The Fires

by Alan Cheuse

  “You have worries, yes?”

  “I do, I do.”

  “Tell me your worries.”

  This was a little embarrassing. I said some cursory things about Ceely, and about Charmaine. All the while you were tracing my body with your hands a few inches in the air above me.

  “And about your work, do you have worries?”

  “Not so much anymore,” I said. “When I was younger, yes.”

  “But now you feel secure in it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So it is just your family.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The living and the dead,” you said.

  “Yes. What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean,” you said.

  “Billie?” I said.

  “Who is Billie?”

  I told you a little about her.

  “Yes,” you said, having known without knowing, and now knowing without having known.

  It was at this point that I began to think this was either all a big hoax, or a big wonder.

  “Are you ready now?” you said.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “Do you understand that I will say a little prayer before I begin? That is just the way I do things.”

  “Yes, my wife told me,” I said.

  “I call on Jesus. And I call on St. Michael and all his holy minions to come into your body, these heavenly entities enter you and cleanse you of the earthbound spirits that weigh your body down.”

  “I see.”

  “You sound fearful. You musn’t be fearful. There is no harm that can come to you through this, only good.”

  “I need some good,” I said, trying to laugh.

  “You may feel things. You may see lights. Other things happen to other people.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And when it is over, you will make a list for me.”

  “Okay. What kind of list?”

  “Of everyone you wish to forgive for all of the wrongs and hurts they have done to you. Do you understand? You’ll write it down and bring it to me.”

  “I do,” I said. “I’ll write it down.”

  “Good. But you must also be on guard.”

  “On guard?”

  “The wandering earthbound entities, the ones who take over your internal organs and make for disease and bad thoughts and bad decisions, they will flee, but then they will also try to come back in.”

  “I’ll be on guard,” I said.

  “You must,” she said.

  “I will,” I said.

  “Then we will begin.”

  I swallowed, tried to calm myself. But my heart beat hard, and I blinked, and blinked, and finally closed my eyes.

  “In the name of Jesus and all the saints,” you said. “Michael, Saint Michael, come to me and attend us, enter into the body of this man, down, down, down, with all of your helpers, and all of the hundreds, thousands of you, build the light about his head, build the light about his body, make it increase and flow and burn away…”

  You talked, you chanted, you whispered, you said a crown of light would appear above my head, and I felt it, and it increased, and it ran down and up the length of my body as I breathed and breathed as hard as if I were rowing in a race, and you said that hundreds, perhaps thousands of entities would enter my body and cleanse it of illness and trouble and distress and worry and woe, down, down, down past the molecular level to the subatomic level and even beneath that, and you had me breathe harder and I rushed and I huffed and I hushed and I felt the heat from your hands hovering above me and I saw light gathering before my lidded eyes—and, sound man that I am, I heard horns, trumpets, I heard loud oaths and the clank and clash of metal on metal on wood and bone and I smelled burning wood and burning flesh, and my body began to tremble, as if I had a terrible fever, though I felt nothing but gentle fire and saw only a gathering of light before my closed eyes, and then I felt as though I were floating off the table, and then, like silk gently falling, settling back onto the table, and I heard the very noise of the molecules gathering and spinning and whirling and dancing. And these were worlds careening and turning in space without limits, and the sound of the essence of existence was both grand and small, from the biggest boom of cataclysmic explosion to the tiniest whisper of the rustle of the fluttering eyelash or the sweet resolve of the falling leaf.

  Oh, Erna, I knew my soul, and it knew me, and I had done bad things and I had done good, and time opened out to me now, the way a door opens onto a new room or a shade slips up and I could see, oh, I could see what I had done and what had to be done for this time and time to come. This was life, I said to myself in my own voice, this was life on Earth, on this planet turning endlessly in a solar system captive of a turning galaxy that was moving itself toward some goal grander than anything any of us might imagine. And I heard music, more music, drum and bass, and the piano coming up under it, flirting with the rhythms and then molding them to its own forward charge, angels playing jazz, angel jazz, and my heart sprung loose, and the blues poured out—Jew blues, black blues, Lutheran blues, half blues, all blues—and I wept, and wept, and more than wept, cleansing my soul, and wept again.

  I went home humming “Jew-Bop,” hooleeyou-do, da-da-dat, hooleeyou-do, dat-da-da…” and when Charmaine came home I had dinner ready and flowers to present to her.

  “How was it?” she said.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  That night we talked of how you, with the help of St. Michael and all of his minions, had purged me of my hurts and my woes and my pains and my false desires, and we talked of many other things as well, old loves and new, and rejuvenating former affections and keeping the good memories in our hearts. In the middle of our conversation, barefoot and in my undershirt, I ran out to the car and fetched the CD and played parts of the Gita for her—

  Fire, light, day, the moon’s brightness,

  the six months of the north-turning sun…

  Oh, my God, the beauty of it all, the poetry, yes, yes, yes, yes, fire, light, day, the moon’s brightness, the taste of the water, the six months of the north-turning sun, heat, sparks, flames, whirl, I was a man waylaid by demons, by earth-bound entities, as all men are, but I saw an end to it, I knew I had a chance, I knew that I must change my life! I felt that, I felt it rising in my heart!

  Ceely called late to say that she was coming home the next afternoon. She had talked to some of her grandparents’ friends, she might have a job in New York. That was wonderful news. She would recover. She might even find some direction. There was hope, for her, and even for me, was how I felt. And then I turned to Charmaine, and we made good love and slept pressed close to each other, the way survivors on a life-raft might after a wreck at sea. I woke up only once, to hear the sharp, harsh, ratchety music of neighborhood dogs barking in the distant dark.

  And then very early in the morning I backslid, I confess—and I hope you’ll forgive me—that I wasn’t completely exorcised—because I stole down the stairs, assailed by chill air when there should have been none, and called the dean at home.

  “Jackie?” she said.

  I hung up the receiver.

  It’s just, as they say in some stories, that I had a moment of recognition. The rest of the day slipped by and I have very little recollection of what it was like except that I began writing the list of all of those people whom I want to forgive.

  It was early evening already when Ceely arrived at Union Station and called to tell me that she was taking the Metro here.

  “I’ll pick you up at the Metro stop,” I said.

  “That’s okay, Father,” she said. “I can walk.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  Smoke, gloom, night, the moon’s darkness,

  the six months of the south-turning sun…

  I listened for a moment to the Gita as I drove down to the Metro stop, but then turned it off. It was beautiful poetry, but I still had my life to live, didn’t I? The cycles of t
hings, birth and death and rebirth, all of that took second place right now to some practical business. Sitting behind the wheel of a car, watching, waiting, while traffic rolled around me in the fading light. A number of people emerged from the exit, men with briefcases, women in pants suits, a mother with child, a few teenage girls with short haircuts, a tall black man arm in arm with a rotund woman who might have been his mother. Here is life, I said to myself in that fuzzy muddled way we have of trying to tell ourselves that we are attentive to the world when actually we are dreaming.

  I looked away at the sound of a passing bus. Minutes went by, and more minutes. Where was she? How had I missed her! My own daughter!

  Oh, St. Michael, you and all your minions, I finally left the Metro exit and drove around the block. Halfway up the street, I saw a tall girl hurrying along with a backpack much like Ceely’s. But she had short hair, very short, I noticed, as I slowed down and passed her by.

  “Hey!” she waved at me.

  I stopped the car. It was Ceely. Nearly bald.

  “What do you think?” she said when she climbed into the car. “Neat, huh? Grandma took a day off from court to take me to the hairdresser. She treated me.”

  Her face glowed despite the onset of the dark, and as though a fire burned within the center of her skull her scalp showed nearly pink through the stubble of her hair. By that light I saw myself, as I once had been, as I was now, as I might be tomorrow, nothing but a sound man detached from his problems, but the only father she would ever have.

  In one of those wonderful slips of the tongue in which the truth slides out like a child in easy birth, I said, “I forgive me.”

  Ceely gave me a beatific smile, humming something I recognized as one of her mother’s tunes, and I steered us the rest of the way home.

  Acknowledgements

  The author gratefully acknowledges Mitch Wieland and the fiction staff of The Idaho Review, where these novellas first appeared.

  Lines from the Bhagavad Gita, translated by Stephen Mitchell, copyright ©2000 by Stephen Mitchell, used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  About the Author

  Alan Cheuse is the author of three novels, including The Grandmothers’ Club and The Light Possessed, three collections of short stories, a memoir Fall Out of Heaven, and a collection of essays, Listening to the Page: Adventures in Reading and Writing. Recently, his short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He is the editor of the anthology Seeing Ourselves: Great Stories of America’s Past and co-editor of Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction. Cheuse serves as book commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and as a member of the writing faculty at George Mason University.

  www.alancheuse.com