yelling ever got to be.
I’d taken a couple of pills from my mother’s well-stocked bathroom cabinet and I lay there waiting for the day’s sharp edges to blur into sleep. The sheets felt rough beneath me like thin cotton over sandpaper and my pyjamas twisted tight around my legs like a trap. I closed my eyes and imagined random objects in my bedroom bursting obligingly into flames, something Thurston taught me, a tailor-made way to relax. It wouldn’t work for everyone, he said, but it sure as hell worked for me. Behind my eyelids, everything was torched and blasted with fire. My shoes smouldered, my alarm clock warped and melted, my bedding was ablaze. I felt like a superhero on a day off, like a plume of smoke, cloud-wrapped, buoyant. I couldn’t move but inside I was flying. The skin on my palms seethed and bubbled. I was a burning candle, I was a pool of hot wax and then I was gone.
Some days inside my head there is nothing but fire. Most nights I sleep deep inside its bright, fast blooms. I have longed for it in random places – the old baths near our flat on Grafton Road, the vacant Embassy Hotel on South Grand, that copse of larch and ash beyond Ernest’s garden, the painted house downtown where my mother went to therapy for a while and left me in the waiting room willing the fish to broil in their gravelly, weed-wrapped tank. My fingers itch constantly for the length and neck and strike of a match. My heart swells and soars at a column of smoke against the sky. I pine for the flame’s lick, the sharp scorch in my lungs, the same way an addict pines for the needle. Thurston said once that I had the sweet moment of surrender all tangled up with love, and maybe he was right, but that didn’t mean I knew the first thing about how to untangle it.
I tried to keep my fires small after we moved back here, small and secret. Hannah was watching me like a hawk, keen to ship me off to some correctional centre or other, now that she could do it on the good old National Health. I couldn’t let her see me. I needed to be cleverer than that. A wastepaper basket, some old clothes, dry leaves, a length of rope, everything has its own flame. Everything burns at its own pace, with its own particular smoke and smell. I made fires every day because I had nothing better to do; little heaps of dry matter assembled and lit before breakfast, after lunch, behind buildings, on wastelands, on walkways and under bridges. I was fast and precise. I could start one in seconds, get up and walk away, my mind a little emptier, my breathing easier. Nothing got damaged, not by the small fires. They were actually pretty useful in their way, a kind of tidying up, an imposing of order and neatness on things. They didn’t do any harm.
I was twelve, my first proper fire, and I was alone. I hid in a hollowed-out oak in a quiet dip in Griffith Park, dragging in gathered sticks and strips of bark like a worker ant. I was careful about building it. I took my time. I had a rolled-up old magazine of Hannah’s in my back pocket for starting it, hungry looking ladies with tight trousers and tight smiles. I had to twist the pages just so – too loose and they’d flare out before the wood could catch, too much and they wouldn’t burn at all. I’d watched Lowell do it often enough in the cramped, weed-choked yard of our apartment. Now it was my turn.
I only had one match. I don’t remember where I found it. I held it up and even I could see how small and pitiful it looked, how unlikely it was to start anything worth bragging about. I breathed in and ran the match across the gritted bottom of my shoe, felt the stroke of it, heard the little pucker of air when it caught. And then I lifted it, burning, into view. It was thrilling to me. It was the start of everything, right there in my hand.
I shielded the tiny flame, moved it slowly so its own breeze didn’t put it out, and then I touched it to the twisted paper. The smiling ladies writhed and blackened and the smoke rose in a rainbow of greys. When the fire leapt up I felt its heat, warped and dancing in front of me like liquid, like magic. I didn’t know a flame could burn so many shades. I’m saying every colour in the world was in that fire, and watching it burn was the biggest, boldest feeling. I’ve never felt it again like the first time, not quite like that.
I got out of there when I had to, when the heat and the smoke made it hard to see and harder to breathe. I stayed low and made sure there was nobody around. My hands on the ground were covered with dust and ash. They looked like statues’ hands. I moved away fast and then I stopped to watch the smoke from my fire rolling fat and dark as a storm cloud. At the top of the park, from the observatory, you can see way out over the endless fume-hung map of grid streets and thin trees and squat tower blocks and lit highways, as far as the horizon, further. My fire was a little insult to all that, something wild in plain view of the city. It felt like a door had swung open, like I’d been kept in an airless room all this time and finally I could breathe. I knew I should hurry, but it was like trying to run in a dream. Bright sparks and flakes of charred leaf floated down through the blue behind me, gentle as you like, and the flames licked and snapped like a dragon, biting clean through solid wood.
I couldn’t see the smoke on the subway but all the time I knew it was there. I looked up and there was a boy, pale and dark-haired and skinny, older than me, fifteen it turned out, and he was holding up a handwritten sign and looking at me like he wanted to make sure I saw it. It read, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? I went red hot and looked at my dust-covered shoes.
“Psst,” he said, and I looked up again and a new sign read, WAS IT WORTH IT? DID IT FEEL GOOD? and I nodded and looked straight at him and we smiled.
That was Thurston. That’s how we met. On the subway, eight stops from Griffith to home, he showed other people other signs and I watched him. He held up the signs and waited for them to notice, and the whole time he stayed looking at me. An old lady got WHERE DID YOU HIDE IT? IT WILL ALL WORK OUT FINE IN THE END. A shifty looking guy got LEAVE IT ALONE and YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE. A girl about the same age as Thurston, her hair tied up high on her head, earrings swinging, got BE A BETTER LIAR and OH. MY. GOD. Each time, they acted like he could see inside their heads and they coloured right up and couldn’t look right at him again.
I loved it. I’m telling you, nobody had made me smile like that my whole goddamn life. I got off at my stop because I had to but I didn’t want to leave and when I waved at the boy he winked at me and held up BOUND TO MEET AGAIN.
Back home, Hannah and Lowell were out, but they’d be back soon, crashing through the door and trampling on my quiet with their verdicts on the relentless heat, the price of everything, and the vital overall importance of their day. Much better, this peace, this alone time, this thinking about the boy on the subway, this picturing my fire. As it burned, I washed my hands and face, scrubbed the muck from under my nails, pulled off my clothes and hid them under the bed. The smell of it was still in my shirt, sweet and black and smoky. I put my face in the sleeve at the bend in my elbow, and I breathed.
I was hooked right then, on both of them, the boy and the fire. I don’t mind owning up to that.
In London, I’d have dreamt about Thurston if I could. I’d have traded him for fire, but even in my sleep I couldn’t find him. The next morning, the noise of the real world descended like a net and caught me in it. Somewhere a lorry was reversing, a car door slammed. I could hear Lowell making coffee, banging cupboard doors, and sweating out his hangover. I felt the weight of my own body like gravity, pinning me down in the wrong place, on this bed. I opened my eyes and everything was the same as the night before, unfamiliar, intact and unspoilt. No plain blue still-as-a-picture California sky but something lower and rolling and cold. No posters on the walls like in my old room, no piles of clothes or comic books, just unpacked boxes. No Thurston throwing stuff at my window, waiting on the corner so we could begin our day. No heaps of ash, no charred and twisted remains, just carpet and plaster and metal, and a father I’d never met and didn’t want to meet, dark on the horizon like a storm. I couldn’t have been more disappointed.
