Philadelphia Fire

by John Edgar Wideman

  What would he say to Simba if he ever found him?

  * * *

  Timbo. I had a dream.

  You too?

  Gimme a break. Listen a minute before you laugh.

  What’s your dream, brother?

  I wake up in a park. Right down the street from the fire. Clark Park at Forty-third and Osage. Or dream I wake up. Then I hear a bunch of kids singing. The words are unintelligible. Another language. But the singing gets to me anyway, right away. I can feel what they’re singing about. Doesn’t matter that I can’t understand a word. It’s a freedom song. A fighting song. Righteous as those movement anthems. Ain’t gon let nothing turn me round, turn me round. Remember? Remember the tears coming to your eyes. Remember how full and scared and strong the singing made us feel? That’s what I awakened to. Those feelings. That music. Only different. Another language. Another country. And kids doing the singing, kids I couldn’t see because it’s pitch-black middle of the night and there’s a hollow in the park and that’s where the singing seems to be coming from. I stand up. Start to walk toward where I hear the sound. Then I’m lost. Dream time turns me all around because suddenly it’s daylight. Or it’s been day all along and I’ve just been walking around with my eyes closed. A grimy, grainy Philadelphia gray morning. Only stark silent. No city babble. Quiet as a grave. I’m still walking toward the hollow and when I pass the basketball court I fall down flat on the ground. I go down fast and heavy and wonder why it doesn’t hurt because I fall fast and hard like being chopped off at the knees. Like suddenly my limbs below the knees are gone and I crumple. Then I’m scared. I scream. But it ain’t myself I’m screaming at. Dream time, you know. Because I’m chopped on the ground, rolling around with half my legs gone but I’m also a witness, upright, floating, somehow staring down at the basketball court, screaming because a boy is lynched from the rim. A kid hanging there with his neck broken and drawers droopy and caked with shit and piss. It’s me and every black boy I’ve ever seen running up and down playing ball and I’m screaming for help and frozen in my tracks and can’t believe it, can’t believe he’s dangling there and the dumb thing I’m also thinking in this dream or whatever it is, is if they’d just waited a little longer his legs would have grown, his feet would have reached the ground and he’d be OK.

  That’s all?

  I don’t know. I don’t know how long I’m there. I don’t know how I remember it is just a nightmare and cut him down. There’s a memory of his weight in my arms. Catching him when the others sawed through the rope. I seem to be relieved. Grateful almost to realize he’s just a child. That his body is small and I can bear the weight of it as I back down the ladder.

  The ladder?

  A basket’s ten feet high. We needed ladders.

  Then there’s more to the dream. You’re talking miniseries, man. Child murders. Ladders. Cops. KKK.

  I’m not sure if there’s more. Certain things had to have happened for any of it to make sense. What I’m left with, what I’m certain of is not very much at all. But indelible. Real. The singing. The broken neck and slumped body. The weight.

  Simba? The lost boy?

  It could be.

  Who killed him?

  It was a dream.

  Well make up something, then. Wake up and make up. You got my attention. Don’t leave me hanging.

  Damn you, Timbo.

  I ain’t trying to be funny. But it ain’t fair to start telling me a story then just stop in the middle.

  The dream stops there. Everything surrounding it’s gone. I want to know the rest, too. Thought telling you might help. But it doesn’t. I feel myself beginning to invent. Filling in the blanks but the blanks are real. Part of the dream.

  Dream?

  Yeah.

  Shit, man.

  PART II

  On May 13, 1985, in West Philadelphia, after bullets, water cannon and high explosives had failed to dislodge the occupants of 6221 Osage Avenue, a bomb was dropped from a state police helicopter and exploded atop the besieged row house. In the ensuing fire fifty-three houses were destroyed, 262 people left homeless. The occupants of the row house on Osage were said to be members of an organization called MOVE. Eleven of them, six adults and five children, were killed in the assault that commenced when they refused to obey a police order to leave their home. A grand jury subsequently determined that no criminal charges should be brought against the public officials who planned and perpetrated the assault.

  Pretend for a moment that none of this happened. Pretend that it never happened before nor will again. Pretend we can imagine events into existence or out of existence. Pretend we have the power to live our lives as we choose. Imagine our fictions imagining us.

  In 1850 John Fanning Watson wrote in the Annals of Philadelphia: Many can still remember when the slaves were allowed the last days of the fairs for their jubilees, which they employed (light-hearted wretch) in dancing the whole afternoon in the present Washington Square, then a general burying ground—the blacks joyful above, while the sleeping dead reposed below.

  The phone rings. You pick it up and listen. You hope somebody will say a name you recognize. His. Hers. Yours. You’ve been caught unawares by the ring. You were absent and the ring brought you back. To where? To whom?

  Hello.

  It is my son and he speaks softly from far away. I can barely hear him. His voice is changing. He’s at that age. Adding muscle and thickness. He is probably larger than I am now. The thought of him growing I put out of my mind quickly. Because I am here. Where I am. Growth means time passing, time apart from him I can’t do anything about. He is my lost son on the phone and I must answer before I don’t have the power to say a single word.

  I say, Hey. How are you?

  And that’s that. We go on with our conversation for a decent interval, until the guard cuts us off or long enough so the little serious joke about not letting Ma Bell get rich off us is appropriate closure. We also don’t go on. Can’t move past the initial formulas of greeting.

  How are you?

  OK.

  I’ve learned the hard way that I’ve always known next to nothing about him. Except I do know the danger of the place where he’s incarcerated, the depth of the trouble he’s in, the innocence and terror and guilt he must cope with day after day and little on the horizon but more of same.

  I don’t know what words mean when he says them. I don’t know if he knows what they mean or knows why he says them. So we can’t move beyond the ritual of greeting. To ask how he is opens a door into the chaos or our lives. Perhaps he’s unable to tell me how he is. Perhaps I wouldn’t understand how to take what he’d say, even if he tried to tell me. Words between us have become useless. Decorative. They can’t furnish the empty rooms of our conversation. But the phone rings and he’s two thousand miles away so all we have to work with are words. I can’t hug him. Smile at him. See how big he’s growing. The growth that’s cruel irony, a blind, relentless message inscribed in his genes, shoving him into the body of a man whether he stands on the sunlit deck of an ocean liner or is curled in the dark comer of a cell.

  We cannot talk, yet we are momentarily connected. Wouldn’t the time we’re allotted be better spent singing, crying, screaming through this instrument? I can hear his hand gripping. I can feel the power. Then he relaxes, his fingertips brushing and stroking the phone absentmindedly, adrift in some inner space where he retreats while I recite ball scores and game highlights, repeat what he’s heard many times before. Small talk. My paltry news. The family’s weather. Does any of it get his attention? He hears me. Responds on cue. I can’t tell what engages him. When he’s just being polite. Sometimes when I ask too much, he’ll cut in and end the call. He’ll say, I better go now. They’re telling me my time’s up.

  Nothing is more painful than the phone ringing and finding him there at the other end of the line, except finding him not there, the sound of the phone call ending, the click, the silence rushing to fill the void words could
n’t.

  A Monday night in bed. Push-button scanning of all available channels, flipping, clicking, twenty-nine cable options and none satisfactory so you choose them all and choose none, cut and paste images, you are the director, driver, pilot, boss hoss, captain, the switch is in your hand. Or rather you grip the remote-control gadget with a desperate love-hate possessiveness that melds it to your palm. Your toy. Your game. Part of the fun of the game is the woman beside me who claims she doesn’t enjoy clicking around the channels, who’s screaming even as she silently indulges my flashes forward and flashes backward and fast shuffles and digital displays popping and muting, exploring every function the gun in my hand allows. She screams without uttering a sound: Don’t touch that dial. And in a way I don’t. We’re in bed. The Sony’s ten feet away. I can round first base and scoot into second and slide through a cloud of dust into third without getting my uniform dirty. A city burns on the screen. Any large city. Anywhere in America. CNN. Cable News Network. Row houses in flames. Rooflines silhouetted against a dark sky. Something’s burning. We watch. Wonder whose turn it is now. Whole city blocks engulfed. It must be happening in another country. A war. A bombing raid. We’re watching a Third World shantytown where there’s no water, no machines to extinguish a fire. Flames, true to metaphor, do leap and lick. The sky retreats, jerks away like a hand from a hot stove. We are curious. We are impatient for the voice-over to tell us what to think. Where? When? Why? What? We’d be on the edge of our seats if we were on seats and not lounging in our waterbed in Laramie at 9:05 P.M. with nothing better to do than play this spin-the-bottle sweepstakes of the dial. But here it was, a jackpot consuming all our attention. Philadelphia.

  Philadelphia.

  West Philly. Osage Avenue.

  Shit. We used to live in West Philly. On Osage Avenue. Osage can you see by the night’s early firelight. Our old row house somewhere in there, down in the darkness of the silhouette’s belly. Long camera shots preferred, sustained. Aerial views, probably from a copter. Perhaps the blaze is too hot to approach any other way.

  Details are skimpy. Or we’ve missed them this time round. They’ll return because news is cycled and recycled endlessly on this network. What we don’t know always carries the potential to harm us, and we know just enough to believe that, so we stay tuned for further developments. Now we bring you a word from our sponsor. But such courteous, ponderous, time-consuming transitions are a thing of the past. Cut. Cut to whatever, wherever with electronic speed. Warp drive. Chiquita and her banana shoved in your face faster than you can rub the smoke from your eyes. What’d he say? The announcer. Sixty-second and Osage? Powelton Village? That’s not Powelton. Too far west for Powelton, isn’t it? But the conversation has switched to a woman pulling the oars of a rowing machine. Where’s she going? What’s she wearing? A miracle fabric or did somebody paint the bitch, brush a shiny second skin over her big boobs and tight butt mashed down into a funny valentine on the bicycle seat of the rowing machine? Do you receive one like her with each purchase? There’s the price, sixty twice, then the number you must call to order right away.

  Somebody’s talking who doesn’t know Philly.

  Pneumatic woman’s gone faster than I could punch her away with my magic twanger. A set of bamboo pots and pans, watertight, indestructible and a wok thrown in free if you call now. Which is May 13, 1985, the day after Mother’s Day. I remember that. Remember it as well as I recall the lump of remote-control device in my sweaty palm.

  We’re both riveted. The channel riveted. We are all set in stone. Judy stops telling me, Don’t touch that dial. She’s having it her way this once without a fuss or fight. We both wonder what the fuck’s going on. Why is Philadelphia burning? How do I know what she’s thinking? Why do I assume I do? Her left breast, the one closest to me, or closer, since it’s one of a pair, slouches brown nubbed and complacent, doing its own thing. If I touched it or bit it, would I learn what it was thinking? Sexy. I think it’s sexy now, paying no attention to itself. Leaving me to make something of it. Whatever. Wherever. Many colors. Many ages coded in this plump breast that is part of this woman, part of this scene which includes the image of a city where we once lived, burning, somewhere, for some reason. Burning in other bedrooms. In other cities. International coverage. I heard later from a friend who said he saw it same moment, same day in Japan. Instantaneous satellite spy-in-the-sky transmission everywhere. So much happening at once. Impossible to keep up. Even if you spin the dial till the colors run together and the tigers melt chasing each other’s tails. But Sambo’s always caught in the middle of the ring. Puzzled. Appalled by the unforeseen consequences of his good intentions.

  In the stillness of our bedroom her breast registers as deep silence. She sighs, extension of the breast, the breast under which she hides in a cage of ribs her heart. One of my ribs, so they say. Never thought to ask which one. To claim it. Many colors. Years coded. Flashing across the screen of this dark room. Forward and backward. On my desk a snapshot of her at fourteen, sweater girl. Pointy, warrior bra that pulls her tits high on her chest. Saluting what? Patient for decades, waiting to relax into this natural, perfect, nubby pout. Flesh after all. Sighs when unbound. Rib bones delicate as rib bones when I trace them with my fingertip and she is fragile as the straw where you might stash eggs for safekeeping and why not think of her chest as a nest, her breasts pouched there for whatever subtle reasons. She is a tree full of nests. Nests of spun light. Nimbus. Swirls of light in branches if you are melancholy and can’t sleep and walk Philly streets at night, look up and you’ll see what I mean, you’ll see wreaths of light, halos in bare branches above the streetlamps. Painterly swirls symmetrically gathering light, spinning it, casting it. Her dark hair used to be long enough to cover her breasts. Now it only reaches the first swell where the flesh softens and understands exactly what it’s supposed to do next. Furrows below her shoulders, bones joined at her throat. I pull her silver-threaded hair forward so it drapes the first soft swelling. I run my finger up and down, up and down, curling the ends, learning the texture of fleece, the insistence of flesh beginning to pile up and form a breast. She was younger once and so was I and our whole history’s contained in glances. In leftovers and new puzzling mounds and creases that we can’t work into other stories. Once upon a time. This time, this age when we huddle under the covers and imitate ourselves as children playing in other rooms, other cities. All over again. Safe the way our children once were safe. Leftovers and remnants and day-old goods tasting stolen and better than ever some nights. Other nights the edginess, the anger, the sense of loss, the fear, so I flip-flop, ply the channels like a ghost, waiting for something to watch.

  That’s how I learned about the Philadelphia fire.

  Giacometti: The more I looked at the model, the more the screen between his reality and mine grew thicker. One starts by seeing the person who poses, but little by little all the possible sculptures of him intervene. The more a real vision of him disappears, the stranger his head becomes. One is no longer sure of his appearance, or of his size, or of anything at all. There were too many sculptures between my model and me. And when there were no more sculptures, there was such a complete stranger that I no longer knew whom I saw or what I was looking at.

  Say the word father. Now say son. Now think of the space between father and son, as they are words, as they are indications of time and the possibility of salvation, redemption, continuity. Think of these two words in natural order and sequence. One comes before the other, always, forever. And yet both must start somewhere, in order to begin one must break in, say one or the other, father or son, to begin. The mystery of their connection is that either word will do. I am the son of my father. I am father of my son. Son’s father. Father’s son. An interchangeability that is also dependence: the loss of one is loss of both. I breathe into the space separating me from my son. I hope the silence will be filled for him as it is filled for me by hearing the nothing there is to say at this moment. I hope saying no
thing is enough to grip the silence, twist it to our need. Which is holding on, not letting go. My breath in him. This temporary contact fallen into silence, into listening for the other’s silence. Not because it is enough but because it’s all we have.

  Gospel at Colonus: Thanks, Frank, for the tickets. The show was great. I’m haunted by the scene in which the old king, blind and weary, led by his daughters who’ve become his eyes, finally reaches the walls of a city that will grant him sanctuary. He’s amazed and grateful to discover dust that will accept his dust without complaint, without conditions, without demanding long speeches from him concerning the wretchedness of his history, the horrors that turned his eyes to stone. The lifting of his burden—incest, murder, exile—is palpable in the music. Oedipus floats, almost kicks up his ancient swollen heels.