Stray Reprints: November 2021

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

BACK ON THE REST

The driver from the airport wasn’t thrilled to hear that Martin lived so far away, but then came a second thought—maybe the money from the fare, or the opportunity to get out into the country—and his face relaxed. Martin settled in, securing his backpack between his feet, slowly forgetting about the suitcase in the trunk. It had been on his mind all day, ever since the zipper-pull broke at check-in when the woman putting it up onto the scale had handled it too roughly. “My bag,” he had cried, and then been immediately embarrassed. It was just a thing. But it was a thing that had been a present from his ex-wife. He had held onto her by holding onto it. Somehow the breaking of the zipper-pull was like a truth delayed. His backpack, by contrast, was new. He had bought it on the trip. It had been front and center in the window of a beautiful boutique, next to a tasteful sign that described its attributes: the sustainable material it was made from, the way the onboard solar panel allowed for a full day outside. He hadn’t cared about any of it before he saw the sign, but suddenly it was everything to him, and he bought the backpack despite its high price and immediately started to feel pride in it. “Do you mind if I smoke?” the driver asked, and Martin started to say that he would prefer not, wondering even before he spoke why he was being so polite about it. “I’m just joking,” the driver said. “Even if you didn’t mind, I’m not allowed. And I have to tell you, it’s a real killer for me. The not-smoking, I mean, even if smoking is a killer, too. I’ve been inseparable from cigarettes since I was seventeen.” Martin shifted forward on the seat and put his head back on the rest. Here, he thought, were all the ingredients for a rich and complex dish: one man struggling with memory and its artifacts, another one situating himself within a predetermined system of freedom and constraint. It would surely make a good scene in a movie, and wasn’t that what he did? But he was tired, more than he knew, and he fell asleep before they left the airport.

PRETTY SMART ON HIS PART

Edwards had an idea, his best yet, which built upon his earlier theory that people were not good stewards of the earth precisely because they were so tethered to it. They took their first steps upon it and then, after their final steps, their final breaths, they were sunk into a hole in the ground. Love the earth, everybody said, but all you could do, if you really thought it through, was love it and hate it at the same time. It was your origin and your destination, your essence and your captor. It conditioned everything. “And so,” Edwards said, “I have conceived of Extraterrestrial Post-Demise Disposal. Bodies, expired, will be shot into space. Each vessel, a casket, will have Onboard Immolation Technology: basically an oxygen wrap. As soon as the atmosphere is exited, the casket will burn away. No one will be left floating in space but everyone will know that space is the final port of call. This will take the pressure off the earth, psychically speaking, and allow people to be good stewards of the planet without also feeling a certain detestation.” Edwards was at home, speaking into a recording device. He had lived alone since his husband had died. He had practiced the speech for days before committing it to tape. He knew how to insert meaningful micro-pauses to indicate capital letters. He switched off the recorder, headed down to the kitchen to make dinner, misjudged the first step, tumbled terribly, banged his head, was dead. The tape was never heard. He was buried.

Monday, November 29, 2021

A KITTEN NAMED MITTEN

They were going around the table, as per the protocol for the summit, saying hello, introducing themselves (by first name only), naming the city where they were born and their first pet. “It’s like this entire weekend is a long con meant to steal passwords,” said Robert, Chicago, Jaws. A woman across the table from him (Elaine, Chesterfield, Mitten) laughed. Then came the meat of it: each of them had to relate their greatest disappointment. They were, for the most part, heartfelt but predictable: divorces, bankruptcy, a lack of courage in a professional context that led to be stranded in the middle of a corporate lake without the will to swim to shore. Robert named his divorce as well. He had loved Sandra more than she had loved him but he had done less to show it. He was not surprised that she had cheated on him. He was surprised that she had filed. He kicked himself weekly for not fighting harder to keep the marriage. A respectful pause followed his presentation. His insincerity during introductions paradoxically worked to produce additional significance for his confession. The man to his right cleared his throat. Elmer, New York City, Golly. Most of the attendees warmed up on their way into their sad tales: “What disappointed me most? Well…,” “When I think of disappointment…” “I’ve gotten perspective on this in the years since, but…” Not Elmer. He charged right in. “When Arlo Guthrie converted,” he said. Robert tried to laugh but heard himself crying instead.

A LIGHT BOTH SHINED AND REFLECTED

In Katherine Baskin’s Follow, Then, To Where You See, a principled academic, frustrated by the failures of her administration, acts alone to expose a professor with a malignant reputation. The protagonist, an otherwise mild-mannered history adjunct known only as XX, addresses rumors of the professor’s harassment of and affairs with students by first projecting incendiary slogans on the sides of campus buildings and then hiring “crisis actors” (XX’s own ironic designation) to reenact the alleged transgressions. With its piercing appraisal of contemporary academia, Follow, Then, To Where You See blurs distinctions between art and activism. Baskin, like Carmela Camarillo before her, uses what appear to be factual documents, though she does enough undermining of their authenticity to keep her book firmly in the world of fiction. This proves to be a canny strategy; as the book moves past its opening gambit into a deeper and more painful examination of how accusations are adjudicated, it becomes a self-aware critique of the ways in which information is evaluated and deployed. For decades to come, Baskin’s book will be hailed as a landmark in the exploration of identity politics, memory, and personal responsibility—not to mention the potentially explosive interaction among them.

THE WORKWEEK

He’s sitting in the sycamore tree wondering when he might be free. He’s cataloging the days of the week, not even trying to figure out which one is in effect at the moment. It’s enough to try to remember them. He gets them all, if out of order. Whew. With that done, he looks down. Does he have to climb or can he jump? At his back is another tree. Turning to see it is out of the question. The last time he tried he pinched a nerve in his neck. But back there, at approximately the same altitude, is the last woman who loved him. If he does come down, slow along branches and trunk or fast through the air, will she come down too? Or will he be on the ground, scratched or bruised, looking up at what is still out of reach? A bug of some kind moves patiently across the desert of his hand.

Sunday, November 28, 2021

WHAT IS NEVER SEEN BY HUMAN EYES

A chess piece attacks another when there are no players around. A garbage bag dislodges a half-eaten sandwich: plop on the floor, gobbled by a dog. A window, puckishly, opens, shuts, opens, shuts. A hairbrush mocks a balding man in a high, squeaky voice. A fork leaps into the spoon tray. A bedside lamplight turns a shocking green—it can.

UPON HIS WILL A CANDLE-SNUFFER

Dr. Simmons-Sargent invented an alternative reality machine. Roughly two feet high and two feet wide, with the depth of a deck of cards, it allowed him to leave his present reality and enter one of life’s forking paths, as it were. He could go back and marry not his current wife, Elena, an upstanding woman with a rock-solid ethical basis, but Gina, his most brilliant student and—“incidentally,” she said, though it was anything but—a danzón champion. It helped her escape the daily drudgery of existence. Dr. Simmons-Sargent and Gina had stolen away more than a few times. Once they met under a bridge for “dancing.” Dr. Simmons-Sargent had been taken ill at the time with the ague, in fact been medicated excessively, but it was only ever Gina. What a man he could have been with her! Would have been! He shook himself like a dog drying. No more thoughts of Gina. He could go back to Wales, where he had been born, and stay there and farm. He could go back to that autumn day in 1977 and join his brother’s band instead of continuing on to university. That fateful day, but every day was fateful. Those other versions of him would be realized finally by the alternative reality machine, though they would exist only as round feelings in his soul and still pictures projected upon the two by two by deck of cards frame. Living them all might splinter the mind, he knew, but that’s why he built the machine as a recorder. He could collect them all into a kind of film or novel. But what would that cause? Heartache to the nth degree. He felt upon his will a candle-snuffer. He sent out for an axe and spent the afternoon turning the machine into kindling. The next morning he visited Gina’s grave and got back to work.

FOR HER THOUGHTS

LaCenne wasn’t good at everything. She had been pretty good at renaming herself, she thought, had been called Penny for years, never liked it, couldn’t sell people on Penelope, but then during college Jack and Jill (both real names!) came into her life, first as lovers, one and then the other, but then as friends and bandmates (and J&J stabilized as a couple!), and they were doing something that wasn’t quite punk, wasn’t quite New Wave, songs built on angular keyboard lines and Penny singing slogans in her high sweet voice, and a scout took notice, and then a label, and they were offered a deal and had to get serious about many things all at once, and Jack and Jill kept their names (of course!) but Penny had to make a change, and she botched up the French she had learned from her mother’s side of the family (sorry Mémé!) and reemerged as LaCenne, which was also the name of the band. The cover of the first album had her dead center, dressed all in black, leather pants, t-shirt, Louise Brooks wig, and Jack and Jill in back of her, fully red and blue respectively. Untied States, it was called. LaCenne had thought of that, too. What wasn’t she good at? Healthy eating, mathematics, board games, sex that didn’t have some complicating aspect to it, finding her way around a city even after years of living there, feeling okay about herself, sleeping, logrolling, love.

Saturday, November 27, 2021

FELTON'S AGGRIEVED FACE

She is sitting in her kitchen, reading about herself in the newspaper, wondering what to do. “Local Dispute Stirs Up Old Memories.” The article concludes what she already knows. She was wrong, dead wrong, grindingly wrong. Her final day in the old house, she was starting to get an inkling of her fundamental lack of rightness, but that didn’t stop her from walking over to Felton’s house, standing firm on her accusation and, when he questioned her integrity, spitting in his face. He stopped talking and just stood there. She could see in his eyes that he had gone too far. Now what? Should she publicly apologize? Send money? Write (for profit) about the complicated nature of truth and memory and then send that money? She designs her own solution. Drive across town, windows down, listening to the radio, songs of her youth, top volume, ragged singalong, bags in the backseat with items central to her survival in this new world, books, pills, a rabbit, a gun, and it works, not like a charm but like an efficient evasion—the further she gets from home, the less she sees his face in her mind. She pulls into a drive-thru, orders large of everything, texts a friend while waiting, proceeds accordingly, drastically overpays, tells the dreadlocked teenager to keep the change, tells him that he too should have a very nice day. She’s not sure if there’s karma but she sure that she’s not sure enough to risk it.

PEEL FOR HISTORY

Labels upon labels, hiding what the jars had contained the year before or the year before that. Today’s pickled tomatoes might be sealed in the same vessel that previously contained preserves. A chutney where once was a jam. Pennies with their coppery half-winks heaped inside the same glass canister that used to hold a single human finger, harvested from an enemy of the empire. The first owner of the house had done some time.

MUSCLE

She was standing in the middle of the street, one foot on one side of the dotted yellow line, the other on the other. Darius could see her from his bedroom. The street wasn’t busy, never was this time of night, and more than one neighbor had even suggested removing the streetlight—the Brannons said it kept them up—but it was still a street, which meant that there was a theoretical possibility of a car turning off Jarrett or Morris and crossing over to Howard. Were that to happen, she might be hit or killed. Darius opened his bedroom window. “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing? A person shouldn’t be standing in the middle of the street in the middle of the night naked.” Oh yes: he had neglected to mention that she was naked. She turned toward him and waved with a friendly rhythm. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I’d really appreciate it.” “But the cars…” Darius said. “Yes, yes,” the woman said. “I know. The cars. The big scary cars. Demons of machinery and gasoline. Look, man, don’t worry about it. I might look vulnerable, but any car that comes along is going to bounce right off me.” Something in her tone convinced him. He went to sleep. And sure enough, in the morning, she was not there any longer, but there were two cars, one on the north side of the road, one on the south, each with a dent in its hood where her thighs and hips had bent the metal.

Friday, November 26, 2021

HINDSIGHT

Georgette knew Katherine when they were both twenty, and both twenty-one, too. They sat next to each other in a writers’ space for about a month before they slept together. Georgette had already sold a book, a collection of essays that, the publisher asserted, would “reframe” the “contemporary understanding” of “literature by women, for women.” Katherine was taking a second shot at college. It didn’t last. It couldn’t last. Georgette was married. Her husband, almost incredibly, thought her straight. She was years away from clarifying. Katherine was a hot shoe. Her phrase: “You know,” she said, “like atop a camera. I am energy that can be used for more than one thing.” Her brilliance condemned so much around her. A year went by, the less said the better, discretion still valor, but a list perhaps suffices: dinners laughing uncontrollably, phone calls where each tried to talk like only business was being transacted, emails in code, orgasms both when least expected and when devoutly wish’d. The breakup, quick, expected. Seats changed in the writers’ space. Georgette progressed like any foregone conclusion might. Her book emerged to acclaim. It reframed the contemporary understanding. More books followed. She was an eminence. Pasts were forgotten. And then one day she saw in the newspaper that Katherine had published a book, also a collection of essays. The review belittled and thrilled her. Katherine’s book was “furious with intellect.” It contained sentences that “could be said to function like poisonous snakes, moving with natural if not preternatural confidence and putting their teeth in.” The review seemed well-written because of how close it had stood to Katherine’s flame. Georgette remembered when she had stood that close. She looked at her own books lined up on the shelf, each the same size as the others, and had a sudden urge to sweep them all onto the floor. Instead, she wept.

GENRE

If you call it a novel, people will pay more attention. If you call it a memoir, people will pay even more attention than that. If you call it a collection of essays, people will focus on the beauty of your language and the clarity of your thought. If you call it a poem, people will focus on the beauty of your language. If you call it a journal, people will skip parts. If you call it a thriller, people will look for the killer.

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

“Hello,” she said. Adam hadn’t talked to her in a while. They’d had two years or so when it was impossible, and two after that when it was difficult, and nearly ten since then. Much of the problem stemmed from how they met in the first place, each trapped in unrewarding relationships, each guilty to the point of sadism about betraying their relationships. But they were sharpeners, each for the other. United, they were optimized. And still, the chastening. Their time together was spent entirely at night, cleaning up (sometimes literally) the mess that they had made in misguided passion: spilled wine glasses, a torn skirt zipper, more. Plus neither of them was good at lying. Plus her parents lived in another country and so she took long vacations around holidays. Plus her boyfriend was such a drastically different type of human being that Adam often wondered it her attraction to him (Adam) was simply a countermovement to her time with him (the boyfriend). Etc., etc., etc. But now she had called—maybe she had heard about the end of his marriage—and the way the sight of her number on his phone screen both chilled and heated his blood did him in. His heart stood in shadow, just out of the reach of the bright white. It was noirish to the point of comedy. He answered. He was never not a fool. She had updates for him. The boyfriend was gone. Her parents now lived in the States. Her looks, she said, had changed, not necessarily for the worse, but she was older now, fuller. “I can carry off that dress,” she said. “No,” she said. She had thought better. “My life is like a hall of mirrors after you turn off the lights,” she said. Adam closed his eyes, tried his best not to feel his own limits and how long he had allowed himself to reside with them. He closed his eyes and made peace with the coming pain.

BREAKUP

“I’ve seen saturation. I’ve seen supersaturation. I’ve seen bonds dissolve. I’ve seen equilibrium. I’ve seen condensation. I’ve seen pressure. I’ve seen instability.” It wasn’t a chemist talking. It was his girlfriend. And she didn’t look happy.

FRAGMENTS FROM OLDEST! THE MUSICAL

Originally Composed January 2007 / Originally published in the Washington Post

December 12, 2006 (AP): Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden, recognized as the world's oldest person, died Monday in a Memphis nursing home, the home's administrator said. She was 116. Emiliano Mercado del Toro, 115, of Puerto Rico is now expected to assume the title of world's oldest person, said a Guinness researcher.

EMILIANO MERCADO DEL TORO:

They call me El Viejo

Because I'm very old

I hail from another time

When the winters still were cold

When I was born, the distant past

Hadn't yet occurred

We had no running water

We had no written word

[A GUINNESS RESEARCHER flies to Puerto Rico to certify EMILIANO MERCADO DEL TORO as the world's oldest person.]

GUINNESS MAN:

This rolled-up paper, when unfurled

Proves you're the oldest in the world

[The GUINNESS MAN pins a ribbon on the chest of EMILIANO MERCADO DEL TORO.]

EMILIANO MERCADO DEL TORO:

We had no Web, no Superbowl,

No Nintendo Wii

I tell you, I go back so far

That I'm in front of me

A century's an insult!

One ten is a joke

If my age was a temperature

The ground beneath my feet would smoke!

And one more thing…

[EMILIANO MERCADO DEL TORO clears his throat to hit a high note and dies instead.]

January 25, 2007 (AP): Emiliano Mercado del Toro was born when Puerto Rico was still a Spanish colony, and he trained as a soldier the year World War I ended. On Wednesday, having spent just a month as the world's oldest person, he died at his home on the northern coast of Puerto Rico. He was 115.

GUINNESS MAN:

I certify this brave old man

As a brave old man who's dead

The oldest living person

Is now someone else instead

January 25, 2007 (Reuters)—A Connecticut woman born to former slaves in the decades following the U.S. Civil War has become the world's oldest person, at 114, according to Guinness World Records. Emma Faust Tillman, born near Greensboro, North Carolina, on November 22, 1892, became the world's oldest person on Wednesday, following the death of Emiliano Mercado del Toro, of Puerto Rico.

GUINNESS MAN:

Let's go, let's go!

Let's start the plane

Connecticut awaits!

We're doing battle with some

Serious attrition rates.

[GUINNESS MAN arrives in Connecticut, rushes to meet with Emma Faust Tillman, and reads a proclamation declaring her the world's oldest person.]

EMMA FAUST TILLMAN:

I'm so pleased that I made it

How I've waited for this day

Now if you will all attend

I have something to say

[She has nothing to say.]

January 29, 2007 (AP): Emma Faust Tillman, who was born to former slaves and lived to see 21 American presidencies, died at a nursing home just four days after becoming the world's oldest-known living person. She was 114.

GUINNESS MAN:

This is just unbelievable

I almost feel cursed

I should trade my jet plane

For a flying hearse

Now I must find another

World's Oldest Man

Or Woman. To the plane again—

A tip came in to try Japan.

January 29, 2007 (AP): Yone Minagawa, 114 years old and believed to be the world's oldest living person, has lived through four Japanese emperors, according to the staff at her nursing home in southern Japan. Born Jan. 4, 1893, Minagawa was identified as the world's oldest person by the Guinness Book of World Records following the death Sunday of Emma Faust Tillman, also 114.

YONE MINAGAWA:

The year was 1893 when I was born. That wasn't all.

The diesel engine was born, too. The lightbulb. College basketball.

They say I should be happy

But I fear that all's not right

They say old age should be enjoyed

But it just makes me paranoid.

[The GUINNESS MAN arrives.]

GUINNESS MAN:

You're spry for an oldster

You're sharp as a tack

Sit down so I can give you

This certificate and plaque

[YONE MINAGAWA bows. GUINNESS MAN takes off his costume. He is DEATH.]

DEATH:

Nice to meet you, Minagawa

We have some business, you and I

For my part, I will touch your shoulder

For your part, you will die

I'd like to thank the Guinness Book

For keeping me supplied

With ancient human specimens

To carry to the other side

[YONE MIAGAWA takes off running at high speed.]

YONE MINAGAWA:

You can't catch me

I'll run to my reward

Just when you think

You're closing in

I'll turn around and—look! A sword!

[YONE MINAGAWA turns. She is holding a giant sword. DEATH gasps. She cuts him, first with a superficial YM, like Zorro might, and then into pieces. YONE MINAGAWA stands over the inert form of DEATH.]

YONE MINAGAWA:

It is no small achievement to have reached this advanced age

I’m not about to let Death remove me from the stage

They say that some excitement does wonders for the brain.

Plus, it seems that I have inherited a plane.

[YONE MINAGAWA commandeers GUINNESS MAN's jet. The pilot, relieved that he no longer has to work for DEATH, says he will fly her anywhere.]

YONE MINAGAWA:

First, let's go to my house.

Then we'll fly to Hollywood.

Next a night in Vegas.

The Bellagio is good.

Then Puerto Vallarta,

Then a New York shopping spree.

With today's exchange rate

I am only ninety-three.

Only…ninety…three!

Thursday, November 25, 2021

WE CAN GO ON TOGETHER

Her words went through him and left him dazed. What was she saying? That she was no longer in love? That she had found someone else? That she was planning on leaving by the end of the month? That she had drained their bank account and moved all the money to where he’d never find it? That she had been slowly poisoning him with the morning coffees that she so obligingly brought to his desk with a sweet smile that he now saw was a murderer’s mask? That she was pregnant and it wasn’t his? He slowed his heart down with great effort. No: she was just asking him where he had put the car keys. He breathed a sigh of relief but remained on high alert. You never knew.

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

LIFE SPAN

Ivan was never more psychic than in the morning, in the time between the first chirp of his alarm clock and the moment when he swung his legs over the side of the bed to stand. He screened mental films that he once thought of as memories but came to understand as prophecies. Today’s was a river bridge at dusk. He stood at one end. A woman he had not yet met stood at the other end. He was facing her. She was facing away from him. She turned slowly, showing brilliant eyes, uncorked a profanity, flung up the shameless finger. He began to run across the bridge, his heart upsurging. She was so beautiful that unthinking men like him would love her forever.

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

HARMONY OF DIFFERENCE

Three voices were better than one, and four better than three, but two was harder to figure, it could be a sublime blend, had in fact been exactly that in the early days, but then Rebecca began to drink too much, and her voice slid down into a lower register, and meanwhile Harriet was struggling with a nervous condition that pushed her voice uncomfortably up, especially when she was feeling excitable, which was pretty much all the time since Albert had decided he was confined to a wheelchair, the doctor disagreed, insisted that Albert could walk just as well as the doctor, could run even, the doctor had competed in a recent 5K and finished in the top twenty percent in his age bracket, “without even training,” he said, “I meant to but then my mother-in-law came to live with us and, you know,” but Albert didn’t know, and neither did Harriet when he passed along the doctor’s wise words, didn’t know at all, and could only squeak.

LIGHT OUT FOR LOVE

Harris was humiliated. He needed to get out of the whole situation. He had an ex-wife in Glendive, but where was she now? Belgrade? Miles City? He found her, finally, in Metairie—she had taken 94 east and then 55 south and pulled over when she had no more reasons to drive. Jacopo, her gentleman, had no idea where she was, and that was good enough for her. She called him to tell him so. Jacopo passed the news along wildly to a clutch of friends, including Dave, Diane, Gerald, Oliver Tolliver, Lil’ Liza Jane, and Richard Stinchcombe. Stinchcombe knew exactly where she was. He had run away with her there one weekend, tugged a shirttail in Lafreniere Park. He kept her secret from all save for Harris. Like recognized like. “You’ll have to drive all night, see,” said Stinchcombe. Harris saw. He shuttered his businesses, the restaurant, the kung fu school, and took off running down the street to his avocado-green Cutlass, the one with a skew-whiff headlight, the gas sot. By his count he was only nine hours from Noelia, which meant that he was only nine hours and fifteen minutes from salvation. He turned the key, felt the Cutlass come to life, lit out for love.

STAR PUPIL

“The language is there to use.” He knew that. “It’s a tool furnished us for our elevation, edification, and illumination.” He knew that, too. But there was something else that wasn’t being said. He racked his brain. He drummed his fingers. He closed his eyes for a nanocentury, considered the growth he had experienced (three beard-seconds and counting) and opened them up again. Nothing around him had changed in its essence. Syreena was still sitting to one side of him, meticulously annotating. Barry was still sitting to the other side, humming disco. And yet he was rested. And yet he was changed. He was revived, able to locate and love the truth, which is that what was missing was a sense of play. He stood, forgetting the lecture hall around him, forgetting what had come before, the prison in which he had served six years for robbery, the small room whose door his mother locked when she cried, which was always, the crib with too-high rails. “I’ve had a perfectly lovely day,” he said. “But this isn’t it.” The faces tilted up at him, Syreena and Barry and a few more, had been that way since he stood. Their average expression hung between approbation and opprobrium. He pointed at the ceiling and called out his own name. Whatever grade he was getting in the class wasn’t good enough.

Monday, November 22, 2021

FAN MAIL

Dear Sir, I have been trying with no success for the past four months to obtain the address or phone number of “Alexandra Influenza,” whose real name I do not know. Just yesterday I noted that you have booked her to appear at your theater and reprise one of her most popular routines, which involves acrobatics while dressed as what she calls a “firebird” but is more accurately described as an angel dressed tightly in red and orange. Are you perhaps able to advise me how I might be I contact with her? I am presently setting my lands in order, having received a grim diagnosis from a doctor who I cannot imagine is deceiving me, and I should like to at least meet Alexandra Influenza and explain to her that in years where I did not think living worthwhile, she made me feel more alive than nearly anything else, and that I imagine she will have a similar capacity for inspiration as I stare headlong into the Final Bottomless. Thank you.

THE FULLY PURPLE CABRIOLET

The man who was certain that nothing was surprising woke, brushed his teeth with a new toothpaste that disappointed him slightly as he knew it would, shaved with a motion that he had learned over the years would leave an errant patch at the back of his left jawline, conducted various ablutions and evacuations that took no longer or shorter than he expected, made himself eggs that he believed would be not quite fluffy enough (they were not), got into the car to go to work, drove the route he believed would put him at his desk by nine, confirmed his belief. He had several meetings that day, all of which played out according to…not to plan, because there was no plan…according to the rhythms of inertia, a point made by a junior member of the team, echoed by one boss, mocked by another, the opposing reactions working to erase the point as if it had never been made. Work ended, as always, around six, and he drove the route that be believed would put him at his kitchen table by seven. He never expected the fully purple cabriolet shooting from an alley, piloted by a rotund man, a recently minted lottery millionaire, so fully enmeshed in his tiny phone screen that he never looked up from the purple-leather wheel. The cabriolet, broadsiding, turned the vowel of the man’s car into a consonant. The evening was erased, the next day too, and all days after that. A funeral was scheduled. Here, finally, a surprise.

DOWN BY THE OLD MAINSTREAM

The quote was unattributed in this new book, by design, as the slim black volume fancied itself a puzzle box. The quote took up most of a spread. Some words were rendered in roman, others in italics. Font size varied excitingly. “What was known,” the quote went, “spun round like a record, the awareness of the average mind dropped like a stylus on its surface, producing the pleasing sound of familiarity. Hits, for all. The chart charts the movements of the songs, but also our movements toward them. Fifty million can’t be wrong. What was not grasped as well any longer—the forgotten, the recondite, the complex—was directed centrifugally off the platter, past the edge of recognition, into the far-flung, where it could be apprehended only by self-styled connoisseur or collector. There it obtained a magic power that consisted mainly in being known best for once being better known.” He snapped the book shut and realized that he could not remember who had written that paragraph, though he once spoke the author’s name nearly as often as his own.

THE HUMAN CONDITION

For a brief moment, he was enormously popular, a central figure in the national conversation. For a much longer moment, he was dead.

Sunday, November 21, 2021

THE EVOLUTION OF LITERATURE: A DIALOGUE

The older woman: “It was once true that without literature it was difficult for any one individual to imagine what other people were thinking: people from a different station, from a different place, of a different mind. Now, with social media, the thoughts of others are not only audible and visible, but inflicted upon you at all hours of day and night. The challenge is not to connect with these other thoughts and develop empathy but to withstand the onslaught of these other thoughts and not develop a carapace that prevents empathy.” The younger woman: “I know that. I’ve seen it said a hundred times. Your voice has an irritating piping quality. I wish you would speak no more.”

Friday, November 19, 2021

STORY CREDITS

David — Title.

Paula — First sentence.

Ross — Most of the character names.

Travis — Whatever character names Ross didn’t come up with.

Mr. Sayles — The second first sentence after Paula’s was discarded.

Brendan — Fancy vocabulary.

Kentaro — Spelling.

Ana — All Spanish.

Naomi — Symbols.

Xavier — Scheduling and motivation.

Gerry — Dialogue polishing.

Jan — Last sentence.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

THE RULES

People with ten favorite songs are better than people with nine. People with nine favorite songs are worse than people with eight. People who are surrounded by dozens of children holding up signs are better than people who are surrounded by hundreds of children holding out money. People who sell fruit are preferable to people who buy fruit. People who secure a show based on their own life and then leave it of their own volition after one season are worse than people who star in a show based on historical figures and stay long past the point where the show has lost its appeal. People who are impressed by parkour are exactly the same as people who are not.

Monday, November 15, 2021

LOST & FOUND

“Loses his life at 91.” Fred was reading a headline. The story under it related the recent fate of a dramatist who had, in his younger years, been a boxer. Fights were won and lost. He bowed out after an example of the former. “You go out on top because it lets you see what else you’re under,” he said. The aphorism advanced into a hundred newspapers, and then a hundred more. There was suddenly a call for more of same. He wrote a small book called Punches Thrown and Landed and then his first play, a thinly veiled account of his upbringing in the toughest neighborhood in Baltimore. The play changed it to Boston. He penned nine more plays, ranging from the stark (Her Dark Eyes, an account of his mother’s incipient dementia) to the sportive (The Stealthy Rose, about a flower intent on seducing a beautiful young writer). Two were adapted into films. Fred had seen one of the movies, City of Effects, which followed three intertwining plots, one romantic, one political, and one medical. All took place in Paris. The film was heavily subtitled. The screening was the film’s premiere, and the dramatist was present. A French critic interviewed him before the movie started. “In most of your movies, the protagonist or someone close to him or her loses their life,” the critic said. The dramatist put up a finger. “I must object,” he said. The finger crouched down until it was part of a fist. “The phrase affronts me. Fights are won and lost. Lives are not. Lives are lived and then translated.” The critic, nodding, translated for half the crowd, which nodded also.

BUZZ BUZZ

Standing on the platform, looking at the woman on the opposing platform, Edward thought he recognized his favorite high school teacher. She had been only a few years older than him. He had intuited a spark between the, but had never acted on it, of course. That would have been terrifying and possibly even criminal. He squinted to see if it was in fact Miss Beck over there. The rain complicated matters. Drops disrupted his field of vision but had also put additional clothes on her, coat, hat. He thought about calling her name, or waving, but another thought rushed in behind those thoughts, which was this: What would be the point? If he were to do this, he needed to have a goal, or rather to recognize the goal that was always with him. The goal was to make the moment work for him. No, not for him, but for something larger. To be precise, it went along a transitive chain. The moment must be made to work for him. He must be made to work for something larger. And then that something larger, whether a sense of beauty or a sense of justice or a sense of absurdity, must be made to work for something even larger. God? The Universe? Every second that fell from the clock was in service. He blinked. Miss Beck was gone. His own train would screech into the station any second now. The city, where he’d be in twenty minutes or so, was a hive of future moments.

Thursday, November 11, 2021

GROUNDS FOR COMPLAINT

In the coffee shop, Keith saw a guy who was much older than him explaining to a younger guy who still seemed older than him why double albums on vinyl were pressed with Side 1 backing Side 4 and Side 2 backing Side 3. “It was for stacking turntables,” the old man said. The younger older man furrowed his brow. “You’d put the records on top of each other in reverse order. Side 1 would play and then when it was done the tone arm would retract and then Side 2 would fall down. The only way for that to happen was to number it like I said.” Keith, stopping in on his way to the hospital to see why he hadn’t had any energy for weeks, stood quickly. “Oh! hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!” he muttered good-naturedly under his breath, and departed, leaving his latte mostly full.

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

HIS OWN PETARD

Mickey’s lifelong project, The Compendium of Typographical Errors, was done. He had labored on it for eleven years, that was by his count, though his girlfriend said it was more like fourteen. “I date it by when you promised me you would think about getting married,” she said. He laughed but was it a laughing matter? Even Beth’s sister called her “Long-Suffering Sally” or sometimes “Sad Cinderella.” It didn’t matter now. He was done. The manuscript was delivered. He could turn his mind to other matters. Well, he almost could. He had turned in the manuscript at 4:08 p.m. on a Tuesday, careful not to pick a more conspicuous time, an 8 a.m. Monday sharp, a 5 p.m. Friday pre-weekend weather balloon. He hadn’t heard back from his editor on Tuesday, which was to be expected. He’d probably get a note on Wednesday. But then Wednesday was noon, then afternoon, then gone. That was fine, to be expected too. His editor, a slightly stooped but still impressive lighthouse of patrician eminence named Benedict Crowninshield, was nothing if not deliberate. He might take a full minute to lift a cup of tea. And he was fairly fond of driving out to his place on the Cape for long walks he called “air baths.” But then it was Thursday and then Friday. The silence increased in volume. Mickey thought about calling. But a call was a mistake. B.C. (a nickname Crowninshield had devised himself, and which he enforced vigorously) was not to be bothered during an air bath, and even less while reviewing a manuscript. Mickey spent the weekend rethinking everything. Had he been right to dive into this project? Error was a part of humanity, and typographical error part of literate humanity. For a time spelling had not been regularized, and then it was left to typesetters, and then to individual typists. Fleets had been launched on the backs of slips of the key. Men had been condemned to hang or rescued from certain death. Wars had been started, romances ended, entire economies upended. Single errant letters sometimes meant everything. So of course someone should go through all the important printed works of the millennium, collecting and annotating mistakes, and why shouldn’t that someone be him? By Sunday night he had talked himself back into faint hope. And then, Monday morning, 8 a.m., there it was, an email from B.C. He opened it, hands trembling. “I hate your manuscript,” it said. Mickey’s entire body went cold as a floe. He began to scratch along his jawline uncontrollably. Beth found him there thirty minutes later. He held like he had not moved though his jaw was nearly bleeding. She looked over his shoulder. “Ha,” she said. “Funny guy. ‘I have your manuscript.’ I can’t wait to see what he thinks of it. Then we can start planning the wedding.” Mickey allowed a dead breath to leave his lungs, flinched as a new one came in, shifted, shocked, sure that he had wet himself.

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

LET'S YOU AND HIM FIGHT

Easton Westerman got cut off in traffic. He was driving to the building that bore his name. His mind was already at work. He had companies to gut, lives to ruin. He chuckled to himself. That’s how everyone else saw him. What was the point in explaining that he was in fact soft-hearted as a dove? He was piloting his sleek new German sedan around the corner, Sparrow Avenue onto Jenkins Street, when suddenly a Jeep shot out of an alley and T-boned him. Westerman flashed from his car. “You lousy so-and-so,” he said. From the Jeep emerged a mountain of a man. “I hate that car,” the mountain said. “And I hate any man who drives it. Do you know what those people did? My grandmother had to flee for her life or else the camps. My poor little grandma.” The man was foaming at the mouth and crying both. Flecks and drops punctuated the sentence of his face. The giant kicked the side of the sedan tearfully. Something in the toe of his boot dented the side panel. Westerman had been ready to retreat but now he went straight for the man’s neck. Westerman had a poor little grandma too, and he could hear her voice urging him to shellac the prick.

BARKER OUTSIDE STORE, DRESSED AS FALSE PROPHET

“Do you believe that things happen for a reason? Do you believe things happen for no reason? Do you believe that nothing happens for a reason? Do you believe that nothing is reasonable? Do you believe that shit happens? Do you believe that a shitty attitude is a reasonable response to things? Do you believe in reason? Do you believe in God? Do you believe that God is sending a sign? Do you believe that all these questions, nicely printed and framed, are for sale in our sign department?”

YEOMAN AND GEO-MAN

Gary Templeton, originally of Olivette, Missouri, the son of a man who made his reputation as the star of local television commercials for his appliance and electronics business (Big Leo, for whom “no problem was too small”), had been a child of cheery temperament, popular in school, a good but not great student, which is why he had remained largely silent regarding his true destiny, which was to be, he knew, not a salesman like his father, not a teacher like his mother (twenty-four years of service, American history at the middle-school level), but something more mysterious and rewarding. Most people were instruments. He would be a lens. He would be an artist. He said nothing about it in high school. How could he? (When he imagined the looks on the faces of his poor parents…). And then in college, too, he kept it to himself, and in management school, and during those years that he rejoined the family business, and when he met Kelly (When he imagined the look on the face of that poor woman….), and when they had their son, and then their daughter, and then their second son, and when he endeavored to build Big Leo’s TV Shack upward and outward, regional dominance a vital part of his increasingly focused national strategy, and when his father passed, and when his mother developed dementia, and when Kevin graduated college, and when Lucy moved to Portugal, and when Kelly asked for a divorce, and when they patched things up, and when he had his first heart attack, fifty-one years old, same age his father had his, Gary’s not a major one, not a “true chest-banger,” the doctor said, inappropriately Gary thought. But the doc was right, and the day Gary got back from the hospital, he opened up a file and got right to it. He was not afraid of the blank page. It was an action movie with an eco-aware twist, the story of a man who traveled through time from the Middle Ages only to meet a scientist with his hair on fire about humanity’s inhumanity not to man but to the planet that sustained them all. He finished the script, The Yeoman and the Geo-Man, in three months. It came out of him like a fire out of a furnace. When Bill McKechnie, a friend of his dad’s since the first days of the Shack, told Gary that Bill’s son Dave was now an executive at a movie studio and that Gary should send him the script, Gary laughed. How presumptuous! But he did it anyway, to make Bill feel better, the same way he smiled when Bill told him how he was the spitting image of his father, by which he knew that Bill meant fat, and within a week that was Dave on the phone, saying he wanted to buy it. Gary wondered what expression his face was making as he heard the news. Dave had only one change. “The title,” he said. “It’s good but not great. I want to dump the ‘The.’ Both of them, in fact. Now this thing sings.” He paused and then continued. “I mean it,” he said. “This. Thing. Sings.” Gary called his mother, who was at the home. She only sometimes recognized his voice. This time, she did, brightly, calling him “Gare” like when he was a kid. He told her the story. There was a silence. “You know,” she said. “I wouldn’t have touched the title. Who does that Bill McKechnie think he is?” Gary started to tell her that it was Dave, not Bill, but he stopped. It was Bill in a sense, wasn’t it?

Monday, November 8, 2021

CANDY SCRAPE

They were all focused on the same goal, which was to get the candy, as much of it as possible, and whatever it took in the way of preparation and strategy, well, that was what had to be done. Frankie explained that to her grandmother. Her grandmother was only half-listening, counting out change for the cashier, so Frankie didn’t take her nod very seriously. Behind her in line were two young women wearing matching sweaters streaked in faint rainbow. They were outrageously attractive. Frankie was honest enough to admit it. One of them held a baby, the other a large bag of flour, though in the baby position. Behind the two young women was an older man wearing a black ski hat and a white t-shirt that said, in red letters, “Occupational Hazard.” He was buying a flashlight. Behind the older man was another young woman with a baby, this one so young that she might have been a babysitter or older sister. Her free hand clutched a magazine. And behind her was a woman whose age Frankie estimated at four thousand. Her face was stone. Her eyes were clouded glass. On one bony arm hung a basket filled with dried flowers. Frankie wondered if this was her lunch. “Francesca,” her grandmother said, tone taut and unfriendly. “We must go.” Frankie turned to get one last look at the people stretching out the line, five mortal enemies who might soon need to be dispatched so that she could get her hands on the candy. Six, if she counted the cashier. Seven, if she counted her grandmother. Which she did.

WHERE HOWARD STANDS

After Scott submitted his monograph on Franciszek Bohomolec, he turned back quickly to an unfinished essay. He was not sure about his first sentences: “Once you own something, it is worth nothing to the world. It is yours to keep or discard. All value resides with you. That is a depressing fact and a crushing responsibility, both at once.” He was not sure about his last sentences: “And that is why I am burning my collection of sketches, the one of young Levi-Strauss, the one of old Rothko, the newborn Marie Curie, the Jane Goodall of indeterminate middle age, burning them with the same hand that made them, an old hand now, tired, shamed.” He was sure only of the title: “Time, the Notorious Serial Killer.” That was a corker. He loved it so much he said it over and over again on nights he couldn’t sleep. His husband Howard loved it slightly less, and begged him to shut up, for the love of a god that neither of them believed in, or else Scott would see who the real serial killer was! He was pretty sure Howard was joking, but why stand so close to the knife block?

HIS LANDS IN ORDER

He had gone down the stairs nearly every day for decades. “I have to say that I’m not certain how wise it is,” his wife said, which was the closest she could come to calling him an idiot. But his tools were down there, hung on pegs along one basement wall, curated in drawers beneath the pegboard, and after he did whatever job he was doing—fixing the door to the porch, tightening the screw on one side of the lighting track—he returned the lucky wrench or screwdriver to its rightful place. He lingered. Something about the place, the slightly sour smell, the limited light leaking through the slot of window, was profoundly therapeutic, an invisible pill. And then one morning he turned the knob, moved forward to the landing, lifted a foot to proceed to the top step, and felt something in his brain flutter. It was a half-second lapse tops. But that butterfly threw everything off. He missed the step fully. He rose into the air, unaccountably thrilled. The thrill receded. Gravity insisted. He knew what was likely next, a rude lights-out against post or floor. On the way down, he didn’t think about himself, not at all. He thought briefly about his wife. He hoped she would remarry. He checked off others: son, daughter, brother, one old girlfriend he had seen from time to time throughout his thirties. Mostly he thought about the tools, and how happy he was not to see a single stray left crooked out on the counter.

YES, SHE SMILED

In the morning we both awoke and refused to leave the bed for a while, not for any reason I couldn’t repeat in mixed company, but because our bones creaked and our brains were not ready for the world. When we finally did begin our day, me rolling right, her rolling left, the two of us found our way into clothes, in poor spirits, and went off to our respective jobs. She oversaw a fleet of couriers. I edited guide-books. We both despised our jobs and, as a result, ourselves. At lunch our moods came up a little. Hers was the result of bad news. One of the directors of her company had passed away. There would be no work on Thursday or Friday. Mine was the result of her improved spirit. If that is co-dependency, so be it. The glow of this poor man’s death was still on her when she arrived home in the evening, and we crowded each other under a red blanket and listened to a radio serial. An enterprising young man had inherited his strange old uncle’s castle. Noises crept from walls and from under doors. An unearthly light hovered just outside the window. We knew that sooner or later we’d have to get up and get food. I proposed a jar of olives and a heel of bread. Yes, she smiled. On the radio, the young man had opened a closet to find a hole in the wall from which emanated a not-quite-human voice. The whole thing was a comforting fright.

Sunday, November 7, 2021

ALUMNI NOTES

He was doubly obscure, a man with no name from a town with no name. When people wanted to call him, they just said to the operator, “connect me,” and took a chance. Few of the calls reached him. One that did came from a television producer. “We love your whole thing,” the producer said. “We think you’re the perfect subject for a new show.” The man valued his privacy. His obscurity was a form of currency. But now he was being offered a way out, a ladder up. He was being greased for fame. His silence indicated a willingness to listen. The producer went on. “I should describe the show to you, of course. It’s what the boys in the writers’ room call ‘an existential Western.’ I’m guessing they mean a Western with plots that call into question the value of life itself. That’s nearly any Western, no? These eggheads went to places like Princeton and Yale and Klemmerschmidt University and the ol’ U. of Chicago, my alma mater. I’ll tell you, if I hadn’t hired them, I don’t think any of them would ever have felt the touch of another human hand. But we’ve got it worked out good. Andy found himself a guy in a bar. Jerry’s dating an executive. Larry plays the field, switches sides every quarter. His phrase, not mine. He called it a ‘fragrant image.’ Like I say, without me, little chance of the touch of a human hand. Anyway, they started building this Western and then one of them said something about you. I’ll be damned if I know how they heard about you. Weren’t you on the radio briefly for a prize pumpkin or something? They convinced me that yours were the life rights to acquire, and that no price was too high. And because I’m the bigwig around here — there are other wigs, but none bigger — they enlisted me to call.” The nameless man from the nameless town felt a pain at the base of his head. This pain was the realization that other calls of opportunity must have failed to reach him. The one that did, this one, was promising, but was it? It consisted of a garrulous purveyor of pop pap insisting that his story could be productively grafted atop a jejune genre exercise. The nameless man could talk the talk, too. He had gone to Klemmerschmidt, and graduated summa cum laude. He hung up the phone with the producer still gabbling. His hand, which had spent time in the vicinity of his eyes while the man was pitching, streaked tears across the receiver.

SUBURBIA, CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

People whose names were occupations fascinated him, the Millers and the Brewers and the Fletchers and the Goldsmiths. He had only met a few men suggestible enough to do what their names told them, some because they were following some ancient generational imperative. “Of course I am,” said a Taylor, a neighbor. “My great-great-grandfather was, and my grandmother used to tell me how much I took after him.” He shook Taylor’s hand and then handed the man a suit that needed alteration. He meant to distract Taylor from the intelligence that he felt was likely not concealed on his face, the fact that he knew that Taylor was sleeping with his wife, had been ever since the summer before, when she had been briefly out of work, between her job at the hospital and her job at the next hospital, and she had been home with a vengeance, dour, vexed, drinking too much, cursing anyone who had ever cared for her. Taylor, a competent seamster, a man of limited imagination, had delivered some pants to the house, and his wife had paid him, and the two of them had gotten to talking about inseams. One thing had led to many others. He knew that his wife was in love with Taylor, that they had hatched a plan to steal from him and relocate to the most distant of the Florida Keys, where they could hump with impunity and explore the reefs of the Dry Tortugas. He knew that the business was already in motion, and that his only chance to stop it involved resorting to an even more nefarious course than theirs, which is why, as soon as he handed over the suit, he was going across town to see Wayne Murderer.

TIME PASSES SLOWLY

It was his sixtieth birthday. The surprise party wouldn’t be for another week. Of course he knew about it! His wife let her chat window open on her computer. That meant that he ad a week to thin, really think, before he had to smile at people and pretend that he was okay with the passage of time. He went immediately to the photo album, to see what his father had been doing at his age. He had been a small businessman whose baby furniture business had taken off fast, and at sixty he was preparing to sell it to a larger company. He looked, in the photos, happy, but all those other things, too: overweight, a little stunned by his success, uncertain whether he needed to change his life. He had, briefly, with a younger woman, and then thought better of it and begged his way back into his marriage. “Your mother was the smarter one,” he liked to say, and she would laugh and say “Was? Is!” Thirty years later, the son looked at the album and began to spiral. He had no company. He had a wife who was smarter than him but she didn’t laugh about it. He was losing his hair faster than his father, and while he was considerably thinner, it only made him seem less powerful. Thinking this way wasn’t healthy but neither were the cigarettes his father was holding in almost every photo.

Saturday, November 6, 2021

ADVENTURES IN MATRIMONY

He transgressed. She transgressed. They transgressed. But this was just conjugation, nothing real, words swagged over tie-backs. In actuality, they were on the train, traveling south from the city to the house in the country. Her parents owned it, had owned it for as long as he had known her. He had visited once a year, in summer, ate food that was provided him, drunk wine he never paid for, smiled like a son-in-law. Each year his dreams grew wilder and his temperament more timid. He kept a book of all the things he had not been able to do and knew that she did, too. She looked across the aisle at him the way a person looked at a problem. The station at the end of the line, the station nearest the house in the country, was small and pristine, a monument to tasteful money. He would step off the train, smile, hug his in-laws, hate every second that was taken from him vampirically by these kind old people who had made his wife, made her the woman she was, made her the kind of woman who found her way to a man like him, turned his head, taught him to like—to depend upon—his own rewarded helplessness. The train shot south. Every tie it crossed, perpendicular to its path, was a momentary mockery.

Friday, November 5, 2021

THE EXPAT, BRADDOCK, TELLS THE TRUTH

Braddock, in his Notes on Montevideo, writes “A yellow bird, most commonly called a Afilada, also sometimes Razored Mouth, was shot in a Humboldt’s willow near Treinta y Tres, and though mortally wounded, immediately began to warble a song, melody rising and falling, rhythm impeccably maintained, which continued until its last moments, at which point it dropped from branch to basis and thwacked its head on the thickest root.”

THE GAME THEY PLAYED

“Artist, actress, secretary, textile heiress, nerd, artist, sailor, academic, writer, writer, editor, landlord, dog walker, don’t know, don’t know, barfly, businesswoman, realtor, cellist (half-blind), singer, biologist, guru, furniture restorer, nerd, nerd, impresario of disgruntlement.” She waited until she was sure he was done. “Which one am I?” she said. He shook his head. “I am so dissatisfied with your answer,” she said. “Do you know now?” he said. She punched the air between them, high on playful malice.

THE SELF-CLEANING OVEN

When he grew so tired that he could no longer think straight, he began to think in loops and whorls, and they dizzied him, and he slept.

CHARACTER WORK

You may have heard of me from the staff at The Community Theater subsequent to casting sessions for their big season-ending production of The Terminator. I was angling for the role of Kyle Reese first but that went to a guy with feathered hair also named Kyle. Then I went for the Terminator but I am famously skinny and also I have it on good authority that the pumped-up chump who got it slept with the director. That was Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday was off. Now I am back to make a last-ditch play for Ed Traxler, every line learned, but when I pull up in my vehicle who do I see but Howie Reuss, who courted my sister, poorly, back in the oughts (his pickup line, “there is method in my mattress,” inexplicably successful to the tune of a six-month marriage), standing there on the front lawn with the set designer, no, not just standing there but handing her a brownie and if you know one thing about Howie you know that his brownies are the best in the world and then some, and I feel the Traxler of it slipping away. And then I’m blind with injustice, extravasating rage, wrenching the wheel to drive up onto the lawn where I figure I’ll kill them both but I miss by a while and no one even flinches. I settle for Detective Hal Vukovich. “Which you’re lucky to even get,” says the director. “How do you feel about that?” Like shit, boss. Like shit.

DATING HISTORY

The literary woman, the attorney, the neurosurgeon, the athlete, the heiress, the student, the designer, the architect, the writer, the critic, the animator, the shopkeeper, the CEO, the trucker, the librarian (of science, she’d stipulate, engineering specifically, which required her to have not only a sense of the history of the discipline, but a genuine enthusiasm for both the benefits and the detriments—yes, detriments, though that might not be the first thing to spring to the mind of an ordinary citizen or even a librarian of the non-engineering variety—of innovation), the magician, the administrator, the artist, the artist, the artist, the artist, the artist.

Thursday, November 4, 2021

THE INTERRUPTOR

“Mankind has never accomplished anything…” he said. A woman stood up in the front row. “Coward,” she said. “So much has been accomplished!” She went on: “Boo! Hiss! Catcall!” She said the actual words rather than making the sounds, and while he could get with “boo” (where the word was the sound, give or take) the other two struck him as preposterous. He was about to object but when he let his eye linger on the woman, he saw that she reminded him of his daughter, Deborah. He had not spoken to Deborah in years, since the two of them had quarreled over her boyfriend (Jack, jerk) and her professional ambitions (deep-sea marine biologist, which frightened him so badly that he erupted into any mention of it, the yawning downward couloir, the dark, the cold, it all felt like death-in-life to him, even though he knew intellectually that it was teeming with life down there, ugly life, sure, bulbs on stalks protruding from foreheads, but maybe the ugly fish found people ugly, like that Twilight Zone episode, though what did any of that matter, he wasn’t going down there and neither was his daughter, why couldn’t she accept that she would be a first-rate lawyer and just join his practice). A longer linger established that the woman was not, in fact, Deborah, as she was close to the age Deborah had been when she had broken off communication, and that was nearly a decade ago. She and Jack had kids, he’d heard. He was suddenly furious. This was his speech! He ignored the woman, and the security coming to get her, and rerolled his last sentence. “Mankind has never accomplished anything without either luck or preparation.” The crowd started chanting, "U!S!A! U!S!A!” The woman had stopped talking, but if she had still been going, she would have been drowned out.

DELAYS AND CANCELLATIONS

I had gotten to the airport more than on time, correctly anticipating delays from the weather, and I was laying it on the line in a bar themed for rock and roll. That’s when I struck up conversation with the two women to my left. Both wore boots. The one further away was entirely immune to any pull I may have been exerting. She was off playing games on her phone in a minute. The other one leaned toward me and started telling me about how photographs were more mystical than people thought. “I think they are very very mystical,” I said. “Are they even more mystical than that?” Her eyes pulsed a silent laugh. This was our first conversation, and it lasted a while before a voice crackled onto the loudspeaker that my flight was cancelled. Her flight, too, as it turned out. “Aw, garbage,” she said, leaning back in her boots. It was her who had the bright idea of getting a hotel room together. Sleep was out of the question because I didn’t want to risk losing what I was seeing. Later on down the line she told me I had gotten everything about her wrong. She wasn’t the princess of a fictitious Himalayan kingdom, half-shrouded in clouds half the year. She wasn’t the inventor of new technology that would allow people to transport first themselves and then, a few seconds later, their clothes. She wasn’t able to read my mind or anyone else’s. She was tall, yes, I was right about that, and depended greatly on the power of the silent laugh, and she understood some things perfectly and other things not at all and was sedulous about converting the latter to the former. But the rest was just my fantasy. She left me with a snapshot that proved she had not aged a day even if her boots had aged thousands. I thumbed the corner of the photograph. It was even more mystical than I thought.

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

THE STORYTELLER

Harry had a professor in film school who first put the idea in his head. “When you start a script,” the man said, softly but with steely authority, “it should be about a meeting.” That night it came to him: Peanuts Hucko meeting Peanuts Holland. He didn’t know if it had ever really happened. Hucko was with Goodman and Condon, Teagarden and Powell. Howell was with Sears and Trent, Bryant and Lunceford. Harry read and read in search of an overlap. Finally he found it: the Armstrongs. Holland had played with Lil Armstrong in the mid-thirties, and Hucko with Louis Armstrong in the forties and fifties. The Armstrongs were done as a couple even by the time Howell joined up with Lil. Holland heard Lil bang on Louis constantly. She hadn’t been impressed with him at first. In fact, he had disgusted her, his country hair, his rumpled clothes. But he had grown on her, a younger man in need of guidance, a genius to boot. Bangs were cut. Suits were bought. Vows were exchanged. Things were good while good. But then he had catted around with Alpha Smith and begged Lil to keep the marriage on the books so he wouldn’t be sued by ardent Alpha, now discarded. Lil banged on Louis to Holland, but he could hear the affection in her voice. The union was finally dissolved in 1938. The two remained on terms, and when Hucko had worked with Louis, Lil was very much a part of the Armstrong orbit. Holland could have dropped by to say hello, seen Hucko on the stage. Yes! Light blazed in Harry’s head! He called his old professor, who seemed nonplussed. “Are you sure the Armstrongs aren’t the story?” he said. Harry laughed. The man was joking. He had to be. It was Holland and Hucko, no more, no less. For more than a year he worked on a script, certain that he had isolated the crux of it, and he was still certain when an elevator he was in fell fourteen floors and made the whole thing moot.

COURSE CORRECTION

Gerald tried to learn something new every day. The first day, he learned that it was impossible.

PRISONER OF WAR

Last year I turned forty and realized that I had raised a skeptic who didn’t believe me. “You seem much older,” she said. My wife made an ironic clucking sound. To truth it, as she says, it was less a clucking sound for Adelaide than it was one for me, a “Hey buddy, you can come down on her hard if you want but she’s not wrong, and what have I been telling you about your haircut and how you dress.” Loud and clear, Patricia, loud and clear. She laughed post-cluck. My daughter laughed. They went off together hand-in-hand to take the car to school. Adelaide is in the eighth grade. Patricia is an assistant principal. I work from home now, mostly sitting down at my impeccably arranged desk and falling into memories, which are also impeccably arranged, though in the manner of an armory. I am wounded by the past because it is so clear to me. I see myself vividly, and Patricia even more so, and Adelaide taking her first tentative steps on the apron around our first tentative house. I keep wanting to get back there and then wanting to shield myself from how idiotic that idea is. It’s all impossible, isn’t it? At four, when the hand-holders return, beaming like psychos, I’m often at that same spot. “Good day?” Patricia will say, and I’ll squint like I’m a man who speaks a different language. “You look like you surrendered,” Adelaide will say, or something similar. “I hope you surrendered to the Allies.”

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

A BOWDLERIZED BOOK

Roy Karlak is the author of sixteen novels, including the five bestselling Leo James/Harriet Hotchkiss mysteries, which began with Get It Right in 2002 and continued on through Get It Done, Get It Together, Get It Sorted, and Get It On. The last of these, originally published in 2017, was significantly more lurid that its predecessors, with at least thirty scenes that chronicled explicit sexual activity between the two detectives, who had previously been depicted as only good friends and possibly even first cousins. Karlak’s readers were taken aback by the radical shift in both tone and plot, not to mention the extensive dirty talk employed by both detectives during the sexual act, and the publisher received more than ten thousand letters of disbelief or anger. “I have read every book in this series,” read one representative letter, “and now I will read them again, with gasoline and a match.” Another letter echoed this sentiment: “Cancel my subscription,” it read, though the novels were not available via subscription. Stung, Karlak reworked Get It On significantly, eliminating all scenes of what he called “Leo and Harriet electing each other to office” along with any mentions of their intimate relationship. The result of his revision was a significantly shorter book, one of only fifty pages rather than three hundred and fifty, and one in which the murder that furnishes the central mystery is solved three pages after it is discovered. Readers disliked that version almost as much, and the series came to an abrupt end.

THE MOTION OF THE OCEAN

Jack met Lucy and knew instantly she was the most beautiful person he would ever know. He was dogged and diligent and occasionally exciting. She had fielded hundreds of offers but something about his passed muster. They made it Instagram-official. They synced up a drum track on a story. They boarded the boat that they had paid for, halfsies, and took up position on the rail, waving in full view of his reverse-angle camera as if they were launching for Europe. In truth, it was only Amber Cove and back. Nevertheless, thus began their life as indentured lovers. They grabbed at each other wherever and whenever they could, removed each others’ clothes like they were stains. Jack was not a practiced Casanova but the boat rocked enough to assume some of his burden. Lucy was carefully kind in touching him and eventually he saw the humiliating truth, that she was making special accommodations. On their second night they met another couple that had about them an air of obnoxious confidence. The man, named Ken, dropped names like anchors as Jerry felt the waves of his self-doubt surging. The woman, (nick?)named Cookie, told stories mostly about herself, and mostly about how she became the kind of woman who told stories. “Honeymoon?” Ken leered. Cookie joked about swinging and Lucy joked about taking it seriously. The conversation stumbled briefly into significance when Ken noted that a friend of his (also a famous actor) had hit someone with a car. He had gone to a special church to shake off the stink of the incident. The idea was that no one bore full responsibility for anything. “The Therapeutic Thesis,” said Ken, like he was naming a pub. That night the two women drank too much and the boat rocked some more. Lucy, tee-heeing, of Cookie: “She in computers,” pronounced com-poo-ters. Ken invited Jack to smoke something, and while Jack declined, he second-handed enough to send him to bed early. It was then that a dream intruded, a dream of the waking variety. Jack, still an adult, was back in grade school, not doing well, standing with the teacher as she phoned his parents and told them they had to come in. “Bring a rod and a reason,” she said. Jack woke, gasping, alone, seasick, silly, with neither.