Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“Dorian!”

He turns to see Khaleela running over the green with a glowstick in her hand, the sky above her faintly glowing and the fireflies sparking around her: a picture of her not to be forgotten and to cry over in future times.

“Dorian.” (Coming to a panting stop.) “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Looking for me?”

He nods; sets his bike against a park bench; and when he turns, she angles the glowstick in his face.

“Bruises all gone.”

“Pretty much.”

“So it doesn’t hurt anymore,” she says.

“No”

“Come on, then”—and takes his hand, thinking to herself that life can tear apart at any moment. The Caliphate could nuke the whole eastern seaboard tomorrow. Are you going to leave things up to a boy? As if there’s time in this world for the slow confusions of nervous boys, the obviousness of whose attraction to you is rivaled only by the self-evidence of their total cluelessness about how to act on that attraction; while he, heart smacking around in his chest like a bee in a capture jar, knows somehow that the destination of this hurried hand-in-hand transit is the hedge at the foot of the hill — and Dorian knowing what will happen there, what he has to do, which he has never yet done though he has performed the action in imagination and also in dream (remembering suddenly a dream about her: disaster drill at school, basic medical in the fallout shelter, everything like normal except it wasn’t a mannequin, it was her; he slid a hand under her neck and pinched the bridge of her nose), and telling himself now, when you do it for real, you don’t breathe into her mouth —and what in one instant is a yearning-forward shall become in the next the foretelling of a happening willed into existence by the dreaming of it, which is: his hand on the nape of her neck and her palm against his cheek and the two of them kissing at (0, 0) and at myriad other parallel points and sending a spike of love, like an electrical signal neurotransmitted, across the infinity of the grid.

As we were trying to figure out how to say goodbye, it happened again. The tone. Khaleela had my phone in her hand because she was putting her number in my book and then the tone was sounding on every phone in the park. And not just the phones. The municipal system was going off, too. Sirens starting up and echoing and multiplying into the sound of a flock of screaming robot birds while a text-to-speech voice, female and ageless, coming from the sky like the voice of a mythological goddess, said: “ Attention. This is the Capital Region Emergency Warning System —”

“Khaleela!”

It was her father. She waved the glowstick with one hand and grabbed me by the shirt with the other.

“My bike,” I said.

“We’ll drive you. Come on. What if it’s airborne.”

She took my hand and we ran across the green, past the carousel, the horses motionless and wide-eyed in the dark, while the voice advised without feeling: “ The following bulletin may affect your area …” Then I was falling into the backseat of her car and there were her parents in the front.

“Who’s this,” her father said.

“Dorian.”

Her mother (pushing the start button): “Seat belts. Where do you live?”

“Poospatuck Circle.”

“What?”

I told her it was a tribe. “A tribe of what,” Khaleela said. “Poopsatuck,” her mother was saying to the GPS. “Poopsatuck Circle.” Which the GPS of course didn’t recognize. “Point me,” her mother said to me, and I pointed and said, “Poospatuck,” and explained that they were a tribe of Native Americans. Her mother started driving and her father looked back at me with disapproval as he switched on the radio. No one spoke the rest of the way. The only words in the car were the clear commands of the GPS and the vague imperatives of the man on the radio concerning the need to stay informed and follow the instructions of state and federal officials so we could protect ourselves, our families, and our community against an incident of bioterrorism about which no further details were currently known. “ Go point-five miles on Washington … There has been a serious incident .”

Where they are now is not where they were the last time when he cut the dog’s throat and he and Yassim, after being measured for the belts, put on make-believe ones filled with twenty-pounds of sand and practiced walking, stopping, and pulling an imaginary cord. That was a farm in the country; this is an apartment on the top floor of a three-story walk-up in the capital, through the window of which (smudged pane of glass, metal screen in the pattern of a Cartesian grid, and small black flies trapped in the interstice) can be seen, down on the street, a smoke shop with a window display of water pipes, and, above and beyond the nearby rooftops, the summits of the pale monoliths of Agency Buildings 1, 2, and 3 …

The first thing they did upon arriving in the capital a little before noon was get food from a drive-thru (cheeseburgers, fries, shakes), which they consumed in the backseat of the car on their way to view the target: a hospital named after an infidel saint. They did not go into the hospital, nor even get out of the car; but sat in the car and looked at the entrance to the emergency room, which, sometime between nine and ten o’clock that night, depending, said the dispatcher, upon how soon symptoms present in the general public, you are to walk through. Inside, you will be in a large room filled with people, perhaps several hundred of them. It will be loud and chaotic. Do not look into the faces of any of them. As we practiced, you will walk to the center of the room, cry Subhan’Allah as loud as your voice can go, and pull the cord. That is the hour in which you will meet God …

Then: single room with single window, table, television, a few carpet remnants where Karim and Yassim and the man knelt and said the afternoon prayer — in the midst of which the food Karim had eaten not two hours before, apparently not accepted by his stomach for digestion, hit the floodgate of his bowels with a sudden and merciless pressure. As he performed the actions of salat — bending at the waist, bowing, and saying Subhan’Allah — he tried to hold himself closed, clenching the muscles with all his might and eyeing the bathroom: only a few feet away, but also scarcely distinct from the main room itself and with no type of ventilation. You cannot walk away from prayers to take a shit . But what if one is physically incapable of prostrating, of kneeling and pressing one’s forehead to the carpet, without losing everything one is trying so desperately to keep in? Just a few more minutes, five at the most. But his control slipping with every passing second (that garbage he had eaten, wolfed down as if not having had a meal in days; like a drug while being chewed and swallowed, but afterward, almost immediately upon finishing, how queasy he had felt and full of regret) — every second an eternity and not even at the first prostration and thinking if you shit your pants right now and going already for the door, not knowing what in the world he had been thinking waiting so long, unbuckling his belt while angling his backside and going into a squat and begging his body to hang on for just one more fraction of a moment, not caring now about smell or sound, only that he get his pants down, but the body refusing to grant the self even that much latitude, so that what the body refuses to harbor, instead of being contained by clothing, explodes onto clothing and hands and toilet and floor …

And now, five hours later: he stands at the window with Yassim, looking down at the smoke shop.

“Wish we could do it one more time,” Yassim says.