Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

“I dreamed about her the other night.”

“Her …?”

While they sit against the black slab of the war memorial, the cicada nymphs advance in the twilight to the trunks of trees and crawl up to the leafy branches, making a sound like faraway whispers.

“I thought that was over,” Plaxico says.

“No.”

“It never was?”

Dorian shakes his head. “I just said that to get out of therapy.”

“Now what.”

“Yeah, now what.”

“You have to figure out her name,” Plaxico says. “If you knew her name—”

“I think I do actually.”

“You do?”

“Skyler.”

“What happened … when you searched it?”

“I found two Skyler Wakefields. One was a flute player in a orchestra in Boston fifty years ago. The other is a eight-year-old boy who had a art project displayed last year in a county fair in Indiana.”

“Okay, so that’s obviously not her name, bro.”

Dorian shrugs.

“How would they do that,” Plaxico says. “Erase everything.”

“I dunno.”

“Look, D. I’m trying to be open-minded over here. But you can’t erase every thing.”

“Yes, you can.”

“No, you can’t.”

“The attack,” Dorian says. “The whole truth about the attack got erased.”

“That’s different.”

“How.”

Plaxico says: “You know how.”

They sit in what is now the total gray of twilight against the memorial and the carved names of murdered civilians. In the sky, no evidence of sunset remains. No star strong enough to show itself. The announcement comes on, broadcast from the top of the civic center. Fifteen minutes to curfew. Plaxico gets up, a rule-bound kid who has a streak of three straight years without a tardy on his report card, much less a curfew violation.

“In the new day,” Plaxico says.

“Later.”

From the park to his driveway by bike takes seven minutes. Only when the clock on his phone reads 8:54 does Dorian start home.

Your friend has a point. It isn’t possible, is it, to completely strike a person out. Certain hyperlinks can be purposely broken, certain pages removed, but not all. If it really is her name, you would’ve found some trace. Words spoken to a reporter at a protest march ( Seventeen-year-old Skyler Wakefield from Sebastopol, California, said she was concerned about …); or an announcement of a prize won for creative writing (SHORT STORY, FIRST PRIZE: “THE LISTENING VESSELS,” Skyler Wakefield, Laguna High School), or Sonoma Valley Academy, or one of a score of other private schools within an hour’s drive of the old house, every one of which Dorian had already contacted long ago to ask if there had been any female students between the years X and Y with the surname Wakefield. There had been twelve. None of whom turned out to be her. Although it had seemed briefly that one, a Maya Wakefield, might be — because the reply from the headmaster of the school mentioned a tragic death, and included a link to a memorial website; and as Dorian clicked, the feeling that came over him was of a door about to be thrown open. Then the page appeared. And he saw a girl who looked nothing like the one in his dreams, from a family not his own. She had drowned in the ocean, taken from a beach by a sleeper wave …

Plaxico is right. San Francisco is one thing, your sister is another. A hacker working for jihadists or domestic anarchists, or a cyber-specialist under orders from the government — someone like that could erase everything: every video taken from the ground that had clearly shown a passenger plane being steered into the bridge, a plane with the words AIR ARABIAon the fuselage crashing into the bridge and then exploding. But your parents … When he gets home, Dorian types the name in again. SKYLER WAKEFIELD. And combs through the results. And finds nothing more than he did before. A dead flautist from the Boston Symphony and a third-grader from Indiana. Can’t be the right name. But he knows it is. Her name is Skyler. Dorian saw it very clearly at the end of the dream:

He was in a windmill and there was a kind of door and a fog swirling in the doorway through which he could see another place, a different room, where a little boy was bent over a board game.

What’s your name?

Noah.

The boy rolled two red dice and one came up a four and one came up a one and he moved the old-fashioned race car five spaces to Luxury Tax. Through a window, Dorian could see what he understood to be the Golden Gate Bridge, though in the dream it was not a thing made of iron painted blood red, but a kind of drawing made of innumerable iron shavings that seemed to be trembling under the power of an atmospheric magnet.

I’m looking for my sister, Dorian said.

Skyler?

Where is she?

As he counted out make-believe money, the boy named Noah pointed; and Dorian crossed into the next room. Thinking: Skyler, Skyler. A laptop computer was asleep on a table; a chair was empty. Dorian waved a finger over the touchpad. The computer woke up and the document came to life — and when he saw the title (THE LISTENING VESSELS) and the name (SKYLER WAKEFIELD), what was happening did not feel like a dream anymore. It felt like something else.

The next morning, Dorian can’t remember having any dream about her. He had gone to bed feeling on the verge of new and damning proof. Her name was like a key brought into sleep. Skyler . His mind would fit it into a lock, the door to a palace inside of which he would find one truth after another. In fact, he did dream about a palace (images downloading all of a sudden from subconsciousness), but his sister had not been inside it. The dream had nothing at all to do with her. Something about an Arabian palace. One of those opulent superstructures from the Second Abbasid Caliphate that the Coalition wasted in Gulf War III. Though Dorian understood, as he walked through it — a labyrinth of halls, chambers, rotundas, and grand staircases overspread with rubble and glass — that he wasn’t in Arabia, but somewhere in the Territories: Nebraska or Montana. In one room, a huge throne room, there was the weirdest thing — one entire wall was a mural of Mount Rushmore made from ears of dyed corn. Trying to remember: Where is Mount Rushmore? Dakota?

He gets out of bed.

Has to pee, but it’s summer and he sleeps in tighty-whiteys, and recently he’s become self-conscious about his morning erections. He could put on pants but he’s too lazy. So he paces the room waiting for the thing to go away, which it won’t, because there seems to be a direct correlation between the fullness of a bladder and the duration of a boner. It’s 7:47. Strong possibility his mother will be in the main bathroom, blow-drying her hair, and his father will be in bed reading …

He cracks his door.

The door to his parents’ room is open. He peers around the jamb. Sure enough, here is his father (a man who literally wears pajamas), drinking coffee with a book in one hand, a pencil perched in the crook of his ear.

“Who’s in your bathroom?” Dorian asks.

“M-O-M.”

“Cliff’s in the other one?”

“What do I look like,” his father says, “a surveillance narc?”

He goes down the hall and tries the knob.

“Morning, nitwit.”

“I have to pee.”

“Uh-huh,” his brother says. “And I have to shit out half a Chinese buffet.”

He returns to his room, pulls on cut-off jeans and walks outside, planning to take a leak in the little woods behind the gazebo. Barefoot across the dewy grass. He is already going, the pee slapping into last autumn’s leaves, when he realizes they are all around him, on the trunks and branches of the trees. The Great Eastern Brood. Each insect perfectly motionless; as if glued to the bark. But each one also moving. Dorian shakes off the last drops and zips. Overhead, the leaf canopy shifts in the wind and there’s a pulse of morning sunlight. There must be hundreds of them on each and every tree, every cicada both still and not — or maybe the way to describe it is: each moving within its own stillness. He studied this in school. The insect is molting. Shedding an outer layer: the nymphal exoskeleton. But what he’s watching here is less like science than magic. What’s happening is: They are coming out of themselves. They are freeing themselves from themselves. Old self splits apart, dehisces down the back, a divide so clean it looks like the work of a surgeon; and a new one — white and waxen and winged — pushes through the gap. The head breaks open next. Dead eyes diverge. The new eyes, the living sighted ones, are blood red and wide with astonishment, as if the creature itself can’t believe the change.