“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.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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