She said, “Of course, of cour—oh my. Oh dear.”
Magnet, which had climbed onto Triple-J’s shoulder, was now fisting the air, both-handed, and whispering.
“What’s it saying?” I said.
Triple-J bent an ear toward the cure. “Sounds like, ‘You know, you know, you know,’ ” he said. “Every time I laugh, or make a laugh sound—well, not every time, but a lot—it practices doing whatever it thinks made me laugh, and then does the thing for me later, at full volume, if I start acting depressed or quiet or something. I must have said, ‘You know,’ and laughed, or made a laugh sound.”
“Oh, that’s great,” I said. “I have—I used to have one that did stuff like that.”
“I guess it’s cool sometimes,” Triple-J said. “I mean, its timing’s usually pretty bad. Pretty annoying. Like, I don’t know about you, but if I’m depressed and something that’s supposed to be funny or cheerful happens, I don’t usually laugh or get cheered up. I usually just get more depressed because it seems like I’m failing to have a good sense of humor or a positive outlook or whatever. Not that I think less of Magnet for it—I mean that’s just SECRT, right?”
“It’s a secret?” I said.
“What? No. SECRT. Magnet’s senso-emotional call-and-response tech. All cures’ SECRT is what I’m saying. It was designed for kids, with kid emotions. Kids with the kid emotions kids had back when you and my dad were kids—where is Dad, by the way? I thought I was late, huh?”
“He’s on a call with Dubai,” Fon said. “Uncle Haj.”
“On a Sunday?”
“I know,” Fon said.
“Hey, where’s your dad, Belt? I thought he’d be joining us. It’s like the day of no dads at brunch around here.”
“He wasn’t able to make it,” I said.
“Yeah, I was told. What I’m saying’s: Why not?”
“Nosy,” Fon said.
“My bad. What I meant was, ‘That’s a bummer. I’d have liked to eat an omelet with your father.’ I’d kind of like to eat one without him, though, too. Maybe even a burger. I’m not starving or anything, but I bet Belt is. And how about you, Fon? Maybe we should have the kitchen bring something up? I don’t think Dad would mind if we went ahead and brunched. I wouldn’t have minded if you’d gone ahead, and he’s later than me. Then again, his omelets—I don’t know if Fon mentioned it, Belt, but my father’s omelets are…they’re kinda the best. Probably everyone thinks that about his father’s omelets, but they’re wrong. My dad’s got this like technique. Am I lying?”
“They’re very good omelets,” Fondajane said.
“I’m happy to wait for omelets,” I said. “I’m not all that hungry. Anyway, we’ve got a box a Crunch here, if things get desperate.”
“I was told you brought that as a gift for my dad.”
“Well there’s a shirt inside,” I said. “That’s the gift, really.”
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s what Hogan—no, Duggan. Or…I don’t remember which one said it. But I thought he said it was like a joke-gift kind of thing where the cereal’s essential to the joke.”
“It’s not really a joke-gift,” I said. “The wrapping—the box—is kind of jokey, but…we should probably leave some cereal in there, but there doesn’t need to be a lot. The cereal’s got nothing to really do with the shirt. The shirt’s just this thing from when we were kids. Maybe your dad told you about it? The Jonboat Say shirt?”
“Oh, that’s what it is! That makes sense, now,” Trip said. “Duggan—or Hogan, whoever—they just said it was a shirt, and I thought, ‘Why would Belt Magnet bring my father a shirt? Why would he think my father wanted some…shirt?’ But okay, okay. Because you helped him design it. You’re who came up with the whole idea to turn the catchphrase PG so kids could wear it at school, right? You told him, ‘Drop the gayola.’ ”
“Well, gaylord, but actually—”
“Right! Gaylord. Ha. ‘Drop that gaylord, Jonboat.’ That’s hilarious. What a great gift. I bet he’ll love it. It’s like a remember-the-good-old-days kind of gift. The swingset murder days, right?” Trip said.
“Pretty much,” I said.
“Man, I really wish I could’ve been there to see all that, Belt. You know, the swingset murders—they’ve got like everything to do with my plans for showing A Fistful. The whole had-to-be-there-to-understand-the-thrill-of-them aspect. Plus, in a way, they were kind of like fisting, right?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, reader, and, given that he’d paused for confirmation (i.e. “right?”) so soon after invoking “plans for showing A Fistful,” and considering how infrequently he’d been pausing, this probably would have been the perfect moment for me to mention that I hadn’t been able to finish A Fistful. Yet his comparing the swingset murders to fisting was not only bizarre to me, but embarrassing. Despite having given up on the possibility of any kind of romance with Fondajane, I still didn’t want her to above-averagely associate me with anuses. Not with doing things to anuses, not with having things done to my anus, and not with thinking about anuses (neither mine nor anyone else’s). Not even metaphorically. I suppose that, were it up to me, it would never have even crossed her mind—hers or anyone’s—that I had an anus. And so instead of confessing to not having finished A Fistful of Fists, I got a little defensive. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I’d compare fisting to the swingset murders.”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “No. I mean, not in their impact, really. I mean, they didn’t catch on. I know that. It’s not like any of the kids who saw the murders started murdering swingsets—at least not according to my dad or Burroughs. But in spirit, I mean. Like, you used a bat in a way that bats aren’t normally used, and you used it to do things to swingsets that weren’t normally done. Like, ‘Here’s a bat, here’s a swingset. Watch this thrilling new thing I can do with them,’ right? It’s not so different from ‘Here’s a hand, here’s an anus. Watch this thrilling new thing I can do with them.’ Or maybe, yeah, now that I’m saying it out loud, I can see how maybe I’m reaching a little—I don’t know. I mean, you being the author of my favorite novel, obviously I want to believe we share all kinds of deep affinities, so maybe I see some where there aren’t any, and, well, like I was starting to say before, I definitely think that what I’ve been doing is a lot like fisting. Like, ‘Here’s a Curio, here’s a whatever, watch this thrilling new thing I can do with them.’ Curios haven’t been around for as long as fists and sex had been around when the inventor of fisting invented fisting, or even as long as bats and swingsets had been around when you came up with the swingset murders—that’s true—but what I was thinking, after I read Fondajane’s friend’s paper, was everyone had them, everyone loved them, and no one had done anything truly new with them in years, right? Decades. Not since Burnsy and Woof invented spidge. See what I mean? I mean, even the second and third Cute Revolutions—they weren’t really new. They were just marketing terms Graham&Swords invented to sell PerFormulae. And they worked. Obviously. At selling PerFormulae. But what did PerFormulae really change, you know? I mean they made cures and hobunks cuter by making them more novel, which of course made overloading on them that much more awesome—I’m not saying they didn’t do that—and they made for wider varieties of spidge, too, but still, the two basic things people used Curios for remained the same: overload and getting high.