Imaginarium 3

by Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall (ed) (v5. 0) (epub)

  A few of those fire-gutted houses stayed that way for years; as a kid I remember these whistling black skeletons dotting the city grid, charred plots where the sunlight went to die. Fire could re-shape any city—take away its profile, reduce and flatten it, rob the concrete memories of a place. The ultimate eraser.

  I was a bit of a firebug myself. What boy isn’t? I’d light rolls of paper caps with a magnifying glass. Make a homemade flamethrower by holding a lighter up to a spray-can of Pledge. Lord! Small wonder a lick of flame didn’t travel back up the nozzle, ignite the pressurized contents and blow my face off. But I don’t suppose I’m the first guy to have used up eight of his nine lives in boyhood.

  Turns out I wasn’t even the biggest firebug in our family.

  That I’d become a fireman isn’t exactly shocking; a lot of firefighters were fire-setters as boys. The polarity shifts: you want to stop fires rather than start them—but firemen end up setting a lot of fires, anyway, under the auspices of knowing thine enemy. You learn its tricks and tendencies in order to conquer it.

  Which is a mistaken belief: you can’t conquer fire any more than you can any classical element. Such forces are immortal and unfeeling. All you can hope is to divert them from humanity.

  I was a firefighter—a Jake, as we call each other—right out of college, a job I held fifteen years. Then I snapped an ankle fighting an air-fed flashover in the Hot Box: a three-storey metal latticework where we staged controlled blazes. The sound of my ankle fracturing was like a pistol fired into wet sand. It healed bad. I couldn’t meet the baseline physical competencies. Chief said: Sorry, Blake, but you got to hand over your axe.

  So I don’t fight fires. I investigate them. I’m the aftermath now, sifting the ashes for the hows and wherefores. The whys you may never know—that’s something else you’ve got to make peace with.

  Lately I’ve been busy. The city’s burning again.

  Detta Wilson. Name of the latest victim. Odetta’s the name on her birth certificate but she was Detta to her friends. Seventy-four years old. Cashiered for forty years at the Shopper’s Drug Mart on Drummond. Devoted parishioner at First Evangelical. Widowed with two loving adult children. Black, but race didn’t appear to have any bearing. Having a busted smoke detector and being a sound sleeper that did have bearing.

  The incendiary rig was a plastic milk jug full of gasoline and a homemade wick. The pyro poked holes around the bottle-mouth to let some of the fumes escape.

  It’s a dead-simple device: light the wick, leave it on someone’s doorstep and walk away. It won’t ignite immediately—gasoline itself won’t burn, you see; only its vapours do. The gas actually acts as a coolant, putting the brakes on the eventual combustion. That jug smolders away like a camp lantern until the flame dips inside, melts the plastic and lets that fuel escape.

  The gas would have caught with a soft whuumph like the wind bellying a boat sail. Next the fire would have been chewing up the latticework to where Detta lay slumbering.

  It pissed me off—all of it, but the method pissed me off the worst. Three liters of gas in a milk jug, an old rag for a wick. Punch some holes in the plastic like you would in a jar lid to keep an insect alive. Light it and leave. By the time it did its damage our boy would’ve calmed his wild eyes and sweated off the greasy stink of gasoline.

  Three bucks’ worth of material and a seventh grader’s grasp of science. Poof—a good person gone to vapour.

  Our boy was a dog who’d learned a very simple trick. A trick he’d performed eleven times in the past six months by my count.

  “We got to ferret this firebug out,” the Chief Inspector told us. “Every bug’s got a routine. Suss out this nut’s.”

  Problem being, our boy didn’t hold to any pattern. Tenement rowhouses, brownstones, duplexes. Single-family dwellings, apartment foyers, warehouses that lay uninhabited but for the rats. Men and women, geriatrics and kids, black and white and red and yellow. I’d stuck pushpins into a map of the city for each site he’d torched: hopelessly random. He operated by no known logic—not even the herky-jerk logic of a pyro. Our boy seemed satisfied to see things go up in smoke; the “what” made no nevermind to him.

  I returned to Detta’s house the day after it burned. She’d made it out alive but succumbed to smoke inhalation a few hours later. It was mid-afternoon, wedges of terra-cotta sunlight burning between gaps in the city skyline.

  The fire was slowly dying in the house: a thousand sly cracklings and crimpings as the heat seeped from scarred metal and wood. It had burnt the east- and south-facing walls off Detta’s home. The brickwork had checked its progress in the other directions, so the fire had done what fire always does: it wormed its way between the floors, feeding on the dust and hair and seventy-odd years’ worth of dead skin trapped under the boards—my old instructor told us that a human being sheds nine pounds of skin per year.

  Old Man’s Beard? he’d said. Yellowed newspapers? Dry human skin has those beat all to hell. Skin’s the ultimate tinder.

  What remained was a near-perfect cross-section of the interior: the kitchen and bathroom and master bedroom laid out, the contents smoke-damaged but intact. Detta’s clawfoot tub tilted at an impossible angle from the charred second-storey floorboards. Her nightgown fluttered on a hook near the bedroom window, which firefighters had smashed to let smoke escape.

  It reminded me of the Barbie Dreamhouse my sister had as a kid, the one that split open down the middle to present its guts.

  I grabbed my kit and bent under the yellow police tape. The fire had trickled off the porch to ignite the dry lawn; my boots crunched over cooked grass. The branches of a mulberry bush hung in blackened spears, the ribs of a denuded umbrella.

  The porch was ash. I braced my palms on the foundation and powered myself up to where the doorway once stood. The structure had been hosed off—water dripped off the scorched cornices and the obsidian-dark points of shattered glass—but the latent heat lay trapped in the brick. The fire turned Detta’s house into a kiln.

  Investigate enough arson cases and you’ll realize just how reductive fire can be. All things, be they natural or forged by the hand of man, have colours and textures. Fire robs them of that. Objects either become light as ash or attain a shocking heaviness: after a restaurant blaze I’d found a stack of cast-iron skillets smelted into a solid mass, so heavy I couldn’t lift it. A vulcanized sheen gets draped over everything: like it’s all been dipped in a pool of rubber at a radial tire factory. That breed of blackness hurts your eyes. Your rods and cones get starved for colour.

  I stepped over the floorboards to the wooden bannister railing, now just a jagged black spike. The carpeting on the stairs had melted and fused to the underlying wood. The billowing, circular smoke pattern on the walls indicated that the fire had carried itself swiftly up the staircase before its progress had been checked by the low ceiling, creating a dead zone of air circulation and denying it the oxygen it needed to thrive.

  Detta had two means of escape: the upper-storey windows or the stairs. She hadn’t jumped. But the staircase would have been consumed in flames by the time she’d woken up. . . .

  I flipped open the kit and grabbed a few surgical pads. I blotted the ash-thickened water on the stairs. I sprinkled the staircase with flashing powder and let it settle. Then I switched on the hydrocarbon detector.

  People believe a fire erases all signs of evidence. Not so. Sure, plenty of clues get incinerated—witnesses too, sadly—but inspectors have our ways and means. The hydrocarbon detector displayed trace amounts of carbonized natural matter on any surface. In most cases, that meant human skin.

  The detector picked up footprints. Tiny, elegant footprints, one on each stair. Detta had run down them while they were on fire. I pictured her at the top of the staircase staring into the crackling glow. Her eyes would have been wide, the eyes of any creature facing such a killing element. I pictured her rushing down the stairs, taki
ng them one at a time, trying to tiptoe maybe, the flames curling under her flannels, licking between her lips to blister her lungs. . . .

  Twelve stairs. Twelve footprints. Twelve swathes of flesh in the exact shape of feet, like boot-prints in the snow, each one incrementally smaller than the last.

  Detta’s skin had fused to the stairs instantaneously—these are known as thermal fusion burns, when the trauma occurs deep in the subcutaneous skin tissues—and she’d have torn her burnt flesh away as she progressed. That raw skin would have hit the second stair, fused, torn free again. Her feet became smaller and smaller, the way a Russian Doll shrinks as you unpack it. Had the staircase been long enough, I suppose Detta would have run her feet clean off.

  Did our boy even know what hell he was wreaking? He worshipped at the altar of Vulcan, and his god was a violent one. Vulcan would like nothing so dearly as to tear the world up in flames and stand by as it burns.

  The next day I drove to the CAMH facility on Dorchester road. My baby sis, Franny, had been a resident for nearly twenty years. I wouldn’t use the word incarcerated, but they didn’t exactly throw the doors open and let her stroll around free-and-easy.

  My sister’s the sweetest, most trusting and gentle soul—but she’s wrong upstairs. Soft in the attic, as people around here would say. Or fucked in the head—although I’d go to war with any man who said that of Franny, despite it being the literal truth.

  Some people aren’t built for the daily rigors of life, is all. Franny had this innate connection to the weak and the innocent. The beasts of the field. Starving orphans on TV. They wrecked her. She didn’t understand that modern life . . . just to exist in it requires a certain hard-heartedness, right? You had to function within the awfulness surrounding you, divorcing your soul from the very worst of it. But if you kept your soul too distant—if it became a buoy tethered to your corporeal being—well, you became a sociopath just like our boy. Franny never achieved that necessary separation. Never formed a bulwark around her heart.

  My shoes made no sound. The tiles were made from special rubber that cut down on the tak-tak of hardsole shoes, on account of some residents being peculiar about sharp noises. The TV in the dayroom was bolted to the wall too high for anyone to fiddle with the channels; the CBC was broadcasting an old episode of Seeing Things.

  Two guys were playing Chinese Checkers. The one in the eyepatch kept putting the marbles in his mouth; his partner snorted like this was an everyday occurrence and said: “Stick them up your asshole, why don’t you, and lay a fucking egg.” His opponent seemed to be legitimately considering this prospect until the big bull orderly said: “Don’t even think about it, Gene. If I have to go digging again I’m gonna stick a cork in you when I’m done.”

  Franny sat at a patio table draped in a big yellow parasol despite the fact we were indoors. Her face broke open in pure sunshine when she saw me. Franny was the most austerely beautiful woman—despite what she’d done to herself, she’d never lost her looks. With her hair swept back and halogens catching the crystalline blue of her eyes she had the wintery beauty of Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder.

  “Look at you,” she said. “A million bucks.”

  “You look like a billion bucks.”

  “You look like a trillion, like—”

  “Infinity.”

  We’d spoken it at the same time. Jinx.

  “So, Fran—, I—”

  “You broke the peace, Blake,” she said solemnly. “You owe me a Coke.”

  I paid for two sodas from the vending machine. Franny’s hair was tied back today. My eyes oriented on the scar above her temple. My father’s gopher gun had made it.

  The day it happened we’d gone to the zoo. Franny wanted to see the polar bears and the naked mole rats. The animals were mostly lazing in the shade of their enclosures—all except the jaguar, who paced its pen as if committed to a ritual, patrolling the same circuit so doggedly that it had carved a ring in the grass.

  “What’s the matter with the big black cat?” Franny had asked our father.

  “It’s just on guard, dear. Protecting its cubs.”

  “I don’t see any babies.”

  The jaguar bit into the marbled mass of its shoulder, fangs worrying right through its fur. Blood flowed over its black coat like oil. It left bloody pawprints in the dirt. Later I’d learn this kind of self-abuse was common amongst big cats in captivity. A reaction to the narrowing of their world and the bafflement of their primal instincts. The thrill of the hunt was gone, right? It drove them batshit.

  Franny couldn’t stand to see innocent creatures in anguish—because really, what had the jaguar ever done? It’d been sunning itself on the Serengeti plains, picking its teeth with a springbok antler, content in the elemental way of a creature who is perfectly in sync with the life it was meant to lead and then wa-bow! some Great White Asshole in a pith helmet shot a dart in its ass. Next thing it’s 5,000 miles from its ancestral home eating boiled horsemeat at the end of a zookeeper’s pole.

  Franny could sense that animal’s loss instinctually. It drove her batshit, too. And she was already halfway there to begin with.

  On the drive home dad tried to comfort Franny but she was inconsolable. A wonder she didn’t dry up like an old leaf, all the tears she shed. When we got back she snuck upstairs, got the rifle out of dad’s closet, chambered a .22 shell, put it to the side of her head and pulled the trigger.

  I recall hearing the pop! of the gun and next she’d wandered into my room with blood blurting out of the perfect little hole above her temple, smiled the sweetest smile you’d ever seen. Next she laid down like a girl falling softly asleep in a field of clover.

  Once she’d been taken to the hospital and stabilized, I’d contemplated what she’d done. I couldn’t even conceive of killing myself. I mean to say the act itself seemed impossible. At that age I was still wrapping my head around the notion of being alive, the hows and whys of that miracle. The word suicide was foreign to me. Our world was so wide-open—why would anyone want to cut themselves off from it with a bullet through the head?

  But my twelve-year-old sister had done it. And so that knowledge became a particularity of my own existence.

  What she’d done stunned doctors. The bullet travelled through her pituitary gland and cleaved the hypothalamus. About two tablespoons of grey matter had been pulped. A perfect lobotomy. She was instantly cured. Franny was left without a care on earth.

  “Did you bring a book of matches?” she asked me.

  “No, Franny. You know I didn’t.”

  “You said you would.”

  “You know I couldn’t in good conscience. Not after all that happened, sis.”

  “What happened?” she said, as if she really didn’t know.

  “You and matches don’t agree.”

  She crossed her arms tight and said, “Oh, pooh.”

  She was sweating, which was another aftereffect of the bullet. She sweated slowly but continuously, like an aged cheese—most heavily when fire was involved.

  The brain is a subtle organ and it breaks in subtle ways. By most yardsticks Franny was truly better off. The angst and existential dread fled. But after the bullet you could light a fire in front of her and she’d just watch it burn.

  Before the accident—the whole family referred to it as such, even though it was like calling a state execution an accident—Franny was afraid of fire. The first time she’d caught me on the porch burning the edges of the White Pages with a magnifying glass, her hands had fluttered like startled birds.

  “You’re going to burn yourself,” she said. “You’ll need skin graphs like Michael Jackson!”

  Jackson had recently burnt his hair off on the set of a Pepsi commercial. Franny—who was highly intelligent but very literal—envisioned a team of eggheads hovering over the immolated pop superstar, plotting graphs on his skin.

  But after the accident her
fascination with fire verged on obscene. A bizarre by-product of her brain circuits being so hastily rewired. She’d collect twigs fallen off the backyard maple and lit fires on the grass. She stole coins from my father’s pockets to buy convenience store Bics. I’d find her on the porch with a Zippo, her nostrils dilated to inhale the perfume of lighter fluid, sparking the flywheel with her thumb but not quite hard enough to light the wick. When I got older I’d come to recognize the look on her face: pre-orgasmic.

  She began disappearing at night. At about that same time, the reports had begun to surface.

  “Can I ask you something, Franny?”

  She traced her finger around the rim of the Coke can, dabbed her wet fingertip on her throat. “Of course, silly.”

  “Someone’s been setting fires, Fran. A lot of them.”

  Franny’s hands clutched the table’s edge. Her knuckles whitened.

  A rash of suspicious fires coincided with Franny’s midnight forays. Nothing serious: dumpster fires, or a stack of pallets incinerated on a warehouse loading dock. But anyone with an understanding of pyromania could spot an escalating boldness.

  One July night I awoke to the smell of smoke. I went to Franny’s room and found her lying on top of the covers. Her nightgown was stained with sweat. The pads of her feet were black with ash.

  “Don’t tell,” she said.

  But I’d told, despite it feeling like a betrayal. I couldn’t shake the image of Franny dashing down dark streets in the witching hours, her white nightgown fluttering around her bare ankles, a bottle of butane in one hand and her Zippo in the other. A beautiful wraith setting the city ablaze.

  “Who’s setting fires, Blake?”

  “Well, Franny, if I knew who I’d stop him.”

  “Why?”

  “What he’s doing is dangerous. People have died.”

  Franny stared at her lap.

  I said, “Has anyone here . . . have you talked to anyone about fires lately?”

  She shook her head in a vicious side-to-side. Her gown slipped to one side to uncover the burn scar over her clavicle. The skin was the mottled pink of carnival taffy. She’d done it to herself in the facility’s washroom, sprinkling hardware-store thermite on the toilet seat and lighting it. The reaction fused the plastic to the porcelain, sending up a cone of superheated gasses that burnt through muscle and fascia to scorch the wing-shaped bones next to her throat. The wall of her carotid artery had ruptured but the afterburn fused it shut; she’d only lost a few pints rather than the whole bottle.