saac walked the suburban night. The lawns were crew cut, manicured like rows of soldiers asleep in bunk rows, darkness fraught with the tension of sleep that walks the edge of a knife.
Each window stared like a vacant eye; are the watcher’s thoughts gone? Or is there a probing consciousness beneath the darkness—absorbing the pad of your feet, your gait and pauses, your darting glances?
In the Rorschach night, he read eyes. A thousand eyes, flung across the night sky, sunk into trees and windows, floating disembodied like drone mosquitos, dancing on dandelion stalks, inset like jewels on studded doors, scattered like pebbles across the ground. Flicking open and closed like the rustle of leaves, an eyelid scraping a dry brain, mechanical and without tears.
He was watched. If he had ever forgotten it, Roman had reminded him. And he was being tempted, pulled back to the forge of his discontent, to be washed clean like a cog in oil. But he would not leave her. He would not leave Sol.
Sol had given him life. Sol had given him hope. Sol had given him reading! What had the Mind given him? What was that compared to anything anyone in this dull life had given him? Without her, he might as well be dead.
He would not betray her by going back to Roman. He would keep to the path he’d hacked through this jungle of bullshit.
It was now that the Mind was losing its ability to read his emotions. It was losing, and it knew it was losing. Even now it was faded to an imprecise desire, the hunger of cigarettes, a pull from underneath—located in the substrate of his consciousness.
He was winning. Why would he give up now?
He walked into the night, each step pressing the past backwards, grinding the anxious eyes down with the twisting of sediment on cement.
***
Sol listened to Isaac reading and thought about Fahrenheit 451.
Why was it that Guy Montag gets absolved in the end? It was Guy Montag who devoured the book-world with his kerosene fire-worm. He burned so his wife could lay surrounded by screens, so that he could drive and eat and fuck infrequently and watch the pyre-flames of history dance.
He burned to obscure the origins of his screens in the factory laborers far away, he burned to forget the wars that come with the burning present.
He burned the past so the world could lose itself in the screaming now of the screens, carrying nothing. But mostly, he burned because he had been handed a flamethrower, handed to him by generations of flame-throwing men in asbestos coats. He burned, and he no longer knew why.
But Sol knew why. He burned because the system was the shape of his world. He burned because his world framed the very questions it answered.
He burned because his world was too small to see the other side of his world, the vacs, the blacks, the proles, the global South. He burned because he had never pierced the veil of privilege. He burned because he had failed to think of others, far away or close.
He burned because he had not thought to think for himself.
“Keep going,” said Sol. Isaac’s finger had paused on a word, his thought drifting.
“It’s about to get amazing,” said Sol, sitting across from him in the cocoon of Cafe Spiral, her hair dark against the yellow wall, the noise of a coffeeshop all around. “He’s about to burn the firemaster.”
Isaac’s finger lurched slightly, unsticking from the paper as he continued to read of Montag, “He twitched the safety catch on the flame-thrower. Beatty glanced instantly at Montag’s fingers and his eyes widened the faintest bit. Montag saw the surprise there and himself glanced to his hands to see what new thing they had done. Thinking back later he could never decide whether the hands or Beatty’s reaction to the hands gave him the final push toward murder.”
Isaac read on, ‘…Montag only said, “We never burned right…
“…And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering mannikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him. There was a hiss like a great mouthful of spittle banging a redhot stove, a bubbling and frothing as if salt had been poured over a monstrous black snail to cause a terrible liquefaction and a boiling over of yellow foam. Montag shut his eyes, shouted, shouted, and fought to get his hands at his ears to clamp and to cut away the sound. Beatty flopped over and over and over, and at last twisted in on himself like a charred wax doll and lay silent.’
“Whoah,” said Isaac, reflexively instapicting the moment and then deleting it. The cafe was silent, numb as though conscious of the weight of words.
“Yeah,” she looked into his eye with calm regard.
“He just burned off his complicity.”
Sol snorted and raised her eyebrows, “How many books did he burn? Just one firemaster and it’s supposed to make up for all those houses and books?”
Isaac broke from her gaze and stared out the window, rebounding from the sudden hardness of her ideas.
How many people had he operated? He had never set his life on fire, never taken such decisive action as Montag. He felt heavy with the weight of his life, with the weight of his past.
He was impure. Would he ever be able to dilute his life with enough good actions to become a new thing? Would he ever be good enough for her?
The moment passed in silence, and he turned back down to the book. His finger moved along the words again, and even while he mouthed the words in the book, the words of his salvation, he was full of doubt.
Can an operator be saved from what he is?