by Susheila Khera

A black smudge is slowly creeping across the flat blue sky and coming into view through the ICU waiting room window. It’s twenty below zero and a brilliant day in February in Fairbanks, Alaska. The snow covering the ground has crystallized into a thick blanket of frost, each flake sparkling like an icy version of the lacy paper cutouts made in school and taped to the classroom window. Thin and delicate, they would melt within seconds on bare skin. Throw a handful into the air and it lands with the tinkle of glass.

I’ve been sitting in the waiting room for a while now. It could be a half hour, it could be three hours. I didn’t notice the cloud until a group of people came in. A man, his arm around a woman who’s sobbing into a handkerchief, sits down with her on the orange vinyl couch across from me. Friends find the few empty chairs or lean against the wall. Every few minutes the door opens and someone else comes in, touches the woman gently on the shoulder, and then joins the others. The man nods his head toward the window. “Yeah,” he says, “that’s the smoke. They lost that whole building.”

I look out and see a black mess spreading across the flawless sky.

My brother-in-law, the only adult family member in town, is on his way. This was before cell phones and I’d called him from the phone in the lobby.

The doctor comes in and kneels in front of the sobbing woman. He tells her about the condition of her husband. The burned lungs and throat. The face, the arms, the legs. He explains that as soon as the plane arrives, sometime late tonight, they’ll medivac him to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, one of the largest burn care hospitals in the United States.

“Now don’t you worry about anything,” her friend tells her as soon as the doctor leaves. He pulls her closer. “We’ll take care of everything.” Others in the room nod. They’ll look after her kids, her house, the dog. They’ll give her whatever money she needs for this. They’ll do anything.

That morning, a propane explosion at the Air Force base just outside of town destroyed a 300-foot-long building and three people were severely burned. One of them was my husband Bruce. I got the call mid-morning at work from the chaplain at the base. His voice sounded young and shaky and he couldn’t answer my questions. All he could tell me was that Bruce was being taken to the hospital in an ambulance and that he’d been burned on his face, his arms, his back. I rushed to leave, but it was too cold and my car wouldn’t start. A co-worker drove me to the hospital, and during the short drive I wondered what adjustments we might have to make in our future for blindness.

Sitting in the waiting room, I’d already seen Bruce down in the ER. The doctor spoke to me briefly before I went in. He said his eyes were okay, but they were swollen shut because his face was burned. He was on his back, his elbows resting on the bed, and he was holding his hands up and away from his body. They were a tattered mess because he’d put out his burning hair with them. His knees were drawn up and he was moving them back and forth to ease the pain of his burned legs. But he seemed perfectly calm and lucid, and we talked. I could touch his shoulders, which weren’t burned. The first thing he said was to be sure I got the silver egg. I looked at the nurse, dumbfounded, and wondered if he’d lost his mind. “He took his daughter’s silver egg to work with him,” she said. “It was in his pocket.” I nodded with relief. We had given his daughter a solid silver egg one Easter and made the wax mold from one of our own chicken eggs. Bruce had taken it to work that morning to show to someone. The egg was in the manila envelope with his personal effects that I somehow got a few days later from the Air Force. It was intact, except for one flat spot embossed with the woven pattern of Bruce’s pants.

When I see Bruce next, he’s in the womb of ICU. Calm nurses are plugging in IVs and bandaging those bloody hands. His voice is scratchy and his eyes are shut, but miraculously he’s in good humor and appears to be fully conscious. Mike, his older brother, has come, and Bruce wants to be sure we use the tickets for that night’s hockey game. It’s a special event, the Japanese Olympic team vs. the Swiss Olympic team. The silly thoughts we sometimes have when our life changes drastically and instantly. Did he really think we would enjoy going to a hockey game while he was in the hospital with 46% of his body burned? It must have been shock, nature’s gift to help us do what’s necessary when everything blows up.

Through an IV, drugs slowly drip into his bloodstream. There’s morphine to mask the pain, Valium to forget it. Mike and I stand by his bedside and chat while the doctor and the nurse work on him. When the doctor finishes, he stretches his latex gloves and flamboyantly zings them into the waste receptacle. He’s a bit stout, in his early fifties, and exudes a cheer and professional ability that instills confidence. This is the last moment of calm, the last we see of Bruce before he’s swallowed by the dark sea of pain and morphine and beyond our grasp. His lifeline is a network of nurses. Patient and kind, they hold him through every horror and tribulation and give the care needed for the doctor’s procedures to work.

I don’t know how long we were there. It didn’t seem long, but I think it was. After we leave, our first stop is to tell his nine-year-old daughter Mariah, who is at home with her mother and stepfather. She’s been crying because she already knows. Her mother works at the hospital and learned of the accident earlier and told her. We sit and talk. After that, we go to Mike’s house and start making the dreaded phone calls. His mother, who lives in Oregon, starts to cry and says she’ll be there tomorrow. His father, who lives in California, and his sister, who lives in Washington, make their arrangements. When those exhausting chores are finally done, Mike drives me home. I crawl into bed and look across the darkness of the wooded valley and over the ridge to town. I can just see the beacon on top of the hospital some ten miles away, flashing its steady blue, white, and red over the complexity of help, healing, and hell inside.

The next morning, Bruce’s head is as big as a basketball and he’s breathing through an oxygen tube. Two evenly spaced, three-inch-long lengthwise slices, crusted over with blood, mark the back of each hand where the doctor performed the escharotomy in the night. This was to relieve the pressure from the swelling skin and maintain blood circulation. The doctor shows Mike and me the $1,700 obsidian scalpels that he used. They rest on the white towel like thin strips of smoked glass. One broke while he muscled it through the thickened, leathery skin. Of the many days and hours of pain and uncertainty in Bruce’s recovery, the events of that one night spawned almost two decades of insomnia alternating with nightmares for him.

He and his brother are in a hallway and his brother is negotiating with someone. The deal is, either Bruce gives up his life or he agrees to have all of his teeth pulled.

Bruce is sitting on a chair and his tibia is sticking out of his tattered calf. The flesh is ragged and has retracted, like a drumstick that’s been left on the grill too long. Bruce has a saw, and while his father calmly watches, Bruce starts to cut his dry, white bone, which is round and smooth. “See,” he says, “it doesn’t even hurt.” He watches the bone dust drift down and accumulate under his leg.

Death squads, beatings, brutal drownings. Nightmares of such magnitude that he would wake up violently shaking. He would get up and sit at the kitchen table or on the couch, naked, reading the paper, waiting until he was so cold that he had to go back to bed and warm up. And then he would lie there, dreading the possibility of sleep.

The explosion was at 8:20 in the morning. At the far end of the large work yard, a loader was parked, its amber beacon flashing. Hanging precariously from its bucket by a chain was a 1,200 gallon propane tank, approximately twelve feet long. It was around one-third full, someone later said. Two workers had lifted the tank with the loader so they could move it, but in the process the bottom discharge valve broke out, leaving about a one inch hole. Knowing the propane was draining, the workers called the fire department.

Inside the adjacent multi-level building, which was actually an enormous refurbished submarine garage from WWII that had been moved to Fairbanks from Adak in the Aleutians, it was business as usual. People were busy in offices or getting ready to go out on a job. Bruce worked there as a civilian, a lead in the base hazmat department. That morning, he was downstairs with some members of his crew, preparing to go to a meeting. Suddenly the power went off and they were left in the dark. Someone lit a Bic lighter to find the door. Out in the work yard, people were spilling from all parts of the building and moving toward the outside of the cyclone fence that surrounded the yard. No one said why the building was being evacuated or why the lights had gone out. Bruce walked toward his truck. He looked to the far end of the work yard and saw the loader. A tank hung from the bucket like a humongous log. Two suited-up firemen ambled by, chatting, their masks hanging down on their chest. He turned to leave and took one more look toward the loader, just in time to see two explosions. The first one shot straight up like a rocket, about as high as a telephone pole, while the second one blasted into the loader cab. And then a wall of fire, some 40 feet high and 300 feet across, roared toward him. He felt it hit him like a bus. He felt the heat crawl up his back. He heard his hair sizzle. He said, “Please don’t let it last too long.”

When he regained consciousness, there was absolute silence. He was standing on the cold asphalt, his high-top tennis shoes and socks gone. He looked down and watched as a pretty little blue wave rolled by, lapped at his bare ankles, and kept going. On the other side of the chain link fence he saw the faces of the crowd. No one moved or spoke. Something that looked like latex gloves was hanging from his fingertips. His pants were on fire. The area had just been cleared of snow, but there was still some left at the edge of the yard. He hurried over, sat down, and piled it onto his legs. Months later we read the transcripts of the fire department transmission that were included in the accident investigation report. “Man on Fire! Man on Fire!” is how they described the scene.

Bruce’s mother comes up the next day. From the airport we go straight to the hospital, and the nurses suit her up to visit Bruce in the isolation room to which he has recently been moved. Mike and I watch through the observation window, and I marvel at how much the swelling in his head has subsided. His mother walks back and forth, from one side of the bed to the other, touching Bruce and saying everything will be all right. “All I see is Bruce,” she tells us. “That’s all I see.”

A few days later his father arrives, and then his sister. We are in and out of the intensive care unit for visits, and each time we are required to don paper shoe covers, robe, mask, cap, latex gloves. The doctor won’t let Mariah visit just yet; she’s too young to see her father in such a state. She makes do by calling him from the visitor phone in the waiting room. After she hangs up the first time she cries and says he sounds like an old man.

One of his friends sends a cassette tape with the sound of a crackling campfire. “Doesn’t that feel good,” he says on the tape. “It’s okay. You can come closer. Come on. This is a good fire.” Bruce’s mother and I are confused and appalled. Why is he sending this? Doesn’t he know? I switch it off. Months later, I start to see the wisdom of his gift and what he wanted Bruce to remember about fire.

Where he isn’t burned, skin is harvested for his ankle, leg, and hand grafts. The doctor saves the expanse of his back in case he has to use it for his face. Fortunately, this isn’t necessary. He has daily physical therapy and regular doses of drugs. And then there are washings and debridings, another well of nightmares for years. Every day, at first twice and later only once a day, two nurses transfer Bruce onto a gurney and wheel him down to the whirlpool. When I first heard about this, I thought it was a gentle, caressing bath to salve his wounds. In reality, the patient’s body is scrubbed with water to clean off dead and damaged skin and reduce the risk of infection. The patient is placed on a mat that is supported by a tubular frame and suspended from a chain hoist, and then he is lowered into the whirlpool. Instead of being a soothing bath, it’s more like being skinned alive. No drugs can fully erase the pain. One late evening in the ICU, knowing he still had to go down to the whirlpool, Bruce became increasingly agitated and kept looking at the clock saying, “They can’t possibly remember. I think they forgot. It’s too late for them to remember.”

At the end of the second week, Bruce is out of the ICU. By now his ankles, legs and hands have been grafted and the swelling on his face is diminishing daily. The night that Mariah finally gets to visit him, she peeks into his room and sees him lying on the bed with his emergency room crewcut and his entire face and head glossy with a generous coating of Bacitracin. “What’s the big deal?” she says. “He just looks like some guy from the Fifties.” Who knows what terrible things she had imagined up to that point.

Bruce’s goal is to get out of the hospital as soon as possible. He has a calendar dangling above his head and we cross off each day that’s passed. He can’t grip a pen or pencil because his hands have a heavy wrapping of Adaptic, gauze, and Ace bandages and his fingers are frozen with K-wires. These are six-inch-long stainless steel rods that the doctor drilled through all three joints of each finger and both thumbs to immobilize them for the grafting surgery. Their ends stick out of the back of each knuckle and thumb. When the time comes to remove them, almost two weeks after his surgery, the doctor winds them out with a special brace while Bruce pulls away in the opposite direction to provide resistance. He isn’t given any anesthesia. The pain is an excruciating burn, as though his tendons are being pulled out. When Bruce looks at his grafted hands for the first time, a long-anticipated moment, all he sees are ugly, bloody claws for which no one has prepared him.

His diet is a prescribed daily intake of 3,500 calories. He rejects the chalky, high-calorie canned drink provided by the hospital and instead downs yogurts that the nurses feed him. The first time he gets out of bed, he tells the nurses he doesn’t need any help. One of them catches him as he crumples toward the floor. “What did you think?” she asks, laughing good-naturedly, “that you were just going to get up and walk?” His muscles have atrophied from the long bed rest and he has to rebuild his strength. Each day, between changing dressings, eating, and resting, he goes to physical therapy and the whirlpool, now less the dreadful procedure from earlier. He does hand exercises and leg work. During the last few days he starts walking the halls on his own. His father is concerned about him coming home because he doesn’t think he’ll be able climb the stairs. “Let’s just see!” says Bruce, leading the way to the hospital stairwell. He goes up and down a few steps while his father, brother, and I watch. “See! No problem!”

He comes home in March, exactly one month after the accident. Our neighbor plows the driveway and finishes just as Mike pulls up with Bruce. Our neighbor gets out of his plow truck to say hi, but he can’t look Bruce in the face. He seems humbled, doesn’t know which words to use.

Our small house is a hub-bub of activity for the next three weeks with the entire family there. Bruce shuttles back and forth between the house and the hospital for physical therapy and the home health care nurse visits daily. She teaches us how to wrap the dressings and put on his pressure garments, the pants, and gloves, without chafing or tearing his delicate skin grafts. And then his father, sister, and mother leave, each a few days after the other, and it’s quiet and we have the house to ourselves. I go to work and Bruce continues with his therapy. He can drive again, and we settle into what seems like a routine.

Oddities start to crop up. One time he forgets to put on one of his socks before going to physical therapy. Another time, he leaves the front door ajar and goes to town. And propane is suddenly everywhere. In trucks rolling down the road, at a friend’s barbecue, at the back of every restaurant. People toss five gallon canisters into their cars as easily as though they were filled with water. If there’s a propane delivery truck stopped at a red light, we stay at least two car lengths away. Even if the underground storage tanks are being filled at a gas station, we go somewhere else to refuel. Forever after, we don’t book a hotel room anywhere above the 8th floor, which is as high as the ladder truck will reach. It’s not about dying. It’s about surviving another fiery explosion.

One way Bruce faces the demon of fire is to help those caught in its path. One time he’s called to the hospital to assure a young boy who has been severely burned in a four-wheeler accident that being fitted for a plastic face mask won’t hurt. Another time he visits a young man who was caught in a house fire while sleeping. Bruce designs and makes glove stretchers out of brass welding rod for him so he can get his gloves on and off alone. One New Year’s Eve a couple of years later, this young man calls Bruce and thanks him for all he’s done. Another time, long after his accident, Bruce reads about two children on a family vacation in Alaska. One night in the motel where they are staying in Fairbanks, a pipe in the ceiling breaks and leaks hot glycol onto the children while they sleep. Bruce visits them in the hospital and tells the parents to be watchful for nightmares. The following Christmas, they send him a card and let him know how valuable that warning was. So many others, once they hear his story, roll up a pant leg or a sleeve, pull out their shirt collar, say, “You and I have something in common.”

When something is burned, it wants to curl up. Lay a piece of birch bark on a glowing coal and watch it. The same thing happens to a person’s body. A burn patient only has about six months in which to control the initial scarring and regain full function of his hands and other joints. You have to work every day to keep the skin and tendons from contracting and shortening, curling over, bunching up on themselves.

Fixing Bruce’s severely damaged hands was critical. And because hands are so intricate, they require the most care and attention. His fingernails were brown, as though stained by years of nicotine. The fenestrated grafts were laid across the backs of his hands and fingers and halfway onto his palms. Inside, his tendons were contracting. After the stabilizing rods were removed, his fingers were immobile, as though petrified. To loosen them, the therapist had to gently manipulate each one by the tiniest fractions of painful motion. Gradually Bruce could move them enough himself to start on a range of exercises that he had to do several times daily. His goal was to make a fist. I would wake up at two in the morning and find him doing his hand exercises.

To reduce scarring, he wore pressure garments. A pair of pants similar to heavy-duty panty hose covered his feet, ankles, and legs. His gloves were of the same material. Scar tissue was constantly trying to form a web between his fingers and thicken across the backs of his hands. For the custom-made gloves, the therapist would measure each finger and send the measurements to the factory. But each time, the gloves would come back and be either too large or too tight, or a seam would painfully press against a joint. Pressure ulcers formed on Bruce’s knuckles. We asked the therapist if there was another source, this was before the Internet, and she gave us the name of the only other company in the country that made such garments. Bruce called them and spoke with someone who could help, and we made photo copies of his hands, noted the measurements on them, and sent them in. The gloves fit better with this system, but after a few months he was wearing two pairs because one simply didn’t seem to provide enough pressure. He stuffed one or two cotton balls between each finger to tamp down the persistent webbing. One night in July, barely five months after the accident, he wanted to see what would happen if he didn’t wear his gloves. Within hours, the backs of his hands were a crazy swirled mass of thick red scar tissue.

On his face, a webbing was developing between the inside corners of his eyes and his nose. The therapist ordered an elastic stocking-type pressure mask that made him look like an IRA terrorist. It even came with a card for the wearer to present to bank tellers and others, assuring them that he was a burn patient, not a robber. The mask didn’t apply pressure where it was most needed and it was hot, uncomfortable, and made Bruce feel freakish. Wearing it home from the hospital on the first day, he pulled up to a red light next to a carload of teenage girls. They looked over and started laughing. After repeatedly requesting a better option, he finally asked the therapist, “Where would you get a mask for someone in your family?”

“Oh, for my family?” she said, and then recommended someone in Anchorage. We went to see him and he made a beautiful plastic mask from a mold of Bruce’s face. He wore it for eleven months, night and day.

His mouth was shrinking. He could hardly open it wide enough to take a bite of sandwich, and his lips were tight and brittle. The corners tore easily, even from something as benign as toast. To halt the steady contracting and try to regain some of its original size, he wore an MPA, a microstomia prevention appliance, or mouth stretcher. It looked somewhat medieval, with plastic braces that fit into each corner and a protruding medal arc with an adjusting screw, but he’d wear it all day and even most of the night, and it helped soften his lips and stretch his mouth. Thirty years later, he still wears it for a few days before going to the dentist.

Six months after his accident, in August, Bruce, Mariah, and I drove down the Alaska and the Cassiar highway to Seattle. It was a wonderful trip, and for most of the way down Bruce wore his mouth stretcher and worked on his hands. In Seattle, he had an appointment at Harborview Medical Center. The three of us sat in a little room and waited. Suddenly the door opened and the doctor, head nurse, lead physical therapist, and several students came in with a burst of energy. Bruce gave them a condensed version of everything that had brought us to this point.

The lead physical therapist, a tall, steady woman whose warmth was healing in itself, took us to one of the physical therapy rooms, which she called the gym. An energetic calm prevailed. People were busy learning from each other, deeply interested in their work. When they saw Bruce’s plastic mask, they all gathered around and studied it. The ones they were making were thin and shiny and somewhat brittle while his was thicker, duller, but more flexible. They liked it very much.

The therapist asked what hand exercises he’d been doing. He showed her and she nodded, and then she wheeled out a little basin of greenish, minty-smelling melted wax. She asked him to make as much of a fist as he could and dip it into the warm liquid a few times. As soon as he pulled out his half-folded fist for the last time, she placed a sheet of wax paper over it and then wrapped it with an Ace bandage as tightly as Bruce could stand. “Watch this,” she said after a few minutes, and smiled. “This is what amazes people.” She unwrapped the bandage and told him to straighten his fingers. “Now make a fist.” Effortlessly, his fingers closed into a perfect fist. Mariah and I looked at each other in amazement. She had me wrap the other hand after Bruce dipped it, with the same wonderful result. She gave us two big blocks of wax for home and every night, no matter what, we melted it in a double boiler, dipped his hands, wrapped them, and then watched the miracle of the fist. A few months later I ran into a friend of ours and he asked how Bruce was doing, and I told him. “Wax,” he said in his expansive Alabama drawl, nodding. “They got all this equipment and technology, and it comes down to wax.”

Early on, the doctor told us it would take about two years for things to stabilize. It took a little longer, but after about three years things did settle down. As a back-up to our oil furnace, we installed a soapstone woodstove at home. It sat in the middle of the living room for months, still half-packed, while we meticulously thought through every aspect of the installation. When we finally built the first fire, the stone radiated a gentle heat. We’ve spent many hours since with our backs to it, looking out the window, watching the trees, the birds, the sky.

Of all the people we’ve heard about being burned over the years, a story I read in our local newspaper sticks with me most clearly. It was about two young men who were burned when the propane heater in their ice fishing hut blew up. “The way I see it,” one of them said, “I went on a fishing trip one day and never came back.” There is a finality about burning something. It’s simply and irretrievably gone. Like the money in those folk tales about the thrifty peasant wife who hides her savings in the wood cook stove, and then someone lights a fire in it. Like all those books and paintings burned in religious and political upheavals. Like the old love letters we throw into the fire, or the photos, the clothes, the bodies. Bruce went to work one day and never fully came back, although I’d like to think he did. During the worst of his times, for years, he would spend long, lonely hours in the depths of cold winter nights, standing at the window, looking up at the night sky with binoculars, searching for a link, an answer, a friend.

It’s a clear winter night in Alaska and the road I’m on winds through the dark valley and a forest of gnarly and stunted black spruce trees. From a nearby cabin, a bluish haze of smoke floats over the highway like a translucent silk scarf. The inside of the car fills with the smell of woodsmoke and everything slows. This is the lovely aroma of evening. The smell of home and warmth. The smell that comes back to us from hundreds of generations ago. It’s a reassurance, that no matter how the day has been, everything is going to be okay, because a good fire is waiting for you.

Susheila Khera lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Her work has appeared in Catamaran-South Asian American Writing, IceFloe-International Poetry of the Far North, The Northern Review, Cirque-A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim and WoodenBoat Magazine. She also has a chapbook, Step by Careful Step, published by Finishing Line Press. She is a member of the Northwoods Book Arts Guild, a group dedicated to the arts of letterpress and bookbinding, and has participated in group exhibits of the Guild.