by Ben Dolnick
With the box in my hands (it was covered in a thick gray dust that I realized might not have been dust), I started scrabbling my way out of the hole, and only then did I allow myself to feel the full horror of where I was and what I was doing. I imagined the dirt sliding in on me; I imagined one of those bony hands shooting out to grab my ankle. But the unprofessionality of my digging, the many dirt chunks and half roots I’d left in place, made for relatively easy climbing. I used my elbows to brace myself against the lip of the hole. Like a grave robber (actually there’s no like about it), covered in sweat and dirt and God knows what else, I climbed out into the cold gray dawn.
[“Wright’s Famous Encyclopedias,” classroom activity, Wright Historic House teaching materials]
1. Can you list five experiences from your own life that were painful? Please be as detailed as possible. [After five minutes, have three students read aloud items from their lists.]
2. Can you list five experiences from your own life that were pleasurable? Please be as detailed as possible. [After five minutes, have three students read aloud items from their lists.]
3. What do you notice about the painful and pleasurable experiences that you have just heard your classmates share? Were any of the items the same? Do you think any two people would have exactly the same lists as each other? [Call on three to four students.]
4. Why do you think someone would decide to make lists like these? Did writing your lists make you feel silly? Happy? Scared? [Call on three to four students.]
5. Based on what you learned today, do you think that Edmund Wright felt more pain or more pleasure in his life? Do you think most people’s lists, if they worked on them for as long as he did, would look like his? [Call on three to four students.]
…
4
I spent that entire day, from sunrise to sunset, reading. Except reading doesn’t seem like an adequate word to convey the involvement of it—I was prying apart decomposing pages, studying lines of faded ink, filling up the blank parts of Hannah’s notebook with notes of my own. The box from Wright’s coffin had been full, as I’d hoped it would be, with notebooks—ones with blue-board covers just like the ones in the display cases upstairs. For hours I lay there on the wood floor in the parlor by the fireplace (I’d built another smoky little fire), getting closer to Wright than any Wrighter had ever been.
The story that the notebooks told was discontinuous—notes, with pages missing, were tucked between letters from years earlier; random scraps of journal entries were scattered throughout—but I was able to piece it together, for the most part. The papers had kept surprisingly well in their box, much better than his body had. Making sense of the handwriting was probably the biggest hurdle, and that turned out to be less a matter of word-by-word deciphering than of making some Magic Eye–like inner adjustment and then just trusting my intuition.
I read Wright’s accounts of first being visited by his son’s spirit, then the many nights after. I read his journal entries and his letters to his brother and his notes to his wife. I arranged things in chronological piles, whenever I could. I read the notes Wright had written to other scientists, begging for their interest. I read the many notes he’d made to himself about developing a unified model of the spirit world, all of which read like some combination of mythology (reincarnation, ghosts, enchanted objects) and botany (cycles, mechanisms, reactions).
And then finally, in the very last notebook, in an entry dated just three days before Wright’s death, I read—with papers stacked everywhere around me like a deranged student—the passage that I’d been looking for.
It seems plain to me now that spirits long for nothing so much as to be freed back into the cycle of reincarnation, so that they might resume the proper dance of generations in which the rest of us are engaged. Their attempts to achieve this freedom by inducing despair in the living are, of course, monstrous. Had I the will remaining to pursue it, I would seek out a more benign means of granting them their desire. Among the most promising avenues for exploration seems to me one that may prove rash & impracticable: the wholesale destruction of the setting that lately they haunted…
When I stood up it was already dark out. I didn’t so much come up with a plan as I did discover that one was already there. It didn’t take me long to gather everything I cared about saving: Hannah’s notebook; most of Wright’s papers; a couple of things from the house. I laid them all in a pile in the center of the quilt from upstairs and tied it into a sloppy bundle. I didn’t feel possessed, but I did feel determined, certain, slightly outside of myself. So this was why I’d come back.
The police were wrong about how the fire got started. At first I just made a torch with a rolled-up piece of newspaper from the basket by the hearth. Then I walked around the room—to the curtains, the green sofa, the yellow wall hanging, tap tap tap. It felt like using a magic wand. Except the fire didn’t really catch at first—the curtains and wall hanging just smoked and smoldered. So that was when I “employed an accelerant”—which is to say, remembered the lighter fluid in the garden shed.
Setting a fire—deliberately setting a fire that you mean to get out of control—is so strange and in a way so satisfying. It feels, I imagine, something like urinating all over the floors and walls, or stomping through a palace in muddy shoes: a childish satisfaction, all rules suspended. With the bottle of lighter fluid I walked around the house squirting patterns on the walls, the furniture, the floor. The liquid was lighter than water somehow, almost weightless; and that smell—baseball team barbecues, fat dads sitting around in Father’s Day T-shirts. Within seconds of my touching the newspaper torch to the trail of lighter fluid on the dining room floor, the curtains were covered in blue flames.
And small fires converge into large fires; this was another surprise to me. It was noisy, like a pack of animals chomping their way through the bones of the house. The walls in the parlor were popping; the floorboards in the dining room were moaning. I thought, watching flames dance across the kitchen floor, about the grill-readiness test, how the coals should be hot enough that you can bear to hold your hand over them for only five seconds. How do you know what you can bear, though, really? What if you don’t have a choice?
Because suddenly the fire in the parlor (a whole new wall had burst into flames) was so hot that my whole body couldn’t bear it. It was time to leave the house. So I stumbled backward, meaning to grab my bundle and run, but the wall behind me was on fire now too, and I remembered, when the air started to shimmer, the phenomenon in which entire rooms burst into flames. So I ran toward the front door, only somehow that turned out, as I slapped my way around looking for the knob (the whole entryway was full of smoke), not to be the wall with the front door at all; it was a wall in the kitchen. What a stupid, stupid way to die. For a second I forgot about Hannah, forgot about Wright; I was just an animal in a fire. I ran—still bearing a heat that I couldn’t bear, still clutching my quilt bundle—through a boiling miso soup of smoke to the front hallway, babbling to myself, praying. And now I was at the door (the knob felt like a scorching seat belt buckle), now I was on the porch, now I flung my bundle into the yard, now I was safe.
From outside, once I’d caught my breath—this entailed actual gulping of pure freezing air, like chugging water—the fire didn’t look quite so terrifying. Flames were wagging from all the windows on the first floor, smoke was pouring upward, but the house was still itself, everything was still in place, it was hard to believe that that had been the inferno. I could feel heat wafting out toward me; the yard was lit up as if by spotlights. No one had arrived yet—not the neighbors, not the fire department, not the police. I thought-panted, Dear God please let me not have made a mistake. I imagined the volunteer firefighters, getting phone calls in their kitchens; the neighbors in front of their TVs, asking each other if they smelled something. There’s such weird exhilaration in having done something catastrophic that only you know about. I couldn’t stand still. The skin on my face, I only notic
ed now, felt tight and crackly. The hair on my forearms was singed. My right palm was branded with an imprint of the doorknob.
The fire department finally arrived just as the flames burst through the windows on the second floor; the glass shattered loudly enough that my arms flew to shield my eyes. Some neighbors had showed up by then too, staring from the end of the driveway in their sweatshirts and slippers. Their presence settled me down somehow, gave me focus; my job now was to not be singled out. And I wasn’t. I was just another obstacle, a piece of lawn furniture for the firemen to race past with their axes and hoses, another body to ask what the hell had happened. I could barely hear anyone’s voices over the fire and the sirens; it was as bright as a stadium now, the heat was coming in waves. Then, when everyone had been standing there for a while (“No one was even living there,” one woman kept saying), there was a massive cracking, like a bolt of lightning directly overhead. Everyone, even the firemen, stood back silent for a second. It was the roof. At first the peak just shifted slightly, like a log in the fireplace buckling in the middle, but then, with a steady crashing whose sound seemed somehow out of sync, it gave way completely. Everyone gasped. It was no longer a house on fire; it was a fire with a house in it. The flames were ecstatic, triumphant. The smoke was an upward-running river. Please please please, I thought, let this have been for something.
And this is when, still on my feet, I started to shake; my last clear memory is of the woman next to me shouting that I was having a seizure. Hannah, it all rushed through me like a charge through a key: you, the field, the water, the fear—and then a light I thought might burst me open. I felt like I was levitating with the force of it. You’re free, I thought, you’re free.
And it wasn’t just you. Here was Jan Kemp standing on the railing of a bridge at night, looking down into swirling water; here was Edmund Wright setting down a bottle on his desk; here was a bird gasping for air while something metal came down from above. This all sounds like it must have taken hours, but it was so condensed somehow, there were dozens of things racing through me every second—a mouse stepping onto a trap; a tree cracking in a storm; an ant stumbling, sick with poison. And I must have been knocked onto my back at some point, because I remember that when I came to, myself again, I was looking up at the smoke against the starry sky. I was confused for a second, thinking it was snowing, before I realized it was ash, and that the flakes were somehow carrying your last message to me: Goodbye.
I don’t remember being strapped to the stretcher, don’t remember the hospital, don’t remember those first days afterward. I just remember something I kept saying to anyone who would listen to me, and how happy it made me: Your own life is terrifying, but life is an unending astonishment.
So I’m going to keep living out my particular, unread fate, Hannah—that’s my burden, that’s my blessing, to stumble blindly on. I do sometimes imagine how it will go the next time, though, and the time after that. We’ll be a bald man selling car parts in a Ghanaian market and the brown dog sleeping at his feet; we’ll be a glistening silver trout in Montana and the woman puckering to kiss it; we’ll be children in a suburb of Paris, seated side by side on the bleachers on their first day of summer camp. I don’t worry about whether we’ll recognize each other. We’re like the hands of a clock, Hannah, chasing and escaping each other, losing and finding each other, around and around, again and again, joined way down at the root, no matter how far apart.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Doug Stewart, Jenny Jackson, Zakiya Harris, Joshua Van Kirk, Billy Holiday, Sam, Elyse, Nishant, and my parents.
A Note About the Author
Ben Dolnick is the author of the novels At the Bottom of Everything, You Know Who You Are, and Zoology, and his work has appeared in GQ, The New York Times, and on NPR. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
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