The origins of Fire were small. A spark flashed to a dead, dry spot of the house. Rats had eaten through the insulation on a wire. The wire had been laid by a tired electrician forty years before. A wealthy, corrupt politician had built the house for his wealthy, corrupt family. The politician had bought the lot from a corrupt real estate agent. Probably, some Indians had been killed on that spot by the French or Americans.

Fire was both pure and malevolent. Its sole purpose was destruction. The great nihilist. As it leapt from the curtains to the couch it let out a delighted cackle. A husband and wife slowly asphyxiated in their sleep (remember to change the batteries in your smoke detector every six months). Their brains created panicked dreams, not quite nightmares, but more vivid than the normal, blurry absurdities of sleep. It was the brain's courtesy to the person who had sustained it for so long, providing a last moment of illusory reality.

In the far back room, a baby cried, robbing Fire of its glee. Fire wasn't a complete asshole, after all. But a job is a job, a function a function. Fire kept on burning, transmogrifying all creation to ash. Everyone in the neighborhood slept soundly. No cars rode past. The fire department wouldn't be called for another 20 minutes. Fire sensed that it had time. It relished each board, each table, every fiber in the carpet. It wished sadly that it could be sated.

The front door flew in, hinges ripped from the damaged wall. It fell into the middle of the floor, and smoke billowed out of the new opening, sending a nearly invisible column into the night sky. Busker stepped into the room, oblivious to any danger.

Fire was furious at the incursion. It roared up hotter on the walls, and dripped menacingly from the ceiling. It sent a smoldering finger towards the boy, but it dispersed a few feet from him.

Busker walked farther into the room. A bubble seemed to surround him. Each time Fire tried to strike, the flames exploded into a shower of sparks before they reached the boy. Busker stopped, and looked for a moment at his feet, as if listening. His head snapped up, and he glared at a spot burning brightly to his left. Fire shuddered. For all its destructive power, it could comprehend nothing as menacing as the dark burning inside this boy. It was like every fire that had ever existed, the very stars and the sun, were alight behind the dark and angry eyes.

There were no more obstacles to his progress. Busker walked calmly to the back of the house, scooped the baby, suddenly silent, out of her crib, and took her out of the house. Fire simmered patiently until the two were gone.

Death stood in a corner and watched with interest. He directed an understanding chuckle at Fire.

Outside, Busker spread out the baby's blanket, a safe distance from the house, and set her in the middle. A firefighter would find her fifteen minutes later. Her aunt would adopt her. She would become President of the United States, and create new fire safety legislation. The number of fire deaths would be cut by 95% in just five years.

No one but Death ever knew how she got out of the house.

*****

An old man walked down the streetcar tracks carrying a large sign above him warning of the coming apocalypse. In bright red letters it recommended repentance, and declared as damned a varied group of sinners. Drivers honked as they passed by. A carload of teens rolled down their windows to taunt the man. Their car exploded three miles away. Only one of them died.

Busker sat on a trashcan by the streetcar stop at State Street, kicking his feet at nothing in particular, waiting for the sun to set. Elongated shadows played across open spaces, full of mirth like the twisted reflection of a child in a funhouse mirror. Look how tall I am, said a tree. Have you lost weight? asked another. I don't know, do you really think so? The tree rustled its branches bashfully, and the school bus yellow sun sent shifting shafts of light through the leaves, through the misty air. The wise old oak across the street watched the dance of light and dark.

“Repent now,” said the old man as he approached the streetcar stop. His lips were dried and cracked, but the rest of his face was soft wrinkles. Bushy eyebrows stood straight out, like two tiny Mohawks. A single nosehair had escaped trimming and hung distractingly from his left nostril.

“Sure thing.”

The old man was taken aback. No one had ever acquiesced. “You know about hell, boy?”

“This isn't it?”

“Don't talk smart with me.”

“Hardly.”

“Where do you live, boy?”

“Wherever suits me for the night.”

“Homeless, eh? You need dinner?”

“I already ate.”

“Blessed are the poor.”

“I'm not poor.”

Busker hopped off the trashcan, picked up a backpack, and began to walk away. A car honked three times at the old man and his placard. Busker encountered an empty Diet Coke can, which he began kicking down the streetcar tracks. The loose dirt billowed up with each kick. The can left small craters with each impact, erased by the dragging of his feet.

The sign fell to a 45-degree angle as the old man hastened to catch up. “There's a library up the street.”

“Yeah, the one in the old house.”

They reached another streetcar stop. Six people waited for a ride. Two of them were talking about the stock market. Busker deftly snatched their wallets, removed all but one dollar (streetcar fare), and returned them, considerably lighter, to the men's back pockets. He never broke stride.

The streetcar breezed by a minute later. Both men swore they'd had more cash. Two withdrawals were made from an ATM downtown. It wasn't their bank, so they had to pay a two-dollar surcharge.

“Stealing is wrong.” The old man was still following him.

“So is cussing, but go fuck yourself.”

A gush of wind came from behind him, and Busker turned in time to block the sign as it fell towards his head. He drew his knife, flipped it open, and had it at the old man's throat in an instant. The old man smiled, lifted the sign, and stepped back slowly.

“You sure you don't need anything?” asked the man.

Busker looked back over his left shoulder, around the bend in the road. “I think I'll be alright.”

Dusk was falling. There was a random scream from a side street. A couple of joggers passed by on the other set of tracks, sucking in the humid air. Lights flipped on. Lights flipped off. Televisions flickered in nearly every home. A rerun of Friends was on. People wondered if they'd missed anything on the evening news.

The boy and the man stood facing each other, knife and sign clutched loosely as a faint memory of the moment before. Busker put away the knife and pulled a wad of bills from the same pocket, opened his backpack, and added them to the ten-thousand-plus dollars already inside. Not bad, for a week's work. From the front zipper, he produced a cigarette. He smoked one a day. Foul-smelling incense for a ceremony only he understood.

Quiet. The saints began murmuring in the old man's head. They spoke to him when it got quiet. No cars passed by. The birds had been struck mute. St. Jude expounded on the nature of loss, referencing both the Holocaust and the Cincinnati Bengals. Jude was a talker. The other saints listened with rapt attention. Jude paused, and for the first time in 50 years the old man experienced a moment of true silence. A saint, probably Jude, whispered a single word: library.

“So, about the library…”

“Yeah, I'll check it out.”

“God bless.”

“What if He doesn't exist?”

“Then I'll feel pretty dumb, having made this sign.”

*****

A tornado whips through the library, flattening the stacks and pulling books into the spiral. The tornado is silent, respecting the prayerful hush of the place. No one is injured, except for a few paper cuts. Painful, but not severe. The funnel pulls back into the clouds, and the winds weaken. Books hit the ground with an empty thud. Billy Budd is sucked up into the clouds, and gets incinerated by a bolt of lightning. Loose pages fall into a perfect stack, into a perfect composition. Only one person ever gets to read this perfect book compiled from the inadequacies of every other book in the library. The boy was the tornado. The boy is the perfect book. Two mirrors are required to read oneself. One last page to go. An epilogue that will prove more important than the climax.

The boy sat at the same table every day, surrounded by four or five books, reading from when the Latter Memorial Library opened until the librarians kicked him out at the end of the day. His brain soaked up the pages, savoring the secondhand experiences, making up for the limited scope of his own life. With each day he came closer to outgrowing the cage of his world. With each day he came closer to being able to escape it.

It was a cold winter morning, by the balmy standards of New Orleans, and the sun practically shivered in the sky. Through the old, thick windows it made the room seem to vibrate. The boy rocked back and forth with a slow, small motion. He was brushing up on his World War II history. Tank treads left serpentine tracks in the desert sands of North Africa until the wind renewed the dunes.

The room began shaking more violently. Words and phrases jumped from the pages of the books he'd read, grew until the letters were as tall as he was, and bounced around the room. He read the passage that formed in front of him, giant words dancing across his field of vision like a dark parody of Sesame Street, brought to you by the letter Q .

One part sugar, one part salt. That's the secret of McDonald's French fries.

He was snapped back to the standard edition world by the librarian shaking his shoulder. Are you alright, are you alright? Yeah, sorry. Good, you had me worried. Sorry about that. An awkward moment passed between them, a second in which a twelve-year-old boy was forced to become a man. You've been here every day for years, and I don't even know your name, the librarian observed.

He glanced at the book he had been reading. “I'm Rommel.”

It was the last word he would read in the library.

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Next: Divertissement 2 - Concert