FLAME OUT

God knows, I’d been patient, standing in my socks behind him in the security line. He wasn’t bad looking, tall and firm, dressed entirely in denim. At first I smiled to myself as he fumbled around in his duffel, arranging and fussing. Perhaps he was flying for the first time since the TSA took over. He pulled out a copy of Muscle and Fitness magazine and stuck it in his pocket. The TSA goons were waving at him, people were shifting and grumbling… Get your stuff into the plastic bins, for Chrissake! Heat is crawling up my shoulders to my neck. My brain begins to simmer, it’s burning in the skillet. It smells like danger and fury. I surrender to it, I grab his arms, I yank the heavy rope from my laptop bag to tie his wrists up quickly.

“Hey, what the fuck!” he yells, just before I shove my handkerchief into his mouth and knock his feet out from under him. I seal his lips with a strip of gray gaffer’s tape and pull the rope between his arms and ankles. Gagged and hog-tied, he writhes on the ground at my feet.

A few people cheer, I hear their words above my heartbeat: “Atta boy!” and “Serves him right!”…. I squirt him with lighter fluid, soaking the denim, splashing his hair and face, and a woman hands me one of those long-necked BBQ lighters. I aim it at Mr. Denim. Whoosh. Bluish fire bursts from its barrel, it catches hold of his blue jeans. Flames race up his squirming body, the denim like underbrush on a parched hillside. He struggles, but it’s too late. Cracking and popping are the only sounds, as flames shoot 20 feet into the air. Only the man seems to burn. Iit smells like a church picnic. I notice the burnt edge of the Muscle and Fitness magazine peeking out of the charred mess on the floor in front of the security machine. I step over and go through.

I feel clean and unburdened. I search for someplace to sit; my eyes are drawn to a flat-screen provided by Channel Seven, showing live pictures of flaming residential horror: Halloween colors. The TV’s audio is on ‘mute’, so I squint to see the white words cutting across the terrified pantomime of a woman, her contorted face bobbing in and out of the frame. The woman is not fat, but there is a fullness to her, in her thirties maybe. The jittery camera tilts down to show her cherubic little girl and a tan cocker spaniel pulling on a leash. The camera zooms into a snapshot of the two of them in front of a teepee, the little girl wearing a tiny Indian headdress and a crooked smile. The shot tilts up to a sky choked in smoke, the fire’s redness smudged with black and billows of charcoal gray. Zoom out, a two-shot, the woman, now crying, and a blond anchorwoman wearing a crisp safari jacket, her perfect teeth moving purposefully … AND ALL THEY COULD SAVE WAS THE FAMILY DOG AND A SCRAPBOOK…

I turn away to find a seat. My wireless screen flashes some email. A deal on a car rental, boring items from work, two messages from back East: ‘Are U OK?’ ‘Is the house in danger?’ California is burning to the sea, Day of the Locusts on CNN. The truth is, if it weren’t for the news, this round of fires would have escaped my notice. Not like last time, when I was surrounded.

I rise to the loudspeaker squawks that announce my flight and climb the wobbly metal stairs to find a window seat. I sink into the lull of the familiar mindless flight ritual… muffled engine rumble, dimming cabin lights, the triumphant lift. Outside, off to the West, I see isolated flashes of tangerine flame and wisps of smoke in the canyons and hills. The plane pierces through the soup that blankets the city after two days of fires. My cheek and eye are warmed by a plastic sun. Aerial vibrations make my cradle rock; my bassinet sways high above cotton clouds.

I’m startled when a steward comes running down the aisle with his hair on fire. He leans over me, but I bash him in the head with a book of poems, which in turn catches fire. It’s OK, because I have a key to my porthole window. I unlock it and hurl the flaming book into the void, watching the fiery thing twirl and smoke as it melts into a panoramic view of the full expanse of Los Angeles — red, flaming, ablaze from the mountains to the ocean. I gasp, my God, I had no idea the fires were so widespread. I could have sworn they said the burning was only in Malibu, maybe Arrowhead, not this hell.

Suddenly I feel the plane losing altitude. We are heading back down, down into the fire zone. I try to make out the geography, but I’m disoriented. I get my bearings when I make out the towers at Universal City, and realize we are headed back to Burbank. I feel a tapping on my shoulder, it’s the steward again, his head covered with scabs and burn marks. He wears only his underwear. It is a true white, a shocking white, a strange comfort.

“What happened to your uniform?” I ask, averting my eyes.

“I lost it in the fires,” he says. “All I got away with was this,” and he holds up a photo album. I am suddenly so grateful that I managed to scan my photos onto the computer last summer. The steward pokes at me again.

“What is it?” I shout, peaking at his underwear.

“We are going to have to ask you to leave, now.”

“Why? What have I done?”

“Your house is on fire, you must evacuate,” and he grabs me, shoving me through the tiny porthole window. I grab hold of the edge of the plane, and yell, “But my laptop, my memories.”

He tosses the case to me and it inflates like a parachute. I glide gently toward burning Burbank. To my right, I see NBC in flames, helicopters spewing water onto the immense buildings. To my left, a brilliant wall of fire on the mountains above town, the mini mansions popping into flame — like when you were a kid, the rolls of caps you spread on the sidewalk, seeing who could pop pop pop the most in a row.

As I near the ground the unbearable heat rises up to me, flames licking my ass. I maneuver myself through a downdraft and onto Alameda Avenue. It is empty, except for the white ash drifting festively. No cars, no people -- where are they? I hear no screams, I smell no burning flesh. I remove my shirt and pants and wrap my sock feet with them to protect against the scorching sidewalk. From the west a flock of gulls, maybe 50 of them, fly into the hot wind in a V-shaped formation creating a perfect moving shadow, like an arrow. I take it as a sign that I must follow.

When I turn the corner, every house on the block has burned down to its nubs. I realize that I am on my street, the street where I live, standing in my underwear with my feet wrapped in rags. This gives me a sense of inner peace and I realize that I am definitely not miserable, I am ready to go on TV.

A group of dogs trots down the center of the street towards me. One of them stops and stands up on his hind quarters. I recognize the dog, it’s Karen’s dog from across the street. I feel awkward because I’ve forgotten his name. Fortunately, he has the social graces to offer a paw and say, “It’s Rocket,” and then I remember, of course, Karen’s dog Rocket. I notice that Rocket has a rosary in his paw. I didn’t realize that Rocket was a Catholic dog.

“They are after all of us,” says Rocket, fingering the rosary. “They are rounding up all the dogs, they believe we have started these fires.”

“No that’s impossible,” I say, “You couldn’t do that,” but Rocket looks down at the ground with a kind of doggy sheepishness that leaves me feeling uneasy and suspicious.

“Where’s Basil?” I ask Rocket, but he runs away. I turn towards my house, or what’s left of it. The doorbell lays on the driveway. I ring it because my keys are still in the plane. I hear Basil barking wildly, like he used to do before he became so deaf. My heart leaps with joy and I step into the building, my laptop case banging against my BVDs at each stride.

“Basil, Basil Rathbone!!” I shout, frantic to find my devoted pet. The smell of burning books hits me like a hammer, and I see my entire library in a charred pile. I lean over and pick up a smoldering copy of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. A strain of electronic wah-wah music produces a rhythmic glide. I grab hold with both hands until it drops me right into the closet, right into the smoky shambles of my wardrobe. I am overcome with grief, all these clothes that I love, especially those which are now too small for me to wear. I start to cry, and then I think, This is ridiculous. I’m in my burning house and I cannot get out of the closet. I wipe away a tear from my blackened cheek, and see Basil sitting in the bubbling hot tub smoking a cigarette.

“You never told me you smoked,” I say to him, getting all huffy.

“Why would I, you would just make my life more miserable,” says the Springer Spaniel.

“You’re all I have left, you and my laptop,” I shout, making sure that he can hear me. He puffs on his filtered cigarette and stares into the middle distance with uncharacteristic chilliness.

“You didn’t start these fires, did you?” Basil looks towards me, grinning in his sly way.

“It was time for you to start fresh, anyway. Your life is such a joke,” Basil says. “You’ve got your laptop, you’ve got me. What else do you need?”

“You call that unconditional love?…Dammit, you set this fire, didn’t you?” I shout. “I can’t believe it, after all I’ve done for you,”

“Oh please,” Basil says, tossing the lit cigarette towards the fern garden, which was still unburnt. “You sanctimonious bastard, you pathetic fool, you self-centered idiot.”

The dog’s words echoed in my heart for a long time. Maybe he is right, I think, maybe I’m confusing anger and love. The flames flare up from the garden behind me. I climb into the hot tub to escape them, and stare into the purple sky.