Andrew Zhou

Fireproofers

I knew that girl was going to set herself on fire the moment she stepped between the pizzas.

Theo and I were in the frozen food section placing mint chocolate chip ice cream in our shopping cart. With all the tubs displayed so neatly in the front, we were tempted to go by the gallon, but I remembered my doctor’s appointment on Monday and the flat metal of the scale at her office, so we settled on individual pints. 

Theo added one to the cart, then two, then three. I never got tired of watching his bare arms move. 

“Wasn’t your mom allergic to mint?” he asked.

“It was the menthol. She carried a special toothpaste around with her.”

On my phone, a grainy video played of two families getting into a brawl outside a polling station in New Hope. A news anchor described the aftermath: by the time an ambulance arrived, one of the mothers had already been killed. 

Theo always found watching the news too depressing, never transfixed like me on the violence of today. He scrunched his face as the audio continued. “Jesus. Remember when we thought we could save the world by voting?”

“This is too much ice cream. Let’s put some back.”

“We can give one to Shannon when she comes—”

So quietly that she could almost be confused for a puff of mist rolling out of an open freezer door, the girl rounded the corner. She walked to the center of the aisle—pepperoni at her eye level, stuffed cheese crust at her stomach. Any other day, I would have thought she was just another college student refilling her ramen supply in those frayed jeans and pink T-shirt. But most students didn’t walk through grocery stores with their hair plastered to their face, pale liquid dripping down their chin.

I grabbed Theo’s shoulder and yanked him toward me, my phone clattering to the floor. He looked at me like I was a pitbull sinking my teeth into his leg, but I didn’t waver. When Theo and I got married, I refused to eat any cake no matter how many plates got shoved in my face, and the next day half the reception had to call out of work with food poisoning.

I have my mother’s instinct. You have to listen when these things hit you in the gut, when your body tells you that a girl is about to set herself on fire.

“Phillip Huang and Theo Madden.” The girl pointed at us, her finger dripping. “Evil lives in your interlocked fingers, and if it is not given up, the world will pay. I’m sorry.” 

 “Excuse me, who—”

But Theo’s hands beat the words to his mouth when the girl raised the lit match and a horror of heat washed through us. All sound flattened: the whine of my phone playing the weather forecast from the ground, the thud of Theo backing into the door guarding the Hot Pockets. Without his arm, I had nothing to cling to but the shopping cart; my hands clamped to the handle like vices.

By the time the flames died down and an employee dragged us to the break room to wait for the police, our ice cream had melted. I still feel it sometimes, all at once—when I’m waiting for the coffeemaker to finish or it’s three in the morning and the insomnia won’t let go: me with my shopping and the shrieking mass of great orange in the center of the aisle, the sweet-sweat smell of blackening flesh that I would come to know so well, and three jars melting into green puddles between us.

#

We thought that was the end of it. The police took statements, and within hours, we had unpacked the groceries into our fridge back home. Everyone we knew called when they saw our names online. Theo’s coworker brought us a Tupperware filled with jalapeno bites.

In bed, we laid with our eyes open. Theo wrapped around me in the dark.

“I’m going to dream about it,” I said. “If I go to sleep, I know I will.”

“We can stay up, like a sleepover.”

“Why do you think she said our names?”

Theo drew me closer, his pine musk drowning out the phantom stench of bloody charcoal. “Some people are just crazy, Phil.”

Within a week’s time, we were both back to work, and Theo came to my office to pick me up for our usual Friday night drinks. He put his hand on my knee as he drove, a gesture I had pretended not to enjoy when we first started dating and I was still intimidated by his macho-man body, but have given in to since. I flicked through radio stations until landing on a sultry voice reading the news: more updates about a pending government shutdown.

“Do you think it’s going to happen?” 

Theo shook his head and turned the dial to a music station, melodic synth punching out the bureaucracy. “It’s just too damn dark.”

“I want to keep up with the big picture.”

“Why do they make the big picture seem so hopeless?”

“I don’t feel—look out!”

Theo hit the brakes just in time to avoid plowing through the man standing with his legs spread in the middle of the intersection. Under the traffic light, his arms read lily-green. He looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, a kindling-beard trailing down to his chest.

That instinct again. My hands were on Theo, and his hand on my knee, but I was standing unmoored in the grocery store aisle again, flashfire and crisping skin on the other side of a shopping cart.

“Phillip Huang and Theo Madden.” The man pointed at us, his voice muffled through the windshield. His face was slick like glass. “Evil lives in your interlocked fingers, and if it is not given up, the world will pay. I’m sorry.” 

Later, Theo said that we both remained silent as the lighter in the man’s hand ballooned into a bonfire in the middle of the street. Theo said that we held still and straight, like two columns upon which a ceiling rests, and it was only the passersby outside our closed windows shrieking bloody murder, panic breaking apart on the glass.

But once, a rat scampered through the kitchen in our old apartment, and Theo insisted that we hadn’t seen it, that rats couldn’t make it to the seventh floor of a building. A fact of nature, he said. The next year, we found three nests under the stove, the vermin fattening all that time, and I spent the whole evening puking. Theo sees what he needs to see.

I screamed my lungs out in the car. I know I did. Imagine watching a nuclear explosion and knowing that nothing will keep the invisible death from your cells, knowing that wherever you hide, it’s all the same—this side of the glass or that. You would know true fear then. You would thrash like an animal. 

#

We watched our faces on TV, text scrolling past too quickly to read. They used a picture of us from six years ago, just before we got married. It seemed unthinkable that the two people on screen were engaged; those baby-faces knew nothing about gasoline.

The reporter’s voice repeated what the police told us an hour ago. A group of extremists, birthed recently in St. Paul and known online not through an official title but a calling-card symbol that looked like a snake looping back on itself, had declared us as enemy number one on their website. 

The world has been evil, their announcement read. It is doomed, and the rot must be plucked from the root. We bring this sleeping knowledge to the surface: Phillip Huang and Theo Madden carry great calamity together, in their closeness. Through great prayer, these names have been identified. No harm may come to them, no threat of bloodshed. They must choose their own separation. They must choose good.

The channel switched to a breaking story—the latest drone technology nearly ready for release, a 3D rendition of bombs reducing cities to pixels. A cut to a factory line, a cut to protests at the capital.

I stared out the window, where the fence posts of our backyard shimmered with summer heat, just as distant as the machinery on the TV screen. 

“So they’re doing all this…to make us leave each other. Permanently.”

“The world’s fucking crazy,” Theo said. “We’ll be careful. We’ll stick together.”

“Why us? You don’t think this is a homophobia thing, right?”

“Who cares? The police will take care of it, and it’ll die down, and we’ll go back to normal.”

Back then, it was his job to dream; it was mine to believe.

The paparazzi wave lasted months, interview requests clogging our voicemails. They all asked if we knew the reason, could think of anybody we had irrevocably injured, but we couldn’t come up with an answer. When one asked us on our lawn if we actually considered the demand, the utter separation, Theo reared back to his greatest height, and I dragged him back inside before he could put those enormous arms to use. 

The police kept a watch on our house at first, then assigned their officers to more pressing needs, a protest here or a truck on fire there. One by one their cars stopped coming by, and then we were alone again. Every so often an officer or a noble passerby would tackle one of the extremists to the ground mid-spark, but like weeds, three popped up where one was removed, their source eternal. A new group, but growing and connected. There was even chatter online of their membership going global.

Theo’s mother tried to come over to comfort us once, but she saw a black outline seared into our door and canceled that day and the week after and the week after that. We tried going out in hoodies and sunglasses, but when it ended with a burst of death-color on the light rail and a fleeing crowd at the Stadium Village stop, we agreed to stock up on air freshener and keep to the house. Our jobs let us go remote full-time, no questions asked.

But we were silly at the start. We made all kinds of mistakes. A month in, we had excised the outside from our lives—weekly grocery deliveries all set up, nose plugs ordered for the pork-roast smell—but hadn’t even thought about the enormous living room window that convinced us to drop a ridiculous down payment on the house in the first place. While I set out plates for lunch, a hawk-faced woman hopped a hedge in the distance. She walked right into our yard, right up to the window. Her finger left a dripping smudge on the glass.

I watched the whole time in a stupor, like a TV character had noticed me through the screen. I knew I needed to sound the alarm, but my brain couldn’t string any thoughts together save for the obvious. “We should stop her.”

Theo looked up from his phone, yelled, and flung the curtains closed as fire caught. The blaze glowed an unnatural color through our gauzy drapes, like a UFO approaching the planet.

#

My parents both passed away long before Theo and I got engaged. When he proposed, there was nobody to ask for the blessing. It was all on me. 

His parents walked us both down the aisle, dad on Theo’s side and mom on mine. All four of us arm-in-arm, off to see the wizard. I agreed to the arrangement half-heartedly; I didn’t want a wedding full of people to feel sympathy for me as I walked down the aisle, a foster-thing to be taken in by the Maddens. But when we reached the end of the walk and Theo’s mother held my face in her hands like it was a beating heart, tears forming in her eyes, I knew we had made the right decision.  

We hadn’t seen her since the girl on fire. Ever since Theo’s dad died in his sleep the year before, Theo’s mom had started spending a lot more time at home, and our trail of ash made things no better. I guess we assumed a time would come when the world would relent, when we would be allowed to emerge from our blackout-draped chrysalis and go to her. 

So the dread call came like a bullet.

I was rearranging our fridge magnets for the twentieth time that week when I heard something clatter to the floor in the living room. When I rounded the corner, Theo stood over his cracked phone, a call still in-progress on the tile.

His mother was driving north to take a rare weekend trip in Maine—she loved lobster more than the whole planet it sometimes seemed—and a drunk driver ran a red light. It was instant.

Theo barely blinked for the next ten minutes. I sat with him on the couch, and his hand was limp in mine, like he had been in the car himself. 

“I have to make calls. There are funeral arrangements…”

“Theo.” I used my softest voice, forced the next words into a kinder shape. “I don’t think we can go.”

“Those freaks aren’t going to keep me from my fucking mother—”

“It’ll be in the news. They’ll be there, waiting for us.”

“I don’t care.”

“Your cousins, Theo. Your dad.”

I spotted the moment when the vision passed from my head to Theo’s. His shoulders slumped with the ghastly sight: a man aflame in a house of God, his red-hot silhouette seared into the pews while the most important woman in the universe melted into casket cushioning.

Theo sobbed into my arms, and I did what I could.

In the mornings, he turned the bathtub into a closed loop, his body reabsorbing all the tear-salt it tried to shed. In the afternoons, a man with a scarf crackle-squealed in the backyard or a woman with a pixie cut curdled black against the front door, usually weekly or even daily given warmer weather. While Theo napped through the evenings, I took on all the chores myself: making dinner, rubbing his back, re-taping the edges of our doors and windows to keep out the smoke.

On the day of the funeral, Theo didn’t say a word. I brought his meals to bed, and he made hardly an indent in a piece of toast, a slice of dry ham. We both knew what was happening out in Boston. A funeral without a mourner, a mother without her son.

I thought we had at least made it through the day when Theo fell asleep early, but he bolted upright just before midnight. Long creases marked his face like knife wounds.

“Mom?”

“It’s just me. It’s Phil.”

He squinted, and a shudder passed through him: the second awakening, when reality kills the dream for good. “She was carrying me to bed. Her hair was still long, so it kept brushing over my eyes. And there was smoke.”

Theo let me hold him from behind. I smoothed his hair. If he shuddered, I pressed my chin into the cup of his shoulder, and when he squeezed my hand, I squeezed right back. That was our love, a lonely fire stoked through the long, long night.

#

A knot came undone that day. The slack set something loose in Theo, a creature of pure motion. 

He cracked open the front door at golden hour, a slice of sunset lighting his face on fire: in his cheeks, the smoke of firewood, and in his eyes, the blue of a gas stove clicking to life.

“I’m going on a walk,” he said. “You should come, too.”

“What? You mean outside?”

He put on his jacket without looking at me. “It’s been two weeks.”

“Exactly, we’re due any day now.”

“It’s a perfect day, and I want to take a walk in the park, so I’m going to the park.”

The door swung open, and Theo slipped into the gold. 

I didn’t know what to do. Months had passed with us trapped between these walls, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand. I knew every step from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen, knew the number of scratches on the inside of the silverware drawer. But I had completely forgotten how to change out the light bulbs with two hands instead of four. 

While Theo was out, I tried to distract myself from the image of my husband encountering one of those extremists on his own, of him walking into a flint-and-tinder trap. Election day was coming up, and there were three ballot measures I hadn’t read up on yet. We forgot to register for mail-in voting, but it wouldn’t hurt to be informed and to have thoughts, to think of something beyond the fire. For hours, I scrolled through post after post of people arguing about liquor licenses and infrastructure budgeting. I tried to form an opinion; I thought of a kidney melting.

An hour passed, then two. Just before I could really start to panic, Theo made his grand return. He walked in with a brand-new layer of soot decorating his coat, a kind of immolation splatter we both recognized as well as each other’s faces.

Theo took off the offending piece of clothing and threw it in the overflowing laundry basket. He yawned. “It was beautiful outside. I forgot how loud the birds sing.”

“How did you…”

“I pinched my nose. I closed my eyes.”

He made it sound so easy, as if we weren’t all born screaming, all born squinting against the big light. 

#

Back in college, my apartment featured the widest eastern-facing window I had ever seen, and I woke each day with the sunrise. That was my only requirement when Theo and I started looking for houses: an even larger window allowing the full body of morning to rush through.

When the human infernos came to the windows and we taped blackout curtains over them, I lost that cycle of light, lost the ability to wake and fall asleep with that celestial-body rigor. I tried alarms, but none of the beeps or jingles ever convinced my body to get out of bed at a human hour. I woke at night, passed out at high noon. Outside the flow of time, I thought I might at least improve my cleaning and cooking skills, but I gave up when I realized the vacuum sounded like a person wailing from inside a plastic bag, when I tried to cook a steak to medium-rare perfection but couldn’t stop imagining an eye melting on the stovetop.

It was late night or early morning. Maybe afternoon, or the edge of midnight. No light, either way. I sank into the couch while Theo practiced six ways to fold the bathroom towels.

“What if we weren’t together?” I meant it.

“What are you talking about?”

“It would just stop if we weren’t. I’m not saying we should, just why didn’t we—”

Theo dropped the towels to the ground, a swan unfurling on the carpet. “Don’t. Just don’t. If we ever saw each other, if we ever spoke, ever bumped into each other on the street, it would all start up again.”

“I know…”

He kneeled in front of me, held my hands. “I love you, Phil. All I have is you. When I think about the universe, it’s you.” He pressed his palm to my chest, then pointed a finger toward the front door. “And then there’s everyone else.”

I didn’t doubt the truth of it. Theo is a creature of loyalty. If it were up to him, the world would be us and two mirrors facing each other, an endless echo of our bodies latched together. He swore in his vows that he needed nothing but me, and in some horrible joke of life, he was making good on the promise. In sickness and in health, out of the frying pan and into the fire. 

Immediately, I winced with guilt. So many would kill for the ideal husband, for a man with enough resolve for two. I should never have even entertained the separation-thought. No, I should have been giving great thanks, figuring out how to be more like him. Then it could be the two of us, ideal and identical on the same side of a wall.

Theo moved to kiss me. I smelled the smoke on his breath before it rolled into my mouth—a flame making the leap from his tongue to mine.

#

A door slamming, devilish laughter—I thought I had awoken to the noise of the world ending. But it was only Theo stumbling in at two in the morning from one of his late-night walks with the stench of brandy on his breath. He had left empty-handed, so he probably purchased and downed a whole bottle while he was out. 

“I killed one of them,” he said.

I didn’t believe him at first, not when I thought of the man who took me on a walk across the Mississippi for a first date, who saw an injured bird on the ground and cradled it like a star until it died. No, not him.

In case the neighbors were listening, I turned on the TV to drown us out, and it played aerial footage of a massacre in St. Paul in slow motion. Theo stared at the blurry gore, bodies laid out on a dirt road.

He laughed. “Jesus, maybe the world really is doomed.”

“You didn’t kill anybody.”

“One of them tapped me on the shoulder. I thought he was trying to rob me, so I tackled him to the ground. Then I saw the lighter, but I already had a rock in my hand, and I just kept going and going. I ran all the way home to you, baby. Ta-da.”

For an ugly second, I thought it could all be true. I thought there might be a killer in my duct-tape sealed home. But I expelled the thought and focused on those immovable facts that form the bedrock of life: I am not a murderer, and I do not love murderers.

I wanted to call Theo’s mom; she would sort him out. But the alcohol breath reminded me that was no longer an option. It was all on me. “That didn’t happen. You would have tried talking to him.”

“He wasn’t listening. He called me evil. You too, hun.”

“Then you could have talked to him, convinced him—”

“They’re all dead men walking. You can’t reason with a corpse.”

This dance was nothing new to us, this idea of capturing one of these extremists and figuring out how their minds ticked. At the front door, I even made progress once, convincing an elderly man to lower the lighter for just a moment, but he started babbling about a blanket of doom and I couldn’t reach him. The fire nearly singed my eyebrows off, and Theo made me promise not to engage with them anymore, not to answer the door. But even then the suspicion wouldn’t stay quiet, that it would be better to try than not, better to peer through the peephole than to keep it closed.

“Why is all the peace on us, though? Why are we guilty?” Theo flopped onto the couch. “We’re all responsible for ourselves.”

In the morning, I woke up before my husband. I sat in the chair across from our bed and watched his nostrils flare with each breath, his eyes rove beneath their lids. His silhouette was unrecognizable under the sheets, like an alien gestating beneath cotton.

At one in the afternoon, he finally got up and started putting on pants. “Something the matter?”

“Last night, you said you killed someone.”

“And you believed me?”

“I don’t know.”

He paused, then came to me and kissed me on the forehead. It was a delicate motion, like kissing china. “I was drunk, and I tried to make a joke. I’m sorry for scaring you.”

The dead bird lingered in my mind. As I watched Theo scramble eggs for me in the kitchen, I chose to believe. My throat burned, like I had chosen to swallow a pretty rock.

#

Thirty minutes. Theo convinced me to go out for exactly thirty minutes, just enough time to grab a drink at the corner bar and head back home. A man in a business suit dissolved on the roof last night, so surely there wouldn’t be another for at least a week.

The fires had slowed over the summer, and the call of the wild grew stronger every day. It had become part of my regular routine to cry in our walk-in closet—one of the few pockets of separation in our house—every time I realized I could no longer recall a shape of the old world: the state capitol dome, the bridge leading to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the street sign on the corner of our street. No wonder I let Theo convince me so easily.

He called from the bathroom. “Ready?”

“Whenever you are.” My finger hovered over my laptop mouse.

Over the past few years, I had become intimate with every divorce lawyer within twenty miles. It was a game of hard-to-get, my finger always a twitch away from sending that inquiry email. But it always ended the same, Theo’s open-wound face whipping through my imagination and my hand instead directing the mouse to delete my search history.

I slammed my laptop closed, the dull sound of shame ringing through the bedroom.

I had forgotten the curse of cold air. Even under our hoodies and baseball caps, the breath of the world stung like gunfire. Nearly all the neighbors had moved away the year before, so we walked through a wasteland, an apocalypse of overgrown lawns and two-story houses missing lights, missing hearts. The last sign of civilization was a billboard advertising some service to sponsor a starving child for a penny a day, and I tried to comfort myself with the idea that some version of good, even some performance of it, still walked the world in our absence. Even so, I stuck close to Theo and watched all openings, every corner and intersection and side street. A star broke orange through the clouds, and for a moment I heard it squeal.

The corner bar had changed hands more than once since we shut ourselves indoors. I didn’t remember the music blaring so loudly, the dance floor packed so densely. Across the ocean of skin, multi-colored lights danced. We absorbed into the center of the room. On all sides, rainbows and sweat.

The bodies, their blood-heat—I didn’t realize until then how desperately I missed it.

With Theo’s hands roving across my back, his forehead against mine, I forgot that we weren’t stupid twenty-year olds anymore. I forgot the burn, forgot that something existed outside electric kisses. Theo nuzzled into me. I took him in.

Instinct struck. I turned just in time to see a girl break through the crowd and plant herself next to us, her stoplight-red hair already halfway to fire. She didn’t even look old enough to order from the bar. And there it was, the second awakening.

I tried to pull Theo toward the entrance. “Oh, God. Let’s go.”

No, no. You said half an hour, so we still have a couple minutes left.” Theo turned to the girl. “Here to give us the spiel?”

“Phillip Huang and Theo Madden.” The girl pointed at us, shaking. She tried holding eye contact with Theo, then me, then delivered the rest of the script to our shoes. Her hair glistened. “Evil—Evil lives in your interlocked fingers, and…and if it is not given up, the world—”

“My mother was killed by a drunk driver. I spent her funeral in a bathtub. Don’t talk to me about the world.” 

Theo spat it out—the world.

Strobe lights broke yellow across the bottom hemisphere of his face, that half-and-half man I had come to know, or maybe I married in the first place without noticing. Part of me thought I should bow down to him, the man who somehow solved the paradox: to live in the world and to deny it, to dance even as blood fills your shoes.

The girl reached into her pocket and started to fumble with a match. She made the sparking motion, but her hands shook and the flame wouldn’t catch. 

“You know, a lighter works wonders.” Laughing, Theo shoved the girl away, and her eyes widened as the shoulder-and-chest mass swallowed her. Theo whispered into my ear. “Let’s try somewhere else. I think there’s a better place around the corner.”

At first, I was glad just to be taken from the impending blaze, but as the crowd receded, I spotted a flower of bright orange through the neon-flesh sea. The girl had finally lit a match. I watched it flicker through a window between bodies. The girl seemed much older than before, like a vision from the future. 

For a moment, I thought I was looking at my own mother. 

I tried to dart forward, but as if he were waiting for it, Theo grabbed me from behind and began dragging me toward the entrance. He held my arms at my side with all his bulk, but I nearly broke free with pure need.

“She needs help,” I said, but I don’t think Theo heard. 

The smell didn’t affect me anymore. My ability to distinguish the smell of a person melting from that of sewage or vomit or cherry blossoms or fresh laundry had died a year ago, or maybe the year before. But the sound and the sweat of it never settled in. When I heard the exhalation of flame on the other side of the dance floor, the shrieking was so loud I thought my head would burst, and the heat was so intense I thought my face would melt off the bone.

I didn’t realize I was screaming until Theo’s hand clamped down on my mouth. His fingers squirmed between my lips, like they used to when we were young and still figuring out what we liked, but this time I didn’t play at it and bit down full-force, iron warmth flooding my tongue. With a screech, he let go and dissolved into the crowd hurtling toward the exit. I pushed through them, my hands outstretched toward the infernal source. An elbow flew into my jaw, a howl straight to the eardrum. The lights flared sickly purple. Fire leapt to a curtain.

“It’s burning!” Somebody cried out like they were dying, like their children were dying. “Please, it’s burning!”

I tried to call back, but my brain forgot all words. It stuck to the taste of blood, the taste of someone else’s blood.