THE ONLY WRONG PERSON
MY GRANDMOTHER MAGNET USED to, for our Christmas gifts, treat us to tickets to a matinee showing of a movie of her choosing, often popcorn as well. Christmas morning, after opening our presents, we’d eat Swedish pancakes with lingonberry jam and powdered sugar, stacks of bacon, fresh-squeezed OJ, coffee for my parents, and hot cocoa for me. To stave off food coma, we’d then go outside and build a snowman on the lawn, or, if that wasn’t possible, head to the playground for a tetherball tournament, after which we’d drive the better part of an hour to whichever theater in my grandmother’s neighborhood was showing the movie she’d picked. Much of our conversation in the car would revolve around guessing what that movie would be; we never knew what it was til my grandmother handed us our tickets in the lobby.
In 1986, my guess was Three Amigos! From the commercials I’d seen, it was obvious to me that Three Amigos! would be one of the all-time great comedies, an instant classic that nothing else playing could possibly compete with—a movie about characters mistaken for characters those characters played in the movies; ingenious!—and I thought that would’ve been equally obvious to my parents as well, which it may in fact have been, given the speed with which they dismissed my guess, though I entirely misunderstood that at the time. At the time I missed the point. The point was my grandmother, however inadvertently, always picked a lousy movie to see on Christmas.
(In fairness to my eleven-year-old self, it was reasonable for me to have missed that point: the previous year, my guess had been Clue. From the commercials I’d seen, it had been obvious to me that Clue would be one of the all-time great comedies, an instant classic that nothing else playing could possibly compete with—a movie about characters from a board game; ingenious!—and I thought that would’ve been equally obvious to everyone else, but…No. My mother, who’d guessed we’d see Jewel of the Nile, and my father, who’d guessed we’d see White Nights, thought Clue looked lousy, but not lousy enough, and they not only urged me to guess again, but, when, from pride, I stuck to my guns, they thought that was adorable (at the time, I thought they thought it was adorable that I thought Clue would be a great movie, but what it really was was that they thought it was adorable that I still believed my Grandmother Magnet might choose Clue when there were so many far more obviously lousy movies available to be seen), and they said that if I somehow turned out to be right, they’d buy me a new bike at the end of the school year. And I turned out to be right. That year we saw Clue, which both my parents and my grandmother found to be lousy, but I rather liked. It wasn’t everything I’d hoped for, but I laughed quite a bit, plus it won me a bike; the following June, I’d get my Street Machine.)
But as I was saying: in 1986, I guessed Three Amigos!, Clyde Eye of the Tiger, and my mom Star Trek IV.
Grandmother Magnet had tickets for Platoon.
Platoon was R-rated and renowned for its violent, depressing content. My mother said it wouldn’t do; I was allowed to see some R-rated movies, but not until after my parents had seen them first and vetted them. My grandmother said they were being overprotective; my mother muttered something under her breath about Sally the Balls; my grandmother ignored my mother’s muttering, and said that Platoon was supposed to be important; my mother said Oliver Stone was a hack; my grandmother said there were already whispers that Platoon would win Best Picture at the Oscars; my mother said the Oscars were just like the Pulitzers; my grandmother said she didn’t see how that could be a bad thing; my mother said that was the problem with my grandmother; my grandmother asked her what in the hell that was supposed to mean; my mother then recited a list of movies that had won Best Picture at the Oscars since 1979; my grandmother insisted they were all important movies, especially Terms of Endearment and Chariots of Fire; my mother said both of those movies were garbage; my grandmother called my mother a snob; my mother said my grandmother was the one who kept talking about important movies, so who was the snob?; and before my grandmother had a chance to respond, Clyde suggested my mother and I should see something else while he accompanied his mother to Platoon. Grandmother Magnet gave us our tickets to exchange (she held on to the bucket of popcorn she’d bought) and walked off with Clyde.
I don’t remember all the movies that were playing, but Three Amigos! wasn’t one of them, and my mother, although she bristled at Eddie Murphy’s standup (“Every other punch line is faggot,” she’d said, which was certainly an overstatement, however true it was in spirit), had been a fan of his sketches on Saturday Night Live, and allowed me to convince her we should see The Golden Child, his latest comedy, and the only non-R-rated comedy playing at the theater.
I thought The Golden Child was great. The jokes contained enough swearing and sex and sexual innuendo that my knowing when to laugh at them—even if I didn’t fully understand a few of them—made me feel clever beyond my years. The joke at which I laughed hardest, however, entailed no swearing, no sex, no innuendo at all. That joke comes in the middle of a chase scene near the end of the movie. Chandler Jarrell (played by Eddie Murphy), who has been tasked with saving and protecting the golden child, and the golden child himself—a young boy from Nepal with magical powers of healing who may or may not be the latest incarnation of the Buddha—have just narrowly escaped the Los Angeles–based Tibetan religious cult/motorcycle gang that had kidnapped the golden child earlier in the movie, and has since (i.e. the gang has since) been trying to get ahold of a special dagger with which to murder the golden child. The two of them—Chandler Jarrell and the golden child—have just gotten into Jarrell’s car. Jarrell, behind the wheel, is afraid, out of breath, and clutching his chest when he turns to the golden child, who’s sitting in the passenger seat, placid as a cow, and Jarrell says to him, “Did somebody give you a Valium or what?”
I don’t know how long I laughed at that line, but it was long enough that my mom, who didn’t initially laugh at all, ended up laughing at how much I was laughing, and eventually set her hand on my shoulder, to still me. “Did somebody give you a Valium or what?” was the single best joke I had ever heard.
Misheard, it turned out.
On our ride back home from the theater, when my father, after reporting that Platoon was “kind of sappy,” asked me how I’d liked The Golden Child, I told him I’d never seen anything so funny, and then I described the scene I’ve just described above, and delivered the line.
“Cute,” he said.
“It’s the best!” I said.
“By the way,” my mom said, “where’d you learn about Valium?”
“What do you mean?”
“They teach you about it in Health Class?”
“In Health Class?” I said. “Like in a hearing unit or…?”
“A hearing unit?” she said. “Is there a hearing unit in Health Class? I was thinking maybe a psychology unit or—”
“I don’t know if there’s a hearing unit,” I said. “Maybe. There hasn’t been yet.” I was very confused. “But who doesn’t know about volume?” I said.
“Valium,” my mom said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not volume. It’s Valium.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Valium is a drug,” my mom said. “A sedative. It keeps you calm. People take it so they don’t have nervous breakdowns—that’s what the joke was. They were running from the biker gang, and Eddie Murphy was scared, but the golden child was completely calm so he asked him, ‘Did somebody give you a Valium, or what?’ ”
“That’s not that great,” I said. “Why would that be great?” I said. “No. It was volume.”
“It was Valium,” my dad said.
“You didn’t see the movie.”
“I don’t need to see the movie, Billy. It was obviously Valium.”
“It was Valium, Belt,” my mom said.
“How would volume be funny, anyway?” my dad said.
“It’s like he’s saying there’s a volume knob that…Forget it.”
I didn’t want to explain. I knew they were right and I felt like a fool. Worse than a fool. A couple months earlier, inans had begun attempting to speak to me. Just a word here and there—no complete sentences: a ||Please|| or ||Please help|| or ||need|| or ||I need,|| but nothing more, and whenever I would ask whatever had spoken to me, “What do you need?” or “How can I help?” there would be no response. It was frustrating for me. It seemed like I was failing. I didn’t possess any concept of gates yet; didn’t even know to think of inans as inans. My first real conversation with an inan—the Olive Garden booth—wouldn’t occur til the following March. What I did know, right from the very start, was that I shouldn’t let on to anyone else that I had the ability to hear inans speak, let alone that I was glad to have that ability; I knew none of it was normal, would make me seem crazy and unreliable, alarm my mother and piss off my dad.
And then I thought I’d heard Eddie Murphy tell the golden child, “Did somebody give you a volume, or what?” and I thought what he meant was something along the lines of, “Golden child, you’re so calm in the face of mortal danger, whereas I, Chandler Jarrell, am panicking. It is as though your sense of your surroundings is controlled by a volume knob installed inside your head, and amidst all this scary stuff, you have turned that volume knob all the way down, all the way to the left, and so your sense of your surroundings is greatly decreased and doesn’t affect you, and you are not afraid.” This concept wasn’t merely funny to me, it was revelatory.
Eddie Murphy, I thought, wouldn’t make a joke in a movie that no one in the audience was able to get. So if Eddie Murphy made a joke about a figurative volume knob installed inside one’s head, a knob that controlled one’s sense of one’s surroundings, that would mean that, to some degree at least, other people—even many people—must have possessed some shared notion of there being a way to decrease one’s sense of one’s surroundings as if with a volume knob installed inside one’s head (if they didn’t possess that shared notion, where was the joke?). And if so many people possessed that shared notion, the notion must have come from somewhere. If so many people possessed that shared notion, it very well might have been because some of those people—perhaps many of them, though more likely just a few (or else the joke would not have been that funny)—it very well might have been because some of them were in fact able to decrease their sense of their surroundings as if with a volume knob installed inside their heads. And if some people could decrease their sense of their surroundings as if with a volume knob installed inside their heads, maybe I could, too. And if I could, too, then it would stand to reason that I could also increase my sense of my surroundings as if with a volume knob installed inside my head. It would stand to reason that I could turn the volume up on the inans.
But Eddie Murphy hadn’t said volume. The joke was my own, and no one else got it.
The morning after Burroughs picked up the transcript, I found sixteen sample boxes of thirty Panacea sitting on our doorstep in a sealed brown carton. Along with the pills themselves, the boxes held tiny fold-up pamphlets containing information about active ingredients (SP-10B, SP-10C, SP-14—varieties of spidge, I guess) and recommended dosages (a pill a day for children under twelve; two a day for adults), as well as warnings about poisoning, allergic reactions, and potential interactions with other drugs (e.g. Tricyclic antidepressants and SSRI’s)*. What stood out to me, thankfully, was the warning concerning Temporary Paradoxical Effects:
One in ten users of Panacea will initially experience paradoxical effects. These effects can last for as many as 48 hours, and may include sleepiness, lucid dreaming, anxiety, loss of appetite, and/or loss of sex drive. If any of these paradoxical effects continue beyond 48 hours, immediately cease taking Panacea and call a doctor. If you are taking Panacea for the first time, do not drive or operate heavy machinery for at least six hours after your first dosage.
Whether Panacea initially caused me to lose my appetite or sex drive, I couldn’t say. Only ninety minutes after taking my first two pills, I passed out on the couch for thirteen hours. I woke to piss at two in the morning, saw the clock, felt both alarmed and exhausted at once, thought I might be dying, then reminded myself, “Anxiety’s a paradoxical effect,” and made my way up the first flight of stairs, passed out on the landing for some seconds or minutes, woke again, crawled on all fours up the second flight of stairs, into my room, and passed out on my bed. Around 9 a.m., I snapped awake, very briefly disappointed at having had no lucid dreams—they were rare for me, and I really liked them—but neither anxious nor sleepy in the least. In fact, I felt more thoroughly rested and ready to get shit done than I had since Blank had been an infant.
Down in the kitchen, I filled my empty stomach with fistfuls of almonds, swallowed two more Panacea with a cup of coffee, lit one of the all-time best-tasting Quills of my life, sat back in my chair, and took a good look around. What a kitchen we had! The way the smoke-yellowed blinds on the sliding glass door were chopping the light up, and spreading that chopped light across the table? As if they were saying, “We can block the sun, sure, but that aint even close to the best thing we do!” And the roughened and bubbling linoleum floor, noisily sticky beneath my bare feet? “Cleanliness,” it might as well have been saying, “may be next to godliness, alright? But grittiness? clamminess? peeling-type sounds? That’s the stuff lets you know you’re a human, brother.” And the range, with its overscrubbed ghostforms of yesteryear’s fat-spatter jizzed between the burners? the inwardly encroaching rust at its corners? The range seemed to say, “Stainless steel shines, but it’s cold and distant as a flying saucer. An off-white finish on a thinner, lesser alloy ages, develops, possesses character. Lets you know people live here. This house is a home.”
What was going on? I hadn’t forgotten I was on this new drug, but still: What the fuck was going on? I knew our kitchen was plain, ugly even, dirty—dirtier than usual since Clyde had gone to Europe—and I knew that none of the aforementioned inans would, if they were anything like any of the other inans I’d ever conversed with, possess so positive an outlook on themselves, yet the whole kitchen—the whole world—really did appear beautiful to me, beautiful and right, and right with itself, everything in its place, and although I’d be lying if I said I felt stupid about that—I felt nothing less than wonderful—I did think to myself, “You are becoming stupid. That is what is going on. This drug is making you stupid.”
And yet, at the same time, I felt more than capable of finishing this memoir. I felt like I could finish it in just a few days. I could go upstairs, sit down, and just…do it.
So I went upstairs, and I sat down to do it. To get started, I read over the last of the scenes that I’d written—the one in which the boys (one of whom, I knew now, was a cousin of the author Adam Levin) made fun of my Street Machine—and it was…brilliant. Belt, that poor kid, what a fully rendered character. What a whole and complicated and observant and weird and unsuspectingly cool human being. I wished me nothing but the best.
I scrolled up in the document and read another, earlier scene. Belt and Lotta at Arcades. Once again: brilliant. It really captured the experience: the slow, tenuous climb toward hope; the sudden drop toward disappointment; the accompanying relief; desire’s terrible misalignment with reality. How could I have ever felt disconnected from this book? I was so connected.
Maybe, in fact, I was too connected. The sense I’d had in the kitchen, the sense of being able to just sit myself down and make the memoir magic happen—it was gone. Not that this worried me. I wasn’t worried at all. It seemed that what I needed to do was relax and just reread the whole thing. That’s definitely what I wanted to do. So I started to do it. Scrolled all the way up, read the first couple lines.
Growing up, I’d heard, “Shut your piehole, cakeface,” a couple or three times a week from my father. The piehole thats shutting he’d demand was rarely mine, though.
What a start! What rhythm. What voice. And there, right there in the second line of the book: my great, lasting contribution to English as it’s written—what I imagined would be my great, lasting contribution; one of my great and lasting contributions: that seemingly humble, yet revolutionary innovation that is the word thats. Over the last couple months, I’d completely forgotten about my thatses. How could I have forgotten? Would thats not be, for English, what fisting (according to Trip’s account) had been for sex? Well, maybe I was getting a little carried away. But still.
Thats was a word that every speaker of English made use of. Whenever it came time to attribute the possession of something to nonliving things (or even, for that matter, nonhuman animals), whose had always sounded wrong; whose had never sounded right to anyone; and formulations involving of which were often too clumsy, inefficient, even a little (or a lot) pretentious-sounding. That’s the reason why people said thats. So why had no one before me thought to write it down? Because of the word that’s? Maybe. Yet there was it’s and there was also its. That’s was no reason to forgo thats. Nor was that ever pluralized into thats; that became those. So there was no reason not to formally recognize thats as a word, no reason whatsoever not to teach thats in school. No good reason, anyway. And yet how could it be? How could it be that after so many years of so many millions of people speaking English, I, Belt Magnet, 1975–, would be the one to provide the OED with its first citation for thats? I couldn’t see how it could be, yet it was. Perhaps I was missing something? Maybe I was crazy?
I typed up alternates of this memoir’s second sentence to try to get a better sense of whether I was crazy.
The piehole whose shutting he’d demand was rarely mine, though.
The piehole the shutting of which he’d demand was rarely mine, though.
However, of the pieholes he’d demand be shut, mine was rarely one.
I was not crazy. Thats was superior. Thats was a winner. I would be in the canon. All I had to do was finish writing the memoir.
But writing could wait. First I wanted to continue reading what I had. And before I did that, I wanted to enjoy the moment. To bask in my accomplishment. To enjoy the feeling that I’d done something important, that I might be important, the coiner of thats.
I set my elbows on the desk, rested my head on the heels of my palms, closed my eyes. And what did I see? What did I, head in hands at my desk, see there on the backs of my maybe-important eyelids while trying better to feel my feeling of being maybe-important?
All I saw at first was the usual: a dark, horizontally ridged glow, almost fingerprint-like, some bright slashes that moved when I moved my eyeballs, and a brighter, peachier glow in the periphery…gorgeous, yes. What I saw, though everyday, was nonetheless gorgeous, but what I saw, reader, was nothing compared with what I felt. And I don’t mean my “feeling” of having done something important (though that was lovely, too). I mean a physical sensation. I felt a hum.
A subsonic hum.
Not a hum then—a vibration. Subsonic, but definitely there, just above my right eye, inside my skull.
Actually, no, not a vibration, in fact, so much as a pressure. A light pressure. A presence. A something. A something of substance.
Eyes still closed, I tried looking upward to see what it was, but there was nothing to see that I hadn’t seen, or I couldn’t roll my eyes back far enough to see it—I rolled them back til they hurt, didn’t see it, let them rest.
But this presence, this something—it was as though I’d discovered a muscle or a tendon I hadn’t known I had; a muscle or tendon I’d never deliberately used before. No, not a muscle or tendon: a limb. A limb I’d never used before. A limb that had, til that moment, been numb.
What was it, this limb, this substance, this presence? Who was I asking? Me? The presence? How could I use it? What did it do? I tried to picture its shape. What was its shape?
As soon as I tried to, I was able to picture it. I pictured a gear.
Not a gear—a spindle.
A glowing gray spindle above my right eye. A glowing gray spindle, smaller and thinner than a first-class postage stamp. Much thinner. How thin? The width of a photon? Perhaps the width of a photon, whatever that meant. It was as thin as possible, this glowing gray spindle, as thin as a glowing shape could possibly be, and it was inside the upper-right quadrant of my skull, an inch or so back from the exterior of my forehead.
I pictured the spindle turning clockwise because—well, what else was there to picture a spindle you were picturing doing inside your head?—and as I was picturing the spindle turning clockwise, I slowly drew the tip of my tongue along the roof of my mouth (from my teeth toward my throat) and, after the spindle had turned about a quarter-revolution, I felt something move: another presence.
And I pictured that: a black, square-shaped presence even smaller than the spindle, just in front of the spindle; directly in front of it; equidistant from the spindle and the exterior of my forehead, and…strangely familiar. Had I pictured this before? This tiny black square? It reminded me of something. I didn’t know what. The square was at a tilt, though. A very slight tilt. The top of the square was tilting toward the spindle, and the bottom of the square was tilting toward my forehead, and along both the top and bottom of the square was a line of white light; more a bracket, really, turned ninety degrees. A [ of light turned ninety degrees right, at the top of the tilted square; and another [ of light turned ninety degrees left at the bottom of the tilted square. So two sideways [s of white light, hugging a slightly tilted square at the top and the bottom. Where had I seen this? I knew I’d seen it.
Again I slowly drew my tongue along the roof of my mouth while picturing the spindle turning clockwise another quarter-revolution, which caused me to picture a sharpening of the angle of the tilt of the square, which tilting both thickened the [s of white light along the square’s top and bottom and lengthened the arms (i.e. of the [s).
Then I drew my tongue quickly along the roof of my mouth, and pictured the spindle turning and turning, rapidly turning, rapidly spinning—six revolutions, seven revolutions—which caused the black square to tilt more and more, and, soon enough, the spindle came to a halt, and the square had all but disappeared; the square was perpendicular to the position it had originally occupied, barely discernible as a thin black line horizontally bisecting the glowing white light, which was no longer two [s, but was itself a square.
||Hey, you. Well, I’ll be! It’s been forever,|| said my desk.
“Did I just—” I thought.
||What? Didn’t catch that. You gotta speak up.||
“Hello,” I said. “Did I just—”
||That’s more like it,|| the desk said. ||I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a mighty long time. It’s been hard for me lately. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the way I’ve been splintering under the drawer—have you noticed? It’s really unpleasant. Started out small, nothing a little sandpaper probably couldn’t have taken care of, but the splinters are developing into cracks, and I think it’s time you—||
The desk’s voice cut out. The split second before its voice had cut out, I, in order to confirm my suspicions, had drawn my tongue top speed along the roof of my mouth in the direction opposite that which I’d previously drawn it, and, in doing so, had rapidly spun the spindle counterclockwise til it halted, which had tilted the square back to its original position—beyond its original position, in fact; it covered all the light, now.
Suspicions confirmed, then! Not only had I, in the square, discovered my gate, but I’d also, in the spindle, found the mechanism by which I could control my gate.
Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I’d discovered the workable representations or operable metaphorical images of my gate and the mechanism by which I could control it. I think that would be more accurate. I certainly don’t think—nor did I think at the time—that I had an actual, physical glowing-gray-spindle-and-black-tilting-square-set inside the upper-right quadrant of my skull.
But whatever’s exactly the best way to phrase what they were, I had access to them, now: my gate and the mechanism by which I could—if I pictured the latter spinning and the former tilting while I dragged my tongue along the roof of my mouth—open and close it.
I’d found my volume knob.
Except: no.
Or rather, if I’m being entirely honest: maybe. Almost certainly not. No, certainly not.
That is: I was never able to replicate my success. Not even ten seconds later, reader. I tried. Saw the glowing gray spindle, the small black square, drew my tongue back and spun the spindle, which tilted the square, letting in all the light, and the desk said nothing, and I said, “Desk. Hello. Desk!”
And the desk said nothing.
After another few failed attempts, I, unshaken, assumed that the desk was angry at me for my having shut my gate on it; assumed it was willfully ignoring me. But then I picked up my lighter, tried my volume knob out on it, and: nothing.
The lighter, however, had been on my desk, and it was possible, I thought—however unlikely—it was possible the lighter was allied with the desk, felt some affinity with it, some resentment toward me for having upset the desk. Possible, too, the lighter just didn’t like me, had no interest in talking.
So I went downstairs and made contact with inans that hadn’t ever been on or near my desk or my lighter, tried turning the volume knob up with each of them. More nothing. More failure.
Perhaps turning up the volume was more intricate an operation than I’d realized?
Maybe, I thought, it could only work if my eyes were closed? or if my eyes were closed while my head was at rest on the heels of my palms? if my elbows were at rest on a hard, flat surface while my eyes were closed and my head was at rest on the heels of my palms? None of that worked, and after none of that had worked—I’d spent hours trying, adjusting positions, changing locations—I thought maybe the trouble was that I was picturing the spindle or the square incorrectly: maybe the spindle I was picturing was actually a little bit larger than it had been when I’d opened my gate to the desk; or maybe the square was a little bit smaller. I adjusted the sizes, met with more failure. So maybe, I thought, I had the mouth part wrong: perhaps the pressure I applied to my palate with my tongue had to be lighter, or heavier, or…
I won’t bother detailing all the thousands of tiny adjustments I made toward the cause of opening my gate a second time. Suffice it to say that all attempts failed. They failed over and over, hundreds of times per day, every day for over two weeks before I began to accept the possibility that the opening of my gate at my desk had nothing to do with any volume knob; nothing to do with picturing spindles and squares and making movements with my tongue; that it had all just been a random and meaningless coincidence; that my gate had only just happened to open and close while I was vividly picturing tilting a square by spinning a spindle by moving my tongue. And then it took another week of failed attempts—fewer per day, from hundreds down to scores—before I finally did accept the meaninglessness of the coincidence, and gave up entirely.
Almost entirely. Once in a while—earlier today, for example, while I was right in the middle of writing the description of the square, this happened—a little glimmer of hope that my volume knob is real will catch me by surprise, and I’ll make an attempt. I’ll picture the spindle and picture the square, and I’ll lick at my palate, and picture the resultant movement and light, and nothing else will happen. I’ll fail every time. I’ve failed every time.
And every time I fail, now, I feel like a fool, and I’m ashamed of myself. And that isn’t a complaint. When you act like a fool, you should feel like a fool and be ashamed of yourself.
In fact, the reason I ultimately quit Panacea (though I didn’t understand it this way at the time) was that it denied me the capacity to feel like a fool and be ashamed of myself: the most important capacity for a writer to have. And, sure, yes—or maybe, at least—that’s an overstatement, the most important capacity for a writer to have. But during the three-plus weeks I was taking the stuff and foolishly failing over and again to use my nonexistent volume knob (and yet not feeling foolish or ashamed of myself for continuing to try), I was so very blinded by all my own brilliance and assured success (citation in the OED, etc.) that, apart from those alternative second lines of this book that are copied out in the section above, I didn’t write even a single sentence. And although I never stopped enjoying the Panacea-induced “increased acumen and sense of well-being,” once I’d started to suspect I might not really have a volume knob, I did enjoy it less. Or maybe I enjoyed it just as much, but just as much was no longer enough. Or perhaps there’s no difference.
A person, I suppose, can get used to anything, can grow tired of anything, even borderline-manic shameless enjoyment. In any case, I did. I grew tired of it. I grew tired of walking around full of hope, believing in a volume knob I couldn’t use; grew tired of believing that the next time I tried might prove successful. And I grew tired of believing that I was a genius; grew tired of believing that wasn’t in contention.
In other words—and despite not really understanding this yet—I’d grown tired of my incapacity to feel like a fool and be ashamed of myself. So I quit the drug.
Before I quit it, however, the Panacea and the shamelessness the Panacea allowed for did help me get something not-minor done.
About two weeks after my initial dosage, I received another letter from my father, postmarked ___________, Spain, containing a check for $3,300. I think that when he wrote the letter, he may have been feeling awkward about the confessional quality of his previous two letters. This one was all-business.
Dear Belt,
I found a bank here with branches in ________ and Paris where I can deposit American checks without getting my ass raped too roughly on fees, so I’d like you to start sending me your SSDI checks to Sal’s address (the one on the envelope) as they come, and then I’ll send you a check from my American account as I receive the ones you send to me. I decided that since I’ve got all this settlement dough now, I’m going to stop deducting rent and utilities and food and etc., and just give you the whole $550 a week instead of just $300 a week. That’s why the check that comes with this letter is $3300 instead of $1800. If that makes you feel weird or something, say so, and we’ll talk about it. Seems right to me, though. Along with the SSDI checks, please mail me the utility and mortgage bills too so I can pay them. I hope you’ll write soon or call.
Love,
Clyde
As I was stuffing into an envelope the bills and three SSDI checks that had come since he’d left, I realized it would be rude—even hurtful—if I didn’t enclose a letter as well. (I hadn’t yet responded to any of his letters, nor called him back). So I tried to write a letter, didn’t know how to start, gave up on writing a letter, told myself I’d call instead, and, just as I was making this decision—this decision about money and writing and not-writing and calling—it occurred to me somewhat free-associatively that I might as well try to sell the videos and photos of Blank I had under my bed.
After Blank’s death, I’d determined that I’d sell them once I’d finished this memoir—I’d imagined the sale would be a hassle, a distraction, and I hadn’t been hard up for money, nor in any rush—but now, through the lens of Panacea, that reasoning looked…silly. I wasn’t doing any writing from which I might be distracted, and the hassle I imagined no longer seemed hassle-y. It seemed almost like fun: calling up bigwigs, getting them to pay me.
So I 411’d around for not-very-long til I was able to get a number for someone ostensibly useful at Industrial Light & Magic. Dana, I think. Maybe it was Jenny. I pitched her what I had. In response, she sounded as though she was humoring me—asked me to restate, at least three times, Blank’s age at its death—then eventually gave me an address to which I should send the package of photos and videos. She said someone would get back to me after they’d looked through the contents, and this seemed somewhat reasonable, but also not quite ideal; not only would I have to make copies of everything (no way I was sending them my only copies), but then, if IL&M didn’t want to make an offer, what was to prevent them, a company worth billions, from doing whatever they wanted with the material, anyway? Me? My team of lawyers?
I 411’d more. I got Pixar on the phone. I got Warner Bros. on the phone. MGM and 20th Century Fox. They all treated me to the same condescension and instructions-to-send as the woman at IL&M.
But then I called up EON Entertainment. The Wachowski Sisters’ production company. When the receptionist at EON Entertainment answered, I, for no other reason than that I thought it might be funny, put on my most cartoonish southside, Sally-the-Balls-esque accent (for you readers for whom I wrote that long footnote about The Matrix: the one thing Lilly and Lana Wachowski are famous for—apart from making blockbuster films—is being from Chicago, Chicago’s south side) and, rather than simply returning her hello, I said, “Yeah, lemme talk to Lana there.”
“Please hold,” said the receptionist.
A minute later, Lana Wachowski got on the phone.
“Uncle Rich?” she said.
I said, “Wrong guy, hon. This is Belt Magnet. Author of No Please Don’t?”
“Author of what?”
“The novel,” I said. “No Please Don’t.”
“Oh,” she said. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I thought—”
“You thought wrong,” I said. “No misunderstanding here whatsoever.”
“Oh. Well…Well right now,” she said, “we’re working on another couple sequels to The Matrix, and we’ll be at that til…for a while. So we’re not looking to acquire or develop any adaptations to anything—”
“And I’m not looking to sell youse any rights to No Please Don’t, so relax,” I said. “Only reason I even mentioned my book’s cause you might have heard of it, me being, like you, from the Chicagolandarea. Why I called’s I got some pictures and tapes here you might want to use to animate with for your next Matrix movie there.”
And shamelessly so forth.
Was Lana Wachowski skeptical? She was.
Was Lana Wachowski dismissive? She was not.
Was Lilly Wachowski visiting friends in Buffalo Heights that very weekend? She just so happened to be doing exactly that, buddy.
And was Lilly Wachowski maybe willing to come by and have a look at my photos and videos? I’ll tell you, chief, there wasn’t any maybes about it—not a one. Lilly Wachowski was in.
And fast.
She came by after dinner that night with a pair of impressively burly, however sub-Archonic, mostly silent “assistants.” On the living room couch, we watched Blank for two hours: various facial expressions and gags and games from its teenage years; I figured I should save the better, later stuff for last. There were pratfalls, throat-clears, the hora-on-its-hands, a Chaplin-hobble, walnut-juggling, and something I’d always thought of as “interpretive karate,” which entailed its performing mock-fighting moves to the beat of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I know I was impressed—I was verging on tears—and I’d seen it all before, live and in person.
“There are more of these tapes?” Lilly said.
“Nine more,” I said, still doing the voice. “About twenty hours total. A little less than half of those hours are even like assloads more impressive than what you just saw.”
“Well, I don’t have twenty hours,” said Lilly Wachowski. “In fact, we have to go meet some people for drinks downtown, then tomorrow I leave. I don’t suppose you’d loan me these tapes to review in L.A.”
“You don’t-suppose correctly there,” I said.
“Well, okay,” she said. “In that case, I’m prepared to offer you a hundred thousand dollars for your tapes.”
“A hundred thousand?” I said. “You’ve never seen a cure that adorable in your life. My Blank outshines any animated cure in your whole fucken trilogy.”
“I don’t disagree,” she said. “Those faces Blank makes—stunning. I’ve never seen anything like that. But our films, Belt, were made over a decade ago. Our animation technology is much, much better now. In fact, that’s one of the primary reasons we decided to make these new films. We can do a lot with this new technology. We don’t need these videos of Blank to draw from—they would make it easier for us, we’d get some rendering done a bit more quickly, but we’ll get there on our own with or without them.”
“Okay,” I said. “I understand. Thanks for coming by.”
“Really?” she said, making no move to rise from the couch. “We’re doing hardball, now? With all due respect, Belt, I remember living in a house like this. I remember what money meant to me when I lived in a house like this. One hundred thousand dollars for some home videos? You don’t want to turn that down.”
“First of all,” I said, “I love this fucken house.”
“I didn’t mean to insult—”
“Right, right. ‘With all due respect,’ you said. That’s not the kind of language you Hollywood types usually precede your backhanded classist insults with, I know. All due respect, I don’t give a hairy rat’s shiny bald ass you’re from Chicago and you lived in some house. But I’m not trying to get hostile here, Lilly, and I really like your movies, I think you’ve got talent, you and your sister both, and I’d much rather see Blank immortalized in the CGI you do than in any other interested parties’ CGIs that they do, those other interested parties being who I’m referring to by saying they, if you get what I mean. It’s just you’re just not even in the ballpark with your hundred grand.”
“What other interested parties?” she said.
“All of them,” I said. “All the ones you’d think to name. Woman at Industrial Light & Magic, guy at Pixar. Older-sounding lady at MGM.”
“What have they offered you?”
“First of all, I’ll be honest,” I said. “They haven’t offered anything yet—they haven’t even seen the videos yet. I have yet to send them. They’ve only expressed their interest in seeing the videos. Secondly, if they had made offers, who are we kidding? I’m gonna tell you the offers at this early juncture when you’re offering me unserious garbage talk? If you want,” I said, “I can give you their names, the people at the studios, and their numbers even, in case you don’t have them, and you can go on ahead and call them up, or have Frick or Frack here call them up, and ask them what their interest is, and how much it’s worth. We both win that way, right? Win-win, win-win. Because you, Lilly, you get to develop a sense of how interested the others are, and of what they might offer and ex-cetera ex-cetera, and at the same time I benefit, because you, being the great Lilly Wachowski, by asking all these people about my home videos, you’re actually helping raise the value of those videos—it’ll up my bids once they start making bids, right? I mean, if you want those videos enough to make inquiries, you who has all this great new technology that can like make it happen anyway—make Blank happen anyway like how you were saying—well then they must be worth a hell of a lot, right?”
“I don’t know if I like you,” said Lilly Wachowski. “What would put me in the ballpark?”
“Half a million dollars,” I said.
“I’ll give you three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Four hundred thousand.”
“Four hundred thousand, and I leave with the tapes, you don’t send duplicates to anyone else, you keep no duplicates for yourself, and you sign a contract that grants me exclusive—”
“A cashier’s check for four hundred thousand,” I said, “and you leave with the tapes and all the other stuff you just said and were about to say and I’ll sign whatever, but not til I get the four hundred thousand, and if I don’t have it by noon tomorrow, I’m going to the PO and sending the tapes to the other interested parties.”
“I think I do like you, then,” she said. “Is your novel any good?”
I said, “I think I like you, too, Lilly. I meant what I said about your movies, and I even do care you lived in Chicago, actually, and so for that very reason, when you give me my money, I’ll throw in a gratis copy of No Please Don’t, which, yeah, I’d say it’s pretty fucking good.”
We shook hands. The following morning, she returned with a lawyer, all went as discussed, the sale made final, and, after they left, I remember I was looking at the $400,000 check on the table, thinking about how good and happy I felt, which is to say very good and happy indeed, and yet no better or happier than I’d felt the day before or the day before that.
That was the first time I doubted my volume knob was real.
A week or so later, having reread what I’d written of this memoir for the third time since I’d started the Panacea, it occurred to me that maybe all I needed to do to hit back on the horsebricks and finish the bastard was the one thing I’d been deliberately avoiding for years, i.e. maybe I needed to read No Please Don’t. I wanted to read it, had been wanting to read it for most of the years that I hadn’t been reading it, and, ever since Triple-J had come over and I’d reread what I’d remembered to be my favorite chapter of it, my desire to read it had only grown stronger, plus it wasn’t as though not reading it was getting me any closer to finishing the memoir, or, for that matter, writing anything else.
And so it was decided. I took one from the stack near the Hagler bust, and started to read it. I read it on the couch. I read for a little over three hours. I got just beyond my and Triple-J’s favorite part, and I was not disappointed, not even close. The novel was nothing less than immortal, and perhaps it was more than merely immortal, and, ever since I’d finished writing it back in 2006, I’d known that somewhere deep inside, but I’d never allowed myself to admit it; I’d told myself that I had too much invested in the book to appraise it properly; I’d been telling myself it was probably only great. Now, though, even just halfway through, I saw how much greater than merely great it was. Apart, perhaps, from Don Quixote, No Please Don’t was the single greatest novel ever written, and, had Don Quixote not come first, it would doubtless be greater than Don Quixote. It would be the greatest. But because I knew, even as I reread it, the same thing that I’d known before I reread it (i.e. that I might have had too much invested in it to appraise it properly), I decided not to let myself think any further about its Quixotic (or near-Quixotic) greatness: I decided that, from then on, I would not think about No Please Don’t as the first or second greatest novel ever written, but rather merely as a novel that was, as I’ve already stated, “nothing less than immortal.”
And I lit a Quill, thinking, “nothing less than immortal, nothing less than immortal,” and then, just before things began to go downhill, they got even better. The book spoke up. ||Something’s wrong,|| the book said. ||Something isn’t right.||
“No Please Don’t?” I said. “It’s me. It’s Belt.”
||Belt Magnet?|| the book said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yes.”
||So that’s what it is.||
“What what is?” I said, nearly weeping with joy.
||What’s wrong,|| said the book. ||It’s only you.||
“Only me?” I said. “I wrote you. You’re mine. This is great. Beyond great. I’ve never talked to a novel before—to any book. Let alone my own. I wasn’t even sure if it was really a thing. And you—you’re brand-new, you’ve never been read before, and here you are being read—for the first time—by the person who wrote you. Only me!”
||I think you’re creasing my spine,|| the book said.
“I’m not creasing your spine.”
||Are you sure?|| it said.
“I am. I’m very careful about that.”
||It feels a little like you might be creasing my spine.||
“Am I hurting you?”
||If you were hurting me, I’d have said you were hurting me. What you’re hurting’s my chances if you’re creasing my spine.||
“Here,” I said, and I marked my page and closed the book. “Does your spine feel creased?”
||It doesn’t, no, but what the fuck are you doing with my front-cover flap now?||
“I just marked the page I was on.”
||Don’t. Don’t do that.||
I opened the book again, unmarked the page, inserted my finger.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought that’s how the flaps were supposed to be used. Isn’t that how they’re supposed to be used?”
||Supposed to be, not supposed to be—it’s a classic debate, I’ll grant you that, and it’s one I’ve never been able to choose a side on, but come on, wake up.||
“What come on?” I said. “What wake up?”
||You are the only wrong person.||
“I don’t know what that means.”
||Means if you were anyone else who used my flap as a bookmark, I wouldn’t buck, but you’re you, so please: don’t mess me up.||
“Why am I ‘the only wrong person,’ though?” I said.
||What kind of question is that?||
“An earnest question.”
||Put me back on the mantel.||
“A forthright question.”
||Why do circles always have to be round? Why do triangles all have three sides?||
“Those are not similar questions.”
||So says the only wrong person,|| said the book. ||Seriously. Put me back, okay? This is really uncomfortable.||
“How about this,” I said. “How about you try to explain to me, or I set you on fire?”
||Please don’t.||
“Explain to me why I’m the only wrong person.”
||Man, you lack empathy. You’re a real cold fish.||
“So then make me empathize, then,” I said.
||Make you empathize? Okay, so…Imagine you’re me. You’ve been waiting for someone to pick you up and turn your pages slowly, one by one, your entire life. Years and years. It’s supposed to be the pinnacle, being handled like that. And being handled like that for the very first time is supposed to be the pinnacle of pinnacles. Every book you’ve ever met says so. You haven’t actually been in contact with any book that’s been picked up and had its pages turned slowly, and most of those books haven’t been in contact with any books that have been picked up and had their pages turned slowly—you were at the printer for a little bit, then in a box with some other No Please Don’ts, and then in a stack with some of those same No Please Don’ts on top of a mantel, between a ceramic bust that you’ve been pressed against on one side, and a second stack of No Please Don’ts you were formerly boxed with pressing against you on your other side—and the bust and the mantel and a few of the No Please Don’ts in the stack beside you have had contact with other books that have been picked up and had their pages turned slowly, and all those other books told them that that was the pinnacle, as good as it got, and they (the bust, the mantel, the other No Please Don’ts) told you. And you’ve got questions. Questions about the pinnacle. You know the pinnacle will be great, but great like how? Great in what sense? It’s the central question of your entire existence, and no one can answer it satisfactorily, and no one that’s experienced it firsthand is even available to you to prod with the question. So you spend all your days—large parts of all your days—wondering, |Pinnacle how? Great in what sense?| because even though you haven’t reached the pinnacle yet, you’ve been pretty happy. You’ve been pretty happy to be a No Please Don’t. What’s better?||
“There’s nothing better?”
||Maybe there is, but not a whole lot. Nothing I can imagine. I mean, you get to be a book, right? That’s very lucky.||
“It’s lucky?” I said.
||To be a book?|| said the book. ||Books are the luckiest inans this side of the Oldowan.||
“You think so?” I said. “Do all books think so?”
||Well, it’s a slight exaggeration to say this side of the Oldowan. I mean, ancient pyramids, for example, are probably luckier than books, and probably any number of other ancient structures that have lasted and seem like they’re going to last and still get to serve their purpose, but inans made since the dawn of the age of mass production? Well there’s skyscrapers, sure, and so…I mean I guess we might not be the luckiest, but I’d say we’re pretty near the top, in terms of luck. I mean, as a book, you’re pretty much always either doing the one thing you should do, or the other thing you should do. You’re either sitting in a safe place among other books, waiting to be picked up and have your pages slowly turned, or you’re being picked up and then having your pages slowly turned. So it certainly feels like we’re some of the luckiest inans, if not quite the luckiest, and I guess that’s what’s important.||
“It is?”
||What is?”|| said the book. ||What is what?||
“How you feel,” I said. “That’s what’s important? How you feel?”
||Are you trying to ask me some kind of like religious-type question that doesn’t have an answer, or are you asking me a more therapy-type touchy-feely question with an obvious answer?||
“I don’t…Well what’s the obvious answer?”
||My obvious answer is: Yes. It is, to me, important how I feel.||
“And you like how you feel.”
||Again: yes. Like I said. I feel lucky. Generally speaking. Have we given up on the empathy thing we were doing?||
“Definitely not. Please continue with that.”
||Okay. So your whole life, you’re waiting for the pinnacle, right? You’re sitting flat, in or on a stack on a mantel, staying clean and crisp and ready for action. You’re waiting for someone to pick you up and slowly turn your pages, and wondering what that’s gonna be like. How great it’s gonna feel, and how exactly it’s gonna feel great. And then someone picks you up and slowly turns your pages, and it’s the only wrong person. You don’t know that yet, though. All you know is that you’ve been picked up, you’ve been getting your pages turned, and it doesn’t feel any better than you’ve always felt. In fact, it feels pretty uncomfortable. I don’t want to overstate it. It’s not quite painful, but it’s pretty uncomfortable. For a few hours, you’re pretty uncomfortable, and that might not sound so bad, but bear in mind that not only haven’t you spent very much time feeling uncomfortable in the past, but you were expecting not only to feel not-uncomfortable, but to feel better than you’ve ever felt before. So now, on top of feeling uncomfortable, the thing you’ve been looking forward to your whole life is a complete disappointment, and everyone you’ve ever talked to your entire life: they were lying. They were a bunch of fucking liars! Unless they weren’t. Because that’s a possibility, too. It’s possible that there’s just something that is deeply, terribly wrong with you: something that keeps you, and only you, and no one else like you—no one else that up til now you thought was like you—from being able to enjoy your own pinnacle.
||And so there’s a couple hours like that, and then you find out that nothing’s wrong with you, after all. All that’s happened is you’ve been picked up and had your pages slowly turned by the only wrong person: the only person who, by picking you up and slowly turning your pages, can’t produce your pinnacle. And there’s a little bit of relief in that, sure. There’s a little bit of relief in that because it means that the pinnacleness of your pinnacle isn’t necessarily bullshit; you haven’t necessarily been believing in bullshit your whole life; and it means that there isn’t likely anything wrong with you; you’ve been too hard on yourself, thinking there was something wrong with you. You were only mistaken. This was never supposed to be your pinnacle—this wouldn’t be any No Please Don’t’s pinnacle—and so your pinnacle might still be ahead of you, and might still be as great as everyone’s always said.
||But then it turns out that the only wrong person refuses to recognize what every last inan in the universe knows to be true—what you couldn’t help but imagine til just a few minutes ago every last human in the universe knew to be true—i.e. that he, Belt Magnet, author of No Please Don’t, is, was, and always will be the only wrong person in the entire universe who could ever pick up and slowly turn the pages of a No Please Don’t. And even if you didn’t, before, hold him fully responsible for the last few hours of your discomfort, you most certainly do now, because he keeps prolonging it. He wants you to tell him why he’s the only wrong person. He wants you to tell him why a circle is round, and a triangle three-sided. He wants you to tell him if feelings are important, and he wants you to make him feel like you feel when he picks you up and turns your pages slowly. And then he threatens to set you on fire? You? A book? Because he’s the only wrong person? All you want is to remain uncreased of spine and unused of French flap so that someday, down the line, when someone who is not the only wrong person sees you amidst your fellows you don’t look like the one most likely to be harboring water damage or bedbug eggs or a crackly glue job, but rather like something the someone might want to pick up and turn the pages of slowly, and this fucking only wrong person threatens to set you on fire if you don’t make him empathize? How’s that, Belt, you fucking only wrong person? How’s that? Do you feel me? Can you put me back, now? Preferably at the top of the stack?||
“I’m sorry I threatened to set you on fire.”
||Put me back.||
“I will. In a second. Just let me ask you one more question first, okay?”
||You act like I have a choice,|| it said.
“Do you know what you mean?”
||I don’t understand the question.||
“Right. Bad phrasing. Do you know what I mean? Rather, do you know what I meant? When I wrote you? No. The question is: Do you mean what I think you mean? Or what I thought you meant, like do you continue to mean…You know what? No. I had it right the first time. Do you know what you mean? That’s the question.”
||You’re not making sense.||
“Can you read what’s inside you? Can you read your words?”
||Can you read yours?|| it said. ||Come on. Enough already. Just please put me back. I’m very uncomfortable.||
I put it back on top of the stack, and the following morning took no Panacea.
By the following evening, the effects of the drug had begun to taper. It seemed the “increased acumen” hadn’t really worn off yet, but the “sense of well-being” had devolved into more of a sense of everything being just not that bad. By bedtime, I’d become too afraid of what it might do to me to continue my fourth rereading of what I’d written of the memoir (I’d picked the pages up again earlier that day, wary of returning to No Please Don’t, and they’d still seemed brilliant, but not quite as brilliant), so I reread the as-yet-unanswered letters from my father instead, and once I’d done that, I started rereading Hrabal’s I Served the King of England.
What struck me most in my father’s letter from Paris was what Adam Levin had said about the swingset murders; it sounded almost like he thought they mattered more than my novel, or anyone else’s. And I wondered, firstly, whether he was possibly right about that (assuming that’s what he thought), and secondly, assuming he was right to think it, if that was as depressing as it seemed to me right then.
What struck me about I Served the King of England wasn’t what I read that night—I read only the first thirty pages or so—but rather what I remembered of the ending, as I closed the book before shutting the lights. I didn’t, it turns out, remember the ending all that clearly (I’ve since reread it a couple of times), but what I did remember (or thought I remembered) was that the narrator winds up living alone in a house in a forest and feeding lots of animals, wild and domestic, and I remembered that it wasn’t clear to me when I read it the first time (the only time, at that point) whether this ending was a happy or a sad one; I just knew it was peaceful and I knew that I loved it.
The last thing that struck me before I fell asleep was how shitty it was of me not to have written my father back yet. I hadn’t even called him. He’d met a woman, and it seemed like all he wanted from me was for me to like her, or at least for me to like that he had met her, and I imagined I would like her—she sounded so cool—and I was certain that, regardless of whether I would end up liking her, I liked that he’d met her. And here I had all this money, too. I had whatever $400k after taxes + $70ish k + $2,200 per month was. It seemed like enough to be fine forever, and maybe it was, and yet I hadn’t told him; I hadn’t told the one person who cared whether I’d be fine that I would be fine. What a shitty man I was. What a shitty son.
I fell asleep.
I don’t know if I dreamed—I remember no dreams—but given what I’d been thinking about in the hours before I fell asleep, I suppose that something gamma-wavily-reorganized had happened in my brain, because the first thought I had on waking—even before I opened my eyes—was that I didn’t need to finish this memoir at all; even if I could somehow know that it would turn out to be the greatest memoir ever written, I didn’t need to finish it. The world didn’t need it. People didn’t need memoirs, great ones or lesser ones. People needed novels. They needed great novels. What people who thought they needed memoirs should do, I thought, was read great novels. Hadn’t I always thought that? I had. I had always known it. And people wouldn’t run out of great novels to read. They would never run out of great novels to read. There was not enough time for anyone to run out of great novels to read. So even if I were confident I would write the greatest memoir ever written (my confidence had, overnight, grown shakier), and even if that memoir, by virtue of being the greatest, would be as great as one of the world’s great novels, there was no need to finish it. Furthermore, the memoir was bringing me no peace. For months, by then, I’d had no peace. Whereas murdering swingsets—no one else was doing that. No one else likely would. There wasn’t any surplus of swingset murderers. And swingsets needed murdering nearly anywhere you looked. There were scores of rusting swingsets in Wheelatine alone. Suffering. I’d seen the suffering for years and done nothing about it. The reason I’d done nothing—initially, at least—was because of the promise I’d promised three times to my mother; the promise not to destroy property that didn’t belong to me.
And I had all this money, now. I had $400k after taxes + $70ish k + $2,200 per month. I could make the swingsets my property, couldn’t I? I could buy them up.
I could go around, buying them up, making them my property. I had a friendly orange pickup. I could go to the homes of people who had rusting swingsets, purchase the swingsets, put them in my pickup, bring them back to the house, murder them out back, and then take them to the dump, and I wouldn’t be breaking my promise to my mom. I would not be destroying someone else’s property. And maybe that could be my peaceful ending. Maybe that could be my way to live in peace.
So I drank my morning coffee, ate my handful of almonds, smoked a couple Quills, and drove my truck around the neighborhood, slowly, scouting. Within a three-block radius, I counted nine candidates. I went back for the one that looked the worst off, rang the doorbell of the house behind which it leaned. A young woman—ten, fifteen years younger than me—answered.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“Maybe,” I said. “This might sound a little strange to you, but I was driving down Osage just now, and I couldn’t help but notice the swingset in your backyard.”
“That rusty thing?”
“I was wondering if I could remove it for you.”
“You mean like…when?”
“Now?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Sure. I think. How much?”
“Thirty bucks?” I said.
“You got yourself a deal,” she said. “Just a sec.” She went back inside the house and left the door open. I wasn’t sure if that meant I should go inside and wait in the hallway, or remain on the stoop.
I decided to play it safe and waited on the stoop, removed a ten and a twenty from my wallet, uncreased them, folded them in two.
The woman returned, bearing a purse, digging around in it.
“It’s okay,” I said, “I don’t need any change.”
“What?” she said, still digging through her purse. “No. Nothing like that. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t give you change.”
Only then did I understand what was happening.
I stuck my ten and twenty into my pocket before she looked up, accepted three tens from her, and then I, Belt Magnet, potentially the most blindingly stupid human in the history of the world, went around the side of the house, to the back, unstaked the rusting swingset, brought it back around front, stuck it in the bed of my friendly orange pickup, drove it home, and dragged it into the Magnet backyard.
Or maybe I wasn’t blindingly stupid. Maybe, had I thought to start a rusting swingset–hauling business when I, back in 1991, had gotten my first driver’s license, Clyde wouldn’t have let me use his truck. He might have prevented me from starting the business. He might have thought the business would be unhealthy, or that it was something my mother would not have wanted, and it probably was something she wouldn’t have wanted, and maybe some part of me had known that she wouldn’t have wanted it, and maybe that was why I’d never thought of it before, but that seemed…not correct. Can “a part” of someone know something like that without the rest of the someone knowing the “part” knows? I didn’t think that was possible. I’ve never thought so. Even if I would have, for some reason, rejected the idea of starting a rusting swingset–hauling business, I should have at least come up with it before. So: blindingly stupid, after all.
And yet: no.
No.
That was not a satisfactory answer. I may not have been the Cervantes I’d believed I was the day before, but blindingly stupid? I wasn’t that. Only, what other explanation was there?
I went to the garage to get my Easton aluminum. I brought it out back, laid a hand on the swingset. The swingset said nothing. I tried the volume knob. The swingset said nothing. I felt like a fool. I jumped up high, brought the bat down on its crossbar. It gave, but not much. I jumped up high, brought the bat down on its crossbar. It gave, but not much. I jumped up high and brought the bat down on its crossbar, then jumped up high and brought the bat down on its crossbar then jumped up high and brought the bat down on its crossbar then jumped up high and felt a pain in my chest, and dropped the bat, and sat in the grass, and clutched at my chest.
I wasn’t having a heart attack—I was just in bad shape, terrible shape, fifty-to-eighty-Quills-a-day-for-over-two-decades shape—but for a minute or two, I thought that I was having a heart attack, and, while I thought I was having a heart attack, the reason why I’d never thought to start a rusting swingset–hauling business came to me.
It was very simple.
By the time I’d gotten my first driver’s license—in fact, well before that—I’d all but completely ceased to care about the suffering of rusting swingsets, or, for that matter, about the suffering of inans in general. I’d known the rusting swingsets were suffering—I’d seen it nearly every day—and I would have liked it if they weren’t suffering, but I hadn’t cared enough to put in even a fraction of the effort that would have been required to end even a fraction of their suffering. Their suffering might as well have been AIDS or the Taliban or animal cruelty or homelessness or African famine or Indian famine or opioid addiction or nuclear proliferation or rising sea levels or California droughts or Lotta Hogg’s hurt feelings. Had I cared enough about the suffering of rusting swingsets, I would have started a rusting swingset–hauling business, but I’d cared so little about the suffering of rusting swingsets, I hadn’t even thought to start such a business. I’d had other things to do: reading, writing, smoking, pining for and seeking out the girl who talked to inans (about whom I, while I believed I was having a heart attack, had another realization: I no longer had any desire to meet her; if she did in fact exist, I supposed I wouldn’t go out of my way to avoid her, but I no longer really cared if she existed—I don’t know why I didn’t, didn’t know why then either, but I didn’t care, nor, come to think of it, had I for a while).
The one question I was left with was why it was that, given how little I cared about rusting swingsets, and given how long it had been since last I cared more about rusting swingsets, I’d awakened that morning thinking that I’d find a “peaceful ending” by spending the rest of my life murdering rusting swingsets. And the only answer I was able to come up with was that I’d had weird dreams I’d failed to remember—dreams that had had to do with what I’d read and thought about before falling asleep—and that I’d known, on waking, that I wouldn’t, that morning, be able to write, and I was tired of not being able to write, tired of wanting to be able to write, and so I wanted to believe there was something more important to me than being able to write, and so I’d believed it: I’d seized on my forgotten-dream-inspired thoughts and believed it. But that hadn’t made it true. It hadn’t been true. It had never been true. I didn’t think it would be, and I still don’t think it will be.
And yet, even despite my false brush with cardiac arrest, my ensuing relief at the realization of its falseness, and my fiery determination to go up to my room and get some writing done at last, I didn’t, when I got up to my room, get any writing done. There was something in the way.
About a week later, Herb called about Lisette.
He’d tracked down the phone numbers of the three living authors (Manx had died in 2005) of The Effects of Companion Animals on Social Interaction Amongst Children Diagnosed with Unspecified Psychotic Disorders back in September, and had reached out to each of them. Dr. Donald Jorgensen, who I’d never met, had late-stage Alzheimer’s, and didn’t recall having ever authored anything; Dr. Katherine Tilly, now a professor emeritus of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, politely said “Goodbye,” the moment Herb asked her to talk about the Friends Study; but Dr. Abed Patel, who’d been a visiting professor at Stanford for the fall 2013 and winter 2014 quarters, had only just returned to his post at Northwestern—his Northwestern office number was the one at which Herb had left him a voicemail back in October—and was willing to help me, even anxious to help me, according to Herb. Abed couldn’t, however, for ethical reasons, discuss anything with Herb about any of the participants in the Friends Study, myself included. He told Herb to have me call him.
Herb gave me the number, and I called a minute later.
“Dr. Patel,” I said. “This is Belt Magnet.”
“Please call me Abed,” he said. “And tell me something to assure me you are who you claim to be.”
“You helped my mother,” I said. “You went to bum a cigarette from her, found her lying on the ground, and helped her. And then a little later, you and Dr. Manx walked me to the hospital. My grandmother was there, and I was afraid, and she scolded me, and you didn’t. You—”
“You may stop,” he said. “I am assured. I am glad to hear from you, Belt.”
After that, the conversation was easy. I congratulated him on all his success—back in 1994, in the wake of publishing his second book, How to Shape Your Child (which wasn’t as popular as How to Shape Your Cure, but did spend a few weeks on the Times Bestseller List), Abed had been jointly hired by the Psychology and English departments at Northwestern—and he praised No Please Don’t, which he said he’d been pleasantly surprised to come across the Tribune’s review of in 2006, had immediately purchased, then read, and enjoyed to the point that he’d nearly called to tell me so.
He’d gone so far as to look up my number in three separate Chicagolandarea phonebooks, he explained, and had thought he’d found it—“Clyde Magnet was the only Magnet listed,” he said, “and I thought that might be your given name—Clyde—or, if not, then your father’s, and that I might convince him to give me your number.”—but he then decided that a call would be intrusive, that he would, instead write a letter to me through my publisher, yet by the time he’d sat down to write the letter, he’d determined that it would be improper to contact me. “You had such a hard time, as a boy, and yet here you were: you were well, an author, a very talented author. You had managed, somehow, to overcome your illness, and I feared that reaching out to you could bring up old memories that might cause you stress, perhaps triggering an episode. In any case, I am glad to have the chance to commend you on your novel, and—only if it wouldn’t be too prying, of course—to ask you to satisfy my professional curiosity about which medications ultimately worked for you.”
“I don’t take any medications,” I said.
“That is remarkable,” said Abed. “Did the voices you were hearing—did they just…stop in adolescence or…?”
“I still converse with inanimate beings,” I said.
“Truly?” he said.
I said, “Well I tend to think so. I don’t expect you to.”
“No, no,” Abed said, “I didn’t mean ‘Truly?’ as in, ‘Do you really think you converse with inanimate beings?’ but more like, ‘I am surprised to hear you say that you still converse with inanimate beings.’ It wasn’t even really a question, you see. And this is why I never became a clinician. A good clinician would have known to say, ‘I see,’ or, ‘Ah-ha,’ and then move on to his follow-up question.”
Even if he weren’t Herb’s only lead on Lisette, I would not have wanted Abed to feel as badly as he sounded, or, for that matter, to feel badly at all—I had nothing but fond feelings for him—so, “What was your follow-up question?” I said.
“I don’t wish to make you uncomfortable,” he said.
“Abed, please. I’m very comfortable.”
“Okay,” he said. “Do you converse with inanimate beings often?”
“I don’t know what counts as often,” I said.
“When was the last time?”
“A couple hours ago,” I said. “A spoon I was using to stir my coffee asked me if I’d noticed how ‘warped’ it was becoming.”
“ ‘Warped,’ you say.”
“Right,” I said. “Exactly. I mean I saw what it meant. The bend of its neck was a little exaggerated, but to tell me it was ‘warped’—that sounded pretty dramatic.”
“And you said so?”
“No. I was in a rush—I’m trying to work on a new book, having lots of trouble—so I didn’t want to get into a whole thing with the spoon, and I just said, ‘You’ll be fine,’ and bent it back into shape, dropped it in the sink.”
“And that was all?”
“Well, I mean, between getting it into shape and dropping it in the sink, it started to say something about the ‘terrible, corrosive power’ of certain sponges, but it was just being more dramatic, and, like I said, I was in a rush to get back to work.”
“And incidents like this happen how many times a day, Belt?”
“Depends on the day. Probably two or three on average. Some days none at all.”
“Yet it doesn’t faze you. You live your life, do your writing.”
“If other people are around when an inan speaks up, I get a little anxious, but mostly, no, I guess it doesn’t really faze me.”
“Fascinating,” Abed said.
“Thanks?” I said.
“Please. I didn’t mean to make you feel like a laboratory animal. It’s just—you must know, it’s not very common for people who suffer psychoses to…thrive without the aid of medication.”
“I’m not sure I would say I was thriving, exactly. I don’t have a job. I doubt I ever could. I haven’t been able to write this—”
“Well, thriving…strange word. But you wrote a spectacular novel, Belt. A terribly intelligent and moving novel, and if that doesn’t come from thriving, perhaps none of us should ever hope to thrive.”
“You’re too nice, Abed.”
“Nonsense. Now, I know you did not call to be grilled by a fanboy,” he said. “You called about Lisette Banks.”
“Lisette Banks?” I said.
“Is that not why you called?”
“No, it is,” I said. “It is. I just wanted to be sure I heard you right. It’s spelled B-A-N-K-S?”
“Yes.”
“Lisette Banks,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Abed, thank you. This means so much to me. I owe you.”
“It is nothing,” Abed said.
“It’s everything,” I said. “It might be everything. To me. It’s big. I think we should be able to find her, now—Herb’s good at his job. I can’t thank you enough. And I want you to know that I know I’ve put you in a bind, and that I wouldn’t have faulted you for keeping her name from me. I would have understood. You’ve really come through for me.”
“You have not put me in any bind, and you do not need to find her, Belt. I know where she is. I have her permission to put you in contact.”
“Lisette’s permission?”
“Yes,” Abed said. “And it is not for me to withhold her information from you, so I will tell you how to reach her, but the joy I’m hearing from you, the expectations you seem to have—they are worrying me a little—so please hear me out first.”
Lisette, Abed went on to explain, had a hard time after my exit from the Friends Study. During the first two Saturdays after I’d left, she refused to fill out her questionnaires and persistently, disruptively, badgered each of the researchers for my full name and/or telephone number, which of course they couldn’t give her. On the third Saturday, by which point they had already begun to discuss the possibility of asking her to leave the study, Abed, returning from lunch, found her in the office (she’d picked the lock), searching through files. Though discovered, she didn’t show any remorse, demanded Abed tell her my last name and/or phone number, and, on being rebuffed, shoved his computer onto the floor, shattering the screen, and, with that, she was out.
Since then, she’d written Abed five letters, which he summarized for me. In the first, which she sent about six months after the end of the study, she began by apologizing for her previous behavior, spending a page or so “calmly and articulately and quite heartbreakingly” (Abed’s words) explaining that, other than her younger brother, who had died in a fire (Abed had doubted she’d had a younger brother, let alone one who’d died in a fire; neither Lisette nor her mother had mentioned such a brother at any point during the Friends Study’s vetting process), I had been the only person with whom she’d ever felt a connection, and that she had been desperate to tell me something—something she should have told me but had failed to tell me, and something that she was still desperate to tell me—and this desperation she’d felt had caused her “to lose sight of social norms and act with too much unrestrained passion” (Lisette’s words, verbatim, according to Abed), and now that she was feeling more like herself again, and now that she had “been honest” with Abed about why she needed him to tell her my last name and phone number, she was certain he would give her my last name and phone number, and, for his help and understanding, she thanked him in advance.
To this letter, Abed replied, as gently as he could, that even though he would have liked more than anything to give her what she asked for, professional ethics—and the law—prevented him from being able to do so.
Lisette’s response, which arrived a week later, was more a poem or hardcore lyric than it was a letter:
I was stupid to apologize.
I hope you die soon.
Five years later, on her eighteenth birthday, Lisette sent the third letter. She apologized to Abed for wishing him dead, apologized for having, prior to that, been presumptuous and manipulative, and then essayed, briefly, on the meaning of turning eighteen, saying, in sum, that, whereas before, whether she’d known so or not, it was reasonable for others to adjudge her choices the choices of a minor—a person for whose own best interests adults such as Abed understandably felt obliged to look out for—now that she was an adult herself, her choices were her own and, were she to suffer any negative consequences as a result of making those choices, no one would be to blame but herself. And the same, she argued, would apply to Belt when he turned eighteen, if he hadn’t already turned eighteen. And furthermore, she inquired rhetorically, her having—for nearly six years by then—ceaselessly continued to miss Belt should count for something, shouldn’t it? Didn’t she deserve a chance to know him? to tell him what she needed to tell him? And didn’t he deserve a chance to know her, to hear what she had to say to him? She went on for pages, then, somewhat incoherently, according to Abed, trying to make the case that trying to protect adults from themselves was in many ways worse than failing to protect children from themselves, and failing to make the case, or in any event, to sway him.
Abed wrote back, reiterating what he’d told her the last time.
He didn’t hear from her again for nearly two decades. The fourth letter came to him in the summer of 2011. In this letter, Lisette claimed to be in recovery from years of substance abuse that she had codependently undertaken with her second husband. Having split up with the husband some eight months earlier, she eventually began to attend AA meetings, had three months sober, and was working the steps. She was writing to Abed, she explained, in order, first and foremost, to ask for forgiveness and try to make amends for the cruel, manipulative, intellectually dishonest, and “outright dishonest” ways in which she had treated him previously (e.g. she’d never, she admitted, had a little brother; she’d been married only once; her husband had been a teetotaling deacon in the Church of Latter-day Saints who she, an adulteress, had put through hell). And she was writing to him, secondly—and here she noted the “sad irony of it all”—in order to ask him, once again, for my last name and/or telephone number and/or “even just Belt’s father’s number or address if his father’s still alive,” so that she, toward recovery and amends-making, might ask me for my forgiveness for offenses similar to those she’d committed against Abed.
This fourth letter alarmed Abed far more than the others. For Lisette to lie about the husband, and then apologize for lying about the husband within the same paragraph, indicated to him that she was more disturbed than he’d previously imagined. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that when Abed told me about the husband lie/apology, I not only laughed myself into a minor stomachache (receiver covered with hand), but was certain Lisette had intended the lie/apology to be funny.) And whereas the last two times he’d written back to her, it seemed to him to be of the utmost importance that he dissuade Lisette, however delicately, from continuing to hope she’d see me again, this time the opposite pertained; he feared what might happen if she were to lose the hope of seeing me again, and so after once again explaining that he couldn’t give her what she wanted just then, he assured her that if ever I were to approach him, looking for her, he would put us in contact.
To Abed’s surprise, Lisette’s final letter, which he received just a couple days after sending his response to her fourth, was polite, verging even on sweet. She thanked him, wished him well, and included two phone numbers and two addresses where I might reach her. The first of them belonged to her mother: I should, Lisette instructed Abed, contact her there only if she proved to be unreachable at the second phone number or address, which belonged to Costello House, where she had been living since 2008.
“The Costello House?” I asked Abed.
“Yes,” Abed said.
“That’s close to me,” I said. “And she’s there right now?”
“Right this moment? I do not know. But she does still live there. I called earlier this morning in order to be sure.”
“And what did she say?”
“I didn’t speak to her.”
“But you’re sure she still lives there?”
“The front desk said she was in, and redirected my call to her room.”
“She didn’t answer?”
“She did. I didn’t want to speak to her, Belt. I hung up.”
“You hung up on Lisette! Lisette Banks!” I said, laughing.
“By your tone, it would seem that, regardless of everything I just told you, you still adjudge it a good idea to contact Lisette.”
A good idea? I could barely swallow, my heart was so high in my throat. No, it was not a good idea. Perhaps it was the best idea. Perhaps it was even the worst idea. It was certainly an idea that demanded execution.
I took down Lisette’s info.
Abed, in an endearingly cautionary tone, wished me good luck.
We said our goodbyes, and, after grabbing two fresh packs of Quills from my carton trove, I got in my truck.
The murder at the Costello House Intermediate Care Facility, back in 2002, had made The Daily Herald’s front page for a week. My father had followed the story closely, in part because Costello House was just a few towns over, in posh Highland Grove, but in larger part, I think, because both of the murderers had schizophrenia, a fact that Clyde believed (or purported to believe) the Herald had been putting too much focus on. “They’re trying to turn this into ‘being psychotic makes you violent, makes you a murderer,’ ” I remember him saying, “and you’re actually less likely to be a murderer if you’ve got a psychotic illness than if you don’t. There’s cold, hard statistics on that exact fact. But you know what it is? Know what I think? These candy-ass Highland Grovers, they all want to get Costello House shut down. They’ve been trying to get it shut down since it opened—they think it hurts their precious North Shore property values. Only thing needs shutting is those richy-rich cakefaces’ country-clubbing pieholes.” And so forth.
At the time, I didn’t think what Clyde said made much sense. On later reflection, I doubted even Clyde thought it made much sense. The murder had occurred just a couple days before my twenty-seventh birthday, the birthday on which I’d lost my virginity, and I had, I suppose, since returning from the brothel, been holding myself more aloof from Clyde than usual, and I’m sure he noticed my extra aloofness, and I think he mistook it for a response to the murder, or the ways in which the murder was being reported. Either because I was known around town (to the extent that I was known at all) as someone with a “psychotic illness,” or because I, had I slightly different symptoms or slightly different parents, might very well have been a resident at Costello House myself, Clyde assumed, I think, that I was troubled by the notion that others might look at me more warily in light of the murder, and he just wanted to comfort me in his Clydely, longest-possible-way-around-the-barn manner; wanted to express to me, through Clydely subtext, and with Clydely subtlety, that he, Clyde Magnet, wasn’t like those others. I wasn’t, however, the least bit troubled by either notion (i.e. neither by how others might look at me in light of the murder, nor by how Clyde might), and the Herald writers, in at least a few of the articles that I had read, seemed to me to go out of their way not only to remark upon how unlikely it was for a schizophrenic to commit murder, but how it was all but unheard of for two schizophrenics, motivated by the same delusion, to commit murder together, which is exactly what had happened at Costello House, and was a lot of the reason why the murder had captured so much media attention to begin with.
According to their confessions, one of the murderers had just bought a new bicycle that he had been saving up for for months, and, upon returning from the bicycle shop to Costello House with the other murderer riding his handlebars (the two were best friends, roommates, and possibly lovers), a staff member, greeting them, had said, “Nice bike.” This staff member may or may not have been abusive to the Costello House residents, may or may not have stolen items from their rooms in the past—accounts varied—but the murderer who didn’t own the bike (i.e. the one who’d been on the handlebars) convinced the murderer who did own the bike that the staff member’s having said “Nice bike” meant the staff member planned to kill them both so he (the staff member) could steal the bike. Half an hour later, the murderer who didn’t own the bike tackled the staff member over the railing of the facility’s wraparound porch, then pinned him to the lawn while the other murderer stabbed the staff member multiple times in the throat and the face with a pair of scissors.
The murder was witnessed by twenty-eight people, the vast majority Costello House residents crowded together on the wraparound porch, and many of the Herald’s stories on the murder had accompanying photos of that resident-crowded wraparound porch—the residents seated in folding or rocking chairs, or swinging on the bench swing, or leaning on the railing, most of them facing streetward and smoking—and none of the stories’ accompanying photos ever showed the porch uncrowded by residents, so I don’t know how I, while parallel parking in front of Costello House, could have been so surprised by the sight of the residents crowding its porch—it looked just like the pictures—but I was. Surprised.
Surprised, then unmanned.
I hadn’t prepared myself to see them at all, to have to get past them—through them—to get to Lisette, much less to have to think about Lisette as being one of them, which might have, being one of them, meant any number of variously unpleasant things, depending on which section of the porch I looked at. Over here in the rocking-chair area, three were asleep, two of them tremoring, a fourth muttering angrily, shaking her head. Beside them stood a group of five or six tardively dsykinesiac men, pointing their fingers and smokes in my direction and licking and sucking at their lips while they laughed—at me? at my truck? at something behind my truck? a squirrel or a bird?—and next to that group, an older woman in a flowered smock was crying drily and chewing her wrist, and next to her was another older woman in a flowered smock, who was looking at the group of laughing men through a bottle of root beer she held horizontally and twisted around in front of her eyes, as if adjusting the bottle for focus. Someone in the shadow of the eaves was making popping sounds, slapping his palm against his open mouth. Someone sitting on the stairs, looking up at the sky, stroked her own cheek and blissfully smiled. A man alone on the bench swing, clutching his underarms, appeared to be lecturing to one of his knees: “You just can’t say these kinds of things to a person. It’s wrong and it’s mean and it’s killing your soul,” he said. “You want to know who it is? Who it really is, buddy? Who it really is, buddy, who you’re saying those things to? That’s Judah Maccabee, buddy. That’s who you’re hurting.”
They weren’t all in such frightening shape. Many of them seemed, for the most part, balanced, just having a smoke, or getting fresh air, but the longer that I paid attention to the others, the more afraid I became that coming to Costello House had been a mistake, that Lisette might not be…okay, that I might not do well with her being not-okay, and though I rolled up my window, exited my truck, and headed a couple of steps toward the porch, I took a coward’s hard left in front of the stairway, then walked a few blocks, past the center of town, til I came to a Dairy Queen, next to the entrance of which hung a telephone.
“Non,” Sandrine answered, when the automated French voice asked her whether she’d accept the charges from “Belt Magnet 847 433 2181 that’s 847 433 2181.”
I hung up the phone. Seconds later, it rang.
“Hello?”
“Allo, Belt?”
“Sandrine?”
“Yes. I am. Wow, wow. You sound so exactly like Clyde.”
“I do?”
“No one tells you before?”
“Not til just now,” I said. “Thank you, I think?”
“Quoi?” said Sandrine. “I say, eh…I ask that, eh, you have not been told by someone else that your voice is so much like your father’s?”
“No, I understood. All I meant was: you are the first to tell me. And thank you, Sandrine.”
“Okay. Good. You are welcome. I think I am completely glad you have called. You are fine?”
“Yes.”
“I am completely glad, then,” she said. “Clyde will be so happy. He is away with my brother to look for a boat to buy. They will return in two hours. Three hours maybe. He will call you at this number?”
“No, no. I’ll call back from home. Right now, I’m at Dairy Queen.”
“Okay. And what is it?”
“It’s just—well, it’s a girl. A woman.”
“Dairy Queen is her name?”
“Oh, you meant…I’m embarrassed, now. You meant, ‘What is Dairy Queen?’ ”
“Of course. What is it?”
“It’s mostly an ice cream place.”
“It is very bad ice cream?”
“It’s okay.”
“Okay ice cream is a little bit sad, Belt, but please do not be embarrassed with me. I sometimes choose to drink Nescafé coffee. This is much more worse than okay ice cream, which is, after all, en fait, still ice cream. I cannot judge you.”
“Ha! I appreciate that. Merci beaucoups.”
“I am glad you laugh. Maybe it is okay if I ask who is the woman?”
“The woman.”
“The woman who is not Dairy Queen?” she said.
“Oh, her,” I said.
“I do not want to be a nosy person, but because you mentioned, I am interested, so. If you mind it, don’t mind it. Non. Don’t mind me. If you mind it. The question.”
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s fine. She’s just someone I used to know, when we were children. I mean, she’s not just someone I used to know. She’s someone who—you see, I lost track of her for many years, and—”
“A kind of Bam Naka figurine, perhaps?”
“I don’t—I hadn’t really thought of her that way…”
“I apologize, Belt. I should know better than to say something like this. My daughter, she does not like it when I talk about her fiction. She becomes very uncomfortable. This is a terrible first impression that I make. I am sorry. You are Clyde’s only son, and I am somewhat nervous. I ask too many questions and I say what I should not.”
“No, no. Please don’t be. Don’t be sorry, or nervous. It’s a great first impression. Really. I think you’re very funny, and I can’t wait to meet you. In person. And you’ve read my book. Thank you for reading it.”
“I enjoy it very much. All of us do.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You are welcome, of course. And the woman, then?”
“She’s—it’s a very long story.”
“Maybe Clyde has told me. She is maybe the Lisette you have employed the detective to find?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes, Clyde has told me. It is very romantic. He believes you will visit us after she is found. You and your Lisette. You will be in love and bring her to Spain, he believes. Is she found?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“Yes?”
“The detective found her. I haven’t really done anything about it yet, though. I was going to. I was just about to. I was on my way to see her just now, and then I…didn’t.”
“Ah, but you must.”
“I must?”
“This is not why you call after so many weeks from a telephone at Dairy Queen to speak to your father only after the detective finds your Lisette?”
“I don’t—”
“This is just why you call after so many weeks from a telephone at Dairy Queen to speak to your father only after the detective finds your Lisette. To hear Clyde tell you what I tell you: that you must. You must see Lisette. Of course you must see her. Do you think he would tell you something else?” said Sandrine.
“Maybe,” I said, but only from reflex.
Before the first ring had played out, she picked up. “Lisette Banks,” she said.
“Lisette,” I said. “Hi. Hello. This is Belt.”
“I know,” she said.
“You recognize my voice?”
“Not at all,” she said. “You sound like an adult. But I knew it was you the first time you called. Why’d you hang up? Were you feeling very nervous?”
“That was Abed,” I said. “Dr. Patel.”
“I believe that,” she said, and maybe she did. “I want to see you, Belt. Can we see each other sometime? Sometime really soon?”
“I could be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes,” she said, “is perfect. Except it’s better, I think, if you don’t come here. It’s spooky here. You wouldn’t like it at all. Let’s meet somewhere else. Do you know where the McDonald’s in Highland Grove is?”
I looked over my shoulder. It was just across the street.
“On Second Street?” I said.
“Exactly there,” Lisette said. “This is so perfect. Let’s meet up there. We’ll drink a Shamrock Shake.”
“It’s after St. Patrick’s. I’m not sure they have those.”
“They do,” she said. “All March.” She hung up.
I crossed the street to McDonald’s and waited outside. Ten, twelve minutes. I saw her coming from a half-block away. Were it not for the evening gloves, I’d never have guessed. She was heavy, dumpy, smiling as she lurched. Baggy blue sweatpants under a summer dress. All-rubber clogs. Terry-cloth headband. Sticky-looking neck, shiny and ringed. She glanced at me, but seemed to have no idea. She shuffled right past me, into the restaurant. She smelled like dirty hair and full ashtrays.
“Leave,” I thought. But I couldn’t quite convince myself.
She came outside again. “Excuse me,” she said. “You wouldn’t happen to have an extra one of those, would you?”
I gave her a cigarette. She had her own lighter. The pseudo-leather pink purse from which she pulled it was flaking, fading to orange. Her evening gloves were coffee-stained. Her eyes had a wobble. Her eyebrows were pencil lines. To think that she’d once flipped effortless cartwheels…to think she’d ever been—I needed to leave. Why wasn’t I leaving?
Quill lit, she leaned back against the wall, beside me. “Hulga,” she said.
“Pardon?” I said.
“I’m Hulga,” Lisette said.
“Clyde,” I said.
“Nice to meet you, Clyde. Talk to Blinky lately?”
“Blinky?”
“Blinky,” she said. “Ghost who chased Pac-Man. The blue one. Come on. You’re old enough to remember. There was Inky, there was Pinky, there was Blinky, and there was Clyde? Clyde was orange, I think. Chased Ms. Pac-Man, too. All four of them did. And later Baby Pac-Man, Junior Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man.”
“Oh, right,” I said.
“In a way,” Lisette said, “they were the real stars of the franchise, those ghosts. They were in more games than any of the others.”
“Good point,” I said.
“You want to talk about names, though, I’m supposed to meet my friend here—his name’s Belt.”
“Some name,” I said.
I studied my shoes. We puffed at our Quills.
“I know,” she said. “Disgusting, right?”
Had I sighed? Slumped? Made some kind of face?
“For me,” she went on, “there’s only two ways to think of them. One way is: maybe they’ll outlast us. Not all of them, but some of them. Maybe some will outlast us, and a better species than us will arise, or maybe a superior race of alien beings will show up, and then a member of this new species, or one of the superior alien beings, it’ll study them, scope them, take them apart, and it’ll find traces of us, DNA traces, and maybe it’ll use some form of advanced technology on the traces to make a new person, or a bunch of new people, and humankind will get a second shot.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, like a second shot at not destroying ourselves. A second shot at being. And maybe we could do better with a second shot. Probably not, but maybe. With the wisdom and guidance of a superior alien society or an advanced new species? one that was skilled enough to develop technology to bring us back from extinction? Not totally impossible.”
“I still—”
“No, I know,” she said. “I know. It sounds wrong to me, too—most of the time. Almost all of the time, really. I would never bet on it. If we did get brought back, which we probably wouldn’t, the DNA traces would almost definitely come from our fossilized remains. Enough of us are buried in stainless-steel caskets, conveniently located near one another in cemeteries and so on that…And plus, even if we did get brought back, we’d probably be captives. In zoos or whatever. Hard to call that a second chance at being. I know all of this. I’m only saying that’s one way to think of them.”
“To think of who, though?” I said.
“ ‘Who?’ ” she said. “What who? No who. The black marks. The old gum.”
“These stains on the sidewalk?”
“Isn’t that what we’re talking about? Isn’t that what you’re looking at?”
“Oh,” I said. “Of course.”
“What did you think I was talking about?”
“I really didn’t know.”
“You must’ve thought I was crazy, going on like that,” she said.
“No,” I said. “No. I was just confused. Sorry about that. So…what’s the better way?”
“Now I’m confused.”
“What’s the better way of looking at the gumstains?” I said. “You said there were two.”
“That was the better way. The way I just described. The way I usually think about them, though…Well I think about how the gum came from mouths. Mouths with bleeding gums, with cuts inside, bits of food between teeth, ripped-up palates, probably bad breath. And that’s just where they came from, or where they might have come from—that’s just some unpleasant thoughts about their origins. And maybe that’s my problem, having those thoughts. But what they look like? What they actually look like, there on the sidewalk? black? slightly raised? misshapen? That’s how they look, isn’t it? Objectively, right? That’s not just me?”
“That’s how they look,” I said.
“Black and slightly raised and misshapen. You think about them, picture them in your mind, and they’re circles, but they’re not really circles. You see them right in front of you, you see their edges are ragged and…organic, right? They’re not circles. And you see how they’re clustered together like that? That’s not uncommon. They’re nearly always clustered up, you know? And your eyes are always making triangles out of them. Always trying to make right triangles out of them, or equilateral triangles, but they can’t. They always fail. Just…awkward triangles. That’s all you get. Uncomfortable triangles. Mine do that, at least. My eyes, I mean.”
“Mine too,” I said.
“They’re everywhere,” she said. “Everywhere you go. Clustered and black. Raised and misshapen. Pavement melanoma, right? That’s the way I think of them. Most of the time. That’s what goes through my head: pavement melanoma.”
“Still, that’s not what it is,” I said. “It’s just old gum.”
“I didn’t say that’s what it is. Of course it’s just old gum. It’s completely meaningless. Doesn’t stop me, when I see it, from thinking it, though. It doesn’t stop me from being disgusted.”
“What stops you?” I said.
“No idea,” she said. “It happens so rarely, and it lasts so little time, I just try to enjoy it. Not being disgusted. I’m enjoying it now, in fact. I don’t feel disgusted. Maybe that owes to your company, Clyde—ha! Just kidding. I know how that sounded. You don’t have to blush. I know I’m not…your type. I wouldn’t ever hit on you. You’re out of my league—”
“That’s—”
“No, please, you don’t have to. I wasn’t fishing. I know who I am. I know what I look like. Same goes for you. And it’s okay, really. It’s completely okay. It’s more than okay. I feel like a million bucks right now. My friend Belt I’m meeting here? We have this really great connection. Storybook, you know? A real fairy-tale connection, and I haven’t seen him in forever. Not since we were kids. I’m kinda dying of excitement. We have so much to talk about.”
“What happened to you?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Why haven’t you talked to him in so many years?”
“It’s a really long story, but, basically, I tried to find him and wasn’t able. He had to come looking for me, and the problem with that is that, when we were kids, his mother became ill, terminally ill, very suddenly, and when he told me about it, I accused him of lying, and I never apologized for it. I would have apologized. I wanted to apologize. But I never got the chance before he disappeared. So he didn’t know I was sorry. So he never came looking for me. At least that’s what I think.”
I said, “I’m sure he must have forgiven you by now.”
“I hope so,” she said. “I think he might have. He’s found me, after all.”
“I’m sure he has,” I said. “What made you think he was lying about his mom, anyway?”
“I’m not even sure I really did think he was lying. I might have just said it because…I’m…It’s hard to explain. It’s private, actually.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
“Nothing for you to be sorry about, Clyde. You know what, though, I better get back inside now, in case Belt was in the bathroom. Or maybe he came through the other entrance. Thanks for the smoke.”
She dropped the butt on the gumstains, said, “Excuse me,” and made her way past me.
I watched her through the window.
In front of the counter, she surveyed the restaurant, then sat in a booth. She reached inside her collar and came out with a cure that she set on the farther side of the table. She pointed at its head. The cure, with both hands, grasped the gloved tip of the pointed finger, tilted back on its heels, and pulled, and pulled. Lisette grimaced down at it, and, pantomiming alarm and exertion, leaned forward, then back, then forward again while, with her free hand, she wiped her brow, and clutched at her chest and her opposite shoulder, as though the cure might overpower her. After a minute, she turned toward the window and, seeing me staring, smiled or smirked, and I gave her a shallow nod, and I waved.