IN THE MATTER OF COPPER CREEK DAM

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

SWEPT OFF HER FEET

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

DEARLY DEPARTED

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

CARPOOLERS

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

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

DREAMING IN 1979

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

TWO SISTERS

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