Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

And while some people, even now, even as Will Banfelder watches the old Saturn arc out of reach, are sealed in safe rooms or locked in underground shelters bracing for a violence that could recur and escalate at any moment, others, like Khaleela Kingsley (the girl from the pool party who, for nearly three weeks, has been a hope running silently in the background of the mind of Dorian Wakefield), are going on in defiance, or maybe denial, of hard data, so that even as Karim Hassad is being carried past the Wakefield house and is looking out the window of the car he is riding in to try and catch a glimpse of the boy he hit in the face and wishes he hadn’t (wishing rather, as he looks and doesn’t see him, for an entirely opposite history), Dorian is reading Khaleela’s post about a vigil she plans to attend at the park downtown at seven o’clock, and Dorian is clicking on the shared link (The Peace Now Project | Light Up The Darkness) as Karim, obeying the dispatcher’s instructions, is fastening his seatbelt and feeling the neighborhood, Poospatuck Circle, which was never his, slip away behind him in the same way that the internment camp, Dakota, a home that was never a home, slipped away beyond the windows of a different car; and he feels stupid for sadness felt about leaving such a place, which is the same stupid sadness about leaving the world, a place also not his and no more real a home.

“Mom …”

She is in bed again, already, at ten o’clock. Dorian, in the past, has seen her almost this bad. At the nadir of winter. But in summer, never. This is the mother associated with gray skies and icicles, whom he has agreed, after long negotiations with himself, to accept as an element of that certain term, with the condition that she will get softer and warmer like nature itself.

“Mom. Later today, there’s this thing in the park.”

“Mm.”

He stands there, remembering how last night he had heard her through the wall, not crying exactly, but breathing hard, winded by the shock of waking up from an overwhelming dream, and he had stood at the threshold of the room (same as now), knowing her to be alone — waiting there while she ignored him, enduring it until some force compelled him to move: not away but closer … And Kathryn not hearing what her son is saying now as she lies in the bed that he had climbed into and slept in the night before (“a thing in the park, a peace thing, it’ll be over by curfew”) — not hearing that; not sure at the moment where she is, not sure when, much less who is speaking to her or what is being said. She isn’t dreaming. Of that, at least, she feels certain. Earlier, seeing her daughter on the phone: that had been a dream. She couldn’t possibly have been seeing Skyler because this is a mass call event and not only is the volume of traffic overloading available channels, video calls have been access-class barred to give emergency responders priority on the network. So that wasn’t real. Okay. But what she can’t understand is: What is she doing in a bed, dreaming or not, when her daughter needs her? Maybe that’s what the voice is saying ( get up, do something, before it all gets lost forever ). She tries to move. Just the intent sets off a bizarre sensation under her skin as she remembers, all at once, that they put fire ants in her circulatory system, the veins and arteries of which are believed by the colony to be a series of tunnels. As long as she stays still, there can be coexistence. But if she moves, they will eat through her from the inside. Wanting to move but unable to, a form of torture no different from wanting to go back and there being no means of travel or locomotion in that direction — and yet she is in a wood now; aspen trees whose leaves in the sunlight and breeze are literally gold coins turning in the air; and the man seated cross-legged at the foot of one of the trees — a Siddhartha clothed in a T-shirt and ripped blue jeans, feet bare, long hair, a bandanna, a spliff the size of a cigar in one hand — is communicating something along the lines of: Let ∞ be represented by a Cartesian grid that extends without borders in all directions. A what? (Smiling, smoking): You weren’t very good at math, were you? No . A giant piece of graph paper. Oh . Now you draw a horizontal line: That’s the x -axis. Ring a bell? The y -axis is a vertical line intersecting the x -axis. The point of intersection of these two lines is called the origin and has coordinates (0, 0). That’s where you are: the present. Behind you on the x -axis is coordinate (0, −1). That’s where you were yesterday, last week, last year, depending on your unit of measurement. Ahead of you on the x -axis is coordinate (0, 1). That’s where you will be tomorrow, next week, next year. I can see it’s coming back to you. Can I try some of that? Good idea, because this is about to get tricky. Let me approach the difficulty via a question. If (0, 1) is where you will be tomorrow, what about (1, 1), the coordinate directly above (0, 1)? Kathryn (thinking, smoking): Where I wish I would be? A frisky answer, and not necessarily imprecise. It’s where you will also be, a point parallel to (0, 1) but also distinct from it, because back at, let’s say, (−26, 1), using years now as our unit of measurement, you did something different from what you did at (−26, 0). You mean my daughter . Correct. I dreamed about her last night . (Nodding): In the terms of this discussion, you remembered a coordinate on the grid: (−8, 12 13) to be exact. Way up in the second quadrant. She was dying . (Smiling, gesturing for the joint): Death is nothing but something that happens at one set of coordinates while life is happening at another. You’re dead right now, Kate, in more than two hundred thousand present moments. Skyler is alive in four million, give or take ten thousand. Alive . Of course, alive. And at several present-time coordinates, you are all alive right now, all five of you, all of you living in California, you and Mitch and the boys still in that same house above the river valley, and Skyler in the city and San Francisco as safe and sound as when you knew it in your twenties (at x = −26) when you were faced with a decision containing within itself an energy powerful enough to shape entire systems of reality … (But none of this said in so much dialogue, not heard by her as words nor even imagined as speech, but come to be understood through sustained hallucination as new subjects can be learned by study: a mother and wife to all outward appearances sleeping off despair, but really a woman in a wood throughout whose blood ants made of fire are conducting a dark pilgrimage to her heart while her body temperature is climbing as surely as the surface temperature of the planet.)

He brakes on the hill above the green and looks down at the war memorial and the carousel and the people gathering.

Seven thirty. The sky bleeding out. The fountain in the pond going hush-hush-hush. Someone strumming a guitar. One of those songs he hates, about a hundred years old and overplayed as a hymn. Projected mental threat: I swear, if you start singing, I will throw that instrument in the water. Then, sure enough: “ Imagine there’s no heaven …” Are you really going down there? You know who these people are, don’t you. They’re the freaks who stand on Broadway, on the corner by the post office, with their signs. And remember that one time, they were actually out in the middle of the intersection and there was a woman with a megaphone standing on a crate shouting that her son was dead, go look, read his name on the memorial in the park four blocks from here, he was drafted in the last lottery (and pretty soon you couldn’t even hear her because everyone was blasting their horns and yelling out their car windows or shouting stupid patriotic shit from the sidewalk). Usually, Dorian would’ve just pedaled past. But that time he stopped, because there were four boys out there in the street, teenagers a little older than his brother, and each of them was holding up a piece of paper, and one of them got the megaphone and said: “In case you didn’t know, they still send actual letters. The draft notice is the one and only form of communication left in America that you can delete by burning.” And that’s exactly what they did. One by one, each kid lit his on fire. And then the cops came up the street in helmets with the clubs and the hand-cuffs — and Dorian is thinking now, as he walks his bike down the hill toward the black wall of the memorial, the same thing he was thinking that day: that he will become one of those boys, he will get that letter in the mail and have to make a choice (go or don’t go; report as ordered or refuse to report), same one his brother will have to make a year from now and which they have never talked about as a family, as if silence can be a rampart against consequence. And that surprises you? What have they been doing for eight years now if not trying to make her never exist with silence — Shake it off: this voice, sectarian and oppugnant to the better angel of your nature, whose accusations ( lying to you, hiding her from you ) you have been repeating aloud for months and believing, as primitive peoples believe in fictitious explanations for phenomena beyond their understanding, when you knew all along (or at least know you should have known): that the truth, be it that of the stars in Heaven or a family on Earth, is infinitely more complicated …