Burning Down the House (19 page)

It's the same for people. The problem is that we don't have a handy weight sticker anywhere to look at, and no set of scales to drive over to tell us when we're getting too close.

Just to be clear here—it wasn't always the firefighting that delivered me downstairs alone. But a lot of it certainly was: the nightmares that drove me out of bed almost always had their genesis in fire calls, especially car crashes. When I got up to escape the thrashing around, it was almost always a fire scene or an accident that had left me unable to sleep. So I would go downstairs and sit, and wait—wait to be able to sleep, wait for my pager to go off again, even just wait for someone to notice that I was gone.

By then, Barby and I had two boys, two small, wonderful, busy boys, with all the exhaustion and complications and changes that small children necessarily bring to life. We were always tired and often out of sorts—and to compound that, I felt more and more like I was exploding. Or maybe, more to the point, imploding, because with explosions at least there's something to see. And nobody seemed to see anything different about me.

The hardest part to handle was the juxtaposition of the small issues I'd be unable to deal with at home and the life-and-death ones I was forced to handle on calls. There would be a crisis at home over something I couldn't even gather up the strength to care about, while on the other hand I couldn't find anyone in my world at home to pay attention to the real broken bodies and broken hearts.

I wasn't shedding things anymore—not at all, not even the small things. It wasn't just a fear of being unable to act: I was getting hung up, stopping and staring at bloodstained broken glass, or at patterns of gouges cut into the asphalt as pieces of cars were forced down into the pavement during an accident.

I felt like a car that had come out of gear—I was still moving forward, but depressing the accelerator only made the engine rev higher without connecting to the road at all. Little things were starting to cover me in an ever-thicker coating, each one adding a complex layer that felt as hard as the nacre of a pearl, pushing inside me, filling my joints, making it so that my arms wouldn't bend and my jaw wouldn't close.

All that time, nobody saw me falling—or if they did, they didn't seem to care. I thought that it had to be obvious to anyone who talked to me, anyone who knew me, because I constantly felt so raw. But there were no open cuts to look at, no marks, nothing concrete, so I suppose it was easy enough for everyone else to gloss it over or shrug it off. You see someone missing a foot with blood spurting out and you know there's something you've got to do—but see someone with that permanent high glaze in his eyes and it's always easier to cross the street and let someone else deal with it.

And the nightmares—I was having nightmares that just piled up on nightmares. There were the waking dreams as well, fugues that left me dazed and defensive. Sort of like flashbacks, except they were so real they seemed alive, and when they happened I lost a period of time—a solid, discernible chunk—when I would drive somewhere without knowing what route I'd taken.

I actually reached a point where I didn't trust myself to know what was really happening and what wasn't. If someone told me I had strangled the family cat, I would have believed them. I was doubting my own grip on reality—and I was jumping over the gaps, trying to find an explanation for why I had left to get something at the store and had wound up on the wharf looking at the ocean instead, with groceries next to me on the seat of the truck that I couldn't remember buying. I would be sitting in front of my computer at work and see the sentences I was working on fade away completely, replaced by the shattered leg of a motorcyclist who was desperately trying to convince us to pry off his long black boot instead of cutting it away with scissors.

He had been real at one point. At sixty kilometres an hour, he had piled into the side of a van that had backed out onto the highway without seeing him coming, and he was alternately howling and begging, while the crowd of onlookers around us grew larger and tighter with every scream. It was down by the church and just before the rock cut, a bright summer day with the sky looking down.

We wrestled with his boot for a while. Every time we pulled, he screamed, then we stopped and he stopped and begged us all over again to save his boot. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics didn't fool around at all, took their scissors and cut the boot, fast, down both sides. His leg seemed to burst out through the slits even as they were cutting the leather, the flesh swelling right in front of our eyes. He closed his eyes after that.

I'd blink my eyes and all at once I was back in the newsroom. The rest of the world, the newsroom and my reporters, had all been right there when all of this was happening in my head, but the noise they made was like a television turned on low in another room, the sound and motion at an easy and acceptable distance.

It's not the kind of circumstance you want to be explaining to your publisher, especially if you're an editor responsible for assigning a roomful of news reporters. You don't want to say, “Excuse me, I have a problem—I sometimes see car crashes that aren't actually there, and it's interfering with my work.” Especially if there is no clear way to make the crashes go away.

I thought it better that nobody know I was heading out to my truck at the end of the day, putting my face on the steering wheel and crying uncontrollably, a combination of the stress of the newsroom and everything else. Behaviour like that has a way of convincing people that you can't handle your job. You can't explain it at the fire department either, because the other firefighters might be just as concerned about your ability to do
that
job. I can't imagine how awful it would be to be suiting up in breathing apparatus, preparing to go into a building, and have my partner suddenly say to the captain that he wasn't willing to go inside with me.

Maybe someone at the fire department would have understood— but that wasn't a chance I was willing to take. Instead, I worked hard on my poker face, tried to have that steady, easy, emotionless stare that Al MacDonald seemed to have perfected years before in Wolfville.

Twice—right then, right in the middle of what felt like the leading edge of a total meltdown—I was picked as officer of the year by my firefighters. Showing up at most of the calls and all of the training, taking charge and making sure everything got done right. Able to fool everyone enough to get their respect.

So twice, in 2001 and 2002, I was the recipient of a pewter-coloured statue of an old-time leather-helmeted firefighter with his hose, a firefighter leaning purposefully into the burning rubble. They were handed to me halfway through the annual fire department ball, right after the turkey, potatoes, gravy and mashed turnip, and just before the dancing was supposed to start. Each time, holding the statue, I felt more like the rubble than the firefighter, caught up in fragments of fires and crashes.

“Thank you,” I remember saying both times, shaking the fire chief's big warm hand. “Thank you.”

Then back to the long tables and dessert, sitting in the dark and hoping again that the pagers would go off and a fire would swallow me up, would put me in that place of doing, that place way past thinking.

I was having a beer with the chief, drinking a new kind of beer in a tall bottle, the first Nova Scotian beer to switch over from the stubbies.

We'd been working on the ladder truck all day, getting ready to put it back into service. I'd been inside the turntable, cleaning out sandblasting sand, because I was the only firefighter who could fit, and my hair was full of grit and grease.

The chief picked up my beer from the table, looked at it, and said that the first time he had seen the tall bottles was in a red pickup truck that had gone off the North Mountain Road in a drunk driving accident. The truck had been sitting in the top of a row of spruce trees, and there was a two-four of beer in the front seat and the bottles had broken all over the cab.

I'd missed that call-out.

“Took us hours to get that idiot down,” the chief said.

SEVENTEEN

I saw a photograph of a bus that had run over a cyclist, and read how it had taken twenty minutes to lift the bus and pry the cyclist out. They'd used equipment we called Vetter bags, big reinforced rubber rectangles that you fill up with high-pressure air like armoured balloons. It's a tricky process, because you have to fill them and place them just right to keep everything in balance; a slip in training doesn't mean much, but it's not hard for a tour bus to squash a cyclist flat. I remember looking at where the airbags were in the photo but not at the victim, checking out how they were placed in case I ever had to do the same thing with a vehicle that heavy. Perhaps it's the way hockey players watch a game, seeing something different than other people do—their eyes set to catch different clues, to spot different things.

Firefighters—especially fire officers in charge of scenes—have to do that too. You're supposed to think, not about people and how the already-passed instant of impact will fragment their lives, but about things such as the angles of incidence and reflection, the complex equations of force drawn on the pavement in tire rubber, and the directions of expended energy in the sprayed diamonds of broken safety glass, all in an effort to make sense of what may have happened physically to the people inside the cars. You examine where they were seated and where their seat belts webbed across their bodies, where they might be injured inside, far from your eyes or your touch. It's as if, by some precise attention to physics or mathematics, you can work backwards and determine everything that happened in an instant, explosive equation.

I was supposed to collect every scrap of information I could, indexing it in my head, while pointedly ignoring the fact that a back-injured teacher was wearing a sweatshirt identical to the one my wife often wore, or that the infant car seat thrown clear at an automobile crash site was the same model my younger son used to sit in. They call it the “mechanics of injury,” the way they call putting two pieces of broken bone together “reducing the fracture.” And perhaps terms like that exist to put some distance between you and the injured.

Sometimes the mechanics of injury are crucial.

Once, after a black Volkswagen Rabbit with a jack-o-lantern sticker in the back window pitchpoled four times—rolling end over end, not just side to side—down the darkened straightaway of an empty road, I watched the paramedics come back after dropping off their cargo just to take notes for the hospital on how many times the passengers had been flung into the windshield. They had been eggs thrown around inside a crate, a driver and passenger with no seat belts who were finally tossed from the car when the driver's door was torn off. It was startling to see how much destruction the shiny wet pavement wore: easily fifty yards of car parts, fenders, mirrors, broken glass and plastic trim, along with every scrap of detritus that piles up in a person's car—cassette tapes, an ice scraper, the jack and its detached handle, broken beer bottles, and, jarringly, a green and black plastic radio-controlled car, the latter a child's toy, torn apart by its own pantomime of the accident that surrounded it. The toy car looked as if you should be prying open its plastic doors with small rescue tools in order to search for more—miniature— passengers.

The passenger in the Rabbit had been lying just off the centre line of the road, thrown clear and unable to move, both of his legs aimed south but now pointing east, broken below the knee. And he howled, feral and loud in the shiny wet darkness, as cars struck him with their headlights and then their drivers pulled out around to pass by him—driving by slowly, but driving by just the same.

The equation for the driver was exceedingly complex, with pieces that were almost impossible to outline concretely. Somewhere in the four long flips—each of which had left a clearly defined mark on the road or the shoulder (in one place the circular outline of a front wheel, so perfectly formed in the sand and gravel of the shoulder that you could put a finger into the dip left by every single lug)—he had left the car, sailed through the air and struck a concrete culvert with the back of his head, ripping a jagged tear that poured blood into the ditchwater. Faced with the human jigsaw, the doctors wanted to know how all the pieces might have shifted apart. But all of it was barely inspired guesswork; knowing only where he had ended up and where the driver's door lay in the road, you could draw several different trajectories for how and when he had been thrown clear, and never really know how long he had stayed inside the relative safety of the car.

Down in the ditch, I had held his legs, listening to the rattling, uneven wetness of his breathing, but I could look across in the dark and see the shining hollow eyes of another firefighter who was holding the driver's battered head. The ditch was deep enough that it offered its own solemn privacy. A breath, a breath, silence. Then a laboured start to that same equation all over again.

The other firefighter had been the first on the scene—I was the second. He was Mike Reid, and the driver was in the ditch at the end of Mike's driveway. Mike had come out of the house, heard a noise in the dark below him, and had scrambled down in time to lift the man's face up out of the ditchwater before he drowned. I got there a few minutes later, to hold the man's hips and keep his neck aligned as much as possible. No backboard between us, just the unnerving feeling that we were waiting for the man to die, because there wasn't a heck of a lot else we could do. He had the uneven breathing of the head-injured, and we stayed with him as the other firefighters arrived and someone finally started to deal with the broken-legged passenger abandoned on the pavement above us.

In the ditch, the paramedic had taken one look at the man with the big bull's-eye flashlight and said, “We'll have to move quick with this one.” He grabbed the belt of his trousers to shift him across onto the backboard. The motion pulled the man's pants open, his penis lying still and curled in its thatch of pubic hair, and that was, oddly enough, the most unnerving sight of all, worse even than knowing that he was on the verge of death.