The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass

fires, he was riding in one of the back seats of the fire engine facing backwards. He was already packed up—bunker gear, air mask, and scuba tank—so that he couldn’t hear or see well, and he was nervous as hell. When they got to the house that was on fire—a fully involved, “working” fire—the truck screeched to a stop across the street from it. The captain leapt out and yelled to Kirby that the house across the street was on fire.
    Kirby could see the flames coming out of the first house, but he took the captain’s orders to mean that it was the house across the street from the house on fire that he wanted Kirby to attack—that it too must be burning—and so while the main crew thrust itself into the first burning house, laying out attack lines and hoses and running up the hook-and-ladder, Kirby fastened his own hose to the other side of the truck and went storming across the yard and into the house across the street.
    He assumed there was no one in it, but as he turned the knob on the front door and shoved his weight against it, the two women who lived inside opened it so that he fell inside, knocking one of them over and landing on her.
    Kirby tells Mary Ann that it was the worst he ever got the tunnel vision, that it was like running along a tightrope—that it was almost like being blind. They are on the couch again, in the hours before dawn; she’s laughing. Kirby couldn’t see flames anywhere, he tells her—his vision reduced to a space about the size of a pinhead—so he assumed the fire was up in the attic. He was confused as to why his partner was not yet there to help him haul his hose up the stairs. Kirby says that the women were protesting, asking why he was bringing the hose into their house. He did not want to have to take the time to explain to them that the most efficient way to fight a fire is from the inside out. He told them to just be quiet and help him pull. This made them so angry that they pulled extra hard—so hard that Kirby, straining at the top of the stairs now, was bowled over again.
    When he opened the attic door, he saw that there were no flames. There was a dusty window in the attic, and out it he could see the flames of the house across the street, really rocking now, going under. Kirby says that he stared at it a moment and then asked the ladies if there was a fire anywhere in their house. They replied angrily that there was not.
    He had to roll the hose back up—he left sooty hose marks and footprints all over the carpet—and by this time the house across the street was so engulfed and Kirby was in so great a hurry to reach it that he began to hyperventilate, and he blacked out, there in the living room of the nonburning house.
    He got better, of course—learned his craft better—learned it well, in time. No one was hurt. But there is still a clumsiness in his heart, in all of their hearts—the echo and memory of it—that is not that distant. They’re all just fuckups, like anyone else, even in their uniforms: even in their fire-resistant gear. You can bet that any of them who come to rescue you or your home have problems that are at least as large as yours. You can count on that. There are no real rescuers.
    Kirby tells her about what he thinks was his best moment—his moment of utter, breathtaking, thanks-giving luck. It happened when he was still a lieutenant, leading his men into an apartment fire. Apartments were the worst, because of the confusion; there was always a greater risk of losing an occupant in an apartment fire, simply because there were so many of them. The awe and mystery of making a rescue—the holiness of it, like a birth—in no way balances the despair of finding an occupant who’s already died, a smoke or burn victim—and if that victim is a child, the firefighter is never the same and almost always has to retire after that; his or her marriage goes bad,