“So the human-Curio dynamic, I thought, has been the same for years and years, but who said it had to be? Who what’s-the-word-circumscribed that dynamic? Graham&Swords? Yeah. Them. And who cares? Why do they get to be the circumscribers? They profit from being the circumscribers. They are not disinterested. They’re this superpowerful corporation and it’s in their interests to limit the thrills we can get from Curios to thrills they can make money off of—overload and getting high. And you have to be a chemist with some serious lab skills, not to mention access to insanely expensive research facilities, in order to even participate in nonrevolutionarily innovating in the Graham&Swords way. I mean, you can have a start-up lab in your garage and make some cool formulae if you’re really talented, but you’re not gonna be able to make BullyKing or SloMo or Independence. That takes teams of top guys with massive research budgets. And even then—even if you’re part of the team that makes BullyKing or whatever—you’re still making something thats main point is to enhance the quality of overload and maybe, if you’re lucky, the buzz from spidge, too—same ole same ole. But so screw that, I thought. I’m bad at Chemistry, and corporations are shady. What can I do? What can I do to revolutionarily innovate cures? How do I start?
“And it was obvious, right? Because I was thinking about fisting, about what Foucault or Ballard or whoever it was who said it said about fisting: it was revolutionary because it was a way to have sex where the point wasn’t to have an orgasm. So if I want to revolutionize interactions with Curios, the first thing I should do is forget about the circumscribed point: the first thing I should do is come up with ways to interact with cures where the point is not to overload or get high.
“And that’s what I did.
“I figured out how to use Curios to connect people socially through acts of spontaneous altruism—like with Charity Party. And I figured out how to use Curios to make people who were already socially connected connect with each other more, and more deeply, through meditative endurance sports—like Ulysses and Hangstrong and Flick&Look. And then there are what I like to think of as the more experimental or artistic or just open kinds of pure research interactions where the point is unknown, where the point is to, like, discover a point, to simply do anything cure-focused except overload, in the hopes that doing so will inspire you, the artist/experimenter, with ideas for revolutionary innovations—that’s what Neo-Gratification exercises are for. Like, remember the other night at the playground?—no?”
With each of the “innovations” he’d listed, Trip had raised one of his right hand’s fingers. Once the thumb had come up for “Neo-Gratification exercises,” he’d pushed the hand forward a little, for emphasis, and then let it fall down onto the counter. At that point, Magnet, which was still on his shoulder, had misread the fall of the hand as a salutational cue, and had raised its own hand and said to me, “Bye, now,” and I, smiling, had shook my head no at it, which Triple-J assumed was a response to what he’d said.
“You don’t remember?” Trip said.
“No, I do,” I said.
“Bye, now,” said Magnet.
“Oh, you were—ha! Quiet now, buddy,” Triple-J said to Magnet, which sat and hid its face behind its hands.
Triple-J scratched its head.
The cure unhid its face. “It’s okay, now,” it said.
“That’s right,” Triple-J told the cure. “It’s okay.” He turned back to me, shrugging a little, and smiling too, as if to say, “That’s Magnet for you!” but he didn’t roll his eyes as I might have expected. Despite his “revolutionary innovations” and the lengths to which he’d gone to impress me by describing them, it seemed to me that Triple-J had a heart, one that abided real affection for Magnet.
“So the other night at the playground,” he continued. “What happened was Chaz Jr. cut his finger. Like earlier in the day. Can of tuna or something. And his mom, she didn’t just put a Band-Aid on his finger, but she made him carry around these extra Band-Aids in case the one he was wearing got dirty or fell off and he had to replace it, or in case he cut himself again because maybe he was having a ‘clumsy day,’ and also in case ‘having a clumsy day’ was like contagious and his friends cut themselves and needed Band-Aids or something—I don’t know, he tried to explain it to make it sound normal, but what it came down to was his mom is really uptight and a little bit nuts, and we were all razzing him about it, all the Band-Aids he had and his uptight mom, and while we were razzing him, I just had this weird, visionary kind of impulse of like, ‘Let’s use those Band-Aids to Band-Aid a cure to the slide at the playground, throw some rocks at it from a distance, and see if something revolutionary develops—some new kind of Curio interaction that doesn’t end in overload, and that we never would have expected to enjoy.’ I mean, we’d tried something like that before, a couple nights earlier, with a different cure, but the same slide, and some glue, and it didn’t come to anything except a typical painsong-driven group overload. But these Band-Aids, right? For some reason, I thought that if we replaced glue with Band-Aids, it might change the dynamic of the whole interaction somehow. Like maybe the cure would be able to free itself, which the glued one just really wasn’t able to do, and that would make the whole thing…I don’t even know, but…that’s kinda the point. That I didn’t know. And, yeah, it’s true that that one—the Band-Aid exercise—didn’t amount to anything revolutionary, but who knows what would’ve happened if we hadn’t run into you before we’d finished, right? Not that I’m not happy we ran into you. Obviously.
“But whatever. I guess that’s not the best example. But Charity Party, though. I mean, take Charity Party, okay? That innovation occurred as a direct result of a Neo-Gratification exercise. We were standing on the bike trail behind the high school, okay? And we’d nailed this single-legger to a tree through the foot—upside down—to find out if it would be able to right itself, and how it would do it, if it did it, like clockwise or counter-, because we thought, you know, ‘Maybe finding out if it’ll right itself, or finding out which direction it’ll go to right itself, if that’s what it does—maybe finding that kind of thing out will inspire us,’ and it just so happened that that particular cure had a kind of too-catchy painsong, which got our other cures painsinging, which was a potential distraction from being inspired, so we all backed away from the tree to where we couldn’t hear it as well, like behind these bushes, til our other cures got quiet, and right about then is when this kid we’d never really talked to before came walking up the path, and he saw the cure, nailed there to the tree, and sort of looked around him, and since we were kinda hidden and the sun was down, the kid didn’t see us, and he thought he was alone, and he started trying to free the cure from the tree, like trying to pry out the nail with a pen or a lighter or something, and Lyle, who’s right next to me there behind the bushes, he whispers, ‘Let’s gobsmack this dirty, thieving mud, Triple-J. Let’s bust him in the biggity-boogity chops.’ And I tell Lyle, ‘Hold on,’ cause suddenly I’m feeling a little inspired, right? It’s often sudden, this feeling. It just comes over me, sometimes, out of the blue. And I’m feeling it, and what I’m thinking is: ‘Maybe we’re verging on an innovation here.’ I don’t know why, really, but I just have this strong feeling of like, ‘No, let’s let this kid be for a minute. Let’s not attack him.’ Because something’s starting to click, you know? So I tell Lyle, ‘Hold on,’ and the kid by the tree, who’s freed the cure by then, now he starts unbuttoning his sleeve to store it in, and that’s when: click. The inspired feeling becomes an idea. The idea comes clear, and what I do is, I execute. I leap out from behind the bushes, and I shout at the kid. I shout, ‘Compliments of the Yachts!’ which startles him, sure, but then after that, he smiles this smile that, Belt—this was a really great, like ecstatic, blessed-type smile. Spoke volumes. ‘This cure is for me?’ the smile said. ‘This cure is for me, from you guys?’ it said. ‘Just because I’m here?’ it said. ‘You’re just giving it to me just because I happen to be here?’ And me? I was smiling a very similar smile, like, ‘Yeah. It’s for you, man. We’re giving it to you. Like I said: compliments of the Yachts.’ We were smiling these smiles, and I knew we’d be friends.