Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

By which time (7:33 p.m. EST), William Banfelder, having driven downtown wearing a half-face particulate mask, had talked his way past the officer on guard at the entrance to the police station, and was sitting in a work cube with a detective who, after listening to everything Will had to say (a computer listening, too, and transforming the spoken words via dictation software into written text), said:

“I’ll get him in the national file.”

“What file.”

“Missing persons. It’s premature under the circumstances, but I’ll do it.”

“Okay.”

“Check in tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow.”

“But what about this guy,” Will said. “I’m telling you, there’s something—” But the police detective, heavyset with a long scar on his neck, just shook his head, refusing still to have any truck with the idea that the man who had abducted his son (“you mean,” the detective had already said, “the man your son drove away with of his own volition and, I might add, with your permission”) was a member of a terror cell with not only no intention of returning Karim, but with the aim of using him, along with the other boy, in some kind of operation, maybe as soon as tonight … Stupid son of a bitch . Oh, like the feeling isn’t mutual. Like he’s got time for some stupid old guy who lets an eleven-year-old kid of whom he’s been the legal guardian for exactly four weeks and three days get into a car with some haji he hardly knows on the second day of an elevated threat alert and then shows up at the police department five minutes after the shit hits the fan expecting immediate action to be taken in response to groundless theories and accusations— Not groundless . Yes, pal. Groundless. I’m not saying wrongful, just groundless, because I couldn’t agree more that there is something really wrong with this picture, but face it, you don’t have a single solitary fact to back up your gut, which makes you, in the eyes of law enforcement (to take just one example of an objective observer), no different from your run-of-the-mill paranoid islamophobe who sees a conspiracy behind every tree … And now almost nine o’clock, and Will Banfelder sitting in his kitchen with a can of beer on the table that he can’t bring himself to drink, the handgun on the table just to the side of the beer can, and the television on (more and more people at this hour arriving at hospitals with symptoms, though still no confirmation of what they are sick with, could be Pneumonic Plague, could be Viral Hemorrhagic Fever, “ both of which start the same way ,” an expert now explaining, “ headache, high temperature, chills, then nausea, then worse, both agents Category A, both contagious ”—while on the alert ticker at the bottom of the screen: BIOTERROR ATTACKS IN MADISON, PHOENIX, ALBANY), and he trying the call again, knowing there won’t be an answer, only that tone of failed connection like a heart arrhythmia — and knowing that, even if the networks weren’t in a state of total disorder, Karim would not answer because the phone had surely been taken from him hours ago and turned off or discarded or more probably smashed to pieces to preclude any possibility of a GPS track.

Lost.

You lost him, Banfelder. Saved him only to lose him. So, total your losses. Because all is lost now — and there is nothing that ever could have not been lost, because the sins were too many, too grievous, the things you (we) did over there, all the evil done and the good deeds left undone of which the not-doing is itself a kind of evil. Listen and you will hear still, even after all this time, the voice of that psychopath from whom you actually took orders, no different from taking orders from a demon, saying: Chill out, Willem. Ain’t no such thing as consequences here . That any of you could have believed such bullshit. Self-righteously deluded as only those can be whose time of dominance has nearly reached an end, refusing to admit the impermanence of your power though there was no more of it left than the oil in the fields you were so desperate to control (already then: a state of terminal decline), and you really thinking that, just because there was no accountability within any system of human justice, there would be no accounting … To the contrary: Your punishment shall be a constant across all pathways — even those in which you never did violence to a single living thing, of which there are many, but nowhere near enough to balance out the genocide committed across the full breadth of the grid, the killings untold of people on infinite parallel planes, men and women insurgent and civilian, whose names and sects you never knew and whose faces are long forgotten, though symbolized in the face of a boy (now lost) through whom you imagined you could redeem yourself — as if his tragedy, created by you, could become, through your mitigation of it, a valid means to personal salvation. For every path you live shall be as a path laid down between two mirrors and leading to the same end, the same loneliness, and the gun the only shade of companionship — and the temptation you feel now (to take one last life and be done with it) as ceaseless and all-important as the taking of breath.

Not reaching out. Warning him off. Get away. Don’t come near me . For a moment, Dorian can’t understand. Then all at once he does. Five minutes later (having called for an ambulance; having gotten a mask from the safe room and returned to the hallway outside her room, where he stands shaking), he hears his brother downstairs, shouting, “Dad, Mom, Dorian,” and can’t answer: his voice gone; dumb as a dreamer in the climactic moments of a nightmare … And Cliff thinking, as he takes the stairs two at a time, that mother and younger brother must be in the safe room; as for father— Then he sees Dorian, wearing mask, holding phone, standing outside the parental bedroom (door shut) and for a second doesn’t understand. Stopping short, looking at the door and then back at the brother; then the house seeming to shift suddenly on its foundation (like that time in California, fourth grade year, a magnitude six centered practically in the front yard, if you could call it a yard, that field of flaxen yellow grass unmowed and the stand of eucalyptus trees and the smell of those trees, smell of childhood), and he putting a hand out now to the wall of a different home and saying: “Oh, man. You called nine-one-one? Okay. I’m going to get a mask. Where the fuck is Dad?”

Pulling into the subdivision. Onto Mohegan heading for Cherokee when an ambulance audible for a half minute already and having gotten louder by the moment, shows up in his rear and side view mirrors, and, as he pulls to the shoulder, screams past him, dousing the cabin of the car with tinted light, drowning out the voice on the radio, and then the voice again— “ if you become ill with fever or develop other symptoms ”—and up to speed again, seeing that ahead, the ambulance is making the right he is going to make and proceeding along Cherokee though not turning off on either Cayuga or Oneida, but continuing on, which means it is going to Poospatuck, giving Mitchell Wakefield the sense that he is following the vehicle according to some predetermined arrangement. Accelerate. Keep the lights in sight. If you don’t, you’ll never find your way. No, that’s not it. Get there first. If you’re there, even if only at the last moment, the dark angel will be required to pass over your house having been programmed to havoc only the households of fathers past due. But he can’t catch up. By the time he reaches the driveway, the thing is off-road and driving up his lawn — and before he is even in park, they (a pair of them, wearing yellow biosafe suits) are getting out of it, one opening the back of the ambulance, the other stepping onto his porch and hammering a fist against the door. Bolting across the lawn now, into the rotations of light: