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

He kept walking, beating his leg with his hand (I bet he already missed his newspaper). I didn’t say a word; I felt bad for the old guy. He was in worse shape than before I’d arrived, I could see that, and as if to illustrate the point, he sat down right on the curb. I sat down next to him, glad for the rest. Like me, Mr. Frazier was breathing heavily, and again I feared for his heart and what I had done to it. Yes, I felt bad for him, and for myself, too, which has to be the truest kind of empathy. I wanted to help him but didn’t know how. Was it possible that I was incapable of helping someone? It didn’t seem fair. Was it possible that there was no such thing as fair? These were my questions, and I was about to think of others when I looked up and noticed that we were sitting in front of the Edward Bellamy House. There was a big, handsome brown wooden sign on the house that said so. I could read it clearly from our spot on the curb.

“Hey,” I said, “there it is.” And in my excitement, I pulled Mr. Frazier to his feet. It wasn’t difficult: there wasn’t much weight to him beyond his clothes. I pulled him up and dragged him across the sidewalk and to the house. I don’t know how I missed it in the first place. Next to Mr. Frazier it was the best-looking thing in the neighborhood, even though someone had tried to torch it: it was gray with green trim and a neatly mowed lawn and electric candles glowing in the windows and a picket fence outside and even an antique black iron boot scraper next to the front door. It was pretty. It was very, very pretty. You wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong with it except that it was ringed by yellow police tape, and there were some faint black singe marks near the foundation. It was like looking at a beautiful woman who’d just gotten a bad haircut. After all the ugliness we’d seen in the neighborhood, its beauty was a fresh, cool breeze on a hot day, and I still couldn’t figure out why Mr. Frazier would want to burn it down. Why not burn the boys’ house down if they were bugging him so? To burn this handsome old house was screwy and made no sense.

“Why?” I asked him. “Why would you want to burn that beautiful house down?” As I asked the question, I realized the answer was right in his letter, which I’d skimmed, but only far enough to know what Mr. Frazier wanted me to burn and not why. So I pulled the letter out of my jacket pocket. But before it was all the way out, Mr. Frazier snatched it away from me. I didn’t even see his hand come between mine and the letter. His reflexes were that incredible. He was quite an old guy.

But he wasn’t much of a reader, at least not without his glasses. It must have taken him half an hour to get through that letter, which he held right up to his face.

“Mr. Frazier,” I said, “why don’t you let me read that for you? It’ll go faster.”

He ignored me and was right to do so. Because I was wrong about his eyesight; or maybe I was right, but it had nothing to do with the glacial pace of his reading. It was obvious that Mr. Frazier simply loved what he was doing. He was like my mother in this respect. He really knew how to read and get something out of it, too, and while he was reading, his face started going through phases, like the moon. He made reading seem like something noble and worth doing — life-altering, even. I again cursed myself for giving up reading so many years ago and vowed to continue reading Morgan Taylor’s fraudulent memoir just as soon as Mr. Frazier finished with the letter.

Finally he did. I knew this because even though it appeared he was still reading — his face was still very close to the letter — I heard this sound, this familiar, repetitive, guttural sound, and when I looked closely I saw that Mr. Frazier was crying, and his tears were getting all over the letter.

“Please, Mr. Frazier,” I said, “don’t do that, don’t — hey, why are you crying?”

“I miss you,” he said in between heaving sobs.

And oh, that was terrible, much worse than the crying! Except that I couldn’t figure out whom he was missing. It wasn’t me, I knew that. For one, I was right there, next to him; for another, he wasn’t looking at me. First Mr. Frazier stared at the letter; then he raised his head and seemed to look at an American flag sticking out of the porch flagpole stand. “I miss you,” he said again, in the direction of the flag this time. So I walked over, yanked the flag out of its stand, and handed it to Mr. Frazier. But that flag didn’t seem to be the thing he was missing: he immediately dropped it on the sidewalk and started crying again, really crying. I thought for sure his heart was going to give out this time, just fall out of his chest and right onto the sidewalk.

“Oh, I’m all alone, all alone,” Mr. Frazier said. Then it was my heart I thought was going to give out. And then it was me who started crying: we were a duo of weepers, all right; we probably scared away the neighborhood cats.

“I’m all alone,” he said again.

“I know,” I said. “I’m all alone, too.” Because no one was more expert in loneliness than yours truly: there is nothing more lonely than being an eighteen-year-old accidental arsonist and murderer and convict and virgin. So I told him that story, which of course he already knew in part. And because I had so much more story to tell and so many words with which to tell it, I went on a philosophical jag and told him that we spend most of our lives running away from loneliness, only to turn around and go and search it out, and as proof, I mentioned how I’d lied to my family for years because I was afraid to be alone, and then lied again on top of the lying, and in doing so I’d pretty much guaranteed that I would be alone. Yes, even though I didn’t know what the letter said, I knew what Mr. Frazier was talking about and why he would want to burn down the Edward Bellamy House and make a good, roaring fire out of the thing. I had seen and heard the reasons myself: the boys had told Mr. Frazier that he didn’t look like them, or, I guessed, like anyone else in the neighborhood, told him in so many obscene words that he didn’t belong anymore, that he was all alone. This was where the fire came in, because after all, you couldn’t feel lonely sitting — toes wiggling — in front of a fire. This was a known fact: even if you were all alone in the world, as long as there was a fire (and the Bellamy House was the biggest, most beautiful house in the neighborhood, and so logically it would also make the biggest, most beautiful fire), you could stare into it and feel its heat and it would remind you of another, happier time, a time long ago when the world belonged to you, when you understood it, when you could live in it for just a few damn minutes and not feel so lonely and scared and angry. “You’re not alone, Harvey,” I told him. “You’re just not.”

What was Mr. Frazier’s response to this? He said (he was stone faced and dry eyed at this point), “Did you just call me Harvey?”

I thought he was objecting to my informality, and so I said, “Yes, sir, I’m sorry, Mr. Frazier.”

“Harvey was my brother,” he said. “My name is Charles.”

At first I thought Mr. Frazier was lying, that he’d made up a brother out of thin air and as a proxy for his own wishes. As a kid I’d used this brother trick many a time myself, like when I accidentally threw a baseball through someone’s window, or accidentally ate someone else’s lunch in the cafeteria, or accidentally backed into someone’s car in the high school parking lot after the junior prom, and I would have used it after accidentally burning down the Emily Dickinson House if I’d been thinking on my feet. But I realized Mr. Frazier wasn’t making up his brother; making up a brother is easy, but it’s much more difficult to cry convincingly about how much you miss the made-up brother when he’s gone.