Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“Wait, I live here.”

Through the respirator of his full-body garment, the one tech says: “When did the vomiting start?”

“What?”

“You said there’s blood in the vomit.”

“Jesus.”

The front door opening and Cliff with a mask on, saying: “She’s upstairs. Dad, where the fuck have you been?”

“Looking for Dorian.”

“He’s here.”

(As the other moves past them with a folded stretcher): “We’ll mask her, but stay six feet back minimum.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t know yet.” (Going in.) “But it’s contagious for sure.”

Then Dorian. Mitch rushes up to him. Literally picks him up in his arms and carries him several yards over the lawn before putting him down and kneeling in front of him, the lights draining the blood from his face and turning his flesh pale white and cold blue in alternation. Saying, “I got home and went into your room,” and Mitch looking into his eyes and telling him it’s all right, and she will be all right, “I’ve been listening on the radio, and it’s probably bacterial not viral, so there are antibiotics,” half-believing that this is what he heard, saying it as much to calm himself as to calm his son, when what he actually heard on the radio is that they don’t know yet, that it could be bacterial or viral, and if it is bacterial, it could be a drug-resistant strain of plague, and if it’s drug-resistant pneumonic, the mortality rate will be one-hundred percent, and if it’s viral there’s no cure, and if it’s viral hemorrhagic, there will be not only the vomiting of blood, but blood spilled internally, coming in time through every bodily outlet. So what he says he heard is what they must believe, because in any other scenario they are going to lose her and we can’t lose her, we can’t : every cardiac cycle of the father-and-husband now an emotional text-in-code: contraction, dilation, contraction: and we can’t lose her, we can’t …

While, in the ugly apartment, the salat reminder application on the uncle’s phone is playing the azan, and as the muezzin chants from the phone, the uncle, who is no semblance of a loved one, says to Karim: “Do you think you can pray this time without defiling yourself?” The other man, the bringer of the belts, wants to know the story behind the sarcasm. The uncle tells him. The other: “Well, that explains the odor in here.” “So, it is still in the air?” (Nodding): “I thought one of you had stepped in dog feces.”

“ Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar .”

And all through the prayers, the tears in his eyes as hard to hold in as the shit had been, and knowing (as he bows, kneels, prostrates, and a tear slips through a crack in a duct) that soon it will be so with everything, soon impossible to keep anything inside: shit, tears, blood, bone, brain … Forehead to the carpet and a baby crying in one of the other apartments, a long drawn-out seemingly eternal keening, like the sound of the homeless and orphaned cats that wandered the internment camp at night trying to find some relief for a feeling that had taken them by the heart and wouldn’t let go: a desire not so different in its ruthlessness from the desire in him, and which, like his desire, has one (and only one) means of satisfaction. To be again with those who have died, you yourself must die . There is no purpose whatsoever in resisting the logic. And to object, on grounds of unfairness, to the difficulty imposed upon you by the circumstances, only suggests that your desire is not as great as your fear; or worse, that your love for them is less than your love of life (which is ridiculous); and worse still, that your devotion to this world is greater than your devotion to God (which is not only apostatic but impossible, since God would never have put you on a path to martyrdom if He didn’t know that you would be thankful for the privilege of dying in His name and surrender completely without being afraid). So, this moment of doubt felt while holding your forehead to the carpet and looking at the stain made there because you aren’t strong enough to keep your tears in is nothing but a moment: passing and past; and once gone, something that might never have happened at all. “O, our Lord, grant us in this life and in the hereafter good things.” Remembering, even as he speaks the words, that time in Dakota (soon after they had died, before the dream-world of the drug) when he had set out with nothing but a backpack containing some food and a blanket, and his mother’s broken eyeglasses in the pocket of the jeans he’d gotten from the nuns, going who-knows-where across the flatness, walking all day, all the way to the fence, until the sun had set, setting same as now, meaning the time had come to take the blanket out of the pack and use it as a thing to kneel and pray on. Except he hadn’t done that. Only after the sun had gone completely down and the air had turned suddenly cold did he remove it and wrap it around himself and sit huddled there, making no excuse in either thought or speech (such as being exhausted after having made such a long journey to nowhere), nor promising that at dawn he would make up for the dereliction with a perfect du’a. He simply did not pray. And as the sky and air got darker and colder, he lay back and watched the stars appear one by one and saw one break from the others and fall in a straight white line and thought-as-felt: up there, beyond all that, that’s where Heaven is supposed to be . An idea that might have been an affirmation if not for the way it progressed into question: where it’s supposed to be; meaning, where they say it is, where I’ve always believed it to be, never thinking to not believe — but what if there are no rivers or gardens higher than the stars; what if there’s nothing but more dark space and stars falling never-witnessed and all of it only getting darker the farther you go? And if so, then this world is everything and should mean everything to us — and furthermore, if there be no praxis of reward, then what we choose to do (or not do) is far from meaningless; in fact, every action means more , not less, because what we do here and now can never be made to seem later — in a heaven bent upon falsifying, like a nation, the truth about actions taken in its name — anything other than what it honestly was … All of this the equivalent of a transmission sent by the self over light-years of cognition, sender-self long dead by the time the message goes its distance, yet heard now by the listener, who, staring down into the circular dimension of a prayer rug, is perhaps sensing, at the outer limits of awareness, a way to alter his path.

What she understands is that she is moving — or, rather, being transported at an urgent rate of speed from one place to another. (Could it be between points on the grid, from one set of coordinates to another?) Certainly, she is no longer in the forest. This is some kind of small enclosure: walls, a ceiling, supposition of a floor; and she in the center, equidistant from the six sides of what is evidently a cube moving at high speed, though she herself (meaning: her body) is immobilized, as by some force being applied against her from all directions, as in a case of gravitational collapse … Think, Kate. What’s happening to you? I think I’m dying . Let’s not get overdramatic. I’m serious. This isn’t normal . Maybe it’s a dream. (Shaking her head while the tech in the back with her, whom she does not recognize for what he is — seeing nothing more than a yellow blur in partial occupation of the space of the cube — says, “I think she’s delusional,” to which the driver responds, “Shit, if this is viral.”) You could be dreaming. I’m not dreaming, goddammit, I’m dying . Okay, you’re dying, have it your way. But remember what the guy said: “Death is nothing but something that happens at one set of coordinates while life is happening at another.” Think about last night. You dreamed about Skyler. Remember, he told you the dream was actually a point on the grid: (−8, 12 13). So? So think about another one. Another what . Another point. Same x , but a different y. How could I do that? Simple. Imagine it’s eight years ago but you didn’t let her move to the city. They tried to convince you, but you put your foot down and didn’t let her. Go ahead, close your eyes. They are closed . I mean your real eyes. All right. Now. The date is August 11, 2030. You’re at the house in California working on a legal brief, right? Yeah . Okay. Where is Skyler? How am I supposed to know? There are a million possibilities . Actually the possibilities are infinite. Just choose one. She was good with kids, right? Yeah . So, c’mon, Kate. All right. I’ll tell you what she did. She got a job as a camp counselor. At the Y in Forestville . Good. See? You just remembered another point on the grid. I didn’t remember anything, I just imagined it … Which is to say that, while strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance — body heat 101.6° F, blood cells escaping by the thousands from veins and arteries whose walls, under direct attack from the pathogen, are becoming increasingly permeable — she is feeling an emotion evocative of how she put her foot down that spring and said: “No, not yet, I didn’t have an apartment until I graduated and I’m not saying you have to wait that long but I am saying this is too soon, and if it ruins the rest of your life to not be allowed to live in the city with two other teenage girls after your freshman year of college, then you can hold me personally accountable and never let me forget it.” And all through the spring, her daughter giving her the silent treatment, and for a week after coming home, too, and Kate patiently waiting out the repudiation — until, one day, maybe a month into the vacation, she realized that the whole thing had blown over, and her daughter, far from angry about having to live the summer at home, was happy to be there (perhaps relieved to have been disallowed from doing something she could see, even in such limited retrospect, had been more a temptation directed at her than a desire born on the inside). Enjoying her days at the camp, her simple and soft authority over a group of six- to eight-year-olds called the Evergreens; and most days leaving that job (no more classifiable as labor than the story-writing she intended already to be her true and future work), leaving the camp and then — not out of any sense of familial duty, but rather because she wanted to, because doing it gave her personal pleasure — driving to Miss Izzy’s to pick up Dorian. It had been her school first, and Miss Izzy her teacher. Fourteen years earlier. And when Skyler walked through the doors of the building now, she experienced (not as memory, but more as a shifting, a gentle subduction of muscles) some sense of the little girl she had been then; and there Miss Izzy would be, different but the same; and there, Dorian (three and a half now), standing at an easel with a paintbrush in his hand, or sitting cross-legged on a rug listening to a storybook, or in the sandbox outside cooking something made of sand on a plastic stovetop, and Skyler watching him, and Miss Izzy coming alongside her to say something like, “He’s so much like you,” or “He was talking about you today.” And then Skyler strapping him into the car seat and the two of them driving up out of the valley, past the firehouse and the wildfire sign, whose dial was set all through that summer of drought to orange or red, and she driving past it and looking at it every day, and her little brother naming the colors each afternoon from the backseat and explaining the significance of each and reporting to her which color the arrow was pointing to: attempting through a repetitive engagement with concrete elements (colors, an arrow: a thing he himself could move if he were allowed to touch it) to apprehend the abstraction that the sign represented, which was not fire itself, but the possibility of fire, the likelihood of danger. And when the day came, the eleventh day of the last month of that summer, the day that some force came hurtling out of the sky over the city, she (at the camp with ninety children, fifteen of whom she was personally responsible for) remembering (again, as a shifting, not a thought) not the sign itself, but the concept and purpose of it, which now seemed to have been to warn them of the possibility, the likelihood of a very different threat: a warning no one had understood and a threat therefore unprepared for, though the building did have a basement, which is where they took the children, out of the summer sunlight into a concrete cave, where she and the other counselors strove to maintain the fiction that there was nothing to be afraid of though half the campers, in the minute of confusion following the first reception of the news, had gone online and read that a meteor had crashed into the bridge and the city was on fire, entire districts burning out of control and further impacts imminent, or that it wasn’t a meteor, but rather a jet plane and within the plane had been a weapon, the type everyone had lived in fear of in the last century (her grandparents, her great-grandparents), but had always seemed to Skyler a menace as remote as medieval plague, a thing whose old dark promises — of incinerated cities, megadeaths, and nuclear winter — had become, over time (after decades of never being kept, and decades more of test ban treaties and reduction treaties and the dismantling of arsenals), not just unbelievable, but impossible. And yet now San Francisco was all at once on fire and she sheltering in a basement with little children, the youngest of them taking turns in her lap while she fielded phone calls from parents en route; and letting the campers go, one by one, until finally, her responsibilities fulfilled, she was able to get in her own car, and as she shut the door and turned the keys in the ignition, she realized: I am here because of my mother. If not for her, I would be there .