The search: FIRE IN the memory palace
An excerpt from Devon’s current memoir-in-progress, exploring the convergence of art, and public service through twenty years of fireground experience and creative inquiry
I’m at Station 17 in Ruskin, twenty miles south of Tampa, drinking stovetop espresso with a firefighter I just met. We call this having a “booch”, from the Spanish buche meaning shot or mouthful, but I only know the origin because I looked it up. It’s one of those terms that is both ubiquitous and unquestioned, like “ender” – a derogatory term for the residents of the north end of the county, or “frail” used as a verb for what happens when someone finally snaps from too much teasing.
There are some things we all know – how many tablespoons of sugar to add to the glass measuring cup. Pour in the first thick drops of espresso and whip it with a spoon until it’s a frothy, sugary paste. Dump the finished espresso into the cup and let the crema rise to the top in a layer of thick, sweet foam.
If this firefighter didn’t have his name embroidered on his shirt, I would have no idea who he was, but these rituals don’t require familiarity. The shirt says Blake Thompson. Now I can see the GoFundMe page. He’s got four young kids and a wife who is dying of cancer. There are things you can know about someone without ever having met them. He isn’t talking about his home life, and I’m not bringing it up.
He’s talking about something more familiar to all of us – the ways we are underappreciated, underpaid, and disrespected, by everyone from the public to our closest friends and family. But the tales of greatest hardship always seem to come from the people who sacrifice the least. The bigger the truck, the squarer the jaw, the lower the body fat percentage, the less likely they are to be of any real use. Calendar boys. When everyone else is taking a knee in the front yard, having a fresh air bottle clicked into their pack between breaths and going back in for their third, or fourth round, these guys have stripped off their coats and are flexing for the neighbors in the front yard, drinking all the Gatorade.
But Thompson is not a calendar boy, and his complaints are not calendar boy complaints. He is tall and stooped, with a shaved head and a regulation-defying handlebar mustache. You could see him on the street and know that he’s a fireman.
He’s talking about the service that we provide to the public not as a collection of physical acts of bravery, but as a group exercise in collective memory. And collective amnesia.
“We get paid to see things that other people don’t want to see. We remember the things they would rather forget. Funny things, sad things, horrible things. And we carry that stuff around with us. Who else is going to do it?”
______
ENGINE 17 RESPOND. PERSON DOWN. LOCATED IN BOX 4301. 8827 WELLINGTON ROAD. CROSS STREETS ARE BLAIRMOOR RD AND GROSSE POINTE BLVD. MEDICAL ALARM. NO CONTACT MADE BY ALARM COMPANY. 89 YEAR OLD FEMALE. PATIENT NAME DARLENE BRADDOCK. LOCKBOX 1016 ON FRONT DOOR. NO MEDICAL INFO ON FILE WITH ALARM COMPANY. CAT NAMED TOM.
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Someone’s grandmother is lying still on a tightly made bed, hair done, makeup fresh, her thin frame leaving only the slightest depression in the taut chenille comforter. It must be 85 degrees in here. Stale afternoon light filters in through the lace curtains. Every sound is muffled by the carpet, the bed skirts, and the thick brocade upholstery.
In the front yard, sun-scorched grass edges up to the chain link fence where our truck sits idling a throaty diesel hum. The air in this room feels like it’s miles from there. It smells of chicken soup and mothballs. Dark. Hot. Silent.
I could navigate these hallways in my sleep. The floor in the hall is a worn parquet, and the bedroom door drags on the thick shag carpet at the threshold.
This could be the house where I grew up. The paper-thin doors don’t stand up to flames any better than they resist teenage fists, and they always burn in reverse. The heat stacks up near the ceiling, and they burn from the top down. When the fire is out, it will look like a burned-out daycare center in here - dutch doors at every opening - with kid’s names, heights, and dates still penciled on the moldings in the kitchen.
______
She’s dressed as if she were on her way to church - a polyester blouse, pleated skirt, knee-high stockings, and neat black Mary Janes. Her little dog is next to her on the bed. Between them lies a patent leather pocketbook and a two-shot Derringer. She and the dog are both dead.
I can hear the crackle of police radios. Maybe her family called for a welfare check. Maybe Meals on Wheels couldn’t get her to answer the door.
Jerry is captain and I’m driving. We have a paramedic student riding with us, and he’s never seen anything like this. The look on his face says that he’s starting to question his choice of professions. He looks at me, then looks at Jerry.
“What happened here?” he asks.
Jerry answers, straight-faced and serious.
“We’re not sure, but we think that dog shot that lady.”
______
Chuck and I continue to make our way along the wall of the living room. I’m guessing we are back on the Alpha side of the structure now. If we stick to the wall, we can navigate through with visibility near zero, but we have made several turns since we came in, and I’m not sure I know where we are now.
I feel up and down the wall as I move. A low marble sill tells me we are probably on an exterior wall with a window that could be a potential escape route should we need it. I could probably jump through it airpack-first if I had to.
I keep one boot against the wall, and Chuck has a firm grasp on my other heel as I stretch out to sweep the room, feeling in the dark with gloved hands. The turned leg of a dining table. The upholstered seat of a chair. Nothing under the table. Nothing on top. Place mats. Pill bottles. Bills.
As we move forward, my headlamp catches on a small pair of eyes through the smoke, and I approach with my heart in my throat.
I’m inches away, frozen, taking in a child’s blank expression before I realize it’s the face of a baby doll. My pulse is pounding in my ears, breathing still rapid as I take stock and try to calm down. It’s in moments like this — when you finally slow down enough to catch your breath — that you feel the claustrophobia of the mask. The slight tug with every inhalation. When you’re working hard, it’s the furthest thing from your mind. But the second you stop, the urge to rip it off is overwhelming — an instinct that would kill you right now. I reach back and grab Chuck’s hand, pulling him up beside me where we lay side-by-side, flattened by the heat.
I push my face against the side of his helmet, yelling in his ear so he can hear me. “LOOK!”, I yell, bringing my hand into the beam of my headlamp so that he can see where I am pointing. I see the look of shock that must have been on my own face as Chuck’s eyes meet the eyes of the doll.
“It’s a fucking doll!” I yell.
“Fuck you, dude!” Chuck’s voice crackles through his mask.
He shakes his head, and we crawl slowly forward again.
______
“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.” – Simonides
The Greek poet Simonides was hired to deliver a victory ode at a grand banquet in honor of the Thessalian nobleman Scopas. Simonides delivered his ode, but Scopas only paid him half of the agreed fee, arguing that Simonides’ ode had spent so much time praising the mythical twins Castor and Pollux – time that should have been spent praising Scopas – that Simonides should collect the other half from Castor and Pollux themselves.
Castor and Pollux were the twin sons of Queen Leda — fraternal twins with two different fathers, the result of a rare phenomenon called heteropaternal superfecundation. Castor was the mortal son of King Tyndareus (Leda’s husband), but his twin brother, Pollux was the divine offspring of his mother’s rapist, Zeus – who had forced himself on Leda in the guise of a swan. When the mortal Castor was later killed in battle, Pollux appealed to Zeus to grant his deceased brother immortality. Zeus acquiesced and turned both brothers into the twin figures in the constellation Gemini, immortalizing their brotherly love forever in the night sky.
After delivering his ode to Scopas, Simonides was summoned outside the banquet hall by two young men, later believed to be Castor and Pollux in disguise. When Simonides stepped outside, finding no one, the roof of the hall collapsed, killing everyone inside and leaving their bodies unrecognizable.
What followed was, in its way, an ancient exercise in search and rescue.. With no other survivors to tell the tale, it fell to Simonides to identify the mangled bodies for burial. He was able to identify each one based on his memory of where they had been sitting at the banquet. Simonides’ technique of spatial memory was termed the method of loci and later became known as the memory palace – a powerful mnemonic device combining image recognition with narrative structure and spatial awareness.
Users of the memory palace mnemonic imagine themselves navigating a familiar environment on a predetermined route, populating their surroundings with objects and images that flow naturally from one association to the next. The human talent for spatial awareness becomes an aid for remembering.
As firefighters, we don’t get to build our own palaces. We crawl through the fetid hallways of others, sparking our own memories and associations with the accumulations of other people’s lives - feeling blindly through their treasures and bringing them into the light of our headlamps before setting them down and moving on. How do we continue to move forward when each find sparks a new association – another diversion from our path?
What is to be done for those of us who may prefer to forget?
______
There’s a twenty-three-year-old in a bra and panties lying on the carpet just outside her bathroom. The gun on the counter looks too big to be hers.
People say that women don’t shoot themselves in the head because they don’t want to mess up their faces. Right now, that seems like something made up by men and repeated until it became fact. But here she is, with a dime-sized hole in her chest, puckered at the edges, a dark ring of powder around it. The carpet I’m kneeling on looks like it may contain all the blood that was in her body.
She’s not breathing, she doesn’t have a pulse, and there’s nothing on our monitor. Contrary to what we see on television, you can’t shock a dead heart back to life - there needs to be some kind of electrical activity there to begin with.
I’ve probably forgotten more of these calls than I can remember. What stays with me is not her face or her hair, the blood, or the tiny satin bow at the center of her bra that I cut through with my trauma shears before sticking the defibrillator pads on her chest. What stays is the contrast between her olive skin and her pink underwear. Complimentary tones. Opposites on the color wheel. The edges of their meeting creates a friction that vibrates like a Rothko painting in the periphery of my vision. Some things are only visible out of the corner of your eye.
Every time I look away I think I see her moving.