Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

And then I found the memoir I was looking for, without even knowing that I was looking for it or that it even existed: A Guide to Who I Am and Who I Pretended to Be, written by Morgan Taylor, one of the bond analysts.

Except according to the book he was now an ex - bond analyst. That was the first thing I found out about his life after prison (I sat right down on the floor and started reading the book, as though catching up with a long-lost friend): Morgan didn’t go back to being a bond analyst. “That life was dead to me now,” he claimed in his memoir, without saying why it was dead or how it was ever especially alive in the first place. But in any case, instead of resuming his career as a bond analyst, he became what he called a “searcher.” The first thing he did after he got out of prison was to go to South Carolina because he’d never been in South Carolina before and his inner voice said that he had to — had to! — visit all fifty states over the course of his lifetime. He also attended a game at every major league ballpark. He traveled to Yosemite and Badlands and Sequoia and every other national park of note …

“Wait a minute — hold on,” I said to the book, and to Morgan, too, wherever he was. Because I recognized the story: it was my father’s. He’d told me those things on his postcards, during those three years he’d left my mom and me, and I, in turn, had told the story of my father’s travels to the bond analysts in prison. They were especially interested in the story — I remembered that now, too.

Was I angry? Of course I was. Is this what memoirists did? Steal someone else’s true story and pass it off as their own? I was tempted to put the book right back on the shelf and not buy it, except that I wanted to see whether Morgan had gotten my father’s story right and also whether I was in the memoir or not. I wasn’t on the acknowledgments page, that’s for sure: I checked, right there in the store, before I moved on to the cash register.

AFTER I BOUGHT Morgan Taylor’s fake memoir and left the Book Warehouse, I did exactly what my father said I shouldn’t: I didn’t wait. Instead I drove out to Camelot. Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.

It was after four by this point, but beyond daylight savings and so already dark and getting suddenly cold and weirdly cheerful and Yuletide-like. Camelot was festive in a way it had never seemed when I lived there, with its streetlights and floodlights, and in a few houses you could tell the ventless gas fireplaces by their steady, nonsmoky, nonflickering blaze. I knew our own ventless gas fireplace wouldn’t be in use — Anne Marie was a big believer in wood fire, and no other kind would do — but the lights were on downstairs, in the living room and dining room and kitchen. I parked across the street so that I could see through our living room’s enormous bay windows, turned off my headlights, and watched as each member of my family passed the window in turn, as if modeling for me. There was Katherine, carrying that gigantic ringed binder full of the homework that came so easily for her that she would already have finished it; there was Christian, holding his plaster hammer above his head as if preparing to strike a blow for the working man; there was Anne Marie, gesturing wildly about something, her free hand flapping around her head as if defending herself against bees, sometimes smiling, sometimes scowling, the whole time talking to someone else in the room, I couldn’t tell who. It wasn’t the kids, because I could see them sitting at the table now, and Anne Marie’s back was to them. She was speaking either to herself or to someone else. But who? I couldn’t tell, because there was me, Sam, sitting in my van and not in the house, looking at the three of them (plus this invisible guest), feeling so far away from them, longing for them and afraid to knock on the door and find out that they weren’t longing for me. Yes, I was outside looking in, all right, which was not unlike being a reader (this was my very thought), and maybe this was another reason why my mother gave up reading: she was sick of being outside the house. Maybe she wanted to be inside, with my addled father, drinking beer until there was no beer left to drink and nothing to forget that hadn’t already been forgotten. Suddenly I wanted that, too, so, so badly, and so I drove out of Camelot, back to my one family, my one family that I didn’t have to long for, my one family with whom I could drink myself to sleep and forget about the other one.

In many of my mother’s books, the troubled narrator has a telling dream at a crucial moment, and so I wasn’t at all surprised that night when I had one. A telling dream, that is.

In my dream I was standing in a cupola, four stories in the air, on the very top of a sprawling, gray-shingled mansion. The mansion backed up to the ocean, and there was a storm. The white-lipped, whip-backed waves crashed against the boats, which were coming unmoored in the surf, their lines snapping off like overextended rubber bands. The water was a bruise; the sky, an even darker, more violent blue. Up in the cupola, my back was to the water, facing inland toward a compound of five slightly smaller shingled mansions, and I was holding a red plastic gasoline can by its handle, daintily, like a purse. The smaller mansions were all on fire: there was more flame than wood, more smoke than structure. But there were people still inside the buildings, and they were leaning out windows, clinging to trellises. Each one was holding books; they were all burdened by books. Some of them were throwing the books out the windows; some were lowering overflowing sacks of books down the trellises toward men waiting on the ground below. There was one woman on top of a roof. She was wearing a gauzy, nearly transparent nightgown. Her hair was on fire: the flames ringed her skull like a crown, dripped down her long, curly locks like wax. I couldn’t see her face, but it was obvious, in the logic of the dream, that she was beautiful and necessary. She was leaning against the chimney, beating her head with one of the books as if to put out the fire. The book was a hardcover, though, and the woman quickly knocked herself unconscious. Slumped against the chimney the way she was, I could see that the woman had no underwear on: her black pubic hair looked like a tattoo against her pearl white stomach and thighs. One of the men on the ground saw this, too. He became distracted, understandably, and while gazing at the unconscious woman’s exposed nether regions, he, too, was knocked unconscious by a falling sack of books. Another man knelt to attend to his fallen comrade, then looked up and pointed to the woman on the roof. Her nightgown was flickering and hissing in the fire; the book, still in her right hand, caught fire and exploded. A severe, sharp cry came from the men on the ground, from the men and women in the windows and on the trellises. It appeared to be the first book lost in the fire. A great despair washed over them all. The men and women abandoned hope, hurled themselves out the windows and off the trellises. The men on the ground below did not attempt to avoid the falling bodies and were crushed.

It was quite a dream, all right, and not at all the kind I usually had. I usually had the kind in which familiar people showed up in unlikely places, like the one in which I found my boss sitting at my kitchen table, drinking coffee, which I found interesting — my boss had never been in my house and didn’t even drink coffee — but no one else did, and when I relayed these dreams to my family, their eyes glazed over as if they were having a dream of their own. No, this dream was different, and I wished my family were around so I could tell them about it and prove what sort of fantastic dream life old Sam Pulsifer was capable of having — although I’d have to edit out the pubic-hair part for the kids. Or maybe I wouldn’t have told them after all, because the dream didn’t make me feel so hot: my head hurt and I was breathing hard. After a dream like that, you’re grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn’t be worse than your dream life. That’s how I felt until I went downstairs (the house was empty again, my hangover more familiar and less terrible, the hangover potion on the table again less urgently needed, though I drank it anyway), opened the Springfield Republican, and discovered that someone had set fire to the Edward Bellamy House in Chicopee, Massachusetts, not twenty minutes from where I sat, reading about it.