Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

By eleven o’clock, Will Banfelder is keeping watch from a room on the second floor. He sits in an armchair by a window affording a view of road, driveway, front yard; and streams on his tablet a replay of the baseball game, with the sound muted, so he can hear, through the screen of the open window, any noise from outside. Around one in the morning, the next thing will happen.

A car appears.

He doesn’t notice it at first. Because it is being driven slowly, with only the parking lights on. Then there it is. Slowing — as it comes even with the driveway and mailbox — to a crawl. He sets down the tablet. Picks up the handgun. The car is stopping now. Brake lights casting a red glow. He slides the safety pin to the left. It is an action the driver seems to sense: soon as the weapon is ready to be fired, the car moves again. Forward. Disappears around the downhill curve of the cul-de-sac. It might be exiting the circle, turning right on Onondaga, and leaving the subdivision. But as Will watches, the headlights reemerge from the trees at the foot of the hill. The vehicle is coming back. He goes downstairs. Eight steps, short hallway, front door. He enters the unlock code. Then transfers the gun to his dominant hand. Opens the door a crack. What if it’s him, or the brother . Slowing, same as before. But also turning. The front wheels roll onto the driveway. Stopping. Passenger door opens and someone gets out and removes something from the backseat, though it’s hard to tell what. The trespasser comes onto the lawn and into the weak light. A few yards, a few more. Then Will unlatches the screen door and pushes on it, and says: “Put that down. Put it down and don’t run. If you run, I will shoot you in the back.” And the man puts it down. A large pot with a handle on the top, a pressure cooker. He sets it on the ground and then he runs. Thinking perhaps that you won’t shoot. That you’ll still be standing near the bomb when he reaches the car and the driver sets it off with an electrical charge from a wireless device. But he is not going to reach the car. Drop him. A single shot between the shoulder blades. Before he hits the ground, fire again at the windshield. Fragments of glass ring over the hood. The car freezes. Then all of a sudden moves. Lurches forward, halts, leaps backward. Empty the clip — and though the driver by now is more or less dead, a reflexive depression of the accelerator will carry the vehicle in reverse across the road and onto the neighboring lawn, at which point even involuntary movement will end, the foot slipping off the pedal and the car slowing, coasting like a thing falling asleep, drifting into a peaceful rear-end collision with a birch tree, directly under the bedroom window of Dorian Wakefield.

The life of the Great Eastern Brood is once again coming to an end — as it has every seventeenth summer since the ice went from the land and a habitat of deciduous forest, a hundred million acres strong, grew up for them to sing in. In school, back in May, the three fifth grades had done a joint project: AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH THE EYES OF MAGICICADA SEPTENDECIM. 2021. 2004. 1987. And so on through the centuries. Back to 1630, a decade after the arrival of the Mayflower. The question of the assignment was: How much does a world change in seventeen years? What Dorian and his friends discovered is that a world can change an awful lot. For example, the cicadas had completely missed the Second World War. The pupae had been underground, blindly feeding on tree roots, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and were still five years from emerging when America, in 1948, after a long and bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland, finally dropped the atomic bomb on Tokyo. The insects had missed the Civil War, too. When the Brood of 1851 died out, Plaxico’s great-uncle’s grandfather had been the property of a white plantation owner in the Mississippi Territory; by the time the next generation came to light, he was a freedman.

And yet. It is possible, too, for a world to change very little, to be stuck in one place, or caught in a kind of loop, so that even the magicicada, a creature which disappears from the face of the Earth for so long a time, may reappear to find conditions not much different from those left behind. To find the same war still being fought. Even after so long a wait … For this world has become stuck. Caught in a loop. As it was in the time of our progenitors, so it still is. So it may continue to be, even in the time of our progeny. Unless the cycle is somehow broken. Unless the course of a given pathway can be altered by a person gifted with an awareness of other pathways . Listen now. When we tell you that among the countless thousands of reality-structures comprising the parallel planes of ∞, there is one in which orderings of random chance and free will are such that this war without end never began. Can you sense that reality? Where the ones you’ve lost are still with you and the ones you stand to lose will always be safe. Listen. To the sound we make. If you listen now, if you let the sound in — don’t fight it off, don’t shut it out — you will hear what we have been saying all along. You will hear her name. Skyler, Skyler, Skyler.

Into his dream comes the gunshot. Even as his sister is turning, moving to cover his body with her own, Dorian is awake and alone, in his real bed — and there are five more shots in rapid succession, glass breaking, the sound of a car engine revving, and when he gets to the window that faces the road and the Banfelder house, headlights are swerving weirdly through the dark, coming towards him though not casting light in his direction, tricking his brain into thinking that time can move both forward and backward. But no. Only the car is going backward. Driving in reverse onto his lawn, heading right for the tree under the window, and as the rear end strikes the trunk, the alarm goes off, three deafening horn blasts followed by a whooping siren. And someone else is coming. Across the road. On foot. Visible in the glow of the headlights. Dorian ducks out of sight. As if in fear of a mad assassin who will shoot anything that moves. Then a voice:

“Mitch! Kathryn!”

His father, from somewhere below: “Will?”

“Hold on!”

One more cycle of horn and siren, in the course of which Dorian’s bedroom door swings open. Cliff. In mid-howl, the siren is squelched.

From the lawn: “It’s me, Will Banfelder. Goddammit, Mitch.”

“Was that you?”

“Just me. They did have something. A pressure cooker, I think. The police are coming. Are the boys awake?”

“Dorian?” Mitch says.

“Yeah.”

“Cliff?”

“Present,” Cliff says.

Will (with a tremor in his voice): “Boys, don’t come down here.”

“Is he dead,” Kathryn asks.

“Yeah.” A pause. “Yeah, he is.”

“Who is he.”

“Not Arab. A DT, for sure …”

And then their neighbor, who has just deposited a dead body and a car on their lawn, runs back across the road. To make sure his adopted son is safe. Saying he’ll be right back, as if to promise that the mess will be cleaned up. Cliff says he’s going down there. Dorian does not move. Doesn’t even look. He just sits on the floor under the window, feeling: I am in trouble. I am in deep and troubled waters. Okay, someone else threw the first punch, and someone else set the wheels of revenge in motion. But why me at the center? This can’t be a coincidence. Some dark desire has drawn death in my direction. I must want these things to happen. Deep inside, I want the trouble to get deeper still.

Residents of Poospatuck Circle, and Members of the Community Lifebook Page: You know from Kathryn Wakefield’s post (2 minutes ago via mobile) that the Wakefield family is safe. It is a post that does nothing to mitigate your collective fears and curiosities about what is happening where you live. The time is two in the morning. Are people supposed to go back to bed under these conditions? Step out onto your porches, your decks. Depending on your view, you may be able to see that a car has crashed backward into a tree, or that the ambulance which came screaming into the subdivision is now just parked in the road, no longer in any kind of a hurry. Most of you, however, can’t see anything but the colored flashes from a police cruiser. What are you supposed to do? Make coffee and sit around until sunup, wondering and worrying? Get dressed. Go out into the darkness. At the foot of every driveway is a light. A lantern on a pole or a simple cylinder jutting not far out of the ground. Everyone, go to this place. Stand in the light and see a neighbor standing nearby in another oasis of light. Call out: What’s going on? You saw the post? Yeah, but . There were four shots . I think I heard six . You think it’s related? To what . Last night . The cross, you mean. I think it must be . Two nights in a row . (Move closer to each other. Drift into the road.) It’s all related. The fight was the first thing, then the cross, now this . I wouldn’t call it a fight exactly . What do you mean . I’d call it assault with a specific intent to commit battery . Banfelder has really opened a can of worms here . I know . I mean, this isn’t just his problem now, there’s a dead guy on someone else’s lawn . Look, another post . From who? Moses Nkondo. Says there’s two dead, DTs, and they had a pressure cooker bomb … So there you have it. Two right-wing haters trying to first-degree-murder your neighbor with an IED ran into a little more resistance than they bargained for. Or maybe the way you see it is: Two self-appointed guardians of the American way, making a statement about what will and will not be tolerated, have been gunned down in cold blood by a man whose loyalties are none too clear. The interpretations are irrelevant. The fact of the matter is: A conflict is under way — and escalating. Right and wrong. Don’t waste time on that debate. Just everyone pull together and do something before violence gains the foothold of an invasive species and spreads faster than you can fight it off.