“What I’m trying to say here to answer your question is there are endlessly more damaged things in the world that never say a word to me than there are things that talk to me. Endlessly more things that I suspect want my help than there are things that have told me they want my help. And I know people already think I’m crazy, but I’d really be crazy if I tried to help everything I just suspected wanted help. And maybe it’s selfish of me to choose what to help. To not try to help everything. To choose to just help the things I have a feeling for, or whatever. Probably it is selfish. From a certain point of view. Because if I really believe that I could help so many things and I don’t at least try to—if I don’t do everything I possibly can to help—probably that’s selfishness. Except that if I do it, if I try to help everything I suspect needs help—even if I try to help anything that I know needs help—it’ll hurt my mom, so that would be selfish too. Or maybe that’s just convenient for me to think. Maybe I care about hurting my mom for selfish reasons. I mean, I know I do. I don’t like to see her hurt. But there’re also non-selfish ones, too, I think: I don’t want her to be hurt. But then also, I think, on top of all this other stuff I’ve been saying, I’d be way less effective, too, if I tried to help everything, because there isn’t enough time to help everything, and so if I tried to help everything, I’d end up helping things that don’t need my help as much as some other things that do. It would be like you not just trying to get homes for every homeless person in the world when you can’t even really do it for one single homeless guy—which, like I said, I bet you actually could, but whatever—but it would be more like, I’m saying, it would be more like you trying to cure cancer and AIDS and end all wars on top of trying to get homes for every homeless person in the world. Or no. What it would be more like is if you, in a world full of homeless people that doesn’t have a cure for AIDS and cancer, tried, on top of trying to get a home for every homeless person in the world and cure AIDS and cancer—if you put the same amount of effort into making sure that all the children in the world who didn’t have ice cream money for Ice Cream Fridays at their schools were given ice cream money. And, like I said, it would probably be selfish, too. But not very effective for sure. Plus the people who love you—you’d hurt them. They’d miss you. You wouldn’t have time for them. You’d be damaging them. You wouldn’t be any good to them, so what would be the point of anything, you know? I mean…”
“Are you too upset to go on, right now?” said Manx. “We can stop if—”
“I’m fine,” I said. “What else do you need to ask me?”
“I don’t think—”
“What else?” I said.
“Okay,” said Manx. “Well, one thing that I’m still a little confused about is that, according to Dr. Calgary, you, yourself, call what you did to these swingsets ‘murder,’ and, if you really think you helped them, then—”
“The newspapers called it that,” I said. “Then everyone else. ‘The Swingset Murders.’ It sounds cooler than ‘The Swingset Mercies’ or the ‘The Swingset Help-Outs,’ and the swingsets don’t care. They don’t care what I call it. And you don’t really care what the swingsets care about because you don’t believe that they really talk to me. You think I’m sick. You think I’m either lying about them talking, or you think I hallucinate. I understand all that. I really do, okay? And I promise I’m not lying. And I understand that maybe I hallucinate. I can see how that’s possible. I can see why you believe that, and even why maybe I should believe it. But I don’t believe it, not usually at least. Still, I’m not a dumb person. And I got a little worked up there a minute ago, I admit that, but I’m taking it on the chin. You don’t have to talk to me like I’m a baby, alright? ‘I’m a little confused.’ Just don’t do that, alright? I came here for an animal. I really want an animal, and I’ll answer all your questions, but just please don’t ask them to me like I’m stupid.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Manx said. “I don’t think you’re anything close to stupid. I’m just trying to learn more about you and make sure you’re appropriate for our study.”
“Yeah? What’s appropriate?”
“You are. You’re very appropriate. You’re capable of insight, Belt—of self-reflection. That’s all we’re here to determine today. Well, that and which kind of companion animal would suit you the best. So answer me this, and answer me honestly: Do you like puppies?”
“It depends on the puppy.”
“How so?” said Manx.
“I don’t like getting licked on the face,” I said. “And I don’t like getting touched on the skin with a butthole. How about a chipmunk? Can I have a chipmunk?”
“Alas, no,” Manx said. “We don’t have any chipmunks. They’re too hard to train, too wired for twitchiness. They don’t like to be held. And all our puppies have buttholes—what do you think of turtles?”
“I don’t like the smell. That sucks about chipmunks.”
“Well what about parrots?”
“Birds need to fly free.”
“Snakes?”
“They eat mice.”
“Some eat crickets,” Manx said.
“That’s almost just as bad. Also they smell.”
“Crickets?”
“Snakes.”
“Hamsters?”
“Weird teeth, and they eat their own kids,” I said.
“Rabbits?”
“Ugly hamsters with less-cool paws.”
“Monkeys?”
“That’s slavery.”
“Cats?” said Manx.
“Dumber than everyone says, plus buttholes.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Manx said. “Let’s head upstairs to the kennel, shall we?”
* * *
The kennel was stacks of cages and aquaria crowded in a noisy classroom lab. Air we disturbed as we came through the door sent floating a gnawed straw of hay and some feathers. It was humid as a mouth in there. The counters looked sticky. The glass of the fume hood was fogged in weird patches. Fur tufts and seed husks and bright specks of dander tumbled and spun in columns of windowlight. Earthtone food pellets dotted the floor. The overall feeling was don’t lean on anything and never touch your face.
Manx, who must have sensed my discomfort, said, “Believe it or not, this place is pretty sanitary, though I know it probably doesn’t feel that way at all,” and he passed me a packet of moist towelettes. I liked him for this. Though his whole “I’m curious/confused” approach had gotten my guard up, the thoughtful reassurance he offered, in combination with his having taken my usage of “buttholes” in stride, amounted, for me, a boy bereft of uncles, to avuncularity. Plus his labcoat was black—I liked that, too. I hadn’t known labcoats came in colors not white, and the idea of a black one was far enough beyond the scope of my fancy that despite Manx having worn his from the moment we’d met, I’d failed to take notice—I must have seen the black fabric and registered a blazer—til he’d fished those towelettes from its low-down pockets.