by Mark Helprin
“Muffled by what?” she asked, her eyes filled with distant flashes.
“Clouds.”
“Why can’t we hear it?”
“It’s too far away. The sound dissipates, but the light doesn’t. That’s why, even were I allowed, I would not go into politics, where, in contradiction of all nature, the reverse is true.”
Fredericka knew that Freddy had thought a great deal about physical science. He frequently spoke to her in terms she didn’t understand, like foot-pounds and joules, which as far as she knew were coupons for buying shoes, and what you wore to important ceremonies. He somehow seemed to be able to predict where things would land, what the weather would be, or how long a mechanical part would endure. So, as she usually did, she asked him what would happen. At that moment, the radio woke up.
“Centennial Two to Control.” Switch-over was accompanied by loud snaps and clicks as the background static commemorated every distant lightning flash.
“Control by, Centennial Two.”
“Report lightning, heat, three hundred and sixty degrees. Three six zero degrees. Range approximately one hundred miles, a hundred and twenty to two hundred flashes per minute. No apparent movement. Over.”
“Read you, Two. Further?”
“Negative. Two out.”
“Roger, Two. Control out.”
And so it went, in desultory fashion, every tower making its report. Freddy, meanwhile, had set up the transit, and by the time he was ready to answer Fredericka’s question, had recorded the heights and bearings of the flashes above the horizon. “Either,” he said to Fredericka, “it will move over us, retaining its shape, or it will move over us, the shape collapsing, or it will fill in around us, which would be inexplicable.”
“Why weren’t we given a heads-up when this damned thing was in Oregon?” one of the towers asked.
The answer came immediately. “It was never in Oregon. It was never anywhere. It started here.”
“Like this?” was the incredulous reply.
Freddy again consulted the transit, made some calculations, and went on the radio. “Good morning, Control, Centennial Seven here.”
“Centennial Seven, Control by.”
“I’ve charted the expansion of the storm, and it appears that the circle in which we find ourselves at the moment is filling in at approximately eight miles per hour. By nightfall or earlier we should be under intense bombardment. Over.”
“Thank you, Seven. I’m going to check the Snake and Yellowstone to see if I can find anything about this. Will be back in a short time. Over, out.”
“Oh, Freddy,” Fredericka said, in the sad and noble tone that women can produce when something terrible is about to happen. “What will we do?”
“We’ll take cover on a hillside, in the lee of some rocks. It’s just a storm.”
“Have you ever seen such a storm?”
“No.”
Then came a report on the radio. The lightning was dry. The fantastically thick mass of gunmetal-coloured clouds had held back their emotion in favour of a barrage of light. This changed everything. All the towers were now fully awake and preparing. The Forest Service had announced that it would mobilise everyone and call for as much help as it could get, but throughout the West fire crews were already working at full tilt. What awakened the watchers in the towers to a fervent pitch was that they knew that as the storm moved through it would drop fires like incendiary bombs. Fires would begin everywhere, evenly, almost simultaneously. There would be no front, no directional trend, no untouched areas, no refuge. The only question was how long it would take until the circles of fire joined and everything came alight. For the observers and the young fire crews, most of whom were summer hires, the world was about to change. No one backed off or away, but all understood that, for some, the courage they showed would be their last memorial.
AS THE STORM filled their lake of peaceful air, the show of lightning grew more spectacular. Though the clouds from which it shot maintained altitude, in closing they seemed to rise up. What had first been visible as a kind of volatile grassfire, made low and linear by perspective, was now a cirque of overspilling clouds from which lightning leapt as if in irritation. The wind howled so fiercely that Freddy and Fredericka decided to leave the tower, for fear that it would be lifted like an umbrella or simply blown apart.
They packed furiously, though with less speed than they might have. Freddy knew that in battle, or its equivalent, slowing down one’s reactions as much as one could afford made them more reliable and precise, while at the same time depriving panic of its most potent fuel. Although this tactic came naturally to him now, when first he had employed it, in the Falklands, when a group of SAS he was leading came under mortar and heavy machine-gun fire, it had been quite deliberate. Now, in advance of the lightning, the thunder of which they had begun to hear, Fredericka rushed, her hands flailing to get things in her pack, and Freddy seemed maddeningly slow.
“Freddy!” she yelled. “Let’s go! Pack!”
“Fredericka?” he asked calmly.
To mock him, she slowed for a moment, and in imitation she said, ever so slowly, “Yes, Freddy?”
“I believe you’ve packed wrongly.”
“Have I!”
“Put in only a third as much food as you have—on the bottom. Then put the first-aid things. Then put in the water, leaving space only for the flame shelter, which should be at the top. Strap the axe and the shovel to the sides, and bring water in as many bottles as you can carry on the belt.”
“What about the sleeping bag?” she asked.
He shook his head, rejecting it.
“What about clothes?”
He did the same. “Put electrolytes in the water,” he commanded.
“I hate them,” she said.
“Just think of all the lovely tastes you will taste for the rest of your life if you live. When you drink it, the water that is now cool will be almost as hot as tea. Everything vital in you will begin to evaporate.”
“Come now, Freddy. Do you really think. . . .”
“Fredericka,” he said, “the forest has been for years harvesting and storing the energy of the sun. Encased within the pines that make the ocean-like noise when the wind blows through them are trillions and trillions of BTUs, waiting for the liberation of a single spark, much less a thousand lightning bolts. That’s why we’re here.”
“BTUs?” Fredericka asked. “What are BTUs?”
“British thermal units.”
“British?” Fredericka asked, forgetting her panic. “Isn’t that carrying things a bit too far, Freddy? Yes, you are who you are, and I am who I am, but how do you expect me to believe that this forest in the middle of nowhere is loaded up to the gills with British thermal units? Isn’t that a trifle self-centred for someone who is always accusing me of narcissism?”
“Not for a long time, now,” he said. “It’s gone.”
She was pleased. “Are you sure they’re not French thermal units?”
“They don’t have thermal units, they just have cheese.”
“Freddy, the way the world seems to belong to you astonishes me every day. Aren’t we going to take the Iliad?”
“Of course not,” he said as he continued to pack. “It’s in libraries. And even were it not in libraries. . . . Do you remember the fire at Windsor? I was the first inside. It was so hot that I had only a few seconds before I left or perished. I was trying to decide which was the greatest painting, so I could save it, and then guess who showed up, twisting about my feet like an ecdysiast?”
“Who?”
“Urqhart.”
“Urqhart!” Fredericka exclaimed. “What did you do?”
“You know what I did. He lives. I took him up in my arms, and left the paintings. It was easy. Even in school, when the question was posed, I knew the answer without doubt.”
“The cat.”
“He was alive. I looked at him, and in that moment, surrounded by fire, I saw a work
greater than any work man has ever made. What artist has made an eye so deep and lively? Or a thing that moves with such grace? The paintings are gone, although we have a record of them, and Urqhart lives even if just for the moment. I was quite comfortable in my choice.”
“Freddy, if they knew, they’d crucify you. You, the heir to the royal pictures, a controversialist of aesthetics.”
“To hell with them,” he said. “My guess is that Lord Clark would have done the same. He knew a masterpiece when he saw it, and so do I.”
Then came a concussion of thunder following immediately upon a near and blinding bolt of lightning. Recovering, Freddy said, “An endorsement.”
EVEN AT RISK of lightning strike, Freddy tried to call the Forest Service and Lucia, but the last bolt had killed the radio. As they opened the door to the stairs, the wind came in as if to levitate the roof, but succeeded only in blasting the pages of the Iliad into weightless commotion, which made those airy quarters look like Freddy’s four-foot-wide confetti-filled water globe of Windsor in a snowstorm. Descending, they saw dry lightning out to the horizon, each strike, like a corn driller, planting a seed of fire. When lightning hit areas that already were burning, the trees near the impact exploded. It was an artillery barrage on an unlimited front, with neither lines, corridors, nor areas that remained untouched. By the continually flashing light, which never abdicated to darkness but varied like a rising and falling wave, they saw that the forest was covered in a haze of white smoke.
“Nothing will be left,” said Fredericka as they made their way into the choking air.
“Only rock and ash, and perhaps the steel structures if the wind doesn’t bellow the fire and melt them down.”
“Can this fire melt steel in the open?” she asked.
“People think that a forest fire burns cool, but if the wind is strong it’s like a blast furnace.”
“If it melts steel,” she said, almost indignantly, “what about us?”
“There are a few things we can do—finding the lee of hills, rocky areas, and lakes; short immersions in the lakes; the fire shelters. Perhaps we can be airlifted from H1, if we can find it.”
They had a fairly good idea of where they were as they moved at a fast pace through the smoke. “Why not just go to the middle of the lake at H1?” Fredericka asked, referring to their evacuation point, a lake in a deep valley with a little prairie of ten or fifteen acres at its western end.
“If the wind were blowing the heat across the water, because of the flat surface it would leave no pockets of cooler air as it would blowing across obstructions on the ground. When you came up for air, it might kill you. In some conditions, the top layer of water boils.”
“Did you know this when you brought us here?”
“Fredericka, almost since the beginning of time, a well ordered line of succession has allowed kings and other royals to gravitate to peril as a bee flies to the rose.”
“Yes, but I’m not a bee, and I can hardly breathe,” she said, coughing as they went through a ribbon of heavy smoke.
“Think of it as smoking a pipe.”
They came to an open ridge where many times they had watched the sky at night. Looking left, south-south-east, they saw a wall of fire climbing up the hill, driven neither by wind nor firestorm but by upwelling heat that led the flames from tree to tree. In the valley it had destroyed, spaces as large as city parks seemed like the interior of a coal stove, with planes of red and black pulsing like an animal breathing in its cave.
They went to the other side of the ridge, farther from H1 but cooler and less smoky. In the valley that fell off to their right, a dozen fires burned, still small. Fredericka had been afraid, but once in motion had lost her fear. “I feel,” she said, “as we weave between fires and exploding trees, that I’ve been here before.”
“If there’s a conscience of our race,” said Freddy, “you have. London was like this, Coventry, and Birmingham, and not for a night or two but for years. You were born to this, as I was. In some ways it’s the starting point; it’s home.”
The forest was completely covered in a pall of white, and walls of flame were everywhere combining and colliding like waves echoing off the sides of an agitated pool. Freddy and Fredericka went where they could. Backtracking sometimes, forced in unwanted directions, they were a false image of randomness, lost now in the darkness from which the lightning had disappeared, navigating by a hellish glow, breathing the rich and offensive smoke, ducking when terrified birds flew past them unknowing that were they to rise for long enough through the smoke they would break out into clear air and blue sky.
Very little daylight filtered through the pall, and by ten they had inhaled enough smoke and worked so hard in the heat that they no longer even thought in terms of night and day. They had finished the water in their belt canteens and now were drinking from the bottles in their packs. In the thick smoke and her fatigue, Fredericka had left her fire shelter behind in some unreachable place soon to be buried in ash. Freddy hadn’t noticed, and they walked on, trying to navigate as best they could to H1, which they knew they could reach if they met the river, which they would then try to ride down to the lake. Though at this stage of the fire the river would be cold, later it might steam like a kettle.
By the middle of the afternoon they were as black as coal miners, except for snowy crests of light-coloured ash that clung to them in outlandish designs, making Freddy, especially, look like one of the New Guinea headhunters he had mocked without restraint since the age of five. (Repeatedly criticised for this, he would say, “I’m sorry, but I have always and will always believe that hunting and killing people for food and displaying their shrunken heads as trophies is inferior to, let us say, garden parties or book discussions, or even the savagery of our wars, which we long not to tolerate and perfect but to condemn and escape.”) And whereas Freddy looked outlandish, Fredericka’s exhaustion and hollowed, soot-ringed eyes made her look like one of the tired and defeated women in a photograph by Dorothea Lange.
They reached the river, which was still cool, and waded in until they were lifted and pulled away by the current. “How do you know there isn’t a waterfall?” Fredericka asked. Her hair was washed clean of ash, her eyes cleared, her body cooled, her voice revived.
“If there is, pray that the pool beneath it is deep, and don’t let the backwash pull you under.”
“How?” she called across the washboard of swiftly flowing water.
“Swim to the side, not against the force holding you back.”
“How will I know?”
“You’ll know,” was all he said before involuntarily taking a mouthful of water. In its centre, the stream flowed rapidly, as if it were panicked by the burning forest.
Swept along, they stubbed their toes and bumped against rounded boulders beneath them. The river sometimes slowed and sometimes sped up, but on average it flowed at about twelve miles per hour. In half an hour, then, they travelled six miles, which seemed a good way to move through a burning forest. In fact, it was so much a triumph over circumstance that they were elated, especially after they passed through lines of fire that would have killed them had they been on foot.
“This is almost,” said Freddy, “as if we are being conveyed from hell.”
But soon they saw directly downstream a flat line complicated only by a mist of falling water. They tried desperately to cross the flow, but after only a few seconds Freddy understood that they would have to go over. “Save your strength,” he said. As they rushed toward the edge that would launch them into the void, they linked arms.
It was too quick even for crying out. As they went over, he looked at her, in those parts of a second just before they knew they would be separated, with the kind of certain love that she might have specified had she had hours to think of the requirements. And then the deepest bond that they had ever had was set permanently as the force of the water pulled them apart.
Anxiety before a fall is a terrifying thing, but in
the air, as seconds pass, it vanishes into joy. Everything comes clear, wounds are healed, regrets instantly addressed, complications smoothed, desires satisfied, and gravity seemingly defied even in its triumph. As they fell in the column of water and mist, they neither suffered nor feared, in an instant of perfection such as few will ever know until the end.
And it might have marked a change in the long line of succession had not the falls been only sixty feet high and the pool beneath them very deep. They fell through a froth of water and air into a fast-moving wave that shot them forward as if from a bow. And then they found themselves once more riding the river, feetfirst, alive, packs floating easily because of the empty water bottles inside. They were as alert as hunted deer. On Fredericka’s left, Freddy reached out to her with his right arm, and she took his hand.
AT THIS TIME of summer in England, between the short season of croquet parties and the cruise on Britannia, a hundred types of flowers would be blooming in the gardens of Moocock alone, newly mulched with fragrant Scandinavian cedar bark. The new summer-weight blazers and cool shirts would have arrived long before. Freddy would delight in a particular kind of day in London when everyone was on holiday, the parks were empty, the streets quiet, and a stretch of summery blue weeks was surprisingly interrupted by a light-saturated mass of grey cloud that hovered in a flat ceiling over the city, touching it with autumn. In northern latitudes the light had to blaze to keep summer spinning, and the moment it ceased or faltered it made for remembrance of the other seasons. That was when Freddy liked to go alone to his offices and work, knowing that the road outside was nearly deserted.
As they were swept downriver in a world of smoke and heat, and he was thinking of days like that in civilisation, confused and pathetic deer, bear, raccoon, and mountain lion lined the banks in numbers such as he had never seen except on the Serengeti or in the zoo. Pushing in from both sides, the fires had raked the forest of all things living, and they, stopping at the water, probably would die there rather than conceive of the river as a way out.
