INTO THE FIRE

I’M RUNNING THROUGH A FIELD WITH MY BEST FRIEND, a man I went to high school with. We’re on the outskirts of Houston, it’s nighttime, and we can see the fire in the distance. It’s a hay barn at the far end of a field that’s caught fire, and the barn is burning, as are the bales of hay in it. The loose bales in the stubble field are aflame, and the groves of trees at the back edge of the field are burning too. My friend, Kirby, is a volunteer fireman now for little Spring, Texas, which is a pretty suburban community (not that long ago, the area was woods) nestled in amid and among the concrete and chaos of Houston. Kirby is dressed in his full turnout gear—his firefighting equipment—as am I, in a borrowed suit; I just happened to be hanging out in the station when the call came, and there was an extra set. We have to run across a golf course, a driving range actually, to get to the fire—another station is already there, we can see the red-and-blue lights—and as we run huffing through the humid night there are little pissant golf balls like mushrooms everywhere, which we keep stumbling on. It seems like it’s a mile to that fire and as if the whole western horizon is ablaze. The turnout gear—helmet, big-ass boots, air tank, bunker coat, rubber overalls, giant gloves—feels like it weighs about seventy pounds. It feels like we’ll never get there, or that if we do, we’ll be too tired to fight the fire and will just have to stand there gasping and sucking air at the edge of the fire, burning ourselves, legs and lungs aflame. Probably when we were eighteen we could have just cruised on out there in forty seconds flat, never even breaking into a pant, but twenty years ago of course we would have been more interested in breaking apart order and structure than trying to weave it back together or keep it from burning down.

Now we are finally drawing closer to the mega-fire—we’re drenched with sweat inside our heavy rubber boots—we’ve divoted the hell out of that golf course, tromped its sand traps, so that in the daylight it will probably look like a herd of wild horses ran through—and with the flames’ backlighting we can see the stick figures of other firefighters moving in and through and among the flames, working with shovels and axes and hoses. There’s smoke and steam, and at night it looks like an evacuating village, elemental. It seems to be calling us.

There are a lot of firefighters on this one. The barn was a goner a long time ago; the trees are goners too, flames searching for the sky, but they have nowhere else to go, nothing else to burn—a city of concrete lies beyond them, with fire hydrants on every corner—and the burning hay bales and the burning field stubble smell good.

The fire’s been going on a pretty good while—maybe an hour, before we received our call to come help close it out. It’s December, nearing Christmas and New Year’s—prime time for firefighters, along with, of course, the Fourth of July and Halloween—all those candles and burning pumpkins! What started this fire was probably either someone trying to collect the insurance money, or a homeless person just trying to find a place to hang out and stay warm. Maybe they built a little fire with which to make coffee. Maybe a cigarette fell in the hay. Either of these explanations is just as likely—or it could have been kids—eighteen years old, perhaps—just out fucking around. In December like this, it was almost certainly a human-caused fire, some errant excess of social imbalance, some fringe unraveling or deterioration, and now the firefighters are here to snip off that excess and snuff it out and smooth it over. It may seem like a cliché‚ and you may, when the talk turns to firefighters and especially volunteers, hear the easy stereotype, the armchair assumption of “hero complex” or “boring home life—needs excitement.”

It’s not this way at all. Perhaps for a handful of them it is that way, but far more common, I think, are the ones who do it for the same reasons that any of us do whatever it is we do, or dream of doing: the act of it, the doing, achieves a fit and an order with the rhythms and essence within. You run across fields with them, you race around town with them from call to call, and pretty soon you realize that it’s just the way they are. You start to view them not as individuals but as a force, summoned and directed by nature, like the fire itself; that in a world with fire, there must also exist a force that desires for the fires to be put out—and further, that the two forces desire and require each other.

They love to put out the fires, as does, perhaps, a rainstorm. Plus, when it’s not dangerous, it’s fun. It tips the world a bit sideways—reorders it, makes it new, recharges it. At this particular fire everyone is sweating like racehorses and walking around ankle-deep in smoldering smoke and flame and ashes and coals, some of us wearing masks and helmets, others of us barefaced for a moment in the night air, breathing good cold air and the sweet odor of dry burning grass. We are pawing at the smoking, burning ground with rakes and shovels, breaking apart the hay bales so they will finish burning and we can go home (they flame brightly, like marshmallows, each time we separate a sheaf of them), and because I do not want to upset the rhythm of things—despite the presence of several units, several stations, they are all more or less familiar with each other, by sight if not by name, as would be athletes who trained or competed together—though in this case they have risked their lives together, each time they assemble—I keep my Darth Vader mask on. There must be thirty of us out here, wandering through the night and the flames, each one of us looking to me like any of the others, but they can tell, I know, when I pass near them that I am not of them, and I duck my head and turn my shoulders when I see one of the various captains or commanders, whose job it is in instances like these not to fight the fire hand-to-hand, but to deploy their crew and observe, like a hawk from above, the flow of things—the comings and goings. To them I stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, and though I have permission to be hanging out with Kirby (who is also a captain), I try to steer clear of the men and women who are carrying radios; I try not to interrupt the pulse and rhythm of the thing they have become in their assemblage, a force that is hopefully equal to that of the fire. We hear the phrases “armed forces” and “show of force,” but the way I mean it, “force” is more elemental than that. I mean it like rain or wind or desire; like gravity, or oxygen.

I can feel them scowling after me as I careen away from the ones with radios. I strike at the smoldering hay bales, break them apart and rake them flat, soothing order back into the system. I had hoped that in theory everyone would think I was a rookie with another captain’s department, one they had not seen in action yet, but of course it did not work out that way: they could all sense or see that I was different, not of them, as if a deer were trying to walk among a gathering of bears, or a moose through a flock of geese, even at night, even amid smoke and flame. I was not an element of their force.

Kirby, picking up on the vibes that are gathering around me—the way my presence is confusing and annoying the various captains—escorts me to the perimeter of the fire, to a still-smoldering section of field that has pretty much already been mopped up. There are puddles of water standing here and there. We walk past the incredible sight of two beautiful red-haired women sitting side by side on a bale of hay that is still burning. They are resting, their turnout coats opened to their T-shirts, and as the firelight flickers on their faces—red freckles, copper skin—it seems they could be drinking a cup of coffee and talking about any old thing, rather than resting, grimy and damp, having kicked this fire’s ass—having cinched or sewn order back into being.

It inflames the senses, firefighting. It argues against chaos, even while it celebrates and marvels at our proximity to chaos. From a distance it just looks like a bunch of men and, increasingly, a few women running around trying to react against and defend something. It looks a little ragged, a little mechanical. From the outside, you don’t quite understand that even as you watch the men and women swirl about (dragging hose, swinging ax), a transmutation is occurring: that they are altering themselves from individuals into connected components often equal or superior to the force of the fire itself. You can’t really see or feel the magic unless you are right in with them—as if in, perhaps, the eye of a hurricane. From a distance it looks as if they are running behind, playing catch-up, and that the fire is in control. You’d never guess that the opposite is true: that they are in control, and not behind but in lockstep with it, feeding on its energy—that it, the fire, is the thing that allows them to exist, and that as it releases stored energy in the burning, it makes that much more energy available to them for them to bend and shape and alter and turn and compress and redirect.

You need to almost go right into the center of the fire to see this.

Going into the fire of course is the worst thing in the world you can do, the last thing you should ever consider doing. The absolute best thing civilians can do is to melt and disappear, to draw way back—to become invisible, if possible—and let the two forces sweep in against each other. This is hard to do. We each have in us an innate longing for spectacle and drama, for an arousal of the senses—as wire desires electricity, as wood desires rot or flame—and when the trucks race past, or the smoke billows from the building across the street, we are drawn to it like angels, or moths; we gather, we get in the way, we clog things up. There is something godlike in the way the firefighters hurl themselves at the fire and shut it down cold—something monstrous, too—and wherever they go, people are following behind them, clinging to the charred edges of the event, gawking and getting too close to the giant hoses and the crumbling, crashing-down walls of things, so that the firefighters can hardly ever concentrate purely on the task at hand—aligning their undiluted force squarely against that of the onrushing fire. Always, it seems, they are anxious to make that leap from human to godlike, forgetting about the people behind them—the spectators, the traffic—and hurling themselves instead completely into the matching of the fire’s force—but always, it seems, there is energy that must be expended by them, wasteful energy, patrolling their flanks, and keeping humans from edging too close, or even following.

I often wonder where such individuals come from. It—firefighting—is both an art and a science. It remakes the individual. In the instance of my best friend, Kirby, it is a marvel to see. This is not the place for such stories, but suffice it to say that twenty years ago he, we, were masters of—what? Shall we call it unraveling things, and pause there? (Matches were not involved, but might as well have been.)

The fires have transformed him—they have found him and summoned and recast him. I do not know why. It is tempting to think that for each of these firefighters there is some space within them waiting to be ignited when the fire, or the beckoning, sweeps over them—and that either you have this place in you or you do not.

I think this is how it is. Plenty of people have hidden or buried or held deep within them the desire for order, sometimes extreme order, just as plenty of them have the opposite desire. There are also plenty with a desire for beauty, and no small number who are enraptured these days with the stupid, the insipid, and the plain plug-ugly.

But it is not that simple. There are only handfuls of them here and there who love to wade into fire, and if you ask them, not a damn one of them, not even Kirby, can tell you exactly or even satisfactorily why they do it. And in observing them one of the things you pick up on pretty quickly, if you’re in close enough, is that, unlike many other things, there seems not to be so much a joy or a pleasure in the doing (if anything, they appear to be in a zone of near-hypnotic, inhuman trance), but rather a deep sweetness of relief and fullness in the after of it. The pleasure of pulling off dirty turnout gear, dirty boots. Looking forward to a cleansing shower.

It’s not very Zen. Or hell, maybe it’s real Zen. But I don’t think so.

Sometimes one fire—the excitement of it, the sensation of it—will seemingly ignite others in the same area, days and even weeks or months later, like some kind of delayed fuse. Even if the first one was accidental, non-arsonous, something will often have been released—something latent—in a handful of individuals, sometimes only one or two, within that community; pining and lonesome for the return of that kind of excitement, hungry to have the senses felt that deeply again (and perhaps cherishing the relief of the aftermath, as the throbbing senses cool and return to normal)—that individual or individuals will then set a fire or fires, seeking to lure or beckon the firefighters’ return.

And always, they come. Occasionally it will be one of the firefighters themselves who has set the fire—the bad seed getting in among them and somehow confused, seeking to simultaneously both create and destroy the very thing that gives them purpose, the very thing that calls and shapes and alters them—but seeking, in a kind of gluttony or instant gratification, to elude or shortcut the rules.

But the men and women in the fire departments are extraordinarily good at sniffing out this kind of firefighter: of determining, as if with ESP, when such a hybrid or renegade is in their midst. They sense it perhaps as the magma flow of a volcano senses the presence within it of a floating chunk of boulder—that which has not yet completely given itself over to the rest. They sense it, by and by—soon enough—when they are fighting fire side by side with such an individual, and they can sense it coming from that person when they are back at the station watching a football game on the television. They can feel it and hear it and see it coming off in waves, as if that individual in their midst is not at peace but aflame, or at least smoldering. They can sense soon enough, by the way he does not fit the rhythm that is their force, that he is the one who is setting the fires in order to be drawn to them and engaged by them, and because this goes against both the code of ethics and the code of physics—the law of nature that lets them and the fires exist in the same universe—they turn him in, or drum him out. They can sense it, suddenly—can see it—as if the message is writing itself in some awful hieroglyphics across the perpetrator’s body.

It is elemental, the way they find out; it is the way animals, who have been here in the world so much longer than we, communicate. They are never wrong.

It is as if their existence, their integrity—the purity of their desire and being—has been threatened near unto extinction, by the presence of one such among them, and it is as if that one has willfully been gambling their lives, rolling the dice, oblivious to the risk that’s being run: the threat of this stranger among them putting their life on the line for mere joy or pleasure—risking a child’s father, a woman’s husband, a mother’s son, or a husband’s wife. Rolling the dice.

There was once one like this whom Kirby found out about—not in his department, but in a nearby unit. Such is the hatred among the fraternity, or family, of firefighters that even he, my best friend, cannot or will not speak to me of him. His voice deepens and his words thicken with rage and wonder; he shakes his head: No, never mind. It strikes me that it, the firebug among them, is like the metaphor, or transformation from metaphor to reality, of their fear, their foe—a building, a structure of integrity and order—burning from within.

It’s rare. Much more common—infinitely more common—are the grass fires, electrical fires, and cookfires out of control; the propane heater fires, careless-with-matches fires, industrial fires, chemical fires, fires started by the friction of two dry branches rubbing together, fires started by lightning, fires started by oily rags, by fireworks, by hot mufflers, by magnifying glasses, by cigarettes. People fall asleep smoking in bed and immolate themselves by the dozens, even hundreds, each year. Sometimes they do it in high-rise hotels and take out dozens or hundreds with them in a single night. Archaeologists excavating the ruined cities of the future might mistakenly believe, viewing the remains, that fire still played an important part in the culture or religion of these times: that sacrifices were still common, and that at any given time in these ghost cities there would have been fires raging, consuming.

But they would not be able to catch the sound of the fire engines racing toward those fires in their archaeological diggings: would not be able to measure the sweat and fury and muscle-cost of the firefighters manning the water-taut hose lines and swinging axes, shouting instructions: the tension and determination and purity of focus as taut as the fire was loose and raging.

Things being cast anew, or tautened and strengthened, by the fires—the archaeologists would miss that. The order that the firefighters cannot restore in the fires’ consumption sometimes gets turned within them, as if with an overflowing, or excess. They come to rely (and be incorporated by) lists and repetition. They can enumerate danger better than anyone—have observed and learned the vertical and horizontal components of it (as if it is thick, like nests of snakes or hives of bees), behind the walls of things, just beneath the skin of the earth, waiting to be peeled back or released by a simple nick or a cut. Their minds are wired taut with understandings of possibility and cause and effect. They break the world down into three components: fuel, oxygen, heat.

When they relax, they do so deeply. Their family lives, rather than becoming weakened by the attention to and obsession with a thing and the time spent at the station, often instead become strengthened. The weave and rhythm of their profession becomes similarly the fabric of their other family, their blood family. You will notice in most of them a celebration of order and structure. They’re big on picnics and cookouts, circuses, trips to the beach, parades, rodeos, trips to the zoo—that kind of thing. They have a ferocity for life, even in the midst of what can be a physically and intellectually desensitizing, unstimulating environment: the late twentieth-century suburban landscape, and beyond that, the decaying cores of the urban interior.

They tend to be aware, too, of how thin the crust or skin of the earth is. Nick it, and fire issues forth. Generalizations are easy and hence dangerous, but I could not help noticing that the “thinkers”—the captains and lieutenants—often tend to be if not fundamentally at least peripherally religious—stolid to near-stolid churchgoers—while the more physically responsive firefighters, the ones who are not so much interested in plotting or strategizing but instead like to hurl themselves at and against the fire according to the captain’s or lieutenant’s directions, are usually reckless to an extreme, living what might be called a compromising or high-risk lifestyle: drinking hard, smoking hard, driving fast—acknowledging the nearness of death and disorder by their actions, every bit as much as the churchgoers.

Hanging out with a firefighter, you learn to see the city not as some artificial and completely controlled system, but as an organism: as a pulsing, supple, almost living thing, responsive to the world. Sometimes things in a city burn because they are meant to and need to—rotting timbers, rat-chewed wiring systems—and other times, as in cases of arson, the fires pop up in what seems to be an illogical response, like cancer, done purposely and malignantly to harm the good cells in a body and bring them to ruin.

It’s amazing how much of a good-sized city is burning at any one time, and even more amazing how much of a city has burned, cumulatively, in the past: as if the scars of fire overlay every inch of the earth, rural or urban, several layers deep; as if the skin of the earth is burning daily, a necessary way of replenishing and invigorating itself, as our own cells are said to do every two or three days. Riding around the city with Kirby, I was almost disbelieving as he pointed out various structures that had burned. I thought it was a joke at first, a parody of a firefighter’s view of his or her city, but it was actually the way he saw it. As if with an X-ray vision of history, he seemed to look right through the glossy surface, the skin, of new paint jobs and newly constructed exteriors and still see hidden within the ghosts of old fires, like opponents with whom he had once done battle. It seemed that at any given point there would always be, somewhere within his range of vision, at least one building and usually more where a fire had occurred during his ten years on the force. We all have our lenses for viewing the world. How many memorable localities in a river walk! wrote Thoreau. Here is the warm wood-side; next, the good fishing bay; and next, where the old settler was drowned when crossing on the ice a hundred years ago. It is all storied.

We all see the world through different lenses, according to our various knowledge and life experience. Doctors, farmers, writers will often look at a landscape and its inhabitants each in a way slightly different from the other, and in so doing, come up with different translations or interpretations, different perceptions, about that place. Kirby’s lens is fire. There is only that which has burned in the past, or which is at risk in the future. There is also a very small portion of the world—within the range of his roving gaze—that is, for the moment, for the time being, safe: secure.

The stories with which Kirby sees his city almost all involve fire. We cannot drive past a place, it seems, without his having a story—as if they are latticed between the walls of structures, waiting to be released by fire—or as if the stories are the skeletal system of a structure: not timber and steel and stucco and concrete, but stories, with humans living within them like ants. He was not inhumane as a teenager—no more than most—but it seems that the firefighting has made him more humane, more understanding of and attentive to the stories within the latticeworks. As a writer, it’s a little fascinating to me, the way we went different directions after high school—he, to marriage and children almost immediately, and to an increasingly fine and responsible job with a suit and tie and office and secretarial staff, appraising urban structures not for fire-worthiness, or fire-proofness, but for tax assignations—while I went in what I thought was a different direction, writing stories and novels and hanging out in the woods. Now I am noticing that our paths did not really diverge at that significant an angle: that he sits at his desk in his day job, high above the city, and runs his evaluation sheets, his analyses, through the computer—but at night, or even in the day, when the dispatcher’s horn sounds, he becomes more sensate, more alive, and he rushes to the fire eagerly. And in moving toward that fire—one after the other after the other—and in the fighting of it, he is as passionate and engaged not just with the process but with the stories and lives of the structure’s inhabitants—as much so as any writer could ever hope to be about the characters housed within one’s story—and I watch this, and try to learn from it. I try to imagine all characters as inhabiting invisible or hidden stories lattice-worked around them, both constraining and supporting them, which can then be released around them—the walls falling away—by fire. In ways that no writing class has yet been able to impress upon me, I begin to think about structure—about what it is—and about the forces that tug and pull at it.

I wonder what it must be like for Kirby’s coworkers to hear, in their air-conditioned offices, the squelch and bawl of his beeper down the hallway; what it must be like to see him emerge from his office like a hornet from its nest—to leave them and hurl himself out into the hot flames of Houston—hot sky, hot concrete, hot chrome.

Certainly his wife, Jean Ann, has mixed feelings about it with regard to her and Kirby’s security, as well as that of their two children, and Kirby’s daughter from the first marriage—her stepdaughter, my goddaughter. Jean Ann knows full well that it’s a big part of what makes him be alive, what makes him be Kirby, what makes him not just the man but the force she married—but she cannot help but also know full well that he is rolling some kind of dice each time he goes out the door—not just for his own sense of being alive, but to help other people in dire straits—strangers, even—and it seems that she walks well a fine line between the two territories; that their marriage has a sharpness and defined clarity to it, a being-in-the-moment quality that may or may not be connected to the firefighting, though it is hard to imagine how it is not, at least in part. It’s impossible for me to watch him go briskly out the door of his home, or out of the fire station, and not think of the Neil Young line: “The same thing that makes you live will kill you in the end”; just as it is impossible for me not to approve and be happy for my friend, and my goddaughter’s father, that he has this thing to be on fire and sensate about.

However, it sometimes seems almost like a kind of entrapment—the way he attaches his sympathy to the victims of the fires—the victims, indirectly, of his passion. He thinks he keeps it at arm’s length, as do most of the other firefighters, but an arm’s length is not very far. Some firefighters seem to have no trouble at all shutting out their concerns and sympathies for the lives of the burned—if I am not mistaken (and quite possibly I am), some of them seem sometimes to almost relish the act of putting up that barrier and not letting sympathy invade, diluting the purity of what it is they do and the fervor with which they do it.

But with Kirby it is not that way, and in the years that I have known him I can see that it has made him more aware of and sympathetic toward structure, and the strength and solace it can give, the support it can have to offer, to people’s lives.

So as not to miss any of the calls, I’m hanging out at his house through the Christmas holidays. The baby girl, Payton, two, is doing all sorts of cute things, and Jean Ann is pregnant with their second child. Kirby gets to keep his other daughter, Kirby Nichole, on Wednesdays as well as alternate weekends and like any parent often is aware of the interval of time, sometimes down to the hour, of how long it is before he’ll see her.

There are Christmas presents wrapped and set beneath the tree and stockings hanging from the mantel. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that we were young. Kirby is telling me a little about firefighters’ philosophies—not so much about the cross-grid, the latticework, horizontal and vertical, of technical data (the boiling point of ethyl glycol; the incineration point of phosphene gas; the counterclockwise threading of metric and standard lug nuts; the carrying capacities, in units of amperage, voltage, and wattage, of city power lines). Rather, he’s filling me in on the invisible stuff, the important stuff, about how firefighters get along in the world: not so much about what things are like inside the burning structures they fight, but instead, more about what things are like inside the men and women who do the fighting.

We’re all just sprawled around on the couch, drinking Cokes and eating hamburgers and chips and watching the baby play. We watched a television show I didn’t know existed—I don’t have one—ER, about emergency room stuff. Kirby scoffed at the inanity of the situations, bent and warped and altered from real life to fit some feeble notions of drama—and after that, a movie we’d rented, Robin Hood. It was pretty mainstream, pretty stable and secure. It was as mainstream as I’d tasted in a long time. It tasted good. It was nighttime and we could feel the temperature dropping, could hear the bare branches clacking and waving in the cold front that was moving through the city, riding in like a wave or a gift: a crispness, a coldness, that seemed of course appropriate to Christmas. It would definitely bring fires, and the feeling I got as we sat there watching the movie and waiting for the dispatcher’s horn to sound was that this was not a bad thing. Kirby didn’t want anyone’s stuff to burn up, nor did he want anyone to get hurt, but I have been around captive falcons right before they go hunting, and bird dogs in the morning before they are turned out into a field, and there was that same calm, steady kind of confidence and anticipation, knowing that the call was going to come, and that he would once again get to test and engage himself against the thing he was evidently meant to do.

“Two things,” he said, “piss off a firefighter more than anything else. Number one, not having a smoke detector in every room in the house. You don’t have to carry out but one burned-up corpse—one charred kid. One’s enough. A smoke detector’s as simple as it gets. A fire starts, you hear the alarm, and you and your family wake up and walk outside to life. They cost five bucks and if you can’t afford ’em the fire department will find a way to get you some.

“Number two gripe is the folks who think a fire’s a form of entertainment—as long as it’s not their house that burns up.” He shook his head. “These silly dumbasses who feel compelled to come get in the way and gawk, or complain, or hell, criticize . . .” So I get to see that part of my fire-altered friend, too. The fires, and the fighting of them, have made him more compassionate to the lives of people in need—but he has been stretched and drawn in the other direction, too, so that he’s lost tolerance for stupidity, carelessness, complacency. I see how important it is to him, this thing he volunteers to do, and how the worst possible thing anyone could ever do would be to accuse a volunteer firefighter—or any other kind, for you do not go into a burning building thinking about your salary, if you have one—of not trying hard enough.

It would be such a mistake on the part of the layman to underestimate how much they love to fight the fire; it would be such a mistake, too, to underestimate the feelings of relief they savor after they have put the fire down.

We are clean-scrubbed and fresh-dressed from the earlier fire; our smoky, charcoal-smeared clothes are out in the utility room. The washer and dryer are almost always going at his house. I can still smell a little of the smoke on me, but it feels good to be clean. Kirby says that in a long and hot fire the insides of your nostrils will cake black with carbon and that the ebony crust of it, the burned lining, will come tumbling out in fragments for days afterwards, and I wonder what the readers of his tax evaluations must think if they find those black crumbles caught between the pages, like dust from a bag of briquets.

The temperature’s dropping fast. We know there’s going to be another fire tonight. And about two-thirds of the way through the movie, the call comes.

It’s interesting to me the way Kirby and Jean Ann look at each other, as they’re listening to the dispatcher’s description of the fire, and the summons. It’s as if, in the listening—independently but together—each is acknowledging the connection they have to each other, and to the fire—as if there are three things in the room, each with a different relationship to the other: and that each time that fire call rings, these connections and obligations—Kirby to Jean Ann, the fire to Kirby, Jean Ann to Kirby—must be acknowledged.

The dispatcher says that it is a structure fire (a building) and that it is “fully involved,” which means that it is really rocking. Kirby is ready to go but is listening intently: he doesn’t want to miss the coordinates. The dispatcher gives the street address. “That’s right near my mother’s apartments,” Jean Ann says. Then the dispatcher gives the name of the apartments, which are her mother’s.

“Call her,” Kirby says, as he and I are leaving. In an instant Jean Ann has, though there is no answer.

It seems to take a long time: a minute to the station, a minute or maybe two or three to get into the station, packed up and suited, and back out. Kirby and I ride in his fire chief’s truck with the siren and lights on. This fire is less than half a mile from the one we were just on and it seems to me that they want to pop up in certain areas like toadstools after a rain: that there is sometimes perhaps some itch beneath the surface that desires the fires and does all it can to summon them, even to the point of encouraging mistakes and clumsiness.

We reach the apartments after four or five minutes of hard driving. We enter the dark complex—we can see smoke, and flames—and try and navigate the swirled street patterns, as if in a maze, that will lead us toward that orange glow in the sky. Every left and right turn we take, Kirby says, is taking us toward Jean Ann’s mother’s apartment—but finally, at the last fork, we see the fire and the other engines and firefighters—we see the burning apartments—and we turn right, where Jean Ann’s mother’s apartment lies just to the left.

There’s nowhere to park without getting in the way of the pumper trucks and their hoses, so Kirby bounces the truck up over the curb and sets it in the grass across the parking lot from the burning buildings, which are an awful sight: tongues of flame racing along the roof eaves, orange fireballs glimpsed through the blackened windows within, and so much thick gray poisonous-looking smoke.

The man who lives in the corner apartment where Kirby has parked his truck on the grass has been peering at the spectacle from behind drawn curtains—all the lights in the complex have been turned off by the firefighters to prevent their being electrocuted as they prepare to enter the flaming structure—and now as we climb out of the big red truck he comes storming out in a rage, furious that we’ve encroached upon his territory.

He’s a little old man with a chip on his shoulder so perversely large that it appears he might have been lying in wait his whole life for Kirby to come driving up and park on his lawn, or rather on the fragment of a corner of the lawn outside the apartment he’s renting. He comes hurtling down the slope in his boxer shorts and T-shirt and house slippers, cursing like a banshee—calling out, among other things, “Hey cowboy! Hey cowboy!” He launches himself at Kirby, becomes airborne, like a flimsy paper kite or some tiny Styrofoam toy glider, but falls short of his mark, so that he’s rolling around on the ground, still cursing, and now he’s on all fours, laboring to get up, so that it looks (and sounds, strangely enough, given the fervor of his exclamations) as if he’s praying to Kirby.

Kirby’s adrenaline is up—I can tell he’s seen a lot, but doesn’t know quite how to take this. He stares at the old geezer (who is now upright and kicking with vigor the tires of Kirby’s truck with his house shoes), and then shakes his head as if to refocus, and turns and disappears into the center of the fire to find an assignment, something he can do before his men get here. He hands me a walkie-talkie so that I’ll look official and tells me to patrol the perimeter and try to keep spectators—of which there are dozens—as far back as possible.

Despite the flames, it’s dark, and now in their tinted fire-hat face shields and heavy turnout gear, the firefighters all look the same. There is a tremendous force of energy encircling the fire, the hopeful presence of frantic, industrial might: powerful portable generators humming on all the trucks, and radios squelching and squalling, and different teams of firefighters running in ordered directions to various sections of the burning complex, their boots heavy on the pavement and across the sodden lawn as ribbons of water surge from taut hoses and cascade onto the flames, slowing their spread but not yet shutting them down.

Walking in circles around the burning apartment, trying not to hyperventilate at the spectacle, the most dominant impression beyond the speed and power with which things are happening is that this is not some drama staged for the screen in Hollywood but is that seemingly rarest of things, the real thing—and you can see what a living thing, what an awful animal, the fire is. You can see it bulging and writhing; you can tell how, when they apply water to one end, the fire hunkers down in that spot but almost simultaneously billows larger somewhere else.

It’s so fucking big. The men and women running into and around it are so tiny.

The suit’s heavy as lead. I’m tired just from my frantic circling. When I tell spectators to “get back, please,” they ignore me, as if my words of politeness were some insignificant breeze, so that on the next lap I have to shout at them, “Get the fuck back, motherfuckers”—trying to break the spell of hypnosis that is being cast upon them (they are edging ever closer to the fire, drawn, faces upturned), and to replace it, jolt it, with fear.

Some of the firefighters are entering the burning rooms, attacking the fire directly, while others of them are being deployed into those apartments that are smoke-filled but not yet burning and are searching those rooms for the young and the elderly, or anyone who might have been felled by the smoke, which is usually what kills the victims, rather than flames or heat. You always check the closets, and under the bed; a lot of times, kids will hide when they’re scared, just waiting for the trouble to pass. And they’re sure not going to come out and say “Hello, here I am” when some big-booted stranger in a dark mask and breathing gear comes stomping through their house, appearing from out of the smoke, swinging a pike staff.

In Larry Brown’s wonderful memoir of his firefighting days, On Fire, he tells how dogs and cats trapped in a burning house will go get in the bathtub, whether there’s any water or not, and how that’s always where you find them, dead and curled up, suffocated. Kirby has told me a somewhat similar thing: that if you’re trapped in a room that’s on fire, or full of smoke, you can open the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom, twist off the U-pipe beneath, and breathe that air, a few minutes’ worth of cool air coming from the place wherever it is that the water goes.

It’s one thing to read about it in textbooks or to have Kirby tell me about it, in a slow and leisurely storytelling way over a beer or something, and quite another to see it unfolding in fast motion. I keep circling the burning apartments. Now firefighters are up on the roof, cutting vents into it with the machine roars of their Sawzalls—a reciprocating saw—to ventilate the fire, to release heat, to help kill it (when it tries to come rushing through those new vents, they will be there waiting for it, and will attack it)—and other firefighters are still storming into the burning building and smashing at it with their fire tools, evil-looking mauls and pikes. Occasionally I get probing, suspicious looks from some of the officers with radios, and from the firefighters themselves, but they seem able to sense, in that zone or loop of unspoken communication, that whatever I am doing, though not readily explicable to them, is all right and not a menace, but a help.

I cannot impress, in these sentences, the pace at which things are happening—the speed and force with which problems are evaluated and decisions made.

I see Kirby disappear into the back side of the building, manning, with one other partner, a heavy hose. If you don’t have enough people on a hose that’s too big, it’ll lift you off the ground when the water surges through it, like the trunk of an elephant, and smash you against the roof, then thrash wildly, anaconda-like, all over the place, deadly brass nozzle flopping and snapping every which way.

Kirby says that when you get into a blackened, still-burning building—unable to see, because of the smoke (flashlights only make it worse)—you always have to go in with a partner. A lot of the time you’re crawling around on all fours and you can’t even see your partner, even though in those situations you keep in physical contact with them—never more than an arm’s length away, and if for some reason you do become separated, each partner should freeze and then slowly sweep their fire tool (like an ax) in a circle until they bump it against either their smoke-invisible partner, or against their partner’s similarly reaching, searching ax. Kirby says that that’s about as scary as it gets: as if you and your partner are crawling to certain death, but that you have to go forward and meet it because it’s what you are and what you do, and the fire is what it is, and it’s not right for one to exist without or unopposed by the other. Of this, Larry Brown has written, “You have to meet the thing, is what it is . . . and for the firefighter it is the fire. It has to be faced and defeated so that you prove to yourself that you meet the measure of the job. You cannot turn your back on it, as much as you would like to be in cooler air.”

You crawl on through the fire-gutted, hanging tentacles of drooping electrical wires, Kirby says, knowing that the power’s been shut off but terrified that some well-meaning onlooker, some dipshit, or even some rookie is going to notice that the main breaker’s been turned off and will flip it back on, thinking that it’s awful dark in there, that maybe the firefighters could use a little light.

Kirby says that when it gets like that, the senses are incredible—that you feel like you’re on another planet—an inflammation of the senses, a hyper-awareness, so that if you knew how to, you could almost read Braille through the heavy leather gloves: every cell inflamed and fully maxed out with physical and intellectual receptivity. Of course it’s addictive—if you survive it.

Kirby says if you get lost in a house where you’re fighting a fire, or separated from your partner and can’t find your way out, you can drop to your knees and crawl until you come across one of the braided fire hoses. He says there are nubby arrows in the weave of them that always angle back to the source—that by feeling the fabric of the hose you can tell in which direction the pumper truck and safety lie, and crawl back out.

If you get trapped by smoke and flame—an injury, perhaps—you can take a knife or ax and cut a slit in the fire hose. The water will surge straight up through the slit and spread itself in a fan-shaped hissing spray known as a “water curtain,” which can keep the fire from sweeping over that area for a few seconds more.

I’m wishing Kirby hadn’t gone into the burning building. All I can see is darkness and flames, darkness and flames. It seems like far more firefighters are going in than are coming out. It seems as if the fire is swallowing them. Sometimes during a fire bats will swarm in great flocks, trying to fly back down the chimney to rescue their young.

I wonder if Jean Ann’s ever seen him in a real fire, or only in training fires. (The firefighters relish the destruction of old condemned buildings, because often they can obtain permission to torch them—and in so doing, are given the chance to practice, under controlled circumstances—to perfect their craft.)

On their hips, the firefighters each wear PALS, or PASS—Personal Alert Safety Systems. If the firefighter is motionless for thirty seconds, the device emits a piercing shriek, which lets all the other firefighters know one of their members is down—though finding the source of the alarm can be difficult, with all the other noise of the fire and (hopefully) smoke alarms. The wails of the PASS also bounce off ceilings, walls, and floors, further confusing the firefighters. They’re taught to freeze in unison when they hear one, control their breathing, open their ear flaps, and cup their hands perpendicular to their faces to get as accurate a fix as possible. They’re expected, when this happens, to change gears, change mentalities, in a split second—to go from thinking in terms of assault and attack to thinking solely of rescue: defense, rather than offense.

The PASS can be self-activated, too, by a firefighter in trouble; you don’t have to wait the full thirty seconds to deploy it. The trouble is that sometimes firefighters, caught up in the rush of adrenaline upon receiving a fire call, or entering a burning building, get a severe kind of tunnel vision and, despite their training, forget to activate the PASS. And then when they’re lying face down, unconscious from the smoke, it’s too fucking late.

It’s all darkness and confusion to me, speed and flames. The fire trucks’ generators are hooked up to giant fans that are humming and roaring, sawing the night with their sound and killing, or bending and routing, the heat and smoke with their cool winds. I hear someone murmur the word “backdraft.” This is the dreaded phenomenon that occurs when a fire, straining against its limits, is compressed by a lack of oxygen but has nonetheless superheated all the materials around it, almost to the point of spontaneous ignition—a bright chrome teapot leaping suddenly into incandescent flame, or a painting on a wall flashing to fire like a match being struck—or an entire room, or an entire building, and the firefighters within, igniting spontaneously in this manner. I hear the word again. I can’t tell if they mean that one’s occurring, or that the fire is approaching the conditions suited for one. (Blackened windows, pressurized gray smoke leaking from beneath doorways and window cracks, windowpanes rattling and trembling their frames.) All that’s required for combustion in a situation like this—the whole building superheated to or beyond the ignition point—is the introduction of even a trace more oxygen, and the mere opening of a door can give the fire access to the welcoming flood of air.

Now the ranks of the firefighters that are surging around me, running in and out of the building, are carrying the message that one of their number is missing, though they can hear no PASS squall. Immediately I look for Kirby, whom I do not see, but a minute later he appears and begins questioning the squad that’s missing one. Kirby wants to know where the firefighter was last seen and what he was last doing, and they point to a second story bedroom window that is bright with flame and say that he was going to try to go in above it, through the attic, and ventilate it.

I can’t quite follow what’s going on after that, but I hear the term “ventilate” repeated, and rather than bringing a hook-and-ladder truck around, Kirby runs up to the back patio of one of the downstairs apartments, lifts one of those big-ass black wrought-iron patio chairs up over his head, runs back out into the yard, takes a couple of frenzied, waltzing spins with it, and hurls it up against the yellow-flame window—and I know that in the morning his forty-year-old back is going to feel that one.

There is another minute or two before word circulates around to us that they found the missing firefighter—that he had gotten dizzy in the heat and smoke up in the attic and had fallen through part of the ceiling and been stuck for a minute or two but that he pulled himself out and got out all right.

The fight continues.

I continue circling the building, urging people back. It is still drawing onlookers and they are still staring hypnotized at it—some of them growing more comfortable with it and edging closer. Kirby says that he likes to fight a hot fire in cold weather and that when it’s really cold he relishes going into the burning building, just to warm up.

There are patches of moments where it seems strangely like Mardi Gras: fragments of time and space that rest on the outside of the thing that is going on between the fire and the firefighters—the weave of that thing being cinched tight. On the other side of the parking lot, not thirty yards from the apartment complex that’s burning, a fortyish woman in a white terrycloth bathrobe, not very tightly closed, is standing languidly in the darkness of the doorway of her own apartment, watching, smoking a cigarette like a movie star, elbow tucked into one hand, legs crossed, blowing lazy smoke rings as the leaping flames occasionally illuminate her: darkness to light, darkness to light.

Watching Kirby throw that chair through the window reminds me of an image from twenty years ago. There was this pizza restaurant called Major Domo’s, just a strip mall restaurant in Houston, but it had a gimmick designed to draw people in: a large plate glass window through which you could watch the chefs, all with baker’s hats and white aprons, as they twirled and tossed immense droopy, saggy flying saucers of dough.

There’s no explaining the surges and hormonal profiles of adolescent blood. For no reason that we knew of then, and still don’t, it came into our minds (watching moths flutter against the street lights, perhaps) to come running up out of the darkness on summer nights and launch ourselves, hurl ourselves spread-eagled, eyes bulging wide and mouths open in expressions of mock surprise, hurtle through the air (dog-paddling as if in space) and then land hard against that great vertical pane of glass, striking it so hard as to make it reverberate within its frame.

I suppose the object was to try to disrupt the pizza-toss—to cause the chefs to pause and stare at us as the pizza, momentarily forgotten, came down on top of them. We never quite got the desired effect, but we did distract them enough to cause a few two-handed saves.

We would hang there against the glass for some fraction of a second as if struck there, like giant tree frogs, before sliding slowly down and then running back off into the night. We struck at random—we might be driving around, bored, and one of us would say, “Let’s do a Major Domo tonight”—and the object of the game became, over the course of the summer, to go all the way to the edge: to guess just how hard you could leap against the big plate glass window without crashing through. We never did, though surely we came close, and it used to please us no end to consider how it must have affected the lives of the dough-tossers: the chefs wondering each morning, perhaps—maybe even upon awakening—whether the window leapers would come that night. And tossing the dough, twirling it, but also squinting, peering out into the darkness, watching and waiting. Sometimes it was more fun to not go by there, to not leap—to let the tension build for days, even weeks.

Another thing the captain of the fire department and I would do, twenty years ago, was to pull up at construction sites after school and walk right in among the half-framed timbers of a place, with our own hammers and saws, and begin hammering and nailing—pounding goofy little pieces of scrap wood into goofy little places, or fooling with screwdrivers as if checking the preliminary electrical wiring boxes, and calling out instructions and measurements to one another, always appearing brisk and unquestioning—hurling bullshit to the redline, trying to see where it would max out. Subcontractors were forever coming and going, especially on the larger projects, and even now I can remember the deliciousness, the sparkling in the blood as we bluffed our way through work—a thing like adrenaline, but goofier—a yearning for chaos, for making a little disorder out of what we doubtless perceived as too much order, too many constraints and boundaries.

Now Kirby pulls burning people out of buildings, saves their lives and properties—hurls himself against the crumbling, burning city as if single-handedly trying to prop it up. The change amazes both of us. I studied geology in college, learned how time carved valleys and mountains and spread the plains flat, but time is no slouch at carving our own lives anew, assembling order of disorder in stretches of time far shorter than millennia.

You can see the fire shrinking as the fighters begin to gain the upper hand. They will always do this—no fire lasts forever—and it’s only a question of course how much damage will be done. This fire is disappearing, and as it does, the apartments seem to be losing what made them alive—flaming, raging, reckless—and becoming instead the blackened, gutted husk of a thing. Finally they are only a smoking, sodden ruins, and now there comes the monotony of salvage and cleanup. The firefighters cover everything they can with plastic tarps before moving through the interior, hosing down anything still smoking. This is good firefighting—there’s no sense packing up and getting back to the station, tired and dirty, only to have to turn right around and race back out half an hour later because a stray coal or ember found a little breeze and fanned back into flame. It’s good public relations work, too, which is always important. Kirby says that little things like that—trying to stack the burned furniture out of the way, or protecting what can be protected in the midst of such carnage—order amid disorder—really helps soften the blow for property owners. You’d be surprised, he says, how much difference it makes to them when they come back to view the damage to notice that someone was thinking about them.

I’m helping carry boxes out from the hollowed, char-blackened apartment. (Investigations will later show that an untended candle started this fire.) The renters are there and one of the shoeboxes of photos, with which they fled, has spilled its photos, and in the darkness they can’t find them. We search with flashlights in the bushes below the second story window and find them, drenching wet, but still with the likeness, the images; we salvage them.

Now it is over and the trucks are loading up and pulling away, letting the night fill back in with darkness and silence. The firefighters have shed their coats and glisten with sweat, ghostly like angels in their white T-shirts beneath the suspenders of their fire pants. Char-faced, they guzzle Gatorade and various sugary drinks; they drain their hoses and roll them back up in neat but basic folds. At the station the next day, they will clean them and dry them and refold them into more intricate packages designed for ease and speed of unfolding. They will coil them up in reverse horseshoe folds, straight finish and Dutchman folds; in flat loads and reverse and split lays, in accordion load folds, and in donut roll and twin donut roll folds. They will practice knots, refill their air tanks, and clean the trucks until they gleam again, bright as the fire itself. Once a week they will go to a continuing education class designed to further cram their brains with knowledge that will help them prove counterweights to the fire, and once a month they will go to an all-day training station to stay sharp, whether they have been having any recent fire calls or not, though in a big city like Houston, there will always be fires—some place in it will almost always be burning, and if it is within their territory, they will be rushing to it and grappling with it, as if trying to wrestle it, to press it back into the earth or wherever it came from.

I noticed at these and other fires I attended, as well as at the training sessions, two basic profiles of individuals. No one person will fit any other’s profile, but I was struck by how it seemed there were only two types of firefighters. (Perhaps if you draw the parameters loose and wide enough, there are only two types of anything.) There seemed to be the thinkers, like Kirby, who loaded their minds with the vertical and horizontal components of possibility—the ones who are able, through repetition and practice, to throw back the awful and intoxicating tunnel vision that can occur in a fire and can instead look down upon the scene (even when involved in the midst of it), as a hawk might look down on a field from two miles up. These people are generally the leaders—the captains, the chiefs.

There are also what could be called, unfairly in many instances, good old boys—men and women who would work just as hard or harder to save your life and property but who prefer to hurl themselves physically at the fire, under orders and command.

It’s possible you could call them thrill seekers—they often moonlight as policemen, security guards, and ambulance drivers—and I think the common denominator these hurlers have with the thinkers is that they desire, have a need bordering almost on addiction, to feel life deeply, sharply—with either their minds or their bodies—and that they also want to do good, for any of a million different reasons.

This specific, unspoken desire in the blood bonds them as close as family; in many ways it reminds me of the unspokenness of animal language. The sudden leap, without transition, from full stop to full start—usually in the middle of the night—when the dispatcher’s horn sounds in each of their homes . . . Kirby’s told me that many times he and Jean Ann have been sitting on the couch and have paused and looked at each other just moments before their horn goes off, somehow knowing that a fire is burning in their territory, and that a call is coming through.

A leader like Kirby needs hawk vision—needs the ability to juggle the horizontal and vertical matrices—but he also needs the animal knowledge of the body—the awareness of grace, or its dangerous, confusing absence.

Kirby tells me of one of the first fully involved structure fires for which he was a captain. It was in the home of a trophy big game hunter. The house was full of smoke and visibility was almost nil, save for the flaming heads of rhinos, lions, elephants, kudu. They were fighting hard but were losing ground and at great risk of losing contact with each other. The whole time, Kirby was antsy as hell, for this and other inexplicable reasons, and finally he made the decision to withdraw—to get the hell out. They’d done all they could—they’d been called too late—and it was out of hand.

Thirty seconds after he had all the men out, the second floor gave way—it wasn’t a typical wood-frame floor, but poured concrete—and it smashed pancake-flat onto the space where his firefighters had been crawling only seconds before.

Then, as if for punctuation, the fire found the ammo cache, and the fusillade of large-caliber bullets in vast quantities—ordnance—began.

The firefighters turned their attention to the other surrounding homes—spraying them down to keep them cool, to keep them from igniting simply from the radiant heat of the house fire next to them. To someone unfamiliar with firefighting, it must have looked like they’d lost their minds—the house in the center burning more or less merrily while the firefighters hosed the hell out of the unburned ones next to it.

Not that he was always cool or graceful, or possessed of hawk vision. Kirby says that on the first structure fire he ever went out on—a green-ass rookie—he got the tunnel vision so bad that he jumped off the truck (his was the first on the scene), and did indeed run into the wrong house, busting the door down to do so, much to the dismay of the occupants inside. They kept asking him why he was in their house and he told them to never mind that, to help him haul the heavy hose up the stairs to the attic, where he believed the fire was hiding.

It seems like a long time ago, that. He’s taken to the profession—his other, alternate, second profession—as if he’d been born for it, fitting comfortably into the huge responsibility of captain, and being named Firefighter of the Year by his district.

We’re driving home so he can tell Jean Ann that it wasn’t her mother’s apartment that burned but the one next to it, and that everyone’s all right—driving sweat-stained and grubby with the windows down, the cold December air cooling us as if we still carry the heat of the fire with us—and I think about the notion that Kirby has been ready for this all along, has been made for this, and has just in the last several years stepped into the fit of it.

I’m remembering a couple of other seemingly mindless games we used to play in high school. The first one, I realize in retrospect, presaged the salvage operations of fires and spoke, even then, to the strange duality we all have in varying degrees within us: an attraction to order, and yet an attraction to disorder. The necessary way the two must bind together.

I can’t believe we used to do this, but when there was a girl Kirby was dating, we would sometimes sneak into her house while she and her family were out to dinner. I might as well call it what it was, breaking and entering, for almost always we’d slither in over a windowsill, or find a key under a doormat.

Once inside (after the requisite trip to the refrigerator), we’d completely rearrange the bedroom of the girl who was the object of Kirby’s affections. I don’t mean in a disorderly way; far from it. We’d just rotate things. If the bed were on the north wall, for instance, we’d move it neatly to the east wall, and move the chest of drawers to the south wall, and so forth, a neat and precise reordering of things. It is no small miracle that we didn’t get our asses shot off. This was in the 1970s, right in the last tiny seam of time when you could still do something like this. Still, we were lucky.

The second thing I’m remembering speaks ever more closely to the fireman Kirby was to become. There was this game we would play in our biology class that we called “Penetrations.” Back then, it seemed to have no logic, but the way we played it—and God knows how we created it in the first place; we just started doing it one day, as if in a trance, or a dream—was to see which of us could, during the middle of lecture, walk up the closest to the front of the room, where the teacher (order! authority!) was lecturing. The goal was to get all the way to the center—to go all the way to the blackboard without being questioned or challenged.

The tension was incredible. I would get up from my seat and walk a few steps forward, then turn and go back to my seat. The point of my forward penetration then became the mark for Kirby to meet and surpass. He’d wait several minutes, then go as far as he dared.

You couldn’t pretend a pencil had rolled off your desk, or be throwing away a piece of trash. You just had to go for it—had to walk up there barehanded.

It was strangely hypnotic, between the three of us—the teacher and Kirby and me. There’s no telling now what she thought. We didn’t say anything, weren’t disruptive, were good students. Often she’d fix her icy blue eyes on whichever of us was daring to come forward, and we, like somnambulists, one at a time, would watch her. She never spoke a word to us about it. I can still remember the strange, unarticulated power of it; the thrill, too, of getting right in close to the heart of a dangerous thing.

That good flushed feeling in the blood, afterward.

We pull up in Kirby’s drive. He’s saved a baby before, has seen dead people before, has seen people burned up and perforated and lanced and crushed. He’s burned himself badly—his body is mottled with ember scars, like constellations—and has torn a knee, twisted an ankle, broken a shoulder, etc., etc. So far, he’s always come back from a fire.

I can feel the relaxation. I can feel the charged new ends of things, the senses whittled sharper. It’s very relaxing, very nice.

It’s 3:00 a.m. The lights at his house are the only ones lit on the street. Lit up like that, his house looks like a castle.

Jean Ann meets him at the door, as she has hundreds of times, and he meets her.

It’s not about being a hero. It’s about being alive. It’s about being the counterweight to a thing: about being connected to some force that’s out there.

We shower, then sleep lightly, waiting for more. He’s different from how he was in high school. The fire has altered him.