Jesse Ball - How to Set a Fire and Why

I wasn’t sure if I should go into the emergency room, but I did, and then I had to wait to talk to the nurse because there were people truly bleeding who were on line in front of me. A little girl was throwing up into her mom’s purse. I’m not kidding. The mom was holding the purse open, and the kid was throwing up into it.

Forty-five minutes later, when I managed to speak to someone, I got hassled about not having any identification, and I solved that by crying.

At that point, there was nothing they could do but take me to her, so they did.

Before we get to what happened when I went to my aunt’s room:

a fact:

my aunt wrote a book. I didn’t know that she had done that until after she was in the hospital because my aunt is almost always in the house when I am in the house and so I never really get to poke around the way you do when you are alone. And that’s the poking that really counts, because inevitably you find things that lead to other things, and next thing you know you have emptied out someone else’s drawers and are looking at notes they wrote to people who are long dead.

At the bottom of one of the drawers was a book called Falstaff, the Proper English Gentleman: An Indictment of Culture by Lucy Stanton, D.Phil.

This isn’t really my type of book, so I only looked at it for a little while. I think it is about things that were important to people once, but not really anymore. By the way, it has nothing to do with Shakespeare, if that much wasn’t already obvious.

I also found a letter from her husband. It is on the inside of a paper airplane, which I guess makes sense since they were essentially children together (he died when she was nineteen). The paper airplane is inside of an envelope, some kind of military envelope. I guess he was overseas when he sent it to her, which is weird, because he didn’t die in the army, so he must have been there before he died.

It seems there was a period when they were apart—he was in the army and she was still in school. He would write her letters, she would do the same. This letter was a paper airplane that was inside an envelope. I imagine she took it out and it must have been pretty exciting. No one has ever sent me a letter, certainly not with a sweet paper airplane in it.

So, the letter says on the outside:

just in case the letter doesn’t get all the way to you, I gave it some wings so it could fly the rest of the way .

Which is pretty terrible, but is the kind of thing a guy might write to his sweetheart when he is sitting in a barracks somewhere.

The letter on the inside is just him going on about how pretty she is and how much he misses her, and about the books that she sent him, which he read, and all the things they will do when he gets back. He lists a ton of plans they must have made, and I think it is really sad, because I know for a fact that he died early in that next year, so they must never have gotten to do most of those things.

Now,

when I was crying at the hospital, they took me up to her room, and I thought, definitely she isn’t in there, because I could see the bed and it looked empty, but when we got over to it, I could see she was there. With the hospital clothes she just looked really small. She was asleep and the nurse gave a sign that meant—don’t wake your goddamned aunt because she almost died. The nurse was a really fat Puerto Rican guy. We went out into the hall and he turned out to be one of these nurses who knows everything. He even asked me stuff about what my plans for the week were and gave me good advice about not having a guardian around.

Regarding my aunt, he said—she had a stroke. Now, she is asleep. Her condition is stable. We don’t know any more than that yet. There will be a bunch of tests.

If her condition is stable, I said, doesn’t that mean you’ll just release her? We don’t have any money and we have no insurance.

He said somehow the no money no insurance thing wasn’t known at the hospital yet, so I should shut up and see how much care she could get before it got cut off. I gave him an I’ll-keep-mum-soldier-salute, kissed my aunt on the cheek, and headed to the elevator. While I was waiting there, he came and found me. He had a sheet that listed visiting hours, phone numbers, other data.

I dropped the paper and knelt to pick it up. When I got to my feet, he was looking back at me.

She might be really changed, he said. Think about it.

When I was sitting at home by myself, I decided to write a series of descriptions for my aunt. I could bring them in to her at the hospital so she would feel like she knew what was going on outside.

Maybe one would be about the garden, one would be about the house. One could be about my school, one about buses, because I really like them. I don’t know. I kept thinking it was a dumb idea, but it stuck. I was sort of pretending that I would be able to see my aunt again, that I would go back to the hospital and she would be there in her body. But, obviously, there was no guarantee of that. My mom is an example of this—one day she left her body and I have never seen her again.

When I say that, I don’t mean that she actually went somewhere else. What I mean is: the shitty little cells that cluster together to muster up in sum total the person I used to know are now clustering in some inferior way and the person I know cannot ever be found.

My mother isn’t even really in my memory—because it constantly erodes. Everything is falling apart all the time.

People love to say it to you like it counts:

Oh, Lucia, she will live on in your memory .

Sometimes they’ll even touch your arm at the same time like they’ve earned it by saying something poignant.

The whole thing about people living on in memory is a crock of shit. The best you can do is try to remember what you can, and include the memories in your routines. But, sometimes that makes the real memories fade faster.

We’re just running down a fucking slope carrying these little flags, and one by one we get shot and we slump and our little flags are in the mud and no one picks them up. No one is going to keep running with your flag. Lucia, no one cares about your flag. I tell myself that. When you fall down it’s over.

I called the school and told them I was spending the day at the hospital. Immediately on hanging up the phone I realized this was a big mistake. If my aunt dies and the school knows, and now they know, then it could mean some kind of institutional business. I mean, they can’t send me away anywhere, I don’t think so, but—better to keep it all quiet as long as possible, and here I go calling them when I don’t need to.

Why not just fail to show up on Monday, and then on Tuesday bring a forged note? I think I called because I wanted to tell somebody what had happened. The sad little individual that I am wanted to hear somebody feel bad about how bad it was for me and wanted to hear a voice wish me well. That’s what happened. The lady at the main office, who I hate, she is really terrible (I see her talking on her cell phone outside the school entrance when I eat lunch there by myself sometimes—and she is just abominable), this very lady is the one who answers the phone (of course she is, she is the receptionist), and she listens to my pathetic retelling of my aunt’s stroke, which I feel bad about even as I do it, and she says, essentially, oh my little bird, you poor dear, oh you frail thing, of course don’t come to school. I’ll let everyone know.

It didn’t make me feel any better—in fact, I felt a bit worse, because she thought she had hung up the phone, and maybe a second later I heard her talking to someone else in the office about how she was going on break and could someone replace the toilet paper in the office toilet for once.