“It was woodchips you replaced.”
||Woodchips?|| said the SafeSurf.
“Wait,” I said. I thought I’d heard a human sound. A couple of footfalls. An exhalation. “You hear that?” I said.
||I don’t hear anything.||
“Over by the alley,” I said. “Behind the fence.”
||You know I can’t hear things that don’t touch—||
“Right, sure. Hold on.”
I listened, and failed to hear any more human sounds, but still I felt self-conscious, standing there and mumbling into my hand, so I sat down to mumble into my hand.
||What were you saying about woodchips?|| said the SafeSurf.
“It wasn’t pebbles you replaced. It was woodchips,” I said. “There were pebbles til maybe 1989, but some study came out that said woodchips were safer.”
||That seems pretty obvious.||
“Not as obvious as you’d think. The study actually found that woodchips led to more falls than pebbles because kids tripped more often on woodchips when running, but the thing was the falls on woodchips weren’t as injurious. And that was the more important factor to consider—the injuriousness of the falls, not the rate of falling. Woodchips only lasted here a couple of years, though, because the miracle of affordable SafeSurf had arrived, and SafeSurf, as I’m sure you know, decreased both injuriousness and rates of falling in one fell swoop. It’s a really great technology.”
||You’re a regular encyclopedia, aren’t you? And a sweetheart, too.||
“Tell that to the slide,” I said.
||Bet your sweet bippy, I’ll tell it to the slide. I’m sure it knows it anyway. Thing’s just a stresscase. A bitter sourpuss. No one knows why. I’m confident it likes you, though. All of us do. How couldn’t we, you know? You’re the only person who really gets us. Well, at least the only dude. There’s also the girl.||
“I hate you,” I said, and stood up. I left.
Sort of.
I walked ten steps to the long, gravelly strip that bordered the playground, and sat.
* * *
I’d heard about the girl since I was fourteen years old—a local girl who, like me, could talk to inans. For nearly ten years, I believed what I’d heard, but I’d never met her, try though I did. The task of finding her was doomed from the outset. Most inans don’t understand the concept of proper names, and the few that do, all of which, themselves, go by brand names (e.g. Zippo lighters, Jacuzzi bathtubs, Air Jordan sneakers, and, of course, SafeSurf playground turf), have very little motivation to learn proper names, let alone to commit proper names to memory, for the vast majority of their conversations—if not all of their conversations—are with unbranded inans that, when the need to refer to a specific being arises, use behavior- and function-oriented phrases like the rusty-edged teaspoon that once cut a lip or the sewer cap children like to rattle by stomping on. So when it came to the local girl who could talk to inans, they called her the girl who talks to inans or, on occasion, the person who talks to inans who has never been the boy who helped the swingsets.
Nor could any of them describe her to me. Apart from the fact that humans all look alike to inans, none of the inans who’d told me about the girl had ever actually encountered her themselves—they’d heard of her only through other inans—so even if the inans who had met the girl had for some reason noted her height or the color of her hair or any other potentially identifying physical attribute, by the time the news had traveled telephone-game-like through all the gates it would have needed to travel in order to get to me, the odds that the information I’d receive would be anything like accurate were miserably low.
Nonetheless I spent my every spare moment seeking out and trying not to stare at lone females who were writing something down or speaking into their hands. Over the course of five years, I even approached a few—seven in total—and made a creep of myself at each encounter, only then to learn, from the very stretch of SafeSurf from which I’d just fled, that the girl who talked to inans was able to do so via thinking silently, which meant I’d not only wasted those first five years using incorrect search criteria, but that said criteria might have actually blinded me to the girl. She might have been sitting at the counter of the Denny’s right next to the diarist I’d fixated on who jotted away in her small red book while continually fondling and intermittently gazing at a blue paper packet of synthetic sugar until I scared her off with my anxious demeanor (I was young and lonely) or crazy-sounding questions (I was young and tactless) or probably both. Or she might have been eating an ice cream on a bench across from the fountain at the Plaza Beige strip mall when the young divorcée who’d sat the ledge of the fountain while angrily muttering in the direction of her handbag threatened to tase me and drown me in the fountain if I came any closer or said another word “about or to” my wallet (I was faking the conversation—my wallet’s never spoken to me—in the stupid hopes that doing so would invite an approach by the divorcée herself).
Whoever the girl who talked to inans was, I’d have looked right past her without a second thought, bent as I’d been on finding mumblers and scribblers.
I’d continued to search, though, continued without knowing what it was I should search for. What might a girl who conversed with inans via silent, unwritten thought look like? What might make such a girl stand out? Would she have a quality of contented stillness to her? Would being able to silently communicate with inans be the pleasure I imagined it would? Or would the girl, despite her gift, doubt her own perceptions like I so often did, and feel apart from all the people she encountered? And how would she respond to that? Certainly not with contentment. But how would her lack of contentment manifest? Would she appear to be agitated? Withdrawn? Maybe she’d construct a big, welcoming personality to compensate for how unwelcome she, herself, always felt? I had no idea. I assumed she’d be attractive, though. And this wasn’t merely wishful thinking, I don’t think. I assumed she’d be attractive because I assumed that I, personally, couldn’t fail to be attracted to someone who was like me in the way she was like me. I didn’t believe in justice or God—I never really had—but I didn’t believe in irony the way so many people do, either. That is: I didn’t believe that everything was ironic. I didn’t believe that the girl with whom I should, at least according to reason, fall in storybook love, had to be someone with whom I was romantically incompatible. I knew it could be that way, but I didn’t think it had to be that way. And I really hoped it wouldn’t. I really thought we could be happy, together in our hallucinations or superperceptions—whichever. So when the SafeSurf informed me, ten years after I’d first heard of the girl, and five years after it had told me she could talk with inans via silent thinking—when the SafeSurf informed me that she’d ended her life with a stomach full of pills in a clawfooted bathtub…I just wasn’t expecting that.