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

They laugh at that one every time; the bond analysts found that telling the truth was as unsatisfying as burning down houses or writing a book, and they’re now back to analyzing bonds, whatever that means. But once a week they take time out of their busy schedules to visit me and help me write my arsonist’s guide. They tell me the best way to burn what sort of writer’s house, when you should pour gas down the chimney and when you should just throw a Molotov cocktail through the window, and what sort of life lessons readers might learn from each method. They remind me, too, that my arsonist’s guide is also a memoir and that one can’t write a memoir without a troubled childhood. Except they don’t think my childhood, as troubled as it was, was troubled enough. They want me to make one up. Mostly they want me to blame my father, who isn’t around to defend himself or protect his story. I tell the bond analysts that I love my father and I miss him and I don’t want to say anything about him that’s untrue and hurtful. They think this is ridiculous and won’t have any of it. So to get them off my back, I write sentences like this: “My father abused me as a child; no doubt that abuse contributed to my desire, in my later years, to burn.” This pleases them, and it also pleases me: because if I were to tell the truth about my father, if I were to say, My father did some bad things, but I still love him, I still miss him so much, and if I were to tell the truth about Deirdre, if I were to say, My father loved another woman and I hated her for it, and so I let her die, I would start crying and never stop. If you tell the truth, you will start crying and never stop, and what good will that do you, or anyone else for that matter? Besides, would anyone want to read a true story that made you start crying and never stop? Would you want to read such a story? Would you read it because it was true, or because it made you cry? Or would it make you cry because you thought it was true? And what would you do, what would you feel, who would you blame, if you found out it wasn’t?

Maybe one day I’ll know the answers to these questions, but for now I tell lies about my father and pass them off as the truth, and this makes the bond analysts happy. But it also fills them with nostalgia: when I read to them from my arsonist’s guide, I can see the bond analysts gaze longingly into the distance, as if my memoir is a ship at sea, and their bonds are the shore.

To be honest, though, I’m not just writing one book; I’m writing two of them. Both books begin with “I, Sam Pulsifer …,” and then one of them tells the story you know by now, and the other one is my arsonist’s guide; one is the story of the one house I actually burned and the ones I didn’t, and the other one is about how I did burn those houses and the details and lessons therein. I plan on calling the story you know a novel, and the arsonist’s guide a memoir. Why write both books? Maybe I just want the best of both worlds, which is exactly what both worlds usually don’t want you to have, and the bond analysts aren’t entirely sure they want me to have it, either, which is why they insist I call the story that includes them a novel and the story that doesn’t a memoir. They tell me, “You need to protect the innocent, dude,” which is what the guilty always say when they need to be protected.

And then there is Thomas Coleman. He’s living with Anne Marie and the kids now, but when he visits, he and I never talk about them. He comes by himself, every other week. Thomas has put on some weight: I can see the buttons on his shirt strain a little with his new gut, can see his shirt collar creep up and crowd his jowls, too. He always comes on Monday, always with a red face, always with that suburban man’s weekend yard-work tan, and I can imagine him on my self-propelled mower; no doubt he keeps his shirt on, and no doubt the other Camelotians like him for that. But we don’t talk about any of that stuff, either. We don’t talk about whether he knew, or suspected, that Deirdre had set those fires. We don’t really talk about anything at all when Thomas visits: we sit there in silence, just two ordinary men with fires and dead parents in their pasts, and a common family in their present, and who knows what in their future, and hearts with holes in them, holes that are in various stages of excavation and filling. I don’t understand why he visits me; when he does, I am sorry to see him come, and then I’m sorry to see him go. I don’t understand that, either.

Then there are Anne Marie and the kids. Sometimes Anne Marie brings the kids with her and sometimes she comes by herself. When all three of them are there, I talk to Katherine and Christian about their days and what goes on in them. Katherine is fifteen years old now, beautiful and tall and dark haired like her mother and something of a model citizen, too. Last week when they visited, I learned that she’d just been chosen to go to Girl’s State.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“What’s the difference between Girl’s State and Boy’s State?” I asked her.

“You must be kidding, right?” she asked back, and I said, “Yes,” because I must have been.

Christian is twelve years old, smack in the middle of the age of balls and bats. It’s not clear he can speak about anything else, and because we have so little time together, I don’t ask him to. Recently he’s become obsessed with athletic footwear and its latest innovations. For basketball, Christian told me last week, the soles of his shoes are filled with air; for baseball and soccer, his shoes have spikes that are made of something that isn’t metal and isn’t plastic, either.

“What are they made of, then?” I wanted to know.

Christian thought about this for a minute, hard. He has a head like mine, outsize for his body and a little blockish, and I could see it begin to corkscrew with the effort of his thinking. Finally he gave up and said, “Something safe.”

“I hope so,” I told him, and then, because I could sense the guard behind me about to remind us of the time and how we were out of it, I told them both, as I always do, “I love you,” and they both nodded, as they always do. A nod means, Yes, we love you, too, Dad, among children who are too shy to tell their father that they love him even though there are so many reasons not to. Everyone knows that the nod is the same as an “I love you, too.” This is the most common kind of knowledge. Is it not?

When the kids are around, Anne Marie and I don’t talk much. But when she comes by herself, as she did yesterday, we have plenty to say. They’re things we’ve said already, many, many times, although the questions don’t seem to lose their interest because of the repetition. I ask if she’s OK, if she has enough money, and she tells me yes, yes, she’s fine. I know they’ve promoted her to full-time manager at the home-supply superstore, and so I ask her about that, and she tells me about lumber that was supposed to be pressure treated and wasn’t, or that wasn’t supposed to be but was. I ask her if Thomas is still living at the house, and she tells me that he is, and I ask her why, and she tells me the truth: “Because we have a lot in common.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve hurt both of us a lot.” I don’t say anything more to this, because I know there is nothing a victimized woman loves more than a victimized man, and because I also know that what she says is true. She doesn’t ask me about the fires themselves or the people who died in them, about why I did what I did or why I did what she thinks I did — maybe out of kindness, maybe out of sadness, or maybe because she can’t stand to think about them more than she already has and does. I will never tell her the truth about those fires, because that would mean I’d have to admit that I lied to her, again, again, and I know how much that would hurt her, and maybe this is what it means to take responsibility for something: not to tell the truth, but to make sure you pick a lie for a good reason and then stick to it. In any case, we don’t talk about any of that. It’s safer to talk about Thomas, and so that’s what we do.