burning buildings

Been trying to write this for years...finally got a first draft. Sure it needs lots of revision, and equally sure my memory has embellished some details and glossed over others.

You covered my mouth and forced me to listen. The crackling sounds from the other room defied explanation: crackling so loud that we could hear it through the thick, century-old walls. You and I crouched by the door to listen more closely. We crouched the way my brother and I used to, at the top of the stairs, listening to our parents argue. I can’t imagine what you and I were thinking in the moment between hearing the sound and realizing what it was, but I don’t think we realized that we were each going to lose the resolve that had brought us to this impasse.

Sitting in the back room with you, I was exasperated. It was your roommate’s bedroom; an odd place for us to be, I guess. I had probably refused to go into yours; to be fair, maybe you refused to invite me. I’d grown used to your opacity and wasn’t trying to figure out what you might have been thinking. I knew that this was going to be our last conversation. I knew that you weren’t going to let it happen any easier than you’d let anything else happen. You were being deliberately obtuse (so I called it. I believe you termed it “inquisitive”): changing the subject, twisting words, and generally trying to stretch things out by denying me any possibility of closure. Closure. Another word that made me realize what a psychobabbling American I was. Still, that’s what I wanted, and that’s what, among other things, you withheld. When you asked me to listen for a strange sound in the next room, I thought it was another ruse.

“Seriously. Do you hear that crackling sound?”

“Shut up. Please just shut up a minute, for fuck’s sake, and let me do this.” Or something over-dramatic like that.

“Jesus, Laura! Just listen!”

I don’t know how long we listened, crouching at that door, before opening it to see the fire. We must have exclaimed something, probably obscene, upon seeing it, but I remember only the sight of it: the couch on fire looked unreal. The division between couch and flame was so clear, so well-defined, it was like a kid’s drawing. It looked exactly like you would expect a couch on fire to look. You don’t think things like that will look ordinary. You’d think the actual sight of them would be so dramatic, so new, that your preconceived mental pictures of them would be blown away. Mine weren’t. The couch was on fire, and I saw no visions in the flames. Just flames.

I don’t remember getting past the fire and out the door. Standing there in the dark, you talked like a maniac about the fire brigade. Even at that point, I was detached enough to note the amusing difference between your English and mine. I’d never said the word “brigade” in all my life, probably never heard it spoken, either. You hated it when I called attention to your way of saying things, yet you felt entitled to compare my speech patterns, repeatedly, to those of the characters on Beverly Hills 90210.

“Listen! Say that again, Laura. She sounds just like Brenda! Say it again!” All Americans sounded alike to you, you loved to say, as you asked me to repeat my pronunciation of “neither” or of “shut the hell up.” You didn’t intend to make me feel like a trained monkey, of course. Besides, I’ve never been one to turn down a bit of attention. But it seemed to happen most frequently whenever I tried to say anything remotely serious, and so it was one of the reasons that you were getting dumped that evening.

All of this was, of course, beside the point as you said “fire brigade” repeatedly. Even that--your infuriating way of derailing serious conversations, a defense so impenetrable that I couldn’t even call attention to it without getting mocked--was burning away.

“Okay. Fuck. Fire brigade. Jaysis. Got to call fire brigade. Fire. Brigade…fuck…fuck! Alex passed out! Fire bri—fuckin’ hell! I’ll go call. You get her. Ah, fuck!

What happened at this point is the part I can’t figure out how to tell. It makes me miss you, because you told it well. You found a way to tell it that didn’t leave me feeling ridiculous. My version makes me ridiculous in two ways: first, for being such a complete lackey that I didn’t even question your absurd division of labor: “I’ll go dial a phone number, you go into a burning house and drag a drunk person out of it.” Are you kidding? I like to think that I would have gone in without orders from your highness, but I’ll never know. So I just feel stupid for being so obedient. Ridiculous, also, because really, who has the gall to tell a story about themselves running into a burning building? It’s like saying, “Throw me a parade! I’m a fuckin’ hero!” And that breaks the hero’s rules of recognition somehow. This idea of heroism, the one that we’ve been groomed to crave since Odysseus sneaks into the telling of every story in some way, I think. I don’t know what to do with it in this one, because while I, like most of us, have always dreamt of doing something like pushing a toddler out of the way of a bus, or taking a bullet for a president we respect, or running into a burning building to pull out a drunk girl, I also know that one of the rules is that people don’t tell their own stories. Those tales are supposed to be picked up by a blind bard or something, sung through the ages, sung in the third person. So it’s you who ought to be telling this story, really. Maybe you are. You’ve been out of earshot for over a decade now, so I wouldn't know. Still, if you were, I don't think the story would be bursting out of my memory so insistently and with such disregard for the rules of its telling. Maybe you’ve forgotten all about it. Or maybe I’m the victor, here, and my prize is writing its history to suit me: a non-transferable prize from a dubious victory. Lovely. A story that insists upon being told by a teller whose fate is to come off ridiculous. Sing in me, muse.

Here’s how you told it: “So I come back from the neighbor’s and there’s Laura, black with soot, coughing like a bollocks. Next to her is Alex, stark naked, lying in the road, legs spread, pissed out of her mind. No idea what was happening. Nearly died and the eejit kept telling Laura to go back in for her coat. Jaysis, Alex.”

At this point, if Alex was in the room, you’d hit her, and she’d look sheepish. Still, you couldn’t describe what it was like inside the house (you gallant dialer of telephones, you), and I never told you. So that's what's left to be done.

In the moments during which you were saying and I was thinking about the word “brigade,” the fire spread to the curtains and, I really think, the walls. It truly looked like the walls were on fire, and I guess that’s not unreasonable, but it’s hard to imagine it being true. It’s not like a couch on fire; I had never thought to form a mental picture of what walls on fire might look like. The stairs were not yet burning as I climbed them, or I very well might not have gone up. There were no flames upstairs, but the smoke was unbelievable—another thing I had never thought to imagine. People describe smoke as “acrid.” It’s more than that. I mean, breathing this smoke was like breathing maple syrup. It was thick and so sweet I gagged. It had texture in my nose and mouth, like something I could grab hold of. I remember being shocked mostly by the sweetness of it.

As a little kid, I used to dip my finger in cocoa powder while I waited for my hot chocolate to heat up. Once, I put a spoonful of the powder in my mouth. It choked me as I involuntarily inhaled some of it; it was so overly sweet it burned. I panicked and spit what wasn’t already stuck to my teeth and tongue into the garbage. Breathing the smoke was surprisingly similar to that, except there was no spitting out to be done.

At the top of the stairs I half-lunged towards the bed and ended up crawling the rest of the way. I couldn’t see anything up there. I hit the bed where I thought Alex would be. I couldn’t form any words—I kept trying to say her name and only managed the first syllable and some coughing. When my hand found her, I pulled at her arms and tried to roll her over, onto the floor. She didn’t stir at first, and when she did, she shook me off like I was her mother waking her up for the first day of school. She was incredibly stubborn and oblivious, which doesn’t surprise you, I’m sure. I tried a few more times until, exhausted from coughing up sweet smoke and bile, I stopped, fell back to the ground, and tried to think. This is one moment that I can remember with total clarity: I felt sure that I had no more than a few seconds left before I would pass out. Then maybe the fire brigade would get both of us out, but maybe not. I decided I had enough time to try to get Alex once more, and if she still wouldn’t budge, I would have to leave without her. I never told either of you that part; that I had made up my mind to leave her in there and save myself. How would a thing like that sound?

This is where the adrenalin kicks in, and memory fails. I remember Alex groping for the window, through which a toddler could maybe have squeezed, and both of us ultimately getting out: me with clothes and face stained by smoke; her with nakedness not very well disguised by the thin layer of dark gray that coated her entire body. Stumbling out of the house, I remember thinking that I was probably burned, that my skin was probably peeling off in horrible ways. I was terrified by the idea of spending the rest of my life scarred and disfigured. Then I thought for a minute that I still might die—only now it would be in a hospital, half my body covered in gauze stuck to bloody tissue where skin used to be, taking insane amounts of morphine intravenously. I tried to steel myself for the pain that would wash over me once the shock wore off, and I looked for reaction in the faces of the gathered onlookers. I think I asked someone for a mirror, which must have sounded bizarre.

When people ask me whether I believe in God, the view in that mirror—intact, unscathed—is one of the moments that come to mind.

We stood there and watched the house burn: it collapsed in on itself. Did you write something on Alex’s stomach with your finger, wiping away the soot to spell out “pissed” or “whore”? I might have imagined that. She asked a fireman for a light, giggling with a fag dangling from her lips. I thought it was kind of pitiful, but I laughed—probably just for the sake of laughing. I remember looking at the stars and laughing hard, standing next to the truck on the slant of the road.

The firemen—brigade—had arrived before the adjoining houses were badly damaged, but yours was a ruin. The outer walls were intact up to the first story, but the second story was gone. The stairs were mostly still there, but they led to nothing but dark sky. Everything inside was black, crackled-looking, like it had been given a very bad faux finish by a creatively stifled housewife. I found my glasses. Only one lens was shattered and I considered wearing them for the remaining good lens. You talked me out of it and I learned to get by without seeing very well.

How could I, after all that, go through with dumping you? You were homeless, and your only money had been in the cupboard (which you called the press), protected by nothing but a rubber band. You called yourself lots of unkind names for not having kept it in a safer place, and I wondered if you had ever heard of a bank—and if you had, what charming name you might have for such a place.

When I told you, a few days later, that I had been trying to break up with you that night, you said this: clearly, the fairies had intervened. They burned the house in order to keep us together. You nearly convinced me. You also nearly convinced me that we should not only get married, but have a cowboy-themed wedding. I guess I was exhausted, too tired to argue or resist, and so went along with it for a while. This is the part I can’t tell, the part where fatigue seemed to lead to something real. Something that still won’t entirely leave me alone, that makes me feel like I lost my bard, like I’m doomed to shout my own pointless story into empty space for all time. Maybe it was the fucking fairies. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it was no match for the expired visa that sent me home. After that, it wasn’t long before I dumped you over the phone.

.:.

If there is an opposite to “running into a burning building” it must be “breaking up over the phone.” These acts would work well as prototypes for heroism and cowardice, respectively, the two extremes of a spectrum. You pointed that out, in fact, during our last conversation. Not in so many words, but however you said it, you were right.

See, here’s the thing: it's not a matter of being a hero or not. To call a person that, to expect oneself to be that, is a fallacy. Odysseus wins the war and defeats monsters only to come home and slaughter the unarmed suitors in an unfair fight. Heroism isn't a personality trait like being outgoing or thoughtful; it’s not something that you consistently are. Maybe you feel like it for an instant, a moment, an occasion that you happen to rise to, followed by another occasion to rise to or not, then another, then another. Nobody is heroic at every opportunity, and anybody can get lucky by choosing the right moment in a million, the one that people might notice and remember. I guess I didn’t realize that in my old dreams of parades and keys to the city. I would have been thrilled to know that, one day, I would run into a burning building. I would feel vindicated, in a way, like in a single deed I held undeniable proof of a simple fact that I wanted people to recognize: that I was a decent person. It’s clear to me now, though, that this version of heroism is kind of a sham—or at least that it’s the easier of the two options. The harder option, the one at which I regularly fail, is to rise to the occasion of each day, to live it with kindness and integrity and patience. And to let go of the desire to be recognized for it. I know people who do that, and they astound me. You and I really ought to find ourselves some people like that, love.