You think you know what’s coming? It’s way worse. Trust me.
So I’m poking the ashes with the tongs, staring at the cinders swirling up the chimney. Show me a kid who isn’t at least a bit obsessed with fire. I pick up a charred log, observe it, blow on it till it starts flaming, the glare immediately flickering in my eyes and on my smooth, bare skin; me, an imp in the night.
Humanity watched as I brought them fire; it was the last they’d ever see.
As I held the log above them, it disintegrated with a pffft. Porcupiny was the first to catch fire. I swear I tried rescuing her, but I was so much in shock that I beat the stuffing out of the poor thing with the tongs, which only caused the embers to sputter all over the place.
One spark and your childhood needs a completely revised, limited edition republication.
One spark and not a single story you ever tell is the whole story.
The moment the fire took over, I realized that Prometheus would have to face consequences, the consequences for tempting powers greater than himself. That was the moment the embers ignited Dr. Jingles and Twig. And the carpet.
I didn’t only give humanity the gift of fire. I cremated them on the spot.
And possibly, if I had acted quickly enough, I could still have done something. If I’d beat the flames with one of Grandma’s embroidered pillows, if I’d alerted Grandpa and he’d grabbed the extinguisher from the kitchen, maybe we would have gotten off with just soot damage and a fire-and-brimstone lecture. But I was nine. Paralyzed. And practically in the buff.
Even now that the flames were spreading lickety-split through the carpet’s dry deep pile and clambering up the curtains, even now, the first thing I wanted was to somehow get my PJ top on.
Go figure, but the fire didn’t scare me out of my wits half as much as having to explain my drag to everyone.
Didn’t tell Mrs. Bernstein any of that. This kind of thing you didn’t even admit to yourself. Even after all those years.
I pattered as quickly and as quietly as I could to the hall, past Grandpa’s and Grandma’s bedroom, expecting the smoke alarm any minute to obliterate nine years of my family’s love.
I couldn’t untie the loincloth.
In my bedroom, hopping from one leg to the other, picking at the knots, tugging on the pillowcases, my limp teeny weenie spraying panic pee into them. By now, a hot, orange glow peering under the door. Prometheus, my manliness, my pride—clean forgot them.
Finally, I pried that soiled rag open, and once I was drip-dry, could pull my PJ pants back on. Top and slippers. I shook my sis awake and she started screaming at the precise second the smoke alarm started blaring.
Then, the chaos. Grandpa and Grandma too old for this kind of action. Us too young. By the time everyone had got out of bed and sized up the situation, it was out of control. Grandpa yelled at us to go outside, tugging Julia and me with his hands, our own hands covering our mouths to keep from inhaling the black smoke. The large room a rampant inferno, I was grateful to note that no traces of Dr. Jingles, Twig, and Porcupiny could be seen through the wall of fire. Relieved that the fire had destroyed humanity before it could expose me.
“A gnarl must have popped out of the hearth,” Grandma cried, as, teeth chattering, we stood in the snow watching Huckleberry Wall burn. Grandpa came back from the conflagration, his arms loaded with blankets to save us from freezing. And Grandma cried, “That’s what it probably was. An ember that sparked the carpet.”
And for me, the father of the fire, this was my second chance to fess up. I coulda said it was me, coulda said I couldn’t sleep and had flung a log into the fireplace, that the cinders spattered onto the rug. That it was an accident. No one had to get wind of my escapades.
What held me back was Prometheus.
That the birds would come and get you if they knew you were the culprit.
That’s not how I had wanted it.
The denial, the repressing of the memories, the refusal to go back upstate: for your parents, your therapists even, it was all normal enough behavior, after all you’d been through. Julia had nightmares for years, scratching on the walls till she was ten. Squeezed empty a bottle of Lysol Power cleaner into the tropical aquarium. I told tales of sharp beaks and talons that visited me nightly to gore me. Didn’t dare set foot outside the city, shit-scared of wilderness and anything that sloped away from man-made structures.
But what really defined the most crucial moment in your life was that you never again dared to be around Grandpa.
That, three years later, when he finally snuffed it after a CVA, you cried with the crowd at his funeral, but they were whew-tears. That’s what you really didn’t tell anyone.
That night’s scene, branded in your brain, the epic plunge in the snow back to civilization, the bulky black devil dragging us on the sleigh, smoke rising from his skull and shoulders—closer to the truth than you think.
Grandpa musta had devilish powers to rescue his wife and grandkids after what he’d been through.
He wanted to get the car out of the garage. Grandma told him don’t do it, no point. But he wanted to, for our sake. It was January and cold; he was afraid we wouldn’t make it otherwise.
Ya see, that figure coming out of the explosion, stumbling toward us out of the wall of fire that had just been the garage, that wasn’t my grandfather. His robe burned away to the seams, the blanket a smoldering lump falling from his hands, all that white hair barbecued away, and the fuming face like a Freddy Krueger mask that resembled my grandfather’s face but wasn’t: soot and blood and charred flesh and two gaping bewildered eyes.
That’s not how I had wanted it.
All those deformed faces. All those deformed landscapes. That’s why I couldn’t face Nick now. That’s why I came to New York. Didn’t Prometheus get punished over and over again?
Grandpa took one more step toward us, then keeled over, that face buried in the snow, and there was a hiss as he slowly melted it down.
7
Back to that day in Amsterdam-Zuid, a coupla days before Nick left for Helvetia. The landing upstairs a jumble of climbing gear, us entangled in exhaled exclamations and spiraling aspirations. I’m tall, six feet, but with Nick’s six four I could disappear in his arms and feel the air stream into him. I said, “Promise you’ll come back.”
“I promise everything.”
“It’s important,” I said. I turned around, as much as the climbing rope permitted, and looked him straight in the eyes, imploring. Ice axe cold steel between us, his skin suddenly granite hard. I imagined something terrifying approaching from on high, something that propelled itself with powerful wing beats and against which I had to protect him unconditionally. “Seriously, you gotta promise me, Nick.”
He pecked my eyelids. “Come on. You can’t control the whole world, Sam.” Coupla seconds later, “Of course I’ll come back, you know that. I always come back.”