She didn’t know how long she stood there, watching Portsmouth Hospital burn. Thick black smoke, piled a thousand feet high, curdled above her, above all of them, a thunderhead that smothered the sky. The sun was a small red coin, glowing through that mass of smoke. One of the doctors said, “Anyone got marshmallows?” and laughed, but no one laughed with him.
They had lost the power, not five minutes after the fire alarm began its nerve-shredding whoop. Strobe lights throbbed in the darkness, smashing time into bright frozen slivers. Harper made her way out through those stammering shadows with her hands on the shoulders of the nurse in front of her, in a line of shuffling evacuees. The air on the first floor was smoky, grained with fine particulate matter, but the fire was somewhere above them. At first the shriek of the alarm was terrifying, but by the time Harper emerged into the day, she was almost bored, had been creeping along in the crowd for forty-five minutes. She didn’t have any idea how bad it was until she cleared the building and could turn around.
Someone told her no one above the second floor had gotten out. Someone else said it started in the cafeteria; one person lit up, then another, then a third, like a string of firecrackers, and a guard panicked and bolted the door to keep anyone from getting out. Harper never found out if that was true.
The National Guard turned up in the early going and the troopers pushed the crowd back to the far edge of the parking lot. Beyond them, the Portsmouth Fire Department threw everything they had at the blaze, all six trucks . . . and anyone could see it wasn’t going to make a lick of difference. Flame gushed from every shattered window. The firemen worked in the falling black ash with practiced professional indifference, blasting the great furnace of the hospital with thunderous jets of water that seemed to do nothing.
Harper had a dazed, almost concussed feeling, as if she had been struck very hard and knocked down and was waiting for her body to report the extent of her injuries. The sight of all that fire and all that smoke robbed her of thought.
At some point she registered a peculiar thing: a fireman, who was inexplicably standing on her side of the sawhorses, when he should’ve been down among the trucks with his brothers-in-arms. She only noticed him because he was staring at her. He wore his helmet and a filthy yellow jacket and he had a firefighting tool in one hand, a long iron pole with hooks and a hatchet bristling from it, and she thought she knew him. He was a wiry, gangly man in glasses, and his face was all sharp edges, and he regarded her with something like sorrow, while flakes of ash fell around them in soft black curls. Ash streaked her arms, feathered her hair. A wisp of ash broke on the tip of her nose and provoked a sneeze.
She tried to recall how she knew him, the mournful fireman. She probed her memory in the gentle, careful way she might probe a child’s arm to make sure there was no fracture. A child, that was it: she knew him by way of his child, she thought. Only that was not quite right. She supposed she was being silly and she should just go over and ask him how they knew each other, but when she looked for him again he was gone.
Something collapsed inside the hospital. The roof, perhaps, pancaking in on the floor below it. Clouds of plaster and grime and ruddy smoke erupted from the windows on the top story. A National Guardsman wearing a paper mask over his mouth and blue latex gloves held his hands over his head as if he were surrendering to the enemy.
“Folks! We’re going to move you back again! I’m going to ask all of you to take three steps back, for your own safety. This is me asking in my nice voice. You don’t want to hear my not-so-nice voice.”
Harper moved back one step, and another, and then swayed on her heels, feeling light-headed and parched. She was desperate for a cool drink of water to clear the grit out of her throat, and the only reasonable place to get one was home. She didn’t have the car—it didn’t make sense for her to have it, she never left the hospital—so she turned away to walk.
She went half a block before she realized she was weeping. She didn’t know if she was crying because she was sad or because there was a lot of smoke in the air. The afternoon smelled like cookouts at summer camp, like charring hot dogs. It came to her that the hot dog smell was the odor of burning corpses. She thought, I dreamed this. Then she turned and vomited into the grass by the sidewalk.
There were clumps of people standing on the curb and in the road, but no one looked at her while she threw up. No one found her the least bit interesting, compared to the sight of the conflagration. People were entranced by flame and repelled by human suffering, and wasn’t that some kind of design flaw? She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand and went on.
Harper did not look at the faces in the crowd and so she did not see Jakob standing among all the others until he caught her in his arms. The moment he was holding her, he was holding her up. The strength went out of her legs and she sagged into him.
“Oh God, you’re all right,” he said. “Oh God. I was so scared.”
“I love you,” she said, because it seemed to her that was what you said after walking away from an inferno, that was the only thing that mattered on a morning like this one.
“They’ve got roads shut down for blocks,” he whispered. “I was so scared. I biked all the way here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, babygirl.”
He led her through the crowd, over to a telephone pole. His bike leaned against it, the one he had owned since college, a ten-speed with a basket between the handlebars. He pushed the bike with one hand, his other arm around her waist, and they went along that way, her head resting on his shoulder. They walked against the crowd, everyone else moving toward the hospital, in the direction of that greasy black column of smoke, into the falling ash.
“Every day is September eleventh,” she said. “How are we supposed to live our lives when every day is September eleventh?”
“We live with it until we can’t anymore,” he said.
She didn’t understand what that meant, but it sounded good, maybe even profound. He said it tenderly while dabbing at her mouth and cheek with a silvery-white square of silk. Jakob always carried a handkerchief with him, an Old World affectation that she found agonizingly adorable.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting the ash off you.”
“Please,” she said. “Please.”
He stopped after a bit, and said, “All clean. All better.” And kissed her cheek, and kissed her mouth. “I don’t know why I did it, though. You were looking like a little Charles Dickens urchin for a moment. Grubby but scrumptious. Tell you what. I’ll make it up to you. We’ll go home and I’ll make you spiritually filthy. How’s that?”
She laughed. He had a somehow Gallic sense of the absurd; in college he had performed as a mime in a mime club. He could walk a tightrope, too—he was nimble in bed, nimble in life.
“That’s fine,” she said.
Jakob told her, “The whole world can burn down around us. I’ll keep my arms around you until the end. No getting away from me.”
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his salty mouth. He had been crying, too, although he was smiling now. She rested her head on his chest.
“I’m so tired,” she said. “Of being scared. Of not being able to help people.”
He put his knuckle under her chin and gently forced her head up. “You have to let go of that. The idea that somehow it’s your job to fix things. To run around . . . putting out all the fires.” He looked meaningfully toward the smoke drifting above. “It’s not your job to save the world.”
That was so sensible, so reasonable, it made her ache a little with relief.
“You have to take care of yourself,” he said. “And let me take care of you some. We’ve got such a short time to treat each other right. We’re going to make it special. We’re going to make it worth something, starting tonight.”
She had to kiss him again, then. His mouth tasted of peppermint and tears, and he returned her kiss carefully, tentatively, as if discovering her for the first time, as if kissing were an entirely new, curious experience . . . an experiment. When he lifted his face up, his expression was serious.