When You Are Engulfed in Flames (14 page)

What happened was that Jackie had come looking for me. He’d knocked on our door while I was out of town and asked in his loud country voice if David could come out and play. Those weren’t his exact words, but according to Hugh they might as well have been. Not everyone saw the child molester calling my name on our front steps, but the ones who did were pretty well connected, and it took no time at all for the story to spread.

From that day on, I always wore headphones when walking past Jackie’s hut. He may have called out to me, but I neither heard him nor raised my head to look in his direction. And it went on this way for three years, until I sort of forgot about him. We didn’t speak again until after he’d gotten his diagnosis. The cancer, I’d heard, was in his esophagus, and its progress was swift and merciless. In a matter of months, he was carved down to nothing, face all gaunt, pants held up with a short length of rope. I saw him on his front stoop a week before he died, and when I waved he beckoned me inside the gate, and we shook hands one last time. I found myself wondering if the cancer had upped his train discount, bumped it from seventy-five percent to something even higher, but it’s a hard question to ask when you’re not fluent. And I wouldn’t have wanted him to take it the wrong way.

Of Mice and Men

I’ve always admired people who can enter a conversation without overtaking it. My friend Evelyn, for instance. “Hello, so nice to meet you,” and then she just accepts things as they come. If her new acquaintance wants to talk about plants, she might mention a few of her own, never boastfully, but with a pleasant tone of surprise, as if her parlor palm and the other person’s had coincidentally attended the same high school. The secret to her social success is that she’s genuinely interested — not in all subjects, maybe, but definitely in all people. I like to think that I share this quality, but when it comes to meeting strangers, I tend to get nervous and rely on a stash of pre-prepared stories. Sometimes they’re based on observation or hearsay, but just as often they’re taken from the newspaper: An article about a depressed Delaware woman who hung herself from a tree on October 29 and was mistaken for a Halloween decoration. The fact that it’s illegal to offer a monkey a cigarette in the state of New Jersey. Each is tragic in its own particular way, and leaves the listener with a bold mental picture: Here is a dead woman dangling against a backdrop of scarlet leaves. Here is a zookeeper with an open pack of Marlboros. “Go ahead,” he whispers. “Take one.”

Then there was the story mailed to me by a stranger in New England, who’d clipped it from his local paper. It concerned an eighty-one-year-old Vermont man whose home was overrun by mice. The actual house was not described, but in my mind it was two stories tall and isolated on a country road. I also decided that it was painted white — not that it mattered so much, I just thought it was a nice touch. So the retired guy’s house was overrun, and when he could no longer bear it, he fumigated. The mice fled into the yard and settled into a pile of dead leaves, which no doubt crackled beneath their weight. Thinking that he had them trapped, the man set the pile on fire, then watched as a single flaming mouse raced back into the basement and burned the house to the ground.

The newspaper clipping arrived in the spring of 2006, just as I was preparing to leave for the United States. There were clothes to be ironed and papers to sort, but before doing anything, I wrote the New Englander a thank-you note and said that the article had moved me in unexpected ways. I did not mention that I planned to get a lot of mileage out of it, but that was my hope, for how could you go wrong with such a story? It was, to my mind, perfect, and I couldn’t wait to wedge it into whatever conversation presented itself. “Talk about eighty-one-year-olds . . . ,” I imagined myself saying.

Six months earlier, my icebreaker concerned a stripper who became a quadriplegic and eventually had her vagina eaten away by bedsores, not the easiest thing to wrangle into a conversation. But if I could pull that off, I figured that a burning mouse should pose no problem.

My first chance came in New York, when I took a cab from JFK to my hotel in the West Eighties. The driver was ten to fifteen years older than I, American born, with a shaved head. There are certainly men who can pull this off, but this fellow looked like someone had taken to him with a hammer — maybe not recently, there was no blood or bruising, just a heck of a lot of lumps. The two of us got to talking, and after telling him that I lived in Paris, and listening to his subsequent remarks about what snobs and cowards the French are, I found my entrée. “Speaking of rats, or things in that general family . . .”

I thought I did a pretty good job, but when the story was finished, instead of being amazed, the cabdriver said, “So then what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did the guy get insurance money? Was he able to save some of his stuff?”

How to explain that this wasn’t really
about
the homeowner. He figured, of course, but the lasting image is of the flaming mouse, this determined little torch, shooting back into the house and burning it to the ground. What happened after that is unimportant. That’s why the newspaper left it out.

I covered these points as cheerfully as possible, and the cabdriver responded with a T-shirt slogan. “Only in New York.”

“But it
didn’t happen
in New York,” I said. “Weren’t you listening? It happened in Vermont, out in the country, where people have houses and piles of leaves in their yards.”

The man shrugged. “Well, it could have happened here.”

“But it
didn’t,
” I told him.

“Well, you never know.”

That’s when I thought,
OK, Lumpy, you just lost yourself a tip. The French business I was willing to overlook, but “Only in New York” and “It could have happened here” just cost you five dollars, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Of course I did give him a tip, I always do. But before handing it over, I tore the bill practically in half. Passive aggression, I guess you’d call it.

I’d come to America for a lecture tour — that’s what they’re called, but really I just read out loud. My first date was in New Jersey, and because I don’t drive the theater sent a town car, which met me in front of my hotel. Behind its wheel was a black chauffeur who wore a suit and tie and introduced himself as Mr. Davis. The man was in his early seventies, and as he lowered his visor against the setting sun, I noticed his fingernails, which were long and tapered and covered with clear polish. Above each knuckle shone a ring, and on his wrist, in addition to a watch, there hung a delicate gold chain.

I meant to plow right into my mouse story, but before I could begin, Mr. Davis started in on what he termed “the traffic situation vis-à-vis liquidity.” His tone was finicky, and rather than speaking normally he tended to intone, like God addressing Moses through the clouds, only gay. After telling me that people were fools to drive in Manhattan, he looked into the surrounding cars and slandered his competition. The woman beside us was a boob. The man in front, a chucklehead. Dimwits, dopes, dummies, and dunces: it was like he had a thesaurus on his lap and was delivering the entries in alphabetical order. He criticized a cabdriver for talking on a cell phone, and then he pulled out one of his own and left an angry message with his dispatcher, who should have known better than to send him out in this mess.

For blocks on end, Mr. Davis fumed and muttered, this until we came to Canal Street, where he pointed to a gap in the downtown skyline. “See that,” he said. “That is where the World Trade Center used to be.”

Out of politeness, I pretended that this information was new to me. “What do you know!”

Mr. Davis stared south and brushed a bit of lint off his shoulder. “Eleven September, two thousand and one. I was present on that fateful morning and will never forget it as long as I live.”

I leaned forward in my seat. “What was it like?”

“Loud,” Mr. Davis said.

One would expect a few more details, but none was offered, and so I moved on and asked what he had been doing there.

“Had myself a meeting with an import-export company,” he told me. “That was my profession back then, but 9/11 killed all that. You can’t ship anything now, leastwise you can’t make any money at it.”

I asked what he imported, and when he answered “You name it,” I looked into the window of the adjacent car.

“Umm. Little stuffed animals?”

“I moved some of those,” he said. “But the name of my game was mostly clothes, them and electronics.”

“So did you travel a lot?”

“Everywhere,” he told me. “Saw the world and then some.”

“Did you ever go to China?”

He said that he had been more times than he could count, and when I asked what he had seen, he rolled forward a few inches. “Lots of people eating rice, mainly from bowls.”

“Gosh,” I said. “So it’s true! And what about India? That’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit.”

“What do you think you’re going to see there?” Mr. Davis asked. “Poor people? Chaos? So much garbage you can’t hardly stand it?”

When I told him that I was interested in the monkeys, he said that the country was lousy with them. “I was with my driver one day, and we passed by this tree that homed over two hundred of them. Baboons, I think they were, and I’ll always remember how they swarmed our car, banging on the doors and begging for peanuts.” A man with a cardboard sign approached, and Mr. Davis waved him away. “Another problem with India is the heat. The last time I was there, the temperature hit one hundred and fifty degrees, saw it on the thermometer with my own eyes. Had myself an appointment with some swamis, but come time to leave the hotel, I said, ‘That’s it. No meeting for me today.’ I’m telling you, it felt like I was burning alive.”

I couldn’t have dreamt for a better in. “Speaking of burning alive, there was this retired man living in Vermont, see, and his home was overrun with mice . . .”

When I had finished, Mr. Davis met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Now, you,” he said, “are just a liar.”

“No,” I told him. “The story is true. I read it in the newspaper.”

“Newspaper or not, it’s a load of b.s., and I will tell you why: Isn’t no way that a mouse could cover all that distance without his flames going out. The wind would have snuffed them.”

“Well, what about that girl in Vietnam?” I asked. “The one in the famous picture who’s just been hit with napalm or whatever and is running down the road with no clothes on? I don’t see the wind doing her any favors, and she just had skin, not flammable fur.”

“Well, that was a dark period in our nation’s history,” Mr. Davis said.

“But isn’t
this
a dark period?” I asked this question just as we entered the Holland Tunnel. The din of canned traffic made it impossible to talk, and so I sat back and tried to get a handle on my growing anger. Since when do politics affect a mammal’s ability to sustain a flame? That aside, who
says
a burning mouse can’t run a distance of twelve feet? What made this guy an authority? His fingernails? His jewelry?

What really smarted was being called a liar, and so matter-of-factly. This from someone who’d reduced the Chinese to a bunch of people eating rice from bowls. Then there was the bit about the baboons. I’d heard of them attacking people for fruit, but doing it for peanuts seemed an idea he’d picked up from the circus. I didn’t believe for one moment that he was really at the World Trade Center on September
11, and as for the 150-degree heat, I’m pretty sure that at that temperature your head would just explode. All this, and
I
was the liar? Me?

Leaving the tunnel was like being freed from a clogged drain. We were moving now, around a bend and up onto an elevated highway. Below us sat storage tanks resembling dirty aspirin, and as I wondered what they were used for, Mr. Davis pulled out his cell phone and proceeded to talk until we reached our exit. “That was my wife,” he said after hanging up, and I thought,
Right. The woman you’re married to. I bet he’s really something.

After New Jersey, I went to Connecticut, and then to Indiana. On and on for thirty-five days. I returned to my apartment in early May, and after closing the door behind me, I asked Hugh to go on the Internet and search for the world’s highest recorded temperature. He took a seat before his computer, and I stood at his side with my fingers crossed.
Don’t be 150, don’t be 150, don’t be 150
.

Later that day, among my receipts, I found Mr. Davis’s business card. Someone needed to tell him that the hottest it’s ever been is 136, and so I wrote him a short note, adding that the record was set in Libya, not India, and in the year 1922.
Before you were born,
the subtext read.
Before you could so casually call someone a liar.

I thought I would send him the news clipping as well, and it was here that my triumph lost its luster. “Mouse gets revenge: sets home ablaze,” the headline read, and then I noticed the letters “AP,” and saw that while the story had been published in Vermont, it had actually taken place in New Mexico, which sort of ruined everything. Now, instead of a white, wood-frame house, I saw a kind of shack with cow skulls tacked to the outer walls. It then turned out that the homeowner had not fumigated, and that there was only one mouse, which he somehow caught alive, and threw onto a pile of leaves he’d started burning some time earlier. This would certainly qualify as thoughtless, but there was no moment when he looked at the coughing mice, running for their lives from the poisonous fumes. He did not hear the leaves crackling beneath their feet, or reach for his matches, thinking,
Aha!

How had I so misread this story, and why? Like a dog with a table scrap, had I simply wolfed it down too quickly, or do I believe, on some subconscious level, that eastern mice are inherently more sympathetic than their western cousins? Where did the fumigation business come from, and the idea that the man’s house was overrun? I recalled myself before the tour, sitting at my desk and lighting one cigarette right after the other, the way I do when time is running out. Garlands of smoke drifted into the next room and fouled the sinuses of our out-of-town guests, who’d arrived a few days earlier and were sleeping in our bed.
The house was overrun, extermination was necessary.
Had I somehow imposed my own life on the newspaper story?

Despite my embroidery, the most important facts hold true: The mouse
did
run back indoors. His flames were not extinguished by the wind. The fire spread, the house was consumed, and these are certainly dark times, both for the burning, and those who would set them alight.