Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

What happens next is not much. By dinnertime, the Wakefields are all together, safe and sound (though the car is scratched and dented on the passenger side and the cheap thermoplastic bumper is cracked, Kathryn isn’t hurt), and nowhere in the country has anything happened yet. There was no chemical in the rain (Dorian feels stupid for fearing there could have been, something he saw on a television show probably); and the storms are wheeling off to the northeast, the harmless precipitation welled like tears in the flower petals of gardens and dripping tear-like from the rounded and pointed margins of leaves, while the clouds break apart, light of a setting sun pulsing through the fissures, a phenomenon you could describe as a kind of molting; and with the end of the rain, the cicadas, a few at first but soon all the millions of them, are once again singing their weird requiem.

It’s a Tuesday.

Family dinner night. And if there is one cliché Mitchell and Kathryn Wakefield can get behind, it’s that terrorism should not disrupt our way of life. Or, in the words (more of less) of their older son: A hundred years ago, people collected scrap metal; today we do our part by sitting down to eat, in a calm and civilized fashion that sends a clear fuck you to the enemy, a bacon-wrapped meatloaf.

“You’d rather have bread and water,” his father says.

“Uh-uh.”

Dorian (looking down at the apportionment of meat, potato, and vegetable on his plate): “Thanks, Dad.”

“You’re welcome, Dodo.”

It’s an exchange that Cliff notices and finds curiously sincere, and that Kathryn is aware of, too, through only obscurely, through a mood darkening by the hour like a day coming to an end. Earlier, when she got broadsided on the highway, pushed over the rumble strip of the shoulder and onto the grass of the median, she had sat there for a half hour. Now she is expected to use a fork; and the idea of a meatloaf made of veggie burger crumble expressly for her is too sad to bear …

“Kate,” Mitch says.

“Mm.”

“Should we serve you? Here—”

“I’m not hungry.”

Dorian (picking up the carving knife): “It’s veggie, Mom. Just for you.”

She gives a kind of smile. “I appreciate that,” she says. “But please don’t guilt-trip me right now.”

“It’s not a guilt trip,” Mitch says. “It’s dinner.”

“I said thanks.”

Silently, Dorian puts down the knife. Feels his lip trembling. Goddammit, if you cry now. Well, what do you want out of me . I want you to cut the baby shit. She could’ve died . But she didn’t, did she. She hates me … Too strong a word, and inaccurate. Hate is that cross that burned the other night. Hate is whatever is coming next, might come at any moment, but probably after we’re asleep — after struggling to keep our eyes open and we just can’t anymore, then it’ll come, because they want us to be dreaming about it when it happens. But this. This not-touching, this not-looking — this is something else: harder to understand, more frightening even than hate.

After dinner, Mitch goes up to the safe room in the attic. Earlier in the day, right after the alert, he had come up here and checked the taping along the sill, frame, seams, and joints of the one window, and then covered the window with fresh sheeting and sealed the sheeting to the wall. Pinned to a corkboard on a different wall is a list of supplies. Check list against items stacked and stored: Ten gallons of clean water, first aid kit, box of safety matches, four N95 particulate respirators … For chemical or biological, nothing else to do. The main thing is an upper floor and no cracks. As for nuclear. There are people (some of them friends) who dug up their backyards after 8-11 and had a 7′ x 8′ x 30′ box made of plate metal buried underground. Last semester, a student told him that all through her childhood she’d hosted sleepovers in a five-room underground bunker complete with a digital home theater … flashlight, twelve rolls of toilet paper, hand sanitizer gel … Of course, he and Kate had discussed it when they moved here, how they’d be living thirty miles from the capital and on the outskirts of a major tech corridor. What if the very worst were to happen? It wasn’t a question of money (they could have financed it like anything else, a house or a car), but there was another kind of cost to be weighed against the benefit. Living with that thing in your yard. Your children grow up playing on top of it. You trim the grass around the blast door. A cold form of comfort. If we need it, it will always be there — and always it will be there, reminding us that, at any moment, we might need it. There it will be, hidden but never invisible to the mind’s eye, a kind of coffin to step into of our own volition … hand-crank radio, pack of playing cards … So, if the very worst happens: the fallout shelter at the high school, a five-minute drive, though who knows how long when half the people in the district have the same destination.

Mitchell Wakefield has always said to himself: We can’t be that kind of family. The kind that lives in fear. But what are we living in now, if not fear? (Every heartbeat a knifethrust.) We can’t live any other way.

Has she ever felt this far away? As if all of reality has telescoped out to the edge of a horizon and is going down like a sun into a dark ocean while she, alone on a shore that doesn’t exist, watches it disappear.

Kathryn is alone in bed. Her bed is the shore. Even her thoughts are distant, though she knows what she’s thinking about: How one night, eight years ago — while to the south the city burned and smoked and sickened — when he was still small enough to be held in her arms, she held him in her arms under the stars and comforted him, and then laid his sleeping body down in the same room where her older son was already asleep; and then — (as she tries to remember, she herself is falling asleep, not quite unconscious but experiencing a déjà vu of the coming dream in which her phone is ringing and a wave of pain crashes against her heart at the sight of the contact photo and the name.

Answer.

And there her daughter is. Crying. Eyes wide and glassy. The night sky behind her like the sky in a medieval painting of hell. Howl of emergency vehicles. Mom, she says. Oh, god, Mom. Please help me.)

I had promised him something. I didn’t know what exactly. But the next morning, when I woke up and saw the news: SUICIDE ATTACKS IN BOISE, HELENA, AND CONCORD—Well, like everyone else, the first thing I felt was relief. It hadn’t been much at all. Small planes (light-sport, single-engine aircraft) carrying conventional explosives flown in the middle of the night into three pretty much empty Greek revival and neoclassical structures that had housed the legislatures of the Territories of Idaho and Montana and the Colony of New Hampshire … I had been the last to wake up. I came into the family room and found my parents and brother there, with the television split-screened so they could see a live-feed of smoking ruins at the same time that they were watching video footage of the crashes (in Idaho, a direct hit to the dome) while also listening to an argument between two pundits about whether the danger was now over or only just beginning.

I got a bowl of cereal.

Pretty soon, the next wave of news broke. Mosques on fire in the Republic of Texas and the Florida Territory — and as I watched the revenge take shape, I thought of Jon-David, and how I had agreed after that meeting to let him drive me home, because I’d lost track of time and it was nearly curfew …

“So,” he said. “Are you with us?”

“I dunno.”

“Jackson can be kind of corny. All that stuff about dinosaurs and asteroids. But he’s right, you know. Our country is going extinct.”