So his dream had been crushed, and he hated himself for the first time ever, was embarrassed by himself for the first time ever, and even though none of that was Fon or Jonboat’s fault, he had blamed them for raising him to be someone who would have such stupid, embarrassingly crushable dreams to begin with. And maybe because he’d known none of it had been their fault, he’d been angry at them for not being able to take the blame. For allowing him—even though they couldn’t have known they were doing so—to blame himself. Or something. He’d been crazed with embarrassment. For weeks now, crazed. Just so angry. At himself. At them. At everything.
And so the first thing he’d come into Jonboat’s office to say was that he was sorry for having been so horrible lately. He wanted to put it behind him. Behind all of them. He would stop being horrible, and he would work with Jonboat to get his grades up in Chemistry. He wanted to be humble about it and go for a B instead of an A. He wanted to be humble because he didn’t want to disappoint Jonboat, or himself, but also because he had something else to work at. Sometime last night, or maybe just this morning, he’d started to have a whole new dream, a dream that had nothing to do with Chemistry, and what he wanted to do was spend his time making that dream come true: as much time as possible.
And the thing about his whole new dream was it wasn’t really right to call it a whole new dream. What it was was a clearer version of the same exact dream he’d always had. If you boiled it down, being the best PerFormula designer had been his dream because he wanted to bring the greatest thrills of all time to himself and to others, and the amazing thing that had been happening to him since yesterday night was that, when he got to Chapter 9 of No Please Don’t, he discovered he was getting a serious thrill from it. It wasn’t as big a thrill as he got from really well-PerFormulized cures or anything, but it was a deeper thrill, a better thrill. A more satisfying one. And it lasted longer. It stayed with him. And, crazier than that, it got richer with repetition. When, today, he reread the first half of the book, the thrills it provided were more intense than they’d been the first time. He didn’t really understand it yet. Not completely. Maybe not even hardly. How he could read some words on a page that formed a story that wasn’t true, a story that he knew wasn’t true, and that he knew was written by someone who had never met him, and yet he could feel like that person—Belt Magnet—he felt like Belt Magnet was not only speaking directly to him, more directly even than he, Triple-J, was speaking to them, his parents, right then in that office, but that Magnet was—and this was the part that really blew his mind—that Belt Magnet, who had never met Triple-J, was actually, in telling this completely untrue story called No Please Don’t, Magnet was actually telling a much truer story about the world that he and Triple-J and everyone else lived in. The book told Trip things that Trip already knew, but that he hadn’t known that he knew until he read about them. And the fact that Triple-J, even though he’d never met Belt Magnet, was able to decode all of No Please Don’t’s lies like that—some of which were really extremely fancy and involved—the fact that he understood what Magnet was really saying, had to mean that Magnet somehow understood Triple-J himself, who he’d never met. If he didn’t understand Trip, then how else would he possibly be able to lie in such a way that Triple-J could see the truth behind? Or underneath. Or inside of. Whatever. It seemed impossible, but it was obviously possible, to understand and be understood by someone who’d never even met you. To be understood better than even you understood yourself by someone who’d never met you. Possible. No Please Don’t was the evidence.
So Trip wanted to understand how it worked, he said. And he really thought he’d be able to do that eventually. It seemed realistic. Because the one thing he understood about what Magnet had done with No Please Don’t was that he’d done it with English, which was Trip’s best subject, and always had been, even though Trip had never cared much about it before. He’d barely even tried at English, and he’d always been great at it—imagine what it would be like if he tried his hardest.
Anyway, he wasn’t trying to say that he was over Curios or anything—he wasn’t, didn’t want to be, didn’t imagine he ever would be, they were great—
Here, Jonboat—who had gone glassy-eyed listening to Trip’s apology, and then apparently been infected by the boy’s enthusiasm—interrupted Trip to tell him that he’d known me back when the two of us were boys. He told him a little about the swingset murders, Stevie Strumm (Fon remembered her name as “Bobbie Rub”), the T-shirt, my mom. He said he bet it wouldn’t be too hard to find me, and that, if Trip wanted, he’d instruct the Archons to do just that. As long as I was stable and not locked up somewhere, he’d be happy to try to arrange for us to meet so that Trip could talk to me about the novel.
Big hugs were hugged, warm and firm, four- and six-armed, and Trip, now glassy-eyed himself, told Jonboat that he very much did want to meet me—he did, a lot.
But not just yet.
He wanted, first, to have something to show me: something to read: some fiction of his own. His new dream, or, rather, his all-time dream in its clarified form—his all-time dream of providing others with the best of thrills—was to become a great novelist.
* * *
If Fondajane’s allowing me to sandwich her hand for the entire time it took her to convey the information contained in the eleven pages above seems strange to you, reader, I sympathize completely—I’d venture it seemed at least as strange to me. She took more time to convey that information than those eleven pages take to read: she went off on tangents short and long; peppered in asides; paused dramatically and mock-dramatically; paused for laughter (hers and mine); answered my questions; answered my requests for clarification; extracted assurances from me similar to those that Burroughs had extracted the previous evening (i.e. assurances that I, when in the presence of Trip, wouldn’t mention Jonboat’s initial suspicions regarding Bam Naka, nor any event that had stemmed from those suspicions); and redundantly backtracked a couple of times in the course of reacquiring a lost train of thought.
And I’m sure that, as an infant, I’d been held for as long as—and maybe even longer than—the hand sandwich lasted; perhaps, too, as a toddler, in his parents’ bed, hiding from monsters or nightmares or loneliness. In memory, however, the closest I’d come to so sustained a spell of interpersonal taction was on my visit to the brothel some dozen years earlier.
Nor did the sandwiching cease when Fon told me of Triple-J’s desire to become a novelist. It persisted for another five or six minutes, during which she proudly and cheerily described Trip’s post-apologetic return to the fold, heaped gratitude upon me for writing No Please Don’t (gratitude I tried to gracefully deflect, though, unpracticed as I was, I probably came off like a faux-modest jerk, which I fear I might be doing right now as well, both in spite and because of my admitting to it, now admitting to that, and humblebrag, humblebrag, ad infinitum), then listened to me bumblingly express my admiration for My Procedures and FABRYTAYF (admiration, I confess, I inflated a little—though only a little—in the hopes that doing so might distract from my failure to praise My Process, On Sontag, Trans AM/PM, and Lamborgina C(unt)ock, none of which I’d read).