Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“Dodo?”

“Skyler. What. What time is it?”

“I woke you.”

“What are you doing,” he asks. “Where are you?”

“Baker Beach.”

She turns the eye of her phone (and the image of his face) toward the bridge, though she supposes the video won’t show much more than the vapor lamps of the roadway like a trail of stars in the dark.

“What’s wrong,” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“It’s after midnight …”

“Is it?”

She sits on the sand with the image of him, grainy and monochromatic. Watches him wipe the last of the sleep from his eyes.

“Weird,” he says.

“What.”

“This dream I was just having. All these people in our yard. But it wasn’t our house. Some other house.”

“Yeah?”

“There was a car and … a guy dead in a car. I can’t remember now.”

“Just a dream,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Anyways, I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“What.”

“If anything’s wrong. I just, I got this—” ( sort of sensation , some part of her is thinking, as of standing with you at a precipice, a dizzy anxiety that some force will pull you over regardless of how firm my hold on you might be )— “This sort of, I don’t know,” she continues. “That you’re in some kind of trouble.”

He shuts his eyes.

“Are you?”

“Sky,” he says. “You know what I said to Mom the other day?”

“No, what.”

I said, “ ‘You know what, Mom? You’re worse than Skyler.’ ”

“Mm.”

“I’m serious. It’s like …”

“What’s it like.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m not in trouble. It’s summer vacation. I’m playing soccer, I’m doing my summer reading list. I’m trying to get a good night’s sleep cause I’ve got a game tomorrow.”

(and some part of her thinking: Something not right, though I can’t say what it is. A feeling I keep getting. {{examples}} That nightmare I have in which the bridge is gone. I’m babysitting a boy who is Dorian but also isn’t. {{where}} I’m in a house I was in once, up on the hill in Presidio Heights, and I can see everything from up there: the bridge, the headlands, the bay, the ocean. Something happens. {{clarify}} I don’t know. An act of war, an act of God. The bridge is gone {{dead link}} and the Marina District is burning. It wasn’t a bomb, but then it is and I know I should be sheltering in but I’m not, because my brother is in very bad shape because he was looking when it happened and he was watching through a window: his face is bloody and his eyes are sightless. So I carry him on my back until we find a hospital — and that’s where I lose him. No choice but to leave him there, but how can I leave him? {{disambiguation needed}} Leaving him. In other words: leaving home, going to college, moving to the city — when he was so attached to me, dependent on me. {{retracted}} That was nine years ago, nine years. The dream is not about that. It’s not an expression of guilt or fear or maternal instinct. It’s not telling me how I feel deep down; it isn’t telling me that I’m ready to have children or that I’m not. What it’s telling me is that something is wrong — something bigger than myself, of which I am (we are) only a small part. {{elucidate}} I can’t. Except to tell you that the feeling seems to come from over there. {{specify}} The bridge. Whenever I’m near the bridge — like now — and much more so when I’m crossing it … )

“Dodo,” she says. Are you there?

His image is frozen.

“Dorian, can you hear me?”

Low bandwidth. The call has dropped. He looks less alive than archived. Grainy, grayscaled, and motionless. As you must look to him. Why does that scare you? He is in his bed at home, breathing, as you are on this beach, breathing. And the bridge is there. It was never not there.

In the morning, Dorian wakes with a start and checks the community Lifebook page. A night without violence. As promised. Peace for a night. Now — how to keep it? Go to the meeting and then what. What will they ask of you next? Slippery slope. One step down and you’ll start sliding. Don’t even go near the edge. But if I don’t … He gets on his bike and goes to a place he thinks of as his alone: a wetland area on the east side of town, where a creek flows over rocks and into an expanse of reeds and cattails. The multi-use trail ends, suddenly, at the interstate: the creek disappears into a dark culvert ablast with the thunder of traffic headed toward Albany or New France. Before that, you can enter the water and wade to where the tall plants protect you like ramparts. He shouldn’t go. He should go to the police instead and tell them what he knows. But as he sits there in that place of contemplation — atop a rock amidst the blades of the reeds and the strange brown spikes of the cattails — it seems to Dorian that to tell what he knows will not solve a problem so much as create a new one, a worse one. He can set this right on his own. Without anyone else getting hurt. And with no one ever knowing he had a connection to any of it. As he stares over the marsh into the heights of the deciduous trees, he will come to feel sure of this — and he will suddenly see, perched on a branch like a specimen from the state museum, an American eagle, which all at once, with a shrug of wings, will come to life and fly away, silent as a drone.

At first he couldn’t believe it. But in the days since encountering Yassim at the mosque, Karim has come to feel that what is actually hard to believe is that there is nothing unbelievable about the appearance of his friend. Hadn’t the imam said in his sermon, two weeks ago, that some of us become lost on false paths, but if we pray well and honestly, Allah will guide us onto the path of our true and best destiny — which will lead us finally and unerringly to the gardens of Paradise? I became lost , Karim thinks to himself. I became lost and I didn’t even know I was, but God has sent Yassim …

After the service last Friday, the two had slipped out of the prayer hall together. On the playground, surrounded by squealing children and beyond the hearing of the mothers standing in the shade of the main building, Karim smiled and fought the impulse to embrace his old friend, for if he did, he was sure to cry.

“Yassim,” he said. “I thought—”

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“You mean you thought I was …” He pantomimed an explosion by a sudden unfurling of his fists …

“I guess.”

“I am, dude. I’m a ghost come to haunt your ass from Paradise. Shit, man. Can you believe this?”

“What.”

“All of it. These fuckin mozlems.”

Karim looked around and saw: little boys with neat haircuts, little girls wearing shiny shoes, mothers in fancy hijabs texting on smartphones. Nice families, each with a car in the parking lot and a home to return to.

“The sheikh wasn’t kidding,” Yassim said. “They’re all infidels.”

“But Yassim …”

“Mm.”

“What are you doing here?”

Yassim smiled and put a hand on Karim’s shoulder. There was nothing sarcastic about this action; no joke. His old friend guided him a few feet away from the play-structures, away from the mothers and the children. Under a line of trees, a few boulders were left over from when the land had been excavated. On one of these rocks, in the shade, Yassim produced a smartphone, touched the screen, and handed it to Karim. A video started up. A boy, robed like a little scholar in a short-sleeved dishdasha, a kufi on his head, looking directly at the recording device, said: “Peace be upon you, my brothers.” The voice. That’s what made Karim realize that the boy on the screen was someone he knew. Realization in the form of a denial ( not him, ears too big ), even as he understood that the ears had been hidden before under hair that had since been cut, and that the boy on the screen really was Hazem — the very boy with whom Karim and Yassim, for half a year, had slept on a twin-size mattress under a lean-to made of scrounged sheet metal and particle board; the same boy who had been joined with them in dependency upon a drug that bore the three to a place far away from where they truly were; the one among them who had always been a true believer, never doubting what the sheikh told them (that, for example, if you lay your life down in the path of God, you will feel nothing when your body explodes). And yet, now — on a playground in the Colonies, a world away from Dakota — Karim still felt a weird doubt. Peace be upon you, my brothers. A thing Hazem would never say. And yet it was him. Was him wearing a suicide vest and standing in front of the flag of the Caliphate, saying: “Every one of you who feels you have no future now but the future of a dog. I thought that was my future. But I have found a new one.” It’s him , Karim thought. Him and not him . And what a strange notion came to Karim next. That this was Hazem’s very self trapped within the screen of the phone, like a djinn in a lamp …