Issue 19

J S Khan

“Wake up, wake up, the world’s on fire!”: these are the first words I recall my mother saying, and the first words I recall being spoken by anyone—but especially and specifically to me.

I was just stirring awake when my mother spoke these words, it was with these words she roused me—that and the soft clink of window curtains being rolled away, and the sudden warmth of sunlight invading the dark room where I slept. I rolled over, lifted my head from the pillow, and saw her silhouette leaning down over me, her enshadowed face framed in the brightness of a new morning as it brimmed in a large window behind her. Only, waking from forgotten dreams to the light and heat of this new morning—and seeing the sunshine sparkle in radiant points throughout the windowpane in what I now assume must have been tiny imperfections in the glass—I misunderstood her words completely. That is, I took them literally.

Wake up, wake up, the world’s on fire!

My mother sang this colorful phrase more than she said it, the cadence and tone of her words as bright and warm as the sunlight pouring around me, and although I couldn’t have been older than three and a half, I recall a tingling sense of excitement as I leaned from the bed’s edge to glance through the window behind her, hoping to see a landscape engulfed in flames.

Instead, it was just another morning: sun-white concrete, cars whipping by, some birds on telephone wires. A disappointment, to say the least.

This must have occurred shortly after my mother left my father, while the two of us were living in a one-room apartment together. I know this because I recall the bed in which I woke was one we shared every night until she remarried. But as powerful as this recollection has always been for me, I began distrusting it in recent years, thinking perhaps it was an invention of my own imagination. Spurring my skepticism was the fact that such fanciful speech is unusual for my mother, and—as we all know—our minds can play tricks where memories are concerned.

And so, almost as a means to discount it, I shared the recollection with my younger sister, who surprised me by saying that—while she couldn’t recall Mom ever saying this, or anything like it—she did recall Grandad waking her with the same singsong phrase when she was small. It made perfect sense that our mother would have picked this phrase up from our grandad, who not only peppered his speech with all sorts of colorful phrases, but found being terrifying one of his customary modes. Often when I stayed the night with him he would take out his dentures, grit his ruinous rotten teeth, and boom Fee fi fo fum as I ran and cried. He’d chase me until, snatching me up, he’d pop his dentures back in his mouth and say, It’s just me, boy, it’s just yer ole grandad!, at which point I’d stop writhing in his arms and attempt to smile, to even laugh with him—as if I’d been in on the joke and not absolutely terrified.

There is one other time I recall my mother waking me in that apartment we shared, but in this memory—which is like an addendum to the first—she did not rouse me with a singsong phrase invoking misconceived visions of apocalypse, but rather a single word: my name. She said it over and over, her voice frayed with panic, and I felt a stirring somewhere above, something I realize as I woke was her groping about under the sheets. And even though she called my name loudly, her voice sounded muffled, somehow far away. Very slowly I realized I did not lie in bed beside her, but rather had been removed to some new dark space. Still wrapped in the bed’s blankets, but also somehow suspended in air. I must have rolled into the pocket formed where the blanket and sheets were tucked in the bed’s side along the wall. But what I realized before all that was that I did not want my mother to find me. I felt peaceful in that snug cocoon, like I could stay there forever—but then her hand tugged on the blanket’s other end and I tumbled loose.

Like any mother, I suppose, my mother wanted to protect me from the world—only she forgot she too was a part of the world and so an inevitable accomplice and even harbinger of all its pain and sorrow. And back then—this feels important—my notion was not that my mother wanted to protect me from the world, but more specifically the world of men. Why else would she never let me play with other boys in our apartment complex? Why had she run from my father, taking me with her? And why, whenever she spoke behind closed doors to Grandad—who I in equal measure feared and adored—must she always emerge with tears in her eyes?   

But the world she tried to hold at bay, however misconstrued, would eventually consume me, and when she remarried it was as if she sought someone who might gently initiate me into these open mysteries. Unlike my blood father or Grandad, this man was neither outlandish nor given to unexpected bursts of rage. He was mild-mannered, even shy, though behind this timid façade lurked a similar taste for dangerous things—imagined or real. Eventually I would just call him “Dad.” He was short but had a solidness about him, and his defining characteristic was his mustache: at one point after the birth of my sister he’d shave this strip of hair off his upper-lip and it was as if he’d lost some talismanic force. None of us could look him in the eyes; he seemed rendered utterly faceless until it grew back.

Because he worked the midnight shift and picked up a lot of overtime, I rarely saw him when I was small. I recall watching him assemble an AK-47 on our kitchen table; other than this, most weekends he spent in the garage. His obsessions were cars, guns, conspiracy theories, alternate histories, but most importantly—like Grandad—he loved to terrify me. He’d insist, for instance, the leaves and branches of a maple tree outside my bedroom window at night—which in their windswept movement coalesced as a silhouette with claws—was the Alligator Lady, some menace who preyed on children; and I have a very early memory of him forcing me to go down into our crawlspace with him to fetch something. I squirmed to return aboveground, but he would not allow it until we found whatever it was he sought. As we moved about in that claustrophobic darkness, he pointed his flashlight at some webs above to illuminate the red hourglass on a black widow’s shiny black belly. He told me how deadly the spider’s venom was and the delight sparkling in his eyes seemed to feed on the fear working its way through my gut.

But the memory that looms largest of my early childhood is the time when countless webworms infested several birch trees in our backyard. At first the tiny hatching larvae wove their silk nests along the birches’ outermost leaves and drooping branches, but as the weeks went by, their isolated wispy cocoons connected in an extensive network of dense gray layers that coated the trees down to their lowest forks. My stepfather—shirtless and wearing nothing but a pair of khaki shorts and black boots—bid me join him in the garage, where he held two sticks of bamboo. He told me to bring him the gasoline from where it sat by the lawnmower, and as I lugged the gas can over, he secured a couple rags at the ends of the bamboo sticks with a metal wire he coiled tightly around their tips. I handed him the gas can and he used it to very lightly wet the rags. I enjoyed the smell of the gasoline—so bright and clean—and my mother appeared briefly in the garage door to say something shrill about safety. Yeah, yeah, I know, he said, or something like it. Bundling the two sticks of bamboo in a single fist, he told me to unwind the garden hose and follow him outside.

I did as told, half dragging and half yanking the coiled-up hose out to the edge of where the infested birch trees rose. There were maybe four or five of them. My stepfather handed me the two sticks of bamboo at the same time he took the hose, using it to spray the trunks of the afflicted trees until their scaly gray bark was a darker brown. Then he sprayed the grass. As he did so, I stared up at the caterpillars’ dense gray nests above; I could see them moving around up there—far too many to count, but surely thousands—tiny and hairy and eating or weaving at the edges of their nests. The thin branches and oval leaves stirred with their activity.

My stepfather gave the hose back to me, taking the makeshift torches in a single fist again. He told me that I was to spray the branches above, but only when he ordered me to do so. I nodded and stepped back, watching as he lifted a lighter from his pocket to kindle the rags at the ends of the bamboo. They caught at once, and he held them up and out from his body. Only very slowly did he place the lighter back in his pocket, and then he moved one of the torches into his other hand and began gingerly walking between the trees and pressing the torches gently into the nests at their densest centers. The webs caught flame, gushed dark smoke, and before long, countless writhing webworms started falling from the smoldering silk. I watched them rain down in droves, heard the smattering of their tiny bodies as they hit the wet grass—at least until a strange moaning began to emanate from the fiery nests above: an unexpectedly eerie noise that made me think the caterpillars trapped inside were moaning in fury or pain.

“That’s not it,” my stepfather said later, shaking his head. “Worms can’t scream. It’s their bodies popping under pressure.”

And when at last he ordered me to start spraying water along the birches’ branches where the last webs burned, I did not respond right away, but instead stood there like one struck dumb. I held the hose drooping in my hands as my stepfather shouted my name, baffled at my stupidity. Though I knew what I was supposed to do, I simply could not stop staring, caught fast in this vision of the small creatures scorched alive and popping under pressure, all waking to their nests engulfed in a burning brightness none could see before it burst them inside out, swirled them off in smoke, scattered them as ash.