When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,14
and find her sitting on my bed or standing like a zombie behind my door.
“You scared me,” I’d say, and she’d stare into my face until I turned away.
The situation at Rosemary’s sank to a new low when Chaz lost his job. “I was overqualified,” he told me, but, as the days passed, his story became more elaborate, and he felt an ever-increasing urge to share it with me. He started knocking more often, not caring that it was 6:00 a.m. or well after midnight. “And another thing . . . ,” he’d say, stringing together ten separate conversations. He got into a fight that left him with a black eye. He threw his radio out the window and then scattered the broken pieces throughout the parking lot.
Late one evening he came to my door, and when I opened it he grabbed me around the waist and lifted me off the floor. This might sound innocent, but his was not a celebratory gesture. We hadn’t won a game or been granted a stay of execution, and carefree people don’t call you a “hand puppet of the Dark Lord” when they pick you up without your consent. I knew then that there was something seriously wrong with the guy, but I couldn’t put a name to it. I guess I thought that Chaz was too good-looking to be crazy.
When he started slipping notes under my door, I decided it was time to update my thinking. “Now I’m going to die and come back on the same day,” one of them read. It wasn’t just the messages, but the writing itself that spooked me, the letters all jittery and butting up against one another. Some of his notes included diagrams, and flames rendered in red ink. When he started leaving them for Rosemary, she called him down to the parlor and told him he had to leave. For a minute or two, he seemed to take it well, but then he thought better of it and threatened to return as a vapor.
“Did he say ‘viper’?” Sister Sykes asked.
Chaz’s parents came a week later and asked if any of us had seen him. “He’s schizophrenic, you see, and sometimes he goes off his medication.”
I’d thought that Rosemary would be sympathetic, but she was sick to death of mental illness, just as she was sick of old people, and of having to take in boarders to make ends meet. “If he was screwy, you should have told me before he moved in,” she said to Chaz’s father. “I can’t have people like that running through my house. What with these antiques, it’s just not safe.” The man’s eyes wandered around the parlor, and through them I saw what he did: a dirty room full of junk. It had never been anything more than that, but for some reason — the heat, maybe, or the couple’s heavy, almost contagious sense of despair — every gouge and smudge jumped violently into focus. More depressing still was the thought that I belonged here, that I fit in.
For years the university had been trying to buy Rosemary’s property. Representatives would come to the door, and her accounts of these meetings seemed torn from a late-night movie. “So I said to him, ‘But don’t you see? This isn’t just a house. It’s my home, sir. My home.’”
They didn’t want the building, of course, but the land. With every passing semester, it became more valuable, and she was smart to hold out for as long as she did. I don’t know what the final offer was, but Rosemary accepted it. She signed the papers with a vintage fountain pen and was still holding it when she came to give me the news. This was in August, and I was lying on my floor, making a sweat angel. A part of me was sad that the house was being sold, but another, bigger part — the part that loved air-conditioning — was more than ready to move on. It was pretty clear that as far as the restaurant was concerned, I was never going to advance beyond dishwashing. Then, too, it was hard to live in a college town and not go to college. The students I saw out my window were a constant reminder that I was just spinning my wheels, and I was beginning to imagine how I would feel in another ten years, when they started looking like kids to me.