And then he is released. He feels heat pressing down and throws the mattress off him. The room is smoky black, flames licking the ceiling. There is a jagged hole where the window used to be. At most ten seconds have passed since the gas that filled the house ignited. Simon scrambles onto his hands and knees, trying to stay under the flames. Then something looms up out of the smoke toward him. A shadowy figure, arm outstretched, hand seized into a terrible claw. It moves toward him and, instinctually, he rolls away. In his heart he knows it is the devil, come to pull him screaming into the molten below. The figure brushes his face and crashes to the floor.
It lies twitching, a black and red skeleton, joints on fire, skin charred stiff. Simon backs away, believing that any moment the charcoal Witch will scramble after him, teeth chattering. He can feel fresh air behind him, mixing with the smoke and flame, and he moves toward it, not wanting to take his eyes off what was once a woman. Her hair is gone. Her clothes have melted into her skin, her head a blackened skull, eyes staring at him from empty sockets. And then he is outside, having propelled himself backward through the gaping hole. Even then, as he stands shaking outside his prison walls, adrenaline races through his veins, and when he runs, he keeps looking back, convinced she is following.
He reaches the street, wild eyed, his feet bare, hospital scrubs singed. Behind him he hears a door open, turns. Rose stands on the top step of the neighboring house, framed by the red door.
“Diyos ko,” she says, seeing him. And then a folding chair takes her down, swung from the blackness behind her. It catches Rose in the back of the head and drives her to the cement. One moment she is there, clutching her untied robe. The next she is facedown on the pavement, and Story Nadir is standing on the threshold, dressed in hospital scrubs of her own, holding a broken aluminum chair.
She tosses it aside, then turns and pukes into the bushes.
“Jesus,” she says, straightening, “what’s the deal with that fucking soup?”
Book 4
The Eremocene
On August 2, Tropical Storm Gilberto muscled its way out of the Gulf of Mexico and into California and Arizona. It was a sluggish beast hundreds of miles wide, driving hot pressurized air ahead of it. The storm hugged the coast as it moved north, forcing dry lightning strikes from San Diego to Marin, and as far east as New Mexico. Forecasters called it a lightning siege. Dry atmospheric conditions evaporated the rain before it hit the ground, generating more humidity in the upper atmosphere and more lightning. Wildfires sprang up in the San Bernardino National Forest and Mount San Jacinto State Park, the Angeles National Forest, and Malibu Canyon. By Wednesday San Luis Obispo was on fire, and lightning was setting blazes in Big Sur and Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
It hadn’t rained in Northern or Southern California in five months. Within hours reports of fire tornadoes were coming in from residents fleeing towns up and down the coast. The days became choking and surreal. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the sky turned orange as a thick blanket of smoke blocked blue light from view. On the West Coast, Earth was becoming Mars.
Meanwhile, arguments raged online about the patriotism of athletes in black armbands, outrage over anti-democratic statements made by politicians known for making anti-democratic statements. This is the lesson we had learned: when you don’t want to face the consequences of your actions, you focus on the soap opera of public life, with its heroes and villains, its clear narratives. It is always easier to wrestle with our human drama than with the vastness of tectonic shifts on a planet almost four thousand miles in diameter, a planet more than four and a half billion years old, where dinosaurs ruled for one hundred and sixty-five million years, where another sixty-five million years passed before humanity was born, where time is measured in eras. The Cenozoic, the Mesozoic, the Paleozoic. Eras that make up eons. The Phanerozoic, the Proterozoic, the Archean, the Hadean.
Geological time is unconcerned with the life spans of animals, with history. Existence at a scale that defies comprehension, in which our own extinction is not just possible but inevitable.
But we are such short-lived creatures, all we know is now, this moment, these people—the hyperbolic dramas of our brief window.
And still the fires burned.
That was the week the soldiers began killing themselves. It started with thirteen new recruits at Fort Benning murdering themselves over three nights. On the fourth day six men at a forward operating base in Afghanistan huddled around a live grenade. At the Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, soldiers awoke the next morning to find five paratroopers hanging from their own parachute ropes. We had given them weapons and taught them to fight the enemy, but it was becoming clear the enemy was us.