HARRY ERICKSON LEANED against his car as his house burned. Fires weren’t uncommon in Bloomington, Indiana. They were usually started by middle-aged men playing with their new flamethrowers. Christmas, Father’s Day, and the two weeks surrounding the Fourth of July were busy times for the Bloomington Fire Department. These were the times dads showed off their fire-breathing toys. But Harry’s house fire hadn’t been triggered by a middle-aged man’s infatuation with flames; it was started, like everything in his life, by intense concentration drifting into absentminded daydreaming.

This was what Harry was doing as his home collapsed into a blazing pile of vinyl siding, fiberglass insulation, and cherished memories—he was daydreaming. As his ex-wife, Amanda, pulled up in her silver SUV and parked behind the fire barricades on South Jackson Street, Harry was deep in his fantasy, one he’d been editing for eight years. He didn’t notice her until she was yelling in his ear.

“Harry!” Amanda shouted over the sirens. “What did you do?”

“Huh?” Harry shook his head.

“Were you playing with your flamethrower again?” She gestured toward the burning house.

Harry did have a flamethrower. He’d bought it for himself when he turned forty. This might seem late in life to purchase a flamethrower, pyromania usually being something that afflicted teenaged boys, but in 2007, after a rash of flamethrower-related accidents, the Indiana state legislature passed a law making forty the minimum age to purchase a flamethrower. The penalty for buying one underaged was premature balding, usually caused by a misfire. In retrospect, they should have set the age higher.

Harry had a misfire the first time he tested his and set his toolshed on fire. Since then, his flamethrower had been stored in the basement with the propane tank disconnected.

“I haven’t touched that infernal device in three years,” Harry said. He never used to speak with this false formality. He used to talk like every other Bloomingtonian, his midwestern drawl laced with warm disdain. Several years earlier, he’d read a book about changing one’s life. The author recommended affecting the speech and body language of the person you’d like to become. Since Harry wanted to become a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he had immediately begun talking the way he thought one spoke. The result was him sounding like a community theater actor playing a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. It was one of the many things about him that drove Amanda crazy.

“Well?” Amanda said. “How can you possibly explain what I’m seeing?”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“You’re calling losing everything beautiful?”

“All the energy contained within our former domicile is presently being transformed into flames, the flames are relinquishing said energy, which is then reconfigured as heat into the atmosphere. We are witnessing the first and second laws of thermodynamics incarnate.” Harry rubbed his brown hair.

“And now you’re going to explain it to me, aren’t you?” Amanda was used to this—Harry using any event, whether it be a power outage or clinical depression, to explain the laws of physics to her. He’d been doing it for years.

“All the energy contained within our house…” He waved his hand toward the burning home, his shirt sleeve flapping; his clothes hung loose on him, like a graduation gown on a classroom skeleton.

“Here we go,” Amanda said.

“…was gathered not just in the wood and the electricity, but in all the stockpiled sundries in the basement. Now, that collected energy is being converted into heat. Prior to this evening’s event, our house was an isolated system; therefore, that energy is increasing in value, as represented by the heat. The one component the laws of thermodynamics don’t account for is the psychic energy.”

“Are you telling me you think our house was haunted?”

“Don’t be silly. Ghosts aren’t real.”

“For a second there, I thought you’d finally lost your mind.”

“I’m referring to the psychic energy from our experiences collected within the house: the love, the memories, and the psychic energy of everyone who resided there before us. That collected energy is now being released into the town.”

“Jesus Christ,” Amanda said, exhausted from eight years of listening to Harry ramble. “I can’t believe I let you sidetrack this conversation.”

“But don’t worry. My theory, Omnicalcumetry, accounts for this energy and can predict its distribution pattern. I devote a brief sixty-three pages to the laws of psychicdynamics in my paper. Our energy will be distributed across our humble hamlet in a psychic cloud. Our immediate neighbors will feel the effects most vigorously, followed by the surrounding streets. Our dear neighbors won’t comprehend the reasoning, but they’ll feel nostalgic for the holidays and want to listen to the music that was popular when they were in high school—side effects of our psychic energy fusing with theirs. The laws of psychicdynamics are a field of study mainstream science hasn’t addressed yet, but they will once my paper is published.”

“The fire, Harry? How did it start?”

“I was toiling away in my study—”

“You mean the unfinished basement.”

“When I detected a hint of smoke. At the sound of the fire alarm, I collected my work and summoned the fire brigade.”

“So anything could have started the fire.”

“The likely culprit is probably faulty wiring or the fact that I was baking the famed culinary endeavor known as chicken Kiev casserole whilst working in the basement.”

“Burnt chicken caused this?” she whispered, her voice sharp and agitated. “If the arson investigator hears you say that, you can kiss your insurance money goodbye.”

“I know how you fret, Amanda, what with my solitude here on Jackson Street, but I’m fine. I’ve already performed the necessary calculations, and all outcomes will be to our advantage.” Even though they were divorced, Harry believed he and Amanda still had a strong relationship. Most of this belief came from the fact that he didn’t consider himself responsible for their split. Having been with Amanda since their sophomore year of college, he simply thought she just wanted to experience life and would come back in time.

“You are the worst,” Amanda said.

A fireball shot into the sky as the flamethrower’s propane tank exploded.

In Bloomington, divorce was the leading cause of depression among men and the leading cause of happiness among women. Couples split for numerous reasons—infidelity, secret bank accounts, burying one’s waffle fries in ketchup as opposed to having it on the side. But Amanda’s grounds for divorce were straightforward: years and years of neglect.

Her first clue there was something wrong was when Harry started spending all his time in the basement. He’d come home from work, kiss her on the cheek, and then head straight downstairs. She was immediately concerned. They’d been married for fifteen years, and up until then, he’d been a devoted father and husband. Then, inexplicably, he began spending his free time alone.

Amanda wondered why he’d opt for solitude in the dank basement instead of being with his family. At first, she thought he’d developed a heroin addiction. Heroin wasn’t a problem in Bloomington—not like drinking cough syrup—but after seeing an exposé on growing heroin use in small towns, Amanda had convinced herself Harry was shooting up between his toes, despite his fear of needles. After six months, she decided to snoop in the basement while he was at work.

One day, she tiptoed down the wooden stairs into their unfinished basement expecting to find a pouch with Harry’s heroin gear. The boxes of their daughter Sarah’s clothes, holiday decorations, and general items that needed to be donated had been stacked along the walls. Harry’s desk—an old metal teacher’s desk recovered from Sarah’s grade school rummage sale—sat next to the water heater, stacks of papers on its surface. At the sight of them, Amanda realized she had been mistaken. Harry wasn’t a junkie; he was probably just writing a manifesto declaring he was going to bomb a building on campus. Harry hadn’t mentioned college since dropping out, but that didn’t mean he didn’t harbor any resentment toward it. Amanda’s pulse had quickened as, wearing only socks, she hopped across the cold, concrete floor to Harry’s aluminum desk. She flipped through the pages, expecting to read a rant against genetically modified jellyfish, an illogical conclusion that the university was creating Bloomington’s future gelatinous overlords. Instead, she had found page after page of mathematic equations. None of it had made any sense to her. All she knew was that it was evidence her husband was losing his mind.

“At least tell me you saved all the important documents,” Amanda said.

“I would rather have been cremated in the inferno than leave them behind,” Harry said. “All the documents I need are currently in the back seat.” He thumbed toward his leather attaché case, brown and cracked.

“Thank God!” Amanda opened the back door of Harry’s Honda Civic and pulled out the leather case. She set his laptop on the car’s roof, flipped through the thick stack of equations, and groaned. “You left your insurance and mortgage documents to burn in a fire, but saved your ridiculous paper?”

“Weighing the need for insurance documents versus saving my life’s work was an equation not requiring calculation,” Harry said. “My paper is far more valuable than proof of insurance.”

“Harry, you need to start living in the real world.”

“I am the only one here who is living in the real world.”

“Believe me, I know. You’ve told me a thousand times: ‘This world is based on a lie.’”

“Correction: it’s based on a misconception, one that’s become so entrenched that we are sightless to being buried alive by it.”

“But you’re the only one in the whole world—a world of eight billion people—who sees the truth, yet you don’t think that maybe, just maybe, you should have seen your way to saving your home insurance documents?”

“Because it’s meaningless. It’s just a piece of paper that’s supposed to protect me in case something happens.”

“Something did happen. Your house burned down.”

“My paper on Omnicalcumetry will ensure nothing like this will ever happen again.”

“I knew it! Years ago, I had a feeling you’d do something like this,” Amanda said, showing him the scribbled pages. “You’re lucky I have copies of everything you need at my place.”

Amanda considered herself a helpful person; it was one of the reasons she went into real estate—that and the money. “I just love helping people find their forever home,” was the line she’d say at parties. Her face was on bus stops across town, graffitied by teenagers. When she filed for divorce, she told herself she was helping Harry, her incredibly irresponsible husband, find himself and—she hoped—grow up a little too. In the meantime, she kept copies of records Harry might need, waiting for the day he would snap out of his daydreams and face reality.

She and Harry had met during their sophomore year of college. Currently, they were both in their early forties. Amanda’s brown hair was cut in the style of everyone she knew—a cheek-hugging bob. This choice of hairstyle was intentional. She believed, being a real estate agent, her clients would feel more comfortable buying a home from someone who looked familiar. And who was more familiar than the person in the mirror? So she tried to look as much like her clients as possible, sometimes even dressing like them. What Amanda hadn’t considered was her clients’ self-loathing. Midwesterners tended to have a strong dislike for themselves, which they projected onto their coastal neighbors, who also had a strong dislike for themselves, which they projected onto their Midwest neighbors. So when her clients walked through a home with someone who looked like them, they thought, This person must be from New York, and Amanda would lose the sale. But really, they disliked her because she looked familiar. This was just one factor adding stress to her life.

She fought the effects of stress with a heavy moisturizing regimen. Despite massaging her face with lotions labeled age-defying and rejuvenating several times a day, wrinkles creased her eyes and forehead, which she regularly blamed on Harry. Her current boyfriend, Dennis, was also a walking headache. Amanda felt uncomfortable calling a man in his early forties her boyfriend; she also refused to call him her manfriend, partner, or the term Dennis preferred—fuck buddy.

Harry’s neighbors stood in their yards or behind the fire department’s barricades blocking South Jackson Street. They had always thought Harry was an odd duck. He kept to himself, didn’t attend the annual block party, didn’t set off explosives on the Fourth of July. But his most egregious crime was that he didn’t mow his lawn regularly. His Indiana neighbors saw this as a moral weakness. Some even accused him of being a Democrat. As they commented about how they were surprised Harry’s house hadn’t burned down sooner, Harry’s daughter, Sarah, pushed her way through the men and women in their pajamas and winter coats.

“Dad! Are you okay?” Sarah wrapped both her arms around Harry and squeezed.

Sarah worshipped her father, partly because she was a master’s student at Indiana University Bloomington on track to earn a PhD in chemistry and she admired her father’s scientific pursuits, but mostly because it annoyed her mother. Sarah, like most daughters, loved annoying her mother. She had been sixteen when her parents divorced, and she blamed Amanda for the split. Sarah also loved annoying her mother because Amanda didn’t approve of her daughter’s career choice. Amanda thought Sarah was wasting her prime years bent over a microscope. She thought Sarah should have chosen a more lucrative major, like real estate speculation. But Harry was proud of his daughter; she was doing what she loved, and what she loved was scientific research. Her love of science wasn’t the only thing she’d inherited from Harry. She was thin like her dad. However, she had her mom’s features, notably the narrow lips that formed a line when she was being critical of a classmate or her mother—usually her mother. She also had her mother’s gray eyes, piercing and cold. She hated these features and often wished she looked more like her father with his green eyes and thick lips. When she looked in the mirror, rage would build seeing her mother in the reflection.

“I’m fine, pumpkin.” Harry hugged his daughter. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to salvage any of your belongings. All your childhood memories, gone in seconds.”

“They’re just things,” Sarah said of her childhood clothes, toys, and grade school essays about recycling and reforestation. She released her father, then glared at Dennis sitting in the SUV. “What’s he doing here?”

Dennis waved from the passenger side. Unlike Harry, he hadn’t aged well; a steady diet of beer and hamburgers had ballooned him. His hair was thinning: a bald spot in the back like a desert island.

“Dear God, Sarah,” Amanda said. “Dennis is part of this family.”

“And you still let him get drunk in your car?”

“I would think by now you would have accepted the fact that he’s not going anywhere.”

“Look at him! He’s a materialistic oaf.”

Sarah was right about Dennis, but it wasn’t really his fault. He was a second-generation car salesman, after all. In the history of Bloomington, there had been two highly successful car salesmen; the second was Dennis Drysdale: the first was his father, Herbert Drysdale. Dennis had inherited Herbert’s business, a Chrysler dealership, and expanded it into three dealerships, adding Porsche and BMW to his roster, in addition to a used car lot.

This growth of the family business made Dennis sound like the more successful of the two Drysdales, but this was a common misconception. Prior to Drysdale Chrysler’s opening in 1976, Bloomington had 152 car dealerships. Herbert Drysdale outhustled, outsold, and out-swindled every other car salesman in town. He was responsible for such innovative sales techniques as the Bloomington Bounce, the Fremont Flimflam, and the Indiana Indirect Mark-Up to Pay for Coffee and Donuts and Shots of Cuervo Silver on the Way Home From Work, all of which helped Herbert Drysdale become the number one car salesman in Bloomington history, a legacy Dennis had a hard time living up to. Dennis was more concerned with college football. Currently, he sat in the passenger seat with a cracked beer in his hand, listening to sports talk radio. The sportscasters were discussing the latest scandal to hit the football team. The star running back had been found passed out in a diner bathroom, his pants around his ankles and an ounce of camel tranquilizers spread across the tiled floor. The over-exuberant voices of the sportscasters—because for some reason all sportscasters felt they needed to imitate the excitement of a game by shouting at peak volume—buried the world outside with their high-decibel cynicism, insulating Dennis from Amanda and Sarah’s argument.

“We needed to be here for your father,” Amanda said.

“Dennis? Yeah, right! He’s here for Dad?” Dennis hid his beer as a police officer walked by. Sarah squinted, brimming with resentment. “He’s here because you dragged him here.”

“He’s here,” Amanda said, “because he’s part of our life—yours, mine, and Harry’s. Isn’t that right, Harry? Tell our daughter that Dennis is part of our family.”

“Sure, part of the family,” Harry said, not really listening. He’d learned long ago to tune out the bickering of his ex-wife and his daughter. Instead, he watched the firemen.

The arch of water from their hoses moved hypnotically back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, spraying the surface, not of Harry’s home—still burning as midnight approached—but of a fresh cut lawn.

The sun shone as Harry drove the long, cobblestone drive to his mansion that had been purchased with royalties from his New York Times bestselling books. The top of his convertible was down, wind blowing through his hair. The sun warmed his golden skin. Black sunglasses rested on his nose. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted from the stereo. Harry wasn’t a fan of Journey. He was indifferent. But for some reason, the eighties anthem was always on the radio when he drove home. (This song choice for Harry’s fantasy might seem obvious. “Never Surrender,” by Corey Hart, or Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best,”—also known as the Karate Kid fight montage song—might have been more inspired choices, but Harry wasn’t that creative when it came to his fantasies.)

Marble columns, imported from Italy, framed the front door. They greeted Harry as he parked in front of his sprawling estate. He walked across the stone floors, also imported from Italy, through the foyer, the living room, the music room, the game room, the home theater, kitchen number one, the dining room, the Harry Erickson Museum of Miraculous Achievement in the World of Physics, the observatory, the arboretum, kitchen number two, and finally the breakfast nook. Outside, Amanda and Sarah volleyed on clay tennis courts. Harry had wanted to import the clay from Italy, but he had been assured the best clay for tennis courts came from France. He’d had the clay courts of the French Open flown directly from Paris so Amanda and Sarah could hit balls over the net every morning. They didn’t keep score, having decided long ago friendly volleying was better than full-blown competition. Instead, they hit the ball to each other, enjoying the freedom that came with the obscene wealth Harry had earned from the publication of his paper, the television appearances, his speaking engagements, and his energy drink endorsement deal. After tennis, in kitchen number two, Amanda wiped her forehead with a cashmere dish towel. Sarah poured coconut water into crystal goblets. They sat down for a breakfast of grapefruit halves and yogurt. Harry was about to ask how their game went when something crashed in the other room.

Harry flinched as the frame for the roof snapped, and sheets of shingles collapsed onto the smoldering heap.

“Oh, Dad,” Sarah said. “This must be overwhelming.”

“This is just a reminder that the universe constantly expands toward change.”

It was their first home, his and Amanda’s. They had purchased it after he dropped out of college. It was where they’d raised Sarah. It had been the location for all the meaningful and commonplace episodes that a family called a life. Now it was being reduced to scorched sticks.

“We did create many wonderful memories there,” Harry said.

“Do you remember the Christmas we bought that tree for ten dollars on the side of the interstate?” Amanda asked.

“When we placed it in the living room, all the needles fell off.” Harry laughed.

“I was six,” Sarah said. “We hung our ornaments from the bare branches.”

“I thought I was getting a good deal.”

They all paused, silently remembering moments from their time in the house.

“See, we’re being nostalgic for the holidays,” Harry said. “The laws of psychicdynamics in action.”

“Jesus, Harry.” Amanda threw up her arms.

“Once my paper’s published, I shall construct us a new house. One with a hot tub, an infrared sauna—”

“And a massage therapist who will come over every Friday,” Amanda said. “Yeah, we’ve heard all about Harry’s magical dream house.”

“Every Tuesday and Friday. The massage therapist will come over every Tuesday and Friday.”

“You can’t sleep in a dream,” Amanda said, exasperated.

An Indiana February could be chilling. While Harry’s belief in his paper had made him immune to Amanda’s criticism, he was still susceptible to the cold. He shivered as the breeze rattled the oak branches.

“Mom,” Sarah said, “Dad needs a place to stay. Are you willing to let him stay at your McMansion?”

“Well, Dennis has to get up in the morning. And I have to work too—”

“You’re unbelievable.” Sarah crossed her arms. “You won’t even give up one of your seven guest bedrooms.”

“We don’t have seven… I’m not doing this with you, Sarah.”

“I have a solution,” Harry said. “For the time being, I shall reside with Sarah. She has ample space.”

“She has a one-bedroom apartment,” Amanda said.

“I shall sleep on the couch.”

“What about Bethany? She practically lives there.”

“Beth’s out of town visiting her folks,” Sarah said. “Even if she weren’t, she’d be more than happy to have Dad stay with us.”

“And the cat?” Amanda said. “You’re allergic, Harry.”

“I shall gird myself for Kevin Catsner’s dander with a healing tonic from Pharm-O-Rama,” Harry said. “What do you say, pumpkin? Shall we be roomies?”

“Yeah, it’ll be like when we used to have campouts in the living room.”

“We shall engineer the most structurally sound blanket fort in the history of blanket forts.”

“Sarah, you need to seriously think about this,” Amanda said.

“I don’t get you,” Sarah said. “Why are you always like this when it comes to Dad?”

“One of these days, you’ll understand why I’m being difficult.”

“Please don’t squabble,” Harry said. “It’s unnecessary. There are no sides in a family. A family is an infinite loop, with love circling back around to the beginning. I know my lab—”

“You mean your house?”

“Burned down. But that doesn’t require you to be at each other’s throats. It’s just a house. I’ll procure another one.”

“How?” Amanda asked. “You barely made enough to pay the mortgage on this one.”

“As for being in Sarah’s way, I’ll be working all the time. It’ll be as though I’m an invisible mouse sitting at her kitchen table.” Harry was almost finished with his paper. He was currently in the proofreading stage, moving commas around like the queen of hearts in a game of three-card monte.

“Do not get our daughter caught up in your madness.”

“Amanda,” Harry said, “I appreciate you being here. Your concern means more to me than words can express.”

“If that’s the case, you would have listened to me a long time ago and stopped this insanity.”

“I’ll race you to your place,” Harry said to Sarah. “I mean, our place, roomie.”

As he drove toward Sarah’s apartment on East Fifteenth and North Lincoln Street, Harry tapped his hands on his steering wheel. The attaché case rested on the back seat, his paper on Omnicalcumetry—his magnum opus—inside it. Eight years earlier, an idea had struck Harry, one so profound he knew he had to devote every second toward developing it, sacrificing everything for a theory he was convinced would change the world. This was the work he’d be doing while he stayed at Sarah’s—finishing the project that had dominated his life. He would sit at her table checking and rechecking his calculations. He would scour the written portion for typos. He would check the bar graphs to make sure each bar went in the right direction. He would check the illustrations to make sure he’d colored within the lines. All for the purpose of trying to disprove Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.