The Fireman

by Joe Hill

People forgot that time and space were the same thing until they were moving quickly, until pine trees and telephone poles were snapping past them. Then, in the middle of all the rush, time expanded, so that the second it took to cross twenty feet lasted longer than other seconds.

Lindy became an instructor at an upscale gym, where she taught aerobic pole dancing to housewives, which she likened to being an animal trainer working with walruses: “You want to throw sardines at them just for turning in a complete circle without falling down.”

“That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that.”

Talk radio was enough to make Harper think the end of the world wasn’t so bad after all.

To live for others was to live fully; to live only for yourself, a cold kind of death. The sugar was sweeter when you gave it to someone else to taste.

She put her hand on the back of his arm and squeezed. She hoped he read that squeeze as Thank you for caring and not God, I’m horny, we should really screw sometime. In her experience it was very difficult to offer a man affection and kindness without giving him the impression you were also offering a lay.

I can tell you, no one went back to the buffet for seconds, but the bar sure was busy.

Humanity is worse than flies. If even one dried nugget of offal survives the flames, we’ll be swarming all over it. Fighting about who owns it and selling the most fragrant chunks to the wealthy and the gullible. You’re afraid it’s the End Times because we’re surrounded by death and ruin. Nurse Willowes, don’t you know? Death and ruin is man’s preferred ecosystem. Did you ever read about the bacterium that thrives in volcanoes, right on the edge of boiling rock? That’s us. Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.”

“Things are different now. Law ain’t law anymore. Without someone higher to answer to, the law is just whoever’s holding the nightstick.

The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.

It’s easy to dismiss religion as bloody, cruel, and tribal. I’ve done it myself. But it isn’t religion that’s wired that way—it’s man himself. At bottom every faith is a form of instruction in common decency. Different textbooks in the same class. Don’t they all teach that to do for others feels better than to do for yourself? That someone else’s happiness need not mean less happiness for you?

“Sometimes you say something just a bit menacing and it gives me a happy little shiver,” he said.

“Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggression with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight—or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won’t follow an outline.” A glumness settled upon her. It crossed her mind that she had never been Jakob’s friend or wife or lover, but only his subject, only material. Writers were as parasitic, she supposed, as the spore itself.

“Ha ha,” he told her. “I get it. Very funny. Everyone loves a good deaf joke. Hey, why did God make farts stink? So deaf people could enjoy them, too.”

“So much kindness,” Renée said. “So many people looking after us. They don’t know a thing about us except we’re in need. I read a Cormac McCarthy novel once, about the end of the world. People hunting dogs and each other and frying up babies, and it was awful. But we need kindness like we need to eat. It satisfies something in us we can’t do without.”

I wanted to learn my craft, and I had not one but two brilliant writers living under the same roof with me—not to mention novelists of all stripes walking through the door every other day. Forty-Seven West Broadway, Bangor, Maine, had to be the world’s best unknown writing school, but it was mostly wasted on me, for two good reasons: I was a bad listener and a worse student. Alice, lost in Wonderland, observes that she often gives herself good advice but very rarely takes it. I get that. I heard a lot of great advice as a kid and never took any of it.

Books are patient with slow learners. The rest of the world isn’t.