NOT A PARABLE, NOT AT ALL

Boxy was a box, and his personality changed depending on what was inside him. If someone put an apple inside him, he felt healthy. If someone put a match inside him, he felt angry and worried. If someone put a book inside him, he felt smart. Boxy lived in a huge house on the edge of town, on top of a hill that overlooked all the other houses. He was very rich. His father, Arthur Q. Box, had been a businessman who had invented the parking meter and the drinking glass and many other common items and become a multi-millionaire, and Boxy had grown up with all the advantages a young box could want. Every night he was filled up with gold coins and jewelry, and in the morning a butler put the finest soaps and towels inside him. At some point Boxy became aware that he was only feeling the way he was feeling because of what had been placed inside him, and that when he tried to bring to mind a clear picture of himself, he saw nothing, only empty space and the terror that came with it. He spent all night awake, many nights in a row, thinking of a plan, and then he worked up the courage to put that plan into action. Boxy pressed the button next to his bed to call the butler, and then asked the butler to put a smaller box inside him without telling him what was inside that smaller box. The butler obliged. Since Boxy didn’t know the contents of the smaller box, he had to imagine them, and the process of imagining was what gave him his own feelings. And with this, he began to become himself.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BUILDING MANAGEMENT

Guterman in 4B is an actual mapmaker, by his own admission. 

Effie Simmons in 3A is not a tech whiz—she doesn’t see so well.

Ike Musa in 4A has a new cat and he’s not telling anyone. 

Melissa Johnson in 2A has always thought her name was too plain, too drab a container for her ideas, which tend toward thinking hard about the sun until the old ideas fade away, and that’s what she has spent the morning doing, not rolling back the blind and looking directly at it, she knows that’s potentially ruinous, not just for optic reasons but for psychological ones, but rather hanging an image of the sun in the center of her mind, rushing hard into it with a mix of jubilation and terror so that it falls, not breaking, not bouncing, just falling, and then leaping upon the way a soldier in a war movie leaps upon a grenade that has been lobbed into the midst of the platoon, knowing there will come a moment when the sun on the floor of her mind explodes and fills her with both light and heat, knowing too that the sense of things that follows that detonation will be more complete than anything she has yet to experience, an ecstasy that cannot be captured by language, that she will have to leave that ecstasy burning there in her mind, more than an ember, an engine, rattling her teeth, sharpening her sight, both creating and filling cavities in her skull, in her body, or at the very least what her mind still remembers of these things, remnants of the physical world, figments, and she is calling out names as she slips further into the state that will produce that sense of things, calling out her own name. 

Brenda Mattsson in 5A is making herself lunch.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BIG BROTHERHOOD IN THE OVAL

A man with his shoe in his hand is called into the office of the president, where he expects to have to explain himself. 

He is not asked to do so, despite the fact that he opens the door with a disclaimer and the beginning of a story. 

“Jim,” he says. “I was at this store, Eyes Ajar, up on To Be Free Boulevard….”

He has known the president since they were boys.

(This story is set in some other decade, past or future. The mere fact that this needs to be said is as affront.)

The president, Jim, cuts Marcus off, confounded. 

He doesn’t want to know about the shoe and is more interested in the fact that Marcus is wearing a mask. 

The mask is nothing obvious, not a Richard Nixon mask or a werewolf or The Shape, but rather a thin transparent film that almost leaves Marcus’s face as it is in everyday life. 

“Your pleasantness, Marcus,” the president says. “I love that.” What he doesn’t say is that the mask has disrupted it.

The meeting is short, two-pronged, half about an upcoming diplomatic event that Marcus has petitioned to attend and that Jim regrets to inform him he cannot, the other half two old friends shooting, as it were, the shit. 

“What?” the President says. “No. I can’t be seen as having used that kind of language. Everyone knows I use it but no one must know. Does that make sense to you? I need for it to make sense to you. I need for you to have a clear sense of what I’m saying. I don’t want to disown you, Marcus. I don’t want to have to disown you. We are brothers, stitched together under the skin. We are two but we are one. I have never loved anyone as much as…”

“Shut up, Jim,” says the man with one shoe and the ability to make others feel he is wearing a mask—though there are as many masks on his face as there are on the foot whose shoe is in his hand, meaning no masks at all. “Just shut the fuck up. You weren’t elected to be anything other than this.” He waves his hands around. “This is what now you are. What now you are? What you are now.”

The two men, virtually telepathically, stand at the same time and walk out together. Marcus leaves his shoe on the desk. He’s not going back for it. Both of them know this as well as they know each other.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

AN EDUCATIONAL SERIES

“Slipping And Tripping“ was the subject of an address given before the boys of the Friday Evening Club yesterday morning, at a specially convened out-of-joint session, by Professor Ivan Fittleford. Fittleford offered a very interesting account of the people of an obscure region of Germany (a region unnamed at his insistence), whom he referred to as “the clumsiest beings upon the earth.” He showed a series of photographs and short movies of the Germans falling that were greeted first with laughter but by degrees converted to a more sober understanding of what Professor Fittleford called “the burdens that may afflict only those far away from us but that we should nevertheless feel as intimately as if they were visited upon us and our very families.” By the end, many of the boys were deep in doleful tears, through which they purchased souvenirs that included hats emblazoned with the slogan “Beautiful Fall Weather” and small sculptures of the Germans tumbling down. Great interest was taken by the boys and membership has increased to more than 100 in advance of next week’s talk. The topic has not yet been announced but the speaker will be Albert Saenz, the famed local acrobat better known as Sky Chicken.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE NEIGHBORS RESPOND

 

Sometimes they come over fast; sometimes they come over time. A lot of times I’ll call and someone will answer, a kid or something, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, so I am careful not to introduce myself too specifically, I’ll say “Do you know who this is?” or “This isn’t who you think it is, is it?” and then depending on the response either go on talking or hang up. Because how do you know what’s next? How can you even keep that phone in your hand with so much in the world that’s uncertain? Sometimes in the process of hanging up my knuckle will tap the keypad and generate a tone and then that tone will create something else, a melody let’s call it, and I’ll start singing, fitting words to that melody, and some of the first words are the names of other neighbors, like “the Mitchells and the Meekers / Spiritual seekers” or “Albert Santoro / Was in the war-o,” and those are the people I don’t call, why would you call them when they’ve been in a song so recently, but that also starts to point me toward who I should call next, and when I get a real clear fix on it I dial the next number and see who answers, hopefully not a kid, hopefully someone who can help. Sometimes they come over fast; sometimes they come over time. Sometimes they don’t come at all.

 

 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WHAT THE LEMONADE STAND IS NOT

It is not a car wash advertised with signs.

It is not punch served from a bowl at a birthday party.

It is not a list of ingredients for lemonade. 

It is not putting a table out at a garage sale with a few half-filled cups—or even a few filled ones.

It is not a black cube with a yellow cone on top of it.

It is not a row of yellow cylinders animated to look like liquid.

It is not designed as a threat to other businesses or beverages; it is just another option amongst many for a thirsty person on a hot day.

 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

 

POSTSCRIPT TO THE THIRD EDITION

In previous editions, I have been careful to respect the original wishes of the author, at least as described in the note found with the manuscript after his untimely death. While it was not always easy to decipher the note, clipped and cryptic as it was, the fact that it represented the final piece of writing in the author’s own hand was for me a compelling argument for its authority over the mostly, but not completely finished manuscript. In that spirit, the names of the main characters in the novel were replaced with the two pairs of initials at the top of the note. Readers only know them by their initials, but they were not always so. OJ, the conflicted protagonist, was originally “Philip Campbell,” and his on-again, off-again lover TP, she of the architectural practice and “hypnotically monochromatic apartment,” was originally “Karen Anderson.” Determining which shorter name stood in for which longer one was not a perfect science, but are decisions of that nature not the primary responsibility of an editor, executor, amanuensis, and friend, four jobs that I continue to hold proudly, even (or especially) in the author’s absence? Similarly, the place names on the note, though significantly idiosyncratic and at times even surreal, were duly substituted for those in the manuscript. New York City became Long Grain & Wild Rice. London became Lightbulb. The note also contained several brand names. I struggled with them at first, uncertain how they fit the novel’s overall scheme. About a week before the manuscript was to be submitted to the publisher, it came to me: they were a device for satirizing the consumerism of the world that surrounded its central couple, a world “loaded with signifiers that signified nothing other than themselves,” to quote a bit of the book’s most famous paragraph. And so, when OJ felt anger, it was rendered as “Pepsi.” When TP experienced lust, it was called “Kellogg’s.” The same principle held for Campbell’s (frustration), Kleenex (happiness), Clorox (fatigue), and V8 (ennui). I did not provide a key, as I felt that would interfere with the literary experience of the work, but given that I was assiduous in using the brand correspondence each and every time the pertinent emotion was mentioned, I believe readers were afforded ample opportunity to decipher the code. Those rules guided my editorial practice for the first edition in 1978, and the second in 1982. I must now report that a new biography of the author has proven conclusively that the note clipped to the manuscript was not a set of editorial instructions, but a grocery list. All edits have been reversed. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE DETAINED MAN

By Ben Greenman

From forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Hard day.

James comes home. 

He stands at the head of his street.

Here's the city whirling around him.

He tries to bring his focus down to the spot where he stands.

That's when he notices that there is a police barricade, lights whirling in the background.

He is not worried about access to his building because all the cops on the street know him.

“Except this one,” says the cop standing there. 

James is not aware he has spoken out loud.

James is the son of a man who was a famous doctor when living, and who is now the memory of a famous doctor, and who was also a writer during retirement, who started with an essay collection that detailed his most important cases, the best-known of which involved a renowned potter and numbness in the fingers, and then, after that memoir was a nationwide bestseller, went on to write a novel, which he called The Golden Age of Silver while he was writing it but which was published as The Detained Man.

The cop has read the novel, but he has no idea that he is speaking to the author’s son.

Even if he did, a brief inquiry would reveal that James has not read the novel as a result of a wrenching rift with his father in his late teens.

The barricade is there, and the lights whirling, because a man a few buildings down has murdered a number of people, some relatives of his, some not, after concealing an echoing sensation in his head that had intensified over a period of months.

The cop can only say to James that there has been an incident. 

The cop adds that James cannot go to his building, not for a little while, and notes James’s pinched frown and the uncomfortable way he shifts his weight at the news that he is being kept back.

The cop is rubbing his fingers because he has recently lost feeling in them.

He does not think to mention it to James, because he has no idea that he is speaking to the author’s son. 

If he did, James would have been able to extend a tentative diagnosis of meningioma, as he read the memoir several times before he saw his father entering a hotel with a colleague’s wife, confronted him about it, and received only stony silence in return.

Lack of bravery which results in lack of communication unfastens the entire race.

JAWS 2020

By Ben Greenman

From future collection, as yet untitled.

Scientists have discovered thousands of tiny sharks in the ocean, many no larger than a human thumb—this gives the species its informal name, “thumb sharks”—which swim in orbit around coral reefs, most of which are in mortal crisis as a result of marine pollution. Polluted reefs pass through two stages of evolution: the “Blue Desert” and then the “Boneyard.” During the Blue Desert phase, any thumb sharks swimming close to the reef will be pulled into its walls by underwater currents created by erosion, though sharks swimming more than six or eight feet away can resist the attraction of the reef, remain independent, and survive. During the Boneyard phase, no sharks are pulled into the reef, but no sharks can profit from it either, as there is nothing left but the rocky husk, and as a result they swim in tight, rapid pinwheel shapes created by groups of ten or more. Recent research has shown that sand disks appear on the shallow ocean floor beneath these pinwheeling groups, and though it is still unclear what the precise function of these disks might be, they seem to be serve as what one researcher refers to as “conceptual spotlights.” What they are spotlighting is less clear. It is also worth noting that the lead shark in each pinwheel formation is designated as a leader, and that all other sharks are not following the pattern at all but rather following the leader (who does follow the pattern). In this, scientists say, the sharks are very much like humans, accepting subsequence as a condition of survival without regard for their own pride. “No philosophy to speak of,” said Regina Sucre, one of the lead researchers on the team. “No quest. Every thumb shark save that lead is a perfect example of a thought unthought, a heart unstirred, a love affair not only unconsummated but unattempted. Nothing is ventured, as the old saying goes, so nothing is gained.” Sucre sat in a sports car that she had purchased with grant money and wiggled her fingers in a burlesque of the lesser sharks.

PITY THE POOR RECTANGLE

In the time of coming darkness, there lived a man named Ralph Angelo, known, because of the square set of his shoulders and his blocky black shoes, as Rectangle. This man was highly skilled in all matters creative and scientific. He could work with wood and silk. He could write songs and poems. He earned money as a television and radio repairman, and he had kept pace with the times by learning how to repair computers and cellular telephones as well. He had a special interest in divination. For an hour each day, beginning at noon, he would sit outside his place of business. Men would bring him books of matches, which he would scatter on the table in front of him, and after inspecting them for a few moments he would lift his head and make an announcement. “Do not leave your wife,” he would say, or “Get to the doctor about that headache,” or “Wake up earlier; you will thank me.” His advice was worth much, and given with a spirit of total sacrifice and generosity. While he sat at the match table, he did not eat and did not drink and would not accept even a penny in payment. His work was tireless. If the community had only listened to him it would have flourished, but the men who brought matchbooks often went away laughing at Rectangle, and their wives and children at home reinforced this mockery, and the men continued sleeping, or did not check out their headaches, or packed a bag and moved out of the house. Appalled by their insensibility, Rectangle folded up his table and went back to repairing radios, televisions, computers and cellular telephones, which brought people news they did not need, and by degrees turned them into people who were needed by no one.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

YOU MADE THE RIGHT CAREER CHOICE!

By Ben Greenman

From forthcoming collection, as yet untitled. 

Something was wrong then and something is right now. Every writer in Bemidji is busy; every writer in Shepherdston and Tumbler City is busy; there are not men and women enough to pen the stories and the books. Authors do not have to peddle their product now. No sooner is a sentence on a page that it is gobbled up by an eager reader, often with a fistful of cash and sharp elbows that gain advantage over the other, equally eager, readers. It is instant, automatic, frenetic. There are those who say that this boom time will not last, but even they must concede that for now it is a kind of Paradise.

ARTHUR MASTERS, MAN OF CONVICTION

By Ben Greenman

From a forthcoming collection, not yet titled. 

A civil young gentleman, Arthur Masters, made a claim.

He kept house with a runner named Arrow (her real name, though she lived up to it), inflated a promise and then burst it, that promise being that he would marry Arrow, the bursting of it being that he gave Arrow no proposition as such but rather a letter that related a story in which characters representing the two of them lived in a house on a hill, and around the hill went a spiral track like the thread of a screw, and the Arrow in the story ran down the track and back up it, and when she returned to the house (still in the story) Arthur was standing in the doorway with a bouquet of flowers and another letter, in which he asked her to marry him. A story folded into a story can then be folded out to create a third story. 

A civil young gentleman, Arthur Masters, made this claim, and he was right.

AFTER THE LIVESTREAM

Robert Rincon, called "Malvolio" by friends for reasons that he had long since forgotten, and that he hadn't understood to begin with, was in the basement thinking about playing guitar when the police banged (loudly) on the front door and shouted (even more loudly) that they were coming in, and then began a count that he assumed would end at three, ten at most, but which went on far past that, to twenty, to forty, to a hundred, to the point where Malvolio was no longer afraid that they would enter but beginning to despair that they would not. "What are they doing?" he said on the phone to his girlfriend, who had been someone else's wife until a month before. Her husband had owned the guitar that Malvolio was playing now. Malvolio had buried the man, his former rival, in the backyard about a week before he went into the car to retrieve the guitar. He did the math. That was three weeks ago, right? He had waited until his girlfriend gave him the high sign. The dispatch and disposal of the former rival had been her idea entirely. "Not everything lasts forever," she said, with a flippant tone that was intended to conceal an undercurrent of seriousness that verged on philosophy. "An undercurrent of..." He had read the phrase in a book about theater artists of an earlier time. It's what he once dreamed he would do. He started in music, left it for theater, then left that for tiny pills that were placed in his hand by a man who increasingly took all his money. From there he went to the sporting goods store for a knife, and then went back for a gun. This was ten years ago, before his first six to nine for armed robbery. He hadn't even met Hannah then, which meant that he hadn't met her husband. He moved his fingers about an inch above the strings, but made sure not to let them touch. Before he had gone into the dead man's car, he hadn't played a note on that guitar or any other since he was sixteen, half a lifetime ago. "You should play," Hannah had said when he came back from the car. "You're a regular..." This was a joke. She knew plenty of names: Reinhardt, Segovia, Burton, Page. But what she didn't say was always louder than what she said. This was the case on the phone now. "What are they doing?" Malvolio said again, louder this time. Panic crisscrossed his voice. "I don't think they will..." she said. Something clicked, either on the phone or off it. "Don't worry about..."

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

AN AVERAGE LIFE

He obtained a bachelor's in history and a Master's in engineering. He spent most of his life trying to invent a more elegant alternative to the plastic trays that divide and hold different types of silverware. He is survived by his wife.

 ©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A BLANKET WENT: A PARABLE

By Ben Greenman

From forthcoming collection, not yet titled.

A blanket went over everything. Some people believed that it was a signal to sleep, and they slept. Some believed that it was intended to hide them and some protested, while others who held the same belief accepted their fate passively. And then there were the ones who interpreted the blanket as a rug and began to walk across it. They were unaware of those beneath it and when they were told of them they did not care.

A BIOGRAPHY OF A GUY READING A ROBERT CARO BOOK

The house in which the man lived and read was located on a street that went straight for three blocks and then curved to the right. From the head of the street, it was not entirely visible, especially if the weather was poor or if it was nighttime, because one of the streetlights down at the curve, known to locals as the hook, was out, and also because the man who lived nearest to the head had floodlights mounted outside his front door, and they washed out the vision of any observer unless he or she moved closer, up the straight part of the street and around the hook, at which point the house came into view. It looked larger up close, as many things do, as proximity is a factor in the apparent size of an object, but not in the actual size, which is to say that the house was not actually larger when it was closer, but that it seemed larger to observers. It was two stories, though there was a large finished attic that could be accounted a half story. The basement walls extended a few feet up from the ground level, which created the impression that the house sat in a box or tray. The house was of a type known commonly as the Foursquare, and it adhered to the floor plan common to houses of this type, with a first floor that included an entry foyer (which in turn included the stairs that led to the second floor), a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. The kitchen included three chairs in motley mismatch, two made of a dark wood and the third lighter in both material (plastic) and hue (a sunny yellow). Though the wooden chairs possessed dignity and style, along with a certain solidity of purpose, the plastic chair was the man’s favorite, for it reminded him of a chair in another house, not a Foursquare, where he had grown up some three decades before, and where his earliest ideas about chairs and kitchens had been formed. It was in this third chair that he sat. There was a teakettle on the stovetop, no longer whistling, though it had been whistling a few moments earlier, signifying that the water within it had reached a temperature commensurate with the requirements of the duty it was about to perform, which involved transfer to a ceramic mug that also contained a small bag made of a blend of wood and vegetable fibers and filled with cured leaves of the plant Camellia sinensis. The water, freshly boiled, would pass through the semi-permeable membrane of the bag, reaching the leaves and creating a solution suitable, when cooled, for drinking. The tea was made at half-past nine and was, at thirty-five minutes past nine, judged sufficiently cool enough for sipping. In the fie minutes elapsed between those two events, the pouring of the just-boiled water over the cured leaves and the judgment that the water, now tea, was cool enough to drink, the man in the kitchen of the Foursquare house had made another judgment, which was to lift a book from the center of the table and turn it over in his hands to signify to himself that he was considering reading it. The man had turned over books in his hands before, and not just books: he had also turned over utensils, items of clothing, weapons, bottles containing medicine, erotic aids, and foods, but none of those things were books, and none of those books were the fourth volume of a biography about a man whose career in American politics had fundamentally reshaped the way in which the legislative branch of the Federal government exerted its influence, nor, for that matter, the way that the executive branch had done the same. The man in the kitchen lifted and lowered the mug filled with tea, transferring a small amount of liquid from vessel to mouth, and then sat in the chair of sunny yellow plastic, at which point he opened the book, the fourth volume of the biography of the man whose career in American politics had fundamentally reshaped the ways in which influence was exerted by the legislative and then executive branches of the Federal government, and he read the first word.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

 

 

SALES ARE DOWN

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

"High Tide, High Time" was the slogan Jack had settled on, after toying with a series of others ("Shore Thing," "Seaweed Solutions," and the rather generic "Just Add Health!"), and he even went so far as to type an email to Stanley with "Got It!" in the subject line and, in the body, a long paragraph explaining the winding but rewarding path that had guided him to the door of what he now believed was the only intelligent destination for the campaign. "We must stress the origins of the product," he wrote. "Isn't that what your father always told us?" He paused and remembered Stanley's father, Theodore, a six-foot-two Brahmin with mostly gray hair cut by a streak of black. "The past inheres," Theodore had said, and then he had pointed at Jack and said, "Stress the origins of the product." Jack could not remember the first time that Theodore had said it, but he did know that at some point he had started to count the occurrences in his mind, and he remembered where he was the hundredth time he had heard it. In fact, Jack remembered that Stanley had been there, too, hearing time number one hundred with his own two ears. Stanley had been young then, just a kid, maybe eleven, maybe ten, he had been in the office on one of the company's Family Fridays, playing a game he liked to call "Mr. Mayor," a game he had invented with his father that had started when he (Stanley) had removed a magazine from his (Theodore's) desk and noticed that he (Stanley) exactly resembled the mayor of Brampton, Ontario, down to the angle of their eyebrows. "We must preserve our floral gardens," Stanley said, waving his eleven-year old hands. "We must fix up our factories!" Then he took questions. At the time Jack had been thirty-two, skating toward his first divorce, convinced that his heedless forward progress would be brought under control by his second marriage, which he was certain would happen as soon as he came to terms with Mariela and convinced Dot that he was free. Dot was Theodore's assistant back then. She and Jack had been seeing each other on the sly for a year or so. She was roughly midway in age between Jack and Stanley. But Jack had been wrong. He had been wronger than wrong. Dot had not married him even when Mariela stood down. "Oh, you can't?" he said when she told him. And then he expectorated his greatest fear. "Theodore?" he asked. She nodded, and his blood ran cold, but then she was laughing. "It's not Theodore," she said. "Don't be daffy. He's a great boss and a great man but for the love of all that's holy, Jack, he's three times my age." She had, she went on to explain, decided that she was attracted to all beings, though women more than men, and that she planned to live in what she called a "multi-faceted amorous community," by which, she said, she meant a share-house where everyone occupied whatever bed beckoned. Twenty years had passed. Dot was still in the house, still beautiful, still mostly with women. Jack had a bent back and a bruised sense of nearly everything. Stanley had never been elected mayor of anything. The great man was in the ground.

WHO GOT THE COAT?

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

He lost his coat. He first knew it when he rubbed his thumb against his index finger, because that’s the same gesture he used when he went into the right pocket of the coat for breadcrumbs. In the other pocket was a plastic baggie with playing cards that had pictures of shrimp on their backs. The fronts were blank. The cards were from was some kind of game where you were supposed to fill in your own suits and denominations. He didn't remember the rules. The coat was the best. He had held court in it often. It went with everything. white shirt, black shirt, no shirt, black pants, brown pants, wolf pants. Where had he left it? The question was humming in his mind. He couldn't think of anything else. He had had it at the Elephant’s Horn. He knew that because it was bunched up under one arm while Banana Imperative was planning, and Cigarillo, and the Tangible Communication Orchestra. But then they left the club for bars, Shapes first, Cowardly Lion next, and by Ring Toss, it was gone. It was morning now. The bars wouldn’t be open for hours. He could call but then he’d have to wait for calls coming in. He couldn’t think of anything at all. Tears were burning the corners of his eyes. Why was he so upset? Valuables were not in question. His phone was safe in his bag, his wallet in his pocket. The coat was just warmth and a few small things without which his life had no meaning.

IT TOOK EVERYTHING SHE HAD NOT TO SCREAM, AND SOME THINGS SHE DIDN'T HAVE

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

She turned on the television.

THE GOOD THINGS

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

I was walking uptown and saw approaching me a guy dressed as Batman, but he was fat with a gut and making coochie-coo noises to two horses he was accusing of kissing. The horses' handlers would not even look at him. He crossed in front of me and disappeared into a theater that I saw was putting on a Batman musical. Justice of the Night! For about five blocks all I passed were various shapes and sizes of people dressed as Batman. A little kid was one of them. A matronly lady  holding a smoothie was another. Eventually I stopped and talked to a tall skinny black woman dressed as Batman. She told me her kids were so proud of her for getting the job. "They knew I could do it," she said. She reached out for a hug and even though I knew the rules I went ahead and hugged her. You have to focus on the good things. 

TIME IS ITS OWN OPENING ACT

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Feet up on the couch, soda on the table next to him, sun dappling the opposite wall, recollection of the night before resting on him with a pleasant pressure, old song on the radio—it was not very old, not as old as it was, in fact, sounded maybe ten years old at most, when it had come out thirty years ago it had sounded like the future, had in fact been the future, right down to the stabbing guitar and skittering drums that stabbed and skittered like nothing had back then but like everything did now—he closed his eyes and felt a contentment that had no place in the modern world. 

HARRIET KEEPS LOOKING

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Harriet looks in the mirror. She’s in there, which she expects, but everything that’s behind her is not, which surprises her. She knows what’s back there: the frustration, the despair, some of it in deep distance, other houses, other towns, but also closer by, the hook on the wall where her husband’s jacket used to hang, the framed photo on the other wall from the week they met, two smiling faces, the envelope on the table from the hospital, the sealed plastic bag with his phone in it, the notepad on the counter with scribbled information she did not understand when the doctor said it and does not understand now, the look in her son’s eyes that’s a plea for answers about any of it. Harriet keeps looking in the mirror.

PARABLE NUMBER X

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

The man in the hat will not come into the room. He sits in the hall in a chair with a glass in his hand. “No better business any more,” he mutters. “Hoped for. Hankered for. But not present here in any amount.” Another man comes by and points at the glass. He is making a joke about optimists and pessimists, but the glass is empty. The joke fills the glass. The man in the hat sends the other man away. The man in the hat seals off the glass by wrapping wax paper across the open end and then securing the wax paper with a rubber band. The joke is trapped in there. The joke is all meaning. The glass is all time. The man in the hat is a divine presence, what mortals would refer to as a god. The room is our earth. 

RAY

I was standing on the street. Then I was standing halfway down the street. I turned to look. Ray was in the spot where I had been standing a moment before. “Hi, Ray,” I said. I held up a hand and waved to him. He didn’t wave back. Ray isn’t the friendliest guy on the street. He has lived here longer than any of us, has been through two divorces, three or four jobs, at least one heart attack, and a half-dozen cars that I know about. Change has swirled around him. But somehow he’s stayed the same Ray: tall, gaunt, deeply informed on matters of, say, North African politics but oddly ignorant about far more common topics: baseball, for example (he claims he’s never seen a game), or gluten (“What in the name of hell is that?”). I didn’t know what Ray knew or didn’t know about the material transmission of a human body down a street and the substitution of another body for that body, especially if he was the body substituting. But there was no doubt. Ray was standing right where I had been. It occurred to me to examine my surroundings. I was in Ray’s front yard, right up against the sidewalk. I was holding a hedge-clipper that belonged to Ray. I remember the day he brought it home from the store. I was wearing his clothes and his beat-up old Fourth of July baseball cap. Was I Ray? I turned back to where I had been standing. Ray was still over there, too. I waved at him again, and again he didn’t wave back. Slowly, he uncurled one of his long fingers, the index finger of his right hand, and then he began to raise his right arm until he was pointing directly at me. Then he spoke, louder than usual, but with his trademark affect, vowels flat and bleak like an empty lot. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “I don’t even know what in the name of hell I’m looking at.” 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

DISTANT, CLOSE

By Ben Greenman

Time moved my books away from me.  Or else it moved me away from my books.

They are on shelves in my house. When I moved in to this house about five years ago, I put them there, all of them. I made a half-hearted attempt to organize them by theme: American novels, British novels, books of poetry, books about authors and poets, books about music, books about history, picture books, funny books, galleys. I gave up midway through but still they looked good on the shelves. They looked comfortable.

The books stayed there on the shelf, but they moved away from me. Except that they weren’t moving. They were shelved. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that I moved away from them. I am often in my house, which means that I’m often around my books, but it got to the point where I didn’t really see them anymore. I can’t even say that it bothered me. I figured that’s what happens when you get older: books recede into the past. I imagined that they were on a raft, drifting out to sea. But no: they were the shore and I was out to sea. 

Then came this: the present moment, the pandemic, the quarantine, the distancing from others, the closing in of the walls.

I have been around my wife and children for weeks, daily, but I have not interacted much with anyone else: other family, friends, colleagues, strangers. There are faces I need to see that I am not seeing, except maybe on small screens. This is not a strange story any longer. It is an agonizingly familiar one. 

When you cannot be close to the same things, you have two choices. One is to find new things to be close to, and the other is to draw closer to the old things.

That is when I moved closer to my books.

I had tried this once before. 

At some point a few years ago, around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I made up a game where I assembled stacks of books that were like totem poles—taken as a set, their titles sent a message. That meant that I had to find the right books, which means that I had to go through all of them, pulling them out from the shelves, turning them over in my hands. 

The first stack was explicitly about the election. The foundation was Matthijs van Boxsel’s The Encyclopedia of Stupidity, and it went upward from there: John Fischer’s The Stupidity Problem, Dickens’ Bleak House, Robert Walser’s The Robber, Julia Phillips’ You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again.

I made other stacks for other events after that: for confirmation hearings, for public investigations. 

Those stacks were jokes, but they were also jousts, ways of putting a lance into reality and trying to unseat it. They were a way of showing spine. 

When this came, all of this, I thought about making a stack about it, but I am not sure what spine is left these days. Reality has put the lance into me. 

I went to bed in a room without bookshelves.

*

I go to bed. Not to sleep. I’m not sleeping all that much. I don’t really dream, because I’m not really sleeping. I half-dream. I daydream but it’s night. I half-dream of a fire. And in my dream the fire reads all the books in my house before I can. I know it’s not happening, but in the morning when the light comes in, a (sarcastic?) reminder of the new day, I go and stand in front of the shelf. 

I close my eyes. I imagine that I’m reaching out and taking a book. Which one? Any of them would be a seed. Plant a seed and it grows. Plant it in soil that has been frightened by the shaking of the ground all around it, and it will grow with a vigor and ferocity and urgency that is almost a despair.

So I could start with Gunther Grass’s The Flounder. It’s been years since I read it and about a year since I tried to reread it and failed spectacularly. But there’s a line in there that has been swimming around in my head since 1990 or so: “Everything looks normal in print.” Grass was talking about how male dominance in history is a result of control of the press, I think. But now maybe he’s also talking about the normalizing and thus numbing effect of the news: old man dead, young man dead, young woman sick, old woman sicker. 

Or I could start with e.e. cummings’ Complete Poems. I love the shiv he puts into Louis Untermeyer in retaliation for Untermeyer including himself (and excluding cummings) from an anthology of modern poetry:

mr u will not be missed

who as an anthologist

sold the many on the few

not excluding mr u

I have been thinking of that in an era when leaders, in the process of trying to convince us that they care for everyone, appear to be self-dealing and self-congratulatory. 

I could start with a tiny little Emily Dickinson collection. I have more comprehensive Dickinsons and more beautiful ones. I have ones with better paper stock. This one’s just a Canterbury Classics I picked up a few years ago. But there’s something about the cover, which arranges her words into a labyrinth like the hedge maze in The Shining, that is both garish and comforting. It creates of the poems a series of rich enclosures. Nearly every line moves me somewhere I am not by moving me to see where I am: “The right to perish might be thought / An undisputed right.”

Or there’s Mary Robison, or Maxine Hong Kingston, or Stanley Elkin, or Fran Ross, or Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, or Pat Jordan’s A False Spring, or Mary McCarthy’s The Group, or Guy Colwell’s Inner City Romance, or Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, or Cervantes’s, a big book that’s a combination memoir/anthology of Milt Gross that I don’t think I’ve ever opened, or a biography of Ezra Pound by John Tytell that I used to know chapter and verse but have mostly forgotten by now. Every one of them helps me do battle with the world as it is these days.

Eyes still closed, I step back from the shelves. Distancing. I realize this has been an error, correct it. The closer I get to the books, the more I feel their energy, not the specific energy of any one volume, but the collective energy of all of them. The metaphor is still a seed, but it’s not one seed sprouting into one shoot. It’s a seed vault, for words, for ideas, for risks, for rewards, questions, answers, everything.

Now I am close enough to reach out and touch the spine of the nearest book. I don’t know which book it is, but it doesn’t matter. Touching one book is a form of touching all of them. I don’t need to open my eyes. The books can pass through closed eyes. I don’t have to worry about their survival—even if the fire reads them all, they’ll still be here). And I don’t have to worry about mine. Reconnecting with one book is a form of reconnecting with them all. They’re in my mind, in fragments, along filaments, and that’s more than enough. That’s how I’ll restart, how I’ll always restart, with half-grasped memories of once-touched volumes. This time, this strange sad time, is moving me closer to my books, and them closer to me. In a strange way, I’d have to say, I’m grateful.

QUARANTINE BLUES

ON KAWARA TRIBUTE FOR THESE QUARANTINE TIMES (INCOMPLETE)

A fake person viewing this fake show—while respecting social distancing, 

of course.