How to Set a Fire and Why

PREDICTION

Leslie is a girl who sits three seats back in homeroom. She has brutal bangs but a wild porcelain doll face and usually wears almost no clothes. She is always talking to a guy, Pierre, who sits next to her. Within the week, she will be horribly maimed in a car accident, and Pierre will never talk to her again. She will then gather her inner resources and become an award-winning physicist. At that point medicine will have advanced and her face will be restored. By then, Pierre will be a homeless drunk and he will pass by a shop and see her being interviewed on a television that is playing in the shop window. Medicine will have restored her face to its exact appearance at the time of the accident, so that despite being thirty-eight at that point, her face is sixteen and hot, really hot, and this will yank Pierre’s heart actually out of his chest so that it flops around on the ground like a trout. People walking on that street will cautiously step around his prone body. Meanwhile, she still secretly loves him, and when she happens upon his body at the local morgue while enjoying the good times with some hard-drinking friends, she can’t deal with the pain. She runs out into the street and is mauled by a car for the second time! Meanwhile, Pierre wasn’t dead—but just asleep. He stumbles out of the morgue and finds Leslie’s mauled body where nine or ten cars have run it over. He fails to recognize her, but what he does see is: miraculously, the pint of scotch she was drinking is unharmed, tucked as it was into the side of her skirt. He kneels to remove the whiskey, and is overwhelmed with fabulous good feeling.

Just kidding! That isn’t how the predictions go.

The predictions are more like:

Tomorrow I will go to the Home to visit my mom. I will wear a raincoat and I will take the number 12 bus all the way down Ranstall Avenue and change to the number 8 at Bergen. While I am riding the bus, I will read a collection of short stories about insects. One of them is “The Metamorphosis,” so you can see that the book is more entertaining than it sounds because the editors have given themselves a wider purview. While I am reading that book, which is an Ace Book and says it was once sold for 45¢, someone will try to talk to me. I will grunt and indicate that I am reading a book. When I get to Stillwell, I will get off the bus. No one else will get off it because no one else will be on it at that point. I will walk half a mile to the entrance, and then half a mile past the gates to the main building. At the main building, I will get a guest pass and I will be escorted to my mother’s room. She will not be in the room. I will then be escorted to the fish pond. She will be sitting in a rocking chair next to the fish pond. She will be wearing a medical gown. Her hair will be in a ponytail (she never wore it in a ponytail). I will approach her and speak to her. She will once again fail to recognize me. I will sit with her for a while until it becomes clear that it isn’t doing anyone any good. Then, I will go back and hand my pass in. I will walk back down the drive. I will walk to the bus stop. I will get on the number 8 bus. I will take the number 8 bus past Ranstall, past Wickham, past Arbor, to Twelfth. There I will get out. I will go into the bowling alley, Four Quarter Lanes, and I will sit at the bar and my friend Helen will pour me a drink. She used to be my babysitter when I was a kid. She is forty-five and is writing a book about self-hypnosis. I always go to see her after visiting my mom.

WHAT HAPPENED

I woke up late and when I got to school third period I didn’t have an excuse, so I got a detention. Really, I guess—if we are being completely honest, I got a detention for asking Mr. Beekman why he was unhappy that I wasn’t on time. He said that I was supposed to be in school. I said, but why are you unhappy about me not being in school. He said because I need to get an education. I said that the whole thing was a farce. Did he believe that the American public was educated? Was that his argument? That he is helping to educate the population of a democracy—and that he wants me to be there at the start of first period so I can do a good job voting some years from now when he is being wheeled around in his old-age home? At this point, he gave me a detention and made me sit down.

That whole business made Stephan want to pass me a note, I guess, since he did. The note said, not-a-democracy-ha. The girl, Stephanie, who passed it to me—yes, that’s right, Stephanie passed me the note from Stephan; I don’t know; people should come up with better names for their fucking children, it’s not my job—anyway, Stephanie tried to look at the note, but the writing was really small so she couldn’t read it.

The point is—and how this lines up with the prediction (1) is that I had detention after school—right at three. So, there was the question, will I go to detention? I wasn’t sure what would happen if I didn’t go. Maybe I would get another detention? If so—that just means I get to schedule when my detention is by going or not. Probably, they give me two. Each one not gone to means two. I bet that’s it.

Well, I didn’t go. Sure enough, three p.m. I got on the bus, number 12—then bus number 8. I had my raincoat—I always wear it when I visit her because I saw a film, Rascal Sven, about an old Swedish man who goes to a mental asylum, or is put there, and someone comes to visit him (his brother) wearing a raincoat. Then that guy—Sven’s brother, who is really kind, evidently they all love each other in Sweden—gives Sven the raincoat, and so Sven leaves in the raincoat and his brother stays at the mental asylum, and when Sven has gotten away, the brother says that he is not Sven and they have to let him go. There is a lot of singing in the movie but it isn’t a musical. Sven just sings these shitty little songs when he does something clever.

So, I figured—maybe I have the raincoat, maybe I’m there, maybe my mom recognizes me, and I can give her the raincoat—then she can get away, go somewhere. I don’t even need to see her. I just don’t like the idea of her sitting by the fish pond.

So, I read my insect book, and this time it was a story about a scientist who alters his DNA to grow a huge fly eye on his forehead. He ends up going insane because he can’t sleep since the eye can’t ever close. In my opinion, a terrible story. I walked up the drive, got my pass from a girl who looked nearly the same age as me. My mom’s room was not what I expected. It had been moved, but she wasn’t there. So, we went down to the fish pond, and there she was, hair in a ponytail. The orderly who escorted me there, a kind of wiry guy in his twenties, asked me about my book so I gave it to him. That’s the kind of thing I like to do sometimes.

I sat with my mom and she did some gurgling. I thought about how it was easy to think it meant something—the gurgling, but it was actually like leaves or gravel or layers of skin. I mean to say—it isn’t meaningful, it isn’t meaningless. Things just don’t really apply to us in particular, even though we want them to.

The orderly came back and he had an applesauce. I think his idea was that I could give it to my mom. It was nice of him—and probably just about the limit of his resources there as an orderly, this applesauce gift, but I wanted nothing to do with it. He could see that, so he didn’t offer it to me. I don’t know, maybe he was just going to eat the applesauce and he forgot I was there at the fish pond. Certainly, my mom wasn’t going to tell on him. Practically anything could happen right in front of her and she wouldn’t notice.

So, I walked back down the drive, took the bus to the bus to the bowling alley. I was wrong before, by the way, about someone talking to me. No one talked to me on the trip there, and no one talked to me on the trip back. At 4QL Helen made me a Manhattan and I was instantly drunk. I sat slumped in one of the pleasantly curved plastic chairs for about two hours watching people bowl until she was finished and then she drove me home.

PREDICTION

So, I made a prediction while I was drunk at the bowling alley. It wasn’t much of a prediction. It was this: I would get home and my aunt would say that the school had called because I didn’t go to detention and then I would say that I had gone to the Home and then she would notice that I was drunk and she would thank Helen for bringing me. What she wouldn’t do is: yell at me for skipping detention, yell at me for being drunk, yell at Helen for giving me alcohol.

My aunt has some rules for the house. They are pretty similar to the rules my dad had when we all lived together. The first rule is, Don’t do things you aren’t proud of. Just don’t do those things. If you end up getting in trouble because of it, then the whole group of us deals with that problem together. But, there is no reason to do things you aren’t proud of. All right, that’s rule one. Rule two is: Don’t believe nonsense, and don’t behave like a robot. It’s much better to get in trouble than it is to be a robot, because the effects of being a robot are difficult to remove.

These rules aren’t ever stated—there isn’t a rule sheet. It’s just the way things are. As long as I am keeping to them, my aunt will stick up for me, I’m sure of it. She isn’t disappointed in me. I really think she thinks I’m doing a good job. I think so too, but probably the two of us are alone in that. Even Helen gives me a sad look when she sees me. Probably she thinks I will become a prostitute. Well, she knows I’m not one yet—because I never have any money to pay her for the drinks she gives me!

Another rule is: Don’t pay attention to property, but be mindful of people’s investment in things. This one is a little tricky. It’s like—I mean, obviously you can’t own anything. So, there is no stealing. My aunt doesn’t care if I steal from the supermarket or whatnot. She might be mad if I got caught in a stupid way, but that’s just because she has an expectation of my cleverness. Sometimes I can be clever. Anyway—there is no stealing because you can’t own anything, so stealing isn’t stealing, it’s just taking something that you can use. However—if someone puts their life into something, then maybe you shouldn’t take it. They call it sabi in Japanese—it is when a thing shows the use of a hand. If there is a guy who has a guitar and it sits in his house and he never uses it, my aunt would be fine with me showing up at home with the guitar, if I am going to play it. But if not, then I am kind of an asshole for taking the guitar, or at best, neutral and a bit covetous. Now, on the other hand, if a guy has a guitar and he plays it all the time and you can see that his hands have changed the guitar—that it is his guitar, really, then it isn’t right for me to take it. If I really needed a guitar, maybe he would give it to me. That kind of thing happens, but that would be up to him.

There is a rule also about being considerate, which is basically just making sure to have empathy. So, that extends to things like cleaning up after myself, which I am not always good at. This is where I get in trouble. But, getting in trouble isn’t so bad. It just means my aunt glares at me a little.

WHAT HAPPENED

We got back and the school hadn’t called, so my aunt didn’t tell me that they had. She did notice that I was drunk, because she put on the pot for tea, which is what she does when I am drunk. Otherwise she asks me if I want tea before putting on the pot.

Also, she did ask Helen if she wanted to stay for tea and thanked her for bringing me home. Helen declined and headed out. I think her book about hypnosis is going to be terrible. She has maybe twenty books about hypnosis at her house. I know because I have been there. Her “book” is mostly just parts she likes from the other books that she has copied into a new book. There is nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t really an achievement. I guess if it is a fundamental improvement, it would be. If all the other books were redundant because of her book, then it is a pretty succinct business, so I guess that would be something. But, it’s about hypnosis, which I don’t believe in anyway.

They had a hypnotist come to our school, to the last one, Parkson, and some people got onstage and he made them pretend to be farm animals and contort into weird positions. The math teacher stood on his head, which is something apparently he can’t do. I don’t know what that proves. The whole thing left me feeling a bit sick.

PREDICTION

I thought about the guy from the Home while I was lying there drunk in the chair holding the tea my aunt made me. I couldn’t drink it because it was too hot, but I was holding it and it was kind of like a hot water bottle. We have one of those, my aunt and me, and we use it in the winter. Actually, I think my aunt uses it year-round, which doesn’t make sense. The window next to the chair is cracked at the top and mended with tape and there is a bit of a draft, which makes the glass brush back and forth. I like to listen to it when I sit in the chair.

It was great of him to bring me the applesauce. It’s probably the first nice thing someone has done for me in a while. He was wearing that awful uniform that the Home makes its employees wear, but it looked okay. I mean, it looked good. I’m sure he is completely deluded. Most people can’t keep all the lies straight—and they end up believing everything. I promise myself every day that won’t happen to me. He is probably in his late twenties. I don’t know.

I wrote down a prediction then, before I went to sleep, and it was:

Tomorrow I will find out more about the Arson Club.

This is a pretty shitty prediction, if you ask me. I think I shouldn’t do predictions when I have been drinking.

Of course, it is possible that such a thing could happen. I could find out more about the Arson Club. But there is no reason to think it would happen. I hate when I break my own rules. What’s the point of me being rational if I flail around like a clown?

WHAT HAPPENED

Stephan, it turns out, is probably also in the Arson Club. I know this because of what happened in Social Studies class. We had to turn in a topic for research and then we had to go to the library and use the computers or look up books about the subject. Most of the kids are useless cretins, so they wait in a line while the librarian does all the work for them. First thing I do when I get in a library is—I go to the stacks and nose around. The idea is—you don’t know what you’re interested in. That’s why it’s possible to be surprised. So, instead of looking for things in particular, you look for what you didn’t know you liked, and then when you find it you know that you liked it, and then you are a broader person than you were before.

That’s what I was doing nosing around in the book stacks. Stephan was maybe doing the same thing. I had a slip of paper and it said, Russia Peasant Fire-Setting. There were some numbers, too, for the place the materials might be. I had walked back and forth, nosing around, until I got tired of doing it, and decided to find what I was actually looking for—and when I did, there was Stephan, looking at the same shelf. He was holding a book called Arson Investigation, Step by Step. He almost dropped it when I came around the corner.

STEPHAN What are you looking for.

LUCIA …

STEPHAN …

LUCIA I don’t know. Why?

STEPHAN …

LUCIA …

STEPHAN I don’t know.

LUCIA Excuse me, the book I want is right here.

I took it off the shelf and handed it to him.

?

You asked what I was looking for.

Stephan looked at the book and looked at me thoughtfully. I had my hood up, so I felt pretty good. I wondered if I should ask him about the Arson Club, but I didn’t. Next thing I know, we are all just back in class, and then I get called to the principal for having skipped detention, and then I am told: you have a week of detention. They don’t understand—I can just read a book. It doesn’t really matter where I am. The principal’s assistant actually takes me to the detention, as if he is afraid that I will run off into the woods.

In my head, I imagine the conversations that they have probably had at their country club with the old principal from Parkson. Little hellion stabbed him with a pencil, watch out. Yeah, he’s the best basketball player we’ve ever had. That and other nonsense I’m sure they say.

Anyway—it turns out that detention was the place to go if you want to join the Arson Club. Which makes my drunk prediction right. I’m not really comfortable with that.

THE ARSON CLUB

Do you want to know how detention works? You go to a classroom and there, voilà, all the other shitty little fucks produce themselves like rabbits out of a hat. Then you are supposed to sit together doing nothing as punishment for not obeying. Maybe you can see from this that I am quite familiar with being in detention. Matter of fact, I feel like I have always been in detention. I am an old veteran of detention, like one of Napoleon’s soldiers limping back from the battle of Moscow. No, not like them—they were chumps. More like—one of the girls who died in the Triangle Fire looking out the window and realizing it is too far to jump, then jumping.

So, you sit there and you are supposed to be stupid, so they don’t expect you to better yourself. You’re not allowed to talk, because they don’t think what you say to each other could be useful, even to their mission, as they pretend it to be (that we are bettering ourselves). I suppose they just think we will make trouble if we talk, which is true. But, the trouble we will make is unavoidable.

Let’s talk about DAY ONE, DAY TWO, DAY THREE, DAY FOUR, and DAY FIVE because those are all the detentions I serve that week, and nothing else that happens at school is interesting. In my classes I have my hood up and I sit and write in my notebook. At lunch I sit by myself. I have zero interactions and people have decided to leave me alone, which is partly due to a photograph someone got from someone else—I guess they know people at Parkson. The photograph was pretty funny. I don’t have a phone, so I couldn’t get the picture for myself, but I would have liked to have it.

It seems like somebody took a picture of me when I didn’t notice. Then they stuck cat eyes on my face and claws on my hands and put in a thought bubble, and in the thought bubble they put a picture of Joe Schott’s actual neck with the cuts from the pencil. So, I guess that other picture had been making the rounds at Parkson, and some genius here decided to be even funnier. Well, I liked it—that much I’ll say. I wish I could have showed it to my aunt or my dad.

DAY ONE

I sat and read The Theatre and Its Double by Artaud. At first I thought it was just about theater, but then I realized Artaud probably hated theater. Or he hated other people’s theater. He wanted to rescue theater from the philistines, which is everyone. So, I sat and read that. I ate licorice. I saw that one of the guys I had seen talking that time, he was sitting next to me. We can sit wherever we want, but we can’t talk and we can’t move once we sit down. Janine Pezaro, for instance, sits at the front. She doesn’t care if people sit behind her because she is a brick shithouse and can beat up half the guys in the school. Probably more than half. She is in here for beating up two girls at the same time. I am sort of in love with her for that. But, she is definitely deluded.

The guy had mentioned the Sonar Club, and now he was sitting near me. I left the book All Russia Is Burning out on the desk next to the Artaud, and asked if I could go to the bathroom. They gave me a five-minute pass (that’s really only enough time to get to the bathroom and back). When I returned to my seat, I saw that he had taken the book from the desk and was reading it.

Give me that back.

He handed it over. Sorry, it looked interesting.

Ms. Kennison yelled at us for talking, so we shut up. A seed sown. There was still the question of if they let girls in the Arson Club. I could imagine some bullshit misogynist nonsense governing this also. My aunt was always telling me—never accept any privileges that are for girls, because it is only half the coin.

DAY TWO

Fatty wasn’t there, so I just read. This time it was some Alfred Jarry that I found in a church bin. Apparently he would carry a revolver around and threaten to use it on people.

DAY THREE

Not a good day. I spat on Lisette at lunch, and got detention for that, because, as it turns out, her mom is the guidance counselor and she has some kind of pull. So, when I show up for detention as usual, Kennison does a little chuckle, and says, I guess you’ll be a regular here for a while, like we have some joke in common. I’m not one to divide myself off from the rest of humanity, I mean, I would like to help them, but let’s be clear—Kennison and I are not in the same boat, no way. So, I just go and sit. I ran out of licorice the day before, and Green Gully ran out too, so I didn’t have any. To explain: there are two stores that sell the licorice I like. One of them, I can steal from. The other I have to have money. Now, my aunt has almost no money, so I can’t use the almost no money she has to buy licorice. That means, I only get licorice when Green Gully has it. They are a fancy supermarket, which means they charge so much they don’t need to have proper security.

By the way, I don’t think spitting on people is that great, but Lisette said something about me living with my grandma, which I didn’t like. All the time—all the time, people basically beg me to freak out on them, and mostly I keep my cool.

DAY FOUR

This is the day when I realize that the girls who sit at the other corner in the back alternate smoking a joint in the bathroom essentially the entire time they are in detention. They do this by repeatedly asking to go to the bathroom and claiming they have their period. I thought that was funny, when I saw them doing it, but I didn’t understand. Then, when I was actually in the bathroom to use the bathroom, I saw one of them, and she offered some to me. So, that made the detention go by pretty quick. In fact, I was high for maybe two hours, so after detention, I went with them to a park, and we watched a homeless guy chase seagulls. At some point, we had been watching him do it for maybe twenty minutes, Lana says, I think he’s chasing the seagulls, which made us all laugh until we cried. Even I laughed at that, and I never laugh.

DAY FIVE

I decided on this day to just do the research paper, even though it would be three weeks ahead of time. So, I browsed through the Russia book and wrote up a gloss of what the paper would be. Then, I wrote the first few pages. The position of the author as far as I could tell is that peasants burned down their own houses not for political reasons, but out of ignorance, and sometimes as vengeance for minor slights. This was a bit depressing, but seemed almost inevitable. There was a part about peasant women waking up early in the morning to take their babies out of the iron stove where they had put them in the night. Yes, they put their babies inside an iron stove full of coals. So, if you see a Russian person doing something crazy, as you sometimes do, remember—they have been doing that shit forever. It’s nothing new.

On day five, which was Friday, I should say—I found a note in my locker. It said—11 p.m., Alcatraz.

Alcatraz isn’t really Alcatraz, of course. It’s just a little island that is in the middle of a lake in one of the medical parks. Kids like to go there to drink.

ALCATRAZ

My aunt doesn’t mind if I go out late, because I mostly don’t go anywhere. She thinks that if I’m out late, then maybe I have some friends. In her mind that outweighs the dangers of being out late, whatever those might be. As it turns out, when I am out late, it is just that I am sitting in a park somewhere, or in a cemetery, or even at a laundromat. You know, places where people go when they don’t know anyone.

That meant I could very easily go to this meeting if I felt like it. I stopped at home to drop off the library books and I got a screwdriver from under the sink. My aunt wasn’t even there—on Friday she volunteers at a shelter; I think it’s some kind of soup kitchen. The other people who work there are religious and she can’t stand them, but she goes anyway. She’s like me—she doesn’t know very many people, and so she gets stuck with the ones she does know.

I had to take the bus to the medical park, because it was pretty far from the house. I had been there twice before, both times with older guys, when I was still in middle school. It looked different when I was by myself, but I found the way.

The first part is—getting past the security booth that is by the main road. To do that, you walk about two hundred feet down along the fence, and there is a spot where there just isn’t any fence. The fence has broken and you can walk through. Why they don’t fix it—I don’t know. So, you go through there, and there is a path that leads to the internal road. While going along the internal road, you have to keep an eye out for the guard, but since he goes around in a truck with lights, there is always enough time to jump in the bushes. Eventually, you get to some woods, and you go through the woods. There isn’t really a path. For some reason no plants grow there, so you can walk where you want. Eventually you get to the island. If you go the wrong way, there is a swampy part and your shoes will get wrecked.

The island can be reached by climbing along a branch that goes about four feet above the water for something like twenty feet. At the end it goes into the water, but there are stones you can jump on. It sounds difficult, but it is pretty easy, especially if you are at all agile. To be honest, the island shares almost nothing with Alcatraz. Kids have been calling it that for a decade at least, though.

From the shore, I could see that there were some people out there. I went along the branch, jumped to the rocks, jumped to the bank. There I was. A kid came up—it was Stephan. He had on an insulated flannel shirt so I didn’t recognize him. He must have been waiting for me.

We’re over here.

He pointed to the right a ways. Once I was there, I could see there were a few groups of kids sitting on rocks. We went up to the crest of the hill and there was a pretty big tree next to a broken-down shack. The shack had writing on it. I couldn’t see it this time, but I knew from before. The writing (I don’t know if it is still there) said, Joan fecks goats. When I saw that, my first thought was that a Scottish person had written it, but I looked closer, and the e is just a screwed-up u. I’m not even sure Scottish people say fecks.

By the tree and the shack, in the darkness, there were a bunch of people, maybe ten. Stephan introduced me to them, but he did it the way you do when you don’t even know the people—essentially when you yourself need to be introduced, but there’s no one to do it for you, so you introduce someone else. It is a shitty way to behave.

This is Lucia.

One of them asked me in a sarcastic voice if I liked fire. I thought it was pretty hokey to do it, but I was holding my dad’s zippo in my hand and I flipped it open real quick and lit it. I did it real quick, I must say. It was some legerdemain.

A few of the kids clapped. One said, yeah, that’s it. You’ll do fine. Someone else asked Stephan if I was his girlfriend, and we both said no.

One of the guys wanted to see the zippo, so I let him. He fumbled with it a bit and gave it back.

I sat down by the tree, and Stephan sat too. The lights of the drive that wound through the medical park marched through the trees in a winding pattern. Beyond that were more lights—the city, the highway, more lights and more.

This terrible little island we were on was a nice mote of darkness. I could hear the water.

I couldn’t see the other people too well—it was pretty dark, but they looked mostly older, maybe seniors. One of the guys on the other side of Stephan asked him when he was going to qualify. Qualify? I figured that meant setting the fire that would make him an official member. Stephan didn’t say anything. I wondered how many members there were.

Noise from the other side of the island filtered through the trees. Some people were shouting—another group had just arrived. Someone set off some fireworks—or it was a gun, I don’t know.

The same guy was talking again to Stephan. I leaned in to hear. He said, you have a month to set a fire, and if you don’t you’re out.

He saw me looking at him. Same goes for you.

I met his eyes and nodded like it was nothing.

He told Stephan to move so he could sit next to me, and Stephan did.

PREDICTION

Well, I saw Stephan that Monday in front of the school. He was standing by himself kicking a stone against a wall. The ground there was all mashed flat and dusty and nothing was growing. He kicked the stone back and forth. It was kind of mesmerizing. I asked him if the meetings were always in the same place.

He said he’d never been to Alcatraz before. He had been to two other meetings—at a guy’s house. Real members have meetings with prospective members, and then the real members have their own meetings. I asked him how he had found out about it. He said it was through his brother, who was overseas in the army.

He said: I went to Stuart Rebos’s place about a month ago. Two other guys were there. We talked about setting fires. Neither one of them had done a big fire yet. Then, Jan showed up—the guy you met. He told us about some techniques and gave us a pamphlet that someone else had given him.

I asked him how old Jan was. He said he thought he was about twenty-four. Definitely he had gone away to college. Stephan said Jan had been his brother’s friend, but that they had for the most part lost touch.

First period that day was a study hall for me, so I sat and wrote in my prediction book.

Jan will try to sleep with me if I am alone with him. Don’t be alone with him.

I wrote also,

Stephan isn’t as smart as I thought he was,

which isn’t a prediction.

OWNING THINGS

About owning things. If you try to own things, but you don’t have very many things, then you can get in trouble. Because you might have to trade in some of the things that you have in order to get the money to get part of something new, but then when you run out of things that you have to trade to get money to give to finish getting the thing that is something new, then you have no money to finish getting that thing—the new thing, and then someone comes and takes the new thing, and then somehow, you have nothing, even though you did start with a bunch of things (however shitty they may have been—they still were yours).

Maybe it will make more sense if I give an example. My aunt got a car, but she only has money for food (someone she knows lets us live in this garage, so she doesn’t pay rent). She doesn’t really have money to pay for the car. I think she got it in order to take me around to where I need to go and such things. I remember her saying something like that. Maybe she thought that because she is old we couldn’t go around together without a car. Anyway—she had to sell her jewelry from when she had a husband a hundred years ago (he died when she was still nineteen, a year after they got married). She had to sell her clarinet and her piano. It was not a nice piano—just a tuneless little upright, but she played it all the time.

Once she had sold those things, there wasn’t anything else to sell. She missed some payments, then people were calling on the phone about it for a while. That brings us to Saturday morning.

We woke up and there were two really big guys outside. They broke into her car and drove it away. I yelled a bunch of stuff at them and tried to call the police, but my aunt said it was useless. The repossession men and the police have an understanding. One of my favorite books was in the back of the car, too, and that they stole. Maybe the car was theirs to take, I don’t know. But the book, Barbarian in the Garden, by Zbigniew Herbert, that was my book, and there is no way they were ready to appreciate it. You have to read probably five hundred books before you can read that one.

My aunt said now I had a good thing to look forward to. What was that? She said now when I go to used bookstores eventually I will find it and there will be a kind of reunion. In the meantime, there are plenty of other books to read.

She didn’t even complain about the car—not once. I was hoping she would shoot them. That’s what was in my mind when I saw how big they were. I know she has a pistol. It’s because of what happened to my father and mother. She isn’t a violent person, but being the first one there (I was at a friend’s house when it happened), I think it was hard for her. By the time I got home, past the police, and so on, there wasn’t anything to see, so I never saw it. My mom was already in the hospital; my dad was at the morgue. I am glad I didn’t, because it really fucked my aunt up. But, I am also a bit jealous, because I feel like it was my thing to see and I never saw it.

PREDICTION

My aunt will say in about ten minutes that we should walk down to Muscha Park and feed the pigeons and read and then afterwards eat a hot dog from a vendor. We will then go to the park and we will sit and feed the pigeons some bread that we got for free from a bakery and we will read and afterwards we will eat a hot dog from a vendor. That is—one hot dog for the two of us.

I wanted to be vegetarian once, but it isn’t in the cards. Buying nice vegetables is pretty expensive. Maybe one day.

When I think about what my future holds, it is a bit like looking into the sun. I flinch away, or I don’t and my eyes get burned down a bit, like candles, and then I can’t see for a while.

The way we have things laid out—it makes it easy to know how to behave, but it isn’t so clear that I will be a success. I have no intention of going to college. Someone told me about a program that is at a school near us, a good school. The program sounded neat, so I read one of the professor’s books. He is a real big shot, and gets prizes, goes to fancy places. There is a picture on the school’s site of him shaking hands with the president, if you can believe it.

His book was terrible. It was intellectually weak. I don’t think his brain is very strong—or somewhere along the way it got polluted. Not to mention that he fraternizes with petty oligarchs.

My question is—why would I go to study with someone like that. I have no intention of bowing intellectually to such a person. My aunt says that I am vain and that I boast, but she doesn’t know that I talk to no one.

WHAT HAPPENED

It went just like that. My aunt was feeling pretty bad about the car. I don’t think she cares about having a car, but I think she was embarrassed for me, because it will be hard for me at school to live in a garage and be broke and have no car. It won’t be hard for me in a metaphysical sense—I can handle it. But, people will turn against me. Public opinion, if you will.

She is cheerful, though, so after a few minutes, she asked if I wanted to get some air, and I said yes, and we went out and down the street. Most people would be pretty stressed out about having to go somewhere with my aunt, because she looks pretty weird. She wears a hat that—let’s just say, I have no idea where she got this hat. She has a turquoise coat and she wears those huge black sunglasses that can cover other glasses, but since she doesn’t have other glasses, I’m not sure why she does it.

I should say, I was sad once when I went with her to a restaurant and we saw a girl from Parkson. It was a girl who I thought was smart and maybe could be my friend, but once she saw my aunt, I knew it wouldn’t happen. I felt bad about it—this was the combination:

part of me felt angry at my aunt for causing it;

part of me felt awful that I wouldn’t get this friend;

part of me felt okay because obviously the girl was terrible if she cared so much about what other people think that she would disqualify me on the basis of my aunt.

The whole thing was even worse because it was supposed to be a celebration. I had this problem for a while where I couldn’t stop crying, so I was out of school for two months and just crying all the time. It made me get brutal headaches. This was the first two months that I lived with my aunt, after the thing happened. So, at the end of that time, when a week or two passed, and I wasn’t crying anymore, my aunt said we should celebrate. Even though we couldn’t afford to, she knew it was the right thing to do—so we went to a restaurant. That’s when this happened, which made me feel even worse. Because my aunt is great. Fuck anybody who doesn’t approve of her!

Of course—I expect that I will look as strange to people as my aunt does if I live as long as she has. I think back then it looked to me that there was a chance I would be able to go undetected—that I could pass through society without being noticed. Since I realize now that people are against me anyway, it is easier for me to stomach having people think my aunt is a freak.

So, ultimately, I can’t take credit for being okay now with my aunt’s weirdness, is what I’m saying. I’ve just accepted that we’re painted with the same brush.

We walked down to the park. There were no pigeons. I don’t know where they had gone to, but when we tossed some bread on the ground, there were many pigeons. My theory is—they hide inside the park benches and wait.

If you want to say, Lucia, there is no inside of the park benches, I won’t argue with you. But, then you have to say where the pigeons come from.

After that, we read—I read a book about cremation in China. My aunt read Faust in German. The hot-dog guy gave us two hot dogs because he felt bad for us when my aunt had to pay for the one hot dog with change.

I want to add about my aunt that she does everything with an immense amount of dignity—so it isn’t that she really looks like a weirdo. It is just that people have so little acumen these days—they don’t even know what dignity looks like. Or, a few do. Like the hot-dog guy. He was moved by her display.

PREDICTION

Tomorrow I will go to the Home to visit my mom again. I will wear a raincoat and I will take the number 12 bus all the way down Ranstall Avenue and change to the number 8 at Bergen. While I am riding the bus, I will read more in my book about Chinese cremation. While I am reading that book, someone will try to talk to me. I will grunt and indicate that I am reading a book. When I get to Stillwell, I will get off the bus. No one else will get off it because no one else will be on it at that point. I will walk half a mile to the entrance, and then half a mile past the gates to the main building. At the main building, I will get a guest pass and I will be escorted to my mother’s room. She will not be in the room. I will then be escorted to the fish pond. She will be sitting in a rocking chair next to the fish pond. She will be wearing a medical gown. Her hair will be in a ponytail (she never wore it in a ponytail). I will approach her and speak to her. She will once again fail to recognize me. I will sit with her for a while until it becomes clear that it isn’t doing anyone any good. Then, I will go back and hand my pass in. I will walk back down the drive. I will walk to the bus stop. I will get on the number 8 bus. I will take the number 8 bus past Ranstall past Wickham, past Arbor, to Twelfth. There I will get out. I will go into the bowling alley, Four Quarter Lanes, and I will sit at the bar and my friend Helen will pour me a drink. This time I will try to drink it a little slower. Probably, I will drink a glass of water first. (If I am hungry or thirsty and someone gives me a beer or a mixed drink, I will almost always drink it too fast, or faster than I should.)

WHAT HAPPENED

I woke up and made my aunt breakfast. That was—a poached egg. My mom showed me once how to do it. It requires a bit of a skillful maneuver. There was a little left of a fancy pepper, so I used it for her egg and ground it over the plate. The pepper ground up really beautifully. When I get to use nice things, I always think: nice things are so nice. But, like everything else—you get used to them and they vanish, unless like me you never get them, or only rarely.

She was really happy about the egg. When I got to her with it, she was already sitting up, since she slept in the chair, so it was just a matter of her opening her eyes and being happy.

I had my raincoat on, and she knew where I was going.

Later, chief! she said. It was a joke from an old TV show that aired fifty years ago. I always laugh and enjoy pretending to enjoy the joke, even though I don’t know what it is.

Later, I said.

I took the number 12 to the 8. I read my book. Three people tried to talk to me separately. I got rid of them by doing nothing. I walked up the drive to the main building. The girl was there, and she gave me a weird look along with the pass. The orderly came, same guy as before, and he was happy to see me. I could tell even though he acted like it was nothing at all. He said he had read the book. Did he like it? He said some of the stories were good but some were very bad. I said this is true—this is the way it is with that book. We went down to the fish pond straightaway, which was new. When he left he patted me on the shoulder, where the raincoat had fallen off. Which meant, he touched my shoulder, and I could feel his hand there while I sat looking at my mom. She was looking at the pond.

She does this thing where she is looking at the pond, and then for no reason she wants to go closer, so she gets out of her chair and leans over the pond, looking down over it. Then she shakes her head a bunch and mutters something and goes back to the chair. If you wait long enough, she will always do this. I think about the visit in terms of how many cycles I stay for. Once, I stayed for six cycles of the head-shaking. If I try to touch her, she says, no no no no no no nononononononononono.

When that happens, I always cry. It is really stupid, and it breaks the rules because it is not something I am proud of. But, so far I have not been able to stop it.

My mom’s gown is not always tied properly, so when she goes to look in the pool, her underwear is pretty visible. That is sometimes the occasion for the touching—I’m just trying to fix the gown so it covers her. She really doesn’t like it, though.

I didn’t want you to think I was trying to give her a hug or kiss her. I know that she doesn’t want that—and I don’t either, since she isn’t actually anyone I know, and I’m not anyone that she knows.

FISH POND

The orderly came back and he must have noticed I was okay with him putting his hand on my shoulder, because he did it again, this time with both hands, one on each shoulder. So, I was sitting there and he was standing behind me sort of touching my shoulders. I leaned back a bit, which encouraged him more.

I said before that my mom doesn’t really notice anything that happens. That’s true. It’s also true that the fish pond is behind a screen of trees on one side, and the back of another building with no windows on the other side. No one goes there, ever.

So, I didn’t have many misgivings about it. I could tell that he was pretty happy about how things were going with his hands on me, and for the record—I don’t get very much affection elsewhere, so I am a little starved. I was conscientious, I mean, when he started undoing my pants, I made sure we were going to do it safely, and he was like, yes, of course, and he showed me, and so—it felt really good. I can treat a person well. I really can, and he treated me really well. People aren’t all horrible. They aren’t. Sometimes you find a good one, at least for a while—even if it’s just for twenty minutes or so.

While we were at it, I looked up and my mom had gotten out of her chair. She had come over toward the pool and was looking around in confusion as if she couldn’t remember where to look. She came toward me and I met her eye, but there was no recognition, none. I must have shifted suddenly, because he shifted too. His hand moved over my breast and I shivered a little. That broke our gaze and I shut my eyes. When I looked back at my mom, she was over the pond, shaking her head, shaking her head, shaking her head.

DAY SIX

That Monday was my sixth detention, so I was done with them for the time being. I finished writing the paper based on Russia Is Burning. and it was much easier because it turned out the school will loan me a computer to use while I am there. I can’t take it home—but I can check it out. So, I typed the paper on that. It is a pretty bad computer. Certainly, I don’t look cool while using it, but I am a fast typist, so it didn’t take long.

Kennison came over and we had an argument about citation. She had some idea about helping me, I guess. But, I don’t need help. She wanted me to do parenthetical citation. I said footnotes are fine. She failed to present a cogent argument about why her way is better. I said footnotes allow for the author to comment on the source immediately at the point of use. She basically threatened me with more detention—but that was just because some of the students laughed when I clowned her.

Lana was there again. Maybe she is my friend. We went to a twenty-four-hour donut shop where her cousin works. He gave us free donuts. She kissed him a little and that’s when I knew he wasn’t her cousin. She said she calls him that because she thinks it’s funny. I thought to myself—this is my kind of girl, and I said, you think that because it is funny. It is funny.

MY DAD’S LIGHTER

We went outside the donut shop to smoke a cigarette and Hal, her “cousin,” asked to use my dad’s lighter, which I was holding in my hand (as usual). I gave it to him.

He did some zippo tricks with it and lit his cigarette. I did some too, so we have that in common now. He told Lana that I was cool, that it was cool with him if she brought me around now and then. It wasn’t a creepy thing to say—it was more like, the three of us can talk without other people messing it up, so let’s keep doing that.

He doesn’t go to school. Hal thinks school is a waste, and I could not fucking agree more.

I want to describe my dad’s lighter to you.

It is a zippo, so it is made up of several parts.

There is an outer shell, a metal case. That holds the parts together. The shell is rectangular, but it is curved at the edge, almost slightly beveled. The top of the case has a true curve across it. Even with all this curving that I’m describing, the main impression you get from the zippo is flatness. All the sides, even the top, they’re all pretty flat. It is intensely comforting. Some lighters seem like they’ll jump out of your hand. The zippo is the opposite of that. The tricks and things that you can do with it are evidence. The zippo likes to be in the hand—it isn’t trying to flee the hand. You can pop it open, make it do a somersault—whatever you want. It isn’t trying to escape to the ground.

That’s the case. Inside the case, there is a sort of spring attachment that flips the top up or down. This spring attachment is connected to the body of the lighter. The body of the lighter consists of: the wick, the flint, the striking wheel, the cloth-like part that holds the fluid. Essentially, the zippo is always releasing gas. If you keep one in your pocket, your pocket will smell like gas (or it will smell like what they make gas smell like so you can smell it).

The outside of a zippo can look a number of different ways. Sometimes it will have a Vietnam kind of POW you are not forgotten thing going on. Sometimes it will have a USMC thing. Sometimes, just a skull. Some of them are mirrored. Others are matte silver. Some are dull black. Like other blue-collar things they will often feature gambling elements, like dice, cards, pool balls, or flags. My father’s is matte black and has a white dot in the center. I haven’t seen another like it. Years ago, I thought about asking him if he had done it himself, but I realized, and this was kind of a big deal for me to be smart enough at that point to realize something like this—I realized that I didn’t want to know. I liked not knowing. So, I still don’t know. The only thing that will make it clear is if one day I see another exactly like it. To be precise, that won’t make it 100 percent clear. But, it would make it likely.

Other things that can vary about zippos:

1. Some are smaller—I don’t know why. Maybe those are marketed to women, or to men with small pockets.

Often, people want to say that things are “for men” or “for women,” but I think that many of these items just share the property that they can or can’t fit into the shitty pockets women get. Of course, if girls were less focused on their appearance, maybe they would wear carpenter’s pants and carry whatever they wanted. Who is to say? It is inarguable, though, whomever’s fault it is, that having small pockets is terrible.

2. Some are looser or tighter in the way they snap open.

3. Some leak like crazy.

4. The inner cartridge on some slips around, so that when you go to shut the zippo, it doesn’t shut properly. This was happening with my dad’s, so I put a little sand into the case, and it is tighter now.

MY AUNT

was in the middle of beating me six times in a row in cribbage. They call it a skunking or something like that. I was getting skunked. That’s when someone tapped on the door. I figured, it is the landlord, since no one else ever comes to the house. My aunt knows nobody. I know nobody. There isn’t anything left to take. Why would someone come?

But, when I went to the door, Stephan was there.

Stephan, what are you doing here? How do you know where I live? It’s eight o’clock. I said something like that to him.

He said it was on the emergency contact card we had to fill out that day. He got the pile of cards for a second and he has a photographic memory.

I thought to myself that this explained why he sometimes seemed smart and sometimes not. I didn’t say that to him; maybe I should have. Sometimes people need to know what other people are thinking.

Mostly, though, I was just embarrassed about him seeing where I live, and then I was ashamed for feeling embarrassed about it, because it is a shallow thing to be embarrassed like that—and certainly not a way of behaving that I could feel proud about.

So, I said, come inside. You can meet my aunt.

Aunt, I said, this is Stephan. He is a convicted child molester. He wants us to know that he lives in our garden now.

My aunt laughed in a congenial way that put Stephan at his ease despite my awkward joke.

Do you go to school with Lucia? she asked.

He said he did.

She has a very foul mouth, don’t you think? Sit down and have some tea with us, she said. We’re just playing cribbage. Do you play?

Stephan took a gander at the room. I could see he was repulsed a little and when he looked at me, maybe he pitied me a little. I try not to be good at identifying pity in people’s eyes. It is mostly better not to.

Anyway, he sat down, and my aunt explained the rules of V_I_C (veritably improved cribbage) to him, and then she beat us both really badly a few times and went to sleep in her chair.

Do you want to go for a walk?

Okay.

We went outside and walked for a while.

I heard what happened, he said.

About the pencil? It’s nothing. He was an asshole.

Not that. Of course that’s nothing. I mean—about your parents.

How did you hear about that.

Jay Lesso.

Oh. Jay, he’s okay.

Yeah. Anyway—I’m sorry about that.

There is a really dirty canal that is near my aunt’s place. We went to it and threw some paving stones into it.

Stephan told me that he was going to set a fire.

I said that I doubted it, he seemed kind of like a pussy to me.

Stephan repeated that he was going to set a big fire. He was planning it. He wondered if I would help him.

I said it is better to do those kinds of things by yourself.

He said, for this he would need a little help.

RUTTING

I think Stephan definitely wanted something else. A couple of times he seemed nervous as if he couldn’t think of what he was trying to say, which is stupid, because he is smart enough to have a conversation without tripping up. He did this weird thing where he would take off his watch and put it back on. So, I knew.

It wouldn’t be so bad. There’s nothing objectively wrong with him. But, since he was someone I could talk to about setting fires, I figured—if you are a young woman, there are many people who want to do things to you that they enjoy doing to young women, so if someone is interesting for other purposes, it can be good to use them for those other purposes and avoid the things that anyone could do.

To be totally honest, and I like animals, it is just about rutting like animals. I ask you—is the best thing we’re capable of just rutting like animals? We need to do it, yes, just so we don’t get anxious, but for the rest? If someone says to me, Lucia, do you want to train to be a great spelunker so we can explore some unexplored part of Carlsbad Caverns, I mean—that is definitely more interesting. I say yes to that. I guess it’s true also—you can do both kinds of things with the same person, but I haven’t found anyone like that.

Before he left he showed me on his phone a video of some Pakistani soldiers beating a cow to death. It made me sad, but I also felt—how large the world is. There are many places and in some of them, people are beating cows to death for no reason. Meanwhile here we beat them to death out of sight and when they appear they are in neat cardboard packaging with tasty sauces.

I said that Darius once punished a river for drowning his favorite horse. Maybe this cow was being punished.

Stephan said he thought the cow was definitely being punished, but for what—who could say?

He asked me for my telephone number, but I don’t have one—that was another embarrassing moment. He wrote his address on a piece of paper like it was 1990 and gave it to me. Jan is going to give a meeting at my house on Thursday, he said. My parents are away, so it’s fine.

WORST THINGS

Whenever I have done the worst things that I have done—it is usually because I thought about doing something, and then I thought, Lucia, you shouldn’t do that. Don’t do that, Lucia. Then, I think, maybe I am just saying that to myself because I am afraid of doing it (the thing). What I fear most is being a person who is afraid to do things. So, at that point, I force myself to do the thing. Later on, it turns out one of two ways:

1. I was afraid to begin with, and it was good that I didn’t let myself off the hook.

2. I wasn’t afraid to begin with. I had some difficult-to-parse but correct misgivings about whatever it was, and when I go ahead and do it, things turn out badly, specifically because I was right and didn’t pay attention to my feelings. This is when I do the worst things that I do. If someone else finds out about it, like my aunt, they say, why would you do that, with considerable astonishment. It’s obvious you shouldn’t do a thing like that.

We had to do one of those stupid occupational tests on Tuesday. First, there was a very long multiple choice. Then, there was a one-on-one interview with a counselor. In this case, I think they could have brought in a clown and it would have been more effective. At the very least, I would have enjoyed sitting with a clown for a while not talking. If neither of us talked for something like two hours, I would let the clown win, I would talk, out of sympathy. But, if he gave up early, I would be glad to claim victory over an undisciplined clown. What am I even talking about? There wasn’t a clown—it was just a counselor, and the counselor asked me what my greatest weakness was. That’s when I said that I was a coward at heart, but a recovering coward. She asked what did I mean. I said that I did everything I could to mitigate the effects of my cowardice. Why is that a weakness? she asked. I said it was because I then ended up doing absolutely inadvisable shit, like jumping off a pier onto a grain barge, or pulling a biker’s ponytail at a hotdog stand.

She asked what my greatest strength was. I said I was perspicacious. She pretended to have to go to the bathroom, but I could tell she was looking up perspicacious in her phone. That’s okay. I would have said it differently, but I think it is a beautiful word. I guess it is my vanity (my aunt would say so), but I like to think it is true, I am perspicacious. One thing about perspicaciousness is that it doesn’t have to be allied to traditional knowledge structures. It’s just good clean insight. I aspire to be a perspicacious person, like a carpenter who knows which one of the beams is important.

The woman came back, and she had the results of my test with her. I was actually pretty eager to hear what it said. You might think these sorts of things are dumb, and of course I agree. However, they are mostly dumb when the results of the occupational test are someone else’s results. Everyone finds their own results to be really interesting. Same with personality tests, all tests having to do with our paltry identities. What fools we are! I include myself in that.

Earlier, when I was waiting in the hall for my turn, Susan Dempsey came out, and she said she could be an architect, but also a performance coach. I don’t know who thinks that is a job.

However that is—it made me curious. What weird thing might they tell me I can do?

Lucia, said the woman, your results in some parts are very good, and in others, well, you didn’t even fill out all the questions.

I didn’t think they could possibly test anything, I said.

This test is put together by very qualified people, said the counselor. It is certainly capable of testing any number of things. Your results, well, you shouldn’t feel disappointed. The test doesn’t ever show the upper limits of what you can do. You are always capable of much more than what others expect. It is very important for you to remember that.

I told her to cut out the bullshit. What did it tell me to be?

She handed me the piece of paper, which said my highest match was 69 percent with a career as a truck driver. I guess she thought I would be disappointed, but I thought that was great. Of course, I want a job where you work by yourself. The inside of those truck cabs are nice, too! Very comfortable. You can have a kick-ass dog with a bandanna. Sure, it is a bit jittery drinking twelve cups of coffee or popping pills to make a long-distance run through the night, but every job has its dangers.

She was looking at me very calmly. I don’t understand it, really, she said. Your scores in these parts of the test are very high. It must be a mistake of some kind.

I don’t think it’s a mistake, I said. And you’re definitely right—the test makers are very good.

Why do you say that? she asked.

Well, it’s probably that—if someone scores more than a certain amount on the ability part, but then loses patience with the test and doesn’t finish it, then that person is likely to hate having bosses, and being in office environments. So, such a person should be a truck driver or a park ranger or something like that. It’s probably built into the algorithm for the test results.

She said she hadn’t thought of that. Not finishing the test might be part of the test.

EMPTY LOT

Stephan came near me at lunch, which was surprising because it meant other people would see that he had talked to me. I figured that might be embarrassing for him. It could be people would think he was trying to get me to give it up, which guys are always proud about. If a guy is a pariah, there is no reason to ever talk to him, societally. But if a girl is a pariah, there is still one reason. How fucked-up is that?

He said that his parents had come back. Apparently his mom got food poisoning in Tangiers. I said that was a lie. He said, yeah, it was because one of his dad’s patients was doing badly. They hadn’t been in Tangiers at all.

I said, I didn’t think that Tangiers was actually a place. It was something like Camelot, but for drugs and sex. He started doing some misguided shit where he took out his phone to show me Tangiers on a map. I know Tangiers is real, I said. You are like four steps behind.

He said we were going to meet at this empty lot, and he told me where it was. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.

I told him I would go, but I wasn’t sure. Meeting two or three guys at an empty lot when no one knows you are there?

I offered him some licorice, but he didn’t want it. I guess he’s one of those who don’t like licorice. I think 75 percent of people hate it, but the other 25 adore it. What else is like that? Trampolines? Tanning salons? Parrots?

GYM

In gym class, we were playing volleyball. Yes, I know, I told you I manage to avoid gym—but not always. I was stuck in gym and we were playing volleyball.

That meant I had to wear gym clothes, which is awful. It used to be everyone would wear ugly baggy clothes, but now the pretty girls wear essentially spandex outfits. This makes it awkward for people who don’t feel like doing that. So, I wear long basketball shorts and a black tank top. I do that so people will know I am not wearing the same shirt I wear during the day. It is no joke—it’s a real thing. If I wore a white tank top, they would think I didn’t change, and I would hear about it. Kids are jackals.

I mean, I like jackals more than kids, so the comparison isn’t fair.

The thing about this volleyball game, and the reason I brought it up is—Clarence Eames, who is huge, and really strong, spiked the ball on Jeanette Levy and broke the hell out of her fingers. It was really really good, because she is not a legitimate person and deserves every bad thing.

She was crying and holding her fingers, and two of them were obviously bent the wrong way. The gym teacher tried to do some EMT business, but it failed and she just screamed louder. Eventually the nurse came, and then an ambulance. It was havoc, and I loved every second.

While the ambulance was coming, I had a fantasy in my mind. In the fantasy I am wearing a doctor’s coat and just popping Jeanette’s fingers in and out and she is screaming. I hold the fingers delicately in one hand and I hold her hand delicately in the other. I don’t say anything, but my posture is like, I am being reasonable. Calm down, Jeanette.

That makes it even funnier (in the fantasy) when she can’t stop screaming, because I am being a rock-solid medical professional—apart from the fact that I am, for reasons unknown, brutally reinjuring the finger as soon as I fix it.

When I was finished with this thought, it was time to go.

SATIE, ERIK

I saw a film the week that I moved in with my aunt. It was called My Dinner with Andre. Nobody really likes this movie. I like it a lot, and my aunt likes it, too. She says it is a good weather vane: if people like it, you might like them. It’s possible, at least.

The movie has some Satie music in it, which is the first I had heard of this guy, Erik Satie. There are basically two things I like to listen to. One is a kind of headphone thing for concentrating. You put the earphones on and there is a tone that sounds sort of far away on one side. Then it goes away and after a while there is a tone on the other side. It is supposed to make you focus better than anything. I got completely addicted to it, and I used it for a long time until it broke, and then I found out they don’t make it anymore. That was sad.

The other thing I like to listen to is Erik Satie. My aunt has a record of someone playing his stuff—and we listen to that. She wants to put it on when we are doing things. I refuse that. I want to sit in the chair and do nothing when I listen to this music.

By the way, I don’t think that it is the greatest music. Bach is definitely better. Aretha Franklin is better. Everyone is better, I get it. There is a lot of really good music. I am not going to argue with you.

For me, though, I like to sit in the chair and listen to this Satie. I heard that he lived in a crappy little room in a boardinghouse, too, and was real lonely.

I think he was simultaneously feted and unappreciated.

But, that wasn’t even what I was going to talk about—I wanted to tell you about this scene in the movie where the main character goes to a house party somewhere on Long Island, and has to dig a hole in the ground for his own grave, and then gets put in a coffin and buried and then taken back out and runs through the night naked to a shining white tent where some ascendant adoration and joy fill him entirely. I think he said it was like being born. When I heard about this, I felt like I was entirely ready to give up being who I am and ready to try being someone else. The trouble is—the someone else you are okay with being isn’t anyone you know. So, who is it?

FIRE

Partway through second period, someone pulled the fire alarm. I figured it was just a prank. At Parkson, Will Scaffy used to get his older brother to call in bomb threats, and sometimes would pull the fire alarm himself until they got the ones that spray you to mark who did it.

But, this wasn’t a prank at all. Someone had set fire to the music room. That is definitely not the room that I would have chosen, of all the terrible rooms at the school. Not that it mattered. I think just one or two chairs were set on fire.

But, we all got to go stand in the athletic fields, which was horrible, because I had to stand next to Jamie Anderson and her hair spray is like nerve gas. I almost fainted once, honestly. And, I’m not a fragile person.

The fire was not a bad one at all—but the principal decided to send everyone home, so the buses came early. I don’t get a regular bus, so I just waited for Lana to see if she would show up, but she wasn’t anywhere. This guy Rufus came up to me and asked if I knew who did it. I said why would I know. He said, he is asking everybody.

I watched him go off along the line of buses, and yeah, he was asking everybody. There are people, there really are, who think that they could be detectives if they wanted to. When I talk to these people I want to say, if you could be a PI or a detective, you would be. Being a detective is too exciting to not do it. If you aren’t doing it, it’s because you couldn’t do it. So, stop telling me you could be a detective.

Detectives are a special case, though. Not everything is like that.

BEEKMAN

You remember I had the argument with Beekman. He’s the one who gave me the detention that led to six detentions. Well, when I turned in my paper early, he was shocked. Seems like he had me pegged as a dunce. I still don’t think he thought it would be good, though. He probably thought I was trying to put one over on him by handing in a terrible paper early.

I went into school, though, the next day, and Beekman comes up to me at my locker and he is raving about my paper. He says it is a really good paper. He says it is the best one he’s ever gotten. Okay. Take it easy, guy. It’s a paper.

He goes off down the hall, and I figure it’s the end of it, but then O’Toole in math asks me why I can write such good papers but don’t do anything for him. He says I can’t leave class until I redo my last two tests, and he gives them to me again. So, I do the tests, and fill in the answers this time. I really wish Beekman hadn’t blown the whistle on me.

It gets worse, though. The rest of that day was fine, but I guess Beekman talked to more people about the paper. He wanted to put it up for some kind of award. It was just too much.

So, last period, everyone comes down to the auditorium to hear this speech that the principal gives about our civic duty and how setting fires is evil, actually evil, and that if anyone knows who did it, that person should come forward.

I think that they should, actually. If a person is a jackass who wants to burn up the music room, where delicate Mr. Alphonse who is from Spain or France and barely speaks English but is the only really kind one in the whole place, he sits there in the music room with crappy pictures of Mozart on the wall and tries to patiently teach people the fucking oboe, if they want to burn that room up, ahead of the rest of the godforsaken place, then yes—clap them in irons, I say. The order of things matters.

By the way, the principal was talking about evil, and I was thinking: how goddamned Manichaean this country is. Isn’t it obvious that the world is a meaningless place where there is a faint impression you can leave on each other by being compassionate, but not more than that? And even awful things just pass away? I don’t understand what evil is, and furthermore, I don’t think he does. Our principal would love to take the occupational test from the guidance counselor and find out that he should be a principal. That would suit him right down to the ground.

I’m sorry for the digression. The point of all this is, after the auditorium speech—someone comes to the principal, another teacher, to talk about the paper that Beekman is blabbing about, my paper. So, the principal gets it in his head that I probably started the fire. He noticed that there was fire in the paper and a fire in the music room. He is basically a hero to himself.

MEETING

What does that mean? It means my aunt gets dragged down after school, and I am sitting in the principal’s office again, this time with Mr. Alphonse across from me. He is purposefully not looking at me. I think to myself—he really thinks I did it. I was shocked.

I touch Alphonse’s knee, and I say, mon professeur, je ne l’ai pas fait.

(I asked my aunt how to say it.)

He smiles this really nice smile. It is like, I said something to someone and for once they believe me.

The principal comes over. What did she say? Then, he and Alphonse have some words off to the side and Alphonse leaves. The old man didn’t want to have anything to do with it, since he knows I’m not the one. The principal is showing Alphonse the paper, which he somehow has, but Alphonse won’t go with it. He says some shit in French and leaves. My aunt laughs. What did he say? I ask. Something about birds and donkeys, she says. I’ll explain later.

The principal comes back and tries to be a tough guy with us, but I point out that I was in a class at the time the fire was set. He calls that teacher in over the loudspeaker, and she hasn’t left yet, luckily, because she is ninety years old and slow. It takes her twenty minutes to get to the office, but when she does, Ms. Cassidy tells him, yes, Lucia Stanton was in Chemistry at that exact moment. I give her a thumbs-up, but it only confuses her.

So, I’m like, too bad, I guess your little witch hunt didn’t go as planned. For which I immediately got a detention until my aunt stuck up for me.

Or, I guess she did. They told me to leave the room, and my aunt talked to him. When she came out, she said she threatened to make a big deal out of me being accused if he didn’t can it. How could he go after a poor girl like me who has done nothing?

My aunt, what a lady.

PAPER

I guess that meant I wasn’t going to get an award for the paper. It’s not like I worked that hard on it. Some of the other kids started asking me to write their papers for them. I said do your own work, weaklings. Actually, I didn’t say that. I just said, no.

Beekman read some of it out loud to the class,

Whatever this material means to the author, there is a dangerous implication. That implication is that the vengeful burning of one another’s dwellings by these peasants is not political, and is not a thing that is performed with agency. In fact, the burning is a result of the ignorance forced upon the peasants by their masters, and by the imposition of a religious framework that fails to prepare them to weather the calamity of their daily lives. The people with agency in the situation have total agency, that is, the masters control completely what happens. When the peasants burn each other’s huts, or even burn their own huts (by accident), the masters have chosen to permit the burning of the huts to occur. It is they who are guilty.

Everyone looked pretty bored while he read it, and I really wished that he would stop. At the end, he asked why it was good, which really made me turn bright red. I completely hid in my hood at the back of the class.

The first girl who raised her hand asked if she could get up to throw her gum out.

Beekman said yes, now—what was good about the paper?

Somebody said maybe it was good because I had read the book.

He said, that was important. He said he often got papers written by people who hadn’t read the book. But, it wasn’t that.

Someone else said something stupid, so Beekman was forced to come out and say it himself, which he should have done in the first place if he wanted it to get said.

He said, it was good because I read the book with an open but argumentative mind. He said the paper was at least good enough to be a college paper, whatever that means. I really wish that he hadn’t said that part, but the first part was okay.

It is pretty stupid, how I felt. I felt that—I wished my aunt was there to hear it. She doesn’t get to hear much that is positive about me. The landlord even told her I am a bad kid, which was rough. He is an old Ukrainian guy, and I thought he liked me.

The sad thing is, I can’t even repeat this stuff about the paper because that would be boasting.

PSYCH VISIT

I guess this was the principal’s revenge. Since he couldn’t give me the detention without my aunt flogging him, he notified the psychologist that she should check up on me.

I want to see how you are settling in, she told me.

I sat down in her office and was immediately really unhappy. This is how it is—there are no chairs. I kid you not. There are two beanbags. She sits on a beanbag and you sit on the other, or, if you want, you both sit on the floor, I guess. Sometimes, she does this thing where she switches from the beanbag to the floor, like some kind of conciliatory gesture. The beanbag chairs are different colors, and I’m sure it means something to her which one you choose. Thinking that made me hesitant to sit before her, so I let her sit first, but I’m sure that means something too. She is really young, Ms. Kapleau, and extremely beautiful, which is why all the male teachers do boss stuff when she is in the hall, like clapping each other on the shoulder and leaning on things. Even the students do. I’m sure all the guys would like to fuck her. On this visit, she was wearing an inappropriate skirt. It was fine, as skirts go, but miniskirts and beanbag chairs are not a match made in heaven.

I told her that I was fine. I was going to try to make it for two more years and then be done. If I couldn’t, I would leave before that, since I legally don’t have to stay any longer.

What is keeping you here? she asked.

I said I didn’t want to disappoint my aunt.

She asked me if I loved my aunt.

I didn’t answer that. What bullshit—where they use whatever you say to make further questions.

Then, she asked if I was angry. I said that anyone who loves freedom should be angry. That shut her up.

We sat there for a while, and then she said she wanted to read me something. She got some shitty poem by Rumi and read it to me. There is a candle in your heart …

I laughed, and she asked me why I was laughing.

I said, you small-minded bitch, you think that is poetry? Of all Rumi’s goddamned poems, you pick that one? Did you find it in some psych-nonsense anthology? That has to be his worst poem, and it isn’t even translated well. How does it feel to wade around in life so hopelessly? You are just mired in shit. You’re so limited.

I laughed some more. Of all the poems, that one.

She was looking at me in shock. I think she was actually speechless, so I gave her some more.

Whoever’s calm and sensible is insane.

What?

I said, that’s Rumi. Or didn’t you know?

I didn’t feel at all bad that I made her cry. After all, a school psychologist probably has to cry a lot in the first years of working at a school. There must be a great deal that they aren’t ready for.

HOME

Well, I got in trouble for that. When I got home, I told my aunt the whole story, about the beanbags, the Rumi poem, everything. I did it because I felt like I had broken the rules. I wasn’t proud of being mean to her. When I’m not proud of what I’ve done, I tell my aunt about it. I used to tell my dad. Now I tell my aunt.

I’m sure it gives her a picture of me that is pretty unflattering, since I tell her all the bad things, but none of the good ones.

She asked me if I thought that it was my job to improve the school psychologist.

I said, no.

She asked if I thought of myself as a person who goes around improving other people by showing them their shortcomings.

I said, no I wasn’t that sort of person.

She said, it was puzzling then, why I would say that to the woman. Wasn’t I trying to improve her? There was another explanation, she said. Maybe I just wanted to demonstrate to the woman that I was smarter than she was. Maybe I was showing off.

I said maybe it was that.

She said, if that was true, then it meant I must feel weak and ashamed, if I need to demonstrate my intelligence, rather than just having it.

She said that quietly, and then turned away to make some tea.

Boy, did I feel awful.

My aunt, when she gives it to you, she really gives it to you. When she brought the tea over she said it is possible my comprehension was not of the really good sort, but just a mean sort of proto-intelligence, and that was why I was being mean. Maybe I was embarrassed about its quality and magnitude, and that led me to go after these low-hanging fruit.

I could see that the corner of her mouth was turning, so I burst out laughing, and she laughed too. It was a good joke.

BELL

Later that evening, we were sitting there and I could hear a church bell from the Orthodox church around the corner. My ear followed the sound there and back, there and back, my eye trailing the distance to the church in the dark. I asked my aunt if she was awake. She stirred in her chair and said yes, she was. I said, how did you make it so long. She asked what I meant. I said, there are so many years. How can you be alone so long. She said she didn’t know.

She pulled the blanket up onto herself and curled a little in the chair. I could see she was thinking. She does this thing where she cocks her head.

A person comes to the door. I ask: Who is at my door? What do they say?

She asked me again, what do they say?

I said, I don’t know. What.

She laughed.

They call to me from outside, It is you at the door, my love!

Wait, I remember, I said. I remember that. It is thou, beloved!

Yes, she said. Jalal ad-Din Rumi. A person who was always standing outside his own door.

EMPTY LOT

I went to the place, Fourth and Simonen, during the day, in order to check it out. Originally, I was just going to go at night to the actual meeting, but then I decided against it. I thought—why not go and look at what it is like and then you can have an idea about whether it is a terrible notion to show up there with some creeps and be potentially raped to death. This is what any right-thinking girl would say to herself.

Along Fourth there are a whole bunch of ramshackle houses. I guess they used to be brownstones. Now they are hovels. There are some places where you can give them a check and they give you 60 percent of the check in cash. There is a barbershop, no, there are three barbershops, and they are all open late, or so they say on the outside—you know, because everyone needs a haircut at one a.m.

I walked up and down the block and had some conversations that I won’t repeat.

There was a little box someone had hammered to a telephone pole. It said, Community Library. There was a copy of a Dos Passos novel with the last chapter torn out (a nasty trick) as well as two Danielle Steel books and a shitty children’s book about a unicorn. I know that because I read it standing there. The book is called My Own Unicorn, and it is about a girl who wants to have a unicorn, so her father buys her one, and then she is happy. I’m not kidding. That’s the plot. The final picture is of a happy girl with her hand on the unicorn’s mane.

My thought on that is—it wasn’t a goddamned unicorn. The point of unicorns is you don’t just get them. So the book isn’t even bad, it’s just invalid.

I had a thrift copy of Benjamin Franklin, some Poor Richard’s Almanac stuff they put together. It was okay, but I had looked at it a little already, so I stuck it in there. Maybe someone will like it.

When I got down to Simonen, the neighborhood changed, if anything, for the worse. The empty lot as they called it was a housing project with a huge fence around it, half of it demolished, the other half decrepit. If I had to pick a place to murder someone, this would be it. I walked around the outside and it was enough to make you cry. It was very beautiful, too, though. I found a spot where I could climb the fence and I went in. It was really quiet in there.

The overgrown part was just a huge lot, maybe the size of a football field, maybe larger, I mean it stretched forever. All the crappy trees that grow when nothing else is growing were there, busting up through the concrete as far as the eye could see. All the walls, wherever they were bare, were covered in graffiti. There were piles of blankets or sleeping bags where people maybe had tried to live. I wandered across the lot. It took me ten minutes to cross it; I kept getting distracted by how alone I was—and how wonderful it felt. Eventually I got into the complex of buildings. There was a kind of driveway with window frames thrown down every fifteen feet. At the end of it was a beautiful courtyard. The windows from the buildings looked down into it and I got completely creeped out, but I couldn’t run away. It was too far. Where would I run to? So, I found a place under a tree where the windows couldn’t see me, and I sat and ate my lunch.

I was embarrassed to mention this earlier, but since I have said everything else, I might as well say this, too. My aunt makes me a lunch that I have when I go places (like school), since we can’t afford to buy things. It is: a hard-boiled egg and a piece of bread and a carrot. The bread she makes herself and it is not good bread. Some people can make bread, some can’t. My aunt is awful at it. I have eaten so much of this bread in the last year, I can’t tell you. But, I am practically psychically compelled to eat it, because when I don’t I have this grievous identification with her in my mind as she leans over the oven with her bad back taking the bread out. So, I have to eat it.

The good thing about that lunch is—it is over in about fifteen seconds. That leaves me more time for other things. Most people—their lunch takes them five minutes at least, sometimes ten or twenty, so they are lagging behind me in efficiency.

I have the licorice, too—which makes the shitty lunch bearable. When I run out of licorice, it gets bad.

You may be wondering whether I was brave enough to go into the buildings. I was not brave enough to go in. I had the thought that I would be a coward if I didn’t go in. Then, I looked at one of the places where the door was broken down. That’s where I would go in, I thought to myself. Then, I thought, I am not going in there, no matter what. You can’t make me. Then, I tried to make myself do it, and it didn’t happen. So, I am that much of a coward, at least.

I went back to the lot, and found a nearer place where I could get out by climbing a wall on the inside. When I jumped down to the sidewalk, there were two guys playing dice in the shade right by me.

Shit, said one of them. What were you doing in there?

None of your business, I said, in a nice, play-along way, and he laughed.

I sat and talked to them for a while and watched them play cee-lo. I wanted to play too, but I didn’t have any money. It’s mostly luck, but it is slightly better to go first, so the trick is—you and your friends make sure the stranger has to go last. That way your money stays with your group. Eventually, then, you have all the stranger’s money.

CEE-LO

You throw three dice and it is only something if you get:

111,222,333,444,555,666

or

any two that are the same and one of something else, which counts as the something else, ie., 33,5 is a 5.

or

123 & 456.

The game is kind of rigged, and here’s why: 1,2,3 is an instant loss. You are removed from the game, but the game continues for everyone else. Meanwhile, 4,5,6 is an instant win. The game is over—bang. You get all the money.

So, the way to think of it—of whether it is fair—is to consider, what if the game was just with one die and you throw it—if you get a 1 a 2 or a 3 you win everything. Let’s imagine that is the game. Well, if that was the case, then you would definitely not want to be last in a group of people who are throwing the dice. Because then you would have a 50 percent chance of losing your money whenever someone else goes. And each of the five guys who are ahead of you are going to go before you. If you put in five dollars or ten dollars, which are common stakes, you could lose as much as 25 or 50 dollars, without ever getting to touch the dice! I grant you, in the actual game, that is uncommon, it would be 2 or 3 percent, I think, per roll of 456—but we are talking about the fairness—and over time, it ends up being pretty unfair.

So, you have to have enough money to suffer the loss that will happen before you get to go, just to make sure you have money to put in the pot for your turn, and then you’d better hope you have at least average good fortune when you do get to go first.

If it truly rotates and everyone gets to go first the same number of times, well, fine. But, people often get tricked out of going first because the dice game will move, people come and go. I have seen it happen. Also, people will often leave right after having gotten to go first, which is a creep move. If the players in the game keep coming and going—and there are a lot of fresh faces, and those people are getting to go first when they arrive for reasons you can’t fathom, well, watch out! Basically the same trick is that they will change the bet when your turn comes around—so the time when you go first is a short-bet, and the rest of the times, the bet is large. The way they do this con is they let you go first, and everyone throws a dollar down. Then when that turn is through, they up the bet to five or ten.

One other trick they will do is when it is about to be your turn someone will throw the dice so that one die gets lost. Then the game is off until another die is found, and at that point there is a new order, and you are at the back of the line again. What bullshit! And if you try to argue, you could even get beaten up—or worse, some of these guys are charismatic. They’ll just talk real sweet and make you seem like an asshole for trying to be some kind of stickler. But everyone knows what is actually going on.

There is a different version that is slightly more fair that involves the dice-throwing player being “the bank.” Then, the rest match his/her bet. People will play that version if they play for a lot of money. I have only seen it once.

And as I was saying at the beginning, even if things are fair—you can be in big trouble when it is you versus a group of people who are friends. This is because they exist as a sort of big bank that preserves itself. Whereas, when you run out of money, you have to stop playing. You stop playing because they have your money and you have no money. They never have to stop playing because it simply won’t happen (unless you are really lucky) that you win all of the money that they have in common.

Essentially, if you are going to weather bad runs of luck, you need to have enough money to never stop playing.

Enough about cee-lo. I’m sorry to talk so much about it—but I really like thinking about games. My aunt would definitely come up with some better rules if she were a dice player.

PAMPHLET

A few days before, at school, Stephan had given me a full copy of the arson pamphlet that he got when he went to somebody’s house. I imagine he must have gone and photocopied it himself, which is ridiculous. He had to be really stuck on me to photocopy a whole pamphlet for no reason. I didn’t even thank him. Sometimes when people get to be too nice, you end up not thanking them, because you are completely tired of saying thank you. Then they become more and more hangdog and you want to thank them even less.

The pamphlet was a bit long-winded. It was written by one of these anarchist types who want to prove that they could be university professors if they felt like it. He is imagining a cadre of university professors tearing his bullshit pamphlet up, and he wants to make sure that whatever grounds they have for tearing it up, it will damned well not be because the thing isn’t smart and awesomely argued on their terms. Which is worse than nonsense. If it is a pamphlet about anarchism or setting fires it should be practical.

I will give you a breakdown of some of the material.

The pamphlet had an introduction. The introduction said that all over the United States, the lower class is fed up with being used. Okay.

Next, it said that the response to that is: people forming groups, syndicates, with the intention of burning down property. What cannot be shared should be destroyed. That’s what he says. The organization of these groups varies from place to place, but it really doesn’t matter how the organization is handled, or even if there is any, because the whole thing is just people burning things, so you don’t need an organization in the first place.

As far as I can tell, the clubs are just there to be clubs, same as any club ever. You get to be around like-minded people and have a nice time.

Then he gets into how even children are joining in to this mayhem, and there are Arson Clubs in high schools. He quotes the record of one boy who was in elementary school. Apparently he burned down a train station in Ohio.

I found some of this doubtful, because I had never heard of any of it, and wouldn’t I have? But then he addresses that, too, by saying much of it is suppressed.

So, that’s the introduction. The first chapter is a history of arson, and talks about how it is mostly on the record in terms of insurance. People burn things to get money for the things that were burned. Then they pretend there was more there than was there and get money for the things that weren’t even there to begin with! He talks about how people even existed once called insurance adjusters who would flock to burning buildings (in the 1920s) to offer their services. They would interact with the insurance company for you and juice up your claim, and for that they would take a percentage. Talk about living off your wits—what creeps. Not that it matters to take money from insurance companies.

The next chapter is about the ethics of arson. It points out that arson is a crime for which you can be murdered by the state. Or executed, as they like to put it. You burn something big down and if someone is inside and they die then you die. I think that is the logic.

In the past people who wanted to destroy property, like the Weathermen, for instance, tried to make sure no one was there. This is a kind of ethical version. The new way, he says, is a new ethic. What is it?

It is: the manner of exertion of the will of the ruling class is such that they do not appear responsible for the vast cruelties they inflict. Each wealthy person can cruise about seemingly innocent, despite in fact being a linchpin in a system that demoralizes and brutalizes the majority of living people. Yet when someone battles back, that person acts as part of a small machinery—the machinery of his/ her individual action—and thus appears guilty. The rich, on the basis of their larger machinery of violent action, can disconnect themselves from the violence of their class warfare. The poor cannot—since they must be their own mechanisms for action.

On the basis of this, he says, we need a new morality. That morality is, if you are a person who owns a great number of things, if you are a person who uses the reins of power to manipulate others, then you forfeit your right to be treated like a person (that is, you are intrinsically connected to the murder you have impersonally done—and will be treated the way the state treats murderers).

There will be two classes of people: those who act in a small, meager way, or a small, meager, compassionate way, and those who live off them. The latter do not get to have the consideration that has historically been afforded to human beings under human moral law.

The crucial thing about this morality is that it enables poor people to more easily burn the machinery of the rich—as they don’t have to worry about the rich people being inside the buildings that they burn. That in turn makes it safer for the poor to strike back, as they don’t have to adopt extravagant measures of safety.

There is a section about arson in which you intend to not be caught, and then there is a section about arson in which you do intend to be caught. Why would you want to be caught? He says this is one of the best ways to broadcast our methods and our rationale to other people, although presumably the media will prevent such a thing from happening, for the most part.

PAMPHLET two

I thought about this, and about the pamphlet that I would write. Mine would be more like:

HOW TO SET A FIRE AND WHY

And it would say all kinds of wonderful stuff about the joys of setting fires. There is definitely a lot to say about that. It would also present a more compelling moral argument. I think I could do that. Maybe there would even be inspiring verses about setting fires that people could memorize. If the technique parts—how to set a fire—were in verse, then people could memorize them more easily, and then they wouldn’t forget, even under duress!

I made a note to work on my own fire pamphlet, since I found this one to be lacking. Still, there was plenty in it that I didn’t know.

PAMPHLET three

The pamphlet got to the good part eventually, which was a breakdown of methods.

As I mentioned, those methods could be divided into two categories, concealed methods and bald methods. The concealed methods attempt to use only things that are present in the place of conflagration in order to burn the place of conflagration. That way no one can say how it happened. The bald methods use other materials in order to ensure a successful fire (it is by no means easy to set fire to a building). Those materials will often be discovered after the fact, and the arson will be discovered.

Having arson discovered is not so bad for us. We, the arsonists, are not trying to get money from insurance companies. In fact, the more arson that is discovered, the more we can feel the growth of our fraternity (this is what he says).

I say he, but really the pamphlet could as easily have been written by a woman. Certainly, the name on it is a man’s name. But, a woman could well choose to write the pamphlet under a pseudonym. I’m sure men would prefer to read an arson pamphlet by a man.

Anyway, I am fed up with telling you about this arson pamphlet. I will just stick in my own pamphlet a bit later on. You have that to look forward to.

INVITATION

When I got home from my expedition, my aunt said that someone had called for me. I prefer to be the one to answer calls like that, because then it seems like I have an actual phone, rather than a home telephone. I think my aunt is the only person in the world who still has a home telephone. Anyway—Lana called to invite me to a party. My aunt said she was real cordial on the phone. I said, Lana is a vicious slut. My aunt said she would never have known.

About this invitation: I won’t even try to pretend that it isn’t a big deal. I have only been to a few parties, and it was usually with asshole guys who took me there to give me liquor. I am a sort of escape artist, though—so don’t worry, I almost always manage to extricate myself gracefully, even if sometimes I am a bit wobbly.

Lana and her friend Ree came to get me. They pulled up in front driving some kind of old convertible (it was red and gorgeous). I was sitting on the stoop—which annoys our landlord to no end.

Nice house, Ree said. Get in.

Lana leaned her head back to look at me through the seats. She narrowed her eyes:

Do you ever wear different clothes?

No, I said. I am not a wardrobe kind of person.

Got it.

She peeled out, and my heart basically took off into the fucking sky.

THE PIER

The party was at this house that is called the pier. That’s what Ree told me. She did this cool thing where she climbed over the seat and sat in the back with me to talk as we drove. Ree is Asian, I think probably Korean, and also part Indian, which is weird, I mean, uncommon. I have never heard of this combination, but she is really hot, so—nice for her. She started telling me about the place and put her elbow on my shoulder like someone in a movie. It killed me.

The pier is a house that has a backyard that used to be a water park. So, it is maybe three acres (it was a shitty water park). There is no water, and all the pools and slides are empty, but it is a great place to hang out. When she told me this, I almost didn’t believe her. It sounded too good.

But, when we got there, it was absolutely true. It is on the edge of the city, so there are farm fields and woods and such around. Ree said there is actually a sanitation plant over the hill, which is what put the water park out of business.

There were maybe a hundred people there already—for which the host, a guy in his forties with no shirt on, apologized. It’ll heat up, don’t worry.

I hate when people say that kind of thing. He knew Lana and Ree and gave them hugs. I did not do that, although he moved to sort of make it happen. I gave him a good handshake.

Get yourself some drinks, he said. Mona’ll be back soon with a truck full of fireworks.

Mona, Ree told me, is that guy’s (Jim’s) girlfriend. She is maybe thirty and an awesome singer. What kind of singer, I asked. Not like that, said Ree. She is an opera singer.

Shit.

I decided I would try to get her to sing for me later on.

JARED

A couple of hours later, Lana and I were sitting at the top of a slide and this real dumb guy named Jared, who is supposedly in a famous law school, is telling me how Lewis Carroll was a pedophile. I can only take so much of that, you know. I mean, honestly.

From the spot where I was sitting I could see the whole water park laid out beneath me—or I would have been able to in daylight. Now, it looked a bit like a diorama, or a structure that you’re in, but that you understand from above—like in a dream.

Jared was being so annoying I finished my drink, and that drink was supposed to last me a good hour. So, I turned against him.

He was starting to say some more, and I had to get away. If Lana wants to talk to him—fine.

I got up, and he had to move to let me go back up the slide to go down the ladder.

Be easy, be easy, I told myself, but then I decided not to. I turned to him:

You aren’t a pedophile because you like to take pictures of naked children. Maybe it’s weird. Yeah, it is. Maybe that’s true. But, I bet being eight and naked and having a chat with Dodgson is better than 98 percent of the activities you could get to do, ever.

He looked shocked.

Lana laughed.

You would have let him put it in, eh? Eight-year-old Lucia would be into that?

Lana. You know what I mean.

I kept going toward the ladder, but remembered the rest of what I had to say to the lawyer-guy.

And for the record, it is Alice Liddell, not Little. Some—people—.

My speech was ruined by the fact that I almost tripped and fell, but I caught the mouth of the slide, and got to the ladder okay. The guy said something, and I could hear Lana saying to him,

Oh, no, she just hates poseurs. You’re not a poseur, are you?

That actually almost made me fall. I don’t want you to think that this whole ladder and slide business was a piece of cake. The ladder was maybe thirty feet long, and many of the rungs were broken. Just getting up there in the first place was not something everyone could do. In fact, I had been surprised to find this Jared individual there when we got to the top.

On the way down the ladder I remembered I had to go to the bathroom, which meant trying to remember where the bathroom was. That meant remembering that there were four different ones (it was a water park after all). Ree was in line outside one smoking a cigarette. She passed it to me and lit herself another, like we had been doing that kind of thing forever. When the bathroom opened up, she said, in you go, and we went in together.

That made me a little nervous, because I didn’t want to mess up how cool we were being with each other, but we got inside and she just pulled her dress up and started pissing in the toilet, still smoking away on her cigarette.

I looked at myself in the mirror. It was cracked as hell and there was a naked bulb blinking on and off right above it. I messed around with my hood a bit and stuck my chin out.

Hold it there, she said. Let me get a picture of you. Hold on.

She was still pissing and smoking a cigarette, and she pulled her phone out of I don’t know where. I love this photograph, she said. You are so beautiful. Grow old and die right now and I’ll play piano at your funeral.

DOGS

A guy named Walt who had three pit bulls with him gave me a ride home in his Wagoneer sometime around dawn. He was pretty old, and his dogs were all sweet as fuck. If you like dogs, he said, you should sit in the back. They will sit all over you. So, I did that. I was thinking, I like these dogs, and, these dogs can actually predate on me if they choose to. One of them, Mona, was 115 pounds. How heavy do you think she is, Walt asked me. I said, she is definitely heavier than I am.

Mona had an awesome white patch on her face. She kept doing the dog thing of knocking the head into me and leaning against me to try to provoke some petting. In her case, though, it is not really a question. You will pet her or she will eat you.

Walt dropped me at the corner and Mona gave a little wail when I got out. The other two dogs didn’t care as much. She never likes anyone, Walt said, which is what dog owners always say. Does everyone believe it? I usually do.

AUNT

My aunt was awake when I came in, or I thought she was, but she was kind of frozen in her chair. It is hard for me to describe it, but her body was really weird and stuck. In my head, I heard a voice I hadn’t heard before, some voice of knowledge say in a slow clear way, she has had a stroke. I think it was probably just my own voice, but I was so far away at that point, I couldn’t even recognize it.

The ambulance came, and they told me I couldn’t ride in it. They carried her out of the house, which was strange—having these men I don’t know inside our house—and then they wouldn’t let me get into the ambulance. You’re drunk, they said. Sober up. I tried to insist, but they said no, and gave me the address of the hospital. One of them led me away from the ambulance a short distance while the other shut the door, so I couldn’t even jump in.

I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me go along with her, but it was awful.

Essentially, ten seconds passed, and I was standing on the street, it was six a.m. and the ambulance was gone. Some people who had been woken up by the sirens were looking at me out their windows. I felt like a real fuckup.

It happened so fast that I had the thought—just jump in the ambulance, after the ambulance was gone. Then it turned a corner in my head and became, why didn’t you jump in the ambulance?

Then, I felt even worse waiting for the bus, because I stopped being drunk and I stopped being high, and I was just hungry and the bus took forever to come. When it did, it got me partway. I had to wait for another bus. That got me to the hospital.

One thing about hospitals is—it isn’t always clear how to get into them. You can walk around the outside a long way looking for the entrance, and then when you find it there are thirty-foot letters that say, Emergency, or Outpatient.

I wasn’t sure if I should go into the emergency room, but I did, and then I had to wait to talk to the nurse because there were people truly bleeding who were on line in front of me. A little girl was throwing up into her mom’s purse. I’m not kidding. The mom was holding the purse open, and the kid was throwing up into it.

Forty-five minutes later, when I managed to speak to someone, I got hassled about not having any identification, and I solved that by crying.

At that point, there was nothing they could do but take me to her, so they did.

AUNT two

Before we get to what happened when I went to my aunt’s room:

a fact:

my aunt wrote a book. I didn’t know that she had done that until after she was in the hospital because my aunt is almost always in the house when I am in the house and so I never really get to poke around the way you do when you are alone. And that’s the poking that really counts, because inevitably you find things that lead to other things, and next thing you know you have emptied out someone else’s drawers and are looking at notes they wrote to people who are long dead.

At the bottom of one of the drawers was a book called Falstaff, the Proper English Gentleman: An Indictment of Culture by Lucy Stanton, D.Phil.

This isn’t really my type of book, so I only looked at it for a little while. I think it is about things that were important to people once, but not really anymore. By the way, it has nothing to do with Shakespeare, if that much wasn’t already obvious.

I also found a letter from her husband. It is on the inside of a paper airplane, which I guess makes sense since they were essentially children together (he died when she was nineteen). The paper airplane is inside of an envelope, some kind of military envelope. I guess he was overseas when he sent it to her, which is weird, because he didn’t die in the army, so he must have been there before he died.

It seems there was a period when they were apart—he was in the army and she was still in school. He would write her letters, she would do the same. This letter was a paper airplane that was inside an envelope. I imagine she took it out and it must have been pretty exciting. No one has ever sent me a letter, certainly not with a sweet paper airplane in it.

So, the letter says on the outside:

just in case the letter doesn’t get all the way to you, I gave it some wings so it could fly the rest of the way.

Which is pretty terrible, but is the kind of thing a guy might write to his sweetheart when he is sitting in a barracks somewhere.

The letter on the inside is just him going on about how pretty she is and how much he misses her, and about the books that she sent him, which he read, and all the things they will do when he gets back. He lists a ton of plans they must have made, and I think it is really sad, because I know for a fact that he died early in that next year, so they must never have gotten to do most of those things.

Now,

when I was crying at the hospital, they took me up to her room, and I thought, definitely she isn’t in there, because I could see the bed and it looked empty, but when we got over to it, I could see she was there. With the hospital clothes she just looked really small. She was asleep and the nurse gave a sign that meant—don’t wake your goddamned aunt because she almost died. The nurse was a really fat Puerto Rican guy. We went out into the hall and he turned out to be one of these nurses who knows everything. He even asked me stuff about what my plans for the week were and gave me good advice about not having a guardian around.

Regarding my aunt, he said—she had a stroke. Now, she is asleep. Her condition is stable. We don’t know any more than that yet. There will be a bunch of tests.

If her condition is stable, I said, doesn’t that mean you’ll just release her? We don’t have any money and we have no insurance.

He said somehow the no money no insurance thing wasn’t known at the hospital yet, so I should shut up and see how much care she could get before it got cut off. I gave him an I’ll-keep-mum-soldier-salute, kissed my aunt on the cheek, and headed to the elevator. While I was waiting there, he came and found me. He had a sheet that listed visiting hours, phone numbers, other data.

I dropped the paper and knelt to pick it up. When I got to my feet, he was looking back at me.

She might be really changed, he said. Think about it.

LUCIA SERIES

When I was sitting at home by myself, I decided to write a series of descriptions for my aunt. I could bring them in to her at the hospital so she would feel like she knew what was going on outside.

Maybe one would be about the garden, one would be about the house. One could be about my school, one about buses, because I really like them. I don’t know. I kept thinking it was a dumb idea, but it stuck. I was sort of pretending that I would be able to see my aunt again, that I would go back to the hospital and she would be there in her body. But, obviously, there was no guarantee of that. My mom is an example of this—one day she left her body and I have never seen her again.

When I say that, I don’t mean that she actually went somewhere else. What I mean is: the shitty little cells that cluster together to muster up in sum total the person I used to know are now clustering in some inferior way and the person I know cannot ever be found.

My mother isn’t even really in my memory—because it constantly erodes. Everything is falling apart all the time.

People love to say it to you like it counts:

Oh, Lucia, she will live on in your memory.

Sometimes they’ll even touch your arm at the same time like they’ve earned it by saying something poignant.

The whole thing about people living on in memory is a crock of shit. The best you can do is try to remember what you can, and include the memories in your routines. But, sometimes that makes the real memories fade faster.

We’re just running down a fucking slope carrying these little flags, and one by one we get shot and we slump and our little flags are in the mud and no one picks them up. No one is going to keep running with your flag. Lucia, no one cares about your flag. I tell myself that. When you fall down it’s over.

TELEPHONE

I called the school and told them I was spending the day at the hospital. Immediately on hanging up the phone I realized this was a big mistake. If my aunt dies and the school knows, and now they know, then it could mean some kind of institutional business. I mean, they can’t send me away anywhere, I don’t think so, but—better to keep it all quiet as long as possible, and here I go calling them when I don’t need to.

Why not just fail to show up on Monday, and then on Tuesday bring a forged note? I think I called because I wanted to tell somebody what had happened. The sad little individual that I am wanted to hear somebody feel bad about how bad it was for me and wanted to hear a voice wish me well. That’s what happened. The lady at the main office, who I hate, she is really terrible (I see her talking on her cell phone outside the school entrance when I eat lunch there by myself sometimes—and she is just abominable), this very lady is the one who answers the phone (of course she is, she is the receptionist), and she listens to my pathetic retelling of my aunt’s stroke, which I feel bad about even as I do it, and she says, essentially, oh my little bird, you poor dear, oh you frail thing, of course don’t come to school. I’ll let everyone know.

It didn’t make me feel any better—in fact, I felt a bit worse, because she thought she had hung up the phone, and maybe a second later I heard her talking to someone else in the office about how she was going on break and could someone replace the toilet paper in the office toilet for once.

AUNT

I went to see my aunt and she was talking. First thing, I said maybe you should pretend to be in a coma so they can’t release you.

She said, it was fine. Someone from the soup kitchen, a woman my aunt has never liked, came to visit and is paying for all her care. She showed me a card the woman brought. It had a Jesus face on it (Shroud of Turin style). I guess she has a ton of money stuffed in a mattress or something, and is really kind. My aunt was kind of sheepish about it, because she thinks she is a good judge of people. Let me tell you—no one is a good judge of people.

I said, now you have to live.

Why?

You have to live so you can get the chance to be nice to her.

Right, my aunt said. I can live a little longer.

I asked her how long she was going to be there for. She said a week at least, because they had been finding some other things that were wrong with her. That’s the trouble with the hospital—they find all the things that have been killing you forever, and that you are okay with, you’re okay with those things slowly killing you, but then they find them and get rid of them, and then other things replace the things you were fine with, and you are not fine, not fine at all with the new things, and so you die, slowly, in utter misery, just the way you would have before, only before you were pretty okay with the manner of it, but now you’re not.

I told her my idea about writing some descriptions for her. She said she liked that idea, but I should make sure not to ham it up. She wanted good clean descriptions, no sentimentality. I was a bit offended, I said, who died and made you king, of course I won’t fucking write you sentimental descriptions just because you had a stroke and shat yourself.

It isn’t anyone’s fault what they do at a time like that, my aunt said. The ambulance ride was really bumpy.

I asked her did she really shit herself and she said no.

LUCIA SERIES

I got out my notebook and practiced doing typography. I realize it isn’t real typography. It is just me drawing some letters, but I tried hard and made it look pretty good.

I figure I will assemble it all and have it actually printed up on cardstock and give it to my aunt. She likes real books.

The cover proof I made looked like this: