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The crowd—still mostly of children—had grown, but they kept well back from the walls. She scouted about for the kindling. Pages of books, the remains of the calendar, and Mickey’s watercolors (“Promising” and “Shows independence”) from the third grade were fed into the dresser. Before long she had a nice little furnace going inside. The problem now was how to get the rest of the furniture started. She couldn’t keep pushing things into the drawers.

Using the lamp pole she was able to get the dresser over on its side. Sparks geysered up and were swept along by the wind. The crowd, which had been closing in more tightly around the bonfire, swayed back. Mrs. Hanson placed the kitchen chairs and table on the flames. They were the last large items she still had left from the Mott Street days. Seeing them go was painful.

Once the chairs had caught she used them as torches to start the rest of the furniture going. The cupboards, loosely packed and made of cheap materials, became fountains of fire. The crowd cheered as each one, after smoking blackly, would catch hold and shoot up. Ah! Is there anything like a good fire?

The sofa, armchairs, and mattresses were more obstinate. The fabric would char, the stuffing would stink and smolder, but it wouldn’t burn outright. Piece by piece (except for the sofa, which had always been beyond her), Mrs. Hanson dragged these items to the central pyre. The last mattress, however, only got as far as the teevee and her strength gave out.

A figure advanced toward her from the crowd, but if they wanted to stop her now it was too late. A fat woman with a small suitcase.

“Mom?” she said.

“Lottie!”

“Guess what? I’ve come home. What are you doing with—”

A clothes cupboard fell apart, scattering flames in modules scaled to the human form.

“I told them. I told them you’d be back!”

“Isn’t this our furniture?”

“Stay here.” Mrs. Hanson took the suitcase out of Lottie’s hand, which was all cut and scratched, the poor darling, and set it down on the concrete. “Don’t go anywhere, right? I’m getting someone but I’ll be right back. We’ve lost a battle, but we’ll win the war.”

“Are you feeling all right, Mom?”

“I’m feeling fine. Just wait here, all right? And there’s no need to worry. Not now. We’ve got six months for certain.”

Incredible? Her mother running off through the flames like some opera star going out for a curtain call. Her suitcase had crushed the plastic flowers. She stooped and picked one up. An iris. She tossed it into the flames in approximately the direction her mother had disappeared in.

And hadn’t it been a magnificent performance? Lottie had watched from the sidewalk, awestruck, as she’d set fire to … everything. The rocker was burning. The kid’s bunk, in two pieces, was burning propped up against the embers of the kitchen table. Even the teevee, with Lottie’s own mattress draped over it, though because of the mattress the teevee wasn’t burning as well as it might. The entire Hanson apartment was on fire. The strength! Lottie thought. The strength that represents.

But why strength? Wasn’t it as much a yielding? What Agnes Vargas had said years ago at Afra Imports: “The hard part isn’t
doing
the job. The hard part is learning how.” Such a commonplace thing to say, yet it had always stuck with her.

Had she learned how?

The beauty: that was what was so remarkable. Seeing the furniture standing about on the street, that had been beautiful enough. But when it burned!

The flowered armchair, which had only been smoldering till now, took hold all at once, and all its meaning was expressed in a tall column of orange flames. Glorious!

Could she?

At the very least she could try to approach it.

She fiddled open the locks of the suitcase. Already she’d lost so many of the things she’d brought with her, all the little bones and bijoux from her past that hadn’t for all her worrying at them yielded her one dribble of the feelings they were supposed to hold. Postcards she’d never sent. Baby clothes. The book of autographs (including three celebrities) she’d started keeping in eighth grade. But what junk she had left she’d gladly give.

At the top of the suitcase, a white dress. She threw it into the lap of the burning chair. As it touched the flames years of whiteness condensed into a moment’s fierce flare.

Shoes, a sweater. They shriveled inside lurid haloes of green flame.

Prints. Stripes.

Most of these things didn’t even fit her! She lost patience and dumped the rest in all in a heap, everything except the photographs and the bundle of letters. These she fed to the fire one by one. The pictures winked into flame like the popping of so many flashbulbs, leaving the world as they’d entered it. The letters, on lighter paper, went even more quickly: a single
whoosh!
and then they rose in the updraft, black weightless birds, poem after poem, lie upon lie—all of Juan’s love.

Now she was free?

The clothes she wore were of no importance. As little time as a week ago she might have thought at this moment that she’d have to take her clothes off, too.

She herself was the clothing she must remove.

She went to where her own bed had been prepared atop the teevee. All else was in flames now, only the mattress still smoldered. She lay down. It was no more uncomfortable than entering a very hot bathtub, and as the water might have, the heat melted away the soreness and tension of the last sad days and weeks. This was so much more simple.

Relaxing, she became aware of the sound of the flames, a roaring all around her, as though she had finally come to the head of the falls she had been listening to so long. As her little boat had drifted towards this moment. But these waters were flames and fell upwards. With her head thrown back she could watch the sparks from the separate fires join, in the updraft, into a single ceaseless flow of light that mocked the static pallid squares of light gouged in the face of the brick. People stood within those squares of light, watching the fire, waiting, with Lottie, for the mattress to go.

The first flames curled around the edge, and through these flames she saw the ring of onlookers. Each face, in its separateness, in the avidity of its gaze, seemed to insist that Lottie’s action was directed in some special way at him. There was no way to tell them that this was not for their sake but for the sake, purely, of the flames.

At the very moment that she knew she couldn’t go on, that her strength would fail, their faces disappeared. She pushed herself up, the teevee collapsed, and she fell, in her little boat, through the white spray of her fear, towards the magnificence below.

But then, before she could see quite through the curtain of the spray, there was another face. A man. He aimed the nozzle of the fire-hose at her. A stream of white plastic foam shot out, blanketing Lottie and the bed, and all the while she was compelled to watch, in his eyes, on his lips, everywhere, an expression of insupportable loss.

“And anyhow the world doesn’t end. Even though it may try to, even though you wish to hell it would—it can’t. There’s always some poor jerk who thinks he needs something he hasn’t got, and there goes five years, ten years, getting it. And then it’ll be something else. It’s another day and you’re still waiting for the world to end.

“Oh, sometimes, you know, I have to laugh. When I think—Like the first time you’re really in love and you say to yourself, Hey! I’m really in love! Now I know what it’s about. And then he leaves you and you can’t believe it. Or worse than that you gradually lose sight of it. Just gradually. You’re in love, only it isn’t as wonderful as it used to be. Maybe you’re not even in love, maybe you just want to be. And maybe you don’t even want to be. You stop bothering about songs on the radio and there’s nothing you want to do but sleep. Do you know? But you can only sleep for so long and then it’s tomorrow. The icebox is empty and you have to think who haven’t you borrowed any money from and the room smells and you get up just in time to see the most terrific sunset. So it wasn’t the end of the world after all, it’s just another day.

“You know, when I came here, there was a part of me that was so happy. Like the first day of school, though maybe that was terrifying, I can’t remember. Anyhow. I was so happy because I thought, here I am, this is the bottom. At last! The end of the world, right? And then, it was only the next day, I was up on the veranda and there it was again, this perfectly gorgeous sunset, with Brooklyn all big and mysterious, and the river. And then it was as though I could take a step back from myself, like when you’re sitting across from someone in the subway and they don’t know you’re watching them, I could see myself like that. And I thought, Why you dope! You’ve only been here one day, and here you are enjoying a goddamned sunset.

“Of course it’s also true, what we were saying before, about people. People are shits. In here just as much as out there. Their faces. And the way they grab things. It’s like, I don’t know if you’ve ever had children, but it’s like that, eating at the same table with children. At first you can enjoy it. Like watching a mouse—nibble, nibble, nibble. But then there’s another meal, and another, and if you don’t see them other times there doesn’t seem to be anything to them but an endless appetite. Well, and that’s what I think can be so frightening, when you look at somebody and you can’t see anything but their hungry face. Looking at you.

“Do you feel that way ever? When you feel something very strongly, you always suppose other people must have felt the same way, but do you know what? I’m thirty-eight years old, tomorrow I’ll be thirty-nine, and I still wonder if that’s so. Whether anyone ever feels the same way.

“Oh! Oh, the funniest thing, I have to tell you. This morning when I was on the can, Miss What’s-It comes in, the nice one, and very matter-of-fact as though it were my office or something she asks did I want a chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake? For my birthday! A chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake? Because, you see, they had to order it today. God, I laughed. I thought I’d fall off the stool I laughed so hard. ‘A chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake. Which will it be, Lottie?’

“Chocolate, I told her, and I was very serious about it too, believe me. It had to be chocolate. Nothing else would do.”

“I’ve thought about it. For years. I don’t talk about it because I don’t think it’s something you can discuss. Once. Once I met a lady in the park, that was a long time ago. We talked about it but I don’t think that either of us … Not then. Once you’re serious, it isn’t something you care to talk about.

“Here it’s a different situation. I know. I don’t mind discussing it with you. It’s your job and you have to do it. But with my family, you see, that’s a different matter. They’d try to argue against it but only because they felt they ought to. And I understand that. I was the same myself. I can remember visiting my father when he was in the hospital—that would be Twenty-twenty or twenty-one, in there, and talking away at him a mile a minute. Lord. But could I look him in the eye? Not for a moment! I kept showing him photographs, as though … But even then I knew what he must have been thinking. What I didn’t know was that it can all seem so possible.

“But I suppose you’ll need better reasons than that for the form you’re filling out. Well, just put down cancer. You must have a copy of my medical report. I’ve been cut open just once, to have my appendix taken out, and that was enough. The doctors explained to me what I can expect and that my chances are better than fifty-fifty and I believe them. It’s not the risk I’m afraid of. That would be silly, wouldn’t it?

“What I am afraid of is turning into some kind of old vegetable. There’s so many like that where I am now. Some of them are just completely … I stare at them sometimes. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself.

“And they don’t realize. They don’t have any idea. There’s one of them who’s gone like that just in the time I’ve been there. He used to spend every day off somewhere, independent wasn’t the word for it, and then—a stroke. And now he can’t control himself. They wheel him out on the porch with all the rest of us, and suddenly you hear him in his tin pot, tinkle tinkle tinkle. Oh, you have to laugh.

“Then you think, that could be me. I don’t mean to say that pissing is so important. But the mental change! Old pisspot used to be such a sharp bastard, crusty, full of fight. But now? I don’t care if I wet my bed but I don’t want my brains to go soft.

“The attendants are always joking about this one or that one. It’s not malicious, really. Sometimes I have to laugh myself at what they say. And then I think. After my operation
I
might be the one they’re making jokes about. And then it would be too late. You can see that in their eyes sometimes. The fact that they’ve let their chance slip by, and that they know it.

“After a certain point you ask yourself why. Why go on? Why bother? For what reason? I guess it’s when you stop enjoying things. The day-to-day things. It’s not as though there’s all that much to enjoy. Not there. The food? Eating is a chore for me now, like putting on my shoes. I do it. That’s all. Or the people? Well, I talk to them, they talk to me, but does anyone listen? You—do you listen? Huh? And when you talk, who listens to you? And how much are they paid?

“What was I talking about? Oh, friendship. Well, I’ve expressed my thoughts on that subject. So, what’s left? What is left? Teevee. I used to watch teevee a lot. Maybe if I had my own set again, and my own private room, maybe I could gradually just forget about everything else. But sitting there in that room at Terminal Clinic—that’s our name for it—with the others all sneezing and jabbering and I don’t know what, I can’t connect with the screen. I can’t make it take me over.

“And that’s it. That’s my life, and I say, who needs it? Oh, I forgot to mention baths. Twice a week I get a nice warm bath for fifteen minutes and I love it. Also, when I sleep I enjoy that. I sleep about four hours a night. It’s not enough.

“I’ve made sense, haven’t I? I’ve been rational? Before I came here I made a list of the things I meant to say, and now I’ve said them. They’re all good reasons, every one of them. I checked them in your little book. Have I left any out?