An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes In New England Part 3

It was not true, as rumor had it around my high school (I went back to the high school while I was out on bail, which was where I heard the rumor), that the whole thing had been some sort of s.e.x club gone horribly wrong. It is correct that I'd thought thought of inviting this girl China, whom I knew well enough and wanted badly, in the way boys are supposed to want girls with exotic names and their own cars, which China also had. And it's true that, as far as China was concerned, I had s.e.x on the mind, prominently, in the very front of the lobe. But I didn't invite her to break into the Emily d.i.c.kinson House with me that night. I knew better. I did! Do you think I wanted to have s.e.x with someone in that house after the stories my mother had told me? Especially the story about the time two kids from the high school (again a boy and a girl "mere babes," my mother called them) bought a six-pack of Knickerbocker beer and decided to break into the Emily d.i.c.kinson House. of inviting this girl China, whom I knew well enough and wanted badly, in the way boys are supposed to want girls with exotic names and their own cars, which China also had. And it's true that, as far as China was concerned, I had s.e.x on the mind, prominently, in the very front of the lobe. But I didn't invite her to break into the Emily d.i.c.kinson House with me that night. I knew better. I did! Do you think I wanted to have s.e.x with someone in that house after the stories my mother had told me? Especially the story about the time two kids from the high school (again a boy and a girl "mere babes," my mother called them) bought a six-pack of Knickerbocker beer and decided to break into the Emily d.i.c.kinson House.

These were the same young children grown up, still nice but not quite as nice as they might have been. My mother stressed that these kids thought too much about what they were doing and what they'd like to do. Their fall lay in the calculation, and I took the lesson to be "Don't calculate," and to this very day I try not to. They walked and made out at the same time, a difficult trick, to be sure. The boy carried the six-pack in a plastic bag with handles; he had condoms in his wallet and a mini-crowbar in his jacket pocket. He was secure in his physical ability and in his equipment and calculated that if he couldn't blow the door down, he'd pry the lock. The door usually gave way easily, though; it was an old door, slightly rotten, and swung open right when you kicked it the first time, as I know very well to be true.

My mother told me this story when I was fourteen, after my father came back, and after my father came back my mother's stories both hardened and became easier, less tense but more gruesome, as was the case with the story about the kids with the six-pack and the condoms. Oh, it was a mess. They walked into the house and started going at it, and soon enough, bits of bone, flesh, tendon, began flecking the walls, crawling under dressers, hopping into the mail slot and sticking there: a cruel change-of-address notification. Imitation gold rings, baseball caps, hair bands, condoms, and full beers were found conspicuously in view, leftovers, the breathing out after a long swallow. A reminder of the evil of illicit s.e.x and its punishment. It was a scene, all right, a regular bloodbath those kids got themselves into, and it seemed obvious to me that if I were ever to have s.e.x, it would never, ever be in the Emily d.i.c.kinson House.

So no s.e.x, and no s.e.x club. Of course, I can't say how far Mr. Coleman got with Mrs. Coleman that night. After the fire was through with them, they were just so much bone and connective tissue. That much I know.

And it was not true that I was, as my first-grade teacher testified, a "little firebug." Not true! As proof, she told, in court, about the time on the playground when I was six, when she found me burning an anthill with a magnifying gla.s.s, or trying to (there were clouds that day, too many of them). Let me tell you, I was not the only kid in Miss Frye's cla.s.s that tried to torch an anthill and learn a little something about solar power in the bargain. And let me tell you, what happened in first grade had no bearing whatsoever on what happened in and to the Emily d.i.c.kinson House. I had forgotten all about the anthill, in fact, and wasn't thinking of fire at all that night when I broke into the Emily d.i.c.kinson House. I was thinking of my mother's stories like the one in which Emily d.i.c.kinson's corpse was hidden in one of the house's many secret compartments and came to life (or at least became ambulatory) only when there was a full moon. There was a full moon that night, and out of nervousness I was smoking a cigarette which was a new habit, a short-lived one, too when I heard a noise. Who knows what it was? It could have been the house creaking or a tree moving in the wind. It could have been the Colemans, enjoying their last private moment on earth together. Or it could have been Emily d.i.c.kinson, as gla.s.sy eyed as your best movie zombie, breaking out of her secret compartment and heading full steam in my warm-blooded direction. Whatever, I dropped my cigarette at the noise and hightailed it out of the house and so didn't notice that my dropped cigarette had lit a heavy living room drape on fire, which set the living room rug on fire, and so on. So. Accidental fire starter? Yes. Firebug? No.

But you know what is is true? My mother's stories were good, or must have been. The judge pointed this out at my trial, the sentencing part, when my defense attorney was again explaining why I was in the Emily d.i.c.kinson House in the first place, and I was explaining again about my mother's stories. The judge interrupted and said, "Those must have been some good stories." true? My mother's stories were good, or must have been. The judge pointed this out at my trial, the sentencing part, when my defense attorney was again explaining why I was in the Emily d.i.c.kinson House in the first place, and I was explaining again about my mother's stories. The judge interrupted and said, "Those must have been some good stories."

"I guess they were," I said.

"But then again," the judge said and he was really editorializing here, but I guess his robes and his elevated seat and his handsome wooden gavel gave him the right "if a good story leads you to do bad things, can it be a good story after all?"

"Come again?" I said. "I'm not following."

"I'm afraid I'm not, either, Your Honor," my lawyer said.

"I agree," said the prosecutor, who was exactly the same as my lawyer except that he wore a cheaper suit and was touchier because of it.

"Bear with me," the judge said. "It's an interesting question, is it not? Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Should we expect it to? Can we blame the story for anything? Can a story actually do do anything at all?" Here he looked at me learnedly, over his gla.s.ses, and you knew right then that he'd always longed to be a college English professor instead of a judge and that he subscribed to all the right literary periodicals and magazines. "For instance, Mr. Pulsifer, can a story actually be blamed for arson and murder?" anything at all?" Here he looked at me learnedly, over his gla.s.ses, and you knew right then that he'd always longed to be a college English professor instead of a judge and that he subscribed to all the right literary periodicals and magazines. "For instance, Mr. Pulsifer, can a story actually be blamed for arson and murder?"

"Huh," I said, then acted as if I were thinking about the question, which I should have been; instead I turned and looked at my mother, who was sitting behind me in the courtroom. There might as well have been a neon sign on her forehead that flashed the words DEFIANCE, OUTRAGE, REGRET, much like our driveway would flash the words MURDERER and FASCIST in the years to come.

"Huh," I said again.

"You'll have plenty of time to think about the question in prison, Mr. Pulsifer," the judge said to me. "Make sure you do."

"I will," I said. Because it was an interesting question, to the judge.

But I hadn't thought about the question, and I wasn't really thinking about it in the morning, either, when I woke up in my old bedroom for the first time in ten years. I wasn't thinking about any of the things I should have: my wife, my kids, Thomas Coleman, or his dead parents. No, I was thinking about those letters, couldn't stop thinking about them maybe because I'd stopped myself from thinking about them for so long. Or maybe I was thinking about the letters because it's easier and safer to think about the things we shouldn't than the things we should. The voice asking, What else? What else? What else? What else? knew that truth, too. There I was, lying in my childhood bed, and when the voice asked me, knew that truth, too. There I was, lying in my childhood bed, and when the voice asked me, What else? What else? it didn't mean, it didn't mean, What about your wife, your kids? What about going home and telling them the truth? What about your wife, your kids? What about going home and telling them the truth? It meant, It meant, What about the letters? Where are the letters? What about the letters? Where are the letters? Yes, that voice was a coward, just like me. Yes, that voice was a coward, just like me.

I put on my pants and shirt from the day before, then crept down the stairs and into my father's room. The lights were off in the room, the bed was made, my father wasn't anywhere to be seen or heard. I opened the end table drawer, and there it was, the shoe box, and inside it were the letters, just as I remembered. It wasn't so much a dramatic moment as it was comfortable, rea.s.suring: the house and my father had changed, but at least the letters letters were in the same place. They were more tattered, smudged, and used than I remembered, and I could picture my father, sitting in his chair, reading the letters and reading them again and again and thinking of me, somewhere out in the world. It was a touching father-son moment in my head. Then I heard a noise a sputter of a cough coming from the living room, and I took it as a warning of sorts. So I put the letters back in the box, put the box back in the drawer, closed the drawer, and followed the noise. were in the same place. They were more tattered, smudged, and used than I remembered, and I could picture my father, sitting in his chair, reading the letters and reading them again and again and thinking of me, somewhere out in the world. It was a touching father-son moment in my head. Then I heard a noise a sputter of a cough coming from the living room, and I took it as a warning of sorts. So I put the letters back in the box, put the box back in the drawer, closed the drawer, and followed the noise.

The living room was a good deal more together than when I'd seen it the day before. There were no booze bottles to be seen, no rings on the tables where they had been, no trace of them at all, as if they'd been called home by the mother ship. There was only one ashtray, a gla.s.s one, on the living room coffee table, with no ashes in it. The exercise bike was still in the living room, but off to the side and not smack in front of the TV the way it had been. As for the TV, it wasn't on, but my father was sitting in front of it on the couch.

"Dad," I said. "Good morning."

My father turned to face me. He had twelve extra hours of gray, patchy beard grown on him since I'd seen him last, and his eyes were filmy and half-closed, or half-open, depending on how you wanted to look at it. Dad had one leg crossed over the other, which I thought was quite an accomplishment for someone as stroked out as he was. And he was drinking a forty-ounce beer, a Knickerbocker in the can. I looked at my watch. I'd slept late. It was two in the afternoon, still a little early for drinking a beer that big, especially since I didn't remember my father drinking before, ever. But then again, my old dad had been through a lot, and who was I to tell him from where he should get his pleasure and whether it was too early in the day to get it. After all, he'd managed to cross his legs, the brave guy, and maybe the beer was in celebration of that huge accomplishment.

"Good afternoon," my mother said, coming in from offstage, as she had the previous night. I turned to face her. She also had a big beer in her hand, and unlike the night before, today I could see her clearly, could see clearly that she had changed since I'd seen her last. For one, she was pretty. I remembered her face being severe and impressive; it could scare you into admiring it, but it wasn't what you'd call pretty. She had always been one of those harsh, clear-eyed New England beauties whose scarily blue peepers always seemed to be looking through the disappointment that was you and back to her own clear-eyed Puritan kin. But now there was a softness to her face, not as though she'd gained weight, but as though she and her face had called some sort of truce and were at ease: her blue eyes seemed at home over her nose, which hung like an awning over her mouth, which was smiling at me. My mother's name is Elizabeth, and she had always seemed like an Elizabeth; but now she seemed like a Beth. As Elizabeth, she had always seemed to be what she was a stern high school English teacher but as Beth, she seemed something kinder and gentler. A nurse, maybe, an especially pretty one.

"You look like Nurse Beth," I told her.

"Ha," she said, girlishly tucking her hair it was black as it had always been, and long, too behind her ears. My mother went over to my father, took the empty beer can out of his hand, opened a new one, and placed it in the gnarled cup holder of his right hand. He said something garbled and multisyllabic, which I took to mean, Thank you.

"Should you be giving him another beer?" I asked. My mother didn't respond in facial expression or word, and so I added, "Because of his stroke."

"Did you hear that, Bradley?" my mother said to my father, her smile getting even softer, full of some private pleasure. "I shouldn't get you another beer because you've had a stroke."

My father didn't say anything back, but he shot her a look and she met it, the look, halfway, and it remained there in the room, like another son, another human being with some mysterious, shifting relationship to the two adult human beings that had made it. Because maybe this is what it means to be a son. No matter how old you are, you are always a step behind the two people who made you, the two people who always know something that you need to know, too like, for instance, how my mother had known that Anne Marie had kicked me out of the house, or even that there was an Anne Marie, or a house.

"Last night you said that my wife had kicked me out of the house," I said. "How did you know that?"

"What?" my mother said loudly, because my father had begun drinking the beer, slurping it heroically and at top volume, and I had to shout the question "How did you know that my wife had kicked me out?" so she could hear it over the soggy racket of my father's imbibing.

"Oh, Sam," my mother said, "it's an old story."

"An old story," I repeated, thinking now now of what the judge had said to me at my sentencing about good stories and bad stories, and for the first time in years I recognized that stories were everywhere and all-important. There were all those letters stashed away in the shoe box, all those people who wanted me to burn down those writers' homes because of the stories the writers had told; there was the story that Thomas Coleman told Anne Marie that made her kick me out; there were stories that the bond a.n.a.lysts had told about themselves in their memoirs, if they'd even written them (one had, sort of, but I didn't know that yet); and there were my mother's stories, which everyone knows all about, and suddenly I knew the answer to the judge's question, or at least half the answer. Of course a story could produce a direct effect. Why would anyone tell one if it didn't? of what the judge had said to me at my sentencing about good stories and bad stories, and for the first time in years I recognized that stories were everywhere and all-important. There were all those letters stashed away in the shoe box, all those people who wanted me to burn down those writers' homes because of the stories the writers had told; there was the story that Thomas Coleman told Anne Marie that made her kick me out; there were stories that the bond a.n.a.lysts had told about themselves in their memoirs, if they'd even written them (one had, sort of, but I didn't know that yet); and there were my mother's stories, which everyone knows all about, and suddenly I knew the answer to the judge's question, or at least half the answer. Of course a story could produce a direct effect. Why would anyone tell one if it didn't?

But what was the direct effect? That, I didn't know, didn't know the stories new or old well enough to know what effect they might have. But my mother did, that was clear, and I hated her for it, hated her on top of already hating her for what her stories had done to me, hated her for knowing something that I didn't and for making me feel powerless because of it, and maybe this is also what it means to be a child: always needing your parents and hating them for it, but still needing them, and maybe needing to hate them, too, and probably that that was an old story as well. was an old story as well.

"An old story," I said again, and then in a rush reminded my mother about the judge, what he'd said so many years before about stories and what they could and could not do, and how I still didn't know and needed to: because if my wife's kicking me out was an old story, then her taking me back (or not, or not!) was also an old story, and I needed to know it. Would my mother help me? "It's important," I said. "Please." I was even prepared to grovel and cry a little, too, and then also prepared to hate her for making me grovel and cry.

"You're talking to the wrong woman," my mother said. "I'm through with books. I'm through with stories of any kind."

"You are?" I said. This was big news, all right. I couldn't imagine my mother without her stories, stories that had meant so much to her that she'd had to force them on me. It was like imagining a musketeer without his sword or musket or the other musketeers just one unarmed Frenchman, alone with his fancy mustache and his feathered hat and his foppishness. Then I looked around and noticed what I'd already noticed the day before: there were no books anywhere. "What happened to your books?" I asked her.

"I got rid of them," she said.

"Why?"

"Why?" she said. Here her voice got sharp, her face got sharp, too, and I could see my new mother, Beth, revert to the old mother, Elizabeth; it was like watching the presidential faces on Mt. Rushmore morph back into the big rock they once were. "Do you want to know why?"

"I do," I said, because I did.

My mother looked at me for a long time, and as she did, her face got kindly again. You could see pity, love, and pain filling her up, rising from her toes, through the hollow tubes of her legs and torso and leveling off in her eyes, where I could see them, the emotions, sloshing around in her pupils. My mother raised her right arm slightly, as if to touch my cheek, and I needed her then more than ever, but this need was closer to love than to hate. I wanted to say, Oh, touch my cheek, Mother. You told me those stories and ruined my life, and I ruined yours, too, but if you touch my cheek ... Oh, touch my cheek, Mother. You told me those stories and ruined my life, and I ruined yours, too, but if you touch my cheek ...

I didn't get to finish the thought, and my mother didn't touch my cheek, either. Instead she grabbed the (empty) can of beer out of my father's hand and went into the kitchen. Then it was just me and my father again, just two men in a room struggling to understand the woman who had just left them alone with each other. This would clearly be a never-ending battle. I could see the two of us sitting in that room until kingdom come, trying and failing to understand the women we loved. The past washed over me right then, as you can't ever stop it from doing, and there was Anne Marie, in my heart, my eyes and ears and brain, wondering what I was doing there with my parents when I should be at home, begging Anne Marie to let me come back to it, and her, and them, and us.

"Should I just go home, Dad?"

"Home?" he asked, confused, as if to say, I think, Home? Why, you're already in it. Home? Why, you're already in it.

"My other home, I mean. Shouldn't I just go back to Anne Marie and the kids?" I asked. "Wouldn't it be better that way? Wouldn't things have been better for all of us if you hadn't taken three years to come home?"

"Wait ... wait," my father said.

"For what?"

"Time," he said.

"How much time?" I asked. "I don't think I can wait three years. Do I have to wait three years like you did with me and Mom?"

Speaking of my mother, there she was again, in the living room, holding a triangle of big beers in both hands. She placed one can in my father's ready claw and he immediately began drinking from it, violently, as if trying to suck up some of the aluminum from the can along with the beer. Then my mother tried to give me a beer, and I held up my hands in protest and said, "Oh no, not me."

About me as a drinker: I wasn't much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I'd tried drinking in high school, at subdivision barbecues I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss's Christmas party (it was vodka I was drinking, more than two gla.s.ses, and so too much of it), I pa.s.sed out for a minute pa.s.sed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional and when I came to, I found myself in my boss's kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pa.s.s before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen's population there was a big crowd in there, including my boss, Mr. Janzen, a tall, stern man who had a big nose that he couldn't help, physically speaking, looking down at you with staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, "Sandwich." Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is.

"I don't really drink," I told my mother.

"You do now," she said, with such certainty that I believed her. I took the can and we all drank our big beers, one after the other, and I discovered that my mother was right: I did drink, and I learned that when you drank, things happened, nearly by themselves. It got dark, and someone turned on the light; it got too quiet and someone turned on the television; the television got too noisy and someone turned it off; we got hungry and someone produced food pretzels, chips, popcorn, something we ate right out of the bag. Things happened, and questions were asked, too, that might not have been asked without the beer. I asked my mother, "You got rid of your books because of me, because of what I did and what happened to me, didn't you?" and she said, "Ha!" And then I asked, "Are you still an English teacher?" and she said, "Once an English teacher, always an English teacher." And then I asked, "How can you teach English if you're through with books?" and she said, "It's perhaps easier that way." And then I asked, "Were those stories you told me, those books you made me read, supposed to make me happy?" and she said, "I don't know what what they were supposed to do." And then I asked, "Why did you tell me those stories, then? And why did you make me read if the reading wasn't supposed to make me happy?" And she said, "Why don't you ask me questions I can answer?" And then I said, "Dad is a tough old guy, isn't he?" and she said, "No, he's not." And then I asked, "Will you ever forgive him for leaving us?" and she said, "All is forgiven," and raised her beer, and for a second I thought she was going to dump it on my father's head in a kind of baptismal forgiveness. But she didn't, and I asked, "Can people know each other too long, too well?" and she said, "Yes, they can." And then I asked, "What happens to love?" and she said, "Ask your father." And I said, "Dad, what happens to love?" and he said something that sounded like, "Urt" And then my mother asked me, "You have a job, correct? Are you going to work tomorrow?" And I said, "I think I'll quit," and I did so, right there, called up Pioneer Packaging and told the answering machine that I was quitting. And while I was at it, I also mentioned a number of things I hated about them and the job they'd given me, things that were totally untrue and that I wouldn't be able to take back later on and that I would have regretted immediately if I hadn't had so much beer in me in the first place. In this way I discovered something else drinking made possible: it made self-destruction seem attractive and let you say things you didn't mean and you might regret, but it also made you too drunk to regret them. When I hung up on my career in packaging forever, my mother said, "Are you going to stay here for a while?" and I said, "Do you want me to?" And she said, "I've missed you, Sam. I'm so sorry about everything," which I took to mean, they were supposed to do." And then I asked, "Why did you tell me those stories, then? And why did you make me read if the reading wasn't supposed to make me happy?" And she said, "Why don't you ask me questions I can answer?" And then I said, "Dad is a tough old guy, isn't he?" and she said, "No, he's not." And then I asked, "Will you ever forgive him for leaving us?" and she said, "All is forgiven," and raised her beer, and for a second I thought she was going to dump it on my father's head in a kind of baptismal forgiveness. But she didn't, and I asked, "Can people know each other too long, too well?" and she said, "Yes, they can." And then I asked, "What happens to love?" and she said, "Ask your father." And I said, "Dad, what happens to love?" and he said something that sounded like, "Urt" And then my mother asked me, "You have a job, correct? Are you going to work tomorrow?" And I said, "I think I'll quit," and I did so, right there, called up Pioneer Packaging and told the answering machine that I was quitting. And while I was at it, I also mentioned a number of things I hated about them and the job they'd given me, things that were totally untrue and that I wouldn't be able to take back later on and that I would have regretted immediately if I hadn't had so much beer in me in the first place. In this way I discovered something else drinking made possible: it made self-destruction seem attractive and let you say things you didn't mean and you might regret, but it also made you too drunk to regret them. When I hung up on my career in packaging forever, my mother said, "Are you going to stay here for a while?" and I said, "Do you want me to?" And she said, "I've missed you, Sam. I'm so sorry about everything," which I took to mean, Yes, I do want you to stay awhile Yes, I do want you to stay awhile. And I said, "Who needs another beer?" We all did, and then we all did again, and again, until I forgot that I'd been kicked out of my house, just like my father seemed to forget he was incapacitated: the more beer he drank, the more mobile he seemed to be, and by his sixth beer he was walking around and could get to the refrigerator and back under his own power, even, and his slurring wasn't quite so dramatic when he asked if anyone needed another drink, which we all did. We drank together, as a family, until there was nothing left to drink and nothing else to do but pa.s.s out, right there on the couch. Not once while I was drinking did I think about Anne Marie and the kids, just a few miles away, and this was another thing I learned that night: drinking helps you forget the things you need to forget, at least for a little while, until you pa.s.s out and then wake up two hours later and vomit all over yourself and then the hallway and then the bathroom.

Because drinking was another thing I'd b.u.mbled and wasn't much good at. All the beer flooded out of me, and all my failures flooded back in, as if in retaliation for my thinking I could forget them: those letters, my wife, my kids, my job, my parents, Thomas Coleman, his parents, their deaths, my life! They were all speaking to me, their voices shouting over the sounds of my retching, a regular chorus of recrimination bouncing off the porcelain and tile. And then there was another voice, a voice that had a hand, a gentle hand on my back, and was saying, "It's OK, it's OK."

"It is?" I asked.

"You'll feel better in the morning," she said.

It was my mother. And because it was my mother, I felt I could say anything and not be too ashamed of it, and so I said, "Oh, Mom, I'm scared I've lost them forever. I miss them so much."

"I know you do," she said.

"Is that an old story, too?"

"Yes," my mother said. "The oldest."

"Stories," I said. "It feels like I don't know anything about them. Please teach me something about these stories."

"I already tried to," she said, and then she led me to bed, which is where I made up my mind: I would have to learn something about stories, and fast. My mother wouldn't teach me; that much was clear. My old dad was too far gone to do me much good; that was clear, too. I would have to go somewhere else to learn, and I thought I knew where.

7

I would go to a bookstore. I couldn't go to a library, I knew that, because libraries demand quiet and decorum and I wasn't exactly wired for that: as a child I'd been shushed to death too many times by too many bony librarians in their cardigan sweaters, and I wasn't going back, the way the intelligent bull never goes back to the china shop after that disastrous first or second or third time. But I didn't recall bookstores' requiring any such absolute delicacy, although it's true that I hadn't been to one in twenty years.

But first I had to do something about my hangover. The story of one's first significant hangover is overlong and familiar and I won't add to it here except to say that it felt as though someone had taken their diseased head and switched it with my healthy one. I got out of bed, hopped in the shower, which didn't make my hangover go away but did wet it down some. Someone my mother, I a.s.sumed and still do had taken my suitcase (the one I'd taken with me to Cincinnati) out of my van and put it in my room. I unpacked the suitcase, got dressed, and went downstairs. The house was empty you can always tell when a house is empty, especially if you yell out several times, "h.e.l.lo! Mom? Dad? Anyone here?" and then check each and every room for signs of life. They were both gone, all right. I had once again woken up late: it was just past noon. My mother had gone to work, no doubt, but where was my father? Had the university press kept him on out of pity so that he'd still feel somewhat normal? Oh, I missed Pioneer Packaging right then, missed the feeling of normality it gave me. Because isn't this what work is good for? Not so much a way to make your money, but a way you can feel normal, even (especially) when you know you are not? I had those hungover, jobless blues, all right, and maybe my father knew I would, because on the kitchen table there was a tall gla.s.s full of something dark, murky, and potent and next to it a note, in his handwriting, handwriting that was a little shaky but definitely still his I recognized it from those many postcards he'd sent me -that said, "Drink me." Like Alice, I did. For a second I felt much worse, and then the second after that I felt much better. Whatever the cure for drinking was, it was much like drinking itself, which I suddenly felt ready to do more of, right after I went to the Book Warehouse.

The Book Warehouse: I'd driven past it many times. It was maybe a mile from my house, right on Route 116. I knew that Anne Marie and the kids went there all the time: for story hour, story circle, story time, story share, and other story-related activities, all, apparently, with their own separate purpose and function. But I'd never been there, and how was that possible? This was the question I asked myself as I pulled into the enormous parking lot, next to a series of other enormous parking lots serving adjacent superstores. How had I, who'd lived near this place for years and years and whose life had been ruled by stories and books how had I not once entered its doors? I was like the ancient fisherman who'd never been swimming and who, on the verge of taking his invigorating first dip, wondered what had taken him so awfully long.

The Book Warehouse was big. That was the first thing I noticed. Plus bright. The bookstores my mother had taken me to when I was young smelled like the back of a damp storage closet and were dim and narrow and filled with towering, overflowing bookshelves that leaned over the aisles and obscured the flickering overhead lights. The Book Warehouse was nothing like that. No, when you walked into the Book Warehouse it was like walking into an operating room, with cheerful music piped in and purple banners hanging from the ceiling that told you to READ!!! Except there weren't any books, not that I could see, because when you entered the store, you walked right into a cafe. There isn't much to say about the cafe itself. I don't remember what it looked like, really, or whether they served food there, and if they did, whether there was anyone there to serve it to you. It was the sort of place where you entered and seemed to pa.s.s out for a second and suddenly you came to and were holding a cup of coffee. It was West African native dark bean coffee. I don't know what that meant, exactly, but the coffee was excellent and came in an attractive ceramic mug with good heft and balance to it. I remember that much.

It was three in the afternoon at this point, and the cafe was empty except for a group of women, mostly, sitting around in a circle in their comfortable chairs sipping their coffee with their books on their laps. These women looked like our female neighbors in Camelot, with their severe, sensible haircuts and expensive casual clothes that were baggy enough to hide how thin they either were or weren't and shoes that were somewhere between clogs and running sneakers and that in any case had very good traction. I'd never really thought about this kind of female Camelotian, pro or con, but Anne Marie hated these women before she started to become one of them. And because I was married to Anne Marie and was on her side, I'd hated them, too, although without much feeling or reason. After all, were they so different from me? What was wrong with them? Was that same thing wrong with me? How could the books help make us all better? I decided to sit down, inconspicuously eavesdrop on their conversation about the book spread-eagled in each of their laps, and find out.

They weren't talking about the book, not exactly; that's the first thing I found out. Instead, they were talking about how they felt. When I sat down, one woman with a flowing tan barn coat and dark circles under her eyes was talking about how a character in the book reminded her of her daughter.

"Oh, it was heartbreaking," the woman said. "It made me cry." Speaking of that, she started crying right then, and since crying is as contagious as laughter or the worst kinds of disease, I nearly started crying, too. But I got hold of myself and managed to choke back my tears, and finally the woman did, too her sobs became whimpers that became sniffles that became brave, quivering sighs. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, wiped the hands on her barn coat, and again said, "It made me cry. I loved it. That's all I have to say."

"Wait a minute hold on," I said. I had all these questions already. What exactly in the book reminded the woman of her daughter? And why did this make her cry? Did she, the woman in the barn coat, cry in great, shameless, heaving sobs in public places, or quietly, behind a closed bathroom door with the water running so that no one could hear her? I remembered my mother a.s.signing me books and asking me, after I'd read them, to tell her about them. Details, she always wanted details and more details, and apparently I was my mother's son, more than I wanted to be, because now I wanted details, too. But I'd said too much already, this was obvious: the other women, mostly, were glaring at me as if I'd murdered both the woman and her daughter with my outburst, and the woman herself looked as though she were on the verge of another crying jag. "Sorry," I said, then sank back into my chair and pledged to listen quietly, very quietly, and with my mind as wide open as possible.

So I listened and learned some things. Another woman wearing a matching sky blue velour sweat suit insisted that anger could be a good thing, a positive thing (she did not say what, if anything, this had to do with the book); a man (he was the only other man there; I thought this near-total absence of men meaningful, even though I couldn't be certain of what it might mean) in his fifties, wearing a shiny warm-up jacket scarred with multiple zippers and Velcro patches, said that he read the book in one sitting and then immediately went and hugged his father's gravestone. The man explained that he had hated his father for years for reasons he couldn't quite remember, and that he had also hated his father for dying on him before they could talk about the hate and the mysterious reasons behind it. "I felt lost, so lost," the man said, "and it was my father's fault." In his resentment the man had let his father's gravestone fall into something of a ruin. The man said that he hugged the gravestone for a long, long time, just so that his father would know that he loved him and that all was forgiven. "I got all dirty from hugging the gravestone," the man said, "but I don't care. It felt good to get dirty."

"Bring on the dirt dirt," one of the women said. She was a white woman wearing wide-wale corduroys and penny loafers and she had the most severe of all the severely blunt, sensible haircuts, but she said, "Bring on the dirt dirt," in a vaguely black-gospel fashion. This clearly gave the lone black woman in the group some pause. The black woman cleared her throat and got up to get some more coffee and left her book on her chair unattended. I made sure no one was looking, then picked up the book. On the front cover was a drawing of a coffee cup, the coffee steaming from inside. The t.i.tle of the book was Listen Listen. On the back cover was a picture of the author, a benign-looking, bearded man with a long-billed fishing cap, sitting in an Adirondack chair, drinking a cup of coffee. On the inside back cover was a list of topics for discussion, and the number one topic for discussion was "How does this book make you feel about the Human Condition?"

It made me feel good, all right, about the Human Condition and about the women (mostly), too. I hadn't read the book, of course, but as far as I could tell, neither had anyone else, and besides, that wasn't what it was there for: the book was there to give the women (mostly) a reason to confess to the feelings they'd already had before reading the book, which as far as I could tell they hadn't actually read. The confessions made everyone feel better, I could tell, because the cafe was now filled with their bright, non-book-related chatter. The book had made them happy! This was a revelation to me because I remembered how unhappy reading books had made me back when I read them they were full of things I didn't entirely understand and never would, and they made my head hurt. Books had made my parents unhappy, too, even though they professed to love them. My mother, for instance, taught The Scarlet Letter The Scarlet Letter every year, and every year after she read and taught it, she looked miserable and depressed and every year, and every year after she read and taught it, she looked miserable and depressed and angry angry about Hester Prynne and her about Hester Prynne and her A A and her Dimmesdale, as though she would like to take the book and beat herself over the head with it and then go out and find the Human Condition and beat and her Dimmesdale, as though she would like to take the book and beat herself over the head with it and then go out and find the Human Condition and beat it it over the head, too. The look on my mother's face had told me that she was certain that the Human Condition would have been grateful for the beating. over the head, too. The look on my mother's face had told me that she was certain that the Human Condition would have been grateful for the beating. Put me out of my misery Put me out of my misery, would have been the Human Condition's sentiment, according to my mother.

But that happened only if you read read the book, or if you read certain kinds of books. The women (mostly) had put aside the book and were now talking about ordinary, worldly things-money, clothes, food and they seemed happier now that they'd confessed and unburdened themselves. It wasn't just that they were happier, either: they seemed lighter, and if it weren't for gravity I was sure they'd have been floating up somewhere near the ceiling with their cups of coffee. Their voices were optimistic and clear and not at all afraid or weepy anymore; they were the kind of voices that made you forget that there was pain and longing and fear and dishonesty in the world, and for the moment I forgot all those things existed for me, too. the book, or if you read certain kinds of books. The women (mostly) had put aside the book and were now talking about ordinary, worldly things-money, clothes, food and they seemed happier now that they'd confessed and unburdened themselves. It wasn't just that they were happier, either: they seemed lighter, and if it weren't for gravity I was sure they'd have been floating up somewhere near the ceiling with their cups of coffee. Their voices were optimistic and clear and not at all afraid or weepy anymore; they were the kind of voices that made you forget that there was pain and longing and fear and dishonesty in the world, and for the moment I forgot all those things existed for me, too.

There was only one more matter I needed to clarify. I walked up to the woman who'd said, "Bring on the dirt dirt," pointed at her copy of Listen Listen, and asked her, "Is this book true?"

"It's a memoir," she said.

"OK," I said, not really sure whether that meant yes, it was true, or no, it wasn't. The bond a.n.a.lysts had been working on their memoirs in prison, but I hadn't been sure whether they were true or not, and for that matter the bond a.n.a.lysts never seemed too clear on the distinction, either, and had spent many hours engaged in debates over the relationship between creative license and the literal truth. I knew better than to press the issue further, because when I'd done so with the bond a.n.a.lysts, when I asked them whether they were telling the whole truth in their memoirs or not, they laughed at me as though the question was just another addition to the house of my b.u.mbling. So instead I asked the woman if she liked the memoir.

"Oh yes," she said.

"Why?"

"It's so useful," she said without hesitation.

"That's all I needed to hear," I told her, because now I knew the answer to the judge's question: books were useful, they could produce a direct effect of course they could. Why else would people read them if they could not? But if that were the case, then why did my mother get rid of her books? Was it that some books were useful and some were not and weren't doing anyone any good and so why not get rid of them? Clearly my mother had read the wrong books. But I would not make that same mistake.

I took my leave of the women (mostly) and the cafe and began wandering through the bookstore proper, making my way to the memoir section. It didn't take too long. The memoir section, it turned out, was the biggest section by far in the whole bookstore and was, in its own way, like the Soviet Union of literature, having mostly gobbled up the smaller, obsolete states of fiction and poetry. On the way there, I pa.s.sed through the fiction section. I felt sorry for it immediately: it was so small, so neglected and poorly shelved, and I nearly bought a novel out of pity, but the only thing that caught my eye was something t.i.tled The Ordinary White Boy The Ordinary White Boy. I plucked it off the shelf. After all, I'd been an ordinary white boy once, before the killing and burning, and maybe I could be one again someday, and maybe this book could help me do it, even if it was a novel and not useful, generically speaking. On the back it said that the author was a newspaper reporter from upstate New York. I opened the novel, which began, "I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York," and then I closed the book and put it back on the fiction shelf, which maybe wasn't all that different from the memoir shelf after all, and I decided never again to feel sorry for the fiction section, the way you stopped feeling sorry for Lithuania once it rolled over so easily and started speaking Russian so soon after being annexed.

Anyway, I moved on to the memoir section. After browsing for a while, I knew why it had to be so big: who knew there was so much truth to be told, so much advice to give, so many lessons to teach and learn? Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves? I flipped through the s.e.xual abuse memoirs, s.e.xual conquest memoirs, s.e.xual inadequacy memoirs, alternative s.e.xual memoirs. I perused travel memoirs, ghostwritten professional athlete memoirs, remorseful hedonist rock star memoirs, twelve-step memoirs, memoirs about reading (A Reading Life: Book by Book). There were five memoirs by one author, a woman who had written a memoir about her troubled relationship with her famous fiction-writer father; a memoir about her troubled relationship with her mother; a memoir about her troubled relationship with her children; a memoir about her troubled relationship with the bottle; and finally a memoir about her more loving relationship with herself. There were several memoirs about the difficulty of writing memoirs, and even a handful of how-to-write-a-memoir memoirs: A Memoirist's Guide to Writing Your Memoir A Memoirist's Guide to Writing Your Memoir and the like. All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me without my even having to read them that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. and the like. All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me without my even having to read them that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was.

And then I found the memoir I was looking for, without even knowing that I was looking for it or that it even existed: A Guide to Who I Am and Who I Pretended to Be A Guide to Who I Am and Who I Pretended to Be, written by Morgan Taylor, one of the bond a.n.a.lysts.

Except according to the book he was now an ex ex-bond a.n.a.lyst. That was the first thing I found out about his life after prison (I sat right down on the floor and started reading the book, as though catching up with a long-lost friend): Morgan didn't go back to being a bond a.n.a.lyst. "That life was dead to me now," he claimed in his memoir, without saying why it was dead or how it was ever especially alive in the first place. But in any case, instead of resuming his career as a bond a.n.a.lyst, he became what he called a "searcher." The first thing he did after he got out of prison was to go to South Carolina because he'd never been in South Carolina before and his inner voice said that he had to had to! visit all fifty states over the course of his lifetime. He also attended a game at every major league ballpark. He traveled to Yosemite and Badlands and Sequoia and every other national park of note ...

"Wait a minute hold on," I said to the book, and to Morgan, too, wherever he was. Because I recognized the story: it was my father's. He'd told me those things on his postcards, during those three years he'd left my mom and me, and I, in turn, had told the story of my father's travels to the bond a.n.a.lysts in prison. They were especially interested in the story I remembered that now, too.

Was I angry? Of course I was. Is this what memoirists did? Steal someone else's true story and pa.s.s it off as their own? I was tempted to put the book right back on the shelf and not buy it, except that I wanted to see whether Morgan had gotten my father's story right and also whether I was in the memoir or not. I wasn't on the acknowledgments page, that's for sure: I checked, right there in the store, before I moved on to the cash register.

AFTER I BOUGHT Morgan Taylor's fake memoir and left the Book Warehouse, I did exactly what my father said I shouldn't: I didn't wait. Instead I drove out to Camelot. Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.

It was after four by this point, but beyond daylight savings and so already dark and getting suddenly cold and weirdly cheerful and Yuletide-like. Camelot was festive in a way it had never seemed when I lived there, with its streetlights and floodlights, and in a few houses you could tell the ventless gas fireplaces by their steady, nonsmoky, nonflickering blaze. I knew our own ventless gas fireplace wouldn't be in use Anne Marie was a big believer in wood fire, and no other kind would do but the lights were on downstairs, in the living room and dining room and kitchen. I parked across the street so that I could see through our living room's enormous bay windows, turned off my headlights, and watched as each member of my family pa.s.sed the window in turn, as if modeling for me. There was Katherine, carrying that gigantic ringed binder full of the homework that came so easily for her that she would already have finished it; there was Christian, holding his plaster hammer above his head as if preparing to strike a blow for the working man; there was Anne Marie, gesturing wildly about something, her free hand flapping around her head as if defending herself against bees, sometimes smiling, sometimes scowling, the whole time talking to someone else in the room, I couldn't tell who. It wasn't the kids, because I could see them sitting at the table now, and Anne Marie's back was to them. She was speaking either to herself or to someone else someone else. But who? I couldn't tell, because there was me, Sam, sitting in my van and not in the house, looking at the three of them (plus this invisible guest), feeling so far away from them, longing for them and afraid to knock on the door and find out that they weren't longing for me. Yes, I was outside looking in, all right, which was not unlike being a reader (this was my very thought), and maybe this was another reason why my mother gave up reading: she was sick of being outside the house. Maybe she wanted to be inside, with my addled father, drinking beer until there was no beer left to drink and nothing to forget that hadn't already been forgotten. Suddenly I wanted that, too, so, so badly, and so I drove out of Camelot, back to my one family, my one family that I didn't have to long for, my one family with whom I could drink myself to sleep and forget about the other one.

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