Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“Don’t get what.”

“Thirteen is your house.”

“Correctamundo,” says Mr. B. “Thirteen is my house. It’s now also Karim’s house. That’s why I called you guys over. Introduce you. Let you know there’s gonna be a new kid in the hood.”

“For how long?” Keenan says.

“Indefinitely, son.”

All at once, everything freezes like streaming video when there’s a dearth of bandwidth at the point of reception.

Finally, Dorian says: “You’re from the camps.”

“No,” the kid says.

“Where, then.”

“I’m from the Jamestown Colony.”

“What Karim means,” Mr. B says, “is that before his family was interned, they lived in Jamestown.”

“And where’s his family now?” Dean asks.

“They’re deceased.”

While Keenan answers his ringing phone and wanders off, talking and glancing back as if someone might be sneaking up on him with a lead pipe, Dorian thinks (flash of cicadas dead on corkboard): I’m sorry about your family. It sucks and I can relate. Can even imagine, What if I was you. Reverse everything. This is an empathy exercise I learned at school: Imagine I’m the orphan and some old guy in a turban adopts me and makes me meet a bunch of camel-fucker kids who clearly hate my guts, of whom you are one. I’d be looking at you, wanting to stomp your goddamn brains into the ground. And like you wouldn’t be wondering what the hell your old neighbor is thinking, bringing someone like me into your sandbox. Indefinitely. Because let me tell you about this street. There’s Black, White, Vietnamese, Indian from India, Catholic, Unitarian, African Methodist, Jewish, Hindu, Free Will Baptist, and Agnostic. Notice what’s missing? Over on Mohegan and Onondaga, there are some of you, and there’s exactly one day out of the year they come over here, and that’s Halloween … Such is the path of his thoughts as the pow-wow awkwardly breaks up. Pretty phased, Mr. B is saying. Long-ass drive. Et cetera. Keenan still standing a good thirty feet away, with zero intention of rejoining the group. “See you around,” Plaxico says. But the new kid already has his back turned. In some kind of pain, judging from the weird twist in his spine. Maybe holding a shit since Ohio, Dorian thinks as he walks down the driveway. By the road, The Negro, in his white shirt and pants, red vest, and red-and-white cap, is bent forward (he doesn’t look so comfortable either), one hand pocketed, the other thrust forth for a reason long forgotten. Slap him five. The summer of your eleventh year is in motion.

They can’t understand where the idea could have come from. A sister. Eighteen years old at the time the bomb exploded, or the meteor hit, or whatever happened happened. Kathryn and Mitch have spent hundreds of hours, literally hundreds in the past six months, trying to figure out a source. A story he read, a movie. They started seeing a psychologist (the two of them with Dorian, then Dorian alone, then all four of them), a man who talked in private with Kathryn and Mitch about paracosms. Imaginary worlds created in childhood. The doctor made the phenomenon sound harmless, even propitious. A phase of intellectually gifted children. But at the worst point, in the icebound days of January, with their son shouting at them almost daily, accusing them of familial conspiracy (some of the episodes so irrational and paranoid, they thought with terror of schizophrenia), Mitch had said: “We need to be completely honest and consider every possibility.”

“I know.”

“Well, think. According to Dorian’s story, she would’ve been born in, what … ’09. So, ’09. The summer of ’09.”

“What about it.”

“Don’t act stupid, Kate. Please. This is too serious.”

“I know what you’re talking about,” she said, making a great effort to keep her voice steady. “But I can’t imagine why you’d bring it up.”

“Look—”

“Now of all times. Like we don’t have enough going on here.”

“There could be a connection.”

“Like this isn’t crazy enough without throwing that in.”

“I’m not throwing it in.”

“I mean, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking it’s the same year. ’09. And that’s weird, Kate. It’s a very weird coincidence. What I’m thinking is, the whole fantasy could be coming out of that. If you’d had the baby—”

“Just stop it,” she said.

And he did stop. And hasn’t mentioned it since, though Kathryn has thought about it plenty. The conversation comes back to her in these sorts of moments: alone in the car, backed up on the Northway while the sun capsizes in a sea of tropospheric aerosols, another day ending with the colors of holocaust. What happened in ’09 was, she was with Griffin and then she was also with Mitch. When she got pregnant, the question of whose could only have been answered in one way — and what would be the point of having such a test if not to choose one man or the other based on its results. One fate or the other. Maybe some people can make a decision that way, but not me. Is the future all mine to shape? What am I going to do, award myself to one of them like a prize? I can’t start a life that way . Thus went her reasoning all those years ago, twenty-six years ago now, when what she did was, she let it go, all by herself. Didn’t tell either one of them. Believing there was purity in this. Knowing, not much later, that abortion had been a way to protect herself against what she’d thought of as total loss. What if you lose both of them and the baby. In the end, she had told Mitch (and can see even now the way he had squinted his eyes, as if trying to see through a swirling fog), but the truth is, by then, what was this admission but itself a kind of test. If you love me.

Exit 8.

She calls home and leaves a message saying she’ll be late (what’s new) and is anyone working on dinner.

She turns on public radio.

The news is: There are elected officials out there, governors and senators, saying that their provinces and colonies, in defiance of the recent court ruling, will close their borders to all former internees. Turn it off. Can’t take it. These poor people. How many different ways must you prove your hate for them. She wonders what Dorian is thinking about all this. End of the camps; the renaturalizations. Should have talked to him weeks ago. It’s your own fault he’s back-sliding. Of course the news is setting him off. He sees these people as criminals. They’re set free and, abracadabra, this bizarre projection of his reappears. This symbol. There’s nothing mysterious about it at all. You studied psychology in college. It’s not complicated. He sees her in dreams and she is nothing but fear given form in a dream. Stop thinking about what your husband said that time. Which he only said for his own selfish reasons. A weird coincidence, yeah. But Dorian cannot know anything about that. Still. If you’d had the baby, it might have been a girl. She would’ve been conceived in ’09. Would’ve been eighteen when he was three. And she could have been in the city when it happened —and when you step into this current of imagination, you lose your balance, emotion passes between you and rationality like a moon between planet and sun. Shadow over your heart. There’s something feasible here. If you had done one thing different.

One of the first things the old guy does is get him a smartphone; and once Karim has it, he starts thinking about what Abdul-Aziz instructed him to do. Call the number. Not immediately calling the number does not mean he’s not going to call the number. Karim will do as he was told by the sheikh (which is the rightful thing to do in the eyes of God, and which he wants to do), he just can’t seem to bring himself to do it today. Tomorrow , he tells himself. Same thing he told himself yesterday after the old guy had taken him to the mall and bought the compact device in its red metallic casing, giving Karim the power to access the Internet, take pictures still and moving, download and play games, and make unlimited audio and video calls. He had never used one of these before. In the camp, they were contraband. Somehow, though, the sheikh possessed one; and once, after dark, Karim had held it in his hands, Hazem and Yassim on either side of him, and the boys watched the glowing screen, blinking like moths winging at a flame. “Don’t be afraid,” said Abdul-Aziz, as the boy in the video was prepared by men in dark hoods, as plastified explosives and tubes filled with nails and steel balls were taped to his skin and bones. But fuck were they afraid, all three of them terror-filled, expecting that at any moment, by design or accident, the boy might burst on the screen before their eyes into a cloud of blood, flesh, bone, and guts. Which he did not. Though he did no less suddenly burst into tears; and when a voice asked him why he was crying, he sobbed, “ Because I am so happy. I am going to see my mother in the highest gardens of heaven …”