Fire Season
by C.E. Hyun
It is fire season in Southern California. It is hot and dry and strangely wild. That morning when Carrie Hirsch drives to work, she sees the sky all gray and red and the lines of cars around her, stretching forever and far in a rainbow of muted colors. Because of the poor air quality, residents are warned to stay indoors and avoid physical exertion.
Carrie stands inside the local Coffee Bean, waiting for her iced chai. She watches her friend, Balaorin, at the other end of the counter as she orders her own drink. It is her friend’s first time at the café—her first time in Los Angeles—and Balaorin has already built up a rapport with the barista. It hasn’t even occurred to Carrie to say anything beyond “Can I get a ___?” and “Thank you,” despite seeing that same barista every day for almost a year.
“How’s LA?” Balaorin asks after they take a tiny table by the window.
“Still adjusting. Busy with work.” A nice catch-all excuse.
“You look like you’ve been working hard,” Balaorin observes.
Carrie knows she looks exhausted, but that has less to do with work and more to do with her depression. As for Balaorin, she looks radiant. They haven’t seen each other in three years, after graduating from Penn State. Her friend has gained weight, and it is becoming to her; her face is fuller and her bare arms toned. She has the same bright blonde hair and quick smile.
Seeing Balaorin face-to-face makes Carrie realize how much she has missed her. “How’s San Francisco?” Carrie asks. Balaorin has also moved out to the West Coast in the past year.
“Love it. The whole earthquake thing is creepy though. Every time I’m on the Muni during rush hour, I’m praying, ‘Please don’t let the Big One hit now.’ We’re packed like sardines in there.”
Carrie smiles. She watches her friend pull the straw from her frozen mocha, lick the whipped cream stuck to the end. Carrie points to the corner of her mouth where some cream has smeared, and Balaorin wipes it away with the back of her hand.
Balaorin sticks the straw back into her mocha, takes a sip of the blended ice drink. “I never told you what I’m doing now. Remember back in college when we did all the lucid dreaming?”
“I do,” Carrie says, surprised that Balaorin is bringing it up after all these years.
It started their sophomore year when they were research assistants for a psychology professor who worked with wake-initiated lucid dreams. They required the awake subject to proceed directly into a dream while remaining self-aware through the transition.
“You were the best out of all of us,” Balaorin says.
Carrie isn’t sure if that is a good thing. She has often preferred sleeping to the real world, seeing it as an escape from real life. Their research with the professor was for only a semester, but Carrie and Balaorin practiced on their own and with friends. They tried shared dreaming and astral projection, with varying levels of success. Much of it came intuitively to Carrie, though Balaorin was especially good at getting everyone to find each other in a shared dream.
By senior year, everyone in the dream group had bigger concerns: namely, what to do when they left the dreamland of college to enter the real world of jobs and having to pay back undergraduate loans. Carrie hasn’t given lucid dreaming much thought after graduation.
“That’s my job now. It pays well too,” Balaorin says. “I’m working for a private research company and we’re using lucid dreaming as a gateway into astral travel. Instead of just going into a dream, you go to an actual physical place. What we’re doing is all new, and one of the reasons I came down was to talk to you about a job. We need good dreamers, and there’s no question that you were good at it.”
It is a generous proposition, and Carrie would be the first to admit that she doesn’t care for her current job or for LA. But while she misses Balaorin and knows it would help to live in the city with a familiar friend, there is a part of her that doesn’t feel fit for companionship with others. Carrie has been isolating herself over the last year, and she hasn’t yet hit the depressive bottom that would give her the impetus to make better changes in her life.
She tells Balaorin she is considering going back to school, that she may as well stay with the same job if she has less than a year left of work.
“Well, think about it,” Balaorin says. “I really think this would be a good fit for you. And you would like San Francisco.”
They chat about other things, about old friends and each other’s families. Then Carrie has to get back to work.
They stand up to leave, and Balaorin gives Carrie a tight hug. “I’m really glad I got to see you. I’ve missed you,” she says.
Carrie catches the note of emotion in Balaorin’s voice. She averts her face as they pull apart so Balaorin won’t see the tears that spring into her eyes.
“Think about the job. Really,” Balaorin says, as they part in the parking lot.
It is a strange picture that sticks in Carrie’s mind, seeing Balaorin against the backdrop of the gray and red sky. Pieces of ash fall from the sky like stray snowflakes, and one catches in a curl of Balaorin’s hair. Carrie reaches forward to brush it away.
“I will,” Carrie promises.
***
A month later, Carrie is laid off. She lives alone and therefore has the luxury of lazing around without fear of judgment. She stays in her apartment for over a week: sleeping all day, watching movies all night, subsisting on take-out, and drinking alcohol as her all-day beverage of choice.
Finally, she wakes up one morning and looks at herself in the mirror. Her lips are purple from last night’s wine. She has probably gained a good ten pounds from this week alone. Carrie examines the wine stains on her lips, scrubs them furiously with her toothbrush.
After opening all the blinds to their maximum, Carrie puts her apartment through a rigorous cleaning. After that, she takes a shower. Knowing she will sink into another week-long depression if she stays in her apartment, she decides to sleep somewhere else for a few nights.
Carrie finds a hotel in walking distance to Hermosa Beach. Up in her room, she grabs one of the big white towels from the bathroom. Hopefully the hotel won’t mind her using it as a beach towel. She buys burnt black coffee so she can horrify her mouth awake.
At the beach, she considers her options, including Balaorin’s offer. She wonders if she can still do it—well, she knows she can do it. Even from her very first time, when she tried it half-giggling with Balaorin in an empty classroom, she knew it was something she would be good at.
Carrie lies back on the towel and relaxes, using the sounds of the waves to help her imagine that she is lying on top of them, rocking her back and forth like a baby in a cradle. When she feels herself drifting off, she projects herself out of her body.
She sees her body lying asleep on the towel below. She sees the long pier that extends into the water. She drifts over the sand and through Pier Plaza, observing the storefronts, the palm trees, and the people. What she sees seems strangely muted and contradictorily magnified, the way one perceives things in a dream. There is a taco truck, and she realizes she has never bought food from one while living in LA.
Waking up, Carrie gathers up her things and walks back to the truck and orders dinner to go. While she waits for her food, she calls Balaorin about the job.
***
The first time Carrie dreams at her new job, she goes to the Alhambra. Upon arriving in San Francisco, she moves in with Balaorin to an apartment in the Marina District. The converted warehouse their employer has set up as their lab is just a few bus stops away. In what will be their primary workroom, Carrie lies back on a reclined chair. Balaorin sits across from her.
“Just go ahead and dream, and I’ll find you,” Balaorin says.
So Carrie dreams.
Carrie dreams herself walking through a forest, until she comes to a clearing that is furnished with an IKEA-style light, rug, and swivel chair. In the swivel chair sits her little sister, Joy, back when she was eight years old. Joy is wearing her hula skirt and a little tank top that has a green apple embroidered on the front. Spinning the swivel chair is Carrie’s other self, back when she was eighteen.
Carrie walks closer to hear Joy and her other self having a conversation that has happened once before.
“You lucky duck,” her other self says, because her little sister has only two more days of school.
“I’m not a duck.”
“Sure you are,” her other self says. “I’ve heard you quack when you thought no one was listening to you.”
“I don’t quack.” And then her little sister starts quacking because she has turned into a brightly-colored wood duck.
What surprises Carrie is that the quacking is loud and distinctly un-wood duck-like, more like a mallard duck. The wood duck stretches its wings and begins to flap them vigorously. It rises up in the air like a hummingbird.
Buzzing over to Carrie, it beeps her on the nose (her little sister loves to beep people’s noses). Carrie can only stare as the wood duck cackles and buzzes away. When she looks back toward the clearing, the IKEA setup and her other self have disappeared. In their place stands Balaorin.
“Hey, this way,” she says. And Carrie takes her hand.
Carrie feels a brush of warm air, a feeling of stepping through shadow, and then she walks into a bush. Behind her, Balaorin giggles. “You just missed the doorway. Look around.”
Carrie steps back to see.
“I chose this place because we both came here before, remember?”
“Of course.”
They’d gone on the same study abroad trip their junior year. Granada was the first city they stayed in for their tour of southern Spain, and the Alhambra the first site they toured.
They are standing in the gardens of the Moorish summer palace, and the bush Carrie has walked into forms one of the arching doorways. Beyond it is a courtyard with a bubbling fountain. Beyond that a long rectangular pool filled with lily pads.
“I know you really like the whole architecture thing, so I thought we could walk through here, and then grab lunch at one of the plazas,” Balaorin says.
“Sounds good. Wow, this is…it’s different than doing projections. Everything is so vivid.” Whereas doing astral projection is like experiencing everything around you through a screen—like watching a movie—the astral travel is immediate. Carrie rubs her hand over the bush she bumped into, noticing the leafy texture against the palm of her hand. She can feel the sun against her skin and smell the perfume of the garden foliage. She turns to grin at Balaorin. “This is amazing.”
“Don’t get too excited. You’ll wake yourself up.”
Carrie and Balaorin walk through the Alhambra, admiring the intricately carved walls, the scalloped windows with their sweeping views of Granada, and the stucco stalactites. Afterwards they eat lunch in the Plaza del Carmen, sharing a big plate of paella and discussing the attractiveness of the men that pass them.
Carrie wakes up back at the lab to find Balaorin peering into her face expectantly. “What did you think? Coming back fast, isn’t it?” Balaorin asks.
“It is.” Carrie sits up in her chair, trying to reconcile it with their sitting in the plaza just moments before. “I forgot how fun it is. Can we try it again?”
***
They are essentially being paid to experiment and play, though Carrie sees the long-term possibilities of their work. It is Carrie who figures out how to transport small objects when they dream travel. She discovers it while practicing on a lazy morning at their apartment. Carrie lies in bed eating strawberries, and she dreams herself walking along Ocean Beach. She opens her hand to find she is still holding a strawberry.
Carrie digs a little hole in the sand, buries the strawberry inside. She looks up when two dogs run past her and bound into the water, barking and wrestling. An early arriving family launches a bright orange-and-green kite into the sky. Carrie walks farther down the beach, avoiding the glistening foam the waves sweep onto the sand like beached clouds. She finds a giant sand dollar, turning it over in her hand. When she wakes up in her bed, she is still clutching the sand dollar.
On Monday, she tells her co-workers what has happened. She mails the sand dollar to her little sister, along with some clothes from a trendy San Francisco boutique shop she thinks Joy, now fifteen, would like.
Outside of work, she and Balaorin go out with each other and with their co-workers, in San Francisco or through astral travel to other cities. In their living together, it is like becoming reacquainted with each other, for Carrie realizes that Balaorin, like her, has grown and changed in the three years they had not seen each other.
In China, they gorge on Shanghai dumplings and all manner of noodles. They go clubbing in Moscow, Hanoi, Ibiza, and Seoul. In London, they explore the various tube stations and search out pubs that serve fish and chips wrapped in actual newspaper. They trail after the latest film crew in New Zealand, spend a day taking in the smell of lobster and corn-on-the-cob in Rockport, Maine. In Argentina, they stand on the grassy island the other tourists can’t access and watch the water that falls all around them at Iguazu Falls.
There are adjustments to living with Balaorin. For one thing, Carrie didn’t expect her friend to bring home so many guys. Had she done that in college? She never talked about it if she did, and Carrie didn’t live with her then. Still, Carrie hates waking up to find a stranger in their kitchen, the awkward small talk that ensues. She would have minded less if she also brought home guys on occasion, but she never does.
Sometimes, Carrie feels uneasy as she watches Balaorin in their travels through the different cities. Sometimes she resents the way Balaorin seems to gather movement and light around her, how she always appears fully present in the events of her everyday life. Yet the way Balaorin laughs when she is happy is infectious. Even from far away, Carrie will be pulled out of her dark musings and, watching Balaorin, feel herself warmed.
***
One Sunday morning, Carrie wakes up and walks into the kitchen to find someone she met several times when out with Balaorin. She knows his name, but can’t recall it. When he sees her, he raises his mug in a sardonic toast. “Good morning.”
“Hey.” Carrie attempts a smile, walks around him to get some orange juice from the fridge. She can feel him watching her, and it makes her uneasy. There is something she never liked about him, the way his eyes follow her when she sees him at a restaurant or bar. She didn’t go out with Balaorin last night, and isn’t sure what possessed her friend to bring this guy home. She has never gotten the impression that Balaorin was interested in him.
“Where’s Balaorin?” Carrie asks.
“She went for a run.”
Carrie nods and goes to the living room, where she turns on the TV for some background noise. She is refolding the blanket on the couch when she turns in surprise to see Balaorin’s friend behind her.
“Hey, what’s your name again?” he asks.
“Carrie.”
“I’m Jacob.” He holds out his hand. She has no choice but to take it. His hand feels like any other hand. She shakes it like she would any other handshake. He lets go first. “So you and Balaorin, you two seem really close.”
“Yeah, we’ve known each other for over seven years.”
“You two are so different, I wouldn’t have figured you as friends.”
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She isn’t sure how to respond. “Look,” she says, stepping around him. “It’s almost twelve and Bal and I have somewhere to be today. Do you think you can…”
“Leave?” he supplies.
“Sorry, but Bal didn’t tell me you were spending the night.”
He doesn’t respond, just watches her. He has unusual, almost vibrant, blue-green colored eyes. “I used to see you come out with Balaorin. Now I hardly ever see you.”
“Yeah well, I’m a bit of a homebody.”
She doesn’t trust him, there is something about him, and the thought of Balaorin sleeping with him—enjoying herself with him—turns her stomach. She hates that he is standing so close and can probably read every emotion on her face.
“You only talked with the people you came out with. Never with the people they met,” he says, and Carrie feels something close in on her when he says this. “Is it that you’re just shy? Or is it something else?” he asks.
Carrie blinks. “You need to leave,” she says.
Jacob shrugs. “Tell Bal I’ll call her.” He lets himself out, and the door bangs shut behind him.
Carrie sits down at the table, trying to piece together what has happened. He didn’t touch her. He left after she told him to leave. Nothing happened, yet she is left with the feeling of being invaded. It would have been different if the two hadn’t been alone in the apartment or if they’d been in a public place.
Balaorin comes in ten minutes later, rosy-cheeked and smiling from her jog. “Carrie! You need to go out this morning. It’s gorgeous outside.”
Carrie looks up at Balaorin. “Your friend.”
“Jacob? Where is he?”
“He left.”
Balaorin tilts her head. “Carrie, you okay?”
Carrie feels herself starting to float inside a strange panic. The way Balaorin watches her with that bemused expression makes Carrie feel like she has imagined it all in her head. She manages: “Your friend, please don’t bring him here again.”
“Carrie, did something happen? Carrie, talk to me.”
She can’t help it. She starts to cry, and it isn’t all due to her encounter with Jacob. It seems he is the catalyst for other things, but what those other things are she can’t articulate. “No, nothing happened. He just makes me uneasy.”
Balaorin is quiet. “Carrie, I’m really sorry. I won’t bring him here again.”
“I’m fine.”
“Carrie…”
“I better shower.” She stands up from the table. “I’m fine. I was just surprised to find him here.”
She feels Balaorin watching her as she goes to her room. “Carrie,” Balaorin calls after her. “Shower, and then we’ll grab some brunch after, okay?”
She doesn’t want to, but knows she won’t do anything better if she doesn’t go. “Sure.”
Over brunch, Balaorin chats happily, and Carrie begins to understand that she and Balaorin deal with conflict in fundamentally different ways. She knows Balaorin is trying to take her mind off what has happened, and she appreciates her friend’s efforts. She tries to match the vivacity of Balaorin’s conversation, but knowing that she isn’t even coming close makes Carrie feel increasingly alienated from her friend.
***
Carrie spends the holidays with her parents and little sister, and the flight back to San Francisco is crowded and long. She has trouble properly sleeping or staying awake, and it isn’t helped by the perky redhead from the airline safety video, shaking her finger at them and telling them that smoking is not allowed.
Balaorin picks Carrie up at the airport and wants to celebrate her return by going out. It starts pouring right before they are supposed to leave and a night on the town is out, so Carrie suggests astral travelling to LA instead. They end up bar-hopping in West Hollywood, but the night doesn’t end well.
They cut through an alley trying to find a different bar. A man walks toward them from the opposite direction. It isn’t immediately obvious if he is taking a shortcut like them, or if he is a mugger.
When he is a foot away, he reveals the inside of his jacket—casually, so it wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else watching—so that both Carrie and Balaorin can see the gun in his waistband. “Wallets. Phones.” His tone is neutral and Carrie doesn’t immediately grasp what is happening.
Balaorin has no such delayed reaction. “I don’t think so,” she tells the man, and moves to push past him. She grabs Carrie’s arm to pull her along.
As Carrie brushes past the man, he reaches for her clutch. Carrie is fine with letting him take it; it only exists within the dream, and the effect is like the man taking home leprechaun gold. But Balaorin sees and, yanking Carrie out of the man’s reach, snaps, “Get a job, freak!”
There is a struggle, the sound of a sharp slap.
Carrie wakes up first. She shakes Balaorin awake.
Balaorin blinks. Her eyes meet Carrie’s. “I’m fine. I was coming out right after you.”
“You’re bleeding.”
Balaorin shrugs, wipes the blood from her mouth. “Well, now we know you can sustain injuries while astral travelling.”
They look at each other, both sitting on the couch in their pajamas. They had been drinking wine and watching Spirited Away before going to sleep, and the movie is still playing in the background as Chihiro reunites with her parents. Carrie pushes her hair away from her face. They are nowhere close to LA now, but she can still feel the chill of the night air, the way her insides froze when the man revealed his gun.
She looks at Balaorin. Her friend doesn’t appear shaken or like she has woken from a bad nightmare. If anything, Balaorin looks like she has stepped off an exciting rollercoaster ride and is still savoring the adrenaline rush.
“Why did you do that?” Carrie finally asks. “Why didn’t you just give him what he wanted?”
“We had the right to walk outside. That’s what we were doing, just walking,” she says.
“The right?” Carrie asks incredulously. Of all the ways she expected Balaorin to try and blow this off, this is the last thing she expected her friend to say. “This had nothing to do with ‘rights.’ He had a gun. You could have gotten really hurt. And our ‘wallets’ weren’t even real!”
Balaorin sighs and stands up. She goes to the kitchen, and Carrie follows her. Balaorin wets a paper towel, holds it to her mouth. “The gun was a bluff. It probably wasn’t even loaded. And besides, we always thought we couldn’t get hurt while astral travelling.”
“Only because none of us have experimented with provoking attacks from people like him. Balaorin, what were you thinking?”
Outside it has stopped pouring, and stray drops cling against the kitchen window. Carrie sees their reflections in the glass; she watches the scene unfold as a detached viewer while simultaneously participating as one of the principal actors. It seems the things they say in the ensuing fight are a bubbling forth of all the frustrations and resentments they have been holding in for the past year:
“Carrie, I’m sorry if I scared you. But that guy was trying to mug us, and I have a right to fight back. Anyway, I’m fine,” Balaorin says.
“Why do you always say that it’s fine? It’s not fine! You always do these reckless things, and you never think about the consequences.”
“You never want to try anything new. You never give anything a chance. Everything we’ve done is because I pushed you.”
“Every week, you bring home a different guy.”
“You never give any guy a chance. You never talk to anyone.”
“You always act like everything is okay, like you’re so happy. It can’t possibly be real. How can you actually be so happy?”
Finally:
“Carrie, you talk about how I get off on living dangerously, but look at yourself. I never used to understand the way you were always depriving yourself, always having such a difficult time letting go, even for a moment. And I realize now, you enjoy it. There’s some part of you that finds safety in living this monk-like existence, and you look for reasons to validate living that way.”
Carrie draws in her breath. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Like what happened with Jacob. I can tell you’re still affected by whatever you two talked about, and why are you? Jacob was a moron. Put him in your folder of people-who-are-irrelevant and move on. What can you possibly gain from dwelling over something that didn’t even happen? You’ve always been like that, and I just don’t understand why.”
They stand at opposite ends of the kitchen. Carrie’s hand grips the window ledge, and she feels the chill of the glass against her knuckles. Drops of rain hit against the glass, each drip representing each stretched out moment in their stalemate.
“Well, don’t you have anything to say?” Balaorin finally asks.
Carrie knows then with perfect clarity that her time in San Francisco is over. Whether or not Balaorin’s words have some measure of truth, they are words that, in the present time, she cannot do anything with.
Carrie meets Balaorin’s eyes. She shrugs. “I think we’ve said everything we wanted to say.”
***
They meet in Spain three years later. Their field is too small for them to avoid each other forever. During that time, Carrie has grown and changed. She acknowledges that she needed Balaorin at that point in her life. That it has enabled her to better adjust at her next job, to know her own weaknesses and work through them.
Still, she is washed over by old insecurities as she leaves her dream and steps into Cadiz, the seaport city where they have arranged to meet. They came here once before during their undergraduate study abroad trip. Carrie didn’t drink alcohol back then, for fear of losing control, and Balaorin had encouraged her.
“Let go a little. I’m right here. I’ll take care of you.”
And Carrie felt safe as they walked through the streets that night, with Balaorin’s jacketed arm linked snugly around hers. The scarf Balaorin wore was bristly and covered in ornate patterns, and the fabric kept brushing against Carrie’s cheek.
She remembers the time they drove back from Las Vegas through the desert when it began to snow, dusting all the cacti and sand with a powdery white. “Balaorin, wake up. Look,” she said, not wanting her friend to sleep through the surreal sight. She remembers sitting with Balaorin at one of the outdoor cafes in Cadiz and eating fried fish, laughing at the novelty of being served coffee in tall, glass cups.
Then she remembers their last meeting and the hurtful things said, more hurtful because they had been grounded in truth. Her heart speeds up at the memories she tried to bury, their recall which still causes anxiety and pain.
And then she enters the restaurant and sees Balaorin at the table, waiting for her. Balaorin, who for better or for worse, she considered her friend.
“It’s good to see you,” Carrie says.
And it’s good that her words are sincere.
________________________________________________________________________
About the Author
C.E. Hyun is a law student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Northville Review, Underneath the Juniper Tree, The Red Penny Papers, and the British Fantasy Society’s BFS Journal. Her website is www.cehyun.com.
“Fire Season” © 2012 C.E. Hyun
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