Fire as an Entropic Multiplier

There’s a squirrel sitting on a fallen tree, looking at me like it knows what’s about to happen. 

I’m trying, I whisper in my mind. But if I were you, I’d start running. 

Those black beady eyes stare back at me and then the squirrel darts off. That isn’t magical, it’s just what squirrels do. I massage the back of my neck, spreading dirt around in the sweat. My university sweater is in a heap at my feet. 

“Give me the bundle of Leo whisperum,” my father says. He growls the words in something other than his normal voice. His normal voice is that of a New York deli owner, which is exactly what he’s been for the last thirty years. The kind that adds an extra “awh” to the word “pastrami” and inflects every sentence upward. I’ve never heard this voice before today. He’s been forcing it ever since we reached the forest edge. It’s been hours since then. Fuel for the sunset is running low and it’s getting cooler. 

You shouldn’t be here. You have to stop this. 

I rifle through the bag full of plants, and powders, and pouches full of seashells, and feathers, and bones, and I have idea what I’m looking at or what he wants. 

“Which one is that?” I say. 

“The dandelions,” he says. 

Dad isn’t well. 

He’s not using any names that I know because he’s not using any names that are real. The scientific name for dandelion is Taraxacum officinale, but I’ll keep that bit of botany trivia to myself. There has never been a day when dad cared about my “going nowhere degree” and there is zero chance of that changing now. He’s too busy trying to resurrect my mom. 

I toss him a tightly wrapped bundle of dandelions. He fumbles the catch. 

“Dad,” I say. “Please. We have to think about this. Can’t we just talk? It’s going to be dark soon.” 

Even if we leave right now - which I know we will not - we’ll be trudging through the forest in the in pitch black. Instead of answering, my father mutters something under his breath. The phrases are rhythmic like a drum beat. I catch the word “animus” alongside a salad of syllables that sit in the uncanny valley of almost-words. 

Are you going to stop him? 

Somewhere nearby a crow caws. The forest doesn’t want us here. The forest wants to be left alone. It wants to languish in the late, unbearable, August heat that has left the plants yellowing and weary and brittle beneath our shoes. The drought has been prolific. Is that right? Can the absence of something be prolific? I watch my father dig a new, shallow hole and bury the dandelion bundle, patting the arid dirt into a mound overtop, and I think it can be.

“We’re almost there,” dad says. “You can feel it, can’t you? Even you? There is an incarna a priori radiating from these grounds, amplified by our work. The ritual is taking its shape and we are witness to it.” 

I sip from my last water bottle, glad I brought so many and wishing I’d brought more. My head hurts. How many times did dad read my mom’s writing, I wonder, to have all of this memorized? In just three months? Maybe he’s misquoting. I wouldn’t know. I don’t think he would know, either. Mom’s handwriting had gotten so shaky. All the haldol and risperidone and other hard-to-pronounce words that actually had meaning funneled the vibrations in her brain down into her hands. Her pen, and later a crayon, were conduits for tremors. 

He’ll drag you down with him. 

“I just feel sad, dad,” I say. “I want us to go home. Please. Everything will still be here. We can always come back.” 

“No, we cannot,” he says. 

That’s true. Not just because we’d never, ever find this exact spot again, but because he’d then have to wait an entire year for her birthday. I think he knows he won’t make it. I think he’s right. 

Dad raises two palm-sized stones above his head and strikes them together. Blue sparks erupt in a circle, fizzling before hitting the ground. Each individual spark seems to defy gravity and hover for a half-second too long. 

“What was that?” I ask. Flint and iron pyrite, maybe? 

“Have you decided,” he asks, “if you’re going to stay?” 

Whether or not he means it to be cruel doesn’t matter. For all of the words that are so foreign coming from dad’s mouth, this question aches with familiarity. It’s the same question he asked just before I’d left for college. When we were separated by packed suitcases and boxes instead of forest detritus and burlap satchels. University wasn’t far, not really, just far enough to not have to watch mom’s mind devolve up close. Dad asked me that question on the exact same day mom graduated from “New Leaf.” Some exceedingly expensive, intensive outpatient program. “Graduated.” A word that’s supposed to have meaning but it got stripped bare because of its use. She’d “graduated” from their care, from being their burden, and was poised to return home and remain ours. Dad and I knew the same thing and we didn’t have to say it. Mom was no better than when she’d started. The medications and therapies had dulled her symptoms but her sickness made up for it with increasing breadth and penetrance. It morphed from roots that ran deep into vines that blanketed everything. My dad, seeing my room packed, had asked me if I was going to stay. He never asked me to. Not out loud. Just like I’d never told him I was considering it. 

Branches rustle deeper in the forest and pull me back. Something running, maybe a deer. Something smarter than me. I can’t see any movement. 

“I’m not leaving here without you,” I say, crunching a dried leaf under my heel. 

“And I’m not leaving,” he says. “Give me the lunis mangolia.” 

I rummage through the bag and bite the inside of my cheek. 

What are you going to do? 

It’s been another hour and the sack in my hands is empty. The sunlight gave up on us. Only a fire in the middle of two dozen, hand-dug mounds illuminates our grove. 

“We are ready,” dad says. 

We’re out of time. 

“It wasn’t your fault, dad,” I say. Have I ever said that to him before? I don’t think so. I’m clamoring for something to break through to him. I don’t know if he catches the wobble in my voice, or if he can feel the pressure behind my eyes. I don’t know if he can still sense things like that in me. 

Dad is quiet, as if he’s considering what to say. The fire cracks and licks and mixes with cicadas humming. 

“Fire,” my father says, “is an entropic multiplier. 

He won’t listen to you. 

I’d heard mom say that a lot, about fire and entropy. I’m sure it’s in her writing. She would whisper it to me in our apartment kitchen, illuminated by dozens of candles even though the fluorescent lights worked fine and the landlord had already asked her to stop. 

“It takes order in,” dad says, “and reduces it to pure energy. A book might be brimming with organization but toss it in the fire and it turns to the same ash as anything else. Orderis reductiaro. To get order back from the universe, you must create disorder elsewhere. Entropy is zero sum. It has to be offset if it’s going to be reversed.” 

“Dad.” 

“You told her that her mind was shattered,” dad says. 

I’m silent. The fire drinks up my guilt and shame and throws it back as smoke. It stings my eyes.

You didn’t mean it.

Dad’s right. I did. In a moment of frustration and desperation and fear, I said that to her. Right to her face. I said it to her before I knew how bad things could get and in the year that followed I learned I was wrong. Madness isn’t the process of shattering — it’s the process of dissolving. Mom submerged herself in all the magical, mystical incantations and rites and other nonsense. She breathed it in and bathed every inch of her mind to those toxic waters. Bit by bit, pieces of her floated away in it until there was nothing left but the solution of her delusions and the person she used to be. Her madness was a process of liquefying. Shattering was reserved for the people who had to watch it happen. 

You have to run. 

“She’s gone, dad,” I say. “We can’t bring her back. Nobody can bring her back.” 

“I saw her do it one,” he says, adopting a new layer of reverence in his voice. “For Gups. I saw the proof of her power. We can do the same.” 

Irritation flashes and makes me clench my hands. Gups. My fish who died at home when I’d left for school. I didn’t want him to, but should have known the same negligence disintegrating my home would make its way to him. 

“He’d been floating,” dad says. His voice catches. “Mom, she…she’d wailed. Held him in her hands. She cried that every life lost is a light snuffed. She wept because of how excited you’d been to get him. Do you remember? He wasn’t a dog, I know, like you’d wanted I — but you saw him and you’d smiled and we’d… “ 

My fists relax. I squeeze my eyes shut until white spots flash in the dark. 

“She thought maybe it would bring you back,” he says. “That you’d come back and get him. You used to take care of him. You loved him. So, she brought him back.” 

I’d gotten the pictures. Of a fish without the same frayed left fin as Gups, swimming in a dirty aquarium. 

“She bought a new fish, dad,” I say. 

“She did it for you!” dad says. “Do you know how much vital energy it takes to bring something back? It took a bonfire to bring back Gups! Even a life as simple as his is so complex. There’s so much order to offset. The entropic debt is staggering.” 

Dad picks up a red, plastic container with a yellow spout and begins pouring. The liquid soaks into the dirt as false relief. Gasoline fumes fill the air and I wonder how close we’d have to be to the fire for them to catch midair. Dad’s footsteps are calculated and irregular, drawing out unrecognizable symbols and letters with the liquid. 

What are you willing to do to stop him? 

I realize I don’t know. Dad is smaller than me. Getting older. After mom, his wrinkles grew into shadowed canyons that extended deep into the recesses of his grief. Mom, even through all of the jumbled pain she caused him, left too big of a hole. He went and he filled it with whatever of hers he could. She’d never kept her madness hidden away, she’s transcribed each thought and every broken idea. She’d left it behind. It got delivered to dad in a plastic bag with the dress she wore to her intake appointment. 

“Mom wouldn’t want this,” I say. “Every life is important - that’s what you said. You know what will happen, don’t you? If you do this?”

Dad pauses his work. “She wanted you to believe her,” he says. His voice breaks free from the character he’s playing and back into the same man who read back orders to customers and asked how their families were doing. 

“She didn’t know what she wanted, dad.” 

“She didn’t want to be in that place!” he says, voice raising. It’s a coincidence of timing and a trick of the lights but the fire seems to surge with dad’s volume. 

The suffering will be immense.

He reaches into his jacket pocket and the tangled bundle he pulls out has hair in it. It glides into the fire. The flames burn a neon blue for a moment. Dad murmurs something in a singsong voice. 

The balefire is spreading now. Licking up the detritus and scattered twigs. It’s moving faster, bleeding outward. 

It’ll be too late. 

It reaches the mounds and the ring of buried ingredients. The dirt is more kindling than earth and the fire digs up each item with ease. Next will be the fuel-painted sigils. Then everything else. 

Please. You cannot let him do this.  

Tendrils extend away from us until they are feet from the nearest tree. 

Do something! Stop this! 

Dark, black smoke is blossoming upward and clouding my attention. Fine. Crackles and snaps from the blaze are like gunfire. I won’t just sit here. Not anymore, and not again. I jump up and sprint for the fire’s edge. At the closest edge, a line of extending fire, I stomp, kick dirt, spray rubble, swing my leg wildly. It’s chaotic but effective and this fragment of the inferno extinguishes. 

One flame down. Just one, tiny piece of the growing disaster. Am I too late? It smells like burnt rubber. 

I expect dad to rush me or shout or scream that I have no idea what I’m doing. To pull me back and say something crazy in a language that isn’t real. Already two streaking tongues of fire replace the one I killed. 

Dad is quiet. 

He’s standing at the fire’s edge. He’s turned to face me so half of his body is glowing in orange light. 

“You didn’t have to see her like I did,” dad says. His voice is low and full of every one of the titled syllables I grew up hearing. Right now he’s not some imitation shaman quoting his dead wife’s books. He’s the man who belongs between the glass counter and the meat fridge. He’s wincing at the heat on his cheek. A tear drops from his eye and evaporates. 

Almentarium misarus! The blaze of agony! 

Fire whips up a tree like lightning striking in reverse, its roaring the thunder. The whole fir explodes into a beacon. There is no containing any of this. Not ever again. 

“I’m sorry, dad,” I say. I have to shout to be heard. “You shouldn’t have had to do it alone!” 

He shakes his head. It’s too bright around us, now. There are no shadows on his face. The gasoline catches and the sigils ignite. 

“I saw her for her,” he said. “Except I saw it too late. And I was too late seeing how you’d drifted away. I…I thought that bringing her back would bring you back.” 

The forest is burning. There is no green or brown or starts there is only fire under a smoke-walled sky. 

“I’m here, dad.” 

He smiles. It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen that. 

“Do you know,” he says, “how much vital energy it takes to bring someone back?” 

I inhale to scream but only pull in smoke.  Clarity cracks against my skull but he is falling backward before a single sound leaves my mouth. 

“No!”

I fall to my knees the dirt grates beneath my fingernails. I don’t know if I’m screaming. The fire is deafening. My back is scorching. Everything is agony. 

It’s ok, darling. 

Mom’s voice was always like a song. 

I think I can hear her chanting. 

We’ll be together soon.