Jesse Ball: How to Set a Fire and Why

Lana looked over. She started to mock me.

That goddamned landlord. He really did a job on you. All he has to do is call the police and no matter what happened, you’re fucked.

Lana grabbed my head in both her hands and looked into my eyes.

Now you’re completely screwed. You poor child, now you can never accomplish anything.

Fuck off.

I tried to shake her, but she had my head real good.

Now there’s nothing left for you. Why don’t you cry some more?

Fuck off, Lana.

Cry little baby, cry. You don’t get to go to your fancy school.

Lana! Stop.

No, no I won’t. You’re the one who has to stop being a little bitch.

She stuck her forehead right against mine.

Nobody knows what you can do. Nobody knows that.

She pushed me away.

Surprise them. Do whatever you want. They don’t matter anyway. It’s like you keep telling me—they’re all stuck in their own heads.

Thanks, Lana.

Lucia, you are a foul bitch—not a sucker. Keep to the script.

Have you been reading my pamphlet?

Are you kidding? I memorized it.

We went on a walk then, after Lana’s pep talk. There is a sump about a half mile from Jan’s house and we walked down there. Some guys honked at us from a car and drove slowly next to us; Lana gave them the finger and they laughed. Evidently that was what they liked, so they started to pull over. We went into a torta shop and waited until they went away.

We were staring out the window. I was thinking about boys and how terrible it must be to be a boy. They seem to feel like they have to stand up to everything, and for no reason.

The cashier at the torta place asked us if we were going to order anything, so we got up and left.

Just then Lana asked me about my mom. She did it this way, like she was far down her train of thought, and it somehow jumped straight out into speech:

What kind of bullshit is that? Tell me, please.

What are you talking about?

Our conversations. They are like this: I say something about my mom. You say nothing. I say something about my dad. You say nothing. I tell you about my brother. You say nothing. So, the question is: what kind of bullshit is that?

Lana, what do you want me to say?

Why haven’t you taken me to see your mom? You go there every week. I don’t mind going with you.

Maybe I mind.

Nobody said anything for a while and I could tell she was hurt—and here’s the thing, I like Lana. I don’t want her to feel bad. Basically, she is near the end of the line of people I wouldn’t mind seeing hurt, and it’s a long line.

Lana, listen. My mom, you would have liked her a lot. You would have. But there’s nothing to like now. Going there—you’re not going there to see a person. It isn’t like that.

Why don’t you tell me about her then?

Fine. I told her a story:

She was really wild. Sometimes she didn’t care about consequences. She and my aunt would argue about this a lot. My dad was pretty crazy too, but he was the one who kept my mom in check. Once, they were sitting in a diner, and I was with them. I was maybe eight. Some guy pulled up in a truck and he went inside real quick, he left the truck running. We paid, and he was still in line as we were leaving. The back of the truck is full of Christmas trees. My mom says hurry up to my dad. They jump in the truck, me on my dad’s lap, and we peel out. My mom drives it full speed down to this one neighborhood, a pretty bad spot, and we dump all the Christmas trees onto a lot, drive to a spot under an overpass. They left the truck there and we walked home in the cold, laughing and laughing and laughing. She never got caught. That was one thing about her, she never got caught.

So, that was one thing about her, one side of her. The other side was: she’d take the newspaper out and we’d sit down on Sundays and we’d go through it page by page finding lies and weasel words. It’s pretty fun. We would compare the new paper with old ones. We would just laugh and laugh. My mom would do impressions, and different accents, trying out what the different articles said. It was one of my favorite things. Sometimes we would call my dad over to verify if we couldn’t remember things, and he loved it, too. I think he wanted to do it with us, but he could see it was nice that we got to do it alone. Also, she would make cheesecake compulsively. I actually don’t even like cheesecake.

Sounds like a pretty great family, said Lana. My mom doesn’t know one end of a hot dog from the other.

She’s sweet, though, I said. And she managed to not die or turn into a vegetable.

Lucia, come on. Don’t say that.

If you saw her, Lana, if you saw her and she was your mom, it’s the worst thing you could ever see.

I guess that made Lana feel bad. I shouldn’t have said it, but the truth is the truth:

We’re just not permanent at all, not the way we want to be. Something happens, maybe even something small, something no one even notices, and next thing you know someone is spooning porridge in your mouth and maybe you like it. Next thing you know someone is wheeling you into a room with carpeted walls.

When we began, I bet you didn’t think things would go this way, did you? I didn’t think so either. When I look back, the girl I was at the outset was pretty helpless. I imagine I continue to be pretty helpless now. Helplessness: it’s our essential condition with regard to the future, no?

The idea was: for the first couple of weeks I would stay sometimes at Jan’s, sometimes at Lana’s. I didn’t have a plan beyond that.

Lana’s mom was pretty angry that I quit school. I think this was mostly because it meant Lana was a hop skip and a jump from quitting school herself. Her mom had the misguided view that school was educating people for glorious and varied lives in a vivacious modern world. But, as my aunt would say—it’s not my job to improve anybody. That meant instead of arguing with her I would just bring her little presents—some wildflowers or a rock or something I stole from the grocery store. Her tune changed from, Lucia should go back to school to Lucia has such good manners, Lana. Why don’t you have manners like Lucia has? And that was fine with me.

Alternately, when I stayed at Jan’s, things were pretty calm. He does different things to get money, I don’t know what, so he is only there part of the time, and he doesn’t care if I hang around. If there is food in the kitchen, I can eat it. Basically, he doesn’t care. You can come up with your contribution later, he said.

So, what did I do all day if I wasn’t at school and I had no job?

I sat around a bunch and wrote down things I could remember about my aunt. Ever since she first went to the hospital I have been writing down everything I could remember about this whole time—from when I got kicked out of the first school, right up until the present. That’s what you’ve been reading, obviously. A person writes down what has happened in order to know it . Then a person can find the way forward.

I thought a lot too about my dad and what he would say. He might say something like: head out west hopping freight trains and be a labor organizer. He was a real romantic that way, my dad. Nowadays nobody cares like that. If you showed up at a construction site people would be too busy looking at their phones to listen to anything you might say. The problem has to be handled differently. But how?

So, I was thinking about stuff like that. Hausmann had maybe given me some false hopes, but now I was realizing: maybe I had made a mistake by believing in this ludicrous fantasy. Lucia, I said to myself sternly, you should believe in inevitable things. Anything else is frippery.