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

“I’m Thomas Coleman,” he said.

“OK, nice to meet you,” I said, and stuck out my hand, which Thomas didn’t take. His jaw started pumping a little bit, as if working up some saliva to spit on the hand I offered to him, and so I took it back.

“You don’t recognize my name, do you?” he said, and he was right in that. There was nothing, no bells or whistles; right then my memory was a happy, empty, echoing place.

“Well, I do recognize the name Thomas,” I said, trying to be polite. “But then again, it’s a pretty common name.” Which it was, and I meant this seriously, but he took it as sarcasm. I could tell by the way his jaw started working double time. He was an angry man, all right, and maybe that’s why he was so skinny: chewing so hard on his anger that he didn’t have the time or the energy or the appetite to chew on anything else.

“Thomas Coleman,” he finally said. “My parents were Linda and David Coleman. You killed them in the Emily Dickinson House fire.”

“Oh!” I said, since I didn’t know what else to say, and then, because this suddenly seemed like a more formal occasion, I put my shirt on. Once I was fully clothed, and out of nervousness, I went into a flurry of greeting: I shook his hand — I went out and grabbed it this time, there was no stopping me — slapped his back, asked, “How are you? So good to see you. How’ve you been?” and so on. All of this may seem horribly inappropriate, but what should I have done? There is no etiquette book for this sort of thing; I was writing it as I stood there. Besides, Thomas didn’t seem to think that I’d been so inappropriate — maybe after you’ve accidentally killed someone’s parents, every other offense is minor by comparison. His face even seemed to get a little color when I asked him if he wanted a drink — beer, juice, I told Thomas he could have whatever he wanted — although it may have been the glow off my own face illuminating his pockmarks. I really was giving off some heat and light; I probably could have powered the whole subdivision if there’d been a blackout.

“Do you recognize my name now?” he asked. “Do you recognize my parents’ names?”

“Sort of,” I said, even though I didn’t, not really, and even at the trial I tried hard not to know their names, as my future seemed a lot more likely a prospect if I forgot the details of my past. “I don’t really remember the whole thing all that well,” I told him, which as I’ve mentioned is a talent of mine and was true besides. Even now, with Thomas in front of me, the fire and the smoke and his parents’ burning bodies were so far away they seemed like someone else’s problem, which is awfully mean to say and in that way perfectly consistent with most true things.

“Sort of?” he repeated. A little more color crept into Thomas’s face when he said this, and I could already see I was doing his health some good, and if this kept up I might even get him to eat something. “Sort of? Don’t you feel even a little bit bad about killing my parents?”

“It was an accident,” I said. Thomas drew himself up at this and made a face, and in his defense I could see how he didn’t believe me: because if you said over and over again about the fire you’d set and the people you’d killed, “It was an accident,” it sounded as though you were whining, and if it sounded as though you were whining, it also sounded as though it wasn’t an accident, and then it didn’t matter whether it really was an accident or not. If you said about something terrible you’d done, “It was an accident,” you sounded like a coward and a liar, both. I sympathized with Thomas completely. But still, the truth is the truth is the truth. “It was an accident,” I said again, again.

“There’s no such thing as an accident,” Thomas said.

“Wow, it’s funny you say that,” I told him. Anne Marie had said the same thing many a time: in our life together I’d ruined more than one surprise party and leaned over backward and broken more than a few of our neighbors’ cherished heirloom chairs and told far too many ethnic jokes in the company of someone of that same ethnicity, and after each of these unconscious, unpremeditated bumblings, Anne Marie accused me of doing it intentionally. “This wasn’t an accident,” she’d say. “You did it on purpose.” And I always told her, “I didn’t! I don’t!” And she’d say, “There is no such thing as an accident.” And I’d say, “There is, there is!” But maybe there wasn’t. I could see what she was talking about, and Thomas, too.

“I miss my parents so much,” Thomas said. “It’s been twenty years since you killed them, and I still miss them so fucking much.”

“Oh, I know you do,” I told him. I was feeling empathy for him deep down in my gut, and his missing his parents made me miss mine, too, and in a way we were both orphans and in the same boat. “Hey, listen,” I said, “are you sure you don’t want a drink or something?” Because I was still thirsty from the lawn mowing, and besides, I was really starting to feel close to him and in his debt for doing what I’d done to his parents and his life, and would have gotten him anything he wanted.

“No,” he said. And then: “Do you know what they did to me in school?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who? When did this happen? What school?” Because I need to know the specifics of a story if I’m going to care, I mean really care, about it. As a child I could never feel much for the three little pigs and their houses because I didn’t know whether the houses — straw, brick, or otherwise — were in a town or a city or a village, or whether that municipality had a name, and without one I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

“This was at Williston Country Day,” Thomas said, “right after you killed my parents.” He said this slowly, as if I were somewhat slow myself and so I would get it all down and understand, which I appreciated. “The other kids, students, friends even, they made fun of my parents.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “That’s awful, Thomas. Those were no friends.”

“They were. They made fun of the way my parents died, you know, in bed.” He stumbled over these last words and was obviously still in a lot of pain and haunted by it, the poor guy.

“For a long time,” he went on, “I was ashamed of them, hated them because of what they were doing when you killed them.”

“That’s understandable.”

“There was a girl in my class whose parents died in a car wreck,” he said. “They were both decapitated. I was jealous of her. For a long time, I wished my parents had died like that.”

“Totally understandable,” I said.

“For a long time,” he said, sucking in a big, wet breath, “I wanted to kill myself.”

“Don’t say that, Thomas, don’t even think it,” I said. Again, I would have done anything for the guy. If he’d brought out the razor blades to slit his wrists, I would have ripped my shirt into bandages; if he’d had pills and swallowed them, I would have pumped his stomach, even without the proper know-how or medical equipment. I wanted to save him just like I wanted to save myself, I suppose. In this way I was like the mirror who wanted to save the guy looking into it and thus save the mirror image, too. It was a complicated emotional response, all right, and I’m not sure I understood it myself, which was how I knew it was complicated.

“And when I didn’t want to kill myself,” Thomas said, looking at me from underneath his eyebrows, which were blond and thin, like his hair, “I wanted to kill you.”

“Well,” I said, because I didn’t have a response to this except to say that I was glad he hadn’t. Killed me, that is.