To say, then, that Triple-J’s audience members weren’t as menacing as Jonboat’s had been isn’t to say they were any less dangerous. Sheep are gentle only until they stampede. As hard as it was for me to picture these perpetual group-huggers picking, let alone winning, fistfights—had even the fittest boy among them provoked him, the runtiest of yesteryear’s BMX skids would have nourished the lawn with Millennial gore—it took little effort to imagine them rioting, lynchmobbing, pogromming.
But sheep, lynch mobs…that might be too harsh. Maybe I was jealous. I did sense that they probably—no, almost certainly—threw far better, more inclusive parties than had the anguished hessians with whom I’d been young (to whose parties I’d rarely been invited anyway), and old-fashioned, generational envy very well may have led me to unjustly ascribe to them the ugliest, as-yet-unseen underside I could think of. Nor can I entirely dismiss the possibility that my impression of their eagerness to embrace conformity might have been, to some degree, unduly enhanced—it certainly wasn’t in any way mitigated—by the vitreous bangles around their left wrists, the LED diodes embedded inside of which not only blinked an identically warm, apricotty orange, but did so in sync with one another, and, for that matter, with the diode inside my own bangle as well.
* * *
Every visitor to the compound had to wear such a bangle. I’d been clamped with mine by a thin-fingered, otherwise Burroughs-shaped man in slate-gray livery and wraparound shades who’d been waiting for me outside the ramparts.
“Mr. Magnet?” he’d half-asked and half-demanded, as I’d started crossing Armstrong toward the Pellmore Place gateway.
“Call me Belt,” I’d said.
“I won’t do that,” he said. “Is your son coming separately?”
“Is my son…? Oh, I see. Actually, I’m the son. My father—turns out he isn’t able to make it.”
“Why are you carrying cereal?” he said.
“It’s a gift,” I said. “For Jonboat.” I hadn’t been able to wrap the shirt in paper—the only tape roll I’d found in our kitchen was bald—so I’d stuffed it inside a box of Cap’n Crunch.
“I’ll have to have a look.”
I handed him the Crunch box.
“ ‘Crunch-a-tize me, Cap’n,’ huh?” he read from the box. “This stuff any good?”
“I like it,” I said. “Not for breakfast, but at night. Some nights. Helps me fall asleep. You never had Cap’n Crunch?”
“I don’t eat things like this.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I don’t think Mr. Pellmore-Jason does either.”
“That’s alright,” I said. “There’s a shirt inside.”
“A shirt.”
“There’s cereal, too, but the shirt’s the real gift. The gift’s not the Crunch. I mean, I only kept the Crunch in there for a kind of joke.”
“What kind of joke?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess a kind of sight gag. Prize at the bottom of the cereal or, like a packing-peanuts kind of thing where the cereal’s the Styrofoam…you know, it’s not a great joke, it’s just—”
“So when I open this up, all I’m gonna find is a bag of cereal with a shirt at the bottom is what you’re telling me. No surprises.”
“Not for you,” I said.
“For who, then?” he said.
“Jonboat,” I said. “I don’t think he’ll be expecting to find a shirt at the bottom of the box.”
“At the bottom of the box, or at the bottom of the bag of cereal?”
“What?”
“Is the shirt in the bag or is it outside the bag? I don’t want to be surprised. Please be specific.”
“The shirt’s rolled up at the bottom of the box, and the bag with the cereal in it’s on top of it. On top of the shirt.”
“That ruins your joke.”
“Maybe a little.”
“The prizes are always in the bag,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “I thought about that. But I thought maybe Jonboat might see the box and want to eat some Cap’n Crunch, and if there was a shirt in there, the Crunch would seem unsanitary, so he wouldn’t eat it. Plus the shirt would have cereal dust all over it.”
“But the prizes are always in the bag,” the man said. “You didn’t take the joke far enough. I don’t think it’ll land. Will that upset you? If your joke doesn’t land?”
“No,” I said.
“Because I’d rather you don’t make the joke, if there’s any risk of you getting upset when it fails to land. We don’t like to see people getting upset.”
“If it fails to land.”
“If, when, whether—which conditional’s more appropriate is not the concern.”
“If the joke fails to land, it won’t upset me,” I said. “I’m not expecting that much from it.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” he told me. Then, into his collar, he said, “This is Duggan. I’m out front with Belt Magnet. Says Clyde Magnet will not be at brunch…Yeah. Thanks.”
The portion of the ramparts that stood between the curbs of Pellmore Place retracted, elevator-door-like. I followed Duggan in, and up onto the sidewalk, where a second liveried, Burroughs-shaped man was standing by the mouth of what appeared to be a stainless-steel, adult-size play tunnel. This man, who Duggan greeted as “Hogan,” bore in his arms a shallow, plastic bin that Duggan had me empty my pockets out into.
“If you’ll enter the scanner, Mr. Magnet,” Hogan said, as Duggan walked off with the bin and the Crunch box, “the conveyor belt’ll pull you through in a blink. Keep your movements to a minimum inside there, alright? You’ll be brunching in no time.”
I stepped inside the scanner, which was dark and smelled of rubber, and was pulled toward its velvet-roped egress at a jogger’s pace. Out in the daylight beyond the rope waited yet another Burroughs-shaped man, his livery a paler gray than the first two’s. He stared right at me, kind of tentatively smiling. “Sorry for any awkwardness,” he told me, after the conveyor belt had ceased to move forward. “This part of the process, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is the one where I have to watch you closely til Hogan says you’re clear, and usually that’s weird enough to do as it is, but this morning the lights inside there went out so I can’t see you well enough with my shades on, which means I can’t wear them, and so now, I know, that thing’s started happening where you feel all dominated if you don’t meet my eyes, so you try to meet my eyes and then you look away because I have to remain unflapped when that happens, that’s part of the job, and I’m good at the job, and I’m proud that I’m good, but then still I know that being good at the job and not getting flapped when your eyes meet mine means I’m making you feel even more dominated than you felt to begin with before you tried to meet them, which, some people, most of them in fact—I wouldn’t care if I made them feel extra-dominated, but Dad told Duggan that you were a writer, and Duggan told Hogan, and Hogan told me, except those guys are philistines—not Dad, but my brothers, Dad’s widely read—so when I asked Hogan what kind of a writer you were he said Duggan hadn’t told him, and when I then asked Duggan—this was just, like, a minute ago—he said he hadn’t even thought to ask Dad, and Dad’s too busy right now for me to bother with questions, but I’m a writer, too, is what I’m trying to say, or I’m trying to be a writer, I’ve never been published, I don’t know if it counts if you haven’t been published, but I’ve written a number of lyric essays, and since we’re both writers, that extra-dominated feeling that I’m making you feel? I wish I wasn’t’s what I’m trying to say. I wish I wasn’t making you feel it. I don’t want you to think it’s something I’m glad about, and I don’t want you to think I think you’re some kind of no one I look upon with like utter disregard. If that’s even possible. Is that possible? Can you look at someone and not regard them? I don’t know. Language is amazing and I just don’t know. Even if you can, though, I totally regard you. And yes, I regard you as someone who I could handle if I needed to, but only because I’m really well trained, and let’s be honest, I’m one of the biggest men on earth, one of the biggest men you’ve ever seen.