Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“What.”

“Dream …”

And then a knock on the door and the uncle who is no uncle peers through the glassed hole of the door, then unbolts the door and opens it — and a second man comes in, carrying a duffel bag.

Sun going down.

Almost time to pray again. Last time to ever pray in this world. Two, three hours left now (depending on how soon symptoms present). In the duffel: the belts. Not your decision. None of it by your own will. Not willed by you any more than what happened in that bathroom earlier in the day: a thing your body does and cannot be stopped from doing. For it has been written. Written that you would shit your pants from fear seven to eight hours before the achievement of your goal, shit all over your clothes and yourself and the floor of this ugly apartment the way that dog shat on the dusty ground of the barn as you bent over his bleeding body with the knife and held the edge to his neck, he looking into your eyes with his, seeming to know what was coming and seeming to desire it, and yet terribly frightened of it, too. But you must not think that those slain in the cause of Allah are dead. They are alive and well provided for by their Lord (Sura 3, verse 169) . But what if you, after cutting the dog’s throat, instead of relinquishing the knife, had thrust it suddenly into the belly of the man now laying the belts out on the table and had stabbed the point of it into him with all your strength, picked up the gun he would have dropped and, holding it with two hands, pulled the trigger as he had pulled it against the dog whose throat you had already cut. What if you had done that. But more important, Karim: Why didn’t you?

And Mitch wishing he had not given in and let Dorian go (which he only did because his son confided in him that there was a girl involved and father-son sympathy won out over vigilance), because now he’s not sure where his son is, and, with the stress on the wireless networks, may not be sure of his whereabouts for some time if, as Mitch hopes, Dorian is sheltering in somewhere near the park rather than riding his bike in the open, in air through which something lethal could possibly be drifting right now …

As he drives, he tries the call again. Gets another dead beeping signal. On the radio, they are saying bioterror, but unknown whether food, water, or air. He finds the park deserted (though votive candles are lit and flickering all along the wall of the war memorial), then takes the route home his son would most likely take if riding home, which Mitch is confident Dorian is too smart to be doing, but then he remembers yesterday, the panic his son was in after riding through the rain, and he isn’t so sure if intelligence or even preparedness has much bearing on human behavior once the energy of an emergency has been released; and who is he, in any event, to be judging the decisions of a boy not even twelve years old when his own decisions yesterday and today have been so unintelligent, ill-considered, and driven by emotions he has no excuse, under the circumstances, for not being able to control … What emotions, what are you talking about? Don’t act dumb. Tell me you didn’t leave the house today because of her, to get away from her — after she had gone back into the bedroom and you went in there later and found her in the bed which you had deliberately not slept in the night before because of what she had said to Dorian at dinner (“don’t guilt trip me right now”), when all the kid had been trying to do was give her food. You looked at her in the bed: “What are you doing in here, Kate?” She, after a long delay: “I can’t keep my eyes open.” And you pushed the door closed and asked: “Is this really who you want to be to them?” Them meaning: Your children. This meaning: An image of weakness, of addiction to your belief in your own weakness, so invested in a sense of weakness that you can’t stand with the people who love you, much less stand up to the ones who hate you … Words not so much recalled as rephrased in thought as he drives the route his son would most likely be taking. Not seeing him. Which is a good thing ( probably sheltering in, maybe in the old casino building in the center of the park ), yet wishing, too, to converge with him on the road so he can get him into the car and bring him home and keep him close until this thing ends, however it ends. Never should have let him leave the house today, as Mitch himself never should have left it. What is wrong with him? With all of them? A family whose members have not only not been together on this defining and exacting day, but have, in fact, one by one, gone missing. She first, to some inner world of despondency. Then he to his office at the college — because when she is like this, she falls into herself like an imploding star that will pull anything in its vicinity over an event horizon of gloom. So he escaped to a place always quiet in these summer months but today nearly soulless, and he sat at the desk in his office and opened the file (listeningvessels.docx) and tried to work on what he’s been writing, if one can correctly call it writing, this phenomenon that, all along, has been more like a streaming of content than a composition of words. But how is he supposed to write when the nation is on high alert and he is so angry, not just about this latest episode of depression but also about an ancient history of which the document on his computer is nothing if not some kind of revision—

Well, that’s what fiction writers do . What, hold grudges forever? Fuck off . No, seriously, tell me. They write about their lives but they change things . So that’s what this is: a fiction? (Thinking, steering, looking for his son): I don’t know what it is . Except you do. It’s what would have happened if you’d known, when you were twenty-four, that the woman you were in love with was pregnant, and the baby was yours (and not that of the other, whose name we will try not to speak) and had been born instead of not, so you would have had a daughter, and she would have grown up but only to a point, only to die at the age of eighteen trying to save a boy who wouldn’t have lived no matter what she did, and in the end her death would’ve been your fault, because she came to you that year, in the spring, and told you what she wanted to do: live in the city for the summer, in a sublet, and intern at a publishing house and wait tables and babysit, and, of course, write. Well , you said, your mother won’t like it . I know. That’s where you come in . Who said I’m coming in anywhere . Dad, seriously, c’mon. A little intercession . With the end result that, six months later, she was present in San Francisco (instead of a hundred miles farther north in Sonoma); in someone else’s home (instead of her own, the one shared all her life with you); and instead of watching the disaster unfold on a television screen, she was in it, a moving suffering part of it — and your wife (her mother) able to say to you: She shouldn’t be there. She should be here . She would be here if you hadn’t let her …

Lost all the same, just in a different and immeasurably more painful way — and the guilt, rightful or not, the father’s to bear, but also, at least, the father’s to own.

And while Mitchell Wakefield makes one more loop back to the park and along a different series of streets (the keens of ambulances mixing now with the sirens of the municipal warning system), and Kathryn Wakefield, through the ebbing light of a forest subconscious, is trying to find a place to vomit and void herself of the parasites that are moving faster now, burning up her insides, keyed as they seem to be to the wailing of banshees coming from deep in the wooded distance, the Tesla Electric being driven by Shadea Kinglsey is negotiating with a falsetto squeal the turn onto Poospatuck and Dorian is saying: “A little further. That one, on the left. Right here, this brown one.” The car abruptly brakes at the foot of the driveway, bodies jouncing forward and back again, and he about to open his door when the mother says, “Hold on,” reversing in order to pull up the driveway while the girl whom he was kissing behind a hedge fifteen minutes ago, first girl ever kissed, is taking his left hand in her right, though not imperatively, not an action suggesting the panic of a separation impending and irreversible; rather, a soft and steady touch that makes him think of the candle they lit together at the park and placed at the base of the memorial. The mother asking: “Do you have an opener?” And he bringing up the app on his phone, garage door lifting, and struck suddenly with a sense of proper comportment in the present situation (driven home, life possibly saved by the parents of a girl suddenly something more than a friend), he says: “Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley, it was really nice to meet you.” Both of them looking back at him: the father with an expression like what-planet-are-you-currently-on; but the mother with a well-wishing smile — and then he’s getting out, watching the car go away, raising a hand in response to her upraised hand … In the garage, only the one car. Opening his contacts and touching the image of his father. Dead beeping signal. Now at the door, keying in the code with the same fingers he had put on Khaleela’s neck and in her hair. Bringing the hand to his face now, he can still detect a trace odor of the soap or shampoo he had smelled when, after the very first kiss, he pressed his face against her cheek, as if you can hide behind a cheek, as if there was anything to hide from there, alone with her. “I hope that’s not all,” she had said; and he breathing then, trying to slow his breathing, breathing in a scent he knew (sweet, verdant) though would not have been able to name; and then putting his hand on her neck and into her hair, eyes closed, not daring to open his eyes but thinking he had to because how else would he relocate her mouth which he never should have strayed from in the first place, but then suddenly there her mouth was, right where he guessed it would be. Calling out now, running into the house and up the stairs, calling to his mother and receiving no answer while thinking Am I in love, can you be in love from just that much and Why isn’t she answering , fearing, becoming suddenly and fully afraid, that upstairs he will find her in the same attitude as when he left her, hours ago. But she can’t still be in bed, not now, not anymore, when some kind of biological agent (they don’t know what yet, or they just aren’t saying) could be floating in the air and coming closer or may already be all around us — taking all at once the easy step over the fine line between fear and anger and imagining that he will find her in the bed, same as he left her, doing nothing and hiding from everything, so he will have to turn on the light and tell her, in a voice steeled by the fortitude it shouldn’t be his duty to display, Get up, goddammit, Mom, get the fuck up , because it’s her, she and all the rest who grew up in the time before, in a peacetime that was nothing but a willful turning away from a war that had already begun: their duty, not his; yet he the one to have to come home and tell his mother that this is serious, that’s why sirens are going off and the phone is making that sound, you pick it up, see, and touch the screen, and then you start trying to stay alive . But opening the bedroom door will scatter all this acrimony to a kind of wind. Yes, the smartphone, lying on the bedside table, is lit up and the tone is sounding through the speaker. But Dorian can tell, even in the dusk-light, that, although the bed is unmade, his mother is not in it. Not there. He takes a breath. She’s probably in the safe room with the radio on. She just couldn’t hear him. And he is about to turn away (sorry for the angry thoughts, cognizant that her struggle will someday be his, for depression is in him and waiting for him, an inheritance no parent wants to leave, and none of it her fault, none of it anyone’s fault) when a sound comes from the bathroom. A sob, a gasp for breath. Dorian already moving forward and seeing, through the open door, his mother on her knees. That much he can see in the gathering dark. But not until he waves a hand at the motion sensor does the color come clear: the red in the bowl of the toilet and splashed darker on the seat which she neglected to raise; and as the room lights up, she holds up a hand, also blood-stained. Not reaching out to him. Warning him to stay away.