After that, photos of Franny were distributed to area hardware stores, convenience stores and drugmarts with a warning: Do not sell flammable materials to this individual.
“You’d tell me if you heard anything, wouldn’t you Franny? If you knew someone was playing with fire?”
“I don’t know that I would.”
“Why not?”
“Did you know that carbon is the chemical building block of all known life on the earth? There are only so many carbon atoms on our planet—no more today, right now, than when it all started.”
“I didn’t know that.” I didn’t like when she got this way.
“It’s true. Things get born, they exist, expire, break down to their elements again. Carbon atoms don’t die, they just get recycled–they go on to be part of new life. So you see, all of us are cobbled together out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. You could have a trilobite’s tail in your elbow, Blake, or a cell from Attila the Hun’s moustache in your eye. Any creature to have taken on life, grown, crawled, run, learned, known, felt, loved or any of that. Carbon. Isn’t that a wonderful idea?”
“It’s not an idea. It’s a fact.”
Franny chewed her lip. I waited for the blood to come. “But you agree that it’s wonderful?”
“Sure. I can agree.”
“So you agree that when things burn, they get brought back to the beginning? The awfulness is gone. From that, something beautiful can spring up . . . because too much of what we have is ugly. I don’t mean ugly on the eyes, brother. Ugly on the heart. Evil and cruelty and all those things that gut the soul. But when you burn them, just the potential is left. Just carbon, and carbon isn’t inherently anything.”
“Oh, Fran . . . don’t the creatures living right now, you and me and our family and friends—don’t we deserve to go on living until nature decides?”
Franny had started to cry, which she did often and effortlessly. Her heart was an imperfect pearl, lacking the needed nacre.
“I wish it could be. Really, Blake, I do. But nature doesn’t have its head screwed on tight. I wish the whole world would burn. You and me, too, even though I love you so much. I wish the earth was a black ball, all charred up. It could be that way for a few million years and then things would start to spring up. Things would be better.”
Franny’s tears ceased abruptly, like a sprinkler shutting off. She sipped her Coke and stared at me over the rim with her head cocked to one side.
“Oh, hello, Blake.”
Cataract City kept on burning. Houses, schools, walk-in clinics. The Saint Ann church on Buchanan Avenue collapsed on itself; the church bell crashed through the narthex and melted into a pool of stannite.
My boss took a stress leave; there were rumblings he’d be fired. I believed he would accept a quiet shit-canning: almost overnight, his hair had gone white.
Nobody saw anything. For all anyone could tell the fires had kindled out of pure nothingness. The citizenry reacted with customary apathy: as if all this was the repayment of some well-earned debt.
The Niagara Gazette circulated a theory that we were under attack from militant anarchists—What Are Your Demands? one breathless headline read—until their printing press got torched. The overtly religious believed Our Boy (he’d earned the capitalization by then) was the Devil himself. Many were inclined to agree.
The other night a squat apartment block, the Portwood Arms, burnt to the ground. Our Boy managed to string fifteen jugs around the Portwood’s perimeter. By the time the residents clued in, the fire had curled around the gas mains, which ruptured in gouts of blue flame and scattered the exterior brickwork over a three-block radius. Flames swept up the telephone poles to the transformers, which exploded in a cacophony of sparks, the creosote-inlaid wires catching like fuses as lines of gibbous whiteness—the distinct colour of an electrical fire—zipped from pole-to-pole across the city grid.
By the time the fire trucks arrived, residents were leaping from their balconies. Snapped ankles, spiderwebbed kneecaps. The firefighters did their best to catch the jumpers with the trampoline but some of the leapers were more ash than skin. The firemen were beat-to-hell, anyway; the stationhouse poles were getting more use than the ones at the strip clubs down Lundy’s Lane—one of which had caught fire midway through the Saturday night disrobing: bucktoothed creeps and willowy half-naked women had spilled from the exits like solar flares released from a sun’s glowing-hot corona.
I visited the burn ward. Gurneys strung down the hallways, air hung with the acrid tang of silver sufadiazine burn liniment.
Clifford Meggs, said the name on the chart clipped to the bed. Thirty-eight years old. Resided in suite 344 of the Portwood Arms. Junior partner at a local law firm. Drove a Saab—why the hell would that be on the chart?
Meggs was a WASP but parts of him were presently black. Joseph-Conrad-Heart-of-Darkness black, except without that beautiful Nubian shine. Meggs was more charcoal-briquette black. When silicite sand is heated to extreme temps it becomes obsidian: black glass. Human skin performs pretty much the same trick.
“Got a smoke?” Meggs asked.
His hands were swaddled in bandages. I lit one of mine, inhaled to get the ember aglow, set it between his lips. Meggs just let it burn.
I tapped the IV bag hung on a pole above his bed. “Methadone?”
Meggs said: “No pussyfooting around, bro. I told them to give me whole hog. Morphine. Self-administered.”
“How?” I asked, nodding at his mummified hands.
“Button’s between my toes.”
Gingerly, I tented the sheet off his feet. Son of a gun. Meggs smiled—only an incremental lift at the edges of his mouth on account of the terrible burns on his neck.
“I’m a fire investigator, Mr. Meggs. I wanted to ask you about the other night.”
For an instant I thought my request had surprised him. Then I realized he’d be wearing that same semi-shocked expression until his eyebrows grew back.
“I didn’t leave my stove on, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“No, no, we’re positive it was an outside instigator. What I’m interested in, Mr. Meggs, is what you might have seen.”
Meggs’ eyes closed. His eyeballs quivered behind vein-wormed lids. Without opening them he said, “Ash me, would you?”
I tapped the ash off. His eyes didn’t open as his lips accepted it.
“Thanks. Now you’re asking did I see anything. The answer is yes . . . but you’re going to think I’m crazy.”
“You seen the state of our city lately?”
“Point taken. Well, Mr. . . .”
“Kennedy. Blake Kennedy.”
“Well, Blake, I believe I saw a woman in a nightgown.”
My heart gave a hard little kick—ba-dum!
“My kitchen window faces south over the Falls, right? I leave the window open at night to catch the rumble of the water over the rooftops. I was at the window nursing a beer when I saw, or think so anyway . . . yeah, a woman. In a nightdress. Some kind of gauzy material that you could juuuust about see through, but not quite. . . .”
“Was she—?”
Meggs cracked one eye. “Carrying a torch? Yeah, although I can tell you weren’t going to ask me that. A lit torch just like an Olympian. It left a contrail same as a jet leaves high in the sky. I’ve never seen anything move so fast . . . a heartbeat after she passed from sight, flames were climbing up to kiss me goodnight.”
“Could you describe her?”
“Anymore than I just did?” Meggs rotated the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. “Not so that it’d stand up in court. But if you plunked her down in front of me?” He gnawed agitatedly at the filter. The blackness on his neck cracked open to reveal shocking veins of red. His drip must’ve been dialled sky-high. “But I don’t think she’s the one you’re looking for.”
“Come
again?”
“You’re looking for one person, right? A lone firebug.”
“The assumption is—”
“What if it’s a bunch of people, bro? A whole city?”
“I don’t take your meaning.”
Meggs swallowed. The working of his Adam’s apple resembled the tunnelling of a beetle under crusted soil. “I’m going to tell you something, but if you hold me to it later I’ll say it was the drugs I’m boated up on, right?”
“Go on.”
“The other night I followed a stranger home. Yeah, I know. Weird. Didn’t know the guy, just passed him on the street like I’ve passed ten thousand other guys . . . but something about this guy was different. Nothing you could put a finger on. I was just . . . curious. Wanted to see where he lived. What kind of car he drove. If he had a family. I followed him down Ancaster to his house on Harvard. He went inside. I was alone with myself again.”
Meggs cadged another smoke off me. He hadn’t smoked the first one, just let it go to ash between his lips.
“I walked back towards my own home. But I kept thinking about the guy. He had a pigeon-toed gait. That intrigued me. I wanted to see him again. But the only way I’d see him . . . this strangest thought entered my mind. The only way I’d see him again was through fire.”
Meggs’ face contorted. “I can’t tell you what I was thinking. I can only tell you what I did, which was find myself at the PetroCan station off Harvard filling a jerrycan.”
He shivered; the flesh split open across his forehead. I wanted to tell him to calm down but I needed to know.
“I had this . . . fantasy, is the only word for it. If I set his house on fire, he’d jump into my arms. I’d save him. He’d be grateful and we’d . . . the fantasy dissolved from there. I came to—like, from a dream—at the gas station. High-test was spilling over the lip of the jerrycan and soaking my shirtsleeve.”
My hand groped under the sheets and found the button between his toes. I pushed it. I pushed it again. Again.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. It’s okay.”
“Jesus,” Meggs rasped. “You can’t. . . .”
His voice trailed to a thin whisper then cut off entirely. I caught the cigarette as it slipped from his lips. I pinched off the ember between my thumb and forefinger.
I fixated on the black spots on Meggs. The skin underneath shone baby-pink. Fresh green shoots could push themselves up from that dark loam, right? A new version breathing itself into existence.
They burnt down the barber shops. The air hung with the reek of fricasseed hair.
They torched three firetrucks—half the city’s fleet. They burnt in the firehouses while the firefighters slept upstairs. A parking lot full of police cruisers went off like chained firecrackers. Ambulances next. A city bus rolled down the street with flames licking from its blown-out windows, shedding passengers from its doors, the driver nothing but a blackened effigy heat-welded to the shotgun seat.
They. Had to be, you know? That kind of wide-ranging destruction . . . team effort, had to be.
The National Guard came in. They strung themselves down the Niagara river, bivouacking against the head of the Falls. What did soldiers know about fighting fires? Nothing, it turned out.
Someone lit up the whale tank at Land of Oceans. Floated a sheen of mineral oil on the show pool’s surface and set it ablaze. The whale, Neeka, couldn’t surface to take a breath through her blowhole; the ambient gasses would have roasted her lungs. She suffocated.
I called CAMH to speak to my sister.
“Were you out the other night?”
“No, Blake. They don’t let me out unsupervised.”
“That doesn’t mean you weren’t out, does it?”
“Don’t talk to me like an infant, please.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you worried about?”
“Can’t you see, Franny? The city’s on fire.”
“Of course I can see. I saw it all along.”
“What the hell are you—?”
She hung up on me. She always did when I used curse words. A minute later the phone rang. “Franny?”
All I could hear were snakelike whisperings.
My job became redundant. I’d become an Armageddon Investigator—and really, what value was that at the end of times? Like a weatherman sticking his hand out the window to tell you it’s raining.
Nobody left town. Oh, there was the odd short-timer with kin outside city limits who took a powder—but the locals, we all stayed. You’d see their haunted faces hovering behind their windows, scanning the night for blooms of flame. I stayed, too. Even considered buying a fiddle.
The forests banding the river went next. Silhouettes of flame danced upon the surface dark of the water. Afterwards the trees were nothing but charred pikes sticking out of the ground. The daggery teeth of some enormous subterranean monster.
The army went in to clean up the mess; when their utility shovels bit into the earth, fresh flames leapt up: the fire was still smoldering in the tree roots, waiting for the ground to open up and let it out again. Men died, though the Army never said just how many.
The gunner on a patrolling Humvee shot an old man in an alleyway. Apparently he’d snuck out to smoke his pipe—his wife refused to let him smoke indoors, figuring if her house was earmarked for ashes it oughtn’t be her hubby who did it. The gunner was twenty-one years old and by all accounts flighty as a hummingbird. He opened up with the roof-mounted .50cal, pumping a belt of copperjacket rounds into the alley. There wasn’t much left to bury.
The Army pulled up stakes. Ostensibly they were re-strategizing, generating a fresh tactical matrix, but they were abandoning us. They were fighting ghosts and losing badly. The city and those left in it were collateral damage.
In the end it was just the good people of Cataract City, and them . . . which might have been us all along.
Backdrafts form the backbone of any firefighter’s nightmares.
Picture a room. One window, one door. Hardwood floor. One big overstuffed chair—a La-Z-Boy or like that.
Say that chair catches fire. It’ll burn merrily, creating thick hot smoke that spreads across the ceiling. Embers will ignite the hardwood veneer, bubbling and pocking the laminate, burning between the slats.
The gasses will evolve—that’s the scientific term: become saturated with heat, turn flammable.
A strange thing will happen: the flames will drop, like a gas range turned down low. All you’ll see is the barest ripple: incandescent blue waves flickering over the floor. The fire has used up the oxygen, you see. It’s starving. But at the same time it’s intensifying, each molecule tightening. It’s finding just enough air to survive: it’ll pull it in from under the doorway and around the windowsill. The fire’s a cockroach, doing anything to survive.
The fire becomes the equivalent of a man trapped underwater. If he stays under too long he’ll die—and so it is with fire: in a few days you could open the door and all you’ll get is a buffet of warm wind. But if you open it when the fire’s desperate, let it take a big breath. . . .
A backdraft is when a sleeping fire awakes. Its harbinger is a comical whooooof, like the bark of a Saint Bernard. Those evolved gasses ignite and expand: a quintillion superheated balloons bursting. Nobody can describe the experience of a backdraft: the first breath you take—a shock-inhalation—will broil your lungs. Backdrafts don’t leave witnesses.
The horror of a backdraft is that you never see it coming—but it’s been there a long time. Waiting for you. Primed. It waits in the places you’ve known all your life. Those rooms of fondest acquaintance. The places you’ve felt most safe.
I walked the shattered city to find her. The blackness of the earth leeched into the sky, a dark imprint on the undersides of the clouds. I knelt beside a little pile of sticks that someone—perhaps a child—had
assembled before abandoning them.
I ran a strike-anywhere match along the sidewalk and touched flame to tinder. Idly I watched it burn.
Franny’s facility was empty. The staff had deserted it. Rooms lay vacant. Beds had been torched down to the naked springs.
I found her on the roof. The city stretched down the alluvial slope to the Falls, which sparkled whitely in the twilight. It was the only place I’d ever known. Born at Niagara Gen, played Little League ball at the Lion’s Club diamond, kissed Laura Crowchild on the bleachers behind Westlane High. All ashes now.
“Hello, Blake.”
“Hello, Fran.”
“Did you know,” she said, “that we’re all the same, chemically speaking? Everything starts as hydrogen. Every living thing on earth. Carbon and nitrogen and oxygen—the chemical building blocks of life.”
“You’ve told me this already, Franny.”
“No, that was different. Listen. Please. These chemicals came out of a fusion process that takes place in the centre of suns, where the heat is twenty-seven million degrees. This heat splits the hydrogen into carbon, into nitrogen, into oxygen. Humans are one of a trillion atomic byproducts of that intense heat. Think about it, Blake: we all hail from stardust.”
“That’s a nice thought.”
“It is, isn’t it? But we fuck it up. It’s our nature.”
When we were kids Franny used to pinch her skin hard enough to draw blood. When I asked why, Franny said she was waiting for it to shed off the way a snake’s did. She hoped one night it would fall away and underneath would be a new face, not her own. I’d wondered: why would she ever wish to be something other than what she was?
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