The Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

  He had to roll the hose back up—he left sooty hose marks and footprints all over the carpet—and by this time the house across the street was so engulfed and Kirby was in so great a hurry to reach it that he began to hyperventilate, and he blacked out, there in the living room of the nonburning house.

  He got better, of course—learned his craft better—learned it well, in time. No one was hurt. But there is still a clumsiness in his heart, in all of their hearts—the echo and memory of it—that is not that distant. They’re all just fuckups, like anyone else, even in their uniforms: even in their fire-resistant gear. You can bet that any of them who come to rescue you or your home have problems that are at least as large as yours. You can count on that. There are no real rescuers.

  Kirby tells her about what he thinks was his best moment—his moment of utter, breathtaking, thanks-giving luck. It happened when he was still a lieutenant, leading his men into an apartment fire. Apartments were the worst, because of the confusion; there was always a greater risk of losing an occupant in an apartment fire, simply because there were so many of them. The awe and mystery of making a rescue—the holiness of it, like a birth—in no way balances the despair of finding an occupant who’s already died, a smoke or burn victim—and if that victim is a child, the firefighter is never the same and almost always has to retire after that; his or her marriage goes bad, and life is never the same, never has deep joy and wonder to it again.

  The men and women spend all their time and energy fighting the enemy, fire—fighting the way it consumes structures, consumes air, consumes darkness—but then when it takes a life, it is as if some threshold has been crossed. It is for the firemen who discover that victim a feeling like falling down an elevator shaft, and there is sometimes guilt, too, that the thing they were so passionate about, fighting fire—a thing that could be said to bring them relief, if not pleasure—should have this as one of its costs.

  They curse stupidity, curse mankind, when they find a victim, and are almost forever after brittle.

  This fire, the apartment fire, had no loss of occupants, no casualties. It was fully involved by the time Kirby got his men into the structure, Christmas Eve, and they were doing room-to-room searches. No one ever knows how many people live in an apartment complex: how many men, women, and children, coming and going. They had to check every room.

  Smoke detectors—thank God!—were squalling everywhere, though that only confused the men further—the sound slightly less piercing, but similar, to the motion sensors on their hip belts, so that they were constantly looking around in the smoke and heat to be sure that they were all still together, partner with partner.

  Part of the crew fought the blazes, while the others made searches: horrible searches, for many of the rooms were burning so intensely that if anyone was still inside it would be too late to do anything for them.

  If you get trapped by the flames, you can activate your ceased-motion sensor. You can jab a hole in the fire hose at your feet. The water will spew up from the hose, spraying out of the knife hole, like an umbrella of steam and moisture—a water shield, which will buy you ten or fifteen more seconds. You crouch low, sucking on your scuba gear, and wait, if you can’t get out. They’ll come and get you if they can.

  This fire—the one with no casualties—had all the men stumbling with tunnel vision. There was something different about this fire—they would talk about it afterward—it was almost as if the fire wanted them, had laid a trap for them.

  They were all stumbling and clumsy, but still they checked the rooms. Loose electrical wires dangled from the burning walls and from crumbling, flaming ceilings. The power had been shut off, but it was every firefighter’s fear that some passerby, well meaning, would see the breakers thrown and would flip them back on, unthinking.

  The hanging, sagging wires trailed over the backs of the men like tentacles as they passed beneath them. The men blew out walls with their pickaxes, ventilated the ceilings with savage maulings from their lances. Trying to sense, to feel, amidst the confusion, where someone might be—a survivor—if anyone was left.

  Kirby and his partner went into the downstairs apartment of a trophy big game hunter. It was a large apartment and on the walls were the stuffed heads of various animals from all over the world. Some of the heads were already ablaze—flaming rhinos, burning gazelles—and as Kirby and his partner entered, boxes of ammunition began to go off: shotgun shells and rifle bullets, whole caseloads of them. Shots were flying in all directions, and Kirby made the decision right then to pull his men from the fire.

  In thirty seconds he had them out—still the fusillade continued—and thirty seconds after that the whole second floor collapsed: an inch-and-a-half-thick flooring of solid concrete dropped like a fallen cake down to the first floor, crushing the space where the men had been half a minute earlier, the building folding in on itself and being swallowed by itself, by its fire.

  There was a grand piano in the lobby and somehow it was not entirely obliterated when the ceiling fell, so that a few crooked, clanging tunes issued forth as the rubble shifted, settled, and burned: and still the shots kept firing.

  No casualties. All of them went home to their families that night.

  ***

  One year Rhonda tells Kirby that she is going to Paris with her new fiancé for two weeks and asks if Kirby can keep Jenna. His eyes sting with happiness. Two weeks of clean air, a gift from out of nowhere. A thing that was his and taken away, now brought back. This must be what it feels like to be rescued, he thinks.

  Mary Ann thinks often of how hard it is for him—she thinks of it almost every time she sees him with Jenna, reading to her, or helping her with something—and they discuss it often, but even at that, even in Mary Ann’s great lovingness, she underestimates it. She thinks she wants to know the full weight of it, but she has no true idea. It transcends words—spills over into his actions—and still she, Mary Ann, cannot know the whole of it.

  Kirby dreams ahead to when Jenna is eighteen; he dreams of reuniting. He continues to take catnaps on the roof by her chimney. The separation from her betrays and belies his training; it is greater than an arm’s length distance.

  The counselors tell him never to let Jenna see this franticness—this gutted, hollow, gasping feeling.

  As if wearing blinders—unsure of whether the counselors are right or not—he does as they suggest. He thinks that they are probably right. He knows the horrible dangers of panic.

  And in the meantime, the marriage strengthens, becomes more resilient than ever. Arguments cease to be even arguments, anymore, merely differences of opinion; the marriage is reinforced by the innumerable fires and by the weave of his comings and goings. It becomes a marriage as strong as a galloping horse. His frantic attempts to keep drawing clean air are good for the body of the marriage.

  Mary Ann worries about the fifteen or twenty years she’s heard get cut off the back end of all firefighters’ lives: all those years of sucking in chemicals—burning rags, burning asbestos, burning formaldehyde—but still she does not ask him to stop.

  The cinders continuing to fall across his back like meteors; twenty-four scars, twenty-five, twenty-six. She knows she could lose him. But she knows he will be lost for sure without the fires.

  She prays in church for his safety. Sometimes she forgets to listen to the service and instead gets lost in her prayers. It’s as if she’s being led out of a burning building herself; as if she’s trying to remain calm, as someone—her rescuer, perhaps—has instructed her to do.

  She forgets to listen to the service. She finds herself instead thinking of the secrets he has told her: the things she knows about fires that no one else around her knows.

  The way light bulbs melt and lean or point toward a fire’s origin—the gases in incandescent bulbs seeking, sensing that heat, so that you can often use them to tell where a fire started: the direction in which the light bulbs first began to lean.

  A baby is getting baptized up a
t the altar, but Mary Ann is still in some other zone—she’s still praying for Kirby’s safety, his survival. The water being sprinkled on the baby’s head reminds her of the men’s water shields: of the umbrella-mist of spray that buys them extra time.

  ***

  As he travels through town to and from his day job, he begins to define the space around him by the fires that have visited it, which he has engaged and battled. I rescued that one, there, and that one, he thinks. That one. The city becomes a tapestry, a weave of that which he has saved and that which he has not—with the rest of the city becoming simply all that which is between points, waiting to burn.

  He glides through his work at the office. If he were hollow inside, the work would suck something out of him—but he is not hollow, only asleep or resting, like some cast-iron statue from the century before. Whole days pass without his being able to account for them. Sometimes at night, lying there with Mary Ann—both of them listening for the dispatcher—he cannot recall whether he even went into the office that day or not.

  He wonders what she is doing: what she is dreaming of. He rises and goes in to check on their children—to simply look at them.

  ***

  When you rescue a person from a burning building, the strength of their terror is unimaginable: it is enough to bend iron bars. The smallest, weakest person can strangle and overwhelm the strongest. There is a drill that the firemen go through, on their hook-and-ladder trucks—mock-rescuing someone from a window ledge, or the top of a burning building. Kirby picks the strongest fireman to go up on the ladder, and then demonstrates how easily he can make the fireman—vulnerable, up on that ladder—lose his balance. It’s always staged, of course—the fireman is roped to the ladder for safety—but it makes a somber impression on the young recruits watching from below: the big man being pushed backwards by one foot, or one hand, falling and dangling by the rope: the rescuer suddenly in need of rescuing.

  You can see it in their eyes, Kirby tells them—speaking of those who panic. You can see them getting all wall-eyed. The victims-to-be look almost normal, but then their eyes start to cross, just a little. It’s as if they’re generating such strength within—such torque—that it’s causing their eyes to act weird. So much torque that it seems they’ll snap in half—or snap you in half, if you get too close to them.

  Kirby counsels distance to the younger firemen. Let the victims climb onto the ladder by themselves, when they’re like that. Don’t let them touch you. They’ll break you in half. You can see the torque in their eyes.

  Mary Ann knows all this. She knows it will always be this way for him—but she does not draw back. Twenty-seven scars, twenty-eight. He does not snap; he becomes stronger. She’ll never know what it’s like, and for that she’s glad.

  Many nights he runs a fever for no apparent reason. Some nights, it is his radiant heat that awakens her. She wonders what it will be like when he is too old to go out on the fires. She wonders if she and he can survive that: the not-going.

  ***

  There are days when he does not work at his computer. He turns the screen on but then goes over to the window for hours at a time and turns his back on the computer. He’s up on the twentieth floor. He watches the flat horizon for smoke. The wind gives a slight sway, a slight tremor to the building.

  Sometimes—if he has not been to a fire recently enough—Kirby imagines that the soles of his feet are getting hot. He allows himself to consider this sensation—he does not tune it out.

  He stands motionless—still watching the horizon, looking and hoping for smoke—and feels himself igniting, but makes no movement to still or stop the flames. He simply burns, and keeps breathing in, detached, as if it is some structure other than his own that is aflame and vanishing, as if he can keep the two separate—his good life, and the other one, the one he left behind.

  The Cave

  RUSSELL HAD QUIT HIS job as a coal miner on his twenty-fifth birthday, though still, five years later, he would occasionally spray flecks of blood when he coughed. But he was as big as a horse, and to look at him no one would ever have guessed that he was not completely healthy.

  Sissy knew it, as they had had numerous conversations, increasingly intimate, on their lunch and dinner dates during the last month, though she was keenly aware that there was much about him that she did not know, too. They were traveling a full day’s journey from Mississippi to West Virginia to visit the country where Russell had once worked and to go canoeing there.

  Sissy was both excited and nervous; they had left Mississippi long before the sun had risen, and all day she had been filled with the feeling that the day was like a present that was waiting to be unwrapped.

  By early afternoon they had passed through Alabama and were up into the foothills of the Appalachians. They drove deeper into the mountains: up craggy canyons and down shady hollows, as if disappearing into the folds of the earth. They passed the leached-out brushfields of revegetated strip mines, as well as the slaughterous new ruins of ongoing ones: big trucks hauling out load after load, pouring out rivers of black diesel smoke from their riddled tailpipes as they thundered wildly down the twisted mountains and then groaned and growled slowly back up the hills.

  They got caught behind one such slow-moving caravan, and rather than fight it they pulled over and went for a short walk into the woods. Russell could feel a cool breeze moving through the old forest, and he said that on that breeze he could detect the odors of an abandoned mine.

  Sissy did not believe him but went with him looking for it, watching him work into the breeze like a hound, casting laterally until the scent disappeared and then changing directions and casting forward in the opposite direction, zeroing in on whatever odor he was able to discern from all others. Sissy could detect only a faint coolness, no scent, but Russell led them right up to the lip of the old adit, and they stood before it, not seeing it at first, for brush had grown over the opening.

  Russell crouched down and parted the leaves, and Sissy saw the dark opening, scarcely wider than a man’s body. She leaned in and felt the breeze issuing from it, cool now against her sweaty face. The mine’s breath stirred the damp tendrils of her hair and carried the faintest hints of sulfur. She wondered if old rocks smelled different from new rocks—as if such things might have changed slightly in the last several hundred million years. She thought possibly she could smell the faintest odor of men, too, and wondered how recently or distantly they might have abandoned this place.

  Emerald-bright moss grew around the hole; wild violets formed scattered bouquets, as if someone, or something, had been buried below and was being honored.

  “How far down does it go?” Sissy asked.

  Russell lay down on his belly and examined the hole. It was barely wider than his shoulders. A yellow butterfly drifted past his face. “There are rungs still hammered into the walls,” he said. “We could climb down and see.”

  “Do you think it has a bottom?”

  “It has to have a bottom,” he said.

  “You go first,” Sissy said. “What do I do if you fall?”

  “Crawl back out, and wait for me to climb up,” Russell said.

  “Will it be cold or hot down there?” Sissy asked. Russell didn’t answer; he was already lowering himself into the hole. It was a tight squeeze and his hips would not quite fit, so that he was stuck already, half in the earth and half out. He strained there for a moment, then wriggled back out.

  “Do you mind if I undress?” he asked.

  “No,” said Sissy, and watched as he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his shirt, heavy denim jeans, and finally his underwear.

  “Tell me why I should go down here with you?” said Sissy.

  “You don’t have to,” he said, easing into the hole.

  She paused, then looked around before slipping out of her own clothes—paused again with her bra and underwear, shock white—the light coming down through the green dappling of leaves felt warmer, different, on her bare skin�
��and then she slipped out of those as well, folded her clothes neatly next to his rumpled pile, and descended.

  “You blocked out the light,” he said, from ten feet below.

  She looked up. “It’s still there,” she said.

  The adit was cool and slick with spring-trickle. The limestone walls were smoothed with years of water-seep, and they felt good against her back and chest. There was not quite room for her to draw her knees up double, and she wondered how Russell could make it, wondered how he had been able to endure his old job, working among men half his size.

  Out of nervousness, she wanted to talk as she descended, but it was difficult for him to hear what she was saying; he kept calling “What?” so that she was having to spread her legs and crane her neck and call down to him, as if trying to force the sound waves to sink—like dropping pebbles, she imagined—and in the darkness she could not tell whether he was fifty feet below her or only a few inches. She descended slowly, not wanting to step on his fingers.

  Sometimes when she stopped to rest it seemed that the slight curves and tapers of the borehole fit the same curves and tapers of her body, though only in that one resting place; then they would move on, again, descending.

  Fantastic paranoias began to plague her as they descended more than one hundred feet. It felt as if they had traveled at least a mile.

  The portal of sky above had diminished to less than the size of a penny, and her breath came fast now as she imagined some skulking woodsperson coming upon the telltale scatter of their clothing and finding a boulder to roll over their tomb. She paused and lowered her head to her chest, forced herself to chase the thought from her mind, but there was nowhere for it to go; like a bat, it fled but returned. She felt chilled, and she was seized with the sudden impulse to pee, but held it in.

  Fifty feet farther down—moving as slow as a sloth, now—she imagined that they were using up all the air, and another twenty-five feet after that, she imagined that although Russell had been a nice enough young man, a gentleman, on the earth above, the descent and the pressures and swells of the earth would metamorphose him into something awful and raging—that he might at any second seize her ankle and begin eating her raw flesh, gnawing at her from below.