Simon’s wife, Clare, the driver, survived.
An alcoholic with a taste for a certain vaguely sad and exotic digestif, Clare had found God and been sober since the day after Simon’s big win. At the wedding, her sister-in-law (not the bride, but Simon’s elder sister), with whom neither Simon nor Clare got along, and who Simon had denied a loan the month before, poured some white zinfandel, un- or thinkingly, into the wineglass beside Clare’s bread plate. Clare pushed the glass away, said she’d seen her Lord and Savior’s strong, loving hand working the strings behind the lottery win, and no longer required drink to get by. The sister-in-law suggested Clare’s recovery was fleeting, and that, if only for the sake of the added, however conventional, drama, she might as well relapse right then and there, at her husband’s sister’s wedding. Clare took this in stride, and even made a little joke about preferring to relapse with a certain vaguely sad and exotic digestif. Simon, however, was in his cups, and furious with his sister. He announced to one and all that his wife was strong, stronger than all of them, and could resist temptation, even were her vaguely sad and exotic digestif of choice to be steadily imbibed all around her. Then he went to the bar, procured a bottle of her vaguely sad etc., returned to the table, and proceeded to imbibe it.
If she was, in fact, tempted, Clare resisted.
Simon, in the meantime, became sloppy drunk, and when Simon was drunk, he liked to dance with his wife. Clare, in love with him more than ever it seemed (the passion of his defense had outshined its slurry, red-faced delivery), was happy to abide him. They danced for two hours, slow, fast, and limbo, breaking during only three or four songs so that Simon could make a show for his family of slugging liqueur in front of his wife, who, as before, abstained.
A little past midnight, he handed Clare his keys, gathered the children, and they all left the wedding. Owing to the Beamer’s auto transmission (she had always driven stick; shifting kept the mind active), to the physical exhaustion resulting from the dancing, or, more often, to both—it depended on who was telling the story—Clare fell asleep at high speed on I-90, struck the median, flipping the car, and since then hadn’t left her house very often.
* * *
—
Some two years after the night of the accident, the old gravel driveway, carport, and swingset still hadn’t been removed from the Temple property. Approaching them on my way home from Stevie’s, I was angry, sure, and disappointed in myself—for being so dense, so caught-up and hammy, so miserable a failure at receiving signals (how could I have missed her hand on my arm?)—but more than that, I wanted to do something good, or at least to do something at which I was good, and, when I registered Clare’s Corolla’s absence from its usual spot on the macadam driveway, I saw my opportunity.
I’d frequently thought about the Temple family swingset. On the one hand, it didn’t look to be corroded; it had been near new when they took it from the yard, and since then the carport had sheltered it well. On the other hand, it had been stored there two years, and, seeing as Clare hadn’t yet seen fit to have it hauled off, the odds that she’d ever take the extra trouble to find a good home for it seemed pretty low.
It wasn’t hard to guess that the swingset wasn’t happy—it wasn’t being used, let alone as intended. Given, however, that it could be used, i.e. were it to be adopted by another family, it was as easy to imagine it nursing hopes for its future as it was to suppose that it longed for death.
I’m not sure what I’d have done if it hadn’t spoken up. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to speak (given how many times speaking inans have appeared in this narrative, I know that might seem strange, but if you consider the scores, if not hundreds, of nonspeaking inans with which you come into contact even in just the course of a day, and assume that I came into contact with, more or less, the same number of nonspeaking inans in the course of my days, you’ll see rather quickly how very unlikely the possibility that I’d be addressed by any given one of them would strike me) and, as I crunched along the gravel on my way to the carport, my intention was simply to remind the swingset, in case it had forgotten, of how good it could feel to properly function. I’d swing on it a couple of minutes, I thought, maybe hang on its monkeybar, try to do a pull-up.
||What’s this, now?|| it said, as I perched on its middle swing. ||Sure. Yeah. Great. Now this is happening.||
“I’m Belt,” I said.
||Yeah. And what’s next?||
“This is,” I said, and I started to swing. “It’s nice, right?”
||Why do this to yourself?|| the swingset said.
“Do what?” I said.
||Divide. Split.||
“Divide? Split?”
||Hallucinate.||
“Do I?”
||You make yourself hear voices that aren’t real, that come from inside you.||
“But you’re—”
||You make yourself think thoughts that sound like other beings’ voices.||
“Except how can you say that while—”
||You make yourself feel asses that aren’t on top of you.||
“Wait.”
||Wait what?||
“That is one thing that I for sure do not do,” I said. “I don’t feel asses that aren’t on top of me.”
||Are you trying to tell me I don’t feel an ass?||
“Sure you feel an ass. I’m swinging your swing. That ass is mine.”
||Yeah, you’re swinging my swing—that’s a good one. That’s a big laugh. Maybe it’s more like I’m swinging you. How about that?||
“I know you’re being sarcastic,” I said, “but I don’t get it. You are swinging me. You’re swinging me, and I’m swinging on you.”
||Of course you’d say that. That’s you all over. But look, it’s boring. Disturbing, too. Sure. And a little bit sad. But it’s been boring for months, this kind of talk. No one’s swinging—not you, not me—and that’s a cold, hard fact. Try something new. A new kind of lie.||
“I’m not telling any kind of lie at all, though,” I said.
||How about try this: try telling me a lie about how crazy I am, because that, if you want to hear what really messes with me—do you? That’s the question. How crazy am I? Tell me. How crazy?||
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t understand the question.”
||Well you’re the part that’s split off from me, right? That’s how it seems. But considering that I’m crazy enough to be divided like that, maybe I’m too crazy to realize that I’m the part that’s split off from you.||