Fire Watch (26 page)

There was nobody on the beaches. Her mother would not let her go out, even to the grocery store, without a hat and sunglasses. She would not let them fly to Canada. She was afraid of magnetic storms. They sometimes interrupted the radio signals from the towers. Her mother was afraid the plane would crash.

She sent them on the train, kissing them goodbye at the train station, for the moment oblivious to the long dusty streaks of light from the vaulted train-station windows. Her brother went ahead of them out to the platform, and her mother pulled Daisy suddenly into a dark shadowed corner. “What I told you before, about your period, that won’t happen now. The radiation—I called the doctor and he said not to worry. It’s happening to everyone.”

Again Daisy felt the faint pull of fear. Her period had started months ago, dark and bloody as she had imagined. She had not told anyone. “I won’t worry,” she said.

“Oh, my Daisy,” her mother said suddenly. “My Daisy in the sun,” and seemed to shrink back into the darkness. But as they pulled out of the station, she came out into the direct sun and waved goodbye to them.

It was wonderful on the train. The few passengers stayed in their cabins with the shades drawn. There were no shades in the dining car, no people to tell Daisy to get out of the sunlight. She sat in the deserted dining car and looked out the wide windows. The train flew through forests, thin branchy forests of spindly pines and aspens. The sun flickered in on Daisy—sun and then shadows and then sun, running across her face. She and her brother
ordered an orgy of milkshakes and desserts and nobody said anything to them.

Her brother read his books about the sun out loud to her. “Do you know what it’s like in the middle of the sun?” he asked her. Yes. You stand with a bucket and a shovel and your bare toes digging into the sand, a child again, not afraid, squinting up into the yellow light.

“No,” she said.

“Atoms can’t even hold together in the middle of the sun. It’s so crowded they bump into each other all the time, bump bump bump, like that, and their electrons fly off and run around free. Sometimes when there’s a collision, it lets off an X-ray that goes whoosh, all the way out at the speed of light, like a ball in a pinball machine. Bing-hang-bing, all the way to the surface.”

“Why do you read those books anyway? To scare yourself?”

“No. To scare Mom.” That was a daring piece of honesty, suitable not even for the freedom of Grandma’s, suitable only for the train. She smiled at him.

“You’re not even scared, are you?”

She felt obliged to answer him with equal honesty “No,” she said, “not at all.”

“Why not?”

Because it won’t hurt. Because I won’t remember afterwards. Because I’ll stand in the sun with my bucket and shovel and look up and not be frightened. “I don’t know,” Daisy said. “I’m just not.”

“I am. I dream about burning all the time. I think about how much it hurts when I burn my finger and then I dream about it hurting like that all over forever.” He had been lying to their mother about his dreams, too.

“It won’t be like that,” Daisy said. “We won’t even know it’s happened. We won’t remember a thing.”

“When the sun goes nova, it’ll start using itself up. The core will start filling up with atomic ash, and that’ll make the sun start using up all its own fuel. Do you know it’s pitch-dark in the middle of the sun? See, the radiations are X-rays, and they’re too short to see. They’re invisible.
Pitch-dark and ashes falling around you. Can you imagine that?”

“It doesn’t matter.” They were passing a meadow and Daisy’s face was full in the sun. “We won’t be there. We’ll be dead. We won’t remember anything.”

Daisy had not realized how relieved she would be to see her grandmother, narrow face sunburned, arms bare. She was not even wearing a hat. “Daisy dear, you’re growing up,” she said. She did not make it sound like a death sentence. “And David, you still have your nose in a book, I see.”

It was nearly dark when they got to her little house. “What’s that?” David asked, standing on the porch.

Her grandmother’s voice did not rise dangerously at all. “The aurora borealis. I tell you, we’ve had some shows up here lately. It’s like the Fourth of July.”

Daisy had not realized how hungry she had been to hear someone who was not afraid. She looked up. Great red curtains of light billowed almost to the zenith, fluttering in some solar wind. “It’s beautiful,” Daisy whispered, but her grandmother was holding the door open for her to go in, and so happy was she to see the clear light in her grandmother’s eyes, she followed her into the little kitchen with its red linoleum table and the red curtains hanging at the windows.

“It is so nice to have company,” her grandmother said, climbing-onto a chair. “Daisy, hold this end, will you?” She dangled the long end of a yellow plastic ribbon down to Daisy. Daisy took it, looking anxiously at her grandmother. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Measuring for new curtains, dear,” she said, reaching into her pocket for a slip of paper and a pencil. “What’s the length, Daisy?”

“Why do you need new curtains?” Daisy asked. “These look fine to me.”

“They don’t keep the sun out,” her grandmother said. Her eyes had gone coal-black with fear. Her voice was rising with every word. “We have to have new curtains, Daisy, and there’s no cloth. Not in the whole town, Daisy. Can you imagine that? We had to send to Ottawa. They
bought up all the cloth in town. Can you imagine that, Daisy?”

“Yes,” Daisy said, and wished she could be afraid.

Ron still held her hands tightly. She looked steadily at him. “Wanner, Daisy,” he said. “Almost here.”

“Yes,” she said.

He untwined their fingers and rose from the couch. He walked through the crowd in the blue living room and went out the door into the snow. She did not try to go to her room. She watched them all, the strangers in their endless, random movement, her brother walking while he read, her grandmother standing on a chair, and the memory came quite easily and without pain.

“You wanna see something?” her brother asked.

Daisy was looking out the window. All day long the lights had been flickering, even though it was calm and silent outside. Their grandmother had gone to town to see if the fabric for the curtains had come in. Daisy did not answer him.

He shoved the book in front of her face. “That’s a prominence,” he said. The pictures were in black and white, like old-fashioned snapshots, only under them instead of her mother’s scrawled white ink, it said, “High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, Colorado.”

“That’s an eruption of hot gas hundreds of thousands of feet high.”

“No,” Daisy said, taking the book into her own lap. “That’s my golden hoop. I saw it in my dream.”

She turned the page.

David leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “That was the big eruption in 1946 when it first started to go wrong only they didn’t know it yet. It weighed a billion tons. The gas went out a million miles.”

Daisy held the book like a snapshot of a loved one.

“It just went bash, and knocked all this gas out into space. There were all kinds of—”

“It’s my golden bear,” she said. The great paw of flame
reached lazily out from the suns black surface in the picture, the wild silky paw of flaming gas.

“This is the stuff you’ve been dreaming?” her brother asked. “This is the stuff you’ve been telling me about?” His voice went higher and higher. “I thought you said the dreams were nice.”

“They were,” Daisy said.

He pulled the book away from her and flipped angrily through the pages to a colored diagram on a black ground. It showed a glowing red ball with concentric circles drawn inside it. “There,” he said, shoving it at Daisy. “That’s what’s going to happen to us.” He jabbed angrily at one of the circles inside the red ball. “That’s us. That’s us! Inside the sun! Dream about that, why don’t you?”

He slammed the book shut.

“But we’ll all be dead, so it won’t matter,” Daisy said. “It won’t hurt. We won’t remember anything.”

“That’s what you think! You think you know everything. Well, you don’t know what anything is. I read a book about it, and you know what it said? They don’t even know what memory is. They think maybe it isn’t even in the brain cells. That it’s in the atoms somewhere, and even if we’re blown apart, that memory stays. What if we do get burned by the sun and we still remember? What if we go on burning and burning and remembering and remembering forever?”

Daisy said quietly, “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t hurt us.” There had been no fear as she stood digging her toes into the sand and looking up at him, only wonder. “He—”

“You’re crazy!” her brother shouted. “You know that? You’re crazy. You talk about him like he’s your boyfriend or something! It’s the sun, the wonderful sun that’s going to kill us all!” He yanked the book away from her. He was crying.

“I’m sorry,” Daisy was about to say; but their grandmother came in just then, hatless, with her hair blowing around her thin, sunburned face.

“They got the material in,” she said jubilantly. “I bought enough for all the windows.” She spilled out two
sacks of red gingham. It billowed out across the table like the northern lights, red over red. “I thought it would never get here.”

Daisy reached out to touch it.

She waited for him, sitting at the white-damask table of the dining car. He hesitated at the door, standing framed by the snow of ash behind him, and then came gaily in, singing.

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your theory do,” he sang. He carried in his arms a bolt of red cloth. It billowed out from the bolt as he handed it to her grandmother—she standing on the chair, transfixed by joy, the pieces of paper, the yellow tape measure fallen from her forever.

Daisy came and stood in front of him.

“Daisy, Daisy,” he said gaily “Tell me—”

She put her hand on his chest. “No theory,” she said. “I know.”

“Everything, Daisy?” He smiled the easy, lopsided smile, and she thought sadly that even knowing, she would not be able to see him as he was, but only as the boy who had worked at the grocery store, the boy who had known everything.

“No, but I think I know.” She held her hand firmly against his chest, over the flaming hoop of his breast. “I don’t think we are people anymore. I don’t know what we are—atoms stripped of our electrons maybe, colliding endlessly against each other in the center of the sun while it burns itself to ash in the endless snowstorm at its heart.”

He gave her no clue. His smile was still confident, easy “What about me, Daisy?” he asked.

“I think you are my golden bear, my flaming hoop, I think you are Ra, with no end to your name at all, Ra who knows everything.”

“And who are you?”

“I am Daisy, who loved the sun.”

He did not smile, did not change his mocking expression. But his tanned hand closed over hers, still pushing against his chest.

“What will I be now, an X-ray zigzagging all the way to
the surface till I turn into light? Where will you take me after you have taken me? To Saturn, where the sun shines on the cold rings till they melt into happiness? Is that where you shine now, on Saturn? Will you take me there? Or will we stand forever like this, me with my bucket and shovel, squinting up at you?”

Slowly he gave her hand back to her. “Where do you want to go, Daisy?”

Her grandmother still stood on the chair, holding the cloth as if it were a benediction. Daisy reached out and touched the cloth, as she had in the moment when the sun went nova. She smiled up at her grandmother. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s come.”

She bent suddenly to the window and pulled the faded curtains aside as if she thought because she knew she might be granted some sort of vision, might see for some small moment the little girl that was herself, with her little girl’s chest and toddler’s stomach; … might see herself as she really was: Daisy, in the sun. But all she could see was the endless snow.

Her brother was reading on the blue couch in her mother’s living room. She stood over him, watching him read. “I’m afraid now,” Daisy said, but it wasn’t her brothers face that looked back at her.

All right, then, Daisy thought. None of them are any help. It doesn’t matter. I have come face to face with what I fear and what I love and they are the same thing.

“All right, then,” Daisy said, and turned back to Ron. “I’d like to go for a ride. With the top down.” She stopped and squinted up at him. “I love the sun,” she said.

When he put his arm around her shoulder, she did not move away. His hand closed on her breast and he bent down to kiss her.

I used to write confessions stories with titles like “I Called for Help on My CB … and Got a Rapist Instead.” I have made various pronouncements about this tawdry part of my past, calling the confessions a “quaint apprenticeship” and declaring that “I did them for the money,” but the sordid truth is that I loved writing confessions, and whenever I can get away with it, I still do.

What throwed me off about this guy was the way he looked. I mean, I ain’t no Burt Reynolds, but this guy was just plain ugly And little. He was wearing some of them fancy high-heeled boots, and he still didn’t hardly come up to my armpit. He had on a fancy East Coast suit and one of them little bitty black mustaches that look like they been painted on.

“Hello,” he says, like I should know who he is.

“Yeah?”

He kind of laughs to himself, and then he says, “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

I shake my head, wondering if now they are hiring midgets at Welfare, which would be a switch. Most of those guys are twice as big as me ever since the Mafia took over the department. If he is one of the Welfare guys I am sure as hell not going to let him in. Last time they grabbed a six-pack of Coors and docked our check fifty bucks. They was looking at Marjean’s love magazines, too. Hell, what good is all that money if they won’t let you have no fun with it? Anyway, he can just stand outside till I figure out who he is.

“Don’t you remember?” he says, still kind of laughing. “Twelve ninety-five postpaid. Delivery guaranteed in three weeks?”