Jesse Ball - How to Set a Fire and Why

A few of the kids clapped. One said, yeah, that’s it. You’ll do fine. Someone else asked Stephan if I was his girlfriend, and we both said no.

One of the guys wanted to see the zippo, so I let him. He fumbled with it a bit and gave it back.

I sat down by the tree, and Stephan sat too. The lights of the drive that wound through the medical park marched through the trees in a winding pattern. Beyond that were more lights—the city, the highway, more lights and more.

This terrible little island we were on was a nice mote of darkness. I could hear the water.

I couldn’t see the other people too well—it was pretty dark, but they looked mostly older, maybe seniors. One of the guys on the other side of Stephan asked him when he was going to qualify. Qualify? I figured that meant setting the fire that would make him an official member. Stephan didn’t say anything. I wondered how many members there were.

Noise from the other side of the island filtered through the trees. Some people were shouting—another group had just arrived. Someone set off some fireworks—or it was a gun, I don’t know.

The same guy was talking again to Stephan. I leaned in to hear. He said, you have a month to set a fire, and if you don’t you’re out.

He saw me looking at him. Same goes for you .

I met his eyes and nodded like it was nothing.

He told Stephan to move so he could sit next to me, and Stephan did.

Well, I saw Stephan that Monday in front of the school. He was standing by himself kicking a stone against a wall. The ground there was all mashed flat and dusty and nothing was growing. He kicked the stone back and forth. It was kind of mesmerizing. I asked him if the meetings were always in the same place.

He said he’d never been to Alcatraz before. He had been to two other meetings—at a guy’s house. Real members have meetings with prospective members, and then the real members have their own meetings. I asked him how he had found out about it. He said it was through his brother, who was overseas in the army.

He said: I went to Stuart Rebos’s place about a month ago. Two other guys were there. We talked about setting fires. Neither one of them had done a big fire yet. Then, Jan showed up—the guy you met. He told us about some techniques and gave us a pamphlet that someone else had given him.

I asked him how old Jan was. He said he thought he was about twenty-four. Definitely he had gone away to college. Stephan said Jan had been his brother’s friend, but that they had for the most part lost touch.

First period that day was a study hall for me, so I sat and wrote in my prediction book.

Jan will try to sleep with me if I am alone with him. Don’t be alone with him.

I wrote also,

Stephan isn’t as smart as I thought he was,

which isn’t a prediction.

About owning things. If you try to own things, but you don’t have very many things, then you can get in trouble. Because you might have to trade in some of the things that you have in order to get the money to get part of something new, but then when you run out of things that you have to trade to get money to give to finish getting the thing that is something new, then you have no money to finish getting that thing—the new thing, and then someone comes and takes the new thing, and then somehow, you have nothing, even though you did start with a bunch of things (however shitty they may have been—they still were yours).

Maybe it will make more sense if I give an example. My aunt got a car, but she only has money for food (someone she knows lets us live in this garage, so she doesn’t pay rent). She doesn’t really have money to pay for the car. I think she got it in order to take me around to where I need to go and such things. I remember her saying something like that. Maybe she thought that because she is old we couldn’t go around together without a car. Anyway—she had to sell her jewelry from when she had a husband a hundred years ago (he died when she was still nineteen, a year after they got married). She had to sell her clarinet and her piano. It was not a nice piano—just a tuneless little upright, but she played it all the time.

Once she had sold those things, there wasn’t anything else to sell. She missed some payments, then people were calling on the phone about it for a while. That brings us to Saturday morning.

We woke up and there were two really big guys outside. They broke into her car and drove it away. I yelled a bunch of stuff at them and tried to call the police, but my aunt said it was useless. The repossession men and the police have an understanding . One of my favorite books was in the back of the car, too, and that they stole. Maybe the car was theirs to take, I don’t know. But the book, Barbarian in the Garden , by Zbigniew Herbert, that was my book, and there is no way they were ready to appreciate it. You have to read probably five hundred books before you can read that one.

My aunt said now I had a good thing to look forward to. What was that? She said now when I go to used bookstores eventually I will find it and there will be a kind of reunion. In the meantime, there are plenty of other books to read.

She didn’t even complain about the car—not once. I was hoping she would shoot them. That’s what was in my mind when I saw how big they were. I know she has a pistol. It’s because of what happened to my father and mother. She isn’t a violent person, but being the first one there (I was at a friend’s house when it happened), I think it was hard for her. By the time I got home, past the police, and so on, there wasn’t anything to see, so I never saw it. My mom was already in the hospital; my dad was at the morgue. I am glad I didn’t, because it really fucked my aunt up. But, I am also a bit jealous, because I feel like it was my thing to see and I never saw it.

My aunt will say in about ten minutes that we should walk down to Muscha Park and feed the pigeons and read and then afterwards eat a hot dog from a vendor. We will then go to the park and we will sit and feed the pigeons some bread that we got for free from a bakery and we will read and afterwards we will eat a hot dog from a vendor. That is—one hot dog for the two of us.

I wanted to be vegetarian once, but it isn’t in the cards. Buying nice vegetables is pretty expensive. Maybe one day.

When I think about what my future holds, it is a bit like looking into the sun. I flinch away, or I don’t and my eyes get burned down a bit, like candles, and then I can’t see for a while.

The way we have things laid out—it makes it easy to know how to behave, but it isn’t so clear that I will be a success. I have no intention of going to college. Someone told me about a program that is at a school near us, a good school. The program sounded neat, so I read one of the professor’s books. He is a real big shot, and gets prizes, goes to fancy places. There is a picture on the school’s site of him shaking hands with the president, if you can believe it.

His book was terrible. It was intellectually weak. I don’t think his brain is very strong—or somewhere along the way it got polluted. Not to mention that he fraternizes with petty oligarchs.

My question is—why would I go to study with someone like that. I have no intention of bowing intellectually to such a person. My aunt says that I am vain and that I boast, but she doesn’t know that I talk to no one.

It went just like that. My aunt was feeling pretty bad about the car. I don’t think she cares about having a car, but I think she was embarrassed for me, because it will be hard for me at school to live in a garage and be broke and have no car. It won’t be hard for me in a metaphysical sense—I can handle it. But, people will turn against me. Public opinion, if you will.