What was going on? I hadn’t forgotten I was on this new drug, but still: What the fuck was going on? I knew our kitchen was plain, ugly even, dirty—dirtier than usual since Clyde had gone to Europe—and I knew that none of the aforementioned inans would, if they were anything like any of the other inans I’d ever conversed with, possess so positive an outlook on themselves, yet the whole kitchen—the whole world—really did appear beautiful to me, beautiful and right, and right with itself, everything in its place, and although I’d be lying if I said I felt stupid about that—I felt nothing less than wonderful—I did think to myself, “You are becoming stupid. That is what is going on. This drug is making you stupid.”
And yet, at the same time, I felt more than capable of finishing this memoir. I felt like I could finish it in just a few days. I could go upstairs, sit down, and just…do it.
* * *
—
So I went upstairs, and I sat down to do it. To get started, I read over the last of the scenes that I’d written—the one in which the boys (one of whom, I knew now, was a cousin of the author Adam Levin) made fun of my Street Machine—and it was…brilliant. Belt, that poor kid, what a fully rendered character. What a whole and complicated and observant and weird and unsuspectingly cool human being. I wished me nothing but the best.
I scrolled up in the document and read another, earlier scene. Belt and Lotta at Arcades. Once again: brilliant. It really captured the experience: the slow, tenuous climb toward hope; the sudden drop toward disappointment; the accompanying relief; desire’s terrible misalignment with reality. How could I have ever felt disconnected from this book? I was so connected.
Maybe, in fact, I was too connected. The sense I’d had in the kitchen, the sense of being able to just sit myself down and make the memoir magic happen—it was gone. Not that this worried me. I wasn’t worried at all. It seemed that what I needed to do was relax and just reread the whole thing. That’s definitely what I wanted to do. So I started to do it. Scrolled all the way up, read the first couple lines.
Growing up, I’d heard, “Shut your piehole, cakeface,” a couple or three times a week from my father. The piehole thats shutting he’d demand was rarely mine, though.
What a start! What rhythm. What voice. And there, right there in the second line of the book: my great, lasting contribution to English as it’s written—what I imagined would be my great, lasting contribution; one of my great and lasting contributions: that seemingly humble, yet revolutionary innovation that is the word thats. Over the last couple months, I’d completely forgotten about my thatses. How could I have forgotten? Would thats not be, for English, what fisting (according to Trip’s account) had been for sex? Well, maybe I was getting a little carried away. But still.
Thats was a word that every speaker of English made use of. Whenever it came time to attribute the possession of something to nonliving things (or even, for that matter, nonhuman animals), whose had always sounded wrong; whose had never sounded right to anyone; and formulations involving of which were often too clumsy, inefficient, even a little (or a lot) pretentious-sounding. That’s the reason why people said thats. So why had no one before me thought to write it down? Because of the word that’s? Maybe. Yet there was it’s and there was also its. That’s was no reason to forgo thats. Nor was that ever pluralized into thats; that became those. So there was no reason not to formally recognize thats as a word, no reason whatsoever not to teach thats in school. No good reason, anyway. And yet how could it be? How could it be that after so many years of so many millions of people speaking English, I, Belt Magnet, 1975–, would be the one to provide the OED with its first citation for thats? I couldn’t see how it could be, yet it was. Perhaps I was missing something? Maybe I was crazy?
I typed up alternates of this memoir’s second sentence to try to get a better sense of whether I was crazy.
The piehole whose shutting he’d demand was rarely mine, though.
The piehole the shutting of which he’d demand was rarely mine, though.
However, of the pieholes he’d demand be shut, mine was rarely one.
I was not crazy. Thats was superior. Thats was a winner. I would be in the canon. All I had to do was finish writing the memoir.
But writing could wait. First I wanted to continue reading what I had. And before I did that, I wanted to enjoy the moment. To bask in my accomplishment. To enjoy the feeling that I’d done something important, that I might be important, the coiner of thats.
I set my elbows on the desk, rested my head on the heels of my palms, closed my eyes. And what did I see? What did I, head in hands at my desk, see there on the backs of my maybe-important eyelids while trying better to feel my feeling of being maybe-important?
All I saw at first was the usual: a dark, horizontally ridged glow, almost fingerprint-like, some bright slashes that moved when I moved my eyeballs, and a brighter, peachier glow in the periphery…gorgeous, yes. What I saw, though everyday, was nonetheless gorgeous, but what I saw, reader, was nothing compared with what I felt. And I don’t mean my “feeling” of having done something important (though that was lovely, too). I mean a physical sensation. I felt a hum.
A subsonic hum.
Not a hum then—a vibration. Subsonic, but definitely there, just above my right eye, inside my skull.
Actually, no, not a vibration, in fact, so much as a pressure. A light pressure. A presence. A something. A something of substance.
Eyes still closed, I tried looking upward to see what it was, but there was nothing to see that I hadn’t seen, or I couldn’t roll my eyes back far enough to see it—I rolled them back til they hurt, didn’t see it, let them rest.
But this presence, this something—it was as though I’d discovered a muscle or a tendon I hadn’t known I had; a muscle or tendon I’d never deliberately used before. No, not a muscle or tendon: a limb. A limb I’d never used before. A limb that had, til that moment, been numb.
What was it, this limb, this substance, this presence? Who was I asking? Me? The presence? How could I use it? What did it do? I tried to picture its shape. What was its shape?
As soon as I tried to, I was able to picture it. I pictured a gear.
Not a gear—a spindle.
A glowing gray spindle above my right eye. A glowing gray spindle, smaller and thinner than a first-class postage stamp. Much thinner. How thin? The width of a photon? Perhaps the width of a photon, whatever that meant. It was as thin as possible, this glowing gray spindle, as thin as a glowing shape could possibly be, and it was inside the upper-right quadrant of my skull, an inch or so back from the exterior of my forehead.
I pictured the spindle turning clockwise because—well, what else was there to picture a spindle you were picturing doing inside your head?—and as I was picturing the spindle turning clockwise, I slowly drew the tip of my tongue along the roof of my mouth (from my teeth toward my throat) and, after the spindle had turned about a quarter-revolution, I felt something move: another presence.