The counselors tell him never to let Jenna see this franticness—this gutted, hollow, gasping feeling.
As if wearing blinders—unsure of whether the counselors are right or not—he does as they suggest. He thinks that they are probably right. He knows the horrible dangers of panic.
And in the meantime, the marriage strengthens, becomes more resilient than ever. Arguments cease to be even arguments, anymore, merely differences of opinion; the marriage is reinforced by the innumerable fires and by the weave of his comings and goings. It becomes a marriage as strong as a galloping horse. His frantic attempts to keep drawing clean air are good for the body of the marriage.
Mary Ann worries about the fifteen or twenty years she’s heard get cut off the back end of all firefighters’ lives: all those years of sucking in chemicals—burning rags, burning asbestos, burning formaldehyde—but still she does not ask him to stop.
The cinders continuing to fall across his back like meteors; twenty-four scars, twenty-five, twenty-six. She knows she could lose him. But she knows he will be lost for sure without the fires.
She prays in church for his safety. Sometimes she forgets to listen to the service and instead gets lost in her prayers. It’s as if she’s being led out of a burning building herself; as if she’s trying to remain calm, as someone—her rescuer, perhaps—has instructed her to do.
She forgets to listen to the service. She finds herself instead thinking of the secrets he has told her: the things she knows about fires that no one else around her knows.
The way light bulbs melt and lean or point toward a fire’s origin—the gases in incandescent bulbs seeking, sensing that heat, so that you can often use them to tell where a fire started: the direction in which the light bulbs first began to lean.
A baby is getting baptized up at the altar, but Mary Ann is still in some other zone—she’s still praying for Kirby’s safety, his survival. The water being sprinkled on the baby’s head reminds her of the men’s water shields: of the umbrella-mist of spray that buys them extra time.
…
As he travels through town to and from his day job, he begins to define the space around him by the fires that have visited it, which he has engaged and battled. I rescued that one, there, and that one, he thinks. That one. The city becomes a tapestry, a weave of that which he has saved and that which he has not—with the rest of the city becoming simply all that which is between points, waiting to burn.
He glides through his work at the office. If he were hollow inside, the work would suck something out of him—but he is not hollow, only asleep or resting, like some cast-iron statue from the century before. Whole days pass without his being able to account for them. Sometimes at night, lying there with Mary Ann—both of them listening for the dispatcher—he cannot recall whether he even went into the office that day or not.
He wonders what she is doing: what she is dreaming of. He rises and goes in to check on their children—to simply look at them.
…
When you rescue a person from a burning building, the strength of their terror is unimaginable: it is enough to bend iron bars. The smallest, weakest person can strangle and overwhelm the strongest. There is a drill that the firemen go through, on their hook-and-ladder trucks—mock-rescuing someone from a window ledge, or the top of a burning building. Kirby picks the strongest fireman to go up on the ladder, and then demonstrates how easily he can make the fireman—vulnerable, up on that ladder—lose his balance. It’s always staged, of course—the fireman is roped to the ladder for safety—but it makes a somber impression on the young recruits watching from below: the big man being pushed backwards by one foot, or one hand, falling and dangling by the rope: the rescuer suddenly in need of rescuing.
You can see it in their eyes, Kirby tells them—speaking of those who panic. You can see them getting all wall-eyed. The victims-to-be look almost normal, but then their eyes start to cross, just a little. It’s as if they’re generating such strength within—such torque—that it’s causing their eyes to act weird. So much torque that it seems they’ll snap in half—or snap you in half, if you get too close to them.
Kirby counsels distance to the younger firemen. Let the victims climb onto the ladder by themselves, when they’re like that. Don’t let them touch you. They’ll break you in half. You can see the torque in their eyes.
Mary Ann knows all this. She knows it will always be this way for him—but she does not draw back. Twenty-seven scars, twenty-eight. He does not snap; he becomes stronger. She’ll never know what it’s like, and for that she’s glad.
Many nights he runs a fever for no apparent reason. Some nights, it is his radiant heat that awakens her. She wonders what it will be like when he is too old to go out on the fires. She wonders if she and he can survive that: the not-going.
…
There are days when he does not work at his computer. He turns the screen on but then goes over to the window for hours at a time and turns his back on the computer. He’s up on the twentieth floor. He watches the flat horizon for smoke. The wind gives a slight sway, a slight tremor to the building.
Sometimes—if he has not been to a fire recently enough—Kirby imagines that the soles of his feet are getting hot. He allows himself to consider this sensation—he does not tune it out.
He stands motionless—still watching the horizon, looking and hoping for smoke—and feels himself igniting, but makes no movement to still or stop the
