I put it back on top of the stack, and the following morning took no Panacea.
* * *
By the following evening, the effects of the drug had begun to taper. It seemed the “increased acumen” hadn’t really worn off yet, but the “sense of well-being” had devolved into more of a sense of everything being just not that bad. By bedtime, I’d become too afraid of what it might do to me to continue my fourth rereading of what I’d written of the memoir (I’d picked the pages up again earlier that day, wary of returning to No Please Don’t, and they’d still seemed brilliant, but not quite as brilliant), so I reread the as-yet-unanswered letters from my father instead, and once I’d done that, I started rereading Hrabal’s I Served the King of England.
What struck me most in my father’s letter from Paris was what Adam Levin had said about the swingset murders; it sounded almost like he thought they mattered more than my novel, or anyone else’s. And I wondered, firstly, whether he was possibly right about that (assuming that’s what he thought), and secondly, assuming he was right to think it, if that was as depressing as it seemed to me right then.
What struck me about I Served the King of England wasn’t what I read that night—I read only the first thirty pages or so—but rather what I remembered of the ending, as I closed the book before shutting the lights. I didn’t, it turns out, remember the ending all that clearly (I’ve since reread it a couple of times), but what I did remember (or thought I remembered) was that the narrator winds up living alone in a house in a forest and feeding lots of animals, wild and domestic, and I remembered that it wasn’t clear to me when I read it the first time (the only time, at that point) whether this ending was a happy or a sad one; I just knew it was peaceful and I knew that I loved it.
The last thing that struck me before I fell asleep was how shitty it was of me not to have written my father back yet. I hadn’t even called him. He’d met a woman, and it seemed like all he wanted from me was for me to like her, or at least for me to like that he had met her, and I imagined I would like her—she sounded so cool—and I was certain that, regardless of whether I would end up liking her, I liked that he’d met her. And here I had all this money, too. I had whatever $400k after taxes + $70ish k + $2,200 per month was. It seemed like enough to be fine forever, and maybe it was, and yet I hadn’t told him; I hadn’t told the one person who cared whether I’d be fine that I would be fine. What a shitty man I was. What a shitty son.
I fell asleep.
I don’t know if I dreamed—I remember no dreams—but given what I’d been thinking about in the hours before I fell asleep, I suppose that something gamma-wavily-reorganized had happened in my brain, because the first thought I had on waking—even before I opened my eyes—was that I didn’t need to finish this memoir at all; even if I could somehow know that it would turn out to be the greatest memoir ever written, I didn’t need to finish it. The world didn’t need it. People didn’t need memoirs, great ones or lesser ones. People needed novels. They needed great novels. What people who thought they needed memoirs should do, I thought, was read great novels. Hadn’t I always thought that? I had. I had always known it. And people wouldn’t run out of great novels to read. They would never run out of great novels to read. There was not enough time for anyone to run out of great novels to read. So even if I were confident I would write the greatest memoir ever written (my confidence had, overnight, grown shakier), and even if that memoir, by virtue of being the greatest, would be as great as one of the world’s great novels, there was no need to finish it. Furthermore, the memoir was bringing me no peace. For months, by then, I’d had no peace. Whereas murdering swingsets—no one else was doing that. No one else likely would. There wasn’t any surplus of swingset murderers. And swingsets needed murdering nearly anywhere you looked. There were scores of rusting swingsets in Wheelatine alone. Suffering. I’d seen the suffering for years and done nothing about it. The reason I’d done nothing—initially, at least—was because of the promise I’d promised three times to my mother; the promise not to destroy property that didn’t belong to me.
And I had all this money, now. I had $400k after taxes + $70ish k + $2,200 per month. I could make the swingsets my property, couldn’t I? I could buy them up.
I could go around, buying them up, making them my property. I had a friendly orange pickup. I could go to the homes of people who had rusting swingsets, purchase the swingsets, put them in my pickup, bring them back to the house, murder them out back, and then take them to the dump, and I wouldn’t be breaking my promise to my mom. I would not be destroying someone else’s property. And maybe that could be my peaceful ending. Maybe that could be my way to live in peace.
So I drank my morning coffee, ate my handful of almonds, smoked a couple Quills, and drove my truck around the neighborhood, slowly, scouting. Within a three-block radius, I counted nine candidates. I went back for the one that looked the worst off, rang the doorbell of the house behind which it leaned. A young woman—ten, fifteen years younger than me—answered.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“Maybe,” I said. “This might sound a little strange to you, but I was driving down Osage just now, and I couldn’t help but notice the swingset in your backyard.”
“That rusty thing?”
“I was wondering if I could remove it for you.”
“You mean like…when?”
“Now?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Sure. I think. How much?”
“Thirty bucks?” I said.
“You got yourself a deal,” she said. “Just a sec.” She went back inside the house and left the door open. I wasn’t sure if that meant I should go inside and wait in the hallway, or remain on the stoop.
I decided to play it safe and waited on the stoop, removed a ten and a twenty from my wallet, uncreased them, folded them in two.
The woman returned, bearing a purse, digging around in it.
“It’s okay,” I said, “I don’t need any change.”
“What?” she said, still digging through her purse. “No. Nothing like that. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t give you change.”
Only then did I understand what was happening.
I stuck my ten and twenty into my pocket before she looked up, accepted three tens from her, and then I, Belt Magnet, potentially the most blindingly stupid human in the history of the world, went around the side of the house, to the back, unstaked the rusting swingset, brought it back around front, stuck it in the bed of my friendly orange pickup, drove it home, and dragged it into the Magnet backyard.
Or maybe I wasn’t blindingly stupid. Maybe, had I thought to start a rusting swingset–hauling business when I, back in 1991, had gotten my first driver’s license, Clyde wouldn’t have let me use his truck. He might have prevented me from starting the business. He might have thought the business would be unhealthy, or that it was something my mother would not have wanted, and it probably was something she wouldn’t have wanted, and maybe some part of me had known that she wouldn’t have wanted it, and maybe that was why I’d never thought of it before, but that seemed…not correct. Can “a part” of someone know something like that without the rest of the someone knowing the “part” knows? I didn’t think that was possible. I’ve never thought so. Even if I would have, for some reason, rejected the idea of starting a rusting swingset–hauling business, I should have at least come up with it before. So: blindingly stupid, after all.