Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

  They are alive and squirming around. Yag’s body, which was covered in gas, is more damaged than Jimmy’s, which, by comparison, looks normal, except he’s covered in ash and he winces in pain. The gash where Yag hit him with the bottle is visible. It has opened up again. This time, he’ll take the ambulance.

  I think about Lucas’s scenario: the house is burning down; who do you save? Jimmy had to save Yag, no matter the risk. My question—my joke—about who started the fire (Was it your faulty electrical wiring?) was irrelevant. Saving Lucas was the only thing I could do, the only thing I can do.

  The Final Final lights up—from across the street I see the fire advance from the basement to the pool table to the bar, Yag’s trail of gas. Seconds pass. I can’t see anything but smoke and flames.

  My hands shake. I shiver despite the hot, muggy night. Slowly my mind comes back to me. “Is this our fault?” I say aloud.

  There is a female police officer by my side now. She assures me this is not my fault.

  “But we could have stopped him,” I say. “If we had said something different.”

  “My experience with cases like these,” she says, “when perps are out of their minds, is that there’s very little anyone can do except restrain them and wait. You look strong, but few are strong enough to hold down a grown man bent on taking everyone out with him.”

  The Final Final is gone. The front window is shattered and flames lick the edges of the building. An orange inferno rages inside. The sign still hangs over the door frame but it is melted out, and my mind immediately turns to word play: The Final Final Final; The Final Final Finale.

  Our antique tin ceiling melts away. The wood paneling in the ladies’ room feeds the fire—the heart I gouged deep: permanent, no longer. The old bar top, a steady old companion, ever faithful, is gone. The pool table’s gone—no more stack of dollars on the rail, bets that will never be called. Lady Justice and her scales, the photos of the past bartenders and old regulars: all gone. About the only thing in the bar that will survive this inferno is the cheap vinyl floor, moisture resistant and impact resistant and scratch resistant—hollow to the heel, lacking in history, incapable of memory. Made to look like wood, the vinyl will outlast the real thing.

  Years from now, when the regulars have moved on to other bars and other lives, the place will reopen with another name, a sports bar called SPRTS or a burger joint called BRGR, some chain that finally made it all the way upstate (an indicator to investors that it’s time to sell the stock). I’ll duck my head in once, just to see what became of my old haunt. The space will be gutted, entirely unrecognizable, fresh drywall painted prison gray, silver stools, laminated cocktail menus. The only remnant of what it once was will be the blasted vinyl floor, which I’ll know as soon as the heel of my boot hits it. I’ll turn around and walk out without ordering a single drink, and I’ll remember what I know now: we are fools to believe any place worth inhabiting is permanent. To inhabit a place is to alter it in some way, to leave a mark.

  The firefighters work to contain the flames. Looks like there’s a good chance they will save the Chinese place and the rest of the block after all.

  This never would have happened if Lucas were here. None of this would have happened. Earlier in the night, he would have put his arm around Martin, like he’d done that night at our house. He would have said something kind, something that made him feel like more than a failure, like a human being, even. He would have forgiven Yag, letting him off the hook like he let everyone off the hook, and Yag would have hated himself a little less.

  As the flames turn our bar to smoke and ash, I consider why we all hang around here so much. Once upon a time, we came to The Final Final to share in Lucas’s goodwill, hoping his humanistic spirit would rub off on our pessimistic souls.

  * * *

  TAKE AWAY THE HABITAT and…

  The creature adapts.

  Migration. Exodus. Change.

  The air is wet and heavy. Sitting on the curb across the street from what’s left of The Final Final, I see lights and sirens and firefighters and cops, yelling commands, hustling, doing what needs to be done, their world so far removed from my experience it might as well be playing out on a TV screen. The curb is hard under my ass. My hands are folded in front of me, covered in soot. My heartbeat is slow and steady. I recognize this calm.

  “So this is the world,” I say.

  Like fire, grief subsumes everything. I’ve been so deep for so long I forgot what it’s like up here. Now I can see the series of traps that caught me long before Lionel died: wealth, the big city, the small town, the LongHorn on Route 1, the bar, the bottom of a drink, motherhood, the holdings sheet. My whole life I’ve been exchanging one trap for another. When Lion died, every trap collapsed into the one that came before, not unlike this bar before me, not unlike that last straw.

  Every time I saw an exit, I took it: I moved upstate, I traveled for work, I abandoned my marriage. These were choices, but they weren’t exits. They freed me from nothing. I believed I was autonomous. I thought movement, in and of itself, was ambitious. It was a grass-is-greener approach that worked until my son died, and then there was no more green grass, not in this world. Not anywhere.

  I never wanted to take Lionel to the zoo, because every time I’d visited one as a child, I felt acutely depressed afterward. Like coming down from a hard night of drinking and cocaine, recovery took a minimum of three days. The animals were cute, but was it worth it? Maybe the animals had moments of happiness at feedings or in tender exchanges with the staff. Maybe they wanted nothing from the wild anymore. But to me, that was the problem: the wanting nothing. The dead eyes. I didn’t want Lionel to see that. I wanted him to want.

  Two years ago, my world collapsed. All trappings became one trap. I lost everything when Lionel fell off that roof. I can’t explain it, but watching the bar burn to the ground feels like a commuted sentence, like the zookeeper opened the gates and said, Best of luck to you.

  Run, I tell myself, if your legs still work. Run.

  The pain will never go away. For the rest of my life, I will burst into tears at random times: when Addie turns left toward Catherine Street, when I catch a glimpse of Lucas and see Lionel’s wide eyes and sideways smile, when I wake in a cold sweat from a dream where I am holding my baby again, naked from the bath, soft and heavy, everything I needed right there in my stupid, undeserving arms. But here on the curb, I make a decision: I will live my life to the bitter end. I want to live.

  I will find Lucas and forgive him. I will tell him I’m sorry. We’ll take comfort in each other, in mutual understanding, in all that we’ve lost. This clarity is strange and exhilarating.

  I admit to myself what I’ve known all along. There is one place that will have me, wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  I can see it now. The Brooklyn town house, lamp lit. Lucas is in the backyard, throwing a Frisbee for Addie. She acts younger than she is now, bouncy and spry. He plants his feet and flicks the Frisbee sidearmed, nonchalant, at ease in his world. Through the lines on his face, I trace sadness that exists parallel to my own, side by side, separate. Lionel not being here for us to love will always be the void between us, around us. We are parents who have lost a child. We’ll never be anything more, or anything less. But when I see that loss in this good man, it makes it easier to live with it in me.

  In this future, Grace and I have offices in Manhattan and Boston. They look nothing like those of our competitors, not because of the architecture or interior design, but because of the people who occupy the space. Our competitive advantage is stories, after all, and we celebrate the diversity of our scars as we did at Francesca Jones’s East Village restaurant.

  Now that I’ve seen it, this life is more real to me than the one I’ve been living: a vision born from the ashes of The Final Final.

  As soon as I allow myself to imagine it, ambition takes over. This future is the reason Grace, once head of private wealth solutions at one of the worl
d’s leading investment firms, walked away from her seven-figure compensation package to work with me. Grace exists in a state of perpetual forward motion. I imagine what it feels like to walk around in this state: alive in a world of possibility, consciously unwilling or unable to perceive a resistance level. Without awareness of a ceiling, none exists; all energy is potential. Immersion in this future feels like a drug. Without past and present, there is no pain, no struggle, only actualization and the experience of actualization—awareness of it—reality, a summit, a singularity comparable, perhaps, to Dante’s divine light, everything and nothing. In the future, I see a sweep of time, a great love, a dog’s companionship, the death of my son. All at once, I feel emptiness and terror and, though I have to fight to identify it, the possibility of joy.

  AFTER HOURS

  MY STUDENTS USUALLY MAKE the mistake of concluding their remarks with a financial projection or recommendation and then putting up a giant question mark on the screen in preparation for the Q&A. When they do this, I mark them down for “insufficient conclusion.” Generally speaking, I find their endings too narrow, too focused on their own analysis. They don’t think about the implications, what their findings really mean in the short and long term for the company, the industry, and society—and beyond society, for actual human beings. MBAs tend to forget that organizations are comprised of people, and their products and services are sold to people, and all these people live and breathe, and to be alive is to be in pain.

  Once, I sat through a guy’s entire presentation bored, but at the end he put up this giant line graph, which basically represented the apocalypse for the entire financial system. He left it up on the screen for the entire ten-minute Q&A, and by the end of it, the exponential curve of the line was burned into my memory. It was like a Bret Easton Ellis podcast: gloom to absurdity—nobody reads, film is dead, the golden age of TV is over, video games are the future of entertainment, Sony is apologizing for making light of food allergies—proof positive, civilization is doomed. That guy got an A.

  The chief question of any great conclusion is, Why does any of this matter?

  * * *

  ADDIE GREETS ME, TAIL wagging, at the door of my apartment.

  There are more text messages on my phone from Grace and Samantha. The night at the bar felt like a supernatural intervention. I’d nearly forgotten about the ridiculous one with Elisa Monfils. I scroll through the texts with no intention of responding. From Grace, a series of stern messages about my fiduciary duty to meet with Elisa are softened by interstitial celebratory texts. The fund is performing better than expected. We’re showing phenomenal numbers. Grace is raising more capital for the fund, which is exactly what my father would do (perpetual forward motion). From Samantha, the texts are more maternal, like I broke curfew, like she’s just concerned. The most recent, from five minutes ago, reads, I’m coming over again to check on you. I have a key.

  I grab Addie’s leash from the hook by the door, and she begins to shake. She never gets walks at this time of night, after bar close. I can’t tell how she senses time. She likes going to bed when it gets late. I know this because she used to follow me upstairs when Lucas was passed out on the couch, in spite of the fact that she never wanted to leave his side.

  Still, the sight of the leash thrills her, even at this late hour.

  The whole process of working on the hedge fund has me thinking about all these stories, the stories that make people special—Pamela’s bookmaking father, my dad’s Italian suit, the French mayor’s death brigade—and the thing I can’t come to terms with is that my story, the humanizing element, is Lionel, and Lucas, and the gravest of all loss. There’s something there, though, in the telling of it, a profit of some kind that cannot be quantified.

  The walk to Catherine Street takes only ten minutes—it’s a small town—and it suddenly strikes me that the law of chance should have dictated more accidental encounters. Lucas must work hard to avoid me.

  There are two types of people who walk: people who take pleasure in idleness, gait easy and light, and people who use the time to ruminate, gait slow and heavy. Lucas was the former; I am the latter. Addie could always sense this. When all three of us walked together in the cemetery, we let her off leash so she could roam while we strolled. She was playful with Lucas, jumping alongside him, nosing his hands, nipping his heels.

  When she ran off chasing squirrels or deer, Lucas would tell me to hide, and we’d crouch down behind gravestones and laugh while she circled around, trying to get an angle on us. Her whole body bounced up and down as she cantered, and when she hit full sprint, she caught air, all fours off the ground at once. Relieved to be with us again, she’d stay close, pushing her head into Lucas’s heels, watching while we read names off gravestones. Lucas liked the old-timey ones—Clementine and Eleanor. He never said it outright but I knew he hoped for a girl too. He wanted Lionel to have a sister.

  * * *

  I LOST A SON and then a husband. Those are the facts. If I lied about anything, I lied about Addie, about not knowing her true preferences.

  Before I headed out to the bar tonight, I opened the pantry and remembered what I already knew: there was only a half cup of dog food left. I grabbed Addie’s leash and we walked out the back, in the direction of the hardware store.

  The store has a dog food club. Buy nine bags, get the tenth free. The clerk keeps a tally. She takes her job very seriously. The source of her authority is a maroon polyester vest with her name, Emily, pinned atop her left breast.

  We lingered in the dog food aisle. I scanned the shelves while Addie sniffed around. There was a problem. The store was out of the usual. For the club, I needed to stick with the same brand—also, Addie is accustomed to this brand—and I always buy her chicken. The only other option available for a medium-size dog was lamb. So that’s what I bought.

  There’s no legitimate reason I always chose chicken except that I myself prefer chicken to lamb. I find the flavor of lamb somewhat gamey. And I project my tastes onto her. Families like all the same things, right?

  But as we walked home together, I lamented that I did not know her true preference, and then I recalled that I still had a little bit of chicken left over: a half cup. We would do a test!

  I put the last of the chicken in a bowl and a half cup of lamb in an identical bowl. I placed them on the floor in front of her side by side at exactly the same time, chicken on the left, lamb on the right. Her nose dipped into the chicken bowl first. She licked up a few nuggets of food; then she turned to the lamb and devoured all of it before returning again to the chicken. Lamb won.

  I made it as far as the living room, where I dropped to my knees. My upper body collapsed forward on the hardwood, the dust grainy beneath my hands and forearms. Heavy with tears, my head hit the floor, and I realized how pathetic I was, my body contorted in this yoga pose, even though I don’t do yoga. It’s just dog food, you weakling, I told myself.

  Addie sat next to me on the floor, upright. Her body was still like the statue of a proud dog, a firefighting dog or a special ops K9: a hero dog. She deserved a placard: FOREVER FAITHFUL. Her brown eyes stared expectantly. Her instinct, when encountering a person at her level, knee-high or thigh-high—the height of a small child—was to play, to cuddle aggressively, to go in for the lick. She knew to suppress her nature but not what to do instead. She knew to stay close but not how close. She knew to wait but not for what. She knew but she didn’t know.

  I confess: I wanted her to choose chicken. I’d been buying her chicken for years, forcing her to choke it down every single day.

  About a month after the divorce was final, I took Addie for a run in the cemetery and let her off leash. She lagged behind, trying to sniff as much as she could, and then sprinted to catch up, and then again, lagged and sprinted.

  The cemetery has multiple entrances—we always enter through the west gate, closest to my apartment, and exit into an adjacent park, closer to Lucas’s house.

  Addie was
chasing a squirrel when I spotted Lucas, walking toward me from the opposite direction, cutting through the cemetery on his way downtown. I slowed my pace to a walk. When he saw me, his gait changed as well. He stood up straighter and put his hands in his pockets. We had no choice but to keep walking forward toward each other.

  The squirrel escaped up into a tree and Addie bounced under it for a few seconds. Then she turned her head and saw Lucas. She crouched down, pushed off the ground, and exploded toward him. She jumped up on him, putting her front paws on his jeans, then dropped to the ground again, then back up, then turned back to me, sprinted, and then back to him and back to me, until we stood facing each other, just a few feet apart. She’d been waiting for this moment.

  We made small talk—I don’t even remember what we said. My mind was occupied with the concern that Addie wouldn’t follow me when it was time to continue on. At some point, we said goodbye. In this moment, I was aware that Addie had a choice. She could continue toward the park with me, or stick by Lucas’s heels, moving in the other direction toward town. My instinct was to put her on leash, pull her away quickly. That’s what I should have done. But I needed to know. I’d worked hard to prepare an argument for why she should be mine—collecting receipts and testimony—and I spent all my time with her, having given up travel. Generally speaking, unless I was at the bar or running a quick errand, I was home. On some level, I’d convinced myself that she’d grown to love me more.

  I said, “Let’s go, Addiecakes,” and slowly walked off in the direction of the park. Lucas started walking too, in the opposite direction. Addie thought we were playing a game. She jumped up at Lucas’s side, putting her mouth on his hand. He batted her back. She jumped again. “Addie, come,” I said. Lucas told her to calm down. He pointed to me and told her to go. She looked confused. I kept walking. She ran over to me and nipped at my heels, a feeble attempt to herd me back to Lucas. I said, “We’re going this way.” I pointed to the park. She ran back to Lucas. I kept walking. At the edge of the cemetery, a dirt path led into the park. A sign read, ALL DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH. I stood there staring at it for what seemed like a long time. Behind me, I could hear Lucas telling Addie to calm down, to go, that it was time. I looked back at them and saw her sitting, looking up at him, her master. She loved us both but she loved him more. I tried hard to hold back tears but they streamed down my face. I was the chicken; Lucas was the lamb.