with my intention, a beam dislodged from above swung down in a shower of sparks to pin my father beneath it. I bent to try and remove the impediment, searing my fingers on its charcoal surface while Papa lay groaning facedown under the weight of the spar. Unable to get a grip on his torso or the torch of his ginger hair, I tried pulling him by the ankles but succeeded only in dragging the beam along with him. It was then that a second rafter toppled, splintering into cinders that left my father nearly buried beneath a mound aglow with salamanders of ash. I stumbled about, looking for a tool with which to dig him out, vaguely aware of having been injured myself, my fingers blistered, head gashed, lungs gasping beyond their capacity to breathe more smoke. Then all at once the room began to recede and I was somewhere else, in a place where if you fell you were raised up again, higher perhaps than you had ever known.
I was riding someone’s broad back through the inferno, gliding out of the Castle and into the street, where I half expected my conveyance to take to the sky. Instead, I was gently set down coughing and sputtering onto the curb, where I proceeded to swallow great gulps of air in an effort to displace the smoke in my lungs. Wiping my eyes with my fists, I turned in time to glimpse my rescuer—shoulders stretching the seams of a peasant shirt, a neck as thick as his shaven head—disappearing again into the Gehenna of the icehouse. After some minutes of throbbing anticipation I watched him reemerge, having apparently duplicated himself; for he was accompanied by his identical twin, the two of them straining under the burden of the scorched and dripping cedar casket. They set it down with a weighty thud on the pavement beside me, as from my slump I pointed with a cauterized finger toward the burning building.
“My papa,” I mouthed, and the stocky pair exchanged puzzled glances. Then they turned back toward the Castle just as a tremendous explosion rippled the surface of Canal Street like a beaten rug. A black cloud the shape of a giant cauliflower with a fiery stalk rose from the wreckage of the icehouse and merged with the sunrise over the river to the east. I leaned against the casket, pressing my cheek to its dampness, inhaling its mildewy odor as I sheltered from the hail of rubble. In the distance the sirens, whistles, and bells drew closer, sounding like a parade that heralds the end of the world…
2001.
…read Bernie to Lou Ella, as they sat in the crotch of a live oak in the botanical gardens or over a bowl of cobbler in a booth at the Dixie Café—while she assured him that, notwithstanding the cannibals, Ku Kluxers, and motherfuckers among her own relations, his family had a lot to answer for. Bernie, for whom his great-grandfather’s burning alive was also news, was inclined to agree; and the closer they came to the end of Ruby’s journal, the more he felt that answer should come from him. But not yet, not yet; there was more of the story left to read, and Lou Ella urged him to continue. She clearly cherished the time they spent tracing the history of the Family Karp’s peregrinations while she and Bernie themselves peregrinated about the city of Memphis seeking out the scruffier corners—abandoned recording studios and heartbreak hotels—where a sanitized present had yet to laminate the past. Both he and the girl were conscious of enjoying an interlude. It was a period during which Bernie Karp, energized by his affection for Lou, his almost lover, and by extension for everything else on earth, was changing in discernible ways. For one thing, he was no longer satisfied with the visionary journeys that now seemed to him so selfish and self-absorbed. Sure, it was nice to become one with the Godhead and all that, but in the end, as the sages said, “Life is with people,” and if you couldn’t take anyone with you, what was the good of leaving your body at all? That said, Bernie had no clear idea of what was next in store for him, though whatever it was he knew it would involve taking as Lou said “the bull by the pizzle.” Still, while Lou Ella had been instrumental in persuading him that he shouldn’t miss out on the experience of dwelling