The painsong rises.
Lisette drops her hand, uncovering her face. She says, “What are you doing? Why is it doing that?”
“It likes to sing.”
The painsong gets louder.
“Stop doing that,” she says.
“It’s cute,” he says.
“I don’t think you should do that. I don’t think it likes it.”
“It’s so cute, though,” he says.
“Just stop!” Lisette says. “Why are you doing that. Why would you do that.”
“Don’t you want to hold it?”
“No!” Lisette says. “Don’t do that! Please stop! Please stop! Please stop!”
The boy, breathing heavily, cups his stroking hand over the cure, looks left, looks right, looks at Lisette, lets out a quiet moan, and grinds his palms til the painsinging stops.
IV
COMPOUND
NEW MODES OF FASCINATION
||BIG DAY?|| MY BETTER pillow said, just as I was waking on the morning after Triple-J and Burroughs came over. I hadn’t heard from that pillow in at least half a decade, but my eyes were still closed, my limbs yet unstretched. I wanted more sleep.
I rolled to my side, breaking off contact, and was startled bolt upright by a reticent crumpling paired with a cold, scrapy feeling on my cheek. Triple-J’s paper. “Living Isn’t Functioning.” By the time I’d finished reading it, late the night before, I’d been too lazy to reach across the bed to set it on the table, and had dropped it, instead, on the other, lesser pillow.
I lay back down.
||Oh, he’s back,|| my better pillow said. ||And don’t I feel special. Hey, you know what? You know what I remember? What I remember every day? I remember how it used to be all I’d do was say, |Hello,| and your smile, man…Even if the only place we were touching was on the back of your head, I’d feel that smile. The tension in your scalp, it would change just a little, in this really special way, and I knew…I knew that— No, though. I didn’t. I didn’t know a thing. All these years you wouldn’t talk to me? Years I’ve spent wondering, |How did I offend him? What wrong have I done him?| And trying to hash it out with the mattress, with the quilt, with every last book you’ve deigned to use me to cradle? Trying to hash it out til they themselves—sick of me, sick of my whining—til they closed their gates to me? And then? Then what? Then suddenly, this morning, you’re suddenly available. Suddenly, this morning, your gate’s wide open, and I think I’ve been forgiven for whatever trespass it is you’ve found me guilty of, and with joy, with relief, out of nothing but the friendliest sense of curiosity, I ask a simple question, I say two words, and you—you do what? You sure as hell don’t smile! You don’t even acknowledge me. You break off contact! It’s cruel, you know that? You’ve gone cruel is what it is. And what’s sick, what’s really sick here—do you want to know what’s sick? What’s sick is, now you’re back, most of me’s grateful. I still feel relieved. I’m still completely curious. What a sap, right? What a sentimental sap. What a jerk.||
“Do books really talk?” I said.
||Excuse me?|| said the pillow.
“You said you’ve talked to books that I laid on top of you. Is that true, or were you just kind of saying it for effect?”
||This is the matter you want to discuss with me? Seven years go by without a single peep from you, I confess my insecurities, I tell you how you’ve hurt me, I tell you how you’re hurting me, I make myself vulnerable, and that’s what you ask?||
“You know I can’t control my gate,” I said. “If I could, I’d have—”
||What? You’d’ve what, huh? What? You’d’ve what? You’d’ve huh, what, you’d huh what huh you’d?||
“Okay,” I said. “So you’re having some fun with me.”
||Bet your gullible, wimpy bottom dollar it’s fun! Oh, what a sweetheart. This is so classic you. What a sucker you are. How do you even survive in the world, you big cornball? You hambone. You armorless wuss.||
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
||That’s better,|| said the pillow. ||Dismissive is better. A wooden voice implies a stone-faced outlook, a thicker skin. So go with that. Go forth with implications. Meantime, what’s the news? What’ve you got on your plate today? And don’t tell me it’s nothing, cause your face was jumping like fleas last night. Last time you got that acrobatic of the visage was the night before your book got reviewed in that paper.||
“I’m gonna see an old friend for brunch today,” I said.
||No, really,|| said the pillow.
“Really,” I said.
||But your jaw, man. Your jaw. The way you were grinding it, your teeth must be powder. All because of brunch? I don’t believe it for a second. You some kind of loser? Maybe you’re a loser.||
“I drool on you, you know that?”
||For thirtysomething years now. Night upon night.||
“You’re basically this soft thing I drool on,” I said. “You’re old and flat and stained and inanimate. You don’t even have a name. For all I know you’re just in my head. Completely made up. And on top of it, you’re mean to me. Why don’t I get a new pillow, do you think? Why do I keep you around?”
||Sentimentality? Inner softness? New pillows cost money you don’t want to spend? Most pillows hurt your neck? You’re afraid of any change, great or small? You’re a loser who can’t let go of anything that might—||
I got out of bed. My jaw did hurt.
* * *
It was half past eight, brunch would be at eleven, and the walk to the compound was only ten minutes, so despite not having yet watched A Fistful of Fists—which, given that it was “video art” made by a boy barely fourteen years old, I imagined would take half an hour at most—I saw no reason to rush my morning rituals. I even thought that, before heading out, Kablankey and I might squeeze in a viewing of the eyebrow-flexing Groucho compilation.
In the shower, I dialed the flow ring rightward to maximize the concentration of the spray, and while the pounding water soothed my overworked jaw, it occurred to me that my back was barely hurting, that I’d slept off all but the last of the pain of Triple-J’s stomping, and I felt a humming, almost ticklish space opening up behind my eyes, as if a blockage were clearing, or a swelling abating, and, in the wake of this feeling, I found myself imbued with a sense of possibility readier and sunnier than any I’d possessed since first I’d heard tell of the girl who talked to inans. Said imbuement, yes, must have owed some to the imminence of brunch at the compound with Jonboat, but it owed at least as much to my pillow having claimed to have spoken with books. I couldn’t help but wonder what that might be like. What they might be like—to speak with, that is. Might they have an understanding of the text they contained? a special understanding? a correct understanding? And why hadn’t any of them ever conversed with me? Unless—wait: Was it possible they had? or that some of them had? Was it possible my gate was occasionally, if not always, open to them? that while reading them, I, though unaware of it, was silently conversing with them? that I had, all along, been silently conversing with them? that to read a book was to speak to that book? that being read was how books spoke? Or no, that couldn’t be: pillows didn’t read, and the pillow was the one that had said it spoke to books. But then perhaps for that very reason—i.e. that people could read, and inans couldn’t—communication with books was different for us than it was for inans? Sometimes at least?