The Fireman (6 page)

She didn’t understand, looked a question at him.

“How long until we’ll know for sure if I have it?” he asked.

“Eight weeks,” she said. “If you don’t have anything by the end of October, you don’t have anything.”

“Okay. Eight weeks. I think it’s a farce—we both know if
you
have it,
I
have it too—but we’ll wait eight weeks. If we both have it, we’ll do it together, like we said.” He was silent for a moment, staring down at his feet, and then he nodded. “If I don’t have it, I’ll be here for you when you do it.”

“Do what?”

He looked up at her, real surprise in her face. “Kill ourselves. Jesus. We talked about this. About what we would do if we caught it. We agreed it’s better to just—go to sleep. Than to wait around and burn to death.”

She felt a hard constriction in her throat, wasn’t sure she could force words past it, then found she could. “But I’m pregnant.”

“You’re never going to have the baby now.”

Harper’s own reaction surprised her; for the first time, Jakob’s dull, angry certainty offended her.

“No, you’ve got that wrong,” she said. “I’m not an expert, but I know more about the spore than you do. There are studies,
good
studies, that show it can’t cross the placental barrier. It goes everywhere else, the brain, the lungs . . . everywhere but there.”

“That’s bullshit. There isn’t any study that says that. Not one that’s worth the paper it’s printed on. The CDC in Atlanta is a pile of cinders. No one is studying this shit anymore. The time to do science is over. Now it’s time to run for cover and hope the thing burns itself out before it burns us off the face of the planet.” He laughed at this, a dry, humorless sound.

“They
are
studying it, though. Still. In Belgium. In Argentina. But fine, if you don’t want to believe me, that’s fine. But believe this. In July, at the hospital, we delivered a healthy infant to a woman who was contaminated. They had a party in the lounge off pediatrics. We ate half-melted cherry ice cream and we all took turns holding the baby.” She did not say that the medical team had spent a lot more time with the baby than the mother had. The doctor wouldn’t allow her to touch him, had carried the child out of the room while the mother screamed for him to come back, to let her have one more look.

Jakob’s face wasn’t such a blank now. His mouth was a pinched white line.

“So what? This shit—how long do people last? Best-case scenario? After the stripes show up?”

“It’s different for everyone. There are a few long-term cases, people who have been around since the beginning. I might last—”

“Three months? Four? What’s the average? I don’t think the average is even
two
months. You only learned you’re pregnant
ten days ago
.” He shook his head in disbelief. “What did you get to take care of us?”

“What do you mean?” She was having trouble keeping up with the run of his thoughts.

“What did you get to do it with? You said you were going to get that stuff—the stuff my dentist gave me after my root canal.”

“Vicodin.”

“And we can crush it up, right?”

Her robe had come unbelted and hung open, but it seemed like too much effort to fix it, and she had forgotten she wanted to spare him the sight of her infected body.

“Yes. That’s probably one of the more painless ways to kill yourself. Twenty or so Vicodin, all crushed up.”

“So that’s how we’ll do it. If we both have the ’scale.”

“But I don’t have any Vicodin. I never got it.”

“Why? We talked. You said you would. You said you’d lift some from the hospital and if we got sick, we’d have wine and listen to some music and then take our pills and sail on.”

“I forgot to grab some on my way out of the hospital. At the time, I was in a hurry not to burn alive.” Although, she thought, given her current condition, she hadn’t escaped anything.

“You brought home Dragonscale but couldn’t bother to get us something so we could take care of each other. And then on top of it you get yourself pregnant. Christ, Harper. You’ve had yourself one hell of a month.” He laughed, a short, breathless bark. After a moment he said, “Maybe I can get us something to do it with. A gun, if necessary. Deepenau had NRA stickers plastered all over his piece-of-shit pickup. He must have something.”

“Jakob. I’m
not
going to kill myself,” she said. “Whatever we talked about before I got pregnant doesn’t matter now. I am carrying Dragonscale, but I am also carrying a baby, and that changes things. Can’t you see it changes things?”

“Jesus fucking Christ. It isn’t even a baby yet. It’s a cluster of unthinking cells. Besides, I know you. If it had a defect, you’d get an abortion. You worked in a goddamn clinic once, for chrissake. You’d walk in every morning, past the people screaming you were a murderer, calling you a baby killer.”

“The baby
doesn’t
have a defect, and even if he
did
I wouldn’t—that doesn’t mean I’d—”

“I think cooking to death in the womb is kind of a defect. Don’t you?”

He stood holding himself. She saw he was trembling.

“Let’s wait. Let’s give it some time and see if I’ve got this shit, too,” he said at last. “Maybe at some point in the next eight weeks we’ll find ourselves on the same page again. Maybe at some point here, you’ll be seeing things a little less selfishly.”

She had told him he needed to get out of the house, but she hadn’t wanted him to go, not really. She had hoped he would offer to stay close, maybe sleep in the basement. It scared her, to imagine being all alone with her infection, and she had wanted his calm, his steadiness, even if she couldn’t have his arms around her.

But something had changed in the last sixty seconds. Now she was ready for him to leave. She thought it would be better for
both
of them if he went, so she could have the dark, quiet house to herself for a while—to think, or not think, or be still, or cry, or do whatever she had to do—clear of his terror and angry disgust.

He said, “I’m going to ride my bicycle down to Public Works. Get the key to Johnny Deepenau’s out of his locker. I’ll call you this afternoon.”

“Don’t worry if I don’t pick up. I might take the phone off the hook so I can go back to bed.” She laughed then, bitter, unhappy laughter. “Maybe I’ll wake up and it’ll all be a bad dream.”

“Yeah. We can hope for that, babygirl. Except if it’s a bad dream, we’re both dreaming it.” He smiled then—a small, nervous smile—and for a moment he was her Jake again, her old friend.

He was on his way to the door when she said, “Don’t tell anyone.”

He paused, a hand on the latch. “No. I won’t.”

“I’m not going to Concord. I’ve heard stories about the facility there.”

“Yeah. That it’s a death camp.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“Of course I believe it. Everyone who goes there is infected with this shit. They’re all going to die. So of course it’s a death camp. By definition.” He opened the door onto the hot, smoky day. “I wouldn’t send you there. You and me are in this together. I’m not giving you up to some faceless agency. We’ll handle this ourselves.”

Harper thought he meant this statement to be reassuring, yet, curiously, she was not reassured.

He walked down the steps and onto the curving path that took him out of sight in the direction of the garage. He left the door open, as if he expected her to come outside to watch him go. As if this were required of her. Maybe it was. She belted the robe, crossed the short length of the foyer, and stood in the doorway. He carried his bike out into the driveway, hauling it over one shoulder. He didn’t look back.

Harper lifted her head to peer into Portsmouth. A filthy sky lowered above the white steeple of North Church. Smoke had hovered over town all summer long. Harper had read somewhere that 12 percent of New Hampshire was on fire, but didn’t see how that could be true. Of course that was pretty good compared to Maine. Maine was all the local news talked about. The blaze that had started in Canada had finally reached I-95, effectively cutting the state in two, a burning wasteland almost a hundred miles across at its widest point. They needed rain to put it out, but the last weather system to move that way had evaporated in the face of the heat. A meteorologist on NPR said the rain had fried like spit on the surface of a hot stove.

Coils of smoke rose here and there, brown, dirty loops climbing from the Strawbery Banke. There was always something burning: a house, a shop, a car, a person. It was surprising how much smoke a human body could throw when it was engulfed in flame.

From her spot on the front step, she could see down the road, toward South Street Cemetery. A car rolled slowly through the graveyard, along one of the narrow gravel lanes, trundling along the way a person will when they’re trying to find an open space in a crowded parking lot. But the passenger-side window was down, and fire was gushing out. The interior was so filled with flames, Harper could not see the person who must’ve been sitting behind the wheel.

Harper watched the car roll off the road and into the grass, until it thunked gently to a stop against a headstone. Then she remembered she had come out to watch Jakob ride away. She looked around for him, but he was already gone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

SEPTEMBER • 8

Two days later her left arm was sheet music. Delicate black lines spooled around and around her forearm, bars as thin as the strands of a spiderweb, with what looked like golden notes scattered across them. She found herself pulling her sleeve back to look at it every few minutes. By the end of the following week, she was sketched in Dragonscale from wrist to shoulder.

One day she pulled her shirt off and glanced at herself in the mirror on the back of her armoire and saw a belt riding just above her hips, a tattoo in gold and black. When she got over feeling winded and sick, she had to admit to herself that it was curiously beautiful.

Sometimes she took off all her clothes except her underwear and examined her new illustrated skin by candlelight. She wasn’t sleeping much, and these inspections usually took place a little after midnight. Much as it was possible to imagine a visage in a flickering fire, or a figure in the grain of a wooden surface, she thought she saw half-finished images scrawled in the ’scale.

That was usually when Jakob called, from the dead man’s trailer. He wasn’t sleeping, either.

“Thought I ought to check in,” he said. “See what you did with yourself today.”

“Puttered around the house. Ate the last of the pasta. Made an effort not to turn into a pile of cinders. How are you?”

“Hot. It’s hot here. It’s always hot.”

“Open a window. It’s cool out. I’ve got them all open and I’m fine.”

“I’ve got them all open, too, and I’m roasting. It’s like trying to sleep in an oven.”

She didn’t like the angry way he talked about not being able to cool off or the way he fixated on it, like the heat was a personal affront.

Harper distracted him by talking about her condition in a languid, almost breezy tone. “I’ve got a swirl of ’scale on the inside of my left arm that looks like an open umbrella. An umbrella sailing away on a breeze. Do you think the spore has an artistic impulse? Do you think it reacts to the stuff you’ve got in your subconscious and tries to ink your skin with pictures you might like?”

“I don’t want to talk about the shit you’ve got on you. I get shaky thinking about it, about that disgusting shit all over you.”

“That makes me feel nice. Thank you.”

He let out a harsh, angry breath. “I’m sorry. I’m—I’m not unsympathetic.”

She laughed—surprising not just him, but herself. Good old Jakob used such smart, picky words sometimes.
Unsympathetic
. Before he dropped out of college he had been a philosophy major, and he still had the habit of hunting through his vocabulary for exactly the right term, which, somehow, inexplicably, always made it the
wrong
term. He corrected her spelling sometimes, too.

Harper wondered, idly, why it took getting contaminated to notice the marriage itself was sick.

He tried again. “I’m sorry. I am. I’m boiling. It’s hard to be—thoughtful.”

A cross-breeze fanned through the room, cool on her bare tummy. She didn’t know how he could possibly be hot, wherever he was.

“I was wondering if the Dragonscale started doodling Mary Poppins’s umbrella on my arm. You know how many times I’ve seen
Mary Poppins
?”

“The Dragonscale isn’t reacting to your subconscious. You
are
. You’re seeing the kinds of things you’re already primed to see.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “But you know what? There was a gardener in the hospital who had swirls of this stuff up his legs that looked just like tattoos of crawling vines. You could see delicate individual leaves and everything. Everyone agreed it looked like ivy. Like the Dragonscale was making an artistic commentary on his life’s work.”

“That’s just how it looks. Like strands of thorns. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I guess it couldn’t be in my brain yet, so it couldn’t really know anything about me. It takes weeks to pass up the sinuses to the brain. We’re still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase of the relationship.”

“Christ,” he said. “I’m burning alive over here.”

“Boy, did you call the wrong person for sympathy,” she said.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

9

A couple of nights later she poured herself a glass of red wine and read the first page of Jakob’s book. She told herself if his novel was any good at all, the next time she talked to him she would admit she had looked at some of it and tell him how much she loved it. He couldn’t be angry at her for breaking her promise never to look at the manuscript without permission. She had a fatal illness. That had to change the rules.

But after one page she knew it wasn’t going to be any good and she left it, feeling bad again, as if she had wronged him somehow.

A while later, after a second glass of wine—two wasn’t going to do any harm to the baby—she read thirty pages. She had to quit there. She couldn’t go any further and still be in love with him. In truth, maybe thirty pages had been three too many.

The novel was about a former philosophy student, J., who has an unfulfilling job at the Department of Public Works and an unfulfilling marriage with a cheerfully shallow blonde who can’t spell, reads YA novels because she lacks the mental rigor for mature fiction, and has no sense whatsoever of her husband’s tortured inner life. To assuage his existential disappointment, J. engages in a series of casual affairs with women Harper had no trouble identifying: friends from college, teachers from the elementary, a former personal trainer.. Harper decided these affairs were inventions . . . although the lies J. told his wife, about where he was and what he was doing when he was really with someone else, corresponded almost word-for-word with conversations Harper remembered having.

Somehow, though, the clinical reports of his affairs were not the worst of it. What she detested even more was the protagonist’s contempt.

He hated the men who drove the trucks for Public Works. He hated their fat faces and their fat wives and their fat children. He hated the way they saved all year to buy tickets in nosebleed territory for a pro-football game. He hated how happy they were in the weeks after the game, and hated the way they would tell the story of the game over and over as if recounting the battle of Thermopylae.

He hated all of his wife’s girlfriends—J. had no friends of his own—for not knowing Latin, drinking mass-produced beer instead of microbrews, and raising the next generation of overfed, overentertained human place-fillers. This did not stop him from fucking them, however.

He did not hate his wife, but felt for her the kind of affection a man usually reserves for an excitable puppy. Her immediate acceptance of his every opinion and observation was both disheartening and a little hilarious to him. There was not a single criticism he could offer that she would not immediately accept as true. He made a game out of it. If she worked all week to throw a dinner party, he would tell her everyone had hated it—even if it had been a wonderful time—and she would cry and agree he was right and immediately rush out to buy some books so she could learn to do a party right. No, he did not hate her. But he felt sorry for her and felt sorry for himself, because he was stuck with her. Also, she cried too easily, which suggested to him, paradoxically, a shallowness of feeling. A woman who got teary over commercials for the SPCA could not be expected to wrestle with the deeper despair of being human in a crass age.

There was all this—his derisive rage and self-pity—and there was bad writing too. His paragraphs never ended. Neither did his sentences. Sometimes it could take him thirty words before he found his way to a verb. Every page or two he’d drop a line in Greek or French or German. The few times Harper was able to translate one of these bons mots, it always seemed like something he could’ve said just as well in English.

Harper thought, helplessly, of Bluebeard. She had gone and done it, she had looked in the forbidden room and seen what she was never supposed to see. She had discovered not corpses behind the locked door, but contempt. She thought hatred might’ve been easier to forgive. If you hated someone, they were at least worthy of your passion.

He had never told her what the book was about, not in any concrete terms, although sometimes he would say something airy-fairy like “It’s about the terror of an ordinary life” or “It’s the story of a man shipwrecked in his own mind.” But the two of them had shared long postcoital discussions about what their lives would be like after the novel came out. He had hoped it would make them enough money so they could get a pied-à-terre in Manhattan (Harper was unclear on how this was different from an apartment, but assumed there had to be something). She had eagerly and breathlessly talked about how great he’d be on the radio, funny and clever and self-deprecating; she had hoped they would have him on NPR. They talked about things they wanted to buy and famous people they wanted to meet, and remembering it now, it all seemed shabby and sad and deluded. It was bad enough that she had been so utterly convinced he had a brilliant mind, but much worse to discover he was convinced of it, too, and on such thin evidence.

It amazed her, as well, that he had written something so appalling and then left it in plain sight,
for years
. But then he had been sure she wouldn’t read it, because he had told her not to, and he understood she was inclined to obedience. Her entire self-worth depended on doing and being just what he wanted her to do and be. He had been right about that, of course. The novel would not have been so awful if it did not contain within it a certain degree of truth. She had only looked at
Desolation’s Plough
because she was dying.

Harper put the novel back on his desk, cornering the edges of the manuscript so it stood in a neat crisp pile. With its clean white title page and clean white edges, it looked as immaculate as a freshly made bed in a luxury hotel. People did all sorts of unspeakable things in hotel beds.

Almost as an afterthought, she put a box of kitchen matches on top of it as a paperweight. If her Dragonscale started to smoke and itch, she wanted to have them close at hand. If she had to burn, she felt it only fair that the fucking book burn first.