The Fireman (4 page)

The guard who had been tossing his baton twitched away from her. His nightstick dropped and clouted him on the shoulder and he fell out of his chair. The other guard tossed his clipboard in the air as if it had turned into a cobra. His heels shot out from under him and he sat down hard on the floor.

Renée looked from one to the other, seemed to lift a placating hand, and then hurried away.

Albert Holmes told Harper: “She said, ‘Don’t mind me, boys, I’m just going to go explode outside where no one will get hurt.’ ”

Dr. Ryall, the resident pathologist, was unimpressed. He had read about outlier cases, where the Dragonscale had reached critical mass and then, for whatever reason, stalled without immediately causing a person to ignite. He assured anyone who would listen that Renée Gilmonton’s remains would be found within a hundred paces of the hospital. But some orderlies swept the high grass in the field beyond the parking lot, looking for cooked bones, and didn’t find any. Nor could they find any trace of which way she had gone: no singed brush or weeds. She seemed not to have exploded but
evaporated
, taking her potted mint with her.

The CDC had a team scheduled to visit Portsmouth Hospital in August, to review their quarantine procedures, and Dr. Ryall said he’d be sure to show them the video of the Gilmonton incident. He was confident they’d share his interpretation.

But the CDC team never got to look at it, because by the time August rolled around Portsmouth Hospital was a hollowed-out chimney, gutted by fire, and Dr. Ryall was dead, along with Albert Holmes, Nurse Lean, and over five hundred patients.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

5

She didn’t know how long she stood there, watching Portsmouth Hospital burn. Thick black smoke, piled a thousand feet high, curdled above her, above all of them, a thunderhead that smothered the sky. The sun was a small red coin, glowing through that mass of smoke. One of the doctors said, “Anyone got marshmallows?” and laughed, but no one laughed with him.

They had lost the power, not five minutes after the fire alarm began its nerve-shredding
whoop
. Strobe lights throbbed in the darkness, smashing time into bright frozen slivers. Harper made her way out through those stammering shadows with her hands on the shoulders of the nurse in front of her, in a line of shuffling evacuees. The air on the first floor was smoky, grained with fine particulate matter, but the fire was somewhere above them. At first the shriek of the alarm was terrifying, but by the time Harper emerged into the day, she was almost bored, had been creeping along in the crowd for forty-five minutes. She didn’t have any idea how bad it was until she cleared the building and could turn around.

Someone told her no one above the second floor had gotten out. Someone else said it started in the cafeteria; one person lit up, then another, then a third, like a string of firecrackers, and a guard panicked and bolted the door to keep anyone from getting out. Harper never found out if that was true.

The National Guard turned up in the early going and the troopers pushed the crowd back to the far edge of the parking lot. Beyond them, the Portsmouth Fire Department threw everything they had at the blaze, all six trucks . . . and anyone could see it wasn’t going to make a lick of difference. Flame gushed from every shattered window. The firemen worked in the falling black ash with practiced professional indifference, blasting the great furnace of the hospital with thunderous jets of water that seemed to do nothing.

Harper had a dazed, almost concussed feeling, as if she had been struck very hard and knocked down and was waiting for her body to report the extent of her injuries. The sight of all that fire and all that smoke robbed her of thought.

At some point she registered a peculiar thing: a fireman, who was inexplicably standing on
her
side of the sawhorses, when he should’ve been down among the trucks with his brothers-in-arms. She only noticed him because he was staring at her. He wore his helmet and a filthy yellow jacket and he had a firefighting tool in one hand, a long iron pole with hooks and a hatchet bristling from it, and she thought she knew him. He was a wiry, gangly man in glasses, and his face was all sharp edges, and he regarded her with something like grief, while flakes of ash fell around them in black, soft curls. Ash streaked her arms, feathered her hair. A curl of ash broke on the tip of her nose and provoked a sneeze.

She tried to recall how she knew him, the mournful fireman. She probed her memory in the gentle, careful way she might probe a child’s arm to make sure there was no fracture. A child, that was it: she knew him by way of his child, she thought. Only that was not quite right. She supposed she was being silly and she should just go over and ask him how they knew each other, but when she looked for him again he was gone.

Something collapsed inside the hospital. The roof, perhaps, pancaking in on the floor below it. Clouds of plaster and grime and ruddy smoke erupted from the windows on the top story. A National Guardsman wearing a paper mask over his mouth and blue latex gloves held his hands over his head as if he were surrendering to the enemy.

“Folks! We’re going to move you back
again!
I’m going to ask all of you to take three steps back, for your own safety. This is me asking in my nice voice. You don’t want to hear my not-so-nice voice.”

Harper moved back one step, and another, and then swayed on her heels, feeling light-headed and parched. She was desperate for a cool drink of water to clear the grit out of her throat, and the only reasonable place to get one was home. She didn’t have the car—it didn’t make sense for her to have it, she never left the hospital—so she turned away to walk.

She went half a block before she realized she was weeping. She didn’t know if she was crying because she was sad, or because there was a lot of smoke in the air. The afternoon smelled like cookouts at summer camp, like charring hot dogs. Then it came to her that the hot dog smell was the odor of burning corpses. She thought,
I dreamed this
. Then she turned and vomited into the grass by the sidewalk.

There were clumps of people standing on the curb and in the road, but no one looked at her while she threw up. No one found her the least bit interesting, compared to the sight of the conflagration. People were entranced by flame and repelled by human suffering, and wasn’t that some kind of design flaw? She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand and went on.

Harper did not look at the faces in the crowd and so she did not see Jakob standing among all the others until he caught her in his arms. The moment he was holding her, he was holding her up. The strength went out of her legs and she sagged into him.

“Oh God, you’re all right,” he said. “Oh God. I was so scared.”

“I love you,” she said, because it seemed to her that was what you said after walking away from an inferno, that was the only thing that mattered on a morning like this one.

“They’ve got roads shut down for a mile,” he whispered. “I was so scared. I biked all the way here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, babygirl.”

He led her through the crowd, over to a telephone pole. His bike leaned against it, the one he had owned since college, a ten-speed with a basket between the handlebars. He pushed the bike with one hand, his other arm around her waist, and they went along that way, her head resting on his shoulder. They walked against the crowd, everyone else moving toward the hospital, in the direction of that greasy black column of smoke, into the falling ash.

“Every day is September 11,” she said. “How are we supposed to live our lives when every day is September 11?”

“We live with it until we can’t anymore,” he said.

She didn’t understand what that meant, but it sounded good, maybe even profound. He said it tenderly while dabbing at her mouth and cheek with a silvery-white square of silk. Jakob always carried a handkerchief with him, an old-world affectation that she found agonizingly adorable.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting the ash off you.”

“Please,” she said. “Please.”

He stopped after a bit, and said, “All clean. All better.” And kissed her cheek, and kissed her mouth. “I don’t know why I did it, though. You were looking like a little Charles Dickens girl for a moment. Grubby but scrumptious. Tell you what. I’ll make it up to you. We’ll go home and I’ll make you spiritually filthy. How’s that?”

She laughed. He had a somehow Gallic sense of the absurd; in college he had performed as a mime in a mime club. He could walk a tightrope, too—he was nimble in bed, nimble in life.

“That’s fine,” she said.

Jakob told her, “The whole world can burn down around us. I’ll keep my arms around you until the end. No getting away from me.”

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his salty mouth. He had been crying, too, although he was smiling now. She rested her head on his chest.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “Of being scared. Of not being able to help people.”

He put his knuckle under her chin and gently forced her head up. “You have to let go of that. The idea that somehow it’s your job to fix things. To run around . . . putting out all the fires.” He looked meaningfully toward the smoke drifting above. “It’s not your job to save the world.”

That was so sensible, so reasonable, it made her ache a little with relief.

“You have to take care of yourself,” he said. “And let me take care of you some. We’ve got such a short time to treat each other right. We’re going to make it special. We’re going to make it worth something, starting tonight.”

She had to kiss him again, then. His mouth tasted of peppermint and tears, and he returned her kiss carefully, tentatively, as if discovering her for the first time, as if kissing were an entirely new, curious experience . . . an experiment. When he lifted his face up, his expression was serious.

“That was an important kiss,” he said.

They made their shuffling way along the sidewalk, traveling a few paces more. She rested her head on his biceps and shut her eyes. A few steps later he tightened his arm around her. She had been drifting, half-asleep on her feet, and stumbled.

“Hey,” he said. “No more of that. Look. We have to get you home. Get on.” He threw his leg over the saddle of the bike.

“Get on where?”

“The basket,” he said.

“We can’t. I can’t.”

“You can. You have before. I’ll ride you home.”

“It’s a mile.”

“It’s downhill the whole way. Get on.”

This was something they had done in college, goofing, her up on the basket on the front of his bike. She was a slip of a girl then and was not much more now, five foot six and 115 pounds. She looked at the basket, resting between his handlebars, then at the long hill, banking down away from the hospital and around a curve.

“You’ll kill me,” she said.

“No. Not today. Get on.”

She couldn’t resist him. There was a part of her that inclined naturally toward passivity, toward accommodation. She came around the front of the bike, put a leg over the wheel, and then scootched her butt up onto the basket.

And all at once they were off, the trees on her right beginning to glide gently by. The ash fell around them in enormous feathery flakes, falling in her hair and onto the brim of his baseball cap. In no time at all, they were going fast enough to be killed.

The spokes whirred. When she exhaled, the air was torn from her mouth.

A person forgot that time and space were the same thing until they were moving quickly, until pine trees and telephone poles were snapping past them. Then, in the middle of all the rush, time expanded, so that the second it took to cross twenty feet lasted longer than other seconds. She felt that sense of acceleration in her temples and the pit of her stomach and she was glad for Jakob and glad to be away from the hospital and glad for speed. For a while she clutched the basket with both hands, but then, when the spokes began to hum—whirring so fast they made a kind of droning music—she let go, and held her arms out to either side, and soared, a gull sailing into the wind, while the world sped up, and sped up.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

6

The night of the hospital fire, Jakob led her through the house, and she yawned over and over, like a child up past her bedtime. She felt lightly sedated, awake but thoughtless, so that she never knew what was going to happen to her next, even when what was going to happen next was entirely predictable. He walked her down to the bedroom, holding her little hand. That was all right. She was tired and the bedroom seemed like the right place to go. Then he peeled her out of her nurse greens while she stood there and let him. She had on pale pink old-lady underwear that came to her belly button. He tugged those down as well. She yawned hugely and put her hand over her mouth and he laughed because he had been leaning in to kiss her. She laughed, too. It was funny, yawning in his face that way.

The night of the hospital fire, he drew her a bath in the deep claw-footed tub that she loved so. She didn’t know when he walked away from her to do it, because it seemed he never left her side, but when he led her in there, the tub was already full. The lights were off, but there were candles. She was happy to see the bath because she smelled like smoke and sweat and the hospital, but mostly smoke, and she had ash on her, and some of that ash was probably dead bodies.

The night of the hospital fire, Jakob laved water over her back with a washcloth. He scrubbed her neck and ears, and then collected her hair on the top of her head and dunked her. She came up laughing. He laughed, too, and dunked her again, and when she came up, she opened her mouth to yawn, and it turned into a kiss instead. Then he told her to get up, and she stood in the tub while he lathered her in soap. He soaped her breasts and the small of her back and her neck and took time soaping between her legs and when she couldn’t stand it anymore he smacked her bum and told her to get back into the tub and she obediently sat.

The night of the hospital fire, Jakob said, “It’s so fucking cheap when people say
I love you
. It’s a name to stick on a surge of hormones, with a little hint of loyalty thrown in. I’ve never liked saying it. Here’s what I say: We’re together, now and until the end. You have everything I need to be happy. You make me feel right.”

He squeezed out the washcloth and hot water rained down her neck. She shut her eyes, but saw the red light of the candle flame through her eyelids.

He went on, “I don’t know how much time we have left. Could be fifty years. Could be one more week. But I do know that we’re not going to get cheated out of one second of being together. We’re going to share everything and feel everything together. And I am going to let you know, in the way I touch you, and the way I kiss you”—as he said it, he touched her, and kissed her—“that you are the best thing in my life. And I’m a selfish man, and I want every inch of you, and every minute of your life I can have. There’s no
my
life anymore. And no
your
life. Just
our
life, and we’re going to have it our way. I want birthday cake every day and you naked in bed every night. And when it’s time to be done, we’ll have that our way, too. We’ll open that bottle of wine we bought in France and listen to our favorite music and have some laughs and take some happy pills and go to sleep. Die pretty after the party is over, instead of going down screaming like those sad, desperate people who lined up to die in the hospital.”

It was like hearing his wedding vows all over again, only better and sexier, and she was turned on, the way he was still moving the soap on her in the water, the way he kissed her right earlobe, which tickled her but aroused her as well. So that was all right.

Except it wasn’t, not entirely. There was something wrong about calling the people who came to the hospital
sad
and
desperate
. There was something immoral about mocking them. Renée Gilmonton had not been sad and desperate. Renée Gilmonton had organized story hour for the kids in the ward.

But Jakob had the gift of confession, could talk about how he wanted to touch her and be with her, with all the daring and athletic skill he brought to riding a unicycle or walking on a tightrope. He was small and compact and muscular, and also intellectually muscular, mentally something of an acrobat. Sometimes she felt that those intellectual acrobatics were a bit tiring; at those times she felt less as if they were feeling everything together, more as if she was simply his audience, someone to applaud his latest leap through the burning hoop of existentialism and his backflip onto the trampoline of nonconformity. But then she was opening her legs to him, because his hands knew how to do things she could hardly bear and needed to feel. And anyway, all his talk just meant that he wanted her and she made him happy. She had to kiss him again, and she did, twisting in the bathtub and flattening her breasts against the cold porcelain, and holding the back of his head so he couldn’t get away until she had a good long taste of him. Then she broke free and yawned once more and he laughed and that was all right.

The night of the hospital fire, she rose from the water, and he handed her a glass of red wine and then wrapped a hot towel around her. He helped her out of the tub. He walked her into the bedroom, where there were more candles burning. He dried her and guided her to the bed and she climbed across it on all fours, wanting him to pull off his clothes and push himself into her, but he put a hand on the small of her back and made her lie flat. He liked to make her wait; to be honest, she liked to be made to wait, liked him to be in charge. He had strawberry-scented cream and he rubbed it into her. He was naked beside her, his body dusky and fit in the low light, his chest matted with black fur.

And when he rolled her over and got inside her, she made a sobbing sound of pleasure, because it was so sudden, and he was so intent about it. He had hardly started when the condom slipped off. He stopped his motion for a moment, frowning, but she reached down and flung it aside, and then took his ass and pushed him down on her again. Her nurse greens were on the floor, stinking of smoke. She would never wear them again. A hundred square miles of French wine country was on fire and more than two million people had burned to death in Calcutta, and all she wanted was to feel him inside her. She wanted to see his face when he finished. She thought there was a good chance they’d be dead by the end of the year anyway, and he had never been inside her this way before.

On the night of the hospital fire, they made love by candlelight, and, later, a baby began.