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February 3rd, 1994
Ma always said that crazy was catching, and it seems like she was right.
Sometimes he thought she was leaving him messages, but that was probably just him being crazy. Sometimes your Ma has a mental breakdown and tells you that you should leave, and sometimes you listen.
When he was a kid, he had taken some amount of pride in being compared to his Ma. She was hardworking, a fighter, strongwilled and forever helping the underdog. What child wouldn’t want to be like their mother? Now, it's all he thinks about, whenever he does anything, anything at all - Am I acting like her?
And it scares him, honest to god, it does.
There's a million and one things he had expected from his 14th year of life, and this - this wasn't it. Wasn't even fucking close.
He can look back, and see where the cracks began to form, as their relationship deteriorated, as she got worse. It happened over years and years worth of time. He didn't notice it because he was in it. Like boiling a frog. That's the best way he could think about it. Every time something went a bit shit-ways, he told himself that it would pass, that it would get better. The frog tells himself that the waters' new found warmth is pleasant, and he keeps telling himself that as his skin blisters and his organs liquify and his blood boils into mist.
His Ma's birthday was 3 months ago, and in another 3 months, it'll be Mother's Day. The thought of acting like those dates aren't important, of trying to ignore them the whole day long, makes his skin itch something awful. Every year since he turned 7 and could manage to lift a pot by himself, he's made her a birthday cake. It's from the old family cookbook, ostensibly one of the only things Ma took with her when she got thrown out by her folks. It was an Italian style rum cake and it was delicious, even if he was more partial to the tropic aroma cake from the old Royal recipe booklet jammed between the cookbook’s' peeling endpapers. It was almost funny how sad the idea of that not happening made him. He still got upset thinking about the old Kodak camera he couldn’t save. It was ancient, he'd found it in a pile of junk someone was throwing out when they lived in Pickering Place, but he'd gotten a reel of film for it and it took a picture like a treat. It had lived for 70-some odd years before he found it and then in his hands it died.
Maybe he liked history too much, got too twisted around in soaking up as much of it as he possibly could into his mind. But every piece of the past he could keep felt significant. He didn't know much about his family's history, he knows his Ma's family is Italian, that a great grandfather or great great grandfather came over from Southern Italy as a teenager... something like a hundred years ago. Her Mom was from Sicily. Her whole family lives in New Jersey. He's got five whole Aunts and Uncles alive out there. His Ma was the eldest of them, which in all likelihood means that he's got to be the oldest of a horde of cousins. Except, his Ma got kicked out right before she turned 17, so she's the only family he's got, the only history he had, existed in her memories and the scant stories she told him on his birthday or when she got too tipsy after a night working at the casino.
Now, he doesn't even have that. He's unmoored in history. In time.
Really, it had begun with his birthday. July 11th, that was when the Oriole Residential Hotel burned down, that was the last time he saw his mother. She had told him to leave back in June. He didn't exactly listen, they'd had spats like that before, and they always ended with him waking up to an apology breakfast that clearly stated that she hadn't meant it, whatever she had said, whatever she had done. She didn't mean it.
Instead, he had crashed on a beat-up couch in an alcove the Oriole's cavernous lobby, in the morning when he went up to smooth things out over breakfast, she wasn't home. So, Matt waited. Every time he asked other residents of the Oriole, they said he had just missed her, they said the same thing every time he briefly left the Oriole - for food, to get new library books, to walk two blocks to do his laundry, anywhere, it was always the same-
"You just missed her, Emmy."
He swore he saw her a few times, on the street, in restaurants, cafes, in taxicabs. Every time he saw a tall woman with brown hair or pitch stone eyes, he couldn't help but pause - because it could be her. He can't quite place when that anticipation turned from a longing into a fear, but it did. Because what would that mean? That she was on the same street as him, no more than 50 feet away, that she saw him and still left. What would it mean if he didn't want her to notice him at all?
Six weeks.
He waited for her for six weeks. He kept the apartment clean, he bought groceries with the dwindling money from the grey metal lockbox in the closet. Mrs. Park never complained about missing rent, and that woman would complain about the sky being blue - so either he had fantastic luck - or his Ma, wherever she was, was somehow keeping up with the payments.
The Oriole was one of the nicer places they'd lived, Mrs. Park was crazy but the rent was fair and there was a laundromat two streets over, so it wasn't a bad deal.
He went to the Sunset Palace, the casino his Ma worked at, and they hadn't seen her in nearly a month. He ended that day in the Cartwright Hotel, which was 3 blocks over and had a payphone in the lobby that was old enough that if you jangled the machine the right way you didn't have to pay, and he called Sal. He was an old friend of Ma’s. Matt had lived with him when he was real little, under five, in one of those big brick apartments in the laundry district. Sal was cool, he worked at one of the theatres in Velvet Vale that was part of a handful of creatives not yet bending the knee to Lovelockers. Sal said he hadn't seen his Ma in 3 weeks, and his sister, Stella, who worked at the Dionysus Lounge, one of the bars by the Sunset, hadn't seen her in just as much time. They both said they'd keep an eye and an ear out for her.
For all intents and purposes, he was the last person to see his Ma. So he had told himself that he could wait just a while longer. You're supposed to stay in place if you get lost. You're supposed to wait for someone to find you. Reason gives merit to the idea that the same could be applied to someone leaving you somewhere.
Early, on the morning of July 11th, he got up, grabbed his backpack, shoved his pulp paperback collection, his cassettes, a week's worth of clothes, Ma's cookbook and the lockbox into it, and went out into the city. If she insisted on being difficult, he wasn't going to let that stop him, he was going to enjoy his goddamned birthday if it killed him.
Less than 15 minutes after he left, according to a report he found in the July 12th edition of the Magnus Legend, a faulty wire in the empty unit 3F sparked and caught the drapes on fire, within 45 minutes most of the buildings 4th and 5th floors were ablaze. By noon the fire was out. The newspaper said that the blaze had been called into the fire department by a man who lived in the Continental Cross.
The paper did manage to get one thing wrong, because 3F was definitely not empty, after all, it was his apartment.
It made him wonder, how bad of luck must a person have that the moment they leave everything burns behind them? Whose luck was worse? Him, or Ma?
Given the fact that it was his birthday, he'd say he won. Even if he didn't care much for it, even if the most that was done as celebration was eating wedding soup while watching The Princess Bride. It was still the one day a year promised, by luck of the draw, as his. Maybe that was a stupid and selfish and petty way to think, but he wasn't above being any of those things. Even if, especially if, his birthday was the linchpin of something worse to come.
•-•-•-•-•
The Continental Cross was right across the street from the Oriole. He just had to find which resident was the man who called in the fire, and what else he might have seen.
The Continental had been purpose built in the 60s to be a Residential Hotel, one of the few buildings in Grant’s Ville, in the wider territory of Magnus, that could stake such a claim. Imposing in all its brutalist glory. To be frank, it looked more like an office building than a place to live. This thought, however, didn't stop him from buzzing every apartment with a man's name next to it from floors 3 to 7.
6D, home to a Mr. "Wm." whose last name had faded into illegibility, was the winner. The man told him that he'd only get his information if he came up, and that was fine by Matt. Just like that, he was buzzed in.
The lobby, besides being quite spartan, blessedly held a working elevator that he gladly took to the 6th floor. He made his best attempt at a neighborly knock when he reached the right door.
When it opened, he was met with the face of a man older than what he had expected based on the tinny voice from the buzzer's speaker. He was quite a lot older than his Ma anyway. Although he knew that that wasn't the best metric to judge age by, Ma was rather young for someone with a teenaged kid. This man was maybe in his late forties to mid fifties?
There was something about his face, his weathered, yet warm, work worn skin, his overly keen gaze, that reminded him of someone.
The man made a comment about having lived in the building for nearly a decade, and the cadence of his voice finally jogged Matt’s memory. The man reminded him of Millie Lamb, his next door neighbor at the Fritz Hershel. She had watched him on a number of occasions, as his Ma was mostly between jobs when they lived at the Fritz, and on those nights when she watched him, she read him stories from a book of Greek mythology until he fell asleep. Her cadence was nearly the same.
After a bit of small talk, the man had divulged that he had seen a dark haired woman ascending the fire escape on the front of the building, climbing onto the roof, and stepping across the foot and a half wide gap onto the roof of the Beaker News Pulp Building.
•-•-•-•-•
Let him be the first to say that crawling through a recently scorched building was not the greatest idea. But it had been 2 days of waiting. He needed to know.
His Ma had always said that he was a bit too curious, and that curiosity killed the cat. He was significantly larger than a cat, and just as fighty, so he had told her that he would fare just fine.
Matt knew what fire could do to a building. The way it could eat anything in its path. There was a big story on the news when he was newly 12, the Kings Fall Radio building had caught fire. The place was historic, so said the reporters on the 6 o'clock news. The newswoman had said that The Kings Fall was the third tallest building in Magnus, with an ornate art deco design. They had even shown footage of the blaze consuming the structure from the inside out. The pressure bursting windows into jagged eyes and the heat melting the fire escapes into twisting hunks of metal hanging uselessly from its sides like broken limbs.
He had lived within 2 miles of the Paper Mill that gave his neighborhood its name for his entire life, he'd seen the proofing fires, the giant funnels that pumped steam into the air. He'd called it the ‘cloud factory’ when he was small, the billowing puffs of white steam resembling the cotton-y clouds of a sunny day. The Kings Fall fire wasn't like that, it was devastating. It burned hot and white, lasting for days. Apparently, it would have cost the city too much to tear the place down, because the towering eye-sore now sits as a burnt out husk, an effigy really, in the middle of Carventi.
The Oriole burned for 7 hours, mostly due to the old fire hydrants of Grant's Ville lacking the power needed to quench the flames. Once inside he noticed that whole swaths of the building sat unharmed, patiently waiting for their inhabitants to return. The first floor of the Oriole had double height ceilings, Mrs. Park rented it out as office space. It was always loud, the lobby echoed something awful, but now it sat perfectly silent.
He used the back staircase to get up to the 4th floor. He could practically taste the ash on his tongue as he went further down the mismatched hallways. It was like one of those spinning bird and cage illusions; thaumatropes. He can picture it - one side of the card burned - the other pristine - spun faster and faster until it was both, all at once.
The door, which had been busted open, looked like the maw of some great creature when he reached it. That intrusion was not what struck him, but something else entirely; The apartment, the one he had lived in for the last 2 years, was empty. It was eerie, in a way. He'd never seen it empty. He'd been sick and staying at Sal's when his Ma moved everything in using the old freight elevator. By the time he first saw the place, it was full of mis-arranged furniture and half empty boxes.
The Oriole was a proper hotel back in the day, and so their apartment was laid out oddly. The kitchen and bathroom shoved right up by the door, dark as all get out. The main room bisected by the old boudoir screen that detonated half of it as his Ma's room. The odd longer-than-it-was-wide dressing room that became his bedroom. It didn't have a door, just an old set of beaded curtains that his Ma had said made the place feel 'bohemian'.
His bed was gone - as were the normally comic book filled pile of milk crates he used as a nightstand and his wicker bookshelf was empty. The window sill was devoid of the old knickknacks he had collected over the years - the glass bird and the tin soldier and the ancient coffee can full of spare change and the wooden cat and the tiny porcelain rabbit Christmas ornament with even tinier wire joints. The old metal travel case his Ma used as a tv stand was gone, and with it the hundreds of photos she stored within. The old pale blue loveseat, Ma's daybed, the half-broken TV and the nesting tables they used to eat dinner on and the cracked hand painted flower pot where Ma liked to store her scarves. The coffee machine and the paint splattered kitchen stool and the baby pink music box. The photos on the fridge and the wall tapestries and the goddamned posters in his room. Everything he had ever known and thought of as his was gone. Not burned, not rendered to ash and cinder as he had been expecting, but gone. As if someone had stolen them all away. The only proof of fire in the apartment were the singed and tattered remains of the deep blue drapes in the main room and his own sooty shoe prints.
He sat for a long while, staring at his own footprints on the scuffed parquet floors - the only proof of his existence - and all he could think of was a rhyme the neighborhood kids would chant in the spring, when the insects returned to Magnus.
Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,
Your house is on fire,
Your children shall burn!