How to Set Yourself on Fire

by Julia Dixon Evans

  We were only together a short while. We’d have sex in his bed, under white sheets, and he’d tell me I was pretty and tell me all the things I made him feel. I never said anything to him about how he made me feel. “You’re so quiet,” he’d say. “I like it. It’s kinda mysterious.”

  I wished I knew what wasn’t enough about him. I wish I knew then that nothing would have been enough at that point in my life. Each morning, leaving his house, I’d feel sick and uneasy. Equal parts being in the wrong place with the wrong man, and being so unfair to Sloane, a kind man. It was easier to stop showing up to work.

  After Vinnie leaves my house, I feel remarkable. I don’t feel sick. I don’t feel uneasy. I feel easy. Things I’ve never felt before.

  The next morning is better than I expect. Torrey is awake early. She sits on the steps with her pink and white Jansport backpack between her feet, the straps hooked over either knee.

  “Morning, Sheila,” she says.

  “Morning. You’re up early.”

  “Not really. This is about when I always leave. You’re the one who’s up early.”

  “That’s true. Although I haven’t gone to sleep yet.”

  “That’s troublesome,” she says. I wonder how much of her language comes from her own brain and how much comes from reading old-fashioned books.

  “Teenagers are troublesome.”

  “I’m not a teenager.”

  “You will be soon.” I smile.

  “Hey, Sheila?” she says. Brief panic: she is going to ask me if I had sex with her dad.

  “Yes?” I say. I look at the ground.

  “Can we go to Harold’s new place after school today?”

  I don’t look up. I feel a tightness in my limbs, a tension, like restlessness and paralysis at the same time. It’s fleeting but I fixate. I don’t even care if Harold has moved. I don’t care where he lives, what he’s like. My biological functions had thirty-five years of doing their thing, surviving mostly, before I knew about Harold Carr, before I knew about my grandmother, about these letters, about the possibility that this thing, the way I’ve memorized 382 letters, might pass me by.

  These letters, my grandmother, Harold, all of it, maybe they are birds, wild birds, and maybe they never really landed on me at all.

  “So,” she continues. “You know how we almost had it the other night?”

  I breathe in. I lift my shoulders, up, down. A roll of the neck. Snap out.

  “The location?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Well, I figured it out. At least, the next place he moved.”

  I don’t say anything for a few minutes. I want Torrey’s school bus to pull up. I want this conversation over. Torrey doesn’t seem to consider the fact that Harold might very well be dead.

  “Not today, Torrey.”

  I watch her face carefully. There’s a strange urge to backpedal, to make her feel better.

  “I just need a bit more time,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “You’re weird. You do things weirdly.” She shrugs a little and picks up her pink and white Jansport. “I’m okay with it.”

  I laugh and feel a bit manic. “At least someone is.”

  That afternoon, there’s the slow rumbling of the engine, the puff of air from the air brakes, and the squeaked swing of the automatic doors. Shuffling, sneakered feet running up the path, the forced click of the latch and the broken metal gate’s drag on the concrete. Torrey is home from school. I close the window the second I hear the bus pull up. I hide inside my house. I read the next letter, the one. The first one that mentions my grandmother’s replies.

  Dear Rosamond,

  Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Your letter arrived properly through the fence. Your penmanship is striking. It’s not as feminine as I expected. I am tempted to take it to one of those newfangled handwriting analysts to see if he can tell me what you think of me just based on the slope of your I’s. I beg your pardon. It is not gentlemanly to tell my neighbor that I am curious of what she thinks of me!

  I hope it is not an insult to say your penmanship is not feminine. In fact, I find that alluring. It strikes a strange contradiction. You are femininity incarnate in person. You’re a gentle matriarch. You dress in quite delicate fabrics. Your voice is calm and pretty. And you are indeed beautiful, if that is not too out of line to suggest.

  I planted sunflower seeds this morning after receiving your letter. They’re right there, against our fence. I imagine in a few months, we will both have sunflower beds. Although, perhaps your sunflowers will wilt before mine grow tall enough to see over the fence. If that is the case, then we shall just have sunflowers for longer, like a relay. Yours first, then mine.

  I have yet to grow any flowers, but I already cannot imagine a point in my life when I will not associate sunflowers with this back fence, with these letters, and, of course, with you.

  I look forward to hearing from you again.

  Sincerely,

  Harold

  I jump ahead. I can’t help it. Each time I’ve read these letters, I’ve read them in a meticulous order, as best as I can figure out. Even the letters without dates are starting to find their places. But today I desperately want to read ahead.

  My dear Rosamond,

  It is late, very late. So late, in fact, that it is early. Yet I am wide awake. I was awoken by your husband’s shouts coming from your house. The source of the trouble was unclear, but I am afraid for you. I am in turmoil, feeling so powerless, when all I want is to bring you to my home and keep you here. I know this is probably not the kind of greeting you would like to receive on the morning after what must have been a difficult night for you, my sweet Rosamond. Perchance I am weak in spirit to send this to you. Perchance selfish. But I write it only out of fondness, affection, and care. I only want you to know that I care. I do not wish to add to your heavy feelings.

  There is a soul out there, close to you, who wishes for peace for you, above all else. Above my yearning, my wretched and unholy yearning. Above our friendship. Above our letters. Above my love.

  My dear, my love. I tell you now something that I have known a long time, but never gave it voice: I do love you.

  I love you with the kind of love that will torture me for all of my days. Never have I been so pleased to be tortured.

  Sincerely,

  Your Harold

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I CONSIDER TORREY’S OFFER to find Harold’s next house, and my aversion to this offer. I don’t understand it myself. I’m the kind of person who walks into people’s backyards while their children are sleeping. I don’t know where that or where Harold falls on the stalking spectrum.

  I don’t want to face Harold yet. Knowing that he said such a clear farewell to Rosamond is comforting. He was so definitive in his departure. A secretive sale of the house, packing up, keeping Rosamond in the dark. He was sure that he needed to leave, or that Rosamond needed him gone, or both. I admired that, the clarity of his goodbye.

  I don’t want to know if Harold is dead or alive. I suspect Torrey knows, based on her research. I don’t want to ask.

  On my phone, Jesse Ramirez’s number fills the screen but I don’t remember entering it. I’ve typed the whole thing. The whole thing. I’ve typed this many times, but I’ve never pressed SEND before.

  I press SEND.

  It rings. Once. Twice.

  “Hi, this is Jesse.” It’s been a year since I’ve heard his voice.

  I’ve never actually heard him say his name. He never told me his name. The unscrupulous sucker at the United Parcel Service call center gave me his name. And address. And number. It’s been years since I worked at the church, where I would be expected to see Jesse or hear his voice. It’s been six months since I last drove by his house.

  Six months clean, I like to think.

  “Hello?” he says.

  I want to tell him: “You are not the loneliest soul on the planet.
” I want to tell him that was my favorite line from page one of his letter. I want to ask who he wrote it for. I want to ask why he never sent it.

  “Is anyone there?”

  I want to speak; I can feel it in my bones.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. So polite. “I’m afraid there’s a problem. I can’t hear anything.”

  The screen goes black. He’s hung up.

  The good news: I know he’s home.

  I make myself a cup of coffee in the ridiculous BUNN Pour-O-Matic two-burner machine that became mine when the church replaced theirs with a much tinier pod machine. It’s completely unsuitable for the size of my kitchenette’s single countertop and the quantity of coffee one person consumes. I pour my fresh coffee down the sink and boil some water for my new white tea instead. White tea supposedly has more benefits than green tea. Perhaps white tea will do the trick. Perhaps I’ll feel better, perhaps I’ll feel things differently. I think about telling the doctor that everything is fine. I fill a tall mug, the tallest that will fit in my cup holder.

  I raise the mug to Vinnie and Torrey in the courtyard but I do not answer them when they say hi. I just drive to Jesse’s house.

  From my parking spot, one house down and across the street, I can see his front door. I can see his living room window. And I can see his form through the window, walking around. He looks to be tidying up. I want to know what he’s tidying up for. I want to know how he cut through my skin and muscles and bones and found his way into my guts, my heart, my nerves. I want to know who the fuck he is. A dark and secret part of me wants him dead and gone, but I find no solace in that. Because what if he just gets replaced? What if the second I rid myself of him someone or something else takes over? What if he’s just a deliveryman who was in the terribly wrong place at the terribly wrong time? I close my eyes and try to think about Vinnie, about why it’s so easy to know him. And then I panic, because what if Vinnie is the next thing? I slowly open my eyes.

  Another figure comes into view. It’s a woman. She stands near him but not next to him. They face each other. They must be talking. The silence in my car almost hurts.

  And then they embrace. It’s brief. They continue tidying up the front room.

  Is she the woman from the letter? Or is she someone with whom he is attempting to fill the spaces, the ones he promised would remain empty?

  My tea is gone. It’s been three hours. I scratch my knee until bits of flaky skin stick beneath my fingernails and dust the floor of my car.

  I don’t want to watch this anymore.

  It angers me to know that I’ve gone so long, six months, without driving by here, and just by coming here again I’ve fucked it all up. I’ll be back tomorrow. And I’ll be back the day after that. I know these things, clearer than anything else at that moment.

  Six months clean, down the toilet.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TORREY AND VINNIE ARE still outside when I get home. I wonder if they sit outside all afternoon and evening because there’s a deconstructed mountain lion or something hogging the living room floor.

  Torrey is reading some sort of Penguin Classic. Vinnie is playing Tetris on his phone. He isn’t smoking.

  “Come sit with us for a little while,” Torrey says.

  “Okay,” I say. I look at Vinnie. I haven’t looked at him since we slept together. “Give me a minute.”

  Vinnie looks up, nods, and goes back to Tetris. This is relieving.

  I go inside, where Harold C. Carr’s letters lie scattered across my entire floor. I don’t remember doing this, leaving them like this. I panic a little, considering the likelihood that I scattered the letters without noticing versus the likelihood of a break-in while Torrey and Vinnie watched my front door. Still, I check them all. I count them, paranoid. Three hundred and eighty-one. There’s one missing so I count again. I must have miscounted them because now there are three hundred and eighty-two and I realize I am sweating. My knee itches to the point of insanity. I look at it and see a pale, crusty patch of eczema that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s the size of a quarter, and as I stare at it and my vision blurs and warps, I can make it grow until it covers my entire knee, the floor, the walls, the sky outside.

  It’s been an hour since Torrey asked me to come sit with them. Counting letters takes time. The sun has long gone down and they’re inside their own house now.

  Is Vinnie panicking about our supposed no-strings arrangement? That because I didn’t come outside, maybe I’m feeling awkward? I’m not awkward. At least, not about sex. Not about Vinnie. I partly want to spend the rest of the evening talking to Torrey, because she makes me feel something like hope. And I partly wish Torrey wasn’t there because then I could have sex with Vinnie again.

  Frontline’s on. It’s about drug-resistant bacteria. I’m fascinated and appalled. I wash my hands in the kitchen sink eighteen times in the first half hour of the segment, eyes glued to the screen. The eczema on my knee is getting worse. I turn up the volume while I rifle through the medicine cabinet. I check the kitchenette. On the counter is oil and vinegar and my skin’s so irritated right now that I opt for vinegar. It burns. I wash my hands again, first with vinegar. Then with soap. They’re red and flaky.

  “…She was a skin picker,” the doctor on Frontline says. “She, as do many kids, picked at her little scabs. And that was likely what introduced the staph infection.”

  I want to look up eczema blogs, but I don’t. I leave the television on and go outside. Vinnie’s finishing up a cigarette.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He nods.

  “Is Torrey asleep?”

  “I think so. She was up early today to get an assignment done.”

  “Oh. Sorry I didn’t come out earlier. I got held up,” I say.

  “It’s okay,” he says. He presses his finished cigarette into the ashtray and gives it a slight twist.

  Frontline says through the open window, “So you’re telling me that he had these bugs and you had nothing left to treat him with?”

  “God, what are you watching in there?” Vinnie asks.

  I shrug. I sit on my front step and scratch my knee, and bits of my skin drift to the concrete. I want to throw up.

  “You okay?” he asks, his voice quiet for Vinnie. If Torrey were awake, there’d be a good chance she actually didn’t hear that.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Your knee?”

  “Oh, it’s eczema. I think.”

  “Is that why you’re watching some horrible germ show?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I don’t know.

  “Well, I have some stuff you can put on it, if you want. Taxidermy is a rough business. I keep lots of salves around,” he says.

  I laugh.

  “I’ll go get something and bring it over,” he says.

  I wait for a minute. Then two. Then I go back inside.

  A nurse is saying, “You go into a room, and maybe there’s a hole in your glove.”

  The letters are lined up on my bed, spread out. I never cleaned them up when I counted them earlier.

  “It’s a very complex environment,” says the nurse. “Alarms are ringing.”

  Vinnie walks in.

  The nurse says, “Did I forget to wash my hands between Mr. X and Mrs.Y?”

  “Here,” he says. “Let me.”

  And then he’s touching my knee, and it’s weirdly intimate and disgusting at the same time. I want to know when he washed his hands last, but he smells clean, and he’s a professional, and I’m watching PBS, so surely he knew to wash his hands.

  “Is Torrey asleep?” I ask, again.

  “Yeah.”

  Vinnie undresses me. This arrangement is going well. I reach for the remote, but there’s a Pfizer VP on talking about cutting research, and he’s a bit handsome. He’s an asshole, and he’s smug, but I hesitate to turn the TV off.

  “Leave it on,” Vinnie says in a low, dark voice. I look at him and wonder if I misheard him. “For the noise,”
he clarifies. “You know. Torrey.”

  My hands are still raw and peeling. There are probably a thousand tiny points of entry for bacteria to get under my skin, right into my bloodstream. I look at his hands. I look at his skin. I consider Vinnie’s hygiene.

  When he climbs on top of me on my small couch, his leg brushes the eczema spot on my knee. I brace myself by grabbing his shoulders and my fingernails scratch his skin. He makes a noise—a moan, a gasp, something in between—and I think about his skin cells beneath my fingertips. I think of him liking this feeling. I think of my fingers, raw and peeling, covered in a thousand micro-tears and vinegar. I wonder if Vinnie’s shoulders sting.

  I scratch harder, just a little drag. The idea of Vinnie’s blood and toxins on my skin is unsettling but it makes me lift my hips off the couch.

  Vinnie pushes into me. There’s a pause, there’s heavy breathing. I feel intense and powerful.

  Frontline says, “It’s been two years since his last operation. It had taken three surgeries and another round of highly toxic antibiotics before doctors believed they had removed all the NDM-1 from his leg.”

  “Fuck,” Vinnie says. “I’m a little bit out of my mind right now.”

  I don’t answer. I don’t disagree.

  “Those letters,” he says, breathless, a little distracted, nodding toward my bed. His movements slow but he doesn’t stop. “What are they?”

  I prop myself up, awkward.

  “Shut up, Vinnie.”

  I scratch at my knee in rhythm to his movements. I feel outside of my body and oppressed by it at the same time. There’s ointment mixed with blood on my fingertips. The TV is talking about the Centers for Disease Control and I reach up to Vinnie’s shoulders and pull my bloodied, oozing fingers across his skin, into the scratches I made.

  TWENTY-SIX

  WHEN VINNIE LEAVES, I drive back to Jesse’s. The house is completely dark. I sleep in my car that night, parked across the street. I fling the driver’s seat back and slump into the gap between the top of the seat and the bottom of the head rest, stretching my feet out on either side of the pedals. It’s almost as good as lying down.