Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“What’s his name, Dorian.”

It takes him a moment to contextualize the question. Thinking: Him. The new kid. He thinks the name to himself, but in response to his mother only shrugs his shoulders.

“I thought you met him,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“So what is his name.”

Cliff raises his hand like he’s back in high school. “His name,” he says, “is Karim Hassad-Banfelder. But Dorian just calls him Camel Fucker.”

“You’re excused,” their mother says.

“What.”

“I said, get out.”

“I’m being i ron ic, Mom—”

Dorian pushes back his chair. She tells him to sit down. He doesn’t. He is walking away and focused on his bike and how much time he’s got before curfew when she catches up with him and seizes him by the shirt collar.

“I guess you’re not happy about all this,” she says. “Maybe you’d prefer it if this boy had been killed along with his family. Then you wouldn’t have to be bothered with his existence. Isn’t that right.”

“No—”

“Your life is one unfair trial after another, isn’t it. First you have to go on a school trip, then you have to accept consequences for breaking a law. Now, as if that wasn’t enough, you’ve been invited to go swimming for a couple of hours.” (She had let go of his shirt, but she grabs him again now, his arm, the bicep, touching him though not with any gentleness. He almost says, You’re hurting me. Starts to say it—) “I promised you last fall I wouldn’t let the next thing slide. Now here it is. That boy has lost everything, Dorian. He’s reaching out for a friend and I don’t care if no other kid on this street responds. You’re going to. Show some kindness. Or I will ground you in ways you can’t imagine. Do you get me? I will ground you back to the Stone Age.”

Karim did not want to have a party in a swimming pool or anywhere else for that matter; but the old guy had already conceived the event with such exuberance, to not assent would be to hurt the old guy’s feelings — and, for reasons difficult to articulate, Karim did not want to hurt his feelings. “I’ve got a genius idea,” the old guy had announced over dinner on the third day. “Pool party.” Which was a thing Karim had never heard of. So the old guy defined it. “First of all, you need a pool, which we’ve got. Second, you need a hot summer day, of which we have no shortage. You, as the kid with the pool at his house, are known as the host. Now all you need are some other kids …”

“What kids,” Karim asked.

“Well, mainly some kids from the mosque. I’ve been talking to a lady over there, Mrs. Mahfouz. She’s a volunteer with the local youth foundation. She already told the middle-school group about you, and the boys and girls from the group want to hang with you, so it’ll be easy to get some names and e-mail addresses. And then there are the boys you met yesterday, Dorian and Zeb, Dean and Keenan, who of course should also be invited”—and so on about making friends and how a pool party is a perfect way to break the ice until finally Karim said, “All right.”

Stupid.

Because the old guy’s feelings will only be hurt more later: after you call the phone number the sheikh gave you in Dakota and connect with the cell here in New York, after you have been guided towards your real purpose and have done your duty, at which time the old guy will think back on the pool party and how you went along with the idea and perhaps even seemed to enjoy the day while knowing all along that you never intended to become friends with anybody (you weren’t a friend, you were an enemy), and in the end you betrayed the kindness of a well-meaning person in the worst fucking way … All this understood by Karim as if in retrospect: as if all of it has happened already. Like he has done his duty and is looking back from the afterlife on his days in the world and contemplating the last thing he ever did — and rather than being proud and joyful, he’s full of regret. Of course, none of this has happened yet. It’s the night of the fourth day. He is in his new bedroom. The time so late it’s early. He was asleep but then he woke up; and now he lies awake, unable to find his way back to sleep. Smelling on his skin the minty soap washed with before bed while the central cooling system breathes down on him like a loving god, thinking all of this even as a voice only he can hear, his own voice but also independent of him, recites the ten digits of the phone number he has not yet called, the numerical code written by the sheikh on a scrap of paper back at the camp and memorized by Karim, an assignment completed without question, because back then, to Karim, everything beyond the camp was a void unknowable and what would he have there, in that empty meaningless darkness, if not the numbers.

The time is one thirty-eight. Across the road, in the house with cream-yellow vinyl siding, Dorian Wakefield is dreaming. His imagination is making him believe he is with that boy who knew his sister. Noah. When the dream begins, Dorian and Noah are playing Monopoly. Aspects of the game not what they really are. Instead of battlefields from old wars, the green properties are named for internment camps: the one that should say Saratoga says Galaga, which Dorian understands to actually mean Dakota.

Is my sister still writing?

Mm-hm.

What’s it about?

What happens next, Noah says. But some is what she wished already happened.

View from the doorway that leads to the next room: Skyler at the desk, intently focused on the screen of a laptop, fingers resting on the keyboard. She sees Dorian and smiles. I’m just going to call Mom, he says to her. Stay right there.

Phone already in his hand and he dialing ten strange numbers. Answering voice: Dorian? It’s the middle of the night . Mom, he says. Come in here. Dorian, it’s the middle of the night, honey . Her bedroom is right down the hall. If she would just get up and come in here, she would see— As a shock of wind hits the house and the sound of every window breaking, of flying glass, of glass shards being rifled into walls and furniture, chiming against objects held together by metallic bonds, is like the music of the world please no glass god dream help now Mom Dad Cliff Skyler …

It is not a nightmare that wakes Kathryn. More like a touch on her shoulder, or the passing of a hand over her face, smoothing of hair; her eyes open peacefully and unconsciousness ebbs. For a moment or two, she is in the old house in California. Confusion with precedent: it happens sometimes; in this unclaimed territory between sleep and waking, she will think she’s younger and lying in the four-post bed under the window that looked out on the eastern ridge of hills, until, coming fully to, she feels surprised by how far she and her family have drifted from that other place, that other life, and by how old she really is. The strange thing, tonight, is her aloneness in the room. No husband in the bed; no child standing beside it. Touched by no one. Then she feels that small familiar grasp — inside, at her own crux — like something rooted being pulled. She goes into the bathroom. In the dark, some blood drips out as she pisses. She doesn’t need any light. The cabinet just in front of her. Box on the second shelf. She pulls the paper strip and presses the pad into the crotch of her underwear. Still happening, this thing. Forty-five years old, and still the body going through the motions of menstruation. Nothing but an echo in the nerves. Back in bed. The old house echoing in her thoughts — and she, lying in the dark, seeing herself moving through it as she had on that day when she didn’t know what else to do but bring the boys home and listen to the news and wait … She waited all day for Mitch to call. By the time he’d heard what had happened, packed up, and driven into range of a tower, the shadow of day’s end was rising on the hills like the waters of a flood. Soon all the land would be under it. By nightfall, he still wasn’t home. While to the south the city burned and smoked and sickened, Kathryn carried Dorian outdoors to look at the stars. Clearest of nights. The galaxy overhead: a river of lights flowing into what some see as heaven … Now her eyes are closing and it seems she can feel her son breathing in her arms under that starry sky. In — his chest pushing on her; out — a warm puff on her cheek. Then something moves out by the windbreak.