Some—if not all—fears appear to be acquired tastes. Oftentimes a child will first appear to be blissfully aloof to a danger, only to slowly mature into one paralyzed by irrational fear. Not to imply that the hazard is as a rule unreal, but that the fear itself is out of proportion with the risk. It has seemed to me for some time now that this was the case with Cindy Adroushan’s fear of fire.
The whole thing started so very innocently, with a minor burn. At first, her parents were amused at how well she learned the lesson. Her brother Armen, they’d recalled, had forgotten the lesson by suppertime. Cindy didn’t forget. She thought about it. She internalized the lesson, a lesson that might have been better forgotten.
She watched fires attentively, but always from a safe distance (which grew and grew over time). She watched the gas burners on the kitchen stove, and she followed the gas line from the back of the stove to the wall. Later, she discovered that a similar line fed the clothes drier. She dropped down to the utility room floor and saw the reflected blue light of the burners. When she later discovered the water heater and the furnace, she began to envision streams of fire flowing throughout the walls of the house, and she wondered what stopped the fire from escaping and burning up her home. She would watch the hot drier exhaust blow out of the house, or when she would feel the hot air blow out of the furnace registers, it seemed to Cindy that the blue fire was exhaling. She began to have bad dreams about the blue fire. She would wear warm clothes around the house so that she could better avoid the breath of the fire, and she spent more and more time outdoors. Then came the day that she considered the exhaust blowing out of the back of the family car, and she realized the fire must be burning in the engine of the car. She saw footage of cars exploding and burning, seemingly spontaneously, on TV. She heard warnings about gas leaks after earthquakes.
This attitude on Cindy’s part toward fire may seem quite neurotic, even psychotic, and perhaps there was some neurosis or psychosis as well, but I think it’s important to recognize that Cindy wasn’t imagining a non-existent hazard. What she feared was—and is—a real threat. The problem for Cindy and her family what that she was too aware of that threat to function normally. And this phobia was no mere inconvenience; it was a source of embarrassment for the Adroushans, particularly when among their fire-infatuated Armenian relatives.