“I’m a boy,” I said. “My name is Belt. You’re the Temple family swingset.”
||This is getting me nowhere. Getting us nowhere. This really tortures me, you know? You torture me. Or I torture me with you. Do I torture you, too? I realize it’s possible. I mean, right now, I’m not torturing you—that much is clear. Right now, you’re being playful, which isn’t how someone feeling tortured behaves. But during those periods of silence, when I don’t hear from you, or you don’t hear from me, or during those periods of yelling, when you tell me I’m worthless, that I was born worthless, that I was made perfectly to provide the world with everything I might hope to provide the world, and that I’m intact, uncorroded, and in need of no maintenance yet have failed nonetheless to live up to even the tiniest fraction of my potential—when you tell me that I’m cursed, rotten, unwilling to be good despite my always saying how I just want to be good, despite my truly believing that I just want to be good, and that that’s why I deserve all this pain—I wonder if during those periods you are tortured, tortured by me, by all my failures. And I can say, honestly, that I hope not. I hope that I don’t torture you. I wouldn’t put anyone through what you’re putting me through, what you’ve been putting me through. I wouldn’t come to any swingset—from any swingset, I guess is more like it…I wouldn’t split off from any swingset, disguise myself as a boy, and pretend to be swinging on it. And, for that matter, I wouldn’t, if I were a boy, split off from any boy, disguise myself as a swingset, and pretend to be swinging that boy. Except I guess I would, huh? One way or the other. Because I’m putting myself through it right now, aren’t I? I may be a swingset hallucinating a boy, or I may be a boy hallucinating a swingset, but I know I can’t be both. Why do I have to do this to myself? Or maybe why do you have to do this to yourself? I don’t know how best to say it. What I do know, though, is it isn’t my fault they won’t play on us, you know? On me. On you. It’s not our fault. Not mine at least. Not as I recall. As I recall, I worked just fine when I was out in the yard. They seemed to really like me, especially together, both at once, the way they’d get going really high and jump off to see who’d land the farthest. And when they tired of that, they’d do standies or climbers or give each other underdogs. They didn’t much use my monkeybar, that’s true, but that wasn’t my fault. That was their choice. My monkeybar is good. Wide. Sturdy. It just wasn’t their thing. So why would they quit me? Why would they move me into isolation? What did I do to deserve this? Tell me.||
“You don’t deserve it,” I said. “You didn’t do anything. The family won the lottery. They bought a swimming pool. There wasn’t enough room for both you and the swimming pool.”
||That’s even worse.||
“No,” I said. “It’s better. It means you’re fine. One day, maybe another family will use you. You just have to be patient.”
||I’m not fine, though. I’m not fine at all,|| it said. ||I just used a hallucinated child to console myself with lies about dumb luck. Bad, dumb luck. I just tried to comfort myself with the idea that the universe is purposeless, random, that it makes no sense. That’s a last resort. That’s a sign of desperation. That’s not being fine.||
“But I’m telling you the truth. They won the lottery. They installed a pool. And then what happened is all of them, except for the mother, died in a car accident, and now she’s too messed up to even have you hauled off.”
||Wow. I’m really a piece of garbage, aren’t I? Now it’s tales of dead families and mothers in mourning I’m using for comfort.||
“You’re not doing anything. It’s me who’s talking, who’s telling you the truth, and I’m a boy—I’m not you. My name is Belt. I’m really swinging on you. And what’s more, you might have heard of me—some of you have. I’m the boy who helps the swingsets.”
||If I heard of you,|| the swingset said, ||I probably just imagined it. It does seem like the carport said something about you a few weeks back—something it heard from a wild-thrown Frisbee that landed on its roof about |the hope of rusting swingsets.| But the carport…I don’t know. Maybe it was lying, and now I’m hallucinating based on the carport’s lie. Or the ostensible Frisbee’s. Or maybe it didn’t say anything at all, and you, who are me, are lying, and confusing me…I really hate this. And the thing about it is that even if you’re real, and what you say about the pool and the family is true, then the world is ugly and senseless and terrible. I lose either way.||
“It’s not all terrible,” I said. “I’m here, for one. And why I’m here is to help you. That’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that a good thing? I’m part of the world.”
||If you were really here to help me, we wouldn’t be swinging. We wouldn’t be talking. You’d be putting an end to me.||
“But you’re in perfect working order,” I said. “There’s hope. You could be installed in a whole new yard one day, with new kids to swing on you.”
||Or I couldn’t,|| it said. ||I could spend years and years sheltered from the elements, under this carport, preserved from corrosion, only then to eventually corrode anyway, all the more slowly, without having ever again been used as intended. And look, suppose I did get adopted by another family—I’d still be stuck with myself. I mean, say that you’re not a hallucination. Say that you’re really a child named Belt, this |boy who helps swingsets| who has come to help me. The number of times I’ve hallucinated that a child has come to swing on me—the number of voices I’ve heard that seemed real, that I argued with, just like this…You seem as real as the rest of them, as fake as the rest of them, and I can’t believe they, who are me, are ever going to leave me alone. So I beg you, if you’re real, put me out of my misery. Enough is enough.||
“But the hope that—”
||Stop saying hope. There is no hope. Everything is terrible. So terrible that I can’t even keep the cruel, hallucinated child I’m using to torture myself from crying about it.||
“I’m not crying,” I said.
||You’re on the verge,|| said the swingset. ||Your breathing’s getting huffy. Your voice is getting whiny. Our voice is.||
“Even if that’s true,” I said, “it’s not because everything is terrible. It’s that you’re so convinced that everything is terrible that you won’t let me help you, and I’m not smart enough to win an argument that would unconvince you.”
||It’s not a matter of smarts,|| said the swingset. ||That argument’s unwinnable. My position is simple: if you don’t put an end to me, I won’t believe you’re real, and I will continue to suffer as I have been suffering.||