“Like everyone else.
“But not always, just sometimes.
“And I knew this occasional urge wasn’t good, which is not to say that I knew it was wrong—how can something so universal be said to be wrong? how can it be said to be anything other than natural?—but I knew it wasn’t good, which is to say I didn’t like it, the having of the urge. As much as I would have enjoyed kicking the shit out of you, I didn’t like the thought of enjoying it. And so my resisting the urge to kick the shit out of you, effortful though it occasionally was, wasn’t any real sacrifice. Again, I’m not seeking your gratitude—that’s not what I’m getting at. To harm you would have sullied me, in my own eyes. It would have felt good to do, but I knew it wouldn’t have felt good to have done. I would have regretted having done it. I would have felt guilty.
“And then I grew up. Went away to school. You sent me some letters I didn’t respond to. You sent me too many. Maybe one too many. Maybe two too many. What does that even mean, though, at this point? One too many? Two too many? It shouldn’t, from where you sit, mean all that much. It didn’t, at the time, mean all that much—not from where you were sitting back then, and regardless of whether you knew it or not. See, had you sent only one letter, or even two letters, then I wouldn’t have—back then, when we were teenagers—it’s true I wouldn’t have thought you were pushy, or obsessive, or fixated—whatever the word is—but you wouldn’t have known what I was or wasn’t thinking because I wouldn’t have written back to you, anyway. One letter, two letters, three letters, twenty—you were never going to hear from me again regardless of how many letters you wrote or didn’t write. As soon as I left for Annapolis, I was done with you, Belt, and not even particularly done with you, Belt, but exactly as done with you, Belt, as I was done with everyone I’d gone to school with here in Wheelatine.
“I became an astronaut. My first shuttle mission, I was twenty years old. I was the youngest man—youngest person—to ever go to outer space. That record stands. Next mission, I went to the moon. First man on the moon in decades. Spent fifteen days on the lunar surface. Another record. Third mission, fourth mission, fifth mission, sixth. Seventh mission, eighth mission, ninth mission, tenth. International space station. Soyuz rescue run. Second moonwalk. Mir repair. Third and fourth moonwalk. Most spacewalks during a single mission. Most spacewalks of any astronaut, period. By the time I was twenty-five, I’d been to outer space and back more often than any other American.
“Back on Earth, in between missions, I got married too young, married to someone so nuts and alcoholic she should never have been married to anyone, let alone me, let alone so young, and we had a son, and I attended state functions, and I attended party functions and diplomatic functions, and I lost both my parents inside of three years, and I inherited everything, and I met Fondajane, and I managed my inheritance, grew my inheritance, I bought and sold companies, I helped build an airline, and I left my wife as my son learned to walk, and she killed herself violently, the press attacked me, and I pushed and pulled and loaned and spent and attended more functions than I’d ever attended and back-channeled tirelessly to legalize prostitution, legalize gay marriage, and I succeeded, and I built a life with Fondajane.
“To say I forgot about you would be to overstate the matter. I didn’t. I didn’t forget—not who you were, or who I was to you. I trust that’s obvious by now. You weren’t someone I forgot about. Just someone I didn’t bother to remember. Basic human stuff, I think.
“And then a few years ago—six? seven?—Burroughs read a review of your novel. And then he read the novel. He liked it, and bought me a copy of my own. He thought that I, even though I’ve never much cared for fiction—Burroughs thought I might want to read your novel. And Burroughs was right. I was curious to read it. I was curious to see if I was in it. More basic human stuff, I think, but not only just more basic human stuff, because I remembered, too, probably for the first time since my first year at Annapolis—I remembered that you’d sent me too many letters. That you’d been pushy, annoying, obsessive, whatever. And I had that in mind when, to see if I was in it, I read the book. And as I read the book, I thought—I admit it—I thought: ‘I’m not only in it, but this book’s about me, about the loss of my friendship,’ about your bitterness over the end of our friendship. I thought: ‘Belt thinks you ruined his life.’ And I was insulted by what I took to be your depiction of me as the action figure: a disappearing nonperson, a mere object that the protagonist delusionally believes—for comic effect no less, or so it seemed—to be unique and valuable despite its being nothing more than a mass-produced hunk of painted plastic. And I was insulted by the things you have the father think about the worthlessness of the action figure—the father, whose worldview, in that book, is supposed to be true, or much closer to the truth than the miserable, delusional protagonist’s. I was insulted.
“I’ve since been convinced I was wrong about all of that. That I saw things in your novel that weren’t there. That I’d been making meaning out of meaningless things. I no longer think No Please Don’t is about me, and am a little embarrassed to have thought that it was. To have thought that—even given your neediness and your weakness and your having written one or two too many letters to me twentyish years ago—seems to indicate that I possess (or possessed) a degree of self-centeredness or capacity for self-aggrandizement that I would prefer not to possess. I would like to live in reality. I would like to think of myself realistically. I would like to believe that I am as grand and central as I actually am, no more, no less.
“I don’t blame you, though, for making me feel embarrassed. I’m not saying that. That’s on me. I embarrassed myself. I was the one who thought the meaningless meaningful, who saw things that weren’t there to see. Same time, though, Belt—and by much the same token—what I owe you is nothing. You’re entitled to nothing. Nada, zero, and fuck-all. Nothing.”
* * *
—
While obviously, reader, Jonboat didn’t say any of that last part, I’m certain it was close to what he meant to convey when, in response to my, “Have I offended you, Jonboat?” he hiked up his eyebrows, uncapped a pen, and, after a number of seconds spent scribbling, pushed across the desk to me a personal check for a hundred thousand dollars.
FOUR-FIFTHS OF A QUILL
“THANK YOU,” I SAID, my head more inclined than I like to remember, my eyes on the check in my hand in my lap.
I raised the hand, examined the check.
Along its longest line was written, “one hundred thousand——————”; inside of the dollar box, “100,000.00”; my name on the Pay to the order of line; on the For line, “transcript”; and on the line to the right of that, Jonboat’s signature, illegible except for the towering J’s. I read the check top to bottom, bottom to top, forward and backward. I read and reread it like the mystifying final sentence of a story I thought I’d understood til I’d gotten to the end: trying to excavate a buried meaning, failing to excavate a buried meaning, uncertain it contained a buried meaning, and, for some reason I couldn’t quite grasp—it wasn’t, after all, a story, but a check—wanting very badly to find some assurance it contained a buried meaning. Did I suspect that the check was somehow a fake? I don’t think so, no; I don’t see why I would have. Had it been a golden nugget, sure, I may have bit into it, but not to measure its authenticity; just to try to get to know it better. I studied it, rubbed it, turned it in the light. Here were Jonboat’s machine-printed name and address; there were the name and address of the bank. Down here were some numbers divided by colons, up there some more numbers in a different font. Here a company logo with a superscript ®, there a padlock emblem resembling a mosque. At a certain angle, a tooth was detectable—not to the eye, but the tip of my left (my softer) thumb. I tried to describe its shade of green to myself. “Pale, but not mint,” I thought. “Worn, but not faded—fuzzy ten-year-old dollar back.” It smelled like the spine of a book. Like glue.