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

“What about you, Dad?” I asked. “What did you do today?”

It was more difficult to read my father’s reaction, since he had so few of them and they were so spastic and incomprehensible to begin with. But I did notice this: my father glanced pleadingly at the television, as though asking it for help. Then he looked at his cooler, which was apparently empty, and to the cooler he said finally, “Work.” As if in reward for his giving the right answer, my mother tossed my father a beer, the way a trainer throws a seal a fish. My father amazingly caught it, too, although in doing so, he nearly capsized the bike, and I had to run over and catch him and it before they crashed to the floor.

“What about you, Sam,” my mother asked. “What did you do today?”

I didn’t know at the time whether my parents were lying or not, but I did know that it appeared as though they were, and I decided then and there as a poorly read and unschooled detective learning on the fly that the key to telling lies is to act the opposite of those who might be liars. I looked my mother square in the eye and said, “Nothing,” and then looked my father in the eye and said, “Nothing,” even though he hadn’t asked the question, which I’ll admit probably hurt my credibility some. But while I was looking them in the eye, I was also wondering if they’d read the morning paper (I’d left it on the dining room table, but it wasn’t there now), if they knew about the Bellamy House fire, if my father knew that I’d been looking through those letters and had even taken (and now lost) one, if my mother even knew about the letters at all. Who knew what — that was the operative question for all of us.

“Well,” my mother said, “we went to work and you did nothing. Another normal day.”

“Just like it used to be,” I said, thinking about when I was a kid and they would go to work, or said they did, and I did nothing, or said I did. We all drank to that, as was not true when I was a child, and drank some more, and they seemed to forget about the whole thing. My parents were very wise in their forgetting, of course, amnesia being, like a fixed mortgage, the thing that keeps your house your house. But I wasn’t wise. I didn’t forget. I got drunker and drunker, but still, the whole time I was thinking about my parents’ normal days and whether they were anything like my normal day, and I was still thinking about this as I went upstairs. I took off my watch before climbing into bed. It’s the expensive, indestructible sort of watch that tells you things — the barometric pressure, wind speed, and high tide in the second-largest city in Sri Lanka, for instance — that you don’t necessarily need to know, but two of the useful things it does tell you are the time and the day of the week. And right then, my watch was telling me the time was 11:21 p.m. and the day of the week was Saturday. It was Saturday. “It is Saturday,” I said out loud, making it official. My parents had gone to work on a Saturday, or said they had. For my father this wasn’t so strange: apparently you could edit or not edit books on whatever day you wanted, and he’d always kept irregular work hours and days. But what sort of teacher goes to work on a Saturday? The question exhausted me, and I fell asleep before I could begin to answer it. I had already looked into the Edward Bellamy House fire and now I was going to have to look into this, too. As everyone knows, once you start looking into one thing, you can’t help but start looking into others.

And once you start looking into others, then apparently you can’t stop others from looking into you. I learned this truth the next day when I woke up and found Thomas Coleman leaning over my bed, his face far too close to my own, as if trying to make sure I was breathing.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“What?” I said, and then, “Hey!” and so on as I scrambled out of my bed, threw on some clothes (like the first time I’d met Thomas, I was half-dressed and thought that maybe our second meeting would go better if I were fully clothed), went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and walked downstairs, Thomas following me everywhere I went until I settled at the dining room table, where my hangover potion and “Drink me” note were waiting. I sat down and did what the note told me to. Thomas was still standing; he looked more substantial than he had the first time I saw him, which had been less than a week earlier. It seemed as though he’d put on some weight; even his hair looked a little thicker and had a little wave to it now, and there was a little color to his face, and all in all he looked like a matinee idol almost all the way recovered from cancer and chemo.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Thomas asked me again.

I didn’t respond, this being one of the all-time most difficult questions to answer, especially if you’re not doing anything or think you’re not doing anything.

“You quit your job,” Thomas said, barely holding on to his patience. I could almost see it against the back of his bared teeth, struggling mightily to escape.

“That’s true,” I said.

“I called up Pioneer Packaging Friday to tell them that you’d burned down the Emily Dickinson House and killed my parents, and did they know they had a murderer and an arsonist working for them, and before I could get it all out, they told me you’d already quit.” Here he paused, as if letting me catch up to his swift train of thought, which I appreciated. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked for the third time.

“I was drunk!” I told him, realizing for the first time that one of the things drink could transform was one’s bumbling. Sober, one’s bumbling was a kissing cousin to failure; but drunk, one’s bumbling could be triumphant. “I quit my job because I was drunk!” I told him. “And you were right: they didn’t know I was a murderer and an arsonist. But I quit before you could tell them! And I didn’t even do it on purpose!”

This deflated Thomas. He sighed and sat down across from me; some of the color left his face. Disappointment took its rightful place in him, evicting strength and optimism. I felt a little sad for Thomas until I remembered why we were having this conversation in my parents’ house and not my own, and what he’d told Anne Marie.

“Why did you lie about me having an affair?” I said. “Why did you tell Anne Marie I was having an affair with your wife?”

The question cheered Thomas up some. His eyes grew far away and dreamy and this disturbed me more than anything he’d done or said thus far. “She’s kind of beautiful, you know,” he said. “I can’t figure out why you would ever cheat on her.”

“I didn’t cheat on her,” I said, and nearly reached over the table to shake him out of his fiction and into our truth. He must have sensed this, because he stood up from his chair and backed a few feet away from the table. “I burned down that house and killed your parents,” I yelled. “Why didn’t you tell her that?”

“Why do you think?” Thomas asked. I could see that he was trying to be a detective, too — that is, if being a detective means making someone answer questions that you should be able to answer yourself but can’t. This didn’t make me feel any better. Did he really not know why he’d told Anne Marie one thing and not another? Did he not know what he was doing here? Was he an amateur life wrecker after all, and if so, would he do more damage as an amateur than he would if he were an expert? There was no way to ask these questions, of course, and expect an answer, and so instead I asked, “Why did you set fire to the Edward Bellamy House?”