Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

June 22.

Only three days past Dakota. But the camp and his friends, the lean-to they’d built out of scrounged cardboard, sheet metal, and particle board: all just disappeared. And now this house. Soft carpeting, gentle gusts of cool air, staircase leading to a second floor and a room all for him (with a futon whose plush makes him feel like he’s remembering something from before the encoding of memories), and in the back yard, get this, a pool, a real swimming pool filled with clean water and covered by a transparent dome. He can’t swim. But the depth is only four feet from end to end. He can lunge around, make some attempts at the rudimentary strokes, and float on a giant yellow smiley face with holes for eyes. You put your ass in one of the holes and let your head rest on the big happy mouth, and eventually Satan will ask a question of you: Is it possible you’ve already laid down your life — a painless passage, as the sheikh promised — and this is Paradise?

It could be ten minutes, could be a century later that he hears a muezzin chanting the azan.

“ Allahu Akbar …”

“ Allahu Akbar …”

The voice is not coming from a minaret, not from a loudspeaker (as it did at the camp); it’s coming from the smartphone. Karim paddles over to the ladder and pulls himself off the float. He drapes a towel over his shoulders. Picks up the phone. “ Come to prayer … Come to prayer …” He exits the dome. A few steps on soft grass, a few more across flat stones that burn the soles of his feet. Sliding glass door. Stepping inside is a dream-change. You are now in a subzero dimension: molecules of chlorinated water freeze into crystals on your skin. Across the room, there’s a magic machine. Push one button, you get jewels of ice; push another, a cascade of perfectly tasteless water. Karim drinks until his brain aches. As he puts the glass down, the old guy says from the doorway:

“Time for salat?”

“Mm.”

“Good, good. You look good today. You feel good?”

“Pretty good,” Karim says.

“Good.”

“ God is greatest ,” chants the muezzin.

“I was thinking,” the old guy says. “Around sunset, how about some mini-golf.”

“Some what?”

The old guy joins two fists and makes a funny knocking motion. “You don’t know? It’s a game.”

“Oh …”

Down in the basement, the old guy has made a place for him to pray. Persian rug. On the wall, a framed picture of the Grand Mosque. Karim stands on the rug and faces Mecca. As he recites the first sura, he raises up his hands. Folds his hands on his chest. Bows. Sits. Kneels. Lowers forehead. Touches forehead to rug. Asks for protection from the torture of hellfire. When he’s done, he picks up his phone.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow, you will call the number.

Dorian thinks of the dream he had a few nights ago. About the Arabian palace with the mural of Mount Rushmore. Now that Dorian has met the kid, it has an unnerving relevance. Hanging out alone in his room, he thinks: I had that dream, and then a couple days later a haji from Dakota appears. But a mural made of corn. That’s just random . When he types DAKOTA CORN into the search engine, he isn’t really expecting anything to come up. But he gets pages and pages of images. Of a building. He clicks on the first one … In the dream, he never saw the palace from the outside, but this first picture is such a perfect match for what the outside would have been that he instantly feels this is the building he was in, in the dream. Some kind of weird mosque. Two minarets with pointed green tops like giant, perfectly sharpened crayons; and three curving domes, yellow and green with red pinnacles, like giant heavenward-pointing boobs with flags coming out of the nipples. The highest flying flag is the Stars and Stripes. Above the entrance, letters spell: AMERICA’S DESTINATIONS. Then white columns support a bigger fancier sign: MITCHELL CORN PALACE. The exterior walls are all muraled — and, there, to one side of the doors is the same mural from the dream. The heads of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Edmonds. Mount Rushmore. Made of ears of multicolored corn.

Via videocall, he explains it all to Plaxico, who has his tablet at such an angle that Dorian can only see one quarter of his face as he plays PGA Tour on his dad’s old console: software so prehistoric you can practically hear, while you’re teeing off, archaeopteryxes screeching in the computer-generated trees.

“What do you call that,” Dorian says.

“What.”

“When a dream comes true, what’s that called.”

“A dream come true.”

He ends the call and walks out of his bedroom, down the hall, downstairs, out of the house, into the meltdown of afternoon sun and the crashing sound waves of the seventeen-year cicadas, over his family’s uncut dandelion-filled grass and onto the neighboring lawn (closely cropped and weedless), to the sliding glass door under the deck through which he can see his best friend holding a remote like a Neanderthal boy with a bone weapon. As Plaxico drives a stupendous tee shot over a virtual fjord, Dorian sits in the chair that looks like the amputated hand of a storybook giant.

“Is it déjà vu?”

“That’s something else,” Plaxico says. “That’s when something happens and you know it happened in another life.”

The brown-skinned, khaki-trousered, polo-shirted avatar waits patiently on the fairway while Plaxico disappears into the utility room and reappears with two chilled cans of Tahitian Treat.

“Saw the kid last night,” he says.

“Where.”

“Funplex.”

Dorian pops the tab on the soda and gives him a look.

“Sorry, it was Family Night.”

“I am family.”

“You’re like family,” Plaxico says. “If we start a Like Family Night, you’re there.”

“Whatever.”

“Anyway, I saw the kid. First time in his life playing mini-golf, he finished two over par with a hole-in-one.”

“So, buy him a green blazer.”

“Precog.”

“What’d you say?”

“That’s what it’s called. When you dream of the future, you’re a precog. But you didn’t see the future.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You didn’t see the kid. You didn’t dream a kid was coming.”

“I saw the mural.”

“So?”

Dorian isn’t sure how to explain it. Plaxico picks up his tablet and after a few seconds of surfing says: “Any plans Saturday?”

“Not really.”

“Just got a invite. To a pool party.”

He reports the news in a tone of dramatic offhandedness that sets Dorian’s mind in motion. Must be from a girl. Maybe Hanna Hyashi or Isabel Ambrose. More and more, he is thinking in these terms, in terms of girls and what might happen with them: for almost a year now, a feeling in him — or the desire for a feeling — like when a thunderstorm foments in the summer atmosphere day after day, and you know the rain is coming though it seems it never will, until finally, maybe at this very party ( I need cooler cargo trunks , he starts thinking, and, I swear, if my mother makes me wear a sun-protective shirt ) … But none of these mental projections are relevant, because when Plaxico passes him the tablet, Dorian sees that the e-vite — the maw of a great white shark rising out of a kiddie pool — isn’t from Hanna or Emily or any other girl. It’s from Karim Hassad-Banfelder.

All four boys receive this invitation. For the coming Saturday at eleven o’clock. When Dean opens the message, he is getting stoned on real shit from Indochina with a sixth-grader who goes by the nickname Landru. Dean clicks on the link and he thinks it’s funny (the shark that can’t possibly fit in the space it is depicted as being in, suggesting a disregard for physical laws, or maybe a change therein, some dimensional passageway at the bottom of the kiddie pool, a wormhole to oceanic depths), but he deletes the e-mail without giving a moment’s consideration to the question of attendance as the hands of Landru proffer a water bong the size of a shoulder grenade launcher … When Keenan opens it, he is in the in-law apartment where his grandmother aged gracefully until cortical dementia infected her mind like spyware. Now she lives in a community for the memory-impaired while her grandson uses her old quarters as a love shack where he and Amber Kakizaki, a thirteen-year-old girl met on a hike for kids with nature deficit disorder, have tortuous outercourse under the grandfather clock that plays Westminster Chimes every half hour. He clicks on the link and doesn’t think there’s anything funny about a shark in a kiddie pool (though he does see the potential for humor if one were to add some towelhead kids jumping out of the pool with their eyeballs bugging out of their faces). Far from amused, the thought of being in a swimming pool with one of them, the idea of immersion half-naked in the same water, makes his guts squirm and burn with a furious nausea … And Dorian and Plaxico are together when they open it, in the basement of the Hightower home, drinking carbonated fruit punch while on the flatscreen television the facsimile of a long-dead golf pro waits to take his second shot on fourteen. Dorian is not so much angry as afraid — and when he says, “Like we’re gonna play Marco Polo with Jig-Abdul of Arabia,” Zebedee can see through the show of rancor to the fear inside, which he guesses isn’t so different from the fear we all harbor. Still. In this best friend (better known than his own brother), it’s something else, too. It’s like Dorian is afraid of himself, of the one thing in life you can know in full: more afraid of himself than of any uncertainty or unknowable. It seems to Zebedee that his friend might start crying, and he’s trying to think about what to say, even as his own mind is distracted by a series of deep links that range through language and history: Jig-Abdul. Jigaboo. The lawn jockey you call The Negro. Your great uncle dragged by rope, by truck, over a dusty southern road to the field with the hanging tree: He to whose name you have changed your name.