Today
Following missing persons reports, Police enter the home of Mike and Amelia Brandman. They find little, save three sets of footprints and a pregnancy test strip reading "positive" seared into the carpet in a side bedroom.
_____
_____
Two weeks ago
The house's electrical panel was installed inches below and to the left of the
guest bedroom window, which was open and dark. Mike pressed his face
against the screen and tried to see in. He was able, barely, to
distinguish the shining lens of the video camera he'd
placed on a tray table facing out the day before. More visible was
Amelia standing behind it wearing the floral cotton dress she'd bought
in college, still soft but worn thin from years of use.
"How much can you see?" She asked.
"Not enough," Mike said.
He thought he saw her smile. "Come in," she said. When she turned
and walked away Mike noticed more than usual the way her shape rounded
and shadowed her dress, shifting softly under fabric. He had not
scrutinized these things so closely since he was a
teenager. He entered the house through the back door.
That
night, Mike watched Amelia's eyes in the light of their living room.
They talked after dinner. Usually this happened only four days a week,
when Mike was not on shift; for this reason Mike considered
petitioning for a longer term of disability.
Her smell drifted to him; she wore violet oil. Their house was
quiet. The television was off. They watched it only during wars and olympic games. Amelia
was a project manager for a financial consultant based in Carson; she
relayed the office gossip to Mike and did most of the talking. Mike
could not affect this levity. He imagined telling her about the
traffic accidents, the three daily heart attacks which were sometimes
still alive enough to vomit from shock. When he was a new firefighter,
Mike had not understood why others in his department referred to those
they rescued by their ailments rather than names. After his first
death (teenage girl in traffic) a
certain need for convenience and emotional self-perservation revealed
itself. He imagined that doctors who frequently lost their patients
did the same thing. So instead of telling Amelia about his days, he
listened. And, that night, when again the power went out and the
house became dark, he watched her afterimage fade from his retinas.
They passed ten seconds in silence. Not knowing what else to do,
Mike said, in his most ominous voice, "It was a dark and stormy night."
More silence. A ghost story was not happening.
Amelia shifted closer. "I'm going to take this as a sign," she
said. Mike felt her hand cup the back of his neck and slide over his
chest. "If we can fuck before the power comes back, maybe you'll get
me pregnant."
Mike said nothing.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I know," he said. "It's fine."
He stood and found the front door. He waited on the porch. The air
was light and without humidity; the moonlight lay reflected in
fragments on the grass. Clouds moved with the layers of air in the
sky, sometimes finding one another. Mike tried to take everything in
around him but found that he did not have enough time to settle; the
lights returned after five minutes, and, again not knowing what to do, he went back inside.
_____
Mike's master bathroom was small enough so that he elbowed the
walls while undressing. He slowly removed the bandages from his thighs
and groin, spotted with blood and hemoglobin and probably urine
too, and dropped them into the wastebasket, covering them with a layer
of toilet paper. Significantly, Amelia had failed to leave the day's negative pregnancy test floating in the toilet. Mike turned the shower on cool and stood
under its stream. He did not bother to soap or shampoo. He let the
water run over him, adjusting the temperature down every minute or so,
allowing his thighs and genitals to cool. He exited and patted himself dry. Because
it was summer, and the humidity was low, his skin was shrinking and
drying, in places splitting. He drew a parallel. Low humidity caused
fires in brush and in his burned skin. This made him smile, almost.
He applied lotion - the erection this caused was painful at first - and
after that a set of fresh bandages.
When Mike gave fire safety speeches at schools, as
he had that day, the kids always asked him to explain the worst fire he
ever fought. Sometimes this question was first; sometimes last. It
was always asked.
Following the question, the kids would assume the appropriate air of
gravity, knowing that they might hear a story about someone's death.
This was bolstered by Mike himself, standing there large and serious in
full PPE. He would clasp his hands in
front of him, holding his axe, which was marred from use. He was
Fireman Mike. In his two months delivering safety speeches, Mike had
found himself, through no effort of his own, on first-name basis with
several teachers in the district. That all of them were female
did not bother Amelia, bless her.
How Mike responded to the question of the Worst Fire depended on the
ages of the children. When speaking to high school kids, he told them
the truth mostly. Mike's worst fire had taken place three months
before, in a trailer in Long Beach. It had been the only
occasion Mike had had to escape a flashover. The elderly woman
inside attempting to break her bedroom window with a nightstand drawer
had not survived. He had exited the trailer, the image of him bordered
by rolling fire, to a shower of sparks, barely missing a powerline that
had dislodged and lay writhing on asphalt crumbling from disrepair. The woman's daughter returned from a
date to find that her life, small as it was, was being released into the sky on the convection column, having been
converted by the flames into steam and carbonic residues. Mike hadn't
become aware of the pain in his thighs and groin until several seconds
later, but he left out this part of the story, focusing instead on his
helmet, warped by the heat and since re-hardened, which he would bring
with him as an illustration of what fire could do to a person.
_____
Mike often compared the growth of his relationship with Amelia
to the stages of an indoor fire: ignition, buildup, flashover,
decay. The parellels were easy to draw mostly.
They'd met at a restaurant when Mike was 26, after he'd interviewed
(and passed) with the Long Beach Fire Department. At the time he'd
been on an eighteen-month waiting list for employment, making use of
his aging A+ computer certification working in tech support.
He likened the meeting to a fire's ignition - particularly the image of
her first smile to him, now more imagination than memory.
The buildup of their relationship was another easy parallel. They
had exchanged I Love Yous after one month, moved in together after
two. Mike had hesitated to tell his family. Not because he was ashamed to show Amelia to them, but because he
knew that moving in with a girlfriend of two months was something one
typically did out of desperation. Which, in retrospect, is exactly
what he had done. Before meeting her Mike had done his best to conceal
his loneliness, though mostly he'd failed; he knew that such a fast
move-in would be taken by his family as the first sign of a doomed
relationship. He also knew that if (when) the relationship ever ended,
his mother in particular would find the most diplomatic possible way of
saying I Told You So.
Amelia was the first one to want children. On their first
anniversary, for her present, she'd asked him to consider the
possibility. He'd said he would, though the thought of having children
with her did not occur to him in earnest for several more months. He
acclimated himself to the idea gradually. Mike was lagging in proposing marriage, partially in reaction to the
short time it had taken him to move in (from now on he would make sure
before taking such large steps); he assumed, with some shame, that a
pregnancy was a way for her to encourage him in this direction.
Eventually he became used to the idea of this kind of lifelong
commitment. Increasingly, the visions he had for his future included
Amelia, their home, their children.
Flashover was a difficult thing for Mike to parallel. Flashover was
the transitional phase before which the fire gradually
burned itself out; Mike searched his memory for something thereby to
define his life with Amelia. He remembered the first time she'd spoken
to her doctor about the possibility of producing children, when she was
told that she would need to lose fifty pounds for a
healthy pregnancy. Would that define a relationship? No. Not by
itself. That Amelia had refused to take steps to lose the weight was
the first source of tension between them, however; this could define
the beginning of this transition. Mike also remembered his own time
with his doctor for a sperm count, after
his burn in the trailer, when he'd sensed to his great irritation that
Amelia was somehow relieved their childlessness was no longer her
fault.
Mike reviewed the footage he'd captured the previous night of the
electrical panel during the outage. He assumed that teenagers in the
neighborhood were entering his backyard through the unlocked gate and
switching off his breakers. He watched the footage a handful of
times. At first he saw nothing unusual. Thinking there wasn't enough
light, he adjusted the contrast and color levels. Still he saw
nothing. He understood the reason for this when he noticed with some alarm that the recording had skipped the five minutes
through which the electricity had failed.
_____
Mike explained sometimes to Amelia that, though their finances were
adequate, he did not want to buy a home of their
own for precisely the issue of repairs. He reasoned
that maintaining a house was expensive, and as long as they had a
landlord to take care of it, why change? He said that the money they
saved not maintaining the house could be better-spent on things like
vacations, cars, and, yes, children. Amelia did not mention that they
had not taken a single vacation since moving in, nor did either of them
drive a car less than six years old; Mike did not mention that a couple
which separated with a house owned between them underwent much more turmoil than a couple without one.
That night, after Amelia returned from work and they'd eaten dinner,
Mike waited in the guest room with the light off. Amelia stayed in the
living room. After what she'd said three days previous, Mike felt too
awkward to be near her; he
thought it would be better anyway if he watched the electrical panel
with his own eyes. He half-sat on the frame of the crib he'd started
to build last winter, sans bars, which they now used as a console
table. The wood was red mahogany, soft and unfinished and expensive.
It felt velvety under his hands. He'd meant to take the remaining
lumber to a mill to have it shaped for bars - this would have been the
easiest part of the whole project - but he'd lost his resolve, and soon
after that had been the trailer fire. The lumber lay stacked against
the far wall, veneered with dust.
He kept his distance from the window. He had a clear view of the
electrical panel and the area surrounding it. Nobody appeared.
Satisfied the outages weren't a prank, Mike turned to leave; but the
sliver of light under the door had disappeared. The power was out. So
he waited.
He did not look out the window but at the unfinished crib. Its
shadow stretched weakly onto the far wall, and in the half-light the
crib and its shadow combined, resulting in a finished, if grotesque,
product. Mike imagined the guest room as the nursery he and Amelia had
intended it to be. The darkness allowed him to visualize a
wide paper border on the wall just under the ceiling - unisex,
consisting of dragonflies and lily pads - and toys on the floor. Then
Mike closed his eyes and concentrated on hearing the cooing of a baby.
It was faint. Too faint to be there; most
likely his imagination pushing too hard (like contractions). Mike
concentrated harder. To his surprise, he smelled baby powder. Then a
diaper. Then he heard a mobile turning in the air above the crib and
thought he saw, perhaps, the shadows of the crib moving, perhaps a
small arm reaching up - he was not sure; Mike's blood became cold, and
when he took a step for the crib the power came back and the images and
smells disappeared. He returned to Amelia. In the minutes after that,
while she moved carefully on top of him, she bent once, twice, three
times, to smell his hair.
"When did you get baby powder?" she asked afterward.
_____
Sunlight lay on Mike's shoulders the next morning as he drilled
holes through all the breaker switches. He threaded each of the
fifteen holes with a length of fishing line, all of which he gathered
like a squid's arms and fed through the guest bedroom window. He did
not bother to sweep up the curls of plastic left behind by the drill.
That night he asked Amelia to stay in the room with him during the
outage. He counted off the seconds on his watch until the lights
died. This time, without any concentration, the flat slapping of
toddler feet circled them, while something like a hand rested itself
against Amelia's heart.
"This is why it's been happening," he said. The five minutes neither of them knew what to do with.
Dark spots appeared on Amelia's sweater above the nipples. Mike
took the fishing lines he'd threaded from the breakers, separating out
one, which he pulled. The corresponding breaker flipped off. He
separated a second line.
"We have five minutes," he said.
"Pull," she said.