How to Set a Fire and Why

by Jesse Ball

  A large house.

  A garden (parts not visible from the street).

  Lighters, matches.

  Gasoline.

  Pipe bombs.

  Gunpowder.

  Three workers.

  Two cars.

  Two phones (could get more).

  Candles.

  50m of fuse.

  Electric detonator.

  On another part I wrote in big letters:

  IT WILL BE OBVIOUS WHO DID THIS SO YOU NEED TO LEAVE TOWN IMMEDIATELY, LUCIA, DON’T THINK YOU CAN GO ON LIVING AROUND HERE.

  When I wrote that, Lana said quietly, maybe I’ll go with you.

  Would you?

  Maybe I would. Is there something better going on?

  Her quiet was contagious. We were both quiet for a minute.

  If we were going to get out of town, she said, we should make arrangements ahead of time, that’s for sure.

  She looked over the piece of paper.

  Lucia, you told me about all the junk he has piled in every room of the goddamned place. It sounds like a firetrap to me. You don’t have that down as a resource. Don’t you think …

  And with that—she had solved it.

  I had forgotten a basic rule: if you want it to be simple, then make it simple. I could just light the room with the wedding dress and the whole place would go up.

  I looked down at my nice plan with its diagrams and lists. I crossed them out.

  Lana, a person could easily get to disliking you.

  I know it, she said. Don’t I know it.

  JAN

  Jan didn’t come back that night, or the next. Lana and Ree and I were sitting around and I said I was worried. Lana said maybe he got run over by a tractor trailer. We went down to his place, and it was wrecked. It looked like someone had gone over it looking for something.

  I said, if he got picked up by the police I don’t want to go to the station to check up on him. Probably not a good idea. Lana said she wasn’t the one to go either. We just both looked at Ree for a while, because she can get anything she wants out of a chump guy, and finally she buckled. She said she’d be back in half an hour and she borrowed Lana’s keys.

  Half an hour passed and lights came in the driveway. Ree said he was up in county. Evidently someone had been telling stories about him, and when they tossed the house they found all kinds of materials. He might be there a while. I felt a little sick about it.

  He’s a sweetheart, for sure, said Ree.

  Why?

  He didn’t put them on to you.

  Lana chimed in to tell me how lucky I was that my things were at her place by chance when the police raided Jan’s. And not just your things, but you. You’re lucky you weren’t there.

  But I didn’t do anything yet.

  Well, he didn’t do anything either.

  I don’t know about that. Maybe he did.

  Lucia, you’re lucky you weren’t there.

  Yeah, I guess so. Here’s to staying lucky.

  We toasted with what was left of the plastic vodka bottle.

  Ree did a little pirouette as we went back to the car. She stopped and dropped into a crouch looking up at us.

  But who would have told on him? Do you have any guesses?

  NOTE

  Lana and I lay on her bed and talked late into that night. She was excited as hell. She said it would be such a surprise for her mom and for her boyfriend when she just disappeared.

  Won’t you leave a note for your mom?

  Yeah, oh fuck, I don’t know. What do you think?

  Even if it makes it a little worse for us, I think.

  She deserves it, yeah. I guess so. But I’m not telling Hal. It’s not like he’s going to have it rough finding a new girlfriend.

  I agreed. Plenty of them sniffing around him day and night.

  She got all businesslike suddenly.

  So, tomorrow, we pack. You go to the Home. We buy the bus tickets for the day after. Then we sleep for the last time here.

  That’s right.

  And what about Jan—do you think he will …

  A guy like him—he has to take care of himself.

  We lay there for a while. I don’t know what she was thinking about, but I was thinking about Lucia Stanton—this person who would basically disappear. What would I call myself next? What clothes would I wear? There is that part in the Bardo Thodol where the dead person goes into a womb to be born again into a new place, where the dead person actually chooses where she will be born—whether into an animal or a human, and into which land. Now, I know that’s just some Tibetan nonsense, but it is a good metaphor. So, I lay there thinking:

  Who will you be, Lucia, when you are not Lucia anymore?

  LAST BIT

  I wrote down that last section after Lana went to sleep. From here on in, there isn’t time to write things, so I will just put down my final prediction about how things will go, and then it’ll be things as they come, however they come.

  Two days from now, Lana and I will go down to the bus station. We will put our bags into a locker there. We will return to her mom’s house. We will get a container of gasoline from the backyard where we hid it. Together, we will go in her brother’s car to a spot some blocks from the house. Then, we will separate. I will walk over to the house. She will stay at the car.

  I will sneak into the house through the basement—the downstairs window can be opened from the outside. I’ll sneak in through that window. Once I am inside, Lana will call the landlord on the telephone from a public pay phone. He will answer if he is in the house. She will pretend to be a police circuit board operator informing him that his car has been stolen. Although this does not make sense, we both believe it will make him leave the house to look at his car. At that point, I will pour gasoline over the contents of the room in which my aunt’s possessions lie. I will set fire to them and to the house, and I will escape back out the basement window. I will travel on foot to the rendezvous point where Lana will be waiting with the car. She will drive us back to her house where we will leave the car. She will leave the keys in the car and a note to her mom on the dash. We will walk down to the bus station and catch a bus out of town. I think we are both frightened about what will happen, but it feels good. The ticket will take us clear across the country. Stay in one place too long and you become a mark.

  Anyway—what else is there to do. Everyone’s always shouting, hurry up, hurry up. For once, we will.

  GOODBYE

  Lana is drunk. I am driving her car and I am not a good driver. We are going down Smith Street past the Wentworth building and I am hoping desperately that the police do not stop us because the only license I have is someone else’s and I don’t think it will pass muster.

  We turn on to Gedding, and then on to Seventeenth. We pass up Wilson and I see a good spot. I do some shitty semblance of a parking job. The gas can is in the back. I grab it and start to head out.

  Hey, Lana shouts. Come here.

  What.

  Listen, before a fight, the cornermen slap the boxer in the face, I think, to get them motivated.

  How do you know that?

  My brother used to watch boxing a lot.

  Okay.

  Lana slaps me in the face.

  That’s awful. Why would they do that?

  I don’t know. I’m starting the stopwatch.

  Here I go.

  I am standing opposite the house where I lived with my aunt. I came here when I had nothing for the first time. Now I have even less.

  As I stand here, I have a change of heart. Now I just want to burn the garage. Maybe it’s just nerves. But it is against the rules. No changing the plan for dumb reasons. I check to see no one is watching and cross the street. I duck into the garden. The windows of the back wall of the house are looking down at me, but they’re blind.

  The garden is overwhelming. I didn’t figure I would be affected by it, but I feel my aunt’s presence there. I am not a ghost person, but I am sa
ying, when I see the garden I remember her clearly, unerringly. She is standing there touching the plants with her papery hands. But, I don’t stop. I go to the basement window and wrench at it. It opens.

  The sun is setting, and there are long shadows that run back and forth across the yard. I can see the garage, but it is dark inside. That whole part of my life is growing darker, and I know that it will never get more light. That’s what the world is—we pass beyond things, and they grow dark to us, and one day we can no longer see them, not even the outlines.

  I climb through the window. I pull myself down into the basement and then come back up for the gas can. I have to stand on a chair to reach it. To me it seems like I am making too much noise, so I try to be quiet for a minute, but then the sound of my own heart and my breathing is tremendous, and I start sweating.

  Keep going. The basement is mostly blacked out now that the sun is low, and I stumble across it to the stairs. The floor feels wet, but I am wearing sneakers. I can’t possibly feel the floor.

  I make it up the stairs. Time is passing. I feel intensely sick, but not sick anywhere, not sick in my stomach, not a headache, just sick. I am shaking all over. I stand there trembling and I realize I haven’t been breathing. I take a breath and as I do, I hear a phone ringing on the floor above.

  The phone rings and rings. It rings and rings. It rings and it stops ringing. I freeze. I am there on the stairs, breathing and trying to hold my breath listening.

  The phone starts up again. It rings and it rings. I hear footsteps. Someone answers it.

  Hello.

  I can’t make out exactly what’s said, but I hear more footsteps. I hear a noise, maybe the phone being set down. Then footsteps toward the front door. I hear locks, and the front door opens and closes.

  Lana. You lovely drunk.

  I rush up the stairs and open the door and am practically blinded by the daylight that’s left there. I look to the front door, which is still closed, and cut around the corner into the hall. There’s an open door—some kind of den. I see the wedding dress slung over an ottoman. The suit’s underneath it. I lay the dress out on the floor. Next to it I lay out the suit. The framed photo’s there, so I put it in between. My aunt’s face stares up at me. She’s holding his hand and looking at me, here, in this blighted little room. I wonder what she thinks.

  The old man’s house strikes me differently now than when I first saw it. I can see that he must have lived here forever. But, seeing my aunt’s dress piled like some kind of prize stiffens me up. This is just a beginning. I have nothing against this guy, even if he will call the police on anyone, on every last person in town. It makes me sad to think of. There are so many like him. Each fire is a small thing. I am just beginning a long process. I am coming into a kind of inheritance. I can’t be the only one. There must be thousands like me.

  This is it, this is it, I tell my aunt. I undo the nozzle on the gas can and start pouring it liberally back and forth all over the room. There is plenty of gas, and the room stinks. My hands are shaking and I almost drop the can, but I keep on. I step back. I am breathing through a bandanna. I guess this is what a funeral looks like.

  Come on now, come on. I peel off my right glove and take my dad’s zippo out of the pocket of my hoodie. My hand is shaking even more, but I flick the zippo open. I step to the door. I take another uneasy step back out of the room.

  I raise myself up as if to ask a question. I say goodbye to things like aunts, fathers.

  I will leave this place. I will set out running, and maybe Lana will go with me. We will head for some corner of the earth where we can survive what we are, what we’ve done, what’s been done to us. It will probably be a place a lot like this one. I don’t know. I am not pessimistic. I just look at my future and I’m snow-blind.

  Here’s a prediction. This is what I think will happen, and it kills me.

  I will leave here, like it’s nothing. I will leave it behind, really leave it behind. I won’t come back, and no one will know where I went. It will have to be that way. I will leave and I will be gone.

  A week will pass, another week, a month, a year—who knows how long, and then:

  My mom will still be alive. She will be sitting in her fucking chair at the Home. She’ll be down by the fish pond, god knows she loves it there, and it will be a day like any other, but on this day, something will change. The sun will burn into her eyes one way or another. Some clouds will pass over with a deformed shape. An unexpected noise will reach her ears. Somehow, who knows how: she will wake up. She will shake herself. She will look around and suddenly she will know who she is. She will remember everything and she will look for me. She will say my name with her bedraggled little mouth, Lucia, Lucia, but I will be so far away then, I won’t be able to hear her. She’ll call, Lucia, Lucia.

  She’ll call to me with a voice I know, but such a thing I will never hear.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to:

  GGG, and some who read the manuscript when it appeared: Sasha Beilinson, Irene Beilinson, Jesse Stiles, John Francis, Jim McManus.

  Jenny Jackson and all at Pantheon.

  Becky Sweren and all at Kuhn Projects.

  Everyone at Ch’ava in Chicago where the book was written.