Robert Wilson - Vortex

Her family was neither rich nor poor. They lived in a neighborhood adjoining the gated community where my father owned a house. I believe they rented. I didn’t mention Latisha to my parents because I knew my father would disapprove of her. There had been hardscrabble Findleys in Texas and Louisiana since before those states joined the Union, and part of my father’s legacy was a racism so offensive he had long since learned to conceal it in polite company. Istanbul had been a particular strain for him, but he found plenty to complain about in Houston. When he was at home he dropped his veneer of tolerance like a pair of tight shoes. The world was being mongrelized, he said, and he knew exactly who was to blame. I didn’t know whether my mother shared these views. If so, she never spoke about them; like me, she had learned to ignore my father’s rants even as she pretended to listen to them.

His racism was almost antiquarian, poisonous but—so I thought—toothless. Nevertheless I wasn’t eager to introduce him to Latisha, who happened to be black. I had already met her family. Her father was a pharmacist; her mother had moved to Houston from the Dominican Republic twenty years ago and currently worked at Walmart. They had always treated me with a cautious but sincere cordiality.

I followed the old railbed until I was opposite the loading bays at my father’s warehouse. I found a dark space between two concrete abutments and hunkered down where I couldn’t be seen, not that there was much chance of anyone coming by. The warehouse was closed, and although my father occasionally stayed late to take care of unscheduled business, this wasn’t one of those nights: he had come home for dinner and settled into the sofa with a drink in his hand and a twenty-four-hour news channel to glower at. The rain fell continuously and I was drenched and shivering, although it had been a stiflingly hot day—the rain fell from some colder, higher place than these cloistered back alleys. I watched the warehouse attentively for half an hour. From my earlier scouting trips I had concluded that there would be no one here after midnight but the night watchman, a skinny drifter my father had hired from the bus depot downtown. By watching the windows I had even established his regular routine: an hourly fifteen-minute walk-through of the upper and lower floors, the rest of his time spent in a small room with a single frosted and wire-reinforced window. I guessed he had a video monitor in there, by the way the light flickered.

I had known my father would be a problem, but I was serious about Latisha. We had even talked about marriage. Or “elopement.” Some arrangement that would leave my father out of the loop until it was too late for him to interfere. No fixed date because Latisha, at least, deserved a shot at whatever higher education she could afford to get. But our plans were real. Or at least I had thought so.

Real enough that I had confided in my mother over the kitchen table. She had listened carefully and wordlessly. Then she sat back in her chair and said, “I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad anymore, if I ever did. But if you do this, it’s probably best you get out of the house.” She added, plaintively, “I would like to meet Latisha one day. When that becomes possible. Until then I won’t say anything to your father.”

I’m sure she meant not to. But over the summer something must have aroused his suspicion, I didn’t know what: an undeleted text message, a phone conversation overheard. He hadn’t questioned me but he had questioned my mother, and she caved in and told him what she knew.

My father believed in direct action. I didn’t know he had done anything at all until my calls and texts to Latisha started bouncing. I went to her house but her parents wouldn’t let me talk to her; they said she had decided to break off the relationship. Maybe so, but I refused to believe it until I had spoken to her herself. I kept an eye on the house but there was little sign of Latisha apart from a couple of trips out in the company of her mother.

I got a note to her through a girl she knew, enclosing a more secure IP address—I had changed it without telling my parents. That night I waited for a return message, but when it came it was abrupt and unapologetic.

Sorry Turk yr father talked to my father made an offer: my college tuition paid provided we break up, shitty deal but now my folks insist on it, only chance for a good school & so forth, not too proud to milk a bigot for his money etc. I would tell them go to hell but really what kind of life could we have broke and young + even tho I love you how long til we start to hate each other for what love cost us? Don’t blame anyone but me I know I have a choice & Im probably making the wrong one but its my life & I have to think of the future. Crying now, pls don’t write anymore.

It was from this low brick building that my father had extracted the cash that paid for our house, our backyard pool, the clothes on my back, and the sedition and betrayal of my best hopes. Out of this warehouse and whatever business he conducted here had come my mother’s chronic unhappiness and my own wholesale humiliation. That was why it had occurred to me with the force of revelation that the building ought to be burned down. For the purpose of revenge, yes, but also as a purification by fire. I had read that on the battlefield wounds were sometimes cauterized to stop uncontrollable bleeding. And I was bleeding, and this building was my wound.

Rainwater gurgled down a storm drain by my feet, stranding scraps of paper, cigarette butts, a discarded condom as pale and flaccid as a jellyfish. The night watchman worked his rounds. I could see the sway of his flashlight on the high windows as he moved from room to room. When he was (as I calculated) at the far end of the building I crossed to the loading bays and mounted a few steps to the steel door, painted military green, that was the building’s back entrance. Mounted beside the door was a two-step lock: you used a physical key to uncover a numerical touchpad. I had taken the key from the top drawer of the desk in my father’s home office, and I remembered the entry code from the last time he had brought me here (because it had struck me as ludicrously obvious: the year of his birth).

Whatever part of Latisha’s tuition my father had arranged to pay, he probably considered it a bargain. My father was never ostentatious about his wealth but I had lived in his house long enough to overhear the occasional veiled reference to offshore holdings and IRS audits aborted by expensive lawyers. He could have sent me to Yale twice over if I had shown any aptitude for schoolwork. None of this money had been applied to the premises of the warehouse, however. The corridor inside had been overpainted with cheap yellow enamel, the floor was ocher linoleum, the ceiling lights were flyspecked fluorescent tubes. A door to the right opened into the storage and forwarding area, stairs to the left led to second-floor offices.

My plan was to douse the hallway, start the fire, pull the alarm by the exit (to give the watchman some warning), and run. Whether the fire would be quickly controlled or whether it would spread, whether the damage would be significant or just another financial nuisance for my father, whether I would be caught and punished for it or whether I would buy a ticket out of town and change my name—I didn’t know, it didn’t matter. My rage mattered, my humiliation mattered. So I took the jug of methyl hydrate out of the plastic bag I’d wrapped it in. I put it on the floor. I unscrewed the cap and tipped it over.

The floor had sagged over the years. The liquid puddled and spread toward the interior of the building. The reek of it was eye-wateringly sharp. It filled the crevices in the linoleum and crept steadily down the hallway, pooling here and there. There seemed to be much more of it than a two-gallon jug could possibly have contained.