Red Room Where the Writers Are

Fire

i

The neighbors' garbage gets torched about once a week.  Dark round spots like scars all over their yard. We're next door - I called it ‘next store neighbor' as a kid - and I see him or her or one of the grown kids out there, dumping the trash, building a frame of wood, striking the match.  They're a blend of sophisticated and feral, those neighbors - they fight loudly, laugh loudly, burn what they don't need.  But they sing, sometimes, with friends, at night, around a bonfire built high, triangular, shooting sparks over all their heads like ideas flaring and fizzing out.  On summer afternoons the girl will play the piano, on Sunday mornings the father will play a guitar.  The notes - folk, jazz, classical - waft across the acres like the good scent of bacon. 

ii

We heat our house with wood.  Saves money, conserves electricity, all that.  But mostly because my partner likes it.  It's her house, she gets to figure out how to care for it.  Takes a lot of wood to keep her warm.  Sometimes upstairs, where all that heat rises, feels like a sauna.  Weird, in winter, to look out the window and see three feet of snow but feel like I'm standing in the desert.  Weird to smell smoke everywhere, always.  Used to remind me of an emergency - fire! - but now it's just what it is. 

iii

I had a talent, of sorts, as a teenager.  I discovered fires.  Had I been a more overtly troubled kid, I'd have likely fallen under suspicion as a young arsonist, but it would've been a false suspicion.  I didn't set them, I just found them.  Like the time walking over to my friend Chuckie Faragasso's house.  They had one of those yard lights that look like a pole with a light bulb on top, with the bulb enclosed in a fashionable little cage made of glass.  A lot of "landscape lighting" is solar now, but back then they were gas or electric or even battery-powered.  The post light was right next to the walkway leading from the sidewalk to their house, and as I headed towards the front door I heard a pop and saw flames burst out of the cage.  Nothing much came of that one - the father was home and put the fire out - but the following year, in the exact same spot, I saw black smoke and red flames shooting out of Debbie Fitzpatrick's garage.  The Fitzpatricks lived across the street from the Faragasso family, and I was right in front of Chuckie's house so I ran up to the door and banged on it.  My semi-frantic pointing and yelling, "the Fitzpatrick's house is on fire!" prompted someone to call the fire department and prompted Mrs. Fitzpatrick to fly out the door and run across the street.  Mrs. Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Faragasso were friends, were probably having tea or something.  But Debbie, who was my age, was home alone, didn't know her house was on fire.  Her mother got her out okay, but it was scary and real for five minutes.  Another time a house burnt to the ground on the same street - Tallen Drive - but I didn't spot that one and have had several decades now of no fire discoveries.

iv

My girlfriend set her school on fire when she was a kid. 

A friend, in eighth grade, pulled the fire alarm on a dare. 

My friend Aida was burning a candle in her study and somehow a piece of paper caught fire and then the curtains and then the whole room. 

My friends Lois and Jeanne came home to their house in flames - I remember, later, spending whole afternoons picking through the rubble, finding something intact, taking an hour or more to scrub the greasy black soot from the surface. 

My father was walking in a field in New Jersey after a few drinks too many at the local bar and he heard an explosion, saw a ball of fire in the northern skies.  He thought the world was ending, but it was just an oil reserve blowing up. 

There was a guy who worked in a jewelry store where I used to live.  He'd been in a fire, was badly burned, his face a melted surreal surface that shined like tar and looked like plastic.  He scared me, but I liked the jewelry and would summon up some peculiar mix of courage and bravado and go in there and browse.  I'd pray that he didn't wait on me, that his wife would come over instead, but forced myself to make eye contact and smile when he did.  He was probably accustomed to whatever he saw in my eyes - fear, pity, grief, curiosity - and I hope he didn't hate me for it. 

v

In Arizona, at night, when the mountains were on fire you could see, from a distance, the orange scribbles of flame writing up the mountainside.  It looked like a magic trick, a language forming, slowly, in the darkness.  Like some kind of message from some kind of god.  Sometimes the fires lasted for weeks, and what was beautiful from a distance became a charred, decimated landscape up close.  There's beauty in damage, too, of course, and certain terrains thrive after a good burn. 

vi

I live near Lake Ontario now, and teach at a college campus right on the lake.  The students go to the lakeside to study, to think, to swim.  At night, it's a good place to make out, although getting there is a little precarious.  The rocky shoreline's composed of fist-sized stones, not flat slabs that are easily traversed - you have to be fully ignited on lust or lit on alcohol to make the trek in the dark.  The kids build bonfires using beached wood, driftwood, and every once in a while a rock will get thrown into the flames.  Certain rocks can endure high temperatures, others can't.  Trapped water, heated, becomes steam, and if it can't escape the rocks explode.  A hot sliver of stone can penetrate skin; the hot touch of a girl, or a boy, lying beneath you as waves lick the shore can do something much akin.

vii

Burn a piece of paper outdoors, sometime, in winter.  Today, for instance, snow falls in soft, airy drifts; our street is silent, everything muffled by the snow's insulation.  The air smells like smoke, everyone who uses wood to heat their homes has a fire going at full blast.  Indoors it's cozy; outside it's cold, it's beautiful, and everything smells like smoke.  I watch the papers next door in the neighbors' trash - they catch and smolder, catch and burn.  Some go fast, some more slowly, some shrivel and writhe, others merely disappear.  Flame carves into the surface, whatever was printed there is gone.  When the whole stack is ignited, little shards split off, float up for a second aflame.  And then they turn black, turn to ash, fall to the snow.  It's hard not to notice that all around, like a circle of elders, trees stand.  It's hard not to notice, sometimes, how feral all our hearts are.