Jesse Ball - How to Set a Fire and Why

The party was at this house that is called the pier . That’s what Ree told me. She did this cool thing where she climbed over the seat and sat in the back with me to talk as we drove. Ree is Asian, I think probably Korean, and also part Indian, which is weird, I mean, uncommon. I have never heard of this combination, but she is really hot, so—nice for her. She started telling me about the place and put her elbow on my shoulder like someone in a movie. It killed me.

The pier is a house that has a backyard that used to be a water park. So, it is maybe three acres (it was a shitty water park). There is no water, and all the pools and slides are empty, but it is a great place to hang out. When she told me this, I almost didn’t believe her. It sounded too good.

But, when we got there, it was absolutely true. It is on the edge of the city, so there are farm fields and woods and such around. Ree said there is actually a sanitation plant over the hill, which is what put the water park out of business.

There were maybe a hundred people there already—for which the host, a guy in his forties with no shirt on, apologized. It’ll heat up, don’t worry .

I hate when people say that kind of thing. He knew Lana and Ree and gave them hugs. I did not do that, although he moved to sort of make it happen. I gave him a good handshake.

Get yourself some drinks, he said. Mona’ll be back soon with a truck full of fireworks.

Mona, Ree told me, is that guy’s (Jim’s) girlfriend. She is maybe thirty and an awesome singer. What kind of singer, I asked. Not like that, said Ree. She is an opera singer.

Shit.

I decided I would try to get her to sing for me later on.

A couple of hours later, Lana and I were sitting at the top of a slide and this real dumb guy named Jared, who is supposedly in a famous law school, is telling me how Lewis Carroll was a pedophile. I can only take so much of that, you know. I mean, honestly.

From the spot where I was sitting I could see the whole water park laid out beneath me—or I would have been able to in daylight. Now, it looked a bit like a diorama, or a structure that you’re in, but that you understand from above—like in a dream.

Jared was being so annoying I finished my drink, and that drink was supposed to last me a good hour. So, I turned against him.

He was starting to say some more, and I had to get away. If Lana wants to talk to him—fine.

I got up, and he had to move to let me go back up the slide to go down the ladder.

Be easy, be easy, I told myself, but then I decided not to. I turned to him:

You aren’t a pedophile because you like to take pictures of naked children. Maybe it’s weird. Yeah, it is. Maybe that’s true. But, I bet being eight and naked and having a chat with Dodgson is better than 98 percent of the activities you could get to do, ever.

He looked shocked.

Lana laughed.

You would have let him put it in, eh? Eight-year-old Lucia would be into that?

Lana. You know what I mean.

I kept going toward the ladder, but remembered the rest of what I had to say to the lawyer-guy.

And for the record, it is Alice Liddell, not Little. Some—people—.

My speech was ruined by the fact that I almost tripped and fell, but I caught the mouth of the slide, and got to the ladder okay. The guy said something, and I could hear Lana saying to him,

Oh, no, she just hates poseurs. You’re not a poseur, are you?

That actually almost made me fall. I don’t want you to think that this whole ladder and slide business was a piece of cake. The ladder was maybe thirty feet long, and many of the rungs were broken. Just getting up there in the first place was not something everyone could do. In fact, I had been surprised to find this Jared individual there when we got to the top.

On the way down the ladder I remembered I had to go to the bathroom, which meant trying to remember where the bathroom was. That meant remembering that there were four different ones (it was a water park after all). Ree was in line outside one smoking a cigarette. She passed it to me and lit herself another, like we had been doing that kind of thing forever. When the bathroom opened up, she said, in you go, and we went in together.

That made me a little nervous, because I didn’t want to mess up how cool we were being with each other, but we got inside and she just pulled her dress up and started pissing in the toilet, still smoking away on her cigarette.

I looked at myself in the mirror. It was cracked as hell and there was a naked bulb blinking on and off right above it. I messed around with my hood a bit and stuck my chin out.

Hold it there, she said. Let me get a picture of you. Hold on.

She was still pissing and smoking a cigarette, and she pulled her phone out of I don’t know where. I love this photograph, she said. You are so beautiful. Grow old and die right now and I’ll play piano at your funeral.

A guy named Walt who had three pit bulls with him gave me a ride home in his Wagoneer sometime around dawn. He was pretty old, and his dogs were all sweet as fuck. If you like dogs, he said, you should sit in the back. They will sit all over you. So, I did that. I was thinking, I like these dogs, and, these dogs can actually predate on me if they choose to. One of them, Mona, was 115 pounds. How heavy do you think she is, Walt asked me. I said, she is definitely heavier than I am.

Mona had an awesome white patch on her face. She kept doing the dog thing of knocking the head into me and leaning against me to try to provoke some petting. In her case, though, it is not really a question. You will pet her or she will eat you.

Walt dropped me at the corner and Mona gave a little wail when I got out. The other two dogs didn’t care as much. She never likes anyone, Walt said, which is what dog owners always say. Does everyone believe it? I usually do.

My aunt was awake when I came in, or I thought she was, but she was kind of frozen in her chair. It is hard for me to describe it, but her body was really weird and stuck. In my head, I heard a voice I hadn’t heard before, some voice of knowledge say in a slow clear way, she has had a stroke . I think it was probably just my own voice, but I was so far away at that point, I couldn’t even recognize it.

The ambulance came, and they told me I couldn’t ride in it. They carried her out of the house, which was strange—having these men I don’t know inside our house—and then they wouldn’t let me get into the ambulance. You’re drunk, they said. Sober up. I tried to insist, but they said no, and gave me the address of the hospital. One of them led me away from the ambulance a short distance while the other shut the door, so I couldn’t even jump in.

I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me go along with her, but it was awful.

Essentially, ten seconds passed, and I was standing on the street, it was six a.m. and the ambulance was gone. Some people who had been woken up by the sirens were looking at me out their windows. I felt like a real fuckup.

It happened so fast that I had the thought— just jump in the ambulance , after the ambulance was gone. Then it turned a corner in my head and became, why didn’t you jump in the ambulance?

Then, I felt even worse waiting for the bus, because I stopped being drunk and I stopped being high, and I was just hungry and the bus took forever to come. When it did, it got me partway. I had to wait for another bus. That got me to the hospital.

One thing about hospitals is—it isn’t always clear how to get into them. You can walk around the outside a long way looking for the entrance, and then when you find it there are thirty-foot letters that say, Emergency, or Outpatient.