I was standing there at the corner, the corner where the smaller street intersects with the slightly wider one. The smaller street was lined with squat tiny houses subdivided into tiny apartments, while the wider one had taller houses, narrow and tall and slender and stretching up all the way into the sky, making you crane your neck to see the tops where the houses angled into quaint triangular steeples like churches—kind of like churches, almost like churches, but not really. The road with the tall houses was wide enough that there were cars parked on both sides of it, big metallic husks flanking the road, immobile and innocuous, and it was funny to see them like that, these machines that were designed for ceaseless motion being so still. On the smaller road, just next to the intersection—almost directly on the intersection, only two houses back from the southeast corner of the intersection—was my house. Not really my house: the house where I lived. I lived in one of the apartments that the house was subdivided into, and had lived there for five or seven or nine years, something like that. It was a nice enough apartment—there were several windows, and the water that flowed out the taps became hot fairly quickly after you opened them, and though there was a mouse who lived in the kitchen, it was the only one as far as I could tell, and I didn’t really mind his being there, and he didn’t chew through my electronic cables or anything like that. We had an understanding is what I’m trying to say. All in all, this apartment was nice enough, and so when I was standing there at the corner where the thinner street intersects with the wider one, looking up at my apartment, I felt that I should have been more upset to see the flames gushing out of the windows, red and orange and eager. But truthfully, I didn’t feel upset; when I saw those flames, flooding out the windows and licking up the exterior wall of the building, climbing up and up in these crazed, irrepressible motions, I didn’t feel fear, or panic, or grief, and what I felt, instead, was a kind of relaxed, steady excitement, pulsing coldly at the base of my neck.
The fire burned and burned and then finally it stopped, and by the time it stopped there were several other people standing on the street corner alongside me, some of us looking up at the building with dull, glazed expressions on our faces and others looking up at the building with tense, worried expressions on their faces. When the flames stopped their rolling and wailing and vanished, they left the building sort of unrecognizable—to be honest it was completely unrecognizable. It was charred black, as though it were a pile of coal in a barbecue pit, or as though it were the skeleton of an animal that had been left to rot on the side of a freeway.
The crowd of people standing there made some shocked or numb remarks about the terrible state of the building in hushed voices, incredulous and shaking their heads, and directed certain questions to the firefighters, who were wiping the sweat and soot from their faces. The crowd of people wanted to know if they could go inside to gather their belongings and where they were supposed to go now that their apartments had become charred black and skeletal and basically completely unrecognizable. The firefighters threw up their hands and shook their heads and, in a frustrated, tired way, told them to stay back, and to not approach the building or attempt to locate any of their belongings in the rubble. Someone then turned to me and said something, addressing me directly, even addressing me by name in a somewhat familiar, intimate way, and I had no idea who they were; I’d never seen them in the five or nine years that I’d lived in the building; I’d never seen them in my entire life, actually. Their face was like the mysterious foliage of a tree—my eyes glided right over it. I didn’t want to speak with them, so I pretended I was too stricken by emotion and immediately left and went around the corner to the wider street on which cars were parked on both sides, where my car was parked, and I unlocked it and slid into the driver’s seat. The car was grey or blue, and it had four doors, and the half circle on the windshield where the wipers moved was sharply accentuated against the rest of the glass because of how dirty the rest of the glass was; in other words, it was just a car, and there’s nothing else to say about it, so don’t ask me. I woke up the car and it was startled, and then I moved it out of its parking spot and down the road.
I went down the road and through the city, and there were large glass towers shining brightly under the hot sun, and there were smaller buildings that sat comfortably or maybe resentfully in the shade of the large towers, and there were massive parking lots that stretched out for acres and acres, and there were large signs looming over chain-link fences that advertised automatically approved payday loans for people with bad or no credit. I drove through this city, and the heat was so strong that I cranked the air conditioning all the way up and cool air blasted out of the little plastic vents; when it hit my face it smelled strange and stale and a bit sweet. I drove through the city until I hit the highway, and then I merged onto it, and right away I became stuck in the midday traffic. The highway was twenty lanes wide, with ten lanes that went east and ten that went west, and all the lanes were filled with vehicles, with all sorts of vehicles: large black pickup trucks elevated five feet high off the ground, sleek two-door coupes, eighteen-wheelers that had decals on the side illustrating the mythological histories of their companies. All these types of vehicles wanted to move down the highway, and all of them were instead stuck unmoving in the traffic. I was completely stuck; there were cars in front of me as far as I could see, cars to the left of me and to the right of me, and when I looked in the rear-view mirror, there were cars behind me as well, as though I were stuck in an endless, glimmering sea of machinery.
I sat there in the car with the air conditioning blasting, and every so often, perhaps every ten or fifteen minutes, I was able to move the car forward by about one metre, or sometimes by a metre and a half. All along the highway, the drivers were blaring their horns, and some people were even leaning out their windows and swearing and cursing at everyone around them. Fuck your mother, you bitch. Fuck your mother, you bitch, a man leaning out his car’s window was screaming over and over again, and it was unclear whether he was addressing another driver in particular, or all the other drivers, or perhaps just the concept of traffic itself. There were also a man and a woman and a child around thirteen years old, all walking in between the cars selling water bottles, sodas, and snacks, and when the child walked by my window holding up the wares so that I could see them, I didn’t say anything to him, just stared at him blankly with placid eyes, and he stared back at me and his eyes were also blank and placid. And then he moved on to the next car, holding up his wares for the driver to see. I sat in this gridlock, moving forward by about a metre every ten or fifteen minutes, for about three hours. And then I gave up. I put on my hazard lights and slowly, terribly slowly, impossibly slowly, over the course of an additional hour, inched my car through the two lanes to my right and over to the shoulder of the road. There were even cars on the gravel shoulder stuck in gridlock. I moved my vehicle even further, past the gravel shoulder, until it fell off the road and down into the grassy ditch to its side. No one paid me any mind as my car plunged into the ditch, and as the car slid down my body was jostled a little, but not too much, and then I stopped the car in that yellow-grass-coated ditch and switched the engine off. I undid my seat belt and swung my body over the centre console and climbed into the back seat, and I lay down on my side and then I went to sleep. I closed my eyes and went right to sleep, basically as soon as I closed my eyes.
When I woke up it was evening, and I could tell because the light slinking through the windows into the car was fainter, red, pulsing, and warm. It was terribly hot, feverish; my hair was matted over my face with sweat, and my clothes were sticking to my skin. I crawled back into the driver’s seat and twisted the key in the ignition, wanting to turn the air conditioning back on: nothing happened. I twisted the key once more, once more nothing happened, and I twisted it again and again and again, and everything was silent and hot. The battery was dead is what I mean; at least I thought that it must have been that the battery was dead, but I don’t know, I guess it could have been something else. I opened the car door, and the air outside wafted in, drifting over my sweat-coated body. When I walked up out of the ditch, I saw that the highway was still clogged with traffic, and that the drivers were yelling and blaring their horns, and that the family was still weaving between the cars selling drinks and snacks. When I looked up the road a bit, I could see another vehicle parked in the ditch, a large RV, off-white and stained with dirt, beige stripes going around its body, the little curtains of its little windows pulled closed. I stomped over the yellow grass, lumbering over to the RV, and when I got to it, I took my fist and rapped on the door, the vehicle shaking with a flimsy metallic sound, like if I hit it slightly harder the whole thing would have fallen apart, like the walls were only 0.1 mm or 0.2 mm thick where they should have been, at minimum, around 0.8 mm thick, or perhaps even up to 1.5 mm, I’m not too sure. After only a few seconds a man swung open the door, as though he had been standing right behind it; he was short and squat, with a pale, sallow face, an aura of dampness, the top of his head balding, and generally unpleasant to look at—but not specifically because of any of his physical features, which I don’t have any issues with, believe me. It was some other thing. He stood there with his eyes bulging a little out of their sockets, looking at me like he couldn’t believe I was there, like I was his long-lost daughter or wife, or like he hadn’t seen another person in two or three weeks, his mouth gaping. I told him that my car battery had died and asked whether he could help me jump-start it. His mouth closed, and his eyes receded back into his head: Come inside for a minute, he said in an affable way, and I followed him into the RV.
Inside there were veneer-panelled walls and veneer countertops and cabinets, and the vinyl floor was a kind of sickly green shade, the gross hue of which validated and accentuated the general unpleasantness that wafted off the man. He rustled through the cabinets and drawers hurriedly, searching for something with his back to me, and I carefully sat down on a frail plastic chair in front of the counter; on the wall over the counter was a placard with #vanlife in loopy serif script. I asked the man whether he lived in the RV full time. For three years now. I was living out west before, and then after the forest fires, almost everybody left, all my neighbours left. I coulda stayed, but I—I took the opportunity to hit the road. I just bought the van and I hit the road. I thought: Why not, right? Why not. A lot more freedom this way—freedom and dignity. The man was then standing right in front of me, and as he spoke, his breath was rancid in my face, sour and sharp, and his pale skin pulsed with a yellowish undertone, all of which made me feel quite repulsed. And that’s it. Never went back. The man stopped for a moment, and his eyes drifted up and to the left, reflecting on something. But then, a couple months ago I did find this wine in a little shop. He pointed at a bottle of wine that was sitting on the counter beside a few empty, uncorked ones. I picked the bottle up and held it closer to examine it; it was only half-full, and on the label there was a dainty watercolour-like illustration. In the left half of the illustration, a forest was burning up, all the pines and firs and spruces aflame, and black smoke was drifting up off the trees and into the right half of the illustration, where a bunch of grapes sat on a vine; the black smoke, as it neared the grapes, took the shape of a hand, and the hand carefully, lightly cradled the bunch of grapes in its upturned palm. On the bottom of the label was the word Smokehouse, in grey, wispy letters that looked like they were also formed from smoke.
It’s from a winemaker in my town. They got hit by the fires pretty bad, everyone did, and then all their grapes got the . . . the smoke inside them. The man moved to open a cabinet above the bar and brought out a plastic cup, not the red disposable ones, the allegedly reusable, branded ones, like you get at movie theatres or family restaurants sometimes, but the decal on this one was faded beyond recognition. He took the bottle and popped the loose cork out with his fingers, pouring the liquid into the cup and handing it to me, and I took it into my hands, bringing it closer to my face. The wine looked and smelled normal, like wine, actually like good-quality wine: floral and dark red. I brought the cup to my lips and tasted it, and it tasted normal too, sweet and nutty and a bit sour but not too much. I tipped the liquid back into my mouth and it splashed over my tongue, and I swallowed it back. And then it was no longer normal. The taste was overwhelming, ashy and hot, almost unbearable; my mouth and throat dried up suddenly, all at once, all the moisture inside me sucked out in a second, making me cough and cough. It was as if I’d swallowed a lit cigarette, but no, it was more than that; it was as if I’d swallowed the forest fire itself, all of it burning and alive inside of me. Even though the fire had occurred several years ago, it still lived on inside me, and the thought of this was horrible and deranged and exhilarating, totally exhilarating, completely exhilarating. It’s good, isn’t it, the man said. I was trying to see if I could taste my house in it, a big part of it burned in the fire. He chuckled and went back to rustling through another cabinet, then quickly turned back to me holding the jumper cables, red and black and dusty, the clamps at the end like little reptile heads, like little dinosaur heads. I’ll turn the van around and then we can start your car. I watched from my plastic seat, holding onto the counter in anticipation of movement, as he went over to the front of the vehicle and slid into the driver’s seat, fishing the key from his pocket and inserting it into the ignition. He turned the key, and the engine made a slight, quiet clicking sound, and nothing happened; he turned it again, and nothing happened. He turned it a third time, and nothing happened.
The man swore under his breath and swivelled around to face me, shaking his head, taking his phone from his pocket and starting to poke at and smudge the screen with his faintly trembling, sickly looking, repulsive fingers. He put the device to his ear, and I watched his dull, slack face as he listened, his breath whistling through his half-open mouth, and then he put the phone back into his pocket. Roadside assistance can’t come out here for a while, they want me to try again later. Apparently another forest fire near here.
I stood up from the counter and we went out of the RV, and when we were outside I saw that the sky was beginning to get truly dark, purple and dark navy with orange and ruby streaks; and out in the distance, east over the highway, back the way I came from, was a dark black cloud, thick and singular and monolithic, beginning to obscure the sky and the entire landscape, beginning to drift over toward us, just like in the illustration on the wine bottle. Because of the angle I couldn’t see it, but underneath the cloud of smoke certainly the forest was burning, certainly the sky over there was fiery orange and hellish, certainly the firs and spruces and pines were ablaze.
On the highway the drivers remained the same as they had been before, hapless in the clench of gridlock, hunched over their steering wheels looking despondent with frustration, leaning out their open windows and yelling at the other vehicles, and there was a guy who was standing on the highway beside his open driver-side door dramatically swinging his arms forward, screaming GO! GO! JUST GO! at the traffic-clogged road, as though all they needed was a little direction, as though he was the only one who knew that the road existed to facilitate movement toward a destination and the rest of them were ignorant and misinformed, and if only his words could get through their thick heads everything would be solved. The family was no longer walking in between the cars, they were instead sitting on the side of the road on three folding polyester camping chairs, and the third chair was small, sized for a very young child, too small for the boy who was sitting in it, making him sit with his knees high up in the air, his body collapsed into itself awkwardly. The three of them were wordlessly, emotionlessly looking over at the big, dark cloud of smoke that was coming off the forest fire, watching as it neared us with deceptive speed. When it arrived, it would be difficult to tell exactly how thick and dark it was, exactly how much it was blocking out the sky above us, since the sun had already nearly completely receded under the horizon, and soon it would be dark, or as dark as it could be with all the lights from the cars and the roadside lamps.
I looked over at the smoke and felt that I should have been afraid, that I should have been filled with sick, anxious grief, but I wasn’t; what I felt, instead, was a kind of blunt, cold excitement, pulsing thrillingly at the base of my neck as I wondered whether, somewhere along the fire’s path, there was a vineyard where grapes were filling slowly, deliciously, delectably with smoke. As I wondered whether, when harvesting season came around, the vineyard workers would pluck these grapes off their stems and squish them and process them and store the liquid in barrels. Whether, in a few years, after the wine had matured, they would bottle it and send it out; whether I would one day be able to tip the wine into my mouth and taste it—taste the hot, dry scorch of the fire that was currently burning through the forest east of the highway and sending dark plumes of smoke up over our heads.
