—
There’s an invisible line in the grass. If I cross it, this thing is going to happen. I want to step over it casually, but instead I just push into it. Invisible, but I can see it in my head, yellow and rubbery and I pull it when I go past, all the way around to the back of the house. I lean against my father’s car and the line is wrapped around me, waiting to pull me back to sanity, insisting I haven’t crossed it yet.
I pause for a second. Because I can’t do this. I can’t really do this. I will turn back. Give this up. This is crazy. This is not the proper course. Then, from beyond, I hear the saccharine stylings of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” echoing across Germantown via loudspeaker. I get the lighter out of my pocket and the invisible yellow line snaps in two retreating strips when I test the flame.
The tank on top is the only one I need. I lift it up, so it’s sitting upright on the pile. I breathe. I don’t think. I unscrew it. I smell…nothing. I but I can hear the gas spilling. There is still time to turn back. This is still my window of sanity. I think again. There are other ways of doing this. Less literal. Less dangerous. Requiring more bravery. More patience. More time. So much more time, and I have it but I don’t know if Tal does. I look at the back wall of my father’s house. It’s not a bad house. It’s just a house. It is history given form. It is Europeans trying to build a dynasty. But where are they? Their descendants? They’re across the street, red-faced, yelling like babies for a bottle. Here, it’s just me. The Afro-Celt. Not even half of the right kind of honky. But it’s mine now. My inheritance. Tal’s too. And then, while I’m looking, I see a whole new foundation crack in the façade. Unknown of before because I never bothered standing here, looking at it, for so long. I reach my finger out, poke my pinky’s tip right inside it. This is the house they think they can just cut up, and move twenty yards? While I still own it. While Tal actually still owns it. I put two fingers into the crack, concrete crumbling down around them as they wiggle. It’s a trap. It’s always been a trap, since first construction.
I light the fire.
I actually see it. The air becoming flame. It doesn’t come to me in a moving image, but instead in three comic-book panels. The first is of a line of orange fire, one as long and seemingly solid as my own arm. It shoots out past my lighter like a ray of sun late to get somewhere. The second image is of a cloud, one that must have always been there invisibly, but now blares into light, connecting each billowing segment, taking over the space all around me I thought was reserved for oxygen. The third image is the simplest. Just flame. The last thing I see before I close my eyes. Before sound is the only sense I can handle. Before even the pain which, as I lie now on the ground, I know will come, because my face has been bathed in the fury. Unless I die, in which case I’ll be spared.
That sound, it doesn’t make a bang. It’s a pop. The sucking of air inward, into whatever portal in the universe I’ve opened. My hand starts to hurt, and I realize I’m gripping the grass. I am blind. No, I just haven’t opened my eyes. I do, and they even work, somewhat. The tears make it hard to see, but I do. And I look to the house. There is a black scorch above the space where the tank once rested. It looks like it hurts. My face hurts so much, surely the house must too. But there is no inferno. I can hear the flames, smell the burning now, but looking at the house, I see no fire before me. Not even inside the window. And I see no top tank. I have exploded the tank. I look at my body. For the pieces of it. For the unfelt shrapnel. The evidence that I am actually going to die now. I see none of it. But I hear the fire. I think to turn to look to the sound of the fire.
There’s an inferno coming out of my father’s Bug.
Such a big flame, such a tiny car.
—
When they find me, I’m still trying to pull the propane out from where it’s lodged under the rear bumper. The heat is so strong, I try to kick the tank, but only manage to stick it farther in there. My hands are already burnt, and even though the flames are reaching up to twice my height over the back engine I am certain I can just reach in there, on the bottom, and pull the metal cylinder loose. I feel someone pulling at my feet so I just kick back and keep crawling. As I get closer to the car I am entering a reality where every molecule of my body wants to dance fast enough to become a gas. There is pain but life is pain so I reach out for the tank and get just enough that I send it rolling out and away as my hands fuse to the metal. But they don’t because I’m pulled back again before the torch shooting from the tank’s now whirling spout can bless me. At my legs, there is still normal feeling, and I know from uneven grips that a different person is pulling on each leg. I feel the grass under my chest, and the roughness of the soil as I scrape along it. And then there is air again, and the relative coolness of a late spring day, and the clouds are so thick and beautiful. I just look at them. Like when my dad was driving the Bug and I would lie down on the backseat and stare up through the window. In the blissful era before mandatory seat belts.
My eyes still blur, but I can see who saved me. I knew it would be One Drop, from the strength of the grip. The monstrous One Drop, who is reaching out to my face, and then seeing the shape I’m in, he pulls back like this might do more damage. I get the sense from this that I don’t look too good. And the other ankle puller. It’s Sun. It’s Sunita Habersham.
Sunita Habersham. She squats down. She puts a hand to my face, where it stings. She has the sense to ask, “Baby, are you okay?” and I lack the sense to say anything but, “Oh yeah. I’m fine. I’m chilling.” To prove this, I go to get up, which turns out is a hard thing to do after your hands have been barbecued. But I rise, still. And Sun hugs me, and I realize she called me baby, which was very nice, yes. I’m in a lot of pain. And there are all the other people. They are all around us, the whole camp, everyone. Tal is there, Spider is there, almost everyone I know now and all the faces I know who have names attached I’ve never bothered to remember. But look at them. They look so concerned. And not about the blessed car, because that’s gone now, I can accept that. And not the house, because the house has not altered its trajectory in the slightest. They look at me. They care about me. My unintentional community. They stand at a distance, sure, crowding together and leaving us in the epicenter of their circle, but I think this is a gesture of respect for the emotions of the moment. And also, yeah, because of the car being on fire.
Still embracing Sunita Habersham, I turn her gently, so I can look back at the ruining of my father’s car. This accidentally aims her gaze toward the mansion. Sun just saw the house, I realize, when she pushes me away. She saw the house, and what I did to it.
“Baby,” I start to try back at her, but the slap she hits me with, it really hurts. Emotionally. But largely, physically. It’s very sobering.
“How could you do this to us!” is screamed at me. Sun is pointing. I follow her finger, to the damned house façade. The fuse box, it pops. Too late. The sparks not even remotely close to the blackened mark of the first flames climbing up the wall. Jumping to the conclusion of arson would makes no sense, out of context. But Sun has context.
“Which us?” I ask, and my general confusion at the moment, my blurry vision, the growing distraction of the intense biting pain emitting from large portions of my epidermis, would seem to add to my clueless innocence. But not to Sunita Habersham, who slaps me again. Who then takes me with two hands by the front of my shirt.