My red and green folders were open on the blotter. Manx closed them and stacked them and cleared his throat.
“Mr. Belt Alton Magnet, I’m Dr. Lionel Manx,” he said—he said it to me, then winked at my mom, I guess to indicate he wasn’t unaware of her presence, but would, nonetheless, speak as if she weren’t there. “You can call me Dr. Manx or Manx, but never Lionel. I never liked Lionel. Do you like Belt? Alton? Belt Alton? I’ll call you Dr. Magnet or Magnet if you like. Mr. Magnet?”
“Just Belt,” I said.
“I like Belt, too. I’ve never met a Belt. Never heard of a Belt. I think you might be the only Belt in the world.”
“He’s named after my favorite uncle,” said my mother. “Uncle Belt. Well, his real name was Gunther, but no one much liked that—how could they?—and when he was only just six years old, his older brother, which is to say my father, was bullying him, at a bus stop I think, or maybe a bus station, I’m not quite sure, but he was making him sing the ‘Happy Birthday Song’ over and over, at the top of his lungs, and a young black woman, who my father always swore was Billie Holiday, though no one ever believed him, she approached the two boys and said to my father, ‘You’re picking on him, now, but just you wait. He’s gonna be a star. Little kid’s got pipes. Boy can belt.’ And after that Uncle Gunther was Belt.”
Manx had politely listened to my mother, who obviously—to me, at least—was feeling a little bit nervous in his presence, but when she was finished saying what she’d said, he turned right back to me without having asked her even one of the more obvious follow-up questions, and I sensed her shrinking in her chair a little, and to help her compensate, I acted as though this story about my uncle Belt, which I’d heard a hundred times, was as intriguing to me as she must have been hoping it would be for Manx.
“Belt never made it as a singer, though,” I told Manx. “He was shy. He sang to himself all the time, but he was too shy to do it in front of an audience. Stage fright. So now listen to this: this is what happened. Everyone started to call him Belt since that time at the bus stop, and when he got to high school, there were all these new kids who hadn’t known him all his life, and they thought he was called Belt because he liked to hit people, and so the hard guys were always picking fights with him. They fought him so much that, soon, he actually got good at fighting, and started to like it, and took up boxing, and fought Golden Gloves, and after the first Golden Gloves he was in, he realized he wasn’t afraid of performing in front of people anymore because he’d lost in the ring in front of lots of people and it was no big deal, so he found some musicians who were looking for a singer, and they started to practice, and it was looking really good for them, and they booked their first show for the end of the summer, but just a couple weeks after they booked it, he fought an amateur match, and he won it, too, but something happened to his hearing. Permanent damage. He couldn’t hear certain tones. And that was that. It was over. It never came back. He never played the show. The band broke up. And on top of that, he was too scared to box again. He was too afraid he’d get completely deaf, or something worse, so he worked at a slaughterhouse, saved up money, and opened a butcher shop, and never got bitter. Everyone said he was the nicest guy, and like my mom said, he was her favorite uncle, and my father’s completely crazy about my mother, so even though he always kind of hated the name Belt, he knew it was important to her, and let her name me it. And it’s better than Gunther. Even he agrees about that.”
My mom squeezed my hand and winked and all was well.
“Great story,” Manx said. “I’m curious. Would you say you’re like your uncle?”
“I never knew him,” I said. “He died in a car crash before I was born.”
“But from what you do know. I mean, that was some story. Like, for example, would you say that you’re shy?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Who knows with shyness? Shyness is weird.”
“Weird how?” Manx said.
“I mean, I do think I’m shy, but I know a lot of people, especially girls, who you hear them say they’re shy, but they’re not shy at all. I guess it’s possible they’re lying. Like they think it’s good to be shy, so they want you to think it. Or maybe they imagine other people are way more outgoing than they really are. Maybe that’s how I am. But it could be the opposite, too. Maybe I’m just so shy that other people who are more normal-shy seem really outgoing to me by comparison. With myself. I know I’m not lying when I say I think I’m shy, though.”
“I see,” Manx said. “Sometimes you do lie?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” I said.
“Sometimes,” Manx said. “Right now, I’d really like it if you didn’t lie, though.”
“I wasn’t,” I said. “I think I’m shy, like I told you, but if someone else said I wasn’t, they might—”
“I don’t mean about the shyness. I don’t imagine you were lying at all about that. I want to ask about what brought you here today, though, okay? And I want you to tell me the truth.”
“Okay.”
“These swingsets, Belt. What made you want to harm them?”
I said, “I wanted to help them.”
“You destroyed them with an ax.”
“I mostly used a bat,” I said. “I used an ax just once, because I had to snap some chains, and then, one other time, when I didn’t have my bat, I did the whole thing with a spade.”
“A bat. I see. Still, I’m a little confused. You say you wanted to help them, but what you did was destroy them.”
“They were in bad shape. That’s the kind of help they asked me for.”
“Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“What part?” I said.
“Well, if I was in bad shape and I was a swingset, I think I’d want someone to repair me. Don’t you think that’s what you’d want if—”
“Maybe,” I said. “But they asked me to destroy them.”
“How come, do you think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they couldn’t be repaired. Or maybe they thought that, even if they could be repaired, no one who was able to repair them would repair them and so the next best thing was…”
“Do you think it’s easier to die than solve your problems?”
“I’m not talking about me. Come on. I’m talking about swingsets.”
“Well I’m asking because—”
“I know why you’re asking. And no. I don’t think that. I mean, well, I guess it probably is easier to die than ‘solve my problems,’ but I don’t think it would be better or anything. I don’t want to die.”