When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,67
the monkeys, he said that the country was lousy with them. “I was with my driver one day, and we passed by this tree that homed over two hundred of them. Baboons, I think they were, and I’ll always remember how they swarmed our car, banging on the doors and begging for peanuts.” A man with a cardboard sign approached, and Mr. Davis waved him away. “Another problem with India is the heat. The last time I was there, the temperature hit one hundred and fifty degrees, saw it on the thermometer with my own eyes. Had myself an appointment with some swamis, but come time to leave the hotel, I said, ‘That’s it. No meeting for me today.’ I’m telling you, it felt like I was burning alive.”
I couldn’t have dreamt for a better in. “Speaking of burning alive, there was this retired man living in Vermont, see, and his home was overrun with mice . . .”
When I had finished, Mr. Davis met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Now, you,” he said, “are just a liar.”
“No,” I told him. “The story is true. I read it in the newspaper.”
“Newspaper or not, it’s a load of b.s., and I will tell you why: Isn’t no way that a mouse could cover all that distance without his flames going out. The wind would have snuffed them.”
“Well, what about that girl in Vietnam?” I asked. “The one in the famous picture who’s just been hit with napalm or whatever and is running down the road with no clothes on? I don’t see the wind doing her any favors, and she just had skin, not flammable fur.”
“Well, that was a dark period in our nation’s history,” Mr. Davis said.
“But isn’t this a dark period?” I asked this question just as we entered the Holland Tunnel. The din of canned traffic made it impossible to talk, and so I sat back and tried to get a handle on my growing anger. Since when do politics affect a mammal’s ability to sustain a flame? That aside, who says a burning mouse can’t run a distance of twelve feet? What made this guy an authority? His fingernails? His jewelry?
What really smarted was being called a liar, and so matter-of-factly. This from someone who’d reduced the Chinese to a bunch of people eating rice from bowls. Then there was the bit about the baboons. I’d heard of them attacking people for fruit, but doing it for peanuts seemed an idea he’d picked up from the circus. I didn’t believe for one moment that he was really at the World Trade Center on September 11, and as for the 150-degree heat, I’m pretty sure that at that temperature your head would just explode. All this, and I was the liar? Me?
Leaving the tunnel was like being freed from a clogged drain. We were moving now, around a bend and up onto an elevated highway. Below us sat storage tanks resembling dirty aspirin, and as I wondered what they were used for, Mr. Davis pulled out his cell phone and proceeded to talk until we reached our exit. “That was my wife,” he said after hanging up, and I thought, Right. The woman you’re married to. I bet he’s really something.
After New Jersey, I went to Connecticut, and then to Indiana. On and on for thirty-five days. I returned to my apartment in early May, and after closing the door behind me, I asked Hugh to go on the Internet and search for the world’s highest recorded temperature. He took a seat before his computer, and I stood at his side with my fingers crossed. Don’t be 150, don’t be 150, don’t be 150.
Later that day, among my receipts, I found Mr. Davis’s business card. Someone needed to tell him that the hottest it’s ever been is 136, and so I wrote him a short note, adding that the record was set in Libya, not India, and in the year 1922. Before you were born, the subtext read. Before you could so casually call someone a liar.
I thought I would send him the news clipping as well, and it was here that my triumph lost its luster. “Mouse gets revenge: sets home ablaze,” the headline read, and then I noticed the letters “AP,” and saw that while the story had been published in Vermont, it had actually taken place in New Mexico, which sort of ruined everything. Now, instead of a white, wood-frame house, I saw a