I wanted very badly to hold that chipmunk. More specifically, I wanted to catch it, cup a hand around its head to show it I was safe, then stick it in my pocket, feed it dried apricots, and set it free just a few minutes later, only to discover it the following day, and every day thereafter, happily awaiting my return to the playground.
The tetherball pole was as far from the gunboat as it was from the rocket, and the rocket and gunboat as far from one another as they were from the pole. I, behind the pole, was feeling fast; not chipmunk-fast, but maybe half that fast. If I were actually as fast as I felt, I imagined, the time it would take me to race to either the gunboat or the rocket would be twice the time it would take the chipmunk to race between them. To put that another, more functional way: in the time it would take the chipmunk to go from the rocket to the gunboat and back to the rocket, I could get to the rocket. So the plan I hatched was to head for the rocket as soon as the chipmunk left the rocket, for that would see me arriving at the rocket just as the chipmunk returned to the rocket. Granted, the chipmunk would have a head start—I wouldn’t go for the rocket til I saw the chipmunk take off toward the gunboat—but then it would also have to turn around when it got to the gunboat, and, given that all I’d have to do to get to the rocket was traverse a vector, the time the chipmunk’s turnaround would take to execute should have, according to my calculations, sufficiently neutralized that head start’s advantage.
I can’t say with confidence that my thoughts were as organized as they appear above. I wrote a similar scene in No Please Don’t—one of just two or three vaguely autobiographical moments in the novel—and in the course of doing so, I may have permanently confused my fiction with my memory (though not on the bigger points; I’m well aware, for example, that for ten-year-old Gil MacCabby, who’s newly mourning the loss of his beloved Bam Naka, the whole chipmunk episode metaphorically resonates quite a bit more tidily than the real one did for five-year-old Belt; I won’t spoil the novel by revealing more than that). I can, however, say with confidence that I did not know geometry or fractions at the age of five, and thus using words here like vector and calculated and twice the time is potentially misleading. But even if my mathy reasons weren’t as concise at five years old as I’ve reported them being at thirty-eight years old, I certainly hatched the plan I’ve described; if there’s any real difference between the way I thought and the way in which I’ve conveyed the way I thought, it’s no larger than the difference between calling a man “tall” and calling a man “over six feet tall.” And for whatever it’s worth, the memory of the time I’m describing—the time my father taught me what suffering was—is really quite vivid to me, despite the potentially fictional nature of some of it. In fact, it happens to be the earliest coherent memory I have of my father, all those preceding it being flashes and noise from which any narratives I’m able to produce require far too much induction to trust.
My plan, it turned out, was less than sound. A few strides from the rocket, I realized that I was going to make it. That is, I realized that I would get to the rocket just as the chipmunk got to the rocket (maybe I was actually as quick as I’d thought; maybe the chipmunk, seeing me coming, slowed its pace because, as I’d imagined, it wanted me to catch it—I’ll never know), but I realized, also, that I would overshoot the mark. I was going too fast.
So I dropped to my knees and slid to a stop. Right on target. As I’d slid, I’d rotated—not on purpose, and just a little, maybe forty-five degrees—in the direction of the chipmunk, and the chipmunk had leapt. The timing was lucky. For me at least. The chipmunk bounced headfirst off my neck, landed on my lap. I cupped its haunches and lifted it up in front of my face. We exchanged stunned looks, both our mouths open. Its arms were outstretched, its little fingers twiddling.
“I got it!” I shouted out to my father, and the chipmunk wriggled, gained purchase with its feet against the muscles of my thumbs, shat down my shirtfront, sprung over my shoulder, and gave me a scratch on the ear as it passed.
I wouldn’t find the scratch til later that night. I had far nastier wounds to contend with. Over the course of my rotating slide, the blacktop had rubbed half the flesh off my shins. Suddenly I felt it. The rapid-fire stinging. Thousands of stings. I fell to my side, looked back toward the pole, saw the chipmunk licking at a curled scrap of skin in one of the gore trails, and started to cry.
The chipmunk bolted. My father rushed over, saying my name. Not shouting my name, just saying my name. “Belt,” he said. “Belt. Belt, you’ve gotta breathe.”
And he knelt beside me and said I had to breathe, and he held my hand and said I had to pay attention, to breathe in when he squeezed, breathe out when he released, and I did as he said, but soon the pain increased, and I told him so, I said, “You’re making it worse.”
“No such thing,” he said. “It’s you getting worse. Trying to dodge a blow you’ve gotta take on the chin.”
“You’re a horrible father,” I said. “I hate you.”
“You don’t hate your father, you listen to your father, so listen to your father. There’s your pain, and there’s your suffering. There isn’t all that much you can do about your pain, but your suffering—that’s all yours to control. This stupid shit you just did—it isn’t going to kill you. It isn’t even going to lay you out for that long. In a week you won’t hardly remember it happened. You’re just surprised, and so you’re afraid, and that’s why you’re suffering. The pain surprised you. The pain from what you did. You’re afraid of the pain so you’re turning away from it. That makes it worse. Face it down.”
“It hurts.”
“So what? It’s supposed to hurt. Let it hurt. It’s a message from your body. Listen to your body. Do nothing but listen, and your suffering will stop.”
“There aren’t any sounds. You’re crazy. You’re mean.”
“Listen to the feeling.”
“There aren’t any sounds!”
“I know. But…Look, forget the word ‘listen.’ Just pay attention. Pay attention to the pain.”
“I am! I can’t help it!”
“You’re arguing with me. You’re not paying attention. Stop arguing with me and pay attention. Stop trying not to feel it, and it won’t hurt so bad. Stop trying to distract yourself. Feel it more, feel nothing except it, and son, I promise, you will stop being scared and you will no longer suffer.”
I did as he said. I shut my eyes, and paid attention to the stings, the thousands of stings, then closer attention, til I fell into a trance in which I came to see that I was the stings, that these thousands of stings, rather than assaulting me, were me, or at least part of me. And the negative valence of the stings receded. They weren’t good, but they weren’t so bad. The stings, which were me, like me, just were. Even calling them stings came to seem incorrect. They were more like not-quite-comfortable pressures; I was more like not-quite-comfortable pressures. I stopped calling us anything.