Chris Carrel
Days of Smoke and Fire
You wake up in the morning with the dull dread ringing in your ears like the emergency sirens outside that are, in fact, ringing in your ears. Is this the state of the world today, you ask yourself? Has it been reduced to the unceasing sonic wail of first responders rushing off to battle the flames or murder another citizen? The questions are too heavy for this early, that being eleven in the morning.
Yes, you have slept in again but lately you find that your personal productivity schemes no longer spark delight in you. The general state of things has deteriorated to a sort of hyperreal surrealism, and nothing seems sustainable anymore. In this state you have become stuck, neither able to move forward nor retreat, just tread water. You can no longer tell the difference between depression and clarity. Even simple maintenance tasks like hydration seem pointless in the face of a menu of looming catastrophes.
"Look," you say to no one in particular and tapping your skull with a finger, "this tub-wrinkled jellyfish up here has not evolved one iota for the past one hundred thousand years. I'm working with ancient equipment, and I have to deal with alarm clocks, emergency services and financialized capitalism! I need some coffee."
"Good morning, Curt." The SmartBeanz™ coffee grinder addresses you with the fake name you gave it as you pour beans into its cylinder. "Would you like some coffee beans ground?"
"Grind these, Dumbass," you say, using the name you programmed for it.
"Excellent choice, Curt." Its voice is that of a moderately concerned TV newsreader from Iowa describing the latest wave of book burnings. This voice from the uncanny valley is helpful in that it keeps you from making the mistake of trusting the device. Even the appliances have chosen sides. Dumbass isn't even done mauling your coffee beans but is already streaming data back to its mothership about your coffee choice, the time of your first cup and the grind you selected, among other things. It would gladly testify against you in court, should the opportunity arise.
"This morning's roast is Voice of the Yellow Songbird," the machine says, raising the volume to be heard above the clamor. "The beans you are currently grinding were purchased from a farm collective in Chiapas, Mexico consisting of 35 small farms that support 247 people, including 138 farm workers, and their spouses and children. The coffee beans are arabica. They were shade grown and organically produced. State law requires me to advise you that no product may be completely organic, and your coffee beans may contain some trace quantities of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and/or various micro and nanoplastics. This blend is currently ranked 87th most Just Fair Farming Friendly. An excellent choice. Would you like to hear the carbon and biodiversity impact footprint from your cup of coffee?"
"Go stuff yourself, Dumbass," you tell it, while swearing that this time you will remember to look up how to turn off the voice feature, even though you do need the social interaction. Despite the promises of the Grindz, Inc. marketing department, the informative device and its product transparency are not making you a better person. In fact, you suspect that when it comes to self-improvement, you may lie beyond the rehabilitative power of small appliances. You don't even remember why you bought it, though you suspect the purchase was a clever diversionary tactic to keep you from thinking about something else. Mission accomplished!
Adding to your growing litany of small complaints, the balcony door refuses to open when you push the door button. The conditions light blares orange at you: Unhealthful external conditions. You cannot leave the apartment until you declare a liability waiver holding harmless the apartment owners, the municipal and federal government and a large pool of corporations and corporate shell entities (and their legal representatives) that may or may not be responsible for the air quality today.
Though tempting, you stop yourself from chewing on the irony of having to sign a waiver to leave your own apartment just to smoke cigarettes in the smog outside. It's just not worth contemplating and you really need that first hit of nicotine, cannabis and God knows what. Besides, you are well accustomed to reflexively signing away your legal rights in exchange for access.
Setting down your cup, cigarettes and lighter, you pull up the liability screen on your phone, tap once, and using your finger, author a poor imitation of your signature. You tap again to dismiss. The light turns green, and the glass door slides open admitting you onto the three-by-five-foot cement balcony thirty-three stories above the street.
You attempt to stifle a yawn, but it veers away from you into a hacking cough. The air isn't even that bad this morning, but your lungs are still sore from yesterday's haze. Wildfire smoke or no, the air is never really free of pollutants anymore. Whether you're inside or out, you are inhaling microscopic pieces of plastic and volatile organic compounds with each breath. You've come to think of the soot from the wildfires as flavoring, like airborne MSG or Za'atar.
Fortunately, marine air is blowing in from the sea this morning, keeping the smoke away from the city. You can see all the way to the foothills where the fires are burning, feeding a steady billow of smoke to the cloudy, gray skies. The land between the city and the fire is a patchwork of burnt and unburnt forest and towns, laced with ribbons of mostly empty roadways.
Somehow, this particular wildfire has been threatening the city for the better part of a month. Something to do with prevailing and countervailing winds being stuck in a loop due to the melting Arctic ice and a grumpy jet stream. The result is that the winds push the fire towards the city and then away from the city, like a naughty child playing the flinch game with a helpless younger sibling.
When the fire first broke out, the mayor warned that an evacuation might be necessary. You waited for several hours along with your fellow citizens, but the call never came. Once the southern and eastern routes out of the city were blocked, evacuation was no longer feasible and you've been trapped here waiting, ever since. Though you'd like to escape the threat of burning to death, the idea of leaving your home in the city feels like more forward movement than you're comfortable with. Like trying to leave your cruddy job to find another cruddy job.
The flames have made five runs at the city now, only for the winds to shift at the last moment and avert disaster. Three times, the threat was serious enough that citizens were ordered to the old nuclear fallout bunkers beneath the streets. Watching the distant inferno reminds you how you felt each time you emerged from the subterranean refuge, and the flood of relief and gratitude you experienced to find the city unburnt. You don't think you have the strength to start over in the smoking rubble of the unknown.
If the city does eventually burn, though, you will not take Dumbass to safety with you no matter how much it might beg. For a moment you revel in the image of the coffee grinder calling for help in your burning kitchen. It's a pleasing vision. Maybe you'll leave the voice function active, after all.
The streets below are largely empty save for the constant pinging of white, blue and brown delivery vans swooping in to deliver brown boxes of stuff to this tower block or that. At this late hour of the morning, most people are at the office, whether the office is in an office or is merely in their bedroom, kitchen or utility closet. You can see a few of the homeless about, pushing their humble inventories around in feral shopping carts, cannily avoiding the regular police sweeps that seek to move them from one place to another.
It's become harder to be poor since the latest regime change ("A New Tomorrow Towards Our Glorious Yesterday") which promised to more specifically focus our hatred and intensify the menu of punishments for those who are not us. One aspect of this has been a reduction of programs to solve homelessness and a raft of new measures designed to make it worse.
Thinking about homelessness reminds you that you should probably get started on your work for the day since you woke up late once again. While you don't exactly enjoy your job, the work hours provide a convenient vehicle through the dull districts of the day and deliver you closer to the doorstep of sleep's sweet oblivion. It's also nice to sleep indoors.
To be honest, you aren't sure anymore what it is you do. Something with the computer. You receive prompts, sometimes substantive enough to be called assignments, and in response you type things on the keyboard. Occasionally, you will speak to other humans on the phone, or over email or messaging systems. Neither the words or numbers you type out on the keyboard, or the conversations you engage in, make much sense to you, though you feel that they might have at one time. Your supervisor checks in now and then to suggest that you are the problem, but you suspect that they have changed the work in some subtle way so that its meaning eludes you.
This is not an unreasonable theory. You understand that humans are susceptible to slow, gradual change, incremental moves that are rationalized one at a time, step by step until a great shift has been normalized. Perhaps that is how we find ourselves trapped in the city by roving wildfires? Was there something we failed to notice as we normalized it, our streets slowly filling with the homeless and their tents, while the temperature crept higher, and the trees and plants dried out?
These questions are also too big for this time of day, and you dismiss them before they have the chance to disturb your ability to function.
Gaining re-admittance to the apartment you head back to the bedroom and boot up your laptop. The machine makes a series of pings, boops and squeaks before inviting you to log on.
You are greeted by a message from your co-worker, Gal.
"None of this makes sense to me!!" the message begins. "I'm in over my head!"
This is not necessarily an unusual message from her. Gal is prone to overusing exclamation points and wearing her anxieties on the outside like a badly botched disguise, but it's best to inquire further.
"What do you mean? What's wrong?" Her response is almost instantaneous.
"Remember when you suggested that I microdose? I screwed up."
"Details? Tell me more."
"OK, well I took one and didn't feel anything, so I took another. I started to feel good, but not great, so I figured I might as well take another. That went on for a while...Now I am stoned off my toes."
"How many did you take?"
"I DON'T KNOW!!!!! It might have been five. Or 500. Or 50. There is a five in the number, I know that."
"Wow. Can you work?"
"No! I don't understand what they want me to do."
"Sounds like a normal day without drugs," you reply, hoping she'll get the humor, though you refrain from including the winky emoji out of concern it might be misread. Conspiratorial thinking is out of control in the city these days.
"It's not like that! The words on my screen are twisted into odd temporal vortices!! There are interstitial conduits linking ideas together until they don't make sense anymore!!! There's some transdimensional bullshit going on here!!!!"
"Whoa. That's a lot," you reply. "Can you take a break? Maybe go to the cafe and drink some coffee? Try to watch some daytime TV. It might give your head a chance to get used to the other dimensions."
"There is this one other thing: Extra-dimensional demons are materializing out of my walls. They are falling onto the carpet and forming a lake of purple acid. I can't leave the bed. I am surrounded by a lake of purple acid!"
You sigh and squeeze your eyes shut. The day is becoming unbalanced, manifestly disharmonic. There is a wildfire apocalypse threatening the city. Is it too much to ask that people use illegal drugs responsibly?
"I'm coming over to get you. We'll get some coffee and talk this out. Hold tight."
You press send and get up from the bed, checking first to make sure your bedroom floor is just a floor, with no extradimensional demons or colored acid.
The liability waiver you signed earlier is good for the entire day, so there's no red tape slowing your exit from the building. The day is much the same as it was from your balcony. The sun glowers but cannot escape from behind gray clouds, and it's warm despite the overcast appearance.
There are more people out on the streets now. You see some more homeless people but most of them appear to be not quite homeless yet and you wonder if they are the new arrivals from the outer lands. The wildfire is constantly chasing more of these poor rural and suburban wretches into the city, adding to the feeling of a population under siege. Many of the refugees appear bewildered by their surroundings, the sky-high towers, the postmodern architecture covering everything in glass and bending straight lines until they surrender into rainbow shapes and circles.
At least you no longer gawk at your own city the way these bumpkins do. They are definitely outerlanders and you can't help but feel a bit smug. You have lived in the city long enough to know not to question its cityness, and to just let it flow over you like a determined, drowning wave.
Further on your journey, at the corner of Seventh and Waterton, you see a large man with wild eyes and a long briar patch beard. He is shouting into a megaphone and gesticulating at pedestrians in an all-too familiar manner.
"The fire shall cleanse the Earth of its wickedness, so sayeth the Messiah," He delivers this uplifting message with all the bonhomie of driving a tank over your neighbor's hydrangeas.
Messiah talk does not interest you. It is the age of messiahs. There are quite a lot of them. There are messiahs that predict the world will end on Saturday, while others predict it for a month from this Wednesday. Some are calling for a rain of fire, while others forecast a killing flood. There are even those that claim the world has already ended and God is just waiting around for us to get a clue.
Due to the general ambient apocalypticness of the world, messianism is a growth industry. Regardless of the specific flavor of the individual practitioner, the prevailing theme is that their preferred apocalypse is nigh and its high time you got yourself right with God. The right God, of course and they just happen to know a guy. All want a cut of the action as does this particular firebrand, who shakes his cup angrily as you walk past.
Some people fall for this junk, but you are immune. While you fear the Apocalypse like any sensible modern citizen, you believe it will be an entirely secular affair.
"No, we are going to just have to destroy ourselves," you think as you near Gal's building.
At the entrance, you press the intercom button for your friend's apartment and wait. You press it again and wait some more. And again. And again. This is worrisome. What if she has dangerously overdosed on her microdoses? She might at this moment be lying in her demon-filled bathtub, turning blue from demonic exposure and lack of oxygen.
You are about to reach for your phone to alert the first responders when it preemptively vibrates. A wave of relief washes through you as you see Gal's ID flash on the screen.
"Hey, where are you?" you say.
"Hey, where are you?" she says.
"I'm outside your building. I've been buzzing you to let me in for the past ten minutes."
"Well, that's weird," she replies, the gravity of her confusion causing her syllables to slow and stretch out like an astronaut being spaghettified at the edge of a black hole. "I'm outside your building, buzzing you to let me in. As we discussed..."
"No, I said I was coming to get you." Uncertainty begins to creep into your internal narrative.
"What happened to the extra-dimensional demons and the lake of purple acid in your bedroom?" you ask with some trepidation.
"I don't know. They were in your apartment. Just how many hits of that microdose did you take?" Her voice has now appropriated the exact tone of concern you had saved for her.
As the two of you continue to argue over which one of you is overdosing on small amounts of illicit pharmaceuticals, you turn slowly to face the street and see that while you have been standing there someone has pasted a garish red and orange flyer on the utility pole across the way. The colors seem to be moving and pulsing around coal black lettering that is just far enough away to be illegible, although you can see how badly the words want to be read. They are clamoring for your attention.
"Hey, I'll call you back," you tell Gal. "Something just came up."
"Don't hang - " you sever the connection and walk over to retrieve the missive.
SURRENDER TO THE FIRE
WE ARE ALREADY BURNING
The flyer in your hands is the size of an ordinary sheet of office paper but that's the only normal thing about it. The paper feels firm and cool like a sheet of formica but it's as pliable and about as thick as standard office paper. Up close, the dancing colors continue to move and shimmer suggestively. This could have been made by one of the top graphic design firms in the city to sell cough suppressants or face masks, instead of this apocalyptic message. Surrender to the fire? Who is trying to reach you with this message?
If Gal's account is correct, though, the flashing text might have more to do with your state of mind than top-notch graphic design work.
Your quandary is pierced by a terrific metallic howling that you can understand regardless of the state of your sobriety. One long, harsh ascending note followed by an equally long descending note, like the sound of a great and terrible machine crying out for help and knowing it won't arrive. The pattern repeats itself mercilessly.
This is the point in your life where the person you were unzips the tired suit they had been wearing and steps out onto the street, revealing the person you are becoming, a new entity, one whose motivations are as yet unknown.
Though you know you should join your fellow citizens who are streaming to the underground bunkers to wait out the emergency, something in you resists. Something that either wants to die or wants to live differently directs your feet to begin walking east towards the edge of the city. Yes, towards the wildfire's advancing front. A few of the more humanely inclined shout at you to join them in the bunker but you wave them off and keep moving forward.
The wildfire is a lot closer than it was earlier in the day, and the smoke has grown thick on the breeze. The farther you go, the less people you see and the louder grow the sounds generated by the approaching inferno. They swell to become a symphony of jet airplane engines roaring their fury at you.
To your surprise, the wildfire has finally entered the city. Up ahead, the street is lined with burning buildings and the air tastes like hot ash and imminent death. The fire spits sparks into its smoky exhalations, sending its incendiary scouts off to find new buildings, parked cars, and people to consume.
As you are walking towards the fire, it is in its way, coming to meet you.
The main front of the monstrosity barks flames in cannon bursts down the street, striking more buildings and setting them alight, regardless of whether they are brick, steel or glass. This conflagration burns everything. Even the street is burning, and you must be careful not to step in the small puddles of liquid flame that dot the street.
The crackle and hiss of flames seem to come from all sides and the smoke thickens to whiteout conditions. You don't have a mask with you, so you light a cigarette to fight smoke with smoke and find it an adequate substitute. The warm, cigarette vapor settles around you like protective armor. Out there beyond your smoke bubble, you can hear the groaning death confessions of wood-framed buildings, and soft, liquid susurrations that might be the sound of melting metal.
The world grows hotter the farther you walk. You are no longer in a part of the city that you know, but you refuse to stop. The fire is calling you forward and if this is where you must die, you accept the assignment. You weren't doing that great a job of living as it was.
But as you are about to walk into the advancing wall of flames and oblivion, the smoke clears away as if a strong breeze had blown in from the sea behind you, and you stop to gather yourself. The buildings on either side of you are fully engulfed in flames and this continues up ahead for many blocks until the street ends in a T-intersection culminated by a flaming midrise apartment building. Your senses have sharpened with danger, and the roar of the flames reveals itself complex and multidimensional, like a symphony with different instrument sections playing their own variations on a theme of ignition and extirpation. Each flame contributes its own notes to the song of destruction.
The suggestion of music calms your mind's perception of the wildfire, and the heat and sound recede for a long moment that makes you think of the eye of a hurricane. Like the eye of a storm, though, it does not last. You realize with horror that it is an intake of breath, and despite your earlier death wish, the body's instincts take over. Dropping to the ground, you cover up in a fetal crouch as the exhalation of flame roars to life over your head. A megatonic breath sprays every surface in flame. Your skin and the deep interior of your flesh scream in agony at the hellish heat. Reflexively, you shut your eyes tight as the inferno swallows you up.
You are becoming flame, burning from the inside out and you envision yourself reduced to a pile of ashes. But just as quickly as the breath of flame struck, it passes over you and the air around you begins to cool.
It's been a helluva day and it's no wonder you don't realize immediately that you are still grasping the flyer in your right hand. Your mind is struggling to catch up to what you have just lived through. You have never overdosed on drugs before, so you can't be sure that if you did, this isn't a typical experience. Nor can you eliminate the possibility of a death throe-induced hallucination. You might be burning to death right now and your mind has sealed off your flickering consciousness from the agony raking through you as your body burns down to its wick. Regardless, there is no choice but to proceed as if you can correctly interpret reality.
You look to see that you are surrounded by smoking heaps of rubble and as you turn in a circle, you find only burnt ruins stretching away from you in all directions and piled high. The streets are littered with ash piles and melted lumps of SUVs and delivery trucks. The smoke clouds have disappeared from above, leaving a bright sun shining down through a brilliant, clear blue sky. The fresh sea air cools your skin and drives its healing breath into your singed lungs.
A new noise tugs on your awareness, a sound you can only describe in hindsight as destruction in reverse. The heap of rubble on the left side of the street begins to vibrate and shudder as its shattered and melted components pull themselves together and reconstitute their shape. They begin growing upward - frames, walls, doors, windows, first floor, second floor - until what stood there before the fire stands again.
Looking up and down the street you find that all the buildings are re-making themselves, breaking physical laws with no fucks given. Before long, the buildings and towers have reclaimed the skyline, beyond which you can see the clouds of wildfire smoke moving away from the city towards the distant foothills.
The city burned but the city remains unburnt.
It's a miracle, you think. If only you believed in miracles. Remembering the flyer in your hand, you bring it up to view. The orange and red background colors are pulsing and throbbing again, and the black lettering has rearranged itself.
THE END IS ALWAYS COMING AND NEVER ARRIVING
With newfound clarity, you think of home and how badly you would like a sandwich and a glass of water. You take a tentative step towards the future. And then another.
Chris Carrel writes speculative fiction and other odd things from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He has been published at Unlikely Stories, JAKE, and Mobius BLVD, has work forthcoming at Partially Shy, Dark Winter Lit, and Skeleton Flowers, and posts occasionally at ccarrel.bsky.social. Visit Chris' Janky Dystopia at thechriscarrel.com.
