Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“Dodo, listen to me.”

“Don’t call me that. She made up that name.”

“You’re seeing something that isn’t there. So am I. It’s happening to me now.”

“What is,” I said.

“It’s hard to explain. It’s what I’m writing. I don’t know where the words are coming from. Something’s going on. Maybe in the water supply or in something like milk that we consume on a regular basis. I don’t think it could be airborne, but— A kind of hallucinogen. A drug that affects memory …”

Soon as he says it, he wishes he hadn’t. Because he does not himself believe it. A drug in the water? If they were under the influence of some kind of chemical, so would countless others be. There’d be widespread reports of people remembering family, friends, lovers who never existed. No, this isn’t pandemic. It’s specific. To us . Us. Yes, us. It’s happening to me now . Nothing’s happening. You’re simply seeing what you want to see. She’s nothing but a dream. The pregnancy was real . And it might’ve been a girl — is that what you’re thinking? And it might’ve been yours. All of it is possible . Okay, fine. Let’s say it was yours (which there’s an even chance it wasn’t), and it was a girl and you kept it and had it. So one day, eight years later, you could’ve been on a beach in California and she could’ve taken a picture of you and her mother and her brother (and herself), and let’s say ten years after that she was in the city when the thing happened, just like Dorian says she was, and let’s say she died there. How did you — all of you — forget all that? Maybe that’s it . Maybe what’s it. The drug. It doesn’t create false memories, it erases real ones . Christ, would you listen to yourself … Listening, insofar as words not spoken aloud can be heard again in memory; and as Mitch listens, he speaks further still, saying it can’t be that kind of drug either, because a life cannot be made to vanish totally: not from the cloud, nor from the mind. Yes, certain links can rot, or be deliberately broken. But Dorian said it himself. There are archives. It’s the same with memory. We can take a pill for grief or trauma. Mitigate the pain of a loss. Even forget the day it happened, the specifics of the event. But we can’t erase a life. The life will always be a part of us, and always will have been a life. And if some force came hurtling out of the sky over San Francisco, not a hijacked plane or a meteor but something infinitely more powerful, enough to crash entire systems of reality … if that’s what happened that day over the bridge and she was there, then all this — the words I am writing, the dreams my son is dreaming, the photo his hands are holding now — these things would be recovered fragments of the life we lost …

Stand up now.

Don’t let him go away thinking: I am still alone, my father won’t listen or believe, no one ever will . Say: “Dorian.” Stop him. Hold him still. Hold him. Over his head, notice a moth clinging to the window screen. Pale green. Eyespots on the tapered hind wings. Not an uncommon type but rarely seen, for its existence is so brief. Because of your light, perhaps it will not die in darkness.

This is the season when thunderstorms form as if summoned by a wizard, over one town or city but not another, golf-ball-size hail falling in one area while somewhere else the wind twists itself into a whirling funnel. In Kathryn Wakefield’s office in the provincial appeals bureau on the twelfth floor of Agency Building 3, the text of a severe weather warning streams along the bottom of the computer screen—

… THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES UNTIL 5:30 P.M.: ALBANY, DELAWARE, GREENE …

— while she looks through a plate glass window down at Empire Plaza, at the flux of human bodies, dozens of people walking on differing paths, each on his or her own small and private journey, and yet all of them (she is thinking) somehow united, part of a choreography of motion around the giant quadrilateral of the reflecting pool, which now, at this hour of the middle afternoon, is showing an image of a bruising sky so color-saturated and sharply focused it might be made not of light and water but of megapixels. She is looking down at the plaza when it happens.

The tone.

A high-pitched, nails-on-a-blackboard screak. But she does not reach for her mobile device. Doesn’t stop the signal, though the signal will keep sounding until she touches the screen and opens the message. Instead, she keeps watching the plaza, all the people whose personal paths through the collective transit had appeared to her, a few moments ago, at once volitional and predetermined. She watches them come to a stop. All of them — all of a sudden — motionless. Holding their phones, touching the screens, stopping the signal, reading the message. Well, not all . Here and there, Kathryn notices, a pedestrian hasn’t even paused, hasn’t broken his stride, as if terrorism does not pertain to him …

Five minutes later, she is in the garage under the plaza. In her little plug-in, in a jam of vehicles inching toward the exits. It will take upwards of thirty minutes to simply get out onto the street. Then she still has to get down the hill to the on-ramp. Could be an hour before she’s even on the highway. Think about alternate routes. Problem is: this is a specific threat against capital cities, based on intelligence credible enough for the threat level to be raised to severe, meaning attacks are almost certainly going to happen. Every artery out of the city will be clogged, not only with commuters, but every resident with enough brains to get beyond a potential hot zone of radiation. She tries her husband again. No good. The networks are overwhelmed. Nothing to do but sit still and inch forward. A driver further ahead leans on his horn for seconds on end — and the sound, as it echoes through the subterranean chamber, brings tears to her eyes. And then she sees. Someone, in an attempt to back out of a space and join the line, is refusing to give up his claim on the queue, while the person he is trying to precede, won’t back up to let him in, or perhaps can’t because the next car is up against his rear bumper. The ultimate effect, after a revving of engines and a yelping of tires is of the interjected vehicle being rammed, at a forty-five degree angle, into the rear of another parked car, setting off its alarm. Someone else, two cars ahead, attempts an end-run around all of this, causing a new collision. Cover your ears with your hands. Open your mouth. Maybe if you scream, all these goddamn fucking people will prove to be nothing but ingredients of a nightmare.

Twenty or so miles north, in the town where she should be, the sky appears to Dorian Wakefield exactly as it had appeared to his mother in the surface of the calm water twelve stories below her office window … While she was staring out of that window, Dorian was walking through the ruins of the old race track, thinking back on what his father had said the night before, feeling that there was something to be done now, something they had to do, he and his father, both of them together, in order to … (This is where he lost his sense of direction.) To do what? Dorian doesn’t know. All he knows is that his father believes him. But is belief in the claim of another an admission of dishonesty? The question is: Do you believe him , when he’s been lying to you for so long, when all of them … This was the argument he was feeling inside himself when it happened.

The tone.

For a few moments, Dorian didn’t really hear it; or, rather, the temporal lobe of his brain failed to interpret it correctly. Because of the cicadas. Because the tone of the advisory system (a combination of sine waves in the 800–1000Hz range) bears a striking resemblance to the song cycle of a periodical insect. The delay lasted a few moments only. Then the neurons in his auditory cortex responded, and Dorian Wakefield felt his heart catch fire. Like millions of others from the Original Thirteen to the Acquired Territories, he reached for his mobile device. Touched the screen. Stopped the signal. Read the text of the alert. Saw the time and thought: She is still at work . He stood there long enough to try a call—“ due to a surge in wireless traffic ”—and then started running. Across the thicketed infield, past the dead tote boards and toward the ruins of the main building, making for the pavilion where he’d locked his bike, while overhead the sky took on colorations suggestive of the bruise that had faded at last from his face, so that, despite the clear and present fear that his mother might not get out of the capital before something went down, the image on his mindscreen was Karim coming towards him across a green lawn and drawing his arm back and the sensation in his gut seemed to be the convulsive pain of a fist striking him there. By the time he reached the pavilion and the fountain, he was gasping for breath, as if all the air had been forced out of him once again. He went down on his knees beside the bike and grabbed at the locking mechanism. Four numbered disks that he had turned probably a thousand times to a combination that he had chosen — and that he now cannot remember. He closes his eyes. Thunder. Like giant pieces of sky smashing into each other and subducting. Then the numbers come to him and the lock is open; and as he stands up on the pedals and starts pumping, a drop of rain hits his face, another his arm. A moment of silence all across the environment (magicicada does not chorus in the rain) — and then a noise like innumerable bullets being shot down from the sky onto rooftops, foliage, concrete. Suddenly, the air is half water. Sensation as reference ( varrain: Rain = dream ofRain), so that, despite absorption in clear and present fears, he is also seeing-as-accessing a dream authored and saved on 07.02.2038 in which it was pouring rain and a muezzin was chanting. Karim was there, though he looked like Omar … I could feel the rain soaking through my clothes, warm like blood; and I understood that Karim was the muezzin and if I just kept him there in that storm, he would begin to experience a sensation like the one I was experiencing now, one of drowning caused by moving through a downpour of water while taking the deep and rapid breaths of someone in a state of terror. Gag and spit. Is there a taste to it? One there shouldn’t be? And I feel something, too. On my skin . That’s called water. No, like a burning . Are you sure? No, I mean, I don’t know . You’re imagining that. But it’s possible, isn’t it. To fly a plane carrying a nerve, blood, or blister agent into a line of storm clouds . Yeah. Calm down, stop breathing so hard. I can’t, I think there’s a taste in my mouth . And watch where you’re going. It’ll take her hours to get home . Red light. She’s probably not even on the highway yet . (Car coming from the left; braking, hydroplaning, barely missing him.) Hello, what did I just say, are you trying to get us killed? (Eyes burning, too. But don’t your eyes always burn a little when you’re crying?)