1

The last couple sat engrossed in conversation across the small table, his left hand and her right touching in the center. They were middle-aged and dressed nicely, too nicely for the restaurant. It was probably their anniversary. You had to find it a bit sweet, people that age still in love.

I hovered just out of sight. I could have found something small to do, but I’m the sort of person that can’t start on one task until the one at hand is complete. Then Janet waved me over.

Janet was a tall, waifish blonde, the sort you’d expect to see as a hostess until she dropped the facade and revealed herself to be a foulmouthed townie, which was probably why she was the hostess of Pajino’s—the Italian equivalent of Applebee’s—instead of a fancier establishment.

“Cody, why are they just sitting there? Hustle them out of here.”

“What do you expect me to do? Tell them to leave? That wouldn’t go over well.”

“Just loom over them. Look black. Blacker. That type, they’re terrified of ethnics.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s unbelievable the things that come out of your mouth.”

“No, what you wouldn’t believe is what I’ll put in my mouth.”

I groaned, then stopped suddenly and waggled my eyebrows provocatively at her. She waggled hers back. I estimate we carried on like that for nearly a full minute before I said, “Besides, I’m only half black.”

“I know that, my incognegro. That’s why I said, ‘Look blacker.’ But really, your indeterminate swarthiness could be even more frightening. What are you? An America-hating Arab? A really tall, disgruntled illegal Mexican? The point is, you should intimidate them the fuck out of here.”

The point became moot as the man finally put cash in the black vinyl bill presenter.

“Like the wind,” Janet hissed.

He’d barely closed the cover when I took it and said, “I’ll be right back with your change.”

The couple’s eyes cleared, gained focus on the rest of the world. I’d burst the little bubble that had surrounded their table, and they noticed that for the first time the other tables were unoccupied.

“Not necessary. That’s for you.”

“Thank you very much, sir. You two have a great night.”

Within a minute they were out the door, which Janet locked behind them.

“Jesus Christ. Assholes think I don’t have anywhere to be on a fucking Friday night?”

“I thought you were being ruder than usual. What have you got going on?”

“Party over on 18th. Already getting crazy. I’ve been getting texts for the past hour about it. You wanna go?”

“Townie party? No thanks. I’ve gotta get to the country club. My future father-in-law is throwing a bash.”

“Oh yeah, ‘a bash.’ People getting wild on crab puffs and Chardonnay.” She rolled her eyes. “We townies be getting nasty, college boy.” Her hands came together and she gyrated her hips a bit.

“Hey, my phone’s been buzzing like crazy, too. This party must be nuts, because somebody wants me there, like an hour ago.”

Janet rolled her eyes. “Oh God, she does know that some of us have to work, right?”

“For some reason she thinks I’m one of them.”

“Getting that fancy MBA from that fancy college has her confused. I bet none of your classmates have to work.”

“Not many. Half of them are already at this shindig.”

“All that thin, blue blood.” She let her eyelids droop, brought her lips together in a slack pucker and held one hand limply up. With her lanky blond hair and fine features, she looked exactly like one of the women who would be drifting around the ballroom. Then she sneered. “Don’t you ever want to cut loose? Get freaky?”

“That an invitation?” I gave her a wink.

She opened her eyes wide and put a hand to her mouth, but when she took the hand away she was ramming her tongue lasciviously into her cheek.

We both busted up until she said, “Go close your shit out. And check on the kitchen.”

I turned and saw all the front house staff vacuuming and wiping down. Vultures swooped in as soon as I turned my back, taking the easy closing duties.

I closed out at the register, then stepped into the kitchen. Steam heat had me sweating immediately in my itchy, polyester Pajino’s polo shirt.

“What do you need?” I asked loudly to be heard over the running water and clattering pots and pans. I swore that dishwasher must have moonlighted as a drummer in a death metal band.

“Dump and scrape the pressure fryer?” George said. He always talked to us front house people in questions. He wasn’t used to this mingling of duties. But the manager of Pajino’s started his restaurant career as a dishwasher, and until everyone was ready to leave, no one got to leave.

I rolled the grease pump into place beneath the pressure fryer when my phone buzzed again.

“Jesus Christ, Madison,” I said, drawing my phone from my pocket with one hand and checking my texts while I twisted the valve to release the hot oil. A few drops splattered on my hand and got me cursing, sending my frustration up a couple more notches.

I licked at the back of my hand, which now tasted like fried chicken, and glanced at the text. It was indeed Madison. Of course it was Madison. Who else had so little experience with employment that she didn’t understand a party wasn’t a good enough excuse to step out early? As if my coworkers would pat me on the back and wish me a good time while I left them to do the disgusting closing duties.

Aren’t you done yet?

The grease continued to drain and I tapped out, Closing now. Leaving soon.

I had to take a deep breath and remind myself to keep things in perspective. These were rich man problems. Madison’s dad was CFO of one of the largest engineering firms in the world, and as long as I didn’t fuck things up, he’d be bringing his brilliant son-in-law on board in a few months and fast-tracking his career into the six figures and beyond.

I liked thinking of my future in the third person, because then I got to remind myself afterward that I was talking about myself. I was the guy who came from a lower-middle slash upper-lower class background and got a full academic scholarship to study business at a state school, graduated Magna Cum Laude and rocked my GMATs so hard that a prestigious university offered a scholarship equal to its enormous tuition so that I only had to cover living expenses (Madison: “With your school covered, why can’t you take out a small loan to pay your rent?” Me: “You should work in finance. You’ve got the right mentality.”). I was that guy who landed the smart, cool, beautiful girl whose father turned out to be the fucking man, which I swear I didn’t know beforehand. I was the guy who, because of his grades and his performance in the classroom had enough buzz about him to not horrify Little Miss Blue Blood’s parents when she brought him home, or later when he proposed marriage, despite the fact that he’s from a blue collar family and a halfrican. I was the guy with the charm and wit to be able to step into the restroom, clean off work sweat and kitchen grease, then show up at the country club and outshine all my silver-spoon classmates and get all the joking job offers (You sure I can’t steal you away? I’ve even got a worthless son-in-law you can replace).

I kept all this in mind as I texted an argument back and forth with Madison, trying to keep my cool. Glancing over at the fryer, I saw that the oil had all drained, and sent a final text (I prayed it was the final text): Gotta go. See you soon.

The pressure fryer accumulated a thick crust of concrete-hard fried flour in a ring that marked the top of the oil. It could only be removed with the vigorous application of a paint scraper, which I grabbed just as my phone rang again. I screamed, which drew looks from the kitchen staff, answered the phone with my left hand and leaned into the fryer to scrape with my right.

“Madison, for the love of God above, I’m almost done.”

“What are you doing?”

“Right this second? Trying to scrape a fryer with the use of only one hand.”

“How long will that take?”

“Probably ten minutes, but it’d go faster if I weren’t on the phone.”

“People keep asking me where you are. They don’t mean anything by it, but I don’t know what to say.”

“Work.”

“And then they ask where you work and…”

I sighed. I understood her position. I really did. She and somehow her parents saw the real me, but that whole country club crew…They were stuck-up assholes. I don’t know how else to put it.

“After that you can leave?” she asked.

“I just need to clean myself up, change and—”

Then came my first lesson in the malleability of time. Suffering is the path to immortality. Hell can be contained entirely in one moment. They say, later, that I couldn’t have seen this. That I imagined it, dreamed it in my coma. That it would have happened too fast.

But I saw the spark spit into life on the heating element. And I don’t know if it’s quantum theory or relativity, but I had time to think, “I forgot to turn off the fryer.”

The brain doesn’t follow the same laws of time that the body does. As I watched that spark turn into a tiny flame, then travel around the coils, then leap to the walls, I took in every detail, but I could not move. From the outside, I was in the middle of a sentence, and then in a split second I was bent waist-deep into a jet engine blasting flames to the ceiling.

But from the inside of that moment, I watched the cauldron fill with unfurling petals of red, orange and yellow. I watched it swirl and dance as it rose, new gases igniting, buffeting the pool of liquid flame back and forth. I wanted to pull back. As the pillar approached my face I tried to hurl myself back. It was like being pinned against a wall as the tooth-filled maw of some giant predator pressed forward inch by slavering inch. Pressing back. Pressing back. Going nowhere. Looking fate in its golden visage, the future blossoming up around my hand, my arm, my face.

When I told this to my parents, my dad asked me why I watched it. Why didn’t I close my eyes? Imagine trying to raise the drawbridge of a castle as an invading horde of savage barbarians charge, knowing that it’s too late, knowing that these men will take everything from you, laughing as they do it. Could you look away?

And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

What finally moved my inert mass wasn’t my conscious mind. My reflexive nervous system finally hurled me back out of the pyre, though one dishwasher would say that he saw the whole thing, that my argument on the phone had caught his attention, drawn his eyes, and as he scrubbed one of his last pans he watched me, not with much interest, but because his eyes had to point in some direction. He saw me leaned in to the fryer, and then he saw me disappear in a column of flame that roared up and spilled across the ceiling. He said that he thought that I wasn’t going to move, that I was going to stand there, one elbow cocked out of the fryer to hold the phone to my ear, but everything else above my chest down in that metal cauldron, staring into the flames forever. Time had gone soft for him, too. When I finally fell back, a man on fire, he expected that I’d be nothing more than a bundle of burnt matchsticks. Blackened bones. Because I’d been cooking for hours before I finally tumbled back, phone still clamped to my ear.

I slipped as I pressed myself back, and I fell. Not into the rolling tub of drained oil, thank God. Yes, thank that most loving and merciful God above for holding me in his loving grace and only roasting me, not deep-frying me. Bastard.

I hit the ground on my ass and tried to scoot out of the flames, thinking I could escape them, not realizing that I was no longer leaning into fire; I was on fire.

I tried to escape my pain but I couldn’t figure out how. I couldn’t see. My vision had gone cloudy on one side and wavered with flame on the other. I couldn’t hear. A sound filled my ears, a roaring. It was so loud my head shook with it. At the time I thought it was the roar of the inferno, but looking back I think it was the sound of my eardrums trying to burst into the airless vacuum the firestorm left behind.

I couldn’t scream. When I breathed in I choked on poisonous fumes, but no air. The fire consumed it all. My vocal cords shook. Nothing came out.

Pressing back, I slid along the floor, leaving my right palm behind to sizzle on the tile, but I couldn’t escape the flame. I thought that the whole kitchen was on fire. The whole world. I burned and burned and burned.

Of course the kitchen wasn’t on fire. My polyester shirt was. My hair was curly, and required some serious product to tame, product that turned my hair into a wick, my head into a melting candle.

It’s difficult to explain burning. Almost no one experiences it. Everyone gets burned, but almost no one burns. You escape the source of heat with reflex faster than thought and only experience the aftereffects. Burning is the sort of thing that changes you forever. It makes you realize that you’re an animal, that all the rest is pretense. I would have done anything to make the burning stop. Anything.

The flames wrapped around me tighter and tighter, clawing into my clothing, melting my clothing to me, which continued to burn like napalm. The flames held me in an inescapable grasp, digging claws into me, thousands of them, deeper and deeper, prying at skin, then fat, then muscle, flaying away my layers.

And then the fire was out. I tried to breathe, and a fine powder filled my mouth, turned to glue in my throat and deeper down so that I wheezed around it. When I could see out of my left eye, I saw this big lug named Brandon holding the dredging tub, emptied of its flour. I looked down and I was covered in white powder. He’d pulled the tub out of the metal counter top and dumped it over me. George was still trying to get the fire extinguisher off the wall. It had somehow gotten stuck.

Everything was quiet. The roar of the inferno had died when the oil burnt off the fryer. Flour choked out my screaming. No one moved. They stood around me, some reaching out to me, but no one daring to touch me.

In that silence, I heard myself cooking. Inside the flour, the fat beneath my skin crackled. My only hopeful thought was that I couldn’t possibly live much longer.

But the moments dragged out. These people loomed over me, staring down at me. If everything hadn’t been so strangely clear, they would have seemed like nothing so much as demons witnessing my torments.

I coughed until I found my breath, finally, after seeming hours caught in an airless vacuum and then a choking cloud, and I started screaming. There was no purpose to it, but there was no purpose to anything, and it poured out of my mouth and it didn’t seem worth the effort to stop it. I was still propped on my hands from having crab-walked halfway across the kitchen on fire, and I fell back and screamed. I screamed nonsense. I screamed curses. I screamed for help.

The pain only increased. I’d wanted to stop burning so badly, but inside that flour coating I still burned.

Someone stepped forward and grabbed at the remains of my shirt, but someone else yanked him back, saying, “Don’t touch him.”

After a few days or weeks, Janet appeared beside me. “What the fuck, Cody? What the fuck?”

“Is it bad?” I asked. “Am I bad?”

“What the fuck?” She held a hand over my cooked torso, either warming it or offering absolution.

With the flames out, the pain didn’t leave me, not by any means. It grew, but it grew in waves. I bobbed on those boiling waves, which somehow had grown so high that they carried me up to explode beneath the nuclear heat of the sun. A storm was rolling in, a storm of insanity, with merciful death blowing behind, only a hope, something to work through the agony in hope of. Each swell carried me higher into pain and madness. Each trough fell less. It was a rolling crescendo of torment, raking through my flesh with multi-hooked claws, lines of fishing-hook clusters being dragged through my veins. Each peal of pain felt like a magnified version of pulling at a hangnail that doesn’t rip off, but rips deeper and deeper, taking the first layer, then all the skin, then the meat beneath, until by the elbow the flap has hit bone.

At the peak of each wave, I felt blackness at the edges. I knew what it was. Not just unconsciousness, but death. It blew this storm in, but it hung back, refusing to take me.

I begged it to take me. I begged it to close in, to swallow me up, to drop me into a merciful, cool balm from which I would never emerge. Each time I felt life grow loose around the edges, and yet the wave would ebb and I knew that I’d survived. I grew angry, angry that I was still conscious, that I was still alive and still burning, somehow still burning, my skin growing tighter and tighter and still sizzling, cooking my blood and sending it back through my veins to tear at my core.

If the darkness wouldn’t come for me, then I would go to it. I slammed my head back on the rock-hard tile floor. Again. Again.

“No,” I heard. “No, Cody.” But I didn’t listen until hands caught me, a lap settled between my skull and the floor. When my vision cleared in the one eye I could still see out of, I looked up at Janet.

And another wave of pain hit, and I screamed. I screamed nonsense. I screamed for death. I screamed for help. My brain spun in my skull, looking for some escape from the unbearable and finding none, trapped in a sphere of bone stuck to a melting hunk of charred meat.

Janet finally spoke. Time had grown soft. Less than a second ago I’d been banging my head against the floor.

She said, “Cody, don’t.”

Her voice pulsed, the waveform falling apart, time so loose.

“Help me, please.”

Hours passed. Hours of unbearable agony. They stretched into days. Lifetimes. Then the doors to the dining room banged open and in rushed EMTs.

They talked so slowly that their words dissolved into grumbling nonsense, the sounds of hundreds of bombs exploding in the distance, of rumbling landslides. They aimed these sounds at me, buffeted me with them.

I wanted to kill them. I wanted the world to ignite again, to burn away everything until only ash surrounded me, piles of whispering, crinkling ash that I could poke with my blackened bones until they collapsed with the same “Shush” you use to silence a child.

If they couldn’t help me, I wanted them to burn.

They sat a stretcher beside me, rolled me onto my side to slide it beneath me. I looked down at my flour coating, watched it slip away, saw a wet glisten, didn’t understand, then did.

My polyester shirt had melted to my flesh, joined it almost completely. It didn’t slide away. My skin did. It flopped aside, big crispy flaps like a piece of chicken barbecued too long, the skin blackening, growing tight, curling away, revealing the juicy insides. Beneath, some glistening melted fat ran, the rest coated me, cooked white as tallow.

When the cool air hit it…Imagine sucking ice cold water over a cavity, then leaving it there, the electricity leaping through your nerves, jerking you like a marionette. Imagine that and you’ll be close to me saying, “Fuck you, asshole, you have no goddamn idea.”

They rushed me outside. The world pulsed around me, expanding and contracting to match my heart beat. Why was nothing solid? Why was reality so malleable, except the one aspect I wanted to change: the diamond-hard pain?

In the ambulance they hooked me to fluids, they wrapped me in a burn blanket, but they did nothing for the pain, no matter how I begged or cursed. They jammed a contraption down my throat instead, what I was later told was a laryngoscope, checking to see if I’d breathed enough smoke that my throat would swell shut. They spoke to each other, not to me, but I understood that my mouth was burned, but my throat looked fine.

Before they strapped an oxygen mask over my face, I pleaded one more time for them to knock me out. I couldn’t take the torment. It was breaking me, had broken me, and yet there was no end. I’d tapped out, begged uncle, but it was relentless.

“We’re barely keeping you out of shock. Sorry, but you’re not getting any painkillers until the doctors decide you can handle them.”

Once again I imagined burning the world. The agony was beyond comprehension, and I couldn’t believe the fire wasn’t in me somewhere, tearing through my veins. If it would only come out, ignite the ambulance, set off the oxygen tanks, leave us a fireball blazing down the highway. But it would do no good. They would all die and I would crawl out of the smoldering wreckage, leaving a trail of charred flesh behind me, the asphalt below my red-hot carcass turning to tar, coating me, igniting, always burning, always fucking burning forever, and never, ever dying.

* * *

They rolled me into the Emergency room, and it seemed that everyone was waiting for me. I tried to lift my head, but it felt so heavy. Then I saw my hand. It looked like it was in a Mickey Mouse glove. Just looking at it brought it into my awareness and it throbbed, seeming to inflate as if someone had jammed the dull needle of a bike pump into it.

“What’s wrong with my hand?”

The doctors ignored me, but a black woman with a kind face and a Jamaican accent said, “Edema. The plasma is leaking out of your blood and into the surrounding tissue. Don’t worry, we’ll get it under control.”

My words had come out strange. My lips wouldn’t meet. I touched them and before someone pulled my hand down to my side I found that my mouth had swollen into a sex-doll O of surprise.

“Can you put me under?” I asked the Jamaican angel of mercy.

“Your blood pressure is too low.”

Staring back up at the ceiling, I said, “Fuck you.”

They’d taken my burn blanket away to poke and prod at me, and I shivered. For all the flame running beneath my skin I felt like I was freezing to death. They rolled me beneath what I swear to God were heat lamps like you’d find at a fast food restaurant, and I shivered and watched them sweat as they continued to poke and prod at me.

“His blood pressure is up. We’re out of shock zone.”

“How much fluid are you putting in him? He’s inflating.”

“As much as we have to in order to keep his heart beating. His blood was turning to sludge.”

Someone finally spoke to me. “Nighty-night, buddy. We’ll take good care of you.”

I watched the man inject something into my drip, and in my thoughts I pledged eternal love for this kind soul.

Numbness, unbelievable, blessed numbness washed over me. My body disappeared, and a warm blanket wrapped itself around my brain. The last thing I heard was, “His family is coming.”