sandra novack
 

fireflies

The night I met Lola was the same night Floyd’s Used Cars seethed into an inferno.  She was leaning against a truck, picking pieces of cigarette filter from her tongue while firefighters ran past her, unleashing their coiled hoses and shouting to each other from under insulated coats and oxygen masks.  The flames had already consumed the cars on the showroom floor, the chairs, and the rows of flakeboard desks before making an ascent, pushing through the roof and into the night air.  Heavy plumes of gray smoke bloomed against the darkness.  It was a dry August.  The trees next to the car lot crackled and hissed.  Brittle leaves ignited and then floated down around Lola like fireflies. 
      I felt lucid.  So when Lola drifted across the car lot to where I stood in the gathering crowd, when she breezily ran her hand over my crotch and said, “I’ve always loved a good blaze, Lucius,” I said, “Yes.”
      You could say we had one of those romantic moments.
      I guessed Lola was no more than twenty, her thin face framed by chunks of red hair cut blunt at her shoulders.  Red hair on a girl sends me into a meltdown.  In the light, her eyes appeared pale, sea-green like smooth glass.  Freckles dusted her face.  Sweat glistened on her forehead.  She looked at me and then looked around at the burgeoning crowd, at the people who walked out from their dark, monotonous half-double homes across the street, at the men in their shabby robes and boxers, the bald-headed guy with the girl on his arm, the group of frat boys who lingered behind Lola and me, their drink-induced laughter rising in the air as they gave each other high-fives.  One of the guys, a big dumb jock yelled, “Bring it on.  Let’s see if you got it in you.” 
      Lola seemed to be weighing her possibilities.  I am not a bad-looking guy. I have a beer gut, yes, but my calves are rock hard from cycling to work and my head is quite well-rounded.  I’ve been told by my old girlfriend, Sheila, that my eyelashes send women into a frenzy.  I have two years of community college under my belt, and for someone twenty-five years old, I am aware, almost painfully so, of the larger world around me, which is more than I can say about the other guys I work with at Red Robin.  I have a large Adam’s apple and am perhaps a bit too tall and (short of the gut) lanky, but Lola was also tall and a bit slouchy.  I considered this fortuitous at the time, a meeting of the heads, lips, and middles. 
      My name, by the way, is Harold. 
      Lola stared off into the flames.  Fire, it breathes, moves.  Smoke suspended in the air above us.  My eyes burned, watered.  Sirens blazed.  The windows of Floyd’s cracked and buckled. Lola leaned into me and said, “You want a girlfriend, Lucius?”
       “Not really,” I said.  “Not on a full-time basis.” Lola looked at me strangely, and I delighted in the burnt smell that radiated from her.  She had small tits, but her T-shirt clung to them.  She wore white shorts that showed off her legs, the rounded curve of her ass.  You tell yourself it’s all about that—the ass, the tits, a certain measure of a girl that suggests she’ll be good in bed and not too much of a hassle, eating you out of house and home and taking over your bathroom, adding to the general thrust of entropy in your life.  I said, “Who is Lucius, anyway?”
      “You are, Lucius.”  Lola smiled.
      With a huge boom the gas tank of a car exploded.  Someone, I don’t know who, shouted for backup.  I was not fanatical about cars—I rode a bicycle to work—but a car on fire was something to see.  It burned blue-green and turned to molten lava.  Metal covered by flames, paint crackling in the heat, and the effluvious vapor of oil and gas in the air caused an almost pleasant high. 
       “Okay,” I said.  “I’ll be your boyfriend, but only for the night.  Do you understand?  It’s mostly because you have great tits.”
      “Please Lucius,” she said.  “Call them breasts.  And, please, call me Lola.” 
      At my apartment, Lola breathed, “Yes.”  I laid her across the bed and undressed her slowly, taking pleasure in the smoky heat that rose from her clothes and skin.  I took pleasure, too, in her v-shaped black panties.  Lola had a cloying, earthy smell—cumin, exotic spice.  Her red hairs curled in wild circles, and, above them, a tattoo of a Phoenix flamed up, stopping just below the mole on her belly button.  I kissed every inch of her.  I kissed her fully.  I nibbled her.  I flipped her around to behold her, but she said wait and pulled out a condom from her purse.  After that things moved so quickly I felt dizzy.  The world accelerated and Lola was the reason for speed—Lola and the fire—and all I could think to do to slow down was hum Ride of the Valkyrie. 
      “You’re kidding me,” Lola said, laughing between squeals.  I hummed more.  Lola pulled from me, turned over.  She got up and made her way, naked, to the bathroom.  The air felt hot and sticky with our sex, with everything about us that seemed to fill the small rooms.
      I lived four blocks from Floyd’s, on the first floor of a decaying building with mold that spotted the walls.   Pipes leaked.  The heaters cranked even in summer because the landlord, some Indian guy named Gopal Dos Varma didn’t pay for utilities and didn’t, as he said, fix things that weren’t broken.  It was a two-room efficiency with a small kitchenette, its walls the color of canned peas.  I had an old sofa covered with a brown crocheted afghan; I had a coffee table, a hand-me-down from my parents who live on the other side of the city.  It was really something of a shit-hole.  But like Eve without any sense of shame, Lola graced my apartment.  She walked around.  She noted my degree in accounting, which was tacked up on the wall.  “Why didn’t you go all the way?” she asked.
      “School?  I don’t know.  Lazy, I guess.  I got tired.”
      “Interesting,” she said.  She ran her hand over my collection of comic books.  Then she turned about, taking everything in.  She placed her hands on her hips. 
      Did I love her then?  I loved the look of her, the contours of her body—the two dimples above her ass, the line of her backbone, the blades of her shoulders, the unending supply of freckles that spotted her body.  I could even say I loved the way the room felt with Lola in it, which is to say surprising, bright.
      Still naked, Lola came back to bed.  We smoked some dope together.  I was pretty supportive of that shit, I’ll tell you--the strange, pleasant feeling that only dope can give, coupled with the sense of wonder and amazement and yes, even love.  Lola breathed in smoke and held it before exhaling.  She smiled widely.   The heaters cranked.  She said, “What is it with your heaters, anyway?” 
      “Gopal Dos Varma says they aren’t broken, so what’s the problem?”
      Lola laughed until she snorted.  She snorted again.  When she calmed down, we watched the weather channel, the swirls of precipitation that appeared on the Doppler Radar.  That was something to see.
      “Quite a fire,” Lola said after a while.
      “It was good for me.”
      “It was fate.”
      “I don’t believe in fate.”
      “You will,” she said. “When love has touched you.  You will.”
      I said, “Oh, when love touches me I’m sure I will.” 
      Lola play-slapped me.  “Listen, I need a place to crash,” she said.  “Are you hearing me?  Stop laughing because this is serious business.  Lucius, listen, will you?  Stop.”
      “Sorry,” I said.
      “You want to be my boyfriend?  My last boyfriend turned out to be a real dud after everyone thought he was promising.  The right people always end up being wrong.”
      I inhaled slowly, then exhaled.  I passed her the joint.  “And the wrong people?”
      “I don’t know,” she told me.  “I never tried one out before you, but I’ll be sure to let you know.  Just don’t make things hard, or else.”  She held an imaginary gun to her head and squeezed the trigger.
      “You didn’t shoot your last boyfriend, did you?”
      She huffed.  “Do I look like Annie Oakley?”
      “I don’t know,” I confessed.
      “My last boyfriend was a real fucker, Lucius.  He messed around with my best friend, my roommate,” she said.  Her eyes narrowed.  “She was a real fucker, too.  I needed a change of pace after that, let me tell you.”
      My legs felt heavy, like doused wood.  I wanted Lola to leave.  When you tell yourself it’s about the sex and the sheer presence of a girl, you don’t leave room for conversation in the equation.  You certainly don’t expect to hear about ex-lovers.  It was all a bit alarming.  I cupped my hands behind my head and stared at the watermarks that spotted the stucco ceiling like a huge question mark.  “We were getting along, Lola,” I said.  
      She inhaled deeply, allowing herself time to calculate a response.  She tipped the ash.  “Good then,” she said.  “It’s settled.  I’ll stay.” 
      She was getting the upper hand.  That much was clear.  I said nothing.  There were practical considerations to Lola entering my life.  I felt unnerved at the thought of Lola spending the night in close proximity.  If you give a girl enough leeway, she’ll take over like wildfire, like Sheila, my last “girlfriend”, who I slept with three times before she acted like she owned me.  What are you doing, Harold?  Sheila would ask when she called from the office.  Are you thinking about me?  Have you thought about other women?  Do you want to fuck someone else, Harold?  Do you?
      Etc.  Sharing fluid was one thing, but sharing an apartment was an altogether different matter.  What if Lola peed voluminously?  Hung her clothes from the curtain rod?  Lined the medicine cabinet with condoms and tampons, nail polish and other junk?  Worse, what if Lola was a lunatic?  I hadn’t indulged the thought before that moment, but what if she was the one who set the fire?   I had often heard that criminals hung around the scene, which made sense, and, in Lola’s case, certainly would have been true.  What if she set the fire to seduce me and now wanted to stay the night so she could put me in handcuffs and steal everything in my apartment while I looked on, all handcuffed and shit?  Deviance of the criminal kind was definitely something I couldn’t handle in my life.  This was what I thought in the amount of time it took Lola to hand me the joint, get up again and go to the bathroom and pee voluminously.
      When she came back, I eyed her suspiciously.  I said again, “We were getting along famously.  Why go and ruin things?”
       “The first Lucius said the exact same thing.  What is it with Luciuses?” she asked, twirling her hair.  “I’ve got to try out a new name.” 
      So, I thought that was that.  Crazy girl inhabits bed while a fire burns in the city.  End of story.   But let me tell you:  Lola, she wasn’t dumb.  She had big plans and ambitions.  She had aspirations.  She had a bank account.  I spent my days scrubbing down toilet seats, vacuuming rugs, scraping caramelized soda from tables and placing signs about the specials in the windows at Red Robin.  I was barely getting by riding a beat-up bike to work and earning three bucks above minimum wage, a salary bolstered by my associate’s degree.  It turned out Lola was a sophomore in college part of the day and the other part of the day she spent balled up on a couch at the Barnes and Noble downtown.  She drank cappuccinos.  She read Voltaire and Salinger.  She gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and told me I could stand to learn a thing or two.  “Here’s a dictionary,” she said one day after I came home from work.  “Now use it, will you?”
      There are certain differences in people that stem down the line of generations, certain things you cannot overlook that should be factored into relationship equations.  For example, my mother was very old-school about things and probably wouldn’t have approved of the way Lola introduced herself to me, if she ever found out.  Also, my mother and father didn’t have a lot of money.  They were middle class, which translated to pretty damn poor.  My father worked as a janitor at a large bank.  My mother worked in a doctor’s office, filing papers.  She crocheted at night, while my father spent hours and hours of his life watching CNN and complaining about the government.   It turned out Lola’s parents, who I never met, lived in another state: Connecticut.  Her father was into computer software and made something like a zillion bucks a year.   Lola’s mother didn’t work at all.  She volunteered at the church shop and served meals to the homeless.   They were good, Christian people.  They were Republicans.  They spent their summers in Italy.  Italy, for Christ’s sake.  Lola spoke another language.  Two languages.  Sometimes when we were fucking she would call out to me in French, Bientot and Vite, vite, Lucius! 
      And she had habits.  A month after we’d been together, I took her out for dinner at Red Robin.  Things started well enough; she ordered a cheeseburger and fries, a classic combination.  But then she did things with her burger and fries that, in other women, I would have found annoying. She squeezed a puddle of ketchup on her plate.  She dumped salt and pepper on top of it, but then she didn’t even touch her fries.  She ate her pickle first, and ate around the edge of her cheeseburger before moving into the center.  She lifted her pinkie high in the air when she held up her burger, which I admit was rather odd. 
      “So what do you want with me, anyway?” I asked while marveling over her plate.  “You should go to Italy.  Get back on the right side of the tracks, you know.”
      “Oh,” she said.  “You’re not the wrong side of the tracks; you’re the interesting side of them.  I have a plan.  I’m doing research, Lucius.”
      “For the twentieth time, Lola, my name is Harold.” 
      “Harold isn’t much of a name.  It’s a little outdated.”
      “It was my mother’s grandfather’s name.”
      “And so that makes it right?  Does your mother hate you or something?”
      “No,” I said.  “She calls each Sunday, you know that.  She sends me blankets.  She crochets lots and lots of blankets.  Have you seen the closet?”
      “Afghans, Lucius.  Not blankets.  And yes, I saw the afghans.  I do look for signs that suggest you might be at all tender.  There is evidence, Lucius, that I am gathering.”
      “Huh,” I said.
       Lola leaned forward.  “And your father?  Is he as incredibly dull as your mom?”
      “Yes.”
      “Poor Lucius,” she said.  She lit a cigarette.  “We’ve got so much to work on, you and I.” 
      I’m getting ahead of myself.  In the first week after the fire, Lola started showing up each night.  I’d be bone-tired, carrying my bike up the stairs after work and she’d be standing there, dressed in cut-off jean shorts, a top that clung to her.  Sometimes she’d have on bohemian-type bracelets and long earrings, like Edie Brickell.  She’d look red hot.  She had this way about her, too, when she said things.  She’d tilt her head and smooth her hair back.  “Hey, we should probably get some groceries,” she’d say, matter-of-factly.   Or, “I brought a Scrabble board and a copy of Backdraft, in honor of our meeting.”  Or, “Baby, we’ve got to stop running into each other like this.”  She was seriously at me.  She started staying over every night. She wore me down.  I tried once to kick her out but she thought I was joking.  She said, “Don’t tell me I’m not the best thing that’s happened to you all year.” She was right.  I mean other girls weren’t exactly busting down the door.  Lola cleaned out my closets and painted the walls of my bedroom one afternoon.  She did her Lit homework on the couch.  I splurged and started taking her to Red Robin.  She even brought her goldfish, Boo, over from the dorm room.  “Boo isn’t safe with that lunatic fucker of a roommate of mine,” she said.  She wanted to know how I reacted to animals.  She tapped her thin finger on the glass bowl. 
      “Because most deviant people don’t relate well to pets,” she said.
      “It’s not a pet,” I told her.  “It’s a goldfish.”
      “Uh-huh,” she said, like she was noting this.
      I tried to be decent, right?  Tried to be a good person.  I stopped asking her to leave when it became clear she had no intention of leaving anyway.  That’s the way some women are.  You push them away and tell them no but they’re persistent, they hang on.  They get you. 
      I’d heard that romances were sometimes born under extreme, hostile conditions, which I suppose is how things went with Lola.  Fires sprang up at car dealerships all across the city.  Always at night.  No one got hurt, but the police started referring to the “Lunar Pyro,” since the person set a good blaze every few weeks, when the moon was full.
      “Lunar Pyro,” Lola said.  This was about a month into things, on a night we vegged out in front of the TV.  “It really doesn’t have much pizzazz, does it?”  She bit into an apple, and all I could think of was how good Lola looked eating an apple, how the apple seemed to be a thing of beauty the second it touched Lola’s pouty lips.
      “Can I have a bite?” I asked.
      “Get your own,” she said.
      I went to the kitchen and retrieved an apple from the refrigerator because unlike Lola I liked my apples cold so we had to divvy things up.  When I came back to the couch, Lola turned off the TV and then turned to me with a rather serious expression on her face.  She said, “Why do you ride a bike, anyway, Lucius?”
      “Environmental protest.”
      She raised her wonderfully thin eyebrows.  “Really.”
      “No,” I said.  “I guess not.  I just don’t have the cash.”
      “That’s hardly a story.”
      “But it’s the truth,” I said. “Why pretend?”
      “Lucius, have you ever been in love, I mean before me?”
      “I’m not in love with you.”
      “I thought you didn’t like to pretend.”
      “Anyway,” I told her.  “I’ve never been in love.”
      “I believe you,” Lola said.  “I mean it’s pretty obvious.  The first Lucius was in love all the time.  He was what we’d call a romantic.  But you, you’re different.  You don’t like to be seen.  You don’t like things too heavy.”
      “I don’t?”
      “Trust me, I know one when I see one.  It’s like looking in a mirror.  See, here’s what I think, Lucius; everyone has to—or should—have a story.  Love, unrequited love, broken love, the search for love, recovery efforts, you know, stuff like that. And if you don’t have it, well, then, you’ve got to make it up because the world requires heartache.”
      What was I to say?  I shrugged.  “Maybe.”
      “So here’s what I think.  You set the fires.  You, Lucius, are the Lunar Pyro.”
      “I’m not a pyromaniac,” I told her.  “I don’t even have a can of gasoline.”
      “True, but you have a lighter, don’t you, for the pot?  That’s the lighter you’ve been using.  You set the fires because your girlfriend—Bertha—the light of your life, the fire of your loins, broke your heart and she works at a car dealership.”
      I turned toward her.  I thought about things.  I said, “I set cars on fire?  What would be the point?”
      She leaned back and twirled her hair.  “The choice is an obvious one.”
      I thought about this some more.  I engaged in some more serious thinking. “Bertha who?”  I asked finally.
      Lola was getting annoyed.  “What does it matter?  Just Bertha, okay?”  She rolled her eyes.  “Fine.  Bertha Copeland, twenty-one, blond hair, short legs, a little stocky—frankly, Lucius, I’m surprised at you—but generally soft-spoken, lacking in a little backbone.  It’s a wonder she had the nerve to break up with you in the first place, few prospects that she has.  She has so few prospects.  She’s really rather quite homely now that I think about it, but her ugliness has fostered in her a good soul, a kind disposition, and that’s what you loved.”
      “I did?”  I bit into my apple.
      “Yes, you did.  Pay attention.”
      “Was she good in bed?”
      “Hardly.  But she had a way of looking at you after sex, you know, a meeting of the souls or something like that.”
      “Interesting,” I said.  “I’m starting to get horny.  Can I call you Bertha?”
      Lola laughed.  She shook her head.  She picked up the dictionary from the coffee table and opened to a random page:  “Effluvious,” she said. 
      “Effluvious,” I said.
      “It’s wonderful when you do that.”
      “What?” I asked.
      “Play along.” 
      At some point, Lola asked for my mother’s phone number.  They talked for an hour, mostly about what I wasn’t doing with my life.  Lola said, “He just hasn’t realized his potential.  I’m signing him up for a night class.” 
      I could hear my mother’s relief flood the wires.  When Lola got off the phone I said, “You’re joking, right, about the class?”
      “No,” Lola said.  “Consider it my share of the rent.  Just don’t pick a math class.  I abhor math, Lucius. Nothing good has ever come from numbers.  Why don’t you try an English class? Maybe creative writing, that would be good.  But really, you should improve your vocabulary first.”
      “Lola,” I said.
      “Lucius,” she said.  “No arguments.  I don’t like to argue. It makes me feel tense.”
      “No arguments,” I said.  “Just thanks.”
      She said, “Don’t say that, either.”
      After that my mother stopped by my apartment more, which is something she seldom did pre-Lola.  She’d show up in a muumuu, her thick ankles bulging from the rim of her sneakers.  When she hugged Lola she buried her in a wall of flesh.  She loved what Lola did with my place—pale blue walls, water in the moonlight.   “Here, Dear,” she said one time and offered Lola a pair of crocheted booties. “For the winter, to keep your feet warm.”  My mother smiled warmly and patted Lola’s back.  “You’re so skinny,” she said.  “Doesn’t Harold feed you?  Where are your parents, Dear?  Tell me, are you on your own?” 
      The cool, gray light of November filtered through the tree branches.  The sun hung low in the skyline, making the entire city, streets, and houses appear blue-gray.  Ducks flew overhead, their dark shapes tearing through the orange sky.  Lola and I stood in front of Floyd’s.  The smell of burnt wood seemed to linger, though this, I suppose, is a detail I may have made up entirely.  Lola reached for me, took my hand, and said, “Criminals always return to the scene of a crime.  It’s usually guilt that drives them.”
      Did I smell death in the air?  Transformation?  Probably not.  It started innocently enough.  It felt like just any other day with Lola.  She said, “Bertha worked here, didn’t she?  I mean this was the first fire you set, after all.  You’ve kept the police on their toes for months now, but I’m too clever for you.  It’s a wonder I didn’t turn you in, really, but it just so happens that I have a soft spot for pyromaniacs.  Still, you can’t hide the truth from me.”
      “Truth,” I said.  I thought about this for a while.  “What is truth, anyway?”
      She ignored me.  “Those fires.  Where were you two nights ago, when the Toyota dealership burned to the ground?”
      “Sleeping.  With you.”
      “A likely story,” she said.  Her lips pursed.  “I dreamt about you and when I awoke you were gone.  It was upsetting, to find you weren’t there.”
      “I did get up and use the bathroom.  I did get up and eat the leftover lasagna.  Cut me a break; you know I don’t sleep well.  It’s a small place.  If you would have looked around you’d have found me.  Maybe it’s the first Lucius who sets the fires.  Did you ever think about that?”
      Lola gazed at the dilapidated building.  Plywood covered the space where windows used to be.  The right side of the building remained collapsed.  Demolition vehicles were parked in the lot next to piles of blackened wood.  She said, “Lucius was here that night, that’s true.”
      “You mean Lucius, Lucius?”
      “He was here with his stupid frat,” she said.  “We’d just broken up.”
      I remembered the dumb-looking jock, but I said nothing.  “Interesting,” I said, as if I were mulling over possibilities. I was no idiot.  I knew what she meant.  Lola used me that night of the fire.  Possibly Lucius followed us to my apartment.  He may have even stood by the window and watched as Lola and I fucked.  Maybe he heard her call my name—his name—in the throes of passion. 
      “So,” I said. “I suppose that was Lucius standing outside the window that night.”
      “Don’t be ridiculous.  You are totally making that up.” She smoothed her hair and seemed to consider this.  Finally, she said:  “You are making that up, right?”
      “Would it matter?” I asked.  “Do you want to be with him or something?”
      “He hasn’t spoken to me since that night.”
      “That’s not what I asked.”  I lit a cigarette and smoked it.  I inhaled. I stared at the wreck that was Floyd’s.  I experienced a moment when I saw myself as Lola saw me, dousing the building with gasoline, igniting a spark, watching everything burn. I was that incredibly jealous, angry man whose girlfriend had dumped him.  I wanted revenge.  I felt sinful in my pleasure when the fire started and the building burned. I reveled in the seething heat.  Then, in an even stranger moment, I saw Lola and me in those flames, burning to ash and cinder.  I said, “How can we really be together when all you do is lie?  Have you lied about everything?  Do you even know what it means to be real?”
      Lola looked as if I’d slapped her.  Her face became red, blotchy.  Suddenly she was on the verge of tears.  I didn’t understand what Lola’s tears meant.  And I didn’t care, frankly, because I was still pretty pissed off about the Lucius revelation.  I walked away from her, left her to her burned-down building.  “I’m going back to the apartment,” I said.  “Maybe you should go sell your bullshit to your last boyfriend.” 
      Lola came back to the apartment close to midnight.  I don’t know where she went or what she did during those long hours.  I wasn’t going to ask, either, but before I knew it I said, “So, did you go and fuck the first Lucius?  That would be just like you, I bet.”
      Lola sighed and turned on the light.  She pulled her hair back in a small ponytail.  She undressed and slipped into bed.  A faint smell of smoke clung to her—I swear it did—and I remembered that first night of our fateful meeting.  I said, “You better start calling me Harold if you want to crash here.  Do you hear me, Lola?  Harold.”
      She turned off the light. She whispered, “Do you really think I don’t know how to be real?  Do you think all I do is lie?”
      “I don’t know,” I told her.  That was the truth.  “You tell me.”
      “I don’t want to be with Lucius,” she said.  “I mean that Lucius.  If you don’t know that, then you don’t know me.” 
      “No kidding,” I said. “Really.”
      She didn’t speak for an hour.  I don’t know what Lola was thinking about.  Eventually, I drifted off to sleep.  I dreamed of Lola.  In my dreams, I held her close, saying, “Lola, Lola, my Firefly.” 
      The next day seemed normal enough.  Lola was a little quiet, I guess.  She ate cereal and read the paper.  She dressed and left for her American Lit. class.  I kissed her goodbye on the cheek. When I came home from work later that night all her drawers were empty, the bathroom was stripped bare, and Lola was gone.  The only thing she left was Boo, who swam mournfully around in circles.  I sat on my bed.  I sat on my bed a long time.  I thought some troubling things as I sat there, things I’d never thought about before that moment.  I thought:  Eventually people just quit and leave you, whether you want them to or not.  Maybe they don’t even really want to leave—who knows?—but they leave just the same.  I wasn’t angry, but a quiet terror filled me. 
      I searched for Lola for weeks afterward.  I’d ride my bike to campus and wait while a flood of students poured out of the Arts and Science building—blondes and brunettes and even a dyed red-head or two, but no Lola.  I started to worry.  I’d roam the quad at night, looking for her.  I hung around outside of classrooms.  A few weeks later, I caught sight of her.  She was wearing jeans and a light blue sweater, and her hair was up in a bun.  I called to her, and, when she ignored me, I rode my bike behind her, pleading with her until she stopped.
      “Lola,” I said. “We were getting along famously.  I don’t know what I did.  I mean, I’ve been using a dictionary for you, just looking stuff up, isn’t that love?”
      She repositioned her backpack.  “I don’t know how to be real, remember?”
      “That?” I said.  “I really could have been joking about that.”
      “You meant it,” she said. “And it was a mean thing to say.”
      “Come home,” I said.  “We’ll talk.”
      “No.”
      “That’s it?”
      “That’s it,” she said.  “End of story.” 
      I’m telling you all this because, see, the thing that happens is you forget over time.  I mean you remember this and that happened, you have a vague sense of events, but the feelings become blurred and nebulous.  I don’t remember the exact moment I realized I needed Lola, and I don’t remember the exact moment of love and how it came to exist in its own complicated proportions.  But I know that I felt these things; I know Lola and I had potential.  I don’t question that love exists, but I do sometimes question the mechanisms of it.  Maybe love simply happens when someone steps into your life and opens up your imagination, and you can see yourself in new ways.  I think it’s at least a possibility.  But what the hell do I know?  My name is Harold and I ride a bike to work, and in twenty-six years I really haven’t learned a lot, that’s the goddamn truth. 
      Last week was the anniversary of the first blaze set at Floyd’s.  The network covered it on what was an otherwise off night.  They recapped the months of havoc, the Lunar Pyro’s path of destruction.  Eventually the guy got caught.  Turns out he was a disgruntled employee, so Lola was almost right.  I wondered what she thought of it all and what she would say.
      She must have been thinking along the same lines of completion because today the post office forwarded a letter to my new address.  It was a fat envelope, taped shut, my name clearly printed on the outside with no return address.  When I saw the handwriting, my hands shook.  Thirty pages—I shit you not—written in the small loopy handwriting that was Lola’s.  I will not bore you with all the details, but one part stood out: 
      You were right, you know.  I touch my skin and know there’s flesh.  I look in the mirror and see my face and it is a confirmation of something, I suppose.  I exist in this world.  I breathe and eat and fuck and learn things and forget and remember. But I almost never feel real.  Do you know what I mean?  Can you hear me?  Because there’s no sense in writing if you don’t.
      I’m sorry I left like I did, Harold. You probably deserved more of an explanation, which is just that I was suddenly, very horribly afraid of sharing the bed another night because there was no place to hide anymore.  If I were capable of love, I might have loved you. I can say without a doubt that I liked you.  I liked you quite a lot, even if your apartment did smell a little funny and your heaters cranked and cranked.
      In other news, I’ve discovered a true passion and have enrolled in a creative writing class.  Did you do the same?  I am writing about fires and a lonely man who keeps a goldfish.  I’ve been having difficulty with the overall flow of events and I am plagued—absolutely plagued, Harold—with questions of point of view.  I have tried writing it from the fish’s perspective, but it didn’t work out so well.  My instructor has told me that in ten years I might have a story, but certainly not even then if I keep writing about animals.  I swear they pay these people to be miserable, but I will persevere. 
      So, why am I telling you all this, anyway?  Because I hope you will listen, really.  Because this all has some pertinence to us, you and me.  I know what you are thinking, that you are the lonely man with the fish.  And partly that is true.  But the strange thing is that when I’m writing the man is also me.  We are one in our aloneness.
      Is that love, Harold? It’s real, I think.  I can’t quite touch it, but it’s real just the same.  For that, I owe you thanks.
      Please give my best to Boo. 
      Sincerely,
      Bertha McKern (your Lola) 
      I sat on the bed and read Lola’s letter again.  I thought:  My darling, skinny Lola had a fat girl’s name.  I just couldn’t get over that.  I took Lola’s note to the kitchen and burned the first page of it.  The fire consumed it, and the paper delicately folded in on itself before becoming black and breaking into pieces at the bottom of the trash can.  I burned another page, then another and another.  I burned it all.  It was a small gesture on my part, a gift to Lola, one required to complete a story. 

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