The Smoke Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

on fire, the rest of the world ceases to exist. You have no friends, no family, no past, and no goals except to do your job and get out. You maintain concentration because if you don’t, the fire will spank you. I’ve never been in a good house fire and been able to think about anything but the here and now, never wanted to think about anything else. Afterward, probably because you’ve been closer to death than at any other time, you realize you’ve never been more alive, either.
    The doorway is dark with rushing hot gasses and smoke that looks thick enough to ride a surfboard on. I squat low under the heat and follow the hose line to the left. I’m moving like a mad dog. A mere five feet inside, I bump into a man and knock him against the wall. I know it is Tronstad by the way he curses when my plastic helmet smashes against the hard air cylinder on his back. I’ve never been so hyped. Not at a fire. Not the time my mother and I went to San Francisco and got mugged. Not the time I fell off a cliff when I was eleven. If I wasn’t twenty-four years old, I would think I was having a heart attack.
    “What the hell! If that’s you Engine Thirty-six fucks, you can just get out of my face.” Tronstad’s angry voice tugs me back to reality.
    “It’s me.”
    “Who the fuck is ‘me’?”
    “Gum. How much have you searched?”
    “I got turned around. I’m in here alone, man. I been alone fuckin’ forever.”
    “The neighbor thinks there’s somebody in here. Where have you searched?”
    My helmet light is on and I have the feeling Tronstad’s is on as well, but there’s so much smoke, I can’t see his light or the beam from mine. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a good house fire where there isn’t a truck company ventilating, but because they aren’t there to ventilate, I can’t see ten inches in front of my face.
    We hear flames in the rooms to the right of the front door. The fire is beginning to lap over our heads with a soft crackling sound, and I can feel the heat increasing. We don’t have long. When you open the door on a house fire, you give it additional oxygen, which causes the fire to build, and if you don’t get water on it right away, it grows like a son of a bitch.
    “How much have you searched?”
    When he doesn’t reply, I crawl over him like a halfback swimming through a sea of linemen for a touchdown. I don’t have time to wait for his answer. I head into the living room.
    I know what the layout of the house probably is from having been in so many of these remodeled prewar houses on aid calls. Somewhere between me and the kitchen will be a stairwell leading up.
    Like a madman I search the rooms at a breakneck pace. I am stronger, faster, smarter, and crazier than a slaughterhouse rat, and more focused than I’ve ever been in my life. I crawl on my hands and knees, performing a frantic left-wall search of the rooms, knocking over lamps and chairs and anything that gets in my way, plunging through rooms like a burglar hyped on methamphetamines.
    To the left of the doorway is a corridor, which is where I’ve met and trampled Tronstad. Next is a living room filled with furniture I identify only by touch: couches and coffee tables. After that I encounter a small dining room, then the kitchen. I storm through them all on my hands and knees. It is far too hot to stand up. Toward the rear of the house, off the kitchen, I encounter a closed door.
    When I try to open it, the door jams against an object.
    The house is clean and tidy, so I don’t expect any doors to be blocked. I stand up in the heat and ram my shoulder into the door, breaking it apart. As I lever the door open, I am barely able to squeeze in. Blocking the entrance is a wheelchair with a man in it, unconscious, slumped over, his head and neck forming a wild distortion of normal human body mechanics.
    I pull the chair back, kick the door out of the way, and wheel him through the smoky house the way I came in. We bump into