Read an Excerpt
I.
I could tell you a lot about fire.
How its color depends on what it eats. How wood and fabric and gas and skin all burn different shades. How the symbols we have for fire and danger and stop are red, but red is just the beginning. Red burns between 950 and 1,800 degrees. After that, fire turns orange, then yellow, then at 2,400 degrees, white. White of purity, virginity, cleansing. White, closest to god. Around 2,600 degrees, fire turns blue-of water and sky and cool breezes. Of baby-boy rooms. It is blue that can eat through bone.
I could tell you how human limbs burn like branches. First the epidermis-the top layer of skin-peels back and chars, then the deeper dermis layers split and fizzle, releasing subcutaneous fat, which can melt and seep into clothing. A clothed human body is like an inside-out candle. If it can develop enough of a "wick," that is, if there is enough fat soaked into the fabric to use as fuel, it can burn for up to seven hours.
My mother wanted to be cremated. That’s all I knew. After all that fire, in the end, we had to pay a professional to do it. I wish I could have laughed at the irony.
Charmaine drove me to pick up her remains at Dignity Memorial in Redding, California. After I signed a stack of paperwork and folded the "permit to transport human remains" into my purse, a man handed me an emerald-green felt bag with a silky drawstring. Inside, my mother's ashes were sealed in a cheap plastic box. She'd always looked good in that shade of green. Verdant against her chestnut-colored hair and eyes. Forested against her olive skin. Maybe we were always going to arrive here, me cradling what was left of my mother in the crook of my arm. Charmaine and I walked silent and somber over the hot asphalt of the funeral home parking lot, the late-winter sun bearing down on us.
She grabbed my sweaty palm in hers and squeezed tight.
"You all right?" she asked.
I looked at her and shrugged. "I mean."
"Yeah, I know. Just figured I should say . . . something?"
I could tell you that flames look like tears because of gravity and the upward motion of air molecules. That in space, at zero G, a piece of paper doesn’t burn skyward in a hungry rising, but horizontally from side to side.
But just as the facts of my mother's death explain little about her story, facts about fire reveal little of what it wants. Of its hunger and complexity. In some ways, it's simple chemistry, a perfect collision of elements ignited by a spark. But it moves in other ways, too, ways that are human, unpredictable, vengeful. It nurtures and destroys. Sustains life and ashes it.
And in my family, it was always there-waiting.
I wouldn't be able to see all the ways that it blazed through our lives until it was over-until everything was gone.
The first night in our new house on Morris Street, my mom, my little brother, Chris, and I slept in a row on the floor of the attic bedroom. It was 1992, when winters in Northern California still meant blizzards and black ice. The propane tank hadn't been filled yet, so Chris and I burrowed deep into the new Garfield sleeping bags that Mom had splurged on at Walmart. She propped up a tiny space heater by our feet. In the middle of the night, it fell and the carpet burst into flames.
We woke to her rolling us away from the fire like logs. She screamed as she slapped it down with an old T-shirt. It burned through the carpet and foam underneath, leaving a topographic crater ringed with nubby singed bits. Mom threw a cheap rug over the hole and we moved my things in.
A year later, my brother and I sat in the same spot, smoking fake cigarettes-strips of college-ruled paper that I'd rolled into skinny tubes. I was twelve; he was four. When we lit the tubes, they flamed, then faded quickly into an electric red line that quietly ate the paper. Smoke curled a wispy dome around our heads, but it wasn't concentrated enough to inhale. We weren't smoking, really. It was the burn that held us. Its tiny, contained danger.
"Guys?" Mom called, as she started up the narrow staircase. In one super motion, I snatched the matches from Chris's hands, scooped up the crumpled paper scraps, and shoved it all into the top drawer of my dresser. As she scaled the final stair to the landing, I spied a half-empty water glass across the room and sprinted to it. I crammed the lit "cigarette" into the water and listened to it hiss, then pirouetted around to flash a smile at Mom. She sniffed the air and narrowed her eyes at my brother, who was busy wiping match sulfur onto his jeans.
"What're you up to, Neen?"
"Nothing," I said. "Just listening to music." I reached across the bed to turn up the boombox on my milk-crate nightstand.
"Were you burning something?"
My face was blank. She looked to Chris, her silence weighted.
"What were you burning, Chrissy?"
"Nothing," he mumbled. His eyes fell to his hands, answering her without meaning to.
"Neen!" she said, sounding more weary than angry.
"Sorry," I whispered. And I was. Not just because she'd caught me "smoking" or because I was a bad influence on my little brother, but because I knew what fire was capable of. And that should have been enough.
I could tell you a lot about fire, and all of it I know because of her.
Ten years before I was born, at 4:40 on the morning of November 10, 1971, my mother and a woman named Raelle Weinstein sat “yogi-style” on the floor of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, kitchen and lit themselves on fire. Raelle was twenty-six. My mother had just turned twenty. They were just blocks from the University of Michigan campus, where my mother had been a student. Police tracked the smell of burning hair to find them sitting on the floor, facing each other, screaming.
"They weren't doing anything to put the fire out," Police Chief Walter Krasny told The Ann Arbor News in his official statement. "We have no idea why they would do something like this. They didn't use gasoline or anything. We presume they were fully clothed in street clothing and just set themselves on fire."
Firemen smothered the flames and cut remnants of clothing from the women's bodies, rolled them into wool blankets, and rushed them into the ambulance. As the siren screamed its make-way to the UM Burn Center, the women held hands. "It's lovely to die together," whispered one. That's what news reports would say. One of the girls. Maybe they were burned too badly to tell which. Or maybe it didn't matter, because it was all just background, scene-setting for an era of protest, student unrest, spiritual awakening, cultism.
As days passed, hospital staff reported that the women continued to act strange and refused to make a statement to police.
Raelle died a month after the fire, just before Christmas.
My mother spent six months total in the burn center, most of them wrapped in gauze and high on morphine, undergoing numerous blood transfusions, skin grafts, and surgeries. She incurred third-degree burns over most of her body. As she healed, her upper legs, torso, back, and neck were left covered in flat, ropey scars, and small spongy patches where the grafts had taken. She lost her outer ears, or the spirally part we think of as ears, entirely, and her right elbow was burned down to bone; the tendons never fully healed, leaving her hand forever stuck half-open, clawed. By miracle or luck, the fire halted right at her jawline and above her knees, leaving her face and lower legs untouched, so that as long as she dressed in a particular way, from a distance, no one could ever tell. My entire life she wore pants, or long skirts or knee-length shorts, to cover her legs, and up top, a turtleneck. Every single day, she wore one: turtlenecks under her T-shirts, button-downs, even dresses.
There was a nurse in the burn unit who wheeled Mom to daily whirlpool baths, where, as she healed, dead skin was pulled from her body like strands of egg in egg-drop soup. The nurse was a teacher of Transcendental Meditation (TM), a trademarked technique brought to the US by an Indian man called Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Learning TM might help Mom in her recovery, the nurse thought. It might offer relief during a period of profound physical and psychic pain. I wonder if she intuited that my mother was searching for something “more.”
Normally, it takes three days to be initiated into TM. The ritual is structured and precise, which I know because at ten years old, I sat sweaty and cross-legged in a carpeted room in Austin, Texas, for three days with Kathy, a woman with mousy chin-length hair and a soothing voice, as she chanted in Sanskrit, burned incense, and built an altar under a photo of Guru Dev, the Northern Indian monk who was Maharishi's guru and taught him the technique he would later bring to the US. Following Kathy's instructions, my father helped me gather a small bundle of lilies, two pieces of whole fruit, and a brand-new white handkerchief, to place at the altar. A longtime TM practitioner and devotee, who found Maharishi around the same time as my mother, Dad was eager for me to receive my adult mantra as soon as it was allowed. He waited outside the door each day for three days while the initiation ceremony and instruction took place. I don't remember much besides the sense of ritual-an initiation through sound and smoke.
In the burn unit, Mom and her nurse must have improvised. Maybe they used the hospital chapel. There wouldn't have been incense, but perhaps they plucked a few flowers from a bouquet that Mom's father, Lou, left on a visit, a get-well token from a neighbor back home in Livonia. Maybe they pillaged the hospital cafeteria, pocketing a bruised apple to offer at Guru Dev's photo. Small details like that wouldn't have mattered. Not to my mother, anyhow. Her devotion was never meant to be dogmatic. To be confined by effigies or inelastic rituals. She erected altars wherever she went.
A turquoise silk scarf laid over a cardboard box.
A thrifted blanket draped over a plastic patio chair.
Throwaway nothings refashioned into something sacred.
I can see the rooms she prayed in so clearly. Trios of veladoras, Catholic prayer candles, burned low in their votives. Patron saint cards lined the windowsills. Her mother's glass rosary, one of her few family keepsakes, snaked between laminated images of St. Francis, the Virgin de Guadalupe, and Joan of Arc, with Archangel Michael at the center. God's chief angel, Michael, was no soft cooing thing but a winged warrior. It was said that in the end times, he would wield his sword and slay demons. The Satan slayer, Mom called him. "Now that is one angel you don't want to fuck with!" she'd hoot. Those unafraid to draw blood in the name of justice inspired my mother's greatest loyalty.
As a girl she'd attended Catholic school in Detroit, where nuns rapped their knuckles with rulers and sins were absolved with a string of Hail Marys. Long defected by the time I was born, she clung to personal relationships with the saints, carrying a sense of sacrifice and mysticism into her adult life. But it was that day in the hospital chapel, staring at the photo of Guru Dev, that her true devotion bloomed.
"Something in his eyes, Neen," she'd tell me later, recounting her initiation into TM. "That was it. That was what I'd been looking for my whole life." She never said what that was, exactly. But I would spend my young life by her side as she lost and found and lost it, again-its pursuit propelling her ever forward. That day in the hospital, her scars still forming, she must have been desperate for something unkillable.
Something like faith.
II.
Hey, dickhead!" Rick Mann's voice echoed through the hall. Shira spun around to face him. Skimming six feet with the shoulders of a weight lifter, Shira wore a teetering blond beehive that I was always waiting to see slide off her head like butter off a corncob. Rick called Shira a drag queen, but I knew her as my neighbor and mother of my friend Aradonus, a stocky white boy a few years older than me with a fade and a stoic German countenance. The worn wooden floors creaked under Shira's feet as she stomped down the hall.
"Listen, Rick," she said. "I'm about up to here with yer bullshit." She shot a hand above her head as if to mark a high-water line. She looked like she could crush him, but Rick just smiled. Shira didn't understand that the angrier she got, the more fun he had. He pushed people's buttons for sport. He liked to see how far they would go. Where their limits were. If they had any.
Rick only had a few inches on Mom, who was five feet two, but his presence was outsize. A stocky dark-skinned Black man with a white skunk stripe running through his short, tight curls, he couldn't have been more different from my father, a softspoken white man whose once-sturdy swimmer's frame had gone willowy from years of meditation and macrobiotic meals. Rick was a social worker and a provocateur, which only squared if you understood life in the 1980s in the Tenderloin, where we lived. San Francisco's poorest neighborhood, it was a triangle of welfare services, soup kitchens, and free clinics. Rick spoke the lingua franca of the streets and was savvy enough to wrestle with bureaucrats. A natural conduit between worlds, he helped people navigate arcane social service systems. And talked trash while doing it. Shit-talking was his love language.
"Anita!" Shira yelled, exasperated. "You better get your man."
Mom stepped into the hall where I was watching the showdown from the top step. She passed me my backpack and coat. "Not my problem," she said, putting up her good hand in protest. "I have to get her to school. We're about to be late."
Rick cackled. "What's new?"
Mom zipped her coat first, then leaned down to button mine. She smelled like Suave and baby powder. "Okay, Bird. We gotta hustle if we're gonna make the train." She smiled like it was a game, her long teeth flashing. Her eyes crinkled softly at the edges. "Ready to hustle?"
