Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

Finally, it’s going to storm. They have all been waiting, desperately: for a wave of northern air as big as a nation to clash with the heat and drive it away, if only for a time. When Dorian and Plaxico exit Keenan’s place, just before five o’clock, after a half hour of talking with Jon-David Sullivan III of the Saratoga Chapter of the American Resistance Alliance, the sky is dark and wind is thrashing the leaves on the trees. “C’mon,” Dorian says. They run across the Cartwright property. To the Wakefield house is a sprint of no more than a hundred yards. But the two boys can’t beat the rain: an instantaneous downpour that soaks their clothes through in a matter of seconds.

They duck into the open garage.

Flash of lightning.

Both of them nervous after having given the names; winded from the run; and now a crack of thunder — like a shot from some impossible gun — jolts their hearts. Almost gasping, they watch the rain beat violently upon the driveway.

“Who was that guy,” Dorian says.

“I dunno.”

“Some kind of Aryan?”

“Well, he’s not from Greenpeace, is he …”

A car comes up the road, which is a sluiceway now. Tires fighting the current and churning water. After it’s gone, Plaxico says abruptly:

“Didn’t you see me looking at you?”

“What …”

Plaxico shakes his head and Dorian wants to know what he was supposed to do, just get up and leave? His best friend wanders around the cavernous space of the garage, saying nothing, finally taking an umbrella from a peg on the wall.

“What are you doing?” Dorian says.

Though it’s obvious what his friend is doing. He’s taking an umbrella from a peg on the wall. At the threshold of the garage, he pushes it open. “We shouldn’t have done that,” Plaxico says — and then he runs into the storm.

As you well know, Kathryn Wakefield: A drug is moving constantly through your bloodstream and circulating through your brain. You ingest it, in pill form, every morning, without fail. What the drug does, from a pharmocological standpoint, is: it boosts levels of seratonin (which you don’t have enough of in your synapses), allowing for successful transmission of important messages about emotion and behavior between neurons. In more human terms, its purpose is to keep you from experiencing sadness and fatigue to such a degree that your sense of reality starts to slip and you find it difficult to load a dishwasher much less shower and dress, drive twenty miles, and perform for eight hours the duties of a general counsel. In the winters — the gray cold days of the Northeastern winter — the disorder gains strength (or the drug loses power), so you have learned to increase the dosage for a five-month period. But this is not December or February. This is June.

Why is it happening now?

You go to your doctor of eight years — who, after stating the obvious ( you usually feel pretty good in the summer ), asks you rote questions ( is there a problem at work, how is everything at home ) before writing a new prescription. On the way to the pharmacy, think about the answer you gave her and the one you might have given. You told her: “There have been troubles with my son, the younger one. Going back to last fall.” But the truth about Dorian is: He has scared you and worried you and made you angry, but he has not plunged you into a darkness. Depression came last winter, the punctual visitor it has always been; and left, as always, with the melting snow and the appearance in your garden of the delicate shoots of the first perennials. Now, two months later, here it is again, out of time. The reason you might have given is: The other night I got to thinking. About her … I say her . Of course, I can’t know what the sex would have been. Yet I do seem to remember having a feeling back then, a sort of theoretical inkling, of two X chromosomes, not an X and a Y. In the generic terms of science is how I tried to think. All my life, I had been moody. But in those days after, I felt as though much more than the embryo and the placenta had been removed from me. (I could call it an emptiness. But that’s not really what depression is. Depression isn’t having nothing in you: it’s the absence of things without which you feel like nothing.) Afterward, I was using up sick days and spending them in bed, curtains drawn against the sun, wanting darkness, wanting always to be asleep, which is a way of wanting to be dead. But if you wait long enough, if you can stand the wait, the missing things do get returned and you want to live in the light again. And I have been trying, ever since, to stay in the light — or at least not allow the darkness to get a good grip on me. But the other night, at the amphitheatre: I got to thinking about it, and I started feeling about it the way I had back then, and now I can’t seem to stop. Thinking: She would be twenty-six now; and eight years ago, when something happened above the Golden Gate Bridge — a thing that, even now, no one can really explain — she would have been eighteen; and she could have been there, in the city, on that day. And so I start crying, and I want to be covered by darkness at the thought. Just the chance. That had she been born, it would have been possible for her to die that way.

Late at night, three days after therapy, he is sitting on his bed, hypnotizing himself. Holding the coin that Dr. Khaled gave him — and pretty soon the coin is falling out of his fingers and he is in that place which she has told him he should go to in his imagination one or two or three times a day, a place which is always there and to which he can go anytime because he is in charge of his imagination: where he can always talk to his mother, because (as Dr. Khaled said) he knows her so well and they love each other so much that he is able to hear her voice and feel her love in his inner mind. What they are doing tonight is this: Sitting on the green grass alongside the shore of the lake, looking at the word of God. Not the new Qu’ran given him by his adoptive father. The one Abdul-Aziz gave him in Dakota. The front cover is torn. Some pages are water-stained, others speckled with mold. Here and there, a winged insect has been crushed into the shape of a letter from some unknown abjad; and on one page in particular (the one open before him and his mother now) there is a smear of blood where, months ago in the camp, Karim killed a mosquito that must have been feeding on him or one of his friends while he read. On this page, just above the blood, are the verses about a place of gardens and fountains, of eternal peace and safety, where hearts will be freed of hatred …

He falls asleep.

(Or perhaps he has been asleep for some time.)

When he wakes up very suddenly, he thinks he must be having a dream about waking up, because the old guy has thrown open the bedroom door and is standing at the threshold, holding a gun.

“Stay here,” he says.

“Jaddi, what.”

“Don’t go out of the house. Don’t go out of any door. Got me?” From the phone in his other hand comes the voice of a woman: “ Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency? ”

“There’s a fire on my property,” he says. Then he’s moving into the hallway, towards the stairs, and Karim hears him say the street address but can’t make out anything else. He gets up from the bed. Opens the window. The floodlights are on, shining on the swimming pool and the patio, but nothing is burning behind the house. So he goes to the room across from his own — and opening the door, sees it framed in the window: what appears at first to be a small tree on fire. Though it can’t be a tree, because there are two straight lines of flame, one vertical and one horizontal, connected, crossing at their midpoints. Not a tree. So, what is it? The boy can’t begin to guess. Having never seen such a thing, nor heard of one …