Andrew Pyper - The Wildfire Season

Without warning, they pull the morphine out of his arm and replace it with a pair of Tylenol 3s on his breakfast serviette. The first thing he does is cry. It’s the sight of the puny albino pills that does it. These are to be his new friends? He bawls so hard he can’t catch his breath. Coughs himself out of bed, starts bawling again. The emergency bell that attaches his thumb to the nurses’ station rings without pause, so that they close the door on him and let him wail himself to sleep. Even through his tears he’s ashamed of himself, and makes some attempts at self-control, but then the image of the white pills returns to him, and it’s all over.

When it comes, sleep is no better than waking. What’s worse than the pain are the dreams. They start at different places, but all of them end with Miles running. There is no fire. What he runs from is invisible but explicit, human and not human, a creature with unfair advantages. A vampire , the voice-over of his dream tells him. One that pursues him through a grid of dark streets. Miles knows that he will lose the race but he rushes on, rounds another corner, hoping to find an avenue of light that never appears. Then, when the undead thing comes up next to him, Miles turns to see that it’s the kid. Teeth bared, ravenous. The kid wrapping his mouth over Miles’s neck. Ripping and swallowing.

When they release him from the hospital, the doctor gives Miles a pharmaceutical loot bag to take with him: tranquilizers, Tylenol 3s, steroid cream. Alex holds him by the arm on his good side, his steps slow and frail, head swimming. He can’t tell whether the sensation of being helped along by his girlfriend makes him feel pathetically young or pathetically old.

They are asked to stay in town for a few days to participate in the coroner’s inquest into the kid’s death, although it’s obvious to all that it’s really Miles’s trial. Fire is fire, and people who fight them get hurt from time to time. But the kid is different. His foreman stopped running from a fire to build one of his own and the kid had carried on up the hill. One rational decision, one irrational. If common sense determined rightful outcomes, the wrong man died.

The panel includes two of the managers who sent his team into the valley, and Miles tries to mentally hammer nails through their eyeballs as he listens to them ask their questions. They want to know how he could possibly justify his ‘grossly unorthodox defensive tactics.’ Miles calls it an escape fire. He calls it the good black. The managers call it unsound manoeuvres. His trial is one of semantics. They don’t allow themselves to forgive him, but he can feel them wanting to. One says, ‘You were a good firefighter, Miles,’ and the past tense reddens the scar on his cheek.

In the end they do him the favour of coming up with excuses on his behalf. Miles wasn’t much older than the kid himself, after all. The conditions were severe. Under the circumstances, it was hard to believe that only one man went down. Though his methods were well outside of acknowledged procedure, the investigators accept that Miles had done everything he could have done within his abilities and experience.

After, in a motel room in Salmon Arm with a NO ANIMAL SKINNING notice over the headboard, Alex and Miles lie side by side in the darkness, fully clothed, fingers locked over their chests like corpses. They talk about what they should do next. Neither of them can think of an option aside from what they would have done if the fire had never happened. They will leave in the morning for Toronto. Alex will take up her job at Arrowsmith’s, and Miles will enter first year of med school. They will start again. Neither of them mentions the promise of marriage that Miles had made the year before.

They drive through the mountains, onto the high ranges of Alberta, across the cruise-control prairies, and over the humped spine of Lake Superior, all in a brooding near silence. Alex never asks about the fire, but Miles can sense her aching to. There’s a buzz of vicious pleasure in refusing to help her open the topic, every hour of silence a greater punishment than anything he might think of to say to her. Behind the wheel, Miles takes an academic interest in his own anger. For instance, he would never have guessed he would resent Alex’s sympathy even more than her curiosity.

The sight of Toronto shrinks them in their seats. Even the lake seems to pull back from the downtown towers. Its waves reluctant, perfunctory, the water the mottled grey of desert camouflage. They drive straight to the apartment Alex has found, a basement one-bedroom on Shaw Street, the only thing reasonably close to both her work and the university that they could afford.

‘It’s not rue Rachel,’ Miles says, looking up and down the street, the tiny front yards blurred with wrought-iron fences.

‘It’s different here,’ Alex agrees. ‘It’s all different.’

They unload their minimal belongings and, after one walk through the apartment, Miles tucks himself under the sheets of the futon and stays in the bedroom for the next week until classes start. Even then, he skips his lectures as often as he attends them. Instead, he drifts through the streets of the new city and feels its eyes upon him. He plays the game of trying to catch people staring. Most of the time, his observers are quicker than he is. But when he snags slow ones, he sticks his tongue out and laughs like a serial killer and watches them scuttle away in what they think is fear, though he knows it’s really shame.

His refusal to speak doesn’t prevent Miles from tracing the growing shape of fury within him. Alex can see it too. It comes to the point that all she will allow herself to tell him is that she loves him, but even this gives offence. He interprets her simple, desperate words as a lie, something she repeats to convince herself of. It is impossible that Alex could feel the same about him as she once did. If he has been turned into a monster, won’t their love have been similarly deformed?

More and more, Miles fears that if he stays with her, something as bad as what happened to the burned boy will happen to Alex. There is also the newfound worry that he might hurt her himself.

They make love only once after the fire. From the morning Miles was released from the hospital, over and over Alex had invited him to her. She had worn only the clothes he had most liked to remove, suggested massage oil backrubs, whispered dirty in his ear. Every time, Miles had declined. Finally, after she grazed her tongue across the back of his neck as he stood before a crackling frying pan in the kitchen, he had turned to her and said, ‘Don’t you get it? I’m not interested in a mercy fuck,’ before returning to flip his eggs. She had not tried again after that.

What hurt her more than his rejection was the extent to which he was wrong about what she was asking of him. Mercy had nothing to do with it. It’s true that she wanted to bring them together, if only for a time, as the open talk that they used to find so natural had deserted them. But her desire was real.

On this night, though, it is Miles who reaches for Alex. Aware of the sound of their own breathing, each clinging to the cold edge of their opposite bedsides, he had rolled over to bring his lips to her shoulder. Both of them are amazed at how even this tentative kiss revives something in them. Miles stays next to her, folding himself over her side. He wants to say a sweet word. Anything plucked from the standard vocabulary will do. But the mere thought of uttering any of them hurts his throat, like a bone caught halfway down.

They surprise themselves with the energy they find, a ruthless yearning. Everything they do is lingered over, repeated, another moment won against the long night. Despite this, they can sense an absence in each other’s touch. The room’s wintry drafts find ways between them, licking around the borders of warmth their bodies create.