Kiss Me, Genius Boy (No More Dreams #1)

4.2 All is burning

4.2 All is burning

The window was dark when I roused to a knock on the door. “Are you awake in there?” Dad asked, his voice muffled by the wood.

“No,” I answered. I liked this paradox. “Why?”

“The tip’s on fire,” he said.

I felt well rested, though terribly thirsty, and threw the covers off with vigor, partly in fear (was this an evacuation?), but mostly in celebration of a startling sense of relative wellbeing. The headache and the sickness were gone.

I answered my door in boxers and a plain, clean white t-shirt. “Should I be worried? Is there a toxic cloud?”

Dad’s face was rapturous. “No. Just come and have a look. If you want to, of course. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Just give me a sec.”

I only had one pair of jeans, currently befouled. I put on my gray wool school trousers instead, and a pair of black-and-white Converse sneakers, no socks.

A few minutes’ drive from our house, back away from the waterfront, was the Trueman’s Road Recreation Reserve: a football field, an athletics track, a basketball court and a clubhouse, all built on earth packed down over half a century of old trash. It had been there my whole life, and for more than sixteen years our refuse had been piling up just a little further down the road, at the new tip closed in with cyclone fencing. 

I’d been there just once, with Mum and Dad, while they scoured the place for old furniture to do up. They’d found a few small desks, odd dining chairs, and a chartreuse velvet lounge-suite put in since the last rain and still dry. This was their aesthetic: old and quirky. Dad, don’t forget, had been a furniture restorer before he won the lottery, and he went back to it now and then for something to do. I’d poked around for a bit, overturning some old mattresses in search of hidden treasures, but then I got a light scratch from a protruding, rusty spring, and backed away into a clear patch in fear of tetanus.

We took the car, and pulled up in the gravel parking lot by the football field. Then we walked silently across the damp grass towards the fence. It was dark out there, and already I could see the red glow cast across the sky. I didn’t want to tell Dad that I’d just had my first lay, but that was the only thing on my mind, so I had to shut up. Sometimes he knew when not to talk. Maybe he could sense something had happened to me that I was still absorbing.

I could feel the excitement radiating off him. Not much happened to Dad since he stopped working, I supposed. Life seemed to be about little things for him now, small, daily pleasures, the rhythms of weather and the seasons, a table stripped and polished, a new house built around the corner, a neighbor’s funeral. It was comfortable to be out in the night with him, not speaking, father and son together in their aloneness.

When I reached the wire, I clawed my fingers into it and climbed to straddle the bar running along the top. Inside, in the distance, a ridge of trash was ablaze, spewing solid black smoke windward and away from us. Amid the flames, I imagined the silhouettes of burning and collapsing mattresses, old tires, and the steel hulks of mid-century refrigerators licked by the flames but keeping their shape, like the indestructible souls of mortals tortured forever in the fires of hell, unrepentant. The world was on fire for me, and for what I’d done.

I know now that philosophers have a name for the idea that the world reflects our inner state. It’s called the sympathetic fallacy. I held to an even wider folly, that it mattered at all to the world—not just the people in it, but the rocks, the sky, the trees, the space between the stars—what happened to me, and whether I became all that I dreamed of being. It doesn’t matter if there is fire without, only that there is fire within, and that you let it burn outward and consume the world. I wanted to let it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to do the wrong thing, so most of the time, I did nothing. The night before, I’d grabbed what I wanted, and look what happened: the world burned.