The Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

  Kirby’s partner now is a young man, Grady, just out of college. Kirby likes to use his intelligence when he fights a fire, rather than just hurling himself at it and risking getting sucked too quickly into its maw and becoming trapped—not just dying himself, but possibly causing harm or death to those members of his crew who might then try to save him—and for this reason Kirby likes to pair himself with the youngest, rawest, most adrenaline-rich trainees entrusted to his care—to act as an anchor of caution upon them, to counsel prudence and moderation even as the world burns down around them.

  At the fire in the house of antiques, Kirby and Grady had just come out to rest and to change oxygen tanks. The homeowner had at first been beside himself, shouting and trying to get back into his house, so that the fire marshal had had to restrain him—they had bound him to a tree with a canvas strap—but now the homeowner was watching the flames almost as if hypnotized. Kirby and Grady were so touched by his change in demeanor—the man wasn’t struggling any longer, was instead only leaning out slightly away from the tree, like the masthead on a ship’s prow, and sagging slightly—that they cut him loose so that he could watch the spectacle in freedom, unencumbered.

  He made no more moves to reenter his burning house, only stood there with watery eyes—whether tears of anguish, or irritation from the smoke, they could not tell—and, taking pity, Kirby and Grady put on new oxygen tanks, gulped down some water, and, although they were supposed to rest, went back into the burning building and began carrying out those pieces of furniture that had not yet ignited, and sometimes even those that had—burning breakfronts, flaming rolltop desks—and dropped them into the man’s back yard swimming pool for safekeeping, as the tall trees in the yard crackled and flamed like giant candles, and floating embers drifted down, scorching whatever they touched. Neighbors all around them climbed up onto their cedar-shingled roofs in their pajamas and with garden hoses began wetting down their own roofs, trying to keep the conflagration from spreading.

  The business of it has made Kirby neat and precise. He and Grady crouched and lowered the dining room set carefully into the deep end (even as some of the pieces of furniture were still flickering with flame), releasing them to sink slowly, carefully, to the bottom, settling in roughly the same manner and arrangement in which they had been positioned back in the burning house.

  There is no room for excess, unpredictability, or recklessness; these extravagances cannot be borne, and Kirby wants Grady to see and understand this, the sooner the better. The fire hoses must always be coiled in the same pattern, so that when unrolled the male nipple is always nearest the truck and the female farthest away. The backup generators must always have fresh oil and gas in them and be kept in working order; the spanner wrenches must always hang in the same place.

  The days go by in long stretches, twenty-three and a half hours at a time, but in the last half-hour, in the moment of fire, when all the old rules melt down and the new world becomes flame, the importance of a moment, of a second, is magnified ten-thousand-fold—is magnified to almost an eternity, and there is no room for even a single mistake. Time inflates to a greater density than iron. You’ve got to be able to go through the last half-hour, that wall of flame, on instinct alone, or by force of habit, by rote, by feel.

  An interesting phenomenon happens when time catches on fire like this. It happens even to the veteran firefighters. A form of tunnel vision develops—the heart pounding almost two hundred times a minute and the pupils contracting so tightly that vision almost vanishes. The field of view becomes reduced to an area about the size of another man’s helmet, or face: his partner, either in front of or behind him. If the men ever become separated by sight or sound, they are supposed to freeze instantly and then begin swinging their pikestaff, or a free arm, in all directions, and if their partner does the same, is within one or even two arms’ lengths, their arms will bump each other and they can continue—they can rejoin the fight, as the walls flame vertically and the ceiling and floors melt and fall away.

  The firefighters carry motion sensors on their hips, which send out piercing electronic shrieks if the men stop moving for more than thirty seconds. If one of those goes off, it means that a firefighter is down—that he has fallen and injured himself or has passed out from smoke inhalation—and all the firefighters stop what they are doing and turn and converge on the sound, if possible, centering back to it like the bats pouring back down the chimney.

  A person’s breathing accelerates inside a burning house, and the blood heats, as if in a purge. The mind fills with a strange music. Sense of feel, and memory of how things ought to be, becomes everything; it seems that even through the ponderous, fire-resistant gloves the firefighters could read Braille if they had to. As if the essence of all objects exudes a certain clarity, just before igniting.

  Everything in its place; the threads, the grain of the canvas weave of the fire hoses tapers back toward the male nipples; if lost in a house fire, you can crouch on the floor and with your bare hand—or perhaps even through the thickness of your glove, in that hyper-tactile state—follow the hose back to its source, back outside, to the beginning.

  The ears—the lobes of the ear, specifically—are the most temperature-sensitive part of the body. Many times the heat is so intense that the firefighters’ suits begin smoking and their helmets begin melting, while deep within the firefighters are still insulated and protected: but they are taught that if the lobes of their ears begin to feel hot, they are to get out of the building immediately, that they themselves may be about to ignite.

  It’s intoxicating; it’s addictive as hell.

  ***

  The fire does strange things to people. Kirby tells Mary Ann that it’s usually the men who melt down first—they seem to lose their reason sooner than the women. That particular fire in which they sank all the man’s prize antiques in the swimming pool, after the man was released from the tree (the top of which was flaming, dropping ember-leaves into the yard, and even onto his shoulders, like fiery moths), he walked around into the back yard and stood next to his pool, with his back turned toward the burning house, and began busying himself with his long-handled dip net, laboriously skimming—or endeavoring to skim—the ashes from the pool’s surface.

  Another time—a fire in broad daylight—a man walked out of his burning house and went straight to his greenhouse, which he kept filled with flowering plants for his twenty or more hummingbirds of various species. He was afraid that the fire would spread to the greenhouse and burn up the birds, so he closed himself in there and began spraying the birds down with the hose, as they flitted and whirled from him, and he kept spraying them, trying to keep their brightly colored wings wet so they would not catch fire.

  ***

  Kirby tells Mary Ann all of these stories—a new one each time he returns—and they lie together on the couch until dawn. The youngest baby, the boy, has just given up nursing; Kirby and Mary Ann are just beginning to earn back moments of time together—little five- and ten-minute wedges of time—and Mary Ann naps with her head on his fresh-showered shoulder, though in close like that, at the skin level, she can still smell the charcoal, can taste it. Kirby has scars across his neck and back, pockmarks where embers have landed and burned through his suit, and she, like the children, likes to touch these; the small, slick feel of them is like smooth stones from a river. Kirby earns several each year, and he says that before it is over he will look like a Dalmatian. She does not ask him what he means by “when it is all over,” and she holds back, reins herself back, to keep from asking the question, “When will you stop?”

  Everyone has fire stories. Mary Ann’s is that when she was a child she went into the bathroom at her grandmother’s house, took off her robe, laid it over the plug-in portable electric heater, and sat on the commode. The robe quickly leapt into flame, and the peeling old wallpaper caught on fire, too—so much flame that she could not get past—and she remembers even now, twenty-five years later, how her fath
er had had to come in and lift her up and carry her back out—and how that fire was quickly, easily extinguished.

  But that was a long time ago and she has her own life, needs no one to carry her in or out of anywhere. All that has gone away, vanished; her views of fire are not a child’s but an adult’s. Mary Ann’s fire story is tame, it seems, compared to the rest of the world’s.

  She counts the slick small oval scars on his back: twenty-two of them, like a pox. She knows he is needed. He seems to thrive on it. She remembers both the terror and the euphoria after her father whisked her out of the bathroom, as she looked back at it—at the dancing flames she had birthed. Is there greater power in lighting a fire or in putting one out?

  He sleeps contentedly there on the couch. She will not ask him—not yet. She will hold it in for as long as she can, and watch—some part of her desirous of his stopping, but another part not.

  She feels as she imagines the street-side spectators must, or even the victims of the fires themselves, the homeowners and renters: a little hypnotized, a little transfixed, and there is a confusion, as if she could not tell you nor her children—could not be sure—whether she was watching him burn down to the ground or watching him being born and built up, standing among the flames like iron being cast from the earth.

  She sleeps, her fingers light across his back. She dreams the twenty-two scars are a constellation in the night. She dreams that the more fires he fights, the safer and stronger their life becomes.

  She wants him to stop. She wants him to go on.

  They awaken on the couch at dawn to the baby’s murmurings from the other room and the four-year-old’s—the girl’s—soft sleep-breathings. The sun, orange already, rising above the city. Kirby gets up and dresses for work. He could do it in his sleep. It means nothing to him. It is its own form of sleep, and these moments on the couch, and in the shells of the flaming buildings, are their own form of wakefulness.

  ***

  Some nights, he goes over to Jenna’s house—to the house of his ex-wife. No one knows he does this: not Mary Ann, and not his ex-wife, Rhonda, and certainly not Jenna—not unless she knows it in her sleep and in her dreams, which he hopes she does.

  He wants to breathe her air; he wants her to breathe his. It is a biological need. He climbs up on the roof and leans over the chimney, and listens—silence—and inhales, and exhales.

  ***

  The fires usually come about once a week. The time between them is peaceful at first but then increasingly restless, until finally the dispatcher’s radio sounds in the night and Kirby is re-leased. He leaps out of bed—he lives four blocks from the station—kisses Mary Ann, kisses his daughter and son sleeping in their beds, and then is out into the night, hurrying but not running across the lawn. He will be the first one there, or among the first—other than the young firemen who may already be hanging out at the station, watching movies and playing cards, just waiting.

  Kirby gets in his car—the chief’s car—and cruises the neighborhood slowly, savoring his approach. There’s no need to rush and get to the station five or ten seconds sooner, when he’ll have to wait another minute or two anyway for the other firemen to arrive.

  It takes him only five seconds to slip on his bunker gear, ten seconds to start the truck and get it out of the driveway.

  There used to be such anxiety, getting to a fire: the tunnel vision beginning to constrict from the very moment he heard the dispatcher’s voice. But now he knows how to save it, how to hold it at bay—that powerhousing of the heart, which now does not kick into life, does not come into being, until the moment Kirby comes around the corner and first sees the flames.

  In her bed—in their bed—Mary Ann hears and feels the rumble of the big trucks leaving the station; hears and feels in her bones the belch of the air horns, and then the going-away sirens. She listens to the dispatcher’s radio—hoping it will remain silent after the first call, will not crackle again, calling more and more stations to the blaze. Hoping it will be a small fire, and containable.

  She lies there, warm and in love with her life—with the blessing of her two children asleep there in her own house, in the other room, safe and asleep—and she tries to imagine the future, tries to picture being sixty years old, seventy, and then eighty. How long—and of that space or distance ahead, what lies within it?

  ***

  Kirby gets her—Jenna—on Wednesday nights and on every other weekend. On the weekends, if the weather is good, he sometimes takes her camping and lets the assistant chief cover for him. Kirby and Jenna cook over an open fire; they roast marshmallows. They sleep in sleeping bags in a meadow beneath stars. When he was a child Kirby used to camp in this meadow with his father and grandfather, and there would be lightning bugs at night, but those are gone now.

  On Wednesday nights—Kirby has to have her back at Rhonda’s by ten—they cook hamburgers, Jenna’s favorite food, on the grill in the back yard. This one constancy—this one small sacrament. The diminishment of their lives shames him—especially for her, she for whom the whole world should be widening and opening, rather than constricting already.

  She plays with the other children, the little children, afterward, all of them keeping one eye on the clock. She is quiet, inordinately so—thrilled just to be in the presence of her father, beneath his huge shadow; she smiles shyly whenever she notices that he is watching her. And how can she not be wondering why it is, when it’s time to leave, that the other two children get to stay?

  He drives her home cheerfully, steadfastly, refusing to let her see or even sense his despair. He walks her up the sidewalk to Rhonda’s like a guest. He does not go inside.

  By Saturday—if it is the off-weekend in which he does not have her—he is up on the roof again, trying to catch the scent of her from the chimney; sometimes he falls asleep up there, in a brief catnap, as if watching over her and standing guard.

  A million times he plays it over in his mind. Could I have saved the marriage? Did I give it absolutely every last ounce of effort? Could I have saved it?

  No. Maybe. No.

  ***

  It takes a long time to get used to the fires; it takes the young firemen, the beginners, a long time to understand what is required: that they must suit up and walk right into a burning house.

  They make mistakes. They panic, breathe too fast, and use up their oxygen. It takes a long time. It takes a long time before they calm down and meet the fires on their own terms, and the fires’.

  In the beginning, they all want to be heroes. Even before they enter their first fire, they will have secretly placed their helmets in the ovens at home to soften them up a bit—to dull and char and melt them slightly, so anxious are they for combat and its validations: its contract with their spirit. Kirby remembers the first house fire he entered—his initial reaction was “You mean I’m going in that”—but enter it he did, fighting it from the inside out with huge volumes of water—the water sometimes doing as much damage as the fire—his new shiny suit yellow and clean amongst the work-darkened suits of the veterans.

  Kirby tells Mary Ann that after that fire he drove out into the country and set a little grass fire, a little pissant one that was in no danger of spreading, then put on his bunker gear and spent all afternoon walking around in it, dirtying his suit to just the right color of anonymity.

  You always make mistakes, in the beginning. You can only hope that they are small or insignificant enough to carry little if any price: that they harm no one. Kirby tells Mary Ann that on one of his earliest house fires, he was riding in one of the back seats of the fire engine facing backwards. He was already packed up—bunker gear, air mask, and scuba tank—so that he couldn’t hear or see well, and he was nervous as hell. When they got to the house that was on fire—a fully involved, “working” fire—the truck screeched to a stop across the street from it. The captain leapt out and yelled to Kirby that the house across the street was on fire.

  Kirby could see the flames coming o
ut of the first house, but he took the captain’s orders to mean that it was the house across the street from the house on fire that he wanted Kirby to attack—that it too must be burning—and so while the main crew thrust itself into the first burning house, laying out attack lines and hoses and running up the hook-and-ladder, Kirby fastened his own hose to the other side of the truck and went storming across the yard and into the house across the street.

  He assumed there was no one in it, but as he turned the knob on the front door and shoved his weight against it, the two women who lived inside opened it so that he fell inside, knocking one of them over and landing on her.

  Kirby tells Mary Ann that it was the worst he ever got the tunnel vision, that it was like running along a tightrope—that it was almost like being blind. They are on the couch again, in the hours before dawn; she’s laughing. Kirby couldn’t see flames anywhere, he tells her—his vision reduced to a space about the size of a pinhead—so he assumed the fire was up in the attic. He was confused as to why his partner was not yet there to help him haul his hose up the stairs. Kirby says that the women were protesting, asking why he was bringing the hose into their house. He did not want to have to take the time to explain to them that the most efficient way to fight a fire is from the inside out. He told them to just be quiet and help him pull. This made them so angry that they pulled extra hard—so hard that Kirby, straining at the top of the stairs now, was bowled over again.

  When he opened the attic door, he saw that there were no flames. There was a dusty window in the attic, and out it he could see the flames of the house across the street, really rocking now, going under. Kirby says that he stared at it a moment and then asked the ladies if there was a fire anywhere in their house. They replied angrily that there was not.