Jonboat suggested we sleep on it.
* * *
I awoke the next morning erect and depressed. I was twelve years old, wanted someone to touch me, and knew no one would. In the months since Jonboat had bloodied Blackie’s nose, some things had changed. First and foremost, my mother had died, a loss so fundamental that it didn’t, much of the time, seem possible. I knew I would never see her again and, when I thought about that, I’d pull neck muscles crying, yet after having mourned just five or six weeks, I no longer thought about it—at least not so directly. Which may as easily have meant that I’d “entered a self-preserving state of denial” as that I’d “arrived at acceptance of the loss.” The therapists differed; I didn’t care. I didn’t know what any of it meant, and to try to sort it out seemed self-destructive, masochistic at best. The loss was too massive, the thought of it too painful, to analyze the style in which I chose—or was compelled—to feel it.
Plus there was my skin—newly oily and porous. And I’d developed dandruff, slight myopia, and whiskers over my upper lip too sparse and feline to call a mustache. The UV-sensitive, autotinting lenses of my overlarge glasses (black wire frames, vaguely aviator-shaped) never fully clarified; even in basements, milk was beige. My father no longer cared to fight about my haircut, and although it had remained the same for the most part—long in the back, short on the top, shorter yet on the sides—horizontal stripes above each of my ears were now clippered down to stubble so my temples looked vented. Eight of these stripes. Four per temple. I’m pretty sure I smelled. Something did. And the stoic, ringbound–Kid Dynamite approach to basic ambulation I’d been trying to affect since seeing Tyson KO Biggs—ground-focused glares and smooth rollings of the neck punctuated by sudden, prey-tracking head-tilts—came off less gladiatorial than Crispin Gloveresque (I learned this through observing how Blackie Buxman spoofed me when we passed in the hallways: all unswinging arms, tightened lips, and startled twitching), and I wanted to quit it, and I tried my best, yet I couldn’t seem to teach myself to walk how I used to; my muscles refused to shake their training. The fire in my eyes, perhaps wild once, sputtered. In mirrors, I suffered, appeared to be crooked. To my peers, my blacksheepishness had ceased to seem elective. Where before I’d been an outsider, now I was an outcast. Even authority figures—even the smiley ones—emptied their expressions when I entered their shops, their classrooms, their offices.
I don’t know why all of this struck me that morning, or if it really did, but that’s how I recall it—being in my bed thinking it. “Outcast, retard, psycho, creep.” My erection uselessly sweating in my briefs. Worse than uselessly. It was getting in the way. My bladder was full.
* * *
—
I headed for the bathroom, where I leaned and angled, aiming not to tag the seat or the lid. I tagged the lid a little, tagged the seat a lot. There was sprayback on the tile, the side of the tub. I sopped the mess with tissue and returned to my room to wait for the pinch in my loins to subside.
There I heard my cure rustling around in its PillowNest. The flushing toilet must have awakened it. I removed the nest’s lid, and found the cure sitting up beside its rear ejection. “Morning, Blank,” I said. It played at deafness. I repeated my greeting, and it lay on its belly, closed its eyes. “Blank,” I said to it. “Blank, Blank, Blank.” But Blank wouldn’t stir.
Blank was short for Kablankey, the name I’d given it, at my mother’s suggestion, for the sound of its sneeze. It had responded to Kablankey since the age of four days, but within a couple months—right around the time I’d vented my temples—I’d determined that Kablankey was overly cutesy. Yet because my mother had liked the name, I couldn’t abandon Kablankey entirely; to do that would have somehow dishonored her memory. So I’d been calling it Blank for maybe four or five weeks, and although it had started responding to Blank, which indicated that it knew it was Blank, the responses seemed to follow too much hesitation, and for the past few mornings, the cure had faked sleep til I’d called it by its full name. The faking, in itself, didn’t bother me at all; I found it as adorable as anyone would. I just didn’t want to have to say Kablankey anymore. Especially that morning. I wasn’t in the mood.
“Blank,” I said.
Its eyes remained closed.
I removed the rear ejection from the nest with a tissue, brought it to the bathroom, flushed it down the toilet.
When I returned to the bedroom, Blank was still faking sleep.
“Blank,” I said.
Nothing.
I refused to lose a battle of wills with a Curio. I had a closet-door-mounted toy basketball hoop and, after finding the inflatable ball that went with it, I started taking shots by the foot of the bed. Inside a minute, Blank climbed from the nest, leapt from the nightstand onto my pillow, and, as I continued pretending to ignore it, shinnied down the comforter and stood at my feet.
“Blank?” I said.
Blank showed me its palm.
I cupped a hand by my ankle and the cure climbed in. It slumped for a moment, still catching the breath it lost getting to the floor, then lay along my forearm, an ear to my pulse, and embraced my wrist like a watchband. I cooed affirmations, scratched it on the neck. It pushed a closed eye against my wrist skin and squeezed. This was nice for a minute, but soon I was antsy, and I got the idea to play a game of chase: I would set Kablankey back down on the floor, roll the basketball at it, then watch it bound adorably away in fear.
Of course the trouble with this game was Blank over-trusted me. Or maybe it wasn’t a matter of trust—it might have been more a matter of stupidity. It seemed, however, like trust to me, or possibly even something like faith, for I’d seen Blank flee things I hadn’t set in motion. One time a cricket, down in the basement. Another time the sound of Jon-Jon’s chow chow killing a squirrel beneath the elm across the street. That morning with the ball, though, Blank watched me setting up. It saw me providing the force behind the roll. And yet, until the ball—an object roughly twice its width and half its weight—was entirely upon it, it just stood there, waiting, the same expression on its face as when I’d give it a candy.
The ball ran it over and kept on rolling as Blank smacked its head against the rim of a nickel that was standing on end, half-submerged, amidst the rough fibers of the wall-to-wall carpeting. At first it didn’t seem too hurt. It sprung up as quickly as it had been knocked down and even seemed poised to do the shuffley little dance thing it so often did when it would sense I was worried or angry about something. But then the ball, having bounced off the baseboard and traveled the path on which I’d set it in reverse, ran Blank down again, this time face-first. I swept the ball out of action—set it firmly on the bed—and when I turned back to look, Blank, though wobbly, was upright once more, shifting its weight from foot to tail, its elbows pointing outward like wings, and its hands autistically flapping the air by the sides of its pinkening, rugburned muzzle.