Jesse Ball - How to Set a Fire and Why

So, I said, come inside. You can meet my aunt.

Aunt, I said, this is Stephan. He is a convicted child molester. He wants us to know that he lives in our garden now.

My aunt laughed in a congenial way that put Stephan at his ease despite my awkward joke.

Do you go to school with Lucia? she asked.

He said he did.

She has a very foul mouth, don’t you think? Sit down and have some tea with us, she said. We’re just playing cribbage. Do you play?

Stephan took a gander at the room. I could see he was repulsed a little and when he looked at me, maybe he pitied me a little. I try not to be good at identifying pity in people’s eyes. It is mostly better not to.

Anyway, he sat down, and my aunt explained the rules of V_I_C (veritably improved cribbage) to him, and then she beat us both really badly a few times and went to sleep in her chair.

Do you want to go for a walk?

Okay.

We went outside and walked for a while.

I heard what happened, he said.

About the pencil? It’s nothing. He was an asshole.

Not that. Of course that’s nothing. I mean—about your parents.

How did you hear about that.

Jay Lesso.

Oh. Jay, he’s okay.

Yeah. Anyway—I’m sorry about that.

There is a really dirty canal that is near my aunt’s place. We went to it and threw some paving stones into it.

Stephan told me that he was going to set a fire.

I said that I doubted it, he seemed kind of like a pussy to me.

Stephan repeated that he was going to set a big fire. He was planning it. He wondered if I would help him.

I said it is better to do those kinds of things by yourself.

He said, for this he would need a little help.

I think Stephan definitely wanted something else. A couple of times he seemed nervous as if he couldn’t think of what he was trying to say, which is stupid, because he is smart enough to have a conversation without tripping up. He did this weird thing where he would take off his watch and put it back on. So, I knew.

It wouldn’t be so bad. There’s nothing objectively wrong with him. But, since he was someone I could talk to about setting fires, I figured—if you are a young woman, there are many people who want to do things to you that they enjoy doing to young women, so if someone is interesting for other purposes, it can be good to use them for those other purposes and avoid the things that anyone could do.

To be totally honest, and I like animals, it is just about rutting like animals. I ask you—is the best thing we’re capable of just rutting like animals? We need to do it, yes, just so we don’t get anxious, but for the rest? If someone says to me, Lucia, do you want to train to be a great spelunker so we can explore some unexplored part of Carlsbad Caverns, I mean—that is definitely more interesting. I say yes to that. I guess it’s true also—you can do both kinds of things with the same person, but I haven’t found anyone like that.

Before he left he showed me on his phone a video of some Pakistani soldiers beating a cow to death. It made me sad, but I also felt—how large the world is. There are many places and in some of them, people are beating cows to death for no reason. Meanwhile here we beat them to death out of sight and when they appear they are in neat cardboard packaging with tasty sauces.

I said that Darius once punished a river for drowning his favorite horse. Maybe this cow was being punished.

Stephan said he thought the cow was definitely being punished, but for what—who could say?

He asked me for my telephone number, but I don’t have one—that was another embarrassing moment. He wrote his address on a piece of paper like it was 1990 and gave it to me. Jan is going to give a meeting at my house on Thursday, he said. My parents are away, so it’s fine.

Whenever I have done the worst things that I have done—it is usually because I thought about doing something, and then I thought, Lucia, you shouldn’t do that. Don’t do that, Lucia. Then, I think, maybe I am just saying that to myself because I am afraid of doing it (the thing). What I fear most is being a person who is afraid to do things. So, at that point, I force myself to do the thing. Later on, it turns out one of two ways:

1. I was afraid to begin with, and it was good that I didn’t let myself off the hook.

2. I wasn’t afraid to begin with. I had some difficult-to-parse but correct misgivings about whatever it was, and when I go ahead and do it, things turn out badly, specifically because I was right and didn’t pay attention to my feelings. This is when I do the worst things that I do. If someone else finds out about it, like my aunt, they say, why would you do that, with considerable astonishment. It’s obvious you shouldn’t do a thing like that.

We had to do one of those stupid occupational tests on Tuesday. First, there was a very long multiple choice. Then, there was a one-on-one interview with a counselor. In this case, I think they could have brought in a clown and it would have been more effective. At the very least, I would have enjoyed sitting with a clown for a while not talking. If neither of us talked for something like two hours, I would let the clown win, I would talk, out of sympathy. But, if he gave up early, I would be glad to claim victory over an undisciplined clown. What am I even talking about? There wasn’t a clown—it was just a counselor, and the counselor asked me what my greatest weakness was. That’s when I said that I was a coward at heart, but a recovering coward. She asked what did I mean. I said that I did everything I could to mitigate the effects of my cowardice. Why is that a weakness? she asked. I said it was because I then ended up doing absolutely inadvisable shit, like jumping off a pier onto a grain barge, or pulling a biker’s ponytail at a hotdog stand.

She asked what my greatest strength was. I said I was perspicacious. She pretended to have to go to the bathroom, but I could tell she was looking up perspicacious in her phone. That’s okay. I would have said it differently, but I think it is a beautiful word. I guess it is my vanity (my aunt would say so), but I like to think it is true, I am perspicacious. One thing about perspicaciousness is that it doesn’t have to be allied to traditional knowledge structures. It’s just good clean insight. I aspire to be a perspicacious person, like a carpenter who knows which one of the beams is important.

The woman came back, and she had the results of my test with her. I was actually pretty eager to hear what it said. You might think these sorts of things are dumb, and of course I agree. However, they are mostly dumb when the results of the occupational test are someone else’s results. Everyone finds their own results to be really interesting. Same with personality tests, all tests having to do with our paltry identities. What fools we are! I include myself in that.

Earlier, when I was waiting in the hall for my turn, Susan Dempsey came out, and she said she could be an architect, but also a performance coach. I don’t know who thinks that is a job.

However that is—it made me curious. What weird thing might they tell me I can do?

Lucia, said the woman, your results in some parts are very good, and in others, well, you didn’t even fill out all the questions.

I didn’t think they could possibly test anything, I said.

This test is put together by very qualified people, said the counselor. It is certainly capable of testing any number of things. Your results, well, you shouldn’t feel disappointed. The test doesn’t ever show the upper limits of what you can do. You are always capable of much more than what others expect. It is very important for you to remember that.