LEASEHOLDERS

We were hoping that the town would praise us for trying to establish a stronger sense of community. We had organized so many meetings and mailed so many letters. But the town was not pleased, and early one Monday dispatched a councilperson and police officer to our building. I answered the door and was presented with a piece of paper upon which was an explanation of why we would have to pack up our things and go, all of us, immediately. The councilperson averted her eyes as she handed over the paper but the police officer glared fiercely and directly at me, tapping the spot on her hip where her pistol was holstered. I took the paper, shut the door, and turned back into the building, calling out the names of the others, but they did not come out of their rooms, as they have no concept of fear and as a result could not make sense of my tone. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

IN REVERSE

Letters on a screen. Yellow letters, black background. A series of notes, not a fanfare exactly, but an insistent figure. Two men walking, one in a blue shirt, the other in green, both with jackets over the shirts. The blue shirt is holding a hat in his hands. The green shirt is eating an apple. A blue box appears over the face of the man wearing the blue shirt. A red box appears over the face of the man wearing the green shirt. Boxes flash on and off. On-flash, off-flash. The man in the blue shirt begins to scream the name of the man in the green shirt. The man in the green shirt begins to scream: just that, to scream. Letters reappear, quavering now. The series of notes, still not a fanfare, is played in reverse. We are exactly where we started, only much worse.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HOLY MOLY

As straight as her posture was, as clear as her tone was, as wonderfully virtuous as her face looked in the light that streamed through the stained glass, she could not help but give off a set of confusing signals to the others in the room. The men in the front row noticed that whenever she professed her faith, she smiled angrily, which was not at all in keeping with the guidelines of any piety. They also noticed that when she turned toward the altar, the part of the room that was supposed to contain the most godliness, she put her hand over her face, as if she was either hiding the divine from herself, or herself from it. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

GOOD DOG, BAD NEWS

A dog who desires egress bats a bell with his paw. It is hanging. It sounds. A human stands to let him out. But the dog has not waited. The dog has lifted a leg on a newspaper. “All the time I have spent training you,” says the human. “All the promises you made me.” The dog looks up, bewildered. Promises? The dog sleeps in the same place every night. The dog eats the food given him. These are promises kept on both sides. The dog trots outside into the warm night, does his business again, chases a rabbit and then a lizard. He digs by a fencepost. He makes a mental map of the scents scattered around the yard. The human calls the dog to come back in. The dog finds a patch of lawn in the calm center of the outdoors and raises up his head to look at the silhouettes of the trees as they melt into the darkening sky. The dog trots inside, passing the newspaper, whose largest headline tells of a meeting between two world leaders that has gone poorly, and which has as a result increased hostilities, a circumstance that has some geopolitical observers anxious, though they are not nearly anxious enough given what will happen in the coming months, angry words, then angrier ones, then sanctions, then espionage, then conditions proposed by one side and rejected by the other, then an ultimatum, then a failure to respect that ultimatum, then an attack, then a proportionate response, then an amplification of aggressions, then a weapon threatened, then an insult, then a weapon used, then a plea for a reversal of the course that has been set, for the die that has been cast, a plea delivered in a tone so calm that the desperation beneath that calm is evident, then a larger weapon used, in error, but irreversibly, and what difference does it make any longer, and at that point there is only increasingly faint hope and a correspondingly rapid draining of that hope, the planet’s heartbeat both accelerating and weakening, until the patch of lawn on which the dog once stood is scorched, and no one can any longer enter the house, and everything has egressed, and promises can no longer be kept. No headline records that development. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

LEDGER

The man is in a room, flipping through a ledger. He sees entries. He sees nothing but entries. Each one denotes a transaction. Each transaction is a moment in a story. One transaction records a cordial conversation between two men of approximately the same age. Another transaction records a moment of surprise for a woman in an elevator who thinks that she has heard her childhood dog, long dead, barking happily. Yet another transaction records the expression on the face of an electrician who has encountered, for the first time, a new kind of lighting control panel system. The man flips faster through the ledger, looking for more moments, finding them, knitting them together in his mind. The man exits the room, enters the story. The ledger falls from his hands. Chalk one up for what has been expressed but can never be understood. The dog trots past the ledger.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WELCOME TO THE WORKING WEEK

Glass and steel skyscraper. Pink and purple lights flowers outside main entrance. Strange furniture that benefits no one in the lobby. Elevator. Bing-bong. Eighth floor. Glass dividing reception from offices. Patch of carpet also dividing. Small crack in one of the panes that walls the corner office. A woman back there shaking her head. A man inside shaking his. A second pair, a man and a woman too, on the other side of the desk back there, nodding. This goes on for a while, the shaking of two heads, the nodding of two others. Return to reception. Turn left. A coffee maker hisses nearby. A man crosses through a small corridor to reach it. His sight is failing. He brings a cup to a woman whose blood is iron-poor. She drinks it and then goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She is readying herself for a meeting. She does not yet know who she will be meeting with, or what ailment or adverse condition that person hosts or harbors. The discussion in the corner office is still going, though the nodders and shakers have switched places, nodding man now shaking, shaking man now nodding, nodding woman now, nodding woman now. The woman with iron-poor blood has started her meeting, which is with a man she has met before, who in fact she knows quite well, but not well enough to know that he is suffering from mixed dementia. The meeting is going swimmingly. Return to small patch of carpet. The crack lengthens. Eventually it will run the length of the windowed wall, which will then shatter, showering glass pearls on both couples, who will neither be nodding nor shaking their heads but clutching one another with garish fear. This will be their affliction, from that moment on, for all time.

©2020 Ben Greenman / Stupid Ideas

DOSES

Two doses will be administered twenty-eight days apart. Three doses will be administrated the week after that. Four doses will be administered in the morning, followed by six in the afternoon. One dose will be administered near the kitchen table, while birthday presents are being opened.  One dose will be administered just before the school year starts, on a windy autumn morning, hurriedly, with an edge of false sarcasm. One dose will be administered in the car while a commercial for a termite-protection service is playing, while the owner of the company's accent is being roundly mocked. One dose will be administered in the mirror, quickly, while no one else is looking. One dose will be administered conceptually. One dose will be administered asymmetrically. No doses will be administered as a result of coercion. No doses will be administered without a mixture of excitement and relaxation. I am speaking, of course, of love: of parents for children, of children for parents, of spouses for one another, of friends for friends, of readers for books, of singers for songs, of people for themselves, of the clock for time, of effect for cause, of the points of the compass for the space it divides, of everything for everything, and nothing more.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HE HAS SO MUCH FUN!

Swimming, sleeping, reading, reading, sleeping, swimming, not much else in the day for him now that he had an empty house filled with memories of when it was not empty, switches that turned on lights but left him in the dark. The only source of energy in the whole place was the letter she had left on the table, and he had promised himself that he would never read it, in fact that he would only let it sit on the table for another few days before throwing it away. So what did he do instead? He struck up conversations with cashiers in shops and hurtled forward through them with a loquacity that seemed to him a sign of good cheer but was to the cashiers  an indisputable illustration of his inward distress. He talked too much on the phone, and too fast, no matter what the business was at hand. He inserted himself into conversations at parties simply so that he could, when the opportunity presented itself, make a riposte that he knew would be received as if he had said something witty, as if he was witty, though here he was the one who knew that it was empty, and the others, dull men with homes that were rich with satisfaction, believed that their own laughter was proof of not only his wit but their own. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ANN PEEBLES, EXTENDED

I can’t stand the rain against my window—or my umbrella, or the hood of my car, or my Chattahoochee patio, or the roof of that restaurant that we go to sometimes, the steakhouse where that one waitress is always looking at my man, especially when she comes over and says “Can I take your order?” and puts a little sauce on her tone so it’s entirely clear what she means, but also entirely clear that she knows she has plausible deniability, because what else is she supposed to say other than “Can I take your order?”? That waitress—her name is Devorah—burns me up to the point where I wrap the napkin around both hands and pull until the circulation is almost cut off, and that’s just to prevent me from reaching for the cutlery and showing her how to stay away from another woman’s man, and while I’m exaggerating, I’m only exaggerating a little, and last month after she lingered at the table a bit too long while bringing out desserts, I keyed her pickup as we left, passenger side, rear wheel, so she’s not likely to spot it for a while, and that night I dreamed that her truck was her and the key was a steak knife, long dream, really lasted, no flinching on my part. And even Devorah bothers me less than the rain.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SHAMED

Jack found another man, as high as a tree, to write dialogue for his film. But that man abused truth, even as he displayed a mastery of his craft, and Jack wanted truth to be free to make its impression—upon him, upon the other man, and upon whoever would be sitting in the theater, rapt, during the run of the film. This would please God, he knew, and he told the other man so, and the other man stiffened and told him (Jack) that he (the other man) believed in God but that he (the other man) knew that he (Jack) did not, and could tell because of the way he (Jack) spoke His (God’s) name. “He guides our mind which guides our pens so that even the basest things can usher in aspects of the divine,” said the other man, and Jack was shamed.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

DETOUR

The 1200 and 1300 blocks of Arrow Place are lined with exceedingly handsome houses, similar in style and grace to those of Mount Zipporah Avenue. This ten-block-square area was, in the middle of the century, home to many artists and authors, to the point where it became known as “Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Hardtack.” Gerritt Porter, born and raised at 1244 by a sculptor father and a dancer mother, bought two homes across the street, 1255 ad 1257, and built a covered passageway between them so that they formed what he called “Arrow Castle.” He paid for the construction with the profits from his first and best-known novel, Green-Light Depot, and then wrote his next four novels there: Breathing Music, Timpanis and Temblors, Inversion Hit Parade, and As A People We Don’t Have Much Time. Each was the equal of the one before it, and though his sales tapered off, he would have had sufficient funds to maintain his lifestyle were he not ruined by bad investments (among the worst was a Green-Light-Depot-themed restaurant, which cost him nearly half his fortune and never opened) and a musical adaptation of Breathing Music (which did open, ran for one night, and cost him nearly as much as the restaurant). Dispirited but also inspired, he set his fiction to the side and turned to what he called “typed jazz,” not verse precisely, but a poetic form that the Marcia Malinka characterized as “improvisatory language deployed on the page for pyrotechnic delight.” As depicted on the previous page, through traffic entering from the north will now proceed around the neighborhood by way of the Sinck Bypass. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ALL HE HAD

He had a character he liked to dress up as, Nubla Con—The Weather Thief, but he couldn’t find a theater and he couldn’t find a play. He had a list of things that he needed to tell people, mostly about what was underrated (“Swept For You, Baby”) and what was not (They Call Me Bruce). He had a check made out to the roofer as a deposit for a repair that would remedy the damage done by the woodpeckers. He had a dog that ran around the yard, looking for his other dog. He had a recording of that other dog from years before, when he was a puppy, when he was alive, a pretend job interview where he would ask set-up questions (“What do you call a tuned radio amplifier?”) and the dog would answer (“RF!”). He had a book he tried to read but found impenetrable. He had a chair he tried to throw away but found tenacious. He had a suspicion that something was bothering him. He had a memory of one evening with one woman, a dark room, a big room, too many pillows, laughter, too, though after that she had hardened to him and the laughs, while the continued, were brittle. He had a hope that time would soften her to him. He had a fork poised above a bowl of beans. He had a pain in his side that he did not yet know was cancer. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NICE GUYS FINISH LAUGHING

He was always there, the fresh-faced guy, always talking to the barista, and while at first this seemed disreputable because the barista was always one of two attractive young women, over time it became clear that his motives were not quite this, and that he was just as jovial when the counter was manned by one of several bearded young men or Dave, who was approaching sixty and couldn’t stop talking about how the Motown songs people didn’t know were far superior to the ones they did know. The fresh-faced guy didn’t get involved in that debate or any other one. He had an unlimited supply of benign observations and self-deprecating remarks, which is why it was all the more surprising when he was named a person of interest in a string of violent bank robberies, then the prime suspect, after which he fled town in someone else’s Mustang, the original license plates of which were found in a dumpster behind the coffee shop with a note that read “I’ll miss you all.” Seventeen days later he was shot to death while sitting in a bright yellow Alfa Romeo Disco Volante near Venice Beach. He had spent the rest of the money on jewelry, clothing, and a book called Nice Guys Finish Laughing. The woman next to him, the spitting image of one of the baristas, was unharmed. Dave somehow took pity on her coffeehouse twin and brought her a rare 45, LaBrenda Ben & the Beljeans singing “The Chaperone.” She loved it. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

REGISTRY

“I had a dream that kept starting over. A woman I didn’t know was leaving a building—a bank?—and the revolving doors spun her back into the building. She tried again. They spun her back inside again. It was like a comedy at first, a silent comedy, but then, in my dream, I could hear the people in the building worrying about her. One man had alarm in his voice. A woman was crying. It got tragic fast. She couldn’t get out of the door. Then I started to try to wake up, from within my dream, and I couldn’t, and then one of the voices I heard worrying about the woman addressed me. What do I mean by that? I guess I mean that it got clearer, shifted in orientation so that it faced me directly. It was a woman’s voice. ‘You can’t get out either,’ the voice said, in a tone that wasn’t quite a question, wasn’t quite a statement. The voice addressing me was clear, then muffled, clear then muffled, I phase, and I came to understand that it was the voice of the woman trapped in the door. Was she sympathizing with me? Was she fusing with me?” But he wasn’t listening. He was thinking that he liked everything about her except that she was okay with putting a milk carton back in the refrigerator crooked. Their wedding, still set for early August, loomed on the horizon like a ship whose hull had just been pierced and which was about to go down.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HOUSE, CHAIR, ROOM

He sat in his house thinking about her house. He sat in his chair thinking of her chair, and how it was different from the chair he owned. He sat by his window thinking about her window, and how it was near enough to a tree that in a brisk breeze the branches moved into it in Morse code, and in higher winds the noise was like that of a fiend trying to enter the house. He sat under his portrait thinking of her portrait, which captured the wide gray insistence of her eyes, the serious mouth that did not take itself seriously (it looked ready to smile or as if it had just slid out of a smile), the way her hair bounced back light like vinyl did. He had painted it when he was younger. He had given it to her as a gift. She had taken it with hands that were so steady that he knew that she was making an effort to conceal her excitement, and that filled him with terror at what might be next for them. But she was, above all, loyal, and would not change her life for him. She was happy being miserable with her husband, who unironically wore a glasses chain and said “The Cream” instead of just Cream when rhapsodizing about his favorite song ever, “White Room.” 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

STRATEGIES FOR GROWTH

I am buying a majority stake in a cup of coffee. That kid over there is buying a majority stake in a red velvet cupcake. The woman on the street is buying a majority stake in a bottle of pills that she has been promised by her doctor will control the pain from her recent procedure. The doctor is buying a majority stake in a boat that he plans to share with his son-in-law. The son-in-law is buying a majority stake in a week’s worth of services from a contract killer who he is enlisting to prematurely end the life of his father-in-law, largely as a result of monies that will then come to him and his wife but partly, too, because of the boat, and the way that his father-in-law condescendingly calls it a “fifty-fifty partnership,” even though everybody knows it’s more like ninety-ten in his favor, and the son-in-law knows there’s no shame in that, he’s only starting to get his nutriceuticals business underway, it’s going to take a while, everyone knows that, how can he compete with a thoracic surgeon who has had a thriving practice for decades, whose success comes off him like a cologne, who advertises even with the name of the boat, A Cut Above, but the lie of the even split irritates him because it is so transparent that is is always exposed immediately in a way that results in the son-in-law’s diminishment. The son-in-law’s wife, the doctor’s daughter, has no knowledge of the plot at all. She’s buying a majority stake in having no knowledge of the plot at all.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas