This was not as absurd a thing to say as it seems, which isn’t to say I wasn’t taken aback. He was quoting a line from No Please Don’t.
“I knew you looked familiar last night,” he said. “I guess it was dark, and you’re older than you are in your author photo, or—no. Who am I kidding? It wasn’t that dark. You don’t look so much older. It’s just I never thought…I knew you lived here, in Wheelatine, and I was planning to eventually introduce myself to you, but the possibility that we might just run into each other—it never crossed my mind. I mean, I’ve thought about meeting you for so long, Mr. Magnet. I’ve thought so hard about how I’d present myself, what I’d want to say, about what I’d do to make a good impression and get you to talk to me, to take me seriously, so to just bump into you—to bump into you on a playground and then—well, you know what happened then…it was basically completely impossible to imagine, so impossible I wasn’t able to believe it even while it happened. Especially then.”
“You’ve read No Please Don’t?” I said.
“I’ve read No Please Don’t—been reading No Please Don’t—for years,” he said. “Two years and change. Start to finish, I’ve read it three times. Twice in a row when I was twelve years old, another time a few months back, before we moved here. Between those times, and since we moved here, I’ve gone back to my favorite parts a lot. Chapter nine alone, I bet I’ve read twenty times. No Please Don’t is the first work of fiction I ever truly loved. It speaks to me the way I speak to myself. It tells its story the way I’d tell its story if its story were mine to tell instead of yours. And it offers me comfort. Whenever I’m reading it, I feel understood. Is this too much? Am I saying too much? Do I sound too…much? I don’t sound like me. I know that much. I wrote this all down. Not this, but what this should be, a much better version. I’m way off script. And not just because of what happened last night. I’m contrite about that, yes, but more than that I’m starstruck. I’m starstruck and sorry. Remorseful and awed. Brimming with regret but also, I don’t know, agog. It’s fucking me up. I’m trying to pay you the highest-possible compliments, with the absolutely utterest of utmost sincerity, and I’m failing so bad.”
“No no,” I said. “Thank you.”
“But I mean it, though,” he said. “Please know that I mean it.”
I didn’t doubt him. Were we standing any closer—were a table not between us—I’m sure I would have hugged him.
“I believe you,” I said. “If I’m not responding graciously, it’s only because I have no practice. I’m not used to hearing from fans of my book. Tell you the truth, it’s never happened before.”
“ ‘Never,’ he says,” my father, looking past me, remarked to an audience I presumed to be rhetorical. “I told you I love your book how many times?” he said to me. “I told him almost every day for a year,” he said to Triple-J. “It’s a great fucken book. Didn’t I tell you I thought it was a great one?”
“You told us. You did,” came a low, raspy voice from the hallway behind me.
I flinched. All but jumped.
My father mimed two short punches to my shoulder.
Over that shoulder, I saw the driver, Burroughs, in his seam-taxed livery and hinge-strained hornrims, wiping dry the backs of his hands on his slacks. His once-black scalp stubble now shone silver, and his skull had managed, somehow, to have grown even broader, but if the twenty-odd years since last I’d seen him had marked him in other ways, they were wholly inapparent. Not to mention beside the point. He still looked like something that had hatched from a boulder.
The downstairs toilet’s after-flush whistle-whine achieved its familiar crescendo and stopped.
“Burroughs,” I said.
“I’m glad you remember who I am,” Burroughs said, and performed a subtle movement I only half-perceived—he may have dipped his dimpled, escutcheonesque chin, or perhaps flexed a deltoid—but which signaled to me that I should enter the kitchen.
I entered the kitchen. Burroughs followed. We all sat down.
I said to Triple-J, “So is your father here, too?”
“What makes you ask that question?” Burroughs said. He could have gripped a nickel with his brow’s thinnest furrow.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “I mean, I wasn’t really asking. Just joking around. Lots of unexpected people in my house today is all.”
Triple-J had gone squinty. He seemed disappointed—with me? with Burroughs? I couldn’t be sure. “Burroughs drives for me, now, Mr. Magnet,” he said.
“Please call me Belt.”
“Call him Billy,” said my father.
“Burroughs drives for me now. Walks for me, too. Looks like at least. He walked me here today because he or my father wants to make an impression. Or maybe it’s both of them. Someone, though, who isn’t me, wants to impress upon you just how very well looked-after I am. I said that all bitchy, didn’t I? I did. It even felt bitchy. Apologies for that. And to you too, Burroughs. I’m doing that thing you warned me about. Resenting the trappings of privilege in public. It’s off-putting. Shitty. In fairness to Burroughs, Belt, I altercated with you. It makes sense he’d insist on joining me here. Still, I’d understand if you felt insulted, and I hope the apology I’m about to make for my behavior last night will what’s-the-word accrue toward your forgiveness of this latest insult. That apology is this: I am sorry, truly sorry, for hurting you last night, I am sorry for the behavior of my idiot friends, who I should’ve managed better, and most of all, I’m sorry it took me so long to figure out who you were, because I would have acted different. I didn’t even tell you how that happened, did I? How I realized who you were. I meant to tell you first, before I said all the other stuff, but then I got starstruck and went off script.
“This is how I should’ve started: About ten minutes after I left the playground, I was almost home, like just outside the compound, about to punch the code in, when I realized I’d left a cure on the slide. I don’t know if you saw it. For all I know, you took it. Somebody took it. We checked before we came here. That really doesn’t matter, though, except for because of how it failed to matter. Fails to matter. I was outside the compound, about to punch my code in, and I remembered the cure, but I didn’t think twice about going back to get it. There wasn’t any way I was going back to get it. I skipped a whole part. I need to backtrack a second—can you spare one of those?”
Thinking he was asking if I’d spare him a second to hear whatever tale he had to backtrack to tell, I nodded and smiled, but then Burroughs said, “Trip,” and I knew I was confused.