When I’ve asked the inans themselves to account for why they speak to me (i.e., not just why they speak to me, but why they do so only some of the time, and why most of them never speak to me at all), they tell me it’s because I’m available to be spoken to and they feel like having a conversation. The reasons they might or might not feel like conversing are as varied and capricious as any given human being’s, but the conditions under which I’m available to be spoken to are, at least to them, clear and constant: we’re in physical contact and our gates are open.
All beings, according to the inans, have gates, and every being’s gate can be closed or open. If two beings with open gates come into contact, one can initiate communication with the other. If, conversely, a being with an open gate comes into contact with a being whose gate is closed, then no matter how badly the open-gated being might want to communicate with the closed-gated being, communication cannot be initiated.
I don’t know what a gate is, let alone how to determine (assuming I’m not, in the moment, already conversing with an inan) whether my gate—or any other being’s—is closed or open, and asking an inan to describe what a gate is hasn’t ever gotten me very far at all. Sometimes it’s like asking a layman what makes art art, or maybe porn porn; other times like pulling a definition of life from a labful of virologists. It’s either “Come on, man! You know it when you see it,” or “Instead of what it is, let me tell you what it isn’t.” The reasoning gets circular almost immediately. What’s certain, though, is this: to be a being—as distinct from an insentient object—is to have a gate. At least no inan with which I’ve spoken has ever claimed otherwise. A minority of inans do, however, believe there’s no such thing as an insentient object, i.e. that every thing is a being; that those things in the world which appear to us (i.e. to inans and myself) to be insentient objects (nonartifactual inanimates like rocks, for example, but also “constituent” artifacts like the strips of adhesive along the edges of rolling papers, the space bars on keyboards, or those rough, golden threads that stitch the inseams of blue jeans) are actually beings with imperceptible gates.
* * *
What, according to Lotta Hogg, provoked the onset of puberty in herself and her friends?
Toward the end of summer break of 1987, before an estimated 350 Washington Junior High Schoolers, I, Belt Magnet, days away from turning twelve years old, spent nearly two hours—fervently at first, and then more methodically—swinging an aluminum baseball bat and, briefly, a five-pound firefighter’s ax in the service of deforming past salvageability a rusting, neglected backyard swingset belonging to a man named Conrad Feather. It was the ninth of what the press would soon be calling “the swingset murders,” all eleven of which were committed by me.
Apart from my role in it, I barely remember the event at all. I was told half the kids there got kissed that night; that the cheerleading squad, atop the elevated porch beside the swingset, performed a mock striptease that became a real striptease; that alcohol was present and Mini Thins and Whip-it!s (spidge wasn’t in play—no one even had a cure yet); that the spirits of belonging and anonymity—those biggest of all the big crowd-moving spirits—uncommonly united to pervade the gathering in a way that even those blessed with older siblings who’d let them tag along a couple weeks earlier to see Metallica headline the Aragon claimed to have never before experienced; that somehow nothing terrible happened; that there weren’t any fights; that there wasn’t any bullying; that no one got petted against her will; that of the 350ish suburban children present, all between the ages of ten and fourteen, not a single one of them was bored.
One seventh-grade boy later told the Daily Herald, “It felt how they tell you that church is supposed to feel.”
Another one said, “The last second of the last minute of the last day of school and plus you’ve got a ride to Six Flags and a girlfriend—that’s how it was the whole entire murder. I got Frenched twice, by two different girls, and one of my friends got Frenched four times, by three different girls, and he went up two shirts, and down one pants. Plus did I mention that the first girl who Frenched me started out Frenching me? I never even heard of that being a thing. My friend who Frenched four of them said it happened sometimes, that when they’re really horny they just skip the batter’s circle, take you straight to tongue city. The official thing it’s called is a ‘no-pitch walk,’ he said. I think that’s funny, but it’s also dumb though. Baseball has nothing to do with girls. Our school’s starting shortstop only got Frenched once—I asked him straight out, and that’s what he told me, and he did it like bragging, like, ‘You bet I got Frenched!’ and I’m thinking, ‘Ha! You, the shortstop, only got Frenched once—I didn’t even make the team.’ Anyway, it was such a good night, really inspiring. I’m saving up for a guitar now, just because of it. I want to turn these poems I’ve been writing into songs.”
“We saw boobies,” a fifth-grader told the reporter, “but it wasn’t like a magazine. The boobies were nice. They looked like breasts. Or maybe like chests. I don’t know the right word. Not boobies though, I’m saying. Not titties, either. Young women’s nice what-do-you-call-thems, bare bosoms. You didn’t want to squeeze them really hard or shake them, just stare like, ‘Thank you, don’t let me forget this,’ and maybe put your ear against one and listen.”
“[The accused] was so cute,” remarked a girl (identified only, to my great frustration, as a “member of the popular set at WJH”) to the reporter from the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday supplement, where appeared, two weeks after my second run-in with the cops, the fifth and final major newspaper feature to focus on the murders. “He was always kind of quiet at school,” she went on. “And maybe weird. So I never paid attention to how cute he was, but then he was up there, doing this crazy thing that I still don’t understand why everyone liked it so much, even me, except he really like meant it, whatever he meant. And I agreed with what he meant. I really believed in it and couldn’t stop watching. I stared at him a lot. And like I was saying: cue-oo-oot. I don’t know how I missed it all these years. It really makes you think. Not that I would date him, though. My mother would kill me. My friends would totally kill me. But if he told me he loved me, though, I think I’d run away to the city with him maybe.”
What I do remember is that the swingset wasn’t nearly as rusted as I’d initially believed, and that the moment I realized that—about twenty minutes into exerting myself to no gainful effect (I was usually halfway-to-two-thirds done by minute twenty)—I had the rare experience of being able to choose my emotional response. I could be angry at myself and—never one for self-harm—take it out on the roiling, shouting child-wall surrounding me by walking in a circle clubbing smiles down gullets. Or I could let myself be sad for the swingset, for my failure to help it, and leave, defeated.