Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“Sorry,” Karim says. “I mean, for scaring you.”

“You didn’t scare me.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, it’s too dark now,” Dorian says. “I was gonna stop anyway.”

“You’re almost done.”

“I know that.”

“So you should just finish,” Karim says.

“Did you ever cut a lawn?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s too dark now to see the line.”

“What line.”

“That’s the point,” Dorian says. “If you can’t see it, it’s too dark.” Karim looks up at the sky.

“Anyway—”

“No, wait,” Karim says, pulling something out of his pocket. “You want a green?”

“Here?”

“Yeah, why not.”

“What,” Dorian says, “does he just let you smoke?”

“Sort of.”

“Whenever you want.”

“Two a day,” Karim says. “Until the agonies stop.”

“The what?”

Returning the box to his pocket, he says: “I used to smoke Dream.”

“Dream,” Dorian says. “Like, opium.”

The kid nods.

Dorian has heard the rumors. Not only that opium was used in the camps, but that government agencies — in league with traffickers allied with anti-Islamist rebels in the Caliphate — actually helped to introduce the drug and to keep it coming through the fences, thereby reducing the people within to a state of perpetual semi-consciousness. A conspiracy theory. Same as the drones. Same as the allegation (so outlandish, it made the notion of aliens from another galaxy seem credible) that 8-11 had been planned in Washington and carried out by a secret command of the Defense Department. Dorian has never believed such things. But speaking of things hard to believe: Here he is, standing on his front lawn in the gathering dark of a midsummer night, having a reasonable conversation with a Muslim who jacked him the day before during a game of croquet.

“I guess you’re pissed,” Karim says.

“I dunno.”

“I hit this friend of mine one time. I thought he was the thing I was mad at, but I realized later …” (Silence.) “Have you ever?”

“Hit a friend?”

“Hit anyone.”

“Not really. No.”

Again, Karim looks up, as if waiting for something to appear in the sky, a star maybe, and says: “I have some issues that require professional help. That’s what the old guy says. I call him jaddi, which means grandfather, but … I don’t know what I should call him. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the issues— I mean, what he thinks is, if I talk to someone, I won’t do anything like that again.”

“You mean therapy,” Dorian says.

He nods.

As each waits for the other to say the next thing, both realize that the cicadas, too, are silent.

Karim says: “They finally shut the fuck up.”

“I know.”

And as if to underscore the cessation of the din: here and there, the mute flash of a firefly.

“Well, I better …”

“Yeah,” Karim says. “But one more thing. You know that girl from yesterday? She wants to friend you but she doesn’t know your last name.”

“Oh.”

“She’s one of my friends, so if I friended you …” (Voice trailing off.) “Or I could just tell her.”

Now, in the space between them, the pale green strobe of a firefly. Each flash like a dot in a line of demarcation disappearing even as it’s drawn. Dorian says: “Whatever, sure …” A few moments later, Karim is walking slowly (almost thinking, home ) over the freshly cut grass, making the walk slow because he knows the boy is watching. Then he hears the mower being maneuvered, the turning of the wheels on the axles. As the garage door goes down, Karim stops. Waits. Watching the space around himself — standing at the heart of a neighborhood dark and somnolent — until a firefly appears, like a mote of magic dust. He reaches out with both hands cupped, and misses.

Work. As methodical as the cutting of stones, laborious as the plowing of a field. This is what writing is — or at least, what it always has been for you. But that night, for the first time in almost twenty years, something mystical happens. You wake up in the smallest of hours — and a character is speaking to you. It’s the girl from the photo. Not addressing you (not calling you by name), nor pronouncing words in a literal sense (that would be impossible, wouldn’t it, since the voice — if it can rightly be called a voice — is located in the abstract space of the mind). No, not a voice speaking words. More accurately, a flow of encoded data. Dimensionless. In fact, in this received form, meaningless . Without you, the voice cannot make sense. Get out of bed. Notice, without in any way factoring the information, that the time is 1:57. For all you care, the time might be Δt = 2T c+ 4T a. In the bathroom, fill cupped hands with cool water and raise to your face. Be as quiet as possible. Don’t wake up your wife. If you do, her voice, a real one, will speak over the wordless one speaking to you, then you also will have to speak. Downstairs, do not power up the computer. What you want is paper — a notebook, wirebound and ruled at intervals of seven millimeters — and a pen, black pigment ink, with a very fine tip. And don’t stay in the room. Where you want to be is out in the night. Exit through the door your sons use when they don’t want to be heard coming in after curfew. On your way across the lawn (still scented from the recent cutting), look up into the sky; and before you reach the small outbuilding under the trees, you will see a planet, set like a precious stone in the zodiac. In the gazebo, switch on the lamp. Place yourself in the rounded spot of light. Open the notebook. Uncap the pen. So this is inspiration. So there really are goddesses to help us and holy spirits to speak through us and divine winds to bring us visions … Of a ghostly shape. Could be a quasar, but could just as plausibly be a girl. Now observe the bigger picture. The girl is a reflection in a tinted lens. The lens is attached to a pair of sunglasses being worn by a woman. This woman is the mother of the girl in the reflection. Beside her, two other people lie prone on the sand. A very young boy and a man. The boy is her son; the man her husband. Now watch as the picture is set in motion. Seven years will pass. And another child, a second boy, will join them unexpectedly — at the very edge of the woman’s potential for such a thing. The daughter (a teenager, beautiful and brooding) has been slipping away from the family, growing distant, moving towards nothing, just moving away. The baby will bring her back. When he is in the womb, the girl puts her fingertips against the mother’s transforming belly, and, with her lips close to the smooth taut membrane of skin, speaks to him about things they will do together; at the birth, not only does she want to be present, she wishes to cut the cord — and after the boy is out, covered in blood and fluid and vernix, does so with the shaking hands of someone performing the first of countless important acts of responsibility; and in the early days, in the night when he can’t sleep, she spells her parents, holds him and walks throughout the house whispering to him with gentle patience — or, better, if the night air isn’t too cold, carries him outside, where a pale green moonglow or the sparkle of the galaxy works a quieting magic. The parents think of it as devotion. Their new-age friends call it astroharmony, a clear-cut case of Pisces and Pisces. But to the girl, turning fifteen, then sixteen (as her brother learns to crawl, speak, walk), the emotional reality is more complicated. At the beginning, she fears he’ll die in his crib — and she checks obsessively to be sure he’s sleeping on his back. Later, it’s the stairs: what if her other brother, a careless seven-year-old, forgets to secure the safety gate. Yet these kinds of worries, about accidents preventable through vigilance, are nothing compared to the darker visions of dangers we can’t control. She can see now (the baby has shown her) that to be in the world is to be in danger; and to move through the world is to be in a constantly shifting relationship with tragedy: we avoid it by a wide margin, or we narrowly escape it, or we feel it suddenly upon us, a thing too big and fast-moving to be outrun. The boy is two. They give the crib away and he starts sleeping in a single bed; and gets into the habit of waking in the middle of the night and migrating into his sister’s room. According to the parents: not a good idea. What happens in a few months when you leave? Granted, you’re not going far, just into the city — but the point is, you won’t be here anymore, and he’s becoming more and more dependent on you . The conversation brings tears to her eyes. A couple of years ago, she was wishing away the rest of high school, dreaming of a faraway college in the New England Colonies. Now the idea of moving just two hours away is more than she can bear. In this fragile state of mind, she says foolishly: You should’ve had him sooner . (They try not to laugh.) You think it’s funny . No, but— I’m going to miss everything . Honey, we didn’t intend to have him at all . Well, you should’ve messed up sooner … And so on, until Mitchell Wakefield has filled ten, twenty, almost thirty notebook pages with words that are neither memory nor fiction, nor a writer’s elementary commixing of the two, but something other and more (though he can’t imagine what ), until around four o’clock the pen slows down, and he can’t think of what should come next. Because the voice is gone, like a spirit that has ceased, suddenly and without explanation, to participate any further in a séance; and the moment he realizes he is no longer writing is like the moment when you wake up and realize you’re no longer dreaming.