And yet: no.
No.
That was not a satisfactory answer. I may not have been the Cervantes I’d believed I was the day before, but blindingly stupid? I wasn’t that. Only, what other explanation was there?
I went to the garage to get my Easton aluminum. I brought it out back, laid a hand on the swingset. The swingset said nothing. I tried the volume knob. The swingset said nothing. I felt like a fool. I jumped up high, brought the bat down on its crossbar. It gave, but not much. I jumped up high, brought the bat down on its crossbar. It gave, but not much. I jumped up high and brought the bat down on its crossbar, then jumped up high and brought the bat down on its crossbar then jumped up high and brought the bat down on its crossbar then jumped up high and felt a pain in my chest, and dropped the bat, and sat in the grass, and clutched at my chest.
I wasn’t having a heart attack—I was just in bad shape, terrible shape, fifty-to-eighty-Quills-a-day-for-over-two-decades shape—but for a minute or two, I thought that I was having a heart attack, and, while I thought I was having a heart attack, the reason why I’d never thought to start a rusting swingset–hauling business came to me.
It was very simple.
By the time I’d gotten my first driver’s license—in fact, well before that—I’d all but completely ceased to care about the suffering of rusting swingsets, or, for that matter, about the suffering of inans in general. I’d known the rusting swingsets were suffering—I’d seen it nearly every day—and I would have liked it if they weren’t suffering, but I hadn’t cared enough to put in even a fraction of the effort that would have been required to end even a fraction of their suffering. Their suffering might as well have been AIDS or the Taliban or animal cruelty or homelessness or African famine or Indian famine or opioid addiction or nuclear proliferation or rising sea levels or California droughts or Lotta Hogg’s hurt feelings. Had I cared enough about the suffering of rusting swingsets, I would have started a rusting swingset–hauling business, but I’d cared so little about the suffering of rusting swingsets, I hadn’t even thought to start such a business. I’d had other things to do: reading, writing, smoking, pining for and seeking out the girl who talked to inans (about whom I, while I believed I was having a heart attack, had another realization: I no longer had any desire to meet her; if she did in fact exist, I supposed I wouldn’t go out of my way to avoid her, but I no longer really cared if she existed—I don’t know why I didn’t, didn’t know why then either, but I didn’t care, nor, come to think of it, had I for a while).
The one question I was left with was why it was that, given how little I cared about rusting swingsets, and given how long it had been since last I cared more about rusting swingsets, I’d awakened that morning thinking that I’d find a “peaceful ending” by spending the rest of my life murdering rusting swingsets. And the only answer I was able to come up with was that I’d had weird dreams I’d failed to remember—dreams that had had to do with what I’d read and thought about before falling asleep—and that I’d known, on waking, that I wouldn’t, that morning, be able to write, and I was tired of not being able to write, tired of wanting to be able to write, and so I wanted to believe there was something more important to me than being able to write, and so I’d believed it: I’d seized on my forgotten-dream-inspired thoughts and believed it. But that hadn’t made it true. It hadn’t been true. It had never been true. I didn’t think it would be, and I still don’t think it will be.
And yet, even despite my false brush with cardiac arrest, my ensuing relief at the realization of its falseness, and my fiery determination to go up to my room and get some writing done at last, I didn’t, when I got up to my room, get any writing done. There was something in the way.
* * *
About a week later, Herb called about Lisette.
He’d tracked down the phone numbers of the three living authors (Manx had died in 2005) of The Effects of Companion Animals on Social Interaction Amongst Children Diagnosed with Unspecified Psychotic Disorders back in September, and had reached out to each of them. Dr. Donald Jorgensen, who I’d never met, had late-stage Alzheimer’s, and didn’t recall having ever authored anything; Dr. Katherine Tilly, now a professor emeritus of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, politely said “Goodbye,” the moment Herb asked her to talk about the Friends Study; but Dr. Abed Patel, who’d been a visiting professor at Stanford for the fall 2013 and winter 2014 quarters, had only just returned to his post at Northwestern—his Northwestern office number was the one at which Herb had left him a voicemail back in October—and was willing to help me, even anxious to help me, according to Herb. Abed couldn’t, however, for ethical reasons, discuss anything with Herb about any of the participants in the Friends Study, myself included. He told Herb to have me call him.
Herb gave me the number, and I called a minute later.
“Dr. Patel,” I said. “This is Belt Magnet.”
“Please call me Abed,” he said. “And tell me something to assure me you are who you claim to be.”
“You helped my mother,” I said. “You went to bum a cigarette from her, found her lying on the ground, and helped her. And then a little later, you and Dr. Manx walked me to the hospital. My grandmother was there, and I was afraid, and she scolded me, and you didn’t. You—”
“You may stop,” he said. “I am assured. I am glad to hear from you, Belt.”
After that, the conversation was easy. I congratulated him on all his success—back in 1994, in the wake of publishing his second book, How to Shape Your Child (which wasn’t as popular as How to Shape Your Cure, but did spend a few weeks on the Times Bestseller List), Abed had been jointly hired by the Psychology and English departments at Northwestern—and he praised No Please Don’t, which he said he’d been pleasantly surprised to come across the Tribune’s review of in 2006, had immediately purchased, then read, and enjoyed to the point that he’d nearly called to tell me so.
He’d gone so far as to look up my number in three separate Chicagolandarea phonebooks, he explained, and had thought he’d found it—“Clyde Magnet was the only Magnet listed,” he said, “and I thought that might be your given name—Clyde—or, if not, then your father’s, and that I might convince him to give me your number.”—but he then decided that a call would be intrusive, that he would, instead write a letter to me through my publisher, yet by the time he’d sat down to write the letter, he’d determined that it would be improper to contact me. “You had such a hard time, as a boy, and yet here you were: you were well, an author, a very talented author. You had managed, somehow, to overcome your illness, and I feared that reaching out to you could bring up old memories that might cause you stress, perhaps triggering an episode. In any case, I am glad to have the chance to commend you on your novel, and—only if it wouldn’t be too prying, of course—to ask you to satisfy my professional curiosity about which medications ultimately worked for you.”