Читать книгу The Wildfire Season - Andrew Pyper - Страница 8

Why Miles?

Alex has wondered this perhaps more than anything else. Why had she decided to shed all her shyness for that one sun-glowy, blue-eyed boy over all the others? Why him, sitting alone on the back fire escape of a Montreal walk-up at the first party of the new term, the weeks ahead of her fizzing with possibility, never mind the next year, the next five?

Sometimes she’s sure it was his mouth that made her step out onto the fire escape on her own. Her housemate, Jen, a boy-crazy psych major from Massachusetts who liked to regard Alex as ‘so Canadian’ (which meant, for her, an innocent who didn’t stand a chance in the corrupt negotiations of sex), had asked where she was going when Alex had left her chatting up a pair of sniggering frat boys in the bathroom lineup, and Alex had told her, ‘I’m sure you can handle Beavis and Butthead on your own,’ and walked out into the cool night. It was his mouth that did it, she’s almost certain. His lips fine but deeply coloured, a mark of delicate youth on a face she would have otherwise thought of as broad featured, even rough. She saw him through the kitchen window, noticed his mouth and wanted to kiss it, as she had wanted before, daydreamingly, of others’. What was remarkable about this boy’s lips was that she wanted to kiss them first and then divide them with her tongue, slitting them apart as a blade opens an envelope, so that she could see what shape they’d make around his words.

‘Have you ever tried to eat the stars?’

Alex is literally taken off balance. It’s the heels she borrowed from Jen’s endless collection jamming through the metal slats as much as his question.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’ve never been hungry enough.’

‘When I was a kid I would pick them right out of the sky. They had a taste, too.’

‘Were they good?’

‘Oh yeah. Too good. My mom told me if I ate too many I’d start to shine.’

Only now does Miles look at her directly, and Alex thinks that it’s too late. This boy has already had more than his fill of stars.

Miles pulls a clear plastic sandwich bag out of his pocket and shakes it in the air. Inside, a cluster of withered caps and stems leap over each other as though in an effort to escape.

‘What’s that?’

‘Mushrooms,’ he says. ‘I spent the summer out on Vancouver Island. Picked these lovelies myself. Very friendly.’

‘So, instead of stars, now you eat magic mushrooms.’

‘I’m always putting something in my mouth.’ He shakes the bag again. ‘Want some?’

‘What do they do?’

‘You mean you’ve never—?’

‘No. I’ve never most things.’

‘That’s okay. They basically take whatever mood you’re in and enhance it, make you see beyond what you’d normally see.’

‘You’re looking at me. What do you see?’

‘A lot of things.’

‘Name one.’

‘I see someone who’s wondering if she can trust this guy she’s never met before, but thinks that she’d like to.’

‘Well,’ Alex laughs, pulling away before she could spoil everything by lunging forward to bite his lips. ‘I guess I’d better have some of those. You can’t be the only mind reader around here.’

Inside, the party gets suddenly louder, as though from a single twist of a volume knob. Alex can hear Jen squealing, pretending to be ticklish. A shattered glass receives a round of applause. The bass line from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ trembles through the kitchen window, entering the steel bones of the fire escape along with Miles and Alex themselves.

But nobody comes outside to interrupt them. Huddled close, their voices low and secretive, as though the simple facts they share are instead shocking revelations they had every intention of taking with them to the grave. They talk about the towns they were from, their majors, the four years that separated their ages (Miles was older), all without telling each other their names. Yet when they finally get around to introducing themselves, with a mannered, lingering handshake, they feel they already knew that they were Miles and Alex, and that speaking these words aloud merely satisfied a formality demanded of them.

‘Have you climbed the mountain yet?’ he asks her, and at first she thinks he is speaking figuratively, of some spiritual challenge he has already overcome that she hasn’t even heard of. But in the next second she realizes he only means Mont Royal, the slope that rears up over campus and all of downtown, a patch of Canadian Shield in the middle of the city with an illuminated cross on top.

‘I’ve worried that I’d get lost.’

‘I brought my compass,’ Miles says, tapping the side of his head.

Alex pulls off Jen’s heels and clanks down the fire escape stairs after him, barefoot. Up St Dominique, turning to catch their reflections in the windows of the Vietnamese and churrasceira restaurants on Duluth, north again past the musky, shivering nightclub lineups on St Laurent. Alex wonders if it’s the mushrooms that make her feel like she is levitating a half inch off the sidewalks.

They enter the park at L’Esplanade, emerging from the enclosure of streets into the expansive night. Alex can see the graphite outline of the mountain now, the white bulbs of the cross. When they move into the forest at the mountain’s base they don’t bother searching for a trail. ‘This way’s up and that’s where we’re going,’ Miles tells her, dodging his way around maple saplings and warning her not to stub her toes on the larger rocks poking through the soil like half-buried skulls. Even though she can still hear the mechanical murmur of the city behind her, Alex imagines she is being pursued. Some wild thing—an animal or fire—hunts her on the slope.

At the crest, she scratches through a patch of burrs to find Miles lying on his back, panting. Alex looks behind her, expecting to see the grid of lights and the Olympic Stadium oval as she has in postcards, but the trees block her view of all but strange flickers between the trunks, dancing like embers.

‘It’s bigger than you’d guess, isn’t it?’ Miles asks her, and she follows where he’s pointing at the cross directly above them.

‘And brighter.’

‘Bigger, brighter, better. That’s the shrooms.’

No, that’s you, Alex nearly says.

Now that they are lying close they discover a comfortable silence between them. Miles finds Alex’s hand and links his fingers through hers, a grade-school gesture of affection that disarms her nevertheless. They stay there, splayed out in the one piece of wilderness on an island of three million, until the first cold of autumn brings them to their feet.

‘You guided me up here,’ she says. ‘Now you follow me.’

Alex’s apartment is a small 3¹/₂ over a bagel bakery. From the front window, the two of them look down on the street, where a line of assorted last-call drunks wait to get something to eat before the long stumble home. Even the curtains smell of coalfire and boiled dough from downstairs.

‘It makes me constantly hungry,’ she says, pouring both of them glasses of ice water. ‘But I love it. So do the mice.’

‘Have you set traps?’

‘Jen wants to, but I’ve been stalling. I know it’s ridiculous, but my thinking is, they’ve got to live somewhere, right?’

‘That’s not ridiculous.’

‘Do you have mice?’

‘No. But I don’t have walls, either.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘In my van.’

‘Don’t you have friends you could stay with?’

‘Some. But I’ve found a very picturesque parking lot. It’s like they say: location, location, location.’

In the morning, Alex awakens with Miles’s arm wrapped around her, pulling her into his body. She remembers the delicate but insistent way that he took her clothes off under the covers, only to lie close, their whispers getting tangled in her hair. Sometime in the night they must have drifted into sleep, but she feels that even in their dreams they continued their talk, adding new confessions to the ones already offered, trumping each other’s Most Embarrassing Moment and Worst First Date stories until her laughter shook her awake.

She turns over as quietly as she can, hoping to study Miles’s face, but his eyes are already open. Alex lands her fingers on his shoulder and presses down, feels the muscle there yield to her. Her hand strokes lower and touches something stuck to him. A round button of fluff.

‘What is that?’ she says.

‘What?’

‘That.’

Miles tries to look over his shoulder but only Alex can see what’s there. A furry grey circle the size of a dollar coin pressed into the skin. Alex pulls on the string attached to it and peels it off Miles’s back.

‘A mouse,’ she says, dangling it between them.

‘A flat mouse.’

‘The poor thing. Snuggled up under the sheets one minute, and the next, the giant decides to roll over and phwat!’

‘So much happens when you’re asleep,’ Miles says, genuinely amazed.

Alex places the mouse on the bedside table. It’s only then that she kisses his mouth.

When she bites, he doesn’t pull away.

Jen moved out the next week. It wasn’t supposed to be Alex, the naive Canadian, but Jen who found the cute older guy to skip class with for three days straight and spend all of them in the bedroom, living on sex, magnums of red wine and Thai takeout. The injustice was so intolerable she unhooked the shoe racks hanging on her walls and took a room in the all-girls dorm where she didn’t have to deal with ‘shared bubble baths and bare asses running down the hallway all the time.’

Alex and Miles didn’t mind the mice, and though the apartment was small, it was, as Miles liked to point out, a good deal bigger than the back of a van. At first, they told each other it was an arrangement of convenience. For the first months, happy as they were, both of them found it easier to speak of their lease on the place over the bagel shop as the thing that brought them together, instead of something more truthful but overwhelming, like love or fate.

Still, they couldn’t help themselves from making plans. Alex was taking education and, after some obligatory internships at special schools, discovered she had a talent for working with children with learning disabilities. Miles had to admit that Intro to Anatomy was the first course he’d ever taken where he saw the point behind it all, the practical link between science and people. He pored over textbooks with their painted pages of interconnected organs, arteries and bones, and could recognize not only the beauty in it but the ways he might fix them if the system failed or came under attack. Alex envisioned him as a surgeon. She told Miles he had all the natural skills for the job, which, in her mind, consisted mainly of a kind face and strong hands. Although Miles had never seriously thought of being a doctor before, within weeks she had persuaded him to apply to medical school the year after next. The University of Toronto was near the top of the field for both of them. The bagels weren’t as good, but they figured they could handle just about any deprivation so long as they were together.

That summer, they sublet the apartment and Miles drove out west for the same job he had worked the past four years, taking a position on a forest firefighting crew in the British Columbia Interior. Alex joined him for the ride as far as Vancouver and found work at an East End daycare. They saw each other as much as they could, Miles coming down to the city on his breaks and Alex taking the eight-hour bus ride to Salmon Arm on Saturdays to spend the night with him before taking the bus back on Sunday morning.

On the return cross-country drive, in a Robin’s Donuts parking lot on the outskirts of Moose Jaw, Miles gave Alex a ring he’d won from his foreman in a poker game.

‘It’s collateral,’ he said.

‘You want a loan?’

‘I want your time.’

‘I don’t get it.’

Miles placed his hands against the sides of Alex’s head. She could feel them shaking.

‘Next summer is going to be my last one working the fires. And when I come back, I want to give you something with a real rock in it.’

‘Are you looking for an answer now?’

‘That’s up to you.’

Alex slipped the foreman’s ring on her finger, a silver band with the name ROY on it in raised fool’s gold. She turned it against her knuckle until the metal warmed her skin.

‘It’s not really my style. And it’s way too big,’ she said. ‘But I’ll keep it anyway.’

They spoke frankly, always and right from the start, and best when of grave things, confessions, the conveying of bad news. For Miles, this involved the story of his missing father. A chemical engineer at the Nanaimo pulp mill who married Miles’s mother, bought a modest house near the harbour, and on the day before his son’s fifth birthday, left without leaving behind a note, an address, anything to suggest he was ever coming back.

Honesty was never an issue between them. They were truthful out of the need to be together, and plain talk came as naturally to them as desire itself. Before they knew it—and for the first time in their lives—they were speaking as man and wife.

Miles was accepted to the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Alex took a position at the Arrowsmith School for learning disabled children in the same city. Three months separated them from their futures. For this final summer before the beginning of their new lives together, of true adulthood, of marriage, Miles headed west one last time to work the wildfire season.

His name is Tim, but everyone calls him the kid. Every attack team Miles has ever worked on has had a ‘kid’, a nickname automatically assigned to the youngest member of the crew. But this one deserves it. He has the sort of face that is an indisputable foreshadowing of how he would look twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, and how even then, he would still be the kid. Round and shinychinned, his skin so flushed as to be an almost laughable display of good health. At first, Miles told himself to call the boy by his proper name, so that at least one of the crew saw that he was doing a man’s job and deserved to be recognized for it. But by the end of the second week even Miles couldn’t fight the obvious and called him nothing but ‘kid’ from then on.

The fire camp Miles has been assigned to is about twelve miles out of Salmon Arm, at the petered-out end of a logging road. When Miles arrives, he is taken into the camp office, where the fire director as well as a rep from the pulp company sit on the other side of the room’s single desk. Miles wonders what he could have already done that would justify being fired.

Instead, they make him foreman. The pay isn’t much better than a crewman’s, but the desk will be his, and use of the camp’s only phone, which will allow him to call Alex in the evenings and catch her before she goes to bed, three hours ahead of him in the east. And he knows there likely isn’t anyone in camp more knowledgeable than himself. Alex calls him a pyro-nerd. When he reads for pleasure, it’s always scientific studies of how fire starts, how it lives, how it dies. Government ‘burn pattern’ reports. Historical accounts of smokechasing disasters—Mann Gulch, South Canyon, Peshtigo.

‘You have two things to take care of out here, Mr McEwan,’ the pulp company guy says at the end of the interview, the only time he speaks at all. ‘The trees and the men. Just know that the company owns the trees.’

‘What about the men?’

‘They’re all yours.’

Miles never thought of the crew as his, but he felt his responsibility as its leader at every moment, not so much a weight but something added to his blood to thicken it. It made it easier that Miles liked them, especially the kid. Another pyro-nerd in the making. Asking questions about the origins of pulaskis, the combination rake-hoes designed for cutting fireline in different ground conditions. Volunteering for the nastiest tasks—staying the night to keep an eye on spot fires extinguished the day before, axing a snag into pieces to see if the smoke had hidden inside it, manning the radio when everyone else opted to make a dent in the beer stocks. He did all of this not to seek approval but because he wanted to see how it was done. The rest of the crew liked him for this, too. Not only because the kid relieved them from unpleasant work but because he so plainly loved doing it. It was hard even to make fun of someone like that.

Miles also admired the way the kid could spend time with him without disturbing his thoughts. As a result, he spoke more freely with him than with anyone else on the attack team. Although Miles never brought up the topic of their friendship, he knew that this is what they had found together. Alex asked after him in every phone conversation they had. She always called him Tim.

‘There’s a pattern to every crewman’s career,’ Miles remembers telling the kid on one of their long drives between watchtowers. ‘The first year you learn, the second year you complain, and the third year you actually enjoy yourself. There’s almost never a fourth year.’

‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘Five years,’ Miles says, laughing. ‘But I’m still learning. With fires, there’s always something you think you know but don’t.’

What Miles neglected to add is that without fires to work on, there’s not much to learn anything from. This year, June and most of July turn out to be curiously uneventful months, despite the above-average heat and string of eighteen days without rain. Aside from a handful of smouldering snags lit up by lightning, and a burning garbage can at a roadside picnic area fifteen miles to the south, the camp is fire free.

The crew spend the time inventing increasingly complex practical jokes, eating too much, pretending to be soldiers. Miles has experienced stretches like this before, though not nearly as long, and is coming to the end of make-work tasks. The two pockmarked pickups had been waxed into glittering auto show pretties. The cache’s store of tools were sharp as butcher’s cleavers, the other supplies hung upon hooks or lined in straight aisles according to an ‘attack priority sequence’, just like the manual dreamed it might be. The bunkhouse was painted top to bottom four times, followed by a poll on each colour’s aesthetic merits. By the middle of July, it was neon pink. A unanimous vote (Miles abstaining) determined it would stay this way for the rest of the season.

It isn’t until the first week of August that they receive notice from a spotter plane of a smoker at the bottom end of a gulch funnelling down into the Mazko River, two hundred miles north. Miles had known that something was there for the past twenty-four hours, as the spotter had to pass the site twice to determine whether it was an actual fire or merely a ‘ghost,’ the mist that can rise in locations near water. The delay in identifying the fire hasn’t allowed it much growth, though—the plane’s last report was of a tight congestion of small spot fires, each one no bigger than the smouldering sticks left behind at morning campsites.

There is a tradition among attack teams of naming a fire they have fought on, large or small. Most of the time it arrives at the end, after mopup is completed and some detail of the location or episode that occurred over the course of the job lends itself. But when they disembark from the helicopters in the lee of the smoke-fogged valley, the kid tosses a name out right away. The crew stand at the crest looking at the Mazko a half mile below and the four or five dozing spot fires where the gulch’s walls meet. The slope down is steep, but they should be able to get to the fires and back up again without climbing gear or ropes. What will slow them are the loose pieces of shale scattered over the hillside, black diamonds of sharp armour like the scales of a serpent buried just below the surface. Although there is usually some debate surrounding an initial suggestion’s merits, the kid’s first try sticks without question. The Dragon’s Back.

Miles is reluctant to touch the dragon’s skin at all. It is one of the first principles of firefighting to avoid cutting line partway down a hill with the fire below. Better to come at it from the lower point and push it higher, the entry in this case being the banks of the river. But when Miles radioes the fire manager, he is told to continue down the slope and fight from above.

‘Get a jump on it and it’s simple as pissing in an ashtray,’ the manager says.

It’s not in Miles’s nature to argue, and his men are so bored with the disappointments of a fireless season that some are already sidestepping into the gulch, shouting jokes about taking long enough to make it down that they might be in line for some overtime. Miles, on the other hand, tells himself it will have to be quick. The longer they stay down there, the more chances there are to be surprised.

When their eyes begin to sting from the smoke, their cheeks freckled with ash, Miles looks back at the crest and judges it to be about four hundred yards up. Next, he does a size-up of what they have to face: a few spot fires, all more than twenty feet apart, licking at green stalks of cheat grass and fescue. Off to the side, a small patch of oak scrub stands untouched. They’ll take the smokers one by one and get them early enough that they won’t have to cut any fireline. Miles doesn’t want to give it that much room to play.

‘Split up in threes,’ Miles tells them. ‘Pick one and hot-spot it. When it’s done, hustle on to the next. By noon, the sun is going to roast us like turkeys down here.’

The day is already showing temperatures that are well above average, and the valley walls only contain the heat, the shale a million dark mirrors magnifying the sun on their backs. Still, for the first half-hour, the men go at their labours with something near joy, the simple pleasure of cutting the earth with the blades of their pulaskis singing up the muscles in their arms. They complain about the work when they aren’t working, but now that they are, they bury the smoke in purposeful contentment.

The kid is the first to hear it.

Less a sound than its absence. Nothing like the silence that can sometimes visit a crew in the way a break in the conversations around a dinner table can leave a room in an accidental quiet. What the kid hears is not an interruption but an end. It makes him think of the project he submitted to his highschool science fair. A perfect vacuum. The demonstration involved sucking away all the air in an empty fish tank, an invisible violence taking place within. Now it’s like he’s inside the tank, looking out.

‘The fuck was that?’ he asks nobody in particular, but Miles hears the question. And now that his attention has been called to it, he can hear what the kid hears too. Unlike the kid, he knows exactly what it is.

‘Let’s move out!’ Miles shouts, circling his arm over his head, directing the men up the hill.

For a time, they only look at him. They’ve just arrived, the spot fires not halfway to being buried. It seems the new foreman is something of a joker. One of the crew acknowledges Miles’s gestures with a honking laugh, and the rest of the men except the kid join him in it.

‘I’m not kidding. Take your shit and haul it on up.’

‘Quittin’ time already, boss?’ the first of the laughers shouts back.

‘We’re not quitting. We’re pulling back. Right fucking now.’

All of them look up at the sound of thunder. Shade their eyes with their hands, searching, but the sky remains a cloudless dome. The thunder rolls on. More a tremor in the atmosphere than something they hear, like standing over a pot of water coming to a boil.

A fire whirl. That’s what the kid heard, what they can all hear now. A conflagration creating its own wind. But what terrifies Miles isn’t the vacuum of a fire whirl but the fury that he knows must follow it.

He glances back to see the fire roiling up at them from the bottom of the gulch. At this distance, it looks to him to be a swarm of yellowjackets spewing forth from a rupture in the earth.

It’s happened sooner than he had guessed. A blowup. The most feared event in fighting fires in the bush, but rare enough that most crewman’s careers go by without seeing one. What begins as a series of spot fires sends hot, lighter air up, and the cooler, heavy air sweeps in to take its place, creating a kind of burning tornado. The spot fires that had stood apart a moment before join together. Invisible gases rise into the air hotter than the white heart of a flame. The ground itself is ignited.

‘Drop your tools!’ Miles orders them, only now noticing that the men, including himself, have been slowed by the heavy pulaskis pulling at their shoulders. ‘Let go of whatever you’ve got! Now! Now!’

Most do. But despite his repeated command, a couple of the men refuse to release the grip on their shovels. Whether from an embedded sense of attachment or from shock that has seized their minds on nothing but the crest above them, Miles couldn’t know. The rest of the crew, now sixteen pounds lighter and with the benefit of pumping both of their arms forward, are able to move at a quicker pace than before.

From Miles’s broader perspective as last man back, he calculates that it still won’t be enough. The men farthest ahead have already grown sluggish against the steepening hill face. At best, they’re managing a couple hundred feet per minute. A fast fire will make triple that in forest conditions, and as much as eight hundred feet a minute in long, graded grass like this. Even faster if it’s a blowup.

They’re caught. A textbook firetrap, and he led them into it, allowed himself to be bullied by some shithead over a radio. Miles can do nothing now but will the men on, ordering one leg in front of the other in his head. Go, go, go, go. So long as he pushes them with these unspoken words he tries to believe they cannot fall.

There is no strategy to what they do now, nor could there be. Miles would be unable to find a single tactic in the wildland firefighter’s training manual to help even if he had it in front of him. It is a foot race and nothing more. There is the fire, the crest, the closing yards between them. There is the searing muscles in the men’s thighs, already cramping, reducing their strides to useless penguin hops. There is a window of time about to be shut. A situation that calls only for what Miles’s first foreman used to call FEAR. Fuck Everything And Run.

From his position at the end of the snaking line, Miles watches and, in half-second evaluations, takes note of his various crew members’ progress. Men he would have guessed to be the most nimble end up tripping over their own ankles, one falling chin first against the rock-strewn hillside and sliding helplessly backward. Another runs with his arms straight above his head, as though at gunpoint. None of them call out to each other. None of them scream. But the humanless quiet that results terrifies Miles more than anything else. They are frantic and inarticulate as vermin. In less than a minute the fire has taken their identities from them, their language, their dignity. It kills them before it touches them.

None are as slow as the kid. It’s not his physical conditioning that works against him, as he is stronger than most, light and long-legged. It’s that he can’t help from looking back every five or six strides. No matter how brief his glances, simply turning his shoulders and blinking once against the rolling wall of flame is enough to break whatever speed he had worked up. When the kid’s eyes return to the man ahead of him he has lost another five feet, and he must dig his toes in and start climbing all over again.

Because Miles won’t allow himself to overtake any of the others, the kid slows him down as well.

Don’t look at it! Miles is shouting at him, but the kid doesn’t hear. He says it another three times before he realizes that the words are pronounced only as an idea within him. He works sideways across the hill to the kid’s line of ascent and slams his palms against his shoulder blades. Every time the kid turns, he pushes again. Don’t look at it, Miles says with his eyes, and this time, the kid gets it.

And then Miles looks too. He’s astonished at the fire’s speed. The conditions are perfect for it making a sprint like this—dried stalks of high grass, the accelerant of oak scrub at the bottom of the gulch, a slope for the flames to climb—but he still can’t believe how it defies what he’s ever observed of fire before, the way it turns gravity upside down. Now Miles can see that it’s true what he’s been told a thousand times. Only fires and bears run faster uphill than downhill.

Ahead, Miles can see the first figures making the crest. The fire is so close he can hear it—not its vacuum but its resulting explosion of flames. The whirl opened up and new air rushing in to fill the space in a metallic screech, a subway train grinding the rails as it goes too fast around a bend. The kid covers his ears.

The two of them are the only ones who remain below now, a little over a hundred yards short of where the slope levels and falls away into forest. It is close enough that Miles can see the individual fingers of grass at the top bending against the rush of heat. The fire will have burned the same blades to black wicks before they get halfway to touching them.

It is close, but Miles has noticed how his pace has slowed almost to a standstill, and the final ascent is far steeper than any other section of the hill. The other men have a chance of making it, so long as the fire is delayed on the crest. But even if they had wings it’s too late for Miles and the kid.

Miles lunges forward and grabs the kid’s arm, stopping them both. Without explanation, he slips his hand into his pack and pulls a fusee out. He lip-reads the kid’s voiceless words—Don’t stop! Don’t stop!—but only raises his hand in reply. Miles ignites the fusee with the lighter he takes from his pocket. When it flares to life, he bends to touch its spitting mouth to the straw around them.

An escape fire. A small burning of grass lit before the main fire hits, so that the burned area—the ‘good black’—can be stepped into and, with their heads buried in the ashes, the worst of the fire may pass around them. It is a technique Miles has only read about. He remembers stories of turn-of-the-century natives saving themselves and any pilgrims who would join them, far out on the Great Plains lit up like a prairie inferno. But there is no mention of escape fires in any of the current training materials, and for good reason. Miles knows that more men have burned in the good black than have been saved by it. But they will die if they run on, and die if they stand where they are. Miles decides for himself and for the kid. They will be an experiment.

Miles steps into the circle, the stalks still snapping and sending live sparks up his pant legs, and waves at the kid to join him. Just ten feet away, the kid stays where he is. Staring at Miles in an uncomprehending palsy of disbelief. Why is his foreman starting a fire when there already is one, a huge one, coming right at them?

For a moment, the two men meet each other’s eyes through the smoke spiralling off the grass. The kid’s effort to see the sense in what Miles has done plays visibly over his face. His throat seared shut, leaving all his questions to sit, heavy as marble, in his chest.

The kid is so close that Miles could grab him and try to pull him in. If the kid resisted, both of them would be caught outside the good black as the main fire hit. Still, if he holds on to the kid’s wrist and falls back, it might be enough for them both to tumble down into the smoking ash and breathe. That’s what Miles would tell the kid if he was lying next to where he is now. Breathe and stay low and bury your face in the charred soil where the pockets of oxygen might be and wait—

Behind them, the fire screams.

A shattering, human sound that sends the young firefighter scrambling a few feet higher up the slope. Though his voice doesn’t reach his own ears, Miles can feel his shouts splitting his throat open.

He lifts his head from the ground to plead with the kid to come back and feels the first swipe of fire across the side of his face, tearing the shirt from his side.

I’m burning, Miles thinks.

A realization so simple it precedes understanding, precedes pain. But he doesn’t lie down. Opens his mouth again to utter another wordless command and hears only the plasticky pop of his own skin.

He can only watch as the boy runs on. That, and make one last attempt to be heard. But before Miles can close his lips around his name, the kid is consumed by the rushing curtain of fire.

They keep him away from mirrors. Anything that can cast a reflection is hidden by the nurses. The chrome kettle in his room is removed, the curtains drawn at twilight when the glass surface begins to send back images of whoever may be trying to look outside. Even his cutlery is replaced with plastic knives, forks and especially the spoons, which, depending on the side turned to him, threaten to balloon or collapse the already distorted features of his new face.

For the first several days, the drugs keep him from knowing when they’re taking off his bandages or peeling away dead layers of his skin. Morphine delivers him to a place well beyond the hospital room’s beeping, bleach-reeking reminders that he is on a bad-news ward. The drip into his arm prevents him from caring about his injuries, how he might look if he ever gets out, about anything. Yet he remains aware of the events around him. The terrible food. A distressedlooking Alex with her hair tied in a bun (he hates it that way and thinks of asking her to let it down, but doesn’t want to trouble her). His wish for something better to be on TV. Even the fire. He remembers trying to pull himself up the slowmotion slope, the unfamiliar sound of his own screams, the sight of the kid sucked back into the furious waves. He remembers it all, but it nevertheless feels second-hand, fictional, like the memory of a film seen years before.

The morphine leads him to a beautiful indifference. He loves the morphine. The days pass in rolls of gauze. Delicately applied and removed, the nurses forcing smiles, nearly constantly asking him Are you okay? He has no idea what okay would be under the circumstances, or what it ever was. Yup, he says. The last thing he wants is to hurt anybody’s feelings. He just yups his way through his first three weeks in the burn ward, and holds Alex’s hand with the one he can still move, all without a clue as to what might follow from here.

They pull back the sheet and leave him bare between dressings for a while now, to ‘get a little air on the business,’ as one of the nurses puts it. Although he’s told not to, it allows him to feel the shape of the burn. From beneath his skin a shell emerges, rough as the edge of an empty tin. Not all of him, though. He has been split in two. The left side of his face is as he remembers it, but the right is a Halloween mask, all hardened latex and stray, unconvincing hairs. His hand continues down his neck, and he discovers that the half-mask comes with a half-bodysuit too. He strokes his chest from one side to the other. The line between the burned and unburned skin comes up hard against his fingertips, abrupt as the intrusion of the Rockies on a continental map. The east of him is smooth flatlands. The west, rows of jagged teeth.

Without warning, they pull the morphine out of his arm and replace it with a pair of Tylenol 3s on his breakfast serviette. The first thing he does is cry. It’s the sight of the puny albino pills that does it. These are to be his new friends? He bawls so hard he can’t catch his breath. Coughs himself out of bed, starts bawling again. The emergency bell that attaches his thumb to the nurses’ station rings without pause, so that they close the door on him and let him wail himself to sleep. Even through his tears he’s ashamed of himself, and makes some attempts at self-control, but then the image of the white pills returns to him, and it’s all over.

When it comes, sleep is no better than waking. What’s worse than the pain are the dreams. They start at different places, but all of them end with Miles running. There is no fire. What he runs from is invisible but explicit, human and not human, a creature with unfair advantages. A vampire, the voice-over of his dream tells him. One that pursues him through a grid of dark streets. Miles knows that he will lose the race but he rushes on, rounds another corner, hoping to find an avenue of light that never appears. Then, when the undead thing comes up next to him, Miles turns to see that it’s the kid. Teeth bared, ravenous. The kid wrapping his mouth over Miles’s neck. Ripping and swallowing.

When they release him from the hospital, the doctor gives Miles a pharmaceutical loot bag to take with him: tranquilizers, Tylenol 3s, steroid cream. Alex holds him by the arm on his good side, his steps slow and frail, head swimming. He can’t tell whether the sensation of being helped along by his girlfriend makes him feel pathetically young or pathetically old.

They are asked to stay in town for a few days to participate in the coroner’s inquest into the kid’s death, although it’s obvious to all that it’s really Miles’s trial. Fire is fire, and people who fight them get hurt from time to time. But the kid is different. His foreman stopped running from a fire to build one of his own and the kid had carried on up the hill. One rational decision, one irrational. If common sense determined rightful outcomes, the wrong man died.

The panel includes two of the managers who sent his team into the valley, and Miles tries to mentally hammer nails through their eyeballs as he listens to them ask their questions. They want to know how he could possibly justify his ‘grossly unorthodox defensive tactics.’ Miles calls it an escape fire. He calls it the good black. The managers call it unsound manoeuvres. His trial is one of semantics. They don’t allow themselves to forgive him, but he can feel them wanting to. One says, ‘You were a good firefighter, Miles,’ and the past tense reddens the scar on his cheek.

In the end they do him the favour of coming up with excuses on his behalf. Miles wasn’t much older than the kid himself, after all. The conditions were severe. Under the circumstances, it was hard to believe that only one man went down. Though his methods were well outside of acknowledged procedure, the investigators accept that Miles had done everything he could have done within his abilities and experience.

After, in a motel room in Salmon Arm with a NO ANIMAL SKINNING notice over the headboard, Alex and Miles lie side by side in the darkness, fully clothed, fingers locked over their chests like corpses. They talk about what they should do next. Neither of them can think of an option aside from what they would have done if the fire had never happened. They will leave in the morning for Toronto. Alex will take up her job at Arrowsmith’s, and Miles will enter first year of med school. They will start again. Neither of them mentions the promise of marriage that Miles had made the year before.

They drive through the mountains, onto the high ranges of Alberta, across the cruise-control prairies, and over the humped spine of Lake Superior, all in a brooding near silence. Alex never asks about the fire, but Miles can sense her aching to. There’s a buzz of vicious pleasure in refusing to help her open the topic, every hour of silence a greater punishment than anything he might think of to say to her. Behind the wheel, Miles takes an academic interest in his own anger. For instance, he would never have guessed he would resent Alex’s sympathy even more than her curiosity.

The sight of Toronto shrinks them in their seats. Even the lake seems to pull back from the downtown towers. Its waves reluctant, perfunctory, the water the mottled grey of desert camouflage. They drive straight to the apartment Alex has found, a basement one-bedroom on Shaw Street, the only thing reasonably close to both her work and the university that they could afford.

‘It’s not rue Rachel,’ Miles says, looking up and down the street, the tiny front yards blurred with wrought-iron fences.

‘It’s different here,’ Alex agrees. ‘It’s all different.’

They unload their minimal belongings and, after one walk through the apartment, Miles tucks himself under the sheets of the futon and stays in the bedroom for the next week until classes start. Even then, he skips his lectures as often as he attends them. Instead, he drifts through the streets of the new city and feels its eyes upon him. He plays the game of trying to catch people staring. Most of the time, his observers are quicker than he is. But when he snags slow ones, he sticks his tongue out and laughs like a serial killer and watches them scuttle away in what they think is fear, though he knows it’s really shame.

His refusal to speak doesn’t prevent Miles from tracing the growing shape of fury within him. Alex can see it too. It comes to the point that all she will allow herself to tell him is that she loves him, but even this gives offence. He interprets her simple, desperate words as a lie, something she repeats to convince herself of. It is impossible that Alex could feel the same about him as she once did. If he has been turned into a monster, won’t their love have been similarly deformed?

More and more, Miles fears that if he stays with her, something as bad as what happened to the burned boy will happen to Alex. There is also the newfound worry that he might hurt her himself.

They make love only once after the fire. From the morning Miles was released from the hospital, over and over Alex had invited him to her. She had worn only the clothes he had most liked to remove, suggested massage oil backrubs, whispered dirty in his ear. Every time, Miles had declined. Finally, after she grazed her tongue across the back of his neck as he stood before a crackling frying pan in the kitchen, he had turned to her and said, ‘Don’t you get it? I’m not interested in a mercy fuck,’ before returning to flip his eggs. She had not tried again after that.

What hurt her more than his rejection was the extent to which he was wrong about what she was asking of him. Mercy had nothing to do with it. It’s true that she wanted to bring them together, if only for a time, as the open talk that they used to find so natural had deserted them. But her desire was real.

On this night, though, it is Miles who reaches for Alex. Aware of the sound of their own breathing, each clinging to the cold edge of their opposite bedsides, he had rolled over to bring his lips to her shoulder. Both of them are amazed at how even this tentative kiss revives something in them. Miles stays next to her, folding himself over her side. He wants to say a sweet word. Anything plucked from the standard vocabulary will do. But the mere thought of uttering any of them hurts his throat, like a bone caught halfway down.

They surprise themselves with the energy they find, a ruthless yearning. Everything they do is lingered over, repeated, another moment won against the long night. Despite this, they can sense an absence in each other’s touch. The room’s wintry drafts find ways between them, licking around the borders of warmth their bodies create.

Afterwards, they watch the flashing blue light of a streetcleaner tumble across the ceiling. This time it is Alex’s turn to search for words and for everything she might say to strike her as laughably belated. It’s not the fire that has come between them, she thinks, but an awareness of themselves. They never used to be self-conscious around each other, and this nakedness brought them an easy honesty, the gift of speaking without gain or penalty. Now they censor their thoughts as though someone is in the room with them, judging their appropriateness, their timing, whether they actually believe what they say or not. The streetcleaner’s blue light retreats through the curtains.

Although she cannot tell Miles why she cries now, her back to him again, she knows it’s because of this. Not the loss of words. Alex weeps for what they have found, the terrible discovery of what love prevents us from seeing as obvious. They have never been one, always two.

By the end of October, Miles stops attending classes altogether, spending his days in the laundry-strewn darkness of the apartment. Although Alex stocks the fridge with T-bones and leaves Mason jars of homemade spaghetti sauce for him in the freezer, he lives on delivery pizza and Chinese, the smelly boxes growing into a cardboard tower outside the bedroom door.

One day that is otherwise the same as the fifty that came before, Miles hears Alex unlock the front door and knows that something is about to change. She drops her keys on the kitchen table and the sound rips through the apartment like a crack of thunder. The storm is breaking and Miles welcomes it. He wants to stand tall enough for the lightning to find him.

‘What’s your plan?’ Alex asks him, standing over the shadowy hump of his back under the sheets.

‘I’m a man with no plan.’

‘Really? You look like you’ve got your crashand-burn all figured out.’

‘No pun intended.’

‘I wanted to tell you something. If it makes any difference.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘I’ll never leave you.’

‘Hey! History’s most broken promise.’

‘It’s not history’s promise. It’s mine.’

‘You’re a good girl, Alex. But not that good.’

Alex crumples onto the end of the futon. She finds his cold foot sticking out and strokes the top of it, but it wriggles away at her touch.

‘It’s not your fault,’ she says.

‘You’re not the judge of that.’

Alex leans forward and switches on the bedside lamp, which casts a tight circle of light out from under the shade. She can see Miles now. The covers pulled up to his chin, his hair a nest of greasy tosses and turns. His eyes blink against the forty-watt bulb as though he had just stepped into the midday sun.

‘I’m right here,’ she says.

‘You don’t have to be.’

‘I’m telling you I know you.’

‘You have my apologies.’

‘Just listen, Miles. Listen. Even if you don’t want to hear.’

‘Hear what, Herr Doctor?’

‘You’ve always blamed yourself for what your father did, and now you’re mixing that up with what happened in the fire.’

‘There’s a nice logic to that, I admit,’ he says, tapping his chin. ‘It even seems to make sense. The trouble is, it doesn’t. You keep looking for sense where there isn’t any.’

‘So tell me, then. Tell me the senseless truth of it.’

‘The kid died.’

‘And?’

‘The kid died.’

‘His name was Tim.’

‘I know his name.’

There is no gesture Alex can think of that Miles wouldn’t take as an insult. She disgusts him, although he assumes it is the other way around. If he said something first, something of his own, no matter how it might hurt her, it might be a way in. But he won’t. He will reply, but not confess, not accuse. Her frustration knots its way through her shoulders, seizing her into a sculpture of pain.

‘You’re so angry and you don’t even know it.’

‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘Not at me. You’re angry at yourself.’ Alex pauses to take a new breath that will manage her next words at a lower register. ‘At your father.’

‘You can’t be mad at someone you don’t remember.’

‘But you can hate them. You can hate them easier for not remembering.’

‘Words of wisdom from Princess Nicey-Nice. What do you know about hating anything? You’re too pure for that.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘I stand corrected.’

‘Everybody’s capable of hate. That part’s simple. The hard part is finding the strength to be capable of forgiving yourself, too.’

‘That’s really wonderful. What section of the Hallmarks did you find that one in? Sympathy for Burn Victims? That would be it, wouldn’t it? Right there between the Sorry for Your Amputation and God Loves You…Please Don’t Overdose on the Sleeping Pills.’

‘Nothing is going to change unless you lose this whole sarcastic—’

‘For Christ’s sake, Alex! Love doesn’t want to spend any time in a shithole like this,’ he says, pulling the sheet down and sitting up all at once. He frames his face with his palms and squeezes the skin into blotchy folds. ‘Love likes it pretty. It always has. Look at me.’

‘It’s not about what you—’

‘Look at me!’

And she does.

Alex sees a ghoul. For the first time, she recognizes Miles’s scars for what they are. She sees their permanence, the wish she has that they weren’t there, the memory of what he looked like when they weren’t. It makes her gasp.

‘You see? You see?’ Miles is shouting at her, and she cannot reply because he’s too close, too loud. And because the answer is yes. She sees.

She tells him of her doctor’s visit in a note she leaves on the pillow next to him as he sleeps. It isn’t long. Half a page of news listed in punchy headlines.

It’s yours.

I’m going to keep it.

I still love you.

We’ll talk tonight.

Much later, she wondered how long after waking it took for him to decide.

He packs in the morning when Alex is away at work. He can’t face the rest of the apartment, so he starts with the bedroom essentials, stuffing a duffle bag with jeans, wool socks, half a dozen bedside-table paperbacks. Then he floats through the other rooms, holding framed photos of themselves to his eyes—kissing in the bleachers at a McGill vs. Queen’s football game, dressed up and drunk at a friend’s wedding—before putting them down again. He rattles through the piles of CDs but can’t remember who bought which one for whom, and discovers he doesn’t want to listen to any of it again anyway. They have collected so much meaningful garbage together that simply looking at it now makes him feel heavy, his veins pumping mercury.

He means to leave Alex a letter. In his mind he imagines an impossible document, at once less and more than an explanation or an apology or a cataloguing of his thousand unmanageable torments. Something along the lines of a thank-you note, or perhaps the obligatory sentence in an author’s acknowledgements page expressing gratitude for all the help he has received but accepting all errors as his own. He even begins a draft, but it doesn’t survive the first reading. No matter how much he keeps out of it, the words can’t help referring to the kid, the gluttonous melodrama of his own selfpity. His second attempt is yet more minimalist, but ends up saying the same things with even greater force.

Miles can see the cruelty in leaving no trace of himself behind for her. It would seem intentional to Alex, one last, silent rejection, but he decides he has no choice. In the end he does nothing more than slide his keys under the door after pulling it shut.