A freeze-frame, a wide-angled freeze-frame showing the long expanse of Thirty-First Street, its corridor of streetlights stretching into the horizon, would show the crowds en route. It would show them all staring up, pointing as if at fireworks, a glaze across their eyes as if they were under mass hypnosis. Some would be caught with their mouths open, black gapes, white teeth catching the light, streetlight maybe, but maybe the light of the glow as well.

Young women would be caught looking innocent. Those with tattooed tears, those holding babies, would be caught looking like their children, sharing their defenselessness, their vulnerability. And the young men too would be caught smiling the way gangsters do when some truth is revealed — innocently, giving one the slightest hope that they could be reasoned with, “saved,” as some of their mothers might say. Of course, they never can be. Gangster faces change like masks. They’re defense mechanisms. But in the freeze-frame the gangsters would be caught red-handed, smiling like bashful teenagers, as if they’ve suddenly found the right answer to a math problem on the blackboard before a class of schoolmates raised from the dead.

In the freeze-frame, Thirty-First Street would be crowded, ready to burst its sides and collapse the walls of the abandoned buildings that line its sidewalks. The exodus might be confused with any other pilgrimage, quests to view saints, kiss the feet of monks, to discover the meaning of life in deserts in Saudi Arabia, atop mountains in South America.

At the bottom of the freeze-frame, those closest to the glow have begun to take seats, resigned to the thought that they won’t get any closer, overwhelmed by whatever the green glow holds.

And this goes on all night, through the heat. The drunks stay awake. The clergy from the local churches lead prayer sessions. Memo, the vendedor, stands there, his band of children crowded around him. The witches’ assistants scan the crowd for more faces, those of the dead, the forgotten, more of whom seem to appear each night.

As morning comes, the very first tinges of light sliding up the horizon, the green glow begins to fade, and so does the mystery of whatever brought the people here. Shadows give way to starkness, reality, and slowly the people begin to move, some slower than others, embarrassed by their own gullibility. As they make their way back up Thirty-First Street to their sweatbox apartments, they crowd in closer, like cattle, seeking safety in numbers. They avoid eye contact, slouch as if hung over. They carry their sleeping children, the mothers following the fathers, everything in reverse. There is an aura of defeat to the crowd. Truth becomes apparent. There is only heat to look forward to, days spent at work, in factories, as secretaries, days spent in bed, days spent watching Memo charge up and down side streets, days spent believing in God, witches, prayer, the coming of another night.

On the south side of Chicago, at Harlem Avenue and Archer, Joe and Frank’s Meat Market pumps out smoked kielbasas like clockwork. Every Wednesday and Friday the smell of burning hickory fills the intersection. If the air is stagnant, smoke billows from Joe and Frank’s chimney and fills the street corner like fog. But when the wind is up, the smoke carries. I live in Berwyn, a full three miles north of Joe and Frank’s, and still, on a good day, with a gust of wind from the Bedford Park Intermodal, a blast of air from the Sanitary and Ship Canal, I can pick up the scent of Joe and Frank’s. It reminds me of my childhood and of Pilsen.

Pilsen was marooned by relics, locked in by ancient industry. To the north was the old C, B & Q Railroad yard, rusted arrays of tracks twenty or thirty sets wide. To the east was the Chicago River and its permanently raised bridges. And to the south was Twenty-Second Street and its mile-long stretch of power plants, vacant warehouses, and junkyards. Pilsen was tall, dense, massive. The only reprieve was the uniformity: the open-air gangways that matched up perfectly from block to block, the side streets that ran uninterrupted through Pilsen. At any point in the neighborhood, down these corridors, our borders were in full view: the abandoned bridges at the river, the terrifyingly dark viaducts at Seventeenth Street, and above it all the fuming smokestacks of Twenty-Second Street.

Our houses were our reflections, cramped, utilitarian. We lived atop one another in wood-frame, two- and three-flat apartment buildings, clapboard siding like stereo-sundials as the sun rose and set. All of our houses were off-kilter somehow, a limping back porch, front steps crumbling and broken like ancient ruins. In some cases the flaws were inside, like in our apartment, where I could roll a penny in the kitchen and have it continue through the living room, pick up speed in the bedroom, and, if the back door was open, hop the threshold right out onto the porch. Pilsen had its share of stone-faced buildings, storefronts, brick churches, corner tenements, but these were torn up as well, mortar dark and broken like rotting teeth, soot rising in columns from wall-mounted chimneys. Pilsen was dark, forever. We lived in shadows with railroad tracks beneath our feet, tracks that ended at walled-off docks or rusted-over bumpers or sometimes at nothing at all, two lines side by side cut off in the middle of a street, traffic beating the ends into the asphalt, burying them slowly, inch by inch, like the whole city was sinking, Pilsen first.

Back then my father was a cab driver. He was in school studying to be a social worker. I didn’t see him much. My mother was a secretary. She worked at an insurance agency, a social-service agency, the phone company: she changed jobs so often I stopped wondering where she worked. She would sigh as we ate dinner alone in our tiny kitchen. Sometimes I would sigh back. “Bad day?” my mother would ask.

“Yes,” I would answer.

“Me too,” she would say.

There was nothing excessive about my family’s existence. We didn’t go out for breakfast. We didn’t order Chinese food. We ate beans and tortillas, fried potatoes, the occasional egg with my mother’s green salsa. My mother made one thing each Sunday without fail, a pot of frijoles, and in the winter the kitchen window would fog over with steam and the house would smell of garlic and onions. In the summer when all the windows of the neighborhood were open and all of Pilsen was making its frijoles for the week, the whole neighborhood smelled of garlic and onions.

Memories of my father during this time are sparse. I used to see him asleep on the couch as I got ready for school. Sometimes I would wake to use the bathroom and he would be at the kitchen table eating leftovers. The streetlight outside would illuminate our white curtain; our white table would reflect the dim light of the kitchen. My father would watch me walk across the kitchen and into the bathroom. Then, when I was done, he’d watch me walk back across the kitchen, everything in total silence, like he was afraid to speak. As it stands, most of our encounters during this period seem more like dreams than actual memories. And really what seems most stark about those memories is the checkered-flag floor in our old kitchen, the tall, rotted step to get up into the bathroom, the painted-over hook on the door, the orange streetlight shining through my mother’s sheer curtain. The image of my father sitting there is so vague I’ve nearly forgotten it: my father is a forgotten dream, how much more detached can I be? But we had the fires, him and me. If not for the fires I might have forgotten who my father was altogether.

I am sure he spotted them while out on his route or maybe on his way home from the garage. What alerted me were his whispers: “Hey, want to go check out a fire?” With that I would sit up, throw on whatever clothes I could find, and off we’d go, down our apartment building’s steps, out the front door, out into Pilsen. That first breath, that first inhale of charred wood, brought me back into the world. It was like morning coffee or that TV ad for hand soap where “the scent opens your eyes.” With that first breath of burning wood, I could tell where I was again: Pilsen, early morning, with my father. A house was burning.