The Thief of Fire

I am a fundamentally flawed person.

Most people are – but there is a limit to the depths of their own personal corruption, whereas the limits of mine are unclear and are, in the best of all possible worlds, subject to the limits of my appetites, which are immense.

This is not an appetite for food, though it is consumptive, ravenously so.

What I communicate to the world is ambition.

Internally, I experience existence as a series of acquisitions to be added to my library of private knowledge.

As if I were a spy agency, all unto myself.

No one knows I am like this, other than me, and I am, in the course of the unfolding of my own existence, an inconsequential scribble, like the little lines I make in my notebook, the little black book I call DreamBook.

This is DreamBook #127. In all, my life story has totalled twenty-five thousand, four hundred pages.

I am twenty-three years old, and I am a thief of fire, like Prometheus.

***

What is a thief of fire, in a modern context?

For clarity:

“This is fire” i.e. a thing may be “fire” – those shoes that young man with the dreads is wearing, the one I’m sketching in the DreamBook? Those shoes are “fire”: they look good, they look expensive.

They don’t just look good on him. They are so trendy, they might look good on anyone.

But his shoes are minor fire, to me at least.

Average fire?

An object that is well maintained, or something thoughtful, something aesthetic that has personal or emotional value, as well as a monetary valuation that is unlikely to depreciate over time.

We’re not talking Monet here.

I’m not an art thief, and in truth, average fire is of little more than passing interest to me. This is simply for comparison.

“Fire”, real fire is the stuff that is irreplaceable, the matter that makes up a person, a thing by which they define the value of themselves – and that can be virtually anything.

***

I am stalking someone.

They appear in DreamBook and have now for the last fifty pages.

Their name is Ambrose, and they live in a very nice apartment on Washington Avenue, in the neighbourhood of Clinton Hill.

I began to notice Ambrose, because my daily walk would take me from my apartment in Bed-Stuy down to Fort Greene, where I would sit in a little park across the way from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and sketch the buildings and people in DreamBook in the late morning.

Ambrose has a dog, and he has a girlfriend, who looks lovely and innocent, maybe a little starry eyed, like she does too much yoga and spends too little of her morning reading the Times or whatever it is depressed people do.

He is a snappy dresser.

I have seen him go into French Garment Cleaners, which is not a cleaner’s at all, but an expensive clothing shop you can just see from my park bench in Fowler Square.

Ambrose bought a button down.

Clearly.

He doesn’t frequent the same bars as I do.

I know this because I followed him.

Instead of simply walking down the street to the Alibi, or The Great Georgiana, or Mo’s, he meets his girlfriend at the G train, switches at the L and gets off at Bedford.

They go to places like “Elite Williamsburg”, a rooftop bar, or the bar at the top of the Wythe Hotel. He is obsessed with rooftops.

Typically, they will get a car home, and that is where I stop following them.

I kick rocks all down Broadway under the clatter of the J-M-Z above, stopping in a few dives to drop a few more memories into DreamBook and thinking of Ambrose, and that one thing I’ll take from him when he least expects it.

***

The thing isn’t in his apartment, nor is it at his work.

I “bump into” Ambrose one day. He has decided to go have a beer alone. Once again, he took the G to the L and got off at Bedford, and walked to an immense beer hall.

They serve only German beer, and Ambrose is, of course, a pilsner guy. Light, effervescent, somewhat grassy. Not too pensive.

I flirt with him a bit and he engages, but in a telltale way where he knows he isn’t supposed to. We talk – about work, and about friends and about New York, a favourite topic of all transplants, and through it all he maintains a diminishing sense of his limits.

He knows not to flirt with this strange woman – too much. He knows he shouldn’t have another beer – lest he flirt more. When speaking of his dog, he primarily speaks of the dog’s size, how it was the perfect size for an apartment.

Not too big, not too small.

The right dog.

I tease him:

“I bet you don’t do anything bad.”

“What do you mean?”

He tenses. Everyone wants to do something bad.

“I mean it. You seem like a clean guy, a nice guy.”

I can see it in his eyes. He thinks I think he’s boring.

And maybe he is. But Ambrose also occupies a quarter of DreamBook #127, and those pages don’t fill themselves. The sketches, the writing, the notes – all the product of a hand that is currently playing with my hair as the bartender asks if I want another drink.

I look at Ambrose as I play with my hair.

I read somewhere, in some bullshit men’s publication that if a woman plays with her hair it means she wants to have sex. I’m testing this to see if it works.

Terrified of being boring, Ambrose orders two pilsners.

We clink glasses.

This is going swimmingly.

***

Ambrose slept over. Better even than I thought.

He is currently fast asleep, drooling on one of my high thread-count, cotton pillowcases. My living room has no windows, but my taste is still exquisite.

I have the trappings of talent.

Ambrose doesn’t use his thumbprint to unlock his phone – he’s old-fashioned, a code will do for him, a code I memorized when he pulled out the device to answer a work email at the bar.

862130.

His girlfriend is concerned because he hasn’t answered her messages. I’ll allow it.

There’s a 9:30 am meeting at work. Now that can disappear.

I open his banking app. $20,000 saved.

My eyebrow arches, almost involuntarily.

This is my target.

It isn’t about the money, not strictly. I also didn’t fuck Ambrose because I couldn’t contain myself, though it was nice. No, no.

Remember:

We’re stealing fire.

Ambrose’s fire?

Stability.

Not that it took much pressure to disrupt the stability of his relationship: but who knows? Maybe he’s not as into her as I thought, maybe it hasn’t been that long, and now that I can get into his phone, I can check that. It’s no issue.

It’s these other things that are cropping up – that very even savings account. The familiar tone in which his boss wrote the email. The right dog that fits just so into his apartment, which I’m sure is beautiful inside and has windows in the living room.

That’s what I’m after.

Stability is what I’m after.

***

He broke up with his girlfriend and messaged me immediately so we could meet up for a drink.

Things haven’t been going super well at work. There have been a few missed meetings, and Ambrose supposes he must have just not seen the messages or deleted them by accident, and, because he is a good person, naturally he blames himself.

This is what your standard person will do. Disruptions will crop up in their life and their first thought will be – “Oh no. What did I do?”

Which I should add is totally natural and is nothing to feel bad about if that is your reaction.

I confess I am an uncommon occurrence.

***

Not only does Ambrose have a new job now, but he hates it too, though he wouldn’t want to admit that.

He tells me it’ll take some time for him to get used to it, that he’s just settling in.

But I know Ambrose now, and I can tell when he’s kidding himself.

The one thing I know that he isn’t joking about though, is me. He frequently says that he’s lucky to have me in his life; that Lauren and he didn’t really click, not like this.

He says he feels safe with me.

I am over the moon.

In this weird new twist of fate, I have become the thing that I am going to steal back for myself. I am the stability he craves, ergo: I am the object of my own theft.

I am fire.

***

While he’s out of town on a business trip with people that he hates, I move everything out of my apartment and put it in a Bronx storage container, way up near Pelham Bay. He never ventures north of 42nd Street anyway.

On day two of the trip, he messages me and tells me he misses me.

I tell him he’s sweet.

And that I love him.

Oh. I do.

I go into his apartment, for which I have the key, log into his computer, and access his online banking.

I transfer all his money to a shell account I created from the residue of Tammy’s identity, a sixty-six-year-old widower who lived in Red Hook two years ago, but now has my face, my age, and an address in Bay Ridge.

At the bank I, Tammy, explain, quietly, sadly, to the bank manager that I have to withdraw all my funds – funeral expenses you see. My brother, he died in a motorcycle accident and my parents have no money.

I have to take care of my own. Have to support the family.

He gets it.

$20,000 (plus a little extra) in an envelope.

I go to another branch, and I close the account.

I keep my phone number for a little while, because I want the fallout. This part is crucial for me, and for DreamBook.

***

This is the part where DreamBook and I imagine Ambrose’s future, and it is why, after all, DreamBook is called what it’s called. Because Ambrose’s life doesn’t end once I’m out of it: far from it.

It continues on, naturally, although now the perspective on his life has been altered forever, and the person he was up until now, effectively, no longer exists.

The messages I received from him blossomed, beautifully, from bewilderment to sudden understanding. After getting off his flight at LaGuardia, he couldn’t afford a cab home for some reason.

Someone had stolen from him.

He came home to find his place exactly as he left it, minus one, but when he ran to my old place, the landlord had two guys re-painting the walls.

Ambrose said he would find me: he doesn’t know my name.

For that matter, neither do you.

As for me, I am being shown a one-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side. I’ll miss Brooklyn, sure. I’ll definitely need to give it some time before I head back for a visit, but home is where the heart is after all, and I carry mine with me all the time.

There is a built in bookcase in this apartment, and Rivington Street is lively. I tell the landlord I’ll take it.

I give him first, last and security on the spot, and he doesn’t argue.

In the silence of my new apartment, I close DreamBook #127. My months with Ambrose have filled it up. On the built in bookcase, I line up DreamBooks #1 all the way through to #127.

I sit on the windowsill, scratch the dog’s ears (perfect apartment size), look out, and unwrap my newest purchase.

A little black book. DreamBook, #128.

My hand scribbles on the page, already searching.