Andrea Avery

You Build It, We Burn It

Content Warning: Please note that this essay contains themes of domestic abuse and stalking that may be upsetting to some readers. 

Author’s Statement: In this essay, I (the author) have taken, without asking, the first-person point of view of another person who took from me, for a time at least and maybe forever, my sense of safety in the world. This feels to me like a fair exchange.

You think of me when you see new houses going up. You and your husband live in that part of town now, against the mountain, where those fires happened twenty-two years ago. You and I were in grad school together then. I was getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to frame houses in the West Valley while you stayed in your little bed with your cat, feeling grown for being with me, the tattooed, tight-lipped scholar-laborer with fifteen years on you. 

You thought of me in 2018, when you saw a police sketch of a man they wanted for shooting a psychiatrist, a psychologist and two paralegals. It was fallout from a messy divorce, police supposed, connecting the shootings. In the sketch they showed on the TV news—in the suspect’s grimace, the set of his jaw, his dull eyes—you saw me. You hadn’t seen me in person in more than fifteen years, but you figured I’d be fifty-six and likely to have gone jowly. You knew I was divorced or getting there. The hat in the sketch looked like something I’d wear and you knew, too, how I wore my rage. You knew how I looked coming through a doorway, slack-armed and shouting. A gun wasn’t hard to picture, though you’d always thought I’d use a hammer.

* * *

When we met, you drew stars around my name in that journal you lugged around. We saw each other everywhere. We were in the same program at school, with the same teachers and friends, and adjacent offices, but you were twenty-three so it was kismet. Kismet, even though the bar you haunted was around the corner from my house. Once, stepping onto a curb in the rain, head ducked and rushing, you nearly collided with me on my ember-orange mountain bike, your forehead grazing my flannelled chest. I jutted my chin and sized you up and went hey and that’s all it took. It was October and I had a girlfriend. You laughed at her at that party when she came up to where you and I were sitting away from everyone, drunk and mad that they wouldn’t play any Skynyrd and running her crazy eyes over the space between your right and my left. 

That fall, the famous year 2000, the Phoenix Mountains Preserve arsonist was leaving notes on construction signs near his fires, in squared-off all-caps, in red pen, warning against attempts to rebuild. We are not yet done, he wrote. The arsonist loved to write. He left notes at the fires and sent taunting letters to the media. In like a ghost, out like a ghost, he wrote. Happy hunting. The first fire and the second, that October, had hit the same house, a gleaming ten-thousand-square-foot, $2.5 million construction up against the mountain preserve. The first fire raged just days before the drywall was installed. The arsonist liked best to burn things when they were new and fragrant, just so many blonde sticks, a house almost but not yet a home. Between the first and second fires, the homeowner built a fence and hired a guard, but it didn’t do any good. Then another house a mile east, this one undergoing renovations, went up. Police had nothing but the arsonist’s MO: Build, burn. Build, burn. 

By November, you were my girlfriend. I had a story out in a literary magazine. It wasn’t your kind of story. I’d been giving you the books I loved, Vintage Contemporary paperbacks full of domestic brutality. My story was like those stories. I wrote grimy kitchens and smoky tool sheds, fat lips and black eyes. I wrote in blocky, plain-faced sentences, where you wanted smoked-glass prose, snowy epiphanies. I told you that there was this whole thing, and there’s more to it but bottom line I threw a bike through my ex’s window so I had to do this state-mandated anger-management course for men but it gave me an idea that I turned into the fiction on your lap there and that was impressive to you because you were twenty-three and no one had published anything of yours then.  

You didn’t write any of that down in your blue spiral-bound journal with gold stars on the cover that you kept in the bookcase under your front window. You wrote that I was all the right thicknesses, all the right temperatures. When you wrote about the age thing, you wrote: We both ride bikes to school and own minimal furniture and read books and write stories. Once, you asked me, wide-eyed, if I was really born during the Kennedy administration, but then we turned our attention back to Florida and hanging chad and an electoral college we’d both ignored our whole incongruous lives. 

At Thanksgiving, I made pie crust from scratch. You never knew you were looking for a man who knew his way around a rolling pin until you watched me shopping for lard. We weren’t fucking, and you were in no hurry to. You liked me best clothed, in Carhartt pants and steel-toed boots and thermals and flannels and a hat, a courier bag slung across my solid body, a book in my hand. Out of clothes I was pinker and grayer than you wanted me to be. You loved the diner food I fixed you—spaghetti, coffee, egg-in-a-hole—and the kick of driving to pay utility bills in person. It wasn’t the choler of an older man that thrilled you but the melancholy of an old man. 

In December, there were four more fires and I cooled on you. I still fed your cat when you went home for Christmas like I said I would, but when you called I told you I’d thrown him into traffic. I went, your cat sucks, throw him out and get a new one. In January, back at school, I turned thirty-nine and I told you I wanted to take a break. You took it hard, even though I was doing the right thing. I never did that with the girl before you, I reminded you. I just stopped with her and started with you. That’s how much I respected you, I said. I said, let’s talk in a week and see. 

But forty-eight hours, five beers, and one Jack and Coke later, you’d decided that wasn’t necessary and you told me so. We hung out sometimes after that. I helped you move into a studio apartment. You didn’t make a point of telling me your plans to spend all of January and half of February drinking and kissing boys but that’s what you did—their names are all over your journal, Jordan and Peter and Sean and CC and René and Michael and Adam—even after I left What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on your desk at school, with a note inside. You taped the note into your journal, but you also made me part of your shtick at the bar, worrying a straw-stirrer between your teeth, chewing at your lipsticked mouth: Buy me a drink, I just broke up with a middle-aged eco-terrorist, you went, because by then the alt-weekly had done a cloaked exclusive with the Phoenix Mountains Preserve arsonist and most of the details didn’t fit but there was the biking, the construction sites, the scorn for rich people, the notes and letters to the press (he’s such a writer!).

You didn’t think I was the arsonist, not really, but this was a good bit for you, it got you a series of dates with a sushi-restaurant manager in glasses and that’s where I found you on the thriteenth of February, at a cozy back table in the bar in my neighborhood, two days after I’d suggested that you and I get married. I asked you what the hell was going on here and you could have just answered but you got mouthy instead, saying it was none of my business. Leave me alone, you went. Will you please leave me alone please. But as I saw it we were due for a serious talk. As I saw it, my business with you was THAT’S IT THEN? IT’S OVER THEN? ALL OF IT? I CAN’T BELIEVE I EVER CARED ABOUT YOU and my business with your Mr. Glasses was making sure he knew not to COME A FUCKING INCH CLOSER OR LOOK OUT and also that he knew was out with A LYING PIECE OF SHIT A FUCKING BITCH A LYING BITCH A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT A WORTHLESS LYING SACK OF SHIT A BITCH. 

You went outside and I kept yelling, and then people you didn’t know came out of the bar and told you to leave, that I didn’t look right. He’s not in the right frame of mind they said, his eyes look crazy. You didn’t go home after the bouncer kicked me out, you went to a restaurant but then you got afraid I was going to go to your apartment and hurt your cat like I’d said. In the car, Mr. Glasses told you he just wanted to be friends after all, which did not surprise you. But then he was a good friend to you, which did surprise you. He took you back to your dark apartment and he called a cop friend for advice, who said Tempe police don’t really take this sort of thing that seriously. Mr. Glasses sat up with you and your cat for a while, drinking beers I’d left in your fridge, until you were pretty sure I wasn’t coming for you.

I came for you at eight the next morning, pounding on your door until you opened it to make the pounding stop and you looked like shit. I stuck my booted foot into the door so you couldn’t shut it on me, so you’d have to answer my simple question but you didn’t answer, no matter how many times I asked: why did you do this to me? Later that morning, even after I called you to apologize, you wouldn’t answer me when I asked you what I could do to make your day easier or better, could I drive you to school? All you would say is never come near me ever ever again. And a few days later I found you in the computer lab at school and I brought you a sandwich from Sacks with extra mayo/no lettuce/extra cucumbers, but you said nothing, even though I slipped in a real sweet poem Ray Carver wrote for Tess and at the bottom I wrote Someday? in my pinched handwriting. 

You must not have been that scared, though, because you kept going to that same bar just down the street from my house. In March, a drunk girl from your class, someone I’d called a dope, cornered you by the bathroom and asked if you and I were done. You told her everything, you used words like terrifying and monster and you pointed to the table where three weeks earlier I’d shouted at you until they made me leave. Well, I think he’s cute, she went. Good fucking luck, you thought, or said. She deserves what she gets, you thought, when you heard she’d sent me an email asking how does one go about corrupting a twenty-two-year-old?

I was still sending you messages then, like one that said Well, I think about you. You workshopped my note in that fucking journal of yours. You called my nice note prose-y and artificial on account of that well and the comma. We weren’t seeing each other anymore—I was with the Dope then—but I was everywhere alone: at Starbucks with my orange bike, in the parking lot at Gold Bar when you were there studying, at school on a Sunday, leaving Rosita’s plaza by your place. It didn’t feel like kismet anymore. You met another guy at my bar, a biggish guy in dark jeans and black T-shirts. When you came home to find a brick through the window of your car, he waited with you for the police, smoking cigarettes on the hood of his black Volkswagen GTI. They dusted the top of your car with a little fanned brush but they told you not to expect much. These things happen, they said. 

By summer, you and Mr. GTI were in love, I was on my way to marrying the Dope, and the arsonist—a fifty-year-old marketing nerd, not an ecoterrorist and not, after all, me—was in jail. 

* * *

A few years later, it was probably 2005 or so, you were on campus. You moved through those hallways where we met, where we had our next-door offices, where I found you in the lab that day with a sandwich and a poem. You’d gone through your old journals and adjudicated your own behavior in the margins. GUILTY, you wrote, over and over in the margins. GUILTY: you lied to me about all those other guys. GUILTY: you didn’t care about me, GUILTY: you were bored with me. GUILTY: you were kissing and groping someone else while my muscles ached from moving your shit. You had a cubicle job in marketing and business cards, all of which made our beery school life a quaint and remote fascination for you. You saw my name on a private office and so you jotted a friendly note on one of your business cards—it’s so much water under the bridge, you thought—and stuck it in my closed door. You can’t have been surprised at my silence. Married or not, you’d told me never come near me ever ever again.

* * *

In 2016, the arsonist was released from prison and you sold a memoir. A few months later, I surprised you on Facebook with a hey. You were quick to reply with hey there how have you been? I congratulated you on your book and you asked about my writing and I said I was back at it after a long break. I told you I was ten years into a being an honest-to-goodness Professor of English and you said were ten-years into a teaching career then, too, even though you’d taken that detour into the cubicles and marketing and the business cards. I told you my little daughter was my best friend and my world and you said I’m glad to hear you love being her father. You asked if I’d ever gotten that note in my door and I said that was a long time ago and I’m very sorry we had such a bad falling out way back. Sorry.

You seemed happy to hear from me. I told you I’d had cancer and you asked if I was okay now. I told you me and the Dope were separated—long story but we argued and things went bad—and you asked if I was taking care of myself during this rough patch of road, you called it. 

Are you okay, though? you asked.

No, I’m not.

I had a hunch.

The separation and fallout has been devastating.

You were older than I was when we were together, but you still met my devastation with jokes. Have you considered writing a memoir, you wrote, with a winky face. I was honest with you (I think I always was). I have anger issues, I wrote. (You with the jokes again: I feel like maybe I already knew about your issues with anger?) Yeah sorry.

If this was a rough patch of road I was on, you were out there with a box blade. I would want you to be not miserable and to know what to do with anger so you don’t hurt yourself or anyone. I just don’t want you to be unhappy, you wrote. How was I supposed to take that?

No one’s getting physically hurt, I assured you. I was being hurt myself, I wanted you to know, by her behavior and actions. I’m working through, I wrote, her internet and app activity before and after separation.

But I’m going to buy your book! I wrote. And I asked you about you: Married? (Twelve years.) Are you happy in your marriage? (Absolutely.) Nice to be in touch with you, I wrote, it’s been a long time. I think about you sometimes. (With rage? you asked. No, not at all.)

Yes, you thought in the hours after our chat ended. How nice to be so nice, after all. How nice to have such friendly resolution. I thought too, in those next hours, and wrote you again: 

So, you wrote.

Okay.

I’ve had sexual fantasies about you.

I said it.

I am not comfortable with your telling me that.

Sorry.

I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.

You didn’t reply so I came back the next day. No door-pounding, no yelling, no boot in the door this time, just fingers on keys, just I am very sorry for my comments yesterday. Very inappropriate. I’ve been going through a bad time and I’ve projected onto others. That’s not an excuse but an explanation.

Blocked. One or two keystrokes and that’s the last of him for good, you thought. You saved screenshots, you know, just in case. You didn’t think much more about me then, though you did take down those books I gave you and read for a bit that night. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a book by my hero, a man terrorizes a woman and her new husband and then makes a mess of killing himself. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the main thing. You puzzled over a couple of emphatic ballpoint lines in the margin next to I even called the police at one point, but they were no help. They said they couldn’t do anything until Ed actually did something. Isn’t that a laugh? Is that your marginalia or mine, you wondered. Anyway, it’s a funny book to leave on a girl’s desk. 

* * *

It was the next summer when you saw the police sketch of the disgruntled divorcé on a shooting spree and you saw in him my thick neck and baggy eyes and slab ears. It wasn’t funny like the arsonist all those years ago. This guy had destroyed people, not rich people’s houses, and this time you actually thought it might be me. You called Crime Stoppers, your voice small in your throat. But a few days later, as the police closed in on the shooter, he killed himself in a Scottsdale hotel room and you saw on the news that he was a Black guy—my age, I’ll give you that—but not me at all. 

The killer’s ex-wife, a doctor, described him in interviews as her personal terrorist. In the nine years since he’d threatened to kill her and she’d divorced him, she’d never relaxed. Fear of him became part of her personality, she said. She drove different routes to work to make herself less easy to find. She hired a private detective, who she then married. There were safe houses and attack dogs. The killer didn’t get her, but he killed almost everyone associated with the end of their marriage, as if to gird her with death before coming for her. As for the twenty-two-year-old Army man she’d met and married at eighteen, she decided he’d only ever been pretending to be a good man.

The arsonist’s wife divorced him halfway through his sentence. When he was released he came back to Phoenix intent on redemption. He became a chaplain through an outfit called Men Coaching Men. Now, he ministers to the homeless in the park, brings them socks and granola bars and the word of God. He’s free to hike the trails he haunted.

* * *

One of the last houses the arsonist burned is just up the street from your house. In the fall and winter, when it’s cool and the air is chimney-cozy, you walk up that hill sometimes to the mountain, if you’re sure you can make it up and back before dark. You have a million unspecific reasons not to walk alone at night, but if someone sat you down and asked you to draw a picture of what you’re afraid of, you’d draw me. 

You’d draw the way I looked that morning twenty-two years ago, my boot in your door. The morning you learned that fear is a pit a man can push you into, if he wants. That sometimes he’ll act like he’s offering to pull you up out of that hole but his notes and his books and his sandwiches and his apologies and his secondhand poems feel like his boots on your fingers scrabbling at the lip. 

You didn’t marry a man of letters like you once thought you might, you married a man of locks. Your husband can be a grouch—you have a type—but you’ve never once been afraid of him. He has outfitted your big pretty house by the mountain with the highest-quality locks and alarms. But even he reminds you that locks are a suggestion at best. If someone wants in, he says. 

But you know how that sentence ends. I taught you. That even if you dig yourself out of the hole and erect a structure to keep yourself safe, no wall, especially not one made of as flimsy a material as words—not please leave me alone or I’m absolutely happy in my marriage—will keep us out if we want in. That the best you can hope for is that we decide to pound on some other door. 

You owe the Dope a thank-you. You’re not sure what I would have done if she hadn’t volunteered to be corrupted, and you’re not sure if you, at twenty-three, would have stuck to your guns if I’d kept my focus on you. She let you forget that you were afraid of me. 

By the time the towers came down, just a year after our romance began, I was in deep with the Dope and you’d stuck a few snapshots of me inside the books I gave you and put them on your shelf. You moved those books three times before you shelved them in the house where you live now, your forever home. You took them down after I messaged you on Facebook and again, years later, as you started to write about me. In the margin of one page, in mannish print, it says He was like a hand that came into my life and lifted me off the stove long enough for my teapot to stop whaling, but he always left again, and the hand always laid me back on the grill. It’s wailing, you think. And: Was it a stove or a grill? If he was the hand, how did the hand do anything after he’d left? You don’t know who wrote this mess, if it’s a true thing about me that you ignored or one of my aborted fictions or if it was in the book and I bought it used and passed it off to you. 

On the cover of one book is a watercolor is a girl in a nightgown tapping her cigarette into an ashtray on an unmade bed, a stack of pages unfolded before her. On the other book it’s a man in a hard hat and flannel smoking a cigarette in a kitchen—lunch pail, work gloves, aluminum percolator—and it brings back that year a lifetime ago when the arsonist was torching new builds and you were seeing me everywhere. Of course, you think. The best time to burn it down is when it’s only just getting off the ground. 

You think of me when you see a man perched on the lattice of a stick-framed house, pounding nails into the spindly softwood. Some people forget that houses—the one you live in, even, its walls sclerotic with drywall and stucco and time and a life’s accumulation of things—are made this way. Are this fragile inside. But you can’t forget. Even a grand old house, you know, can never forget that it’s made of kindling.