Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

And the father and his sons going into the house, understanding that no one is to enter that bedroom, which Dorian has of course already done, thinking now that his head hurts, thinking he feels both hot and cold, and knowing for a fact that there’s a sick feeling in his stomach, though he is aware that it may not be the bacterium or the virus giving him nausea and causing him to shake, but rather the terror they’ve started in him, infected him with — imagining their satisfaction at how very frightened they’ve made him, having made him see his mother bent over a toilet, hair viscous with sweat, blood dripping from her mouth, looking twenty years too old as if aged by black magic, and making him fear now that he will be next, looking from father to brother (both touching and scrolling on their phones), reasoning: in the bed I was less than six feet from her; if the incubation period is twenty-four hours, I’ll be vomiting blood in the morning ; and Cliff saying:

“Dad, here’s the thing.”

“What.”

“It’s spread through coughing or bodily fluids. So last night … Did you and Mom. I’m just saying. If you did—”

“We didn’t.”

“And you don’t have a headache or feel feverish.”

“No.”

“Or like you’re going to throw up …” And the voice in Dorian’s head going further: and I kissed someone tonight, and our tongues touched, and if I’ve got it then I gave it to her , and moving already, as if being pulled like something roped, across the safe room into the half-bath where he riffles through the medical supplies and finds a thermometer and puts it with trembling hands into his mouth, feeling a rush of heat in his face which he knows may not be due to the bacterium or the virus, but to a terrible sense of responsibility for what he’s done and embarrassment at how ill-fated he must be to have done it, imagining some survivor friend of the girl he kissed after all this has run its course and life gone back to normal (though not for him, and not for her, because they’re both dead) — hearing the friend saying in a near-whisper, standing by a row of school lockers, in a school decimated and in mourning: He had it and he kissed her and she died. She died because he kissed her . And someone else: Who was he . And the first: Who knows. Nobody. Just some boy. His mother was sick all day but he didn’t notice. Nobody did. And then he kissed her … By the time his father comes to the door, he’s taken the thermometer out of his mouth because he’s crying too hard to keep it in place.

“Dorian, we’re going to be all right.”

(Shaking his head.)

“Dodo, listen—”

“I slept in there, Dad.”

Moving away and turning his face away, to protect his father from the spread of the disease … And Mitch thinking: God, that’s right. I went in there around dawn and there he was where I sleep (should have been sleeping) and years since he’d come into the bed and probably wouldn’t have if I had been in it … While Cliff in the main room is facing (as he has been for the better part of a calendar year) two doors, labeled GOand DON’T GO, and once the envelope comes with the notice inside it —ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION—he is going to have to open one of those doors and step through it, and thinking now that he needn’t be unsure anymore about which: fuck passive resistance and fuck fear of death, like you could sit on your ass now jerking off in some halfway house in New France while she lies buried here and a chance that, over there, you could kill someone who might be said to share some blame, however remote, for what is happening to her … As Dorian, having gone to his knees, is crawling into the shower stall and closing the door, telling his father to stay away, “I know I’ve got it so don’t come near me,” huddling against the wall and putting the thermometer back in his mouth, knowing he has it and has already passed it on, so I’ll be vomiting blood by tomorrow morning and she by tomorrow night , a fact his reasoning mind finds hard to accept: an hour ago, behind that hedge in the park, the two of us were just beginning, and already we’re over. Thermometer in mouth now, father speaking on the other side of the shower door, though you not listening, phone in your trembling hands, thumbs touching alphabet, backspacing against the errors, then deleting the message before sending or even finishing (hearing that voice again: And he didn’t even call her, he just sent her a text ), closing his eyes, memory-touching his palm to her cheek and memory scripting a link using the scent of her skin as anchor — and in a new window of the mind: I am coming home from school on a summer afternoon in Northern California, the car (in the back of which I am seated) going up the dirt drive past the eucalyptus trees, through the shadows and the scent of them, closing my eyes and breathing through the open window the infused air (something like the smell of a girl I will kiss eight years in the future: narcotic, pheromonal) and remembering now, in the corner of the shower stall, how he would be painting at an easel or playing in the sandbox or listening to a story, and would turn or look up and there his big sister would be, come to take him home, and they would drive home together, past the firehouse (he telling her about the wildfire sign, what the colors meant and where the arrow was pointing) and then up the dirt drive through the trees and the smell of the trees. Except for the day she did not come to collect him. The day that something out of the ordinary happened. The school closed early, right before the napping time, so I could hardly keep my eyes open in the story corner while a teacher was reading us a book about a boy and his pet dinosaur, and I remember turning and seeing my mother standing next to Miss Izzy and I took one last look at the book (the dinosaur tangled at the neck in telephone wires) and got up and walked to my mother, feeling like I was walking in my sleep, and almost instantly, as soon as she strapped me into my car seat, I was asleep, and when she saw in the rearview mirror that I was, she must have turned on the radio, and I must have been hearing in my sleep what was being said on the radio, because I was having a dream that something had happened in the city: the reason we’d gone home early was that something had crashed into the bridge and set the city on fire: and the reason Skyler hadn’t come to get me was that she was in the city: and I (even though I knew I was apart from her) was also in the city: and though I was myself, I was also another boy, an older boy, who lived in a house on a hill overlooking the bridge and we were in the house together: something had happened in the sky above the bridge only it hadn’t happened yet: and in the dream, I am looking through a window waiting for it to happen and knowing when it does that everything is going to change and life will never be the same again.

In the ugly apartment: a table. On it, the suicide belts, which are more like vests, are laid out. On one wall: the flag of the Caliphate. What they are telling you to do is stand, one at a time, wearing one of the vests, in front of the flag, while holding an automatic rifle, and read something from a piece of paper while one of them points the eye of a smartphone at you and records you holding the gun and wearing the vest and reading what is written on the paper. The problem is, holding the paper leaves only one hand and arm for holding the rifle; and neither one of you is strong enough to hold an AK-47 in one arm. The uncle says, “So, let them sit in a chair.” The other (whom you seem to despise even more than the uncle, though he has done nothing special to warrant a greater resentment) says, “One cannot make a declaration while sitting down.”