Essay |

“The Explosion”

The Explosion 

 

Each spring when the weather starts getting into the 80s, I climb a ladder onto my roof to take the covers off the attic ventilation turbines. Two years ago, I had an extra half hour in the morning before I was to leave for a poetry reading in another city. So I climbed up and began removing the covers. While up there, I found a gaping hole the size of a basketball. I knew immediately this damage had been caused by debris jettisoned from the explosion down the street a few weeks prior. I called a friend who sent his roofer over the very same day while I was flying east, and he fixed the hole for the cost of the materials. I think the roofer (or my friend) offered this kindness because of my trauma. But I had no trauma that I knew of. Maybe I was flying somewhere far above it. Now, two years later, I sit here in my chair looking for the trauma or signs of it as someone might look for their house when flying over their own city. I’m trying to distinguish the landmarks, the neighborhoods, the parks and football fields, the roads leading here and there, based on the direction I’m heading.

 

***

 

My family is quarantining more thoroughly than most people around us during the pandemic, what some call an explosion of COVID 19. Both my wife and I are at serious risk due to our various respiratory issues. She’s got severe asthma, and I almost died of pneumonia a few years back. With more than a little dark humor, I call us “candidates for death”. To maintain our sanity, like many others, my wife and two girls and I go on evening walks through the neighborhood. Despite the enormous difficulties people are facing, some find ways to make the best of a grim situation, improving not just home but home life. It’s nice to take these family walks, coming across friends out walking, chatting about our upcoming month that we’ll spend in Taos, or just seeing what’s new in the hood.

Yesterday we walked by the house just down the street that exploded two years ago. But that old house is no longer there. A new brick house has finally taken its place. You would think that an architect and builder would take some consideration of the styles of houses in an older neighborhood. The new house shows little creative imagination or evidence of decorum or thoughtful architecture. It was designed by a practical person who understands square footage and profit. A freshly-poured, gray driveway takes up half of the front lot. Situated only ten yards from the street, the house presents to the viewer its oversized two car garage door, its own explosion of flat-out ugliness. Perhaps it is nice inside. Hopefully, the person who owns it will get some trees and shrubs around the front to make it look better. To hide it.

Our neighborhood is situated just to the south of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. It’s the neighborhood where a lot of the professors live. Lubbock is five hours west of Dallas and five hours east of Albuquerque, these streets of Tech Terrace first paved with bricks back in the 1930s and 40s, when this was the edge of town and all the property to the south was cotton fields. The houses are mostly modest, 2- or 3-bedroom, brick, one-story affairs with small closets and small bathrooms, arranged on perfectly parallel streets on quarter-acre lots. Maybe a shed or two to provide a little extra space for storage. Each house has its own unique character. After World War II, a lot of folks built small back houses behind their residences to house many of the soldiers who returned from the war to go to Texas Tech on the GI Bill.

The new house has little character to speak of. One long brick chunk of a building, it takes up nearly the whole front of the lot. The builder clearly wanted to maximize the square footage, so on one side he has set it only about four feet from the fence (maybe ten feet from the house itself) where the neighbor was standing when she was killed. A smaller fire had broken out first somehow, so she and her husband had been spraying down her fence in the backyard with a garden hose. A projectile suddenly launched from the explosion and hit her.

Her husband still lives there, right next door to where it all went up in flames. None of us expected that the new builder would construct the same kind of house with the same footprint, but you’d think there’s got to be a way to … what? to heal? to not leave a scar? to honor or merely respect what was and is already here? Several neighbors had been trying to get the city to approve a small memorial garden, but no.

 

***

 

When the explosion happened, my wife and I were going to bed. It must have been just before ten o’clock, because that’s when our girls went to bed on a week night. A light rain was starting, as low pressure was moving into the area. It’s dry here on the high plains most of the year, especially in the early spring, so we notice when it rains.

A huge boom startled us. It didn’t sound anything like thunder. More like a jet had crashed a block away. We looked at each other. But maybe it was lightning, we thought, until seconds later when the next boom hit. My wife jumped out of bed, looked out the window, and screamed that the neighbor’s house was on fire. On the street behind us about five houses down, flames were raging into the sky from the entire back of the house.

Our girls had awakened and were stunned, standing there in the bedroom doorway. I yelled at them to stay put and do not leave the house. I think I yelled that. I threw on some blue jeans, a shirt, a jacket, laced up my shoes, and I sprinted out the door toward the burning house. When 9/11 happened most people ran away from the buildings, but some ran toward them. I’m not a romantically heroic sort, but after 9/11, I intentionally put it in my head that some day, if I had the opportunity, I would run toward the flames. And this was my time. This was my explosion.

I can run three or four miles at a decent pace with no problem, but the adrenaline had me out of breath after only fifty yards out the door and down the street. Only the back of the house was on fire. I couldn’t see much except for what was lit by the flames shooting skyward, and my glasses were wet from the rain so everything was blurred. Some local college-aged boys were already there on the scene. It seemed someone was trying to bust open a fence gate toward the back of the house and someone had gone into the front door under the carport yelling was there anyone inside. I approached, walking now, trying to think of what I should do, trying to see what was in front of me through my wet glasses. There was a burnt chemical smell. Was it a crash? Jet fuel? Would there be another explosion any second? When I reached the carport, I looked around to see where I might go next. Inside the house? To the back yard where the fire was raging, growing?

I then saw before me in the shadows, as if he had appeared magically, like a fallen angel, a stout, shirtless man on his knees. He was squinting up at me. I can’t breathe, he said. Help me, he coughed. I told a college kid nearby to assist me in getting this guy away from the house. We pulled him up by his arms to standing, and each of us hoisted him from under his armpits until we were across the street. He was a furry man, and the hair on his torso was singed, I could tell. It wasn’t until halfway across the street that I realized the man was completely naked. Had the explosion blown the clothes right off his body? How does that work?

Firetrucks finally arrived on the scene, and paramedics. Everyone was moving too slowly with the hoses or getting out of their trucks. Or was my perception of time skewed? I was angry with the emergency personnel, I remember. This is urgent. I waved a fireman over and asked him to help this man who had apparently been at the center of the explosion. He can’t breathe, I told the fireman. Someone put a coat around him. The fireman got him to sit down on the sidewalk there. I think I remember another emergency personnel coming over, and they began to help him. There was nothing more I knew to do for him at this point.

I wandered back toward the burning house, but now there was no need for my help. All manner of emergency vehicles were on the scene, coloring everything red. The fireman began dousing water onto the fire. There must have been a hundred neighbors on the periphery. I went to look for my wife and found her near the front porch of the neighbor’s house, next to the burning house, where paramedics were helping the woman who would soon be pronounced dead upon her arrival at the hospital. The woman’s husband was there, and he was holding his own hand, clearly injured. It must have been broken. They wheeled her out to an ambulance. People were yelling for everyone to get farther away. The firefighters battled the blaze but the flames were shooting into the sky from the back of the house. I prayed nothing else would explode, and it didn’t. Nothing more we could do but get out of there and not be one of the crowd of gawkers.

When I got back to our house, I needed some water. My girls were upstairs in their room, and I let them know that I was home. Everything was ok. But everything was not ok. I wondered had I ingested some kind of poison or smoke. I was in our kitchen. I kept trying to clear my throat. Our border collie, wide-eyed and shaking, had come over and was sniffing at me. I looked down and saw that I had dripped blood across the kitchen floor. It was all over my jacket and dripping. It was not my blood. It was the blood of the man I had helped lift from the floor of his carport out to the road. He must have been burned pretty badly, but at the time, in the dark, I couldn’t tell. I began praying for him. I didn’t know he was already dead at this point. The next day, another neighbor of mine, a doctor, told me that when I had found the guy, the inside of his lungs were likely already burnt and the tissue inside was in the process of swelling up till there was no way air could get in.

I took off my jacket and threw it into the back yard where it was still raining. I would retrieve it in the morning. I remember thinking that maybe it would rain enough for all the blood to get washed away. I got paper towels from under the sink and wiped up the blood so nobody would be traumatized by it. That was my thinking. I didn’t want anyone to see the blood.

 

***

 

A few weeks later at my daughter’s middle school, a transformer exploded at the power station right across the street. With all the school shootings of recent years, no one knew at first what had happened, and the school started to go into lockdown mode. It was only a transformer. But later that night, my daughter, unable to sleep, found it difficult to breathe, waking us up to tell us she was going to throw up, though she never did. She didn’t have a stomach bug. No fever. My wife finally figured it had to do with the explosion. We made an appointment with the counselor at school, and she helped us work through it with our daughter.

Our dog was traumatized, though we didn’t know it till a few thunderstorms afterwards. She had never been one of those dogs in the least fazed by thunder or lightning. But now if the lightest rain starts, she cowers under the island in our kitchen or she comes upstairs where she is not usually allowed. We recently got a baby gate from a friend whose child has outgrown it, and we now put it up in our open kitchen doorway to keep the dog downstairs. We thought we were done with baby gates ten years ago.

Right after the explosion, the newspaper interviewed me. So did a lawyer. He was seeking damages on behalf of the victims. The newspaper article reported that I had run into the house, though I had only gone under the carport. At church, a young woman I hardly knew embraced me and asked me if I was ok. My wife looked on suspiciously. Friends checked in on me through Facebook and on the phone. I’m a poet, and I wished I’d felt more, but it was just something that happened, and I didn’t think much about it. Are you going to write about it, someone asked. No, I said. Why would I?

Even though the investigations were completed, it took the city many months to demolish the house. The owner’s wife had relinquished the property, so it was up to the local authorities to take care of the wreckage. The explosion was all due to her and her husband experimenting with hydrogen on their own property. He was some kind of scientist, or mad scientist. The city had put a temporary impasse fencing around the property, but people started looting it anyway. The owners had been not only self-proclaimed inventors but hoarders, and you could see piles of junk spilling out of the wreckage of the house. At one point, people started leaving dolls found at the scene lying around in creepy positions, and the neighbors made complaints to the police. Oddly, the ruin of it was actually like a dollhouse, the front removed, and the contents spilling out, visible for anyone who wanted to imagine the lives (or deaths) here. One evening at a nearby block party, I asked the mayor couldn’t the city do something about this and tear this down? I felt bad for the next door neighbors.

Back to that big hole in the roof right over our bedroom … Piecing that night back together, I figured a projectile, one of the gas tanks this mad scientist was using, had launched from his house a full block away, landed on my roof, and maybe exploded back up into the sky only to land god knows where else in the neighborhood. Was that what I heard when we heard the second explosion, as others we talked to only heard one explosion? We’ll never know. But that initial explosion was a doozy. Indeed, we kept finding debris throughout our yard and elsewhere in the neighborhood where we would go for walks. I asked my neighbor had she found anything in her yard next to us, and she said her yard man had found a canister of some sort but had disposed of it not knowing what it was.

A block further away a gas tank went all the way through the roof of a house and went crashing into a bedroom through her bed. A college student had been lying there, but a friend had come over to visit, and this surely saved her life.

Someone said later that if he hadn’t have put his lab in a bunker then it might have been much worse. Great. Thanks.

 

***

 

The man that I “helped” away from the house, the man who died ran a company out of his home called E2Amm LLC. He was trying to develop engines or processes that used hydrogen fuel. His company manufactured “hydrogen and ammonia modules.” He had approached Texas Tech at some point with his ideas, but no one at our university would work with him. He and his wife apparently weren’t very neighborly. People hardly knew them.

Apparently, this guy liked to weld in the nude. Neighbors shared stories about getting glances of him beyond his fence. Welding naked, someone said. Doesn’t that give you sunburn? I asked. Within hours after the explosion, people assumed there was some kind of nefarious meth lab activity, as well, going on at the house: “Breaking Bad” come to Lubbock. I mean, if you’re walking around naked with a welding torch, it stands to reason, right? Someone said they saw people running from the house right after the explosion, though that was never proven. Investigators found no meth lab. A local politician got upset that anyone could, if he or she wanted, build a lab in the backyard. There aren’t any ordinances against it. But there are a number of reasons we don’t have hydrogen engines propelling every-day engines. You can Google that. Still, someone’s always looking for a breakthrough, perchance some mad scientist trying to prove he’s not mad but misunderstood. This one may have been misunderstood, but he’s also dead.

 

***

 

If you’ve ever put together a crib or rebuilt a carburetor, you’ve looked at an exploded diagram. And looking at it, trying to figure out where something went or something was missing or where you screwed up, maybe your head felt like exploding. When I was in high school, I took a drafting class because my friends were taking the drafting class. I remember we did a few of the simplest exploded diagrams. I was pretty good at it, and I thought maybe I’d be an architect some day. Maybe an architectural engineer. You slide that T-square smoothly across the paper and all seems orderly, a nut and bolt or maybe some kind of wood joint fitting to explain how things come apart and how they go back together. Straight lines. Air between. Order. Explosion. If it’s done well, you can see how it all implodes back together into a systematic machine. You can see how it works. But maybe it doesn’t come back together. You know, like new theories about the universe we hear of, where matter just keeps on expanding with greater and greater emptiness in between, and doesn’t contract.

 

***

 

Last week I asked for and received the police report. It is full of redactions because of ongoing lawsuits. But there isn’t much information there. I want to make sense of what happened, but what happened to us here in Tech Terrace is no exploded diagram. It was an explosion. I was told by a cop friend of mine to get the lawsuit paperwork, and I’d find a lot more information. I found the initial $20 million lawsuit petition online, and it didn’t offer much more than I already knew. But what do I want to know? Why do I need to know it?  Should I get the coroner’s report of our mad scientist or his neighbor who were killed that night? Should I interview my colleagues at Texas Tech who met with the scientist and rejected him? What with a $20 million lawsuit, they are surely smart enough not to offer information to anybody unless a lawyer is present. I did think about contacting Razvan, husband of the deceased, whose hand was broken during the explosion. But I don’t know him that well, even though he’s a neighbor. He teaches math at the university, as did his wife. We’re as different as math is from poetry, which is not all that far, if you think about it the way I do. But I don’t want to bother him and open up old wounds. And what with the social distancing required by the current pandemic, I couldn’t reach out and touch his shoulder if I needed to. Couldn’t embrace him. Maybe we’d awkwardly talk six to eight feet away from each other for me to get the information I didn’t know I needed.

Two years ago, a few weeks after he buried his wife, I saw Razvan coming down the sidewalk. I stopped him and we chatted for a few minutes. I asked him how he was coping. She was my life, he said. She was everything. I don’t know who I am. His arm was in a sling or a cast, I can’t remember now. I prayed with him. Or did I tell him that I was praying for him? Why can’t I honestly remember that? I should remember. My mind is burying what happened, and I don’t know why. Reader, what do you want from me with this story? I haven’t found what I want from it: an epiphany, order, some kind of recognition of my own hurt or health, damage or recovery? If we’re honest with ourselves, we can see that after explosions, things have been blown apart, much ruined. Very little, from what was there, is ever put back together.

 

Contributor
John Poch

John Poch’s most recent collection of poetry is Texases (WordFarm 2019). He teaches creative writing and literature at Texas Tech University.

Posted in Essays

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