From where he lay on the sofa he could see out the window into the field. Arpeggiated poppies, each taller and redder than the last, led his eye from left to right. He rubbed his palm on the nap of the velvet. Something smelled like cinnamon. Mick Ronson played loud on the stereo in the other room. His mind slowed, stilled, and he drifted off to sleep, where he dreamed exactly the same thing.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
“We have access to words that describe our emotions, no? Both the positive and the negative, yes? And yet, it too often seems that we resort to wordless expressions of frustration that are squeezed out through the mouth like escaping air squeaking from the pinched neck of a deflating balloon.” The babysitter tapped her finger on the chair of the arm to call Ellen to attention. The babysitter, a college student, kept her back straight in judgment. The babysitter, recently reborn into the world via the power of carnal love, glanced at her phone to see if a text from Rolf had arrived and if so when he wanted to come over. Ellen, who didn’t want any of this garbage anywhere near her, shut her eyes and imagined the babysitter expired.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
I have made my world small. This process began at birth, when I turned one way and refused to turn the other way. I heard voices beseeching me but there was nothing there. I knew it. That continued. I’d read a sentence of a book and stop. I’d walk out of a movie after one scene, a meal after one course. I lacked learning and sophistication. Any adventure was anathema. That continued through young adulthood, through maturity, through middle age. There was not a single choice I made along the way that helped me feel as if I might be growing, and while I did marry, while I did have a child, I did nothing in their direction either. The other day I turned ninety. That afternoon, the family doctor paid a house call and informed me, with rather less sadness than I would have preferred, that my days are numbered. My son came to sit with me when the doctor left. “I have my my world small,” I said, and explained what I have explained here. From the corner of my eye I saw him touch a finger to his chin. He is a wise child of sixty. “Is it possible,” he said, “that you are so receptive to the smallest moment, the smallest change in the space around you, the beat of a butterfly wing, the descent of a leaf, an expression on a face, a single musical note, that you are forever at capacity and wary of overload?” I didn’t turn toward him but I smiled. He gets all the credit in the world. When I am gone — tomorrow or the day after — I want to be remembered not only the way he is remembering me, but the way I will be from that day forward. In eternal darkness I will be placid and satisfied. It will be just enough.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
It was Peter’s favorite drink. He poured it into the sink. “Nice,” she said. He gave a rueful laugh and started singing: “The widow made plans / And threw up her hands / At Pat Murphy’s bar / She’s always a star.” She pointed at the sink. “And you’re the widow, I presume?” He made a face like an Iyem and reminded her that just the day before, crack of dawn, he had taken her for a drive up the hill to the big white church. The two of them had held hands up there and looked across the valley, ribboned with fences. “Enclosure,” he had said. “Heart of capitalism.” She conceded his point, though she had not been objecting up until then, and they drove into the small downtown. Barely anyone was awake yet. They got coffee and sat in the car. “What are we doing?” she said. He bowed his head in defeat. “You’re right,” he said. “I really have to stop drinking.”
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The grass in the meadow was green-blue, a sea under the sea of the bluer sky. It dizzied him. He closed his eyes and promised himself he wouldn’t leave the car. But of course he did. He had to look for Geppetto, terrible name for a dog, too dignified, too doddering, too…specific, but he had told Emily that she could name the dog anything she wanted, and they had just shown her Pinocchio, sat her in front of it during an evening when they wanted to sneak off and get high. “This is Grade-A parenting,” Helen said. Anthony felt guilty but said nothing. Silence could be misconstrued as strength. And that was how their puppy became Geppetto. Figaro would have been better, or Stromboli, even Monstro (it was a big dog, a Doberdane). At least she hadn’t gone with Lampwick. Anthony had been responsible for the dog’s escape. He had been correcting papers in the Student Union, loaded a big stack into the back seat of his car, and needed two trips to get them inside the house. The door didn’t get closed, and that’s when he saw the black dot, already in the distance, heading toward the Meadows. He stepped out of the car. A jade butterfly came up out of the camouflage of the grass carpet and wobbled away carefully, with small loops back toward him, as if it was looking for the dog too. As Anthony looked around, he wondered what had brought him here. Not proximately. That he knew. He wondered about the delicate math of it all, the way his devout youth had given way to reckless years, the first look at Helen in the bar, the night she told him she was pregnant, the drugs at the party they went to after that, the emergence of Emily, the hundred nights he had woken up with a start and tried to face down the darkness and what it gave him, the brutal abstractions of his own fears and uncertainties. He knew he’d find the dog. He knew he never would. He felt like falling to his knees, and did.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Some traits were cleanly and clearly inherited. She didn’t dispute that. But those traits didn’t interest her. What interested her were those traits that developed in opposition to the behavior of parents, and at times in an almost mechanical antithesis. “Take being late,” she said. This was the example she always gave. “Let’s say that you are a young woman who has grown up with a mother who is always late. She’s late getting you from school, taking you to doctors’ appointments, meeting you and your partner for lunch. Each of these stings. Each is absorbed as a moment of neglect. It is not likely that you will repeat this behavior and inflict the same tardiness on your own intimates. Compulsive punctuality is the likely outcome.” She straightened her notes on the podium. She could feel her throat thickening, as it often did at this point in the speech. That lunch! She had been so proud to introduce her mother to Angela, and so humiliated when they had waited not only the twenty forewarned minutes, but thirty-five, forty, nearly an hour. Angela had patted her hand in a way that confirmed that she had made the right choice, a somewhat silver lining. She made her notes crooked and fought down the coming tears by remembering the medical name for what she was experiencing, not the awareness of the etiology of her compulsive punctuality, not the melancholy of her memory, but the lump in her throat: globus pharyngeus.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Their honeymoon, in Cameroon, Western highlands, she dreamed islands, he smiled and clarified, Sarah sighed, Karl booked passage, packed baggage, enlisted a guide, swelled with pride, visiting Fondoms, he forgot condoms, she stumbled upon some, borrowed, Ugandan, he remained wary, “why marry?” she said, as he read The Speckled Band, she interposed a freckled hand between the chapters, “at the mercy of your captors,” she said, lifting up her shirt, she joked about dessert, he acknowledged his sweet tooth, “I see you speak truth,” her shirt descended, he attended to her pantaloons, that rainy night in Cameroon.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
“Whatever is happening is happening now. All that is happening is happening now. There is now. That is all. It is an observation that has been made before, but has it? If you see words to that effect as if printed in your memory, if you hear the remarks as if echoing in your mind’s ear, you are still experiencing them in the present and the present alone, and to that degree you are the inventor of those words, those remarks, an originator. You have coined a new currency, though the diminution of the pride you feel in this achievement comes right on its heels, with the recognition that only you can spend it, and what would you spend it on? Until the future, which does not yet exist, which may never exist, there is nothing you can offer yourself that you do not already have.” He found the note and lost it instantly—or did he?
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
A funeraldeath of absentfamily, a feudopen, a casketcase, but before that, a young man, pleased in his strength, called talented by some, blinked, no longer young, self-shoved west from Baltimore to Bakersfield, a wife, a second wife, a child by her who hated him, the second gone soon enough too, roistered there for nearly twenty years, kept thinking of a third, hoping, fumfering when not, presenting the case to whoever he met, in bars, in church, in the yellow-fronted brick that was the city bus, never got a buy-in, grew lonelier, weaker, louder and then quieter, climbed to a hilltop a block from his house, expired bathed in northern light.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Long ago Yasmin and Carlotta met in London. One was accompanying a boyfriend who was an actor, up and coming, though he had started to get the feeling that he had come as far up as he ever would. The other had been transferred by her company, had been gazumped on her first apartment, was looking for a place to stay until the second one was all ironed out. Each had a reason to drink. Both were drinking. The pub had a name that they would argue about for years. “It was The Prospect,” one would say. “No,” the other would object. “It was The Prospect of something.” Then one would go into the pocket for a card, pretending that might solve things. It was never a full dispute, more a question of amendment. That was the nature of their entire relationship, which started that first night when one sloshed near the other. Alcohol may have accelerated the first kiss but it didn’t determine which road was taken. Lust did that, and lunacy, and the invisible intelligence of love. The actor was let down gently. The company was not informed. Yasmin and Carlotta were largely inseparable from that first night, making love, making time, opening and closing doors in times both playful and disconsolate, working hard, cooking meals, traveling one summer to Cairo, visiting Yasmin’s parents briefly, riding motorcycles there, after which, lying flat on backs on their hotel floor in full view of the wind-reddened sky, sand brought up from the Sahara and dispersed through the air, optic fire in flight, one put her hand on the other one’s shoulder and breathed out just as the other breathed in. They were totally sober but far more gone than they had been that first night.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
One thing to recognize is that I am much happier when people are productive. A lack of productivity makes me upset. A team of surgeons pleases me, as does the man cleaning the valley, as does the woman writing a symphony, as does the child trying to remember yesterday. What is yesterday to a child that has so few yesterdays? Would the child not be better served trying to remember tomorrow? I am writing this from my desk in the center of the large room that once housed the MurTec Corporation, a construction firm that specialized in patios and pools. Murray Erskine founded it. The “Tec” meant his patented technology. He installed more than a thousand pools in a decade before he drowned in one. That is an impressive track record. One thing to recognize is that I am much happier when people are productive.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He pushed the wheelbarrow proudly. It had cost him a thousand dollars and had tires like an airplane. A tall man coming toward him on the street was pushing a broken-down shopping cart. “This is a wheelbarrow,” the tall man shouted. “A nicer one than yours!” He started to shout something back but they were close enough to each other for him to see that the tall man was blind. No wonder he was confused about his shitty cart. But how was he steering the thing in the first place? He was still puzzling through the matter as he walked over an open manhole cover and fell out of sight forever.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Brad stood next to the lectern. Brad wore a blue suit with an American flag pin on the label. Brad had been to the gym that morning and lifted. Brad remembered being a magician when he was young. Brad owned a keychain with a miniature figure of a sailor who resembled but was not Popeye. Brad had a cold coming on and his nose was red. Brad had burned his way through two marriages to women who could have loved him had he not treated them poorly. Brad had one bad ear. Brad had a habit of being hilarious. Brad was running for office. Brad took questions. “Do you know how qualified you are?” said a man named Bob. Brad was Bob. The room was empty. Brad felt foolish. The air turned icy. Brad, who had come to practice for later, felt his knees buckle, felt himself falling, narrowly missed the lectern, hit the floor, clutching his head, his head which suddenly felt split in half, heard himself screaming, screaming how much he loved America, screaming that he hoped he would stay alive long enough to vote for himself.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Olivia, in the tower, in the top of the tower, speaking into the microphone that broadcast her voice out over the surrounding lands, realized suddenly that she didn’t want to be up there anymore. She had arrived at the tower years earlier, still holding the resume that had gotten her the job, or had at the very least not hurt her chances. She had the idea she’d have to present it as a receipt. That had not been the case. She folded it in half, put it in her jacket pocket, nodded nervously at the woman who had unlocked the door at ground level, smiled nervously at the man who unlocked the door on the first landing. She had the idea she’d see them regularly. She never saw them again. The higher she climbed in the tower, the more it became apparent to her that everything was there: food service, exercise machines, shops, even a regular stream of co-workers who could be friends, bed partners, inspirations, commiserators. They were. She arrived finally at the top of the tower, at her broadcast station, unfolded her resume, taped it to the wall over her desk, and got to work. She read out the news. She read out the weather. She announced holidays. She told jokes now and again. From her vantage she could see down to ground level, and she thrilled to the way people would stop and look up at the tower when they heard her voice. It went this way for years, though a a boom time, a bust time, a war, several severe thunderstorms, one unexpected afternoon of steaming pellet-sized hail, Easters, Christmases, the birthdays of noteworthy scientists, and an abundance of punchlines and puns. One morning she woke up, accepted a kiss from her bed partner, brushed her teeth, walked across the hall to work, started in on the weather (clouds, rain unlikely), and felt something within her both harden and dissolve. She was done. This was it. Time to retire. Time to go back down the tower, all the floors, all the stairs, through that door on the first landing, through the front door, back out into the street, where she could be one of the people who looked up when a voice came from the top of the tower. She took down her resume from the wall, folded it into a paper airplane, and sailed it out the nearest window.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
His understanding of things is limited. He goes sock, shoe, sock, shoe instead of sock, sock, shoe, shoe. He fiddles with the radio dial until he gets static and proclaims it “the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.” He eats grasses and ferns with little regard for their nutritional value. He thinks Judah Maccabee is the opposite of Noël Coward. He insists that his father invented the spaces between words. He maintains a defiantly unfashionable hairdo. He can’t sit still to see an entire movie, and consequently must be told the end right at the beginning. He cries easily. He abhors compromise. By all these things, beliefs and bargains both, he avoids responsibility. His understanding of things is complete.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Jason lives across the way. He never comes to see us. Not anymore. We are mostly fine with this arrangement, as we don’t like him very much, though at the same time we cannot fathom why he isn’t sprinting across the street to come see us. We have everything he likes. He used to roll around on the main couch in the living room making sounds of carnal satisfaction. He used to mix various liquors from out wet bar and declare the result a “Jaybomb.” He used to pretend to waltz with our dog, Frederick, who is almost as big as Jason. The incident that initially busted up his pattern of regular visitation occurred last Christmas. We had no present for him under the tree. He flipped out and then some, tried to wrestle the tree to the ground. Everyone called good riddance after him, a jerk. And yet, a year on, we find ourselves missing him terribly. There’s no way to fathom the uncertain pulse of the human heart.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Ellen set up a table in front of Town Hall. “Get your programs,” she said. “Programs for sale.” They weren’t programs, not really. They were guides to the city not as it was but as she imagined it might be. The main square outside of City Hall was, in her version, “a sun-drenched space capable of disinfecting any guilty citizen.” The park down the way was “a carnival of the most outré ideas about how two or more bodies might intermingle.” The museum, down a little further, was “absolutely crawling at all hours” with “stealthy patrons of the arts trying to switch out existing canvases for candy-colored visions of their own.” She was sure that her guide was better than reality, which is why she was charging a hundred dollars per guide. The first person to step up to her table was a rotund and bright-eyed pre-teen. “I’ll give you all the change in my pockets,” said the pre-teen. “You got it,” said Ellen, handing enlightenment to the enlightened.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
We went to the house to meet her. “Is she our friend?” Susan said. She was trying to remember. “I don’t think she is,” Susan said. Susan was right. She was always right. Antoinette wasn’t our friend. She was, if anything, a nemesis. She had met Susan around an advertising campaign that Susan had spearheaded. The product that Susan had been advertising was a cosmetic that had been manufactured in accordance with the new understanding. It respected both animals and the environment. But Antoinette was incensed about where it was made and fired off a lengthy letter. Susan had responded, point by point, and she and Antoinette had become acquaintances. That’s where I came in. I was having lunch with Susan, trading normal updates (her husband was thinking of designing a new house for them; my wife had started cooking traditional Greek), when she asked me what I thought about Antoinette’s letter. She handed it to me across the table for inspection. “This is massively rude, for starters,” I said. “Though this woman does appear to have a good heart.” Susan told me I had to have breakfast with the two of them that next Sunday. It didn’t seem like a request. That breakfast went fine enough. I sensed that Antoinette was always on the verge of pouncing on Susan and tearing her limb from limb, so I made jokes, introduced distractions, cleared my throat more than was necessary. And so, every four months or so, the three of us got together under these conditions. This was the most recent iteration, the meeting at Antoinette’s new house, which she now shared with what, Susan explained, she called her “newest lover.” Susan mimed sticking her fingers down her throat when she spoke the phrase. “This guy,” Susan said, “is either twenty years younger than her or twenty years older. I don’t remember which, but it’s the same difference.” Also present would be the newest lover’s cousin, a classical composer of some note who had recently renounced symphony work as a result of a disturbing increase in mistreatment of musicians by other musicians. Antoinette wanted to pair them off and see if Susan might throw her firm’s considerable weight behind a campaign to stamp out musician-on-musician cruelty. Susan enlisted me. A car came. We rode twenty minutes to the house. Susan rang the bell. I knocked. Antoinette answered. “Hello,” she said. “Look who’s here to make the world better.” Not a jot of irony was discernible in her tone. Behind her in the house a darkness loomed. We went in, knowing we were turning on a projector that we probably couldn’t stop.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
For so long he didn’t lock his door, not so that people could come in but to create the illusion that he could go out. He made it through a few months of video calls but when that became too much he just turned on his camera and mimed his side of a call. He ate food at his kitchen table and left it there, imagining that a waiter might come. He bought a guitar over the internet and wrote one couplet. He exercised in the hallway, sometimes walking halfway up the walls. He investigated at length whether an oil stain on his sofa could be cleaned. He took down books from the bookcase and, failing to read them, returned them to the shelf. He imagined better plots for past relationships. He failed, above all, to sleep, instead remembering what he had eaten, or commending himself on exercise, or condemning himself for spilling salad on his couch, or pretending that the next day he might lock the door, or repeating the single composed couplet over and over again, “Everyone is lost out on the trails / Seeking holy and unholy grails.”
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The young woman coming down the aisle of the plane is listening to something on her headphones, or at the very least has her headphones on and is pretending to listen to something, eyes looking out into middle distance, head bobbing in time. She pauses at Franc’s row, reaches up to knock out one bud. “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m in here.” Franc pulls himself to his feet, steps out into the aisle, lets her pass. She’s in the middle seat. No one’s in the window. Maybe someone will be, but Franc doesn’t think so, since most of the passengers have filed in, and the flight’s not full by any means. The young woman sits and unloads her possessions into the various spaces at her disposal. Her shoulder bag goes under the seat in front of her. Her purse goes under her seat. Her phone goes into the seat pocket in front of her. The cord stretches from it into her ear, still only one ear. The other bud dangles off the cord. Franc gets back to his book, a history of subversive subcultures in American cities in the twentieth century. He has no intention of talks to the young woman. It would be too forward. That’s why he’s not immediately responsive when she talks to him. “That book you’re reading,” she says. He turns the cover so it faces her. “It’s a very interesting…” he starts to say, but she interrupts. “I know it,” she says. “My father wrote it.” Franc laughs. “Really?” he says. “That’s not just something you say when you see someone reading it?” She shakes her head. “Of course not,” she says. “I’m telling the truth. I remember when he was working on it. I was little then. It’s dedicated to me.” Franc turns to the front. To Lily, it says. “What’s your name?” he says. This is just a joke, but her face starts to crumble, and he realizes that he’s offended her. “I’m fooling,” he says. “It’s very nice to meet you, Lily.” She smiles now, for the first time, and shakes his hand as he extends it. And that is how Franc spends the morning of his hundredth birthday. Odds are that it will be his last one, but he beats the odds, not just the next year but for a half-dozen years after that.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
By Vestergaard’s standards of the time, That’s My Mother’s Name! is a fairly conventional novel, from its clear prose, to its familiar settings (for its first half, Copenhagen in the 1970s, and for its second London in the 1980s), to the structural arrangement of the chapters, which mirrors the architecture not of the author’s preceding book, Inner Stranger, but of his earlier breakthrough, Rainbow Boys, alternating a present that progresses in a straightforward linear manner with disarranged flashbacking. But this structural solidity cannot conceal the shifting quicksand at the project's foundation. Vestergaard’s narrator is at least ambivalent about whoever might be reading him, and maybe even hostile. Resigned when it describes diurnal minutiae, disturbing when it attempts to capture the texture of late nights and dreams (“The flesh in his hand was not his own, he wrongly thought”), the novel is constantly in the business of eating itself and getting sick in the process.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
“Crash” Jenkins, born Charles, schooled as Chip, married as Charles, divorced as Chuck, took on this final name at age 40. He was talking too much that year, and the year before. He couldn’t help it. He was like an antenna for the species, and what he was picking up was pain. He needed some way to put it down. That way? Chatter. “It’s just that I wake up some days and I have a bee in my bonnet, several bees actually, so I have to get them out and then figure out why I was wearing a bonnet in the first place.” He said this to Louis Esterhazy, his business partner. Louis indulged him, always did. Louis was a prince. Louis knew that Crash had kindness flowing through his veins, but also that he was highly animated by both caffeine and a kind of private grief. The two of them had joined forces when they found that they possessed complementary skills: one a gabbling visionary, the other a steady hand. They founded Cloudseed, a financial app whose offerings included stock trading, banking, and retirement investment. “We ask them to climb to the top of a building,” said Crash, “stand by the lightning rod, and stretch out their arms to the gods of prosperity. The next sound they hear will be either their victory or their demise, and in either event we’ll be there for them.” Louis faced into the wind of this explanation and typed out the copy that would appear on the front page of the app: “our offerings include stock trading, banking, and retirement investment.” Crash hadn’t stopped with the victory or demise. He had continued, and was talking now about a woman on his block who wandered out into the front yard wearing a housecoat and talking about President Carter. She was beautiful, faded, fatefully disappointed, beaten down by the fact that time insisted on passing. He was talking now about something he had read in Hegel, and now about something about something he had read in Peanuts. He was talking now about his suspicions regarding the morality of capitalism, even though he also said that he was pledged to help Louis make a mint. Louis didn’t write any of that down. Mainly what you did for a friend was listen.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He’s just fine, thanks for asking. He’s doing well, appreciates the good wishes. He’s on the mend, up and around. He’s taking it slow, no reason to rush things. He’s making the best of it, each day is a gift. He’s dead.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
For three days in a row he had dreams that, upon waking, were verified by the news. He dreamed that a famous actress was robbing a bank and woke to find that a famous actor had stolen a car. He dreamed that a new species of bird had been discovered and woke to find that an old species of bird had been declared extinct. He dreamed that four people fell through the observation pane of a glass-bottomed boat in Jamaica and woke to find that three people had been struck by falling debris on a glass-bottomed observation deck in Boston. His wife turned white as a sheet. “You’re psychic,” she said. “I knew it. I know I should have made you invest in the market.” An ex-girlfriend had a different take. “We read so much news now, coming in from all directions, that nearly any dream can be mirrored by some report or other, if you’re on the lookout for correlations of that nature. This is less a psychic phenomena than confirmation bias.” As his ex-girlfriend was now the president of the United States, he valued her opinion highly, though he probably would have anyway. “Gotta go,” she said. “North Korea.” He presented the confirmation-bias case to his wife, who was only half-listening, still fretting about the market.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Sharon moved into the house at the end of the block. Being on the end, she had only one next-door neighbor, and she heard several things about that neighbor within the first week or so. Your neighbor is crazy, people said. Your neighbor is a fascist. Your neighbor murdered a trio of deliverymen and put their bodies in the basement. Your neighbor is a terrible cook and a worse hostess. Your neighbor is a tax cheat. Your neighbor is a slattern. On the Saturday following the Monday of her move, Sharon screwed up her courage and went next door. She rang the bell and waited. She heard a rustling inside and then the scraping of the lock. The door opened. “Hello,” Sharon said, and reached out her hand. What she saw stopped her heart. The neighbor was her. She was the neighbor. The neighbor gasped and shut the door suddenly. That was Sharon’s last visit next door, and she did her best not to even think about the place until the police came, acting on an anonymous tip, found the bodies in the basement, and dragged the lady away.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Susan started having a bit of a breakdown. She couldn’t sleep then thought that maybe she was asleep and couldn’t wake up. She put her hand on her heart and couldn’t feel it beating. She tasted something metallic in her mouth. “It is the wrong idea,” she said. She tasted hair in the air. “It needs brushing,” she said. She found a brush and brushed the air. She sat on the carpet next to the bed and told the stuffed tiger that Genie had won for her to go stand by the door. She told the door to stay where it was. She called Genie on the phone. Genie answered. “I’m not here,” Genie said. Genie hadn’t answered. Susan wasn’t even holding her phone. Susan went into the bathroom and started telling the face in the mirror to be quiet but it kept talking, screaming even. She went back out into the bedroom. The tiger hadn’t moved. “Move,” she whispered. “Move.” The tiger moved. Susan ran back into the bathroom. She brushed the air in there, unwilling now and forevermore to face the tiger.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
“Put on your wigs and your neon coats,” he says. He really just means that the class should brace themselves for what lies ahead. They are about to delve into the most recondite section of the syllabus, starting with Keller’s “Sublation and Signification,” moving on to Vigneron’s “Returning History to Oblivion,” then through Boisseau and Bock, Graf and Frankel, the audio-only films of Accardi, the sealed-room installations of Merritt-Meyer, and finally the Teflon Revolution, a three-day period of unrest in a upscale suburb in Missouri that Earnhardt believes “both erases and makes permanent the notion of ‘the smallest measurable unit of will’” (that’s Graf’s). He’s always both charged and exhausted by this stretch. So many questions, so few answers. Is that his motto or his epitaph? He pats his pockets to make sure he’s alive. It’s his motto. He goes home, sleeps, wakes, rereads his class notes, drives through town, sleeps, wakes, heads off to class. When he walks into the room, the first thing he sees is a young woman named Hannah, one of his better students, sitting in the front row, notebook already open, pen already poised, smiling because she has done what no one else has, which is to take his words at face value, which is also to remake them as pure irony, and there she sits, almost laughing now, in her wig and neon coat.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The day her husband left for his business trip, he went out the door without turning or speaking, and that confirmed her suspicions that he was probably gone for good. She sat down at the kitchen table and had the rest of the eggs and bacon. After breakfast, she walked to the office, not the short way along the street but the long back way that took her along the edge of the creek, through the graveyard, into the large meadow that always surprised her when it appeared—it was as if the town had disappeared entirely, and this massive patch of grass put in its place, a form of starting over—and then out the back corner of the meadow into the alley that ran between the church and rectory and and deposited her at her office. She had covered ground, to the point that when she stood up at the podium to address the small conference that had assembled to hear about trends in publishing, her voice was steady and she found herself concerned more with the pain of a woman in the front row, whose could not keep it from her eyes, than with her own.
One EMT was moved from the building where both were housed to the fire station. The other was sent home. The one who was moved went, knees trembling, stomach every kind of butterfly, worried about how the transition would be. Would people be nice? Mean? Were those words too broad to describe human behavior? The one who was sent him didn’t go there. He went to the fire station and lay in wait for the first one so that he could jump out and scream. He expected terror and then laughter but he knew he’d be fine with just the first.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Althea’s friend Sarah texted her to say that she had written a play. “I know the theater is dead,” she said. “But maybe this will make it live again.” From the description of it, Althea was skeptical. “It’s about you,” Sarah said. “But not you you. A you who is a man in nineteenth-century Russia, who’s mad because his mother keeps trying to marry him off to the meanest woman in town when he’s sweet on someone else—a guy. And he’s scribbling all this into his journals, using a code that he invented so that no one can read it even if they find the journals, which they won’t, because he hides them between his mattress and the bed frame, just like you do. There are songs done in a punk style but more like rat-a-tat spoken word and a dance that gestures toward ballet without being it, and the whole thing ends with a big light show.” The text was too long and much too much. The play sounded dicey at best. And how the hell did Sarah know where she hid her journals?
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Here was the joke of it: before they moved, but after they found out they had to move, Magda was told by Billie, a friend whose husband had been transferred the year before, that the place was “kind of a one-horse town,” and that was why, Billie said, she was hanging out at bars when Fred was away on business, why she sometimes went home with the guys she met there, why once she even brought a guy to her home, to the apartment she and Fred shared, and Magda said that she had to go or else the news was going to give her a heart attack, and Billie said that she wished Fred would have one, and Magda clucked her tongue and said that even though Fred had his problems he had always been a good friend to them like that one time that he loaned them his generator and then didn’t even ask for it back the next winter just bought himself a new one and Billie said sure he could be giving in some ways but not in the most important ways if Magda knew what she meant and Magda clucked her tongue again and said that Billie and Fred better stay together so that Magda and Francesca would have friends to go to dinner with or to invite over to watch football, there was a new coach, everyone was hopeful, and Billie sighed and said that yes, it was likely that she and Fred would stay together, she was just trying to keep her head above water in the pile of sticks and bricks they called a town, and Magda hung up and she and Francesca packed up their life into boxes and waited most of a morning for the movers and spent the night in a motel and then drove to meet the movers at their new house, and this was all before Billie failed in her attempt to hold things together with Fred, failed because it turned out he was running around too, and she poisoned him for a little while but decided that divorce was probably easier, and he moved back to the city and remarried, and Billie had a brief fling with Magda, nothing serious at all, too much vodka and sorrow, a little high school redux was all, Magda even told Francesca, who said she was hurt but would laugh it off (and did), but back to when they were waking up in the motel and driving to meet the movers, when the first thing they saw when they came across the town line, plain as day, was two horses.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
INT. STORE
MURIEL spies a customer looking up at the top shelf, where the handbags and binoculars are kept, along with some art books and jewelry. She slides across the floor, speaking before she arrives.
MURIEL
Hi.
She extends her hand and then, when it is not taken, withdraws it. She senses that the man is ready for whatever she has to say so she says it.
MURIEL
We don’t have prices, exactly. Pick something out from up there and then spin the wheel. Wherever it lands, that’s what the item costs. That’s how things work here at the store. That’s how we do. It’s our way of making it seem more like a contest, a game. It’s aleatory. That’s a word that Francisco learned in graduate school, a million years ago, before he moved out West, had a band, hit the charts, broke the band up because he thought he could go solo, recognized he was wrong and then some, sunk into addiction, surfaced without drowning, cleaned himself up, did a little acting (you probably remember Rattled, right? No? Brief Candle? Jumping Through June?
Geez—do you ever go to the movies?), made a little cash, started this store. How long has it been a business? That’s a hard question to answer. Francisco has carried this idea around with him for as long as he can remember. How long have we been here? Hard to say, too, depends on whether you mean in town or at this exact location.
Oh, when did we open? Yesterday.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
“Exhausted.” She had asked him how he felt and he briefly debated lying, but he wanted to get off on the right foot. She had let him pick the restaurant and he paid her back with honesty. “It’s just work,” he said, as if that explained it, but it wasn’t just work. It was his ex-wife, and his kids, and his health, and his hair, and his car, and even smaller things, like the fact that he couldn’t find his copy of Your Arsenal, and streaming wasn’t good enough, maybe for some people, not for him, it was ownership he desired, but he felt strange about going into a store and buying another copy, mostly because of how Morrissey had turned out. He didn’t go into any of this. He was committed to honesty, but not insanity. The meal was good. The wine, too. She invited him back to her place, and he went, not exactly lustful, more curious to see what would transpire, and what did transpire was what she wanted, evidently, another drink in her kitchen and then lights dimmed so they could move to her couch. A session there, alternately cautious and frantic. They did not make it to the bedroom. That was her intention, as she said more than once, but she sensed that he was flagging and permitted business to finish on the couch. He slept. When he woke, he needed a minute to adjust his eyes. The couch was gone. He felt ground beneath him. The entire apartment, in fact, was gone. He was outside, exposed to a sky that was a gory red. She was gone, too, or at least nowhere in sight. He glanced at his watch; the hands were spinning wildly. Was it a dream? No sooner had he asked himself the question than he knew it was not. He knew, with a plummet of certainty, that he was wide awake, that he had in fact slept for a hundred years, a thousand, more, that the world had ended and he had woken into the aftermath. Lucid, marooned, he stood and glanced at the horizon, where fire licked upward into the sky. “Absurd,” he said out loud. “Ridiculous.” No one was around to hear him. He started to sing “Glamorous Glue” at the top of his lungs.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He heard a noise in the house that he was pretty sure was the wind moving through the third floor hallway, where he had left the eastern window open, partly as a reminder to himself to get the blinds fixed, which he believed was just a simple matter of tweezing out debris from where the lift cord met the valance, and though it had rained once and dampened the carpet up there, the fear of mildew making a mess of the entire level, and especially the small office he had on the western side of the house, through an overemphatic dark wood door, just served to strengthen the reminder, which he told himself when he heard the noise and reiterated the mental note. He was wrong. The noise was an intruder. The error was his last.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The man with thinning hair and thickening glasses went to see a similar man, similar in that respect, different in others, the first man was a journalist who had attained fame with his first book, an essayistic meditation on the role of fear in business, it had topped bestseller lists, was often in the hands of CEOs on jets public and private, prosperous men, emphatically so, though their exact relationship with it, beyond ownership of course, was unclear (one contemporaneous review called it “a thick rectangular badge of belonging that is destined, for better or worse but probably better, to be mostly unread”), the masterstroke with this book, he liked to tell people at conferences, was its cover design, which was purely white aside from a centered little pinpoint photograph of a screaming man, so that was the first man, and the second man was a pop songwriter, famous in the sixties, famous in the seventies, famous in the eighties, still famous, though slightly less, and he had read the book, truly read it, and found it both trenchant and odious, as he said in the letter of invitation he wrote to the journalist, using precisely that language, “I found your book both trenchant and odious,” and though he also indicated in the letter that he was, at this late date, expanding his horizons and receptive to the notion of a collaboration that would produce something that was both pop and prose, the truth was that he had only told a half-truth, that he found the book odious but not trenchant, that he was enraged with its success, that he was tired of flying on planes or sitting in private airports and seeing it in the hands of other men (only men, but that was a whole other story), and that, as a result of a recent series of doctor’s appointments, increasingly hopeless, which located within him a terminal illness that would most certainly send him before the year’s end to, in the words of one of his most famous songs, “a place to read alone,” meaning the great beyond, meaning the grave, he felt even more urgency in writing the journalist, asking him to visit, setting the place up with food and drink and steeling his courage to, when the man arrived, kill him.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The man was standing on the table, intensively. He kicked off one plate and then another plate. He was so mad that he wasn’t going to stop until he had kicked off every one. He pulled his foot back and got ready to kick again. But then he noticed that the next plate had food on it. How had that happened? The smell of it rose to him. The smell of it was delicious. He got down on his hands and knees and ate the food, which was spaghetti and steak and corn. He ate all of it, filling himself, believing this was an act of love, and then he stood and kicked that plate off the table, too.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Hulbrecht switched on his set. A puppet was on, dressed in a suit, wearing glasses. Next to the puppet, on a small table, was a glass of milk, or at least a white liquid intended to read as milk. The puppet opened its mouth. A noise like a throat clearing emanated from the general direction of the puppet. "Are we on the air?" the puppet said. Beat. Beat. The puppet went on. “The middle class, long in the center of the the nation’s so-called Sandwich of Prosperity, below the top bread of the billionaires and multimillionaires, above the bottom bread of the poor and poorer, used to be a combination of turkey, ham, and Swiss, layered generously, and with a mustard of aspiration between them and the wealthy (who are, remember, the top bread).” The puppet paused, drank the milk, emitted a tiny nearly saintly burp, went on. “But as the nation finds itself remade and reshaped by what economists call the ‘three p’s’ — pandemic, policies, and polarization — the meaty middle, where a family could once own a home, drive two cars, send their kids to school, and have a little left over for an annual vacation, is missing in action. Back to you, Charlie.” A picture of Charlie Chaplin now filled the screen. Music played. Was it...reggae? Hulbrecht closed his eyes. He was going to need the longest nap ever.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The two men riding in the elevator do not know each other, not really, but they have been brought together by fate in the form of an office, one man the boss of the company, in fact the scion of it, has been riding this same elevator since he was five years old, at his father’s hip, used to bound out into the hall with unconfined enthusiasm, The Whirlwind they called him, now he’s in that same elevator again, heading up to the same office where his father once sat, same desk even, different chair at least, he jokes, sometimes he feels like he’s absorbing the old man’s thoughts, his hopes and disappointments, maybe even more than that, there’s an ache in his side that he worries might be cancer like the kind that took his dad, kidney, if it is he’ll get through it, he has a support network, same as his father, same but different, no wife any longer, Arizona, Peter, but kids, two, neither at the company, neither with any interest in it really, funny that way, he didn’t push them away but away they went, is he the end of the line? The other man in the elevator is a new marketing manager. He has very few thoughts and is determined to keep it that way.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
[man stands] [tips cap] [tips cup] [cup’s filled, too high] [cups spills] [scalds thighs] [lady sitting nearby scowls] [“the word ‘thighs’ is gross”] [man with lady, sitting close, sighs, says “you have body issues”] [“I have Bobby issues,” lady says] [I’m Bobby,” says Bobby] [“I know,” says lady] [lady cries] [man tries comfort] [lady won’t look at his eyes] [glances up toward skies] [dog trots in, bares incisor, bites man] [man dies] [“from the dog?” says the lady] [doctor shakes his head weightily] [“heart attack,” he says] [explains technical artifact contributing to stoppage of the inner fist] [touches lady’s wrist] [gazes intersect] [it’s purely incorrect] [pulses quicken] [the stricken man is left upon the table] [the pair drives as quickly as they’re able] [doctor’s apartment] [hand tugs on garment] [doctor and lady disrobe] [doctor strokes lady’s earlobe] [lady speaks] [“right there”] [heat leaks through hair] [man wakes, nightmare] [gets cup of coffee] [spills it] [scalds thighs] [yelps, then] [“here we go again”]
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Heller, in fact, presented his collection of writings as a deft, deviceful way to describe humanity “in all its puny glory.” Brushed off for forty minutes straight, he employed actual gunpoint to prevail upon the men and women in the room, along with any family members who happened to be visiting at the time, to read the whole manuscript. As the exercise was wrapping up he went to them one by one, hammer cocked, and demanded to know what they had thought. He came to understand by the consensus that coalesced out of these intensely solicited reviews that the portrait of the species was perhaps not as vivid as he had wished, but that nevertheless he had to accept as he found it. He lifted and turned the pistol until the barrel was on his temple. He considered eliciting a reaction from himself. Newcomb saved him, citing Pearson, who referred to Gluecomb, who paraphrased Fleerson, point being that many other thinkers of the time agreed that the most significant unit for the production of empathy was not definitively the extended narrative but might instead be a series of short telegraphic paragraphs. When he got home that night, breathing easier now, maybe easier than ever, with the gun stashed in a paper bag beneath the front seat of the car, he couldn’t get the key into the slot in the lock despite several attempts. It never occurred to him, not the first time, the second, or even the third, that it was a metaphor.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
“A language star,” Albrecht said, turning to face the class, no, not a class, he was in the boardroom, how embarrassing. What had happened? He breathed in through his nose and held what life he could. He slowed time. What had happened was that he believed himself to be still at university, still that brash and angular young writer and instructor, face always wearing an expression of wolfish enthusiasm, ideas akimbo. Decades had passed since then. He had published a slim book and then a fat one, made a little money, lost it, married, made a series of promises, kept them, and in what seemed like a blink had been loaded like cargo into his wife’s father’s company, ground floor, elevator going up, Executive VP Albrecht. Seven wealthy faces tipped up at him. Sweat mizzled in the space between his lower back and ass. How much time had passed? He needed to start talking. Sales were on the table, distribution too, development as well. Ground needed covering. Concision was everything. Mnemonic: laconic. Bring your spiel to heel. He breathed out though his nose and began to polish all seven faces with hokum.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
“Boring and incoherent,” “light and entertaining,” “engaging and elegant,” “self-indulgent and grandiose,” “lyrical and melodic,” “mystical and angry,” “beautiful and monotonous,” “standing in the doorway and sitting on the bed,” “wearing nothing and remembering having worn everything,” “worrying about the electrical bill and fantasizing about a new laptop,” “mumbling his name and mumbling her own,” “testing the limits of comprehension and making bad coffee.”
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He never wrote the same sentence twice, though it should be said, as a point of clarification and possibly pride, that his only book, published in 1948, a bestseller that got him his reputation, his mansion, his sports car, his wife, a masterpiece they said, about which he would later crack that "it skinned leisured society, didn't it then?" was just one sentence long.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
A whole half's hope hangs in the room. It's putty-colored where it's not red or blue. The captain gets into the middle and clears his throat, which clears his thoughts. Everyone's expecting a speech but instead he begins to sing. There's laughter at first but when it dies down the room is filled with his tone, which is one of agony, the humiliation of the first half, the sense that the deficit might be insurmountable. One player starts to sing along, and then they all do. The second half goes as expected. The team forms a choir instead.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
For years Sussman’s dog didn’t talk. Then one morning in the middle of going out the door, claws clicking on the hardwood, he turned and spoke, in a clear voice, at a moderate volume, with an accent that was distinct but also difficult to place (Virginia? Maryland? he had been born in Illinois as far as Sussman knew). “Do you want to know what I think?” the dog said. Sussman did, intensely. “What, Oliver?” he said, feeling foolish as soon as the words had left his mouth. The dog had been called something else when he had come to Sussman. It was presumptuous to have hung another name on him. But Oliver responded to Oliver amiably. “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “Not just you you, but all of you. All the humans. And I’ve come to one conclusion.” Sussman leaned in for wisdom. “What I’ve learned is that everyone is a bubble, and everyone is also the stick that can burst it.” Tears sprung to Sussman’s eyes. Oliver was right, exactly right, more right than any dog had ever been. He stepped forward in appreciation, but Oliver was already making his way to the lawn for his daily constitutional. He never spoke again.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He and his girlfriend were having, he explained to his therapist, sex. She was bewitched by his tenuous hold on his obvious authority and he by the lengths she went to to affect an effortless beauty. “We’re not the first two people to do this,” he said, defensively, but when he focused his gaze he could see that the therapist wasn’t attacking. He shifted to an apologetic tone though he had not been accused. Why was he apologizing, then? Was he chicken? “It’s ‘sex,’” he said, fingers in the air around his ravaged face. “When you get old you have to put it in quotes because it contains other things and also does not quite contain itself anymore.” The therapist had been his girlfriend’s idea. The therapist was younger than her and attractive. The therapist was younger than her and frowned. The therapist was a thousand years old and made of dust. The therapist was a figment in the window that showed through its glass children playing in the snow. The therapist was a note he had scribbled to himself that said “burn the whole goddamned thing down.” The therapist was out of network and consequently he knew that this would be their final conversation, that it would solve nothing, that he would go right back to his apartment and fall into the same sad situation that had brought him here. He would not learn. He never learned. He was afraid he never learned. “That’s why I sent you there,” his girlfriend would say, and then disappear into the bathroom to get ready for the romp ahead. Sex!
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
“Could you be more boring, Roy?” She was sitting at a table for two when he came in. He chuckled and pretended to recoil. “Ha ha and all but I’m serious,” she said. “You have been the beneficiary of so many advantages, starting at birth, continuing through your schooling and your jobs, all of which elevated you with their prestige and elevated you further with the false sense that you had earned them. So you get that head start and you do what? You write and then record these long thoughtful pieces about…about what, exactly? You present back to people what they already know and in doing so simply confirm the shallowness of both those people and of yourself. Bedpans, Roy. Bedpans. You know, there are those who go to bat for you. You are skilled, people say. Lyrical, they say. Fluent. Do they mean fluid? Whatever. None of it’s true. You have had endless opportunities to skitter out, stiffen up, stop, stall, or sink, and I can only assume that’s why you have eventually learned to float. But float is the best I can say. I listened to one of your recent pieces. I don’t know what depressed me more, the manicured style and obvious insights that dominated it or the few impotent leaps into what you must think represent a riskier brand or writing and thinking. Let’s even get to the matter of your body. You’re an inch or two taller than an average guy, Roy. Did you really think that gives you something special?” He shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “I’m Alan.” She wasn’t fazed. “It still applies,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Her face was in shadow, which she liked. More mystery. The phone call came in as scheduled and she picked it up and before the voice on the other end of the line could say so much as hello she rattled off a string of numbers. It had been easier in the old days when there was a cord to twist in her hands. She would use the cord for finger strangling, push the blood one way or the other, turn an index tip a deep pink verging red then ease off and watch the white joint darken back to normal. Now she was done with the numbers and listened with her whole body as the voice on the other end of the line told her a story: he had left the embassy, he was on his way over, he had a love letter and a knife and half a mind to use one of them. Her eyes could have gone wide as saucers but she played it the other way, narrowed them to dashes. The pair of them Morse Coded an M across her face. She hung up the phone and shook her head contemptuously. In the back, behind the director, she could see various thumbs up, but she didn’t need them. She had been famous so long that she knew that they had gotten exactly what they needed.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Life is additive not subtractive, if you ask the worker in Cubicle 1. It’s subtractive, not additive, if you ask the worker in Cubicle 2. The worker in Cubicle 3 is a gifted artist. The worker in Cubicle 4 is gifted at nothing. The worker in Cubicle 5 has replacement parts in both legs and jokes about being a robot. The worker in Cubicle 6 hates those jokes. What’s so funny about being a robot? The worker in Cubicle 7 has pica, and thinks that no one notices, though everyone does. The worker in Cubicle 8 once believed that life was structured in a way that permitted an endless circuit of generosity, but then he spent nearly an entire summer laboring on a project for the guys from C Division, cracked the design issue that made the whole thing possible, and when the company announced the new product launch he wasn’t mentioned at all, and that broke something in him, even though he knew that he shouldn’t have let it get to him, and he went from being a garrulous Pollyanna, a little too skinny, sure, to a lowering wraith that the president of B Division said was “the embodiment of capital-D Darkness, but not in any powerful or interesting way,” and even though she was serious about that, she laughed, a buoyant trill that her husband, who worked for A Division now but used to run D Division, had always loved. The worker in Cubicle 9 is sleeping in a rowboat out at sea, lips cracked by the salt and the sun, entirely unaware that a nearby gull has marked him for and will soon pluck out his eyes. He is dreaming the rest of them.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The good people were lined up at the door. The door had a lock on it but it was never engaged. For that matter, the door wasn’t even closed. It was flung wide open and the good people moved through it, those in the back only faintly aware of what those in the middle could hear, and what those in the front knew: that beyond the door was a library filled with books, and not ordinary books either, but books whose sentences were composed of words that contained meaning but not only meaning, that contained fragrances and musical notes and the equivalent of human touch and even jokes. The people in front had already entered the library and had already tipped books down from the shelves. They were reading them. Emotions and excitement played across their faces. The people in the middle knew what awaited them. The people in the back were starting to know. Also in the room, in the center, in full view of everyone who held a book and everyone who was filing in with the intent of holding a book, was a fountain. The clearest water burbled from the top stone shelf and spilled down to the lower level. Light played out in its surface and depths. The water carried a different kind of message than the books. It inspired fear, awe, and lust, and moved everyone to move closer to everyone else. The room itself was sentient, and knew that though it had been empty just a few minutes before, it would soon be filled with the humanity of these good people. Surprise ending: Everyone was dead.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
An ominous visitor was at the door. He did not give his name. An ominous, anonymous visitor was at the door. He was always there. It was not anomalous for this ominous, anonymous visitor to be at the door. He knocked and knocked with growing force, explaining that he needed to be let inside so that he could correct the record, and that his impulse to do so sprung only from a highly developed sense of moral rectitude. “My motives are autonomous,” said the ominous, anonymous, non-anomalous visitor. Inside the house, a group of people sat around a table, playing cards, telling each other that the knocking noise was the pipes. They were a diverse bunch—an economist, an agronomist, two astronomers, a commoner—but only called each other “friend.”
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He stopped reading after a page. Something in the beginning of the book, in the first paragraph or two, before characters or setting were established, before any plot could be unfurled let alone comprehended, had moved him, in the full sense of the word, and he was not in the park anymore, not watching the robust woman across the narrow paved path untangle her dog’s leash from the leg of a bench, not listening to the conversation of the older couple parked in a patch of shade (they had been together for a decade, married for a year, and one of the men was pretending loud regret that they had tied the knot), not positioning himself vigilantly so that he could keep an eye on the freak-denim pair at his back (the young man seemed like a pickpocket; the girl seemed like someone whose chemical proclivities might require her companion to pick pockets and pass her whatever cash turned up). All of that had left him, or he it, the minute he started moving through the book, when a short stretch of language, a few words really, a verb that surprised him, a noun he didn’t expect, an adjective placed daringly, had come up off the page, pierced him like an arrow or a blade, and sent him to what seemed not exactly like an afterlife but like an additional one.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
When Keller goes to the cemetery he is drawn to the tombstones of the important and the remembered. He stands in front of the tombstones, thinking about the people who are under there, the artists, the statesmen, the philanthropists, the barons. They intimidate him and make him feel small. They are songs on the radio and he is only notes on a page. They are cardboard and he is only stiff paper. They are birds in the air and he is a grimy feather downdrafting into a street gutter. They are known and he is unknown. But he is living and they are dead. He holds this as a victory for a second at most before he realizes that it is the greatest defeat.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Christina opened a bar called The Pitiful Compromise, hoping that it would be accepted in the right spirit, and it was, though at first by an elite group of ironists, and in that way she met the man in the Arsenal soccer jersey who became her second husband and then, three years later, after a honeymoon in Italy that had both of them breathless with excitement at all times, after a return to the States to manage the bar, now a neighborhood institution, after two years of leveling off that she told herself were like a foundation settling, after fights that she knew were caused by drink and fights that could not have been, after an awkward moment where she saw him in the bar flirting with someone else, the same person, more than once, he became her murder victim, but not before he confessed that he had been feigning enthusiasm in Italy. “You’re too much,” he said. “I was undone by your intensity.” The bullet redotted the “i” in Emirates. He was wearing his jersey as he did far too often.
©Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The gallery kept saying in its newsletter that the time had come for miniatures. “Incorrectly thought of as curios,” as “works that evidence a certain technical skill but are otherwise without consequence,” they were “returning to currency” and would “rule the day.” That pleased Dennis greatly, because that is what he had been making. He forwarded the email to Julia. “My time,” he said. “My time.” But the next time he went to see a show, and the time after that, he walked in the front door to see huge canvases covering the walls. The third time he called ahead. “I see that your newsletter keeps signaling a return to smaller scale,” he said. The woman on the phone agreed with a pleasant young voice. He imagined her ankles. But when he and Julia arrived, he saw that the ceiling had been peeled away along the back edge to allow a portrait, fifty feet square, to be lowered into the place. The portrait was of Arthur Jettelson, the owner of the the gallery and the author of the newsletter. Had it all been a feint? A sadism? Dennis went looking for Jettelson. He didn’t have to go far. He was leaning on the front desk, talking to the woman with the ankles. “Hey!” he said. “Hey! Hey!” He imagined that the repetition was an accumulation of power. Neither of them looked up at him. He turned toward the massive portrait of Arthur Jettelson and began to run. At his back, Julia called his name but it was far too late.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
The bravest man he ever knew died alone in a New York cab, a handled paper bag on the seat next to him filled only with a pair of sneakers, white, a pair of socks, same, and an unopened bottle of eyedrops, items so ordinary that they could only give the wrong impression of their purchaser and, all too briefly, their owner.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He has spent so, so long becoming. He was ready, or was at least ready to say that he was ready. He set up shop on the corner and began to declaim his verse. It takes the form of oratory at times and at other times music. Some people passing think him lousy. One little boy bursts into tears although his much older sister looks back with sly appraisal. The mother keeps her eyes ahead. She does not want to look back at this man made mostly of words. He declaims more verse, drawing on his own inspiration, on what was remembered and what else was remembered wrong, on the five thousand books on his back. What he’s saying sounds good enough to him to speak up, louder. The older sister is standing on the corner across the street, still watching. The brother and mother have vanished inside the belly of a store. The sister, jet hair, maroon coat, stares levelly, mouthing “ragged odist.” How does she know? How old is she? He can’t look at her though she is all he wants to look at. He feels upbeat. He will make it after all. Or will he? Can the intensity of his optimism vault him from obscurity to the renown he has always deserved? He pogos up on hope, determined not to slip and shatter on the sidewalk below. He attains an altitude. Wafting from a window he can smell a garlicky brodetto. Beneath him people go back and forth, holding bags weighted down with items they have just purchased. Their receipts float near the tops, unlit wicks.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Three weeks after I sent you the four-page story that you said saved your life, you woke me at 2 a.m. by phone from Tualatin and we talked for forty minutes. You talked, rather. I pressed the phone to the topside of a head I was unwilling to lift from the pillow. You posed a battery of questions about the story I had written, at first typographical ones about how I wished dialogue to be represented (quotation marks or dashes?), eventually letting go that pretense to interrogate me about the character I had created in the story. I had based it on you, of course, and specifically on the way you had acted in the wake of our breakup. It wasn't my idea. It was your prompt. “I don't want to be invisible,” you said. “I want to be seen by your talent. It's the least you can do.” But now I had to do more. I had to field your questions. Who did I think owned the character? Who deserved to control him? In changing him from a depressed but manic young suitor to a cheery young husband, was I erasing you? What trace of you remained? All I remember saying was that I had considered every consequence, because I felt that saying otherwise was an abdication of my responsibilities as a writer, and also because I wanted to get off the phone. Four days later, you bulled into a local coffee shop at closing time, ranting about how aliens had probed you and sucked your soul out through a small metal tube. My fiancé said it was a sad circumstance, but he was laughing when he said it. “And the story you wrote,” he said, “is hi-larious.” He was in the room with me, not on the phone, but next to me in bed, as he had been when you called.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Well, let me repeat. That’s a very important question, and the answer has to be clear. In this matter, one thing is certain, and that is that any and all interest in the project, whether municipal, national, or otherwise, must be justified as a function of the cultural value of the surrounding property while at the same time factoring in the political considerations associated with the storage and disposal of residues, both toxic and noxious. Perhaps the clearest way I can express the presiding state’s policy on the topic at hand is to refer all inquiries to the relevant agencies. I should also add that as this is a teleconferenced hearing rather than an in-person meeting, I am wearing no pants, and have no intention of doing so. Oh, none of you is wearing pants either? Well, now I feel a mix of embarrassment and condemnation. What is wrong with you people? I can do anything I want. I am the mayor. My wife is the governor. But you are what, engineers? Teachers? Journalists? Come on. Have just the tiniest bit of self-respect. Don’t scowl like that, Mr. Abram. I could walk three stories down and smack you across the face, you know. I won’t, but I could. And you, Dr. Tolliver, shouldn’t smirk. Some people look better without pants. Some people look better without anything. I swear it. What? No. I don’t think so. What I do think is that this meeting is over. In about five seconds I’m going to lean down and hit the red button and all of you will disappear from my screen. I’ll disappear from your screens, too, but that doesn’t mean you’re done with me. Sleep with one eye open. I own weapons and I’m stealthy and as I think this call has established I’m not what you would consider stable. Here I go. I’m pressing the button. Sleep with one eye open or risk having them both closed forever.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He finished visiting her in her office, went back to his to pick up his coat, and then hustled to get to his car. Rush hour was looming, a dark cloud on the horizon of his mind. He welcomed it, in a way. He would make the most of the long drive home. He needed time to think. He needed time to think about her. He would turn the radio off, or turn it on to news voices he could filter out like the ink marks on paper that came from trying a pen to see if it still worked. Grooved concrete shot by as they descended in the glass elevator. He liked the phrase. He smiled, turned it so it caught the light. But just as he started to appraise it he was seized by the idea that he had read it somewhere. Did that mean that it was not his thought? Or perhaps, by resurfacing the thought, he had established a claim upon it. No one else in the elevator was thinking the same thing. Within the elevator, he was the author of that thought. But he knew this was a dodge. It wasn’t truly his. It had come from his memory, not his mind. He hated himself. He was nothing, a mountebank, a flop. What had she ever seen in him? Of course it was just a fling, as she had said. Of course it made no sense to rattle their home lives, as she had said, or to jeopardize their careers. It was a risk only worth taking for a man of originality and value, and he was neither. He saw that now. Someone in the elevator passed gas. Someone else faintly whistled a reggae tune. He closed his eyes and melted invisibly into a corner. The elevator drained out into the parking garage and he followed. His legs felt numb. He listened to music on the drive home because what was the point? There was nothing open for discussion anymore.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Julia, the editor, called Georgina, made her remarks, paused as if waiting to hear the sound they made when they fell into the space between them, made some more remarks. Her tone was a close match for the way she had looked when the two of them had met for coffee. “Let’s say lunched,” Julia had said. “It’s more dignified.” But Georgina hadn’t eaten anything. She had been too nervous. She had been living with the book for more than a year at that point, and she needed to know that it might find favor. It had. Julia had made a few broad recommendations, more time on the banks of the Ganges, a little less humor close upon the sex scenes, and Georgina had left that lunch at an altitude. Two more years had passed since, and Julia was calling with a verdict. The gist was that the book needed work. At least one major character was “drawn flatly.” A new beginning would certainly help, and a new ending might. It would likely miss its publication date but “you can't put a stopwatch on art.” All would be memorialized in a letter to follow. Nothing was said about the Ganges or sex, and Georgina located a filament of pride in the weave of despair. She had satisfied those demands. Why would the new ones be any different? But Julia’s voice was further and further away and that was when Georgina realized that she was also falling into the space in the conversation, that she had already fallen, and that she was, if still alive, also dead.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
I try to give her a reason to talk to me. She doesn’t have a reason not to, but that’s how she acts. She stays on her side of the office inventing work to keep herself there. I swear to God she could be done by eleven or latest noon but every day the report or the summary of the report of whatever she’s working on keeps her busy until five sharp and then she’s gone. Sometimes on her way out she’ll stop at Angie’s desk or Mary’s desk and say that she felt like the day just sped by. As a joke. Great joke, huh? On days when she has nothing to do, when Bob or Anderson stops by in the morning to tell her that it’s going to be a light load, you know what she does? She fakes phone calls. I clear my throat or shift so I can catch her eye but she won’t take the bait. Instead I see her pick up the phone and she might only deal three or four numbers, making a show of the last one, which is never anywhere close to seven, and then her voice curls into a conversation that I know she’s not having, oh yes the report went out yesterday and we’re expecting to see a proof of it tomorrow and at that point I’ll be able to review it, oh no I didn’t know that he had said that it’s amazing because I thought the same thing, oh well it was nice to talk to you, and then she hangs up. Can you imagine? Everyone around her must know that it’s fake but they don’t let on. That’s no way to act. Would you say that’s a way to act? By the time we get home I’m sometimes so mad that I can’t even smile at her when we’re sitting at the dinner table.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
He went to the gym, to the store, to the other woman’s home, to his own. He set up shop in the kitchen, made a sandwich, halved it. “You just went to the gym,” his wife said. “Why are you eating again?” He scowled smilingly. “Fill the hole,” he said. He went to the sofa to watch TV. His wife balanced out the other end. “This is like a calendar,” he said. He didn’t wait for his wife to ask why. “It’s how we know another day has passed,” he said. The TV rolled through news he knew he needn’t register. Commercials deployed a series of lively fools. The weatherman had piercing blue eyes. His wife reached across the couch to arouse him but he was spent. He had prepaid. He thought of his office, all the people there he hated, all the people who pretended not to hate him. He thought of the one spot in the hallway just outside the bathrooms where his immediate boss liked to stop and confab. He hated his boss and his boss was one of the rare honest ones who didn’t pretend not to hate him. He had to get to work early the next morning to have a meeting about something. He couldn’t for the life of him remember who was supposed to be running the meeting. It was him, he realized. He dug in his ear for wax. He scratched an itch on the inside of his thigh where the other woman had been. His wife called him by his name. He responded in kind. Each understood the other was attacking. He went to bed, his wife followed fast behind him, reached across again, her motive the same, and this time he pantomimed, joyful but not, fascinated but never, guileful only insofar as it brought on sleep. He could not do so: sleep. No one deserved their name. The weatherman had piercing blue eyes but what were they piercing? It was him, he realized. He let gravity take him downstairs for a glass of whiskey and a bowl of chips. “Fill the hole” measured the hole. He went to the cemetery. The first tombstone was his. He climbed back into the accepting earth.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
Gary Numan did “Are ‘Friends' Electric?” and then went to sleep, confident that he had done his best communicating the chilly but arousing notion of robotic intimacy via a chilly but arousing pop soundscape, synthesizers standing where guitars once stood. He knew that Tubeway Army was going down the tubes, pun intended. The name had outlasted its usefulness. He would shutter it and reemerge into his solo career as a new man, pun intended. He needed sleep, but he was too wired. He could still feel the Minimoog glowing in the center of his mind. He attempted to dispatch the song by declaring its title repeatedly in a quick murmur. “Are ‘Friends” Electric?…Are ‘Friends” Electric?…Are ‘Friends” Electric?” But from the moment he drifted off he was thronged by the syntagm, set upon by questions structured similarly. Are “Songs” Noetic? Are “Thoughts” Monastic? Are “Faces” Emetic? Are “Eyes” Idyllic? Are “Brains” Erotic? Are “Inches” Metric? Are “Limes” Acidic? Are “Feet” Podiatric? Are “Dreams” Bathetic? The questions bounced like sounds off the tile of the room where he suddenly found himself standing, a massive gleaming white bathroom with an ornate full-length mirror, and blinking away the white he effortfully reached his dream arm up and pinched his dream neck, hard, intending to wake himself up, doing so.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
When she died, Betsy was surprised. She was only sixty-three and as far as she knew healthy, still a practical nurse, still a decent squash player. She had been on a mile-long jog the day before though toward the end it had been more of a rueful walk. Her phone had whistled and she had answered it: an excuse. “Hi, Jan,” she said. Jan was her sister, four years older, immodestly proud when people said they looked like twins. Jan was a poet or had become one after she had stopped being a tech executive. “It’s one of the things I like most about poetry,” Jan said. “All the money in the world can’t make me better at it.” No: but it could make people say you were. Betsy kept that to herself for a while but when she finally told Jan she was rewarded with a gale of laughter. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?” Jan said. “It’s truer than true. An editor took a poem of mine recently and then hinted un-hintingly that maybe the journal could use a sizable donation to continue discovering new talents such as myself.” “What did you do?” said Betsy. “I paid,” Jan said. “It was only a hundred thousand dollars.” She laughed again. But when Betsy answered the phone call that downshifted her jog, Jan was crying. Martin had left her. “Again?” Betsy said. Martin had been a loyal husband for thirty years, to the point where even his storm-outs were predictable. They happened every two years or so, always with aggrieved hand-wringing about how they were not complete without children. “I think this time it’s for real,” Jan said. “And I thought you were smart,” Betsy said. Now Jan laughed, a little. “I just need to do something to take my mind off of him,” Jan said, and Betsy agreed. “You should write a poem or sleep with a shopkeeper or something. What you shouldn’t do is feel bad on the phone with me.” “Talk to you tomorrow,” Jan said. Hanging up, Betsy had felt a twinge in her chest that she assumed was a mix of pity and fury toward her sister. She had gone home to take a nap but felt agitated and instead had a glass of wine and went to bed. Now her side ached a bit. If she had still been married she would have complained more but solitude suited her. “I’ll just nod off now and wake up in the morning feeling fine,” she said. She was wrong. Dead wrong, she thought, laughing at the joke because no one else was around to do so. Her body was not gone but attached to her consciousness more in the manner of a suggestion. She felt light in the limbs, with an almost erotic charge that ran up the center of her like a thin hot cylinder. She was in a white expanse, dotted with yellow, which was her favorite color. She wondered if other people saw other colors. Was death a state of mind that fed back to the subject a personalized and thus comprehensible version of an ineffable experience? She heard a voice singing, and made out that it was singing “Waters of March,” and that clinched it. It wasn’t possible that everyone got her favorite song. This was not the Jobim version or Susannah McCorkle’s, her favorite. It was even better, which was impossible. So was her environment an articulation of her inner state, her preferences, her comforts? Is that what death was, for everyone? Was she being rewarded for a life well-lived by being given more of herself? Frankly, it seemed like a punishment. She became aware that she was in not in a boundless expanse but rather in a room decorated, if that’s what you could call it, in pure flat white. She was sitting in a chair. A dresser was off to the right, maybe against a wall, but she couldn’t fully sense a wall. On top of the dresser there was a mirror, reflecting back only flat white. She knew she had to go look in the mirror. Her legs were starting to extend. She tried to stop herself. What would she see in the reflection? It was times like this when she wished that she was the poet and the billionaire.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
