Standing up, the smoke makes my eyes water.
I drive my shoulder into the door, throw my full weight against it, but it will not budge, and I cannot breathe.
I drop back down onto my hands and knees; haul in air. Steam rolls off my sodden clothes.
I look for another way out, but it’s getting hard to see.
Fire procedures, what did I remember about tackling fire?
wet clothes, wet face
cloth across the mouth
percentage of deaths from smoke inhalation, 50–80 per cent
Cause of death
respiratory trauma
poison
thermal damage to lungs
I feel the hinges of the door, run my fingers over the lock, concentrate.
carbon monoxide poisoning
CO bonds with haemoglobin in the blood, giving it its red appearance
Two locks, one a fairly simple mortise lock that I could beat with a fork and a bit of time, the other heavy-duty, need a knife or a piece of metal, something to get leverage with
unlike O2, CO will not separate from the haemoglobin, continues circulating
treatment for CO poisoning and smoke inhalation: hydrated oxygen
Can’t see, the black smoke throws the light of the fire around
oxygen toxicity: too much oxygen in the body tissues
central nervous system damage
retinal damage
pulmonary damage, only really a problem in a hypobaric chamber
or undersea
or in
pressurised conditions
My fingers fall away from the lock.
I am
the fire
I am
my fingers
I am
crawling
Climb on a table away from the fire, window furthest from the fire, smash what’s left of the glass
eyes closed
breathe
smoke running out
my face
my skin
can’t open my eyes, just darkness
cold air
hot smoke
breathe
the tiny hairs in my nose are burning, I feel the air scald my throat
I am
breath
I am
fire
I am
darkness.
The darkness is me.
Chapter 28
I dream, and I dream of a fantasy that could be Parker.
It must be fantasy, since I cannot remember a thing about him. What do I actually know about this man from Maine?
The me-that-met-him wrote some impressions down, as we shared pancakes and coffee in a café off Seventh Avenue.
Parker: Who Is He?
Surprisingly funny, talkative (he talks because the alternative is silence), passionate about music to the point of obsession, kind to strangers. Today I have seen him chat to a homeless man from the Bronx for half an hour, grill a waitress about the history of her tattoo, perform coin magic for a pair of marvelling five-year-old twins on the train, entertaining them while their mum comforted a shrieking baby. A show-off. Fearsome in his hatred of the news in the US, dismissive of politics.
Flashes of melancholy, sometimes laughs too loud, too high. His opinions often flare into certainties — an insistence that the Tale of Genji was written during the Kemmu Restoration, and he sulks, proper sulks, for ten minutes when I prove him wrong. Envious of celebrity to the point of contempt, bitterness inflecting his words. “They’re just people,” he says, “just fucking people”, and yet his knowledge of who said what and who was seen at what party is encyclopaedic.
Erudite, to the point of obsession. Am I the same? I can’t help but measure myself by him, the only equivalence I have ever met. Constantly on his phone, constantly double-checking the world around him. We order pancakes; he looks up the history of maple syrup.
Nanabozho, he says. Trickster god of the first peoples, credited sometimes with the invention of maple syrup. At the Sugar Moon, first full moon of spring, the tribes of the north would celebrate the coming of warmer days by tapping the trees, collecting sap until the rising temperatures of the forest made the sugars less sweet, unpalatable.
“How many cultures,” he muses, “so far apart, have gods that delight to play tricks.”
More letters, memorabilia. A menu from the diner where we ate the pancakes — I remember eating a lot of pancakes, until my belly ached with it, which was not my normal pattern of behaviour, and now I think about it, perhaps it does make sense that some figure I can’t remember was there too, encouraging gluttony.
A note, and I remember finding it in my pocket when I let myself into my downtown apartment and just standing in the hall, staring in wonder.
Today you met someone like you. You cannot remember him, but here is his picture. He has a note just like this one, and you are to meet again at 10 a.m. at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
I barely slept that night, and the next morning went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to meet someone I’d never met before. A letter, recounting that meeting, along with a mug showing cherry blossom in full pink bloom, which I thought I could remember buying but which, upon further racking of my memory, I wasn’t so sure I had.
We met at 10 a.m.. He came up to me, a nervous man with mousy hair I had never seen before. He had my picture on his phone, grinning at the camera, giving it a thumbs up, his face pressed in from the side of the frame.
“Hi,” he said, holding out his hand stiffly. “I got a note from myself telling me to be here to meet someone I can’t remember ever meeting before.”
“Hi,” I replied. “I got the same thing.”
His eyes widened in fear and delight, and then he’s talking, just talking, non-stop for nearly an hour, maybe two. He wonders how long we’ve been meeting like this, if we’re already the best of friends, tells me about his life — has he told me this already? — wants to know everything about me, how I live, how I eat, how I keep myself sane.
I tell him about taster classes, speed dating, card counting at the casinos, and am briefly surprised when he replies, “I go to prostitutes, so much easier. Once you’ve found one or two who you like, who you know will be good with you, then it’s just better and so much more honest, I mean, more honest for us both, than me trying to pick up some date in a bar.”
Perhaps he’s right; I don’t feel anything either way. Cautiously, I admit that I have sometimes done a little thieving, and steal his wallet while he’s distracted by a family squabble on the other side of the rose beds. He exclaims in wonder at this, and finally admits, “I just rob people.”
That’s when he shows me the gun, small and dark, hidden in a holster underneath his arm. “It’s okay!” he exclaims, at my expression of horror. “No one ever remembers being robbed, I mean, it’s just like they dropped their wallet or something.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Jesus, no! Jesus!”
And now I wonder: do I believe him?
I have no memories of him on which to construct a pattern of his truths and lies, but in much the same way that I see how it is logical to seek sex with a hooker, I can also see how someone in our predicament might find it easy to make their living with a gun. Perhaps I read too much. I must examine myself as thoroughly as I examine him, if I want to make this sort of judgement. Yet, in that I have no other resource than these words now by which to remember him, I feel I must write it down: this is the thing I feel, these are the questions I have. Remember them.