The Fire Artist

"The Fire Artist"
by Seth Pevey


         "So tell me, young man," began the figure across the table as he clicked on a recorder, "why it is you're in here."
         "Me?" I stall. I don't want to answer him. I'm busy thinking about how the walls of this room, the man's scrubs, the fluorescent lights – how they are all the same shade of light gray and I'm wondering if that's a coincidence.          
The man clears his throat and asks me again if I know why I'm here.
         I remember thinking that fire is always more dangerous when it's trapped, but I don't tell him this.
         "I was tired, and I never want to be again," I told him.
         
I just got tired one day. There was nowhere in that dorm – not one spot of wall – but had some curse, slur, or lewd sketch scrawled on it. You'd be on the can reading the paper, maybe thinking about how nice it is to be alone sometimes or about a woman you love and maybe even the scent you caught on the wind that morning and wondering just where did it carry you off to, when from behind your paper the words "LiCk mY BalZ -Tdog" would grab at your eye.
         The image of a scrotum butting in, biting at all the love inside you.
         It would steal everything, usurp your soul for a moment, make you feel dirty and tired when all you wanted was to be pure and alone for a while.
         Every day some asshole like T-dog is suddenly pissing on my fire.
         
"Fuckers," was all I said to the psychologist across the desk, in my mind the words bouncing off the cheap enamel tiles of a communal bathroom.




School was a technical college in a town of five thousand. It was all that I could become one day, an interstate exit to paradise.
"What a shithole," I had said that day in the bathroom, grimacing as I wiped with the Hon. Reverend Billy Graham's daily column.

"Do you remember what happened son, in the stairwell?" the psychologist said to me with this really contemptible look. He isn't here really talking to me, though. He is looking down on me from wherever God must live, deciding what's crazy and what's not.
"They didn't have to call the cops," I tell him, ”but they did”.
         
What I drew on the wall last night in the dorms was not a threat to anyone. It was a defense. Everywhere life is like that. If you let them for one second think they can make you tired, or get a foothold in your thoughts, then they win. They never stop trying your whole life. No recess if you run; take your Ridalin if you’re wild; detention for speaking out of turn; kiss your boss's ass; and now this pissant psychologist dissecting your soul. I had kept my fire this long, it was all I had. I wasn’t going to let guys like T-dog stop it now, and that’s why I’m here.
That’s why this morning, when the janitor found me asleep beside two empty jars of catsup and mustard I’d stolen from the communal kitchen, and a mural of beautiful condiment flames smeared into the wall and curling up 4 stories of previously graffitied stairwell, he called the cops.
My flame art, a bomb threat? My soul exposed, some petty thing about secular violence.
Like I said, they all want to piss on your fire.




The chain of slurs I threw at the psychologist next was sufficient to bring an end to the interview.
Afterwards I heard him whisper something about “a cute man ia” into his recorder.
“I knew you were sweet on me you homo,” I yelled at him from the other room, laughing loudly.

With that, the nurse brought me some pills and put me to bed.

That night as I lay in the ward with a million drugs beating through my lonely heart, I had a dream. I dreamt that as I lay under a starry field my body was consumed by a fire as bright and hot as the summer sun - and yet I would not burn. Instead the fire roared on, and all the demons and angels of my soul were dancing round me in a circle to the wild and free rhythm of their passions.

They never once got tired.