A Fire Goes Through It
This story originally appeared in Slippery Elm, 2023 print edition.
Last night I dreamed I was back at the old house. My brother was there, and an old girlfriend. I forget her name now—isn't that shitty?—but I remember the way her skin felt (like sandpaper) and the shape of her mouth (like the folds of an old purse). The house was dark, but somewhere in it was the sense of a party. My brother said he smelled smoke, and when I checked the utility closet I found fire, heat, this awful roar, and on the floor were millions of tiny ants. They were everywhere, man; they poured from the cracks like gunpowder and ran like hell. Madness. Then, just like that, the fire was out. The wooden braces were burned, the ants were gone, and everything was still.
That's the way it goes, sometimes, in dreams: everything's cool, some calamity occurs—maybe a fire goes through it—and then it gets so quiet.
I've been thinking about it all day, how you don’t realize the little things that make noise until they're gone. Out west it's all sound, heat, lights, and friction; a lumbering beast of avarice and frozen souls scrambling up a dirty mound. You can search for water and never find it. Wine is a fossil fuel. It's not easy to see. I sling a guitar on stage, I make words with my mouth, and sometimes I wonder if any of it's real or if it's just artifice.
Callum, my brother, he says the whole music affair is crazy. It's a boondoggle designed for the moneyed, he told me once. They buy it for jolts. There's no art. You make music for people to fuck to. No—to feel GOOD about fucking to. Like a costume. A fucking costume. Maybe he's right—I knew this guy once, he made dinosaur porn. Weird stuff, even in the common parlance: triceratopses and ankylosauri that engaged in God's act even though, by many accounts, they're not God's true creatures at all. The guy—the pornographer—he used to run pirated Dusty Springfield tunes for the sound beds. Later, he switched to Pat Metheny. Had a good run of it, until he got caught. It got so bad, he had to cough up his entire library to the feds for investigation.
I tell Callum about the guy. He says it's like the Traci Lords scandal all over again.
Traci Lords, the human, I say, was never copyrighted. She was 16 and lied; she did porn and said she was a full-grown lady in the eyes of the lord and the law. One of them, anyway, had their hands on the wheel. They had their eyes on the ball. Har har.
He turns his head. We're laying in the grass, watching the stars. There's a glow on the horizon from the fires in Cuyamaca that burns the sky like a rash.
That joke's not funny, he says.
OK.
Do you ever think about how you can use fire to clean stuff? he says. He twirls his hair around his middle finger.
Yeah, I tell him, but I don't have the soul to bore him with my dream so I tell him another thing: I was playing this bar a few months back. Really ripping into it, you know? The crowd's massive—I hold my arms out to show him really just how big it was. These people were bouncing and thrusting. Sweat was dripping down the walls. You hear what I mean? They were agape. It was majesty. So I'm halfway through the solo, and I hear this commotion and look up. I clam the grace note, but it don't matter because there's smoke coming out of the restroom. It's a lot. All these people are running for the door, falling over each other. I finish the solo, the bartender goes and puts the fire out. We finished to an empty room. Didn't even get paid.
Huh, says Callum. You think there's life on Mars?
You with the questions. Always with the questions. How should I know?
You're pretty smart. A well-informed fellow. I just figured.
I think about it a minute. "Well informed" connotes a willingness to take pleasure in knowing. It begets itself. You know? I don't know if I'm that guy. I'd rather risk doom and not be aware, I think, but I turn to him and say:
Yeah, maybe. I think probably. I mean, it's stupid to think we're the only things alive in the whole universe.
Elon Musk says he's going to make houses on Mars.
Who?
Elon Musk. He's gonna let us live on Mars.
Facilitate it?
He's building a spaceship.
Who's Elon Musk?
A scientist.
Can he make you a brain?
Your jokes suck, he says. He reaches over and touches my arm. I jump back. He has electric fingers. No volts, no watts, all amps. Where're those smokes? he says.
Not in my fucking bicep, I say. I'm cold. Let's go.
On the way to the store, we pass a beast with a sign that says "Need SOULS for FOOD" and I itch my scalp as the stars fly overhead. By the time we get to the store, I'm still sussing out the computational vagaries of space and time and who we are in this thing. The corner store is a steel fist on the hill with a gleaming jewel set in the center and Callum pushes it open, he swings it wide and then we're inside, we're really in it. There's a sex rack with glossy pages next to rows of onion chips, vanilla air fresheners, off-brand cola, and it's so cold in here, colder than it was outside even. I zip my jacket and discover the zipper's broke. In my pocket there's a hard cube. It's the smokes. They were there all along, a pack of dirty agriculture, but I don't tell Callum. I know I should, but I just don't.
When Callum gets to the counter, he says
Gimme them smokes.
The clerk looks at him. Which ones? she says.
The good ones.
The clerk blinks once, twice. She doesn't have the desire for this shit.
There's a wealth of smokes back there, says Callum. Surprise me.
Sir, she says—it's funny, she calls him "sir"—Sir, you got to choose. I'm not gonna be held liable.
Are you telling me that you are qualified to take my money, to work that machine there that greases this whole contraption, this commercial enterprise, but you can't determine the best tobacco product for me? I want to be surprised, man. Tickle my receptors. Give me some fashion and toss me a random.
Sir, she says, there are other people in line.
I look around and there is only one other soul here, a man that stands behind me in a wholly uninterested way.
I'm a paying customer, says Callum, goddamit. He hems and haws. I don't mean to swear, he says. Excuse me. I'm uncouth. But in this world there are few pleasures, and one is the spark of surprise. I'm a paying customer in this establishment and I want to you to surprise me. Spin the wheel. Pick a number. Fuck it; you know—he throws up his hands and squeals—give me the dromedaries.
The Camels?
Yeah.
Which ones?
Surprise me.
The woman's eyes roll. Just as she opens her mouth to exorcise the demons, the guy behind me slips forward. He bumps Callum and falls onto the counter, he leans into it, and when he raises his arms to the center of his sight he's got this machine, this war machine. OK, it's a pistol, and the heat rushes out of my blood and the man says
Everyone shut the fuck up. I've got a gun!
or something like that. He has intent, you know? Gravitas.
Callum steps away. The clerk puts her hands in the air, her eyes get wide and blank and she mumbles something, but what I notice, what I home in on, is the man's T-shirt. It has the Stone Temple Pilots logo on it, and it's cool, but this shirt is for Shangri-La Dee Da, the absolute worst of all their albums, and I lose respect for the man. I mean, he has a gun, and I feel some heavy deference for that, but in his core he's an absolute trash human. I know this because of his stupid shirt. Somehow, either by chance or by design, he chose this shirt or the shirt chose him and now he's wearing it, he put it on his flesh and took it out into the world. It's alien and bad, and I don't believe I can forgive him the digression.
Callum has no such reservation. He taps the counter and opens his mouth and I think, No, don't, but he says
Hey, that's a nice gun.
The man with the T-shirt looks at Callum like he just appeared. What? he says, and Callum says
Nice weapon. Where do you get a thing like that?
The man's shoulder twitches and he says, Shut up. Put your money on the counter. He waves the gun at the clerk, he jiggles it at the register and says Empty it, and the woman starts riffling through the machine's lifeblood.
A lot of people think you can't shoot a gun in space, says Callum, but it's not true. Did you know that? You can shoot a gun in space. It goes off just like it does here. The bullet, though, it just keeps going. There's no, like, air to slow it down. It just keeps bulleting until it hits something. Wonder what it would hit? Hey, man—you want a snack cake or something?
Callum's fingers tap-bap-bap on the counter, and I want him to tell him to stop but I know he won't. I know this about him; he'll go and go, just like the bullet in space. He stands there and stares at the man. When the man doesn't respond, he says
Maybe a Little Debbie or something?
I don't want food, says the man.
Well, you want some smokes?
The clerk rolls her eyes at the mention of cigarettes. It's an incongruous move in this impossible of situations, but she performs it: her eyes spin to the ceiling, and to Callum, the register, and finally to the gun. The man turns to Callum and waves his gun at him.
Fuck off, man, he says. Dump your cash.
Callum reaches into his pocket. As he digs deep, he says
Hey, man. How about a hug. The warm embrace of human affection.
Callum pulls his hand out of his jacket, and it's empty. He reaches up to the man like a shitty Jesus, he's absolving sins, and as his hand touches the man's shoulder there is a flash like the light of creation. It’s the Big Bang, or it's a big bang, and Callum does a backstep; he does the Riverdance and crouches like he's going to take a shit right there on the dirty floor. The clerk yells, and a cherry forms on Callum's yellow shirt below his pentagram necklace. I stare at it; I am mesmerized as it blooms and explodes like a supernova, like an angry sun that has given up the ghost, and I wonder about Mars and how anyone could live there. It's red dirt, man; it's dust. Nothing can grow—no human, no plant matter, no potatoes in rank human shit like that Matt Damon movie would have you believe. Callum looks up at me but doesn't. His mouth is open, but it's all wrong; it's a black burnt hole that stinks like eggs, his eyes are paper, and he falls to the floor in slow motion.
I bend down to him and grab the leather of his jacket. Cal, I yell. Cal. But he doesn't answer. The door crashes and the man is gone. The woman screams but it's light years away. There are ants beneath the candy rack. When I look through the glass I can see, from our place on the hill, the orange glow just over the horizon, it's a massive conflagration out there, but in here, in the store, there is no fire, and it is quiet and cold.