Report from a Place of Burning

by George Looney

  • • •

  Ray is still so much with me sometimes. Once, holding Gloria as her breathing returned to normal and the red around her neck faded, I listened to her tell me about her childhood. She told me the story of her best friend in third grade. How, at the end of that year, on the last day of school, her best friend, Alice was her name, Alice told Gloria her parents had told her they would be moving in a couple of days. They had told Alice to say goodbye to her friends at school, because they were going far away and would not be back. Alice told Gloria she had not told anyone else, and had waited to tell Gloria because she knew that once she told her it would happen, and she didn’t want it to happen. That day, as they waited for the bus with tears in their eyes and holding hands, Gloria said she felt like her heart was some sort of fish in her chest, kicking its tail furiously to try to swim off. Gloria said as the bus pulled up she took Alice’s face in her hands and, before Alice knew what was going on, Gloria was kissing her. Gloria said at first Alice almost pulled away but then her lips pressed back and her mouth opened just a bit and Gloria said their tongues just touched and then Alice had turned away and was getting on the bus, waving to Gloria and smiling. Gloria said that kissing Alice that day had seemed the most natural and most wonderful thing to her. She had never forgotten that kiss. Gloria likes men, don’t get me wrong. Still, the time she kissed Alice goodbye has haunted her all her life. Even now it haunts her. Am I, for her, a kind of Alice come back after all these years? It’s not just the dead I’m afraid to ask things of.

  Ray is still so much with me. After Gloria told me of kissing Alice, I told her a story. The story of how, when I was twelve, my heart stopped. I told her it was in summer, and I had just run out of the ocean and my mother was drying me with a beach towel. There were a couple of boys poking sticks at an unlucky jellyfish. Whether it was alive or dead they were too far off to tell. I told Gloria I remember hoping it was already dead so it didn’t have to be suffering the boys’ cruelty with the sticks. I told Gloria that was the last thing I remember thinking before my heart stopped.

  My mother was still toweling me dry and I collapsed against her, into her arms, the towel enfolding me like wings. I told Gloria my mother started screaming my name and then she was yelling for my father who was still out in the water. I told her my mother told me later how she laid me down on the blanket and opened my little mouth and felt around in it with her fingers for anything that might be an obstruction. She was still yelling for my father as she pushed my head back so my chin was jutting out and up and pinched my nose with her fingers still wet from my mouth. She stopped yelling my father’s name long enough to breathe into my open mouth. She said she was frantic.

  My father, she told me, was beside her then, dripping on her back. He told her to move down and start pressing her hands down on my chest while he took over breathing into my mouth. My mother told me a crowd had formed around us there on the beach. I like to think even the boys had thrown off their sticks and were in that crowd, I told Gloria. I told her my mother said she and my father worked over me for what seemed like an hour but was probably only a matter of minutes, because, she said, when I finally took a breath on my own and then another and another, I was already fine. Even though my father picked me up in his arms and carried me off the beach to where our car was parked and put me in my mother’s lap and got in the car and drove to the hospital, they knew I was fine. Though my asking them about the jellyfish, I told Gloria, did worry them a little.

  I told Gloria that after that, I thought the dead were talking to me, that I heard them talking. I told her that, though my memories are a little fuzzy, I can still remember voices saying things to me, the oddest things, and often at times that were not good times to be listening to the dead. Like in school, when I was supposed to be taking notes on what the teacher was saying, suddenly I’d be hearing some dead person talking to me, and my notes became useless after that, a mish-mash of random thoughts and ideas and questions. I told Gloria I thought I could remember the dead talking to me right up until the time I met Ray. I told her that somehow just meeting Ray made the dead leave me alone. I told Gloria that was how I knew I loved Ray, that I loved him because he got the dead to shut up.

  I don’t know why I lied like this to Gloria. Like I said, Ray is still so much with me.

  • • •

  Was I lying? Maybe that little girl whose heart stopped really was me. That’s certainly as possible as me still now and then smelling vinegar in the air despite the fact the Heinz plant has been closed down for years. The stories we tell others even when we think we’re lying might, it turns out, be true. Sometimes we just can’t say for sure.

  Maybe that’s how my brother got lost. He was thirty-three when he was led out of the building where he had worked putting pieces of plastic together. Identical pieces of plastic. Over and over. Day after day. For nine years he had put those same plastic pieces together, the exact same way. Two men led him out after securing the straightjacket around him. By the time they got there, my brother had calmed down, but they still put him in that jacket. Procedure, he told me they said to him when he asked if they really needed to.

  Sometimes, when Gloria and I are lying in her and Sam’s bed and she has her arms around me from behind, holding my arms to my body and my body to hers, I pretend her arms around me are the sleeves of the straightjacket they carted my brother off in. I imagine Gloria is a straightjacket, but I don’t struggle. Being confined that way, in my imagining of it, is a comfort.

  Though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a comfort for my brother. Still, he had lost it, he told me, and at least three co-workers had to be hospitalized, one without two of his fingers. The straightjacket must have seemed a reasonable precaution, he told me later.

  I visit him at least once a month. This is what can happen, Sis, he tells me, when the voices won’t leave you alone. When the dead keep coming to you and talking your ear off and telling you to do things. Terrible things.

  My brother has told me the dead are immune to all the drugs the doctors give him to get them to go away. When I visit him he’s just my brother, and I tell him I can’t understand why he has to stay in that place.

  I’m dangerous, Sis, he says. Or so they tell me.

  You’re not dangerous, I tell him. Just confused.

  Once he told me Ray had been by to see him the night before. This was a couple of years after Ray died. It was his delusion at work. At least, I wanted to believe that. The thought of the ghost of my husband visiting what was left of my brother was too much for me to handle.

  He asked me to give you a message, my brother told me. I watched while his forehead scrunched up like he was trying hard to remember the message exactly. The twilight zone, he said, my brother told me, isn’t far off. My brother looked at me as if what he was about to say was a question he was asking me, and not something the ghost of my husband had told him to tell me.

  I could have borne it, he said, my brother said.

  • • •

  Last night on the news another burned baby. Like the others, the police have no idea how it was done, or who did it. It’s unreal, all these babies just going off in their cribs like Roman candles. And they say nothing else burns in the rooms. They say the inside edges of the cribs are charred, but nothing else. I’ve thought about going out and visiting my brother early this month. I’ve thought about asking him if he’s heard anything about the babies, other than what he’s heard when he’s had television privileges. I’ve thought about asking my brother what the dead have to say about the babies burning up all over town.

  Do they know who’s responsible, I’d ask him. Is it one of them? I’d ask. Has Javed Iqbal come to town? I’d ask. Is the ghost of Javed Iqbal burning the babies, like he burned the pieces of the homeless children in acid after he had raped them? Tell me, brother, I’ve thought about saying, tell me what the dead know.

  I’ve thought
about it, but I’m not sure I want to know what the dead know. I’m not sure I want to hear what the dead have to say. I’m not sure why my brother is locked up and I’m still out here. At large, as they say. I’m not sure how much the dead have to say about us. The dead, too, are at large. Maybe the police don’t stand a chance. No more than any of the rest of us do, left alive.

  The Adulterer Curses the Static

  Women, it turns out, are more adept at indifference than men have been led to believe. At least some women. Certainly Angela. And if Angela is typical, women are better liars than men, too. At least, they’re better at faking emotion, which is supposed to be, after all, their domain. Angela certainly had me believing things it seems were never true.

  I remember when Angela and her husband were going on a little vacation to points west. This was not long after the morality question became moot. Of course, the only reason anything happened between us was because I was already lost. I was so in love with Angela there was no way I could maintain my stance as a moral man when she asked me to kiss her one night in the ruins of the Heinz plant, which had become a kind of home for the two of us together.

  Her home with her husband was a matter of maybe fifty yards or so to the east. In fact, from parts of the plant we could see the lit windows of the apartment where her husband was probably listening to police or fire reports over his broad band radio.

  She told me he would sit in the little room he called a den, what was really supposed to be the second bedroom of their two bedroom place. He would sit in his den and drink beer and sometimes have some chips or something else to snack on, and listen to the faint and crackling reports for hours. The bastard would leave her alone for hours, until he needed more beer and didn’t want to get up from his listening to go get it himself and would yell for her to bring him another beer, and she would. He’d stay in that den of his and leave her alone just so he could listen to pointless reports of small fires or break-ins or domestic disputes or, occasionally, a robbery or some violent assault.

  She told me whenever she would look in on him he would be sitting in front of the radio, facing it and staring, waiting for the next static-broken report. She said she asked him once what it was he was doing, listening to those blurts of static and strained voices. She said he just looked at her like she had said something in some foreign language he’d never heard before. After a moment, he told her that by listening to those reports he was participating in the life of the community at large. He was staying up on what was going on. This, he told her, as if it were the last word that needed saying, is important.

  Being with you, I told Angela when she told me this story, is what’s important. How can he rather spend time listening to a damn police radio than to you? How can he not want to be touching you and holding you and making love with you? I just can’t understand that.

  That’s what I told her, and I meant it. Angela is such an amazing woman. Her husband’s apparent lack of interest in her is something I just will never understand. Of course, it would seem that she prefers his indifference to my passion. She’s with him, after all. And pregnant with his child. And I’m alone, and stuck with training a new girl to take Angela’s place, as her husband, after she started to show, decided, I guess, that it didn’t look good, him letting her continue to work pregnant like that.

  • • •

  Not that he’s interested in spending more time with her or anything. Even though Angela has decided we can’t be lovers anymore, she still calls me at the store, and sometimes at home, to talk. It seems that even with her carrying his goddamn child he can’t be bothered to pull himself away from his police radio or whatever else it is he does to stay away from her. At least, that’s the way she presents things to me. At this point, I can’t be sure how much of what she’s telling me is the way things actually are. I can’t be sure, in fact, of anything she ever told me.

  Like that night before their vacation out west. We held each other, her in my lap, her legs wrapped around my legs, her head, when we weren’t kissing, rested on my shoulder, and she talked about how she was going to miss me, and how I had to take care of myself, make sure nothing happened to me.

  If anything happened to you, Angela told me, I’d be alone. I’d have no one to talk to.

  You’d have your husband, I said.

  She was quiet for a minute and rested her head on my shoulder. Then she kissed me and said, I’d be all alone.

  Then she asked me to make sure to look at the moon every night while she was gone. She said every night she would look up at the moon and that the two of us both looking up at the same moon would make her feel closer to me. It’ll be a kind of being together, she said, even though we’re far apart. It’ll bring us closer, she said.

  Of course I promised her I would look up at the moon every night. I told her I’d take a walk every night, walking where we had walked together, and I would look at the moon.

  It’s odd, but there was one night she was gone that I looked up at the moon and it was nearly full and the face, you know the one you see in the moon when the light is right, well the face that night I swear looked just like Angela. The moon has never been so beautiful since. I convinced myself that the moon had Angela’s face that night because we were both looking up at the moon at the same time. I told her that when she came back and she laughed and kissed me and we kept on making love, there in that place that had been ruined by fire.

  • • •

  Was that it? Were the two of us ruined by fire too, or by the tearing down of the ruins of the Heinz plant by the ash-smudged men who come in for lunch most days? Is the indifference in Angela really ashes and smoke, or did the fire ever burn there at all? Maybe for Angela the fire never got near the town inside her. Maybe it was slowed and stopped by fire fighters long before it became more than a dim glow at night on the horizon. Maybe her husband listened to the chatter of the fire fighters through the static of his radio. Hell, maybe the people in the town inside Angela never even smelled smoke.

  What’s going on back there? I yell into the back, since there are no customers in the store. It smells like something’s burning.

  Under control, one of the cooks yells back. It’s Tim, which lets me relax a bit. Tim knows what he’s doing.

  I used to be able to say I knew what I was doing. Angela fixed that. I used to be a moral person, a person who would never touch another man’s wife.

  Love has its own morality. Loving Angela made touching her not only a desire but moral. Not that that makes sense, not that it’s reasonable. But then, love isn’t reasonable. Or practical. Despite what Angela may have convinced herself of, in order to stay with her husband. In order to get pregnant with his child.

  Angela would not, of course, agree with me, about the whole indifference thing. She doesn’t see herself as being indifferent. She’s just being practical.

  He was there first, she’s told me. As if linearity matters when it comes to the heart.

  I want to make her see order has nothing to do with this. I want to tell her love isn’t concerned with what others think. I want to close the store and walk over to the apartment where she’s watching TV and he’s in his den, calling for another beer, the static on that radio of his a history of indifference. I want to take her hand when she comes to the door to see who’s knocking and, with a finger to my lips, I want to pull her out of that place of cold ash and distance and loss and take her home.

  I would place her on my bed after taking off her clothes and spend the night massaging her legs and whispering a name to her rounded belly. In the morning the child kicking for the first time inside her would be our child, and she would kiss me and we would spend the whole day touching one another in bed and making plans for our daughter’s future.

  • • •

  The books aren’t balancing tonight. Something’s wrong, and it looks like I’ll have to stay late to straighten things
out. Angela hasn’t called. The kids up front are talking about another baby burned in its crib. I think it’s up to eight now.

  I’d tell whoever is going around setting babies on fire that cursing God doesn’t work. I don’t think he’s listening.

  Though maybe that’s not it. Maybe it’s just we can’t curse loud enough to make it through the static.

  The Mother Paints Cathedrals of Fire

  Nothing but theories, that’s all there is anymore. I try to believe it was different once, that there were at least a handful of certainties in the world, one or two things you could count on no matter what. Not this constant and absolute doubt; this is not how things have always been. I sense that, as if my intuition about tragedy is coming back to me. But I can’t imagine what it must be like, having something you can trust won’t turn on you.

  Harlan, I know, worries about me. Sometimes, when I’m painting and he’s at home, he sneaks outside so he can look in to the room where Samuel burned without so much as a whimper, the room now full of canvases in various stages, all of them pieces of one canvas too large to be contained by this small space, this space of fires in the midst of which his wife sits and works on one canvas or another. I can hear him as he steps carefully, trying to avoid making any sound, trying to go unnoticed.

  He’s not graceful, Harlan. He’d make an awful burglar. He’s so awkward he’d end up in prison over and over and any neighborhood he was casing would be filled with people who would smile and wave to him, sure they and all their worldly possessions were safe so long as it’s only him, Harlan the clumsy, Harlan the inept. Harlan the harmless.

  The other night in bed I asked him why he sneaks outside to look in to watch me paint. Why don’t you just come in and sit down and watch? I asked him.