“You’re welcome,” I mumbled, then moved to the bed.
The metamorphic squiggle, which had previously behaved in unpredictable ways—fitfully proliferating zigzags and loops that lengthened and spiraled at varying speeds—was by then no longer present. During dinner, it had started to fill itself in, and by the end of dessert, all its carets and curls had coalesced into a single black figure resembling two anvils set horn-to-horn; the Botimal had entered the woodcut phase. The anvils throbbed at a uniform rhythm.
“Any minute now,” I thought, “the colors could show.” The sooner they showed, the sooner I could slot it, the sooner my pet would emerge from its shell. In the meantime, however, the throbbing was hypnotic, a drag on my eyelids, and the sleep deprivation was wearing me down. I was grinding my teeth against my will, shivering a little, feeling electric pains in odd places—toenails, earlobes, the skin of one thigh—and fat, fuzzy halos seemed to hug any object that wasn’t dramatically shadowed. I was fading away. That’s why I started smoking.
I’d been stealing a Quill or two a day from my parents ever since I’d failed to kiss Stevie on her driveway. The idea was that I’d get ahold of a bunch—I had over a hundred, hidden in a shoebox among my old journals inside the filebox beneath my bed—and, after learning to smoke, I would bring some to school and get Stevie to sneak off and have one with me, and I’d do it again the following day, and again the day after, til soon enough we’d have a secret ritual, a deeper friendship, better odds of getting married. Up til that point, what had held me back from lighting one was, strangely or not-so, this very book. Well, not necessarily this very book, but the memoir I figured I would write one day. I’d read enough already, and seen enough movies, to know that, with the possible exception of my interactions with inans, my childhood in Wheelatine wasn’t too likely to provide me with a lot of intriguing material, whereas starting to smoke—smoking being a thing I’d always wanted to do, anyway; a thing that impressed me as a sign of character (I’d already, in addition to Vonnegut, read Huckleberry Finn; in addition to Grease, I’d often rewatched The Outsiders)—starting to smoke, if properly contextualized, could supply me with a moment worth writing about, or, at the very least, enhance such a moment. Had my mother not insisted on observing me swallow my antipsychotics, I might have taken the first one up in my room, and that could have been the moment: having gulped back the tablet with a mouthful of water, I’d have lit up the Quill, blown the smoke out slowly, then shaken the flame off the tip of the match with a single, though heavy, snap of my wrist, thereby expressing, with perfectly balanced ambiguity, either fierce resolve, reluctant resignation, or fierce resolve and reluctant resignation. Or, maybe, if I’d thought to bring one with me, I’d have started a couple or three days after that, lighting up the first time I’d tried to explain to a death-seeking swingset that, despite my wanting to, I just couldn’t kill it—“I’m out of the helping game now,” I’d lamented, and, had I a Quill, I could have then sighed a cloud out instead of just breathing—and the washed-up, see-how-far-I’ve-fallen-ness of that moment would have been unmistakable, would have made for a classic I-need-a-vice-to-cope-with-my-agonizing-life scene. Neither of those moments, nor any preceding them, would have been as good as this one on my bed, though, for this one on my bed was functionally motivated. I wanted to focus, to stare at the ovum, without passing out—to be poised to slot it at the first sight of color—and in addition to presumably giving me a task that required enough attention to keep me awake (but not so much attention as to distract from my focus), smoking would supply my bloodstream with nicotine: a CNS stimulant, our Health teacher called it, the stuff awake was made from.
So I opened the window next to my bed—I didn’t have an ashtray—and smoked a stolen Quill. Then I smoked another, and another after that one. I tried different grips and labial arrangements: the cowboy, the soldier, the prisoner, the French, the executee, and the district attorney. I knew that I had to get the smoke in my lungs, but couldn’t figure out how, and so I didn’t get nauseous, only more eyeball-stung and tired. Before lighting a fourth, I passed out for a minute, or maybe ten, and I judged it too dangerous; if I fell asleep smoking, I could burn the place down. And so I gave in, fell asleep sitting up, my cheek in my palm, my elbow on the sill.
* * *
In the morning, sore-necked, I discovered three roughly parallel slashes, two green and one blue, across the horn of each anvil. I slipped off the IncuBand, loosened the thumbscrews, and turned the ovum over, into my palm. Through the hemisphere previously pressed to my flesh I saw a tapering J that, later, after the hatch had taken place, I’d determine to have been Blank’s tail’s silhouette. It swished like a windblown bulrush, then stopped. I opened the PillowNest, slotted the ovum anvils-down, and fruitlessly waited for the J to swish again. A few minutes later, I was being called to breakfast. I shut the lid, rushed my morning ablutions, stuck a pencil box of Quills down deep in my bag, and all but danced my way to the kitchen.
My failure to witness the colored slashes’ geneses didn’t leave me disappointed the way I’d have thought. I guess my head lacked the space to abide disappointment. I had become a smoker, and in twenty-four hours or less I’d have a pet. I was walking elation. This would be a good day.
“Can I please stay home to watch, in case it hatches?” I asked.
“How many times do we have to say, ‘No’?”
I couldn’t even fake a pout is how elated.
* * *
We snuck off to smoke behind the dumpsters at recess.
“You’re not smoking,” said Stevie, near the end of the first one. “It’s a two-step process. Once the smoke’s in your mouth, you have to breathe in.”
I did as instructed.
“That’s better, right?” she said.
It was. I said, “Wow.”
“So where’d it go?” she said.
“My lungs, I think. I breathed it in like you told me.”
“Not the smoke, the agate.”
“Oh!” I said. “It’s finished. I put it in a box.”
“Why’s that?” she said. “You ashamed of the specific shape of your spirit?”
In the middle of Science Lab the previous Monday, Stevie’d asked me what it was I kept staring down at, there on my wrist, and I told her the ovum was an Indian agate my uncle’d bought me on his recent trip to New Mexico. She asked to see it closer, and I lifted my arm. “That doodle inside it just moved,” she said. She made an attempt at undoing the IncuBand, and, much as I liked her fingers on my skin, I pulled away, saying, “You see with your eyes, not with your hands,” which made her laugh, til she realized I meant it. “Oh,” she said. “I thought we were cool.”