Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

After which he takes back his gun and returns to Dorian the pump rifle. Saying: “Where’d you get this museum piece, anyway?” And requesting that Cliff assist the other man in carrying the drugged boy. Dorian holding the rifle. Expecting from his older brother a look of damnation, but getting only a blank expression suggesting not only the absence of any option other than compliance, but the irrelevance of any other option. Cliff’s eyes saying: What does it matter now, the end all but here and the context for all behavior being eliminated by its imminence, so what is the picking up of this kid and the taking of him into the house but the movement of a body from one point in space to another . By which time the guy named Justin is opening the door of the car, grasping Omar by the wrists, and hauling him out of the backseat, saying, “Forget it, I got him,” the boy’s legs and feet (which are bare) knocking against the rocker panel of the car and then the asphalt of the driveway, the man dragging him over the driveway and into the garage, while Jon-David, as he circles to the driver’s side, is saying, “Basement if they’ve got one,” and Dorian realizing, as Jon-David cuts the engine, that the car has been idling all this time with nightbugs orgying in the glow of the headlights, and now everything, all at once, gone very quiet, still, and dark. Watching Jon-David go to the open trunk. Listening to him saying: “What’s going to happen now is, we’re going to have a sort of interrogation.” And thinking (insofar as a knowing at one’s core that one will soon have to act in one way or another is a form of thought): But that isn’t what his eyes should have meant at all. What he should have meant in that moment of looking is that with the coming of the end, a new context is created for our behavior, and every thing we do now, in these final moments, is not less important for its proximity to the end, but more so …

“Mitch, is that you?”

A voice from behind them, from the lawn. Recognized by Dorian despite a distortion of the voice.

(Turning): “Mr. N. It’s me — Dorian.”

“Dorian.”

Seeing him now. Wearing a nuke-bio-chem mask with giant eye windows and a metallic proboscis. Carrying a baseball bat.

“Is that your father?”

“No.”

“What are you holding? Is that a shotgun?”

“It’s just an air rifle.”

“Dorian, you should be sheltering.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Jon-David says. “His parents are at the hospital—”

“Who are you?”

“With all due respect, I might ask you the same thing.”

“He’s our neighbor,” Dorian says.

“Well, okay, neighbor. I’m Dorian’s cousin. I’m taking care of things until their dad gets back. I guess you saw the post …”

And Moses Nkondo breathing. Taking breaths through the filter of the mask: creature from a world where humans, insects, and robots have interbred. And Dorian listening to him breathing. Thinking: Go, Mr. N. Go . Even while saying aloud: “It’s all right, Mr. N. We’re going up to the safe room now.” Even while imagining (trying to inoculate reality against the event by a mental prediction of it): the gun firing, his neighbor spinning and falling, struck by a bullet loaded by me , while his neighbor is actually nodding slowly, saying: “All right but get in the house now, don’t stand around out here; and stay strong, okay, your mother’ll be all right, you’ll see; you need anything, you text me …” Imagining the sound that will cut the speech short: loud enough to take hearing away: the neighbor set spinning, though in reality he is turning slowly, turning away now and walking back whence he’d come, his shoes crushing the dead shells of cicadas— shp, shp, shp —and his breathing almost like the sound of waves to a deafened ear. Listening and thinking of waves a thing I won’t ever hear or see again, for I won’t ever stand barefoot on an ocean shore, I’ll never go back to California, nor see the sun set over the Pacific, never will while Jon-David turns back to the trunk of the car and lifts out and hands to Dorian what appears to be a toolbox, though it isn’t that (not a collection of small objects but one dense thing), carrying it with one hand, with some difficulty, through the garage while holding the rifle in the other, knowing the time is coming, the thing you can’t know is the shape of the time and the way you will shape it , but feeling certain, as he leads the way to the basement, that a moment is coming to be shaped in part by him.

Cliff (as they enter the basement): “Okay, so you’ll go get the pills now?”

“Big brother, chill.”

The other man: “He’s waking up, JD.”

“Good.”

Two flashlight beams, one showing the boy on the floor, the other casting around for a sense of setting.

“He’s trying to get away, JD.”

“So, impede him.”

Planting a foot on Omar’s spine and Omar going: “Umph!” While to Dorian Jon-David says, “There” (and Dorian putting it, whatever it is, on the card table on top of an unfinished Monopoly game), and then, having found a chair, says to the other man, “There” (while unzipping the duffel and removing a roll of duct tape), “let’s bind him right there.” And Omar saying as if coming out of a dream: “Wherem’I?” And Dorian thinking it will take both of them to do it, one to keep him in the chair while the other tears off the tape . And watching: Jon-David pulling tape from the roll and saying, “Hold him now,” while the other is muscling the boy into the chair, and your brother (as ordered) holding the flashlights. You watching all of this and knowing at your core that there is an act for you to perform one of the last things I’ll ever do and maybe the last thing that’ll mean anything though still unsure about the shape of it and not yet aware of the means. “Dorian, open the case.” There’s a snap button. The top flips over. Inside: an old military telephone with a hand crank and a pair of cables ending in metal clamps (like what you use to jump-start a car) which they will attach to him, one to his bare foot and the other— And then both shape and means come clearer, as Jon-David removes the gun from his pants and places it on the table. Then goes back to taping the feet. “Will you fucking hold him.” And the means within your reach, and you about to reach for it, when the shape suddenly changes. Because Omar is about to wake up. When it happens, you will be staring at the gun, about to reach, so you won’t see his body jackknife into motion — elbow to the solar plexus of one captor, knee to the chin of the other — but you will see him on one foot (the other taped to the chair) trying to run and crashing into the table, sending everything on its surface — board game, torture device, nine-millimeter pistol — to the concrete floor across which the gun is now skating. Loaded and chambered. Skating and spinning. Omar screaming. You, on your hands and knees. Feeling on the floor. And finding it. The means in your hands, but your hands so tremulous, how are you going to create the desired end? You might hit anyone. Or nothing. One flashlight showing a spot of ceiling, then illuminating a part of a body, then veering off again. The other fallen to the floor. Then picked up by your brother, shouting your name and waving the beam around, showing enough of the scene that you understand who is where. Now: the safety. On the back of the grip. Feel it? Under your thumb. Push the switch forward, the trigger will untense. One hand around the grip and two fingers on the trigger and your other hand on the barrel trying to stop the shaking. Jon-David has him. About a yard away. A knee on his spine and choking him by pulling his shirt back against his neck, and Omar hacking for air. Go closer. Cliff capturing your movement in the beam. Jon-David seeing you and saying, “Put it to his head.” And when your brother says “Dorian,” it will be like a calling from a fog at a time of perfect stillness, like a loon calling from the heart of a still lake through the fog of dawn when you’ve woken up before the others and gone down to the dock, and there you stand, alone and hearing it: the haunted call of a loon which sound I shall never hear again, never to stand again on that dock, waiting to hear it again, listening until suddenly: a stroke of wings on water from the heart of the fog and from the cabin the voice of my grandfather whose boyhood toy of a gun you have shot many times (gust of compressed air, soft pop of a pellet), but which could not have prepared you for the use of this weapon, your grip is all wrong, not firm, and when you do pull the trigger, having pressed the barrel into his body and he saying sharply, “That’s not him, that’s me,” the weapon — as you close your eyes and turn your head away — will nearly jump out of your hands. For a moment, you won’t be certain what you’ve done. What you have done is this: You have done the best you could. On the darkest of pathways, you have managed to stay true to the better angel of your nature.