An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [63]
THE DAY ITSELF WAS MUCH different from the day I'd visited Mr. Frazier and the Bellamy House. This day, it felt like fall, real fall: the air was sharp in your throat, the wind was cold and looking for a scarf to blow around, and the sky was so blue it looked as if it had been chemically enhanced for maximum blueness. It was the kind of day where you would have smelled leaves burning somewhere if leaf burning hadn't been outlawed. I felt nervous, much more nervous than I'd been while driving to the Edward Bellamy House, maybe because I'd read so much of Twain at my mother's behest ― he was my mother's favorite, and I'd known this and wanted to please her, and so I had made sure to laugh at the things she'd told me were funny, and to shake my head admiringly at the things she'd told me were wicked. Or maybe I was nervous because the drive was longer than the drive to the Bellamy House and gave me more time to be nervous, and this would be another thing I'd put in my arsonist's guide: for an arsonist just starting out, it's perhaps easier to burn down a nearby home of an obscure writer rather than burn down a more famous writer's house in a more distant city.
Once I got there, though, I saw that no one had really burned anything and that the Mark Twain House was going to be just fine. Again, there was yellow tape around the perimeter of the house; you could see some singe marks up near and around the first-floor windows, but nothing had really been permanently damaged except for some bushes that had caught fire and then been doused and were in a very bad way. The house itself was absurdly thick and tall ― a normal Victorian house on growth hormones ― and was surrounded by three other slightly less massive houses, and the whole compound reminded me of the houses in my dream of a few nights earlier, my dream featuring the many houses and the naked woman and the burning books, and maybe that's why I found the whole place especially spooky and sad and uninhabitable. Maybe that's what Twain had felt, too: he had built the place, the house of his dreams, and the whole thing was so impressive and dreamlike, finally, that he didn't want to live there. There were no lights on in any of the main house's windows, and the only humans on the property, besides me, were reporters: three or four television reporters in their sharp suits, followed by their cameramen with their high-tech gear, each one dressed in those many-pocketed khaki vests that would have looked good on safari. The reporters and the cameramen made me nervous, too, not because I thought they'd recognize me, but because they seemed so much better prepared, organized, and equipped than I was. But they were paying attention to the house and not to me. Besides, I'd seen what I'd come to see and knew the two things I now thought I knew: someone with access to my father's shoe box had memorized or copied the letters asking me to burn down the Bellamy and Twain houses; and the Mark Twain House had been burned, or not burned, by the same person who also hadn't managed to burn the Edward Bellamy House. It didn't occur to me that different people might fail at burning down different writers' homes in New England in the same way. Always count on a bumbler to think that he is unique in his bumbling, to believe his bumbling is like a fingerprint, specific to him. The truth is that the world is full of bumblers exactly like you, and to think that you're special is just one more thing you've bumbled.
AT LEAST I DIDN'T bumble the letter. I read it several times, and thoroughly, too. It was from an English