The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  “Thank you. I’m not hungry. But Stefan is downstairs talking to one of the surgeons, and it would be good to walk and stretch for a couple of minutes.”

  She moves Rosko’s arm gently, so that it lies by his side on the bed, then gets up. Just as she’s leaving the room, she turns, one hand on the door.

  “Daniel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Rosko says you are the only person he’s ever met who thinks like him. What makes you two so close?”

  I look down at her son. “We worry about the same things. Most kids in high school are too worked up about their grades or their acne, or whether their shoes are uncool, to think about the big picture.”

  “The big picture?”

  One of the machines over the bed beeps faintly then falls silent again. A red LED on an oxygen monitor shifts from 94 percent down to 92 percent, then back again.

  “Abstract stuff. The kind of thing that makes even Morag impatient. Rosko and I trade unanswerable questions. Is it right to kill one innocent person to save five? Is there more happiness than suffering in the world? What if the past’s an illusion? Rosko’s favorite is right out of Charlie Balakrishnan’s founding ISOC document: is the brain a physical object—and if it is, how can it be conscious?”

  “Philosophers.”

  “Pains in the ass, Ella says. Rosko said in the lunchroom once, ‘Why praise or blame anyone if they do what they do because of the way they are, and they have no control over the way they are?’”

  “And you two spend a lot of time talking about these things?”

  “No, not really. We’re just kind of aware of them, like a hum in the background. Rosko’s the only person I know, other than me, who finds it scary that our common sense makes no sense.”

  Truth is, right now I don’t have any interest in chewing the cud with Rosko about some philosophical puzzle. When we’re alone, I put my hand over his, listen to his breathing, focus on the climb.

  “I need you back, Spidermensch. I need your memories, what you saw up there. You go die on me, I swear I’ll punch your lights out.”

  His hand twitches, as if he’s heard me, and the oxygen monitor beeps again, registers 95 percent. The pressure of his fingers causes a small, sharp pain in the line of stitches, hidden under the bandage, that’s holding my injured finger together. I must have still been conscious when the stitches went in, because I remember seeing a nurse hold my hand steady as someone else, just out of my line of sight, tugged at it with a tool like a pair of thin silver pliers.

  “Rosko.” I start trying to describe for him the disconnect between the grief I imagined and the rattled, creepy, fogged-and-spooked feeling I actually have. When one of his eyes pops open, it’s a complete surprise. Ought to call a nurse, or his parents; instead I just lean in close.

  “Rosko. It’s me.”

  He moves his head a few degrees, not quite enough to see me, gets the other lid open. The blank expression dissolves into an unmistakable hint of a smile.

  “Daniel,” he whispers.

  “I’m here, dude, right here. We’re in the hospital in Punta Arenas.”

  “Figured that out all by myself.” His voice is just a rustle of leaves. I have to lean in to catch what he’s saying.

  “You been awake already?”

  “Little bit. Everything blurry—feels like I smoked a kilo of weed.”

  “You just came out of surgery.”

  He glances sideways at me, turns his head just enough to see my hands. “What a fuck-up.”

  “You’re going to be OK.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m totally fine. Bit of rock rash is all.”

  “I’m not talking about your injuries. I’m talking about your mom, Daniel. I know she died. I am so sorry.”

  I try to come up with the right thing to say in response to this. There’s no right thing, and my eyes are full of pepper, so I just squeeze his shoulder and say nothing. Then he starts jerking his head back and forth, just by an inch or so, as if there’s a fly buzzing in his face. I can’t tell whether he’s having trouble speaking, or trouble finding the right words.

  “What?”

  “I need to know how bad the damage is. What I’m dealing with. What did I break? Why does my head still hurt so much? Don’t sugar it, Daniel. Promise me you won’t sweeten the pill. I need to hear it from someone I trust.”

  “OK.”

  I give him what I know from overhearing the doctor. “Your right leg was broken pretty bad. Also you cracked four ribs, and your kidneys are bruised. That’ll all mend. What they’re not so sure about are your back and your big fat swollen head.”

  “I got a concussion?”

  “The impact destroyed your helmet. But the famous Eisler brain is intact, according to the scans. Even that freakishly enlarged Babbler hippocampus that the ISOC people are so hot to study. Still, they don’t like the fact that you have intracranial swelling. They’re talking right now about transferring you up to Santiago.”

  “What else?”

  “Hairline fractures in your tailbone, something like that.”

  “Will I be able to climb again?”

  “You’ve got at least one more round of surgery yet, and your Dad says they won’t know how big a deal it is until after that.”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  I take a deep breath. “At this point, they don’t know anything.”

  “Scheisse.”

  With Gabi about to come back, this is either a bad moment to change the subject or the best moment I’ll get. I squeeze his fingers. “Hey. I need you to tell me something too. Think back to the climb. Right before the accident—exactly what do you remember?”

  He frowns, stays silent for a long minute, and my heart misses a beat as an awful thought occurs to me.

  “You remember it, right? The accident and everything?”

  He grimaces and shifts, then relaxes again. “Sure. I remember everything. But there’s not much to tell. Iona in the lead, me in the middle. Only a hundred meters below the summit. It was windy, but nothing unusual.”

  “Go on.”

  “And then that giant rockfall. Out of nowhere.”

  “Go back. You’re missing stuff. Give me every detail.”

  He tilts his head, gives me a puzzled look, stares at the ceiling in complete silence for so long that I think he’s drifting, has forgotten I’m even there. “OK. I remember now that Iona paused to rest, just before it happened, and shouted something down to me. I couldn’t hear her over the wind. And then, boom—and she’s pushed off the wall, the aids fail, and I’m dragged with her.”

  My heart sinks as he carries on: “The funny thing is, I don’t remember feeling fear. I knew, I absolutely knew I was going to die. But all I felt was a kind of calm. Happiness even. Like: this is correct, this is what is supposed to happen.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s kind of awful, now that I think about it: it was like, I wanted to die.”

  He pauses, eyes darting around as if looking for something. “So what am I missing?”

  I put my hand on his shoulder again. “Relax. Take it easy.”

  My mind is racing over the gaps between what he remembers and what I saw. I have no idea what to say to him, and what comes out is a messy, on-the-fly compromise between nothing and the truth:

  “She did something strange, just before the rockfall. Climbed ahead too far and too fast, as if she was racing to get to the top. And then it was like she saw something, and—and there was—I’m just not clear in my mind what happened.”

  “Sorry—I don’t remember any of that.”

  He’s about to say something else, but at that moment a nurse comes in.

  “Hello, Señor Eisler. Good to see you’re awake.” She picks up his chart. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’m on a ship in a storm. And an elephant is sitting on me. And someone is drilling holes in my head. Fine, otherwise.”

  I can hear,
just in the way he says those two words, that he has put our conversation aside for now and is going to switch into Charming Rogue mode.

  “You have some injuries, and you are under some powerful drugs. Try to relax and not move too much. I’m going to ask you a few questions. Yes?”

  “Please go ahead.”

  “What is your full name?”

  “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”

  “Serious, please. What is your full name?”

  “Rosko Gerik Eisler.”

  “Where were you born?”

  He pauses, as if trying to remember. “Did anyone ever tell you that you have exceptionally pretty eyes?”

  She sighs, as if to indicate that she’s not being paid enough. “Yes, Mr. Eisler. My husband. Where were you born?”

  “München. Munich.”

  “Tell me something about Munich.”

  “It is the birthplace of many famous people. Including, unfortunately for the tourist authorities, both the Nazi Heinrich Himmler and the terrorist Andreas Baader.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen years, seven months.”

  “What is twenty-four minus seven?”

  “Seventeen. Which, interestingly, is the minimum number of numbers you can have in a sudoku puzzle and still guarantee a unique solution. Your husband is right about your eyes, by the way.”

  She puts the clipboard away, then turns to him again: “Such compliments from young men with sevoflurane in their bloodstream, unfortunately I cannot take seriously.”

  “I must remember to say it again later.”

  “One more test question,” says a familiar voice from the doorway. “What is your mother’s name?”

  Gabi’s pretending to play it cool and casual, so Rosko does the same. “Ah, hello, Mutti. Nice to see you. My mother’s name is, oh, let me see. Helmut. No, wait. Gabriela. With one l.”

  I get out of Gabi’s way so that she can lean down and plant a kiss on his forehead. As she’s moving toward him, I don’t give it a second thought. Until the moment when her lips touch him, I don’t give it a second thought.

  When I actually see the gesture, I feel like I’m being cut in half with a band saw.

  Later, back in my room, I stare out the window and think about the fact that either Rosko has amnesia or I’ve become delusional. Can he not have seen what I saw? Does he really not remember? Can I have made it all up?

  But no, on that last one. The bruise on my neck is there because she fell a long way before hitting me. The aids failed because she fell a long way before the rope pulled taut.

  Eager for distraction, I claw around in my bag and find the paint-by-numbers thriller I was reading before the climb. My place, halfway through, is still marked by a stalk of dry Patagonian grass. The Defenders, it says, in embossed silver letters on the cover. A multivehicle pileup of feel-good patriotic clichés, it includes a rogue ex-Marine with big muscles, even bigger emotional issues, and a heart of gold; a gorgeous but manipulative intelligence analyst in a tight red dress; an overrated CIA director who’s in bed with his own biographer. In the background, as predictable as the rising sun, there’s a bearded, Hoboken-born Yemeni who has personal as well as ideological scores to settle, is also (to keep things simple) plain evil, and who has (deeply original surprise here) single-handedly buried a nuclear weapon in a tunnel under the White House.

  There’s a ticking clock: there always is. Muscles knows the bomb will go off in exactly This Many Minutes and That Many Seconds. Everything will depend on him racing across the city, eluding the posse of FBI second-raters who think he’s the bomber, and cutting the blue wire (or is it the green wire this time?) with exactly three seconds left on the little red readout.

  Escapist fun, a week ago, as reassuringly predictable as grass going in one end of a cow and not-grass coming out the other. But Muscles has a couple of things going for him that I don’t: he knows what the problem is, who the bad guys are, and how much time’s left. All I have is the queasy certainty that something’s wrong.

  I read for twenty minutes, but can’t even get into it when Muscles and Red Dress have the mandatory steamy hookup right in the stacks at the Library of Congress. They’re still panting and readjusting their underwear when I send The Defenders spinning onto the floor.

  Is it a sign of mental illness, or only of grief, to have half a dozen moods an hour? I look at the book, lying there abandoned in the middle of the room, and my irritation drains away like water from a sink. In place of the irritation, I feel desperately, hungrily, emptily alone. It’s not the kind of thing that’s going to be changed by finding something different to read, or chatting with Stefan and Gabi. Not by talking to Rosko. Not by waiting patiently for Dad and Morag’s plane to land.

  For a couple of minutes I’ve no idea what to do. Then, out of nowhere, I know exactly what I must do. So I stumble down to the nurse’s station and cause a major international incident.

  “Señor Calder. You are supposed to be resting.”

  “I don’t need to rest. I’m not tired.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I want to see my mother’s body.”

  Maybe I should elaborate. Maybe I should point out that I never got the benefit of the corny movie good-bye, where she’s ninety-five, and dying but completely pain-free, and I’m having Meaningful Last Words by her bedside in a sunlit bedroom on the family farm. Closer to the truth is that I simply need to believe it’s true: her death is so unreal, so improbable, so impossible to believe that I might as well have read it in a news feed. I need to know.

  The nurse looks at me with incomprehension, at first, then horror. She flusters away and comes back with one of the doctors, who repeats the performance. A second, more senior doctor offers me a lot of smooth, patronizing garbage about how it’s not for the best.

  “When my father asks to see her body, you will allow him to do so. Yes?”

  Yes, certainly. Yes.

  I try to think what Dad would say here. His swagger gets results. “You will allow him to see the body, but you have a policy, is that it, a written policy that says I cannot see her body? Because I am only her son, not her husband? Or because I am under eighteen?”

  N-no, not exactly.

  They are completely unsure of themselves. Nice. “So in fact you have no reason to prevent me from seeing her body?”

  Well—

  “She is too disfigured? And you are afraid that it will be upsetting?”

  She is—The body is damaged, yes.

  I’m careful to walk a fine line after that: irritated, insistent, polite, irritated, insistent. Eventually they give in, and I’m taken down to the morgue by an orderly, a middle-aged woman with a sour expression. She shows me the way with hand gestures, never offers a word, treats me like a prisoner who’s been granted a special privilege that the jailers themselves disapprove of.

  The morgue is in a subbasement, all concrete walls and mechanical hums, like an area that was designed as a parking garage and then taken over by the dead and their pasty-faced vampire attendants. Outside a big set of swing doors, the grim woman says a few words to another assistant, a bald man in a white lab coat, and hands me off to him. He gives me a funny look too, says nothing as he bashes through the doors. Then he flips on lights, opens a drawer, stands there. It feels awkward to ask, but I manage to make it clear that I need him to leave me alone. I don’t even approach the drawer until he steps back out.

  When I pull back the sheet, yeah, it’s a shock. Her face is a mass of bruises, swellings, and small cuts, like she was the victim of a bad mugging. I look away, at first, but as soon as I look a second time I find it surprisingly easy to forget how she looks, treat it as a kind of static, and reach beyond it, to her.

  “Mom.”

  Daniel

  Thin as a whisper, the voice doesn’t even surprise me this time. Once again, it doesn’t come from where she is, but from right next to me, as if she’s by my side looking down at her own fac
e. I want to be able to ask someone: is this what hallucinations are even like?

  There’s a narrow cut running from her neck, up across her cheekbone, to her hairline. I reach out and touch the line of it with a fingertip, right at the cheekbone, where it’s wider, then put my hand on her forehead. And wish I had not. It has the exact temperature, the exact same waxy resilience, of supermarket meat.

  Find out, Daniel

  “Find out what?”

  Daniel

  “Find out what?”

  No

  “Tell me what to do.”

  Not

  “Tell me what to do.”

  Silence.

  The fact that I hear my own voice in the echoing room, that I’m actually talking to her, is even more disturbing than hearing her voice. For a moment I feel as if I’m stepping outside myself, looking at the situation more objectively, and the obvious question—the question that would occur to anyone else—is whether I’m grieving or going insane. Several sandwiches short of a full picnic, Ella would say.

  I wait for some revelation about this to strike me, or for the voice to come back, but there’s nothing. Then I see the bald man looking in at me through the round porthole in the swing door, and I’m so angry at the intrusion that I stare him down. Seems to take forever, but eventually he gets the message and turns away.

  There’s nothing here to stay for, but I’m putting off the moment when I will look at her face for the last time. The tips of my fingers, poking out from their clumsy nest of bandages, go back to her, touch her hair, then, as if they have wills of their own, they trace the thin, dry wound, as gently as they can, all the way down to the point where it disappears under the sheet.

  Must go now.

  I’m already in the act of lifting my hand away when I feel something that’s not the edge of the sheet brush against the extreme tip of one finger.

  Another wound? But when I ease back the edge of the sheet, it’s not a scabbed-over cut that I find, but a thin strand of brown leather, square sectioned like an old-fashioned bootlace. I glance up to check that the orderly has not returned to the doorway, then pull gently. It’s a loop, around her neck. Attached to it, like a single jewel, is a tiny cylindrical vial made of blue metal.