to plead with the kid to come back and feels the first swipe of fire across the side of his face, tearing the shirt from his side.
I’m burning, Miles thinks.
A realization so simple it precedes understanding, precedes pain. But he doesn’t lie down. Opens his mouth again to utter another wordless command and hears only the plasticky pop of his own skin.
He can only watch as the boy runs on. That, and make one last attempt to be heard. But before Miles can close his lips around his name, the kid is consumed by the rushing curtain of fire.
They keep him away from mirrors. Anything that can cast a reflection is hidden by the nurses. The chrome kettle in his room is removed, the curtains drawn at twilight when the glass surface begins to send back images of whoever may be trying to look outside. Even his cutlery is replaced with plastic knives, forks and especially the spoons, which, depending on the side turned to him, threaten to balloon or collapse the already distorted features of his new face.
For the first several days, the drugs keep him from knowing when they’re taking off his bandages or peeling away dead layers of his skin. Morphine delivers him to a place well beyond the hospital room’s beeping, bleach-reeking reminders that he is on a bad-news ward. The drip into his arm prevents him from caring about his injuries, how he might look if he ever gets out, about anything. Yet he remains aware of the events around him. The terrible food. A distressedlooking Alex with her hair tied in a bun (he hates it that way and thinks of asking her to let it down, but doesn’t want to trouble her). His wish for something better to be on TV. Even the fire. He remembers trying to pull himself up the slowmotion slope, the unfamiliar sound of his own screams, the sight of the kid sucked back into the furious waves. He remembers it all, but it nevertheless feels second-hand, fictional, like the memory of a film seen years before.
The morphine leads him to a beautiful indifference. He loves the morphine. The days pass in rolls of gauze. Delicately applied and removed, the nurses forcing smiles, nearly constantly asking him Are you okay? He has no idea what okay would be under the circumstances, or what it ever was. Yup, he says. The last thing he wants is to hurt anybody’s feelings. He just yups his way through his first three weeks in the burn ward, and holds Alex’s hand with the one he can still move, all without a clue as to what might follow from here.
They pull back the sheet and leave him bare between dressings for a while now, to ‘get a little air on the business,’ as one of the nurses puts it. Although he’s told not to, it allows him to feel the shape of the burn. From beneath his skin a shell emerges, rough as the edge of an empty tin. Not all of him, though. He has been split in two. The left side of his face is as he remembers it, but the right is a Halloween mask, all hardened latex and stray, unconvincing hairs. His hand continues down his neck, and he discovers that the half-mask comes with a half-bodysuit too. He strokes his chest from one side to the other. The line between the burned and unburned skin comes up hard against his fingertips, abrupt as the intrusion of the Rockies on a continental map. The east of him is smooth flatlands. The west, rows of jagged teeth.
Without warning, they pull the morphine out of his arm and replace it with a pair of Tylenol 3s on his breakfast serviette. The first thing he does is cry. It’s the sight of the puny albino pills that does it. These are to be his new friends? He bawls so hard he can’t catch his breath. Coughs himself out of bed, starts bawling again. The emergency bell that attaches his thumb to the nurses’ station rings without pause, so that they close the door on him and let him wail himself to sleep. Even through his tears he’s ashamed of himself, and makes some attempts at self-control, but then the image of the white pills returns to him, and it’s all over.
When it comes, sleep is no better than waking. What’s worse than the pain are the dreams. They start at different places, but all of them end with Miles running. There is no fire. What he runs from is invisible but explicit, human and not human, a creature with unfair advantages. A vampire, the voice-over of his dream tells him. One that pursues him through a grid of dark streets. Miles knows that he will lose the race but he rushes on, rounds another corner, hoping to find an avenue of light that never appears. Then, when the undead thing comes up next to him, Miles turns to see that it’s the kid. Teeth bared, ravenous. The kid wrapping his mouth over Miles’s neck. Ripping and swallowing.
When they release him from the hospital, the doctor gives Miles a pharmaceutical loot bag to take with him: tranquilizers, Tylenol 3s, steroid cream. Alex holds him by the arm on his good side, his steps slow and frail, head swimming. He can’t tell whether the sensation of being helped along by his girlfriend makes him feel pathetically young or pathetically old.
They are asked to stay in town for a few days to participate in the coroner’s inquest into the kid’s death, although it’s obvious to all that it’s really Miles’s trial. Fire is fire, and people who fight them get hurt from time to time. But the kid is different. His foreman stopped running from a fire to build one of his own and the kid had carried on up the hill. One rational decision, one irrational. If common sense determined rightful outcomes, the wrong man died.
The panel includes two of the managers who sent his team into the valley, and Miles tries to mentally hammer nails through their eyeballs as he listens to them ask their questions. They want to know how he could possibly justify his ‘grossly unorthodox defensive tactics.’ Miles calls it an escape fire. He calls it the good black. The managers call it unsound manoeuvres. His trial is one of semantics. They don’t allow themselves to forgive him, but he can feel them wanting to. One says, ‘You were a good firefighter, Miles,’ and the past tense reddens the scar on his cheek.
In the end they do him the favour of coming up with excuses on his behalf. Miles wasn’t much older than the kid himself, after all. The conditions were severe. Under the circumstances, it was hard to believe that only one man went down. Though his methods were well outside of acknowledged procedure, the investigators accept that Miles had done everything he could have done within his abilities and experience.
After, in a motel room in Salmon Arm with a NO ANIMAL SKINNING notice over the headboard, Alex and Miles lie side by side in the darkness, fully clothed, fingers locked over their chests like corpses. They talk about what they should do next. Neither of them can think of an option aside from what they would have done if the fire had never happened. They will leave in the morning for Toronto. Alex will take up her job at Arrowsmith’s, and Miles will enter first year of med school. They will start again. Neither of them mentions the promise of marriage that Miles had made the year before.
They drive through the mountains, onto the high ranges of Alberta, across the cruise-control prairies, and over the humped spine of Lake Superior, all in a brooding near silence. Alex never asks about the fire, but Miles can sense her aching to. There’s a buzz of vicious pleasure in refusing to help her open the topic, every hour of silence a greater punishment than anything he might think of to say to her. Behind the wheel, Miles takes an academic interest in his own anger. For instance, he would never have guessed he would resent Alex’s sympathy even more than her curiosity.
The sight of Toronto shrinks them in their seats. Even the lake seems to pull back from the downtown towers. Its waves reluctant, perfunctory, the water the mottled grey of desert camouflage. They drive straight to the apartment Alex has found, a basement one-bedroom on Shaw Street, the only thing reasonably close to both her work and the university that they could afford.
‘It’s not rue Rachel,’ Miles says, looking up and down the street, the tiny front yards blurred with wrought-iron fences.
‘It’s different here,’ Alex agrees. ‘It’s all different.’
They unload their minimal belongings and, after one walk through the apartment, Miles tucks himself under the sheets of the futon and stays in the bedroom for the next week until classes start. Even then, he skips his lectures as often as he attends them. Instead, he drifts through the streets of the new city and feels its eyes upon him. He plays the game of trying to catch people staring. Most of the time, his observers are quicker than he is. But when he snags slow ones, he sticks his tongue out and laughs like a serial killer and watches them scuttle away in what they think is fear, though he knows it’s really shame.