Fire

There are few things that please me more than a good fire.  We would build a modest campfire after dinner in the camper, and settle down with bellies full of steak and salad, bourbon and a splash in our mugs.  The chairs would be arranged just so to allow for careful placement of moccasined feet on the fire ring and to allow room for snoring Labradors to twitch and grumble underneath.  Sometimes, being poised on the still point of the turning world involves finding the perfect balance between the love, light and heat suffusing the campfire and the cold darkness pressing against our backs as a starry Arizona sky wheels overhead.

It is easy to spin out the metaphor of fire; light from the sun captured in growing mesquite and pinon, released into ephemeral flickers and dark smoke carried out over the canyon.  Fire from the sun, fire from the stars, from the blinding light and flash of the first moments of being; all of this created the moment, the "now" of being, the uncomfortable awareness of moving through  the universe and the even more uncomfortable awareness that someday the light flickers out.  The fire of creation is also the fire of destruction; existence is intense, bright and short.

Fire is also fever.  Fever is the body's last defense against infection, the struggle to maintain life at the cellular level.  A virus invades, perverts cells into mutations; the body responds with a cascade of white blood cells and the elevated termperture.  I have had fevers in my life; illnesses like the flu which lit me up with heat and  ache.  The sensation of fever is bizarre; in my case, lower fevers caused malaise and fatigue while higher temperatures seemed to scorch to fog out of my head and allow me to see the world with a strange illumination; fire behind every atom of matter, a halo of light.

But I had never seen fever like this.  Bill's fever was lethal, the shirt of Nessus determined to extinguish his life.  First fevers from the virus, scorching his brain; then fever from the inevitable bacterial infection roaring through his body.  In an hour his temperature soared to one hundred and five degrees.  His eyes were fixed into an upward glare, unable to blink; his muscles racked, locking and unlocking in tremors that vibrated the hospital bed away from the wall.  The ICU nurse was focused in, using all her "mad skillz", pumping tylenol after ibuprofen after demerol after morphine through the IV.  I ran and fetched ice bags, wet towels, soaked sheets; coaxed and cajoled a floor fan from a sweating security guard:  I mopped and fanned, damped and iced.  I prayed.  I tried, with my thoughts to reach out through that red darkness to find my husband's mind and hold on.

Bill came back; within an hour and a half he was asking for coffee and wanting to order us a pizza.  But the fevers returned again and again and again, until in frustration a doctor sent my husband back to a regular room, since "his fevers are persistent and untreatable".  After another crash and return to ICU, I found Bill unable to breath and scorching hot.  I held his hand, begging him to come back to me, even if for just a moment so I could say goodbye.  He stared through me and began shaking violently, in incomprehensible terror.  "There is a man.  He has a gun. He is here for me.  Don't you see him?"  The corner he was looking into was empty.

I stood between him and the corner. "If he is coming for you, he's got to go through me first."  The respiratory therapist administered a treatment; an oxygen mask was placed; I draped a cool washcloth over his eyes.  Slowly the tremors decreased, the breathing slowed, the hand relaxed and sleep came, and healing.  A new drug, a new protocol, and Bill began to surface, breathing damply, thickly,  like a drowned swimmer.  Every fever strips away a little more strength, a little more consciousness, a little more time.

A fever, the sun, a thermonuclear blast, campfires, heat, friction, liberation, destruction.  Fire consumes and creates.  It is too soon to know what the fire has left behind, destroyed or annealed.  I have been too close now not to know that death will come eventually; but Bill's will to live is an amazing thing to see.  He has always proclaimed agnosticism, but I point out to him that there are no atheists in foxholes. He gives a  small, wary smile, admitting to feeling that when he was drifting away there was an immense sense of peace in going home and that he was no longer afraid.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope or else despair
  Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre--
  To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment?  Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
  We only life, only suspire
  Consumed by either fire or fire.
--T. S. Eliot  Little Gidding