Fire is a brief, temporary thing—the very definition of impermanence. It comes suddenly, roaring into life when heat and fuel come together and ignite, and dances hungrily while everything around it blackens and curls. When there is nothing left to consume, it disappears, leaving nothing behind but the ash of its unused fuel — those bits of wood and leaf and paper that were too impure to burn, too unworthy to join the fire in its dance.
It seems to me that fire leaves nothing behind at all — the ash really isn't part of the flame, it's part of the fuel. Fire changes it from one thing to another, drawing off its energy and turning it into . . . well, into more fire. Fire doesn't create anything new, it simply is. If other things must be destroyed in order for fire to exist, that's all right with fire. As far as fire is concerned, that's what those things are there for in the first place. When they're gone, the fire goes, too, and though you may find evidence of its passing you'll find nothing of the fire itself — no light, no heat, no tiny red fragments of cast-off flame. It disappears back to wherever it came from, and if it feels or remembers, we have no way of knowing if it feels or remembers us.
Sometimes, peering into the bright blue heart of a dancing flame, I ask if it remembers me. "We've seen each other before.
We know each other. Remember me when I'm gone." ,
Mr. Crowley, the old man whose leaves I burned, liked to sit on the porch and "watch the world go by," as he called it. If I happened to be raking his yard while he was out, he would sit and tell me about his life. He had been a water-system engineer for the county for most of his life, until last year, when his health got too bad and he retired. He was old anyway. Today he ambled out slowly and painfully propped his leg up on a stool after sitting down.
"Afternoon to you, John," he said. "Afternoon to you." He was an old man but a large one, big-framed and powerful. His health was going, but he was far from feeble.
"Hi Mr. Crowley."
"You can leave these be, you know," he said, gesturing at the leaf-covered lawn. "There's plenty more to fall before we're done, and you'll just have to do it again."
"It lasts longer this way," I said, and he nodded contentedly.
"That it does, John, that it does."
I raked for a while longer, pulling the leaves together with smooth, even strokes. The other reason I wanted to do his yard that afternoon was that it had been almost a month and the serial killer hadn't struck again. The tension was making me nervous, and I needed to burn something. I hadn't told anyone my suspicion that it was a serial killer, because who would believe me? I was obsessed with serial killers as it was, they'd say.
Of course I'd think this would be one. I didn't mind. It doesn't matter what other people think when you're right.
"Hey John, come here for a second," said Mr. Crowley.
He gestured me over to his chair. I grimaced at the interruption, but calmed myself and went over anyway. Talking was normal—it's what normal people do together. I needed the practice. "What do you know about cell phones?" he asked, showing me his.
"I know a little," I said.
"I want to send my wife a kiss."
"You want to send a kiss?"
"Kay and I got these yesterday," he said, fiddling awkwardly with the phone, "and we're supposed to be able to take photos and send them to each other. So I want to send Kay a kiss."
"You want to take a picture of yourself puckering up for a kiss and then send it to her?" Sometimes I didn't understand people at all. Watching Mr. Crowley talk about love was like hearing him speak another language—I had no idea what was going on.
"Sounds, like you've done this before," he said, handing me the phone with a shaking hand. "Show me how it's done."
The camera button was pretty clearly labeled, so I showed him how to do it and he took a shaky picture of his lips. I ' showed him how to send the photo, and went back to my raking.
The idea that I might be sociopathic was nothing new to me—I'd known for a long time that I didn't connect with other people. I didn't understand them, and they didn't understand me, and whatever emotional language they spoke seemed beyond my capacity to learn. Antisocial personality disorder could not be officially diagnosed until you were eighteen years old—prior to that it was just "conduct disorder."
But let's be honest: conduct disorder is just a nice way of telling parents their kids have antisocial personality disorder. I saw no reason to dance around the issue. I was a sociopath, and it was better to deal with it now.
I raked the leaf pile into a large fire pit around the side of the house. The Crowleys used the pit for bonfires and hot dog roasts in the summer, and invited the whole neighborhood. I came every time, ignoring the people and tending solely to the fire—if fire was a drug, Mr. Crowley was my best enabler.