Two By Fire

The first, Monday morning. The sole remaining resident of the apartment building just a few blocks down from mine--the one on giant pillars, leaving its ground floor open to the air. On the day he was slated to be evicted, he shot himself in the head. Fire built from somewhere--he was said to have about him the record and detritus of decades in that very apartment--and consumed the unit.


Damage to the building was not estimated, as it has been slated for demolition. The man himself was the building’s caretaker. Most did not know the building had any remaining residents.

The second, Friday afternoon. Red Square, University of Washington. A “staff member.” Not faculty, The Post-Intelligencer was quick to mention. He doused himself in gasoline. He sat in a pool of it, right at the center of the square--where the topography of the brick allows a pool to collect. A young man saw him and tried to wrest his matches from his hand.

This failed--the man at the center of the gasoline set himself aflame. The young man, branded a hero, stripped down to his boxers and used his clothing to try to suffocate the flame. Others came, removed their own clothes, fetched fire extinguishers. Others reported their own anguish at their paralysis as the man in the center of Red Square burned.

Eventually the fire was put out; the man at the center, 61 years of age, died from the burns.

I thought immediately of two events: the Vietnamese monk who sacrificed himself in protest, and the Reno woman who attempted to kill herself in her motel room in November of 2006.


The first harmed only himself; he was transformed to icon. His charred skin and his absolute still are, in fact, two of the textures of the Vietnam War for us now. The second survived; she had pushed a mattress against her door and lit it aflame. The resulting fire would eventually kill eleven others. This was the Mizpah Hotel--a residential hotel, a home to those in permanent flux. She was arrested.

When we kill ourselves under fire, perhaps we seek grace. This is too fast and too simple, I know--but what feels more gracious, what feels larger than leaving the world as light, as heat, and overcoming pain to do so?

But fire carries its heat, too: to the shoes of one boy in Red Square, to the rest of the abandoned building in Capitol Hill, to the memories of all who see the image of the immolated priest, and straight through the lives of six others back home in Reno--claiming as home an outpost, a waystation that was lost under the force of someone else’s violent flux.

But still, it feels like lifting--like sublimation. Some are carried out on flame. In the case of the two this week, they leave behind them that had rendered them completely impotent (the first, a new condo development; the second, the bureaucracy of the University): and they responded by turning their bodies to fire.