Or maybe that was all too romantic, too fanciful. Maybe books lacked comprehension of the words inside them. Maybe, to them, the words inside them were only their “ink parts” or something like that, something like birthmarks, or freckles, or hair, no more or less legible than their glue or their thread. Maybe books wished only to be held, to have their covers opened, their pages turned. And maybe, after all, they didn’t have gates.
It didn’t really matter, though, either way. None of that mattered. In the shower, I mean. Nor did it matter that the pillow, when it mentioned it had spoken to books, had done so in the course of kidding around with me, nor even that my conversation with the pillow (or with any other inan, ever) might have only been a product of psychosis NOS.
On second thought, no, that stuff did matter. A bit. It did. Actually, I guess it mattered kind of a lot. But matterfulness is, if nothing else, relative, and there was something that mattered a whole lot more to me than what lay behind the gates of books (assuming, to begin with, that they did have gates), or whether inans were hallucinations: what mattered was that I hadn’t, before that morning—i.e. not once in all my life—I hadn’t ever wondered what lay behind the gates of books (nor whether books had gates to begin with). Despite being someone—perhaps the only person on Earth—who both a) thought frequently of inans and gates, and b) had spent hours every day of his life holding and reading and trying to write books, it somehow hadn’t ever occurred to me to wonder. This never-having-wondered mattered so much to me, there in the shower, not because it meant I was dumber, or less imaginative, than I’d long suspected (though it may have meant either or both of those things, too), but rather because it appeared to suggest there was more to imagine, far more to imagine (if not to discover), than I’d long suspected. New modes of fascination. New tales to tell. Deep and formerly unthinkable thoughts. And the world seemed generous and full of potential, pregnant with thrilling, benevolent mystery.
I shut the tap and toweled off and dressed, then woke and fed and watered Kablankey, ballooning all the while with ardent hope. I could aim that hope at anything, looked forward to everything. Near or far, great or small, it all seemed so auspicious: the books I’d write, sure, and the next book I’d publish (whatever it might be), and No Please Don’t resultantly coming back into print (would Dalkey put it out? would New Directions?), and the girl who talked to inans (had she spoken to books? to a No Please Don’t? to more than one copy? had they said the same things? could she tell me what they said? had they convinced her to love me? would she tell me things I’d meant without my having known I’d meant them?), and my friendship with Jonboat (riding shotgun in the Boatmobile, into the city, out to the lake, him telling me what outer space was like, me telling him my thoughts on living in Wheelatine, us wistfully remembering Stevie Strumm together, maybe driving to Joliet Correctional to visit Blackie just because, and organically developing, as we sped along, a kind of endless game where we listed behaviors for which “pissing through a boner” was an appropriate metaphor), and my friendship with Jonboat’s family, too (Triple-J a kind of Beckett to my Joyce, or Giant to my Beckett; the brilliant and inspirationally gorgeous Fondajane a vocal champion of my work, its rediscoverer, perhaps the author of an NYRB piece to be reprinted as the forward to the new edition of No Please Don’t, the piece itself in part responsible for No Please Don’t’s new cult-classic status)—yes, my forward-lookingness applied itself to all these things, but also, and equally, to humbler and less hypothetical things like the walk I would shortly take to the compound, the way the breeze would feel on my face, the way the grass would smell in the heat, and the day’s first Quill, the one I would savor with my morning cup of coffee.
And that coffee itself. That first cup of coffee. As I headed downstairs, that’s what I was focused on: how that cup would be the twentysomething thousandth of my life, and how strange it was, and how very interesting, that every cup I’d ever sweetened (and I always sweetened coffee) I’d sweetened with sugar, i.e. never with honey, not even once, and how I might, that morning, in just a couple minutes, go right on ahead and just change things up a bit, honey my coffee, for maybe honey was better than sugar, and if that were true, if honey were better, then that morning’s cup of coffee, the cup I was just about to drink, could prove to be the single best coffee of my life. And in the midst of envisaging honeyed coffee’s mouthfeel, I stepped off the stairway, into the hallway, and raised my eyes and looked into the kitchen and discovered my father bending over our range, on which too much bacon—a whole pound, by the sound of it (I couldn’t yet see, having frozen on the carpeted side of the threshold bar)—was frying on much too high a flame. And I deflated instantly. I withered and sunk.
The way he was standing, like a busted cornerboy submitting to a pat-down—wide-legged, arms raised, palms against the door of the microwave oven mounted over the stove—seemed as deliberate as it did bizarre.
It seemed…strokey.
Alzheimersesque.
“Dad?” I said through the greasy smoke, over the zapping and sizzling and squealing.
He leapt back and gasped, holding his chest. Across the bottom of his face, he wore a checked bandana, tied in the style of a railroad bandit, and, above the bandana, elastic-banded goggles through the lenses of which his eyes expressed shock, disorientation.
“Oh wow!” he said, and lowered the flames (there were two pans of bacon). “You got me,” he said, pulling down the bandana, showing me his teeth. “I haven’t flinched that hard since— Hoo! Wow. Good one. Really. That was a good one.” He took off the goggles, wiped at his brow. “So I’m staining this shirt,” he said, pointing at his torso. He had on a baggy JONBOAT SAY T over a long-sleeved, waffle-textured thermal.
“I don’t think you’re well,” I said. “Let’s sit down.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I don’t feel like sitting down.”
“Let’s sit,” I said.
“I said I don’t want to, and you’re freaking me out, you wanna know the truth. What the hell kinda look is that you’re giving me, Billy? And that sadvoice you’re doing. That wary, uh, timbre. I’m not that old,” he said. “Well, I guess I am. But I’m in good shape. I mean, Jesus, you know? If you thought I was some kind of coronary lightweight, why’d you even startle me?”
“I think something’s wrong,” I said. “I think you might be having some kind of an episode.”
“An episode?” he said. “I don’t have those,” he said, and the power with which his incredulity came across did testify to a Clydely self-possession, even in spite of the getup, and yet…
“What were you saying you were doing with the shirt?”
“I’m getting it stained for you to bring to brunch,” he said. “I guess that sounds pretty weird, but I thought a lot about it at the tavern last night. Talked to Mal Vaughn about it in depth. Verdict was you can’t show up empty-handed. But what kinda gift do you bring to a billionaire? Especially if you’re, you know, not exactly a billionaire yourself, right? And I came up with the answer: sentimental. A sentimental gift. So: the shirt. And yeah, I know, sure—I’m sure he has one already. Probably has a hundred. But he’ll never admit it. He’d seem too precious, too self-centered, and you, if you give him one, it’ll be like you’re saying, ‘Hey man, I bet it’s been a while since you seen one of these, huh?’ and that’ll be like saying you’d never imagine in a million years that he’d be the type of guy who’d hold on to cheesy souvenirs of himself.”