Free Burning Down the House by Russell Wangersky Page B

with anything: your face is inside the mask, a fireproof hood covers your head and ears under your helmet, your fire jacket and bunker pants cover you from your neck to your heavy rubber boots. And the dislocation goes further. It’s not your house, so the rooms are strange, and often they seem completely foreign once the smoke has lifted.
    Walking back down the upstairs hall in that house in White Rock, after almost all the smoke was gone, I became entranced by the intricate pattern of the carpet; it seemed incredibly involved, a bright pattern of cream and brown. Then the yellow dome of a firefighter’s helmet passed right through the pattern, and I realized that I was looking down through a hole in the floor, that the ceiling of the kitchen had burned away entirely, taking some of the hall carpet with it. What had been a pattern resolved itself into the kitchen floor and part of the cabinets. The problem is that appearance can be every bit as real as, well, reality.
    Except for the distraction of that pattern, the fact that I had stopped for a moment to try to make sense of it, I would have stepped through and fallen eight or ten feet straight down. Below me, a firefighter from another department turned, looked up at me through the mask of his breathing gear and waved, his arm swinging slowly back and forth like a semaphore signal.
    Things were never what they seemed. You couldn’t trust either your eyes or your feelings to tell you the truth.
    We were last in and first out in White Rock, and when the fire-ground commander was done with us, Dave Hennessey and I rolled up the used hose in coils known as doughnut rolls and stacked them on the tailgate of the pumper.
    As we drove away, both of us on the back of the pumper standing on the rolls of wet hose to keep them from bouncing off, I looked back at the house—a house I’ve never seen since—and was left with the same sort of impression of it that you get when you see a dresser with half its drawers pulled open and clothes hanging out, the feeling that I had glimpsed a kind of manic disorder which I was not meant to see, where so much is revealed that it carries an inevitable embarrassment. There were wet curtains hanging out through the broken windows on the second floor, limp and sooty and ragged, and dark triangles above the windows where the smoke had boiled out and the flames had nibbled away at the eaves. It was like seeing a lover with her hair all wild in the morning—except she’s not your lover at all, so it was more like trespassing. Like walking through a friend’s house and running into his partner coming out of the bathroom with her robe open.
    More like being a peeping Tom, eyes wide and staring, than anything else.
    The chief got us all out for a training night at an old people’s home on Main Street, one we’d been to before for fire calls because a resident we knew as the Major liked to pull the fire alarm and then masturbate to all the flashing lights outside.
    But this time the chief wanted us to evacuate as many people as the administrators would let us move, to see how much time it would take us to clear the building, and Chief Wood was being a real prick about it. Most of the time we rescued other firefighters, and that was hard enough, but this time it was actual residents, and one was a huge, laughing woman trussed into a wire Stokes basket. She was laughing so hard that her entire body shook, and she kept telling us, “I haven’t had this much attention from men in years.”
    We were lugging her down the outside wooden fire escape, six or seven of us trying to hang on to the edges of the basket, when the firefighter at the bottom broke right through the stair tread and we all started to fall, bright yellow dominoes toppling forward until we could find something to grip and get our balance back.
    The lady’s basket was sliding down along the fire escape railings, and if anything she was