Before it is extinguished, it will claim a land area greater than most national parks, leaving a lake of ash behind. It will turn bones to swan feathers. It will kill, and hide the bodies better than the most calculating assassin.
It will do all of this as though motivated by some idea of itself, by ambition, by hate. But as with all fires, it will have no desire but to live.
Why Miles?
Alex has wondered this perhaps more than anything else. Why had she decided to shed all her shyness for that one sun-glowy, blue-eyed boy over all the others? Why him, sitting alone on the back fire escape of a Montreal walk-up at the first party of the new term, the weeks ahead of her fizzing with possibility, never mind the next year, the next five?
Sometimes she’s sure it was his mouth that made her step out onto the fire escape on her own. Her housemate, Jen, a boy-crazy psych major from Massachusetts who liked to regard Alex as ‘so Canadian’ (which meant, for her, an innocent who didn’t stand a chance in the corrupt negotiations of sex), had asked where she was going when Alex had left her chatting up a pair of sniggering frat boys in the bathroom lineup, and Alex had told her, ‘I’m sure you can handle Beavis and Butthead on your own,’ and walked out into the cool night. It was his mouth that did it, she’s almost certain. His lips fine but deeply coloured, a mark of delicate youth on a face she would have otherwise thought of as broad featured, even rough. She saw him through the kitchen window, noticed his mouth and wanted to kiss it, as she had wanted before, daydreamingly, of others’. What was remarkable about this boy’s lips was that she wanted to kiss them first and then divide them with her tongue, slitting them apart as a blade opens an envelope, so that she could see what shape they’d make around his words.
‘Have you ever tried to eat the stars?’
Alex is literally taken off balance. It’s the heels she borrowed from Jen’s endless collection jamming through the metal slats as much as his question.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’ve never been hungry enough.’
‘When I was a kid I would pick them right out of the sky. They had a taste, too.’
‘Were they good?’
‘Oh yeah. Too good. My mom told me if I ate too many I’d start to shine.’
Only now does Miles look at her directly, and Alex thinks that it’s too late. This boy has already had more than his fill of stars.
Miles pulls a clear plastic sandwich bag out of his pocket and shakes it in the air. Inside, a cluster of withered caps and stems leap over each other as though in an effort to escape.
‘What’s that?’
‘Mushrooms,’ he says. ‘I spent the summer out on Vancouver Island. Picked these lovelies myself. Very friendly.’
‘So, instead of stars, now you eat magic mushrooms.’
‘I’m always putting something in my mouth.’ He shakes the bag again. ‘Want some?’
‘What do they do?’
‘You mean you’ve never—?’
‘No. I’ve never most things.’
‘That’s okay. They basically take whatever mood you’re in and enhance it, make you see beyond what you’d normally see.’
‘You’re looking at me. What do you see?’
‘A lot of things.’
‘Name one.’
‘I see someone who’s wondering if she can trust this guy she’s never met before, but thinks that she’d like to.’
‘Well,’ Alex laughs, pulling away before she could spoil everything by lunging forward to bite his lips. ‘I guess I’d better have some of those. You can’t be the only mind reader around here.’
Inside, the party gets suddenly louder, as though from a single twist of a volume knob. Alex can hear Jen squealing, pretending to be ticklish. A shattered glass receives a round of applause. The bass line from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ trembles through the kitchen window, entering the steel bones of the fire escape along with Miles and Alex themselves.
But nobody comes outside to interrupt them. Huddled close, their voices low and secretive, as though the simple facts they share are instead shocking revelations they had every intention of taking with them to the grave. They talk about the towns they were from, their majors, the four years that separated their ages (Miles was older), all without telling each other their names. Yet when they finally get around to introducing themselves, with a mannered, lingering handshake, they feel they already knew that they were Miles and Alex, and that speaking these words aloud merely satisfied a formality demanded of them.
‘Have you climbed the mountain yet?’ he asks her, and at first she thinks he is speaking figuratively, of some spiritual challenge he has already overcome that she hasn’t even heard of. But in the next second she realizes he only means Mont Royal, the slope that rears up over campus and all of downtown, a patch of Canadian Shield in the middle of the city with an illuminated cross on top.
‘I’ve worried that I’d get lost.’
‘I brought my compass,’ Miles says, tapping the side of his head.
Alex pulls off Jen’s heels and clanks down the fire escape stairs after him, barefoot. Up St Dominique, turning to catch their reflections in the windows of the Vietnamese and churrasceira restaurants on Duluth, north again past the musky, shivering nightclub lineups on St Laurent. Alex wonders if it’s the mushrooms that make her feel like she is levitating a half inch off the sidewalks.
They enter the park at L’Esplanade, emerging from the enclosure of streets into the expansive night. Alex can see the graphite outline of the mountain now, the white bulbs of the cross. When they move into the forest at the mountain’s base they don’t bother searching for a trail. ‘This way’s up and that’s where we’re going,’ Miles tells her, dodging his way around maple saplings and warning her not to stub her toes on the larger rocks poking through the soil like half-buried skulls. Even though she can still hear the mechanical murmur of the city behind her, Alex imagines she is being pursued. Some wild thing—an animal or fire—hunts her on the slope.
At the crest, she scratches through a patch of burrs to find Miles lying on his back, panting. Alex looks behind her, expecting to see the grid of lights and the Olympic Stadium oval as she has in postcards, but the trees block her view of all but strange flickers between the trunks, dancing like embers.
‘It’s bigger than you’d guess, isn’t it?’ Miles asks her, and she follows where he’s pointing at the cross directly above them.
‘And brighter.’
‘Bigger, brighter, better. That’s the shrooms.’
No, that’s you, Alex nearly says.
Now that they are lying close they discover a comfortable silence between them. Miles finds Alex’s hand and links his fingers through hers, a grade-school gesture of affection that disarms her nevertheless. They stay there, splayed out in the one piece of wilderness on an island of three million, until the first cold of autumn brings them to their feet.
‘You guided me up here,’ she says. ‘Now you follow me.’
Alex’s apartment is a small 31/2 over a bagel bakery. From the front window, the two of them look down on the street, where a line of assorted last-call drunks wait to get something to eat before the long stumble home. Even the curtains smell of coalfire and boiled