by Jesse Ball
PRAISE FOR JESSE BALL AND SILENCE ONCE BEGUN
‘One of the triumphs of Silence Once Begun is the way that Ball enriches his metafictional restlessness with humane curiosity… The language seems aware of the charged space around it, as if one were praying aloud in a darkened, empty church. His characters speak at once lucidly and uncannily; words have become strangely heavy.’ James Wood, New Yorker
‘Absorbing, finely wrought…A piercing tragedy…that combines subtlety and simplicity in such a way that it causes a reader to go carefully, not wanting to miss a word.’ New York Times Book Review
‘A seductive “Rashomon”-like chorus of competing explanations for Sotatsu’s actions, each cunningly building upon, or canceling out, the last…Beginning as a work of seeming reportage, Silence Once Begun transforms into a graceful and multifaceted fable on the nature of truth and identity.’ Wall Street Journal
‘And so the beguiling and instantly classic Silence Once Begun exists to fill in a missing part of the world. A part which, on further inspection, was never there in the first place.’ New Inquiry
‘Daring…Silence Once Begun is a wondrous and provocatively strange reading experience that places the actual Jesse Ball among our most compelling and daring writers today.’ LA Review of Books
‘With echoes of Franz Kafka, Paul Auster, and Kobo Abe, Ball creates an elegantly chilling and provocatively metaphysical tale.’ Booklist
‘As in Kafka’s The Trial, the justice of Silence Once Begun is both tragic and absurd…Ball has built in a few genuinely surprising twists that exist solely because of how the story is structured. That’s an accomplishment; Silence Once Begun is a fascinating project in which almost everything is stripped away but the contradictory stories people tell.’ LA Times
‘The closest contemporary American writer we have to Italo Calvino in ear and mind.’ Interview
‘Expands the meditative, eerie ground Ball has already established…An extremely refreshing presence in American writing, and one that provides more than it requires.’ Vice
‘Ball indulges our natural curiosity about what’s real and simultaneously repudiates the idea that it matters. This is a writer too interested in the transformative power of language to come down on one banal side or the other.’ Age
‘Throughout, there are many questions about both what is said and what is left unsaid; motivation, memory and reliability all come under scrutiny…What had been a taut crime story stands revealed as something much more ominous.’ Time Out New York
‘A great page-turner…As hypnotic as any metronome… Think Camus’s The Stranger, but with bonus material, like interviews from some of Meursault’s closest confidants. Or think Kafka—only a version where the agents of power will pull up a chair and tell you exactly what was at stake in the trial… A daring and beautiful little book.’ Chicago Reader
‘[A] meditation on the flaws of perception…Every time a truth is revealed, the novel doubles back, shifts…The only real truth is what we believe to be true, and, for many, what we love and how we feel are the clearest truths we have.’ Rain Taxi
‘Jesse Ball…makes readers’ heads spin yet again with a darker but more tempered version of his strange, almost whimsical multimedia creations…There’s no denying the fascination his aberrant storytelling inspires.’ Kirkus Reviews
‘Silence Once Begun…felt more real than the news and most documentaries and memoirs. Once again, Ball has extended the reach of the novel—of the love story, even—into menacing, freaky new places.’ Positively Fifth Street
‘I can think of only a handful of mystery novels that have used intrigue and suspense as efficiently in the first hundred pages… What first appeared to be a mystery quickly turns into a meditation on love…Ball poses the question: “Can any of us can truly know ourselves, let alone the others around us?”’ Full Stop
PRAISE FOR JESSE BALL AND A CURE FOR SUICIDE
‘Elegant, spellbinding…With the simplicity of a fable and the drama of a psychological thriller, Ball tells a story about starting over from nothing, reconstructing life from its most basic elements…There is yearning at the core of A Cure for Suicide and in that yearning is the reason for carrying on when doing so feels impossible. Ball asks whether, given the chance to start over with the mind of a child, we would want to do so—to what extent pain informs identity, and what parts of us would remain were we to shed that pain…Ball deftly explores questions with the eye of a poet and the logic of a philosopher, revealing new facets with perfect timing and acuity. At each unforeseeable turn, A Cure for Suicide is a story Ball ensures we understand and, because it is subtle and breathtaking, we are happy to be told.’ New York Times Book Review
‘War doesn’t exist anymore, and neither do prisons, in the seemingly not-so-distant future where Jesse Ball’s magnetic, suspenseful, occasionally heart-rending fifth novel, A Cure for Suicide, unfolds…Ball also weaves in romance—the sweet triumph of a resilient heart…Hypnotic.’ Boston Globe
‘There are few things more tantalizing, more compelling, than wondering what the hell is going on…Hushed, enigmatic… Elegant…This turns out to be a love story about a penniless man and a rich, dying woman, and it’s one of the finest things Ball has ever written, a magical, gripping burst of emotional history, which interrogates the book’s ultimate subject, suicide and the desire for oblivion…In Ball’s best and eeriest work, it gives him the power to touch deep, luminous emotions.’ Chicago Tribune
‘Jesse Ball is a master of dialogue…The book prompts a conversation about life—how we enter it, how we navigate its shoals, and how we exit it.’ New York Journal of Books
‘Ball…crafts a full, satiating story…A rich, tragic love story. Ball is commenting on the texture of our strongest memories—jagged rocks that jut out amid the steady tide of daily life… An enthralling thought experiment that considers the value of memory versus the pain of grief.’ Huffington Post
‘A novel about learning to forget the past…It also functions as a kind of mystery…A beautifully written quest for meaning that challenges assumptions about the tie between memory and the creation of meaning…Heartbreaking and hopeful…It is important not to let the search for answers get in the way of the constant, subtle pleasures of its language…Devastating.’ Bookslut
‘Elegant and spooky, dystopian and poetic…A puzzle, a love story, and a tale of illness, memory, and manipulation.’ Millions
‘This dystopian novel from Ball is both a puzzle box and a haunting love story…Whatever the source of this book’s elusive magic, it should cement Ball’s reputation as a technical innovator whose work delivers a powerful emotional impact.’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘Ball artfully keeps the reader in the same position, measuring out a little information here, a little there, always suggesting that no information is, or ever can be, complete, until an emotional disaster, a tragic revelation and two or three extraordinary structural shifts break open our way of seeing things.’ Guardian
‘What starts out as a playful thought experiment evolves into a meditation on grief, trauma and recovery in Jesse Ball’s stylishly wrought novel…A strange, always engaging story.’ Huffington Post, Best Fiction Books of 2015
‘Fans of eerie dystopian settings à la Never Let Me Go will love this read.’ Elle
‘A novel that is simultaneously powerful and elusive, whose dreamlike textures and sense of dislocation lend its reflection of our own fears genuine power, suggesting not just unsettling questions about our own unease about suffering, but also probing the uncertain intersection of fiction and reality, memory and imagination.’ Australian
‘A strange and beautiful tale…I am already looking forward to reread
ing it.’ Otago Daily Times
Jesse Ball is the author of five previous novels, including Silence Once Begun and A Cure for Suicide. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship for 2014 and the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © Jesse Ball 2016
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, 2016
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2016
Cover design by Kelly Blair
Page design by Maggie Hinders
Typeset by Scribe, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Creator: Ball, Jesse, 1978—author.
Title: How to set a fire and why / by Jesse Ball.
ISBN: 9781925355475 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781922253989 (ebook)
Subjects: Dysfunctional families—Fiction. Teenage girls—Fiction.
Pyromania—Fiction. Arson—Fiction.
Dewey Number: 813.6
For Frank Bergon
1
Some people hate cats. I don’t, I mean, I don’t personally hate cats, but I understand how a person could. I think everyone needs to have a cause, so for some people it is hating cats, and that’s fine. Each person needs to have his or her thing that they must do. Furthermore, they shouldn’t tell anyone else about it. They should keep it completely secret, as much as possible.
At my last school no one believed me about my dad’s lighter. I always keep it with me. It’s the only thing I have from him. And every time someone touches it there is less of him on it. His corpse is actually on it—I mean, not his death corpse, but his regular one, the body that falls off us all the time. It’s what I have left of him, and I treasure it.
So, I said, many times I said it, don’t touch this lighter or I will kill you. I think because I am a girl people thought I didn’t mean it.
Someone told me they read in a book that a scientist saw a chimpanzee using sign language on a tree. Apparently the chimpanzee had learned sign language, and then it decided to use the sign language—and it used it on a tree. The amazing thing is, the story ends there. They made the chimp use it with researchers and such—no sign language with trees. I am completely against this sort of thing, and not because I think trees talk or anything—don’t worry, I am very clear-sighted. But still, I bet—you let this chimp talk to the trees and a decade later, well, you don’t know what happens, but that’s the point.
What I mean is, I have my own plans, my own ideas. Being kicked out of my last school—it didn’t really affect them. I guess I don’t really care which school I go to. But, I am sorry that I only grazed his neck with the pencil. I thought I could do better than that.
It was a pretty ugly scene. They had me sitting there in the principal’s room, with my poor aunt next to me (I live with my aunt—dad = dead, mom in lunatic house) and across from us the principal, and Joe Schott, and his dad and mom. His dad owns a car dealership, which means that everyone respects him, though I don’t know why. For instance, the workers at the deli call him boss even though he isn’t their boss. I’ve seen it happen.
Anyway, the secretary was there too, taking notes. The secretary is also the gym teacher, and I hate him, so, basically, apart from my aunt, a room full of enemies.
It wasn’t lost on me that the principal sat with the Schotts. They started it out in the worst way. The principal said to the secretary, are we ready to begin, and then it was, yes, I think so.
Schott senior said something like, Lucia, we are ready to forgive you, with this horrible expression on his face, and then Joe said, I won’t forgive the bitch. I’m going to miss at least two games, and then Schott senior put his hand on Joe’s shoulder and started to say something, but the principal cut him off—he said, hold on, let’s let her go first. Lucia, are you ready to begin? Do you have something to say?
That’s when I said, your little prince basketball hero shouldn’t have touched my lighter. Then I wouldn’t have put a pencil in his neck.
Well, they didn’t like that. Joe Schott is very admired in those parts, the town darling. There’s a burger named after him at the diner, and he even has his own house on his parents’ property—a “cottage” if you can believe it, which no sixteen-year-old guy should have. I know because a girl I was in study hall with went back there with him (he is good-looking). She is awful also, so I wish them well.
Lucia, if you are going to stay at this school, you must apologize to Joe and to his family.
I am sorry, I said, that I wasn’t clearer. Don’t touch my fucking zippo, Joe. Eventually, these people are all going to go away and you’ll be left alone. Do you understand?
My aunt squeezed my leg, so I didn’t say everything I wanted to.
She is really nice. I mean, my aunt is one of the kindest people in the world, I think. She must be. When we got back to the house, she said she was sorry that things had happened that way, with my dad dying, and with my mom going away, but that stabbing somebody wouldn’t fix it. She understood the sentiment, she did. Also, she didn’t care that I couldn’t go back to that school. She would find another school that would take me. The thing she was most glad about was: the police weren’t involved. Probably the school had wanted to avoid a scandal. But, a person only gets so many chances.
I love my aunt. She is my dad’s older sister and is at least seventy years old, I don’t know how. They were dyed-in-the-wool anarchists, she and my dad, that’s what my dad used to say. Then, he died and she clammed up. She has enough money to live pitifully and tend a garden. She was so sweet to me, I resolved right then to be no trouble to her ever. We went to a shitty movie theater to watch an old picture about horses. It was a terrible print, and the dialogue was horrid and sentimental. It wasn’t Flicka or Black Beauty, but it was completely ridiculous and awful. Anyway, we both cried a lot at the horse’s predicament and then we went back to the house and ate a lot of ice cream with big spoons. She said the big spoons were good on a day like that.
2
You may be wondering why I am giving you this account. Well, I don’t know, really. A bunch of things happened, and I am just putting them in order. I’m doing it for myself. You are just a construction—you’re helping me to put things in order. You are my fictional audience, and as such I appreciate you very much. I figure when I finish, I will throw this out. Don’t think that I believe you are any less terrible than anyone else. That’s on you—if you want to behave like a decent person, do so. Those of us who aren’t miserable fools will probably recognize it.
Anyway—this is how it went:
My aunt found a new school for me to go to. That school was called Whistler High School. It was the school for the next town over. I could still bicycle there, or take a bus.
I had a month off, and then it was my first day—the start of the next quarter. I didn’t like the idea. You might think that I am some sort of hard case. I am just a quiet person who minds her own business. Going to school is terrible and it frightens any right-thinking individual.
That morning my aunt had a surprise for me. I came downstairs and on the kitchen table, there it was—
my dad’s lighter.
How did you get it?
My aunt winked at me.
I took it from the office the day of the conference. It was there on the desk. I don’t want them to have it any more than you do.
What a lady!
Then it was time to go.
I always wear the same thing, so there isn’t really much getting ready for me. My aunt has bought me other clothes in the past; I threw them out.
I have:
a gray hooded sweatshirt (hood up)
black jeans
a white tank top
cheap black sneakers
++my dad’s lighter++
a notebook & pencil
house key
some money and ID
usually some book
some licorice for if I am hungry
I believe that a person such as myself can live off licorice. Luckily, I have never had to demonstrate the truth of this claim.
When we got to the school, she stopped the car. She said, you look pretty this morning. I said it is because yesterday I cut my hair like a boy. That’s one of those paradoxes you hear so much about. She laughed.
First, I was outside the school. It was big, bigger than the other school. All concrete and glass. I didn’t like it. I’m not sure that there’s any reason for building anything other than huts. Can’t we just live in huts and be kind to each other?
I suppose we’d better go inside.
3
I could draw my first day at Whistler like a diagram. There is a line that goes across the page a little ways and then it hits a Rorschach blot. When it hits the Rorschach blot it just dies, the line absolutely curls up and dies. Which isn’t to say that it went badly.
