Robert Wilson - The Divide

His head hurt. When he moved, the pain was dizzying; nausea constricted his throat. The agony was so generalized as to seem sourceless; then he touched his head above his left ear and felt the pulpy texture of the skin there. The hair was matted and wet. His hand, when he pulled it away, glistened in the firelight. This wetness was blood.

Blood and fire all around him.

He remembered Roch.

The overheated air created by the flames was vastly lighter than the cold, stagnant air surrounding it. It shot upward almost volcanically, coursing through the abandoned building like a river cut loose from the restraints of gravity. Where stairways had fallen, it rose through the gaping spaces. It discovered flues and airways. It was merely warm by the time it reached the top of the building, but still hot enough to seek out an icy five-foot gap where the ceiling had collapsed and to rise, lazily at first, into the still afternoon air.

This was how Susan saw it from the Honda: a waft of almost pure white smoke.

It gathered strength.

John understood that something was broken inside him. That was the way it felt, and it might be literally true; Roch had hit him pretty hard. He was confused about this place and he was confused about whether he was “John” or “Benjamin”—or what these names implied—and just about the only thing he was not confused about was the urgency of getting out of the building. The building was on fire; it was burning; he could be trapped here. That much was clear.

He managed to stand up.

He saw the flashlight on the floor and picked it up. He could see well enough in the firelight but he might need this later. There was a thin veil of acrid smoke all around him—fortunately, most of it was still being drawn up by the rising heat. That might change, however. And even this faint haze was choking. Combustion products. Toxic gases. These words floated up from memory, briefly vivid in his mind: he could read them, like printed words on paper, in the space behind his eyelids. But the danger was real and imminent.

He staggered into the hallway, where Roch was waiting for hire.

Roch came forward in a lunge with the copper pipe extended, grinning hugely. John knew that Roch meant to kill him and leave him here where the fire would consume his body. He understood this by the expression on Roch’s face. There was nothing mysterious about it. Blunt, burning hatred. Once again he watched the slow ballistic swing of the pipe above Roch’s head and the arc it would follow downward: this was familiar, too.

The ballet of his own death.

But not yet, John decided.

It was not even a thought. It was a denial so absolute that it felt like a seizure. He took a step back, hefted the big hardware-store flashlight and threw it at Roch. The flashlight whirled as it flew, end over end, and it seemed to John that Roch was staring at it, perplexed and wholly attentive, as it impacted squarely against his forehead.

Roch teetered on his heels, lunging forward with the pipe-section for ballast. No good. He sat down hard on the concrete floor. A line of blood seeped out from the impact point on his forehead.

He looked at John with mute, angry amazement.

“Son of a bitch!” he managed.

Began climbing to his feet again, pipe in hand.

John turned and ran.

But who had thrown the flashlight?

This question occupied a brightly lit corner of his mind as he staggered down the increasingly dark and smoky corridor.

Because, he felt different.

Not John or Benjamin.

Some third thing.

It rose and shifted inside him even now. It was large and still wordless. It didn’t have a name; it had never had a name. Some new presence. Or maybe not: not new at all.

Maybe, John thought, it had been there all along.

Roch had cut him off from the ladder where he had climbed up to the second floor; John ran in the opposite direction.

The fire was large and potent now, able to leapfrog the stony breaks between oases of wood and insulation. No part of the building was safe. Already, on the floor above, two of the tiny wire-reinforced windows had been blown out of their frames by the pressure of the burning. Flame jetted from the empty spaces, a newly crowned infant king surveying his kingdom.

The fire created its own weather. Throughout the eastern half of the structure, air that had lain stagnant for years began to stir. Locked or boarded doors groaned against their restraints. Shuttered windows rattled. The sour dust of limestone and decayed animal droppings stirred and lifted. The fire drew in gusts of clean air from the winter afternoon, and for one paradoxical moment it seemed as if a kind of spring had come.

John felt the air on his face, a good sign. It meant he was moving away from the main body of the fire. He had decided there must be another way down; it was only a question of finding it. But the light had dimmed to a smoky nimbus; he had lost the flashlight and soon he would be groping on his hands and knees. And Roch was close behind him. He heard the footsteps, though he could no longer calculate direction and distance.

He understood, too, that the fire had grown large enough that it might encircle him. That if it did, he would be helpless.

Strange, he thought, to die without knowing his own name.

The darkness now was absolute, interrupted in rare moments by the flicker of Roch’s flashlight from behind. John toiled onward as quickly as he dared. But the air was warm and choking. He didn’t have much margin anymore, and he knew it.

When he saw a glimmer of light down the corridor he was afraid that it might be the fire circling around from the front. He slowed to a walk, groped ahead cautiously, then stood for a moment surrounded by this dim aurora before it registered as window-light.

The windows were tiny glass rectangles set in a wickerwork of framing. They rose from waist level to the ceiling, and they were so thickly crusted with grime that he hadn’t recognized them at first for what they were.

He pushed against one of the panes with both hands, but it didn’t yield. This was carpentry as old as the building itself, Victorian and hugely solid. He took away his hands and carried enough dirt with them that the prints let through a brighter beam of light, hand-shaped in the smoky air.

He looked around. He wanted a brick, a pipe like Roch’s, anything … but the corridor was bare.

Roch’s flashlight flickered behind him.

Sighing, John pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around his right hand. Bracing himself, he drove his fist directly into the thick glass.

It was like punching rock—bruising, even through the cloth. But the glass splintered and fell away, leaving a razor-toothed space where cool air came flooding in.

The panes of glass were maybe twelve inches square, and he knocked out ten of them so rapidly that there was no time to notice the shards that ripped through the lining of the jacket and pierced his hand and wrist. The pain was momentary and irrelevant. When the glass was gone, he kicked and ripped at the wooden latticework until there was a hole big enough to fit through.

He heard Roch almost directly behind him now, but there was time to ascertain that he himself was directly above the old loading bay; that there was a roof below him, two-by-fours covered with lathing and tarry shingles, some of this eroded by the weather … not exactly a firm footing; time enough, too, to see that the fire had reached the west end of the loading-bay roof and was spreading wildly.

He turned his head and saw Roch running down the corridor toward him, his features clenched in a concentration so total that John was reminded of a master chess-player—the same all-consuming focus. The copper pipe-length was cocked at an angle, ready. John leaped forward and down onto the canted roof of the loading bay and then spread-eagled himself against it. The shingles were already warm where his cheek pressed against them. Something was burning down below. But the air was clean.