“It’s hard to resist it when it begs,” Grandma Magnet said, “but believe you me, Belt, it’s completely worth it. I taught it ‘Shut your piehole’ in under an hour. I taught it ‘cakeface,’ too, but, for some reason it wouldn’t put them together.”
I wowed and grinned for Grandma Magnet’s benefit, and to Mouth, I said, “Cakeface?”
“Cake. Fay,” said Mouth, and I wowed and grinned more for the Balls’s benefit.
“See, if it would’ve said it right,” the Balls informed me, “I’d’ve given it a morsel, but it didn’t say it right, so it don’t get a morsel. You want to strive for perfection, both here, and in all other things in this life that we live on this beautiful earth, which can try us at times, but also reward us with all sorts of types of rewards that produce satisfaction like the love of a beautiful woman, young Belt. And even in our very October, which may have seemed like December til the sun and the balm came and now all the sudden it looks like August, at times even like June, depending on the point of view and such.”
“Aint that the truth, Sally,” said my Grandmother Magnet.
The Balls gave her a wink, put Mouth in its cage, and showed me where the towels were, and how the remote for the television worked. “Last thing,” the Balls said, “is if the birds start screaming and it’s bothering you, you just turn out the lights, and they’ll pipe down fast.” He was having some pals over to meet his new gal, he said; they’d be right upstairs if I needed anything. Meantime, they’d leave me to my own private party. Grandma Magnet kissed my cheek and said she’d come down later to see how I was doing.
She didn’t come down til the following morning. Judging by the crooner music, laughter-bursts, and footfalls I heard through the ceiling, she and the Balls and his pals had a blast. For a while, I did, too.
The inside door of the bathroom was mirrored, and I brought a couple dumbbells in there and pumped, looking up every couple minutes or so to witness the enlargement of my biceps and forearms, which happened, at first, even faster than I had dared to imagine. When, after three sets of ten, the enlargement plateaued, I strained slowly through a final set, then went to the bench, pressed twenty, then thirty, then thirty-five pounds before I felt a shift at the base of my abdomen, and feared what would happen if the thing that shifted tore—I didn’t know from hernias, but thought a sudden pain could make me drop the bar, which could land on my throat—and decided to lay off working out for the night.
Mouth, in the meantime, had been reciting near continuously; running through, it seemed, every last word and phrase it had ever been taught. There was a lot of swearing, and, much of the time, I couldn’t help but imagine, what was said wasn’t voiced in quite the same way that Mouth was taught to say it. “Good birdy!” it would scream, as if to ward off attack, and then, in the android voice, “Fucknuts” and “Jagoff,” and, later in the evening, still androidally calm, but with more of an interrogative lilt: “Don’t?” and “Water?” and “Bite the salam?” Once its humor wore thin, the nonsense of all this verbal behavior—or, rather, what at first struck me as the nonsense of it—confirmed my core belief regarding pets, a belief I had readily adopted from my father: that they were little more than high-maintenance furniture, they were decorative home appliances that smelled and made a mess, and guys who claimed to “love” them were shallow, or lonely, or shallow and lonely—tasteless dummies, friendless losers. At least for the most part. After all, there was the Balls, who seemed kind of tough. The contradiction didn’t really bother me, though. I was only a kid. I solved it readily: I told myself the Balls had tasteless dummies for parents, or friendless losers for parents, and that these tasteless, friendless loser-dummies raised him with birds, and so, despite everything good and right with the Balls, he got saddled with this bird-loving thing too early to shake it. Then again, he may have had a loser-dummy, bird-loving older brother, or a non-loser-dummy, bird-loving baby sister (it wasn’t loserly or dumb, I didn’t think, when girls said they loved animals) who died when the Balls was still just a child, and when he looked at a bird he thought of his beloved, departed sibling who, in the case of a sister was truly a sweetheart, and in that of a brother was as much a loser-dummy as any other bird-lover, though his death had come before the Balls was old enough to understand that.
Mouth’s cage, true enough, didn’t really have a smell, but it was certainly a mess, the bars and the floor of it caked with brittle feces that itself was caked with bits of down and pinfeather wax, nutshell particles, who knew what else. Ditto the Bourkes’ cage. Had I not thought that doing so would hurt the Balls’s feelings, what I would have told him when he’d finished explaining the rules to me was that setting any of these animals free was the last thing I’d want to do in the basement, even if none of them were capable of violence—I was too afraid of getting shat upon by them, and too afraid to step in shit, too afraid to inhale a beak- or claw-loosed flake of crust a wing aflap might set afloat.
So when I finished lifting weights, I turned off the light. The birds, as promised, went quiet at once. While watching TV, I guzzled Mountain Dews, ate half a bag of Ruffles with a full jar of cheesefood, any number of Smarties, and a snack-size Twix. For dessert, I had some Orange Milanos and Thin Mints, then fell into a half-sleep in the middle of Carson. Shortly thereafter, I was startled awake by spasms in my legs that must have owed to the Mountain Dew’s caffeine. I stretched my thighs and occasionally rubbed them til, by Letterman’s end, my arms started stiffening. I got out of bed, thirsty, tried the tap in the bathroom, which tasted like minerals and seemed a little thick—“Neosporinish” is how I phrased it to myself—and glugged another Dew to clean my palate. I played a game of pinball on the Playboy machine, found my reflexes dull, and the game not-relaxing, the sound effects grating when they weren’t startling. I gave up on pinball, took a stick off the wall rack, shot twice and missed, and gave up on pool.
I lay down again to sleep, and sleep wouldn’t come.
I sat up in bed, started getting emotional. An eyelid kept twitching, my mouth was dry, I was hungry yet full, and the thought of the available food made me nauseous. My arms kept getting stiffer, my back a little too, and when I went to the mirror on the bathroom door, my biceps, I discovered, had shrunken back to normal. My face looked like cheese.
It was 2 a.m.: a time of day I’d never encountered awake. The thrilling aloneness that Grandma Magnet and the Balls had permitted me had turned inside out, into desperate loneliness. The sound of the thoughts in my head was whiny. The imagery with which I tried to comfort myself—my mom bringing me a mug of hot broth in my sickbed, singing my name; my father and I playing Whac-A-Mole and Skee-Ball, side by side, at Showbiz Pizza Place, high-fiving twice every ten tickets won—was stock and Vaseline-lensed and made me feel wimpy. Here I was in this suburban basement Pleasure Island, and instead of gamboling between all the fun-machines, laughing like a donkey, and feeling like a man, I was sitting on a shaggy, teal bathroom throw rug, frowning and missing my mommy and daddy.