Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

And thinking to herself (as she is wheeled unconscious, strapped to a stretcher, out of the back of an ambulance by two EMTs in biosafe suits and through the in-patient entrance of the emergency room, into a scenario of suffering and panic and inadequate epidemiologic response: upwards of a hundred people, the sick mixed with the worried, half of them unmasked and half of those vomiting blood into sickness bags), that the reason she is thinking about all this — about that summer and how Skyler might have been in the city that day but wasn’t — is that she drove down into the valley earlier today, surrounded by the hills yellowed by sun and heat and lack of rain, and just as she was passing the firehouse and the fire warning sign (the arrow pointing to orange), she came suddenly, after a curve, upon a car driving slowly and cautiously, with a bumper sticker that said: 8-11 NEVER FORGET … Not that I ever do. Every single day, some part of me (if not concretely, then in the abstract) remembers what happened and what might have been and gives thanks (to whom or what I’m not really sure) for my family’s deliverance. Still, in the summer, it’s different. As we come closer to that date in August, the anniversary of a thing I guess we are just never going to understand, I feel the coming of it, like the fog that builds over the ocean, inevitable and integral, moving closer and massing overhead like memory. So, I was behind that car this morning, which was going far more slowly than the speed limit — and how could I know why. For all I knew, the driver (say, a woman like me: fifty, a mother) was thinking of that day and a child she lost, a daughter or son who was in the city on that day, whom she had not stopped (and saved) from being there, the way I stopped Skyler — and for all I know, she’s weeping right now behind the wheel, the landscape a blur of grief. And my mind starts doing something that it does sometimes, that once it starts I can’t bring a halt to, which is: darkly envisioning who I might be — what would be left of me — if she had been taken from me; if, on that day that the city was burned and turned to ash and sickened, my daughter had been there and I here , a hundred miles away, which might as well have been light-years of spacetime for the impossibility of reaching her and helping. And I see myself in the house with the boys. Waiting and hoping (and praying to a god I don’t even know) and trying to keep from Dorian what is happening; and waiting not only to know if Skyler will be all right but waiting for Mitch to get home from Mendocino; and trying not only to convince Cliff that Skyler will be all right but myself as well — and believing she will be because any credence given to the alternative is an acceptance of an unacceptable fate. (Breathing faster and more shallow now, central venous and arterial pressures falling.) Where was I? Coming into town. Yes. The car with the bumper sticker turning east. And instead of completing the errand I had come to do in avoidance of the brief I didn’t want to write, I took 116 west, along the river, all the way to the end, to the beach where the harbor seals birth and nurse their pups, though the seals are long gone by summer. The beach devoid of people, too, and I sat alone against a log, a section of tree which, having been washed long ago into the ocean, had come ashore in a new form, contours rounded by wave action and bark bleached to near whiteness by sun and salt, and I sitting against it now, holding my phone and slideshowing through photos of us stored in the cloud as waves rolled and beat heart-like against the sand, and getting to this one: taken here: of me and Mitch and Cliff (I wearing sunglasses with lenses the size of tea saucers): remembering that Sky, eight or nine then, had lain in the sand in front of us, having actually made a shallow cavity in the sand so she could point the camera up at us, though she had managed to bring the ocean into the frame as well as the rock formation in the middle distance: the arch with its archway like a gateway. Which I sent to all of them (the photo, I mean: to Mitch and Skyler and Cliff and Dorian) with a note reading: VISUAL EVIDENCE NOTWITHSTANDING, I SWEAR UNDER OATH I NEVER PUT ON ANY SUCH PAIR OF SUNGLASSES. And I there, losing my connectivity to time, staring out at the ocean and the rock and its archway: no living thing around me, nothing moving on the sand or in the air above, nor the air itself, and at last even the ocean seemed to be still.

They sit tight with the radio on. Hearing the same urgent message again and again. “ Officials suspect that a Category A bioterrorism agent has been released in this area .” Their father gone to the hospital to make sure their mother is being cared for and not lying unconscious on a gurney in the midst of total chaos, forgotten because there aren’t enough nurses and doctors and no one to advocate for her and make demands in her interest. They sit tight, awaiting his return, for approximately forty-five minutes, at which time (9:22 p.m. EST) the next thing happens. The power goes out.

Everything dark and quiet.

They switch the radio to battery. Turn on the battery-powered lantern. Wake up their phones and learn that the electrical grid is offline — and not just New York according to some accounts, but everything east of the Proclamation Line and even up into New France, which means the system has been attacked. And now a report of a fire at a substation up north and speculation about a bomb in a tractor trailer or possibly a light aircraft; and an hour gone now and still he isn’t back, and he said an hour at most, and no call and no text either, so where is he, and a sense in Dorian that things are coming to an end: an unreal feeling from a dream in which you have glimpsed the fictionality of setting and event but are terrified nonetheless by a seeming realism.

“You okay,” Cliff says.

“I dunno.”

“Here, take your temperature. It’ll still be normal and Dad’ll be here any minute.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

Dorian puts down the thermometer and walks to the closet, opens it and takes out the air rifle. The only gun in the house. Which is nothing really but a toy. Into the wooden stock of which his grandfather (at ten years of age, almost seventy years ago) had carved: 1962 . No sooner is it in his hands than they both hear, through the one sealed window, the car in the driveway below. Through the cloudy plastic sheeting: an aurora of halogen light. “See.” Cliff says. “Like clockwork.” Leading Dorian out of the room. Cliff with the lantern and Dorian the gun. Into the hall, down the stairs. Intending to open the garage door manually from the inside — and downstream of consciousness, as they enter the garage, a suspicion struggling against the current of presumption (though too weak to stop the actions), so Cliff already pulling the release cord of the machine, then shining the light on the door handle and Dorian ducking first under the lifting door, stepping out into the night to find that the car idling on the driveway is not theirs and the man standing outside it, a shadow in the backlight, not their father, and also another man on the other side of the car, neither of whom is clear to see, and Dorian thinking suddenly of something from a few years back, a kid from a town far, far away who’d disappeared and they’d found the body finally but never the head, as a hand grabs him by the shirt and seizes the rifle as a voice he recognizes but can’t quite place (the pitch, timbre, and intensity allaying his extant fears while creating a new order of them) says: “Take it easy. It’s just me.”

Meaning: the man Dorian met in Keenan Cartwright’s in-law apartment eight days ago; who called Dorian six nights ago while another man was dead on his lawn and whom Dorian hung up on and then called a day later in an attempt to stop a flow of violence that seems now so trivial as to be meaningless; whom Dorian told Keenan Cartwright four days ago to call and tell to stay away; and who asked Dorian, two days ago, to be there when the time came. So the time, it would seem, has come.