Report from a Place of Burning

by George Looney

  I was desperate. The smoke alarm, I said, looks to be new. Turns out that it was, that the father had gone out to the local hardware store the week before the baby was born and bought the smoke detector, and put a new battery in it and stood on a ladder while his wife was asleep on the couch in the living room to attach the detector on the ceiling right over where they had decided to place the crib. What I couldn’t say was why that was worth noticing.

  Anything else? DeGreco said.

  It was a test. DeGreco was testing me. I focused on that, on DeGreco testing me, and that let me really look at the mess in that room, that charred and smoking baby in the crib. There’s no evidence, I said, of the baby doing anything in response to being burned alive. I mean, you’d expect him to grab at the edges of the crib, to pull himself up and tear at that damn crib, but there’s nothing except for some charred marks around the body that seem to have been incidental, just proximity charring.

  DeGreco nodded, waiting.

  It took me that long to notice. I’d seen it four times before, and each time it took me a while to notice it, to remember. The arms, I said, and DeGreco put his big hand on my shoulder. Bingo, he said.

  We had not released all the information about the crime scenes to the press. It was standard practice to hold something back, something only the person who committed the crime could know. Once we had a suspect, we would need this little detail to help put the sicko away. If we ever got a suspect. After five babies, we had nothing.

  The baby’s arms, which were little more than bone with a thin layer of what might have only been ash but was actually charred skin, were crossed on top of its chest. The baby could have just been discovered in a dark tomb in Egypt somewhere, a tiny mummy. You’ve seen them. Even the child mummies, the arms are crossed over the chest in a pose of, well, calm. But this was no royal child who had died and been prepared for the afterlife by hordes of priests and attendants. This was a baby who by all indications had burned to death in his crib. If this baby turned out to be like all the others, there would be no evidence indicating he had been dead before he burned up in his crib.

  Everything else that was damned odd about these cases aside, this was the worst. A baby who burned to death, even if he’d been asleep when the fire started, should have woken up and been in such pain he would have torn at his crib and at himself and his charred corpse should show obvious signs of that struggle. These babies, the first four and this fifth, I was sure, even before any autopsy had been done, had died in the fire that left the cribs charred and everything else in the room untouched. In burning the babies, the fire had not set off a single smoke detector, and there was not a hint of struggle or of suffering about the corpses. The charred remains in fact, except of course for the fact they were burned, showed every sign of a calm death, a death that came to them in their sleep so quick there’d been no pain at all, just one breath then another and then nothing. The arms crossed over the little burnt chests was just another sign of this notion of a calm death.

  None of it made any sense, and standing in that room which had been so carefully prepared for the child who was now just a smoking corpse in his crib, I stopped thinking like a detective and remembered something I’d seen on a recent Sunday morning on some televised church service. I had just gotten home after two days without sleep, and was too exhausted to get up and change the channel, or to find the remote I hadn’t seen in days. Some very loud preacher was giving what I can only guess was his version of a sermon. He was talking about some scripture, something out of the Old Testament, back when God was a vengeful old geezer.

  Then he was talking about the babies that had been going up in flames around town. God’s wrath, he called it. I was up and the TV was off before I heard what I knew was coming, what supposed ill of our society he was going to blame for this fiery wrath of the almighty, this judgment enacted on the bodies of innocents.

  Standing in the nursery of that fifth victim, watching DeGreco turn the charred baby over to look under the body for any evidence of who had done this awful thing, or of how it had been done, I let myself think maybe what was going on was Biblical. It did make a kind of sense, after all. I mean, here we were with number five, and we still had no idea how this was being done or who could be doing it. Supernatural isn’t a word I’m used to using, or thinking, but it didn’t seem completely out of place, especially after DeGreco pried apart the little arms and called me over.

  What do you make of this, kid? he said.

  Another detail we would not release to the press. There, in the center of each tiny, blackened hand, DeGreco had discovered in each palm a patch of unburned skin that, surrounded by all that obscene charring, had the look of two wounds in the center of the palms. Stigmata, I knew, was what the unburned patches looked like, a kind of reversed stigmata, the entire rest of the baby’s body a wound. I also knew better than to say the patches looked like stigmata. That was the last thing I should say.

  Odd, was all I did say. Damn odd, I said, and snapped a couple of pictures. Was he holding something? I said, trying to be rational. Something that, though it burned finally, protected the skin it was held against long enough to leave those patches, maybe? I was trying to pull something out of the proverbial hat, I knew that, but what choice did I have?

  DeGreco just shook his head.

  Lucky thing, for me, the coroner picked that moment to call DeGreco on his cell phone. The coroner and DeGreco had known each other forever. Rumor is that the coroner introduced DeGreco to his now ex-wife, that they go back that far. The coroner on the phone gave DeGreco a better foil than me to work with.

  Yeah, DeGreco said, though I can only guess the coroner had asked if we had another burned kid on our hands. And this one, believe it or not, DeGreco said, has stigmata. There was a pause while the coroner said something and then DeGreco almost chuckled.

  Just like the others, far as I can tell, DeGreco said. What he said next caught me off guard. It wasn’t so much what he said but how he said it. I had never heard him sound so human, so vulnerable.

  Find us something, Roger, DeGreco said to the man who was headed our way in a black station wagon with the seal of the state and white lettering on its front doors. Anything. We need something.

  By the time we walked down the hall and DeGreco had used the phone in the living room to call in and to request the lugs on this line for the last month be pulled, his humanness had worn off. When the mother was brought into the living room, still crying, DeGreco was finishing his report over the phone and the husband, who was holding up his wife, barely, must have heard DeGreco say we had a fifth victim. Maybe the mother heard it too, but she was in such a place I doubt anything was registering but the crude fact of what had become of her son.

  DeGreco spoke to the man holding onto the woman whose arms looked like they were covered with a rash. I could barely hear his voice. It was a whisper in that room at that ungodly hour.

  What happened to your wife’s arms? DeGreco asked.

  The man explained that his wife had found their son and had picked him up and cradled him in her arms until the paramedics had managed, with his help, to pull his son, or what was left of him, what was left of Samuel, from her and place him back in the crib. Our son was still smoking, the man said. Her arms, he said, are burned.

  Did your wife fold his arms over his chest? DeGreco asked the husband. The wife shook her head.

  DeGreco nodded to the coroner who had come in and was standing in the hall with a leather bag draped over his arm, a demented waiter in a four-star restaurant. Everyone there wanted to be someone other than who they were, somewhere other than where they were. DeGreco gestured down the hall where the nursery was. The coroner’s grin was a ghastly thing before he headed for the nursery and the still-smoking victim.

  The paramedics came back into the house and one of them bent down to look at the woman’s arms and told us we could, if we wanted
, follow them, but that she needed to be taken to the emergency room to get the burns on her arms treated, and she had to go now. They would take her in their ambulance. You’re welcome to follow, the paramedic said and, with her husband’s help, got the woman, whose burnt arms were still in the pose of holding her child to her breasts to feed, up and out into the ambulance whose flashing lights changed the color and feel of the house and the yellow police tape strung up around the house and the yard. Not even the grass looked real in those flashing lights.

  We waited at the hospital while the woman’s arms were treated and bandaged up. DeGreco still had questions for them. He likes to cover as much as possible while things are still fresh in people’s minds, he says, before memory has a real chance to get involved and start to muck things up. So I stood there in the background, hardly saying a word, while DeGreco had the couple, the mother’s burned arms covered in ointment and gauze, go over again the details of how they had discovered what had happened to their child. It seemed wrong to me, a kind of torture.

  This wreck of a woman, whose arms were hurting from being burned by the charred and smoking body of her son, she looked over at me while DeGreco asked her and her husband the questions he felt couldn’t wait and it seemed at one point she was accusing me of something. The mother of the fifth burned baby looked at me as if I had let this happen to her son, as if I was supposed to protect him and when he needed me most I failed him. What had I been doing? the way she looked at me asked, while her son was burning up in his crib. What was more important than my baby?

  I wanted to be someone who could keep babies from going up in flames. Standing in the garish light of that emergency room while DeGreco asked this couple, whose child had just gone off like a tiny Molotov cocktail thrown in his crib, questions about how it happened, I wanted to protect her. Let her alone, I wanted to say in a voice that would make even DeGreco shut up.

  I stood there, mute, unable to make what had happened not have happened.

  Go home, kid, DeGreco, exhausted, told me outside the emergency room doors. Let’s both of us try to get some rest and start fresh on this tomorrow.

  Tomorrow we’ll see what the coroner has for us, he said. This time there’s going to be something, DeGreco said. The freak is going to have messed up and left some sign. We just have to look for his signs, DeGreco said. It was clear he was trying to convince himself.

  Funny, I thought, at home and alone except for the pretty news anchor on channel 24. The one I fall asleep with most nights. She was saying something about the farmers worrying about signs of a bad drought and they were showing the Maumee, which was low enough for the second time in the last decade, she was saying, people could walk across it from bank to bank by following the stone plateaus revealed by the drought. Isn’t it funny, I thought, how DeGreco used the male pronoun, as if only a man could be doing such a thing.

  What if there’s no sign of him because no man, or woman, could be doing this? What then?

  The Prophet and the Signs

  Signs are signs no matter the year.

  Too many these days think mystery is antiquated, no room for it in this enlightened age. An age of reason, they call it. As if reason could overcome mystery. We may change the course of a river, but we can’t predict every consequence of doing so. It might turn out the river knew, if knowledge is something a river could be said to have, better. Years after putting up the dams we may have to take them down, to return the river to the course it had chosen.

  It’s happening. We’re beginning to see what some call the limits of our knowledge. The world, it turns out, is not mute. It’s just our hearing isn’t as good as we like to think it is.

  Mystery isn’t outdated. All of this reason so many put their faith in, and it is faith, is just another form of religion.

  It’s remarkable there aren’t cathedrals for this new religion.

  But I give science credit for understanding it’s all about vision, about how things are seen. Not what they are, but how they are perceived.

  • • •

  Signs are signs no matter the location.

  The summer of my eleventh year, I spent a lot of time playing capture-the-flag with my older brother and the kids in the neighborhood. For us, this was no mere game. We spent days just setting up the battle lines and the rules of engagement. The games themselves would last a week, sometimes more. This was real, and failure had consequences.

  Being captured meant you would have bruises that could take weeks to fade. Pain was something we accepted. There were nights I would not sleep, I was in such pain. But I was respected, even by the older kids. Not once did I break. No enemy ever got information from me. And when my team would release me, I’d be rewarded for my courage with a milk shake or sometimes a whole meal from McDonald’s. Or they’d let me be the one to actually take the other team’s flag. They’d create plans that would sacrifice others to get me in position to get the flag and get back across the battlefield home.

  The battlefield often included the interstate overpass, or rather the railroad tracks under it. Those tracks ran along a gorge on one side, a place where limestone had been carved out of the earth years ago. No one was mining it by the time we lived near it. It was just an open pit, fenced in, with danger signs posted all around, and warnings against trespassing. In the spring, it would usually fill up with enough water that we would sneak through places where the fence had been cut by other kids in the past to swim in the green water. Sometimes we’d be sick for days after a swim, but that didn’t stop us from going back.

  It was during a game of capture the flag I saw the first sign. I’d been captured, and was being held prisoner at one edge of one of the massive concrete pillars that held up the highway. We were on the gorge side of the tracks, and they had me roped to the fence around the gorge while they interrogated me. There were two guards. One was yelling questions at me, asking where our flag was, where our forces were, what our strategy was, and the other was pounding me, his fists on my back, my arms, my chest. Sometimes one of them would slap my head or kick my thighs, but they were careful not to hurt me too much, in case they were captured in a rescue operation. There were rules in this game, like I said. It was okay to give the enemy bruises, but any real damage was punishable outside of the game. Besides, we were all friends, despite being at odds in the game, and, though the game was real to us, there were limits.

  It was in the midst of my interrogation we heard shouts coming from over our heads. The guard who was pounding on me stopped and told the other guard to shut up. We heard a voice shouting but couldn’t make out the words at first, nor could we see anyone. No doubt they were afraid it was a distraction for a rescue attempt, but I knew what I was hearing was not the voice of anyone on my team. It was not the voice of a teenager, of that I was certain. The three of us listened, trying to make out what the voice was saying and where it was coming from. As we listened, it became clear the voice was moving. It was getting closer.

  I was the first to see him. If, in fact, it can be said I saw him. What I saw was the light reflected off the figure, a light that was captured by my eyes and burned upside down on my optic nerve. It’s that upside-down, redrawn figure of light, translated by my brain into yet another unique image, I actually saw. I shouted and pointed out the figure to the guards. Suddenly, we were outside of the game, though they didn’t untie me. There are rules, after all.

  • • •

  You’ve all heard the dogma. Observe and theorize. Then test the theory by observation. Again and again. The more independent the observation the better, they say. But there’s the core of the deception. There’s no such thing as independent observation.

  There’s even a scientific principle about how behind every bit of so-called science there is mystery—the Uncertainty Principle, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

  For so long it was believed, yes, believed is the word, that the at
om was the smallest particle of matter. Then, of course, came the realization the atom was made up of smaller particles, and they were given names. No sooner were they given names than they were believed to be made up of even smaller particles, and down the rabbit hole we went. Like a series of Chinese boxes, matter kept opening up and opening up to reveal yet smaller particles, until it all became uncertain.

  It was in this observing of these tiny bits of matter the Uncertainty Principle was born. A principle about how observation, the act upon which all theory is predicated, the rock upon which the church of science is built, how that act is tainted, is impossible without acknowledging mystery. In short, Heisenberg’s principle says it’s impossible to know both the direction and position of any sub-atomic particle. In order to know the position of a particle in space, to observe it, what is required makes it impossible to know the direction or velocity of the particle. And vice versa. Like those dams that change the course of rivers, this little bit of “knowledge” has repercussions that ripple across every bit of what we call science and logic and reason.

  One thing it means is that observation will never provide us with an understanding of the nature of matter, of the existence of things. That at the core of everything we know is something we cannot know: mystery.