to observe this burning phenomenon of architecture gone awry. It was a huge building and flames were pouring out the roof.
Suddenly, almost instinctively, I turned around and saw the bus I had just gotten off driving away with all the passengers back on it. We all got off when we were told to, and then they all got back on again, except of course for me. I think it had something to do with the official who was running up to the bus, yelling. He must have told the driver to let the passengers return to the bus, which they all did, except for one passenger who was busy watching the fire.
That passenger decided to walk to his hotel.
He did not want to deal anymore that morning with buses that had revolving doors. The fire was on the way to his hotel, so he stopped briefly and watched the flamey doings. The passenger had never been fascinated with burning buildings before, so his watching the fire was an exception to his lifestyle.
There were three ladder trucks with firemen on top of long-flame-reaching ladders pouring water down on the fire, and there was a good crowd of people watching the building go.
The passenger noticed that there was almost a festive feeling among the observers. Many were smiling and some of them were laughing. Not attending fires regularly, preferring movies, he was fascinated by this.
A man complete with a sleeping bag and backpack containing what he called his life was sitting down across the street from the fire drinking a bottle of wino-type wine. The man looked as if wherever he went was his address, and only a bloodhound had any possibility of delivering his mail.
He enjoyed long, carefully thought-out sips of wine from a bottle in a paper bag while he watched the building burn down. It would be an easy matter for a trained mail-delivering bloodhound to track this man down. All the dog would have to do would be to follow a trail of paper bags with empty wine bottles in them to deliver this man a letter from his mother saying: “Don’t ever come home again and stop calling. We don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore. Get a job. —Love, your ex-mother.”
It was not a building occupied on a Sunday morning, so there was no drama of life and death to mar or perhaps enhance the fire viewing. The passenger had no idea why people gathered to watch buildings burn down, especially if it had nothing to do with them, if it wasn’t their house burning down or one nearby threatening to burn down where they lived.
Yes, the passenger found it all very different and interesting, and then he remembered a woman that he had been involved with years ago. They’d had an often very intense love affair that occupied large portions of his time in the late 1960s and finally dwindled out in the early 1970s. It was the kind of involvement referred to as “off and on.”
During a time when he was not seeing her, she had picked up an undue interest in fires and become a firetruck chaser. She would go out of her way anytime, day or night, to be at the site of a burning building. One morning around 4 a.m., she found herself watching a duplex join the kingdom of ashes and ruin when she noticed that she was wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas and had a pair of slippers on. She had just jumped out of bed when she heard the sound of nearby fire engines, slipped on her bathrobe, put on her slippers, and headed out the door toward the fire.
She had been watching the fire for about half an hour before she noticed what she was wearing. Her attire startled her. She had gone a little too far, so she hung fire-watching up.
She had absolutely no interest in becoming a nut.
She probably wondered how it had gotten this far.
She went home and vowed to denounce the siren call of sirens.
The passenger years later, watching a building burn down in San Francisco, decided spontaneously to call her on the telephone if she still lived in San Francisco. She had done a lot of traveling since he had known her in the later 60s. The last time he had seen her, accidentally meeting, she was living in San Francisco.
Perhaps she was still there.
He decided to call her up from a telephone booth right across the street from the fire. It seemed like a logical thing to do for a passenger whose bus had gone off without him.
What are old former fire-groupie lovers for?
The passenger dialed information and sure enough, she still lived in town. He called her and when she answered, she immediately identified the passenger’s voice, though he had only said, “Hello,” and she said hello back using his given name, which of course was not Passenger.
Though it would have been slightly amusing if she had said, “Hello, Passenger.”
That would have startled and given the passenger cause to think.
But no such thing happened, thank God, and the passenger returned her greeting by saying, “I was just thinking about you.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m watching a building burn down, and I thought I’d give you a call.”
She laughed.
“I’m right across the street from it,” he said.
She laughed again and said, “I just heard about it on the radio. They say the smoke is eight stories high.”
“Yeah,” the passenger said. “And there are three firemen standing at the end of ladders pouring water down onto the roof, but you probably know more about this than I do.”
Again: laughter.
“Well,” the passenger said. “That’s about it. The next time I see something burning down, I’ll give you a call.”
“You do that,” she said.
They both pleasantly hung up.
In the past there had been many exchanges between them that were not nearly as pleasant. The passenger thought about their past together: of first meeting, then becoming lovers, and days and nights together, crossing from one decade into another and then events crumbling away into blank years and the silence of emotional ruins.
The passenger thought about the telephone call that he had just made to her. Somehow it seemed perfect in its bizarre logic.
He never would have made that telephone call if the bus had not driven off without him, stranding him at the site of the fire, which he decided to investigate, having nothing better to do, and being on the calendar map that February Sunday morning of his strange wanderings, which started out innocently enough when he left Montana in late September.
I guess that’s what a passenger’s supposed to do, pass from one place to another, but it doesn’t make it any simpler. About all you can do is wish him luck, and hope that he has some slight understanding of what uncontrollably is happening to him.
Why am I suddenly back in Alaska being driven down a road by somebody who is insisting on taking me somewhere to look at fake totem poles? I guess this is just the way it happens if you have lost control of days, weeks, months, and years.
I’ve seen real ones in the museum of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, but I humor the man who wants to take me to see fake totem poles in Ketchikan, Alaska, because he is a nice man and wants to be a good host, guide, and some fake totem poles are part of his itinerary for me.
As
