So I appreciated my father’s decision not to press. I admired it, even. We had an understanding, something in common. I was sluggish? Felt syrupy? I’d seen a chatty counterman verging on suicide? Well, whatever. If my father wanted to take me to the mall, I would let my father take me to the mall, and he would—and did—let me smoke in the truck on the way to the mall.
It was the tongues of some Jordans displayed on a dais in the Foot Locker window that announced the next symptom: the reflective white around the Jumpman logos appeared to be swelling, squeezing the Jumpman. I squinted, attempting to make the swelling stop, but all the squinting did was cause venous lines of purple iridescence to bulge from the tongue, somehow ringing my fillings, which wasn’t, this ringing, strictly speaking, unpleasant. It tickled a little. I remember thinking the following words: “The depths of this silver.” And then I was clammy.
I don’t know if that happened before or after I regrettably asked for the Agassi Air Techs with the marbled pink panels and tiny black swishes—shoes that my father, until I outgrew them, refused to replace (less, I would think, because he was a skinflint than because he so relished coming up with new names for them; my Swishies, my Fagassis, my Likey Cutey Boots, my Fagassi Swish Techs, my Fagassi Fairy Techs, my Likey Fagassis, my Fagassi Air Pinks, my Pinky Swish Boots, countless other derivations)—nor do I recall my dad buying his Wranglers.
The next thing I remember is listing in bed, so dizzy and depleted that flipping the pillow cooler-side-up took planning, drained strength, and indicated thusly that to cuddle Kablankey against my bare chest—which, apart from not feeling the way I was feeling, which is to say poisoned, was the only thing I actively wanted to do—to cuddle Kablankey would be impossible. Just the thought of raising my arm to reach for the PillowNest brought on vertigo.
I passed out for hours. When I woke, the sky in the window was navy, I was gushing with sweat, abundant with need, and I ruined my boxers as I ran the eleven steps to the bathroom to sit on the toilet and puke in the tub.
I hadn’t thrown up in a number of years—not since Jim tore the face off that fish—and I’d never once shat myself outside diapers. The trauma was manifold, disgust upon pain upon fear upon shame, and it lasted for hours, wrecking multiple garments and pieces of linen, freeing my GI tract of every last graspable particle and hope. Once it was over, I slept through til Sunday, a little past noon. With an acid-ravaged throat, and limp, trembling muscles, I managed to brush my teeth and shower—my father must have cleaned the bathroom while I’d slept—and then, still in towels, had another night’s sleep before Sunday night had even started to fall.
I dreamed of a Jumpman squeezed by a tongue til its dunking arm snapped in very slow motion. I woke sitting up, opened the PillowNest, and found Blank grieving, lying there prone, head under elbows, hiccupping wildly. We’d been out of contact for nearly two days. I knew, of course, what the hiccupping meant, and I thought another cure could be a nice thing to have, but Blank’s suffering, however admittedly adorable, looked so harrowing, and Blank so defeated—chunks of velvet had fallen from the stripe on its back, its neck appeared scaly, and, though I sang-sung its name in ever-sweeter tones, it wouldn’t stand up, or even show me its face—I could not, in good conscience, let it keep grieving, much less for all the hours that cloning would require. I picked it up and cupped it against my bare chest and, within a few minutes, the hiccupping stopped. Blank hummed a couple bars from its painsong’s opening, then, twice, told me, “Anks,” which is how it said, “Thanks,” which was one of the only words it knew—a word I hadn’t deliberately taught it—and by which it meant “Please,” having learned to associate the sound of “Thanks” with the making of requests, rather than with the fulfillment of them.
“Anks,” Blank said, and I took that to mean, “Please feed and water and continue to hang with me,” and so I filled its thimble, gave it a pellet, and we stayed up late playing Box with the Shoelace, Rock Paper Scissors, and Make This Face. Its skin reacquired its smoothness by morning, and by the end of the week the stripe on its back was no longer patchy.
The only other time I ever saw Blank grieve was ten or so years later when I accidentally OD’d on Risperdal. OD’d sounds dramatic. It wasn’t dramatic. About a month into my soon-to-be-failed attempt to become a normal citizen, I thought that, maybe, if I doubled my dosage, the inans in the lobby of the Wheelatine Palace would quiet down for good and I’d learn to love work, like work, or not dread work. I swallowed the pills right after dinner, went to bed early, slept twenty hours, drank a glass of water, went back to bed, and didn’t rise again til well past midnight. The symptoms Blank displayed when next I opened its PillowNest were the same as the last time: major hiccups, patchy stripe, scaly neck, stricken mien. I wouldn’t swear they manifested less severely this second time (though that would stand to reason, given that this overdose episode had kept us out of contact for only about two-thirds the number of hours the previous, i.e. the food-poisoning, one had), but I seem to recall the hiccups being fewer and farther between, and Blank’s healthy pallor’s recovery more rapid. I do admit my memory here is a little bit iffy—I was, after all, still fairly stewing in antipsychotics—and so I suppose it’s possible that Kablankey’s claws had also been afflicted by the grief, but, if so, they couldn’t have really been too afflicted. They certainly weren’t bleeding. I’d remember that for sure.
I’ve described here the times I witnessed Blank grieve not in order to excuse the mistakes I made with Triple-J’s cure once I got it back home, but rather to simply account for those mistakes and, perhaps, mitigate my culpability a little. It isn’t just that my experience with grieving cures was less extensive than most American toddlers’, nor just that I hadn’t read the manual since childhood, but that Blank’s style of grief—the style of grief I was, naturally, most alert to—had never entailed any (memorable) damage to its claws. I know now, of course, that the state in which I found the claws of Triple-J’s cure, claws I’d assumed to have been smashed and pried by a Yacht (if not more than one Yacht) in the course of inflicting a medieval torture…I know my first thought on seeing the devastation of the poor thing’s claws should have been that it was grieving and would soon attempt to clone. I know that likely would have been your first thought, whoever you are, and I assure you that had it been my first thought—or my tenth or my hundredth—I would have approached my ministrations differently.
Namely, I wouldn’t have taped the cure’s ribs, three of which I had discovered broken, while I cleaned and dressed its more obvious wounds. It’s not as if rib-taping had always been something I longed to do. I was, truth be known, hesitant to do it. Though I believed, and still believe, I understood the basic principle—to minimize how much they shift around—I didn’t really know how to tape ribs, and, on top of that, the cure, when it saw the Band-Aids I’d originally intended to use for the taping, backed away so fast it fell in the sink, stubbing its tail, afraid, I would guess, that I was planning to bind it to a slide and stone it.