Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“When are you taking off?”

“6-13.”

“Shit, man. Sayonara.”

“I wish I was going to New France.”

“Why.”

“Because it isn’t a province of America the god damn Beautiful.”

“I sympathize, but the camp doesn’t allow intersexuals.”

“Suck me.”

“How about camel-fuckers. Do they let them in?”

“Jesus, look!”

They all stop talking — Dorian, Zebedee (whose real name is Plaxico), Keenan, and Dean — and look to where Dean is pointing. They have been passing around a green; and each boy thinks, for a moment, that the motion before his eyes must be drug-induced, a trick of his own mind, in which case it’s strange for the others to be aware of it. Then they realize: The ground really is moving. More precisely, the soil (a sandy clay dried to a pale brown after rainless weeks) is trembling, as if the rocks below are subducting like tectonic plates. But it’s not that; it’s the cicadas. The nymphs emerging from their underground cells. At first, the boys think they can be counted. But no. They’re everywhere. Dozens of little heads rising up from the dirt, forelegs reaching up into the air like the arms of babies reaching for something suspended overhead. This is happening everywhere: in the yards, in the park at the center of town, on the campus of the college, in the woods and the nature preserve. The brood is emerging. Slowly and without sound. All across New York and beyond its borders, up and down the Atlantic coast, from the Province of Massachusetts Bay to the Virginia Colony and even west of the Proclamation Line. Dorian is kneeling and watching one of them struggle out of its burrow. Someone offers him the green and he takes another drag … “Just think,” Keenan is saying. (He’s got one of them in the palm of his hand.) “Seventeen years. Since before we were born this little guy has been growing and waiting and now here he is out of the dark ready to — what did Mrs. D’Angelo call it—‘continue the beautiful cycle of nature …’ ” He takes the nymph between two fingers and pinches until the abdomen splits and the gut-snot comes out.

I am eleven, going on twelve. I am Dorian. Don’t get me confused with Keenan. Our names have the same last syllable, but we are nothing like each other. He lives on my street. I was in third grade with him and this last year in fifth. But we were never friends until the thing at the mosque. After that, while half the world was harshing on me, Keenan was on my side. To say he hates Arabs is an understatement. It’s like saying Hitler didn’t prefer the Jews as a people. But what I did at the mosque—

Well, I didn’t want to go to the mosque in the first place. What I wanted was for my parents to not sign the consent form. I knew that Keenan’s wouldn’t. I figured half the class wouldn’t be going. “Then you’ll be in the open-minded half,” my mother said, scribbling her signature.

In the end, twelve of twenty got on the bus. My class had been to Albany before. The provincial museum is there: a windowless maze of passages and galleries with everything from combustion-engine cars a century old to the taxidermied corpses of extinct birds whose archived souls call out from speakers in the ceiling. I remember feeling a cramp of anger when I saw the mosque. The imam was standing at the entrance in his long white robe. I was not angry at the imam. He wasn’t very tall and his voice was soft and his skin was black. As he led us through the place, showing us all the things we’d read about in our textbook (the wall that faced Mecca and the mimbar from which the khatib delivered the khutbah), I thought about how most Muslims in America were probably like him, even the Arabs. Despite all that, in the bathroom (in a toilet stall that looked like every other toilet stall in the world, containing a toilet that looked like every other toilet), I unzipped my backpack and removed the magic marker and wrote on the metal partition:

FUCK ISLAM

They live now in the Province of New York, not far from the Proclamation Line and Crossing No. 6. Every morning, Kathryn commutes by electric car from their small suburban town to the provincial capital. Albany is a city that appears to her, in these globally warmed days, to be a scale model of itself enclosed in a transparent sphere aswirl with photochemical smog. She takes the exit for the government buildings and brakes at the security scanner of the subterranean garage. Clearance is indicated by a green glow that floods the interior of the car like alien moonlight. Her office is on the twelfth floor of Agency Building 3. A window overlooks the plaza. Down there, she can see the sky, clear as a painting of the sky, in the rectangular surface of the reflecting pool. Once, last winter, she had been staring down into that sky and saw a jet plane crossing the blue, a tiny unreal thing, and she’d been filled with a terror she didn’t understand.

What was it?

San Francisco. Of course. Because a lot of people believe it was a plane. Though others believe very different things. And yet that tragedy was not the source of the fear. The source was harder to trace. Something about a reflection of a thing very far away. The sky facing up. Things turned upside down or inside out … Summer now. Only June, but already very hot. Kathryn plays her voice mails; and while listening, stares down at that mirror of water (upward-facing sky the hazy gray of amnesia) and thinks about her son, the younger one, Dorian, whom she and her husband have been worrying about for months — who, all of a sudden, just when they’ve begun to think that maybe the whole weird thing is finally fading away, comes downstairs at seven-thirty, sits at the counter in the kitchen, fills a bowl with dry cereal, and, while adding milk, as if challenging all of them, her and Mitch and Cliff, to a duel with pistols, says:

“I had a dream about her.”

Her …

Kathryn can remember very clearly where she was, what she was doing, when she heard. Eight years ago now, but like yesterday in memory. They lived in California then. In the Russian River Valley about a hundred miles north of the city, a few miles inland from the Pacific. Dorian three years old. Cliff nine. Dorian at preschool. Cliff at camp, just down the mountain, and Kathryn was home working on a brief in the study when she got an alert on her breaking news app. Something had crashed into San Francisco Bay and exploded. The bridge had been destroyed. The Marina District was on fire. For some reason, she hurried through the house to a door that gave onto a small brick patio: a trellis threaded with bougainvillea; a bird bath; and then a wooden gate that opened onto a side yard windbroken by a line of eucalyptus trees. She went into the grass and stopped. Like she was looking for something and had suddenly forgotten what. She stood there. On the distant hills, the cattle stood motionless, too. Hills the color of straw. Sun. The fog bank melting overhead like a polar cap. Great shelves of fog falling into the sky and fading into the blue. Next thing, she was in the car driving down the mountain and into town. She passed the firehouse and saw that the dial on the wildfire sign was set to orange. On the radio, they were saying intercontinental missile. So she was thinking about where to go, where to take the kids, where to hide. She didn’t know. Because no one had thought about this for many years, much less prepared for it. Nuclear war. Words from a language she didn’t speak, because she hadn’t learned it growing up. No one in her generation had learned it. As she drove, she tried to remember where in town she had seen the sign — yellow and black, three inverted triangles: FALLOUT SHELTER—the kind of thing you’d buy in an antique store, evocative of another time and irrelevant to your own.