nonfiction: Saeed Jones
We Will Not All Be Saved
I cannot see them from the window of my hotel room, but wildfires are flaring out of control at the edge of Austin. Walking away from what I cannot see and slipping back into bed, I pull the newspaper off of the nightstand. “The Bastrop Wildfire has claimed 800 homes.” Attempting to match what is being reported to what I am seeing, I turn back to the window.
The only cloud in the sky looks like Monet himself put it there. An airplane draws a thin white line as it flies from one corner of the window to the other. Some of the plane’s passengers are likely looking at the fires right now. A few days ago, while flying into Austin myself, I looked out of my window to see walls of white smoke rising up from the edges of burning fields. Places where the fires had already been snuffed out were marked by acre-wide patches of charred grass. Staring at the scorched terrain, I thought wounds and what it takes for wounds to become scars.
In my hotel room now though, the fires are just something I read about. The flames are only as real as the words in the newspaper describing them. As if to make the fires vanish, all we have to do is turn away. This avoidance, this make-shift erasure, is how I have answered (or refused to answer) the reality of my mother’s recent death. The fires aren’t burning if I can’t see them. And, surely, my mother is alive – somewhere. The problem is that in spite of my efforts, as I stare at the city stretching out toward the hills, the visual absence of the fires becomes a presence.
*
My mother told me once, years before she died, that she had almost named me Omar. It means “king” in a language neither of us know how to speak. I wrinkled my nose then at the thought of that name and said something about what a name like that would have “done to my life.” I have always felt that names act upon the named.
She didn’t tell me why she changed her mind about Omar, but I would like to think that she felt me inside of her, shaking my barely formed head in disapproval. Eventually she decided to name me Saeed which means “happy and fortunate” in Arabic. I would like to think that this name has laid out a life for me, or at least a direction. It is not just a body that has been named, but perhaps a purpose as well.
Bastrop is a town just outside of Austin, Texas. It now has a wildfire named after it. The wildfire has been named for the place of its birth which, of course, is also the place of its violent life. “The woman sitting next to me,” writes poet Rigoberto Gonzalez, “is the place of my birth.”
And here I think: The Bastrop Wildfire is killing its mother.
*
As I sit down for lunch with my friends Angelica and Ralph, the waitress hands us menus and then pauses expectantly. This is usually the point at which she would offer us water, or take our drink orders. Ralph speaks up and says “Can we have some water?” And the waitress nods and heads off, satisfied.
My friends explain that the drought has become so severe that restaurants are under strict orders to only offer water to patrons when explicitly asked.
“You know how police departments will do stings to see if bars consistently ID people when they order alcohol? Well, apparently they’re doing that with the water now, “ explains Angelica.
When the waitress places my glass of water on the table, I stare at it for a moment like it’s an alien artifact. With a drawl that always appears when I’m back in my native state for longer than 24 hours, I say “Well damn” and take a grateful drink.
*
See? Even as I write this essay, I am telling one story in order to avoid telling you the one that keeps me up at night. Let me try again.
*
The Saturday evening before Mother’s Day, I’m in bed, streaming Netflix on my computer. Around 8:00 pm, my phone rings and I see that I have a call from my uncle. We speak once or twice a year, usually on holidays, so I assume that he’s calling to remind me that tomorrow is Mother’s Day and to get in touch with all of the women in my family. My mother is in Memphis, where he and most of our family lives, to celebrate with my grandmother. I don’t answer; I will call everyone tomorrow. I go back to my computer.
Without leaving a message, he calls again. “Saeed,” he says when I finally answer. “Your mother is the Emergency Room. After having dinner tonight, she had trouble breathing and went to the hospital.”
“Okay,” I say in a voice I don’t recognize.
“I will call you back as soon I as I know more.”
“Okay.” And I hang up the phone.
My mother has had a history of heart problems and three years ago ended up in the Emergency Room due to congestive heart failure. She was sitting in the audience at my high school graduation a week later, cheering and taking pictures. I’m telling you this because of what I did after I put down the phone.
I went to my Buddhist altar, chanted for less than five minutes and went back to watching Netflix. I did not cry or pace the floors of my apartment. I got back into bed and stared at the images flickering across the screen of my laptop. I even slept well that night. The fires aren’t burning if I can’t see them.
But, of course, they are. A week later, standing in my mother’s ICU room, I learned happened while I had been busy turning away from the possibility of my mother’s death: Minutes after being admitted into the Emergency Room, she went into cardiac arrest for in excess of twenty minutes before doctors were able to shock her back into a regular pulse. She went into a coma and was pronounced brain dead a few days later.
I am writing this essay as an attempt to say that I cannot yet forgive myself for turning away that night after the phone call. The fact that my reaction was probably due to shock does nothing to assuage my guilt. When a wildfire seizes upon your home while you stand helpless across the street, knowing that the fire is not your fault is of little comfort.
*
My second day in Austin I decide to visit the city’s botanical garden. Late afternoon in the middle of a drought, it turns out, is an awful time to visit a botanical garden. There is not a single rose in the Rose Garden. The lone coy fish in the Japanese lily pond looks like it is the sole survivor of some epidemic. The fish doesn’t seem to mind, but I mind. I mind everything: the shrubs that have not been labeled, the peeling paint on the gazebo, the dried out water fountains, the sound of grass cracking under my shoes whenever I veer from the path.
Exhausted with minding, I sit down on a bench and start crying before I even know why. It is terribly hot and I haven’t been drinking enough water and the last thing I want to do right now is cry, but I do anyway. I cry and realize that I still cannot believe that, a few months ago, I picked out my mother’s coffin.
The sobs build; it hurts to cry so forcefully but I can’t stop myself. Memories of the last few months swarm me. I remember calling a florist and telling her how much my mother loved—had loved—sunflowers.
“I know this is short notice and you’re about to close for the day,” I said on the phone while the funeral director stood a few feet away from me, trying to look busy. “But she loved them. Could you put some sunflowers on her casket? Could you do that for me?” Even now, it physically hurts to remember those sentences leaving my mouth.
As I cry, a blue jay in the tree behind me begins to squawk incessantly. “I know,” I answer, too tired to lift my head from my hands. “I know.”
*
The wind must have changed direction this morning. Smoke from the Bastrop Wildfire has covered the entire city in a haze. The sky is perfectly clear, but the smoke makes it look like clouds are walking through the streets.
When my mother was still in a coma, I walked into her room in the ICU and, without meaning to, thought to myself “We will not all be saved.” Unannounced and unwelcome, the sentence burned its way into me. I have been saying it to myself ever sense. Maybe it was the fact of being in a hospital full of sick people and knowing that inevitably everyone would not survive their stay. My mother would be saved, of course. But not everyone. It is just one of those facts of life. That is what I thought, at least.
Maybe this is why we are human, because we will feel the thousand degree heat and say to ourselves “Yes, but this is not my fire.”
As smoke drifts through Austin and into my lungs, I think again about that sentence. Actually, I hear it as if someone is standing right behind me and whispering “We will not all be saved” into my ear. With my suitcase packed, I get in my rental car and head for the airport, thinking to myself “I know. I know.”
A 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominee, SAEED JONES received his MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark. His poetry has appeared in publications like Hayden’s Ferry Review, StorySouth, Jubilat, West Branch & The Collagist. His chapbook When the Only Light is Fire is available from Sibling Rivalry Press. His blog is For Southern Boys Who Consider Poetry.