“And if I do put an end to you?”
||You know better than I do, I bet, but I like to imagine I’ll get repurposed. Weird as it sounds, I’ve been thinking about my constituent parts a lot lately, and the more time that’s passed, the more I’ve come to want to believe in their sentience, which isn’t to say that I do believe in it, just that I like the idea that they could have it better one day. It isn’t their fault I was dealt a bad hand, and yet they must have suffered—if they’re sentient, that is. Then again, maybe they haven’t suffered. Like my bolts, for instance. Maybe my bolts, having held me together, have fulfilled their purpose and been satisfied by it, even though the whole they’re a part of, which is to say me, or us—even though I, or you and I, have been a total failure. But then that’s all the more reason, I guess, to hope they don’t get junked. They worked. Did their job. They could work again. Hold something else together. Anyway, I know that if I get junked I’ll be gone, and I’m pretty certain—certain enough, at least—that even if I get repurposed, I won’t be me. I won’t remember. Try as I might, I can’t remember any previous existence, and I’ve never heard another inan claim to either. Granted, I haven’t met all that many inans. The carport, sure. A garden hose wrapped around my leg during my one good summer. The sprinkler attached to it. A bucket the children tied to my monkeybar once, to play some kind of modified basketball game with, and the ball they used. None of them ever claimed to remember any existence prior to their final assembly—not to me at least—and, crazy as I’ve gotten, as in need of comfort as I’ve been, you’d think I’d have at least hallucinated a memory of one of them claiming that. So the end of me will be the end of my suffering—there’s not a single good reason not to believe that, and, if you were real, and if you were reasonable, and kind, or even just decent, you’d know what needed doing and do it, understand?||
“I guess so,” I said.
||Yes, you do. I can tell. You’re breathing a lot more evenly now. It’s just too bad for me that none of this is real.||
* * *
Our house was only a ten-minute walk away, but I couldn’t predict when Clare Temple would return, much less when she might leave her house again. The garage across the street, however, was halfway open. I went there for a bat, and, failing to find one, borrowed a long-handled spade instead.
When I returned to the carport, I felt too exposed, too out in the open. I dragged the swingset into the backyard. There was just enough space between the sideyard fence and the edge of the pool deck to fit it.
||I wish this were happening,|| the swingset said.
The progress of the murder was uncommonly rapid, despite the swingset’s pristine condition. Standing atop the deck’s extra-wide railing, I was able to go for the M straightaway, so not only didn’t I have to consume time performing the strength-sapping, leg-hacking, usual prep work, but each overhanded blow I put to the crossbar was considerably more powerful than any I’d delivered during previous murders. On top of that, the spade, with its bladelike edge, proved far more efficient at concentrating force than my Easton aluminum had ever been.
I slammed down with vigor. I smashed nonstop.
The interior V of the nearly M’d frame was just a couple inches shy of fatal depth when the spade’s metal grip broke off in my hand. The scoop, still attached to the wooden handle, fell to the grass.
But no big deal. No reason to worry. Being barely a fifth of the handle’s length, the grip was inessential; what might have been another five or six blows’ work would now be another eight or nine’s was all; the spade was still a spade.
I leapt off the side of the deck to retrieve it, in the course of which retrieval my leg brushed the swingset’s.
||You stopped?|| said the swingset.
“Just for a minute. I dropped my—”
||Well, something,|| it said, ||is starting to occur to me. What’s starting to occur to me is: Wow. This seems real. This seems different enough from my other hallucinations that maybe it isn’t a hallucination at all. And so maybe I did hear about you from the carport. Maybe you are the so-called |hope of rusting swingsets.| And the next thought I get is: Should I maybe reconsider? Like, maybe we haven’t exhausted all our options, here. As in, maybe, instead of outright killing me, you could find a tool kit and disassemble me, then clean me off or something, put me back together. Maybe if you did that, then, somehow, I’d still be me, you know? But without the craziness? Without the hallucinations? Maybe, I’m saying. I don’t really know how or why that would work, but intuitively, it seems like it could work, right? Because I’m thinking now that maybe I don’t want to disappear so much as I just want a second chance. And I mean, who knows? There might be no second chances. Maybe reassembled, I’ll be just the same, but if that’s how it is, maybe then you kill me. To just give up now seems…weak. Plus it’s not like I think death will be so wonderful. I guess I’m actually kind of afraid of death, which, believe you me—an inan afraid of death?—that, in itself, is a sign of malfunction. I mean, to be scared of being unused—sure, that makes sense, but to be scared of simply no longer being? It doesn’t even make sense to me, and I’m the scared one. So that has to be a malfunction in itself, fear of death. Malfunction isn’t always—or even often—permanent. So I guess what I’m trying to say here is I’m actually kind of really scared of dying. There’s something about my crossbar being all bent. It’s showing me, for the first time in a really long time, just by contrast—it’s showing me the kind of condition the rest of me is in. I mean, the rest of me is in seriously good condition, right? Except for the self-hatred and hallucinations—if that’s what they are—I mean. I could still serve a purpose. I could still be of use. So I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to die. Not if I don’t have to. And why should I have to? I shouldn’t, right? At least not for a while.||
“Well you’re pretty far gone,” I said. “You really are. I’m sorry to have to tell you that, but it’s looking pretty bad. I mean, I really don’t think I could bang your crossbar back into shape. The V—it’s almost there. It’s really close. The angle’s acute—it’s definitely acute.”
||Okay, I understand that. I do. I get it. Okay. But so what about…I mean I bet you could fix it with a blowtorch or something. Some heat, you know? Some heat, some bending. Then you just slap a little paint on the stressed parts, and bingo, I’m back to how I was, right? and then you disassemble me, and then reassemble me. That’s doable, isn’t it? Or maybe the reverse? Maybe you disassemble me, fix the crossbar, and then reassemble me. Either way, I know it might take a little while, but what I’m thinking is that I could go on like this for even maybe a couple of days, you know? Probably a week. I could go on for a week if that’s what it would take.||