Igneous Range

The events to be recounted in the following pages transpired in that most mythical of lands, the country of my birth.

Of late named “Gold Mountain” by the Chinese imagination, that fabled land was first mentioned—it appears—in the 11th Century epic poem, the Song of Roland, wherein the bard mentions a land he calls Califerne.

According to eminent mythologist A.J. Carnoy, Califerne was a derivative of the Persian Kar-i-Farn or Kar-i-Farneh. One can easily imagine such a corruption being born on the tongue of a Frenchman, given the French treatment of the letters L and R. Kar-i-Farn, it turns out, is the name of a great fire-temple crowned mountain in ancient Persia, a land famous for its stone griffins, guardians of the Persian Empire.

It would be natural that the legends concerning divine fires, the paradises on the mountains, and the marvellous birds which kept them or transported them were located on the mountain of Kár or Kár-i-farn (Kár of the farnah) as one had to call it.

—A.J. Carnoy

Centuries after the bard sang of Roland, Garcia Rodriguez de Montalvo revived this mythical land of griffins in his romance, Las Sergas de Esplandian (ca. 1510 A.D.). Montalvo called it California. He seemed to have based this fictional land upon a place known to his readers by the same name, whether real or fictional:

In this island called California, because of the great ruggedness of the country and the innumerable wild beasts that lived in it, there were many griffins, such as were found in no other part of the world.

Montalvo imagined this isle of California to be east of the Indies, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that when a rugged, griffin-inhabited island was discovered west of America, that it occurred to a Spaniard to call the island “California.”

And make no mistake: there were indeed griffins in California. L. T. White of UCLA reported that in 1647, Bisselius the Jesuit insisted that in California

griffins (gryphes) are found; and this is not a fable but the truth.

With such reports on the record, it’s easy to see how the name California stuck.

But of course we have learned much since those times. We know today, for instance, that California is no island (though it may have appeared to be, looking at it from across the Gulf of California). And we also know that no griffins inhabit California. Or do we?

There is actually a very large Californian raptor that once had the scientific name Pseudogryphus californiacus, and for good reason. Today we call it the California condor. It is not even the state bird, yet it may have been one of the primary reasons—or even the primary reason—why California got its name from an epic poem and a romance novel.

Cindy was generally regarded as something of a tomboy, but I think that was more by virtue than by inclination. I don’t think she could help being seen as a tomboy given the strength in her arms and her hawk-like eye. It is true enough that she didn’t seem to yearn to be included by girls or chased by boys, but that, I think, was due to a sense of personal autonomy on her part. It wasn’t as though she wouldn’t join in a tea party or a slumber party if invited, but she did not hunger for whatever social status was conferred by such rituals.

I remember first noticing that she seemed to have strong arms and great hand-eye coordination. It was during an impromptu baseball game on the back lot. We needed players, so we invited her to join us. Everyone was surprised at her native talent for throwing the ball and swinging the bat. Cindy seemed just as surprised as any of us, and make no mistake, she enjoyed her sudden success, but I think in Cindy’s case “success” was just as much between her and her body as between her and the boys. She had learned a lesson about herself that she would continue to build upon.

I remember the time I let her try my new slingshot. She took it and knocked a nut out of our walnut tree. Her arm never seemed too shy to pull hard. Her eyes always seemed steady and undistracted. They seemed to take hold of whatever they focused upon. It was a little spooky, but it wasn’t like they were shifty or scheming eyes. They were just very strong and certain.

Cindy always carried an air of confidence, even when she was uncertain about something. She could be aloof or engaging from moment to moment, but she wasn’t flighty. She just didn’t seem to care to belabor one moment at the cost of the next. She never seemed to crave anyone’s attention, but she was no solitary daydreamer. She would draw you in with her practical charm, but she never made an effort to keep anyone close. She was far from incurious, but she sometimes seemed aloof toward social events. It seemed that the society of her peers, though of passing interest to her, held no special place in her heart.

There was one thing that got under Cindy’s skin: fire. This was really peculiar given that she was raised in that pyrophyllic Armenian culture. Though her family and relatives never passed up an opportunity to adore a fire, Cindy would stubbornly reject the very thought, and if one pressed her they would have to contend with a violent anger or mad fear, or even a combination of both.

Cindy was rarely preoccupied or inaccessible, but she always seemed to be occupied with something. Because of this practical inclination, she did well in school, though she didn’t appear to derive much pleasure from the approval of her teachers. Like anyone she had her days, and there were those days that fire ruined completely.

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.

One hot night in July, the Adroushans were sitting watching TV before bed. The windows of the house were open to prevent the house from cooking its inhabitants. The Adroushans heard shouting outside, competing with the audio of the TV. Armen ran out to see what was going on, then burst in a moment later to report that the Hacienda was on fire. The Hacienda was a Mexican restaurant down the street. Armen grabbed a drink out of the fridge and ran back outside. Mother and father followed. The crying of sirens soon followed them. Cindy waited inside, then thought better of it, and walked out to the street to keep a watchful eye on the fire down the way. Her pyrophyllic family was down at the corner, admiring the flames up close.

Cindy did not approach the ruins of the fire for days, but spent hours in front of her own house keeping an eye on the wreckage, as if on a fire watch. Cindy got precious little sleep. Finally, Armen talked her into getting a closer look so that she’d know that the fire was truly dead.

Once Cindy gained the courage to approach the corner, she would walk by it often, over and over again, looking into the black, saturated ruins. Neighbors, kids at school, and people at the supermarket checkout line all wondered aloud about the cause: Arson? A casually discarded cigarette? A gas leak? A grease fire? Cindy listened, and she silently inquired into each suspect and brooded.

How could grease start a fire?, she asked herself. Nobody in her family gave her a very good explanation, so she tried asking a librarian. She was given a book that gave an explanation, but she needed help understanding the explanation. It occurred to her that a firefighter might know, so she dropped by the fire station that was a block out of her way on her way home from school. A friendly firefighter took the time to explain to her how water can expand quickly when heated, and how steam could blast out of pan like steam from a kettle, or even an old locomotive. Then the firefighter showed her some superheated grease. The firefighter then explained to Cindy how the steam could carry the grease very far very fast, and Cindy began to understand. She understood that even water and cooking oil could conspire to burn a building down. She could see it quite clearly. But this enlightenment only deepened Cindy’s fear.

Grandpa Adroushan took his gardening shears out of his overalls and cut the stem and cap off the fruit, and said, “anyone up for a friendly game of pomeball?”

Armen hurried off to fetch the baseball bat.

The Adoration of the Magi — Leonaert Bramer, ca. 1634.

Armen thought about what his grandfather had said about Armenians having once been something his grandfather called “Magians.” Grandpa-A tossed him the pomegranate and he foul-tipped the fruit-ball down at the ground.

Armen let out a question. “Grandpa, was our family Magian before they were Christian?”

Grandpa-A replied that he didn’t know for sure and he reminded Armen that Armenians have been Christian for a very long time, and tossed the next pitch.

Armen missed it completely. Strike two. Cindy waited at Grandpa-A’s side, hoping to field anything that Armen might manage to hit. She turned to Grandpa-A and asked, “what’s a Magian?”

Her grandfather answered that he didn’t really know, except for what he’d said about prophecy and astronomy, and also that they kept fire temples—that they had a high regard for fire, just as Armenians still do.

Armen hit the pitch, cracked the game ball open. “You get the next one, Cindy,” promised Grandpa-A, and they sat together in the shade of an apricot tree, picking the red arils out of their respective shards.

The new turn gave Sam new hope, but no hope the fire water could not by then overcome. The influence of the fire water grew until its scent permeated the house. The very walls, even the frame of house seemed saturated with it, as it were the wick of a lamp.

Mehran’s mother opened his bedroom window and sat on his bedside. She picked up Huckleberry Finn from his bedside table and read several pages to him. She turned to see that he was asleep, kissed him, patted Mehrzad goodnight, and switched off the bedroom light.

The dragon leapt out of the coffee can and reached out to the tall, yellow August grass. It devoured the hay in big mouthfuls, sucking in the air and exhaling smoke, sending a black-haired boy, a yellow dog, and a swarm of yellow jackets flying in a whirling stinging flurry through the flaming night. Mehran heard the the distant sirens, and ran before the wasp swarm, desperate to be far gone before the arrival of the yellow-jacketed giants in their gigantic red trucks. He remembered how the giants rivaled the height of houses, and he ran harder yet.

Boy and dog ran through the streets of Bakersfield until the boy succumbed to exhaustion, and collapsed under the cover of a shrub. After a day and night of flight and hiding from the fire and his guilt, Mehran grew very hungry, and he looked at Mehrzad and knew the poor dog was doing no better, so they crept through the next town they came upon, scrounging whatever food they could, and continued to do so together for days and nights on end. And so the two brothers continued on from town to town, Mehran fearing the the scene of his crime, and Mehrzad was not about to leave his brother’s side.

It was about then when Sam began to have the dream. He would find himself looking back on his burning home, and he would see something move in a window. He drew cautiously closer to see what the movement might have been, and looks through the window to see a girl in her nightgown, facing away from him, brushing her hair before her mirror. He tried to open the window, but it was locked or jammed. Then he saw her stop brushing, as if she had heard him. She begins to turn slowly to her left, as if to bring her window into view, and Sam is stricken by panic, fearing that she might see him and identify him in his guilt, and he is frightened into the waking world. He bolts up in a sweat, and just as often as he does, he runs out onto the road and runs, and runs, and Huck jumps up out of his own slumber to run by Sam’s side.

He could never stay with the dream long enough to meet the girl’s eyes. He could never remain calm enough to continue.

Soundtrack: Bob Dylan, High Water (for Charlie Patton)

The fire burned down from heaven upon the vast, white wastes. When stone burns, it is like burning iron: it becomes a red and yellow liquid. So it was with the white wastes. They liquefied in the sun, but their lava was blue; a deep, absorbent blue. It sucked in the fire of the sun, and the fire burned through it, washing through the blue lava in warm currents of blue flame, liquefying more and more of the frozen wastes. This it did until the entire earth was awash in the blue lava, with hot spots spattering and raining the lava onto the land, sometimes cooling and hardening—sometimes streaming down landscapes back to the blue lava sea, or pooling up into seas on the land.

A warm, Hawaiian breeze blew across the surface of the great fog.

Deep under that placid lake surface, at the bottom of the fishless, stagnant white murk, Sam’s child-form lay sleeping, dreaming of koi fingerlings, slowly maturing into their reds, oranges, and blacks—flowing through ponds like flames of water.

The rain pattered and pattered on the pond surface, echoing the pattering on the roof over his head. The rain pattered and pattered on the streets, and the leaves of trees. It pattered on the canals, though the canals were already full. It puddled up around the corners of baseball diamonds, along the trails that cut through vacant lots, and randomly in supermarket parking lots. It puddled against curbs, and then it puddled against storm drains. It pressed against cellar windows, and trickled around the panes. Rivulets crept through the dusty earth in the crawlspace.

A glass fell over onto its table, and the water spilled out in all directions, covering every inch of the table, as though it were searching out every dry spot to consume.

In the mountains, the rain pattered the grassy slopes, the chaparral, the forests, and the exposed stone. Then it pattered the snow, breaking it up, pulverizing it—bit by bit, and liquefying it. The snows flowed into the rivers, over the spillways, through the canals, and over the levees.

And what were once fish ponds were suddenly fishing holes in a broad, shallow river. The koi arose from their sleep in the bottoms, following the flood into the resurrected lake.

Sam sprang up from his dreams, and lept out of bed to look out his bedroom window. He turned, ran out into the hall, across the back porch, and down the back steps into the flood. He slogged through the dark water, paused, turned back, and could only see the glare of the floodlight on the surface. He turned back ahead and slogged on toward the pond. He came to the gate, opened it against the current, and saw a gold flash through the water at his side. He turned around, then turned back through the open gate, and gazed across the black, rippling surface.

She saw white stone—miles and miles of it, and she heard a pulse—she felt the pulse. It was hot. Deep fractures in the rock screamed with superheated water, and as she looked deeper the heat intensified and the white rock acquired a glow around the cracks.

She followed the fractures upward and upward for miles, until she broke out into a cold darkness. She saw the face of the rock as the stars began to appear one by one. The face of the rock the face of a woman—no, it was her face—and she was suddenly beautiful, even as bald stone. It was asleep. She floated upward in the air before it. She heard the steam whistling, and looked down to see tiny, capillary geysers spraying out of her breast.

The light intensified. She looked up to see a dawn wrapped around the crown of the stone head, and a blinding daystar broke over the horizon. Clouds gathered around the head, clinging to it like the hair of a world. The clouds darkened as they thickened, and just as the clouds seemed about to obscure the sun they began to boil and crack. Lightning bolts wrapped the head like silver hair, and her shoulders ignited, the flames blowing from right to left and climbing the leeward side of the head, up to the crown, and nearly licking the sun. The distant stars still shone above the sun, clouds, lightning, and fire. The stone face began to subtly crack and heave. The tiny geysers, like eyelashes, began to arc around the covered rises of her eyes. The stone eyelids began to lift.