“The asphalt was hot beneath my feet, and I wondered if we weren’t placating forgotten gods left to dream and rot in the crumbling sewers and take some comfort in the holocaust above. The air this close to the flames was hot and acrid and Geneva couldn’t breathe without her oxygen. Her eyes watered at the smoke and left tarry streaks of mascara on her cheeks. The plastic lotus was gone. Once in a while she’d tug my sleeve or Christine’s and try to say something, but all she could ever get out was a cough and sometimes a little spatter of blood.”
The car wouldn’t stay in the lane. I slowed further to compensate, but the world blurred and darkened into a low drone of peaceable movement. Sounds were few – the ladies’ faraway breathing – and soon it was only the road dreaming us forward, and Christine’s sighs lost all meaning to my exhaustion. My body ached and itched and my clothes felt like motel sheets. I imagined love in Chris’s breathing that I knew wasn’t really there, and the sound brought me back to stagnant nights where I’d sworn that this was it, the final disappointment, where I’d pour myself into a glass and hit the streets, remembering nothing, except every morning I still woke up in her arms.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I mean, sorry about that. I don’t feel good.”
More streets, roads, each slippery with memories or maybe dreams – I couldn’t tell them apart now, so I drove, concentrating on the dashboard lights if I were concentrating on anything.
At some point I heard Chris calling for me to stop. I pulled to the shoulder, looked around. The neighborhood was unfamiliar. Had I driven us here?
Red and blue lights flashed across the faces of dilapidated houses. A police siren wailed just behind us.
So this was how it was going to happen.
I reached for my wallet in a half sleep, tossed it on the dash, and placed my hands on the wheel.
Chris looked at me like I was crazy.
“What are you doing?”
The police cruiser sailed past our car without slowing.
“I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“Keep going.”
So I idled through the emptied neighborhood – old Sears Catalog houses, most of them, in varying shades of demolition, some already burned, some half-collapsed, others just weak with soft age. Huge trees dwarfed the houses on all sides and gnarled untended lawns in shadow. This looked like Ojibway, sure enough, but no neighborhood I’d seen before.
An orange glow through the trees up ahead like the night of the crash.
“Left,” Geneva mumbled from the back, nearly too drunk even for that monosyllable.
Around the corner was the police car, blocking off the road, and the house fire just past – a huge will-o’-the-wisp that singed the trees and hurt to see and spilled long painful shadows down the street.
Geneva had the back window cracked so she could smell the smoke, and soon I could taste the burning electricity in the air. She needed her mask now and only took it off to give me directions, and even then I could hardly understand her for her coughing, which was worse now than it’d been all evening. This was it, surely. She couldn’t possibly come back from this one, even though somehow she always did. Still, I looked away and focused on the road, unable to watch her sentence be executed.
When we approached the inferno, I parked the car and the three of us joined the crowd at the burning house, though Chris and I were just aides-de-camp to Geneva’s sick whimsy. This was already the third house to go up tonight, someone said, and there hadn’t been any firetrucks yet, just a couple policemen urging everyone to keep back. Too many fires.
The asphalt was hot beneath my feet, and I wondered if we weren’t placating forgotten gods left to dream and rot in the crumbling sewers and take some comfort in the holocaust above. The air this close to the flames was hot and acrid and Geneva couldn’t breathe without her oxygen. Her eyes watered at the smoke and left tarry streaks of mascara on her cheeks. The plastic lotus was gone. Once in a while she’d tug my sleeve or Christine’s and try to say something, but all she could ever get out was a cough and sometimes a little spatter of blood.
Through the heat and smoke and chaos all sounds were mixed and indecipherable – here a man and woman arguing in Spanish, there the blazing crackle of splitting wood. Some garbled voice from a police radio, screeching tires, a car horn. The heat was almost a sound all its own, a vibration of sweat and summer that rumbled the early morning and its firelight was felt more than seen. Another faraway siren, a second police car edging its way here to join us congregants in our ritual. No sign of a fire engine.
The women disappeared into the darkness of the crowd like shadow puppets dancing before a paper lantern. I moved with the onlookers, all of us compelled toward the conflagration. The heat left a cobwebby film on my face as I got closer, mollified by the whiskey I didn’t realize I was holding.
After a few minutes my skin was wet and burning and I couldn’t breathe without coughing. Somewhere in the pandemonium Chris called my name. Or her husband’s name – there was no way to tell any longer. Maybe he was hiding somewhere in the smoke and fire. Or maybe Geneva had been right all along, and he and I were reflections of the other: his a life I couldn’t recall but mine all the same, and somehow all this heat and disorder made her version of reality more plausible than Christine’s.
I followed the sound of her voice but lost it almost immediately. I remembered news stories where they’d interview wide-eyed victims, ask about all the things they’d lost in the fires – priceless memories, pets, heirlooms, eccentric collections – the answers were all the same – and I repeated her name in my head like a mantra as I sorted through the smoke and vapors and blinding light – Christine Emily Helms. Surely she hadn’t been calling my name.
Somewhere, more Spanish, someone calling out gato over and over again, a question and answer all bound up in one. The fire had moved to my left, or maybe I’d just circumnavigated the thing. The house shook as a few crossbeams rattled themselves loose inside. Sparks hissed in summery swarms from a broken window.
Gato again, and then ayuda.
For a second it looked like my childhood neighborhood – the gables the same, the peeling paint, gentle-sloped drives and walks and steep-pitched roofs, here and there a fallen villa with one or two Queen Anne flourishes still evident. Another joyful draft of liquor, and this one I barely felt.
Later I found Chris hunched over Geneva, who was collapsed on the ground red-skinned and silent and still. A smear of blood was pink beside her mouth; her knuckles were white at her oxygen tank’s handle. Tears in her eyes. Chris waved me close: we needed to ferry her back to the car.
Chris hoisted her up and left me to carry the oxygen tank. We moved slowly, in a fiery dream, but away from the blaze the autumn cold swept in fast, filling a vacuum, and the sounds of the fire receded almost as soon. The tank was weightless somehow and the fire crackle and crowd murmurs an autumn breeze, and again something about this street of ashes – a brief flash of childhood, racing toy cars down a sidewalk with my brother, waiting for my father’s Camaro to come rolling up the driveway, and now, here, the summer heat was at least the same.
We helped her into the back seat and she seemed to stare back at us though her eyes were closed and she wasn’t conscious anymore. We brushed her papers away and slid her into the back.
My mind cleared up a little and I mouthed the word hospital to Christine but she shook her head.
“Home,” she said.
We climbed in front. I took a long look over my shoulder before I started the engine. Geneva breathed gently, hesitantly, caught up in some deadly dream.
Christine shook her head.
So I drove, keeping an eye on Geneva. Her sketchpad leaves were spilled across the seat and floor in a private way of sorrows, station to station and one agony to another, adding up to nothing.
For a long time the house fire burned in the mirrors, and when the morning sun slipped into its place I hardly noticed.
Leave a Reply