngest first and then the oldest. But Bryan never made it out of the bedroom. His feet went left when he told them to go right, his body and mind disoriented in the smoke, and the door he opened led to the walk-in closet. He stumbled against a laundry basket, spilling clothes across the floor, and his legs gave out around the loose fabric. He struggled to get back on his feet, but by now he was choking. He tasted flint on his tongue and felt the wheezing in his lungs.

  The sound of two competing alarms was so loud that he couldn’t hear anything else—no sign that his kids were breaking windows, were jumping out, were falling to safety. Pam was still in the bed. Smoke curled above his head, creating a hundred crooked halos. And then there was light, all around him, starry and hot, and he tried one last time to stand, he had stood up so many times in his life, and he lurched over his knees but his breath was gone, and he wished he had the breath to say he was sorry, terribly sorry, for what exactly he did not know, and wouldn’t, and those he wanted to tell were deep in the wailing, beyond his hands, somewhere in the lightness, which moved him without his having to move at all, which felt like standing up without ever reaching the end of that beautiful motion.

  Eleven minutes after the emergency call went out, the Orient Volunteer Fire Department arrived on the scene. Neighbors had already gathered on the street, their cheeks dancing with yellow flames, unable to do anything, not even look away. The Denmeyers. The Griffins. The two elderly Merriband sisters. Karen Norgen. The bystanders wore blankets around their shoulders and hugged each other, as if those embraces could somehow be transferred to the Muldoons. At first the fire seemed to be confined to the windows, bright orange flags waving in each frame. But soon, as the fire spread, it flared so thick that it turned the night soft and the air loud with its moan. Black shapes appeared in the upper windows, and bystanders prayed at first that the shapes were human, one of the boys or Pam, then prayed the opposite as the shapes dissolved in flames.

  The Muldoon house, which neighbors drove by every day and could sketch by memory on a napkin, had always seemed a small, featureless convention of wood and brick. But the fire opened it, showed off its many rooms, the glass side patio bursting with light, the living room a paper lantern with space to burn, even Pam’s rosebushes blossoming with flickers. The house was old and relented slowly, but the furniture inside was new and combustible, and the blaze ate through its meat and joints. Before the trucks arrived, the fire remained in the house, confined to its shape, but soon the house was in the fire, the way a setting sun holds a distant home within its disc. No living thing jumped from its edges.

  The emergency call had gone out to the electronic pa
gers of all fifty-five members of the volunteer fire department. Thirty-one were awake and in range, and within seven minutes they had assembled at the station on Main Road, speed-dressing in their helmets and Kevlar reflector coats. Their lights and alarms swirled through the night frost as they drove the two engines and one heavy rescue pumper up the icy corridor of Youngs Road. The volunteers were a diverse group of Orient men: older farmers whose families had been given the first land grants from the king, religious and temperate and Republican with old tattoos and out-of-shape bodies; then there were the younger, drunker, high-fivers who were quicker to enter a burning house and more precise with their reflexes.

  Adam Pruitt, as head of the department, steered the lead engine into the Muldoons’ driveway and called out orders as he leaped from the cab. The men worked in tandem, each aware of his role from their monthly drills. They unleashed the hoses across the lawn and secured them to the tanks as other men opened the street’s fire well, one of the underground water basins that served as the village hydrants. Adam radioed headquarters in Southold for backup, trucks from Greenport and Mattituck; they would be slow on the ice that was still barricading half the causeway. “Is anyone inside? Has anyone gotten out?” Adam shouted. The bystanders said nothing, their tongues broken in their mouths. Adam knew what that might mean: four bodies.

  Bystanders stepped back as the heat swelled. Just to stand twenty feet from the house was to feel what the fire could do to a body, bringing the liquid to the surface, sucking oxygen from the lips and nose. Beams crackled and split; a stench of smoldering synthetics swept through the oaks; the whole house seemed to turn on its foundation, roaring as an eave dropped like paper on the lawn. “Just keep it moving,” Adam yelled to his men. To stand still for a second was to risk becoming dazed by it, staring infatuated at the fire like an angry form of love.

  They blasted water from the nozzles and drenched the roof and walls, beating back the highest flames. Hoses stretched from the well’s opening as men suited up in respirators and masks, chancing the porch steps and axing the glass in the front windows. They sprayed the ceiling through the windows to break the thermal mass before the fresh air fed it. The fire was at 1400 degrees; no way this was electrical, no way this was a cigarette left burning or a gas stove catching a dish towel or a wire gone to rot in a socket. Adam knew by the color of the smoke and the smell it left in his nostrils. This was fire with intention.

  The well water quieted the blaze, pacifying the wood to runny char, but under that char were embers ready to relight. Fire was patient too. The firefighters crawled through the front door on their knees, as debris flew above their helmets like summer birds. For a few optimistic minutes it seemed to be under control—the roof was still a roof, the walls were walls—but the hoses had emptied the nearest well, the spouts dribbled, and the fire took advantage, shooting higher, feeding from the inside out until it engulfed the second floor. The beams popped and the roof caved toward collapse. “Out, out, get the fuck out right now,” Adam ordered.

  They’d need to relay water from another well, a hundred yards down the road; if the Muldoon family hadn’t gotten out already, they wouldn’t get out now. Had Bryan Muldoon thought about those minutes when he blocked the county water-main proposal? That main would have brought hydrants to every street in Orient, an endless supply from the county water grid. Adam didn’t have time to consider the irony of it. George Morgensen unbuckled his coat by the engine’s rear step and started working the relay pump. Sirens sang from the causeway with the promise of water and fresh men.

  The flames were shooting from the roof into the branches of the oaks, threatening to spread in any direction it wanted. But the hoses fattened again and the water flew into the trees, cascading along the Muldoons’ roof until finally black smoke replaced the flames. The Greenport firefighters ran to relieve the Orient volunteers. They dropped to their knees below the smoke line, crawling through what was left of the downstairs. Adam Pruitt knew they’d need the coroner. And not just that, but the detectives, the arson squad, and the mandatory ambulance with its false sense of hope. What was left of the long-standing Muldoons drifted like steam into the night sky.

  Eleven minutes from call to scene, thirty-six to extinguish the blaze. How quickly a house was erased.

  Mills watched from the street with the other neighbors. He had run from the sofa as soon as he saw the reflection of orange spilling through the living room. Paul joined him two minutes later, holding a coat he hadn’t put on, in slippers wet from the snow. Police detectives and friends created a brief gridlock of cars and sorrow on the street, grief-stricken bodies unable to walk, hurrying detectives with no time for grief. Firefighters dug through the rubble. The left side of the house gaped open from roof to basement. There was talk of survivors—no names were mentioned; to say Theo or Tommy or Pam or Bryan was to recall them in happier times—but no survivors were whisked into the idling ambulance. When a neighbor asked if the two brown Labradors were searching for the family, the officer shook his head. “Arson dogs to detect an accelerant.” A team of paramedics carried stretchers into the house. Paul took Mills by the shoulders and told him they should go inside before the stretchers came out again.

  Pam and Theo had been discovered in their beds. Bryan had been found in a fetal position on his bedroom-closet floor. Tommy’s body was the only one not found in a bedroom. It was lying in the upstairs hallway. His window had been smashed from the inside out, suggesting that he might have considered jumping before moving into the hallway to try the stairs. Or perhaps he went into the hall to rescue his family. He should have been discovered first, but the ceiling had caved in on him; firefighters had trampled on the boards before noticing his blackened fist. The detectives tried to get in touch with Lisa Muldoon at her dormitory at SUNY Buffalo, but Pam’s parents, reached at 2:00 A.M. at their condo in Islip, demanded that they be the ones to break the news.

  Finally, the trucks and police cars pulled out of the driveway, backing up so noiselessly it was as if the Muldoons were still asleep. For a while darkness returned to the street, an unsettling quiet like a matchbook in a drawer.

  At dawn, Mills put on a pair of Paul’s mud boots and a blue winter coat. Certain that Paul had set the door alarm, he jimmied open a back window and climbed out. Mist from the Sound mixed with the steam from the rubble. The wind brought passing toxic squalls, making the low morning cloud bank smell artificial. He walked toward what was left of the house, darting around back in case a neighbor was staring out a window. He ducked under the police tape. There were pieces of the family everywhere—picture frames, an axed kitchen table, pots and pans and pillows charred and left in syrupy puddles, clothes strewn like fishing nets across the grass. Everything the Muldoons had collected in their home was spread across the lawn for all to see. Someone—a firefighter?—had placed a half-burned needlepoint sampler, “CONSERVE WATER, CONSERVE . . .” on the dislodged washing machine, pinned under a chunk of brick.

  Mills picked up a fireplace poker and thrust its arrowed hook in the mud. He had come to say some last words to Tommy, to mourn or remember him somehow. Tommy’s desk chair and garbage can lay under a sheet of corrugated metal. Whatever Tommy had been in life had died with him: a kid with so many escape plans, who had failed to escape the one house he pledged to leave. He and the house were gone now, and he would remain that kid in Orient who perished with his family, one of the tragic Muldoons, until even that recollection thinned to nothing. Mills wondered if a seventeen-year-old victim would be called a boy or a man in the newspaper. Probably a son, he thought.

  He moved through the rubble, knocking chunks of wood apart with the poker. He saw the black safe with its flaming orange sticker poking from scrolls of carpeting. The DAYS OF OPTIMISM decal bubbled illegibly across its door. Mills wedged the tip of the poker against the hinge and steadied his boot on the safe. He put all his weight on the poker until the metal door snapped, and pieces of a shot glass fell out on the dirt. Mills knelt do
wn and removed Jeff Trader’s journal along with the rest of Tommy’s secret stash—a slip of paper and a computerized watch, the kind Tommy said his father kept giving him as gifts. Mills pressed its on button to see if it worked. The large, rectangular screen turned blue and told the time, and at the bottom was an icon marked NOTES.

  Mills picked through the safe, unsure of what to do with most of the stuff he found. Should he remove the Baggie of pot to save Tommy from being remembered as a druggie? He shoved it in his coat pocket. What about the cherry-flavored condoms? The pack of cigarettes? The framed photograph of Tommy and his sister, which Mills had last seen propped on his desk? He left those in the safe.

  Mindful that what he was doing constituted tampering with evidence, he quickly ducked back under the police tape, the journal and watch in his hand. He escaped just in time. A green-and-white taxi pulled in front of the driveway, and a young woman, only slightly older than Tommy, climbed out. She ran toward her house, past the four snowmen that still stood at a safe distance by the curb. Then she turned away, looking up and down the street, as if her childhood house could be found somewhere else, anywhere but in the blackened structure at the end of the walk. The cabdriver waited, turning off the engine and, after a moment, the meter. There was no house for Lisa Muldoon to enter, so she stood in front of its remains, whimpering wordless sounds. She had Pam’s sharp chin, Mills saw, and her father’s pointed nose, and her oldest brother’s deep-set eyes. Finally, she looked at the snowmen—four members of her family with their arms extended, faces slick and melting—and fell to her knees. The thin Indian driver helped her into the taxi, and they vanished green-and-white down the tree-lined street.