Barrelhouse Reviews: As If Fire Could Hide Us by Melanie Rae Thon
Reviewed by Joe Sacksteder
Fiction Collective 2 / April 2023 / 206 pp
Melanie Rae Thon’s stunning new book bears the subtitle “a love song in three movements,” and the fathomless gray area between literature and music is only one of many liminalities it’s devoted to exploring. In the extensive white space of the first movement is nested the opening quatrain (poetry and prose being another of the liminalities): “I remember birds / or the shadows of birds / hundreds of hearts / trembling through my body.” Birds and the phrase “the shadows of birds” flit frequently into all three of the movements, acting like a leitmotif lifting above a swell of practiced orchestral parts. To inhabit As If Fire Could Hide Us is like the impossible experience of continuously reading the entire book all at once, every sentence, through fragmentation—line-level, temporal, perspectival—borrowing from music its capacity for simultaneity.
While the end effect is neither gloom nor traditional catharsis, Thon’s three movements feature some of the saddest stories one could imagine. “Orelia, in hiding,” over half of the book’s length, is about a twelve-year-old girl who sneaks out of her house one night and doesn’t come back. The protagonist of the second movement, “The Seventh Man,” is a corrections officer on Death Row who must take turns with his coworkers playing the role of an inmate being executed as “rehearsal” for the real deal. In tragic communion with Orelia, he, too, finds himself on the edge of life and death in a space between civilization and the wilderness: after a haunting day at work, he rolls his car down an embankment. The protagonist of the slim third movement, “The Bodies of Birds,” is Anika, a girl already transitioned to the other side, also the victim of a car crash, who’s given new life and new consciousnesses in the bodies of beneficiaries of her organs.
All three movements feature characters whose work or bad luck involves them in dalliances with life and death. A reader approaching the book as three interconnected stories should seek connections on the associative, thematic, and spiritual levels. Orelia’s mother works late nights at the lab “infusing her aging mice with the plasma of young humans.” In one section of “The Seventh Man,” the dire choreography of Valen Arnoux’s employment is intercut with a memory of childhood in which his father forced him to mercy-kill a wounded calf. There are miracle-working doctors in “The Bodies of Birds,” and there is also a slaughterhouse worker, Anika’s father.
The difficulties of Thon’s avant-garde techniques work to involve readers in the stories’ varied investigations and equip readers with incantatory material to invent the genre of the novel anew. As Orelia’s parents and the authorities search for their daughter in the opening movement, for example, readers perform a search for Orelia’s story amidst boundless tragedy: the struggle for survival of Seattle’s unhoused population, the mistreatment at school of Orelia’s eventual “assailant,” Jude, and the painful deaths from cancer of Jude’s aunt and grandmother. Orelia stows away unseen in the truck of David Zaer, who loved Jude’s grandmother in a past life, and who struck a boy with his car while hung over seven years before. This accident led to his disfigurement, his financial ruin, and his inexhaustible need for penance.
The most powerful “side story” of all (there are no side stories; that’s the point of Thon’s book) is that of Orelia’s father’s absence on the night of her disappearance. By trade, he is a salvage worker, and in the book, he dives over and over searching for—and finally recovering—the body of a child from a boat that sank after a sudden storm. As the storm rolls in on the vessel sooner than forecast, we see the couple doing everything in their power to not understand their predicament. Thon intercuts the wife’s rationalizations in italicized shreds—“all shall be well […] impossible to believe […] we are close, we are safe now […] a story to tell, years after”—with a fuller picture of the unfolding tragedy from various temporalities: “Never in the days and decades to come will she be able to invent a story that explains why the body chooses not to go down, rescue the child first—why it chooses instead to start the engine, circle back, find the father—why in a delirium of dopamine, the body believes saving them all still possible.”
Only when she’s in the ocean rescuing her husband does she see how low the boat is sitting in the water, and she makes the impossible choice of cutting herself free from her literal ship in a storm. And from her child.
This grief-stricken couple’s predicament reveals a theme that keeps surfacing during As If Fire Could Hide Us: one person’s life-line is another’s anchor chain, and myriad life-lines are knotted together in more complicated ways than we could imagine. Orelia’s mother’s scientific work reversing the aging process, her father’s retrieval of a child’s body from the depths of the Pacific—these occupations are what absent them from Orelia’s life on the night of her disappearance. The boat a tomb. De-aging the death of a mouse. The life-line a drowning rope that must be cut.
Storytelling’s role in the lives of these characters is likewise ambivalent. Maybe we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but—to live—we must marshal new stories to undo or revise the old. Thon’s writing doesn’t “freeze” Joan Didion’s “shifting phantasmagoria [of] our actual experience”—it shifts and flickers and flits to help us see life more fully for its phantasmagorical nature. We are beset not just by seemingly random calamities, but also by failing narratives. Thon lingers, delves, and—most importantly—reveals the limitations of how stories are mediated to us. She does this by filling in the lacunae that at best make the cutting room floor—and by giving us glimpses of whole new lacunae that can never fully be filled.
The effect of Thon’s fragmentation is not one of shapelessness. The text’s frequent references to spirals offer a way to assemble the dazzling conclusion of “Orelia, in hiding.” The final pages perform a zooming out that plays back those myriad lacunae that wouldn’t make the breaking news:
In the story, you will find no tattooed cellist, no paramedics pumping the chest of a dead man […] Missing from the story are the children wearing black garbage bags over black hoodies […] You will not be invited to imagine the disappeared […] You will not find filthy clothes in a pile in the bathroom, no bones dissolved, no bog girl revived […] On the nightly news, you will not hear the words xenotransplantation, parabiosis, osteomyelitis, glioblastoma—[…] In the newspaper there is no space for stars—[…] No galaxies, no cosmos, no black holes, no dark energy pulling us apart—[…]
The widening gyre finds us suddenly back at ourselves, reading a page, reading perhaps the most apt summation of what Thon as a whole is giving us: “You will be given no time for contemplation, no openings of white between paragraphs to enter the borderlands where you and not-you dissipate—” In the story’s imagined future, a girl and a man—Orelia and her unbeknownst smuggler, David—assemble stones at water’s edge. It’s like a miniature of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. “If you were here in the particular light of this day,” the text hazards, “you might begin to perceive the stones not as things, but as interludes, occasions, evanescent beings, shimmering stones flecked violet, gold, green, silver—”
As If Fire Could Hide Us is about responsibility, about looking head-on at the disasters we create, about not searching for anything to hide behind. It’s also a project of radical empathy and forgiveness. Especially for Jude, the boy that readers perhaps have the most reason to label an antagonist. We come to understand not why he did what he did to Orelia, but at least how he found himself there. Thon implies that it’s no weakness to see how evil actions can coexist with coincidence, youth, and tragic catalysts beyond a teenager’s volition. The news and the tribunals of social media would likely not follow up on Jude to see how the passage of a few years changes him, how a nurturing vocation—working with bees—might transform such a boy into a person careful enough not to utter the word forgiveness, but rather to do the best he can to live worthiness day by day.
In the second movement, “The Seventh Man,” the atrocity of Leonard Loy Hayes’s crime—robbing a woman and fatally stabbing her husband—can coexist with the cruelty of a botched, state-sanctioned murder: “43 minutes to find a viable vein, 26 to push the drugs—buried alive, nerves on fire.” Years after the execution of Willie Jay McFerrin, “IQ 87,” Valen Arnoux has not stopped relitigating the case—“Errors of fact discovered after a constitutionally fair trial do not require judicial remedy”—and checking over his shoulder for the vengeance of Daniel McFarrin, Willie’s brother. “2,329 human beings,” Arnoux considers the incarcerated, “you can’t scrub, can’t scour, can’t bleach the skin—the smell inside and out—skin of the naked self, the self permeable.” These realizations will become only more pronounced as he battles for his own life in a dark forest after the car crash.
Beyond death, Anika muses in the book’s final movement, “Continuous, miraculous, the bodies I am tonight, uncontained by multitudes.” One beneficiary of her organs is a boy set on fire by bike thieves, a sacrifice that is merely a stopgap on this stranger’s road to recovery. “Weeks or days—soon enough his body will reject mine—” Anika admits, “but now, tonight, as the drugged boy drifts through dreams he won’t remember—red-winged birds falling from the sky, howling dogs, fur on fire—tonight, the collagen of my skin fuses into the scraped clean, scoured pits where once there was blood and muscle.”
If this tragic victim can give of her whole body, the book seems to ask, can’t we try to look at lives and stories in the fullness of their often-messy complexity? Melanie Rae Thon reminds us there’s life—someone’s, somewhere—past all disasters. Fire can’t hide us; grace can reveal us all.
Joe Sacksteder is the author of the story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books) and the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press). Recent publications include Michigan Quarterly Review, West Branch, DIAGRAM, and The Offing. He has his PhD from the University of Utah and teaches at Sweet Briar College in Virginia.