Just as it had atop the platform, it balled itself up, but there was still too much rope for it to hang itself to death once it had, having passed out, unballed.
It climbed back over the trapdoor’s edge, stood once again atop the platform, pulled the lever, which shut the trapdoor, and turned and stared into its eyes in the mirror, its swelling face dripping with glistening tears and equally glistening, though slower-dripping, blood.
Its hands were in fists. It examined its fists. Lifted one, then the other. Stacked one atop the other the tall way. It crouched down and set its stacked fists on the platform. Stretched its legs as if to lie on its belly. Turned its head and set its cheek on the fist-stack.
It stood up once more and looked back into the mirror. Its jaw had relaxed. Its brow had smoothed out.
Again it stacked its fists. It pressed the top of its right fist against its throat, the top of its left fist against the bottom of its right fist. Gazing into its eyes’ reflection, it took some deep breaths, and then, its bent elbows pointing outward like wings, it jumped high in the air, kicked its legs out behind it, became horizontal, remained horizontal throughout its brief descent, and, upon its left fist’s impact with the platform, snapped its windpipe and shuddered and died.
The animated flyers appeared on the screens. The audible sighers exchanged looks of wonder. I kept my eyes down. I just wasn’t there yet. But I wasn’t wrecked either. Having transcribed A Fistful of Fists must have, whether im- or permanently, done more than a little to desensitize me to images of brutalized cures. I wasn’t unaffected by the gallows video, but nor was I any more affected by it than I would have been by, say, seeing a homeless man beg on the street, or viewing nightly news footage of war orphans, weeping.
The second clip didn’t affect me even that much. Though notably gorier than the gallows clip, it was a quarter as long, and the AOL was far more efficient. The cure was set between a pair of mirrors, and once it passed through the face-caressing/self-hugging phase, no one got in the way of its repeatedly bashing its head against the mirror on the left. Once its snout was half-flattened, a final blow to that mirror shattered it entirely, and the painsinging cure, spinning on its heel to see the other mirror, slipped on a puddle of its blood and fell sideways, hard, impaling a cheek on a silvery shard, then scrambled to its feet, shard still wedged in its cheek, plucked the shard, examined the shard, dropped the shard, bent to pick up a longer shard, then straightened itself, and, observing its reflection in the still-intact mirror, lined the shard up with one of its eyes, then buried the shard in its head, which killed it.
Next thing I knew, I was being rung up.
As I waited for my credit card receipt to print out, the three young men who I’d met by the endcap barrel—they’d gotten in line behind me while the flyers between the two clips were screening—argued over how derivative this second clip was of the P.A.L. clip that had started the AOL craze.
“Total rip-off,” one said.
“I don’t think so,” said another. “In the P.A.L. one, it takes a little longer. The cure doesn’t dact for like, almost five seconds, after it stabs itself. There’s a lot more seizuring kind of movement, you know? Plus this one’s a better painsinger.”
“How the hell would you know that?” said the first one. “There isn’t any sound.”
“You could tell by its face. It was really emoting.”
“He’s right,” said the third. “You could totally tell. You could tell by its face.”
* * *
On my return from A(cute)rements, I found, on our stoop, a padded manila envelope addressed to me, c/o of my father. The sender was Gus. Along with three handkerchiefs, the envelope contained a handwritten letter.
Dear Belt,
Thank you for your complex, impressive work of literature. I just finished reading it. Man, what a ride. Many times I was a little confused, but those times I was confused I was laughing, and am good with that.
In case you want to know, the most confused I got was at the end. The end made me sad, and I do not know why, don’t know was I even supposed to be sad. Maybe it was just a personal reaction I had, specific to myself. I am not asking you to tell me if I was supposed to be sad, or why if I was supposed to be I was, but I will read it again and if I still don’t understand, I might write to you again and ask you those questions.
The handkerchiefs I picked for you are eggwhite white, the most popular white.
My regards to your father.
I hope to read more of your writing soon, and I wish you best of luck with your bubblegum venture.
Sincerely,
Gus Aronov-Katz
Reading over the letter just now, I can’t help but notice how vague its language is, and I find it strange that, given that vagueness, I didn’t, when I first read the letter, spend even the briefest of fleeting moments doubting that Gus had enjoyed and admired my novel enough to want to reread it, let alone doubting that he’d read it at all. And yet I didn’t; I doubted nothing. I took Gus at his word, and—perhaps because he, a retired miller and part-time security guard at a bank, was just the kind of reader I’d previously feared my fiction couldn’t speak to; perhaps because his was the very first fan letter I’d ever received; or perhaps because receiving it reminded me how I’d also sent Stevie the novel, and, since Stevie was (or so I would’ve assumed) exactly the kind of reader I’d always been confident my fiction could speak to, I became newly hopeful regarding the prospect of receiving from her a similar letter or, for that matter, any kind of letter at all (which, by the way, I never would; to this day, I haven’t heard back from Stevie)—my desire to celebrate, which had dulled a bit since my visit to A(cute)rements, returned in full force.
And here I had a gift for Blank from me, I had a gift for me from Gus, and I had a gift from myself to me. How best to proceed? I did the boring parts first: stuck the old PillowNest under my bed, atop the box of recordings of Blank’s songs and gags; set the new PillowNest up on my night table; and went to the kitchen to wash and fill the new thimble with water, and get a short glass.
Back in my room, I turned on the light inside the new nest, set the thimble in the slit, closed the nest’s lid, poured myself a dram of MacGuffin 18, removed Blank from its sleeve and set it, standing, on my better pillow, facing the night table.
Blank double-took and back-stepped, moved a little to the right, a little to the left, all the while with its eyes on the nest, as if to better adjudge its feng shui.
“Fweep,” it whistled, pointing at the nest, meaning, I presume, either “Is this for me?” or “What happened to the old nest?” or “Do you see what I’m seeing here? A different nest!”