In late 2013 I packed a small fraction of my belongings into a Toyota RAV4 and drove across the country from my hometown of Sacramento, California to Bowling Green, Ohio to begin graduate school. For four days I gazed through a rearview mirror reflecting a half-foot space between cardboard boxes and the road intervening between me and home. By the time I passed through Utah into the sprawling emptiness of Wyoming I had already been using the time to think about what I’d left behind, and I couldn’t reflect on those objects or people with any equanimity. I felt little about the trivial comforts–Tempur-Pedic bed, books, video games, the recliner I sat in every day. The twenty-eight years of accrued sentiment was more difficult–the bedroom door covered with badly-drawn caricatures of my friends, old recorded VHS tapes of the films I loved and hated, the gaming magazines I collected over a five year span during my teens, friends who I feared would forget about me, animals that would die while I’m away, my lonely dad who never took care of himself.
The house was built on short tempers and constant criticism.
A black cloud moved in from the east and settled over the verdant Wyoming hills. Rain smeared it like gray paint running down a canvas. Some of that blackness swirled and despite the windless calm I imagined a tornado touching down on the land around me and sucking me up into it. My family and friends wouldn’t find out until days later when my body would be discovered miles away in the mangled car my dad gifted me alongside shredded books and the gnarled innards of what used to be a hand-me-down television. My friends, my family, my animals, my home, the personal possessions I mistook for memories–I would never see them again. It was only by day three, halfway through Nebraska on what turned out to be an ill-advised eleven hour drive, when city lights polluted the skies and offered a comforting sense of familiarity. For a little while I let go of my anxieties.
I reached Bowling Green by mid-afternoon on day four, collected my key from the landlord, and set my belongings on the tattered carpet of the small living room. The nearby Goodwill sold me a crusty green couch with a floral pattern for just shy of forty dollars. Small amount, yet the spending dipped into my savings accrued over a year of working at a used bookstore in Sacramento. Seats still down, the RAV4 swallowed most of the couch while a bungee cord held the back door shut. I remember pulling the couch out of the back by myself, dragging it down the stairs, and pivoting it into the basement dungeon while my back sent fire down the nerves in my legs. I inexplicably set the ugly green abomination in the center of the living room and let my legs dangle over the edge. The dim orange Halloween lights I brought from Sacramento and pinned to the wall turned out to be a bad choice that only made the new place feel less like a home. I fell asleep, exhausted and bored and scared, in a strange town with no friends.
A lot changed in five years. I stay in that same apartment–furnished, a partner, and a cat. I got better at making a home out of elsewhere, yet I’d always had the nagging suspicion choosing to visit Sacramento every Winter and Summer was the biggest mitigator of my homesickness. It was home. A constant. The apartment that warmed and cooled me during the six years in Bowling Green felt transitional and temporary by contrast.
Mom is alive. She’s a ghost. Dad’s hand ungrips her. She turns to fog. Floats down the hall. Through the living room. Into the kitchen. Past the family room and utility room. She touches every object and wall and carpet fiber and speck of dust on her way outside. She stretches her spectral arm, translucent white, through the doorway. It turns to black smoke.
On June 24, two days into one of my short visits back to Sacramento, I was too busy grading student papers to care that my father was struggling to get his animals to calm down at what I thought was the sound of a wood chipper cutting into tree limbs. Then I heard my dad yell expletives. He ran past the sliding glass doors in the backyard to grab a garden hose. I went outside and around the side of the house to see a fire engulfing the neighbor’s roof and kissing the fence linking our homes.
My father sprays a limp stream toward the blaze. Drops the hose. Runs through the smoke. The dogs inside, frightened, shivering. Melted shingles burn holes into my dad’s shirt. He desperately lets the black smoke envelope him. Life and home corrode emphysemic lungs. He breathes mom’s neck, exhales the memory of it flying down the stairs at me like a heat-seeking missile…
I call emergency (thank goodness our cat’s in Ohio). Grab both dogs under each arm. None of the cats in sight (did they run away?). Neighbors scoop the dogs into their truck and drive off. I in my pajamas, on the grass, crying out to the house as if it decided this. My partner retrieves the laptops. Sirens in the distance.
Mom arrives to watch her absence burn away.
The flames had already crawled along my dad’s fence to the roof and cut halfway into my childhood home to burn away all of what I was afraid of leaving behind five years ago. By the time the fire engines arrived my dad stood in shock on the neighbor’s lawn across the street. I asked him if he had homeowner’s insurance, but trauma colored his face red as he stared through me at his life’s work disintegrating before him. His shirt was destroyed. Black globules of tar had hardened into the white fabric between gaping holes. Smoke and wires and melted paint permeated the hundred degree air. My seventy-six year old father had aged ten more years in that moment, and I could tell then he thought his life was over.
News crews arrived to document and commodify our tragedy. My neighbor clamored to be on television while my dad paced around to avoid the anchor. I could see why. Strangers cautioned my family to keep an eye out for opportunistic scavengers in the weeks ahead. Apparently news reports have a way of advertising the location of valuable items left behind by displaced families. Those scavengers scoop up goods before the families can return to claim them. I would call it monstrous were it not for my suspicion that their bad behavior is bred not out of their indifference to us, but a kind of capitalistic desperation for all of what we may have forgotten we owned.
As water quenched the blaze firefighters took the time to comfort my unresponsive father. They apologized for his loss, and I knew they meant it. I could see them carrying out what they must have been trained to treat as important in a crisis: old photo albums, family videos my dad and sister and I had converted from VHS to DVD, cheap jewelry that an untrained eye could easily mistake as authentic, boxes of the kids’ high school assignments I thought had been thrown away years ago, my father’s nearly unusued desktop computer, consolation trophies from the year I bowled in a league–two-handed and terribly–alongside my siblings and strangers, and random articles of clothing that had been left on the living room floor. All of this was leftover material culture that had been hidden away deep in the house and discovered by strangers who had never set foot inside the place before or since. These artifacts didn’t matter enough for me to remember them. I would never have known they’d been incinerated with all of what I imagined during those long, stressful hours had been destroyed by water and black smoke.
I watched the firefighters cut holes into the roof as the structure sank. I could only think of all that might be saved. What might be lost that I did remember. Almost everything. When they finally let us into the house hours later it smelled like industrial waste. Opportunistic flies buzzed around the wet soot piles on the laminate flooring my dad had just installed months ago. His new couch, huddled into a dark corner of the family room, absorbed water still dripping from new holes in the ceiling. Popcorn ceiling dangled and sometimes fell to the floor around us. Down the hallway the bedrooms were untouched save for areas blackened around the vents from billowing smoke. My bedroom acted as a storage closet for all the smoke-damaged items firefighters managed to save from getting waterlogged. All of those personal belongings absorbed settling dust and particulate matter. Most of them were too putrid to justify saving. The insurance adjuster later told us that they would dispose of what we couldn’t carry.
That house was always burning. Over those five years I was away my dad stripped the place of what he decided didn’t belong. Year after year I would return and find some new development or project to improve the house, some new item or object recycled or donated, some of my memories missing. The fire was the end result for me and a tragedy for my dad. A disaster that had already been taking place long before smoke claimed the material culture left behind.
Trophies collect rain on the muddy backyard lawn. A cardboard box degraded into moist soil. The contractors thought we’d miss them after they’d stripped the siding.
After the insurance company informed us that the trace amounts of asbestos discovered in the ceiling precluded them (and us) by California law from salvaging anything or entering the home without hazmat suits, we grabbed what we thought mattered to us, left the rest behind, and made countless mistakes along the way. Our insisting on entering the home in the weeks intervening between the fire and the home’s gutting made us minor criminals in California. We were aided and abetted by insurance agents and construction companies that feigned ignorance at our self-destructiveness. Suddenly, the state told us, all of what used to be ours wasn’t ours–it was dangerous garbage. I took some of it and stored it in my brother’s garage. The rest I let go. I abandoned most of my games collected since the age of five, old consoles that had long been collecting dust in plastic containers, out-of-commission electronics from yesteryear, old gifts I sentimentally hoarded for fear that disposing of them would mean I never really appreciated the labor that went into acquiring them, close to four hundred books that cost me countless hours of minimum wage labor to purchase and rarely read, clothes dating as far back as middle school, art work that had been hanging on the wall of my bedroom for over a decade, and eight years of notes from my undergraduate career. I needed to stare at each object, turn the especially important ones over in both hands, and wipe the dust away. Two months after they shipped all our belongings off to a warehouse to catalog and eventually convert into a dollar value, the home is now only studs and space without the illusion of privacy.
