Infinity Smashed: Ritual Purification Through Arson

[lb_lee]

Ritual Purification Through Arson

Prompt: ‘Fire’
Notes: This is the only revenge story I’ve ever written, and I listened to the Beach Boys album ‘Pet Sounds’ while writing it.  From now on, every time I hear saccharine sixties songs like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ and ‘Here Today,’ I’m going to think of arson.


I came to Biff’s apartment and found him gone.

This alone wasn’t unusual.  Biff kept odd hours, and mine were sometimes irregular too, so missing each other was inevitable.  Normally, I would’ve just shrugged and either waited up for him or darted back out his window, but this time, I paused.  Something was missing, and after a moment, I realized what: his spice rack.

Really, it wasn’t even a rack, just a duct-taped shoebox stuffed with shakers, but the way Biff acted, it was solid gold and invented the fork, and if you tried to touch it, he’d bite your head off.  The spice box was always on the counter, the place of honor, so he could reach it without moving from the stove.  And now it was gone.

It wasn’t the only thing missing, either.  The crooked shelves still held the usual jars of flour, sugar, oil, and beans, but the perishables were gone, and when I came inside to look around more thoroughly, so was his cooler.

For anyone else, this would’ve meant a forgotten grocery run, but Biff’s food was his entertainment center; he never ran out.  With a growing sense of foreboding, I went to the cantankerous old fridge.  It took a good couple yanks, but I finally succeeded in getting the door open.

The rusty thing was completely barren except for one large Tupperware container with a bit of paper resting on the lid.  I reached forward and took it, and caught the paper before it fell.

The Tupperware, it turned out, contained chili.  The front of the paper was a grocery receipt for bacon, beans, beer, and other normal Biff fuel, while the back was covered in scribble that took me a few seconds to recognize as actual handwriting.  With resignation, I sat down at the rickety folding chair to decipher Biff’s medical school penmanship and Cummings punctuation.   It took a while, but I finally managed to parse the whole thing:

Kid

Gone to Georgia Ill be back next week water my plans EVERY DAY

PS eat the chili

No explanation.  No return date.  Just an attempt to buy me off with home cooking.  For a moment, I muttered and fumed and ground my teeth and twisted the note between my fingers.

Then, like the patsy I was, I went to ransack his cabinets for something with which to water the basil, rosemary, and unknown Treehouse monstrosity growing in coffee cans on the fire escape—his ‘plans.’ No reason for the horticulture to suffer just because their owner was a jerk.

As I poured the water over the coffee cans, my aggravation gave way to growing unease.  Biff was a bit of a vagrant… but only in his own city, and Georgia was a good couple days’ trip by bus, at least.  A trip like that cost money, at least a few hundred dollars.  Biff had made some money lately, but not much, so what could possibly be so important that he’d drop everything and go all the way to Georgia?  There were only two things there of significance to him, and he hadn’t mentioned his family lately—

I froze.  The tequila bottle I was using as a watering can went empty, but I didn’t think to right it.

Oh no.

She was in Georgia.

I didn’t know her name; he never gave her one.  He always called her just she or her, like she was less a person and more an entity, an idea, a symbol.  If he’d intended to deface her into nothingness by refusing to give her a name or identity, it backfired royally.  Instead of just one person, she seemed like everyone you ever ran from.

And now he’d gone to Georgia.

Part of me hoped he knew what he was doing.  The other part worried what that might entail.

…

That was Monday.  For the next week or so, I darted back and forth to Biff’s apartment, watering his plants, giving quick furtive glances around, then scuttling out again.  Eight days passed.  Nine.  Ten.

I grew steadily more twitchy and irritable, until finally I got addled enough to ask Raige and Thomas over breakfast, “You guys haven’t happened to hear anything about Biff lately, have you?”

Raige raised his eyes from the top of his fantasy novel to give me a dubious look. “We don’t exactly run in the same social circles.”

“I know,” I said hastily. “I just meant… er.  On the news.  Or something.”

It went over as badly as it sounded.

“Oh god, what’s he done now?” Thomas groaned from behind the classifieds. “Wait, never mind, keep it to yourself.  I don’t want to be an accessory.”

“He hasn’t done anything,” I retorted, praying I was right. “He’s just… vanished for a week and a half now.”

Thomas and Raige were both giving me ‘this is surprising you why?’ looks now.

“I’m not concerned,” I hastened to add. “Just… ten days…”

Thomas and Raige let their reading materials fall slack and gave each other sardonic looks, then turned back to me with identical expressions of wide-eyed sincerity.

“What’s that?” Raige asked innocently. “You mean he just up and left without telling you where he was going and when he’d be back, except in the most general of terms?”

“You mean you have no idea what trouble he might be in, just that he probably is?” Thomas added.

“You mean you’re desperately worried about him but have absolutely no way to contact him because he didn’t seem to think you might actually want to know?” Raige continued sweetly.

Thomas rubbed his chin. “Remind you of anyone?”

Raige snapped his fingers. “It’s on the tip of my tongue, give me a second…”

“All right, all right, I get it,” I snapped, “this is karmic retribution for all the times I did the exact same thing to you.”

They burst into frenzied applause.

“Oh god,” Raige said, wiping away an invisible tear, “after all this time, you finally understand, I’m so proud to be your boyfriend right now…”

“Now all we have to do is teach her not to hang out with Biff, and we’re set,” Thomas agreed.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re both hilarious, stop clapping.  So you haven’t heard anything?”

“Nope,” Raige said, going back to his Mercedes Lackey, “and I’m going to say that’s a good thing.”

“I’ll ask Ma to keep an eye on the Most Wanted list,” Thomas retorted, pulling up the classifieds again. “I’ll let you know if he pops up.  But seriously, I meant it, don’t tell me what he’s doing.”

…

It was Thursday of the week Biff said he’d be coming back.  I darted in Biff’s window.  The spice box was still missing, and a layer of dust was starting to build up.  I sighed and picked up my old friend the tequila bottle.  It, at least, had proven reliable.

Biff’s sink hadn’t worked consistently in ages, and even when it functioned, the water that came out of it was an unappetizing rusty color.  All the water in the apartment tended to come from his shower—or rather, the section of severed garden hose haphazardly duct taped to the pipe sticking out of the wall. I went to it and gingerly nudged the tap; I’d learned from experience that the hose was fond of blasting.

Not so this time; nothing came out.  I twisted the tap harder, but still nothing.  I tilted my head back, stared at the mildewed ceiling, and sighed.  Great.  Looked like his pipes problem was perennial.

I had no idea what Biff usually did to fix his pipes, and even if I did, I was in no mood to enact it.  He already had me pulling gardening duty for a week and a half; he could dang well fix his own rusty pipes.

For a moment, I was tempted to leave the plants, but I still had no idea when Biff would be back.  ‘Next week’ was already almost up, and he hadn’t showed.  Finally, sympathy for the abandoned houseplants made up my mind, and I grudgingly pulled back the deadbolt and went to the creepy old lady across the hall.

Biff insisted the woman wasn’t his landlady, merely someone he shared a mutually beneficial business arrangement with, but from what I understood, she was the one who had gotten the place power and semi-reliable running water, and she was the one who had given him the room, so in my opinion, she was his landlady.  He just paid the rent in protective services, rather than in cash.  The most I’d seen of her was a long, pointy nose and glaring eyes, usually for only a couple seconds before the door slammed the rest of the way shut.

I knocked on the cracked, splintery door.  It opened a few inches, exposing the familiar nose and beady eyes.

“Whaddaya want?”

I held up the tequila bottle and smiled cheerfully. “Hi, I’m Biff’s chump lackey for the week, watering his poor forsaken houseplants.  His pipes have died, so—”

“I ain’t fixing no pipes till he’s back.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to.  I just want some water for the plants.”

She eyed me suspiciously, and for a moment, I thought she’d tell me to go away and bother someone else.  Then a bony, taloned hand reached through the crack in the door for the bottle.  I handed it to her, and she took it and shut the door in my face.  After a moment, it opened again and she passed the bottle back to me, filled.

“You that kid who hangs round here, makes that goddamn noise and racket all the time,” she said.  I couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question. “What, you his kid, girlfriend or something?”

“Er.” For a moment, I was tempted to say both, but I worried she might actually believe me. “Neither.  I’m his…” god, what were we to each other?  English failed me, and I just let it drift off.

“And you water his plants.” Again, statement or question?  Couldn’t say.

I shrugged.

She sniffed derisively. “He’ll be back Saturday night.  Now stop skittering round all the time.  You think I can’t hear you?  I ain’t deaf.  You worse than the rats.”

The door creaked shut again.  I stood there staring at the flaking paint, tequila bottle hanging from my hand.

Finally I shrieked, “He couldn’t have told me that before?”

Then I stormed off to water his godforsaken plants, muttering furiously under my breath.  When I got home, I was going to give Raige and Thomas both big hugs and profuse apologies.  They deserved to be canonized for all the times I’d done this to them in the past.
…

The downtown Vaygo Interstate Bus Service terminal was an interesting study on the futility of humanity’s battle against entropy.  At the best of times, the irregular arrivals, departures, and breakdowns of rattling buses threatened to destroy the management’s tenuous order; at the worst of times, it resembled a cross between a Chinese fire drill and the New York Stock Exchange on a hectic day.  I sat outside on a hard metal bench with graffiti scratched into the paint and watched bewildered people rush back and forth, but mostly I waited.  Raige had offered me a ride, but for all his sweetness and politeness, I knew that he didn’t enjoy spending any more time with Biff than necessary, and I didn’t want to torture him.  Nor did I want him to be around if Biff turned out to have done something highly illegal.

If he came back at all.  Which I was still uncertain about.

It’d been a long day.  A long week (and a half).  The jittery terminal board showed that the last bus from Atlanta was delayed yet again, and I didn’t have the currency to buy something to eat.  Despite myself, I started nodding off on the bench.  Back in Treehouse, it was five in the morning—early even by my standards, and I’d been up late with Raige and Thomas the night before.  My chin dropped to my chest.  My eyelids felt leaden.  I started to doze off.

“Hey.”

I jerked upright.  It was dark, and the terminal was almost deserted except for a couple bleary backpackers.  Biff stood in front of me with a sweatshirt tied around his waist and a ratty duffel bag slung over his shoulder.  His perpetual stubble had grown into a scruffy beard, and his clothes were rumpled from two days on a bus.  For the first time I’d ever seen him, he wasn’t broadcasting the subvocal criminal vibes; he just looked like an ordinary human being, and as tired as I felt.

“How long you been waiting there?” He asked.

I twisted my neck, which cracked. “Your stupid bus was late.”

“How you know which one was mine?”

“I didn’t.  There aren’t that many buses arriving from Atlanta on a Saturday night, so all I had to do was wait.” I stretched the kinks out of my back, then stood up, and we headed off towards the subway.  “I worried you wouldn’t come back.”

His mouth quirked skeptically. “You thought I’d stay in Georgia?”

“More specifically, its prison system, yes.  I know why you went back, Biff; I’m not a houseplant.”

He winced and lengthened his stride, but I kept pace. “You been watering mine?”

“Yeah, I treated them like they were my own leafy children, truly devoted.  You owe me way more than one Tupperware of chili for that, by the way.  But back on subject—”

My stomach chose that time to send up a gurgling wail of agony.  Biff jumped on the interruption happily. “You eaten?”

“No.  You want to talk about it?”

He looked away from me and kept walking, and I assumed he’d ignored me.  Then he said, “I ain’t eaten either.  After that…” he shrugged. “Okay.”
…

By the time we made it back to his apartment, the moon was high and the night time bar crowd was mostly staggering home, which made for an interesting time on the subway.  Biff shrugged on his usual body language armor of ‘I’ll break your arm if you look at me funny,’ which did its job, but he didn’t seem to be putting much heart into it.  Then again, after two days sleeping on a bus, I probably wouldn’t have much energy for anything either.

While we clung to overhead straps to stay upright between the drunks and the subway lurched its way back south, I tried to look Biff over without making it obvious I was doing it.  He wasn’t covered in blood or anything, and in fact, nothing seemed different about him except that underneath the smell of sweat and deodorant, I caught the odd tang of gasoline, which I assumed was from the bus.

No, the change was more in his posturing; he wasn’t doing it anymore.  He wasn’t trying his utmost to look or act like a tough guy, wasn’t dressed to display his muscle, wasn’t pulling his hair back to conceal how long it’d gotten.  He didn’t look like a thug; he just looked like a broke traveler.

But what made me most uneasy was his anger.  Usually, Biff constantly radiated a steaming, simmering rage that was always on the verge of boiling over, and I was pretty certain it was the only thing keeping him alive half the time.  Now it was gone, and that had never been a good sign in the past.

“You’re staring,” he told me without looking up. “Get some tact, kid.”

I grimaced (being caught was bad, getting chided for lack of subtlety by Biff of all people was worse) and stared at an ad requesting sperm donors for the rest of the trip.

We stopped across the street for a brief grocery run, where Biff snatched emergency supplies of eggs, milk, and produce.

“No ethanol?” I asked.

“Don’t need it,” he said as he dug cash out of his armband.

Groceries legally attained, we made our way up to his place.  Worn out from two days’ travel, Biff dropped his duffel and the grocery bag in the doorway, and shuffled straight for the shower, rubbing his lower back.

“Your pipes are out again,” I told him.

He halted.  He made a face.  Then he waved his hand derisively at it and moved for the couch instead. “Fuck it.  I’ll take care of it tomorrow, shower and shave then.  Another night won’t kill me.”

He flopped onto the couch with a sigh of relief.  After a couple nights of being stuck upright, I didn’t blame him.

“I ain’t cooking tonight,” he announced, draping his knees over the armrest without taking off his boots.

“I could give it a shot,” I volunteered.

He looked at me skeptically. “You can cook now?”

I fidgeted. “Scrambled eggs?  Sort of?”

I grabbed the eggs and a frying pan, and Biff managed to hold out for all of two minutes before my attempts at homemaking made him decide he could cook after all.  He shoved me out of the way and took over, grumbling halfheartedly about how I wouldn’t know how to grease a pan if it shoved itself up my rectum and died there, and would I make myself useful and get him some butter?  He put me to work grabbing ingredients and dishes, and that kept us both busy for a while, until we finally retreated from the stove-heated kitchen with his (far superior) scrambled eggs to the fire escape to take advantage of the cooler night air.

Outside, the traffic was a glowing grumbling crawl of lights down the clogged streets.  In Vaygo, some traffic was always jammed, no matter the hour.  I hung my legs through the railing, watched the night people scurry by, and scarfed chicken ovaries.

“So?” I prompted around a mouthful of cheese, tomato, and mushroom. “How’d it go?”

He shrugged and propped his feet against the rusty railing. “She’s a lawyer now.”

No emphasis.  Just she. “What kind?”

“Dunno.” With a shrug, he forked some eggs in his mouth and chewed. “A rich one, I guess.  Nice house, good part of town—still got the ’67 T-bird and now a Silverado in the garage too.” There was no malice in his voice.  He chuckled and shook his head. “Go figure, huh?  She’s doing great, and I ain’t stopped fucking up since.”

I watched him, chewing without attention.  He seemed oddly calm—more relaxed than I’d ever seen him, including the times he’d been loaded up on alcohol, nicotine, or Vicodin.  He was using the present tense to describe her, but that didn’t reassure me much.

“What’d you do?” I asked.

He didn’t seem to hear me. “She got a boyfriend too,” he continued, tapping his fork against his plate. “They seem happy.  Ain’t living together or nothing; he must be new…”

“Biff.  What did you do?”

He glanced up at me, as though startled at my seriousness, then went back to staring out into the glittering night skyline. “I set her car on fire.”

“Jesus.  The Silverado or the T-bird?”

He snorted. “T-bird.  She didn’t give a shit about the Silverado, so I just slashed the tires.” He saw my face and hastily added, “It was on the street.  Wasn’t nothing else gonna burn.  I stayed, watched to make sure.”

“Uh huh.” He said it so casually that I could think of nothing else to say.  It was like he was discussing buying the eggs and tomatoes for dinner, not committing arson.  Finally, I swallowed my eggs and admitted, “I worried you were going off to kill her.”

His face went through a rapid tumult of expressions, including a wince that apparently he was so easy to read, then settled on a smile that didn’t express much in the way of amusement. “I thought about it,” he admitted. “But it wouldn’t really do much.  Besides, I don’t got a gun right now.  I would’ve had to touch her to kill her.” He leaned back against the concrete and folded his arms behind his head, letting the plate rest in his lap. “You gonna lecture me?” Despite the words, his tone wasn’t defensive.

“No,” I said. “I feel like I should, but honestly, I’m just relieved you stuck to property damage.  Even if it isn’t your usual MO.”

Biff shrugged. “Some things, you just gotta burn.”

Something about that answer bugged me.  I scarfed my was through the rest of my eggs as I turned it over in my head, and finally I got it.  Biff just didn’t do arson.  He did breaking and entering, assault and battery, all very hands on.  If he destroyed property, it was unpremeditated and spur-of-the-moment, like slashing the tires, and he did it in person, not with matches and lighter fluid.  And given the choice, he didn’t attack things; he attacked people.

“What’d you have against that car?” I asked.

That won me a glance of mild surprise.  Then he smirked, gave me a sarcastic nod as though to acknowledge that once again, I knew him too well, then reclined back with a sigh.  He spoke calmly, staring out into the skyscrapers as though I were inconsequential.  It was just as well he wasn’t looking at me; it meant he didn’t see my face at what he said next.

“She loved that car.  Custom paint and everything.  Took me round in it a few times, for—stuff.  Before I left.” He shook his head and pulled a cigarette case and his Zippo out of his back pocket. “Lot of guys would’ve killed for that, but I fucking hated that car.”

The lighter burst into flame, and he lit up.  I watched in silence as he inhaled, then tucked the case and lighter back in his pocket and sighed the smoke out over the rail.

“How’d she react?” I asked finally.

He shrugged. “Don’t know and don’t much care.  Left before she got up.  It’s why I burned it; I take a sledgehammer to it at two in the morning, someone’s gonna hear the noise and stop me.  I set it on fire, ain’t nobody gonna see it till I let ‘em.  I stuck around a couple hours, made sure it was good and wrecked, then I left.”

“I would’ve stayed for the reaction.”

He shrugged again. “Enh.”

He went back to smoking.  Apparently he was done talking.  I was quiet for a long time, trying to think of something to say.  Something useful, something intelligent, something that was neither patronizing nor banal, just something.

Finally I asked, “Did it help?”

He looked at me, expression unreadable.

“Please tell me it helped,” I said, moving my plate so I could pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them. “I keep hearing revenge doesn’t work, and it’s going to kill me if you feel just as horrible as before after all that.”

He opened his mouth, but seemed to rethink whatever he was going to say and ended up just shutting it again.

“You look a lot less angry now, but the only other times I’ve seen you not angry, you were on the verge of putting a gun in your mouth,” I continued, “so I’m not exactly reassured.  Do you need me to hang around for a while, because I can…”

His expression softened. “It helped,” he told me in an oddly gentle voice. “Less than I hoped, more than I worried, but it helped.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He snorted. “’Course, I’m still fucked up.  But I never figured it’d fix me, I just wanted to feel better.  And I feel a helluva lot better after watching that car go up.  I got to watch all that custom paint melt down.  Saw the leather seats burn, the engine go up, her stereo system fry.  Must’ve been a hundred thousand dollars worth of shit all going up in flames—she’ll get it all back, ‘course,” he added. “You gotta be nuts, not to insure something like that.  But she ain’t never gonna get that car back.”

“Good,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow at my venom. “No lecture?”

“No.  She deserved it.” I straightened up and glared out onto the skyline. “I’m an atheist, Biff.  I don’t believe there’s any divine justice awaiting us; I’m sure that we just muddle through our stupid, ephemeral lives and die and that’s it.  Which means we have to get our justice the best we can in the time we’ve got, and your legal system never would’ve done a thing.  You know it, and I know it.  Even if you reported it, even if they believed you, even if you could afford to take her to court, even if you could handle the grilling they would’ve given you when you were frogging sixteen.  They wouldn’t have done a thing.  Someone’s got to punish her; it might as well be you.  I’m sorry it happened, and I’m glad you got to do something.”

I put the plate away and leaned forward to rest my head against the rails, trying to steady my breathing and get my pulse to stop hammering.  Dang it, now I wanted to set someone’s car on fire.

Biff watched me try and calm down for a moment, then chuckled. “You got it wrong.”

I raised my head to look at him. “Enh?”

“It ain’t about her anymore,” he told me, and he was smiling as he said it. “’Kay?  Been about her for nine fucking years now, and I’m tired of it always being bout her.  I didn’t set her car on fire to piss her off—I coulda done that a million different ways, and none of ‘em would’ve ever been enough.  I did it so I’d never have to think about it ever again.  Now,” he made as though brushing himself off, “it’s over.  Done.  I can go do other shit.” He slumped back against the wall with a look of relief. “All this crap can finally just be over.  About fucking time.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m happy for you.”

He smirked at me and punched me in the shoulder. “And here I thought you was getting moral on me.”

“I was,” I said. “They just so happened to be in your favor this time.”

He snickered and went back to smoking and watching the night life go by.  Below us, tides of humanity ebbed and flowed, going from party to party, bar to bar, all with the aimless haste of the city.  Cars crawled down the streets.

“So, while you were over in Georgia, did you go see your family?” I asked.

He curled his upper lip and shook his head. “Nah.  Wasn’t sure I could keep myself outta sight.”

“Would that have been so bad?”

“Better I stay dead to ‘em,” he said evenly. “Least till I stop being the kinda guy who sets cars on fire.  Not ezzackly the sorta thing you want coming home to you.  Better wait till I have something good to show for all the years.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah I do.  Oh,” and he tapped his coffee can garden, “thanks for watering the plants.”

“It’s spelled with a ‘T,’ just so you know.  For future reference.”

He snorted. “I don’t hear a T in ‘plants,’ do you?”

“I didn’t invent the English spelling system, Biff, I just enforce it.”

He rolled his eyes. “How’re the eggs?”

“Good.  Oh, and one more thing.”

“Enh?”

“Don’t ever make me find out your itinerary from your landlady again.”

“She ain’t my landlady.” But it was muted, and we sat and watched the traffic crawl by like gold through the inky streets.

Comments

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Ah, so that's the '67 T-bird from Ten Years, the incident that finally sent Biff over the edge. I admit to being curious about the perpetrator, but as Biff said it's not about her. I wonder if he'll ever be the kind of person he feels will deserve to see his family again.

[lb-lee.livejournal.com]

I wonder if he'll ever be the kind of person he feels will deserve to see his family again.

When Homecoming sells, you'll get to find out! :D

--Rogan

[silvercat17.livejournal.com]

Awesome. I'm always a fan of fire.

Typo: “She got a boyfriend to,” he continued, tapping his fork against his plate. - should be 'too'

[lb-lee.livejournal.com]

I am embarrassed at how long this story has been up and yet I missed that typo. Thanks, it's fixed now.

[silvercat17.livejournal.com]

It's so hard to find all the typos.