Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“It’s not just the glasses on Mom,” Cliff is saying. “It’s that thing on Dad’s — under his lip.”

“It was called a soul patch,” Mitch says.

“Ha! Oh, and the two of you think you’re so cool—”

“We do not,” Kathryn says.

“Yeah, you think you’re such hipsters. And then look at me, your son and heir, fat as a blimp.”

“You’re not fat .”

“I’m like a baby that got delivered in a Denny’s in West Virginia.”

“That’s offensive,” Kathryn says.

“It is,” Mitch says. “But it’s true. He was a goddamn embarrassment.”

And Dorian laughing, too, though he feels weirdly left out, having not been envisaged much less born at the time his sister transformed his parents and brother via imaging software into a jigsaw puzzle of pixels which, at a certain degree of magnification, shows them exactly as they were one day on Goat Rock Beach in what must have been 2020 or 2021.

“I just don’t remember this at all,” Skyler says. “Are you sure I took it?”

“You must’ve,” Mitch says.

Kathryn (pouring wine): “Sky, I remember, specifically. You dug this hole in front of us …”

And his mother repeating herself now, which she tends to do when she’s drinking and happy. Happy because everyone is home: Skyler staying the weekend, in the bedroom that hasn’t undergone a change since she moved out completely five years ago at the age of twenty-one. Evening meal long over. Everyone drunk but him (even Cliff, who has downed his one special-occasion glass of wine and negotiated a second); and Dorian feeling tempted to sneak away and smoke a green, but knowing if he does they’ll know he did it and they really will be angry (his parents, that is), and he will have done damage to what in a way has been a perfect night.

“Doesn’t matter who took it,” Cliff says. “The point is, the two of you think you’re so cool …”

And Dorian does leave the table, though not to do anything delinquent. Just going outside. Where the sun went down some time ago. Making now just the faintest light over the western horizon: as when, in a crystal ball, future images spark and swirl. And he thinking, like the glow from a crystal ball . And wondering if his sister, the aspiring fictionist, would appreciate that simile, maybe even use it in the book she’s working on at school. If she were out here with me, I’d tell it to her . Or maybe he wouldn’t. Because for some time now, a few months, maybe more than a few, he has been feeling … How? He can’t say. Can’t pin the emotion down with any adjective. Except: Different. Different than he always has. As if something is changing (has changed already) and the old (or only) ways of feeling about and acting toward his sister are broken links: words and gestures pointing toward a relationship that has become forever unavailable.

The door slides open.

It’s Skyler. Coming out of the house, onto the patio; and closing the door behind her, muffling again the laughter and the shouting, though Dorian can still hear it as he watches her fall onto a lounge chair.

“Our brother is sauced,” she says.

“I know.”

“I have to admit, I’m a little tipsy. Mom is completely trashed. Dad. Dad I think has a bionic liver. I hope you’re looking forward to your future as an alcoholic.”

“I guess I am.”

“So,” she says, “when are you leaving?”

“For camp?”

“Mm.”

“Next Thursday.”

(On her back, looking up at the sky): “You nervous?”

“Nah.”

“No? So, what is it then? What’s up with you?”

Silence while night seems suddenly to crest over them: a wave of darkness flotsammed with stars. And Dorian thinking of the night Skyler called him, a few weeks ago, late, to ask the same question (though her tone that night had not been casual), and he had told her there was nothing wrong, which is to say he answered her untruthfully; and remembering how, when his ringtone sounded, he had been dreaming, standing on the lawn of a house that was theirs but wasn’t, with a car wrecked against a tree and the driver dead by gunshot. Her phone call shocked him out of the illusion, though he then had the feeling, for just a moment or two, that he had only traded one dream for another. In another instant: fully awake — and, in a way, lying to her (to whom he never lies, cannot lie), saying I am in no trouble, when in fact he’d been troubled for months, struggling to understand why everything seemed to be coming apart when everything was perfectly fine and still is now and yet even on a perfect night like this— my family together and happy and I am even alone with my sister under the stars —it seeming to him that something is being lost.

He finally says: “I dunno.”

“Dodo.”

“I’m serious, Sky. I can’t explain it.”

Something moves out by the eucalyptus trees, a swift passing of hooves or paws (deer or fox); then nothing again.

“Maybe you’re in love with someone,” she says.

“I doubt it.”

“Maybe you’re in denial about being in love with someone.”

“Are you?” he says.

“What. In love?” Still supine. Staring up at what some see as Heaven: “I think so. Yes.”

And Dorian thinking of the boy (strange to say: man) whom he has met more than once. Doesn’t like him, doesn’t dislike him. He who just is. Who might as well be a principle of physics.

“Things aren’t like they used to be,” she says. “Are they?”

“No.”

“I feel it, too. I have this dream sometimes, I don’t even know if I should tell you.”

“What.”

She sits up and sits on the edge of the chair. “Something happens in the city. An explosion, a meteor or a bomb. It hits the bridge and whole neighborhoods are burning, and you’re really hurt, except you’re not really you. You belong to someone else and — I can’t really save you. I can’t even stay with you.”

“Sky,” he says. “WTF.”

“I know, but my point is, that would never really happen. Same with you and me. We’ll never grow apart. No matter how much things change. We’re just afraid we might. That’s all it is. It’s just fear.”

And he thinking later (too late to still be awake and thinking, but he can’t stop his thoughts): She’s right. It’s the same way people have always felt. Since the days we lived in caves and feared the violence of nature and then dreamed up the idea of gods and feared their anger and then joined together in groups and came to fear each other. Yet even after the passing (no, the slaying, as of dragons) of those primal superstitions and prejudices — despite the agreements, accords, and treaties of the New Enlightenment — a fear is still in us: haunting ghost of a time when we said it was already too late, the ice caps are melting, the oil is running out, the civilizations are clashing … (Falling asleep now, though still thinking, and the thoughts being bent by the curvature of sleep): But we saved everything, we saved it all in the clouds {{examples}} all our memories and dreams and that’s where we live now {{where}} in the cloud {{disambiguation needed}} …

The next week, despite everything she said and the good sense it made to you, getting on a jet plane to fly across the continent will feel like embarkation on a spaceflight to another galaxy, during which trip you will sleep and dream for a century, to realize, upon awakening, that everything you once knew — everything you were —is dead and gone. Calm down. This is just how it feels . Say to yourself — after making it through the security check, putting your shoes and belt back on, slipping your backpack over your shoulder — as you stand blinking at the departures on the monitor, looking for DETROIT PAN A.M. 343, say: It’s fear, that’s all . And keep thinking, as you make your way to the gate: Just a fear of what might happen . Because you will take off from San Francisco and land in Detroit as safe as can be — and you’ll make your connection in plenty of time, video-calling and texting and posting photos all along the way, aware of how lonely it would’ve been, once upon a time, to make a trip like this by yourself and have no real connectivity to anyone you’d left behind, no more contact than an analog phone call in a booth, a few minutes with only a voice: to your mind, the saddest form of communication. At the airport in Albany, by the luggage carousel, there will be someone waiting with a placard. DORIAN WAKEFIELD. The person holding it, a man (about the age of your sister’s boyfriend, but with long hair held back by a bandanna), gives you a smile a moment before you even move toward him, and says (reaching out in a handshake that is more than a welcome; it’s like an assurance that you’ve arrived at a place destined for you):