Fire
He felt the need to go out and move in this new city. To follow the lines and be concerned with things Seattle people are concerned with. To meet people and make friends and fuck and to know it like it was his home. Which, he guessed, it was. What does it mean to be home, to feel at home? He had moved dozens of times as a child but never felt especially displaced, never felt homeless. Now he had shelter, that is, a place to sleep and eat and exist--and he paid for it. But that wasn't his home. Home wasn’t a place to him but a mode of being. He only really felt at home with certain people, within certain memories. College was fun but it certainly wasn't home. Even home wasn’t home for him anymore, he needed people, only people made him feel at home. Certain people. Odysseus didn’t suffer (well let’s be honest it wasn’t all suffering) war, cyclops’s, witches, sea-monsters, and anthropomorphized nature itself for in island or an edifice. He tricked the Trojans, sacrificed his men, and tied himself to the mast of his own ship for a feeling. For something he knew and that Penelope also knew. He lost himself for twenty years but returned the instant he strung his bow and fell back into his own history,. The groove. Whoever said language was less powerful than the stick or the stone never believed in anything.
He knew people here, in this new city, so the most logical response to his loneliness was for him to call them, so he did. He found himself going places because they were new and made him anxious, specifically because he didn’t want to (a test of sorts). However sometimes he suspected himself of using reverse psychology, thereby, after time, becoming completely neutral or severely polarized about an issue which he deserved to have a singular opinion about. He was lost at sea with people he had felt at home with in the past and with which he hoped to feel at home again. The places they went, titularly diverse yet purposefully identical, were grooves themselves, places for people to practice the most rudimentary and rote of habitual actions. Drinking. It usually mattered not what he spoke, he found, but only that he did speak. Choosing words that he felt would be the most pleasing and amiable to his audience. Telling stories that he knew, because this audience had received them well before, would carve that nostalgic groove along the hard thing in his chest, allowing them all to follow a path lazily back to a feeling. Machiavellian, despicable. Could he not still connect with these friends, must they flee into the refuge of the past, to words already said? Was nothing new possible?
He accepted every invitation, wanting to be everywhere at once, envious of comic books. There was still feeling somewhere in there, he knew it, but how best to show it, to represent it. Somehow every time he spoke he felt the need to represent himself. But how to represent Change? He wished he were a painting to be scrutinized over centuries. Oh to feel timeless. Like a stone in a river, solid and secure without a care in the world, only to discover that you’ve been water all along! He was both person and representation. He had profiles (several of them) and an idea of what it meant to be honest, thinking that (just maybe) how you are perceived matters more than how you really are. Sometimes he looked through pictures of himself on the internet, staring. THIS, if nothing else, would remain even after he died. It would probably still be floating somewhere, somehow accessible for ever, he guessed. Pages burn as does the world but what happens to waves, to light? He hated it. Some static, card-board-cut-out ghost of his life would haunt the stars like time didn’t exist. The word “fuck” revolved around his head loudly as he realized that was more scared of deleting these profiles than he was angry at reality.
So he left the house, venturing out into great unknown regions of concrete being clacked upon by black stiletto heels, driven upon by desperate immigrants, and used (as a destination no less) for escape. Like Lewis, and maybe even Clark, he moved fearfully into the researched but unexperienced. No amount of research, information, artistic representation, or even written word can portray to Ishmael the exact feeling he experiences upon first witnessing a live whale. The whole (of an object) always equals more than the sum of its parts. Words can no more substitute an experience than they can represent it. And that was the whole fucking problem wasn’t it? How could he even tell her what he wanted (which is what he wanted) if his methods always fell short. He couldn’t say how he felt even if he wrote it down.
Again and again he would leave, each time comparing himself to some tragic hero.
Not alone but feeling so, with companionship, to visit a place where people act out. Where fun is had in and on things but not with them. Inside and on top of them but definitely, definitively not, within them.
Whoever was driving that night parked the car dutifully, taking much more time and care, as the chemically concerned often due, than was legally necessary. Under a tree though, so that (although it was dark) they would have more coverage. He reached into his pocket and retrieved a small, square, translucent plastic bag with many iterations of a red middle-finger reprinted stylistically across its surface. He opened the small bag with a practiced air, propping its mouth wide, careful not to spill its precious cargo while maintaining its width with a steady prescribed pressure. Once again he reached into his pockets and this time produced a ring of keys, those for driving. His eyes roved back and forth suspiciously, feeling the cloth headrest bristle comfortably across his hair as his head made the universal symbol for “no”. The long groove in one specific key allowed for the maximum containment of cocaine, letting it reside, not unironically, in that which allowed it to fit perfectly into the car’s ignition. The groove allowed the machine to move, endowed it with an agent.
After the machines were in motion they exited the sloping car and proceeded to their determined destination, also not unironically named “The Battery”. Here he and they imbibed and retold the mechanical tales of their progeneration, the stories which ended in now. An ancient contentment fell over them like men staring into a fire or at a rolling ocean. How many circles had been made by the very same atoms that now composed this group, how many times had he been here before and how many times would he return? He felt like Aristophenes relating the separation of himself, from himself, and how he might, eventually, reattach. He felt like an unwilling Cercei, turning his lovers into pigs and animals and then lamenting the loss of their humanity. He felt like an animal himself and smiled.
The bar was unremarkable. Slatted wood walls decorated with car-related objects ranging from pictures of famous drivers to physical engines, trying to do what all bars do, lubricate its mechanical patrons, encourage motion. The four of them sat on plush leather stools adorned with nineteen-seventies era seat belts. For safety. Behind them grated a shuffleboard table which, once vacated, they populated until he spilled an entire Lagunitas IPA (oh the brewmanity!) in its sand, thereby ruining the game and causing him to back away slowly and resume his seat at the bar. Tenderly. They all laughed, taking things seriously was no longer cool anyway and being pointed is pointless in a time where Siri can give you directions.
They met with more at The Battery in Capitol Hill, each refilling each other, refreshing the past, retelling, recharging. Laughter, banter, posters on the wall which instigate certain ancient fondnesses and connections. He went to the bathroom and saw a picture of Harrison Ford wearing his Indiana hat and felt instantly warmed, instantly reassured and at home and unafraid. Here was a man (a character) who fought, however whimsically, against time and change. Attempting to allow the past and present to exist simultaneously and to break free of our third dimensional conceptions. Indiana saved history from the greedy hands of time and made sure that things mattered, he was a hero for preservation, and a fool.
He often thought of extinct species and found himself finding himself on the brink. “I am an endangered species,” he would say to himself, “forced to survive the only way it can.”. He studied dinosaurs fervently as a child and admired their dignity, their quiet and awe-inspiring power. They seemed to ask for nothing, not even recognition. The day they all died started like any other day for them. Did they think of themselves as individuals, did they understand that things end? Their discovery was a mere accident, their sovereignty over earth, accidental. They never asked to be remembered like we do, continually and always, but faded from home like one who knows what he's supposed to do. Consciousness, or more precisely individuality, if they had it, did not seem to burden them so. It seemed to him, in his envy, that they were merely bodies and that we are merely souls. His first instinct was to be grateful, despite his seething, burning envy of their extinct power, but recently, in adulthood (or what he thought was adulthood) he envied their very existence. How freeing it must be, he thought, to be only a body, to rely only on instinct and to be blamed for absolutely nothing. To be a conduit, to be channeled through and never questioned. Never TO question anything at all. To purely be action, movement, and never even to have a concept of stillness. To be blameless. It is said that if a shark stops swimming that it will die, but what it doesn’t know is that it will die anyway.
They filled up at The Battery and played various time-wasting, drink-inducing games until time butted up against their senses of self. The bar was closing in and it became too late to justify their actions without their continuation. A friend, a friend from the past, brought them all back to his house for more beer, which was close by and therefore not more inconvenient than just going home and sleeping. He went with his friends.
They walked the short distance to the house (I will not call it a home) and sat on Goodwill couches swapping more (and at this point sometimes the same) stories that reaffirmed each other's existence. Only making the already explicit, explicit again in some vaguely new or merely unfamiliar way, challenging nothing and perpetuating nothing. Ripping the past into expressible quadrants and then pasting it back together in ways that made them seem new, repackaging portions of their lives for consumption.
In some parts of the country it is considered polite to offer guests in one’s home a cordial drink, so that everyone may feel at ease. In California this offer is expected, anticipated, and therefore supplanted by the offering of Marijuana, which in most cases, is the toxicant of choice. Here in Seattle however, the offering of alcohol or marijuana seems paltry or contrived and so the host is forced to offer something alternate and possibly stronger, more apt to create (lasting) connections. So the Seattle host, in the sincerely generous mood of self-preservation and fear, provides his guests with cocaine. White, efficient, and innocuous. Groovy.
They sat on the couch watching T.V. and listening to music while he watched the host pour, and then compose, white lines of the substance on an iPad. Hungrily. Apple products feel like they were made for cocaine use. Their pretty metal curves and clear glass against the purely black background gives some form to space. You can see yourself in them, darkly transposed and close as you lean forward to stave off time a little longer. The host pushed the pad in his, and their, direction indicating that it was appropriate for all to engage, to rumble idly and contain the motion within, a little longer. With the same hunger mentioned above, he inhaled gladly, as if on a mountain’s peak.
With invigoration the conversation returned (about what who can recall) and they all, as if at once, left the couch for the balcony, producing cigarettes for what they’re meant for. They all sat there, telling things and smoking things and laughing. They stayed out there for the time requisite, approximately, for the inhalation of twenty-three lines and fourteen Marlboro 27’s. One such found its way out of the host's mouth and into the space between cushion and couch, for a frantic moment or two, but was then retrieved to much satisfaction. Although it had to be re-lit. Balconies and porches are some of the most comforting and affirming places to exist for a time because they are transitions. The step between inside and outside, somehow transcending both. A place to loiter before choosing to be in or out. How freeing it feels to sit, for longer than can be proper, on the porch and resist choice itself, to laugh in the face of decision. To be the rock and act in ways that you know are counter to your mechanism’s smooth running. How good it feels to take what you’ve been given and use it for whatever purpose you like, thereby redefining what it is and making it your own. Creating new grooves, which can always be ridden later.
After an unknown (unknown I say!) quantity of cigarettes and lines had been consumed, the group sauntered somewhat reluctantly into the house and projected a comedy sequence on the television, for which to fall asleep to. It was cynical and ironic and made them feel comfortable in their fidgety skins, enough so to close their eyes and listen. But probably not to sleep.
In what felt like only moments later, his eyes fluttered open to a vision of legs in motion, carrying a body which was in turn carrying basin (full of water). He then witnessed those legs, attached to arms and a body like most legs are, fling the watery interior of the aforementioned basin upon an enflamed couch.
The couch was thoroughly engulfed, the flames ravenously devouring its flesh and letting show, amid each flicker, its skeletal structure: that which would remain after effulgence but not apotheosis. The wires and very twistations which, built upon, made the couch a couch, for it was only a couch if it was also flammable. The flames dazzled him. He watched them enraptured, hearing a sound heard since organisms developed the ability to hear and didn’t feel afraid. It was still a symbol to him and he couldn’t quite decipher its meaning. What did it mean that the couch was on fire? He knew instantly why it was on fire, it was obviously the cigarette, supposedly recovered by the host which had started the flame, but what he did not know, and probably never will, is why it mattered. Did it matter? He looked into the flame and felt in communion with it, felt like Burning itself, not something burning. He felt, for the first time in a very long time at home. There are no individual fires, they are all just Fire. Although you may extinguish an instance of fire, fire will always exist in some form somewhere, burning and burning and leaving skeletons that misrepresent their bodies. But the fire cares not about how it appears, in fact the fire cares not at all, but lights the dark a moment and shows that straight lines don’t exist.
He felt like the man in Plato’s cave who, seeing the fire realized that all he once knew to be true were only representations of the truth. Shadows without substance or honesty. However he did not feel unshackled or in any way freed; he also did not feel the need to explain this to anyone or to attempt to “free” either himself or anyone else. True he looked into the flame, but what he saw couldn’t and maybe even shouldn’t be spoken, for to attempt a conveyance would only muddle and invariably destroy the experience for him. He didn’t want to tell anyone about his experience with the fire. This wasn’t selfishness, though or even solipsism: he simply felt unworthy of such a task. It takes a god to understand fire and not even a god can master it, for once Prometheus (in his single Akrasian act) gave fire to man, not even Zeus could reclaim it. Unmechanical and multifarious and resistant to syntax or structure, fire can neither be created nor destroyed, but rather summoned and then sent back. Lent from a place where time stands rather than marches.
The eyes that saw those harried legs then snapped into consciousness, ascertaining the gravity of those flames, what they meant (right now) and lurched to attention. The legs and arms and body that were attached to the fluttering eyes lagged behind their perception and languished, somewhat voluntarily, in inaction until the need for their movement became obvious and they, like the pair of legs before them, went to the kitchen, grabbed a similar concave utensil, filled it with an aqueous solution, and flung it over and over again upon the conflagration, regretting it somewhat even as he did. Some part of him wanted to let the fire do what fire does, not to hinder it. But straight lines do exist in a society, right angles, road signs, and licenses too. And so he rebelled against the nature inside him so that the edifice he walked within would not burn.
He and his compatriot, wordless yet communicative, carried bowls of water to and from the fire until it was extinguished, hearts elevated by the experience and the night before’s (barely dispatched) inhalations. All the while a man carried on, sleepfully unaware of his peril, only feet away from the blaze. They were on the the fourth story of an apartment building and thank baby Jesus (who died for our sins) that the balcony was concrete, for it certainly would have caught the terrible virus that is flame, thereby killing the building’s less somnambulant occupants. This man slept through the entire ordeal, utterly unaffected, to this day, by what still haunts those two pairs of legs. Had they slept on, listlessly and happily, as that supremely unconscious man had, they would all most likely be dead. But their consciousness, the very thing they attempted to eschew via nightly abuse, had saved them from the fire. What had they done to deserve such fortunate treatment, why were they alive? This question, although unspoken, hung more heavily in the air and choked them more thoroughly than the plastic smoke staling in the ceiling. Fire doesn’t just burn but it also produces, and its products (both light and obscurity) linger longer than their figures. Was this fire illuminating or did it simply add to the confusion?
They looked at each other and there was still some left so such questions were left unanswered and suspended in its white wake. Dawn, peaking from behind the immolation, forced its awareness upon the wide-eyed, gaping, survivors. There were only two of them despite the four who resided in the apartment, the dozens in the building. They alone experienced the desperation, the critical nature of their wet, steaming mission for survival.
They looked at each other, breathing hard, not saying (daring to explicate) what had transpired between them while everyone else slept, the only evidence being the smoldering and unrecognizable “couch” that they quickly disposed of. Once used for comfort it was now only a deathly reminder.
They looked at each other, their breath slowly normalizing and their pupils slowly making contracted contact at points, back to singularity and away from communion, back to a time before and after the fire.
