Burning Man

by Alan Russell

  Still, someone up high must have decided my face was good enough to be seen in public. Or maybe my facial disfigurement, he or she decided, would better serve the department. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Sirius and I were being used to combat a recent spate of bad press suffered by the LAPD. Months earlier the governor had announced that the two of us would be receiving California’s Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor, the state’s highest award for heroism. Not long afterward, the LAPD announced it was awarding me its departmental Medal of Valor. When I asked about my partner being similarly honored, higher-ups told me that a recipient of a Medal of Valor had to perform an act displaying extreme courage while consciously facing imminent peril. Apparently they didn’t think a dog could be conscious of peril. I did and threatened to skip the ceremony. When word of my potential boycott surfaced in the media, the department did a one-eighty better than Kobe Bryant and announced that Sirius would also be receiving a commendation. He was going to get a Liberty Award, the canine version of the departmental Medal of Valor.

  Getting medals isn’t so bad; getting them in public is. There was a reason for the pomp and circumstance, though. One commander had confided to me that heroes were always good for getting extra departmental funding.

  “Here we are!” Maureen said.

  I had never seen a meeting room so large. It was like one of those aircraft hangars designed to house jumbo jets. What made it even worse was that as cavernous as the space was, it was filled with people. My heart pounded and my chest and throat tightened, making it difficult to breathe.

  “I need to make a pit stop,” I said. “Is there a bathroom nearby?”

  “There’s one just down the hall,” she said. “Why don’t you meet me back here in five?”

  “Five,” I said and then took off with Sirius.

  The bathroom had urinals on one side, stalls on the other. The stall side appeared to be empty. Sirius and I went into an oversized stall that was designated for the disabled. I qualified, even though I didn’t want to. I sat down and fought off the shakes.

  The week before I’d met with the departmental shrink, a small man with a big, bald head named Dr. Lockhart. Cops forced to see him call him Doc Rock Hard. Rock told me he just wanted to have “a little chat.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m really encouraged. Every day I’m getting that much better.”

  “Many people that sustain injuries such as yours suffer depression.”

  “Not me,” I said smiling. “I’m grateful to be alive. All that physical therapy must be keeping my endorphins up.”

  “Do you have any fears of what the future might bring?”

  A shake of my head; an Alfred E. Neuman look of “What? Me worry?” “I guess I’m luckier than most. I have a very supportive girlfriend.”

  That helpful and imaginary girlfriend was the same one that I had invented for the mental health professionals at the hospital. Her name was Patty Norville and she was an elementary school teacher. Patty helped me with my exercises. The only drawback in our relationship, I said, was that Patty was a cat person. I always laughed when I said that. Patty was supposed to be coming to the next burn patient get-together. I had this feeling that poor Patty would be coming down with a bad cold just prior to the party.

  “How are you sleeping?” Dr. Lockhart asked.

  “Like a baby,” I said.

  “No insomnia or recurring disturbing dreams?”

  For once, I was glad of the skin grafts on my face. There were no beads of sweat to give me away. If I’d been a pinball machine, I would have been going tilt, tilt, tilt, tilt.

  “Not that I can recall.”

  Fake it until you can make it.

  My deception fooled Rock Hard, as it had fooled everyone else. They had all bought into my clown act. Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears of a Clown” had become my song.

  I had investigated my condition on the Internet. According to the medical literature, I was a textbook case for posttraumatic stress disorder. During the day I can control my symptoms, at least to a degree, but not at night. That’s when all hell breaks loose in my dreams. During any given week, I have the same dream three or four times. That doesn’t sound so bad. The reality is that several nights a week I find myself burning to death.

  The dreams feel real. Nothing in my mind tells me that I’m dreaming. I relive what happened. I smell the smoke and feel the fire. All my despair comes back; all my pain returns. My flesh manifests what I feel. When I wake up, my skin isn’t just hot, it’s burning.

  When I was a kid I remember my friend Craig Steinberg asked me, “You want to see a match burn twice?” I told him I’d like to see that, so Craig struck a match, blew it out and then pressed the hot tip into my flesh. It hurt, but it didn’t quite burn the flesh. That’s how a match burns twice.

  That’s how it is with me. I keep burning. I am the burning man.

  In my research I had found one doctor who had written about this phenomenon. He called the dream sequences “mental metabolization,” and according to his research certain patients relived their burning again and again, “often very realistically.”

  His conclusion was an understatement. On a few occasions I awakened from my dreams of fire and pulled back my compression garments only to find my skin red and blistered. No dream should be so vivid. It doesn’t help matters that I can’t talk about my dreams to anyone but Sirius. I know the LAPD wouldn’t give me my job back if there was any hint of lingering PTSD. It makes sense to err on the side of caution if your employee is carrying a gun.

  That’s why I was working so hard pretending all was well. That’s why I had agreed to this public luncheon and ceremony. The truth is that most of the time I feel like the Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now. I am Captain Willard waiting for a mission in my hotel room in Saigon.

  I took a few deep breaths. By this time Maureen would be looking for me. I reached out and scratched Sirius behind an ear, and he responded by leaning his head into my hand. His presence made the impending ordeal a little more bearable. We exited the booth, and I paused at a sink to splash down my face. As I patted myself dry, I avoided looking at my reflection.

  We made our way out to the hallway. In the distance I could see Maureen standing in the midst of a circle of people. She was nervously wringing her hands and didn’t seem to be talking quite as much as usual. Her head turned in our direction, and when she caught sight of us her relief was visible.

  Pointing our way she said, “There they are!”

  Several photographers broke from the pack. I didn’t smile—with my scarred face, the result looks like a grimace—but I did my best to look affable.

  One of the photographers directed me with his hands: “Can you turn this way, Officer Gideon?”

  I did as he asked. Judging from the angle, he preferred my bad side over my good. I guess scars make for more compelling photographs.

  “We need the dog in the shot,” another photographer said.

  “Give the lady what she wants,” I told Sirius, and signaled him in his pose. My partner doesn’t think he has a bad side.

  Maureen introduced me to Kent McCord, who was emceeing the event. For a time McCord had been the face of the LAPD, playing the role of Officer Jim Reed on the TV show Adam-12. We posed for a few obligatory shots and then chatted for a minute.

  McCord wanted my opinion on a few cop jokes that he was planning to use on the crowd. “Shoot,” I said.

  “How many cops does it take to screw in a light bulb?” he asked.

  “How many?”

  “Just one, but he’s never around when you need him.”

  I gave it a thumbs-up, so he tried another. “So this man has to work late, and when he’s driving home he gets pulled over for speeding. Now the cop notices the driver has these tired-looking eyes, so he says to him, ‘Sir, I can’t help but notice that your eyes are bloodshot. Have you been drinking?’ The driver isn’t happy with the insinuation, s
o he says to the cop, ‘Officer, I can’t help but notice that your eyes are glazed. Have you been eating doughnuts?’”

  It got a laugh out of me, which seemed to please McCord. I decided it was my turn to tell a cop joke. “So,” I said, “how many cops does it take to throw a suspect down the stairs?”

  He asked, “How many?”

  “None,” I said, “he fell.”

  “I might use that,” he said, pulling out a pen and scribbling it down.

  McCord struck me as a good sort. He didn’t put on airs like other actors I’d met. It was unusual that Hollywood had actually selected someone right for a cop role. I had heard about one actor who put up a stink over having to wear a Kevlar vest during a shoot because he thought it made him look fat, but I didn’t have a chance to tell the story to McCord.

  “I’m afraid I have to break this up,” Maureen said. “We’re already running behind schedule.”

  The meeting room hadn’t shrunk any in the ten minutes since I’d last seen it. There were probably a thousand people in the room, some of whom I actually knew. Friends and colleagues came over to pat me on the back and say a few words. It took Maureen a long time to get me to our table, which not coincidentally was in the center of the banquet room. There was a place for Sirius at the table as well, which gave me a little breathing room. He sat to my right, and I offered him a water glass from which he drank.

  “I took the liberty of ordering Sirius a steak,” Maureen said.

  “I hope you ordered it extra rare.”

  Most of those at my table were LAPD brass, which required me to make small talk, but luckily all the well-wishers that kept converging on our table spared me from having to manufacture much in the way of conversation. I was shaking more hands than a politician on the stump.

  Finally, the show began. In the front of the room the assistant chief was offering up the LAPD Media Relations version of what had occurred on the night of the fire. His description of events wasn’t like what happened or like my dreams. The police officer he described didn’t suffer from fear and panic, nor did he lose his mind for a time. It was a good war story, but not the one that I lived. I tried to ignore the stares directed my way, just as I tried not listening to what was being said. It was easier to think they were talking about some real hero rather than me.

  Kent McCord was the next speaker. After his jokes, he talked about bravery, heroism, and duty. The more I pretended to be having a good time, the hotter the room seemed. I felt on the verge of spontaneous human combustion. That wouldn’t be the kind of PR the department wanted, but I knew it would clear the room fast. I recalled Richard Pryor’s line about racing out of his house when he’d been on fire: “When you’re running down the street on fire, people get out of your way.”

  The loud sound of applause interrupted my musing. All around the conference room people were standing and cheering. Suddenly the space wasn’t cavernous anymore; it felt small and stifling.

  I motioned for Sirius to come with me, and as he struggled to his feet the applause redoubled. The old show business rule still applied: never follow a dog act.

  Gene Ehrlich was the new chief of police. He had inherited a department rocked by scandals. Ehrlich came into town with more than a white hat: he was a cop with an MBA from Harvard. The top cop knew a good photo opportunity when he saw one and stood waiting for us in the front of the room. I tried not to limp but wasn’t successful. Sitting sometimes does that to me; the fire had forever taken some of the elasticity out of my ligaments. Flashes kept going off, and I was afraid that Sirius and I would be the new poster boys for an updated Spirit of ’76 picture. I walked slowly so that Sirius could keep up with me. He was still dragging his left back leg. Television shows to the contrary, you don’t get shot and recover overnight. His vet was confident his leg would come around in time. Sirius’s fur had mostly grown back, but he was bald in a few places where the scar tissue had prevented his hair from coming back in. I was thinking about getting him several toupees. Like me, Sirius had lost a lot of weight. One of the things about severe burns is that you almost always lose weight.

  We finally made it to the front of the room, but my torture didn’t end there. I had to stand while the chief offered up more platitudes. Finally, at his signal, I lowered my head and he placed the medal around my neck. Chief Ehrlich didn’t dub me with a sword, but the ceremony still felt knightlike. I found one more use for skin grafts. No one could see me blush. As the medal was draped over me, applause filled the big room.

  After the chief was finished with me, he dropped to a knee and draped a similar medal around Sirius’s neck. The crowd went crazy over that and then went even crazier when Sirius extended a forepaw for the chief to shake. I didn’t tell him to do it. Sirius acted on his own volition, but the chief must have thought I directed him. As the moment was captured by the media, the chief was smart enough to know that the picture of top cop and hero dog was going to land him on the front page of every newspaper in the country. He could also count on the spot getting him two minutes on local television, and thirty seconds on national.

  In the glow of that coup and while basking in the applause, the chief put his arm around my shoulder and whispered to me, “When you come back, Gideon, whatever position you want, you’ve got.”

  CHAPTER 2:

  HAIL TO THE CHIEF

  The goddamn fire kept reaching for us. The blast furnace was every-fucking-where. A frustrated tear escaped my eye; the droplet sizzled on my cheek. I tried to hold my panic in check; my partner was bleeding out and I didn’t know where to go. The fire seemed to be chasing us. We moved away from the worst of the flames but couldn’t escape the smoke. It billowed, writhed and constricted; the black snake squeezed my lungs. Seeing anything was next to impossible. My eyes felt as if they’d been punched out. I struggled for air and it seemed as if I was only swallowing fire. My insides burned; my flesh was burning. In my arms my partner wasn’t moving. With one hand I slapped at Sirius’s fur, trying to put out a fire fueled by his coat. With my other hand I held him tight, along with my gun. If the Strangler made a run for it, even hell wouldn’t stop me from shooting him. And then, from all sides of us, a wall of fire rose up and dared us to pay the price of passage.

  My partner’s muzzle pushed at my face, and my first thought was that he was still alive, thank God. And then I realized that Sirius was there at my side to deliver me from my after-fire. The jolt of awareness that came with knowing I was in the here and now made me feel as I had just jumped into ice water. My flesh stopped sizzling and I gasped, taking in air.

  And then there came to mind the image of me standing in front of Chief Ehrlich. What I saw and felt didn’t make me feel any better.

  I looked at the clock. It was 3:07. In less than seven hours I had an appointment with the chief. I patted Sirius to show him that I was all right. Because of my dreams, he always slept on the floor next to my bed. Drained from my fire walk, I tried to go back to sleep. I never dreamed of fire more than once a night, or at least I hadn’t so far, and maybe because of that I slept again.

  At half past seven I was up for good. Physically, I was almost back to where I’d been before the fire. For more than a year I had never missed a physical therapy session, and I worked just as hard on my own. To a casual observer, the scarring on my face was the only telltale clue of my injuries.

  I had thought that my physical recovery would put an end to my burning dreams, but my dreams hadn’t cooperated. There were times when I didn’t wake up burning for two or three nights in a row, but every time I began to hope that my fires were behind me my dreams always returned with a vengeance.

  Perchance to dream, perchance to burn.

  I kept my condition a secret because I knew bringing in a shrink would derail, or at a minimum delay, my getting back on the force. The way to stop my dreams, I thought, was by getting back to who I was before the fire.

  Jen had been the photographer in the family, and she’d turned the video
camera on me a number of times during our five-year marriage. I used those tapes as reference material, reliving birthday parties and Christmas gatherings, and even watching home improvement videos of me building a deck and painting our new house. The guy I studied was confident, even with paint on his face. He had a one-liner for everything. He was a man who spoke his mind, usually managing to do it with a wisecrack. The person on the tapes came across as a tough guy, but he softened whenever he was around his wife or dog. It hurt a little—you could even say it burned—reviewing these tapes, but I did it to try to remember who I was and how I should act. In looking back at the tapes, I realized that I had been an innocent, unprepared for life without my wife and the firestorm that was coming at me.

  I learned from the tapes and did my best to play the former me. My imitation was good enough to fool almost everyone, but it didn’t stop my fire walking. I burned, and I burned again and again. Because of the frequency of my fiery dreams, I kept expecting that over time I would build up a tolerance to them, but that still hadn’t happened. My night terrors continued to plague me. Maybe there are some things you can’t, or shouldn’t, get used to.

  Still, there was one strange benefit from my burning dreams that I thought of as the “moment after.” When I realized my flesh wasn’t really afire, my heart would stop its thundering and relief would rush over me. It was then that I had my moment of clarity; or sometimes, like this latest episode, it was more like a moment of ambiguity.

  Maybe the sudden reprieve my body experienced after my fire dream made it relax in such a way that a kind of window opened. Maybe I had to pay a high price for gaining insight of any kind. It’s not like the moment after was a gift from the gods, or that it made me Confucius or anything, but it often gave me a perspective that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Earlier in the week I had gotten this image of the Iron Maiden reacting to one of my pranks. The Iron Maiden is big on Norman Vincent Peale–type messages and loves posting rah-rah words up on the walls. Her pearls of wisdom for the week had been “Hard work pays off in the future,” and “The early bird gets the worm!” When no one was around, I had used a Sharpie to add my own editorials below hers: “Laziness pays off now,” and “The second mouse gets the cheese!” At the time I was pleased with my handiwork; everyone laughed when they saw what I wrote, including the Iron Maiden. But in my moment-after insight I could hear the false notes in her laughter and see the disguised hurt on her face. The Iron Maiden’s cheerleading routine might not have been sophisticated but it was heartfelt, and in my moment of clarity I could see that I had pissed on her efforts. Sometimes what you see in the mirror isn’t always pretty.