Rehearsing for the Fire

sitting alone in one of the many rooms (from which I soon notice there is only one way in and out), I quietly wait for the doctor to finally knock and eventually breeze in through the door, interrupting my memorization of the skeletal chart on his wall, naming all the bones and the blue-red tangle of nerves--a confused subway map--as well as my fascination with the plastic puzzle-models of the human heart and the wrinkled human brain, looking something like a sad, deflated football, sunken in its middle, resting on the counter by the sharps-disposal and glove-dispenser and the gleaming metal sink, so clear I can see my reflection on its sparkling faucet, everything smelling so clean and fresh, so antiseptic and scrubbed, the way it should smell while waiting in a doctor's clinic on a thin skein of white paper...

...so unlike the damp, vinegar-mildew scent of the basement in our old house where I lived during the first part of my life as a young boy with my family, that basement that obviously thought nothing of taking in water through the window wells (those less-than-watertight vases) where now we stood--my three brothers, myself, and Mom--listening to Dad going over the procedure for exiting the house as quickly and safely as possible in the unlikely event of a fire, and we would grab the nearby stepladder, he pointed out, and quickly and efficiently slide the latches on the windows and then kick away the screens to gain soggy access into the wells and to the rest of our lives, and we each got to try our luck with the latches and the windows, I remember; like some carnival-barker, he was: "Step right up, kid," though I was only four years old and could barely reach the windows, let alone the latches, with my thin, weak bonefingers (those four-year-old proximal and intermediate and distal phalanges) so unused to serious work like moving in concert to save a life, my young boy's hands in that dank basement better put to countless hours spent playing with my brothers and with our toys--scattered like some motherlode along the dusty rows of wooden shelves stacked with Matchbox cars, and metal-cast replicas of tractors and trucks, and plastic Johnny West cowboy action-figures--the kind that would sometimes fly apart from overuse, literally losing their limbs and head, like the worst torture imaginable, drawn-and-quartered and beheaded all at once, until my dad (always frugal and industrious) discovered one day how to mend the tired, dismembered cowboys; like some frontier doctor himself, with needlenose-pliers, pins, a hot-glue gun, and rubber bands, and then--wouldn't you know--those cowboys good as new, plastic-molded arms and legs all in place once more, everything fine--except the unfortunate head, which would never move again, glued in place at the base like some stiff-necked plainsman, never again to casually turn toward a sunset, or to tilt his head for a kiss from the woman he loves, or to nonchalantly catch a glance of the lone, mysterious gunman who carries with him the bullet (always a price to be paid, it seems, for enjoying life one more day), these young hands of mine were more used to playing in that basement with only matters of make-believe, you see, certainly nothing like real-life latches and windows and flames, those soft young hands were more used to playing--in that basement--the thick stack of old 45s on my mother's well-worn console-stereo--the stack of small, black discs with song-titles like: "If I Fell," by The Beatles, and The Band's, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," and though I had no earthly idea, then, who The Beatles were, of course--being only four--and The Band's song made no sense to my four-year-old ears and mind (was the song, after all, about some girl named "Dixie," I wondered, and where was she being driven down to, and why--perhaps some subway-platform, I thought, to await the Danville train--whatever that was), I simply knew that for my brothers and me this music was good, and it was fun, and we quickly learned that leaving up the arm on the record player saw the needle-stylus return as if by magic to the abrupt plunk-and-hiss of the spinning black disc's opening groove, and play ad infinitum a soundtrack to our lives spent in that basement--the very basement our dad was trying now to show us how to leave, if need be, one by one, all of us taking our confused and frightened turns to rehearse for some fire that he told us could happen...

...in this appointed room at this appointed time at the doctor's clean clinic, sitting alone on the table, taking a break, for a moment, from bones and brain and heart, when the doctor suddenly appears as promised, breaking the deathly silence of memory and ushers himself into the small room, sitting on a milkmaid's stool in the close corner of the pristine little room (from which, I notice, there is no escape), he looks at me all the while through his fashionably thin black-rimmed frames and, amidst the growing crackleroar of flames and the final, acidic smell of smoke, slowly begins to say something