And when, on the night after my thirty-eighth birthday (i.e. over twenty years after I’d first heard of the girl, i.e. over ten years after I’d given up all hope and come to delicate terms with what looked to be my permanent state of loneliness), the SafeSurf spoke of her as if she were alive—as if it, itself, hadn’t been the one to inform me of her death—I felt not only betrayed and manipulated, but deeply insulted. How could it forget that it had told me she was dead? or think I was dumb enough to have forgotten it had told me that? or daft enough to believe that she had come back alive? Even if our conversations were hallucinatory, how could it? Especially if our conversations were hallucinatory…Because that would mean I did it to myself. To tell myself via extremely convincing hallucination that a girl who might be able to love me actually existed, and then that she died, and then that she was somehow alive again—the level of self-contempt it would take for me to do that was impossible to justify. I wasn’t a bad person really, I didn’t think. I was unkind to my grandmother on the telephone sometimes, and I resented my father for the way he occasionally lorded over me, but on the grand scale these were minor offenses. Small potatoes. Someone was hurting me and I didn’t deserve it, even if I was that very someone. Unless maybe I deserved it because I was that someone. Because I unjustly persecuted myself. Oh God, I felt crazy and ludicrous and worthless.
I unsleeved Blank and set it on my knee.
* * *
I unsleeved Blank and set it on my knee. It blinked heavily, twice, scratched its chin with its tail, and whistled an interrogative melody.
I lit up a Quill.
It whistled again—same tune, higher-pitched.
I shrugged, smoked.
Blank leapt from my knee to the gravelly strip, started humming the cancan, then bobbing to the cancan, then dancing the cancan upside down on its hands and brassing the hums up with tuba-like lipfarts.
Just as I began to feel cheered by the performance—as much by its intent to entertain away my misery as by its content (which was old-school Blank; it hadn’t done the cancan since it first learned to Hora a couple or maybe three years earlier)—I heard footsteps approaching from across the playground. Not wanting to appear like I had anything to hide, I turned my face forward, in the footsteps’ direction, and very casually extended my arm—as if I were merely stretching out my triceps—to allow Blank quicker access to its sleeve.
Blank’s hearing had always been keener than mine, so I can only assume that, given its ears’ proximity to the gravel, the scraping noise of the cancanned pebbles must have drowned out the sounds of everything else, for Blank didn’t race back to its sleeve as it should have, nor did it cover its face.
By the time it stopped dancing, the boys were before us.
Four of them. Fourteen-year-olds. Maybe fifteen-. They wore cardigan vests over turtleneck T-shirts, and each had a sailor cap, Dixie cup–style, with a name in felt block letters stitched to its brim: LYLE, BRYCE, CHAZ, CHAZ JR. A fifth kept his distance. He was over by the slide, half the playground away.
Of the four before us, two—the Chazes—actually rubbed at their eyes with their wrists.
“No way,” Chaz said.
“No way,” said Chaz Jr.
“What?” Bryce said.
Lyle pointed to Blank.
Bryce said, “Oh my dang donkey! Is that item real, mud?”
Lyle and Bryce both knelt on the SafeSurf to get a closer look. Centered on their throats, at the folds of their turtlenecks, yachts was embroidered in golden thread. Silhouettes of sailboats embossing the swooshes of their Nike CureSleeves were also done in gold, and earthwormy stains shone dully like smears of petroleum jelly near the Velcro closures. Similar stains marred the legs of Lyle’s shorts. He saw me seeing them.
“Sloppy,” he said. “I know. I do. Judge not, though, kind mud. Our domestic, Pilar, took ill on laundry day.”
“What is it this time?” Bryce said, winking. “Croup? The grippe? I hope it’s not pertussis, or, God forbid, dropsy. Your Pilar’s always down with something, what what. You need to tell your mother to find a new girl.”
“Pilar,” said Lyle, “is irreplaceable. Vigorously loyal, kind, and—”
“Buxom? Vigorously buxom and oral you were saying? Buxom and foxy and docile and oral?”
“I surely wouldn’t,” said Lyle, “regret a sudden change of subject, dear Bryce. For example, golly me, this mud’s cure over here.”
“Indeed, we might table the Pilar conversation for another, better time. The mud’s cure does merit further discussion.”
By this point, Blank had turned its back to the boys and was creeping sideways on the tips of its fingers, slow as a loris, in the direction of my arm.
“It is so tootin cute—the way it’s hiding?” Lyle said. “As though it thinks it’s clever? As though it thinks it can elude us? As though it believes that treading lightly enough will grant it the power of invisibility? Word it up on the real now, how adorable is that! Holy jams I want to smash it. Holy jams holy jimmy.”
“Holy jimmy to the jimjames jammety jimjam, that stripe down its back—that stripe looks painted,” Bryce said to Lyle. “Is it painted,” Bryce asked me, “or did it grow that way, mud? Don’t you guff me on this.”
“Painted?” I said.
“You needn’t feel you have reason to say it that way—in that voice. As though I’m a cretin. It’s an honest question.”
“Know this one thing if no other,” said Lyle. “Bryce is neither cretin nor weisenheiming rogue. The fellow shoots straight with whomever he addresses, be they mud, chap, lady, chippy, harlot, or tot. I believe you should apologize. Word is bond, now, what.”
“No need,” Bryce said. “It’s all entirely good. Were there any hard feelings, why, they’d soften in an instant, yo. May I hold it, though, please? Your cure, mud, what.”
“It wouldn’t like that,” I said. “It’s shy. It fears strangers.” Blank was in arm’s reach, both mine and Lyle’s. I swooped it up. Not wanting to secure it inside its sleeve—the sleeve was on the outs, the zipper catchy—which would grant the boys more time to ogle it, I stuck it in my shirt. It clung to the fabric just under the collar and emitted happy beeps in three sets of two.
“Nonsense,” said Bryce. “No cure fears strangers. And would you listen to that voice it has! I’m completely in its thrall. You really shouldn’t hide it, mud. Hiding it is rude. You should really let us hold it, mud. That is what I’m saying, and we all of us agree. Hear hear, Chaz Jr.?”