When I snapped to—a minute, or three, or maybe five later—my father was there, right where he’d been, holding my hand, squeezing and releasing it in time with my breathing.
“Okay?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s cause you’re badass.”
He picked me up off the blacktop, and sat me on his shoulder, then carried me all the way back to the house. I was way too old to be carried like that, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t say a thing. I was focused on the pain, on being the pain.
At home, he installed me on the couch in the living room. He Bactined my legs and wrapped them in gauze, then turned the TV on and ordered a pizza. The Bactine incited a new kind of sting that I successfully entered the trance to fight (or rather to not-fight), and, over the course of the next couple weeks, as the scabs formed and dried and slowly fell away, I found the trance also worked to take the edge off itches.
I haven’t since come across an acute sensation that I couldn’t, given the opportunity to concentrate, reveal to be a not-quite-comfortable pressure. The more acute the sensation, the heavier (and also—maybe paradoxically—the easier to enter) would be the trance.
The one I entered the night I met Triple-J wasn’t the heaviest in which I’d ever been (I’d landed splay-legged on a balance beam once; lost a ring finger’s nail to a Little Leaguer’s fastball; broken a molar on the pit of an olive), but it was still pretty heavy. Heavy enough, in any case, that I fell asleep right there beneath the stars.
The nap must have been brief, for Blank hadn’t moved. It would have gone to its sleeve had it realized I was sleeping, but it was still in my shirt. Huddled there, shivering. I think that’s what woke me—this hot vibration against my ribs.
||You alright?|| said the SafeSurf.
I didn’t respond. I wanted to ignore it; to freeze it out. And I was hearing something else. With my ears, I mean. Something awful and saccharine from over by the slide. Rather, I was trying to hear it; no sooner had I noticed the sound than it stopped, or got carried off by the low-power breeze.
||I’m really sorry,|| said the SafeSurf, ||that you got your ass kicked. Even though you told me you hated me before.||
Blank wouldn’t quit shivering. I scratched the back of its head through the cotton, dragged a knuckle along its curved spine. Neither gesture seemed to calm it in the least. We had to get home. I’d give it half a lollipop stick to chew on, light up a Quill. It liked to pretend we were smoking together.
I lurched to my feet, wobbled, and sat. It wasn’t my kidneys—their pain had dulled down into something like cramp—just a big headrush from rising too fast. Blank came out of the bottom of my shirt, stood on my thigh, looked up at my face. I smiled to let it know I was fine. Still shivering, it nodded, climbed back in my shirt.
||I feel so damn helpless right now,|| said the SafeSurf. ||I feel like I failed you. Like I could have protected you. I know that’s crazy, but still. I feel ashamed. Do you really have to ignore me on top of it? You know I can’t move.||
Again I heard the faint, awful sound from by the slide. I held my breath, the better to listen, but the rubbing of a passing car’s tires undermined me.
||You know I can’t move,|| the SafeSurf whined. ||What could I have done? Tell me. What?||
“Nothing,” I thought.
||I know,|| said the SafeSurf, ||nothing at all,|| pronouncing the words as if in agreement with my unspoken thought; as if my thought had passed through its gate unadorned by noise. Maybe it had. But if it had, so what? It was just two syllables, a one-word response, and, given the context, a highly predictable response at that. No. I didn’t believe the SafeSurf had heard me think ||Nothing.|| And I was made freshly angry by what seemed to be yet another attempt on its part—or, worse, my own—to mess with my head. We both knew, after all, how I wished for the ability to silently communicate my thoughts to inans.
“Absolutely nothing,” I said. “Agreed. You’re completely worthless.”
||Oh man. That’s harsh. |Completely worthless.| Jeez. That’s harsh. But at least we’re talking, right? I appreciate that. Look, is there something I could do? Like to make you feel better?||
“Could you go back twenty years and untell me about the girl who talked to inans who probably never even existed? Or maybe you could go back ten years after that and untell me that she died? Or even just, you know, go back twenty minutes and untell me that she was still alive after all?”
||I never said that girl was still alive,|| said the SafeSurf. ||Why would I say that? It’s not just untrue—it’s…it’s crazy. She’s gone. And I’m sorry if I got you thinking about her. I was talking about the other one.||
“The other one, right. What other one?” I said.
||The other girl,|| said the SafeSurf.
“Yeah, sure. What’s her name?”
||I wish I could tell you.||
“You’re lying,” I said. “I got angry at you for messing with me, and now you’re lying. You’re saying you didn’t mess with me, but you’re messing with me more.”
||Belt, man, please. I’m not messing with you. I never even met that first girl once. I didn’t find out she was dead til at least a month after she swallowed those pills, and, tell you the truth, I don’t even know if she really swallowed any pills. She didn’t live that close, at least I assume she didn’t, and the number of gates the news had to pass through to get to me from the bathtub she died in’s uncountable. You know information transforms a little with each transmission, even if every inan whose gate it passes through is honest and well-intentioned, which—who knows, right? We only know who we’re touching, and maybe we don’t even really know them. Like right now, I feel like you don’t even know me, which makes me feel like I don’t even know you. But this other one, though. This other girl, I mean. The one I mentioned earlier tonight—I met her. And she seemed really sweet. I just didn’t catch her name. I didn’t think to ask. I should have. Now I feel even worse. I should have gotten her name for you. I suck at that. I’m sorry, man.||
I wanted very badly to believe the SafeSurf—not only because I wanted to believe there was a girl in the world who might be able to understand and love me, but because, apart from having just been thrashed by the adolescent son of the only male friend I’d (at least thought I’d) ever had, I’d proceeded, in the course of attempting to befriend that son, to accidentally scare him off, thereby proving to myself for the millionth time that I was even more repellent a bumbling pariah than I’d formerly imagined, which, in turn, pretty powerfully suggested that, with the exception of Blank, inans were the closest things to friends I’d ever have—and, owing to that, I doubted the SafeSurf. Its telling the truth would have been just good enough to be untrue.