The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  But in a show, there’s also the implicit promise of safety, which is why it’s so unsettling when Evel Knievel crashes his motorcycle trying to jump the pool at Caesars Palace. (Were we supposed to see that?) That makes the atmospheric tests uncanny: although they purport to be mere performances, at least to the tourists lining the road, they’re actually planned disasters. Call it a test, but it’s a real atomic bomb. The clips I’m watching are snuff films, even though the ones killed are off camera, soldiers in their foxholes, downwinders asleep in St. George or Bountiful.

  It must have been alluring to think that going to see the bomb explode would be a lark. But in reality, it’s a flash-picture of how the world is likely to end. Why did the tourists go to see it? So they’d recognize the “real thing” when it came? (The one you’ve all been waiting for.) Now I think that disappointed witness—who wanted to see “something like the fire that consumed the world”—sensed the truth. She faced the test for what it was, a vision of destruction, and was disappointed, maybe in herself, for needing it to be more than what it seemed.

  And that other woman standing on News Nob, sunglasses fallen around her neck, what did she think? Did it comfort her that she wasn’t watching this alone? Maybe she caught the hands on either side of her; other fingers laced through hers, slender bones. And the soldier who set the stage when he nailed shingles to the Doom Town house. If he saw that house explode, did he think I did my part? Or What does it matter? Nobody lives there anyway.

  In an interview he gave Good Morning America in 1985, about six months before his death, Liberace meets Ron Reagan—the son of the president—and walks him backstage, through his dressing room at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. “Someone famous once said never criticize a man,” Reagan jokes, “until you’ve walked a mile in his rhinestone cape,” staggering beneath the sequined platinum-and-ebony cape’s weight. Then Liberace gives him a tour of his house on Shirley Street. It’s the same place from the TV specials I’ve watched, from the pool with the piano keys to the sunken bathtub with a special faucet just for bubble bath. From a mural overhead, Liberace’s disembodied face beams down at the bather. I think it’s terrific. Liberace leads Reagan through the house—really two ranch houses joined together by a Hall of Mirrors sort of like the one at Versailles, stuffed with antiques and froufrou and dogs—and as they sit across from each other on low sofas, Reagan says something to Liberace that I think gets at the heart of it all.

  Leaning forward, he says, “You know, I get the feeling that all of this that we see around us—the crystal, the porcelain and everything, your costumes—is really, to a large extent, a calculated effect. It’s not really you. You’re almost making fun of it at the same time—”

  And then Liberace interrupts him. “That’s right,” he says. “I discovered that you have to draw the line between the performer and the person.” Looking back, knowing now how close he was to the end of his life, I see something moving in this admission—as though, finally, he could admit that he’d been telling the truth but telling it slant, protecting himself ever since he put on that first shiny dinner jacket. “By now, my costumes have become a very expensive joke,” he says, looking away. In another interview, he said “I’m a product that I’ve created.” Does the show become reality, if repeated enough times? Hundreds of atomic devices exploded outside the city, most of them many times larger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Poison impregnated the air, and the sand, and the water deep below the desert floor. The excesses of Vegas come to seem like the perfect reaction to the destruction that bloomed on the northern horizon before dawn.

  Not long after I visited, the Liberace Museum closed. Some of its items have been showing up in online auctions: framed gold records, a sculpture of a sheep, even one of the Stars and Stripes costumes, hot pants and all. And recently I saw a video that a Vegas resident, an Elvis impersonator, had taken of the house on Shirley Street. The house sits empty, its iron gates bent and broken, and although the cameraman can’t get inside, when he places the lens up close to the window, it’s almost like you’re there. Through the glass, you can see the dim outline of the door to the master bedroom; over there is where the Hall of Mirrors must be. And in the foreground there’s the living room. In the 1985 interview it’s crammed with furniture, soft rugs, lamps on the fireplace hearth; in the middle of the shot, Liberace sits on the sofa. Without even trying, he’s the center of attention, pulling in everything in the room—furnishings, interviewer, camera crew; the audience at home; me, now, watching from years later and leaning in to hear him better.

  Then the interview ends. The house is in foreclosure. The empty living room looks cold even on the August afternoon of the video, the floor shiny as a stage, clean as a hospital.

  The audience expected something particular, and he gave it to them. But how it must have chafed. What if Liberace watched the test shots? I don’t have any evidence that he did—in his memoirs, he spends time describing his possessions, not reflecting on his inner life. But he spent a lot of time in Las Vegas during the atmospheric testing years, and it’s possible. Later he was known as a night owl, so maybe after one of his evenings at the Riviera, too wired to sleep, he drove out to the desert to watch the show. Put yourself in his shoes. Picture him standing there in the chill dark before dawn. Wrapped in a plain jacket, waiting, nobody watching, longing for something like the fire that consumed the world. Something to wipe all this clean, all the props borne along in a cloud of dust on the precursor-forming surface. They say it’s the most gorgeous thing you can imagine. You have to see it to believe it.

  The Measure of My Days

  (Buddy Holly Reprise)

  SOMEWHERE IN CERRO GORDO COUNTY, IOWA

  It was an old upright piano heavy enough to bow the floor where it sat. At one time it had been fronted with mahogany, but that was long gone, and you could see the guts clearly: hammers coated with dusty felt, wire-wrapped strings, tuning pegs marching down the soundboard of glued-together maple. I pressed a key and the hammer struck a flat, slow note. To be expected. Outside it was a hot afternoon in late July, but as far as I could tell, the power hadn’t been on in here since ’92. That’s a lot of winter nights cold enough to etch frost across the drafty old windows, make the maple pull tight and the pins contract. Now, midsummer, the old glue relaxes; gives up might be a better term.

  I was standing in an abandoned one-room schoolhouse with my friends, and we were lost. We’d been hunting for the field where Buddy Holly’s plane crashed and we’d gotten confused after one too many ROAD CLOSED signs. Backtracking down gravel roads, scaring up red-winged blackbirds and rooster tails of dust, passing farmhouses and NO HUNTING signs painted on old tractor tires, we happened upon this little white gable-roofed school at a crossroads and pulled over on a whim. Weeds grew through the steps but someone had broken down the door, and we stepped inside.

  There’s something about an old schoolhouse. Cooped-up kids, the necessary grind of times tables, pair alliances formed and severed. That would be enough. But this room held even more. Posters tacked to the walls said things like KEEP THE HEART OF LIBERTY BEATING: REGISTER & VOTE. The slips of paper on the floor were some kind of voter verification tickets. Hymnals were stacked on flip-top student desks. WE LOVE OUR MOMS AND DADS, someone had chalked on the board. Education, civics, God, family. A narrow box atop the piano held nails someone had set aside to save, and a ruler tucked inside a drawer said LORD MAKE ME TO KNOW THE MEASURE OF MY DAYS.

  We turned to go, and I picked up a copy of Sing Sociability Songs (1943, price 20¢) to steal away with me. Someone had written the singer’s name, Erwin P., on the top right corner in tidy, new-teacher hand. Together the chorus had learned, maybe, the words to all four verses of “The American Farm Bureau Spirit.”

  And even though I knew it was junk, I hated to leave that old piano behind. Someone needed to make it jump. “Brighten the corner where you are,” one of the Sociability Songs read. “Someone far from harbor you ma
y guide across the bar.” Said the preface, “Some who cannot sing may make a definite contribution by whistling.” All the songs that piano had played sunk traceless inside it now, stones dropped in a well.

  SURF BALLROOM, CLEAR LAKE

  I parted the heavy curtains and stepped onstage. The place was set up for a wedding reception, and the bride and groom’s table looked out over the dance floor, the blue-painted ceiling, the peonies floating in glass bowls. Buddy would have stood in this very spot that night, and the dance floor would have been packed with fans. I jumped down on the floor, nobody looking, and did a little twist. It felt good, the narrow-gauge maple springy beneath my sandals, even with “Rebel Rouser” on the speakers, and then “The Wanderer,” Yeah the wanderer, I roam around around around around.

  Relics lined the lobby. There was a copy of the lyrics to “La Bamba,” handwritten by Ritchie’s aunt; he wasn’t fluent in Spanish and needed her help. There was the pay phone where Buddy called Maria Elena for the last time, a framed note confirming his use. There was an invoice written in slanting ballpoint, revealing that it cost one hundred dollars for the “care, embalming, treatment, and delivery of body of Jiles P. Richardson to Mason City Airport. Paid in full February 4, 1959, Ward Funeral Home.” There was a pair of shiny black pilot’s headphones salvaged from the wreckage of the plane.

  All too much, and I headed backstage. Signatures covered the walls, all of them more recent than the crash. ZZ Top, Little Feat, the Kentucky HeadHunters. People left notes like “I’m humbled” and “It’s an honor to play here.” Three little steps led up to the stage door. Buddy would have stood here, checked his hair in the mirror, maybe hopped a little bit on the balls of his feet to get the blood moving. Then, on cue, he would have run up the steps without thinking much about it.

  Before leaving, I bought a piece of Original Maple Flooring (1948) in a clear plastic treasure box. The top of the wood was thickly waxed but the bottom was splintered where the sander didn’t reach. The cut edge smelled good, and you could see the tight parallel banding of the year rings. I counted seventeen, the same age as Ritchie.

  The four of them—Ritchie, Buddy, J.P., and the pilot, Roger Peterson—will always step up into the little plane, brush sleety snow from their shoulders, and pull the doors shut. The plane will always crank up, taxi down the runway, and disappear into the snow. That cannot change. What can change is what you make of it.

  It keeps pulling me back, that spot onstage where Buddy stood. The dance floor was full of unseen others, maple polished for them and tables laid, napkins pressed and folded, saltshakers close at hand. Booths lined the perimeter of the dance floor. Empty then, but later that night people would slide inside, set glasses on the linen-print Formica tabletops, laugh at the toast the best man would give. Then they would walk past the Buddy Holly telephone, disconnected years ago, and push through the double doors into the summer wind, rich with the smell of algae, that still blows in off Clear Lake. They’d make for the highway, driving past the convenience store sign spelling out REDEMPTION in tall red capitals.

  CRASH SITE

  Standing there in the soybeans, I couldn’t bring myself to feel much of anything. There was the fence, just like in the photographs. There was the memorial marker with the names and the dates. But most of the leavings looked like people had dug in their pockets and dumped what they didn’t need. Swipe-card room keys, bottle caps, pennies. A purple latex glove, guitar picks, a disintegrating plush monkey. And glasses, lots of them: sunglasses, half-moon reading glasses, 3-D glasses, knockoff Buddy Hollies they sell at the Surf for five bucks a pair.

  I’d wanted to leave an offering myself—a pinch of dusty dirt from Lubbock, a uranium crumb, an irradiated dime (circa 1959) from the lab at Oak Ridge, a hammer from that old schoolhouse piano. Nothing felt right. What we abandon, someone else must face. I stood beside the fence with my friends, whistling. That’ll be the day, ooh ooh, that’ll be the day. Little purple butterflies swarmed the path. After deer pee, I bet. They shivered and trembled, going about their business, consumed with the stuff of life.

  I turned the felted hammer over in my hands—a dropped tooth, useless on its own—and remembered a night from years before, in a city on the other side of the world. Dresden, shortly after reunification, a city marked even then by the firebombings of ’45. I had just finished college, and was working on a translation project with a group of people I’d never met before and haven’t seen since. We were staying in a Soviet-style apartment block with a basement common room and a heavy old upright in the corner. Like most things in that town the piano had seen hard use, and like the piano in the old schoolhouse its faceplate had been taken off. Something in us wants to watch the music happen, as if that might help make sense of the mystery.

  My friend drank too much; I knew it even then. He was a graduate student in musicology, and he played piano and destroyed bottles of cheap red like the tanks were coming for him. I remember tottering around the city one night, searching for the grave of Carl Maria von Weber; it eluded us, and it’s not like it moved.

  But on this night, my friend made his way over to the old upright and started playing. The basement was packed with people, and he played quietly at first. Chopin, messy, and then he played louder, pounding it out, big hands spread in chords that muscled up and down the keyboard. And even as he mumbled, I’m getting this all wrong, he kept going, skidding over fumbles to hit his mark, plastic cup of wine shivering on the piano’s top. Outside, the sausage man sold brats and Radeberger Pilsner, and all around us the room swirled with laughing people, but his playing carried over everything, the slurry conversations I barely understood, the street noise that came in when people opened the door for a welcome breath of air, the little Trabants careening down the boulevard as the long, bleached-out evening slid toward night.

  I used to pray for perfection; how flat that seems to me after watching him, his eyes fixed somewhere far away. I pushed my way through the crowd to the back of the piano and stared at his hands as they leapt and fell and stretched, knowing that the keys beneath his fingertips, cool at first, had warmed as he played, yielding and resisting and playing along with him on a song someone had written long ago, when the Frauenkirche still raised its dome beside the river and the Semper Gallery still sheltered Titian’s The Tribute Money and Liotard’s The Chocolate Girl inside its cool rooms. After all those stones were pulled down so that one was not left atop the other; after Chopin, the man who wrote this song, died far from home; after someone tucked a jar of dirt from Chopin’s homeland inside the coffin before sealing it—it must be there still, that soil he knew, mixed now with the dust he became—after all that, this song, still, this song. And someone liking the way it sounded and losing himself in playing it and hauling me along, gripping the back of the piano and willing time to stop as I listened clear through to the end.

  ACT TWO

  If we can’t fix it

  Nobody can!

  Destroy it.

  BUSINESS CARD,

  AUTOMOTIVE REPAIR SHOP,

  GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA

  The Lay of the Land

  Pickens County, South Carolina

  Head north out of town, veer right at the fork, and take it slow. No sense in rushing. The road’s gullied and steep, so tight there’s no centerline. As the grade climbs you’ll see little towns on the right and mountains on the left, but keep your eyes on the road. There at the summit you’ll find the fire tower. Park the car and make sure you lock it.

  And enter this memory with me. Of climbing the chain-link fence (sneaker toehold in each little diamond), holding down the barbed wire with one hand, pushing up and over, and landing down on the grizzled grasses on the other side. Dead rats, spray-painted pentagrams on the cinderblock toolshed. The tower’s steel struts burned cold but I held tight and swung my legs underneath me, soles of my Keds slipping on slick frost. I balanced on the V of the strut and edged up higher to where the steps started, flight after fli
ght, dry-rot wood greasy with ice. Walked on the edges where it was stable. The trapdoor opened with a cry and I boosted myself up and into the cabin.

  Stand here with me and feel cold wind on your face through the busted windows. Floor crunchy with a wicked little crush of shattered bottles. Rusty bolts worked loose by time.

  See mountains upon mountains, crumpled and old and quietly themselves, catching my heart, bumps and waves of green close by and in the distance purple and blue. Walnut Cove, Mount Chapman, Grassy Knob, Potato Hill. Country worked over time and again. Down in the pasture, braces of tied-up hound dogs moan.

  What if we could see further, see more? Rhododendron growing on the mountainsides, sourwood, laurel, a trillium that gives off a smell like rotting meat to lure pollinating flies. Under gneiss shelves live spiders that knit lampshade-shaped webs, black rat snakes excellent at tree-climbing, groundsel that sparks like tinder, the click beetle some say foretells death if you hear it ticking in the walls.

  Like in the walls of the house sitting empty beside a hook in the road. Silent oak tree and grass high as your pockets. In summer, moss turns the shingle edges to velvet and paper wasps nest in the windows. Iris corms push up neat blades, still obedient to the old woman who planted them shallow, remembering warm sun and the press of her fingertips on their papery sides.

  And as the years pass, wild grapevines tug the roofline slumped. Gelatinous light in green rooms. Kitchen cabinets lined with home-canned quarts of tomatoes, corn, chowchow. Nailed to the wall a calendar only a few years out of date. Sometimes a puddle of old blankets where someone slept or sleeps. Beside the back stoop, wild rose pushes crumpled silk from canes stubbed with thorns. Carpenter bee drills his perfect circle and dry dust sifts down. When frost comes, the pokeweed goes to slime. But the pile of sawdust still sits where the bee left it, tidy mound piled on the floor someone long ago painted white.