“I don’t have a blowtorch, though,” I said. “I don’t know how to use one. I don’t have any money to pay someone to use one. I’m twelve years old. I have to leave here before Mrs. Temple gets home. The amount of work you’re talking about—it would take a lot more time than a week. And you’d be suffering all that time. Do you want to risk that? Just so that maybe when you’re finally reassembled—if you’re even still you—you might not feel like you’ve been feeling these past couple years? And before you answer, there’s also another, much bigger problem, which is that we might never have the chance to talk again, which means—”
||Why wouldn’t we talk again?||
“I don’t have control of my gate,” I said. “I can’t get it to open or close when I want, and what I’m trying to say is we could get into a situation where I do all the work you want me to, and then, once you’re reassembled, nothing’s any different, you feel as bad as always, but you’re unable to tell me you want me to help you, or rather I’m unable to hear you tell me that, and you’re stuck.”
||Come on, now. What are the odds that would happen, do you think? That we wouldn’t be able to talk again, I mean.||
“High,” I said. “They’re really high odds. I haven’t talked to many inans more than once. And it’s not because I haven’t wanted to—I’ve tried. And the couple that I’ve talked to about it tell me it’s my fault. They say they’ve tried to talk to me a bunch of times, and I just don’t respond. They get angry about it. They think I’m ignoring them, but that’s not how it is. I don’t even hear them.”
||Okay,|| said the swingset. ||Okay. So…What about if you just left me the way I am right now? What if you did that? Do you think Mrs. Temple might eventually do what it would take to reassemble me? Or that she might pay someone to do it?||
“Well, she hasn’t done anything with you in a couple years, right?”
||Right, sure, yes—that is: no. She hasn’t. But except I’ve been fully intact up til now. Maybe the sight of me, nearly M’d, would move her? Maybe she’d remember all I meant to her children and want to fix me up and give me to someone? Like a niece or a nephew?||
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Maybe the sight of you would move her, sure, and she’d want to give a swingset to some kid she loved, but the cost of fixing you would probably be close to, or maybe even higher than, the cost of a new swingset, so I think she’d probably just buy a new swingset for whoever she’d thought about giving one to.”
||Oh,|| said the swingset. ||I guess that makes sense.||
“Plus even if she did all it took to reassemble you, there’s still that whole problem where if you still feel terrible and decide you want to die, I won’t be able to hear you say so, so I won’t know to help you.”
||I see,|| said the swingset.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
||Well, I guess…You know, I guess, no, then. I mean, I guess you better kill me. The idea of waiting indefinitely—I can’t do indefinitely. Not like this. Especially when there’s no guarantee that…Wow. Man. I’m really about to die, huh?||
“But maybe you don’t have to think of it like that—like it’s bad. I mean, all that stuff you were saying before—”
||I thought you were a hallucination before.||
“So maybe you should try to think that again. Maybe it’ll make things easier to think that.”
||But I know it’s not true. I feel it’s not true. I can’t pretend. Plus I don’t want to. If there’s ever been a moment when I shouldn’t deceive myself…No. I really shouldn’t pretend. I’m really afraid here.||
“Is there something I can do,” I said, “to make this easier?”
||I don’t know. I don’t think so. I wish there were. Maybe you could tell me what it was like with the others? I mean, what’s it like to help us swingsets?||
“It changes,” I said. “Minute to minute, and swingset to swingset. Except at the end—the very last blow. That always feels right.”
||To you, or to them?||
“Both, I think. Definitely to me.”
||I suppose it would pretty much have to,|| said the swingset. ||Or else how could you keep doing it?||
“Right,” I said. “Of course. I agree. Does that help? To know that?”
||Maybe?|| said the swingset. ||I really can’t tell. It probably helps a little. Maybe it only makes things worse, though? I don’t know anything. I don’t trust myself to know anything at this point. How could I, right? Probably I should just try to be brave now, or at least to act brave, to accept what’s to come. To have some dignity. There’s probably no reason to go on this way. I guess, you know…I guess I’m ready when you are.||
* * *
The murder was over in under a minute. The last blow, it turned out, didn’t feel so right after all. It felt like defeat. Or maybe more like a victory I’d rather not have won. I couldn’t tell if there was truly any difference. I couldn’t tell if how I felt was even relevant. Nor whether it should be. Was I helping the swingsets for their sake or mine? I didn’t doubt I was putting an end to their suffering, but since witnessing them suffer caused me to suffer, and since relieving their suffering helped, however briefly, to relieve my suffering, the mercifulness I’d ascribed to the murders, if not quite eclipsed by my own self-interest, was at least a little darkened by its shadow, wasn’t it?
Trying to untangle these eternal unanswerables, I stepped from the sideyard into the front-, and a pair of startling, simultaneous phenomena prevented my reflections from proceeding any further: Clare Temple’s Corolla pulled into the driveway; the battered spade I was holding spoke.
||You’ve ruined my existence,|| is what the spade said.
I dropped it on the gravel and ducked into the shadiest corner of the carport, flattening myself against a support beam.
||You’ve ruined my existence,|| the carport told me. ||I have nothing left to shelter. Protecting the swingset was my only purpose.||
The Corolla’s trunk popped.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into my shoulder. “Maybe she’ll park here, now that you’re empty.”
||She won’t even park in the attached garage. Not even when it snows. Not even when she has to unload a bunch of stuff.||
As if to demonstrate the carport’s point, Mrs. Temple started carrying grocery bags from her trunk to her stoop.