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COOPER
(Cooper enters. He is fighting mad.)
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? Talk to a tape recorder? A freaking tape recorder? What year is this, 1994? My parents are paying for me to talk to a shrink, not a machine that no one’s used since Clinton was president.
(He huffs around. Someone offstage shouts something at him. He sits down, defeated but still mad.)
Talk about anything, huh? Anything in the world? Well,obviously not anything. I could tell you about the time my hamster died but mom told me it ran away, but that wouldn’t do us any good and you’d tell me to start over. You want something relevant. Something relevant to my problem. Your word, not mine. Their word, not mine. It’s not a problem. It’s a hobby.
I am a connoisseur of fine… fires. My tools of the trade are zippo lighters, dry leaves, paper towels, sticks, pinecones… anything that’ll burn, really. Sometimes I use plastic bics. Sometimes I use matches. But I like Zippos best. There’s something classic and timeless about a Zippo that bics and matches haven’t got. When you flip a Zippo, you feel like you’re in a detective movie. There’s a- a sort of permanence about the metal casing. Bics dry up and you throw them away, but a good Zippo you can keep for years and years and years.
Before you think I’m some kind of psychopath, I never hurt anyone. Not even animals. I’m not one of those sick kids who lights bugs on fire.
That wasn’t the point of what I wanted to say.
Um.
I meant to tell you about the first fire I ever lit. When I was about eight or nine, we lived next door to this kid, Joey Crusoe. He was… twelve, thirteen? I idolized him. He was tall and athletic and cool. Oh man, he was so cool, or at least I thought so when I was eight. Anyway, that’s not the point. Sort of. I mean, Joey Crusoe’s got everything to do with the story, but, I mean-
Um.
So, I was on my way home from school one day – eight or nine, I thought I was cool that mom let me walk the half mile from our house to the school – and Joey Crusoe was out in his driveway. It was October, so there were dry leaves everywhere, and he had a little pile of them in front of him, and he was sitting on the ground. “Hey, Cooper,” he says. “Want to see something cool?”
Who was I to say no. So I went over and he had this magnifying glass and he was catching the sun and focusing it just so that the leaves would start to smolder.
“Want to try?” he asked me. And, you know, I couldn’t say no, ‘cause it was Joey freaking Crusoe actually acknowledging my existence. So he gives me the magnifying glass and shows me how to hold it and after a little bit I’ve got a flame going and he tells me I’m pretty cool, which was exactly what I wanted to hear, and he let me keep the magnifying glass, and-
Um. I kind of forgot where I was going with that.
Um.
Can I start over? Talk about how treatment’s affecting me and all that? Well, here’s a start: I threw away my whole collection of Zippos – I didn’t want to, but mom stood over me and wouldn’t leave until I gave her all of them, and all the bics under my bed, and my matchbooks I collected from fancy restaurants when we were in Europe last summer, and even the magnifying glass that Joey Crusoe gave me.
(Beat.)
Man, it’s weird to talk about this. I think – I’m glad I got caught, because I don’t know how kids come clean about this stuff. I mean, I did it once before, not about this- about something else. But it went as well as you’d expect. You think “Mom, Dad, I can’t stop setting fires” is bad? Oh, sure, it’s a problem right now, but they shell out for a few appointments with an after-school psychologist and you’re all better. Parents want their kids to be perfect. It’s what they do. You’ve got jacked up teeth, they put you in braces and call it an investment in your future. You give them something they can’t fix, though? And what about this, do you think they can fix this? What is this, a bad habit? Do they think they can paint bitter liquid on my nails and I’ll stop chewing?
(Beat.)
The fire setting’s a compulsion. I’ve been jittery all week.
But I’m here to get better. I’m going to get better. I’m going to get better. We’re all. Going to get. Better.
(He sneers.)
It’s a nice thought, isn’t it? Getting better? I don’t think getting rid of all the lighters was a ‘step in the right direction’, though. Those had sentimental value. I mean, the bics? I don’t care about the bics, but the Zippos and the matches and the magnifying glass had sentimental value. I don’t think she really had to take those. They were mine. I bought them with my own money.
(Another pause. Then, sardonic.)
Talk about anything? Like what? You want to hear about my grandfather who died when I was eleven? You want to hear about the kid who shoved me in a dumpster every day after school in seventh grade? You want to hear about my hamster? Because I can tell you that one if you really want to hear it.
I went to summer camp and Mom was supposed to feed him. But she forgot. She forgot to feed my hamster – she passed its cage one-two-three-four-five-SIX times a day and forgot to feed him. She didn’t notice it was dead until it started to smell. But you know what? You didn’t really want to hear that story, and you know why? Because it doesn’t matter. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with what we’re talking about.
(He listens. Then:)
Okay. Okay. Okay. You’re looking for cause and effect and that’s why it’s not working. This is … Idiopathic mental disease. I looked it up. It means a disease that arises spontaneously with no apparent cause. No cause and effect, just a random case of the crazies. Okay. Okay. There. I admitted it. It’s mental disease. It’s compulsive. Happy now? I’m screwed up. I’m crazy. We’re making great progress today, aren’t we? Isn’t the first step of treatment admitting you have a problem?
Trying to say that what I do, I do for any particular reason… It’s, um, it’s a fallacy. How’s that for a ten dollar word? You can’t try to pin me lighting fires on some kind of horrible childhood trauma I won’t fess up to because I haven’t got any. I just have me and Joey Crusoe lighting fires in his driveway, and it was the best two weeks of my life.
I’m having an- an epiphany here, okay? You’re all a bunch of quacks. You leave us alone so we can have epiphanies and you leave us alone with our thoughts. We’re a bunch of screwed up kids and you leave us alone with our screwed up heads. And it’s – it’s a hobby, but if it’s a hobby that you can’t stop–
-You teach us to be afraid of ourselves. You teach us to be ashamed of ourselves.
But there’s no cause and there’s no effect. No reason to keep doing it. Every screwed up part is screwed up separately.
There’s no cause and effect. I don’t want to get better, because there’s nothing to fix. You want to cut out the cancer but it’s wrapped around my spinal column, my brain, my nerves, down into my fingertips where the urge to ignite begins, the itching feeling as it crawls up my arm to the places that only I know, the twinge in my chest, the anticipation of a flame, the zippo in my pocket, and I need to burn something but there’s nothing to ignite! You’ve taken it away, locked me in a little room with my thoughts and my fears, until I realize that the fire is the only thing that was ever real!
So I take the match, and I strike it on whatever’s handy. One, two, three, snap-hiss. And the way that it glows, the way that it dances – I don’t need anyone to tell me that beauty is dead in the world because I can find it in the tiniest ember. And I kindle the flame.
And I whisper to it – Hello, hello, please burn for me, hello – And I find kindling wherever I can, a burnt offering to my fiery god-
And it feels so good to burn things. It feels so good to burn.
Hi, you don't know me, but I'm a friend of Caleb's, and I just wanted you to know that you did a really good job on this piece. I watched his work in progress video of it, and your writing is really good!
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