Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

On the drive home from work, think of Dorian. The baby he once was; the boy he is now; and the person you are frightened he will soon become. It seems you spend half your waking life these days on the Northway, backed up in traffic, worrying about the person your son might become. A hateful one who will pay hate forward.

Hate.

A strong word. But isn’t it an accurate one? What he did on that school trip, at the mosque. Heart hurts at the memory of reading those words written in a hand undeniably his: FUCK ISLAM. What is that, if not hate? When all you’ve ever preached is love and respect for others, not through religion (you are not religious, though there was, when you first moved east, a brief flirtation with a Presbyterianism so open-minded it bordered on the agnostic), but in the socially progressive terms found in the messages of good books and the enlightened lessons of history. You cannot understand it, any more than you can understand why he sees a sister who never was; and though the two things — the emotion and the illusion — are surely interconnected, the question of which caused which is all but impossible to answer … Now this: A new boy across the street. When you heard the news, that your neighbor has adopted an orphan from the camps, you thought: That’s strange. Because it isn’t a thing you would expect from that man, whom you know and like well enough, but about whom you have heard … Well, nothing specific or definite; only that he was one of those men who went to the war for money, and who, regardless of any crimes he might commit there, was guaranteed through the corruptions of occupying power to never see the inside of an indigenous courtroom. That was three decades ago. Must be seventy years old now. A widower with no children. A man getting old alone — and now, suddenly, a guardian, a father, who in giving this boy a home will put a stop to the wrongs done him. Is this really so strange? If it seems so, it’s merely because the world has become so warped that any act of kindness makes us look automatically for some counterwork of cruelty. The more you think about it, the more brightly a feeling sparkles in you; it’s like a star appearing strong in a dark sky … Which brings us back to your son, who did not, in your opinion, learn anything from what happened back in the fall. After admitting to an act of vandalism, he served a two-day suspension from school. On the first day, you took him back to the mosque, where he apologized to the imam and then covered over what he’d written with a fresh coat of paint. On the second day, he attended a half-day tolerance workshop for tweens sponsored by the hate crimes unit of the police department. And it was just a few days later, in the course of a conversation intended to bring some closure to the incident, that Dorian lost his temper and said he knew he once had a sister, and though he had forgotten for a long time, just as you all had wanted him to, she was coming back to him in dreams, and you couldn’t hide it anymore. It had taken you quite a while to understand what in the world he was talking about — but as you absorbed the shock of the idea, you were thinking (not in words, but in a wave of feeling faster than words and more complete) that this claim was a deliberate invention, a way to deny responsibility and reflect blame back at you, as if you were the reason for his bad behavior and also the source of his prejudice. So he had learned nothing. In fact, he was only entrenching himself more completely in the kind of thinking that had to change.

Dorian has been at Plaxico’s all afternoon and now, at about six forty-five, he’s sitting at the dinner table with the Hightowers eating Mrs. H’s pulled pork and mashed potatoes when he gets a text from his father, which reminds him that tonight is family dinner. “Shit,” he says. Mr. and Mrs. H both look at him. “Sorry,” he says, pushing back his chair, “I’m supposed to be home.” “Don’t you leave those dishes just sitting there,” Mrs. H says. He clears his plate and glass and utensils and shouts out a thanks as he exits through the front door. Into a sun that is knifing through the day’s last quadrant of sky. He sees his mother’s car in the driveway. Good , he thinks — or maybe he is wishing it wasn’t there. Was he trying to upset her? No. That was not the intention. All he’d said was: I had a dream about her. Is it his fault if a simple statement of fact is so upsetting? Of course, there is also the how and when of saying. But Dorian was not thinking of that when he spoke the other morning, and he isn’t thinking of such things now. He isn’t planning what to say — or how to speak — at the dinner table when the subject of the new kid is brought up. Instead, as he walks (under the two oaks whose green boughs are as heavy with insects as summer thunderheads with rain, the sound downpouring), his mind is thinking what it wants to think, which he doesn’t even want to be thinking: since the thing at the mosque, your mother has scarcely touched you .

In the kitchen, his father is removing a roasting pan from the oven. Something horrific involving green peppers.

“Where have you been?”

“Next door.”

His brother, pushing on a salad spinner as if trying to accelerate lettuce to the speed of light, says: “Set table, pinhead.”

A few minutes later, the four are seated equidistantly at the square table; four plates with a stuffed pepper in the center of each.

“What’s the problem,” his father asks them.

“Nothing,” they say.

“So eat.”

“It looks like a dead frog,” Dorian says.

“Have to agree, Dad. Ixnay on the epperpay.”

His mother, as if introducing a mitigating factor, says: “Mine is tofu.” She pours wine and Dorian listens to the mouth of the bottle ring against the lip of the glass. “I hear there’s a new kid on the block,” she says.

Cliff says: “Old news, Mom.”

“Well, it’s new to me. Why don’t you give me a full report.”

Cliff says: “Dorian …”

“What.”

“The general wants a full report.”

“I dunno.”

“Have you met him?” his mother asks.

“Sort of.”

“Meet is kind of vague,” Cliff says. “Ask him if there’s a pool party for prepubes on Saturday.”

“He invited you?”

Dorian nods — and his mother says, in a tone so calm and sincere that he feels compelled to look up at her, “That’s great, Dorian.” And she looking at him. There’s a freeze here. Expression on her face like a phrase written in a foreign language he can almost read. Then the words come out of him:

“I don’t like pool parties.”

And her eyes blink and the muscles of her face move and the meaning is gone. “Since when,” she says.

“Yeah, since when, xenophobe.”

“Keenan isn’t going. And neither is Dean. And neither am I.”

“Your loss,” Cliff says. “ ’Cause it’s gonna be a blast. Do some cannonballs, drink some Kool-Aid, jam to some Arab death metal.”

“Could you tell him to shut up.”

“Both of you,” their father says. “Eat.”

His brother picks up his silverware and proceeds to cut along the midline of the vegetable and scoop out the organs.

Through the bay window, west-facing, a crepuscular beam of sun is about to slant into the room: Dorian can see it coming, through the boughs of the elm in the front yard. And as it finds the table — three, two, one, now —it makes of the wine in his mother’s glass (tapered glass half-full held in both her hands and she staring into it) a living color, sunlight blending with glass and liquid to create a red glow that might be a magic worked by the power of his mother’s mind. She is about to say something to you. When she says it, she will not be looking at you, but still into the glass which by then will have gone dead like a fire burned out because the planet will have turned a hundred miles on its axis and the sunbeam will be touching something else far away and until that moment unimagined. Not looking at you — you had that chance at contact and you lost it — and the color going out of the glass and the whole room losing color as she says: