READING

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

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

THE PITIFUL COMPROMISE

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

BRUSH WITH GREATNESS

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

A HERO LOOKS AT EIGHTY

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

THE GARLICKY BRODETTO

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

AUTHOR'S NOTE

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