By the time I reached Jade’s house, the fire I’d set was not in its uncontrollable maturity but it had advanced to its daredevil adolescence. The central flame, headquartered in the stack of newspapers, had sent attack parties of smaller flames to menace the house itself. Points of flame scattered along the side of the house and fluttered like small orange pennants. A circle of fire had been dispatched to the floor of the porch and seemed to race around the newspapers for a short time, and then, thrilled with the very fact of its existence and drunk with the berserkness of its cause, spread out in a dozen different directions.

I backed away. I already felt the heat on my face, burning through the passive warmth of the August air. I backed off until I slipped off the curb and rammed myself against Hugh’s car, a ten-year-old Bentley that he nursed and loved to excess and beyond. I rubbed my back—a moron checking for a bruise on his spine while everyone he loves sits in a burning house. The flames that darted this way and that on the house itself were all on the feeble side, but there were so many of them and they had enough confidence in their power to continually divide themselves. And then, almost as if the fire was controlled by a dial like the flame on a gas stove, in an instant the flames—all of them—tripled in size and power. I let out a cry and rushed toward the house.

The porch was already half covered with flame—there were shoots of fire everywhere, an intermediate garden of fire. I flung the screen door open and tried to open the big wooden door, which was usually unlocked (not as a gesture of trust but an accommodation to the constant human traffic). Tonight, however, the door was locked. I pounded on it with my fists and shouted—no, not “Fire!” but “Let me in! Let me in, goddamnit! Let me in!”

Sammy opened the door. He was, in fact, on his way out because now, finally, they all smelled smoke. “David,” he said, and put up his small hands as if to stop me.