• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"Oh, I'm all alone, all alone," Mr. Frazier said. Then it was my heart I thought was going to give out. And then it was me who started crying: we were a duo of weepers, all right; we probably scared away the neighborhood cats.

"I'm all alone," he said again.

"I know," I said. "I'm all alone, too." Because no one was more expert in loneliness than yours truly: there is nothing more lonely than being an eighteen-year-old accidental arsonist and murderer and convict and virgin. So I told him that story, which of course he already knew in part. And because I had so much more story to tell and so many words with which to tell it, I went on a philosophical jag and told him that we spend most of our lives running away from loneliness, only to turn around and go and search it out, and as proof, I mentioned how I'd lied to my family for years because I was afraid to be alone, and then lied again on top of the lying, and in doing so I'd pretty much guaranteed that I would be alone. Yes, even though I didn't know what the letter said, I knew what Mr. Frazier was talking about and why he would want to burn down the Edward Bellamy House and make a good, roaring fire out of the thing. I had seen and heard the reasons myself: the boys had told Mr. Frazier that he didn't look like them, or, I guessed, like anyone else in the neighborhood, told him in so many obscene words that he didn't belong anymore, that he was all alone. This was where the fire came in, because after all, you couldn't feel lonely sitting ― toes wiggling ― in front of a fire. This was a known fact: even if you were all alone in the world, as long as there was a fire (and the Bellamy House was the biggest, most beautiful house in the neighborhood, and so logically it would also make the biggest, most beautiful fire), you could stare into it and feel its heat and it would remind you of another, happier time, a time long ago when the world belonged to you, when you understood it, when you could live in it for just a few damn minutes and not feel so lonely and scared and angry. "You're not alone, Harvey," I told him. "You're just not."

What was Mr. Frazier's response to this? He said (he was stone faced and dry eyed at this point), "Did you just call me Harvey?"

I thought he was objecting to my informality, and so I said, "Yes, sir, I'm sorry, Mr. Frazier."

"Harvey was my brother," he said. "My name is Charles."

At first I thought Mr. Frazier was lying, that he'd made up a brother out of thin air and as a proxy for his own wishes. As a kid I'd used this brother trick many a time myself, like when I accidentally threw a baseball through someone's window, or accidentally ate someone else's lunch in the cafeteria, or accidentally backed into someone's car in the high school parking lot after the junior prom, and I would have used it after accidentally burning down the Emily Dickinson House if I'd been thinking on my feet. But I realized Mr. Frazier wasn't making up his brother; making up a brother is easy, but it's much more difficult to cry convincingly about how much you miss the made-up brother when he's gone.

"OK," I said. "But why exactly did your brother want me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House?"

"Because he was. . . " And here he paused as if trying to understand his brother's reasons. "Because he was odd," Mr. Frazier finally said. "He had problems."

"I bet he was a reader, your brother, like you," I said.

"Yes," Mr. Frazier said. "He read too much. That was one of Harvey's problems. The world wasn't enough like the books. It was always disappointing him. But at least he had the position at the Bellamy House ..."

"Let me guess," I said, awed by the serendipity of it all. "He was a tour guide."

Mr. Frazier nodded. "He was a tour guide until the state had budget problems and they cut his position."

"And that really disappointed him," I guessed.

"Correct."

"And so he wanted me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House because he got fired."

"I suppose so."

"And now