Alan Russell - Burning Man

We finally made it to the front of the room, but my torture didn’t end there. I had to stand while the chief offered up more platitudes. Finally, at his signal, I lowered my head and he placed the medal around my neck. Chief Ehrlich didn’t dub me with a sword, but the ceremony still felt knightlike. I found one more use for skin grafts. No one could see me blush. As the medal was draped over me, applause filled the big room.

After the chief was finished with me, he dropped to a knee and draped a similar medal around Sirius’s neck. The crowd went crazy over that and then went even crazier when Sirius extended a forepaw for the chief to shake. I didn’t tell him to do it. Sirius acted on his own volition, but the chief must have thought I directed him. As the moment was captured by the media, the chief was smart enough to know that the picture of top cop and hero dog was going to land him on the front page of every newspaper in the country. He could also count on the spot getting him two minutes on local television, and thirty seconds on national.

In the glow of that coup and while basking in the applause, the chief put his arm around my shoulder and whispered to me, “When you come back, Gideon, whatever position you want, you’ve got.”

The goddamn fire kept reaching for us. The blast furnace was every-fucking-where. A frustrated tear escaped my eye; the droplet sizzled on my cheek. I tried to hold my panic in check; my partner was bleeding out and I didn’t know where to go. The fire seemed to be chasing us. We moved away from the worst of the flames but couldn’t escape the smoke. It billowed, writhed and constricted; the black snake squeezed my lungs. Seeing anything was next to impossible. My eyes felt as if they’d been punched out. I struggled for air and it seemed as if I was only swallowing fire. My insides burned; my flesh was burning. In my arms my partner wasn’t moving. With one hand I slapped at Sirius’s fur, trying to put out a fire fueled by his coat. With my other hand I held him tight, along with my gun. If the Strangler made a run for it, even hell wouldn’t stop me from shooting him. And then, from all sides of us, a wall of fire rose up and dared us to pay the price of passage.

My partner’s muzzle pushed at my face, and my first thought was that he was still alive, thank God. And then I realized that Sirius was there at my side to deliver me from my after-fire. The jolt of awareness that came with knowing I was in the here and now made me feel as I had just jumped into ice water. My flesh stopped sizzling and I gasped, taking in air.

And then there came to mind the image of me standing in front of Chief Ehrlich. What I saw and felt didn’t make me feel any better.

I looked at the clock. It was 3:07. In less than seven hours I had an appointment with the chief. I patted Sirius to show him that I was all right. Because of my dreams, he always slept on the floor next to my bed. Drained from my fire walk, I tried to go back to sleep. I never dreamed of fire more than once a night, or at least I hadn’t so far, and maybe because of that I slept again.

At half past seven I was up for good. Physically, I was almost back to where I’d been before the fire. For more than a year I had never missed a physical therapy session, and I worked just as hard on my own. To a casual observer, the scarring on my face was the only telltale clue of my injuries.

I had thought that my physical recovery would put an end to my burning dreams, but my dreams hadn’t cooperated. There were times when I didn’t wake up burning for two or three nights in a row, but every time I began to hope that my fires were behind me my dreams always returned with a vengeance.

Perchance to dream, perchance to burn.

I kept my condition a secret because I knew bringing in a shrink would derail, or at a minimum delay, my getting back on the force. The way to stop my dreams, I thought, was by getting back to who I was before the fire.

Jen had been the photographer in the family, and she’d turned the video camera on me a number of times during our five-year marriage. I used those tapes as reference material, reliving birthday parties and Christmas gatherings, and even watching home improvement videos of me building a deck and painting our new house. The guy I studied was confident, even with paint on his face. He had a one-liner for everything. He was a man who spoke his mind, usually managing to do it with a wisecrack. The person on the tapes came across as a tough guy, but he softened whenever he was around his wife or dog. It hurt a little-you could even say it burned-reviewing these tapes, but I did it to try to remember who I was and how I should act. In looking back at the tapes, I realized that I had been an innocent, unprepared for life without my wife and the firestorm that was coming at me.

I learned from the tapes and did my best to play the former me. My imitation was good enough to fool almost everyone, but it didn’t stop my fire walking. I burned, and I burned again and again. Because of the frequency of my fiery dreams, I kept expecting that over time I would build up a tolerance to them, but that still hadn’t happened. My night terrors continued to plague me. Maybe there are some things you can’t, or shouldn’t, get used to.

Still, there was one strange benefit from my burning dreams that I thought of as the “moment after.” When I realized my flesh wasn’t really afire, my heart would stop its thundering and relief would rush over me. It was then that I had my moment of clarity; or sometimes, like this latest episode, it was more like a moment of ambiguity.

Maybe the sudden reprieve my body experienced after my fire dream made it relax in such a way that a kind of window opened. Maybe I had to pay a high price for gaining insight of any kind. It’s not like the moment after was a gift from the gods, or that it made me Confucius or anything, but it often gave me a perspective that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Earlier in the week I had gotten this image of the Iron Maiden reacting to one of my pranks. The Iron Maiden is big on Norman Vincent Peale-type messages and loves posting rah-rah words up on the walls. Her pearls of wisdom for the week had been “Hard work pays off in the future,” and “The early bird gets the worm!” When no one was around, I had used a Sharpie to add my own editorials below hers: “Laziness pays off now,” and “The second mouse gets the cheese!” At the time I was pleased with my handiwork; everyone laughed when they saw what I wrote, including the Iron Maiden. But in my moment-after insight I could hear the false notes in her laughter and see the disguised hurt on her face. The Iron Maiden’s cheerleading routine might not have been sophisticated but it was heartfelt, and in my moment of clarity I could see that I had pissed on her efforts. Sometimes what you see in the mirror isn’t always pretty.

It was easy to imagine how and why the Iron Maiden had come to mind. My subconscious-probably tired from working overtime on my own pyre-had cued me into my inappropriate behavior. But my latest middle-of-the-night vision of Chief Ehrlich wasn’t as easy to interpret.

In some ways my conjuring up the chief shouldn’t have come as any surprise to me. The doctors had finally approved my going back to work, and today was the day I planned on cashing in his marker. I wanted Robbery-Homicide Division, what LAPD cops called Homicide Special. That was what I was going to ask him to deliver. I had thought I was sure about that, but my moment after was making me have second thoughts about my game plan.

In my postdream awakening I had this sense that the chief was offering me a job in Robbery-Homicide. That’s what I was expecting from him. What I didn’t expect was my coming to the job interview naked. What was worse was that my unclothed body revealed the extent of my burns. My vision had distorted the picture of my body, making my skin grafts red and raw and all my flesh rigid. Somehow, my year of healing and all my gains looked to have been reversed. My body showed all the ravages of the fire and more. Instead of going forward, I had this sense that I was going backward.