Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

THE NEIGHBORS HADN’T NOTICED the building’s slow emptying, didn’t register the change until autumn’s lavish colors arrived and leaves sailed through the windows the man hadn’t bothered to shut. The wind captured various vestiges — a sun-bleached postcard covered in outmoded cursive and a chipped plastic refrigerator magnet shaped like a P and a curling photo of a red-haired woman asleep on a couch — and flew the tenants’ things before relinquishing them to the sidewalk.

He was often visible in the evenings, backlit by a feeble table lamp, immobile in a plastic school chair placed against a top-floor sill, and he seemed untouched by any changes in sound or light or weather, an ambulance’s amplifying moan or the snap of a storm on parked cars or the inked saturation of the sky at dusk. Some nights his seat remained empty, and yellows and whites and golds briefly filled each room before darkening and appearing in the next, the lights traveling from the first floor to the third, and the movement of electricity was a quiet spectacle, like the reappearance of hunger after a long illness.

When the cold knock of air came and New York turned white, he closed the windows.

ONE YEAR EARLIER

ASIDE FROM THE GIRL on the top floor, they all came out to watch the fire, and most saw the woman walk into it: Thomas still wearing his disability like a new shirt, unsure of how it fit his body; Edward in the baseball cap pulled low that had been his uniform all summer; Claudia and Paulie, she begging that he not ask the firefighters any questions about their outfits; Edith repeating the name of the neighbor trapped inside, a woman she’d known for forty years. Three stories above them, Adeleine came and went, a face in a window, her hands often tugging at the curtains.

“It must have been candles,” Edith said from the lowest stair of the stoop, as if naming the ingredient at fault in a lackluster meal. “She does love those, the tall kind with the saints.” She was the only one who did not appear panicked, who did not worry that tragedy might prove contagious. Sitting beside her, Thomas held the wilted side of his torso with his right arm and stared at the idling ambulance, trying to divest himself of personal associations with it. He didn’t ask Edith where she was going as she rose, slowly as a diminished balloon, didn’t watch as she moved towards the throbbing orange light.

Paulie, as excited as he’d been to comment on the show of red hats moving through the dark, had soon settled all his six feet and two inches onto his sister’s frame, his chin sharp in her collarbone, and closed his eyes. Just beyond them, taut hoses crossed from their hydrants to firemen who stood with their feet planted on concrete, who gripped ladders that emerged from the trucks at a lean.

It moved from the first story to the third in a matter of minutes.

Standing with a hand still on their gate, Edward looked down the slight slant of the street. All the buildings had emptied of people, some already dressed in pajamas and nightshirts, and they moved together in the dynamic flicker, passing sweating bottles of water, readjusting the children on their hips. The low thrum of air conditioners and the silver-blue glow of devices in the apartments they’d come from were briefly forgotten as they speculated on the fates of their neighbors, four of whom had already departed in speeding, flashing fanfare.

“Nothing brings a community together like a good old fire,” Edward said. “ ‘ And how’d you meet your wife?’ ‘Fire!’ ‘Where’d you get this wings recipe?’ ‘Great guy I met at a fire!’” Claudia permitted herself a restrained snort against the tightness of Paulie’s body, which pressed against her like a vigorous current. Through the curls of her brother’s hair, she saw Edith’s slight shape moving and raised her hand to point.

“Hey,” she said, trying to reach Edward through his cynical haze. “Hey, that’s your landlord .” His face slackened from its smug expression and assumed a limp astonishment as he watched Edith step beneath the angle of a ladder, her wizened body newly divided into frames by the steel rungs. He gestured to Thomas, a low, brief fold of the hand, as if indicating the fleeting presence of a grazing deer or a rare bird. In one square, they saw the veins of her upper legs, the cotton of her shorts tucked higher by sweat on the left side; in the next, her torso, the arms reaching away.

Edward and Thomas abandoned their disbelief almost immediately, and soon they were crossing through, placing their hands on anonymous shoulders, kicking their knees up to step over rubble, holding their shirts over their mouths, working towards the glow.

A fireman had reached her before they could, had shoved her from risk, and as they approached, he looked down at Edith as though she were a total impossibility. She opened and closed her mouth but it was apparent, without being able to hear over the roar, that it produced no words, did nothing, a door blown unlocked by bad weather. When they got to her, when they each took a flaccid elbow, he had brought a small black box to his mouth and was speaking into it. “Yeah, I need an escort for a possibly disoriented older woman. That’s correct. She almost walked right into a fire here.”

“There’s no need for that,” Thomas said in the brawny man’s general direction, determining his confidence in the statement as he went. “We’re her neighbors. We can take her home.”

“Just across the street,” Edward said, motioning with a quick shrug, as though denying his involvement in a crime. The man raised his hat a little to look at them, the odd slump of the taller one’s body, the established sweat and food stains on the shorter one’s shirt, and pressed a button on the device, preparing to issue some further instruction.

A sound filled the next moment, something like the forcing of an object into a space much too small for it, and the man in the heavy black cloth was gone. The two neighbors, briefly meeting eyes over the meager fluff of their landlord’s hair, began to advance, their fingers still fixed to the crooks of her arms. Thomas took naturally to small reassurances, the restrained lilt of them, and with each step he offered another. “We’re just going to head home. We’re just going to get you out of this heat. It’s only a little farther now.” Twice Edith looked up at them, examining their faces, giving off benign blinks. The crowd parted like water around a rock, and they watched her shuffling in the same way they’d watched the windows of the ignited building buckle.

Outside their home Thomas and Edward waited, their backs turned to the heat, for her to speak. When she couldn’t, they began the work of filling the air. “Here we are,” Thomas said. “There’s your kitchen window, Edith, with the spider plant and the rosemary soap you like and the tall blue kettle.” Rattled by the pressure to comfort her, Edward spoke too loudly. “And there’s the front door, and just inside the brass mailboxes and that ridiculous sign that says No Flyers What-So-Never.” As Paulie untucked himself from his sister, he seemed to spring into his full height, the jungly curls of his hair moving half a second behind the momentum of his body. Confused by the nature of the game, he mentioned objects as though they were questions. “A bucket full of umbrellas no one uses? All the doors painted differently?” Edith’s stare remained fixed on something they couldn’t see, and her mottled arms hung limp as dishrags.