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

“What?” he said. “Who?” Thomas looked genuinely baffled: his eyes retreated a little deeper into their sockets, leaving little lines in their wake, and his mouth puckered as though bewilderment were something sour. Then curiously, his face relaxed: a little, flickering smile illuminated his lips. Thomas cocked his head in the general direction of my dad’s room and said, “Is your father home?”

“No,” I said. “He’s at work.” And then, “Wait, do you know my father?”

“So long, Sam,” he said, and then turned heel and walked out the front door. I sat there for too long, making sure I fixed the details in my head before I lost them for good. Thomas had mentioned my father. But so what: after all, he knew where to find me, and so he also knew that I had a father, as so many people did and as Thomas did not. But there was that cock of the head. Was that coincidental? Was it just a tic? Or did he cock his head in the direction of my father’s room, knowing that it was in fact my father’s room? And if so, how did he know that?

I got out of my chair and ran to the front door, trying to catch Thomas before he left my life for who knows how long this time. And I might have caught him, too, if the bond analysts hadn’t been there, on my porch, blocking my way.

I CALL THEM THE bond analysts, but of course they had names. There was Morgan, as you know, and there were also two Ryans, one Tigue, and one Geoff, whom everyone called G-off. G-off was the only one whom I could keep straight, because he had dark, curly hair and looked slightly — by comparison and for lack of a better word— ethnic. The rest I could never tell apart, and looking at them now, I still couldn’t. It wasn’t especially cold out, but they were wearing duck boots and khaki pants and ribbed turtleneck sweaters, and each of them — other than G-off — had his hair combed to the side in a youthful, private-school fashion. They were all shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, as if they’d have liked nothing better than to have something elevated — the bumper of a classic car, maybe, or a picket fence, or a day boat’s prow railing — to prop their legs upon. Except for G-off, they kept flicking their hair out of their faces with a twitch of their necks. Since prison (and until the day before in the Book Warehouse), I hadn’t thought about them much, which of course is a talent of mine, and it seemed as if time hadn’t thought about them much, either: they looked exactly the same as they had ten years earlier. As for me, my belly was a little softer and bigger than it had been, and so, with my half-barrel chest and in right profile, I probably looked like a misshapen version of the letter B, and while I had kept most of the hair on my head, I had also added some elsewhere. The point is, the bond analysts had not aged and I had, and this was another thing I’d bumbled.

“Hello, Sam,” one of them said — it might have been Morgan. I say that because he’d always been sort of their leader, and on the porch the other four had fallen into a ragged flying V behind him, which I thought was kind of them, to distinguish Morgan as the important one in that way. Other things should organize themselves in the same way. Life, for instance. “Long time no see.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. With Thomas and his surprise visit, it had taken me a few minutes to locate my anger, but with the bond analysts and their surprise visit, I’d fallen right into it. I figured that if I kept getting surprise visits, I’d start getting angry beforehand, that the anger would in fact announce the arrival of the surprise visitor and not follow it. “You had no right.”

“What?” one of them said — maybe it was Tigue. “What did we do?”

“What did we do?” G-off said, and I remembered that one of their talents was to parrot one another to reinforce a point.

“You took my father’s story and passed it off as your own,” I said, and then pointed accusingly at what I hoped was Morgan. It was: he put his head down for a moment in shame, and while he did I got a good look at his part, which was straight and deep, like a canal cutting through the landmass of his hair.

“OK,” he said, raising his head. “I’ll admit it: that was wrong of me.”

“Very wrong,” G-off said.

“But I paid for it,” Morgan said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“As you know, I wrote the memoir and stole your father’s story,” Morgan said. “As you also might know, I was on parole when I wrote the book. Well, my parole officer read the book when it came out.”

“Lots of people read it,” Tigue said.

“It did quite well,” G-off said. “It even went into paperback.”

“Not all books do, you know,” Tigue said.

“Anyway,” Morgan said, “when the parole officer read the book, he thought I’d violated my parole by leaving the state. He wanted to put me back in prison. So I had to tell him that I’d made the whole thing up, that I hadn’t even left Massachusetts and I’d never done those things or gone to those places and that it wasn’t my story to begin with.”

“Then word got out,” Tigue said.

“The publisher found out and was pissed,” G-off said. “He demanded the advance back, plus all royalties.”

“I had to take out a loan to pay back the money,” Morgan said. “I even had to move back in with my parents for a while.”

“Hey, just like me,” I said, meaning for our common experience to cheer him up. Which, of course, it didn’t.

“It was humiliating,” Morgan said.

“But I don’t understand,” I admitted. “I don’t understand why you had to steal the story in the first place. Why didn’t you go out and do something on your own and then write a book about it?” I’d been in the Book Warehouse, after all, and knew that it could be done. As far as I could tell from the memoir section, if you were a memoirist, you did something— anything —only so that you could write a book about it afterward.

“That’s why we’re here, Sam,” Morgan said. “We came here for a reason.”

“A specific reason,” Tigue said. The two Ryans hadn’t spoken yet. In the movies these guys would have been the muscle, except they were too trim and they kept their hands in their pockets instead of menacingly smacking their fists into their palms.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Tell him about Africa,” Tigue said.

“Shut up,” Morgan said, and I had the definite impression that he would have smacked Tigue upside the head if they’d been a little closer in the V. But Morgan didn’t smack Tigue upside the head. He drew himself taller, as if to make a rehearsed speech. “In the past,” he said, “men like us, men of a certain means and of a certain age, if we’d gotten bored or dissatisfied or restless, if we needed to get our blood pumping, take a big, life-affirming risk and so on, we would have gone to Africa, on safari. We would have hired native guides. We would have hunted lions or gazelles; we would have come back with some animal horns or tusks of some kind. We might even have written a book about it after we’d returned. We can’t do that anymore.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“They’re protected,” Morgan said. “Lions, rhinos, okapi — you can’t touch them anymore.”

“The veldt is closed, man,” G-off said.

“We’ve even tried bungee jumping,” Tigue said. “We thought it might be risky enough.”

“You tie a big rubber band around your legs,” Morgan said. “You jump. You hang there and wait until someone cuts you down. That’s it.”

“That’s it,” Tigue repeated.

“It’s humiliating,” G-off said, “hanging there like that.”