How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

“See you later, Edgar,” George said.

  “‘Look in the closet’ or ‘There is no Santa Claus,’” Anna said, reading off strips of paper once again culled from the basin of a plastic pumpkin.

  George would have liked to attend a party without a mission, but Kate was so used to missions and games and plots that it never occurred to her to protest. And this was one game she liked.

  “The first one,” Kate said.

  “Whatever,” George said.

  “Do you need to write it down?” Anna asked.

  George was prone to forgetting the code phrase, or so she claimed. Reluctantly, she took the slip of paper from Anna and stuffed it in her pocket.

  This party was a legitimate one, not a con. It took place in a three-bedroom off-campus apartment that belonged to grad students in the English lit department. Anna had recently begun a friendship/flirtation with her American lit TA. She frequented his office hours, always in an attempt to get a grade changed. She managed this approximately 30 percent of the time, according to her notes. Reed Bannister, PhD candidate, had moral codes—he stood by his grades, and he didn’t date students. Anna, however, was good at cracking codes.

  “When you were a child, were you afraid of monsters?” Kate asked the first person she encountered at the party. It happened to be Lane Smith, a theater major who was never seen without a colorful scarf around her neck and wild, wayward hair that appeared unstyled but took hours to fashion.

  “No, but I had an imaginary friend named Lucy,” Lane said.

  “Where did Lucy live?” Kate asked.

  “With me.”

  “She didn’t hang out in any particular part of your bedroom?”

  “No.”

  “You never had to go look for her or anything?”

  “No.”

  “I see,” Kate said. “How about ghosts? Did you have any ghosts in your house?”

  Anna tried a different tack. She approached the preppiest male in the room.

  “Do you play golf?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” Preppy Male said.

  “If you were to instruct someone on how to find your golf clubs, what would you say?”

  “Look in the trunk of my car.”

  “No, that’s not it,” Anna said, meandering away.

  The triumvirate settled around the keg, refilled their cups, and shared notes.

  “I’m getting nowhere with the monsters-as-a-child method,” said Kate.

  “For future reference, if you ask a stranger to borrow his clothes, he finds it suspect,” George said.

  “Back to the drawing board,” Anna said.

  “I have an idea,” said George. “Why don’t we just enjoy the party?”

  “Now, where’s the fun in that?” Anna said.

  “What’s the game, Anna?” her TA asked, approaching the group with an empty glass.

  “What game?” Anna said, playing innocent.

  “Your friends are asking my friends ridiculous questions.”

  “My friends can be ridiculous at times.”

  “You are a very strange woman,” Reed Bannister said to Anna.

  “Thanks,” said Anna. Had he told her she had the manners of a truck driver or the ethics of a bank robber, she would have replied in the same tone. Anna maintained a thick skin by never being inside it.

  Meanwhile, George was ready for the game to end. She instructed Kate to hide in the closet so that she could ask someone where Kate went.

  “That seems like a shortcut,” Kate said.

  “That’s the point,” said George. “Now, please, get in the closet.”

  Reed Bannister came closer to Anna and whispered, “In fifteen minutes, meet me outside.”

  “I don’t think so,” Anna said, but they both knew she was bluffing.

  Reed departed just as Edgar stepped across the threshold. He scanned the room nervously. Not even a minute passed before he felt out of place. Anna saw him turn around abruptly as if he were about to make a run for it.

  “Edgar! Get back in here,” she shouted.

  Edgar followed her instructions, as most people did.

  “Glad you could make it,” she said.

  Edgar searched the room, looking for the woman he was always looking for. “I’m not sure I can stay,” Edgar said when he couldn’t find her.

  “You need to tell her,” Anna said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Anna said. Although Anna was talking about Kate, and Edgar was thinking about George. “I know her. She won’t say anything until you do. You have to tell her how you feel and you have to do it tonight.”

  Edgar summoned courage from some mysterious recess in his mind.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  Anna answered, reluctantly ending her own game.

  1998

  Santa Cruz, California

  “Did you know there’s a woman sleeping in our closet?” George asked.

  “She moved in a few days ago,” Kate said, coating her toast with a thick layer of butter. “I’ve been meaning to introduce you, but you haven’t been around.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Sarah Lake.”

  “Where did she come from?” George asked.

  “Do you mean what city and state? Humboldt is where she was last living. I’m not sure where she was born. I can ask her when she wakes up,” Kate said.

  “Why is she here?” George said.

  “She needed a place to stay. And the hall closet is big enough to sleep in. Anna always said we should turn it into a guest room.”

  “How long is she staying?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s paying rent.”

  “What? So it’s permanent?”

  “I don’t think any of us are staying here permanently.”

  George checked her watch, unhitched a banana from its bunch, and poured a cup of coffee into a commuter mug.

  “She’s not staying,” George said. “This is a whole human being. It’s not like a stray cat.”

  “You didn’t let me keep the cat,” Kate said. She had never argued about the cat, which only fueled her resentment. It was short-haired, and there were shots, and some people just got over cat allergies. All points she’d made in her head when she carried the Abyssinian mix in a pillowcase to the pound.

  “I have allergies!” George snapped.

  “Now you have a human allergy?” Kate asked.

  “You can’t just invite people to move in here.”

  “Before you rush to a decision, maybe you should meet her first,” Kate said.

  It was, in fact, Anna who’d first met Sarah Lake, the closeted houseguest. But later she would not recall their introduction.

  For two weeks straight, Anna had lived in the library, studying for her organic chemistry final. She was barely passing the class going into the final exam. Sometimes Anna would study with Kate, making 3-D molecular models. But Kate always managed to digest the material in a fraction of the time it took Anna, assembling her model like a child playing with Legos.

  Anna was living on caffeine and Ritalin and gummy bears and beef jerky. In the library, it was hard to miss the pajama-clad woman with an overcoat and matted hair. She was afraid to stop, like the driver of a car with a recently jump-started battery. Her skin took on a blue-yellow tone. Her hands had a Parkinson’s tremor; she couldn’t trust that she hadn’t accidentally stabbed an extra electron on the Lewis dot structure. Sometimes merely looking at a hydrocarbon chain would bring her close to tears. Nucleotides went down easy. DNA, RNA, their relevance to medicine, the human body, shook her awake. But the snaky polymers and peptides, those fucking endless impenetrable carbon chains, made her forget everything she’d learned. She scratched her neck until it bled. Kate put a bandage on Anna’s scratches and covered her fingers in sports tape. One night, Anna entered the front door, sat down on the floor to remove her shoes, and fell asleep in the foyer.

  Kate woke her early the next morni
ng and fed her coffee, and the cycle started all over again.

  The final exam was on Tuesday from ten to noon. When the TA collected Anna’s Scantron, he raised his eyebrow with an unspoken question. Anna shrugged. She refused to predict her performance, having surprised herself too many times with abysmal test results on exams she’d thought she had aced. Anna left the physical sciences building at 12:05 p.m. with other bleary-eyed students. While many congregated for an exam postmortem, Anna was done, like an assembly-line worker clocking out for the day. There was no need to revisit any of it. She walked, with no destination in mind, just away.

  A winking neon sign beckoned her. She could have sworn she witnessed a letter die, like an old square flashbulb. Now the sign said Pet E ra. Anna decided then that if she ever opened a bar, she’d call it Pet Era. She even wrote the name on her forearm so she wouldn’t forget. She opened the door. Inside, it smelled of whiskey and beer and bleach; that was good enough for her. She entered the tavern. Darkness had never been so inviting.

  “What’s your poison?” an unusually tall woman with dirty-blond hair and white-girl dreads asked with a touch of irony.

  “Whiskey, with a beer back,” Anna said.

  Two men, regulars, chatted at the edge of the bar, griping over politics, the economy, the End of Days. Anna listened only so she could blot out the battling formulas and compounds that dusted her brain, like a chalkboard haphazardly erased between lessons. The whiskey helped, and so did the beer. She knew how this day would end. That familiar sensation would return—the need to do something wrong. Anna ordered another round and thought about calling Kate or George as a preemptive strike, but she knew they’d show up too soon. Anna scratched her home number on the back of a coaster and called the bartender over.

  “When it’s time for me to go, will you call this number? Ask for Kate.”

  The bartender looked at the coaster and then returned her gaze to the young woman, already on her second round before one in the afternoon.

  “You got a name?” she asked. “I figure I better be able to identify you to whoever I’m calling.”

  “Anna.”

  “I’m Sarah. Nice to meet you.”

  “Can I get another round?”

  Sarah put a bowl of salted nuts in front of Anna. “Eat the nuts and then we’ll talk.”

  Four hours later, Anna was slumped in a booth with a dodgy-looking guy wearing a trucker hat and sunglasses and sporting a Fu Manchu mustache. Happy hour was in full swing. Sarah knew the man’s look was most likely just the result of a series of bad fashion choices, but it came off as a sketchy disguise, and Sarah began to feel uneasy, having time to clock Anna only occasionally out of the corner of her eye.

  Sarah picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  “Is there a Kate there? Hi, I’m a bartender at Pete’s Emerald. It’s on Pacific Avenue and Water Street. You should pick up your friend Anna. She’s had a few and, uh, is currently keeping some questionable company.”

  Anna’s plan to drink her studies into oblivion had backfired. Her final exam clung to her like a remora. She exhausted the disguised man as she droned on explaining organic chemistry to him, though she could barely explain it to herself anymore. His eyes darted about the room in search of another diversion.

  Kate arrived half an hour later. When Anna saw her, she had a sudden recollection of a series of mnemonics that Kate had contrived to help her on an anatomy test. Anna had no knack for mnemonics, so she’d gladly relinquished the job. Kate dove into the assignment with great aplomb, but Anna managed to recall them only because of their sheer preposterousness.

  “Sammy Likes Taking Paul’s Teeth To Charlie’s House. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate.

  “Tom Creates Nuclear Missiles Inside Locust Caves. Talus, calcaneus, navicular, medial cuneiform, intermediate cuneiform, lateral cuneiform, cuboid.”

  The disguised man wrapped his arm around her waist and whispered in sour-beef-and-cheap-beer breath, “Shut the fuck up.”

  “I can’t,” Anna whispered back. She couldn’t.

  Kate stood in front of the table with her arms folded in disappointment. “Did you come here right after the test?”

  “Hello, little girl,” the disguised man said.

  “I thought I told you not to talk to strangers,” Kate said to Anna.

  “Why don’t you take a seat, sweetheart?”

  “Why don’t you take a hike, mister?” Kate said. She was usually incapable of that kind of bold retort but was buoyed by the public space and Anna’s presence, as if Kate could somehow own part of Anna’s powerful persona when that part was missing from Anna herself. Not unlike the way atoms share electrons.

  “You don’t have to be like that,” the man said in a sly, reptilian voice.

  Sarah watched the proceedings cautiously. The disguised man was a regular. Never caused any trouble. But men and booze and someone interfering with a potential fuck were a combustible mixture. Sarah finished wiping dishwasher spots off a glass and approached the trio.

  “I think this one has had enough,” she said.

  “I think she’d like to stay for another round,” the disguised man said.

  “Yes! One more round,” Anna slurred.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to refuse service,” Sarah said.

  A guy in denim and layers of cotton and polyester with carefully coifed bedhead who appeared to be somebody important (at least in the hierarchy of Pete’s Emerald) entered the bar. He approached the tense congregation, took one look at Anna, and said, “Get her out of here.”

  Kate helped Anna to her feet. Anna broke free and cut a switchback to the door, then shouted “Serpentine!” in a weak Peter Falk impression. “I want to see that movie again,” she said to no one in particular.

  Sarah and Kate followed Anna outside in a straight line.

  “Where’s your car?” Sarah asked.

  “What car?” Kate said.

  Ten minutes later, Kate and Sarah loaded Anna into a pristine 1972 charcoal-gray Mercedes two-door. Anna was encouraged to hang her head out of the window like a dog on a road trip.

  “Don’t even think about vomiting.” Sarah put the key in the ignition and started the car. She adjusted the seat, turned the windshield wipers on and off, and pulled onto the road.

  “Thank you,” Kate said. “That was going to be one long walk home.”

  “You couldn’t borrow a car?”

  “I could. But I couldn’t drive it.”

  “How do you live in California without knowing how to drive?”

  “Buses. And hitching rides. It’s easier than you’d think, and I don’t have the responsibility of a vehicle.”

  “You should learn how to drive,” Sarah Lake said.

  “That’s what people tell me.”

  “Does your friend always drink like that?” Sarah asked.

  “It’s a little early in the day for her. At least, it was when she got started. But it’s finals week. She hasn’t been herself lately.”

  Sarah and Kate propped Anna’s arms over their shoulders, walked her through the front door and up the stairs to her bedroom, tossed her on the bed, and tipped her onto her side. Kate removed Anna’s shoes and socks and threw a blanket over her. Later, Kate would force her to consume three glasses of water, a liter of Gatorade, and four slices of toast. But for now she let Anna sleep.

  Kate walked the Good Samaritan to the door and said, “If you ever need anything, you know where to find us.”

  The next day, accompanied by a wicked hangover, Anna flew back east for a short visit with her family. Colin had a new girlfriend to be vetted; she was the same as all the other girlfriends, Anna thought after she met her. Over dinner one night at the Union Oyster House, Anna said, “Does Pet Era mean anything to you?” She turned away from her parents’ blank look to her brother and his date. The woman’s name she would remember as Tanya, but really it was Anya.

  �
�No,” Colin said, sucking down his sixth shuck of the night.

  “Is it a band?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know. Did you look it up on the Internet?”

  “It takes forever. Nothing came up but pet stores.”

  “Maybe it is a pet store,” Colin said.

  “Why would I write the name of a pet store on my arm?” Anna said.

  “Can we please change the subject,” Lena said, which brought all conversation to a halt.

  “You said if I ever needed anything,” Sarah said, standing in the doorway of the High Street house on a Saturday night. Kate was home alone and had had no plans until Sarah arrived.

  An hour later, Kate was perched on a fire escape outside the window of Sarah’s apartment building, the center block of three neglected brick squares. Laundry hung on lines stretching to the next building, and television noise vied for airspace, creating a cacophony of jingles, laugh tracks, and screams.

  “What happened to your key?” Kate asked.

  “I’ve got it somewhere,” Sarah said from inside the apartment. She leaned her head out the window and passed a brown grocery bag brimming with clothes to Kate.

  “This would be a lot easier if you found your key.”

  “Not really. The key doesn’t work.”

  “Huh?”

  “Manager changed the locks. Asshole.”

  “Why?”

  “I stopped paying rent when I saw the mouse.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you want to come inside? I think the gas is still on. I can make you a cup of tea while I’m packing.”

  Kate could hear the three admonishments her deda had repeated in broken English many times over the course of ten years. “Tree tings you remember: One, you a citizen, you vote. Two, don’t vaste your money on nonsense. Tree, don’t break laws. American prisons like summer camp compared to my country, but you still shouldn’t break laws.”

  “I guess I’ll just stay out here,” Kate said.

  Sarah dropped a suitcase and five grocery bags off the fire escape. She climbed down after Kate. They gathered Sarah’s most valued possessions and lugged them in the shadows to a late-model Cadillac with fuzzy dice and a pine-tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

  “What happened to your other car, the Mercedes?” Kate asked.