Bubblegum, page 15
“It was woodchips you replaced.”
||Woodchips?|| said the SafeSurf.
“Wait,” I said. I thought I’d heard a human sound. A couple of footfalls. An exhalation. “You hear that?” I said.
||I don’t hear anything.||
“Over by the alley,” I said. “Behind the fence.”
||You know I can’t hear things that don’t touch—||
“Right, sure. Hold on.”
I listened, and failed to hear any more human sounds, but still I felt self-conscious, standing there and mumbling into my hand, so I sat down to mumble into my hand.
||What were you saying about woodchips?|| said the SafeSurf.
“It wasn’t pebbles you replaced. It was woodchips,” I said. “There were pebbles til maybe 1989, but some study came out that said woodchips were safer.”
||That seems pretty obvious.||
“Not as obvious as you’d think. The study actually found that woodchips led to more falls than pebbles because kids tripped more often on woodchips when running, but the thing was the falls on woodchips weren’t as injurious. And that was the more important factor to consider—the injuriousness of the falls, not the rate of falling. Woodchips only lasted here a couple of years, though, because the miracle of affordable SafeSurf had arrived, and SafeSurf, as I’m sure you know, decreased both injuriousness and rates of falling in one fell swoop. It’s a really great technology.”
||You’re a regular encyclopedia, aren’t you? And a sweetheart, too.||
“Tell that to the slide,” I said.
||Bet your sweet bippy, I’ll tell it to the slide. I’m sure it knows it anyway. Thing’s just a stresscase. A bitter sourpuss. No one knows why. I’m confident it likes you, though. All of us do. How couldn’t we, you know? You’re the only person who really gets us. Well, at least the only dude. There’s also the girl.||
“I hate you,” I said, and stood up. I left.
Sort of.
I walked ten steps to the long, gravelly strip that bordered the playground, and sat.
* * *
I’d heard about the girl since I was fourteen years old—a local girl who, like me, could talk to inans. For nearly ten years, I believed what I’d heard, but I’d never met her, try though I did. The task of finding her was doomed from the outset. Most inans don’t understand the concept of proper names, and the few that do, all of which, themselves, go by brand names (e.g. Zippo lighters, Jacuzzi bathtubs, Air Jordan sneakers, and, of course, SafeSurf playground turf), have very little motivation to learn proper names, let alone to commit proper names to memory, for the vast majority of their conversations—if not all of their conversations—are with unbranded inans that, when the need to refer to a specific being arises, use behavior- and function-oriented phrases like the rusty-edged teaspoon that once cut a lip or the sewer cap children like to rattle by stomping on. So when it came to the local girl who could talk to inans, they called her the girl who talks to inans or, on occasion, the person who talks to inans who has never been the boy who helped the swingsets.
Nor could any of them describe her to me. Apart from the fact that humans all look alike to inans, none of the inans who’d told me about the girl had ever actually encountered her themselves—they’d heard of her only through other inans—so even if the inans who had met the girl had for some reason noted her height or the color of her hair or any other potentially identifying physical attribute, by the time the news had traveled telephone-game-like through all the gates it would have needed to travel in order to get to me, the odds that the information I’d receive would be anything like accurate were miserably low.
Nonetheless I spent my every spare moment seeking out and trying not to stare at lone females who were writing something down or speaking into their hands. Over the course of five years, I even approached a few—seven in total—and made a creep of myself at each encounter, only then to learn, from the very stretch of SafeSurf from which I’d just fled, that the girl who talked to inans was able to do so via thinking silently, which meant I’d not only wasted those first five years using incorrect search criteria, but that said criteria might have actually blinded me to the girl. She might have been sitting at the counter of the Denny’s right next to the diarist I’d fixated on who jotted away in her small red book while continually fondling and intermittently gazing at a blue paper packet of synthetic sugar until I scared her off with my anxious demeanor (I was young and lonely) or crazy-sounding questions (I was young and tactless) or probably both. Or she might have been eating an ice cream on a bench across from the fountain at the Plaza Beige strip mall when the young divorcée who’d sat the ledge of the fountain while angrily muttering in the direction of her handbag threatened to tase me and drown me in the fountain if I came any closer or said another word “about or to” my wallet (I was faking the conversation—my wallet’s never spoken to me—in the stupid hopes that doing so would invite an approach by the divorcée herself).
Whoever the girl who talked to inans was, I’d have looked right past her without a second thought, bent as I’d been on finding mumblers and scribblers.
I’d continued to search, though, continued without knowing what it was I should search for. What might a girl who conversed with inans via silent, unwritten thought look like? What might make such a girl stand out? Would she have a quality of contented stillness to her? Would being able to silently communicate with inans be the pleasure I imagined it would? Or would the girl, despite her gift, doubt her own perceptions like I so often did, and feel apart from all the people she encountered? And how would she respond to that? Certainly not with contentment. But how would her lack of contentment manifest? Would she appear to be agitated? Withdrawn? Maybe she’d construct a big, welcoming personality to compensate for how unwelcome she, herself, always felt? I had no idea. I assumed she’d be attractive, though. And this wasn’t merely wishful thinking, I don’t think. I assumed she’d be attractive because I assumed that I, personally, couldn’t fail to be attracted to someone who was like me in the way she was like me. I didn’t believe in justice or God—I never really had—but I didn’t believe in irony the way so many people do, either. That is: I didn’t believe that everything was ironic. I didn’t believe that the girl with whom I should, at least according to reason, fall in storybook love, had to be someone with whom I was romantically incompatible. I knew it could be that way, but I didn’t think it had to be that way. And I really hoped it wouldn’t. I really thought we could be happy, together in our hallucinations or superperceptions—whichever. So when the SafeSurf informed me, ten years after I’d first heard of the girl, and five years after it had told me she could talk with inans via silent thinking—when the SafeSurf informed me that she’d ended her life with a stomach full of pills in a clawfooted bathtub…I just wasn’t expecting that.
And when, on the night after my thirty-eighth birthday (i.e. over twenty years after I’d first heard of the girl, i.e. over ten years after I’d given up all hope and come to delicate terms with what looked to be my permanent state of loneliness), the SafeSurf spoke of her as if she were alive—as if it, itself, hadn’t been the one to inform me of her death—I felt not only betrayed and manipulated, but deeply insulted. How could it forget that it had told me she was dead? or think I was dumb enough to have forgotten it had told me that? or daft enough to believe that she had come back alive? Even if our conversations were hallucinatory, how could it? Especially if our conversations were hallucinatory…Because that would mean I did it to myself. To tell myself via extremely convincing hallucination that a girl who might be able to love me actually existed, and then that she died, and then that she was somehow alive again—the level of self-contempt it would take for me to do that was impossible to justify. I wasn’t a bad person really, I didn’t think. I was unkind to my grandmother on the telephone sometimes, and I resented my father for the way he occasionally lorded over me, but on the grand scale these were minor offenses. Small potatoes. Someone was hurting me and I didn’t deserve it, even if I was that very someone. Unless maybe I deserved it because I was that someone. Because I unjustly persecuted myself. Oh God, I felt crazy and ludicrous and worthless.
I unsleeved Blank and set it on my knee.
* * *
I unsleeved Blank and set it on my knee. It blinked heavily, twice, scratched its chin with its tail, and whistled an interrogative melody.
I lit up a Quill.
It whistled again—same tune, higher-pitched.
I shrugged, smoked.
Blank leapt from my knee to the gravelly strip, started humming the cancan, then bobbing to the cancan, then dancing the cancan upside down on its hands and brassing the hums up with tuba-like lipfarts.
Just as I began to feel cheered by the performance—as much by its intent to entertain away my misery as by its content (which was old-school Blank; it hadn’t done the cancan since it first learned to Hora a couple or maybe three years earlier)—I heard footsteps approaching from across the playground. Not wanting to appear like I had anything to hide, I turned my face forward, in the footsteps’ direction, and very casually extended my arm—as if I were merely stretching out my triceps—to allow Blank quicker access to its sleeve.
Blank’s hearing had always been keener than mine, so I can only assume that, given its ears’ proximity to the gravel, the scraping noise of the cancanned pebbles must have drowned out the sounds of everything else, for Blank didn’t race back to its sleeve as it should have, nor did it cover its face.
By the time it stopped dancing, the boys were before us.
Four of them. Fourteen-year-olds. Maybe fifteen-. They wore cardigan vests over turtleneck T-shirts, and each had a sailor cap, Dixie cup–style, with a name in felt block letters stitched to its brim: LYLE, BRYCE, CHAZ, CHAZ JR. A fifth kept his distance. He was over by the slide, half the playground away.
Of the four before us, two—the Chazes—actually rubbed at their eyes with their wrists.
“No way,” Chaz said.
“No way,” said Chaz Jr.
“What?” Bryce said.
Lyle pointed to Blank.
Bryce said, “Oh my dang donkey! Is that item real, mud?”
Lyle and Bryce both knelt on the SafeSurf to get a closer look. Centered on their throats, at the folds of their turtlenecks, yachts was embroidered in golden thread. Silhouettes of sailboats embossing the swooshes of their Nike CureSleeves were also done in gold, and earthwormy stains shone dully like smears of petroleum jelly near the Velcro closures. Similar stains marred the legs of Lyle’s shorts. He saw me seeing them.
“Sloppy,” he said. “I know. I do. Judge not, though, kind mud. Our domestic, Pilar, took ill on laundry day.”
“What is it this time?” Bryce said, winking. “Croup? The grippe? I hope it’s not pertussis, or, God forbid, dropsy. Your Pilar’s always down with something, what what. You need to tell your mother to find a new girl.”
“Pilar,” said Lyle, “is irreplaceable. Vigorously loyal, kind, and—”
“Buxom? Vigorously buxom and oral you were saying? Buxom and foxy and docile and oral?”
“I surely wouldn’t,” said Lyle, “regret a sudden change of subject, dear Bryce. For example, golly me, this mud’s cure over here.”
“Indeed, we might table the Pilar conversation for another, better time. The mud’s cure does merit further discussion.”
By this point, Blank had turned its back to the boys and was creeping sideways on the tips of its fingers, slow as a loris, in the direction of my arm.
“It is so tootin cute—the way it’s hiding?” Lyle said. “As though it thinks it’s clever? As though it thinks it can elude us? As though it believes that treading lightly enough will grant it the power of invisibility? Word it up on the real now, how adorable is that! Holy jams I want to smash it. Holy jams holy jimmy.”
“Holy jimmy to the jimjames jammety jimjam, that stripe down its back—that stripe looks painted,” Bryce said to Lyle. “Is it painted,” Bryce asked me, “or did it grow that way, mud? Don’t you guff me on this.”
“Painted?” I said.
“You needn’t feel you have reason to say it that way—in that voice. As though I’m a cretin. It’s an honest question.”
“Know this one thing if no other,” said Lyle. “Bryce is neither cretin nor weisenheiming rogue. The fellow shoots straight with whomever he addresses, be they mud, chap, lady, chippy, harlot, or tot. I believe you should apologize. Word is bond, now, what.”
“No need,” Bryce said. “It’s all entirely good. Were there any hard feelings, why, they’d soften in an instant, yo. May I hold it, though, please? Your cure, mud, what.”
“It wouldn’t like that,” I said. “It’s shy. It fears strangers.” Blank was in arm’s reach, both mine and Lyle’s. I swooped it up. Not wanting to secure it inside its sleeve—the sleeve was on the outs, the zipper catchy—which would grant the boys more time to ogle it, I stuck it in my shirt. It clung to the fabric just under the collar and emitted happy beeps in three sets of two.
“Nonsense,” said Bryce. “No cure fears strangers. And would you listen to that voice it has! I’m completely in its thrall. You really shouldn’t hide it, mud. Hiding it is rude. You should really let us hold it, mud. That is what I’m saying, and we all of us agree. Hear hear, Chaz Jr.?”
“Hear hear,” said Chaz Jr. “And Chaz agrees, too.”
“I do agree, too. That’s the truth,” said Chaz. “Not to mention Lyle, who agrees, too, also.”
“And I would wager my trousers Triple-J agrees as well. Triple-J!” Lyle shouted to the boy near the slide. “Come on over here, chap! We need your help. You need to vouch for your opinion.”
“What opinion?” Triple-J said.
“Your opinion that this fellow should let us hold his cure.”
“I’m occupied, Lyle-san,” Triple-J said. His voice sounded like someone’s. I couldn’t place whose. I didn’t know any kids.
“Are you beginning without us, Triple-J?” said Lyle. “Don’t begin without us!”
“I’m starting,” Triple-J said. He backed up away from the slide a few yards and sidearmed something from his pocket at it. Probably a rock. The sound of the impact was a flat, raspy click.
I remembered the tract of shallow dings I’d noticed earlier.
“He started without us! Wait a minute, Triple-J. We’ll be there in a minute. Come on, lads, let’s go.”
“Hold up,” said Chaz. “I think first we should ask this kind citizen here to quote us a price for that bugger in his shirt.”
“That’s clever. I like it. You heard the gent, mud. How much’ll you sell it for? I’ve got fifty clams in this very billfold. Will fifty cut the mustard?”
Triple-J whipped something else at the slide. Another raspy click.
“What are you doing to the slide?” I said.
Triple-J ignored the question, or failed to hear it.
“ ‘The slide,’ ” Chaz said. “ ‘The slide,’ the man says.”
“Don’t insult the man, Chaz, for the man will speak nonsense. That is the lesson he means us to take. And take it we shall. That adorable bugger’s worth eighty beans, easy, sure as I’m standing here.”
“One hundred at that, Chaz Jr.,” Bryce said.
“One hundred’s high, Bryce. That’s four new, factory-sealed, LuckTest EmergeRigs—six, by golly, on three-for-two Tuesdays over at A(cute)rements. High odds from six marbles we’d emerge one just as cute.”
“Be reasonable, Chaz. You know that’s not true. You saw how it was sneaking—it had to learn that. It isn’t a baby. It’s at least what, two, even three years old, hey.”
“Bryce is right,” said Lyle. “The price is wrong. And when I think about it sneaking, I just want to—dear! I just want to pin it to a wall with my thumb is what I want. I want to pin it to a wall by the throat and mash…mash its rootin-tootin face in slowly with a twig til it…”
“Pops?”
“Til it pops! Yes, indeed. Til it pops and gushes forth. Now hear me out, mud. Lucre we’ve got. On loot we’re not short. Fifty a chap is two hundred, I say, two-fifty assuming Triple-J pitches in, and we’ll call it a deal, yes, hey, what, word?”
Triple-J’s arm blurred. No raspy click. “Bullseye,” he said.
I said, “What’s your friend doing?”
“He’s starting without us. Word up now, I say, let’s settle our business.”
“My cure’s not for sale.”
“Everything’s for sale.” “All our fathers say so.” “Indubitably.”
“I don’t know your fathers.”
“Very few do.” “If any at all.” “And especially not you.” “Our fathers are beyond you.” “They’re beyond even us.” “Light-years beyond us.” “Not quite as many light-years as they are beyond you, though.” “Let us cease speaking of our fathers at once.” “Yes, enough about our fathers.” “Name us your price.”
“Really, guys,” I said. I stood up to go home, and to get, on my way, a closer look at whatever Triple-J was doing. The four formed a semicircle, blocking my path. I took a step to the right, to get around them, and Chaz kicked my thigh. It was not a strong kick.
He said, “Consider that a warning. Forewarned is fore—”
I pushed him harder than I meant to. He fell on Chaz Jr. and they both hit the SafeSurf. Bryce put his fists up, and I knew he couldn’t hurt me—he could hardly have reached my chin if he’d uppercut—but my cure was vulnerable, there in my shirt, and the pleasure I took in striking Bryce’s forehead with the heel of my palm was greater than I would have liked to admit. His neck bent back, and his hat popped off. Beneath the hat he was yellowly mohawked. He did not look okay. Twice he whimpered, “No,” and his eyes started streaming. He lunged forward anyway. I caught him by the throat and threw him back at the fence, which bounced him to his ass on the gravelly strip. He sat there and wept. Lyle ran away. I looked at what I’d done, knew I needed to fix it. I moved first to Chaz Jr.—after all, he’d done the least—but before I had the chance to extend my hand, something crunched against my temple, stung my left eye shut.
