An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [132]
So the letters keep me busy, as do my many visitors. The bond analysts visit me once a week because they feel so bad that I've taken the fall for them; they successfully blamed me for the fires they set, and this makes them feel guilty, not happy at all. They don't understand that I've taken the fall for them intentionally, willingly, that this is a sacrifice and not a mistake. They don't understand this because sacrifice is an alien concept to them, having made only one sacrifice themselves.
"Take our story," they tell me. "You've already taken the blame for our fires; go ahead and take credit for it now. Write a book about it. We owe you one, dude; you have our permission."
"But what about the truth?" I ask them. "`Just tell the truth, dude. You'll feel better afterward' Remember that?"
They laugh at that one every time; the bond analysts found that telling the truth was as unsatisfying as burning down houses or writing a book, and they're now back to analyzing bonds, whatever that means. But once a week they take time out of their busy schedules to visit me and help me write my arsonist's guide. They tell me the best way to burn what sort of writer's house, when you should pour gas down the chimney and when you should just throw a Molotov cocktail through the window, and what sort of life lessons readers might learn from each method. They remind me, too, that my arsonist's guide is also a memoir and that one can't write a memoir without a troubled childhood. Except they don't think my childhood, as troubled as it was, was troubled enough. They want me to make one up. Mostly they want me to blame my father, who isn't around to defend himself or protect his story. I tell the bond analysts that I love my father and I miss him and I don't want to say anything about him that's untrue and hurtful. They think this is ridiculous and won't have any of it. So to get them off my back, I write sentences like this: "My father abused me as a child; no doubt that abuse contributed to my desire, in my later years, to burn." This pleases them, and it also pleases me: because if I were to tell the truth about my father, if I were to say, My father did some bad things, but I still love him, I still miss him so much, and if I were to tell the truth about Deirdre, if I were to say, My father loved another woman and I hated her for it, and so I let her die, I would start crying and never stop. If you tell the truth, you will start crying and never stop, and what good will that do you, or anyone else for that matter? Besides, would anyone want to read a true story that made you start crying and never stop? Would you want to read such a story? Would you read it because it was true, or because it made you cry? Or would it make you cry because you thought it was true? And what would you do, what would you feel, who would you blame, if you found out it wasn't?
Maybe one day I'll know the answers to these questions, but for now I tell lies about my father and pass them off as the truth, and this makes the bond analysts happy. But it also fills them with nostalgia: when I read to them from my arsonist's guide, I can see the bond analysts gaze longingly into the distance, as if my memoir is a ship at sea, and their bonds are the shore.
To be honest, though, I'm not just writing one book; I'm writing two of them. Both books begin with "I, Sam Pulsifer ... ," and then one of them tells the story you know by now, and the other one is my arsonist's guide; one is the story of the one house I actually burned and the ones I didn't, and the other one is about how I did burn those houses