Jesse Ball: How to Set a Fire and Why

He asked me what I was studying and I said that I was studying the idea of poisons. He asked me what that meant. I said many things are poisonous, but only some of them are poisons. Who gets to decide that cutoff point? Historically, the cutoff point moves around depending on who benefits. I mean—alcohol is pretty poisonous, for instance. He said he liked alcohol. Of course you do, I said.

Do you like to go to shows?

Not really.

Why not?

Because they are expensive. Sometimes my friends and I get in for free.

He said he wasn’t surprised that they would let us in for free.

I said that one of my friends is really pretty—so that’s probably why.

He said, no, he was saying he wasn’t surprised—that he figured I could get in for free, friends or no.

He asked me if I wanted to go to his place, and I said yes, but when it was time to get off the bus, I stayed on it. He got up and he was like, this is the stop. And I just stayed put. I looked out the window. Then, the bus had started up again and he was off it. Maybe I won’t ever see him again. That would be okay.

My aunt and I play cribbage sometimes, but she thinks that it is boring, so we have set up a gambling system. Usually you play to 121, and you accrue points in order simply to win. Well, she had the idea (my aunt) that the points could potentially be spent, and that it might make the game more interesting. So, during hands, and between hands, there are ways in which you can use points in order to do a bunch of other things, like nullify cards, or redraw, or double the stakes of a particular game, buy the crib, or double the pegging points. This makes the game very fun. My aunt likes to win. I also like to win. The table that we eat supper on has an inset that you can pull out to reveal a giant cribbage board. We use that when we play. The giant board makes it more fun when you win and less fun when you lose. Whichever one of us is the current victor gets certain privileges in the house. One of those is never doing dishes. Another is getting the blue blanket. At this point, she was the current victor. To be honest, she is usually the current victor. I think she understands the whole thing better than I do. Her claim is that we are both equally good, but this is disproven by the fact that she is the victor more often. I guess it could be true that she is demonstrating some distribution where she is lucky in the early running. Anyway, when she is the victor and she is tired, she sometimes refuses to play because she doesn’t want to lose her crown. The conversation that night went something like this:

LUCIA Let’s play cribbage.

AUNT MARGARET You promised to tell me about school.

LUCIA Cribbbbbbage. Cribbagggge. [Looks at the floor.]

AUNT MARGARET Oh, here is something for you.

She gave me a notebook with a black felted cover. My old notebook was just a marble notebook. This one was pretty obviously superior. I took it and looked at it under the lamp. I liked it immediately. It is really very nice. Maybe it is the nicest thing I own—in terms of how much someone else would value it.

Right then I had a really good idea. I would use the notebook for writing down my predictions. It would be

THE BOOK OF HOW THINGS WILL GO

I don’t know, maybe you think that an idea like that is not a good idea. I am pretty confident in my predictions, so it seemed to me like my sum total of happiness would be improved by having such a book. Not that I need to use the book to prove to anyone that I was right. I don’t tell people about the predictions, so that isn’t a thing.

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I opened it and wrote on the first page:

Leslie is a girl who sits three seats back in homeroom. She has brutal bangs but a wild porcelain doll face and usually wears almost no clothes. She is always talking to a guy, Pierre, who sits next to her. Within the week, she will be horribly maimed in a car accident, and Pierre will never talk to her again. She will then gather her inner resources and become an award-winning physicist. At that point medicine will have advanced and her face will be restored. By then, Pierre will be a homeless drunk and he will pass by a shop and see her being interviewed on a television that is playing in the shop window. Medicine will have restored her face to its exact appearance at the time of the accident, so that despite being thirty-eight at that point, her face is sixteen and hot, really hot, and this will yank Pierre’s heart actually out of his chest so that it flops around on the ground like a trout. People walking on that street will cautiously step around his prone body. Meanwhile, she still secretly loves him, and when she happens upon his body at the local morgue while enjoying the good times with some hard-drinking friends, she can’t deal with the pain. She runs out into the street and is mauled by a car for the second time! Meanwhile, Pierre wasn’t dead—but just asleep. He stumbles out of the morgue and finds Leslie’s mauled body where nine or ten cars have run it over. He fails to recognize her, but what he does see is: miraculously, the pint of scotch she was drinking is unharmed, tucked as it was into the side of her skirt. He kneels to remove the whiskey, and is overwhelmed with fabulous good feeling.

Just kidding! That isn’t how the predictions go.

The predictions are more like:

Tomorrow I will go to the Home to visit my mom. I will wear a raincoat and I will take the number 12 bus all the way down Ranstall Avenue and change to the number 8 at Bergen. While I am riding the bus, I will read a collection of short stories about insects. One of them is “The Metamorphosis,” so you can see that the book is more entertaining than it sounds because the editors have given themselves a wider purview. While I am reading that book, which is an Ace Book and says it was once sold for 45¢, someone will try to talk to me. I will grunt and indicate that I am reading a book. When I get to Stillwell, I will get off the bus. No one else will get off it because no one else will be on it at that point. I will walk half a mile to the entrance, and then half a mile past the gates to the main building. At the main building, I will get a guest pass and I will be escorted to my mother’s room. She will not be in the room. I will then be escorted to the fish pond. She will be sitting in a rocking chair next to the fish pond. She will be wearing a medical gown. Her hair will be in a ponytail (she never wore it in a ponytail). I will approach her and speak to her. She will once again fail to recognize me. I will sit with her for a while until it becomes clear that it isn’t doing anyone any good. Then, I will go back and hand my pass in. I will walk back down the drive. I will walk to the bus stop. I will get on the number 8 bus. I will take the number 8 bus past Ranstall, past Wickham, past Arbor, to Twelfth. There I will get out. I will go into the bowling alley, Four Quarter Lanes, and I will sit at the bar and my friend Helen will pour me a drink. She used to be my babysitter when I was a kid. She is forty-five and is writing a book about self-hypnosis. I always go to see her after visiting my mom.

I woke up late and when I got to school third period I didn’t have an excuse, so I got a detention. Really, I guess—if we are being completely honest, I got a detention for asking Mr. Beekman why he was unhappy that I wasn’t on time. He said that I was supposed to be in school. I said, but why are you unhappy about me not being in school. He said because I need to get an education. I said that the whole thing was a farce. Did he believe that the American public was educated? Was that his argument? That he is helping to educate the population of a democracy—and that he wants me to be there at the start of first period so I can do a good job voting some years from now when he is being wheeled around in his old-age home? At this point, he gave me a detention and made me sit down.