Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman

Author:John Edgar Wideman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

A Monday night in bed. Push-button scanning of all available channels, flipping, clicking, twenty-nine cable options and none satisfactory so you choose them all and choose none, cut and paste images, you are the director, driver, pilot, boss hoss, captain, the switch is in your hand. Or rather you grip the remote-control gadget with a desperate love-hate possessiveness that melds it to your palm. Your toy. Your game. Part of the fun of the game is the woman beside me who claims she doesn’t enjoy clicking around the channels, who’s screaming even as she silently indulges my flashes forward and flashes backward and fast shuffles and digital displays popping and muting, exploring every function the gun in my hand allows. She screams without uttering a sound: Don’t touch that dial. And in a way I don’t. We’re in bed. The Sony’s ten feet away. I can round first base and scoot into second and slide through a cloud of dust into third without getting my uniform dirty. A city burns on the screen. Any large city. Anywhere in America. CNN. Cable News Network. Row houses in flames. Rooflines silhouetted against a dark sky. Something’s burning. We watch. Wonder whose turn it is now. Whole city blocks engulfed. It must be happening in another country. A war. A bombing raid. We’re watching a Third World shantytown where there’s no water, no machines to extinguish a fire. Flames, true to metaphor, do leap and lick. The sky retreats, jerks away like a hand from a hot stove. We are curious. We are impatient for the voice-over to tell us what to think. Where? When? Why? What? We’d be on the edge of our seats if we were on seats and not lounging in our waterbed in Laramie at 9:05 P.M. with nothing better to do than play this spin-the-bottle sweepstakes of the dial. But here it was, a jackpot consuming all our attention. Philadelphia.

Philadelphia.

West Philly. Osage Avenue.

Shit. We used to live in West Philly. On Osage Avenue. Osage can you see by the night’s early firelight. Our old row house somewhere in there, down in the darkness of the silhouette’s belly. Long camera shots preferred, sustained. Aerial views, probably from a copter. Perhaps the blaze is too hot to approach any other way.

Details are skimpy. Or we’ve missed them this time round. They’ll return because news is cycled and recycled endlessly on this network. What we don’t know always carries the potential to harm us, and we know just enough to believe that, so we stay tuned for further developments. Now we bring you a word from our sponsor. But such courteous, ponderous, time-consuming transitions are a thing of the past. Cut. Cut to whatever, wherever with electronic speed. Warp drive. Chiquita and her banana shoved in your face faster than you can rub the smoke from your eyes. What’d he say? The announcer. Sixty-second and Osage? Powelton Village? That’s not Powelton. Too far west for Powelton, isn’t it? But the conversation has switched to a woman pulling the oars of a rowing machine.

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