Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

When the phone rang, it was not her husband, who was up in Mendocino at a cabin in the forest beyond the reach of wireless signals. There wasn’t even a land line. She touched the answer button.

“Kate,” her mother said. “Do you know what’s happening?”

“Yes.”

“You’re in the car.”

“I’m getting the boys.”

“They’re saying there’s another plane.”

“Plane?”

Kathryn told her mother what she’d heard and her mother said she hadn’t heard that. What she’d heard was a passenger plane with the words AIR ARABIAon the fuselage — and that every airborne flight in the country had been grounded, but there was one not responding to air traffic control. And then she was at the camp and Cliff was running to her under the redwoods by the river, teary-eyed, smartphone in hand, saying an asteroid had hit the city and soon a cloud of dust would encircle the planet and cause our extinction. By the time they got to Dorian’s daycare, Kathryn had convinced him that his online source was not reliable: No one knew yet what had happened. It was about eleven o’clock. The little parking lot was full of cars; parents were carrying children in their arms or securing them in safety seats. Inside, she found Dorian in the story corner listening to Danny and the Dinosaur . It seemed to Kathryn that she was watching the sun of his childhood going down. She didn’t want him to see her until the story was over. Didn’t want the story to end for him.

“Kathryn.”

Beside her stood the director of the center, a woman, maybe fifty, whom the children called Miss Izzy. She asked Kathryn:

“Do you have family in the city?”

“No, not family.”

Dorian turned as if he had heard her voice, though she’d spoken in a whisper. He got to his feet, slowly. Before coming to her, he glanced once more at the open book.

“He doesn’t know?” Kathryn asked.

Miss Izzy shook her head. “We haven’t told the children anything.”

Dorian says he had a dream about her; and then he waits, like someone shipwrecked and marooned who has fired a flare into a dark sky. The colors of distress light up the room. His parents make believe they don’t see. “I have to get to work,” his mother says, and hurries upstairs. Cliff is earphoned. As for his father: It’s summer, classes have been over for weeks, and he is in between writing projects, lost and miserable, convinced he will never conceive another fiction. He has nowhere in particular to be, but he turns to the stove clock as if the sight of the time will create an imminent deadline. 8:02. Dorian eases a spoonful of granola and milk into his mouth. His father removes his eyeglasses and holds them with the silver arms folded into an X. It is hip to wear glasses, to look like you come from another century, but no one actually has prescription lenses in the frames. There isn’t a pair of eyes in the world whose imperfections haven’t been corrected by laser beam — except for those of his father. When Mitchell Wakefield takes his glasses off, he literally can’t see more than a foot in front of himself.

“Are you trying to upset her?”

“No.”

“But you know you are.”

“The reason why—”

“Don’t start that again,” his father says. “We’ve been through all of this. You promised, Dorian.”

“All I said is, I had a dream.”

His father stares at him. Not seeing him clearly, Dorian knows. Seeing a blur; general shape of a son. Then he puts the glasses back on, takes a deep breath, and says: “All right, tell me the dream.” And Dorian realizes he doesn’t want to tell it. Hasn’t brought it up for any good (or, as Dr. Beltran would put it, “forwarding”) purpose. He knows perfectly well that his desire is to move the family backwards, back to the time, last autumn, when he had accused his mother and father and brother of hiding everything from him, everything —and, after they’d responded with a show of ignorance and confusion, had felt justified in going totally nuclear on them. That’s what he wants to do now. Because when he had shouted and cried and demanded they tell him the truth, the pressure, wherever it was coming from, had lightened a little.

Now his father says: “Tell me. I want to hear.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do. I want to help, Dodo.”

“I don’t need help .”

But he does. He does need help. Just not the kind they are offering. If I keep this up, I’ll wind up in that doctor’s office again . So he says he’s sorry, there was no dream. “I don’t know what my problem is. I’ll say sorry to Mom.” And he walks upstairs. The bathroom door is open a crack and his mother stands before the mirror drawing a dark line along the ledge of her lower eyelid. Faint scent of perfume in the air. He says nothing. He goes into his room and clicks the door shut. Sits on his bed and turns on his pad and waits for her to at least knock, poke her head in and say goodbye so he can ignore the farewell, or make a sound indicating that her departure means nothing to him. But she doesn’t knock. He can see the end of the driveway from his window: the car turning onto the curve of the cul-de-sac and arcing out of sight.

He has fitted the pieces they’ve hidden from him, the ones he has found in dreams, to the open spaces in the pictures he knows. They left California when Dorian was three: six months after the attack. No one denies this. But they didn’t move because his father found a new teaching position and they were afraid of radiation blown on the winds and settled into the soil. They moved because she had died. Because his parents couldn’t bear to live in the same place where she had been born and had grown up. The way he remembers it is— Well, he doesn’t. He was only three and you don’t really remember anything from that early time. You hear stories and you look at pictures and become convinced over time that things retold and recorded are your own true memories. What if no stories are told and all images are deleted? When they left California, what happened is: They stopped talking about her. Gave away her old toys and her clothes, school notebooks and artwork. Purged her from the photo folders on the family desktop. He has been through them many times: no image of her; nor any image within an image, such as a photograph in a frame on a shelf in the background, or a grade-school collage on the refrigerator with her name printed in a corner. He had zoomed such pictures and found nothing. Yes, they had done a very thorough job. Left absolutely no evidence. Allowed a silence to grow up around her death, unnatural and supernaturally dense, like fairy-tale brambles around a castle in which she slept under the power of an evil spell. He must have asked about her at first — but after a time (say, a year), stopped asking, wondering if perhaps all she’d ever been was an imaginary friend beyond whom the time had come to move. Then he must have started to forget. But you never really forget, do you? It’s always there, deep down. But that’s not where it is. These memories are very high up, saved in a kind of cloud that moves across the sky in your dreams.

Evening of the emergence. After sunset. Dorian is with Plaxico at the park downtown. Of all his friends, this is the only one who knows about his sister. They’ve been best friends since kindergarten. This past year, in the course of a school geneaolgy project, Plaxico learned of a lynching in a distant branch of his family tree — after which he decided he wanted to change his name in honor of that murdered forefather, and his parents let him. So his name is legally Zebedee. But Dorian (and only Dorian) still calls him Plaxico.