Ed Taylor

FIRE IN A BOX

1.

PRY THE DINGY, SMUDGED WHITE lid off the long plastic bin—“kids stuff” on a blue masking tape strip—and there’s water in the bottom, and a smoke smell, crushed clothes, some broken kitchen plastic, a soggy dark towel, then an underlayer of soaked cloth and paper stuck together, everything brown and black and gray now although originally not.

He’s asked me to check my garage, one of the places he’s stored what he could salvage, for video games: He remembers them in a black drawstring bag. His three preteen sons want them. They’re not here.

But what does it mean, he asks as we kick through the frigid three-alarm wreckage; even in gloves my hands are numb, but sunlight is where the roof was and enameled blue out the empty casement windows shattered from heat or axed open last night by firefighters, who also rammed open the unlocked front door, humping up stairs with masks and tanks into a fire and snow ocean, under the hovering weather of a cherry picker fire-hosing a solid beam of water down in the dark but the thing not visible up there in trees and night sky, just its halogen spotlight and that silver white jet into the orange flare and sparks.

He called that apartment Tonga, after Tuvalu and the other places before that, never “home”—there’s only one home, he said, where his wife was, and everything else was waiting until he was there again.

Water’s dripping everywhere now despite January air, out of the ceiling, in runnels over exposed mortar and brick—from the hole that plaster-and-lath chunk fell from, knocking an iron sconce off the wall in a spot from which he’d just absentmindedly wandered away. There’s an untouched apple, a package of hot dogs, dunes of ash, paper, furniture, melted Legos, backpacks, mounds of matter reconstituted by heat and the burning of context, an experiment mixing catastrophe and its opposite. But the results are just old news—tons of shit for a landfill, and the house officially “unsafe.”

The Red Cross van had arrived with coffee and a warm interior for firefighters and any displaced—he'd been guided in there and given $500 for a hotel and food and something to wear.

There was a cat: Now there's a melted litter box—nobody knows. There were meds; records; photos; legal papers; hard drives; a Christmas tree although they were Jewish, for the boys.

In the snow on the phone he had pleaded with his estranged wife to be allowed to spend the night in their old house, where the boys were taken, pacing up and down the line of fire engines and hoses and ice shoals building at both curbs around the parked cars, a symptom one firefighter was half-heartedly working at with one hand on a shovel.

I’m sorry, you can’t come here, but I’ll pay for a hotel.

He’s got the clothes he wore, and a couple of chairs, and a hamper of dirty clothes he dragged out, along with a Guy Fawkes mask.

 
2.

We sat masked at opposite ends of a park bench the previous March; he’d called and said he really needed to talk. We met.

His wife had taken their boys, and the dog, to visit her mother, she’d said. Then she’d called him: I’ve filed a protection order, and the police will be there in an hour and you have to leave.

Thanks to Covid, his flatlining business had finally folded, and that day also meant the last of the landlord’s grace, and he’d been trying to wrangle volunteers to empty twenty years from his workspace.

He couldn’t breathe, he was crying and saying he didn’t blame her, he was terrible.

Why? He was a doting partner, exemplary father of bright, headstrong, exuberant kids.

I’m such an idiot. I didn’t listen.

Not legally actionable.

She’s right. I deserve it.

But why?

She was unhappy.

He couldn’t focus. He calmed down as the sun set; I walked him back to the friend’s sofa he had landed on in a group house. No job, no college degree, no car. He was turning forty-eight in a couple of days. Married for sixteen.

He and his estranged wife asked me to act as a go-between as the court order prohibited any contact. Over nine months I conveyed messages back and forth about separation distance, “line of sight,” baseball practice, food stamps, unemployment, antidepressants, anxiety medicine, panic attacks, therapy, court-appointed attorneys, holidays, food, kid pickup and dropoff. Gout medicine after he got hit by a car and that apparently settled into a damaged big toe. Pleading. Pleas. Please. Court dates. Moves—he moved off the couch another three times as short-term rentals and donated housing with room for children ended; he called the first Tonga, the second Tuvalu, the third Palau; just Pacific places light years from “home”—he will never call any place home, he said, except the place to which he’s waiting to go back.

The year arced in a kind of rehab, with his addiction being to hope—as hearings and court appearances blurred by, and social service interviews, couples therapy, and discussion over thawing Level 1 to Level 2 court-ordered distance waxed and waned but didn’t stop.

What does it all mean?

The fall night he was mugged while wandering his latest neighborhood at midnight because of the insomnia, a month before the fire, he checked himself out of the hospital and, too broke for Uber and skittish about sidewalks, trudged six miles home up the middle of empty quarantine streets in the cold sunrise glow, out of his mind.

Then, banging on the door just after he’d managed to get to sleep: a sheriff's deputy, delivering an envelope. Divorce papers he threw across the room, screaming, as I sat there because his wife had called me worried after he left the hospital and I said I'd check. He apologized and said he’d had a tough night.

After doing landscaping day labor for under-the-table cash, he figured some things out, getting help and donations from friends, and, with a loan from his brother, bought a car to get in on what he’d heard about the delivery game after outdoor work season ended.

And one Wednesday doing DoorDash, he was the sole witness of a suicide at sunset on a bridge—“the guy looked me right in the eye.” Called the police and me, having a panic attack.

He was on another DoorDash delivery when his frantic landlord called yelling to get out of the house, that it was on fire. “I thought it was a joke, but it was from his number.” I told him I'd meet him at his house, and we both hoped. The boys were with their mother.

Why? What does it all mean?

He says no official cause was announced, but the fire appeared in his apartment, the second floor of a three-story house.

Human lenses, focusing something, and if enough flammables drift in or are hoarded: or maybe it's chemistry and natural and inevitable as tectonics and tides.

But why not a scar instead of a fault line; why not a path?

So many alarms, so many fires, and if the tempering continues until you're in a bed, surrounded by machines or just soft light, your pale face with its speckled vellum skin, a few hairs, ragged breath, what diamond is born in the ash?

“Spir” is the Indo-European root of both “spirit” and “breath.” What's there is air, everywhere, within and without, of everything, in all cells. Fuel, needed for combustion, for light and heat, until the fire's burned it off and moved on.

Or “Blah Blah Blah, according to George Gershwin,” he says.

   3.

“Any guns or ammo in the house? We don't care, it's okay, it's just, you know, helpful to know.” A firefighter with a clipboard asks.

A neighbor holding a steaming travel mug of coffee asks, with a dog at the end of a leash, “How are you?”

He stares, and then starts laughing, bends over to do it, then straightens and walks away in the fire-punctured dark, down the uneven sidewalk—stumbles, almost falls, then steadies himself.

I follow him, remembering to watch where I step in the lunar cold.

I am helping him apply for food stamps in the newest place, a carriage house, complete with the new landlord's dogs that have adopted him and the boys; he comes to the “address” line and looks at me.

 “I still have trouble with this,” he says, but writes where he is now.

John Berger, somewhere, called home “the place from which the world can be founded.”

The eight-year-old says excitedly, “Have you been to our house—it's just a hole now.”

Even the foundation's stripped out, his dad says, ruined by heat. However, insurance is paying for a rebuild. The previous landlord, another friend, has already invited him to return when it's finished.

You'd move again? Dude.

And he says it's something to seriously consider, yes. Like going back home. And he laughs.

He didn't call it Tonga—or anything else: first time in a year.

ED TAYLOR is the author of the novel Theo (Old Street Publishing, 2016), and six poetry books and chapbooks.