Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

IN THE REEL we were watching by then, the dogfights happened as if they’d been scripted, so far away that they were tiny, almost toylike. When a plume of smoke went up it seemed no bigger than what might rise from a match, while a wing torn off and falling looked like the wing of a moth. We knew there were men inside those machines but we couldn’t see them. We rustled in our seats, flirted with our neighbors, kissed our cousins if they would have us. We tuned out the Tchaikovsky Kathleen was playing, talking to anyone within range and feeling, although we wouldn’t have admitted it, slightly bored, now that the drama between Leo and Naomi had played itself out.

Perhaps because of that, those of us in the back row, including Leo, turned toward the piano as soon as Kathleen started coughing. We were on our feet when, as the coughing grew more violent, her playing stuttered and stopped. Surely we couldn’t have a repeat of Myra, not twice on the same evening? Four of us rose, took a few steps toward her, and in an instant, as something noxious filled our nostrils and mouths, began to cough along with Kathleen. Kathleen kicked over her bench and fell to the ground, a searing pain in her throat and lungs and then in ours; someone shrieked and someone else turned on the lights; those of us toward the rear of the room saw the thick yellowish brown smoke pouring out of the ducts along the back wall, while those toward the front saw, if not the smoke itself, the rest of us clutching our throats, bending double, falling down.

How fast does chaos arrive? Faster than we can say it. We heard a hissing sound, which seemed to come from beneath us, and then more smoke mushroomed through the ducts. The lights were still on but the room was dark; some of us squeezed toward the three doors opening into the corridor, pushing so hard that we might have killed each other if Otto, Albert, Ian, and Frank — they deserve much credit — hadn’t seized chairs and hurled them through the windows running the length of the room. Through those jagged holes we poured, shredding our hands and faces and backs. Someone heaved Kathleen, already unconscious, out one opening; her arm broke when she landed. Dr. Richards and Dr. Petrie, handkerchiefs tied over their faces, crawled along the floor beneath the clouds, working toward the back and searching for those who’d already fallen, dragging them toward the windows and doors. The night watchman, walking the grounds, saw the smoke and rang the fire alarm, which sent Eudora, who by then was standing in Leo’s empty room and wondering where next to search for Naomi, down the stairs at the end of the wing and outside. The moon was full and across the wide lawn she saw the crowd tumbled in the flower beds in front of the dining hall and the lobby, the figures stretched out on the circular driveway, a resident doctor herding those of us who could walk or be dragged into the raised garden that filled the center of the circle. We knelt and clutched our chests and choked, vomited and gasped and began to turn blue. Eudora ran in our direction, trying to grasp what was happening.

But this wasn’t like any fire we’d known before; there were no flames shooting out the windows, no floors collapsing downward in the heat. Nothing that might, had the fire engines from the village been anywhere near us yet, have driven back the hoses. There was only the smoke, which, those of us less badly hurt were beginning to realize, was not so much smoke as a suffocating gas. Still it poured through the dining hall, which was empty by now, pushing through the corridors, the lobby, and the solarium, into the elevators and the stairwells of the administration building and then up, and up.

Jaroslav, who’d been sitting in the second row behind Dr. Petrie and Dr. Richards but who’d bolted before the bulk of the crowd, running into the lobby and throwing open the main entrance doors, was in better shape than many of us; he was the first to shout, “The infirmary!” and to remind us that seven people lay up there. In the center circle Nan and Polly were already counting, although they could barely breathe themselves. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty; was everyone here, was everyone out of the dining hall? We knew how many of us had been present, but weren’t sure how many staff had joined us, and the confusion over that distracted attention from the infirmary patients.

We weren’t cruel, we weren’t stupid; we were nearly dead. We had broken wrists and legs and ribs, wounds small and large from the broken glass (Zalmen was struggling to get a tourniquet around Belle’s thigh, which was jetting blood), while even those without a scratch were coughing so hard tears ran from our eyes.

Our heads swam, our vision dimmed. But some of us looked up not long after Jaroslav called out, and then we saw that two of the fourth-floor windows had been opened and were leaking trails of smoke. Framed in the windows were five faces: Mary, Vivian, Morris, Pinkie, George. Still there were no fire engines. The building had no fire escapes; the stairwells were fireproofed, lined with gypsum block and tile, and we’d been instructed to avoid the elevators in an emergency and use these sturdy passages instead, which could never burn. Indeed they were not burning now.

“They’ll have to jump,” the night nurse, who’d rolled Myra out in a chair to the front lawn when the alarm sounded, said to Eudora.

“Onto what?” Eudora asked. Knowing the answer, refusing to think it, she continued to scan the crowd. By then she’d glimpsed Leo, Dr. Petrie, almost everyone she’d seen inside the dining hall. But where was Naomi?

The nurse looked down at Myra, whose eyes were closed and who was very pale. Then she turned her head at the sound of a motor and Eudora, following her gaze and hoping the sound signaled a fire engine approaching, instead glimpsed a Model T headed away from us, far down the hill but only just emerging from the curve that, for a long stretch, hid everyone approaching or leaving Tamarack State. Later, when Eudora could leave us for a moment (already she was bending over our bodies, encouraging one of us to breathe deeply, wiping another’s foaming mouth, pressing a wadded shirt against a wound), she would check the parking lot for Mrs. Martin’s car and feel relieved by its absence. But for now Eudora moved among us, trying to help everyone at once and realizing as she did so that she hadn’t seen Irene. Irene hadn’t been in the dining hall; perhaps she’d gone out for the evening, or perhaps she was still at work. Like the rest of us, she hadn’t yet remembered what would seem obvious later: that Irene’s domain was directly underneath the dining hall.

“Jump!” called one of the four orderlies who’d appeared beneath the infirmary windows, each holding one corner of a blanket. They moved together, like the legs of a horse, shifting the small scrap of safety right and left.

Instead of fading, the clouds pouring from the infirmary windows increased, and when the fire engines still didn’t arrive (their ladders wouldn’t have reached, but they had nets), all five patients did jump, one by one, onto that improvised device. Mary bounced off, hit the ground a glancing blow, and broke her collarbone, four ribs, and her shoulder. Vivian broke both legs. Pinkie was fine — except for his lungs he has always been lucky — while George broke only his wrist. Morris fell at an odd angle and died just a few minutes later; a rib had punctured his liver and one lung. And in the excitement everyone who was still conscious — not very many of us by then — forgot that not five but seven people had been up there, and that two were still in their beds, where they remained. Edith Weinstein, Denis Krajcovic: gone.

LATER, WHEN SUCH things became possible, we placed these notices in our Kill-Gloom Gazette: