The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer [Iyer, Pico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95746-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

We waited, my mother and Hiroko and I, for day after long day in our temporary lodging, looking up at the hills in the distance or, in my case, not looking up at all, for fear of what I would see. For night after night I dreamed of fire—three straight nights—and each time, when I awoke, it was with the sense, unanswerable, that our house was gone. I would never see it again, my unconscious seemed to be telling me.

When the earlier fire had burned down our house—and four hundred and twenty-six others—it had come as a sudden, one-night epiphany. A wildfire had broken out on a distant ridge at six in the afternoon; within ten minutes or so it was all around our home. I had fled to a lower spot, trapped for three hours as I watched the outlines of our lives stripped away, and by the end of the night nearly all the damage had been done. The fire, whipped on by “sundowner” winds, roared down from the hills into the crowded residential areas and then jumped the six lanes of the freeway, seemingly intent on passing through every neighborhood until it reached the sea.

This time there was none of the sudden shock and quick release into a world of ashes. Day after day we looked up and saw smoke now surrounding our house, now seeming to have left, and each day, as the sun set, we girded ourselves for late-afternoon winds suddenly to pick up and send the flames skittering, unstoppably, in the direction of the town again. The local newspaper told us that the fire chief himself expected to lose a hundred houses—ours and all our neighbors’—the night we evacuated; “the whole bloody world’s on fire,” as a fire officer in Greene’s Blitz had memorably put it.

In time, after ten days or so, the wind blew the flames up over the top of the mountain and away from all structures, and, thanks mostly to the firemen who formed a single line to stand the blaze down, we and those around us were safe—until the next time. We drove back to the house; we unpacked the boxes stuffed with papers and passports and jewelry and objects of sentimental importance again. Sometimes we were lucky, it seemed; sometimes we were not. The only lesson the fire taught was that you never know what will happen next—our destinies can unravel even as we think we’re writing them.

Hiroko and I returned to Japan a few weeks later and summer began to subside, giving way to the peaceful blaze of autumn. Then, in mid-November, at least a month after “fire season” ended, I was talking to my mother on the phone when she said, “I went out with a friend to see a movie last night, but as soon as we passed the turn, midway down the hill, I saw huge flames around the town. It looked a long way away, but you know how it is. The winds were moving at sixty miles per hour.

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