Jesse Ball - How to Set a Fire and Why

…

We sat for a while.

What would you do? she asked me.

I think I would go to the top of a building with a friend, and then I would leap off, jump all the way to the ground and be crushed against it. The ground isn’t dangerous. It’s just the ground, but somehow when I touched it, I would be crushed against it. No matter how delicately I reached out my hands, my feet, I would be crushed flat.

Shut the fuck up. Do it then.

Oh, we laughed and laughed, Lana and me.

Everyone should just crush themselves to death.

Yeah, everyone should do that. Why not?

I can’t think of a reason.

Wait, wait. No. No, I can’t either.

Let’s throw something off.

Like what?

To sum up, let me tell you: I’m not one of those nihilistic types who thinks there is no meaning. I guess, I don’t think there’s meaning; there’s definitely no meaning, but not in a nihilistic way. I don’t find it exciting the way they do. I think you could as well be a bug or a sparrow or part of an antler, or the back of someone’s pocketknife.

There’s a story someone told me, a friend of my aunt’s who came to the funeral. She said, your aunt was at the soup kitchen and a guy came in and he wanted a bowl of soup, but there wasn’t any soup. We call it a soup kitchen, but more often there are sandwiches, or burritos or whatever. Soup is kind of messy. But he wants some soup. So, my aunt gets him a sandwich and she sticks it in his bowl and hands it to him with a spoon and she says, soup for one. Apparently all the people at the shelter liked this a lot. They would always say, soup for one. Soup for one. One guy even tattooed it on his leg. Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what it’s like to hear something like that? To hear someone say something and feel the world ripple around you?

Well, I got back to my aunt’s place, and I stood there looking around. It felt pretty bad, I have to say, being in a place like that. I stuck most of my things in an army bag and put it by the door. That made me feel a little better. Then I noticed an envelope that was on the kitchen table. Somehow I hadn’t seen it.

—LUCIA—

It was addressed to me—a letter from my aunt. She must have left it out the day before. She was probably waiting for me to find it. That’s the kind of thing she would do—and did, all the time.

I opened it. There were two letters inside. One was from Hausmann. It was an acceptance letter.

I sank into the chair. Then I realized I was sitting in the chair where my aunt died and I started to stand up. But, I decided, why not. I might as well huddle there with her death, so I curled up and looked at the other letter.

It was from my aunt. One thing about her that you should know—her handwriting is perfect. It looks like the work of a Victorian handwriting machine. She writes on paper without lines and all the words are perfectly laid down, everything symmetrical. I think it has to do with her posture.

Anyway—this is what she said:

Lucia, dear girl,

It is of course your decision and I will respect whatever it is that you choose to do. However, you should know that opportunities do not come so easily as the years pass, and that therefore, when one is young, it can be a savvy choice to obtain what you may as freely as you may. If these people will house you and give you a place to grow—you do not even need to learn what they want you to learn. You can continue your own education in the midst of these circumstances, which, you must admit, appear quite lovely. It is also true that you might find people there to talk to. It is always a pleasure to have people to talk to, people of real worth. We have always had each other, but I am sure that you will soon be alone—and then what?

However any of this might be, I want you to know that I am quite overcome with pride—not that you have managed to be admitted to this school, but that you have not failed to be the person I have always hoped you would be. It is a sad thing for me that I imagine I will not live to see you become utterly her—become her whom you will be inalienably. That person, I feel, will be someone to behold.

Goodbye for now,

Your strongest supporter always, Lucy

Well, I cried for a while, I don’t mind saying. I folded the letter up and stuck it in my pocket. The one from Hausmann I put in my bag. I stood up and looked around the room and it was as if I had never seen it before. My eyes moved over the various objects and I truly felt at that moment as if I had never seen any of them, as if I was for a moment, entirely new. I wondered what I would do.

That’s when I noticed it. On the back wall—something was missing. My aunt basically owned nothing, you know that already. But, she did have an old wedding dress and an old suit and the old wedding dress and the old suit, they hung together on the back wall of the house—like a costume exhibit. Next to the old wedding dress and next to the old suit there was a framed picture. In the picture, there were two people. One of them was a man. He was wearing the suit, but in the picture it was not an old suit. The other was a woman, a pretty young woman, and in the picture she was wearing the wedding dress. That woman was my aunt.

The picture was gone; the dress was gone; the suit was gone. There wasn’t even any reason for someone to take that stuff—some useless old clothes. It had to have been just some creepy whim.

But, I was pretty sure I knew who had done it.

Next thing I knew, I was on the front steps. I banged on the glass. Nothing. I banged on the glass. Nothing.

The landlord came to the door. Maybe I mentioned him to you before. 1. He hates me. 2. He hates me.

He opened it, looked down at me. I could tell he knew I knew.

What do you want?

There was just enough room, so I brushed past him into the house.

I know what you did.

He yelled at me to stop, but I ran into the next room, I guess it was the kitchen. There, on the counter, I saw it in a big pile—right there on the counter he’d stuck the dress and the suit and the framed photo.

Asshole!

I grabbed the stuff from the counter and turned around. He stood there, blocking my way.

He said something about my aunt owing him money.

I said the clothes weren’t worth anything anyway. He’d better let me go.

He threatened to call the police.

So I put down the stuff. I could see that he thought he’d won. His expression changed, and became if anything, even uglier. The wreck that age had made of his face, which is usually something I like to see—I admire it—in this case made him look like a vile clown. His mouth was practically spitting at me in his supposed victory:

Now get out of here, he said.

I went to go by him and he grabbed my shoulder. I tried to get him off, but he pulled me along and tossed me out the door.

I ran back to the garage and just sat there sobbing like a weak little wretch. For some reason it was too much for me. Someone like my aunt, she venerates this stupid clothing that she wore a million years ago, just because her life is a train wreck and for her sometimes thinking back on one of the few good things, her ultimately fruitless wedding, could make her feel good—and what happens? When she’s dead, even this dumb little display of her ordinariness—even that doesn’t get respected. It gets taken by the landlord who likes collecting quaint worthless shit. I wonder how long he had his eye on it.

I felt right then that I needed to get as far away as possible from this, from the beginnings of my life. If I could get some distance away, I was sure I could make something clean and cold and clear. Someplace else, not here, I could be the inheritor of my aunt’s, my father’s ideas.