Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  He heard a tapping at the window. Christina again. He moved from his bed to the window expecting her face but when he pulled back the curtain Tyler’s face peered back at him instead, his hair obscured by a knit hat, his breath fogging the glass.

  Matt pulled open the window. What the fuck are you doing here?

  Hello to you, too. Jesus Christ.

  What, you don’t call for days? And now you want to come in?

  Tyler climbed inside and stood in the middle of Matt’s room, hands balled into cold fists. His coat still on and filled with the scent of recently smoked cigarettes. Look, I’m sorry, he finally said. He glanced at Matt. For all of it. For everything.

  That’s not good enough.

  What do you want me to say?

  I want to hear you say it. I want to know what you’re sorry for.

  Tyler closed his eyes in frustration. He kept his coat on. Strands of hair crept from beneath his hat.

  I’m sorry I left you there. He looked at Matt straight on. It wasn’t my intention. I freaked out. It wasn’t that we’d be caught together. It was that I didn’t know what to do.

  None of us knew what to do. But I wouldn’t have left you there.

  Do you think anyone knows how to react in a situation like that? You’re not a fucking saint, Matt. We’re all failing. We’re all fumbling our way through all of this.

  Matt felt himself soften, a slackening that made him angry.

  Tyler had no right. Tyler had left him.

  Tyler was human and fallible, like anyone else.

  You’re ashamed of me, Matt said. You can’t even say what we are to each other.

  Tyler stepped toward him. Have you ever even been to my house? Do you know why I’m always here, why I come to your window like this, why you’re never there?

  Matt thought of the number of times Tyler had found his way through the backyard, the tapping he’d grown used to across the past summer, the certainty that Tyler was waiting outside. He thought of his father’s words: a lack of supervision. How his parents never knew of Tyler’s tapping but would surely know it if Matt left the house, would hear him traveling through the kitchen and out the side door, would hear the ignition of his car turning. How he’d never considered why Tyler left his own house, what it was that he was leaving. How Matt’s own father had turned away from him but still cared for him in the end, a kind of love that was brittle but enough.

  I don’t come from where you come from, Tyler said. What you want. It’s not easy for me to say out loud.

  You could’ve told me that, Matt said. He heard it already in his own voice, a sharpness rounding off, something quieting.

  What is there to say? There’s nothing to say. I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to know where I come from.

  Matt felt himself beside Tyler. He was there and his body fought it, a learned flinching. But he couldn’t help himself. Couldn’t stop his hand from gripping Tyler’s coat and sliding it off. What Tyler had done, a small scarring. So much smaller than the specter of someone at school, someone capable of knifing through the heart of an entire town. Tyler pulled back his hat, his hair a shagged mess beneath.

  I’m sorry, Tyler said.

  Matt let the words find their place.

  And then Tyler’s mouth was upon his, familiar tongue, the faint taste of smoke. Tyler’s mouth was on his and Matt closed his eyes and let himself go, let all of it go only hours before, according to the time recorded in the newspaper the following morning and across the news stations, Midvale County police responded to a call sometime in the night, as Tyler crept his way through the sidewalks and back to his house, that another house was burning, the emergency of Alexis Thurber’s home on fire.

  FIRE CRISIS

  Fifth House Burns; Authorities Seek Answers

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2003

  ST. LOUIS, MO—A house fire, the fifth in a string of residential fires across eleven days, claimed one life early Wednesday morning within the Pensacola Apartment complex in the 1400 block of Dartmouth Avenue in Midvale County. Firefighters responded to a neighbor’s call at 2:23 a.m. Wednesday morning and observed smoke pouring from the windows of a third-story apartment, the top floor in the building’s 32-resident complex. The fire required 25 fire personnel, including police officials from nearby Hamilton County as well as FBI representatives on the scene, and was finally extinguished at 3:14 a.m. All other residents evacuated the building, some treated for smoke inhalation though none were injured. According to police officials, the victim has been identified as Kevin Thurber, 36, father of Alexis Thurber, 16, who perished in the Lewis and Clark shooting.

  “It’s unbelievable,” said Marcus White, a next-door neighbor who stood in the Pensacola’s parking lot as fire officials battled the flames. “He was a nice guy, a good father. Losing a daughter is enough. We’ve all had enough.”

  FBI officials were on the scene to determine the fire’s potential connection to Midvale County’s other home fires within the past week, all linked to families of Lewis and Clark High School victims. Firefighters and police officers combed the complex for indications of arson and scanned the crowd gathered outside of the complex for potential foul play. Neighbors heard no signs of struggle within the apartment and say Thurber lived alone.

  “It was just him and the girl,” said Arlene McCreary, a neighbor on the third floor who called the police when she smelled smoke in the hallway. “Nice people. Always said hello. They didn’t deserve this, any of this. We all just want to know what’s going on.”

  The fifth fire occurs amid public outcry over the cause of the fires and whether malicious intent is at play. Midvale County police, Midvale County fire officials, and FBI representatives are working together to locate a cause and put an end to the current atmosphere of fear. The cause of the fires is under continued investigation.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOME COMBUSTION

  FIRE CHARS WOOD at a rate of 1 inch per 45 minutes on each side of exposure. 1,400 degrees: the temperature it takes to burn through grain. A minimum temperature of 800 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit is needed to ignite any combustible beyond wood.

  Beware open windows, the drafts of which offer false points of origin. Beware wind, the pulling of air, large areas of damage made to look like a source.

  Beware the kitchen. Beware oil. Vegetable, animal, fish, linseed, corn, olive, sunflower: every oil except mineral, the potential to ignite spontaneously.

  Beware charcoals. Hickory. Oak. Ash. All impulsively sparked to flame.

  Let a guard fall away only with gas burners, for even every burner activated full blast leaves no room for combustion due to drafts, due to cracks in windows and between floorboards and among bricks and the gaps of screened windows, all keeping gas below the danger of a flash point, all leaking air from a home, imperceptibly, all of the time.

  Steer clear of thinking, for a second, that gas, oil, or oak is the cause.

  Known melting points: aluminum, 1,220 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Polystyrene: 266 degrees Fahrenheit. Copper: 1,083 degrees.

  Steel: 1,400. Ethyl alcohol: 1,540. Gasoline: 1,490. Stove propane: 1,778. Magnesium: 1,995. Glycerol: 550. Lead: 3,100. Water: 212. Salt: 1,470.

  Calcium, bone: 1,547.

  Human skin: the thinnest membrane.

  Human skin: just 162 degrees between flame and disintegration.

  LAMP, CARPET, CLOCK

  WE LEARNED THE news early, so few of us able to sleep fully through the night.

  We knew Alexis Thurber from our classes, a girl who’d run in other circles, a girl we remembered most vividly from Des Peres Elementary’s school-wide production of The Wizard of Oz when we were in sixth grade and the kindergartners were members of the Lollipop Guild and Mark Linehan was the Cowardly Lion and Colleen Zhu the Tin Man. Alexis Thurber: the Good Witch. How we remembered this in junior high when Alexis rounded bases early, when we knew nothing else of good or bad except who attracted boys and who lost their virginity f
irst. How we knew she harvested the attention of Russ Hendricks in high school, a boy with a temper. We knew little of her home life, only that her mother had passed away and that her father raised her alone in an apartment not far from school. We didn’t realize how young he was, only twenty when she was born, his age printed so clearly in the Post-Dispatch.

  The fire consumed the front-page headlines in thick print we turned away from after we couldn’t see it any longer, headlines and subheadlines that blurred together. We knew the paper would tell us nothing, that whatever officials knew they would manage it carefully to avoid mass panic. A panic we’d already felt rising across the previous day, another fire, police out in force on the streets and FBI vans swarming through our streets, agents and officers and a flood of reporters. Women in starched suits. Men in gelled hair. All of them waiting for the slightest shred of new information.

  The cicadas: gone. We awoke to silence, summer gone for good, so many chilled dusks that had at last swallowed their hum.

  We awoke to other news, stories we gleaned from back pages of the newspaper. The Yankees up by two in the World Series. Elliott Smith gone by suicide at only thirty-four, songs we associated with long drives and cornfields whipping past the car windows. The War on Terror: Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl confirmed killed by the principal mastermind of September 11. The security of Kabul unstable, according to United Nations forces in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch accusing U.S. troops of using excessive force against Iraqi civilians.

  We awoke to news that school was still on, always on, that we couldn’t afford to lose any more days. But something new: that counseling sessions would be mandatory, a missive from the Midvale County School District that a team of school therapists had been temporarily hired. That during academic labs every student would see a counselor for at least one required meeting to determine if further sessions might be needed, and to manage the stress of returning to school and the tension of an ongoing investigation.

  We awoke jaded. We awoke scared. We awoke fully devastated, news that even expected still fireworked through our skin. We awoke unsurprised. We awoke suspicious.

  We awoke imagining an apartment, a dark night, another incineration.

  NICK PORED THROUGH the latest news on his computer before school, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s online version and CNN’s website, his door closed and his family in the kitchen down the hallway. The language of every news story: ever vague. As vague as the language of flame colors and flash points, what Nick had stayed up researching long after he’d dropped Sarah off at her house and before he awoke and learned of Alexis’s father. The feel of Sarah’s body still pulled through him, the same pull of having entered the ocean as a child and feeling the waves roll through his skin for days after, a lulling of blood and water, the same tow of the moon. But he couldn’t stay away from his computer, a gnawing compulsion to follow every trail to its end. Mr. Albertson’s lecture: oxidation. Gas excitation. Atoms burst to heat, a rapid shift from low to high energy. A thought he’d returned to across dinner and across a night of television, a tongue worrying again and again the socket of a former tooth. He’d stayed up late, the monitor’s screen the only light glowing through his bedroom. He’d researched everything he could find that could stretch beyond the lectures of Mr. Albertson’s classroom, flame temperature and flash points and when the human body first ignites. He’d also looked at what Matt had told him in the cafeteria: organic materials. Fish oil. Mineral oil. Vegetable oil. What was left behind in a kitchen, what could be thrown aflame into a bedroom. What didn’t make sense at all, every home a demolition, an inferno so far beyond rags and bottles of cooking oil. Nick had let himself delve further online into the chemistry of fire, everything Mr. Albertson had said, everything surely inside the textbook he’d left inside his school locker. Line emission spectrum. Flame color. Hues corresponding to ignited compounds. Household items. Chemical accelerants, what Nick knew could be ruled out. Organic materials: canola oil. Oxygen and carbon.

  The fabric of human skin.

  Nick looked away from the computer and his gaze landed on the television, turned off in the corner of his bedroom. A late-night special beyond the bounds of evidence, research no one knew he’d done the night before. There was no shame, everyone asleep. No harm in bending beyond rationality for one more night. Nick leaned forward and opened a new browser and let himself call up the same websites he’d already seen, every case he could find on unexplained home fires. Conspiracy theorists and bloggers and wikis of speculation, the same kinds of sites he would’ve found if he’d looked up local paranormal investigation teams, ghost sightings with no empirical evidence. Testimonies thin as silk. Eyewitness accounts he could easily blast apart. But also credible sites: scientific sites. Sites using the terminology of research, the same as those explaining the process of gas excitation. Historical sites. News sites of the most recent cases. Web pages explaining the consequence of spontaneous burning.

  Self-ignition: organic. No evidence of accelerant or external cause.

  More than two hundred cases reported since the first in Italy in 1745, a countess drifting to bed early, the last anyone would see of her, and by morning a pile of ash but for the remaining evidence of her feet. 1806: An Essay on the Combustion of Humans, a treatise disseminated by French scientist Pierre Lair. Then a rash of cases taken up by American Prohibitionists as their championed cause: that alcohol was flammable, the root of spontaneous fires inside the bodies of those who drank. Most recent studies: trial experiments on the body’s production of certain chemicals when ill, organic compounds that in their toxicity were far more likely to burn.

  What didn’t make sense: in every case, there was always something left. A pair of shoes. Human hair. The charred remains of legs from the knee down. Not absolute disintegration. Not the eradication of an entire home. A complete combustion even more implausible than spontaneous burning due to the enormity of flame temperature it would take to burn an entire body and an entire home. The human body: 80 percent water. How difficult it would be to set fire to so much liquid. Bones in particular, too brittle to burn. How even crematoriums burning at 2,000 degrees wouldn’t diminish the body fully to dust. How only heat beyond 3,000 degrees could consume a human skeleton, what 250 years of spontaneous ignition couldn’t account for: the body reduced to ash, incinerated. Leaving nothing but the powder of cinders.

  And now, this morning: a new browser open to the morning’s terrible news. Alexis Thurber’s father. What none of the articles mentioned and what Nick knew the police would find: nothing left. He heard his family in the kitchen down the hallway, another day of school he felt reluctant to face. The night’s research still open on his computer in three separate tabs: spontaneous igniting. Gas excitation. Atoms displaced from one level of energy to another.

  Nick squinted at the three tabs of sites, still in his pajamas. Alexis Thurber’s apartment. Flames piling high into the night sky, smoke billowing across the entire complex. A parent’s grief. A father’s atoms, an entire life displaced inside his body.

  Displacement. Excitation.

  Nick sat forward in his chair.

  Self-ignition: an inescapable fever. Every organic compound readying to burn.

  Nick heard a knock at his bedroom door, breakfast waiting down the hallway, another day of high school beyond the kitchen. He closed down every browser.

  Self-ignition: heat rising beyond a bearable threshold.

  ZOLA WAS THE first of us to be pulled from her academic lab, her name called by an administrator at the door. She listened to the names of her peers and watched them slowly disappear from the room in alphabetical order, one by one, a fifty-five-minute class period for every one of them to speak to someone for a mandatory half hour. Her academic lab, its fallen students: likely flagged as one of the most crucial to file through sessions. When Zola’s name was finally called, she rose from her desk and resolved to stay silent.

  She followed the administrator down the hal
lway, a middle-aged man she’d never seen at Lewis and Clark. She watched his pant legs bunch and stiffen at the ankle as he shuffled down the corridor. He escorted her into a small room, one she’d have otherwise assumed was a janitorial closet. Its door opened to a tiny space with an industrial-looking couch and a lone desk seating a woman in a black pantsuit, her face turning in welcome.

  Come on in and sit down, she said. Zola sat on the couch beside a small table sparsely populated with items suitable for a therapy room: lamp, clock. A box of tissues.

  Please, call me Natalie.

  I don’t have much to say, Zola said bluntly.

  Natalie smiled. Everyone’s different. Some people have a lot to say—they want to talk about everything—and others aren’t sure where to begin.

  I know where to begin. I just don’t have much to say about it.

  Well, we have thirty minutes today to determine that. Why don’t we start with today’s news. How you feel about that.

  I don’t feel anything about it. The news is the same. It’s the same every day.

  Does it frighten you?

  It might have last week. Now I’ve just come to expect it.

  And how does that make you feel? That you’ve come to expect it?

  Zola met the therapist’s gaze. I know what you’re trying to get me to admit. So fine, I’ll say it. I can’t believe that this is the new normal.

  I’m not trying to get you to admit anything. I just want to know how you feel.

  That this is what we’ve come to expect? What we wake up to every day? I don’t know what you want me to say. That I feel good about it? No one does.