Robert Wilson - The Divide

He began inching downward. With luck, he might make it to the edge before the flames caught up with him. Then he could swing down to ground level. If there wasn’t time—he could let himself roll and tumble, take his chances on what might be down below.

In the distance—already audible, though it escaped John’s awareness—the firetrucks howled their sirens.

The smoke that had drifted up lazily only minutes before was darker, and it boiled skyward in massive gouts. The roof of the building had drifted over with snow, but that was melting—a sudden waterfall developed where the roof sagged toward the southeast corner—while the snow nearest the flames was simply vaporized by the heat. The hissing was as loud as the crackle of the fire; Susan, running back down the tracks from the pay-phone and the Honda, was startled by the sound.

The makeshift roof over the loading bay was just twelve feet above the ground at the lowest point of its slope. What John had contemplated doing might have been safe: to let himself tumble down and hope the snow would cushion his fall. But he was transfixed by the sight of Roch stepping up into the frame of the broken window, a mist of smoke writhing after him; clinging to the frame to keep himself from falling, shards of glass piercing his hands as John’s hands had been pierced, the copper pipe fallen and rolling away—missing John’s head by three or four inches—over the roof and out of sight.

Hanging there, Roch looked down at John in a blaze of distilled hatred—and then across at the western edge of the roof, where the flames had begun to creep forward.

He braced his feet and took his hands off the window frame.

The roof was old and weathered. It had been designed to carry a calculated weight of snow—barely. In the years since it was erected, dry rot had invaded the studs; ice and water had pried up the shingles and rusted the nails. It could not support more than a fraction of its calculated load.

In particular, it couldn’t support Roch.

His left foot pierced the shingles first. Roch’s eyes widened as he slipped to thigh-level, like a man in quicksand, his right leg buckling under him and the shingles peeling away with sharp, successive snaps. His right knee penetrated similarly, and then he seemed to hesitate for a moment, straddling a joist, hands clawing at open air … and then the joist separated with a sound like a gunshot and Roch simply disappeared.

There was a sickening moment of absolute silence, then the thud as Roch impacted against the loading-bay platform below.

John raised his head.

He could see Susan running toward the building, Amelie not far behind her. Those two were safe. That was good.

He could have joined them. He knew what to do. Let go, tuck and roll, let his momentum carry him away from the loading dock and hope that the snowdrift would break his fall. He was aware of the beat of his heart and the onrushing eagerness of the flames—how could he do anything else?

But he felt himself inching forward, up the angle of the roof toward the hole Roch had made.

He braced his fingers against the shingles at the edge and looked down.

Roch was lying motionless, his hips at an unnatural angle and his eyes closed, the flames advancing from the western end of the loading bay and already hot enough to singe his eyebrows.

One more experiment, John thought.

Just one.

But maybe it wasn’t an experiment. Maybe it was something more important.

He felt himself straddling a cross-joist and wrapping his arms around it, then levering himself out over this high vacant space, swinging down toward Roch and the burning platform, and he understood with a sudden piercing clarity that he wasn’t John or Benjamin anymore. Some new being had grown into the vacuum of his skin, nurtured by his fever and the sudden desert heat of the flames—a fragment of self so fundamental that it had lurked undiscovered beneath all the latticework of words. It had existed even before he learned the word I; an uninvented self.

He let go of the creaking joist and dropped in a crouch next to Roch, feeling a sudden pain in his ankles and knees and spine but still able to stand.

His vision blurred in the smoke. He was aware of the blood on his hands, the cuts circling his wrists, the throbbing in his temple where Roch had struck him with the pipe. He was not sure he had the strength for this.

For this experiment.

He kneeled against the hot floorboards and slipped his arm around Roch.

Roch was not wholly unconscious. His eyelids flickered open as John lifted him up. Briefly, he struggled; but his legs dangled limp and useless and the pain of his injuries must have been excruciating—his eyes riveted shut again.

The flames closed in from the western edge of the loading bay and began to lick out from the warehouse doors. John glanced up and it was like staring into a furnace; his skin prickled and itched. Overhead, the joists were popping their nails with a sound like gunfire. Embers rained down all around him.

He should leave this burden and simply run—

But the thought was evanescent; it vanished into the tindery air.

Roch’s legs would not support him; it was like hefting a two-hundred-pound sack of sand. Roch opened his eyes once more as John hauled him up. He did not struggle; seemed only to watch, almost impassively … his eyes were fixed on John’s eyes and his face, now, was only inches away. His eyes seemed to radiate the single blunt message: “I’m not one of you!”—and John understood, in a final flash of inhuman insight, that Roch had willfully set himself apart; that when he looked at other human beings he saw protoplasm, bags of flesh, vessels that might contain the elements of hatred or contempt … but never anything of Roch.

Roch was only Roch, the only one of his kind, alone in his uniqueness. And across that vast escarpment there was no bridge or road or trail: the divide was as absolute as a vacuum. And John perceived that this was not some flaw of character or nurture; it was more profound, a trick of gestation, a stitch in the glial network … somehow, it was built in… My God, John thought, he’s not even altogether human. …

He pinned Roch’s arms in his own and dragged him toward the snow. Roch was stunningly heavy, a dead weight. But the fire was close enough to raise smoke from their clothes and John drew some strength from that. He pulled Roch along with his heels dragging against the steaming floorboards. He felt Roch’s breath against his neck. Roch opened his eyes again, now two blank wells of unimaginable hostility—and maybe something else.

Maybe a question.

“Because I don’t want to be what you are,” John said. The words came out punctuated by his gasping, overwhelmed by the roar of the flames; but patient, gentle. “Because I’m tired of that.”

He carried Roch away from the burning platform of the loading bay, into the steaming snow and beyond into the thick snow that had not yet melted and where the reflection of the fire was gaudy and strange.

In the end, he was only dimly aware of Amelie as she pried at his fingers. His embrace of Roch was fierce and hysterical. But he gave it up at last.

Spring is the rainy season in Los Angeles, but today the air was cool and clean; the sky was blue; the smog had rolled away in a vast tide of Pacific air. Susan placed a wreath of flowers on her father’s grave and stood up, smoothing her dress. The sun picked out a fleck of mica on the headstone, like the winking of an eye.