A fortune teller in Northern California looked at my palm and said, “You’re going to lead an unnaturally long life.” Then she slid my money back across the table and added, “I feel bad for you.” This was in 2008 or 2009. My memory of the year is less distinct than the mournful expression on her face, how she pulled off her chintzy Madame Sofia veil, leaned back, and lit a cigarette as if to say, sorry, kid, that’s how it is.
I was supposed to pay her $30 for 30 minutes, but we sat there for almost two hours while she read my tarot cards. By the time she got around to looking at my hands, she’d already told me three important things about my future. I was going to travel across an ocean. I was going to do things no one in my family had ever done. And I was going to outlive everybody I knew. As of 2018, two of those three predictions have come true.
It’s amazing how quickly life can change. You leave the house every day and say, this is the job I do. This is the market where I shop. This is the person I live with. These are the faces I see as I walk down my street. This is the field with daisies nodding in the wind. This is me. For the moment, at least, this is me.
And if you succeed, if you’re healthy and disciplined and dedicated and proficient, if you don’t weaken and get that regular colonoscopy and save your money, you might last long enough to see all your variables change. Then you’ll say, this is me—isn’t it? But you won’t know how to answer. You’ll remember the fortune teller saying, “I feel bad for you,” and you’ll understand what she meant. You won’t know how to recognize yourself. You’ll be a survivor. And nobody actually ever wants that. The last man standing is, by definition, all alone.
Some of us die and are reborn in a single lifetime. In my four-and-a-half decades, I’ve already lived several full lives, played roles that had perfectly formed inciting incidents, climaxes, and denouements, which in earlier times or in other places could have described the total breadth and depth of a person’s lived experience. I’m 44 years old, not too old but not that young, either. Most days, I look 10 – 15 years younger than that. Is that good?
I spend a lot of time lost in my own head, reading, walking around and looking at things. And I’ve managed to orchestrate a life where I can do that. I can become fascinated by very simple experiences, the wind in different kinds of trees, for example, or the way sound echoes on the canal beneath my bedroom window. There’s a lot going on everywhere you look. Sometimes, it’s hypnotic. Sometimes, it’s beautiful. Sometimes, it makes me want to scream for a real long time. The world is too much. It isn’t interested in making sense or being rational. We’re the ones who make it matter. But do we really?
I don’t recommend going to fortune tellers very often. If they’re good, you’ll know too much. If they’re bad, you’ll be wasting your money. If they’re stupid, you’ll feel stupid. And if they’re clever, you’ll feel even more stupid. A fortune teller is like a bad pizza. You paid for it. So you’re going to eat it. You might feel disgusted afterwards. You might not want to talk about the experience. You might want to put it away in the file labeled Decisions About Which I Will Feel Forever Ashamed and vow never again. But you’ll probably be back.
It’s how magical things work. It’s how art works. You go see the performance piece at the museum and it has some guy drenched in urine and suspended upside-down by fish hooks from the ceiling for hours over plaster of Paris horses having sex. And you think, wow, that is neither pleasing to the eye nor conceptually interesting. It’s pretentious and it’s trying way to hard to be something that isn’t boring. You write scathing things about it on your blog. You try to put it out of your mind because you know that every minute you spend thinking about it is a minute you’ll never get back. But six months later, you go, I wonder what’s showing at the museum. So do you want anchovies on your plaster horsefucking pizza this time? Of course you do. Want to know the future? Just let me shuffle these cards.
I took piano lessons as a kid. I was very serious about them. My teacher was a professor in the music department at the university. He was a lot like Mr. Rogers. He radiated that improbable blend of whipsmart intelligence shrouded in simplicity and humor. He was a remarkable man, a truly gifted person who knew how to appreciate life. And one of the things he really appreciated was teaching children classical piano. I learned an immense amount about how to be a decent human being just by spending time with him.
I remember us sitting in a room with about 50 grand pianos. He played a single note and we listened to it until it passed away. Then we discussed its shape, its color, its temperature. There was an entire life in that sound, a whole universe from the big bang to the last chapter of the Book of Revelation with dinosaurs and empires and prophets and an Industrial Revolution and fiber optics and climate change and insane politicians and Mad Max and the heat death of a wandering star. All we had to do was listen. And, like gods, we knew we could always play another note—that, in fact, we or someone of our great pantheon would play another one and would inevitably bring another cosmos into being.
Years later, far away at a different university, I’d study the Metaphysical Poets and I’d encounter Thomas Traherne’s poem, “Shadows in the Water.” It contains these lines:
I my companions see
In you, another me.
They seeméd others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.
And I’d write a half-baked undergraduate essay on the metaphysics of sound as expressed through the semiotics of Traherne’s mirror imagery. Fabulous. The only important thing about it was that I remembered listening to my piano teacher play that note when I read “Thus did I by the water’s brink/ Another world beneath me think” and thought: exactly. Our second selves these shadows be. The gods look down from Olympus and see their reflections in us as we, in turn, look and listen to our own universes encapsulated in the breadth of a single note—as above, so below. Quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius. I’ve lived many lives, been reborn into many universes. Godlike, I’ve brought universes into being.
All being depends on context, which is to say, on the existence (meaning) of a universe. One of the many reasons I love Carl Sagan is that he said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” This is as true for the pie as it is for the pie maker—they both depend on the existence of a universe to contain them and give them meaning. By extension, if the pie maker is the last man standing in his universe, all meaningful correlation between the existential condition of the pie and that of the universe eventually breaks down.
In short, one can only eat one’s own apple pies in solitude for so long before one goes insane. The existence of a pie implies both future and past in space: in the future, someone will sit in a landscape and eat the pie which the pie maker made in the past. Because of this, if you succeed at the game of life, I will feel bad for you.
You will outlast your universe; your apple pies will no longer be meaningful. You will survive and will have no one for whom you can make an apple pie or anything else. You will see the sky fall, the stars burn out, the destruction of the world. You will be haunted by memories of times long past and people you loved and wars that no one remembers. That is a truly horrible fate. Do you want to win this game? For your sake, I sincerely hope not.
“Two rich couples drop out of a limousine. The women are wearing outfits the poor people who were in ten years ago wore ten years ago. The men are just neutral. All the poor people who’re making this club fashionable so the rich want to hang out here, even though the poor still never make a buck off the rich pleasure, are sitting on cars, watching the rich people walk up to the club.”
— Kathy Acker
For every good writing day, I have 20 bad ones. A good writing day is one in which I feel inspired to make progress on a piece. But that doesn’t ensure that I will be able to finish it or feel satisfied if I do. It doesn’t mean that I will think I did a good piece of work or that I will be able to trust that judgment over time. All I know after a good day is that I felt good. All I know on those other days is that I felt frustrated, uninspired, and aggrieved whether or not I produced pages, whether or not I think (or will think) that those pages are worthwhile.
Optimal conditions rarely exist for creative work. There is always something getting in the way, some defect of body, mind, or circumstances that conspires to obstruct progress and generate despair and self-doubt. The only answer is to keep writing, to admit that I can and will generate unsatisfying work, to avoid wondering about my talent, and to just get on with things. As my trombonist friend, Mike Hickey, once said about being a musician: just keep playing.
Just keep writing.
No one feels they have talent all the time. In fact, most people feel the way I do: it’s hit and miss, always a struggle, always an emotional upheaval. If literary geniuses really do exist outside the marketing generated by a hypocritical and terrified publishing industry, they would, by definition, be critical of themselves. History confirms that creative work is hard, even for the most famous and memorable writers. And it can’t be genius to believe it’s always easy or that your talent will confer all the pleasures and none of the agonies.
Just keep writing.
I tell myself to forget the people who have advised me not to give up my day job; they don’t know and can’t judge. Forget the family members and acquaintances who wanted me to reflect their own lack of talent and resented me for trying to develop my own; they can only see disappointing reflections of themselves. Forget the graduate school competitors, the half-starved adjunct professors, the depressed self-diagnosed creative failures, the cynical postmodernists declaring everything already over; they’re all too emotional. They’re like sick dogs. And sick dogs don’t typically write fiction. Don’t be a romantic. Be methodical. Cultivate a classical mind. Stay dedicated to the work and just keep writing because all these feelings and emotional people will disappear.
The only thing left will be the words I’ve written down. Whether there are many words or just a few is irrelevant. The point will be that I wrote them and kept writing them. In the end, that’s all I will have because the books will get put away on a shelf or recycled or lost. The computer files will get forgotten or deleted. What I wrote will be no better than a half-remembered dream. Just as what I intend to write is nothing more than a flimsy possibility. A trombonist is nothing without his trombone in his hand. If he keeps playing, he’s a trombonist.
Nothing exists except for this moment and what I do in it. So if I call myself a writer, I have one job.
All libraries contain secrets, even the most sterile and unwelcoming collections. One thinks this must be why conservative politicians despise public libraries and continuously go after their funding. It can be frightening to imagine that the public has access to knowledge that those in power have neither the time nor the inclination to discover.
A library represents free information and therefore runs contrary to the ethos of authoritarian capitalism and consumerism: if something is free, it’s suspect because nothing of value can be free. So when corporate culture and its politicians aren’t creating more poverty to criminalize, they devote a certain amount of their free time to portraying libraries as cesspools of homelessness. People can’t be going there to learn. The knowledge marketplace demands that information be endowed with a certain market value.
Libraries are all too often described as places where bad-smelling, mentally ill, bearded men spend their afternoon snoring with titles like Les arts de l’Asie centrale or A Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts and Miniatures, volume III as dusty pillows. No one sleeps in Amazon.com or on the stack of Reader’s digests and Wall Street Journals in front of the local newsstand. And that’s how conservative America likes it: if you’re not going to buy anything, please go away and die somewhere discreet. And maybe take The History and Development of Ancient Chinese Architecture with you. No one wants to buy that.
But I, for one, find unwashed old men in libraries reassuring if not a little endearing. Just as when it rains, I take solace in the regularity of storm clouds, when I hear that tell-tale snoring, I enjoy the thought that some vet named Burt will be sitting around the corner in the Dewey 930s, pretending to read a text in Arcadocypriot Greek when the librarian passes by. If you look closely, you might notice that the book is upside-down. But you won’t look that closely.
At the end of the day, when one of the librarians picks up the book to reshelve it, she’ll no doubt experience a sense of wonder: someone finally came in search of that obscure Peloponnesian dialect—and casually to the extent that the person didn’t even feel the need to check the book out! The possibility that it was merely being used as a sad old man’s headrest would be too cynical for a true librarian to entertain, at least straight away. Instead, she’d prefer to believe that someone walked in determined to learn more about the world of pre-Dorian Cyprus. And that is why true librarians are wonderful people (people filled with wonder). But, as with anything else in this late age of revenge politics, throwback Enlightenment scientism, and YA fiction for adults, true anything is rare.
Still, libraries, like museums, are meant to preserve such rarities. So it makes sense that a library might contain hidden practitioners of true arts the same way it secrets knowledge away from the broadcloth-and-pearl-wearing delinquents currently ruining the United States and demeaning the arts and sciences of the West. Maybe Burt was (is) a sculptor. Maybe the gentleman with the Fu Manchu and the Army surplus jacket at that table in the corner has a masters in historical musicology. Maybe the toothless wonder currently snoring into a puddle of drool once wrote a dissertation on the rejection of evidentialism in religious epistemology. You never know.
Maybe a star seen through a library window at midnight is actually a symmetrical angel—too distant to be clearly perceived in its full geometry. Yet, if viewed from within a dark library with one’s feet in the proper position while speaking the right Arcadocypriotic line from Pausanias’ Description of Greece, one might have a rare insight into stars and angels. One might even begin to comprehend the range of symmetrical possibilities that converge on a functioning library card: that a library is a city of doors, that it gratefully accepts the snores of sleeping homeless men the way the hills accept the rain, and that it is, above all else, an infinite palace of vaults and ritual chambers in which one finds all the angels, devils, and true adepts resident in the human imagination.
How many people will come along with the necessary Arcadocypriotic, having read the Pausanias’ prescribed ancient manuscript (even right-side-up in translation), and capable of accessing the library at midnight in order to stand by the dark window on the appropriate night and have this mysterious realization? Very few. This is how libraries veil their secrets. The information is available, but you have to do the work of discovering it. And then you have to engage with it beyond merely using the book as a headrest. The librarian believes in you.
If you succeed in this, unlike Betsy DeVos, you may attain a level of knowledge and conversation with the deeper mysteries of the library and what it represents; though, you may not reacquire your teeth or find a place to sleep after closing hours. But you will grasp the golden chain of true insight that has come down, unbroken, through the hands of countless artists, scholars, monks, philosophers, scientists, and mystics—the other end of which may be held by Venus or may disappear in the source of all books, a cloud of unknowing silence which nothing but silence can express.
There was something evil in the glow of the room’s blue lights. I felt the weight of the man on top of me. He could no longer move. His eyes were closed. I stared long into his face. I realized that I wanted him. I wanted the passion he had until a moment ago. I wanted his shoulders, which were quite muscular for his age, and his naturally tan face. I got out from under his body, sat in a chair, and lit a cigarette. I had to wait like this until he fell into a deep sleep.
It was raining outside.
— The Kingdom, Fuminori Nakamura (trans. Kalau Almony)
First, a Sincere Declaration of Thanks
I’ve spent most of my life running in circles looking for something authentic, then waiting for permission to explore it, and harshly criticizing myself when I didn’t get that permission. Maybe other people have different experiences, but this has been mine, my personal through-line from childhood to the present. So I try to be as sincere as possible when I write about my frustrations and failures. Because what else can I do? While it’s true that sincerity doesn’t make you friends, at least it makes you the right sort of enemies. I imagine this blog post will do more of that.
Still, I try to avoid self-pity and, because of this, I usually take a long time to form opinions about what I’ve done or failed to do and how others have reacted. I ruminate. I turn things over, trying to see past faulty assumptions, convenient rationalizations, and other self-serving anodynes. Most people probably do this to some extent, but I think I do it more. Sometimes, it works. Other times, what I took for a true perception, for reality, eventually dissolves into just another subjective field, just another corridor of the maze that I have come to think of as my life. In a maze, you never know what the next twist will bring. Usually, it brings another twist.
With this in mind, I should begin by saying that in 2010 I came very close to ending my life. This essay is about that time, but it’s not just about depression and not really about suicide. It’s not a success narrative where I write about how I overcame great difficulties and am now nearing perfectibility. It’s not about taking revenge on others through a misguided petty hit piece. And it’s certainly not about castigating myself for the many imaginary errors I’ve regretted and then dismissed over the last eight years in order to keep getting up in the morning. It’s a slice of life—a big, fat, ugly slice that tries to embrace the broadest range of experience in order to get closer to the truth. In this, it’s a lot like an advanced non-fiction exercise.
“Advanced” because it is not easy and not something you would assign to a 17-year-old English major in an introductory writing workshop. “Non-fiction” because it’s a mode of creative expression that pretends a certain degree of inviolable objectivity, even though we know that’s impossible. Every memoir, no matter how fabulous, must begin implicitly or explicitly with an assertion of truth or at least with a sincere declaration of authorial good faith: “I did this. I saw this. This happened. At least, I think it happened.” Rousseau’s Confessions does it with style:
Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood.
This is my favorite passage from the first part of the book because literary historians have proven that the Confessions contains many misstatements if not deliberate falsehoods. Such graceful bald-faced prevarication is a rare and beautiful thing. But I am not so talented. And I have no plans to weigh my heart against a feather on the last day.
Instead, I will put it this way: I suspect I am not a horrible person. I have faith that I’m not even tactless. I believe my greatest defect is that I lack the imagination necessary to see several moves ahead. I lack interpersonal foresight, which has made me a poor manager of nervous egomaniacs and a terrible chess player. But I love chess. And that is a serious problem, even if I hate the high-strung pampered egomania of academic writing programs, because everything toward the end of my PhD program was just a version of that game.
Robert Greene, in the acknowledgements of The 48 Laws of Power—a book loved equally by goateed 25-year-olds with a Libertarian Bitcoin fetish and the morose IT professionals you see combing the self-help section for books on how to become an alpha male—has a similar protestation of sincerity:
I must also thank my dear friend Michiel Schwarz who was responsible for involving me in the art school Fabrika in Italy and introducing me there to Joost Elffers, my partner and producer of The 48 Laws of Power. It was in the scheming world of Fabrika that Joost and I saw the timelessness of Machiavelli and from our discussions in Venice, Italy, this book was born. . . . Finally, to those people in my life who have so skillfully used the game of power to manipulate, torture, and cause me pain over the years, I bear you no grudges and I thank you for supplying me with inspiration for The 48 Laws of Power.
If we read this carefully, we have to smile. Greene is doing what we might call an “inverted Rousseau,” making the same assertion in a backwards way: this is a book about real things; therefore, I thank all those who have manipulated and tortured me for providing good material and, in the process, I declare my sincerity.
Greene puts us on notice that his book is based on subjective material that emanates from his and Elffers’ lived experience, creating a Rousseau-esque escape hatch. As The 48 Laws of Power is all highly subjective (essentially a kind of implicit portrait of Greene stitched together in historical anecdotes), the value of whatever he writes defaults to his apparent sincerity (“I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood”). It’s not about an objective truth process. It’s about rhetorical ethos.
That is wonderful because ethos might be the only sincere rhetorical mode. After logos topples from an unstable foundation of assumption, appeal to authority, and generalization; after pathos is unmasked as merely a screen of emotion recollected in tranquility; the persuasive credibility of the speaker is all that remains. In a world where absolute truth does not exist, everything is ethos. And so I construct my own ethical escape hatch.
2010 was the worst year of my life, the year after my mother died of lung cancer; the year after my first book was published; the year I got my PhD in English; the year I attended my last AWP Conference; the year I traveled to the deep South for an excruciating week-long job interview and realized the English department clichés also obtain south of the Mason-Dixon Line; the year I got very ill; the year I was admonished by my mentor for questioning the value of my degree and told to be grateful for indefinite unemployment; the year my father began another surly adolescence; the year I began to think that there was no place for me in this world. There are many years I’d relive if I could. 2010 is not one of them. But I have been told to be thankful for these experiences because they have supplied me with a lot of inspiration. As such, this writing is my sincere declaration of thanks.
Prelude
You never know what the next twist in the maze will bring but, in 2009, I think I was doing as well as could be expected when I stood in front of the department graduate adviser’s desk and said I needed a leave of absence to visit my mother in hospice. For some reason, that moment stands out as a prelude for the upcoming year.
The adviser, the department’s resident medievalist, seemed to exist in an acid vapor of contempt for all creative writing students and their keepers. She disliked me in particular because I’d dropped her Old English seminar the previous semester and she’d taken it personally. Since I was doing a PhD with a creative dissertation (the final product would become Gravity, my first story collection), I didn’t need to be in her class. But she needed me there. Or, at least, she needed to feel loved by as many students as possible.
This was the woman who would thereafter try to prevent me from graduating so that my funding would run out. This was the woman—whether due to old workplace feuds or out of resentment that there were more creative writing events on campus than dramatizations of Piers Plowman and undergraduate maypole dances—perpetually tried to block funding to the creative writing program and force out the graduate students depending on tuition waivers. Her style of chess was to kill the pawns first. Attack the supply lines, starve the more dangerous units in their fortifications, and wait for winter. Classic medieval siege tactics.
However, standing before her desk, I was barely aware of the billowing acid cloud. I was half-blind with grief. All I thought about was my mom and how I had to get back to California to see her. Looking back, I’m surprised I even had the wherewithal to stand up straight, much less ask for a leave of absence. But I was very responsible. I took everything seriously. I thought a lot about my future in academia, especially in creative writing instruction. And I felt my future depended on me contentiously following up on every detail. I was, essentially, as sincere as I have ever been in my life. I shouldn’t have been that sincere.
Given my emotional state, what the adviser said to me didn’t register until I’d left the building. The conversation went something like this:
“I need a leave of absence to go to California because my mother is dying of cancer.”
She rolled her eyes, looked out the window as if she were considering it, sighed, then shook her head. “No can do. You only have so much funding. Your funding will not cover you for another semester.”
“My mother is dying. She doesn’t have long. I’ve completed my course work. My dissertation only needs to be approved. I don’t even need any more credits.”
Another sigh. More contemplating the clouds. “Well, that’s really too bad. You have to be in residence or your funding will run out while you’re gone. Good luck.”
I stood there, trying unsuccessfully to process this. Then she rolled her eyes and asked me if there was anything else.
The grief robot turned and left her office, got on the elevator, rode it down to the bottom floor, walked out to the fountain in the center of the courtyard, and stared at the water for a long time. Only then, did he think of the graduate adviser rolling her eyes. Over the ensuing 9 years, the moment of her eye roll would be impressed in his memory as a perfect metaphor, a perfect image foreshadowing all the inspiration and gratitude to come.
The Tragedy of Not Dying
A hospice is a horrible place. It’s like being given a lollipop for a bullet wound. You’re bleeding out and everyone tells you to enjoy your lolly. It’s cherry. It’s got a smiley face. Why aren’t you happy? Visiting my mother with my father there added another layer to the experience. In spite of the pain and horror of the place, in spite of watching my mother waste away in her bed, hallucinating and suffering and being afraid, I came to understand that my father’s grief was different from mine. I was feeling bad for my mother. He was feeling bad for himself.
This was still 2009. My only course, aside from empty dissertation credits, was a German reading and literature seminar. The professor, a kind old man about to retire in his late 60s, loved his students the way he loved his trees—which is to say, far more than he loved the university. I asked him for advice because he was the only person I could ask. And he made it possible for me to exist in two places at once. I gave my own writing students two weeks of work and held online course meetings via Skype and I emailed my German professor my work, which made it seem like I was present. This is what allowed me to fly to California and see my mom for the last time.
In those first awful trips to the hospice, I’d naïvely hoped that my father and I could come together in our grief and support each other. Of course, this was pure fantasy since he’d always enjoyed being a father but had rarely done any fatherly things. I could count the number of times we’d gone to movies, the one thing we could do together because it involved no conversation. And there were a few other misadventures over the years where my mother badgered him into going to some school play (he stood by the door to be the first person out) or taking me fishing (we did a U-turn at the access road to the lake and went home) or camping (it rained and so we packed up in the middle of the night and left). He never beat me and he brought home a paycheck. To the best of my knowledge, he never stepped out on my mother. But he was never involved more than that; though, he lived with us in the same house—somewhat more than a housemate, somewhat less than a relative.
So my hope that he would be able, somehow, if in a manly way, to share this painful experience with me, was not based on reality. After a certain amount of talk about how sad he was, it became noticeable that he never talked about my mom. He sat by her bed, lost in his own self-pity, as the cancer ate its way through her brain and wasted her body. As she died by inches, he proceeded as usual, focusing on his own needs above all else.
I witnessed this. My wife witnessed this. But I was so aggrieved I could barely speak. Sometimes, my wife had to help me walk from the car to my mother’s room. Have you ever been so upset that you can barely walk? Until you have, you won’t know the feeling. When you have, you’ll never forget it. It transcends description.
I focused completely on my mom. I waited for her moments of clarity. I told her I loved her. I told her the good things about my PhD program. I made jokes and she tried to laugh. One day, my great aunt—a stately old Italian woman who sounded like my late grandmother and seemed covered in the old-world charm that vanished with her generation—showed up with a peach and a kitchen knife. She cut slices and fed them to my mom with a smile on her face. Even now, as I write this, I cry a little because it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. That kind of goodness doesn’t exist much in this world.
It was a very difficult time. Two weeks later, I returned to finish my program. In one of her last moments of clarity, my mom had ordered me to go back. She didn’t want me to see her die and me being in the PhD program meant a lot to her. I think she felt ashamed that she wasn’t going to be around to take care of my father and me the way she always had. And knowing that I was going to get a doctorate was a relief, as if it would be the next best thing. She also had a lot of pride in her appearance and the cancer had been unkind. So when I offered to stay, she insisted that I not. About two weeks after that, my father called and said to say good-bye to her. I told her I loved her. And I think she died shortly thereafter.
I miss her every day. But this isn’t about that, either. It’s about the aftermath, how everything changed as a result of her death. Some people are the linchpins of their families. When they go, everything goes. That was what happened. I flew back again for her funeral. She was buried holding a photo of my father and me. It was a closed casket and I don’t remember much else, just bits and pieces. I was out of my mind.
As we moved toward the Fall semester of 2010, I felt melted down and recast as a different person. I’d lost my happy thoughts. I didn’t go out or talk to many people other than my wife and my program mentor. I stopped writing fiction. Most of what I did was perfunctory. But I knew I had to get my degree. Even if I collapsed afterward, I would complete the PhD.
The Reading Series
The year before, I’d allowed myself to be persuaded that working as the assistant coordinator for the university literary reading series would “look good on my resume.” And I did my best as the monthly, sometimes bi-monthly, flier maker, venue securer, introducer-to-the-introducer, complaint taker, fielder-of-calls from mentally unstable bookstore proprietors, irradiated scapegoat, and general handler of said low-rung celebrity infants terribles.
Sometime before I left town for good, one of the faculty members admitted to me that the assistant coordinator position was really only supposed to entail flier making and that the professor who was getting paid to be to be doing the other things had dumped the rest on me. But by then I was so depressed that I couldn’t summon the necessary outrage.
One writer wanted a per diem that wasn’t in his agreement. Another wanted intel on, in his exact words, “the most fuckable students who might be around.” The butch lesbian poet would only communicate with me through an intermediary because I was straight and male. The playwright was supernaturally high throughout his entire visit and had to be physically guided to the stage. The “local writer,” penciled in because there was a vacancy in the schedule that month, struggled to contain her spiritual darkness through the entire event such that when I handed her the honorarium (significantly less than what the other, slightly more famous writers had received), she snatched it out of my hand, hissed a “Go fuck yourself,” and then smiled broadly at an approaching faculty member. These were some of the more endearing ones.
Needless to say, it was not the greatest collection of individuals. They generally came across as worn out, mediocre, vain, full of fear, full of resentment, and perpetually on the hustle for any crumb of recognition. Calling them fools wouldn’t be accurate because they were all reasonably intelligent. They simply knew the score too well, knew they should have received more for their dedication and efforts. You could see that loathsome awareness stamped on their faces. Now they were privileged to read their work to the smirking tenured faculty who hadn’t hired them, a menagerie of twitchy English students, and whichever townies may have wandered in looking for free wine. It wouldn’t get much better than that.
I disliked the visiting readers even though I saw myself and my fellow grad students reflected in them. Most of the people featured in the series that year hadn’t been picked for life’s cheer squad. They were the leftovers, the understudies, the adjuncts with slim books from presses you’ve never heard of. Many, it seemed, faced depression so considerable that they were pharmaceutically enhanced 100% of the time. I wondered more than once how they could continue to produce writing. The greatest irony was that most of them had already gone further in their careers than anyone currently in my PhD program stood to go.
There were a few exceptions, a few graceful and brilliant souls who’d agreed to come as personal favors to various faculty members. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them as well as the moments of hilarity you find in every English department. 2010 wasn’t all doom and gloom, just most of it.
The second time I was told to go fuck myself was around 3 AM on a Sunday morning toward the end of Fall semester. My insomnia had become pretty dependable at that point and I was already awake when the phone rang. I got out of bed, told my wife I had no idea who it was, and shuffled into our tiny living room, where I sat on the couch and listened to the breather on the line. He was panting hard. I thought it was quaint that in this day and age people still gave breather-masturbator calls. The caller ID came up with nothing.
When he realized I’d said hello and was listening, he rumbled out a “Go fuck yourself” and hung up. I sat in the dark for a while, thinking about the human condition. Then he called back. It was F, one of the few grad students who’d been asked to read in the series. He mumbled some things and then shouted that he thought I had a problem and should get help. He was drunk off his ass.
I asked him why he felt that way and he broke it down for me. F had read with his wife, you see, and I’d made the mistake of introducing him before her. Neither of them were ever going to get over it. Plus, she was a Navajo princess and I’d introduced them as husband and wife. You don’t do that to a Navajo princess. Didn’t I fucking know that? What was wrong with my head?
“Princess? Really? I thought you guys were from Pittsburgh.”
He hung up again and didn’t speak to me until I ran into him at the AWP Conference a few months later—where he was keyed up and sweaty, slapping me on the back, telling me how he’d been featured in a very cool spontaneous reading held on one of the convention center’s escalators that drew an enormous crowd. Now he had a pocket of phone numbers to network. Amazing. He didn’t remember a thing about calling me in the dark and telling me what I could go do with myself.
Or maybe he’d repressed that memory along with his courtship of the Navajo princess, that hard winter living as tribe’s writer, the majestic swish of his khakis as he hunted buffalo, armed only with an unpublished manuscript. I haven’t seen him or heard a thing about him since the conference, but I suspect he’s either got tenure by now or he’s back in Pennsylvania selling pre-loved automobiles like it’s a poetry slam.
The End, My Friend
Depression is a very idiosyncratic and personalized illness. But those who have it tend to have a few things in common, one of which is that depression can be cumulative in its gravity and magnitude. Today, you’re not feeling good. Tomorrow, you can’t get out of bed. The day after that, you’re standing on a chair with a vacuum cleaner cord around your neck and you think you’re the only one in the history of the world who’s endured such a linear degeneration. Feeling alone is a big part of it.
I felt alone until I discovered Darkness Visible by William Styron and recognized a lot of what I’d been going through. I don’t know how I found the book, whether it was in the fiction section of the library where I sometimes studied or whether I encountered it in a used bookstore or somewhere else. While it wouldn’t be true to claim that the book “saved” me, I can say it helped enough to get me down off the chair, multiple chairs, actually.
Reading it was an emergency measure, but it was something I could depend on. I didn’t talk about my feelings. I’ve never been very good at that, not even with my loved ones. But I could read someone else talking about his. And since I loved Styron’s fiction, I felt like I could trust him. If he said it, I could accept it enough to be able to think about it. And that was usually all it took for me to keep going.
By Spring break, I was prepared to submit my dissertation. I missed my mom horribly and my wife and I returned to California to take care of the empty house where all my mother’s things sat gathering dust. My father wouldn’t go near the place. When he wasn’t drunk, he was hard at work rediscovering his hormones in erratic, awkward, and desperate ways. Our relationship, never substantial to begin with, began to splinter irreparably when, out of guilt, he started to regularly criticize my mom.
He was a self-righteous Catholic for most of my life, who often amused himself by telling me to get my ass to church and that since I’d been baptized I could never not be a Catholic. But after a year of drinking, trash talking, and a pissed-drunk rape attempt on my cousin in front of me, he was ready to start up a relationship with an equally neurotic married woman who’d run after him at an event.
He confessed this to me one afternoon because I guess he couldn’t confess it to his priest. Then he added that it was like a DH Lawrence love story. Then he said she was going to get a divorce from her despicable husband and they’d marry each other. Lovely. I didn’t want to hear about it. I especially didn’t want to hear him ask me to be his best man. I could hardly speak. It shows how detached and self-involved he was that he thought it was something he could ask me.
“What about all that Catholicism?” I remember asking. I don’t remember if he answered.
Around that time, because he wouldn’t help me clean out my mother’s things, I’d been over at the house, crying, putting her clothes in Goodwill boxes, packing up old photo albums, doing all the things we could have done as a family. Instead, my wife helped and we did the best we could in a few days. Much was overlooked, things from my childhood, things in the garage that I really do wish I could have kept. But we only had so much time. Now I imagine my father and his new wife paid at some point to have it all carted to the dump. But I have no way of knowing, since I haven’t been back in years.
I do recall taking to the gardener, who revealed that he’d had my mother making food for him right up to the point where she went into the hospital for the last time. She couldn’t lie down straight in bed. So she was sleeping sitting up in a chair in order to breathe, then walking around on crutches, cooking and cleaning. According to the gardener, he screamed at her frequently. She was fucking dying and this is how he treated her. That’s abuse. It’s horrible fucking abuse. And my mother, who was just about a saint in every way, did her best.
My mother was a talented painter and sculptor, but he’d left her art in a shed that had a broken roof. It rained a lot that year and most of her work was ruined. I’d been standing in the backyard, looking at the shed, unable to get in because he neglected to give me the key to the deadbolt (probably because he didn’t want me to see what had happened) when he called with a task for me. It was something small, something to do with getting a TV boxed up for him and cancelling the TV service that my mom had in her hospice room. I’d already taken care of it, but he spoke to me with contempt, as if I were very lazy. He said, “After all I’ve done for you, couldn’t you take care of this one thing?”
I thought of my mother on crutches, making him breakfast. I thought of her art destroyed through neglect. I thought of my father drinking a case of my cousin’s high-end champagne and then trying to fuck her in front of me. I thought of all the nasty things he said about my mother when she was gone, after he’d cried his eyes out for himself, after he blamed me for not being there when she died, after the sizeable amount of heirloom gold from old Italy that my mom wanted to come to me but that disappeared right around the time my father and his new cadaverous lady friend got a second condo in San Antonio. I thought about all these things and saw that no matter what his paycheck had been worth, no matter how much I may have cost as a child, no matter what my mom and he may have given me as a teen or a confused 20-year-old, I owed him nothing.
I felt something snap and a certain coldness overtook me. My depression had come to be replaced with something more useful: calm, thoughtful anger. We had it out. He told my wife and I we had to be out of the house. Within 48 hours, we were. I’ve never looked back.
Gone for Good
I got my PhD without fanfare. My wife and I went out to dinner and it was nice, just the two of us. I knew I’d miss my mentor in the program and her brilliant husband. I’d miss certain things about the university town and my own writing students, several of whom had become more like friends. But I was glad to be done—done with the degree, done with my father, done with trying to hump the dream of being an academic creative writer.
In the eight years since the day we drove south, blasting M. Ward’s “Helicopter” with the windows rolled down, I’ve thought about 2010 quite a lot. I still get depressed. But I can cope. I’ve learned that it is possible and, for me, even preferable to have a life outside academia. And I’ve come to accept that family isn’t really who raises you when you don’t have a say in the matter. It’s who you choose when you do.
I miss my mom every day and I write fiction every day. As of this writing, I’m working on my third collection of stories with a novel draft mostly written. I’ve published over 30 items in magazines, worked as a freelance writer and journalist, and lived in 9 countries. I’m healthy. I really don’t have anything to complain about right now. And sometimes I even give myself permission to think I’m happy. Somewhere, there’s a Navajo princess riding through the clouds over Pittsburgh, but I doubt our paths will cross again.
Looking at photos of relatives from the early 20th century, I’m struck by how incredibly normal they look, how I could walk down any street and see the same faces. Such an insight comes easily since I live near the locus of my ancestral lines, but I think it’s a realization one could have anywhere. Stare into the faces of passers by and you will see many physical and psychological reflections of yourself, as if the genetic mirror were shattered, replicating the same fate, the same consequences, the same inner struggles across continents and generations.
Someone once said that all wars are the same war, that all short stories are just one long story, and that all people—no matter how diverse or alien they may seem on the surface—are actually one life and one humanity engaged in one struggle playing out simultaneously in every heart and mind. Being a gifted dancer, Michael Jackson once put it like this: “Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the Creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on.”
This is the 2000-year-old concept of Nataraja, the image of Shiva as the cosmic dancer who dispels illusion and reveals a higher truth. As part of the dance of time and space, forms rise and fall—in the microcosm of the individual mind and in the macrocosm of all creation—but the dance itself, the maelstrom of change, remains constant as an expression of something else, something beyond the perception of transient things. The ancient sages and priests of the Madhya Pradesh and Kashmir regions first portrayed Shiva this way around 6 C.E. in temple statues and paintings, depicting a true, eternal, changeless Self that is simultaneously immanent in every person and transcendent in the ubiquitous I AM.
Ram Dass, in Polishing the Mirror, expresses this when he writes, “The only thing you really ever have to offer another person is your own state of being.” Or whatever you offer to others, you are also confirming and offering as part of yourself. This posits an equals sign between people, not an arrow, a plus, or a minus. Is there anything new under the sun? Ecclesiastes says no. Read enough literature and I think most people will be inclined to agree: we find meaning in another because that meaning resonates in ourselves. Yeats wrote that ultimately it is not possible to distinguish the dancer from the dance. Repair the shattered mirror, the broken and limited perception of others that sees them as irreparably isolated from us, and a higher octave of meaning is revealed. We are isolate. We are also one. And, in our ultimate oneness, “we” and “are” and “one” cease to have any meaning and the truth of existence becomes evident.
Pay attention to your ancestors, to their lives, to the things they did and said. See yourself in them as one being. Then see yourself in others, in everything. Look past the superficial trivia that limits your understanding and obscures the truth of the matter: assumptions about linear progress (originally post-Enlightenment / Victorian but now, with our current STEM fetishism, solidly reductive materialist and technocratic) depend on an unexamined and distracted mind. There is no new thing under the sun in any meaningful sense. The are only forms, rising and falling, being born and dying.
Start paying attention to this. Start asking, Who am I? Start asking, Who is it that asks, “Who am I?” Go deep, beyond the forms. You are not those things. Get to the point where you can perceive the dance always taking place, the energy of creation itself, which is expressed as movement, as change. This is also synonymous with the highest, emptiest, most profound form of awareness. That is what we are.
“After negating all of the above-mentioned as ‘not this’, ‘not this’, Awareness alone remains – that I am.” – Ramana Maharshi
I love Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop media franchise-festival-website-train wreck-tent revival-circus because it’s so bad, so transparent, so cynical, so marketed to the sad and the gullible, that it’s good. It fails so spectacularly that it inadvertently succeeds at being something else: not just more disingenuous commerce beneath a layer of new age double-talk, but, like Gwyneth herself, a new mutant reality, a fun house mirror that you can step into, like any magic mirror, and find yourself in some alternate world.
Whenever I witness something from Goop, I think, “Oprah did this” in the sense that Oprah’s marketing simultaneously harnessed the libidos of multiple generations of frustrated women across economic and ethnic boundaries in a way hitherto unrivaled by Madison Avenue. Oprah was up in everybody’s grill. Her media empire embodied the Wachowskis’ matrix concept: persistent, ubiquitous, artificial, verisimilar, and controlling. For 25 years, the Oprah Winfrey Show (with its attendant book club, “favorite things” endorsements, travel events, health trends, mail-order spirituality, and assorted celebrity mea culpas) gave viewers a voice, essentially Oprah’s voice.
But, for all that, one got the impression that she at least meant well. Beneath the innumerable folds of consumerism and coercive string-pulling, Oprah maintained a pearl of optimism about human beings. Much of her show focused on ways to realize oneself, actualize one’s unique gifts, and live a better life—not such a bad thing given the dry rot at the heart of American culture. The weight of that simple optimism seemed to counterbalance all the product placement.
Daytime talk show tabloidia could accept Oprah as a messiah figure perhaps because she came bearing free cars, spa trips, and the occasional house. Someone would walk on stage with a check the size of a Volvo and hand it to a weeping audience member. Confetti would fall from the ceiling. And everyone would bellow in orgasmic wonder.
But nobody wants to find their spiritual apotheosis in Gwyneth.
I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I’m still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.
– Charlie Brown
Years ago, when I was in law school, I had a curious experience, one that has recently echoed back to me from the son of a friend coming to the end of his 1L. I would attend classes for about 5-6 hours a day, then spend 8-10 more studying in the library. I was wired pretty tightly, well on my way to developing a host of stress- and anxiety-driven illnesses, a drinking habit, anger management problems, and a degree of generalized hatred for myself and all humanity. And I was one of the relatively soulful, philosophically minded, well-adjusted ones. You wouldn’t have wanted to spend 10 minutes in my presence.
The substance abuse in my first and second years was incredible to behold. It was comparable to the level of fear sustained in the students by the policies of the school, the economy, and their own Type-A personalities. At this time, jobs in law were just starting to become scarce. People were deeply in debt, had sacrificed everything to get there, and were obsessively, neurotically, pathologically motivated to succeed. The most popular directions were intellectual property, cyber law, and various other strains of corporate or business-oriented practice. Those interested in criminal law were viewed with a mix of wonder and contempt. The poverty law clinic people were considered idealistic rubes destined to live on ramen and hot dogs for the rest of their miserable lives.
And so it went. There was a suicide at the end of 1L, a hushed-up sexual harassment scandal involving a star professor, a few students dropped out, one to get married and become a suburban housewife, another due to undisclosed health problems, another after an in-class meltdown. The rest of us soldiered on because we had to. What else did we have? We were children who’d practiced the tuba for hours and hours and now we were in Advanced Tuba School. Take our tubas away and, we felt, we’d have to go sleep in the park.
I was no exception to any of this. The only thing that I had going for me was a tiny secret flame of creativity that I kept lit. Every Sunday morning, like a religious ritual, I took an hour out to read a short story. That was my church and my scripture. It was also another source of pain because it reminded me that somewhere someone not in law had written those words. My fellow students fantasized about opening surf shops, being school custodians, managing bowling alleys. The escape fantasies came thick and fast, especially around exams when the law library mostly reeked of coffee and body odor. I fantasized about these things, too, about being a writer custodian or a writer surf shop cashier.
One afternoon, sitting in a fern-laden restaurant I couldn’t afford with a drug lawyer who had become a mentor of sorts, I came to a realization. She was on her third glass of wine, telling me that I needed to love law school because it was only going to get worse afterward. She said, “When I was in law school, I got to the point where I thought that I might be able to get hit by a car and live. If my legs were broken, no one could blame me for quitting.” I walked out of that lunch feeling like I’d just visited the crossroads and the devil had handed me some solid advice: you can sell your soul, but why don’t you go home and think it over first?
In the grand synchronicity of all things magical, I’d gotten an email that day from a writer I admired. I’d sent him a few old short stories and asked the most annoying question a young writer can ask: “Am I any good?” But he was kind and honest. He wrote back and said, “Yes, in my opinion, you are. But the life of a writer is not easy and you should know what you’re getting into. If you want to come study with me, you’re invited.” Warnings and dire pronouncements were nothing new. I heard them every day. So the caveat made absolutely no impression on me whatsoever. His opinion about my writing did. Shortly thereafter, I left law school to study creative writing and subsequently get a PhD in English.
Still, you don’t just walk away from that life. Law school makes a deep impression. It made me strong in certain ways, forced me to stop seeing success in law as a grand test of self-worth. Law school isn’t an IQ test; it’s not a metric for willpower, character, cleverness, or discipline; though, it draws on all of those things (like anything made artificially difficult). Law is generally taught poorly, often emotionally brutalizes students, and is unforgiving of human frailty in totally unnecessary ways. It’s also idealized when it should be analyzed. People worship law education because succeeding there is held up as an objective way to know one’s worth, which is tragic.
I want to say these things to my friend’s son. But I know I can’t because I see in him all the masochistic investment that I saw when I was back in law school. Instead, I will say it here and add: someone who seems stupid and unsuccessful in one respect will be smart and successful in another. Often these things will not be superficially evident. Until you can accept this—that there is no way to judge your worth apart from looking for it inside yourself—you will always be sad, scared, and beholden to the social power of others.
Be free. Let it go. Try to experience love. Try to discover small things that make you happy and look for ways to share those things with others. That’s when life really gets good. When you see someone who appears to be the smartest or most powerful person in the room, take a step back and widen your perspective until that feeling of being impressed and intimidated passes. Then look again.
For the last 27 years, I’ve kept a diary in which I’ve made entries three to five times a week in a ritualistic obsession to document my life. To be honest, I’ve also kept the diary to have someone to whom I can talk. No one but a blank page would ever care to listen to all my complaints and worries (given their number and variety) and no one should have to. When I was a child, it was my mother who listened. Now Microsoft Word is my mother.
Many of the entries are short. Some go on like essays. But no matter how voluble or terse, joyful or upset I was when I wrote, I’ve been able to use the entries to bend time—essentially to bring my past more vividly into my present. As a result, I believe that who I am now is more meaningfully informed by who I have been at various other points in my history, affecting the way I view my present place in the world and my sense of momentum through life.
Bending time is one of the most outstanding benefits to keeping a diary, maybe the only real benefit. It may sound like a kind of hell, endlessly ruminating over people, places, events, and feelings long gone. And one does pay a price. I’d be lying if I said my diaristic habit hadn’t aged me in certain ways while keeping me young in others.
In one sense, I carry a unique emotional weight. Some things that happened decades ago may seem like they went down yesterday. And what is happening right now may resonate in idiosyncratic ways, causing me to react unpredictably. Why am I so angry? Why did I find that so funny? Well, you see, back in 1997 . . . I don’t heal very well from past wounds. Some things I just can’t let go or forgive. I wouldn’t even say I hold grudges because that would imply an unnatural or inappropriate degree of ill will or resentment over time. My ill will and resentment are perfectly natural and appropriate, given my perspective.
I’ve also seen personal themes emerge, but I can’t say whether it’s because of character, destiny, or maybe just selective attention. I only know that I’ve noticed cycles, repetitions, even echoes across the years. Situations will happen over and over. Similar personality types will appear and be magnetized to me or repulsed by me or both in their seasons. People will say the same things. Headlines will look the same. I’ll often (though thankfully not always) make the same stupid mistakes.
I’ll even have dreamlike moments of déjà vu in which I won’t be sure whether I imagined something, saw it in my sleep, or actually experienced it. But I think I’ve reached the point where I care a lot less about the distinction between daydreams, actual dreams, misremembered dreams, and lived dreams. Life really is but a dream and, if I experienced something, it was undeniably an experience.
Ironically, my compulsive documentarianism has made everything seem a bit relative. I celebrate many anniversaries, births, deaths, resurrections, departures, (not so) sudden arrivals, accomplishments, magical epiphanies, failures, desperate heartaches, humiliations, dignities, and small quiet moments. I remember a red leaf from a chestnut tree that I picked up while standing in the German WWII graveyard outside Tallinn; walking behind an NYU undergrad through old town in Prague, how his T-shirt had male and female restroom icons made to look like they were at a wedding and the words GAME OVER underneath; dancing with a girl who’d driven down that night from the Flathead Indian Reservation at a bar called the Iron Horse in Missoula, Montana, the same night a friend of mine got high and chased two fraternity brothers through the frozen streets with a razor sharp hunting knife.
I remember the night I met the woman who’d become my wife; the moment I learned that my father had been abusing my mother right up to the day she went into cancer hospice; holding my first book of stories when it finally arrived; the day I spent acting in a TV commercial; standing in the ruins of the Hell Fire Club on Montpelier Hill overlooking Dublin on a rainy day; lying down on a grave in Savannah, Georgia, and staring up at the night sky through the branches of a willow tree.
I’ve already lived multiple lives, died and been reborn multiple times. And I feel this has modified the way I see everything, the way I write, how I speak, probably even the structures in my brain. In a moment of absolute strangeness and synchronicity—not to be believed but true nonetheless—my neighbor is playing the Pixies’ Where is my mind? (poorly) on the piano. Good question.
At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.
– Charles Bukowski
Source: http://bit.ly/2DzrRnn
This is what I often try to communicate on this blog. Here’s Dave Grohl saying it from a musical perspective.
Caleb was a smart, funny, middle-aged real estate salesman who dressed well and seemed amused by the world. He sat apart in my Shakespeare seminar, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, shrouded in the kind of invisibility that accompanies older, returning, so-called “non-traditional” college students. The rest of the class, early 20-something undergraduates, were only interested in each other and passing the 3 credits of Shakespeare required for their various humanities degrees. But I paid attention to Caleb and listened to him when he occasionally spoke up.
Maybe this was because I spent my childhood and early adult years in search of male role models, my father having been emotionally absent for most of my life. Whatever the reason, while the other students were busy trying to get together with each other and / or ridicule each other’s ideas—oblivious to everyone and everything (often including the professor and the work) that stood outside the narrow purview of their post-adolescent obsessions—I was taking it all in, especially the things Caleb said.
I remember thinking that he seemed to have everything a man could want: intelligence, style, money, wit, and enough virtue to believe that he could better himself by getting a second bachelor’s degree. In my own very naïve and superficial way, I thought he was teaching me something by example. I paid attention because I believed there were life secrets in plain view that could be discovered as long as I showed up, closed my mouth, and opened my mind. But the lesson I was destined to learn from Caleb would not be taught until I got to know him better.
Toward the end of the course, we had to find a partner and prepare a presentation on one of Shakespeare’s history plays. I was a hard worker. So the presentation was relatively easy. And since, like Caleb, I was a social outsider in the class, it seemed natural that we would be partners. In this way, I got to know him a lot better. We met a few times at the country club, of which he was part owner, and he taught me the basics of golf—which I found interesting but which I have not played since then.
We did the work, but I also got drawn temporarily into his social sphere. Caleb had a magnetic personality and was constantly surrounded by money, activity, assistants, and stunning women, most of whom were professionals in commercial real estate or finance. His lifestyle was impressive and a bit overwhelming to me. Still, working with him over the course of a month gave me an insight I hadn’t had, a vision of what life could be like after college. But it all fell away one afternoon over lunch when Caleb gave me some frank advice.
We’d just finished eating with a woman named Eva, who was about 5 years older than me and already a heavyweight in east coast corporate real estate. She could have easily been a girl in one of my classes, but she’d graduated a year before from Princeton. She was also one of the most physically beautiful people I had ever looked at. When she said her good-byes and went off towards the tennis courts, Caleb and I watched her go. I felt like I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning—that curious blend of admiration and despair that started wars in the ancient world, made poets fill their heads with absinthe and jump off bridges, and makes everyday people like you and me weep in the dark.
Caleb noticed the look on my face and said, “Don’t be a walking wallet in your life, Michael.”
I said I didn’t understand and he just looked at me with a faint smile as if to say, yes, you damn well do.
“This is no life to fall in love with,” he said. “Study hard. Do what you’re good at. This—” he frowned and waved his hand to take in the people sitting around us, Eva (now a tiny figure in a white skirt among other tiny white-skirted figures on the tennis courts), the rolling golf course, the perfect blue sky—“is artificial.”
Over the years, it has occurred to me more than once that I could have sincerely responded with: “Most things we want are.” But I wasn’t that glib at age 21. Instead, I must have nodded or changed the subject because I don’t remember the rest of the conversation. I do remember how Caleb pronounced artificial, like it was covered in some kind of excrement. And I clearly recall how my sense of Eva immediately changed from infatuation to a kind of dread.
If Caleb, a man who seemed to have everything, could feel bitter about his choices, then what lay in store for Eva? For me? How long would it take for the acids of commercial real estate to etch lines of acrimony and despair into her beautiful face? And to what lengths would she go to cover all that up and approximate her former smile? To what lengths had Caleb gone? And how unsophisticated and superficial was I that I couldn’t see this while he could read my deepest longings and insecurities over a Caesar salad at the club?
I suppose he’d taken his own advice in spite of his regrets. Caleb was doing what he was good at: reading me, helping me understand how to find satisfaction. A gifted salesman knows your likes and dislikes, knows how to help you get what you want. At the deepest purest level, a salesman is your best friend. No one cares more deeply about fulfilling your needs, about why and how you’re hungry and how to feed you. It has occurred to me that a true salesman—someone following his inner gift such that a writer like Cormac McCarthy might say he carried the secret fire—is as much an artist as any painter or poet. He merely works in a cruder medium: human desire.
Caleb was one of the few people I’ve met in my life who carried that fire alongside his pain. The possibility that one could actually do this was the lesson he taught me in a single conversation on a beautiful California afternoon sometime in 1993. It opened my mind, not to becoming a real estate salesman like him, but to the reality that I had the secret fire, too; that somewhere it was already burning; and that discovering it was more important than all the dreams of avarice.
A review of The Last Jedi on Splice Today.
Read it here: https://www.splicetoday.com/moving-pictures/you-can-do-magic-honey
The latest on Splice Today.
Source: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/as-the-leopard-so-the-coliseum
One thinks: this shit’s never gonna end. Puerto Rico. Idiot with a bump stock on the the 32nd floor. Nuclear Viagra giving Trump an intercontinental hard-on. Hurricane Maria, Irma, Harvey, take your pick. My friend’s house underwater in Houston, his dog on an inflatable raft. Girls stabbed in Marseilles. Girls with acid in their faces. Girls shot in a club. Catalonia blowing up. Spanish police hurling voters down the stairs, zip ties, broken jaws. It will never, ever end.
One thinks: on a long enough timeline, the probability of any given thing in the United States becoming a horrific instrument of death rises to about 99%. Maybe puppies, water lilies, and soft serve ice cream are exempt, but you’d be surprised. America is a lethal place. More lethal this year than last year and you know why. There is no fate. No grace. No help from above. Just you and me and the justice we make. But maybe I don’t know what’s just anymore.
One thinks: if we could figure out what justice is, we might make a little more of it in the time we have left before the Empire falls and the barbarians come wailing in to roast mom for dinner. But, you see, mom has it coming. The Empire is always collapsing. That’s part of what makes it the Empire. And mothers are the ones raising a new generation of infantry to help it all along. Mothers are secretly to blame. If you really want to be the change, just don’t breed. But you can’t help yourself, can you.
I once dated a girl whose mother had retired to Coronado Island after 30 years of running a large farm in the Midwest. The woman now lived in a pristine four-story mansion with stained glass windows and aged admirals as neighbors. The story of how she got transported from a farm to a high-end resort off the coast of San Diego unpacks like a cliché movie of the week: illegal pesticides, cancer deaths, enormous lawsuit, and an out-of-court settlement that made everyone but the families of the farm laborers obscenely rich.
Mom was, as they used to say in Northern California, hella happy with the outcome, even though (or maybe because) her second husband also kicked it in the process. She was the Laughing Farmer Buddha of corporate hush money. Though after she met me, she was perhaps less amused by life or by her daughter’s choices in men.
When we shook, she twisted my hand open in a death grip, looked down at my palm, and said, “Hmm. Soft hands.” Then she stepped back, crossed her arms, and frowned at me the way you would at a corpse just dragged from a polluted river, the corpse of the man I could have been but obviously wasn’t and never would be. Watching the exchange, her daughter—who I’d been out with no more than two or three times before that night—seemed ready for good bit of fun. It was then that I began to feel that none of us were destined to be best friends.
One thinks: there must be a reason I had this experience, some sort of magnetic resonance floating out around my navel, pulling in all manner of bigots, racists, fools, prevaricators, sea lawyers, farmer savants, red-mesh-cap-wearing bumpkins with absolute opinions on everything they don’t understand and fear. Why does Donald Trump exist, you ask? Why does wedding cake taste like shit? Why can’t we have nice things before those things try to kill us? Scott Pruitt works for the EPA, for one. But maybe you don’t like that answer. Pay no attention to the pesticide behind the curtain.
Toward the end of dinner, her mother told the story of how she’d come into her millions. It was a yarn she seemed to have told at many dinners over the years. She’d refined it with certain references to the overall stupidity of her late husband, racial slurs aimed at the farmhands, clever allusions to the worthlessness of a college education, hints at an ongoing Zionist conspiracy, and various artful insinuations that such evils were all rooted in the basic homosexuality of our times. She was, in short, one of the most repulsive people I’d ever encountered.
She was so offensive that I began to wonder whether it was all a practical joke. But by the end of the night, I saw the truth. This was a suitability test being run by her daughter. If I could deal with the repellent overbearing mother, I was worthy. If not, well, there are winners and losers in this wide world and the daughter was only interested in the former.
For desert, we had mother’s old-time funnel cake topped with sweet cream. We took our plates to the den, where mom started up the fireplace and handed out glasses of cheap bourbon to go with the cake. I saw my date wink and pour hers into the philodendron by the couch. But the plant was not within range of where I was sitting. I thought about pouring it between the cushions.
“You gonna drink it or look at it?”
I smiled and ate some funnel cake. Mom was already into her second glass.
Then her daughter said I was trying to be a writer, which made her mother guffaw and suggest we play a game of Scrabble. Because writers are supposed to like Scrabble. And so did mom, who saw it as a kind of IQ test. She even owned a Scrabble dictionary, no doubt for those late-night bourbon-fueled disputes about whether “gherkin” was a 170- or 180-point word.
Needless to say, mom won the game. I don’t remember the specifics, but I do recall her mix of satisfaction and disappointment, as if she’d once again proven to herself the uselessness of liberal intellectual book learning and what a waste it all was.
One thinks: why didn’t I run out the door screaming when I had the chance? Maybe because I stayed (and because others before me had probably excused themselves long before the funnel cake), the daughter decided I was good boyfriend material. She kept calling long after I gave her the Let’s Not Even Be Friends talk and blocked her number. Her mother had done her part for Big Farm Poison and the Hitler Youth while Jesus Camp and Rush Limbaugh were riding high. Now her daughter was running free on the earth.
This was long before we ever thought Trump would be anything more than bad TV, before he started referring to our present non-nuclear-holocaust moment as “the calm before the storm.” This was before the end of America, the grand finale, the New American Century with Slim Pickens riding the bomb down to bring on the Rapture. I know you believe it. So stop shaking your damn head. You were there in Charlottesville. I know it was you.
“He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.” – John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
She’s married now, lives in a suburb of Boise with husband and kids, supports Donald Trump, the white identitarian movement, and a particular identitarian organization of which I gather her husband is a card-carrying member. She must be a genius. The public posts on her FB timeline are mostly family photos, lifestyle articles from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop site, comments about the coming race war, and Breitbart. I know she’s not an evil person. But I can’t make fun anymore. It’s hard to even smile.
And so one thinks: that’s all over now, the thought, the hope, that the system would right itself. The system is what got us where we are. The system is wrong if it has produced this. I’m almost to the point where I’m ashamed I voted at all, even if it was for Hillary. Let’s not ever be friends, okay?
You go make America great again until your gene pool becomes so homogeneous that you start sacrificing people on step pyramids in the forest. Only the steps of those pyramids will be made out of bullet casings and the skulls of immigrant children. Go ahead. If your sister doesn’t mind, I won’t say no. I’ll be in hiding. I already am. Don’t come looking for me. And don’t keep calling. I’ve got soft hands. I like books and classical music and non-violence. I don’t own a bump stock. I don’t even own a gun to put a bump stock on. I won’t be manufacturing any justice in my basement today. I just want you to stop fucking with me. I’ve got my ear to the tracks.
PDX in the afternoon and everyone is miserable. Suitcase slightly too heavy equals the most exorbitant bag fee I’ve ever paid in a fever of desperation. I could have bought a second suitcase, should have. In the security line, a teen starts shouting that he’s not going to remove his shoes and is detained while 200 people watch. 45 minutes later, the scanner finds a sword-shaped metal object hidden down the back of my shirt. There is nothing down the back of my shirt. I am patted down.
“What’s back there?” asks a bullet-headed TSA officer with a nervous tick in his left eye.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure about that?” He looks me over, twitches, does the hand-held metal detector. It beeps when he passes it over my back. I can still hear the boy shouting in some far-off security area.
I am asked to step behind a partition. I remove my button-down. I am patted down a second time. My T-shirt is tested for explosive residue. My shoulder bag is tested for explosive residue. My shoes are examined with a TSA dentist’s mirror-flashlight, then tested for explosive residue. I am asked multiple times where I am going and my answers are checked against passport, boarding card, secret TSA spreadsheets. This is not the first time this has happened.
I tell him I think there’s probably someone with my name and physical details on some kind of list.
“Oh really?” He taps that into his tablet PC and gives me a long sour look. “You’re free to go.”
Layover at SFO. 45-minute security theater, but I have time. It passes smoothly, no screaming, no detentions, no squeaks from the machinery. I deposit my last freelancing check at an ATM, change the money into Euros, hating myself for doing it like that but feeling like I should have some cash in my pocket. Then I look at my boarding pass. It says, “THIS IS NOT A BOARDING PASS.” I go to the gate, but there’s no one at the gate. At information, I’m told that this particular airline won’t issue a boarding pass at the gate for this flight and that I have to go back to passenger check-in to talk to a representative. I’ve never heard of this, but things are always changing when it comes to air travel. So I consider my options.
Since my 20s, I’ve had a knee problem that can act up in a very painful way. Today, I’m walking with a limp and every step is agony. But I’m a veteran traveler and I’m not going to call for the senior citizen golf cart. Plus, time is now getting short. A crowd of anxious Irish have already started queuing up for the flight to Dublin. So fuck it. Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim. Back to check-in I go.
By the time I get there, I am perspiring heavily. The pain in my knee feels hot, dull, and serrated all at once. The girl in the green polyester blazer gives me, then my passport, the same level stare. “It’s a good thing you came up here,” she says. “Your bag might have not gone through.”
My bag? What did my bag have to do with it? Ah, I think, it must be because I’m flying with two different airlines, United and then Aer Fuckery. The latter must not like the former. Airlines are like angry steroidal pumas that need to be constantly stroked and placated or your valise winds up in Somalia.
I smile. But because no one smiled at her since she was a child, just developing her deep hatred for all life, she is immune to smiles.
“I have a knee problem and I’m wondering if there’s any way, since we’re doing this, you can put me on the aisle. It’s a 10 hour-flight.”
She gives me the stare again, hands me the boarding passes, then unleashes the puma: “You were already on the aisle. But I wouldn’t have changed your seat. We never change seats. You couldn’t have gotten a seat change from me. Oh no. We don’t do that. So you shouldn’t ask that at check-in.”
“Really? Never?” I think Aer Fuckery must fly in a different universe than the rest of us.
“Never. And I’d advise you to get to security if you want to make your flight.” She said all of it with maximum leaden distaste: look at this bum asking for a better seat.
Back to security theater, the line is three times longer than before and people seem three times as anxious. When I get through, I have to run-limp back to the gate. The extras from Titanic have already started boarding, replete with bowler hats, a miasma of farts and liquor, and multiple jokes being told at all times in multiple directions. I love the Irish. And Irish air travelers love a gimp willing to run through an airport. A few people cheer for me when I show up coughing and sweating.
“You did the foot race.” The enormous red-faced man in front of me in line smiles, sways, and extends his hand. We shake. Yeah. The foot race. Grand.
There are no more problems getting going. And, though I now stink and have started wincing with every step, I’m ready to settle in with Excedrin, my book, and a good 10 hours of intercontinental semi-consciousness and dread. I actually love the physical sensation of takeoff and landing, and I’m not afraid to fly. But put me in any poorly lit area for that long and I start thinking about my life, which is never ever advisable. As soon as the harsh self-critical life performance review begins, I usually start the in-flight movie fest. Pull blanket up to chin. Shut off brain. Sweet novocaine for the soul. Unfortunately, I’ve been flying so much this year that the only films available I haven’t seen are Marley & Me, The Boss Baby, and The Fast and the Furious.
I wonder whether I should just drink my way across the Atlantic. But Aer Fuckery charges for their alcohol and the stubborn angry Welsh hillbilly in me feels that the booze should at least be cheaper and more abundant if not better. Moreover, I will not give AF any more of my money after all the fun I had back in SFO. This is the dark side of assimilation, kids. I noticed the Americans on the flight had already opened their wallets and fired up the Vin Diesel. I’ve lived in the UK too long to appreciate an $8 can of Budweiser.
Could it get worse? Well, the plane didn’t crash. No one freaked out. And I had space. So I can’t complain about the basics. I did have some issues with the complimentary key lime pie (fellow travelers allergic to the chemicals used in UK and Irish dairy products take note) and spent a good part of the night in line for the toilet reminding myself that at least there was a toilet. Think about it. Small graces. Simple truths. Yes, indeed.
The connecting flight from Dublin to Paris was also uneventful and sedate. Of course, AF lost my suitcase (“Your bag might have not gone through.” Uh huh). And then, on the delirious train ride in, some girl wanted to talk to me about Donald Trump. Really, universe? After all this, you offer me a Trump conversation before I even get to Denfert Rochereau?
Well, so be it. I’m here. I’m back. I have new income possibilities. I can eat the cheese. I feel a certain rationality returning that was conspicuously absent during my recent visit to the States. I feel a new chapter of my story beginning. Meanwhile, my suitcase is either winging its way to me over the dark waters or is destined to be a gift for someone in Mogadishu. But words are still here and my knee is already on the mend. Who knows what’s next? Only time, as they say, will tell.
I feel toxic, radioactive. || Michael Davis
Source: Hurricane Dreams
What’s next after the violence in Charlottesville? || Michael Davis
Source: Burning Down the House
I’m currently going back through the first 75 ms pages of the novel, making notes and essential line edits, and putting in reminders of the edits people have suggested to me here and on Wattpad. This has been a great experience so far and I’m excited that Chapter 10 will be done before long. Since I’ve never written a science fiction novel before, much of this is new in process as well as substance. Keep the emails and comments coming and thanks for reading. ~ Michael
[8 July 17, did some essential line edits and added some material. Currently working on Ch.10.- M]
9
Luck, fate, delusion, coincidence. They might have all been the same as far as Donny was concerned. The code made it all relative. That which he couldn’t control he named—for lack of any other way to emotionally cope with it. He called it bad luck. He called it coincidence. He called it the Damocles Algorithm.
Had he hallucinated a fragment of his consciousness as a lonely girl in a red cap? Had he named her Mera, the Cultivator, because some broken piece of awareness was trying to send him a message? It was possible. The history feed said Griffith Gardens had been locked for 57 years. Had he really been there? Or had Donny been sitting on a curb somewhere, delusional, lost in the deserted wastes of his own mind, another side-effect of being chipped, adrift an impossible world of his own making, like dreaming of a sky with no rain.
His black coveralls were uncomfortable, freshly creased smelling of chemical starch. He zipped the front all the way up as he swiped in through the tiny airlock on the north side of the Shung Building’s dome. Why the employee hallway needed an airlock was a question for the history feeds, not for night workers like Donny. Still, one noticed details now and then: airlocks where a simple doors would have sufficed, enormous anti-riot spikes as if a building were an ancient dreadnought set to tear holes in enemy ships, asymmetrical quadrangles designed to force rioters toward various choke-points or lines of sight.
If you paid attention, you’d see the signs of how corporate culture had anticipated changes in climate, population, and culture over time. Adapting to and channeling human behavior is what kept the multi-nationals alive. And now the sectors of Los Angeles were an archaeology of blight and control, layers of subcrete, Plexiglas, and steel pulverized and effaced decade after decade to make room for new, more profitable, layers. The dead zones were like necrotic organs, devoid of all profitability and therefore of meaning, of existence—disavowed, disrecognized spaces. Security gates walled them off with motion detectors, autoguns, electrified concertina wire. You didn’t approach a security gate red zone from the dead side unless you had a municipal identity card or chip with a transponder. The autoguns were highly accurate.
The Shung Building was itself was a kind of dead zone, a junk pile from an earlier era guarded by humans because synthetics were too valuable and expensive to waste on a detail like that. Over a century ago, the so-called robot revolution was expected to usher in utopia. All the dull, filthy, dangerous jobs were supposed to go to pre-synthetic industrial units and a universal basic income was promised to all—as if the corporations would ever let that happen. Instead, corporations like Shung, Ryderco, and Aspernix developed the first synthetic technology. And many of the dirty and low-paying jobs that went to low-AI proprietary robots went back to cheaper humans. Many specialist jobs went to the high-end synthetics. And so things continued the way they always had, if a little quieter, as the fearful voices of egalitarianism and humanism faded into the hum of mega-factories that operated unceasingly with flawless efficiency. Art, culture, and most human intelligence went orbital. Those left behind had ubiquitous AI, the feeds, an endless variety of pre-pac soy that imitated various old-world foods, the luminescent half-dark of the city, and the endless poison rain.
Donny entered the break room and printed a soy-chicken sandwich, still thinking about Mera, about his meeting with Freddy, and how that old woman’s PVC arm seemed obscene and yet just right, a sign of the times far more honest and true than the synthetic white Shiroi Karasu or even Freddy himself. The soy-meat sandwich was supposed to smell like the real thing. Sometimes Donny chose tuna, sometimes beef or chicken, but it always smelled the same, tasted the same. The printer’s internal assemblers congealed a gray patty and sprayed directly into a congealed soy-bun—a lunch eaten by every worker on the planet. It was supposed to have all the nutrients your body needed, but how many people on earth knew what actual chicken tasted like or what nutrients were necessary for a long, cancer-free life beyond your estimated peak productivity levels? Donny put the sandwich in the mini-fridge, filled his thermos with Postum, and his starting workday ritual was complete.
Then Loach stepped in, panting, smelling like body odor and patchouli.
“We don’t have no time to bullshit, Donny. You listening? We got a situation.”
“Why don’t you take a step back.” Donny held the topped-off thermos between them as much to cancel Loach’s smell as to put some symbolic distance on what the big man was muttering. Loach had told him that patchouli kept off the mosquitoes. Donny couldn’t remember ever getting bitten or even seeing a mosquito in the Shung building, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. According to Loach, the stagnant water bred swarms of them, some lethal, full of disease. But Donny would believe it when he saw it. Until then, killer mosquito swarms would be just another one of Loach’s stories.
“Them version ones up on the deck level 15 are activating and I don’t know what else.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Yeah?” Loach massaged the back of his neck. “Zeke’s here and he says he saw it. And Zeke doesn’t lie.” Loach looked more exhausted than usual. He’d unzipped his coveralls down to his navel and Donny could see a V of sweat on his ribbed tank-top underneath.
“You’ve been up to something down in control, haven’t you? Did you flip some switch, turn something on by accident?”
“I didn’t turn on shit! Come on!”
Loach walked out of the red-lit break room and Donny followed screwing the thermos shut and wondering whether his supervisor had finally gotten into the sand. Zeke was waiting for them in the hallway, three electric double-barrels bundled under his arm. Where Loach was balding and stocky with oily shoulder-length hair combed back behind his ears, Zeke was completely hairless. He didn’t even have eyebrows. Tall and thin, his coveralls hung on him, all bones and sharp angles and a long grave face.
“Hey Donny. Been a while.”
Donny nodded. He wanted to ask how long. They always worked opposite shifts. So Donny didn’t know exactly how long it had been since he’d last seen Zeke. Maybe since before. But if Zeke noticed a difference, he wasn’t letting on. He handed a shotgun to Loach and one to Donny. The guns had ARQUEBUS LTD down each barrel in chrome block letters like some kind of toy. But their 10-gauge 766-grain lead slugs accelerated and compressed to 1400 feet per second by an electrical current. They could cut most walls in half, turn an organic person into red mist. Donny didn’t know what they could do to a synthetic. He’d only seen the guns once when Loach showed him the security room down in control. They’d been locked to a wall-rack with a shiny steel chain through the trigger guards. But now one of them was right here in Donny’s hands. Why Loach thought they needed to be armed like this when they could just cut the power to the nursery level was unclear. Version ones didn’t have an onboard power supply. They drew power through the bottoms of their feet. Shut down the level and they’d shut down everything beneath a version three, of which there were none currently listed in the building.
“I hate this shit.” Loach cracked open his gun’s breach and checked the slugs in each barrel.
Donny looked at how Zeke was holding his shotgun resting in the crook of his arm and did the same. “I suppose you’re going to fill me in on why we’re set to take down an army.”
“We don’t actually know what’s going on up there. There might be a lot of them. They might be going apeshit.”
“It looked like a lot of them on the monitor,” Zeke said.
“How many?”
Loach sighed. “Does it matter? We got a protocol for this. We go straight by the book.”
They had a protocol for everything. There was a four-inch-thick operations manual back in the break room—an ancient, coffee-stained three-ring in a hard plastic case that Donny had never seen Loach take down, much less read. It stayed up there, covered in dust like some kind of forbidden scripture. Loach quoted from it with great specificity at times—a specificity that could only come from a perfect recall or from perfect bullshit. Maybe Loach carried eidetic cross-point memory implants, but Donny doubted that even more than the big man’s mosquito stories.
“So what’s the protocol?”
“Simple, kid.” Loach cocked the hammers on his double-barrel, and Donny heard the faint whine of its trigger coils charging.
“We go up there and shut the bitch down.”
Zeke put his hand on Donny’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Anything comes at you, blast it.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Good, Donny. That’s real good.” Zeke nodded and smiled around his cigarette as he lit it.
Loach went first. Then Donny. Then Zeke, keeping one eye on the hallway behind them. Then they went through the round opening that had once sported a pressurized cast-aluminum door with a wheel handle in the center for sealing the employee hallway from the main dome. It was made like that in case of a gas attack, but now the door was long gone, probably stolen. They crept out, across the ground floor of the dome—silent, except for the motion detector’s ping and the whispery shuffle of their work boots on the subcrete.
Speaking felt wrong under the vast dark of the broken Shung dome, vulgar, like raising one’s voice in a place of worship. Loach would have denied it, but it seemed to Donny that they all felt it, the solemnness, the quiet. They climbed the frozen escalator steps to the mezzanine like they were in some kind of procession—black-clad gunmen, the long hand of the Shung Corporation reaching out from 30 years ago to kill whatever had woken up on deck level 15.
It occurred to Donny that whatever, maybe whoever, was now awake up there probably didn’t know that there had been any kind of shutdown. These were version ones, the first generation of synthetics, still more machine than artificial person. They were supposed to have been problematic, made a lot of mistakes, sometimes caused accidents, deaths. Only the Shung corporation would have assigned a group of them to a nursery level.
“Hold up.” Loach murmured so quietly Donny almost missed it.
The three of them stopped, still in single-file, halfway across the mezzanine. Donny looked back and saw that Zeke had squatted, pointing his double-barrel over his left thigh at the valley between two six-foot-high mounds of what looked like broken plastic crates. Zeke looked coiled, ready to shoot or spring back, and Donny wondered where he’d learned that pose, what sort of life Zeke led before hiring on at Bug.
“What?”
Loach didn’t answer. He adjusted the motion detector, panned it around.
Then Zeke whispered, “We better get a move on,” smoke trailing up from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
“I hate this. Makes me want to shit myself.” Loach stared into the dark.
“Maybe using the flashlight would, you know, help you get control of your nether regions.”
“Fuck you.” Loach moved forward, the motion detector in his left hand, the double-barrel held low in his right.
By the time they reached the enormous urn and the hidden access hallway, Zeke was already getting to the end of a second cigarette. He flicked it and they watched it spark orange against the wall. When they got into the freight elevator and pulled the doors shut, the crackly AI voice said, “Smoking is hazardous to your health.”
Donny looked up, past the safety bars, as he always did, at the tiny points of light.
All kinds of things in the Shung building were hazardous to one’s health, some due to age, some by design. But Loach didn’t want to give away their position. If there were malfunctioning version ones wandering around the upper levels, keeping the flashlight off was probably wise. This generation of synthetics had limited vision, but they’d notice a flashlight.
The freight elevator took the three of them to deck level 15, but it didn’t open directly onto the marble foyer that led to what had once been condos for Shung middle management. Instead, they had to walk through a completely dark loading area by the glow of Loach’s motion detector, then through another access hallway so narrow that, if Donny hadn’t been holding a shotgun, he could have reached out and touched both sides. When the detector started pinging, they stopped in place.
Loach muted it but kept his eyes on the detector’s small glowing screen. “16 meters,” he murmured. “North-northeast.”
“What’s up there?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions.”
“Just get ready,” whispered Zeke as he patted Donny on the back. Zeke had gotten very close in the dark. And Donny found himself wondering again about Zeke’s past. What possessed a normal person to want to work in a place like this—to want to work for Bug Security at all? Donny knew his own excuse. And Loach was clearly making a career out of it because it was just about the best he could do for himself. But there was something off about Zeke, off like the guys who came to Friendly’s group. Was he chipped? He didn’t show signs of wreckage. So what was it? He could be a little crazy. Maybe he was just a weirdo. Or maybe—though Donny didn’t even like entertaining the possibility—Zeke was synthetic.
When they reached the end of the hallway, Loach shut the detector off and faced them. “This is an access hatch. It’s designed not to be noticed. But we got no idea what’s going on out there. The scan said multiple pings, 16, maybe 20. So pick your targets, if it comes to that. There’s a hallway goes straight back. At the end is the power emitter. We shut that down, the whole floor goes dead.”
“The floor is dead,” said Donny.
“As dead as it gets,” said Zeke.
Loach set the motion detector down at the base of the wall and turned back towards the door. “Just don’t shoot me in the ass.”
And you, Donny wanted to say to Zeke, when the time comes, where will you be pointing your gun? But he just looked back and saw the other man’s bald, eyebrowless visage in the light from Zeke’s antique chemical lighter. He puffed a cigarette into being, grinned with the corner of his mouth, and snapped the lighter shut. Then all Donny could see was the glowing ember when Zeke took a drag.
“I think I got it.” Loach said as he cranked the wheel handle. The hatch groaned and he pushed it open.
They crouched in silence, gripping their guns—so quiet that the hiss of Zeke’s cigarette sounded like air being let out of a tire in short intervals. It was humid. A nearby pipe must have burst or the heat exchangers must have spooled up when the level came on. Loach was sweating out every drop of moisture in his body. Fear sweat. Don’t make a sound sweat. Did version ones have a sense of smell? If so, Loach was more of a problem than a solution.
They crept a few feet into the foyer, then crouched again. The three of them stayed that way, perfectly still, not making a sound, until their knees started to ache. Eventually, Donny detected a mechanical hum, almost beyond the range of hearing, somewhere far off in the dark. It might have been in the walls. Might have been on another level entirely. But it was the only thing noticeable apart from the sound of Zeke smoking.
Finally, Loach couldn’t take it anymore, whether from knee pain or stress. He stood up and said with a normal voice: “Fuck it. I’m done with this shit,” then snapped on the flashlight. Loach could take care. He could be methodical. But he hated being like that. And enough was enough. They couldn’t crouch there in the dark forever.
When the light came on, Zeke said, “Holy shit,” his voice higher than usual, cutting off at the end as if he had a lump in his throat.
There were 16 version ones standing in the foyer. In good condition, they’d look vaguely human—rubbery skin over a baked ceramic endoskeleton harder than steel. The ones meant to pass for female had on dresses or miniskirts. The males had jumpsuits or faux-canvas work pants and long-sleeved vinyl shirts. They wore wigs, had fake eyeballs that hid tiny sensor arrays, brains that contained 1000 microprocessors and the most advanced AI for their era, which still couldn’t pass the Turing Test; though, it could beat the world’s greatest living chess master nine games out of ten.
But these version ones were not in good condition at all. A few had been burned horribly such that arms or, in one case, half of a torso had melted like wax. Others had lost their wigs and had put new ones on incorrectly, long blond hair hiding half of a scorched face or slipping back on a an exposed ceramic skull meant to imitate human bone structure. All 16 of them simultaneously turned toward Loach a moment after he shined the flashlight around the room. Then two started walking over. The one on the right was missing both of her arms and her face was half-melted. The top half of her dress no longer existed and her rubbery breasts were torn and blackened. But the male on the left seemed relatively whole. He even had his wig on properly and could have easily been mistaken for an organic person in low light—save for the star-shaped bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
Loach shined the flashlight on him. The version one’s eyes stared straight ahead the way a blind man seems to have traded common sight for a vision of something infinite and distant.
“Stop right where you are,” Loach said. “Designate.”
Hearing the old command word, the two did stop, for a second, the lead synthetic tilting his head to the side like a puzzled animal. Then they continued forward.
“I knew it.” Loach started backing up. “Command and control is offline.”
Donny was in the middle of asking what that meant, when Zeke opened fire.
8
“Certain moments in life stay with you forever—even if they didn’t happen.” Friendly smiled behind a clump of kitsune udon. He held the noodles in front of his mouth with black chopsticks, making Donny think of worms in the beak of a crane. “Anyone can have an anomalous experience. The unenhanced hallucinate just as often. It doesn’t mean you actually met some magical gardener and had a life-changing experience.”
The noodle shop was named 白いカラス, Shiroi Karasu, White Crow. Its oversized mascot fluttered and refolded its wings, staring through the glass storefront at the rain. A thin silver chain ran from its leg around a dowel, which made a perch at the top of a wooden hat stand. The stand was very old, would have been a valued antique if long thin nails hadn’t been hammered into its top struts in order to keep the dowel in place.
“Is that what I am? Enhanced?”
Friendly slurped fat white noodles between his lips, grinning as he did it. Everything he did seemed easy, effortless, enjoyable. “Well, you’re just as special as everyone in the group. You’re also a product of our times. I still think you need a sponsor.”
“She said she knew . . . “
“About your chip? Your old life?” He laughed and plucked a hunk of aburaage from his bowl. “Of course she did.”
The bird was synthetic. It didn’t need to be chained to its perch. It would never try to escape. But someone had decided that the silver chain was necessary to maintain the illusion. It turned its head and looked at Donny, blinked, then looked back out at people passing the restaurant. They kept their heads covered with slowly dissolving broadsheets, walking umbrellas, the sanitary hoods of cheap mylar ponchos one found in Venice Sector’s canal stalls. The shop’s name blinked above the door, staining the crow’s pure white feathers with multicolored light.
“I never said I had a life-changing experience.”
“But that’s what you wanted, right? Some kind of relief? Some kind of explanation?” Friendly rested his hand over Donny’s on the table, but Donny pulled away. For a brief moment, Friendly stopped smiling. “It’s what everyone in the group wants, Donny. But what does The Book say about that?”
Donny looked down at his cup of jasmine tea, the little black grains at the bottom. Graciela said her mother taught her how to read the future with tea leaves. He wondered if she could read the past.
“I don’t know.”
Friendly drank from his bowl, noticed that the tip of one of his shorter dreads had gotten into the soup, smiled at it like it was a pet, then cleaned it slowly with his paper napkin. As he did this, he recited from memory: “Part two, chapter 13, ‘The Futility of Blame.’ Our problems are of our own making. The synthetic aspects of our being merely symbolize our struggle. We have accepted the truth, that ultimately we have done this to ourselves, and that we can therefore hold no one outside ourselves responsible for the experiences in our lives.”
“She was crying . . . when she put me in the drone. She said she was sorry she forgot to make me tea. Then she said, ‘I only wanted to be touched one last time.’ What do you think that means?”
“What I think is irrelevant. Since you imagined it, you have to ask what it means to you, what your unconscious was trying to communicate. For example, I’ve noticed you don’t like to be touched.”
The old woman in a ragged kimono, who’d served them, came out from behind the curtain. She frowned, barked something in a language that wasn’t Japanese, went back to the kitchen. Her left arm was filthy white PVC that had been scavenged from a pre-synthetic public service unit. If you lost a limb and you could find an arm or a leg that fit, there were clinics that would wire the servos to a cheap control chip. It wasn’t illegal because nobody cared about the old vaguely human municipal robots. Do it with any version of a synthetic person, though, and the LAPD would make you disappear. Loach once told Donny about a black market synthetic body trade that was big money. But Loach liked to talk.
“What else did she say?” Friendly tipped back his soup, then set the bowl down, smiling as if Donny had just told the best joke ever.
“I don’t remember much. I was drugged. The Midnight Gladiolus—”
“Does not exist. There’s no such plant. There’s an Evening Gladiolus, which went extinct 137 years ago on all continents, but that’s all. I looked it up when you left me that crazy message.”
“I don’t know.” Donny squinted at his untouched tea. “I think I asked her if she’d always been the Cultivator. And she said that always is a long time.”
Friendly laughed, shook his head. “Listen to yourself, brother. You definitely need a sponsor.”
“Do you like it here, Friendly?”
“As in, this noodle house? Yeah, I love this place.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Friendly tilted the bowl and showed him the last fat noodle curled at the bottom. “Do you know why it’s called kitsune, Donny? Because it’s supposed to be the fox’s favorite food. Do you think that’s true?”
They looked at each other.
“I think we’re done here.” Donny stood and wouldn’t shake Friendly’s hand, which seemed to amuse Friendly as much as the prospect of noodles being named after foxes.
“Look, I’ll get you another copy of The Book. And Donny? Read it this time, okay?”
“Her name is Mera,” said Donny.
Friendly grinned, nodded slowly. “Right.”
< Read Ch. 9 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-IN >
< Read Ch. 7 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-IJ >
7
“You know my name?”
“Indeed, I do.”
“But I don’t know yours.”
She had light brown hair done up beneath her cap and green eyes. Her face was pale like the patch of moonflowers he’d seen beneath the sycamore trees.
“Do you want to know my name?” The girl extended her hand and they shook. She had a warm, firm grip. Donny felt the film of dirt on her palm. If she were human, an organic human, at least, she’d be about 19 or 20. She’d have a job, some kind of ongoing romance, maybe a capsule apartment like his in one of the megablocks. She’d have certain goals for what she’d do once she took the off-world qualifying exam and left the dark poisoned world behind.
But Donny figured she’d never been anything but a pretty girl of about 19 or 20. She didn’t have big dreams because synthetics produced on Earth were meant to serve a purpose planet-side and were therefore forbidden to leave. Every now and then, one of them tried to sneak into a freight container bound for a low-orbit docking platform and got caught or died from hypothermia.
“What version are you?”
She wiped her hand on her smock and sighed. “Version four, I think. Is it that obvious?”
“Just a lucky guess.” It felt strange returning her smile. Donny supposed he’d grown used to ignoring Friendly’s constant grin. But he wondered whether patrolling the lonesome empty spaces of the Shung Building, those sad group meetings, and the constant fear that the code would catch him off-guard had weaned the smiles out of him. When was the last time he’d felt kindness or humor? Graciela said she found him interesting, funny even. But she had no idea.
“So. What was it? Facial biometrics when I came in?”
“Bacteriological phenotype recognition, actually. When you walked through the lilac-nasturtiums.”
Donny tried to recall what the lilac-nasturtiums might have looked like.
She laughed at the look on his face. “The little orange flowers with the dark centers.”
“I don’t remember them.”
“That’s part of their charm.”
He nodded. “So you’ve been aware of me since I entered.”
“I’m the Cultivator.” She turned and pointed at the little wooden shed. “I live there. I’m aware of everything—in the gardens, not cosmically speaking.”
“That was a joke. I think you told a joke.” Then he felt bad because it sounded condescending, which wasn’t how he felt. How did he feel? He wasn’t sure. Unsettled, perhaps. Like he wanted to keep talking to this pale girl who knew everything and smiled and winked at him and told jokes. But then he thought of the iron stair, the moths fluttering around the light globes, the rippling spiderwebs.
“Humor is a sign of intelligence.” She stuck her trowel into the dirt and handed him a fat purple eggplant. Donny turned it over. It was heavy, flawless.
“What is the nature and purpose of the gardens?” A control question. Synthetics tasked with particular jobs had to answer, even if they didn’t want to.
She frowned, as if the question hurt her somehow, then recited: “Griffith Gardens is an architectonic botanical printing facility and public attraction. All organic materia that enters is sampled from intake nodes in the ceiling. Internucleotide telemetry is calculated based on an index of over one-billion phosphate groups compiled on 27 October 2042 by Doctors Shoda Yokoyama and Suhaila Habib of Biomedizinische Ingenieurproduktion, GmbH. The purpose of Griffith Gardens is to curate aspects of Earth’s historical genetic diversity.” She shook her head as if snapping out of a trance and pressed her lips into a thin line. “You didn’t have to do that. And my name is Mera.”
“Sorry.”
She took the eggplant back, cradling it like a child, and some of her former smile returned. “Apology accepted, Donny. Please only ask control questions if absolutely necessary. In most cases, I am allowed to provide information without being compelled, especially to a donor.”
“So now I’m—”
“Yes.” Her grin came back brighter than ever, as if she were about to shake his hand and congratulate him on a job well done. “Your DNA is now part of the gardens, too.”
“How is that legal?”
“It’s not illegal.” Mera took his hand and led him toward the shed. “It’s wonderful.”
In gardens that were more than gardens, the shed was destined to be something more than just a shed. The interior was awash in the pallid light of a ball-sized globe hovering near the roof’s peak. Fanged pruning saws lined the walls along with shovels, garden stakes, hanging sacks of chemical fertilizer labeled RISQUE BIOLOGIQUE, a green HDPE soil hypodermic, two meters of coiled garden hose; inverted bouquets of dried posies, impatiens, camellias, foxgloves suspended from hooks around the edge of the ceiling; and a wheelbarrow of potting soil in which three perfect eggplants had been rested as if it were a crib.
Mera raked her thin fingers through the wheelbarrow dirt, making a slight furrow. She placed the eggplant from the garden beside the others and sighed. “There,” she said and patted the fruit.
“What are you going to do with that?”
She turned back towards him, smirked, cocked her head to the side. “I’m responsible for this, Donny. All of this. I’m the Cultivator. What am I not going to do with it!”
“Right.” He nodded at the eggplants dreaming their small purple dreams. And the spell of the place, of Mera, the beautiful, improbable garden Cultivator, faltered. The sheer weirdness of the moment—standing in a half-lit garden shed with a synthetic girl who told jokes about the cosmos and treated eggplants like babies—bloomed in his mind like the electric blue hydrangeas he’d passed with their tiny hyperoptic lights.
All that glitters is not synthetic. Donny smiled at the thought, a new adage in a world defined by synthesis and hybridity, where nothing is ever all one thing or pure or simple or natural in the old-world sense of the term. Not even Mera, who seemed to be studying his expression with a mix of cheerful curiosity and . . . something else. He felt an overwhelming urge to tell her about the chip in his brain. Instead, he looked down at the the dirt floor and the subcrete trapdoor set with an iron ring.
“That’s where I live,” Mera said. “My capsule.” With the index finger of her left hand, she hooked the iron ring and pulled, revealing not a trapdoor but a solid meter-square block of subcrete gridded with ancient rebar. She lifted it out of the square hole as easily as if it were paper and set it down beside her. Then she noticed the look on his face and laughed. “I’m strong.”
“I guess you are.”
“Would you like some tea?” Mera dropped into the hole without waiting for an answer.
Of course he’d like some tea. What else did one do after putting eggplants to sleep in a wheelbarrow crib and lifting enormous subcrete blocks with a finger? Donny didn’t jump after her. He climbed down the short ladder that had been made from bent rebar, his palms orange with rust when he got to the bottom.
But it wasn’t a capsule at all. At least, it bore no resemblance to any megablock apartment capsule he’d ever seen. The room was oblong, felt cold and dank like a sub-basement, but the walls were hard-packed earth, machine-smooth. Roots grew out of the ceiling. Long cream-yellow flowers in bloom clustered across the floor. The little pathways that had formed around the clusters reminded Donny of the twisting subcrete walks in the garden above. And he wondered if the designer who’d made the lonesome iron bridge, the light globes, the ever-evolving genetic soup of the flora and fauna had made this space as well—mechanically replicating the motif of the garden above as if this were a shoe-box diorama, perfectly to scale, and Mera was tasked with maintaining its fidelity.
She’d slipped off her red knit cap and her hair down over her shoulders. A small kerosene lamp on a stool cast flickering shadows of Mera and the flowers over the walls.
“No floating lights down here?”
“No.” In the center of the room, she was a dark silhouette amid the still blooms as if she’d grown up with them. Maybe she had. “These flowers need an extra amount of darkness. The lamp is the only light source that won’t damage them.”
He walked towards her, letting his fingertips brush the open petals, breathing in the perfume. “This is . . . I feel . . . strange.”
Mera moved farther in until she was a shadow among shadows at the other end of the room. But her soft voice was clear. “Is it strange, Donny? The gardens have been around for 78 years. How long have you been around?”
The kerosene flame disappeared and the room went dark.
“I don’t remember. I have a chip—”
“In your brain. I know.”
Donny felt her arm around his shoulders. Mera had found her way back to him in total darkness without making a sound. They walked forward together.
“How could you know?”
“The gardens are connected to the municipal database. Your genetic fingerprint is how the LAPD knows who you are, where you work, how to locate you. Legal bio-cybernetic implants are included in your file.”
He felt the hard aluminum edge of a cot press against his shins. Mera turned him around and helped him sit. Donny could sense an unnatural chill radiating through the dirt wall at his back. And the faintest vibration there—an enormous machine far away, yet powerful enough to make itself felt through meters of compressed earth.
“Then it is legal.”
He felt her warm lips on his forehead. “It is. It was.”
“And you know . . . about me.”
“Yes.” Mera held his face, kissed his jaw, his cheeks, his lips. “I know about you.”
“I need to—I don’t remember.” Donny struggled to form the words. She was beautiful—synthetic, yes, but it felt like being with Graciela. Mera’s voice was soft, her touch gentle. Yet she’d straddled him and was holding his wrists against the cold dirt wall. His mind felt tangled. Was it the code asserting itself? Donny felt a wave of fear. Where had he put his pills?
“The flowers are beautiful, aren’t they?”
“I can’t see them.”
“But they can see you, Donny Stilton” she whispered. Then she kissed him again, tightened her thighs against his hips, laced her fingers into his, sending trickles of dirt onto his arms.
Something in him was trying wake up, to initialize—a control structure, the Damocles Algorithm, possibly a neurochemical anomaly formed from neodymium leaks in the chip’s housing. He had to find his pills. But Mera’s hold on his wrists was solid, immovable.
“You need to . . . I need . . . ”
“They’re called gladiolus tristis, commonly referred to as Midnight Gladiolus. And twice a year, they’re lethal.”
“I—”
She kissed him again. “Don’t worry. Right now they’ll just make you sleepy.”
And the code drifted back into the darkness of his mind. Somewhere, out there, it was still trying to activate, to run its processes in the monotonous one-pointed logic of a machine whose sole purpose was to kill its user.
Donny’s mind drifted after it.
< Read Ch. 8 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-IL >
< Read Ch. 6 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-IH >
6
Simple presets. You said, “Take me to the park” or “I want to go to an aquarium” or “I want to buy some shoes” and the taxi AI knew just where to go. But it only seemed to be following a stochastic process, using random sampling for all potential outcomes in its flight range that fit the criteria in that exact moment. The truth was that certain destinations were fixed, hard coded from the beginning. Corporations paid big money for that. Everybody knew it, but no one talked about it in the feeds because AI was supposed to be independent. They called it “computational neutrality,” a fancy term for being able to choose your shoe outlet from a list of potentials. The taxi drones never gave you a choice. You said “shoes.” The drone said “Thank you” and that was it.
Donny felt that maybe he should have said “home” or even “aquarium” instead of “somewhere beautiful” because who knew where the drone was going. He supposed he’d have to ask eventually. What deal had Skyway Cabs made for the fixed value of “beautiful”? Sometimes, when he looked at the plastic clown face making his udon, the liquid crystal cartoon butler asking him if he’d like a shoe shine while he was getting his pants fumigated in a delousing kiosk, the giggling toddler speaking English with a 40-year-old Japanese woman’s voice trying to sell him laxatives scented like cherry blossoms, he worried that the whole world had gone synthetic. Fake smiles, grinning cartoon rabbits, green-faced women moaning about live bait suppositories. He knew he was sometimes dealing with a kind of swarm intelligence or a decentralized self-organizing data entity whose sole purpose was to get him to buy laxatives that smelled like Tokyo in autumn, take them all, and then buy more.
He liked to give the commercial AIs his personal Turing Test even though he knew they’d fail it: do you like it here? They never knew what to say. Maybe one AI in a hundred was soft coded for extraneous chitchat like that. You could say, “Shit, it’s going to rain again?” And your capsule apartment’s housekeeping program might respond, “I know. So disappointing.” That is, if you felt like paying to have a conversation with your ceiling. Donny didn’t have a housekeeping program. He had to clean up his own messes.
The drone shot through the rain in the center of the skyway as the tiny plastic compass next to the dash monitor pointed north.
“Where are we going?”
The monitor woke up, its eyes blinked. “Current destination is Griffith Gardens, 4730 Crystal Springs Drive, Los Angeles, Feliz Sector, 90027.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” The left eye winked. Then the monitor went dark again.
The group got scared if you didn’t share your story. They needed to be able to have some idea of what you could do. They had to feel like they trusted you. They wanted to believe you weren’t coded to torture or kill everyone in the room or light the building on fire in a trance. Friendly was supposed to know if someone was okay. Los Angeles County Psych Services forwarded him the files on potential group members before they attended meetings. The really violent ones (that they knew about) stayed locked up at Psych Central. At least, that’s what Friendly said. But he didn’t always know. And in this day and age, you couldn’t be sure about anything.
Not even the gardens. Some of it had to be organic. But most of the flora was overtly artificial, even to the extent that the hydrangeas glittered with tiny hyperoptic lights where their anthers should have been and the sweet alyssum’s flowers were so perfectly identical that it was clear they’d come out of a lab. Donny turned and watched the drone lift off, pointing south as it rose above the Griffith Gardens Arch. It’s blue jet lights blended with those of the larger tumbrels and fourgons moving down the skyway.
The gardens hid from the burning rain beneath insulated octahedron domes as big as the foundry he’d just left. By day, the panels polarized dark green, turning completely opaque in order to screen out all light and radiation. But at night, they became transparent. Donny looked up through the rain-soaked dome at the brilliant coruscation of the skyway, a serpent of varicolored jet lights moving through Feliz towards Chinatown, where it would bank west into Inglewood Sector.
This was the taxi’s “somewhere beautiful” preset. And it was. Pale white globes hovered, gently washing the subcrete pathways with a ghostly moonlight. The gardens looked deserted. Still, the gentle light, the faint rain patter far above, the singing of cicadas in the copses of ash tree clones imparted the sense that the place had been waiting there just for Donny, that someone must have known he was coming and arranged it all specifically for him. That was the effect of a well-constructed garden—solitude without loneliness. It felt so different here than the Shung Building’s dark expanse, which always seemed more absent than solitary, more like it had been hastily emptied than opened by design.
Naturally, the cicadas weren’t real. Or, if they were real, they weren’t organic. They lived in this perpetual artificial night and sang whenever they wished, unlike their ancestors who existed in the natural world and had to hide from predators. Donny started down the twisting subcrete walk, wondering whether the biologists who maintained the gardens had also introduced predators for the cicadas to balance the ecosystem. What would prey on a synthetic insect? A synthetic lizard? A spider with hyperoptic eye clusters? A glowing night bird born full-grown in a designer’s lab tegument? Donny hadn’t watched the relevant feeds. Anything was possible.
He passed mounds of white forsythias like explosions of mist in the half-light. Cape fuchsias, lilacs, bunches of purple dianthus that looked like obsidian stars jumbled on either side of the path. And then flat fields of moonlit grass, gray and waving in the airflow. Everything had tiny octagonal labels spiked into the ground somewhere nearby, even the fields: poa annua – meadow grass in glowing cursive.
Even more flowers after the fields ended. Identical night-blooming clusters under shade trees that faded into the darkness. Ironic: shade trees that lived in continual night, no doubt genetically engineered to survive that way, the ultimate in absurd botanical design. Nature had been completely subverted. But what was nature? A fairytale. A myth. Humanity had become its own synthetic creation, subject and object collapsing under strata after strata of unregulated urban growth, pollution, structural violence. The chemical wasteland to the east of the city stretched all the way to Dallas. The old flora and fauna were now grown in vats, unable to survive outside specially engineered habitats. And the sky hadn’t been blue for decades.
Donny had seen on VR what the sky used to look like. At least, he’d seen what the VR feed manufacturer thought the sky used to look like. VR sense immersion hadn’t existed three generations ago when the rain finally grew lethal and the sky turned gray-brown. The history feeds said there had been great sunsets for about three decades while the old empire fracked the last drops of oil out of the earth and fled to the orbital colonies. But how could anyone know for sure what the sky was like? VR was a simulation of a guess, in the end no different from the chip forced into Donny’s brain—fake perceptions, fake urges, fake data, fake life. A simulation of a guess of an approximation of a memory. And now, maples, birches, sycamores—silent and dark, cloned from single genetic templates, single parents, perfect in every way except in their replicated perfection, in their high fidelity, in their interchangeability. Above all else, the trees, the garden, and the flowers were products. Like everything. Like everyone.
He put his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker and considered going home. Maybe he’d come to the gardens simply because they figured into a complex marketing algorithm that had included the drone taxi’s preset. Maybe it was sheer randomness that brought him here or the serendipity of an aimless night or the need to detoxify from the infectious dread and pain of the evening’s group session. Maybe. But Donny had ridden the elevator to the old children’s nursery at the top of the Shung Building many times—where yellowed crayon drawings were still pinned to the walls and a dead first-version synthetic named “Mother” sat in a rocking chair smiling into the dark. And he dreamed he’d seen an organic pigeon flap past his apartment window. And he thought he might have smelled Graciela on him in the morning after they’d made love. And he told himself there had to be more to all this than code.
At the center, there was a green wrought-iron staircase that arced over the back half of the dome up to a door in the curvature of the roof. The stair was something out of an ancient world’s fair, wide enough for only two people to walk abreast yet incredibly solid, as if the entire span had been cast at once from a die. Its green paint peeled in dark tongues and the spiderwebs that clogged its whorls and arabesques rippled gently in the circulating breeze. It was an old stair, interesting if not beautiful, like something out of a dream.
Again Donny wondered: maybe all of this really is a dream. Maybe I’m in some VR coma brought on by the code. I’m actually in my kitchen with my eyes rolled back in my head, making a high-impact over-and-under Anaconda revolver from printed resins and toilet cleaner. He walked up the grassy mound to the little subcrete dais where the stair began. It’s possible, he thought. It could all be in his head. Didn’t Graciela say she was beginning to wonder whether she’d dreamed him?
The stair’s entry arch featured two iron swans standing tall with wings outspread atop chipped green Corinthian columns. Their necks were bowed and the tips of their beaks touched to form the peak of the arch. A few steps beyond, light globes—small versions of the ones that hovered over the pathways—glowed on either side atop ornamental posts. In older centuries, their iron cages might contain gas lamps or even fire. But whatever bacteria or bioluminescent substance had been grown in them now cast a perpetual radiance every few meters. The posts were decorated with coiled snakes or fish or spiral columns of ants, an unnatural level of detail for something so lonesome and neglected.
Donny thought he might bring Graciela here just show her the staircase bridge and ask her what she thought. Was it real? The stair didn’t belong here in a octahedral dome full of synthetic mock-ups of forgotten life. Yet it seemed perfectly fitted to the space. Had some designer commissioned it, spiderwebs and all, to look exactly like as it did? If so, Donny wanted to meet that person, someone who’d go through the trouble of making an iron staircase that looked so old and out of place, then leave it for others to discover still and alone in the pale half-light.
The staircase was longer than it looked from the ground. He climbed until he found himself beneath enormous turbines set in the roof of the dome. Their deep thrum made the structure vibrate beneath his feet. The stair terminated at a iron-railed landing bisected by a plastic door in the shape of a ribbed octagon. He held onto the railing and leaned over. The landing was so high up that all Donny could see were the pairs of light globes back down the span. They looked like a slope of tiny glowing eyes floating untethered in the dark. From that elevation, the floor of the dome was shrouded in darkness and overgrowth as if it had evolved that way instead of being deliberately engineered.
He realized that the long bow of the stair mirrored the necks of the swans decorating the top of its entry arch. Maybe the entire staircase was a swan. But the iconography of Griffith Gardens could have meant anything. And as far as personal meaning was concerned, octagons and swan necks did nothing to help Donny understand why he’d wandered here when he should have gone home.
He’d once seen a VR reconstruction of some author from the ancient world reciting a poem. One of the lines stuck with him: “Not all those who wander are lost.” Maybe not. Then again, not all those who are lost are wandering. And many who wander are lost, but there are a lot of ways to lose yourself in Los Angeles at night. Not wandering seemed better to Donny, all things considered, than the alternative, given the chip in his brain. Yet here he was, “somewhere beautiful.” And so the question remained: was any of it real? How real? To what degree were his senses being mediated by the Damocles Algorithm—suppressed for the moment, but still integrated into the primary functionality of his brain in ways he he’d never fully understand?
Donny slid the plastic door to the side, stepped through, then slid it closed behind him. He found himself on another iron-railed landing that overlooked what must have been the second dome. An identical staircase, lit by more sets of caged globes on iron posts, swept down into a jungle canopy. From the skyway, Donny had seen at least three domes, maybe four, like a cluster of gunmetal blisters on the crumbling ash-gray mountainside. This was apparently how one traveled within them, which meant the long staircase was deliberate, which meant that, instead of a drone or a lift or some sort of moving walkway, visitors were intended to climb these ghostly stairs. What did that say about the designer who planned it out? The gardens seemed more like a personal expression than an invitation.
He started down, stepping around small puddles of condensation formed on the steps. As he got farther way from the turbines, the air grew progressively humid. One of the light globes reflected in a puddle like the moon on a clear night. The moon over the jungle. Donny considered that someone who’d gone through the trouble of building such an environment might have felt obligated to put a few synthetic jaguars down there, little octagonal tags around their necks listing their genus and species for visitors to discover in their last moments.
Little clouds of white moths fluttered around the light globes as he got closer to the overgrown canopy. That explained the spiderwebs, at least. Synthetic moths coded to flutter around the lights. Synthetic spiders coded to web up the ornaments and flourishes in the wrought-iron railings. The circle of life preordained by an unseen hand.
It was all very absurd, funny in a way, but also darkly believable. This designer saw himself as an artist, not caring that some wouldn’t be able to climb the long narrow staircases between the domes or that people might slip on a puddle and tumble down hundreds of feet of wrought-iron steps. He or she didn’t seem concerned that visitors might simply give up, not willing to follow the complexities of the creative vision. But didn’t that describe Los Angeles as a whole with its abandoned warehouses and lonely arcologies, its crowded megablock slums and vacant skyscrapers? One of the last remaining cities on the surface of the earth, it was a place of extremes, an expression of everything that could be done without ever asking whether it should be done. Like the chip in his brain.
Chipsets were very complex. They could imitate simpler circuitry to hide their true purpose. Neural dataflows could be obstructed or redirected in response to specific triggering events without the subject ever being aware that his behavior had been pre-coded. Would the moths flutter if they knew they were hard coded that way? Would the spiders look for a different source of food or stage a hunger strike?
Donny often wondered how people could be expected to relate to each other, to know each other in any real sense, with tech like that now so common. How did you know you liked spaghetti or the smell of rain on dusty asphalt? How did you know it was you who’d learned to build sand castles that summer in Heaven’s Paradise with your uncle Mel? How could you ever be sure that what you felt was love or hate or anything? As the hardware improved, software and wetware became increasingly synonymous. People no longer said things like, “That’s out of character for him” or “That seems just like something he would do.” Character had simply evolved into a type of persistent algorithmic circuitry. And circuitry needs no justification in a world where jungles grow in domes.
But when he reached the floor of the second dome, Donny saw that it wasn’t a jungle at all. It was an enormous grassy field enclosed by trees and topped by gnarled vines which grew across the entire space like a roof. Impossible. Not natural. Yet there it was. The stairs ended in the center of the field, a few feet away from a small wooden shed with a peaked roof, surrounded by a tidy vegetable garden. A girl in a red knit cap and filthy white smock knelt in a patch of eggplants, raking the dirt around them with a trowel and humming to herself.
She looked up and smiled. “Hello, Donny.”
< Read Ch. 7 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-IJ >
< Read Ch. 5 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-IF >
Trump, Brexit, and what we can learn from Anthropoid. || Michael Davis
Source: My Friend Has Gone Nazi
5
Maybe he didn’t want to go home.
The anonymous author of The Book advocated a daily routine as the test for sanity. Code might turn you into a werewolf every full moon, but if you got up in the morning, went to work, cooked dinner, and kept a tidy living space, you were at least a functional werewolf. That was supposed to be better than nothing. But Donny wasn’t so sure.
He stayed dry under the florescent awning that blinked with advertisements in 17 or 18 languages. The feeds said there were 25 documented language groups in the city, 72 discrete dialects. You could hear or read almost all of them if you walked a few blocks through the Feliz Sector. So far, Donny had walked about three kilometers. Around kilometer two, he’d finally gotten one of the damp cigarettes going while staring up at an advert for Portuguese contraceptives. A green-skinned girl moaned and writhed on what looked like a blue octopus. Pinyin subtitles blinked across the bottom of the screen. From what he could tell, it was a biotic suppository called “Live Bait.” But Donny’s Pinyin was bad.
Maybe he didn’t want to go home because that was regular, stable, predictable, just what Friendly would advise. Maybe Moss was right: they woke up with chips in their brains because they’d made the choice at some point to explicitly not follow the rules.
The rain was as filthy as on any other night, smelled like sulfur, turned your skin gray after prolonged exposure, a mark of the street. Whole families lived and died in the shadows of the arcologies, the corporate office towers, the megablocks, the commerce domes that squatted like enormous mirrored bullfrogs in the vast circuit-board horizon of greater Los Angeles. Most street kids would never ride a drone up over the lights, see the city pulsing and fuming beneath them in black space like a confluence of stars. They’d never see the orbital colonies, feel a low-grav susurrus lift them off their feet beneath an artificial sky. Instead, they’d subsist on garbage and carry weapons made from broken machine parts. The rain would burn their faces gray like the skyline. And toward the end of their short lives, they’d become unnoticeable shadows, as if they were merging with the streets and alleys that birthed them.
Morbid thoughts on this rainy Tuesday night. Donny smoked as he walked, pulled up the hood of his windbreaker, watched two kids chase each other out a steam-filled doorway. Their clothes were a mesh of metals, resins, scraps of synthetic fibers no doubt salvaged from the Staples Garbage Pyramids far to the south. You couldn’t see the Garbage Pyramids at night. But during the day they pointed up through the rain like gargantuan hives, shaped that way from a century of municipal dumping.
The drone on the foundry’s roof hadn’t waited, even though Donny had asked it to. So now he was on foot. The meeting had been so upsetting, so pointless and depressing, that he wouldn’t have wanted to go right home even if he could. There was a drone station six kilometers south in Chinatown. Six in the dark. He’d walked it before on a night just like this. The streets were congested with the usual foot traffic, ground cars, rickshaws festooned with blinking lights, holograms swooping up to scrolling marquees, light-glow in the rain, street vendors grilling pale ikayaki and gai yang that could make you sick for days, while the crowd swarmed in every direction, heading to every sector that wasn’t dead.
Maybe it was simply that he didn’t want to stand beneath the buzzing light bar that ran the length of his capsule apartment, thinking of the 34 handguns he’d made all in a single night. Bleeding from another near-miss, half aware, Donny had stacked the guns in two laundry baskets in the closet. Then, on some night after that when he’d been too slow with the pills, the baskets had gone empty. Of the 34 guns, he’d now found ten—the most flimsy, the ones that would have only worked once or perhaps not at all. The zip gun made from a cardboard toilet paper roll. The crumpled graphite barrel printed and reprinted until it began to resemble a 1905 Luger 8. The blue glass bottle, its back end melted into a propellant reservoir with a plastic compressor valve that could send a bullet down the neck.
And bullets. Boxes of them. Bullets were harder to make. Still, Donny had so many. Somewhere, he was buying them. Had been. Consistently. Which meant the yellow pills weren’t working all the time. And he wasn’t remembering when they didn’t. So the Damocles Algorithm was toying with him. Some part of it—some part of Donny—knew he’d eventually run out of materials to make guns at home. Then what?
The drone station came into view. Intense white floods. Pristine subcrete. Little caged security guns on electrified poles that sparked blue from the moisture. And the row of drones, a line of black wasps gleaming in the light under a large corrugated awning. Donny didn’t know how the others left the meetings. Friendly had a ground car. The rest must have walked or caught drones. But Donny couldn’t imagine enormous Moss climbing into one of those narrow cockpits. Moss was afraid of heights. Even if he could have fit, the drones reached dizzying levels at the top of the skyway.
Donny climbed into the drone at the end of the row, spoke his 18-digit account number, and waited for the AI to authenticate. He knew he was thinking too much. Ruminating. Depressed again. Lost in all the Moss questions, chip questions, bullet questions, blue octopus, Garbage Pyramids, the cold darkness of the Shung Building, Graciela snoring in this T-shirt, how long will the yellow pills last, and what to do about the little broken duck.
Maybe we can get some epoxy. Put it back together. It’ll be a fun project. Fun was something people had, a normal part of everyday life. Graciela knew about things like that. She said being with him was fun. Donny probed the idea the way you might hold an odd stone, maybe put it in your pocket and turn it over a few times, your brain absently mapping its contours. Fun. A strange, oddly shaped thing that she’d handed to him. Dangler might ask what one did with fun, what its intended function was. But Dangler didn’t say anything earlier in the evening when Friendly also told them how important it was to learn how to have fun again. Like everyone in the group must have had all kinds of fun at some point but forgot about it along with everything else. Like it was possible to recapture that life again.
Jackson Filter said, “I think I had fun once.”
And Friendly nodded, flashing his maddening grin. “Yes, Jackson, of course you did.”
Of course. But nothing was of course anymore. Jackson Filter had taken his name from the logo on the industrial lading container where he’d woken up covered in blood that wasn’t his, a tube snaking out of his nose, and a portable pacemaker on its last three bars of power. Jackson had a bomb in his heart. As long as he recharged the pacemaker every day, he’d stay alive. If he didn’t, the chip in his neopallium would trigger and nobody knew how big the explosion might be—as big as the city of Los Angeles or as big as a man’s heart. No, of course was stupid. Of course was unthinkable.
“Check,1187, rising,” said the drone, a different pair of eyes—far less alluring that those of the previous drone—blinked at him from the dash monitor. “Please fasten your seatbelt, Donald Stilton.” Then the turbines kicked in and the drone hovered slowly out from under the awning. Rain clattered against the acrylic canopy and the black wasp suddenly went straight up towards the skyway, gathering speed as it rose past the marquees, the tangle of hologram adverts, bright white floods, coruscating fields of pixilated Pinyin, New German, English, Spanish, Japanese, the green girl in the distance advertising “Live Bait,” the night throngs of the sector down on the street with their bio-luminescent amulets and VR-guided walking umbrellas and tuk tuks belching grease fumes into the particolored night.
“What is your destination?”
“I’m . . . not sure.”
“It is necessary for you to state a destination. What is your destination?”
“I . . .”
“Are you disoriented? Do you require medical assistance?”
“No.”
“Please state your destination.”
“Do you like it here?”
“You have failed three of five opportunities to state a destination. What is your destination?”
John Desmond Frame, Jr. had been unusually talkative that night, And Rupert Two-Gears. Two extremely closed-mouthed individuals suddenly telling stories, emoting, describing memories. It felt strange. In a circle of ghosts, of men who’d been erased from the dayside life of human society, strange was an achievement. And then there was Moss’ outburst at the end. That wasn’t of course, wasn’t something anyone would forget. Moss throwing chairs. Putting his fist clear through the side of the corroded steel bin behind him. Breaking the arc lamp’s tripod over his knee. Screaming about how unfair it was, that he’d kill someone, that he’d have his revenge. He never said on whom. Because he didn’t know.
Moss was a kind, gentle giant until he wasn’t. Then he was a raving psychopath. Of course he was. Donny thought of the guns impossibly hidden somewhere in his capsule apartment. It’ll be a fun project, she said. If by “fun” Graciela meant something else, maybe “a moment of slightly less fear.” Maybe that’s what fun was for people like Donny.
The drone was at 700 meters and still rising to the skyway. The city was teeming with light, movement, energy—except for two unlit megablocks standing dark and neglected in Old Hollywood like rectangular black holes, enormous intangible voidspaces noticeable amid the rain chop and light wash only by virtue of how desolate they seemed. They no longer drew power from the L.A. grid. Disrecognized. Like him.
“You have failed four of five opportunities to state a destination. What is your destination?”
“Take me somewhere beautiful,” he said, not sure why, half-expecting the AI to ask for clarification or deny his request or offer him a sedative. But the eyes on the dash monitor blinked and the AI said, “Thank you” as the drone rose into the bottom lane of the skyway.
< Read Ch. 6 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-IH >
< Read Ch. 4 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-ID >
4
He’d broken the little ceramic duck by the sink. He’d been so out of it, so determined to pick up every last pill, that he must have missed the duck. But Graciela hadn’t.
“You came. You left. I guess I slept through our whole night together.”
Donny watched her lean towards the camera. He had an ancient Samsung VR phone, but he couldn’t use its clunky obsolete VR. No room for a second chip to make his brain backwards compatible. Whenever Graciela or Loach or someone from the group left a message, he had to watch it on the tiny screen.
“I’m beginning to wonder if I haven’t dreamed you.” Still in his white T-shirt. She must have called as soon as she got home. Graciela’s long black hair shined in the ambient light from the window. L.A. was never fully dark, never fully light; though, the days were brighter than the nights. And the rain never stopped.
She lived somewhere on West Washington by the old cemetery. Bad area, full of gangs, junkies with heads full of sand. He’d never been to Graciela’s apartment, couldn’t see anything in the message but the corner of the window behind her, the same window he always saw when she left a message. “So I left the duck by the sink. I don’t know. Maybe we can get some epoxy. Put it back together. It’ll be a fun project.”
Donny smiled. She hated shit like that.
Graciela said she’d call him tomorrow, but he knew she wouldn’t. She tried so hard to be unpredictable that he could tell whenever she was going to call. Sometimes she surprised him—like showing up in his bed last night—but mostly they did the on-again, off-again thing. How it had to be. Donny’s time was limited. Some night, the algorithm would win. He didn’t want Graciela to be anywhere near him when that happened.
The drone banked north towards Feliz Sector. Sunset Boulevard curved below like a dead vein running straight through the heart of the city. Donny could barely make it out beneath the lights of the megablocks and the sherbet-colored rain-halos of the scrolling marquees, signs flashing TITUS LTD, ENLISS-ZAIBATSU, DAIMLER MONEYSHOT 360, COKE, DELCO POYNTER. You could see so much when your drone climbed up toward the top of the skyway near the upper floors of the mega-structures—the sectors that pulsed with light as well as the unlit dead zones like Sunset Boulevard or Old Hollywood. The LAPD didn’t control those areas. Their blocks stood dark, vacant, populated by the mentally ill, failed cyborg conversions, cannibal gangs, rogue synthetics, fugitives, the castoffs of society. You might see little fires dotting the landscape there, but everyone knew: if your drone went down in a dead zone, you needed to get clear because it would be about to self-destruct. No rescue-retrieval in the unregulated sectors.
He played her message again. I’m beginning to wonder if I haven’t dreamed you. Maybe she did. Maybe they were dreaming each other along an endless timeline of days no different than nights. Someday Donny’s timeline would reach a termination point. Graciela wasn’t synthetic. So someday hers would, too. In-between was some kind of shared dream that passed for life, that could feel like a nightmare if Donny let himself get distracted, if he didn’t try to make it be a good dream after all.
When the drone plunged straight down to the jump pad, he felt a moment of weightlessness. Cheap taxis didn’t worry about your equilibrium.
“Take it easy,” he said. And a graphic of a woman’s eyes appeared on the dash monitor—long lashes, turning irises that read Skyway Cabs in stylized Gairaigo.
“Has your experience been unsatisfactory?”
“Your descent was too fast.”
“Would you like to register a complaint?” The eyes blinked. Someone had coded those beautiful lashes to blink but left the rest of the face off. As if someone were peering out from a crawlspace in the nose of the drone, a perfect nubile beauty grown in there just to take passenger complaints.
“No.”
The eyes blinked, crinkled at the corners as if she were smiling. “Thank you.”
The hatch opened and the filthy rain drenched the cockpit.
Donny was late. He felt sure storytelling had already started by the time he crossed the roof and took the shaky metal stairs down to the foundry’s alley. The Feliz Sector was desolate, even though many of the old factories and warehouses were still in use. Donny wondered (again) why Friendly had chosen this location for their meetings. Was it just that they were erratic dangerous men who couldn’t be trusted? Or was it something more? Aside from a dead zone, one could not find a more lonesome place to meet.
These enormous, empty buildings were what remained of the old defense engineering sector that had crept inland over centuries of endless war. Around 30 years ago, the last military-industrial facility went sub-orbital. Now, according to the learning feeds, production was fully automated with enormous mass drivers that could put materiél anywhere on the surface within minutes. What the feeds didn’t say was that after the military left, the parasites crept in. Aftermarket chipware. Sand labs. Organ printing operations. Sweatshop micro-assemblies for obsolete nano still salable in Europe or Inner China—not all of it criminal, but certainly gray market, highly temporary, and very low profile. Everything was done quietly in Feliz Sector. Windows were spray painted or taped up with plastic bags. Equipment ran in basements with only a spaghetti-profusion of power cables and fiber-optic transfers jacked to external grid boxes to indicate anyone was there.
When Donny came out of the alley and rounded the corner of the building, the street was as dark as a dead zone. He walked through the unlit hallway that ran the length of what had once been a ground-level production floor until he saw the glow of the basement stairwell. Then he heard the sound of Rupert Two-Gears telling the story he always told when it was his turn. Rupert was the most unnatural-looking member of the group. Ironically, he also happened to be one of the least coded. Three flights of stairs and Donny could smell the basement—heavy rust, the tang of machine oil, mold, wet earth—and he could hear Rupert saying, “It’s not that I lost my mind. I was just over-written three or four times.” Overwritten. Meaning Rupert had gone in and gotten himself chipped. And then somebody didn’t like the fact that he had. Or just didn’t like the fact that he was alive.
Donny walked into the glow of the arc lamp and Rupert paused, stared at him. Then everybody else did, too.
Friendly smiled. “Welcome.”
Moss’ glowing irises rotated. “Welcome” Then his left eye flashed. Did that mean he’d just taken a picture?
“You’re late,” said Jackson Filter.
“You’re l-l-l-late,” said Teague.
Rupert raised a long pale hand. “May I continue?”
Friendly inclined his head. “Please do.” Then, still smiling, he looked up. “Aren’t you going to have a seat, Donny?”
There was one empty folding chair in the circle. Donny’s. He sat and took out his waterlogged pack of cigarettes, carefully pulled out a bent one without tearing it, and put it between his lips.
“After my third overwrite, something must have happened. I drank solvent.”
“No,” Dangler said. “It was not solvent. Four weeks ago, you told this story and you said you drank lubricant.”
“Well, I don’t remember. It might have been lubricant. Then again, it might have been solvent. But I know it did this to me.”
Dangler nodded.
Jackson filter said, “For fuck’s sake.”
Moss’ left eye flashed.
Rupert Two-Gears was hairless, blue veins forking in his marble skin, lips in a small pained frown. His ribs pushed visibly against his pink child’s tank-top that had obviously been printed for a girl. Donny wondered whether there was a little girl in Rupert’s life. He looked alien, undead, skeletal, like something that had clawed its way to the surface but shouldn’t have.
“And that’s when I blacked out the last time. I remember that. Blacking out.”
“And then?” asked Friendly.
“Then nothing. Memory stops. The rest is —fragmented.”
Overwrite a chipset and it wouldn’t matter how small the original program was—a helper for differential equations, maybe, or basic Spanish, or a field-of-vision clock display. No matter what it had been at first, once overwritten, its code would mutate into bloatware, an expanding tangle of contradictory commands, as new control structures tried to dominate the implant. The mutant code would eat into parts of the brain that were never meant for it. Overwrite a chip once and, given time, aneurysms, hemorrhaging, and serious mental illness would be inevitable. Do it three or four times and you clearly want the subject to die a long horrific death. Yet here was Rupert. All that remained of him. Such a small change, overwriting a cortical chip. It was almost elegant compared to the Damocles Algorithm. But, in many ways, it was far worse that Donny’s affliction. Donny knew he would lose control some night and put a bullet in his brain. Rupert’s bullet was already there twisting through the gray matter.
“I admire your courage.” Moss had gotten red nano tattooed in a Celtic knot pattern around the back of his neck. When he leaned forward, it writhed and resolved into a new design. Donny wondered how many different triquetras it had in its memory. Some functional tats could change into hundreds of different related shapes over time.
Rupert regarded Moss for a moment, then offered a tight smile. “Thank you. You’re very kind.”
Moss’ left eye flashed.
“What the fuck is that?” Jackson Filter pointed at Moss’ eye. “You recording again, asshole? Didn’t we cover this last time?”
What could that nano tat do? What was its intended function? People suffering from invasive code didn’t often go in for more enhancement. They tried to hang on to the humanity they had left. And Moss was so augmented that further modification would bring him dangerously close to the synthetic tipping point, where one could no longer claim to be predominately human.
“My eye is malfunctioning today.”
“Bullshit.” Jackson Filter crossed his arms, looked at Friendly. “I don’t buy it. He’s always trying to preserve everybody’s stories for some secret fuck fantasy of his. It ain’t right.” Then Jackson looked at Donny. Donny nodded. It wasn’t right. But neither was Moss.
Friendly shook his head, grinned, opened his leather-bound copy of The Book of Synthesis he always kept under his chair. “You all might want to follow along. Part three, chapter 41. ‘Trust as a Prerequisite to Recovery and Reintegration.’”
John Desmond Frame, Jr.—who’d torched half of his face years ago exposing the titanium reconstruction beneath, his right eye pulsing like an orange ember in the wind—was wearing an expensive suit, vest, 19th century railroad watch on a golden chain, silk tie with a Balliol College pin. He always dressed like that, his suit always smartly creased as if it had been printed that morning. His copy of The Book was non-synth cream leather pressed with silver letters that glinted in the light from the arc lamp. He had a red leather bookmark featuring a black chess rook above a lion rampant. The bottom of the bookmark read, CASTLE SECURITY in block letters so big Donny could read them from the other side of the circle. Frame seldom spoke. When he did, his voice sounded immanently human and soft, yet somehow menacing coming from that half-titanium face, those blackened lips burned into perfect titanium teeth. “Focus,” Frame said, “on the text. And be quiet.”
Jackson Filter closed his mouth and looked down at his copy.
Moss’ left eye flashed. The crimson triquetra on the back of his neck turned green as it changed shape.
Danny didn’t have a book. His edition had long ago made its way through the bowels of the Los Angeles municipal recycling system. Instead, he flicked his plastic lighter, but the damp cigarette wouldn’t catch. “Shit,” he mumbled and kept trying.
Friendly chuckled, beamed at him, then commenced reading the most well-known passage in The Book: “We take as fact and yet also as an article of faith that we are bound in a confraternity of suffering. Our pain, as we have come to understand it, is our sacred mutuality.”
The others, even Jackson Filter and John Desmond Frame, Jr., started to read aloud in unison.
“Our certitude, that we have been victimized by parties unknown in ways that are mysterious and ineffable, is the basis of our devotion both to each other and to the truth—”
Donny joined in at the end, not sure why he did apart from the fact that he’d heard the words so many times he’d memorized them, the bent cigarette jerking in his lips as he spoke.
“—that we are now, as we have always been, human beings, worthy of the designation and destined to live the time we are given as our forefathers have done—in life, knowingness, and hope.”
“Amen,” said Jackson Filter, brushing away a tear.
Friendly slowly closed the book. “Amen, my brothers.”
Donny whispered it to the cigarette as he tapped it back into the pack with the tip of his finger. He couldn’t argue with the words. They were all suffering in ways none of them fully understood, and the biggest, deepest pain came from not knowing why.
“I want to weep,” said Moss, “but I can’t. No tear ducts.”
Dangler’s monotone: “That makes sense. Without tear ducts, crying is impossible.”
“There are other ways to express your grief.” Friendly steadied Moss’ shoulder but pulled his hand away when Moss looked down at it.
Then Moss turned toward Donny. “What do you think?”
“I think grief is overrated.” Donny sniffed the waterlogged pack of cigarettes, frowned, and put the pack in his windbreaker pocket. “I’m a big fan of survival.”
John Desmond Frame, Jr.’s orange eye glowed, but his human eye looked just as intense. “Yes. And payback.”
“And payback.” Moss nodded. The Celtic tracery on his neck burned bright red like a brand.
< Read Ch. 5 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-IF >
< Read Ch 3 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-Iw >
3
Still twitchy, but he had to go to work. And, now that he’d arrived, swiped in, got his black coveralls on, printed a soy-tuna sandwich in the break room and put it in the mini-fridge, Donny almost felt normal. The pills would prevent the chip from communicating with his body for three or four days, but the inhibitory drug’s side effects would last a whole week. He wouldn’t be able to smell or taste anything and his pounding headache wouldn’t go away no matter how many vending machine painkillers he took. Felt like someone dropped a heavy weight straight down on top of his head. And then there would be the dangerous period when the pills wore off. The lingering side effects prevented Donny from taking more, leaving him completely vulnerable for a few days before he could dose up again.
The code didn’t always run on those unprotected days. There was no telling exactly when it would. But it did once, right in the middle of his shift. He barely survived that night. So he now kept a pair of handcuffs from the equipment locker with him at all times. There was a spot in the sub-basement where Donny could lock himself to a pipe coming out of the wall if he felt the chip coming online. Unlit hallway. Nothing else around. Even Loach, his supervisor, wouldn’t look for him down there. Because if Loach ever found out, that would be the end. And what better job was there for someone in Donny’s situation than as a night guard? Better to pass out down there in the dark and tell Loach he’d gotten drunk, overslept, something.
He made Postum in the ancient tin percolator and poured it into his thermos. The tiny break room had caged red lights in the ceiling to discourage sleeping on the job and it smelled like a rubber tire. Donny spent as little time in there as possible. Tonight, especially since he was feeling on edge, he wanted to get out and do his rounds, just be out there in the dark with the heavy flashlight and the motion detector, where nothing ever moved and the only sound was dripping water. He stepped into the dark and swiped his key card through the magnetic reader, locking the break room down. Old tech, but there wasn’t much of value in the tiny closet apart from the filthy printer. The red light at the bottom of the door faded, and Donny clicked the strong LED flashlight on, did a sweep around what had once been a synthetic play-garden for children. The beam lit up a 300-meter cone, made the distant shop windows flash and the drops coming down through the dome ceiling far above glitter like falling diamonds.
The Shung Building was gigantic, deserted, partly flooded on the ground floor. By the time Donny made his first round through the dark shopping levels with wires hanging from the ceilings and the old silver mannequins still posed in shattered storefronts, he’d be ready for his sandwich and second thermos. He didn’t remember being hired for the job at Bug Security. It, too, was from before. But he supposed it couldn’t have been hard to get. Most people probably didn’t enjoy being all alone in such an enormous dark space. Then again, Donny wasn’t most people. It suited him just fine. Even if he’d never been chipped, he felt he would have sought out a job like this.
As he passed, the smooth chrome eyes of a mannequin stared at him from a shop that used to sell synthetic canaries. He had no idea what use a canary shop would have had with a mannequin, but the whole place was like that. He noticed strange details now and then on his rounds—enough that he no longer questioned why a mannequin head might be staring up out of a broken toilet, why a half-skinned animatronic cat might be hanging from a snare in the one of the vacant bedrooms on the hotel level, or why the steel hatch to the jump pad on the roof might be banging open in the storm when it had been supposedly welded shut. Maybe normal people would be unnerved by things like that, things that didn’t have answers. But not Donny. The world was too much, too broken, too sick and evil for him to ever feel like it owed him an explanation.
The motion detector hummed softly, occasionally making a set of quiet pings when it sent out a pulse. The semi-circular display had a glowing grid he could use to pinpoint exactly how something was moving and how far it was from him. It never picked up anything bigger than a rat. And he’d killed the last rat weeks ago. He hooked the motion detector on his belt and took a sip from the thermos, panning the cone of light over the broken shop windows like jagged translucent fangs and then out across the vast ground floor. Far off in the dark, the constant rain had collected in a stagnant puddle that seemed more like a small lake. Loach said it was draining, but Donny didn’t see how it could. The rain never stopped.
Still, Loach was the man. You didn’t argue with him. Donny climbed the dead escalator, listening to the motion detector ping and then answer itself. Somewhere, on the other side of the dome, in an area where the subcrete floor had partly fallen into the basement level, there was the rubble of an old-fashioned 20th century glass elevator. Loach showed it to him on his first day, shining the flashlight at the shards of chemically treated glass, lighting them up like rainbows. Loach chomped on his cigar and said, “Look at them lights, man. You ever see anything like that?” Donny said he hadn’t. But, to be honest, maybe he had.
The mezzanine level was mostly broken equipment and piles of garbage. It overlooked the ground floor and was the real reason whoever owned the property still paid for Bug Security. There wasn’t much to steal, but if people wanted a quiet place to squat or smoke sand, this was it. Through Loach said he’d caught some junkies once, there was never anybody when Donny did his rounds. The motion detector pinged as he shined the light between piles of broken furniture, shredded paper, packing cartons, useless machinery brought down from the hotel level and dumped here long ago, the burned torso of a mannequin protruding from the side of a junk pile like it would crawl away if it only had arms.
There were 32 empty levels, part of a corporate arcology that never took off, and Donny’s job was to check them all three times during his shift. The Shung Corporation disappeared 30 years ago. Loach had told him all about its history, how the entire workforce lived at the top. When the company went bankrupt, everyone got chipped for a one year lifespan. The big tech corporations did things like that back then. And though it was still legal to contractually agree to a post-termination death date, technology had improved. Now an employer could reliably erase a worker’s memories without having to cause a fatal aneurysm, rendering corporate espionage and data insecurity a non-issue. The Shung Corporation had been notorious for a number of things. But they were long gone, just another ghost in a city of ghosts.
Still, someone was paying for the power. The whole building was jacked into the greater metropolitan grid and could be turned on from a control room in the basement. Donny found the access hall to the freight elevator. The two-meter-wide hallway was totally hidden unless you knew to turn right at an enormous urn that must have once held an equally large plant, maybe a shrub genetically engineered to grow as large as a tree and emit relaxing pheromones whenever anyone stood close to it. Now the urn was full to the brim with rain water. It was directly under one of the holes in the dome, which sat like a five story high blister at the base of the tower block. If you took a drone from LAX to Griffith Admin Center, the Shung Building resembled nothing if not an erect cock and ball. At least, that’s what Loach called it and now Donny couldn’t look at it any other way.
He reached the end of the access hall and swiped his key card on the elevator’s call panel. A distorted male voice said, “Thank you. The elevator is approaching.” It had an antique AI. Donny could talk to it, but what was the use? Its firmware hadn’t been updated in three decades. It never said anything interesting, though it might spontaneously offer inaccurate weather reports and the incorrect time. If he asked it a human question, like “Do you like it here?,” it would respond with “The Shung Corporation is on the cutting edge of biotechnological innovation.”
Donny stepped onto the elevator, pulled the steel doors shut, and told it to go to level three. Then he glanced, as he always did, between the safety bars that crisscrossed the top of the elevator car. Tiny points of light set in the dome twinkled like stars, some of them caught in an endless cycle of sputtering and flaring, and there was something beautiful about that—unintended beauty, like the shards of the old glass elevator or the silver eyes of the mannequins in the shops staring into the dark.
“Do you like it here?” he said to the elevator.
“The Shung Corporation is on the cutting edge of biotechnological innovation,” the elevator said.
Donny nodded and looked back up at the artificial stars.
< Read Ch. 4 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-Iw >
< Read Ch 2 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-Ir >
2
Donny clicked open the door to his apartment. Graciela was asleep in his bed. One of many good things about the apartment: you could look straight from the bedroom, through the kitchen area, through the living room, to the door. You could sit up in bed and put a bullet through an intruder—if you were fast like Moss and you could shoot straight. But Donny had never fired a gun at another human being, even though there were more than 34 handguns currently in his apartment. He’d fired about half of them at himself. That was the Damocles Algorithm. That was part of his wreckage, but not all of it.
He let the door shut behind him, then walked over to the foot of the bed and looked down at Graciela. When they had sex, she’d sweat. She liked to cuss. She liked to smoke his cigarettes in bed. She liked to drink. When she used his bathroom, sometimes the smell of shit lingered through the toilet’s deodorant spray. It made Donny feel good, calm. Graciela was real, as organic as any woman born the old-fashioned way in a hospital. Not in a lab.
Sometimes a synthetic person came to believe it was organic. And every now and then, organic people like Donny, who’d been involuntarily chipped by a family member or a spouse or an employer, discovered their hardware or coding during a routine physical or because of a triggering event or in some other more dramatic way. In most cases, forced implantation was legal in California, whether it was court ordered or whether the subject contractually agreed to it. The problem was remembering your life before the implant, even remembering you’d agreed to it in the first place. A certain degree of memory loss was inevitable. It protected the people who’d done it to you. At least, it added another layer of difficulty if you tried to find out. But sometimes people got their memories back. And sometimes they took revenge.
Graciela didn’t know about any of this. She knew, in a general way, things like forced implantation took place. But she didn’t know about Donny’s coding or the few fragments he remembered from his past. She thought all the guns were some weird macho thing. That was good, too. But Donny didn’t like it when she spent the whole night at his place, because that’s when it usually happened. He had some pills. They were supposed to help him block the algorithm that made him build guns in a feverish agony-filled trance and then try to use them on himself. The pills worked about half the time—if he remembered to take them. The side effects were horrible. Donny only took them when he felt the code kicking in, the strobe of pain in the center of his forehead. When it started, he had to move fast. He didn’t always make it.
Graciela sighed in her sleep. Donny took off his shirt, shoes, chinos, and lay down beside her, resting his right hand on the small of her back. She was wearing one of his white T-shirts and her warmth felt nice through the cotton. Real cotton. A luxury item, hardly in his budget as a night guard. But synthetic clothing gave you skin cancer and Donny felt he had enough on his plate. He smiled at the thought: enough on my plate, imagining an antique china dinner plate, gold scroll-work around the edge, a gold spoon beside it, and a Steyr Mannlicher L-D12 with an extended clip resting in the middle like a charred T-bone. Black steel. Tactical sights. Very similar to the first gun he could remember finding hidden in his apartment.
Donny panicked that night, not knowing that he’d ordered it online six days earlier. That was before the assembly subroutine activated. Now he had guns made from PVC piping, cardboard tubes, a disassembled fire nozzle he’d brought home from the Shung building and hacksawed in a trance with bloodshot unfocused eyes, his nose bleeding down to his belt. He’d gotten rid of his 3D printer, but he was still finding polymer firing mechanisms sunk in the toilet tank, piled on top of each other in a forgotten bowl in the kitchen cupboard, stuffed into a rip in the side of his mattress. He dreamed about guns almost every night, had encyclopedic knowledge of their specifications, materials, assembly. It was part of the code.
There was a VR channel where you could learn about objects from the past, examine them from all angles, experience what they might have been like sitting in your hand. Donny felt that in his previous life—the life before the implant—he must have spent a lot of time in VR, especially on the learning feeds. Most people had never seen an astrolabe, van Gogh’s Starry Night, a 16th century Koran in green leather fitted in brass. But he could remember such things and they had nothing to do with the Damocles Algorithm.
He’d heard of a similar channel for extinct animals. Some liked to spend all their free time playing with otters in high-def mountain streams. But somehow virtual animals didn’t have the same appeal for Donny. The archaeology of the past was more real because it had been artificial from the beginning—then an astrolabe, now a pixilated astrolabe. That was more honest, more organic, than a pixilated otter.
Donny listened to the rain patter on the big circular window to the right of the bed. The window depolarized at night. Unless he raised the auto-blind, the enormous ECO-TANGENT marquee on the apartment block across the skyway lit up the bedroom. Graciela apparently didn’t know where to find the controls. So the blind was still only half-raised, the way he’d left it that morning. A red-orange bar of light twisted on the ceiling whenever the enormous ECO-TANGENT logo flashed passing drones.
In a few minutes, he’d go into the kitchen and make a strong cup of Postum to keep him awake. Then he could go somewhere else and let Graciela sleep. The apartment was oblong, actually a very small capsule model. 72 floors up the megablock. The block generated a new capsule whenever a tenant moved in, incinerating the old capsule in its slot for hygiene purposes. Donny felt lucky to live there. It was hard to find a place in the city with decent filtration and radiation shielding. He didn’t know how he’d managed it. All he knew was that his name was on the lease. So he must have lived there before.
Somewhere Moss, Teague, Friendly, Jackson Filter and the rest were also going to sleep, however they managed to live, in whatever holes they called home. Well, he thought, they probably weren’t actually sleeping. They, as a group, didn’t seem to sleep all that much. And who could blame them? They’d gone to sleep one night as a relatively normal people only to wake up to nightmares they couldn’t escape.
Donny didn’t realize he’d dozed off until the subroutine had already begun. He gasped, sitting up beside Graciela. She was still on her chest, still breathing deeply, sleeping like a normal human being, whatever that was. He didn’t know anymore. The cramps had already started, aching nausea, his left hand trembling as if being jiggled at the end of an invisible string. His hand was separate from him now, coming online, connecting to the thing in his brain that wanted him dead.
He slid off the bed, dry heaving, his right arm hugging his stomach. Nothing to vomit. Just pain. A drop of blood fell out of his nose, black and glistening on the capsule’s blue polyamide carpet like a tiny jewel. Then his left arm started flopping at his side like a fish struggling to breathe.
There was still time. The spasms always started in one of his hands, then moved across his body like a seizure. There was time to get the pills, to get to the sink. He needed to take four of them. They were big. Donny had to put them in his mouth and then get some water in there. And he had to do it fast. He could already feel his heart starting to race. He focused on his breathing. If he started to hyperventilate, it was all over. He’d pass out and then the chip would only wake up the psycho-motor areas of his brain—the parts necessary for locating or building a firearm, loading it, and firing it point-blank at the side of his head.
The little ceramic duck on the edge of the sink. Something Graciela wouldn’t notice. Donny knocked it over with his right hand, trying to stay upright with his left arm spasming, his left leg starting to vibrate, his throat muscles getting rigid. Underneath the duck was a little cellophane packet full of the yellow pills. He tore the packet open with his teeth and they went everywhere. Focus. Count four lying on the counter. Starting to hyperventilate. His entire body trembling. Just as Donny’s right fingers started to pulse, he got the pills in, cut his mouth on the sink faucet, but got the water flowing. Swallowed. Fell to the kitchen floor and didn’t think, didn’t move, until the convulsions slowed, then faded and he lay there surrounded by triangular yellow pills that didn’t have a name. Donny listened to the rain. Graciela hadn’t woken up. One good thing. One small good thing.
< Read Ch. 1 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-In >
< Read Ch. 3 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-Iw >
“As touching the terrors of the night, they are as many as our sins.”
– Thomas Nashe, 1594
1
They wanted Donny to talk about the algorithm running in his brain, as if talking about it again would change something.
He stood and knocked over his folding chair. “Stop recording. I’m not gonna tell you twice.”
“Sorry. I wanted to—review it—later.” Moss’ irises pulsed faint blue, then rotated as he erased the file.
The group stared. Donny lit a cigarette with a paper match. “Yeah, well, I shouldn’t have to say it.” He didn’t take his eyes off Moss.
Sitting, Moss was still taller than Donny. Standing, he was easily over eight feet. He weighed close to 400 lbs., all synthetic fast-twitch muscle fiber and chemical emulsifier. Hairless and scarred, Moss looked like someone who’d grown up in an industrial ghetto or who’d been sent to the gulags. But he had perfect balance. Was ambidextrous. Said he could see 20/20 in the dark and could bend a steel railing with his hands. Donny believed it. Moss was obviously enhanced. And code like that was open source these days. Outpatient. Anyone could chip you in—or have you chipped against your will. There was no telling who Moss had been or what he’d done or what his skeletal structure looked like. He was the same as everyone who came to these meetings. His memory was salad.
“I said I was sorry. I’m—really sorry, man.” Moss looked away, folded his hands in his lap.
“You know the rules.” Friendly raised his eyebrows and nodded to himself, wrote something in his notebook. “We don’t record. We keep it all in-group.”
“I could care less about the rules. I just don’t like the thought of him watching playback of me in his head. It’s sick.” Donny righted his chair and sat back down, exhaling twin jets of smoke out his nose like punctuation.
“I accept the rules,” Moss said. “But the reason we’re here is because—because maybe we’re not so good at following rules.”
Friendly grinned, nodded again. “That’s the truth, brother. The absolute truth. That’s what we mean by self-acceptance.” Friendly had big white teeth, a wooden ankh on a bead necklace, thin dreads tied in a perfect bun. He was definitely synthetic. He didn’t sweat. He smiled way too much. Donny wondered, again, what Friendly had done to wind up running a support group that met on the production floor of an abandoned foundry. Who’d built him? Why? Was it for this or something else?
“Let’s just get on with it,” Donny flicked ash onto the subcrete and Friendly’s glance snapped down at the nub of ash the way a mongoose fixates on the head of a snake. The snake’s head jerks, the mongoose follows it so fast it seems like they’re moving as one. Yeah, sure, nothing unnatural about Friendly.
Friendly’s gaze slowly unfocused, softened, he looked up at Donny and nodded. Then smiling, he looked around the circle. “It’s Teague’s turn to share this evening. Isn’t it?”
Teague peered at Friendly with his good eye. The other was a dead milky orb with only the faintest outline of an iris. Someone had done that to him, among other things. He had pockmarked cheeks. Had someone done that as well—for realism? Or was it natural? He probably didn’t know.
There’s a burning question, thought Donny. Can synthetics get chicken pox? Is that the new thing?
“I shared before,” Teague said. “I told you—you know who I am. I’m chipped. You know this. Right?” Teague looked at Friendly, who nodded.
“Yes. But we need to hear your story.” Friendly would be smiling even if he’d had to tell a mother her kid had been torn apart by wild dogs. Donny stared until Friendly noticed and winked.
Teague sounded nervous, but telling your story was part of the therapy. In your first meeting, you were expected to share the nature of your coding as far as you understood it. You did a fearless and searching inventory of all the people you’d hurt as a result of your involuntary actions. You confessed. But there wasn’t supposed to be any judgment, just understanding, acceptance, compassion. Only then could healing begin. That’s what The Book of Synthesis said, anyway. Friendly gave everyone a copy. Donny read half of chapter one before throwing it in the trash. He didn’t expect to be healed. Talking couldn’t remove a chipset from your cerebral cortex or the software that had become integrated with your brain functions, your wetware. Donny didn’t know why he came back week after week, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t because of The Book.
Teague crossed his arms, cleared his throat. “Well, okay, so you all know me from last time, right? You know my name. It’s Teague. It’s my last name. I don’t know my first name.”
Moss stared intently at Teague with those dull blue filaments in his eyes that pulsed whenever one of his subroutines kicked in. Moss said his eyes weren’t supposed to do that. They had their own battery power and it was failing. Soon he’d probably go blind. Or worse. There was no way for him to know without contacting the company that made his eyes. But, of course, he couldn’t remember.
“But what’s your wreckage?” Donny flicked another bit of ash from his cigarette to see if Friendly would react the same way.
Friendly smirked and wagged his finger as if Donny had been a naughty boy. “We don’t call it wreckage, Donny. You know that.”
“Wreckage?” Teague’s mouth twitched. His good eye darted around the circle. Then he stood and spread his arms, and sang out in lyric tenor: “By the River Jordan, I sat down and wept! By the river! Le delizie dell’ amor, mi dei sempre rammentar! Sono io! Sono io! Ecco chi sono!”
“That’s who you are? You’re a river?” Dangler tilted his head to the side, considering the possibility.
“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal!”
Friendly stood and put his arm around Teague, helping him down into his folding chair. “Firewall. It’s okay, brother. Just sit back down.”
Teague had begun to shake, spittle foaming at the corners of his mouth. He tried to keep talking but could now only utter incoherent syllables, his good eye turned down toward the tip of his nose while his hands writhed in his lap.
“Wow,” Dangler said. “How is that anything like a river?”
“Let’s go easy on Teague tonight.” Friendly sighed, sat down, and smiled warmly at the group. “Evidently, this is a protective aspect of his coding. But that’s why were here, right? That’s part of the work.”
Dangler shook his head. “That must feel strange.”
“How do you know what strange feels like?” asked Jackson Filter, who always seemed to be sitting next to Dangler even though Jackson despised him.
“You’re right. I don’t actually know what strange feels like. What does strange feel like, Jackson Filter?”
“Talking to you. That feels strange,” Jackson said and turned his folding chair slightly so he wouldn’t have to look at Dangler.
Donny smoked, took it all in. These men were broken, miserable. And the group meetings were a special kind of hell. What good did they do? Every week Donny swore that was the last time. But when the next meeting came around, he found himself on a drone texting Friendly that he was on his way. Could coming to the meetings also be part of his coding? Someone wanting to program him to attend group therapy for being programmed was absurd, at least as absurd as anything else in Donny’s life.
The old foundry’s enormous pressure injectors, iron crucibles, plungers, chamber machines, and die cavities towered around them like the discarded toys of a giant race. Everything had rusted horribly from the moisture, even the walls and the roof. It was always raining in Los Angeles and you could smell the acid tang of the rust. Hundreds of feet above them, rain clattered on the foundry’s corrugated roof and filled the air with mist, muting the glare of Friendly’s arc lamp. One day, the roof would come crashing down. Then they’d finally see who had physical enhancements to go along with the code.
Dangler, for example, looked completely normal. No scarring. No obvious synthetic characteristics. That is, if you overlooked the fact that he was 62 but appeared 22. He had bushy blond hair, a perfect even tan, and a vacant stare. He’d been coded against emotion. Sometime, he claimed, maybe 20 years ago, someone had done it to him. And for the last two decades, he’d felt no happiness, joy, fear, or anxiety. Higher levels of creativity were forever closed to him. Dangler was very good at imitating the behavior of others, but original thought or action was beyond him. He once said a middle-aged woman occasionally stopped by his room at the YMCA to ask how he was feeling. But he didn’t know who she was or why she came. She refused to explain why Dangler had been tattooed in the center of his chest. But that was his name. She said that had always been his name.
“I’m sorry.” Teague pulled up the collar of his white T-shirt and mopped his face. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“You were speaking Italian,” said Jackson Filter.
“I don’t know Italian.”
“Well, I guess you do.”
Friendly raised his hand. “Guys, we all know what a firewall is. It’s the code protecting itself. Sometimes, it’s hard. That’s intentional. But what do we say to those who have harmed us?”
Everyone but Teague and Donny called out in unison: “WE FORGIVE AND PRAY NOT TO FORGET!”
“Yes,” Friendly said. “And, as it says in The Book, self-remembering is the basis of love, which is the greatest power in the universe.”
“Amen,” said Moss.
“Amen,” said Dangler.
“Amen,” said Jackson Filter.
“Amen,” said Rupert Two-Gears.
“Amen,” said John Desmond Frame, Jr.
Teague covered his face with his hands and started to weep. “Amen,” he said.
Everyone looked at Donny. He blew a line of smoke at the arc lamp. Then he smiled at Friendly and flicked a nub of ash onto the subcrete.
< Read Ch. 2 here: http://wp.me/p2mP19-Ir >
Source: Here’s Why Denis Johnson Was the Last Truly Great Gonzo War Correspondent
Early rendition of Alfred E. Neuman, 1908.
Today, I wonder whether I should re-think some of my ultra-liberal biases and attendant leftist news consumption. This is good. But, man, I’m beat.
The alt-right (and the radical religious right) to me seems like a uniquely American expression of deep stupidity but, of course, I would say that. Look at my demographic: college educated, democrat, fiction writer, from Southern California, who’s been an expat for almost a decade. Of course, I think Trump is the worst thing that could have possibly happened to the world. Of course, I wanted Bernie but voted Hillary. Of course, I want net neutrality. Of course, I support many (but not all) positions taken by the ACLU. Of course, I believe that, in an earlier era, Obama would have been considered a moderate republican. Of course, I have a problem with drones, civilian casualties, the terrific scope creep of the Patriot Act, and the “war on drugs.” Of course, I care about my country.
If I didn’t think the Green Party was run by bumblers, I would probably join. I’m pro-choice, pro-Planned Parenthood, and I support gay marriage. I think many of these things should not even have to be controversial in a liberal democracy. I dream of a day when there will be universal healthcare and free college tuition. I think climate change is one of the most, if not the most, serious issues we face today. But the truth is that most of these biases and beliefs can be (and are) predicted by an algorithm. The even sadder truth is that I only have so much energy I can devote to fact checking and being outraged. This is a problem. Tiredness is a problem.
The problem is not that there is a right answer we have to find. The problem is that uncertainty and complexity are exhausting over time, especially when you’re necessarily engaged in other things. Most Americans are not, actually, stupid. They’re invested in certain areas–mostly job and family–and in most other respects have a general (superficial) understanding of the world, including political issues and identifying yellow journalism, confirmation bias, and what passes for fear mongering click-bait. I have also seen this in European and Asian countries, relative to various cultural differences and levels of education. The USA doesn’t own “stupid.” Every country with a powerful media has a horse as a proconsul somewhere. The difference is that the States likes to put its toga-wearing horses on display, whereas other countries have not. But this is changing.
In an enormous post-industrial society, you will have many levels of political, historical, and economic awareness and many opinions emerging constantly in the news media. You will also have crackpot theories; secessionism; separatism based on race, religion, and / or gender biases; conspiracy paranoia; multi-directional shaming; late night talk show infotainment; social justice fanatics; religious absolutists; new age hucksters; ambulance chasers; a continuous horde of cynics; doom-saying historians looking for their 15 minutes; the resurgence of failed orthodoxies (like Nazism, ethno-nationalism, and whatever Steve Bannon happens to be reading); and the all-encompassing opportunism that feeds off these things. What you won’t have is a simple black-and-white truth. You will have truthiness.
To live in an information society infected with truthiness is extremely taxing. But just as there is no black-and-white truth, there is no easy solution. A friend of mine has suggested “slow news” as opposed to internet news feeds. It seems like there are some merits there. But slow news does not necessarily safeguard against yellow journalism, which has been around since newspapers could fold. In many ways, the 24-hour news cycle and its problematic presence on social media makes it harder for governments and corporations to spin interpretations in their favor. We should be grateful for the ineptitude of Sean Spicer and the alacrity with which he and his boss are covered by the press corps.
I don’t have answers. I don’t think there is a single version of what is true—at least not one that can be had through the media. But I also don’t think the cross-eyed chants of “burn it down” and “fuck your feelings” have done any good. They helped Trump get elected as president, and he has thus far made a mockery of America. The left understandably wants him gone. The GOP wants him to calm down and let them get on with the kleptocracy. His base supporters are currently upset because he bowed 5 inches to receive an award in Saudi. Some of his supporters are no doubt upset that the Reich hasn’t yet emerged in all its glory. I suspect they will still be upset when he gets impeached.
“Nothing is an absolute reality; all is permitted” – Hassan-i Sabbah
Today I’m thinking about how most people locate the center of meaning in their lives in their social identity, which is synonymous either with their career role or some caretaking role or both. But the artist finds the center of meaning in the act of making art. This is an important distinction to keep in mind, especially for me when I’m not writing.
When I don’t feel capable of producing writing, I nearly always get depressed to some degree. My insecurities get stronger. I start wondering whether I’ve wasted my life following insubstantial dreams. Nevermind that I’ve already accomplished things my younger self could have never imagined possible. It’s as if none of that ever existed. It’s failure, failure, failure, failure, failure on repeat in my head. And it never relents.
Of course, this doesn’t happen in productive times because, when I’m actually involved with my work, I’m not even considering other things. At most those old insecurities are tiny thoughts, easily dismissed by the reality of the page filling up with words. Writing is all-consuming when it’s happening. When it isn’t, when I’m unable to move my mind into focus, I feel incredibly empty and worthless, which reminds me of something my first creative writing instructor once said: “Writers drink and use drugs probably because when they can’t write, they think they don’t exist. And they will do anything to escape that pain.” It took me years to fully understand what he meant. But I don’t try to escape the pain that way. I just suffer.
No matter how much I publish, no matter how many stories and chapters and essays and posts I write, it’s never enough to make me feel satisfied like I’ve arrived in a secure, content, stable place in my life and work. As soon as I write the last word of something, I’m already thinking about the next thing. Only during those moments of actual work, when I can forget myself fully do I feel any respite.
When I’m like a clear pane of glass and the light of my work is shining through me, I experience a kind of bliss, a satori. Nothing is ever that good. Drugs or alcohol can’t come remotely close because they shut down or at least reconfigure thought processes. Writing, when I’m immersed in it, enhances all processes, all existing configurations of thought—even the critical and analytical routines that consider form and technique—and precipitates insights, perspectives, realizations. This is far better than taking drugs. These are the drugs of the mind. And the only thing I live for is to be in that place, putting words on the page. The rest of my life, actually 90% of what I do that isn’t writing, is preparing to write or recovering from having written so I can do it again.
This way of life emphasizes introspection and subjectivity. It is not contingent on the opinions of others, permission from authorities or institutions, or any other sort of social frameworks external to my inward experience. That is a wonderful thing, sometimes. But sometimes the alienation I feel can be terrible: from friends, family, society, culture, what passes for normal life. The constant pain of living in my own subjective universe and knowing that, while others may do the same, they can never truly share this experience with me, is very subtle but very tangible, especially when I’m depressed about not writing. When there is no bliss, there is only emptiness and doubt, an inner stage devoid of actors, props, and background, all too easily filled with regret, self-criticism, worry, and the memory of past failures. But that’s the life. That’s its hard interior, even when it looks soft on the outside.
It means I have to make a living somehow as well, whether though freelance work, teaching, or something else. When I’m producing, that’s fine. It’s easy to accept when you’re high on life. But these needs, these ups and downs, having to be a responsible adult while also being this other thing, a writer, an artist, can make life quite difficult when the words aren’t there. The thing that society labels “artist” the way people label “happiness” or “love” or “god”—using the term in an offhand way, while not truly knowing what it is or truly caring that they don’t—is the life of Persephone, half on the earth, half in that other place.
All jobs are hard. All lives are challenging for the people living them. This one, too. Even those days when I manage to get it right. Why do I do it? Maybe I’m obsessed. And I guess it’s something at which I’m reasonably competent. And I like it better than mowing lawns.
Trump thinks he has eliminated the problem. || Michael Davis
Peril Jack is political art. But what does political art mean? Come find out.
“Some people write for fifteen years with no success and then decide to quit. Don’t look for success and don’t quit. If you want to write, write under all circumstances. Success will or will not come, in this lifetime or the next. Success is none of our business. It comes from outside. Our job is to write, to not look up from our notebook and wonder how much money Norman Mailer earns.”
– “The Long Quiet Highway,” Natalie Goldberg
A long time ago, I watched a black-and-white movie about the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. The title escapes me, as does most of the plot, but I vividly remember one scene. A young recruit had snuck off to a local village to visit a girl he liked and was arrested for deserting his post. He was brought before his commanding officer, who gave him a lecture very similar to a bit of dialogue in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, a film I have watched over and over. I think that’s why I remember the scene from the former otherwise forgettable film.
In any case, the lecture went something like this: You think you care about this girl, but you’ve already seen people die all around you. You think you want to go back home someday, have a family, and grow old comfortably. But these are civilian dreams. You are not part of that world. You have no need for that world, and it has no need for you. The recruit is visibly agitated, angry, surprised. He asks whether they aren’t there to make the world a better place as they have been told—to fight the National Front for democracy and to preserve social order. The commander shakes his head and says: Today, we fight them. Tomorrow, we fight with them against somebody else. Politics changes like the weather. But we stay the same.
I’m reconstructing this conversation from memory. So it may not be exact, but I think I’ve captured the essence of the dialogue. It was a good scene, maybe the only good scene in the movie, but still very romantic in how it evoked the “this life is not for you” sense of doomed heroism we love in stories about the cult of the warrior.
For many years, I’ve rejected this romantic perspective. I’ve thought about professional soldiers the way I’ve thought about sport hunters: anachronisms at best. More often, they seem dangerous and cynical, full of misplaced machismo and the need to justify their existence with bullets instead of brains. So I felt annoyed when someone recently referred to my freelance writing as “being a hired gun.” Not only is that inaccurate—though I can see it in terms of private investigators, lawyers, even lobbyists—but I think it sensationalizes what is basically a very humble line of work.
While there is a lot of professionalism in the field, writing content for media sources and corporations has always struck me as nothing like being a mercenary, a legionnaire, or even a samurai. It always felt more like being a craftsman who specializes in a very specific sort of product. Still, it got me thinking about what a “professional” actually is in a philosophical sense. And now I’m not so sure about these distinctions. This morning, I gave myself a writing assignment, something working writers, especially freelancers, need to do on a regular basis. I set a goal of 700 words in response to: what is a professional?
The Existential Condition of the Professional
I started thinking about that Foreign Legion movie scene and the moment in Seven Samurai when the samurai have successfully defended the farmers against the bandits; though, their friends have died in the process. Kambei Shimada expresses the inherently Pyrrhic nature of military victory: “Again we are defeated. The farmers have won. Not us.”
Again we are defeated…
It’s a melancholy moment that resonates with You have no need for that world, and it has no need for you. But, thinking about it in terms of my many varied writing jobs over the years, I think I’ve come to a deeper understanding. Being a professional means walking the path of mastery and radical individualism. So while it may be true that “civilian life is not for you,” such a path seems more like an existential choice than involuntary alienation from normal life.
It seems to me that if you are a true professional, you engage in one thing so deeply and exclusively that it emerges as an aspect of your nature. Your will, your inner self, and this thing you do are indivisible, indistinguishable. Essentially, you learn that it is who and what you have always been. It’s an inner part of your character that has now found expression in your life as some kind of career or activity. This emergence ultimately transcends existing categories of normal, mundane life, realigning your values with the profession as the most profound and worthwhile source of meaning. All else must take second place or no place.
The I-Ching alludes to it in hexagram 32, Heng / Duration: “The dedicated man embodies an enduring meaning in his way of life, and thereby the world is formed.” To embody an enduring meaning is to become synonymous with it, to presence it such that you are its student and its conduit. As Yeats says at the end of “Among School Children,” “O body swayed to music,/ O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
The Superior Man vs. the Inferior Man
Not everyone is called to be a professional in this esoteric sense of the term. Its exoteric definition simply indicates a level of proficiency where one can expect to be paid for one’s efforts. But there seems to be a deeper stratum of self-awareness that emerges in some practitioners. The I-Ching calls this person the “superior man,” meaning that he or she operates on a more profound, more philosophical level.
32, Heng
The “inferior man” is someone content to live more superficially within existing, inherited cultural frameworks. Above all else, the inferior man values gratification and relief from the problems in his life and offers up obedience to conventional society in exchange. Conversely, the superior man seeks mastery and will pursue it to the detriment of family, friends, finances, and even social respectability—which is not to say she automatically gives up these pleasures. Rather, she assigns them second place in her life.
In The Hagakure: A Code to the Way of the Samurai, Tsunetomo Yamamoto, a 17th century Edo samurai in the service of Lord Nabeshima Mitsushige, writes “Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.” To a samurai, “awakening from your dreams” means accepting death as the most likely consequence of your profession. It is pursuing the path of mastery regardless of the consequences. And it is therefore the way of the superior man, who embodies an enduring meaning in his way of life above and beyond the conventional joys and trials of mundane existence.
Seduction of the Youth
This way of life can seem very romantic. The young, in particular, are often attracted to its emphasis on integrity and its ostensible clarity. This is how it should be. If the long painful road to mastery didn’t enchant and seduce people from an early age, humanity’s deepest knowledge would eventually be lost to time and mortality.
And yet, very few set foot on the path of Duration fully realizing how much they will be asked to sacrifice. In the fullness of time, they will die to their old lives and be reborn in the image of their chosen profession, which is to say, they will embody this thing which now sustains them, which flows through them, and which has come to define the purpose of their existence.
Consider the difference between these two expressions: he is a dancer versus he dances. The first describes a professional. The verb of being shows equivalence. He = dancer. There is no distinction between the two. Contrast this with the second expression where dancing is something he does. It is an action undertaken by a noun, not an existential state. He does some dancing. It is not what he is.
Many people who are frustrated with their lives, especially teenagers and disappointed young adults, fantasize about being absorbed into the lifestyle of some profession. They think, if only I could be like so-and-so (often a professional athlete, artist, or celebrity), then I wouldn’t have these problems. But becoming a true professional involves as much pain as it does pleasure. It can mean cutting out everything that is not the profession—a high price to pay that becomes a brutal requirement for those trying to progress. Lawyers will sometimes say, “law is a cruel mistress,” which is undoubtedly true for all professions where mastery is concerned.
Who Becomes a True Professional
Anyone can do it, but few will, since the obstacles are wholly internal. Time, age, finances, social permission, and starting ability are ultimately irrelevant because the path of the true professional is a state of mind. Only the inferior man has to worry about those external things, since he functions primarily within the constraints placed on him by others. The true professional, being the superior man, develops his own set of constraints organically by paying attention to his character and the dictates of his heart.
Jean Reno showing one-pointed focus as Leon, the Professional
This is a matter of discernment, of self-understanding, which makes the professional mindset possible through a succession of insightful shocks or moments of clarity. Such realizations often come when certain sacrifices have been made.
For example, the time, money, and logistical arrangements necessary for living in a remote cabin for three months in order to finish your novel will produce not only work product but also greater awareness of what you really want to write and who you really want to become. This, in turn, will provide a vision of the next step, the next goal and its necessary sacrifices. Every step entails a sacrifice to be made, something material that will be given and received, a self-insight, and an altered state of consciousness.
In some philosophies, this pursuit of mastery is considered dangerous, an outlaw ethos. It’s seen as “antinomian” (anti / opposite or against + nomos / rule or law) in the sense that it often disregards approved social norms. Those who have become proficient to the degree that they have “awakened from their dreams” have disregarded the desires and statuses manufactured by consensus culture. They threaten the system by their very existence. They have undertaken a path of radical individualism that privileges subjective personal meaning and depends on mastery and self-understanding for forward progress.
It is very hard to control such a person with conventional rewards and punishments. The path of the true professional stands in stark contrast to lifestyles that interpolate people into preexisting categories designed to provide gratification and relief in exchange for obedience in thought, word, and deed. Instead, having transcended superficial levels of meaning, the professional finds himself enjoying hidden pleasures and suffering from unique pains. He can talk about his discipline to beginners and to the uninitiated, but only to a point. There are things that can only be understood by those with eyes to see and ears to hear, developed through firsthand experience.
There is no Going Back
It’s not hard to see that the path of the true professional, being extremely demanding and fraught with difficulties, is not for everyone, nor should it be. There is something to be said for the joys of a simple mundane life and the fun of dilettantism. Moreover, as you walk the path of individuation, you may come to a sobering realization: once you took the first faltering steps toward what would become a life-defining quest for mastery in your field, there was no going back.
In a sense, as the commanding officer says to the legionnaire recruit, you reach a point at which you have no need for that world, and it has no need for you. The path has changed you forever as you’ve sacrificed and been reborn again and again. The Egyptologist, Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, expresses this beautifully in Her Bak: the Living Face of Ancient Egypt, a speculative account of initiation into an Egyptian mystery cult where radical self-transformation is the highest goal:
What is life? It is a form of the divine presence. It is the power, immanent in created things, to change themselves by successive destructions of form until the spirit or activating force of the original life-stream is freed. This power resides in the very nature of things. Successive destruction of forms, metamorphoses, by the divine fire with rebirth of forms new and living is an expression of consciousness that is independent of bodily circumstance.
When the dancer is the dance, both emerge as an expression of consciousness, a state of mind above and beyond the movements of the body. This is the reality of the true professional.
I have been reading about pro-Nazi exiles recruited and paid by the CIA. I can never read such things without feeling powerfully upset. But I also keep in mind Ludwig von Rochau’s idea that “the law of power governs the world of states just as the law of gravity governs the physical world.” Rochau supposedly coined the term, “realpolitik,” which originally had to do with achieving Enlightenment ideals in a world that didn’t operate according to those ideals. Reading about the CIA’s support of the Svoboda Party in the Ukraine led me back to Rochau, someone I haven’t thought about since my undergraduate years.
People seem shocked when they first learn that American Imperialism (like all imperialism no matter what costume it currently happens to be wearing) involves propping up murderous dictators, victimizing the weak, and destabilizing the social order of disobedient nations. Every nation that reaches a certain level of power becomes amoral. This is not to say it’s alright from an ethical standpoint. This is just the nature power politics–inherently pragmatic and opportunistic.
The inherent viciousness of such governments is held in check by two closely related things: the press and public opinion. Laws have nothing to do with it. Laws can be changed or ignored–as we see happening in the UK and the USA. But look at what has happened at the town hall meetings across the States. Those are a large part of what caused the lack of GOP support for Trumpcare. Fear of an angry mob gets things done in Congress, yessir.
Exposing a government’s essential Machiavellianism will not change the imperative for realpolitik in the world, but it can blunt the essential cruelty of decision makers, opening up a space for the weak and poor to evacuate to the hill country. Get grandpa dressed and fire up the sampan while there’s still time, why don’t you.
Picture an enormous rock rolling down the side of a mountain. The rock is moving in accordance with universal law. If you’re smart, you get out of the way. If you’re not so smart, you try to argue with gravity. I propose the wise course is to pay attention to what’s going on, know when to get out of the way, and live to read more books, complain about the murderers in power, and play with more kittens in your hut. Then maybe you can write political pieces on the inherent nastiness of the rulers and live to see them published.
Alternately, you can die for your beliefs. That is very heroic, but gravity will keep the boulders rolling down the mountains and there will always be bullets flying through the air. There will also always be empires and bloody strongmen and fools wearing crowns. It’s up to us to accuse them, argue for reform, and cast blame where it belongs. But we can’t do that face down in the canal.
And it’s alright to say, “But who will look after my cats?”
I do not often post writing that isn’t mine. But, thinking about a former friend today, who through bitterness and a certain insanity has become a neo-Nazi, I searched “Who becomes a Nazi?” and discovered this brilliant Harper’s piece from August of 1941 by Dorothy Thompson.
I think it’s not only (unfortunately) timely, but it reveals something about the personality types we often see in the media. It may help us comprehend how friends and relatives can become this hateful thing.
Who Goes Nazi? | Harper’s Magazine http://harp.rs/48j9xxa
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
At any rate, let us look round the room.
The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry.
He has never attracted any attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him. . . . Why not?
Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why? . . . Why the one and not the other?
Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.
Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.
The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.
Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.
There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.
I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.
Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.
On the other hand, Mrs. F would never go Nazi. She is the most popular woman in the room, handsome, gay, witty, and full of the warmest emotion. She was a popular actress ten years ago; married very happily; promptly had four children in a row; has a charming house, is not rich but has no money cares, has never cut herself off from her own happy-go-lucky profession, and is full of sound health and sound common sense. All men try to make love to her; she laughs at them all, and her husband is amused. She has stood on her own feet since she was a child, she has enormously helped her husband’s career (he is a lawyer), she would ornament any drawing-room in any capital, and she is as American as ice cream and cake.
II
How about the butler who is passing the drinks? I look at James with amused eyes. James is safe. James has been butler to the ‘ighest aristocracy, considers all Nazis parvenus and communists, and has a very good sense for “people of quality.” He serves the quiet editor with that friendly air of equality which good servants always show toward those they consider good enough to serve, and he serves the horsy gent stiffly and coldly.
Bill, the grandson of the chauffeur, is helping serve to-night. He is a product of a Bronx public school and high school, and works at night like this to help himself through City College, where he is studying engineering. He is a “proletarian,” though you’d never guess it if you saw him without that white coat. He plays a crack game of tennis—has been a tennis tutor in summer resorts—swims superbly, gets straight A’s in his classes, and thinks America is okay and don’t let anybody say it isn’t. He had a brief period of Youth Congress communism, but it was like the measles. He was not taken in the draft because his eyes are not good enough, but he wants to design airplanes, “like Sikorsky.” He thinks Lindbergh is “just another pilot with a build-up and a rich wife” and that he is “always talking down America, like how we couldn’t lick Hitler if we wanted to.” At this point Bill snorts.
Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.
H is an historian and biographer. He is American of Dutch ancestry born and reared in the Middle West. He has been in love with America all his life. He can recite whole chapters of Thoreau and volumes of American poetry, from Emerson to Steve Benet. He knows Jefferson’s letters, Hamilton’s papers, Lincoln’s speeches. He is a collector of early American furniture, lives in New England, runs a farm for a hobby and doesn’t lose much money on it, and loathes parties like this one. He has a ribald and manly sense of humor, is unconventional and lost a college professorship because of a love affair. Afterward he married the lady and has lived happily ever afterward as the wages of sin.
H has never doubted his own authentic Americanism for one instant. This is his country, and he knows it from Acadia to Zenith. His ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and in all the wars since. He is certainly an intellectual, but an intellectual smelling slightly of cow barns and damp tweeds. He is the most good-natured and genial man alive, but if anyone ever tries to make this country over into an imitation of Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, or Petain’s systems H will grab a gun and fight. Though H’s liberalism will not permit him to say it, it is his secret conviction that nobody whose ancestors have not been in this country since before the Civil War really understands America or would really fight for it against Nazism or any other foreign ism in a showdown.
But H is wrong. There is one other person in the room who would fight alongside H and he is not even an American citizen. He is a young German emigre, whom I brought along to the party. The people in the room look at him rather askance because he is so Germanic, so very blond-haired, so very blue-eyed, so tanned that somehow you expect him to be wearing shorts. He looks like the model of a Nazi. His English is flawed—he learned it only five years ago. He comes from an old East Prussian family; he was a member of the post-war Youth Movement and afterward of the Republican “Reichsbanner.” All his German friends went Nazi—without exception. He hiked to Switzerland penniless, there pursued his studies in New Testament Greek, sat under the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, came to America through the assistance of an American friend whom he had met in a university, got a job teaching the classics in a fashionable private school; quit, and is working now in an airplane factory—working on the night shift to make planes to send to Britain to defeat Germany. He has devoured volumes of American history, knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans have ever really read the Federalist papers, believes in the United States of Europe, the Union of the English-speaking world, and the coming democratic revolution all over the earth. He believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free.
The people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power. He talks about the workmen in the factory where he is employed. . . . He took the job “in order to understand the real America.” He thinks the men are wonderful. “Why don’t you American in- tellectuals ever get to them; talk to them?”
I grin bitterly to myself, thinking that if we ever got into war with the Nazis he would probably be interned, while Mr. B and Mr. G and Mrs. E would be spreading defeatism at all such parties as this one. “Of course I don’t like Hitler but . . .”
Mr. J over there is a Jew. Mr. J is a very important man. He is immensely rich—he has made a fortune through a dozen directorates in various companies, through a fabulous marriage, through a speculative flair, and through a native gift for money and a native love of power. He is intelligent and arrogant. He seldom associates with Jews. He deplores any mention of the “Jewish question.” He believes that Hitler “should not be judged from the standpoint of anti-Semitism.” He thinks that “the Jews should be reserved on all political questions.” He considers Roosevelt “an enemy of business.” He thinks “It was a serious blow to the Jews that Frankfurter should have been appointed to the Supreme Court.”
The saturnine Mr. C—the real Nazi in the room—engages him in a flatteringly attentive conversation. Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly. Mr. J is definitely attracted by Mr. C. He goes out of his way to ask his name—they have never met before. “A very intelligent man.”
Mr. K contemplates the scene with a sad humor in his expressive eyes. Mr. K is also a Jew. Mr. K is a Jew from the South. He speaks with a Southern drawl. He tells inimitable stories. Ten years ago he owned a very successful business that he had built up from scratch. He sold it for a handsome price, settled his indigent relatives in business, and now enjoys an income for himself of about fifty dollars a week. At forty he began to write articles about odd and out-of-the-way places in American life. A bachelor, and a sad man who makes everybody laugh, he travels continually, knows America from a thousand different facets, and loves it in a quiet, deep, unostentatious way. He is a great friend of H, the biographer. Like H, his ancestors have been in this country since long before the Civil War. He is attracted to the young German. By and by they are together in the drawing-room. The impeccable gentleman of New England, the country-man—intellectual of the Middle West, the happy woman whom the gods love, the young German, the quiet, poised Jew from the South. And over on the other side are the others.
Mr. L has just come in. Mr. L is a lion these days. My hostess was all of a dither when she told me on the telephone, “ . . . and L is coming. You know it’s dreadfully hard to get him.” L is a very powerful labor leader. “My dear, he is a man of the people, but really fascinating.“ L is a man of the people and just exactly as fascinating as my horsy, bank vice-president, on-the-make acquaintance over there, and for the same reasons and in the same way. L makes speeches about the “third of the nation,” and L has made a darned good thing for himself out of championing the oppressed. He has the best car of anyone in this room; salary means nothing to him because he lives on an expense account. He agrees with the very largest and most powerful industrialists in the country that it is the business of the strong to boss the weak, and he has made collective bargaining into a legal compulsion to appoint him or his henchmen as “labor’s” agents, with the power to tax pay envelopes and do what they please with the money. L is the strongest natural-born Nazi in this room. Mr. B regards him with contempt tempered by hatred. Mr. B will use him. L is already parroting B’s speeches. He has the brains of Neanderthal man, but he has an infallible instinct for power. In private conversation he denounces the Jews as “parasites.” No one has ever asked him what are the creative functions of a highly paid agent, who takes a percentage off the labor of millions of men, and distributes it where and as it may add to his own political power.
III
It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t-whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
New DOJ policies on illegal immigrants will benefit the private prison industry. || Michael Davis
Source: Money Is Thicker Than Blood
Trump knows he’s drowning. || Michael David
Source: The End of the Hustle
Trump’s last months in office. || Michael Davis
Source: The Crying of Lot 45
Reeling this morning from my all-Trump-all-the-time ulcer-inducing news feed of despair, I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. I’ve been a compulsive news reader since I learned how. And, for the last few months, my morning habit has evolved into a kind of shamanic pathworking. Not the startup-bro takes ayahuasca at Burning Man to dream up new apps sort of thing. More like: I drank the cobra venom and I might be having an aneurysm but, if I live, I’ll probably learn something. Because that’s why we read the news, right? To learn something?
My wife walked into the room, looked at me breathing in front off the laptop, and walked out. After living with me for close to two decades, she deserves a merit badge for humanitarian service. I accept this. Nevertheless, we can’t bring ourselves to compromise on certain things—when the enfant terrible will be impeached, for instance, or when certain GOP representatives will disrobe and start flinging fecal matter at Rand Paul live on CSPAN. You can’t agree on everything.
But one thing we do agree on is that, after reading political posts for an hour, one should not look at emails, blogs, or news about the academic job market or the entertainment industry. Doing so inevitably weaponizes the cobra venom to such an extent that instead of a golden journey to Ixtlan with Don Juan, one finds oneself slipping down to Xibalba with the Lord of the Smoking Mirror. Ghost jaguars. Shrieking bats. Night winds. Tentacles. The American Healthcare Act. Steve Bannon in a bone necklace gesticulating at the moon. A real bad trip.
I was just about to read some Penelope Trunk on why it’s better to marry for money and get therapy instead of going to graduate school for an MFA when my wife came back in and asked me if I’d lost all sense.
“I’m, uh, reading.”
“Why do you do this to yourself?”
“Because, um—what am I reading? Shit!”
I was still in a trance. Penelope had already led me partway down to Tezcatlipoca’s Place of Fear and Torment. I closed her blog and the five newspapers I had open in the browser before I could go any further, but the damage had been done. You never emerge from a news pathworking unscathed.
For example, I’d read in the L.A. Times that Dave Chappelle just cut a $60 million dollar deal for 3 Netflix comedy specials at $20 million per special. And, in all honesty, I got the same feeling I’ve had in the past while reading about Trump filing Chapter 11 six times and defrauding his contractors while possibly laundering money for the Russian mob; Bannon and Puzder beating their wives; and a recently fired U.S. Attorney getting headhunted to teach at NYU as a sweet payoff in which he can “continue addressing the issues I so deeply care about.” Right.
There’s something sickening there, like justice has nothing to do with any of it—just graft and lots of vigorous lying. How many gold-plated toilets do any of them need? I got a very unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach as I tried not to think that such things exist in the same world as the famine in Sudan or North Korean death camps or the East Chicago water supply so full of lead that 1000 residents are being asked to relocate. Don’t play in the dirt, kids. Just Netflix and chill.
Still, reading about Chappelle was a nice break from the moral Andrea Doria taking place on Capitol Hill, even if the obscene payout did make me a bit nauseated. I think Dave Chappelle is one of the funniest people on the planet. He’s brilliant. There is a very small cadre of extremely talented comedians in the world, of which he might be the foremost member. Very few entertainers are on his level and he definitely deserves to get paid for his work. There’s no question about that. But $60 million on top of all the millions he’s already made seems a bit excessive, no? How about that children’s hospital in Sudan where so many children need help that “the hospital has run out of beds”? I wonder what a quarter of a million could do there? I wonder what $1000 could do.
If anything, the article on Chappelle caused me to start thinking philosophically about what an amount of money like that really means in the life of any individual. I know you can buy a lot of bottles of Pernod-Ricard Perrier-Jouet. And I know you can reach a level where everything becomes relative. If you’re partying with the rich and famous all the time, $60 million might still be an important chunk of change, but maybe it’s not as much, relatively speaking, as one imagines at $50,000 a bottle.
I find myself thinking, what if Dave took 2 of those $60 million (he’d still come away with $58 million, which would be enough to purchase several small islands and a Bavarian castle) and devoted that fragment of his inconceivable wealth to changing someone’s life or the lives of several people who could would clearly and directly benefit? What could be done for someone who can’t afford a prosthesis, for example, or someone living in a shelter who doesn’t have the resources to get back into the workforce, or a family in the Rust Belt living in a transient hotel because they lost their house? Such people aren’t hard to find right at home in the great United States.
Moreover, it may be that someone with over $60 million in the bank could easily hire the right assistants (a whole team, a task force, an entire building’s worth of henchmen and secretaries) to make something like that happen ricky tick. We’ve seen far stranger things in the media lately. We’re bound to see stranger things in the months to come.
Cool dude.
I know Dave has been involved in a lot of charitable events and donated his time to good causes—all of which is as admirable as his talent. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about direct action in the lives of people who would be forever changed. Is that naive? It’s certainly not as easy as giving a NGO a big tax-deductible donation or volunteering to participate in a charitable event. Then again, genius-level comedy isn’t easy, either. It takes guts, brilliance, a gift, and the determination to make it happen—just like anything good in life.
Someone in college once said to me, “Yeah, money can’t buy me love, but a certain amount of money will give me the power to make finding it more likely.” I thought about that for years before concluding that it was pure garbage. You can find love in a ghetto. You can find love in a refugee camp. You can find love after everything has been taken away and you think your life is over. As my wise grandmother used to say, “If someone loves you, they’ll come and spend time with you while you mop the floors in a slaughterhouse.”
That seems right. Quality is not quantity. And love, happiness, tranquility, and the satisfaction of doing good work are all priceless, being essentially internal achievements and therefore free to all human beings. But one thing money can do is create conditions for healing the world. And that matters, maybe more than anything. Why do I bring this up after too much Sean Spicer on a Wednesday afternoon? Because it’s been making me ask myself the same old question: What is good? And, once again, I must conclude that quality and quantity are mutually exclusive categories. Show me what you’re doing. Show me how you’re going to heal the world. Then I’ll tell you what’s good.
What is it like to be Dave Chappelle—to be a brilliant artist and to have so much money that it sets you apart from every other artist in your field, except for a very exclusive group of people who happen to be as fortunate and gifted as you are? I have no idea. I do know, like most people, I love his work. But, at the same time, I think of the dreams most people have of a little house with a dog and a garden somewhere quiet where they don’t have to live in fear, of no more crushing debts, of a dental plan, of their kids having reasonable chances to work for a decent future, and of some kind of profession that doesn’t produce night terrors. And I know what it isn’t like to be Chappelle.
These are very modest dreams, but they’re ones that most sincere people have. Most people don’t need half or a quarter of a million to realize such dreams. Most people don’t need or want a super yacht, don’t need to be on the board of the Bank of Cypress, don’t need a tower in midtown Manhattan with their names way up on top in gold. Shit, most people don’t even need tenure—even though the failed sideshow entertainer who passes for our President wants to destroy PBS and the NEA just for kicks; even though, for 30 years, the academic job market has been run by people who dress up in SS uniforms and burn offerings to Ronald Reagan in their secret masturbatoriums. But I know reading about such things is imprudent. It’s Paul Ryan’s Popul Vuh.
So I’ll be trying to detox from the news for the rest of the day. Maybe I’ll work on my novel while I wait for the next paid writing assignment to appear in my inbox like sweet life-sustaining mana from heaven. One thing I won’t be doing is reading any more about Dave Chappelle discovering El Dorado. Because I feel reasonably certain that today someone’s going to die because of money and it won’t be him.
Long ago, I was an English teacher at a private high school in central California. It was a good, if demanding, job and unlike many of my colleagues, I seemed to manage occasional moments of non-misery in the workplace. In fact, the two years I spent working there taught me more about human nature than two decades of university teaching, freelance writing, and working abroad ever did.
Without a doubt, teaching over 100 adolescents each semester schooled me not only in how people will behave when going through some of the worst years of their lives but the extent to which many parents are feverishly inadequate when it comes to raising kids. With respect to family, no one wants to admit they have no clue what they’re doing. Everyone must pretend things are running smoothly and they’re in complete control.
I found this pretense interesting, particularly during parent-teacher conferences when ashamed, bewildered parents would whisper, “What do you think I should do?” as if my ability to manage large groups of adolescents somehow qualified me to give them advice. At first, I would explain that my two degrees in English plus minor gifts in speaking in front of people and writing did not mean I had a solution to why Jimmy couldn’t sit still or why Leticia cried through every class and felt compelled to layer everything around her in Purell, or why Leo circulated pictures of his girlfriend’s vagina. Over time, I developed a less draining response: “I do not know.” All Quiet on the Western Front may prepare us to think about the meaning of war, but it will not prepare us for Leo’s girlfriend’s vagina.
I suspected then, as I still do, that confronting such situations is not within the job description of a high school English teacher. But maybe, in the hundreds of outrageous situations in which I found myself in that job, I could have done more. The questions I ask myself now are the questions many parents asked me then: what should I have done? Was there anything to be done at all? There must be an expert somewhere, a veteran administrator or someone with a PhD in education theory, who can speak to this. Maybe a prison psychologist.
I wish I could believe that. In spite of my lingering questions, I think I’ve come to believe the opposite: there actually are no rules—not just for teaching or parenting, but for any area of human experience. A friend once said to me when we were going through our own high school torment: “This is the meaning of life: we all suck and we’re nothing.” I don’t think he fully appreciated how profound that statement was when he said it. 27 years later, I’m still seeing it prove out.
We all suck: no one—and I mean this in the broadest, most inclusive, most general sense—actually knows what they’re doing to the extent that assumptions and judgment calls are unnecessary. Perfect human understanding does not exist and human error is ubiquitous. Even our attempts at artificial intelligence are subject to our limited assumptions about what intelligence actually is (or can be). What can we know beyond a shadow of a doubt? The truth is: nothing, unfortunately.
Surely an engineer will feel confident that, say, as energy is transformed or transferred, an increasing amount of it is wasted. Surely something as dependable and consistent as a physical law (in this case, the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is immutable, absolute, not a matter for interpretation. But even something as ironclad as a law of physics is not without its exceptions. Some things are givens within the parameters of a particular knowledge paradigm, but those givens are always relative to and dependent upon the parameters themselves.
For example, within the agreed-upon bounds of thermodynamic theory, basic laws obtain as a reliable set of rules for the behavior of energy, entropy, and temperature at thermal equilibrium. But we also know that even within that theoretical framework, an empirical finding like the Second Law is subject to exceptions. In 2002, researchers at the Australian National University, in a paper entitled, “Experimental Demonstration of Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for Small Systems and Short Time Scales,” found that “systems can undergo fleeting energy increases that seem to violate the venerable law.” And while this is only one small example, it is by no means isolated or anomalous to the extent that we could dismiss all such exceptions out of hand.
In fact, our entire narrative of scientific progress is predicated on discoveries which alter existing assumptions about how the world works. As Thomas Kuhn observes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.” The scientific narrative changes. Because it was always a narrative, never an unassailable, omniscient catalogue.
Nothing is beyond interpretation, not even the bedrock assumptions of our most materialistic sciences. Rather, ways of knowing amount to best possible premises always subject to discourse and development over time (to say nothing of the complexities of the information technology we rely on to document and transmit that discourse). We do the best we can. We develop and codify optimal principles for a given field. And then we work with those principles until we encounter a paradigm-disruptive discovery that forces us to revise our theories.
But we’re nothing: Even the most qualified and intellectually responsible claims are part of a conversation (discourse) which is grounded in work that came before and which will be superseded by discoveries and realizations that follow. In many cases, an individual contribution to any field is no greater than a minuscule inch forward with vastly disproportionate implications.
Still, there are careers to develop and Cessnas to purchase and grants to chase and colleagues to slander and books to write and mistresses to support and students to convince. In Polishing the Mirror, the guru Ram Dass—then a social psychology professor named Richard Alpert—describes what he felt was a hollowness at the center of western academia:
In 1961, I was thirty and at the height of my academic career. I had a PhD from Stanford University, and I was a professor of social relations at Harvard. I had arrived at a pinnacle of life as I thought it should be, professionally, socially, and economically. But inside there remained an emptiness—a feeling that, with all I had, something was still missing. Here I was at Harvard, the mecca of the intellect. But when I looked into the eyes of my peers, wondering “Do you know?” I saw in their eyes that what I was looking for was nowhere to be found. In a social or family setting, people looked up to me and hung on my every word because I was a Harvard professor, and they clearly assumed that I knew. But to me, the nature of life remained a mystery.
In Ram Dass’ use of the term, we “do not know” much about the world in any absolute sense. We cannot know because our intellectual tools are as finite as the time we have in which to use them. This is not to argue that we should be content with ignorance. But it is a way to foreground a simple suggestion: speculation is absolutely necessary when it comes to developing knowledge.
Assumptions are necessary. Ultimately, belief is necessary. Kuhn, at least, seems to agree: “Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.” This seems reasonable not just in science but in any field of human activity.
So what remains to be done if we can never fully know our world and ourselves? Everything! Our inability to attain perfect understanding is no reason to abandon the pursuit of outer and inner knowledge. Rather, it leads us to an acceptance of our limitations as individuals and as a species and, in that acceptance, a very personal yet very real sense of freedom.
Maybe the right answer to those parents who wanted advice should have been: you already know how to raise your kids because what you think is best will be the best you can possibly do. Maybe, as my high school friend seemed to imply back in 1989, we are not static, monolithic, isolate objects. We are no thing.
Instead, we are dynamic, dialectic, fluid collaborations—living syntheses of what was known in the past and what will be discovered in the future. Maybe “discourse” is the most accurate metaphor for human experience. If so, all we can do is try to engage in life’s conversation as robustly as possible. Maybe there are no rules beyond that.
“Baby,” I said, “I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum
These are strange times to be an American. || Michael Davis
Sally Yates at Carter Center
Woke up this morning thinking about Sally Yates—how standing up to President Trump seems to have dramatically influenced the course of her life, how I’ve watched part of her emotional transformation through social media, specifically Twitter, and how her public narrative seems to reveal and confirm things I’ve suspected about the nature of personal meaning and career.
She seems to be undergoing a kind of emotional rebirth. As someone who works primarily in the emotional mind—emotional intelligence being the primary resource for teaching and doing creative writing—I have learned to recognize when someone is emerging into a deeper, more meaningful emotional life. She certainly is, even if only by a slight degree.
Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning consistently seems to prove out: it doesn’t matter what we do or where we are as long as we can find or create meaning for ourselves. And so I return to the question of my own career, my own meaning. When I think back to the teaching I have done, I’m faced with the choice of believing that most of my professional life has been meaningful vs. meaningless. Obviously, I prefer to think my work has made some kind of difference.
It’s hard to believe in things I cannot see, but I have to nurture a certain degree of faith in the teaching and writing I’ve done. Sally Yates, someone who has lived primarily in the analytical mind, is now at the beginning of something new—one hopes, something emotionally significant and transformative. To see someone publicly come into being like this is to bear witness to a largely unnoticed dimension of human experience. It’s something that sincere teachers get to see more often than any other profession.
But my personal question remains: how am I coming into being? Just as someone with Yates’ background and skill set might step into a more intuitive life (by running for public office instead of remaining in the legal-bureaucratic infrastructure), I bear the responsibility for my own development. Where am I going now? What’s next? The future is never fixed, never certain.
More developments are emerging regarding Trump’s Russian connections – a new post on Splice Today. Read it here: http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/sater-cohen-and-the-collapsing-house-of-cards
Speak of the Devil: Journalism in the Trump Era
Good nutritious narrative angst from yours truly…
Fun news: I just published my 32nd piece of short magazine fiction, this time in Ink & Coda magazine. You can read it for free on their website: http://www.inkandcoda.com/issues/4-1/bora-bora/.
Best wishes to everyone in 2017!
We come into the world screaming and it remains for us to learn how to impose order on our experiences such that we can live in a reasonable way. We could say that adult life comes down to whether we have behaved reasonably, according to the information available. In the tension between what we know (including perhaps what we should know) and what we do, agreed upon behavioral standards emerge as a social foundation.
This seems obvious, but the question as to what constitutes reasonable behavior (and, by extension, right action) is always a matter for interpretation. The standard of a “reasonable person” for determining negligence, at least in U.S. civil law, usually goes like this:
The so-called reasonable person in the law of negligence is a creation of legal fiction. Such a “person” is really an ideal, focusing on how a typical person, with ordinary prudence, would act in certain circumstances. The test as to whether a person has acted as a reasonable person is an objective one, and so it does not take into account the specific abilities of a defendant. Thus, even a person who has low intelligence or is chronically careless is held to the same standard as a more careful person or a person of higher intelligence.
A jury generally decides whether a defendant has acted as a reasonable person would have acted. In making this decision, the jury generally considers the defendant’s conduct in light of what the defendant actually knows, has experienced, or has perceived. (http://bit.ly/2fWFUqi)
When this is effective, the reasonable person standard incorporates social assumptions about “ordinary prudence” (aka common sense) and still allows for the particular situation of the defendant, creating polarity between the ideal and the real, insofar as the court is able to imagine these things. In other words, we try to come up with a standard for what should have been done and then ask whether the individual in question could / should have followed suit.
Due to its flexibility, however, the standard can lead to what may seem like odd or inappropriate conclusions. And as useful as it may be, sometimes we can’t help but suspect that any attempt to establish reasonability will still be rooted in the arbitrary biases and popular assumptions of those involved. It calls to mind the old philistine response to art: we don’t know what art is, but we know what we like. Similarly, we don’t always know what reasonability is, but we always like to think we know what we would have probably done. And just as this remains a difficult question for the courts, it remains a difficult question in every individual life.
Birth is painful—the first, most profound lesson we are taught by our mothers. Every subsequent lesson, whether taught to us by family, friends, or schools, is a matter of determining and enacting reasonability in a particular context. This may often be just as painful as giving birth, but it’s something we must do and something most of us do automatically. It is equally necessary in the life of a chemical engineer, an entrepreneur, an impresario, and a stay-at-home mom. When undertaking anything, we have to ask: What are the best practices? What are the best premises? How should we proceed according to what we already know? Our overall effectiveness depends on how we answer these questions and put the answers into practice.
Again, this is all very obvious on its face; though, the questions become more difficult and complex when someone raises “policy.” Policy comes into play in arguments where “each party offers plausible interpretations of the law. In this situation, the judge may then decide the case on the basis of the social goals that the decision will promote, and the purposes behind the particular rules” (http://bit.ly/2f3JC0c). Simply put: we may not only ask what should have been done and whether the person could / should have followed suit. We may also ask whether this is the sort of behavioral standard we want to encourage. As the old saying goes, “If you can’t argue the facts, argue the law. If you can’t argue the law, argue the facts. And if you can’t argue either, argue the best policy.”
Such determinations are challenging in established courts with rules for how arguments are made. It’s that much harder to determine reasonability and best policy in private organizations that require everyone to accept the group’s ideological viewpoint before discussion can even take place. Courts of law are bound to examine a broad range of ethical, political, and social policy considerations, whereas private groups—even those that are extremely large and diverse—need only keep their narrow institutional assumptions in mind when determining what should be.
For example, while one might argue against punishment in a particular case because it could invite a deluge of frivolous litigation (and it is good policy to discourage frivolous litigation in our already overburdened courts), a religious tribunal might decide that the same party should be punished because they are in violation of holy law. To the religious court, the highest standard of reasonability, and therefore the most beneficial policy, rests on scripture, which is the ultimate value and authority, no matter whether this is at variance with the values of mainstream culture.
With this in mind, the members of such organizations find themselves faced with an important question: are the beliefs of the organization more persuasive, i.e. more reasonable, than those of mainstream society? This opens up additional problematic questions, like: is there something unreasonable in mainstream assumptions as I have come to understand them? Is that what led me to this organization (with its alternate viewpoint)? Do I have the knowledge and insight to make a reasonable choice now that I’m in this organization? Did I have the requisite knowledge and insight when I decided to join?
In this, as in so many other things, only lived experience and its results can provide clarity. In other words, when trying to decide what a reasonable person would do and the best policies that should support that behavior, one must look to the “real world”—to what passes for objective material existence—as the only reliable test.
For instance, it’s all well and good to believe that if you pray to the tooth fairy, she’ll bring you a plate of peppermint candies at midnight. It may be more pleasant to believe in a world where that could happen, but believing doesn’t make it so—doesn’t make it a feature of lived, objective, material existence. And if you choose to sincerely believe that this is going to happen, you shouldn’t be disappointed when you don’t see the peppermints in the morning. So one comes back to the necessity of testing one’s assumptions in the laboratory of everyday life.
Saying this presupposes that it is more reasonable to behave in a way that squares with lived experience and to found one’s assumptions on observable, material phenomena. In other words, it is reasonable to assume there is an objective, physical reality that is more or less dependable. Some things prove out, again and again, when we do them. If you put your hand in the flame, your hand will burn.
Without falling into Cartesian hypotheticals about external forces capable of conditioning our perceptions, we can say that ideologically driven organizations run into difficulties when the foundational assumptions of these groups do not prove out in lived experience. Most religions have this problem, but also cults, social clubs, governments, corporations, and private societies do as well.
The question for the individual remains, no matter what group’s set of assumptions are being used: what is the most reasonable standard of behavior? How to do I know? And what should I do when I’m satisfied that I do know?
So here are a few questions you can ask yourself if changing times make you feel like your beliefs are in jeopardy: What groups have you joined? What is your “reality tunnel”? What is the reasonable person standard of these groups? What biases and assumptions do they contain? How do you think they contrast with the standards of mainstream society? What values do these standards reveal? What “best policies” are implied? Where and how do you lack the knowledge to answer these questions? Are there obstacles to gaining this knowledge? What are they and why are they in place?
Maybe the most important question is: how has your lived experience supported / refuted the assumptions about reasonable behavior in your political party, cult, religion, club, society, or corporation? If your lived experience has nothing to do with what you’re being asked to believe, you might want to make some changes.
We get up in the morning for a grande latte enema. || Michael Davis
Source: A Good Day to Die
In the wake of Trump’s victory, we must keep asking, “What now?” || Michael Davis
Rise up. Create. Raise awareness. Raise consciousness. Build understanding. Drop the empty rhetoric of your “party” and focus on understanding. See the possibilities of becoming more than what you are. Recognize this in others. It’s not about religion. It’s not about tribe. It’s about art, expression, the grassroots potentialities that emerge as every person’s birthright–if we only pay attention. It’s about you and me. How can we come together? How can we build something excellent? The tools, the powers are right here, available, free.
It’s 4:30 AM as I begin to write this. I’ve already been up for an hour. I’m not sleeping that much these days. Over the last 48 hours, I’ve lost friends, given a lot of advice, gotten advice, been told off, and been accused of hypocrisy for taking a political stand while using the term “antinomian” to describe myself. But I think people misunderstand.
The broad definition of “antinomianism” (originally a Protestant term used to mean that divine grace releases one from the need to follow secular law) can be used to indicate spiritual non-conformity, not necessarily secular or political non-conformity. And whenever I use the term “spiritual,” I’m talking about consciousness, becoming more conscious and less under the sway of conformist culture. That is my spirituality—to become more conscious, to wake up to the vertiginous complexity and potential of everyday life as I’m living it and, in that never-ending process, to make the world reflect my best qualities.
Therefore, being anti-nomos (against law) is, for me, an internal, subjective stance, which may find expression in the objective-world choices I make, but which begins in the mind and heart. In this sense, the usage of the term is a lot like what Emerson means when he writes that “every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.” Inwardly rejecting the “normalization” exerted by conformist culture is anti-nomos; it amounts to a spiritual revolution.
That said, I do not believe that abstaining from voting and posting cynical, defensive statements about the political system does a bit of good. Not participating in the political process is, in my opinion, the height of stupidity and the position of default conformity. It is rooted in fear of having to make a choice and having to take an external, painful, perhaps terrifying objective-world position. Further, I believe it expresses weakness of character.
True spiritual antinomianism is to find what you truly believe, what expresses your most deeply cherished values and then work to make those values manifest in the world. It mandates work and, in light of recent events, it definitely mandates political involvement, even if such involvement amounts to voting for a third-party candidate or writing one in. Non-participation hands power and its jurisdiction over to others. It is the ultimate capitulation to conformist culture. It is opting out of the hard work of citizenship. And it is irresponsible to one’s Self, to that degree of consciousness one already possesses.
I’ve been posting two kinds of things for the last few days: news items critical of Trump and music. Because that’s where I am emotionally right now. I’m still processing what I feel is my country’s latest, greatest political blunder. I’m also questioning whether I should never return to the United States or whether the next opportunity for me to become more conscious lies in that direction.
Many of you saw me write, before the onslaught of private messages (both supportive and accusatory), that I wouldn’t be returning to the States again. I still feel that way, still completely averse to the decision my country has made to choose the worst, most disastrous candidate for President. But I’m also beginning to wonder whether that pain, that aversion, is a meaningful indicator from “myself to my Self,” i.e. from that inward part of me always on the lookout for ways to become more awake, more conscious, and less subject to groupthink.
It brings to mind two myths of Odin. In exchange for wisdom, he sacrifices one of his eyes for a drink from Mimir’s well, which will impart ultimate knowledge. It’s a deep myth in the sense that it contains layers of meaning (among others, consider the implication of gaining insight and yet seeing with one eye instead of two). And yet the value of an eye is undeniable. How far would we go to obtain internal gifts at the expense of our external bodies?
The second myth comes from the Havamal, an old Norse poem from the Viking age: “I know that I hung, on a windy tree, for all of nine nights, wounded with a spear, and given to Ódinn, myself to myself, on that tree, which no man knows, from what roots it runs.” In order to obtain the Runes, Odin submits to a nine-night ordeal, again making an external sacrifice for an inward gain, the Runes symbolizing, among other things, the power to create meaning through language.
In both of these and in many similar world myths and legends, we find the theme of pain as a doorway to greater consciousness. And deliberately, consciously embracing such pain when it arises is nearly always anti-nomos, in direct violation of the Pleasure Principle that delimits popular opinion and what passes for common sense.
So I’m still exploring these ideas, but I can tell you one thing: voting in a legal election is revolutionary in the most profound sense. However, in the aftermath of a failed revolution, one does not dig one’s grave in accordance with the wishes of those in authority. If one seeks to act politically as a conscious revolutionary instead of reacting obediently as a sleepwalker, one practices discernment in moments like this. One looks inward and asks, “What’s next? What’s best? What will make me more conscious? What can I do to raise the consciousness of others and thereby make the world a better reflection of my best qualities?”
There’s a lot of work to be done, I think.
Read the Letter Aaron Sorkin Wrote His Daughter After Donald Trump Was Elected President
The Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Social Network and mastermind behind The West Wing reacts to Donald Trump being elected the 45th president of the United States in a moving letter written to his 15-year-old daughter Roxy and her mother Julia Sorkin.
NOVEMBER 9, 2016 8:52 PM
Well the world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from. That’s a terrible feeling for a father. I won’t sugarcoat it—this is truly horrible. It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time) but it is the first time that a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn has.
And it wasn’t just Donald Trump who won last night—it was his supporters too. The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons. Angry young white men who think rap music and Cinco de Mayo are a threat to their way of life (or are the reason for their way of life) have been given cause to celebrate. Men who have no right to call themselves that and who think that women who aspire to more than looking hot are shrill, ugly, and otherwise worthy of our scorn rather than our admiration struck a blow for misogynistic shitheads everywhere. Hate was given hope. Abject dumbness was glamorized as being “the fresh voice of an outsider” who’s going to “shake things up.” (Did anyone bother to ask how? Is he going to re-arrange the chairs in the Roosevelt Room?) For the next four years, the President of the United States, the same office held by Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., J.F.K. and Barack Obama, will be held by a man-boy who’ll spend his hours exacting Twitter vengeance against all who criticize him (and those numbers will be legion). We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of our children and the world.
And the world took no time to react. The Dow futures dropped 7,000 points overnight. Economists are predicting a deep and prolonged recession. Our NATO allies are in a state of legitimate fear. And speaking of fear, Muslim-Americans, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans are shaking in their shoes. And we’d be right to note that many of Donald Trump’s fans are not fans of Jews. On the other hand, there is a party going on at ISIS headquarters. What wouldn’t we give to trade this small fraction of a man for Richard Nixon right now?
So what do we do?
First of all, we remember that we’re not alone. A hundred million people in America and a billion more around the world feel exactly the same way we do.
Second, we get out of bed. The Trumpsters want to see people like us (Jewish, “coastal elites,” educated, socially progressive, Hollywood…) sobbing and wailing and talking about moving to Canada. I won’t give them that and neither will you. Here’s what we’ll do…
…we’ll fucking fight. (Roxy, there’s a time for this kind of language and it’s now.) We’re not powerless and we’re not voiceless. We don’t have majorities in the House or Senate but we do have representatives there. It’s also good to remember that most members of Trump’s own party feel exactly the same way about him that we do. We make sure that the people we sent to Washington—including Kamala Harris—take our strength with them and never take a day off.
We get involved. We do what we can to fight injustice anywhere we see it—whether it’s writing a check or rolling up our sleeves. Our family is fairly insulated from the effects of a Trump presidency so we fight for the families that aren’t. We fight for a woman to keep her right to choose. We fight for the First Amendment and we fight mostly for equality—not for a guarantee of equal outcomes but for equal opportunities. We stand up.
America didn’t stop being America last night and we didn’t stop being Americans and here’s the thing about Americans: Our darkest days have always—always—been followed by our finest hours.
Roxy, I know my predictions have let you down in the past, but personally, I don’t think this guy can make it a year without committing an impeachable crime. If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years. And three years from now we’ll fight like hell for our candidate and we’ll win and they’ll lose and this time they’ll lose for good. Honey, it’ll be your first vote.
The battle isn’t over, it’s just begun. Grandpa fought in World War II and when he came home this country handed him an opportunity to make a great life for his family. I will not hand his granddaughter a country shaped by hateful and stupid men. Your tears last night woke me up, and I’ll never go to sleep on you again.
Love,
Dad
First dig two graves. I think Confucius said that. But nobody started off by saying I wanted to stab my girlfriend and bury her in the backyard, but I was reading Confucius. So I dug two graves. Instead, they usually began with I really don’t remember. I’m not too clear on what happened. It was a mistake. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t do it. I did it, but she had it coming. She begged me to do it. I don’t remember digging. I didn’t dig. I’m on meds. I walk in my sleep. I’d had some drinks, Ambien, Klonopin. I couldn’t have done it. If I did it, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t do it but, if you say so, I don’t know. Maybe.
They started all kinds of ways, but they usually finished the same: You need to understand. If you’d been in my shoes. If you were me. If you only knew. You’d have done it, too. They wanted you to see, to make sure you understood, it could have been you. So put a No. 2 pencil through the left eye of your cousin because he took your favorite CD and then say, you’d have done the same thing. How can you say you wouldn’t?
On April 6, 2010, I sat in a motel room in Denver, watching people say this over and over. It was my last year of graduate school and because I’d picked up a paralegal certificate along the way to my PhD, I’d gotten a job transcribing around 100 digitized police interviews for a defense attorney’s office. The original transcriptions had been lost and they were desperate. I told myself it was just another job because it paid like one. But it wasn’t. It was a journey through human dread and pain. Watching those confessions brought back my nightmares, then my relentless insomnia, then my chain smoking, then a depression so thick and wide I felt like I was drowning.
I’d driven out from Kalamazoo, Michigan, two days before in a rented Ford Econoline 150 that I’d meant to use as a living space while I attended the AWP Writer’s Conference at the Colorado Convention Center. The van was completely empty except for the driver’s seat and some bungee cords. I had a sleeping bag, a cardboard box full of books, some clothes, my backpack, and a laptop. The Conference was four days long. I planned on driving over to the hotel every morning, then relocating to a distant parking lot every evening. It was a good plan in theory.
But I felt shaken when I saw the van start moving towards the interstate at a rest stop somewhere in Nebraska. I barely reached it before it rolled into traffic. And even though I’d found a cinder block to put under one of the wheels, I couldn’t relax after that. I kept imagining it going head-on into a family of six. So when I got to Denver, I found the cheapest motel room I could, charged it to my sad broken credit card, put the van in their empty asphalt lot out back with boulders and cinder blocks under all four wheels, and tried to calm down. I told myself at least I wouldn’t be sleeping inside it when the family went boom.
My memory of that time is intensely vivid. I’d never been to Denver before. And, though it was my third AWP Conference, I’d decided that this was the one that mattered. I was about to get my PhD in English; I was waiting on several university job interviews and had one lined up at the Conference; and it was possible, against all odds and popular opinion, that my career plans were actually going to work out. I just needed a little more cash. Hence, the transcriptions. I had a deadline, an envelope of flash drives, and a supervising attorney who never returned my emails. I was transcribing about ten interviews and confessions every day. And I was starting to feel not right the way one feels after watching Triumph of the Will or the 2016 presidential debates: this can’t be real.
I suppose I’ve been thinking about Denver because my old friend, Theo, emailed me the other day while I was watching the final Trump-Clinton debate. The last time I saw him was six years ago at AWP. So the fact that he emailed me suddenly, after so long, was surprising all on its own. But I opened Theo’s email right when Trump started talking about Clinton being okay with ripping babies from their mothers’ wombs, right as I was starting to feel the old out-of-control nightmare anxiety rising in my chest, the sense that things were not right, that I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Theo wanted to know how I was liking Kentucky, if I was still writing, why he hadn’t seen me at any conferences. I thought, Kentucky? And then I remembered. That was the interview I’d had at the 2010 AWP, a small regional college located close to the Tennessee state line. While Trump was saying, “In the ninth month. On the final day,” I looked at Theo’s paragraph and thought, this is what he remembers about me. This is what motivated him to write to me after six years. Trump says, “That’s not acceptable,” and I think, Jesus Christ.
How do you make a true confession? You sit in an interview room at the police station, sometimes in a hotel room or a conference room. White walls. Simple table or none at all. It’s not often an interrogation room. It’s for interviews. It’s small and everything is plastic, metal, Formica. Maybe people walk around in the background. Maybe it’s completely quiet. Lean forward in the steel chair that’s bolted down and doesn’t swivel. Fold your hands on the table that comes directly out of the wall. Start off with: “I’m not sure. I don’t remember.” And even though he’s recording what you’re saying, he’s also nodding and jotting it down on a steno under your name, which tonight is something normal, like Jim. He notes that you have a wandering right eye, a cleft lip, and a green tattoo of a cat on the side of your neck. He notes this in spite of the fact that it has already been noted in your file because he’s bored. But you’re thinking, trying to remember. You’re a bit stunned. You think you can talk your way out of this.
File after file, story after story, it only got worse. Around 9:00 AM on the first day of the Conference, I found myself in the back row, watching a panel discussion entitled “Decolonizing Poetics: Womanism and the Art of Decolonization.” As I sat there, I listened with my right headphone to a man explain how he pulled his brother out of their burning vehicle. He’d been driving, had a BAC off the chart. He said he didn’t know his brother was dead. And in my left ear: poetry’s essential role in the decolonization of bodies from centuries of white supremacist, capitalist, heteronormative intrusion. It was hard for me to concentrate on the evils of patriarchal hegemony while listening to someone crying, saying I didn’t know. How could I know? And the detective saying, I understand. Take your time. I was typing furiously on my laptop in order to keep up. People thought I was taking lots of notes on the decolonization of la mujer.
The room was packed, which was good. My undergraduate creative writing students from Kalamazoo wouldn’t be able see me from the hall. I was in no shape to interact with them. Of course, I hadn’t slept. Around 3:00 AM, I’d watched The Mothman Prophecies in the motel room, probably not the best thing to do, given my state of mind. But it’s one of those movies you can sink into, like Blade Runner, Vertigo, or Chinatown—movies I always keep with me, maybe just to have them playing in the background while I’m doing something else. I’d shut the laptop in the middle of a deposition involving a juvenile accused of multiple homicide. Even though I’d only transcribed about one-fourth of the files and I was half a week behind, I just had to stop for a while. I smoked a pack of Camel Lights and watched John Klein have creepy phone conversations with Indrid Cold until the sun came up.
The supreme irrelevance of the panel discussions at AWP is a thing of legend. After 90 minutes of decolonization, I remember meeting Theo on the mezzanine, where we drank vending machine coffee and read the Conference program. “Play Ball: the Language of Sports,” “The Writer as Literary Outsider,” “Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond,” “What’s Not Funny About Serious Disease?” “The Person Within Myself.” I thought they were hilarious and stupid, but Theo was upset. He took everything seriously and was trying to figure out why he’d flown to Colorado just to listen to low-rung literary celebrities talk about whether they wrote on a word processor or with a pen. I told him I’d heard there was going to be a meet-and-greet with some Big Six agents from New York. But Theo just looked at me. No one was going to be interested in his book-length memoir about teaching English in Guam.
Theo was skinny, had bushy brown hair, and wore ripped thrift store clothing, whether from choice or necessity I never knew. He also smoked but wasn’t concerned with quitting. I think he needed to smoke because, in his own very quiet, withdrawn way, he was just as stressed out as me, maybe more. He was about to hit the job market with no publications, no interviews, one composition class of which he’d been the teacher of record, and a six-year PhD in English that he’d financed mostly through private loans. I never asked why he’d done it like that or what he planned to do after we earned our degrees, but his protracted silences and occasional outbursts didn’t militate in favor of wine and roses. Instead, he sat across from me, slurping chemical coffee and shaking his head: “’Aroused, Parched, and Fevered: the Translation of Sexual Poetry?’ Goddammit. Why am I here?”
I didn’t have an answer. I was there for the interview. That was my reason and I felt it was a good one, maybe the only legitimate motivation one could have for going to AWP.
He stood up, said he was going to go wander around the area, maybe find a bar where he wouldn’t have to see perspiring writers handing each other business cards. I watched him walk down the convention center mezzanine as long as a football field. I didn’t know it at the time, but his brother had been involved with a conservative group demonstrating against the “Ground Zero Mosque” that was supposed to have been built near the site of the former World Trade Center. Theo was constantly talking about how crazy the Tea Party was, about how Obama couldn’t get anything accomplished because of GOP obstruction. At the time, I think we all felt that American politics couldn’t get any more embattled. And Theo seemed to suffer from the political upheavals that year the way we all do now, worrying that no one is capable of guiding us away from self-destruction, that our world is careening out of control.
I put my time in. My interview wasn’t until lunch the next day. So I drifted through random poetry readings and panel discussions, across the book fair area where small presses and magazines had tables covered with all the books they’d published that year. Lost Nose Quarterly. The Dingus. Barbaric Yawp. Boilerplate Cadenza Press. And then the big trade houses, tables manned by the best dressed interns in the world who’d drawn the short straw and had to sit there glowering at peons all day.
I knew a few people, grad students from my university, professors, employees of magazines that had published my stories over the years. I was happy to see a few of them. But I didn’t talk much. I simply exchanged nods or a quick word, keeping my distance. This is because AWP is a place of reckoning for most English studies people. You will inevitably notice your friends and colleagues there in the process of making horrible life-wrecking decisions. For example, if you’re going to walk around with your girlfriend where people will notice and tell your wife all about it, why not let it be at the world’s biggest book fair and writer’s conference?
I remember colliding with a professor I’d known for years, who normally dressed like Agatha Christie, but that day was done up in black leather and heels. A wispy undergrad who’d been unsuccessfully attempting a mustache was holding onto her arm with both hands.
“It’s you.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s me.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I have an interview.”
She did a double take. Her companion looked from her to me the way one watches a flying squirrel jump from tree to tree. It’s alien and incomprehensible and a bit unnatural. But we’re all mammals, so one has to look.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
It seemed crazy to her that someone could be considering me for an actual job. I recall telling her where and seeing the look of relief on her face when she realized it was somewhere far away from anywhere she would be. Why? This happened a lot in my world and not just with me. It was as if people were living in pampered, self-congratulatory reality bubbles. And, when those bubbles collided, there was immense cognitive dissonance, distaste, even dread. I must have been a destructive force to her—someone presenting a very unflattering reflection. All that black leather. She’d bought it for a reason and I was ruining her cosplay experience with young Werther.
She mumbled out something like good luck and moved into the crowd, pulling Werther along with her. I watched her go, feeling grateful that Theo hadn’t been there to analyze, for an hour, why she and the kid and the conversation we just had was so fucked up. But that year everything was fucked up, painful, riddled with lies and disappointments.
At the same time, I was learning that the way to make a true confession is to believe there is a truth and you know it. There’s what happened. There’s what you think might have happened. And there’s what you confess. It doesn’t matter if you’re the only person left alive, the only one who saw, the only one who’s supposed to know. You’re being asked to tell a story. So you do.
Jim’s interview is long, full of silences, false starts, retractions. The detective has gone from uninterested to barely awake, murmuring his questions from behind the camera.
“I’m coming out of the Elbow Room,” Jim says. “It’s late. They kicked us all out at bar time. And that’s when I see Sean. He’s got a board.”
“A board?”
“Yeah, like a board with some nails pounded in it. And I say, ‘When you gonna give me back my Steel Wheels?’ And he goes, ‘Fuck you, Jim,’ and tries to swing on me. And I had a pencil in my pocket.”
I write it all down, word for word, but I don’t contextualize: maybe you’re not stupid, but you’re drunk. Or you’re not drunk, but you’re scared. Or you’re scared, but you’ve been in this steel chair before, which makes you really scared. Or you haven’t, which makes you terrified. And the detective says, I understand. Take your time.
Back at the motel, I made progress with the work, but it took a toll on my body as well as my mind. I subsisted on beef jerky, fruit cups, and tap water while I typed until my fingers ached. Like any good student, I had a due date. I had to get it done. I moved between the particleboard desk and the moldy bed, changing positions whenever my back started to hurt too much.
“You sure about that, Jim?”
“About what?”
“Him swinging the board at you.”
“I think he did. It looked like he was.”
And there you have it: the moment of truth, wherein Jim enters what could reasonably be called his own personal Air-Conditioned Stupid Place or The Shitcloud of Unknowing or, my personal favorite, The Solid Gold Stinking End of All Life—that empty space between the known, the unknown, and what gets said about it, where admissions of guilt are born and go to die. And you go with them. Maybe the only thing the court will know for sure by the end of its time with Jim is that there’s a right way and a wrong way to make a true confession.
Three people I didn’t know in a very warm room at the Hyatt Regency. I was sitting in the stiff-backed desk chair. They were sitting on the bed.
Left, Betsy: Victorian lit., floral-print dress under beige grandpa sweater, belly bulge, black leggings, bags under eyes, gray-streaked brown hair still damp from midday shower, unmistakable hangover wretchedness on her like some kind of odorless colorless gas. She scowled at me over her tumbler of coffee.
Middle, Jack: British Modernism, cadaverously thin, didn’t know what to do with his hands baby-blue polyester suit like a sagging dirigible, black tie with salmon swimming up toward the knot, rimless glasses—the expensive kind that darken when you go outside—now half-dark.
Right: Abeline: creative writing: Levis and a man’s white button down, hair combed behind her ears, tight practiced smile, multiple silver rings on each finger.
How long, I wondered, had this hiring committee been looking?
Abeline dropped her hands on her knees. Her silver rings clinked. “You know, it’s a funny story. We saw this guy in the elevator—where was he from?”
Silence.
Then Jack, to the carpet: “He—”
“Ole Miss.” Betsy frowned into her coffee, then snapped her gaze up as if I were about to argue.
“Yes. Ole Miss.” Abeline’s smile never moved. She leaned forward to refocus my attention. “He was wearing a wig and a fake mustache. Can you believe that?”
I opened my mouth, but she wasn’t asking me.
“Ha,” said Jack.
“Typical,” said Betsy.
They looked at me. I said: “That’s strange.”
“Not so strange. Actually, no.” Abeline tilted her head to the side in the way of a raptor about to steal an egg from a nest. I realized her smile was small so it could stay fixed without hurting the muscles in her face.
“Not so strange for AWP.” Jack shot a glance at Betsy, who glared at him.
“He was looking for a different job,” Abeline said. “Going behind someone’s back.”
I attempted a smile. “Are you enjoying the conference?”
Jack cleared his throat. “So we like your CV. It’s a good CV.”
Abeline nodded. “It’s a very good CV. You have a lot of teaching experience. I suppose that should count for something, right?”
I nodded. I was having trouble processing, following the implications. Something? Should count? Did that mean the default was that it counted for nothing? And if you stripped away my teaching experience; if you discounted my letters of rec.—which hadn’t and, I knew, wouldn’t be mentioned because they hadn’t been read; and if the entire committee was made up of two lit. professors, who probably didn’t read much outside their specialty areas, and a creative writer, who seemed more a product of natural selection than a sympathetic colleague; my hybrid fiction-theory dissertation wasn’t going to matter. I had nothing. I was screwed.
Betsy peered at me, a knowing grin spreading across her face. “What makes you want to work in our department?”
“Ha,” said Jack.
Abeline nodded, looked me over.
I’d prepared a speech. I’d practiced. Because I was scared. Because there was a woman who wrote on the internet about what not to do in an academic job interview and I’d believed her. Because I had one interview and this was it. I launched into a disquisition on their department, on who was publishing what and how I thought my work would make a good fit, on my student-centered decentralized teaching style, on my commitment to diversity. And, though all of it was true, I saw the expressions on their faces change like time-lapse of a decaying corpse. I saw each of my memorized bullet points float away into the abyss between me and the three professors sitting on the bed. But the woman on the internet had said, focus on what you can do for them, not on what you want them to do for you. So I focused. I focused like a motherfucker.
4:00 AM. Beyond exhaustion in the dead gray motel room, I was almost done with the transcriptions. Dry mouth, stinking of instant coffee, I didn’t even have the energy to feel my usual anxiety. I watched a tiny spider on the window sill laboriously rope the legs of a fly three times its size. It seemed to take a long time, the fly getting tired, then struggling in frenetic terrified bursts, the spider crawling all around its body, staying on top of it, relentless. It seemed like a big meal for such a little spider.
On my laptop, Albert Leek was explaining to John Klein that telling the world about phone messages from spirits accomplishes nothing. It was the scene where they’re standing in Leek’s “college professor’s house,” straight out of central casting, with the usual stacks of books, dust, sad photographs, and regret—Leek in a crew cut like some retired police captain who’s seen too much, a little heavy, a little tired, and Richard Gere in his Washington Post reporter’s overcoat. He’s supposed to be John Keel, aka John Klein, but he’s really just the same old Richard Gere, gently bewildered, just crazy enough around the eyes for us to believe he’d go looking for an author on psychism to explain Indrid Cold—the voice on the phone, the invisible presence in every scene, the psychopomp of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
It’s a good scene, maybe the best scene in the movie. Leek is a tormented man, not just by ghost voices but by everything he’s lost in his attempts to tell the world about his discoveries—
“John, I had tapes of their voices! But so what? Nobody cared. I knew a building was going to blow up. I tried to prevent it, but no one listened . . .”
“What happened?”
“People died.”
—tormented the way we feel John Klein will be if he continues trying to reveal the truth.
Five hours later, after a shower, a fast food breakfast, and taking the wrong freeway exit on my way to the convention center, I found myself in “Tips, Trips, and Techniques for Publishing Insiders,” where I watched Charlie Sheen’s estranged twin go over each step in the publishing process as if he’d personally invented it. But I was still thinking about Albert Leek and Indrid Cold and that spider, as merciless as any force of nature, crawling around its prey.
The high point in the talk was when the blasé panel of Big Six agents and junior editors slid into Q&A and began to explain how tired they all were, how overwhelmed, and what this meant for the the future of publishing. Charlie’s twin, replete with slicked back hair and facetious grin, was saying something about having five novel manuscripts to read on his flight back to New York the next day.
Then a hand went up.
“Yeah?”
“But what are you reading for dinner tonight?”
She must have been 24 or 25. No one in the room seemed to know how to react to her question.
Even Charlie hesitated. “I think I’m free.”
Nice. There was an exhalation. Somebody clapped. People laughed. Love conquers all. An elderly woman with long silver hair, her face flushed purple, stood up, said, “Shit,” to no one in particular, and stalked out of the room. She couldn’t accept the inherent beauty of a community of writers coming together to engage in mutually beneficial intercourse.
I thought: somewhere Indrid Cold is watching all this. Toward the end of the scene, we realize John Klein can’t accept that the older man is just telling him to give up.
“I was investigated, almost arrested. My wife divorced me. My kids stopped speaking to me. Do you know what four years in a psychiatric hospital can do to you? Being right is worse than being wrong. If you’re wrong, you’re just a fool. If you’re right, you’re a suspect.”
I knew the lines by heart. Was it better to be a fool or a suspect? What do people want to hear? And why should anyone care? Bring your manuscript to dinner. Wear something sexy.
Somebody raised a hand and asked whether literary fiction, given Harry Potter, was finally dead. One of the editors started to describe how he’d first met J.K. Rowling and what a wonderful person she was. The woman who’d invited Charlie to dinner sat there with arms crossed, not looking at anyone, a smug expression on her face. That’s when I left, too.
If you’re smart, you don’t confess it the way you think it happened. You’re smarter than Jim. You’ll say, The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had born as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You’ll say, I swear I was in my right mind at the time, just as I am now, and I recall everything perfectly. I chose to do it. I planned to do it. Moreover, I’d do it again. As I transcribed those words, I’d know that you were lying. But the detective will merely sigh and say, go on.
To tell a true confession is to confess it like it’s true. It’s not about what happened, what Indrid Cold whispered to you over the phone at midnight. It’s about how you narrate what happened. It’s about your delivery. It’s about suspension of disbelief. If you want to tell it right, you have to set the scene. You lay down some back story. You make it plausible—even if you are lying and are trying to confess a crime you didn’t actually do.
“You always walk around with sharpened pencils in your pockets, Jim?”
“I just had one, alright?”
“How sharp was it?”
“Pretty fuckin’ sharp.”
“Give me the sharpness on a scale of one to ten.”
“Are you kidding me? It was a pencil. All I know is it was sharp.”
Later, after “Horror and Sci-Fi Taken Seriously” and “Ecological Cowboy Prose of the New American West,” I decided drive back to Michigan the next day. Theo found me on the phone in the lounge of the Hyatt, letting the car rental company know. When I hung up, I could see that he was functionally yet unquestionably drunk.
I told him about the interview, how all they’d really wanted to know was whether I’d take a one-year teaching appointment instead of the tenure-track position they’d advertised. Theo shook his head the way you do when you hear your teenage cousin got arrested again. He’d been drinking gin steadily since the night before, his own bottle, up in his room.
I asked him what he’d gone to at the conference and he said, “Do you . . . think I could make it in sales?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Good. Because this English crap won’t hunt.”
I agreed. The English crap wouldn’t hunt. It wouldn’t bark or roll over or bring you your goddamn slippers unless you took it out to dinner. I told him I was driving back in the morning. But he was concentrating hard on standing up.
“Sales,” he said.
I nodded. “Sales.” And I raised my fist.
I finished the last transcript sometime after midnight, then finally got a little sleep. I left my plastic key in the motel’s after-hours drop box and got on the road before dawn, feeling like this was probably going to be the last AWP Conference I’d be attending.
I’d wasted a lot of money and time to bear witness to the fall of the academic-trade segment of the publishing industry with all its slaves, clowns, and dancing bears. I didn’t have a job offer or a book deal. Then again, I wasn’t the one getting plugged by a poor-man’s Charlie Sheen in exchange for him reading my novel manuscript. The road, at that point, felt like a relief.
I suppose Confucius said that you should dig two graves because vengeance is the path of destruction and that which you offer to others, you offer to yourself. The wisdom of this is beyond reproach. I’ve thought about it carefully. However, it does not account for how you will get your victim and yourself into the graves once you’ve committed the act—to say nothing of who will replace the dirt on top of you.
This means you will either need accomplices or the second grave isn’t for you. The entire interpretation changes. And the true nature of Confucius emerges as a lethal, cold-blooded killer. Don’t just take out your enemy. Take out his friend or a family member likely to avenge him. Do it in twos. You’ll be glad you dug the graves ahead of time. Then at least you’ll have a good story to confess.
So It’s the end of October now and I think I’m going to vote for Hillary, even though I have my reservations. I’ve seen too many lousy politicians come and go to consider the alternatives. But the harder thing will be what to say to Theo. I’ve changed a lot in these last six years. I’m not sure how I could possibly explain, in an email, the twists and turns my life has taken since I left Denver in that rented van. If Albert Leek is right, confessions make you into either a fool or a suspect. And I suppose what I’ve written here will do both. But it’s something. And it’s all true, as well as I recall it. Would you believe it? And believing, would you hear me out if my name were Indrid Cold?
We want a plan. We need a plan. || Michael Davis
Source: The State of Emergency
A short story I decided not to submit to magazines. It will be included in my third story collection, Living the Dream.
There was nothing. I told myself I just wanted to get out for a while. I went to the Post Office Bar with Elka and had some drinks. Elka wasn’t quite five feet tall, but she drank like a Ukrainian diplomat and only wore black.
Maybe I thought things were too still. Back at the apartment, the rooms were too white, too still, too silent. We didn’t own anything but a couch and a bed. My wife was on one. Then she was on the other. All day long. She needed everything quiet all the time. Quiet, so she could think. There’d been a death in the family, you see. So it had to be quiet. But really, there was nothing left. I’d been selling everything we owned. Now we had paper plates. My wife had a little Sony she watched with the sound off in the afternoons. But there was nothing. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Nothing left. Nothing but white walls. Nothing to do but leave her alone. Nothing to say.
But then Elka. Shrieking. Sweating. Her big Italian sunglasses. Screaming, “Take it off, bitch!” when the gay threesome came on dressed like neighborhood postmen.
The DJ announced that they were gonna go postal and Elka laughed so hard she splashed gimlet across her 12-year-old boy’s v-neck.
“Shit,” she said. “I love this fucking place.”
And, right then, so did I.
Later, we knew that time had passed because we were out of money and cigarettes and Elka had lost her voice. We staggered out the side door into the snow. The tiny lights of Hauberk looked blurry and far away like a Walmart Christmas tree rolled down to the end of the alley.
Elka wheezed, pounded on her chest. “What am I gonna do with you, Percival?”
“You’re gonna stop calling me Percival.”
She tripped, landed on her right knee in a snow drift that came up to her chest, which we both found funny.
“What, you wanna go living a lie?”
“Fine.” I helped her up and we almost fell together. “Go ahead. Call me Percival.”
My name is Carmine. Carmine is better than Percival or Percy. But nobody calls me Carmine. Some people call me Jeff or Skip. My wife used to call me Tim, even though she knew Carmine was it. Her name was Lilly, like the flower.
Elka and I tried to make out, but she was too short and that always made it impossible. We walked out of the alley and stopped on the sidewalk blinking at each other.
She stood on her tiptoes and patted my cheek like grandma from the old country. “Be good to yourself,” she said and tottered over to her antique black Karmann Ghia. I leaned against the corner of the Post Office Bar and watched her drive the four blocks between the bar and her house. She parked with one wheel up on the curb, got out, fell in the snow, lost her balance, found her keys under the car, and staggered to her door. Then I was alone again.
Hauberk, Missouri, is not a large place. But it has a downtown and an uptown, train tracks, and, beyond them, a zone of inbred criminality before you get out to the farms. I’d lived in various parts of Missouri all my life and people said everything was changing. But at 3:00 AM all cities are one. They even smell the same. After a night in the Post Office Bar, you noticed booze and mold and body odor and stale cigarettes peeling off into the crisp night. And that’s the fuel you needed to keep walking and breathing in the good wholesome darkness after all those cocks went postal.
I wandered down Artichoke Lane and took a right on Fugit. I didn’t have a destination other than not home. What do they say? You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here? What did the DJ say? Now that we’ve gone postal, let’s go ball-istic—AT THE AFTERMATH! There was a bus outside for all the drunks who wanted to keep the party going. Elka wanted to go, but she was broke. And I was too square for after-hours party buses or the chicken adventure someone said they were about to have on the one outside. We’re gonna have a chicken ADVENTURE, people! Maybe that’s why I was unhappy. I didn’t get down with the poultry on a Thursday night.
Still, Elka was a good drinking buddy and she seemed to like me, even if she still didn’t know my name after a decade of working at the same car lot. She sold many Range Rovers to senior citizens who wouldn’t be allowed to drive in a year. What was she? 60 years old? It was hard to tell with the little people. But she was a hell of a saleslady.
By the time I got to Areopagus Avenue I started to seriously wonder why this part of Hauberk had the most fucked-up street names I’d ever seen. Then I realized the answer in one of those sudden bursts of clarity that only bloom in the botanical quietude of a cheap gin drunk: because I was walking towards the cemetery and everything gets self-consciously fucked-up around Midwestern cemeteries.
No one mentions it. You don’t think about the superstitiousness until you notice it for yourself. After you do, it’ll stick with you like a nasty fact of life you’d rather not remember. It’ll bother you forever on a deep gut level, even if it does seem like something that could be a story you could probably tell at dinner. I realized I was entering a distortion field of nervy Midwestern superstition as surely as the street was named “Areopagus.”
I crossed over and went down along the tall wrought iron fence that separated the world of the Hauberk dead from the lowest rent housing this side of the tracks. People say you’re supposed to whistle to keep the spirits off. And I will not claim to be wholly unsuperstitious; though, I’d had enough gin that whistling would have probably interfered with walking and right then one was more important than the other.
Nimcato Cemetery explained the fanciful street names, why front doors opened onto driveways on the other sides of the houses, and why there was not a single window facing Areopagus Avenue. People didn’t even like to park their cars on streets that ran along a graveyard. Or, if they did park there, you might see little crosses drawn in the dust on the corners of a hood. Plastic Jesuses. Bibles in back windows between stuffed Tiggers and Kleenex boxes. And every now and then, some old lady hammering nails into the corners of her front yard to “nail down the sin.” That was Hauberk, Missouri, when nobody was looking. Still, I didn’t aim to get primitive with the locals. Sin rhymed with gin and the only thing getting nailed that night was my liver.
But then I said, “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Mary Joseph Mother of Christ Saint Expedite Infant Savior of Prague Saint Anthony Defend Us In Battle Holy Spirit Amen. And all the souls in purgatory may they fucking protect me.” I said this out loud and with great sincerity, the fumes of my iniquity rising up out of my mouth like some reverse gimlet Pentecost, not only because no one else was visible in the pools of yellow-bright streetlight but because when I finally got to the corner of Areopagus and Bardolph, I could see the front gates of the Nimcato Cemetery standing wide open.
I didn’t know if the gates were always left open, but I suspected they weren’t. This bothered me. It might have scared the shit out of me—at least enough to bring on some religion. And if anyone had been around in that superstitious moment, I might have further confessed that if Elka hadn’t arrived to pick me up at the dog park three blocks from my apartment, I’d been prepared to drink the pint of Gilbey’s I’d bought as a safety measure earlier in the day. Drink it straight, sitting in the dog park. Hallelujah. It’s a wonderful life. Moreover, I realized I was sipping on this same pint as I wandered onto Bardolph and then through the cemetery gates. But liquor is never an explanation for anything.
It started to snow again. In the pale glow from the streetlights, the mausoleums and sepulchers seemed like an alien world, an abandoned planet of monuments and pylons under a dead sun. And I walked right in, not only because I was drunk but also because the booze had breached some iron-bound vault deep down in the sub-basement of my being where I kept thoughts of my wife’s mental illness alongside memories of the times she used to speak and live. Memories that went back before her father put a gun in his mouth, before there was nothing. And though I was not an unsuperstitious man, I simply didn’t have the capacity to cry and also wonder why the gates were open or whether it would be wise to walk through them. Thus, I was deep inside before I started to get truly upset.
But upset isn’t the right word. It would be better to say that I had a moment of terror, knee-deep in a drift, looking up at a weeping angel looking down at me, snow collecting on the top of his head, his shoulders, his pointing hand. It was the saddest largest marble angel I’d ever seen, sculpted to heroic proportions, his wings outspread like the goddess of victory. And how he was lit in that ghost light. And how the contours of shadow behind a falling sheet of snow made his expression seem impossible and beautiful and wholly unsympathetic to any sort of human grief, a thing of perfect tragedy up from the foundations of the world. At least, that’s how he seemed to me as I stared awestruck and drunk in the snow, gripping my Gilbey’s like a magical weapon.
The gin might have been magic—if I’d turned my back and downed it all with oblivion in mind. But the bottle slipped from my fingers when I looked along the angel’s extended arm to where he was pointing. And, with that, oblivion was but a transient thought, a sincere wish lost to a saner, soberer life where the dead don’t walk. Or, in this case, lie on top of graves.
I looked at where the angel was pointing and I saw my wife, Lilly, lying on a grave, the nightgown she never took off arranged just the way she liked, bunched up beneath her knees. Her delicate ankles. Her feet askew. Her hair draped over her shoulders like I saw it some nights when I looked at her in the moonlight, thinking about nothing, no future and no past, trying hard to wish away my hopes and dreams one by one.
“Lilly?” I whispered and took a step. “Lilly?” Almost as if to say her name out loud was the deepest obscenity I could utter in that place. And then I fell and didn’t want to stand up and look at the angel’s face or at what might have been my dead wife in the saddest strangest part of town.
I lay face down in the snow until I imagined that I, too, was dying, losing feeling all over my body from the cold. But because I am a coward and because I may have been screaming when I finally staggered to my feet, I found I was facing the opposite direction. I found myself running out as unconsciously as I had come in, running for the gates which I imagined might close any minute. I knew with some animal certainty that if they closed on me, I would vanish, all trace of me gone forever, even my footprints in the snow.
I shot into the street and kept running down Bardolph, as fast and as far as I could, my breath wheezing out Camel Lights and lime-gin. I ran until I reached the cheap Christmas lights of Hauberk’s downtown and burst into the Dixie Diner—panting, wild eyes, covered in snow like the yeti.
The obese pink polyestered waitress behind the counter took me in piece by piece. “You need a hand?”
The two men at the counter—who were both dressed in gray felt suits and skinny black ties like door-to-door vacuum salesmen from 1950s, but who could have been anything at 4:00 AM in a diner in central Missouri—looked up from their Denver omelets and grinned.
The wiry, nervous cook covered in grease leaned around the door to the kitchen.
The old lady with horn-rimmed glasses in a booth by the window, eating a chili bowl and reading a paperback, glanced over, the corners of her mouth stained orange.
And I said: “I think I need a cup of coffee.”
The waitress poured it without a word. I sat at the counter and tried to drink it, but my hand shook so much it spilled.
The two vacuum salesmen to my right were still grinning.
“Tough night, pal?”
I didn’t say anything. I tried to sop up the spill with a napkin, but even my napkin hand was shaking.
“Look,” the waitress said to the spill. “You don’t have to pay for that coffee. But I’d ask you to drink it and go. We don’t want no trouble in here. No druggies.”
The other of the two men—the one who hadn’t spoken yet, content to eye me like a feverish delighted vulture looking at a corpse—slapped his palm on the counter and said, “Aww, come on, Junebug. He ain’t gonna be no trouble. Look at him. He couldn’t find his cock in a rainstorm.”
This made Junebug and the other vacuum salesman laugh. And that’s when I started crying.
“Shit,” Junebug said and got a box of tissues from behind the counter. She put it in front of me beside the puddle of coffee. Then she took out two tissues for herself. The sight of me crying made her want to cry, too.
“Well I’ll be damned,” said the first vacuum salesman. “This is a cry-diner. A criner.”
“That it is, fucko,” his partner said. “That it is.”
Nothing made any sense. I looked at the coffee in the cup, at the spill on the counter like it was a logic problem I couldn’t solve. I didn’t know if I should stand up or fall down or run into the street.
“I need to get home to my wife.”
The old lady in the booth peered at me through her horn-rimmed glasses.
Junebug sniffed and polished the pie case. “That sounds like a very solid idea, hun.”
But because I was a coward, I gripped the counter as if I might get swept away into space, into the deep ocean, into the cold endleess nothing. I didn’t want to go home all of a sudden and learn where Lilly was: there, not there, lying in Nimcato Cemetery on top of a grave, being pointed at by the saddest angel in the world.
Fucko wouldn’t stop. “I’d like to buy this gentleman breakfast. “Whadya say, huh?” He slapped me on the back. I could smell his cologne drift over me in a great cloud of chemical musk. You could spray it on villages in the desert and go down for war crimes. “Whadya say? Ham and eggs? Junebug? Ham and eggs? Give him a plate for fuck’s sake.”
She looked at him. “I don’t think that would be the wisest course, given his precarious condition.”
“Come on. I’m paying. Give him some ham and eggs. Ain’t this a business? Ain’t I a customer?”
“You’re getting on my nerves is what you are.” Junebug sniffed, dabbed the corner of her eye with a new tissue, and sighed. “Don’t make me come across the counter and crack your face open, sweetie.”
Fucko shut his mouth. Then his friend looked at his watch and said, “Come on. Time waits for no man, am I right?”
“Yeah. Too bad for you. No ham and eggs.” Fucko got up and they walked out.
The sun was rising. The old lady with the horn-rimmed glasses was long gone. Junebug offered me another tissue but I didn’t notice until she was stuffing it back in the box.
“What’s really going on with you, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“I wandered into the cemetery. I saw an angel. And I thought I saw my wife lying on top of a grave.”
“I guess it was a long night,” she said. “You know them old visions are only in your head, right? My old man used to see his grandpa coming for him with a knife after drinking moonshine all night. You ever try moonshine?”
“I might have had it once.”
“Well then you know.” She nodded and refilled my coffee. “I’d call you a cab but the cabs don’t start up for another hour.”
“I’ll make it.”
“Go home. Kiss your wife. You’ll be fine. Some nights you just get lost. Drink enough moonshine and you get into all kinds of weird shit.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t process. I didn’t know which end was up.
There was no way I could have foreseen that three years later, standing at the memorial service after Lilly finally ended it all, I’d think back to that night and to what Junebug had said. Sometimes, you just get lost. How could I have known then, how could I have told her, that she would be right?
No one says what they’re really thinking: there is no escape. || Michael Davis
Source: The Debate Did Not Take Place
20 thoughts on what it takes and how to do it.
1. Nobody owes you time, money, or sympathy. Editors have hard jobs and need to balance a lot of concerns that writers don’t. If an editor or some other client is spending time on you, take it as a compliment. This is true for all readers of your professional work, whether they’re publishers, managers, or website owners. Any time spent on you and your writing is a vote of hope and confidence in your abilities, even if the reader is critical or has a hard-edged personality. It’s a tough business. Keep that in mind.
2. Never write for “exposure” or because someone says the job will “look good on your resume.” That is usually a mistake.
3. Don’t waste time. There are a lot of ways to do this that seem good at first. Sometimes, you have to take a risk on something that will ultimately turn out to be a wasted effort. But most of the time, money is a good test. Are you getting paid? For real? In legal tender as opposed to “exposure”?
4. Write outside your comfort zone and don’t be afraid to do research. It’s the only way to grow. Get used to pushing yourself. You should be surprising yourself at what you can do on a regular basis. How do you expect your work to impress others if it’s the same old thing putting you to sleep?
5. The truth is compelling. Try to tell it as much as possible in and about your work. Contrary to popular belief, telling what you believe to be the truth is likely to result in a higher degree of personal effectiveness.
6. Don’t complain that it’s hard. Of course it’s hard. You can always go clean carpets for a living if you can’t handle being a writer.
7. Don’t complain that you’re broke. Of course you’re broke. A writer trades social respectability and small middle-class luxuries for the big luxury of being a professional writer.
8. Play the field. No one knows you exist unless you make them know. Moreover, rejection will be a constant. The writing world communicates primarily in metaphors of loss and rejection. Remember that it will hardly ever be personal, even when people try to make it seem that way.
9. An agent is not your personal savior. An agent is a businessperson who understands how to make money in your particular field of writing. Sometimes, agents help. Other times, they’re a waste of precious time and effort (see point 3 above).
10. Always plan six months to a year ahead of time. You will hit dry spells and in freelancing there is no security net on which you can depend.
11. Avoid wasting time convincing judgmental friends and relatives that you are honest and have an actual job (see point 3 above). People will be curious about how you exist. They will often assume that you are gaming the system somehow while they have to break their backs at jobs they hate. To non-writers, it will seem like you are getting paid for doing something everybody does on a daily basis. This attitude is grounded in ignorance, but don’t tire yourself out trying to correct it. For example, if you also write screenplays and novels, it’s better not to mention it. When people hear, “I write fiction,” the first thing they’ll think is, “How come I’ve never heard of him? If he were any good, I would have.” The way to avoid people automatically concluding that you’re a loser and a failure is to stay as boring as possible: “I mostly write technical stuff.” The upside is that if you’re a freelancer for any length of time, this will be at least partly true.
12. Get sleep. This should be obvious, but early college programming dies hard. You can’t write well with a bleary mind.
13. Don’t be afraid to disappear to get work done. Time gets distorted when you’re writing intensively. What seems like a week to you might only be a few days of sustained work. Often, your friends and family won’t even notice that you’ve spent the weekend at a small table in the attic.
14. Get out and meet people. Freelancers usually prefer to write from home in their pajamas. Outdo them by dressing like a professional and offering to meet with clients. Some people won’t be interested, but some will jump at the chance to avoid having to express themselves in text (their problem in the first place). This is especially true if you soak up the travel expense. While meeting with them, take pictures, notes, recordings. Practice active listening. Stay as engaged as possible with the culture of their organization. You may also mention that you offer writing tutorials and intensives. Be a walking advertisement of all you can do for them. You will develop some very meaningful business relationships that way.
15. Accept that much of what you write will be secret. It’s called “ghostwriting” and it exists at all levels in all fields. People don’t want it known that they had to hire you because they didn’t have the opportunity or capacity to do the writing themselves. Your CV should be honest, but accept that you’ll always have done more work than you can show. This is part of your professionalism. Some of the highest paying clients will require the most discretion.
16. You don’t need to impress anybody. That’s for escorts and politicians. Your writing has to impress people. It does this by being clear, precise, imaginative, and otherwise correct as defined in your guidelines. As long as you can produce work like that, you will get a lot of repeat business.
17. Have fallback income to reduce stress. This goes beyond just saving half a year in advance. There will be times when no one wants to hire you and you’re burning through your savings while you wait for new leads. This doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It’s just the way things go sometimes. Having a secondary way to pay the rent and get your teeth cleaned will keep you sane and actually make you a better writer by giving you new experiences. It also toughens you up in a lot of different ways. Just like Aunt Fanny used to say: every artist needs a trade.
18. Give yourself assignments. Writing well takes constant practice—just like playing the viola, only the viola is the writing part of your mind. So you need to write regularly even if no one is paying you to do it. You can use those pieces later as samples if you don’t have professional clips yet. Post your uncomissioned pieces to a blog and let the world in on what you’ve been thinking about. This practice is indispensable.
19. Help other writers out when you can. “Good will” comes back to you when you least expect it. This is another hidden dimension of what it is to function as a professional. It’s also just a decent way to live. That said, sometimes helping someone out means giving an honest appraisal of their work when they ask. It doesn’t mean hurting their feelings if you can avoid doing so. Never expect others to be as tough as you pretend to be.
20. Never apologize for what you do. Your cousin, Jimmy, might imagine that all you do is sit around all day while he busts his ass at the car lot. Send him a card at Christmas and let him feel superior. He will never understand your strange world of ideas, structures, and sounds. He doesn’t need to. Not everyone can sustain the writing life (see point 11 above).
She was my first real girlfriend and she terrified me. More precisely, the possibility of her getting bored with me terrified me. And she was always at great pains to remind me that boredom would have dire consequences. Boredom was the end.
I had no idea who she really was and neither did she; though, I had developed some ideas over the months we’d been dating. I’d projected and imagined. Meanwhile, she thought I was Ross from Friends. She’d say it all the time: “You’re just like Ross. Oh my god.” Sometimes, she’d say, “You’re just like my brother,” but, mostly, it was Ross.
Between her brother and his collection of hot mustards and Ross, there was a very narrow margin for keeping Christina entertained. Still, I tried like a motherfucker. I was 18 years old and fully believed she was The One.
She broke up with me while we were sitting in a theater before a movie. I don’t remember what movie it was, but I do recall that it was a Sunday afternoon and it was extremely hot outside. She told me she needed to feel safe and protected. And she didn’t think I could do that. She needed someone who would fight for her. We stared at the blank screen and listened to the Muzak. Then she said she hoped we could stay friends.
For the next two hours, Christina rested her head on my shoulder while I contemplated the infinite tunnel of grief and abandonment I had just entered. I suspected the real reason she was breaking up with me was that she’d gotten bored. And I hated myself for letting it happen when I’d known ahead of time THAT WAS THE ONE THING THAT COULD NOT BE TOLERATED. 25 years later, I still remember her saying, “You don’t even own a gun.”
To my credit, I did not run to the corner gun shop and buy a nine. I’ve always felt that having a gun around would make it too easy for me to permanently check out. But I thought about what she said for a long time and eventually the reality of who Christina was blossomed in my mind. She was, for all intents and purposes, an idiot. But then, as the wise man once said, stupid is as stupid does. Her point about me not owning a gun would prove to be the set-up for a 25-year-long joke, the punchline of which was delivered only last week . . .
My 9x19mm Parabellum Romance
At the end of Games People Play, transactional psychiatrist Eric Berne suggests, not unlike Orwell in 1984, that most people are concerned primarily with reproducing and distracting themselves while they wait for death. However, Berne notes that exceptional individuals can transcend the default monotony of an unexamined life:
THE somber picture presented in Parts I and II of this book, in which human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait, is a commonplace but not the final answer. For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behavior, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they are, seeking their solutions in popular techniques of social action, such as “togetherness.” This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it. (81)
I’ve entertained this idea for a long time. In fact, it has bothered me enough over the years that I’ve structured a large part of my life trying to be an individual who isn’t caught up in mindless self-distraction and reactivity. But sometimes I feel incredibly afraid of this binary. I’m never sure if I’ve succeeded in avoiding groupthink or if success is even possible.
It’s not Berne’s “fright of the unprepared”; rather, I think I get afraid because I worry that the binary itself is oversimple and therefore misleading and impossible. Can I honestly believe that individuality is directly and cleanly opposed to conformity and that these are the available options in my life? I sometimes wonder whether I’ve fallen prey to false assumptions in this respect. Frankly, the thought leaves me cold.
For example, I think, I’m going to avoid going to that melodramatic tear-jerking romance. How boring. Looks like Titanic in space. Having seen over a hundred similar formula-bound period pieces, I feel on some level that I must be right. But then I have to wonder how many people out there are thinking the exact same thing. How many people, by selecting out of the Mindy Project-Titanic-Atonement-A Walk in the Clouds-Bridget Jones demographic, have opted into the anti-Mindy Project-Titanic-Atonement-A Walk in the Clouds-Bridget Jones demographic? How many of these “non-conformists” are straight men within a certain age group? How many of their life choices could be predicted based on the Facebook groups they follow and don’t follow? Should I then run out to buy a TEC-9 to impress my empty-headed girlfriend? What sort of man would make her feel safe and protected? Who decides for me if I don’t? Who decided for her?
Your Brain in its Vat will be Tangy and Scrumptious
There appears to be a marketing angle for everyone as soon as we learn that someone has written a mass-market manual, entitled The Art of Non-Conformity. But isn’t this about more than just marketing and consumerism? Isn’t it really about whether we’re sleepwalking through our lives? How does one lead, in Berne’s terms, an aware, spontaneous, and intimate life? Do any of us know what these things mean such that we could define this sort of life in a sentence? Or is such an existence necessarily so idiosyncratic that it resists generalization?
Orwell wrote that the proles “went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds.” That sounds a lot like most people. But it’s certainly not the picture of an aware, spontaneous, and intimate life—is it? How can we tell?
If, like Orwell, we assume that there is a persistent objective universe that could be mediated at all times by the political ideology of a state apparatus (or a Cartesian brain-in-a-vat AI), then we can’t be individuals unless we assure ourselves that we know and can act meaningfully on what is objective. We can’t lead authentic lives unless we have both knowledge and agency grounded in an objectively persistent material world.
Moreover, as philosophically complex as this becomes, I have to wonder whether it is even possible to determine whether an objectively persistent material world even exists—back to Descartes and the problem of the Cogito. In the end, there are no definitive answers and it would be naive to expect them. There is only the eternal interplay between narratives and questions. What do we prefer to believe?
My Killing Joke
The punchline came when a mutual friend of ours tagged her on Facebook and the hand of the past reached out to tweak my nose. There she was in the same town, SUV, kids, cop husband. Over the last 25 years, she got exactly what she wanted. I avoided all that, which is exactly what I wanted and I still don’t own a gun. Have either of us changed? Or are we both still playing the hands we’ve been dealt, telling ourselves we’re special and authentic and clever? There’s no way to know. We can believe what we like.
In the end, it seems, the joke is on us. No matter who we decide we are—no matter if I’m actually Ross or Christina’s actually a rocket scientist—there’s no central authority to tell us what’s objectively real and what isn’t. This is not Oceania and there’s no dominant newspeak (yet). Instead, we’re forced to carry the burden of meaning as individuals: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible” (Frankl 131).
The most responsible thing might be to keep spinning narratives and keep asking questions. If nothing else, we can be consistent in that.
Works Referenced:
Berne, Eric. The Games People Play: the Psychology of Human Relationships. Ballentine, 1996.
Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon P, 2006.
Guillebeau, Chris. The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World. TarcherPedigree, 2010.
Hickey, Lance. “The Brain in a Vat Argument.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/. Accessed 26 September 2016.
Orwell, George. 1984. U of Adelaide, Feb. 2016, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/index.html. Accessed 26 September 2016.
Skirry, Justin. “René Descartes (1596—1650).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/descarte/#SH4a. Accessed 26 September 2016.
(or: Footage of a Canadian Treeline in a Time of Goats and Perdition)
I watched it last night and was going to write a review entitled, “Why Snakes on a Plane is Better than The Witch” but I realized there is no comparison. Snakes on a Plane has snakes, Samuel Jackson, and a plane. The Witch has . . . the treeline and a message at the end informing the audience that it was based on actual accounts of 17th 
century witchcraft, making us wish they’d studied plot structure a little more closely back in the 17th century.
Oh and everybody dies except Thomasin, the ingenue, who has two expressions: dumbfounded fear and hysteria. Because, you know, there’s a witch out there who lives in a hut like Baba Yaga and likes to get dolled-up as Snow White with lip implants. But that’s neither here nor there. She’s got a veiny beast-arm with which she kills children. Sometimes shit floats in the dark. This is some serious business. It’s a witch, people. Come on, now.
I’d warn about spoilers, but it’s not possible to spoil something that has been rendered un-spoilable by stripping it down so far that the possessed family goat has more gravitas than the entire cast. Katie Dickie is a brilliant 
actress, reprising her nutcase mother role from Game of Thrones, but now in a bonnet. She gets three expressions: dumbfounded fear, hysteria, and maniacal hostility. William, the bewrayed, misunderstood husband, who knows a lot about scripture but who is somehow as effective in life as a suburban husband in a Lorrie Moore short story, gets two: grief-stricken and fearfully enraged.
The rest of the family—the spooky eyeliner-wearing siblings, the chickens, the brother whose sole purpose is to eventually meet the beast-arm—are plot furniture. They each get one expression: ye oulde dumbfounded fear. Maybe the chickens also get the poultry version of bitterness, since they happen to be better actors but, due to species-bias, they are relegated to supporting roles. Hollywood, man. The sickness is deep.
Overall, The Witch is a lot like the Big Alligator in the Sewer movie you go to see in the afternoon when your air-conditioning breaks down. Only Snow White isn’t that scary, the 
Devil isn’t very present as a supernatural menace, and the treeline is under-utilized as a character. I almost want to say that Deborah Harkness could have written a better screenplay—which is saying something, since A Discovery of Witches is one of the worst novels I’ve ever had the misfortune to attempt. Yet it seems better than this.
Where is the Devil? Out there, in the woods, right? Oh yeah, that’s the beast-arm’s function in the story. Wow. Or possibly the Devil is hiding in the fear-wilderness of the human unconscious? Sure, that works. That’s what Hawthorne gives us in “Young Goodman Brown,” a story that manages to make you feel a little more paranoid and insane every time you read it. And then there’s WGN America’s Salem, in which evil is a very real, very tangible, very transformative presence—which is what we need in a movie like this. And that is definitely what’s missing–aside from, you know, an interesting plot and characters. Hence, the superiority of Snakes on a Plane, which doesn’t even try.
You can’t rely on repeated expressions of dumbfounded fear to make the audience feel something. You can’t explain the flatness away by saying, “Well, these backward rubes were religious fanatics. So, you know, there’s your paranoia and human unconscious at work!” No. I don’t care if they were a settlement of Juggalos who fell out of a time machine. It doesn’t matter who we think they are. What matters is how rounded they are as representations of real human beings to whom we can relate.
We have to feel what the characters feel. And we can’t feel anything if all we get is constant two-dimensional dread. Put simply, in order to feel afraid we have to have the experience of not feeling afraid as well. We have to know and relate to the characters as extensions (projections) of what we feel and what we care 
about. But there is no balance in this film.
At the very end, when the ingenue decides to join up with the goat, who speaks like Sir Lawrence Olivier with strep throat, we think there’s going to be some big reveal, some payoff that’s going to transform all the open-and-shut dumbfounded fear into something else. Maybe Thomasin will show us something new about herself that adds depth and ultimately makes us give a damn.
Nope. She’s buck naked, floating, laughing like Janis Joplin. Roll credits. And you just wasted 93 minutes you could have spent walking through the woods of Ontario. So mote it be.
This morning, there was an enormous bumblebee on the inside of my bedroom window. I didn’t know how it could have gotten through the slatted vent near the ceiling, but that was the only explanation. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched its shadow crawl up my arm. A bumblebee! Enormous but tiny, just like me.
I am lethally allergic to bee stings. And so I found myself imagining once again how I might die from the anaphylaxis that could be brought on by such an enormous tiny creature. It could have stung me in my sleep. Of course, the engine of a 787 could have fallen through the roof and killed me in a giant conflagration of bloody bone fragments, busted two-by-fours, and smoking metal. Or my heart could have simply exploded at the stroke of midnight, all those muffulettas catching up with me at last. You never know.
Anything can happen and sometimes it does. I sat there and imagined my death for at least 45 minutes before I realized I was doing it. Then I got mad at myself. I just wasted 45 minutes of my life imagining my death. I can never get those 45 minutes back. It’s like I’ve been dead for the last three-quarters of an hour. But I also had a back ache. After a few more minutes thinking about the pain in my back and imagining myself in a wheelchair—how hard it would be to take a shit in my tiny bathroom if I were paralyzed, how I’d never have sex again—I thought, well, at least the bumblebee got my mind off of my back pain for a while. Now my back’s going to hurt all day. What a miserable day. Fuck my back. Fuck that bee. Fuck all creation. Life was, once again, a festival of misery and hate. A friend of mine in high school once described it as “a shit show for the devil,” but we’re not friends anymore and, if that were truly the case, I tend to think god would be the one laughing the loudest.
I got back in bed and pulled the covers up over my face. On days like this, I will sometimes lie in bed thinking horrible things, crying sometimes, unable to concentrate, unable to motivate myself to even stand, but feeling certain that death owes me a favor and it’s time to pay up. Today I had all the symptoms: intense pressure in my skull like my brain was trying to push its way out, racing thoughts, overwhelming world-veiling all-consuming guilt with no rational explanation, and that persistent little voice always telling me I deserve everything I get (What makes you so special, anyway? Who says you’re more worthy of taking shits and having sex than the next guy who’s probably paralyzed, constipated, and horny and yet still a better person than you? What have you really accomplished? All you’ve ever been is a horrible humiliating failure. Let’s relive some selected memories . . . ). So it goes and it never stops. Until it does. And then, suddenly, I’ll be fine again. The sun will come up. I’ll get out of bed. No one will have noticed. And I won’t mention it.
The longest I’ve ever been down in one of my “spells” has been three consecutive days, three days of black torment that almost caused me to take my own life. But that was an extreme. I’m more often down for 24 hours or less. And since I set my own work schedule, it’s still possible for me to function as a professional. I can usually feel it coming. Almost like a drug addict who, from bitter experience, knows to lock the house down and draw the curtains before shooting up in the basement, I log out of social networks, turn off my phone, put journals, mirrors, and alcohol away.
In Darkness Visible, William Styron puts it like so: “Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.” Sadly, it is not incomprehensible to me. Of all the friends I’ve had, it’s the one I know will never abandon me.
So I lay there—thinking about all the worst possibilities in my life, all the horrible outcomes I’d probably brought on by being defective and weak and cursed, while running a search through my past to find the elusive Turning Point where I must have transitioned from an innocent kid with potential into the embarrassing failure I was now—and felt the bumblebee land on my face.
Granted, I had the bedspread completely covering me. But it landed directly over my eyes. I could see it through the fabric walking around, fluttering its wings a little, its feelers rotating.
I’m not a flower, I thought. I sent it telepathic messages. I’m not a flower. I’m a human. And if you sting me, I will fucking end you before I die. I felt extremely angry, infinitely angry, so angry that it was hard to keep still. The worst part was I didn’t know why. The bee was innocent. It was as much a victim of circumstances as I was. But all I could think of was how stupid it would be to suffocate from anaphylactic shock in bed with the covers over my face like a suburban burial shroud. The Shroud of Michael. More than I’d earned but no less than I deserved.
I had perhaps one of the oddest sensations I’ve ever had, feeling like my emotions were clawing at me, trying to pull me apart, and yet having to focus on remaining completely still—all while my mind was defocusing into the irrational haze of a depressive fugue. I thought about Styron, how I didn’t know enough about his life; about some of the people I care about, how I knew even less about theirs; about Hem and Fitzgerald and how much my high school students had hated A Movable Feast and how I’d loved it; about my early failure to become a classical pianist; about my subsequent failure to become a lawyer; about my failure to get on the tenure track; and about the failures of various students over the years which I’d carried like a sack of rocks on my back, each one somehow traceable back to me, to my fault, my mistakes, my defects. And though there may have been some faint light blinking at the end of the dock, something I could focus on, something to tell me that yes, there was an end to this just as there was to all things, I couldn’t see it.
Then the bee flew back to the glass. Slowly, ever so slowly, I crept up, opened the window, and watched it fly away, over the rock wall, into the trees.
I sat back on the edge of the bed. The clock read 8:03 AM.
The robot ghost of Ram Dass, one of my favorite self-help gurus, posted the following to his Facebook page this morning: “The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation.” This statement is why I love Ram Dass. His personal philosophy is so opposite to mine that I feel he is my spiritual uncle, still part of a family from which I was estranged long ago.
Since the dear old boy obviously didn’t post this himself and since the invisible automaton (whether human or a AI postbot amounts to the same thing) tasked with marketing his personality isn’t programmed for discussion—and since the commenters on the page seem more like the postbot than the guru—I will add some thoughts here with my morning coffee.
It would be easy to say, “Judge and prepare to be judged because this is human nature.” But responding that way is useless without a lot of support: what is human nature and how can we know it? What is judgment? How are passing judgment on others and the experience of judgment being passed on you similar and different? And why should this part of human nature be preferable to the idea, “judge not.” If I can’t develop some reasonable working hypotheses here, I can’t argue with the guru at all.
And yet there is something I feel when I read a statement like, “Separation closes your heart.” I think I feel angry, indignant. Same with, “Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation.” So I want to explore these feelings as a way to at least get to some subjective truth, some way of knowing myself. Because if I can’t come up with answers to the above questions, more objective ways of knowing are foreclosed. In the end, while thinking about this, I have only myself, my feelings, my sense that something rings true or false. Where do these negative feelings come from? Why was I experiencing them when all the guru was saying was that it’s good to come together with people and try to understand them?
Inception
I was re-watching Inception the other day, a movie I like a lot and one that manages to be extremely clever while also being high-concept and super-formula-driven. And I thought about something a screenwriting teacher from AFI once said about the social function of movies, especially high-concept ones: they provide novelty (i.e. new information); the reinforce dominant social values; they offer vicarious emotional relief via a simplified fantasy life; and they generate a sense of closure (i.e. everyone lived happily ever after until the sequel) as opposed to real life where there is never any true closure. Inception does all these things.
After watching Inception multiple times, I felt like I finally understood it enough to think about it critically. And as soon as I reached that point, I started to get depressed because here was one of my favorite movies showing me something about all movies and, by extension, about human nature. Inception provides a complex matrix of streamlined ideas about lucid dreaming and subjective filters for reality (novelty / new information); it has the usual provincial social values of most action films (hero must set things right with wife and family who don’t understand what he has to do to make a living); vicarious emotional relief via a simplified fantasy life (unlimited funds, beautiful women, travel, super powers in a “heist movie” frame, and meanwhile the corporate energy moguls are portrayed as sad clueless cretins); and it gives a sense of closure (the Total Recall ending—is this reality? Does it matter if you’re happy?). All well and good. We can pick any high budget action film and get the same layout. But what does this teach us about what we need? Because we will obviously pay good money to get it.
What I realized while watching Inception for something like the fifth time is that we are indeed separated. We are indeed suffering. And this is so horrible that we need to enter another frame of reference (the fantasy world of the movie) for relief. Inception, like so many other movies in its genre and in general, gives new information because our days are monotonous and we are bored. It reinforces social values because we feel uncertain about what we are told to believe about our lives. It offers emotional relief because the conditions of our lives regularly depress and discourage us. And it gives a sense of closure because this suffering only ends at death and since we don’t understand death, we can’t look forward to closure there, either.
In short, Hollywood understands the nature of our constant pain and offers us a very straightforward transaction: pay a little and get a little relief. We might criticize the movie industry for this, but really there is a lot of sincerity there. Hollywood wants to make great amounts of money, sure. But people also want to make Star Wars, Escape from Alcatraz, Key Largo, High Plains Drifter, and Citizen Kane because of the power in creating something like that—the vast cultural impact that comes with satisfying the above human needs so deeply that people will carry some of that satisfaction for the rest of their lives. Because life will be hard for everyone whether they open their hearts or not.
Separation is a Given as is Judgment
So when the guru tells me that separation breeds suffering, I have to agree. But this is why I’m estranged from that particular family: we cannot avoid suffering and it is disingenuous to claim that we can. This is how I feel when I think about my own experience as a social being. Suffering is inevitable because culture depends on being able to use stable and replicable data (old, often monotonous, information). A stable society depends on shared values that are nevertheless constantly being challenged in a divisive and uncertain world and therefore need reinforcement. We’re very upset about these things. And nothing is ever completely handled. It’s never over.
I think I get angry at such self-help advice because it presupposes things can be solved. And that, if I only change myself, suppress something in myself, root something defective out of myself, I will have life handled. This makes me angry because it seems like a lie, like marketing, beneath which is a very old, very Christian idea: you are defective the way you are. You must atone for this defectiveness by conforming to the pattern we give you. Only then will you find release from your suffering. Rubbish. I would rather watch a movie and find temporary relief, then think about and understand why.
There is a lot to be learned from gurus advocating self-help and self-change, even if those gurus are engaging in stealth Christianity. I like Ram Dass for his infectious cheerfulness, his sense of humor, and his intelligence. However, when it comes to what I must do to feel better, my emotional sense is that I would rather indulge in who I am than try to become who someone says I should be.
There are only two sureties in life: that we have been born and that we will die. The rest, at least from a finite human perspective, is variable.
No True Answers, No Answerable Truths
Contemplating the mystery of our birth—why was I born?—is likely to cause a certain degree of anxiety, at least for those of us who judge ourselves to be in mundane circumstances: my family is not wealthy; I am not wealthy; I am not famous; my job is not glamorous; my children are unimpressive; my spouse is boring; I am not exceptionally beautiful or witty or gifted; and, though I secretly tell myself I’m smarter than most people, I just as often fear that I am not. Erase me completely and there will be someone very much like me to take my place. Why, then, do I exist? The world is quick to provide temporary relief and sell us an answer to this unanswerable question. If we’re honest with ourselves, maybe after purchasing a few bottles of snake oil (and who can blame us for that), we will eventually come to the conclusion that if we can’t know about the reason for our own lives, no one can.
Death is a similar mystery with no good answers or reasons. We know what happens biologically after the cessation of life, insofar as we are able to agree on what actually constitutes life. But we do not know whether mind is coterminous with brain. If it isn’t, then where does the mind go after the body rots? If it is, then human consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter and is therefore unlike any other thing (event? concept? process? ghost? singularity?) in the known universe—another unfathomable mystery. As Marcus Aurelius says: “Providence or atoms” (Meditations, IV.3). Life comes down to one or the other, even if we can’t know what either truly is.
Only We Care About What Our Lives May Mean
Even before we’re naught but dust, we will watch ourselves vanish by inches. Consider that in a few years, society will tell us that our significance has already passed. We won’t be dead yet, but we will still be told that it is time to retire and make way for those who are younger and therefore more socially relevant. Our worth will be judged according to what we have earned for ourselves in 20-30 years of active adult life. And such judgment will be based on the social values of the moment—ideas presently in fashion, not even, necessarily, what we were thinking about when we started the company, wrote the book, or climbed the mountain.
We will still be asking, Why, then, do I exist? And, as we reach retirement age, we may find others asking us that, too. Moreover, we may complain about the stereotypical characteristics of the Millennials, but every generation (like every individual) judges the world according to its own perspective and values. We, in Generation X, also judged the Baby Boomers. And they cruelly judged us as well as the Lost Generation, etc. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Times change, and we change with them. And so goes the world.
But in spite of our all-encompassing solipsism, we will still have regrets. We will either have worked very hard in practical ways to do what was expected of us (and feel that we never fully addressed our inner potential) or we will have pursued some path of inner realization (and feel that we never got to experience conventional kinds of success and recognition). This may be an oversimplification, but the principle is sound. We will eventually realize, on some level, that we cannot have it all because we are going to die and our time is limited. This may make us cry because we can’t stop asking why we had to go through all this anguish and absurdity just to wind up in the ground. Or it may make us free because the inevitability of death puts all the anguish and absurdity into perspective.
Freedom From the Burden of Meaning
There may be some value when we contemplate life in terms of death. Embracing the inevitability of death can free us from what we may feel is a mundane and meaningless existence. Someday soon (especially if we consider the relative shortness of life), we will all be dead. All the people we know will be dead. All the things we cared about will have changed, some far beyond what we could have imagined. And those who follow will not think about us much. How often do you think about your great-grandparents? Your grandparents? Your great uncles and aunts? They are not a relevant or functional part of your day to day existence, even if you do have some way to regularly honor them.
At best, the people living after us will have certain ideas of who we were, since it is impossible to convey the dimensionality of a human life. If we are lucky, we will be summarized in terms of our professional achievements and historically significant actions (if any). Our images may be preserved in photos or videos, but those images won’t be us, either. People will never know who we really were inside, what we truly thought, how we truly felt. In every way that counts, we will be gone, questions silenced, problems solved, story told. We will be free.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
“Ozymandias,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (1977)
As I have said many times and in many different ways, graduate study in literature and creative writing is not easy for anyone, even in the most favorable circumstances. There is an inner, emotional, psychological, processual effort that no one talks about and an outer, technical, rhetorical, production effort that everyone takes for granted. Both of these “efforts” are difficult. They must run concurrently and consistently for satisfactory completion of your program. And no one—not advisors or fellow
Philosopher with an Open Book by Salomon Coninck (1645)
students—will have the wherewithal to set aside their own problems in order to help you with yours. You are alone. You are responsible for expressing a universe of ideas in your own voice. You will accept this or fail.
If you pay attention, you will soon come to realize that your path is more or less unique—that you’re following a largely self-determined trajectory through the work. It may be partly modeled on someone else’s (such as that of a mentor with a strong personality telling you what you should be reading, writing, and thinking), but ultimately you’re making your own intellectual path by walking it. This is one of the signature characteristics of higher study in the humanities. It may be a strength.
A large part of this blog is dedicated to exploring these things, to making the implicit explicit for the good of those who feel drawn to the discipline of English studies and / or creative writing. It’s clear that I’m critical here of what I often see as hypocrisy and self-serving prevarication in greater academia. But I also disagree with the Libertarian voices currently developing the Don’t Go to Graduate School in the Humanities genre of business-oriented success advice. I think, in spite of very practical arguments to the contrary, if you feel called to study, write, and teach, by all means do it. Just don’t do it ignorantly and learn how to survive afterward so that you can keep doing it. How this unfolds in your life will be a mystery specific to your becoming.
With this in mind, I expose my own values here, my own work, which continues the inner-outer efforts I mention above. The Writing Expedition represents part of my disciplinary “production effort,” dedicated to expressing insights on what I have experienced in this field. Moreover, I think “expressing” is the right word because it implies a dichotomy. In order to ex-press something (or “squeeze out” if we want to look at the origin of the word), there must be an interior area where it already exists. An inner world. Often, a hidden world that can make the dominant scientistic discourse of reductive materialism very nervous. Like it or not, the Academy is subject to the dominant political, economic, and aesthetic tropes and discourses of the day; though, academics often find this distasteful and prefer to ignore it.
The ivory tower covered in camouflage.
It is safe to say that the Academy is an ancient type of institution that has survived to the present by appearing to be what society needs it to be in any era. Study the history of higher education in the West and it is easy to notice that the great universities have not existed in spite of what they imagine to be the barbarism and ignorance of the profane, but as a mode of cultural expression, 
a conglomeration of beliefs and rituals, a matrix of ideas given a particular form in the material world. In other words, the Academy is an extension of culture. It offers a product that society wants and survives by making that product seem relevant. It has always been that way; though the outer wrapper of the product is redesigned again and again to reinforce existing narratives of power and faith. In the rare times it fails to do this: Kent State, May 4, 1970.
As Martin Petersen writes of CIA tradecraft standards (intelligence agencies being very similar to universities), “We have to establish our credibility and usefulness individual by individual, administration by administration. There is no down time when it comes to quality” (“What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence Analysis for US Foreign Policymakers,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 55, No. 1). Without being too cynical, we could easily convince ourselves that establishing credibility and usefulness is one of the ongoing directives of the Academy: we want to matter.
Enter: John, who also wanted to matter.
When I was in graduate school, studying creative writing and rhetoric, John, a friend of mine there who happened to be a gifted poet, went through a kind of nervous breakdown. Since no one knows what a “nervous breakdown” actually is, we can call it that or we can say he went through a season of harsh depression, anxiety, purposelessness, and emotional pain. His wife described it as a “slow-motion train wreck” and they both tried to laugh about it. But it was real and the pain he went through changed his life.
Before you even think it, I should note that this person is not me. Things may have changed for John since then, but what hasn’t changed is the high-schoolish competitiveness in our colleagues that has lingered for a long time. Since many of them read this blog, I will only tell the part of his story that everyone already knows. And I will do it for a particular reason. Nevertheless, I hope he forgives me for this and understands what I am trying to say. Knowing him, I think he will.
It started with the birth of his daughter in our second year. John had come to the PhD from a high-paying career in industry, such that he didn’t have to take out student loans and could rent a fairly large house (as opposed to the holes most of us were living in). His wife didn’t work and they were living off their considerable savings. Still, the pressure was on, partly because John now had a child to think about, but also because had an immense work ethic and he was no fool. He knew, as did we all, that there were very few full-time teaching positions available and that trying to get one (even getting an interview at AWP or MLA) was like playing the Irish sweepstakes.
Nevertheless, John applied himself, wrote good poems, said smart things, and generally did well. He was older, married, and didn’t waste his time like the rest of us at the sad graduate school parties or looking for love in all the wrong places. He had a particular energy around him that said, I know the truth and, if I don’t know, I’m sure we can discover it together. In short, he seemed like the type who should win the career sweepstakes and become an assistant professor. There should be more people like John in teaching positions. When I think of what it takes to be a great graduate student, I think of him.
But he reached a breaking point, something in his “inner process” that no longer worked the way he thought it should. The reality of being a father had become far more real and compelling than the realities he was creating as a student of English and a poet. His hair turned stark white over the course of a month and he went through a kind of existential fugue, which according to him involved a lot of crying, regret, and hopelessness. Eventually, he dropped out of the program. He moved with his wife and daughter to Arizona to live with his in-laws. And two or three years later re-entered a PhD program at a different university, this time to study British modernism. As far as I know, he’s now a professor somewhere in the Midwest and I am sure he is great.
I tell his story here because although it had an ostensibly happy ending, his dark night of the soul is one that most of us experienced on some level at some time in our work. The difference may have been that he suffered from pressures we didn’t have, destroying the credibility and usefulness of the Academy for him. I believe this as much as I believe that he also lacked certain essential qualities necessary for running those inner and outer efforts concurrently and consistently, at least the first time around.
The voice in the fire: one hears it or one does not.
A teacher of mine once made an interesting observation about “mystery.” The more one seeks out the lacunae in one’s life—the numinous moments, the noetic leaps of high strangeness that result in extraordinary creations, realizations, and states of consciousness—the more mystery seems to increase, not decrease. Seek the mysteries and you will find there are more mysterious things in this world than you ever imagined. Or maybe you will find yourself imagining more such things as you 
learn to accept new ways of knowing.
Conversely, if you let existing modes of expression, accepted narratives, the exoteric rituals of consensus culture (especially those of the Academy) crowd your senses, ways of knowing will become narrower; meaning will become increasingly delimited and rigid; and the dominant cultural discourses (for us, scientism and reductive materialism) will come to seem all-encompassing. This is what I believe happened to John in his first PhD program. His outer effort was strong, but his inner work was obstructed by the anxiety of feeling responsible for his family. I do not fault him for this. However, I think his experience offers us an interesting lesson.
Recall that the “inner effort” is an emotional, psychological process. It therefore partakes of mystery because interiority cannot be completely mapped. This is where the muse, the creative genius, lives. This is where we dream, where we hear that voice speaking to us about who we truly are and how we must express ourselves. It is the place artists go when they produce authentic and original work.
Funny thing about the muse. She gives and she takes. Dedicate your life to a particular mode of expression and you must always try to hear her. Your sense of the numinous will increase exponentially, but you will also have to make sacrifices. As your outer effort must concern itself with “credibility and usefulness,” your inner effort must be like a love affair with the mystery inside you, which is what we’re talking about when we refer to the inner life of an artist.
Hakim Bey discusses this in The Temporary Autonomous Zone and calls it “sorcery”:
The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication–but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind—sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow—priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web.
A poem can act as a spell & vice versa—but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature–it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo, in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence.
Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs like dried dreams–the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink—wine & ganja, meat, yantras & gestures—rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis—the sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.
We can just as easily speak of it in terms of embracing a wider spectrum of expression. Viktor Frankl puts it this way: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible” (Man’s Search for Meaning).
The Green Muse by Albert Maignan (1895)
What, then, is the voice in the fire? It’s not a degree from Yale, tenure, and a tactless sense of entitlement. It’s that unmappable, ineffable interior effort, that numinous guidance system which instructs and inspires us to continue our work. It sustains us through years of advanced study, reveals the mystery inherent in the world (even in something as outwardly mundane as the sight of water), and helps us answer for our lives. If we are responsible practitioners of our art, we will listen to this voice just as carefully as we may express our work-products. If we stop listening and forget the internal process, focusing only on the external product, we will enter the dark night of the soul, which entails a lot of suffering.
This is the meaning of that famous line from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” If this is the life you choose (realizing that you have been chosen to answer for your life this way), I continue to wish the best for you.
Listen. And seek the mysteries.
Today, there was flooding in London. I was supposed to be there. But because I have no cartilage in my knees, I often wake up in agony on barometrically improvident days. Dark days of lying on the bed, focusing on my breathing. Days in which it’s hard to think, much less write. Days of codeine and jasmine tea and misanthropy. Walking from room to room is difficult and leaving the house is out of the question when I’m feeling like this and Port Meadow is up to 22C with 95% humidity.
Strangely, this never happened when I was living in Bangkok, one of the hottest, most humid places on the planet. Only here in the UK will the muscles in my legs tighten overnight, pulling the bones of my knees into each other, slowly, like a form of medieval torture. As with most manifestations of extreme pain, the experience transcends words. Maybe if I brushed up on my German, I could describe it. German seems like a good language for articulating suffering. At my current level of fluency, I can only say 
things about rain: schließlich, regnet es auf der Wiese. Or something like that. Maybe that’s all I need.
This condition has been going on regularly since 2003 when an orthopedic specialist gave me the option of surgery (resulting in no more pain but having to walk with a cane for the rest of my life) or occasional pain and my normal range of functionality on all the other days. I chose the second option, of course, which I still think was right. But goddamn, son, it hurts.
It’s a shame she won’t live – but then again, who does?
So it’s late afternoon. I’ve been trying to get meaningful writing done all day and a personal blog post is as good as it’s going to get. Lots of painkillers, tea, and sheer meanness seem to have worked such that I can at least get these words down. Lord knows I can’t allow a day to pass without producing some kind of manifesto, story, novel segment, editorial, white paper, or media rant. But, sitting here in my bathrobe, feeling like I’ve been put to the question by 
the town fathers for leading a black mass in the woods, I’m close to just dosing up, crawling back into bed, and moaning myself to sleep.
Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking. I know. Bad idea in my current state of mind. Still, I keep seeing the image of Deckard and Rachael making out in Deckard’s apartment, which admits of no rational explanation other than I associate rain, flooding, and climate change with the Blade Runner aesthetic. Blame PD James and Alfonso Cuarón for linking those together in my head via Children of Men.
Anyway, Blade Runner‘s about halfway over and Rachael’s been sitting at Deckard’s piano, talking about her dreams. And we feel bad for her because even though she’s sensitive and beautiful, we suspect she’s just some high-end Real Girl noir sexbot insinuated into Deckard’s life to distract him from the real nefarious shit that is likely going down over at the Tyrell Corporation. And every time I watch the movie, I read the moment they kiss in a different way.
Sometimes, I read it as Deckard giving in to the illusion. He knows she’s a replicant and doesn’t really care at that point because they’re both lost souls in a world where the distinction between natural and artificial has ceased to have any meaning—so forget about the fact that you’re lost and come over here.
Sometimes, I read it as Rachael giving in to the illusion that what she’s feeling for him is more than just an algorithm written into her synthetic gray matter by proto-Elon Musk Eldon Tyrell. Giving in because she wants to and maybe wanting is enough or everything.
And yes, if we look at that scene after reading Through a Scanner Darkly, we will have an emotional meltdown because Philip K. Dick was no fool and he understood something when he wrote:
But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away.
So I do this. I think of this. And I listen to “Wish You Were Here” sipping my tea and breathing through the pain while I look at the meadow. And that last stanza, “We’re just two lost souls/ Swimming in a fishbowl/ Year after year/ Running over the same old ground/ And how we found/ The same old fears” means a lot to me; though, I have never felt more alien in this world.
The Voight-Kampff Empathy Test
Sometime back in 1993, William Gibson is supposed to have said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed,” which is a saying that seems wise, then obvious, then wise again the more you think about it. But 23 years of hindsight 
later, the obvious part seems far more dominant than whatever might have proven insightful. It’s 2016. Has the sheer science-fiction-horror-dread of this moment in time caught up to us from the back end of the 20th century yet? The future is not evenly distributed, at least the good parts where someone like me can get bionic knees. In 1982, Blade Runner gave the world a vision of rebirth after decay instead of the unadulterated Kali Yuga we’re entering now.
Ridley Scott wanted to show us how replicants just want to be loved and how those replicants are really us. Instead, we’re seeing how we’ve failed to evolve beyond the dystopian Reagan-era cyberpunk automatons we fantasized about in the 1980s. We never got past Terminator. Now, all we can say, with any degree of sincerity, is: blame the drugs. But not the ones people were on in the eighties when they handed us the trickle-down theory. Blame the nasty synthetic street drugs that made the best story of the last two decades have to be about a high school chemistry teacher dying of cancer who starts cooking meth to pay his bills. Yeah. Debt. Meth. Drones. Endless war. Doesn’t it add up? Time for your meds.
All our dreams of machine salvation, online utopia, and some vague transhumanist singularity depending on an equally flimsy brain-as-hard drive metaphor became loud, stupid, self-important Neo from the Matrix—our savior, here to make us feel better about being consumers and take away our pain. The fridge logic singularity of Matrix Revolutions was merely the last cynical whimper.
But I’m in a bad mood today. Don’t listen to me. Now we have Trump and Hilary. Now the sweaty holographic fetish reel of decadent and naïve Reagan-era consumerism obviously didn’t work, but we’ve taken too much fluoxetine hydrochloride to care. It was never going to work. It wasn’t built to work. And it was always going to be ugly beyond words.
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
– Count Zero, William Gibson
I’ve written three books of fiction to date, all story collections; though, only one of them has been published.* This is not remarkable or typical in any sense, even if I do have the stereotypical writer’s voice in my head telling me that I should be submitting to more book contests, etc. My submission schedule results in about 2-3 stories placed in magazines every year, a process I actually enjoy, and I have no plans to stop doing that. Still, I sometimes wonder whether the world needs another immature literary magazine, another lousy e-book marketing campaign (what Chuck Wendig calls the “shit volcano”), or another mediocre career-building novel entering the flotsam. What does the world need?
Better: what do I need?
Books are not the only way to be published, even if they are the fiction writer’s holy grail—specifically novels, ideally lots of novels—because they sell and therefore build careers. Or, as an industry professional once said to me at an AWP conference, “You need to write at least a novel a year for the next five years if you want to be a contender.” He was an important person in the publishing world, had a red nose, a cigar in his lapel pocket, and I was completely intimidated by him at the time. So I nodded as if I understood. But I didn’t and should have asked, “A contender for what, exactly?”
Publishing only feels like boxing. In reality, it’s business, the alchemy of transforming things into money. When business and art collide, a volatile chain reaction usually takes place resulting in all sorts of monstrous transmogrifications, creeping morbidity, and a certain amount of screaming. Put simply, how many writers have you heard of who built a career out of publishing a book a year? I can think of maybe one or two and none writing outside strictly defined genres.
The only literary writer who may produce full-length books with that kind of regularity is Joyce Carol Oates, someone as great as she is prolific but who is entirely unique. So “a book a year” might not be the best advice if you’re in this to make art. If you’re in it to make money, why aren’t you running a brothel, flipping houses, developing apps, or managing a hedge fund? You can probably make an app a year. Brothels, I don’t know, but I imagine their schedules are a bit more eventful.
Every writer asks a version of this question, sometimes on a regular basis: should I be writing harder, faster, longer, mo betta? Should I be soaking down the meadow like a frustrated stallion on horse viagra? How much is too much and why is it that by asking this question I feel soiled? Of course, as with most questions writers ask themselves, there are no answers. There are only opinions and that vague soiled feeling. To be honest, there is only subjectivity in this context.
So how much? Stop asking. Stop thinking about it. Just write. And if you want to be a “contender,” find a different metric against which to measure your progress.
* 2021 update: 3 published, 2 more currently seeking a home.
“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.” – W. Somerset Maugham
Yesterday, I got an email from a former student asking for advice on whether he should apply to a PhD program in English. This is not the first time someone has asked me this, though I have mostly stopped answering because (1) people must learn for themselves and no one thinks his or her experience will be typical; (2) graduate programs generally present an unconscionably glossy face to prospective students; (3) in order to persevere in an academic career, it is necessary to develop a personal philosophy that allows you to put the work first; and (4) my own experience in academia has been highly atypical.
Still, I consider May 1 to be my 6th anniversary as a PhD in English. This remains, in spite of all my criticisms, one of the greatest (and surprisingly joyful) achievements of my life. So every year around this time, I take a day to reflect on the good as well as the bad—how far I’ve come and what I’ve had to overcome as a result of my long years in graduate school.
As part of that, I write this blog post from a place of deep sincerity, responding to the question: should I apply to PhD programs in English?
Graduate school, especially in the arts and humanities, is an existential riddle very few people solve to any degree of satisfaction. Its dimensions are so far-reaching and complex that many years can go by before those who have lived through it get any kind of clarity about what they experienced.
I might have understood a bit more, a little bit sooner, about my situation than most graduate students. As someone who spent a significant amount of time acquiring various academic degrees and certifications, I have always been studying something. I grew up in an academic household, have been incredibly lucky with finding good teaching positions, and have learned to handle “administrative prevarication” in ways that have allowed me to survive. Not everyone has this experience. In fact, my story is an exception to a very unpleasant rule.
Deep-seated career frustration, depression, and even suicide seem to be on the rise for graduate students. This would appear true even if we assumed that 50 years of back-page articles on dysfunctional academia and the perpetual ranting in the higher-ed blogosphere was inherently anecdotal. By 2016, however, we no longer have to wonder. Over the last seven or eight years, we have been getting a clearer sense of how broken graduate education is in the west. William Pannapacker (aka “Thomas H. Benton”) writes in “Just Don’t Go, Part 2” (2009) that graduate schools
play obfuscatory games with their placement records and rarely give students a realistic sense of what it is like being in graduate school — how it’s not all about the “life of the mind” as two years gradually turns into a decade of contracting horizons and growing desperation.
Of course, the lack of accurate information available to students about graduate school is not accidental; it’s an essential component of the academic labor system. Even assistant professors, who should know what’s going on, encourage their students to go to graduate school because it is professionally risky to do otherwise. One might be seen as “doing a grave disservice to the profession,” as one writer said to me in a tone of bureaucratic menace.
But of the many letters I received last month, the majority included some version of “Why did no one tell me?” and “What am I going to do now?”
More than a few confessed the depression they experienced in graduate school. Several mentioned thoughts of killing themselves, and — after a decade of reading letters by the thousands on similar themes — I was not surprised at all. It’s more than accumulated anecdotes. As Piper Fogg recently presented it in The Chronicle (February 20): “67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.”
These are actual numbers. And the reason Pannapacker remains one of my personal heroes is that his was one of the earliest and most honest voices to talk about the obfuscation that I and my fellow graduate students experienced firsthand. What once sounded like a conspiracy theory, fancifully attempting to explain why an English department could be staffed with 8 tenured faculty members and 38 adjuncts, now looks like reality.
There has (at least since the late 1960s) been a dearth of reliable data for most academic fields correlating graduate student health, subsequent career performance, and program funding. I suspect this is because acquiring such information was as difficult as asking someone to incriminate themselves in court. There is a reason the Fifth Amendment exists. The academic analogue might be labeled, “The Conspiracy of Silence in the Interests of Self-Preservation.”
It’s not hard to understand that, particularly in academic culture, speaking up at any point may ruin one’s already slim job prospects. Moreover, it is unwise to use language like exploitation, depression, long-term poverty, unnavigable bureaucracy, Machiavellian feuding, and misrepresentation when talking about what you experienced for close to a decade as you tried to get a PhD. People will tell you to keep your mouth shut and that’s largely good advice, at least from the standpoint of the strategic job search. Unfortunately, it’s not so great from the standpoint of mental health.
Maybe your experience was like mine: after two masters degrees, I completed a PhD in just over 3 years. And though I suffered some serious personal tragedies toward the end of my program, I was able to complete my work with a minimum of trouble. Compare that to Zoe Stavri who writes in her blog, Another angry woman, that her PhD program was “so indistinguishable from depression, that I am left wondering whether in fact depression is a feature rather than a bug.” Or Audry Watters, now a freelance writer and tech journalist, who received no support or leeway when her husband died in the middle of her PhD in comparative lit. On her website, hackeducation.com, Watters explains why she quit:
I quit because I’d lost the stomach for being part of the institution of higher education — one that wasn’t sustaining me intellectually, financially or spiritually; one that wanted me to teach classes for very low wages — as a grad student and then likely as an adjunct faculty member. I quit because I was exhausted and couldn’t handle the obstacle course that grad school and the academic job market still required my running through. I quit because I needed to heal from the trauma of watching Anthony die. I quit because far from that so-called Ivory Tower being a place of solace and contemplation, it had become a nightmare of bureaucracy and politics. (“The Real Reason I Dropped Out of a PhD Program”)
Historically, what could usually be found (aside from the highly suspect Bowen and Sosa Report in 1989) came from confessions made online by the disappointed and the overlooked—those who no longer had anything to lose, felt they had gotten a raw deal from the academy, and were unwilling to be complicit any longer. Sadly, more of these non-entities exist now than ever before. The upside—if such a word could even be used in this context—is that people like William Pannapacker are telling the truth—at least a version of the truth that teaches survival.
The saddest, most tragic part is that only those who are tough survive. For example, I have survived because I love teaching so much, I’d do it for free and I’m ruthless about avoiding that eventuality. Others, whether through intensive networking or existing connections, survive through a kind of perpetual low-stakes patronage that can be like nepotism or hustling or just an exotic form of luck. But everyone agrees that academia shouldn’t be about these things. And, with the exception of Penelope Trunk, everyone agrees that a graduate humanities degree should not require the prospective student to have a trust fund as a prerequisite. As Alex Pang wrote back in 2004:
No one has born the weight of the decade’s terrible academic job market more than young Ph.D.s. Caught between a culture that insists they cannot leave academia, a system that doesn’t have enough room to allow them to stay, and a sense that Ph.D.s are not suited to nonacademic jobs and nonacademic jobs are unsuitable to Ph.D.s, they have too often found themselves deprived of opportunities and alternatives.
In a highly cited Chronicle of Higher Education column, “Deprogramming from the Academic Cult,” Margaret Newhouse mentions a number of unhealthy attitudes typical in this kind of academic culture, ranging from extreme perfectionism to overwhelming peer pressure to unrealistic career expectations. It’s useful to read her piece alongside a similar Chronicle post by Pannapacker in which the author summarizes Newhouse’s ideas relative to his own career:
Although I am currently a tenure-track professor of English, I realize that nothing but luck distinguishes me from thousands of other highly-qualified Ph.D.’s in the humanities who will never have full-time academic jobs and, as a result, are symbolically dead to the academy. Even after several years, many former graduate students grapple with feelings of shame and failure that, to outsiders, seem completely irrational.
For all its claims to the contrary, graduate education does not seem to enhance the mental freedom of many students, some of whom are psychologically damaged by the experience. As Newhouse suggested—perhaps more rhetorically than seriously—graduate school these days seems to have a lot in common with mind-control cults.
Science writer, Gwen Pearson, also thinks of academia as a cult and writes that the “Alternative Careers in Science” workshop she is regularly asked to give at her university is called “alternative” because “They don’t mean becoming a music composer or a patent examiner; they mean getting a job that isn’t a professor in academia. Because, to them, anything else IS alternative, and, ergo, inferior.”
For many grad students, it seems that there is eventually a “looking glass moment” in which they wonder if they truly are inferior life forms and realize that their sense of self has been inexorably altered as a result of living inside academia. Sometimes this is what you’d want: you have acquired a range of implicit and explicit methodologies for leading an intellectually curious life. But just as often, it can be shattering: you feel unfit to be or do anything other than function as a scholar in a university setting. Most people stop at that stage and grieve for the life they could have had if they hadn’t gone into graduate study, for the deep sacrifices they were compelled to make by a broken system, and for the profound opportunity cost involved.
There is an immense amount of unfairness and dishonesty integral to higher education, at least right now in the west. And it goes without saying that reform is needed. But I think Zoe Stavri is correct when she notes that even though it’s obvious reform is necessary “none of this will happen, because the problems in our universities are the same as the problems outside of our universities”—which is to say that the entire concept of an “ivory tower” as a refuge from economic and political realities is nothing but a myth:
The thing about PhDs is they are a scam. On paper, they are studying a topic that you love, and becoming an expert in it, and generally contributing to human knowledge. In practice, what actually happens is the university gets a research assistant for three years, to work on a project that they want studied that is in some way related to a thing that interests you (but is actually whatever they could get funding for). The university doesn’t have to pay a penny for this research assistant: in fact, they get paid to have you there! I imagine it would be a whole lot easier if everyone just admitted that this is what is happening, but nobody does. And instead, the whole structure gaslights and emotionally blackmails PhD students. It shifts all of the problems we encounter as employees into personal failings: clearly we’re not interested enough in this topic that we supposedly chose, and if we cared enough, we’d want to do the work.
If you want to attend graduate school do not dismiss voices like these. Remember, these people—the ones passionately describing what were perhaps life-shattering experiences—are just like you. They love(d) something and want(ed) to be part of it. They are smart, driven, accomplished. And they were cast out of a system as soon as they ceased being functional parts of its hierarchy. By rights, they should be teaching someone like you at some college somewhere. But this is not how things worked out.
Consider further that Pannapacker’s hypothetical of what could happen to any (academically successful) PhD after graduation is a point-by-point accurate description of what befell at least two people with whom I went to grad school:
Everyone has told her that “there are always places for good people in academe.” She begins to obsess about the possibility of some kind of fatal personal shortcoming. She goes through multiple mock interviews, and takes business classes, learning to present herself for nonacademic positions. But again and again, she is passed over in favor of undergraduates who are no different from people she has taught for years. Maybe, she wonders, there’s something about me that makes me unfit for any kind of job.
This goes on for years: sleepless nights, anxiety, escalating and increasingly paralyzing self-doubt, and a host of stress-induced ailments. She has even removed the Ph.D. from her résumé, with some pain, but she lives in dread that interviewers will ask what she has been doing for the last 12 years. (All her old friends are well established by now, some with families, some with what seem to be high-powered careers. She lives in a tiny apartment and struggles to pay off her student loans.) What’s left now but entry-level clerical work with her immediate supervisor just three years out of high school?
I write this not to scare you but to open your eyes. Graduate school is wonderful. It is also hard. It can also damage you greatly. You have to be strong, steady, emotionally resilient, and willing to look at your years of study as valuable in themselves. No matter what people say, a PhD in an arts or humanities subject is not likely to be a strategic career move. You do it because you love it and you are too stubborn not to do it. Regrets are inevitable. However, if you love the work more than you love leading any particular lifestyle, you will be able to put the work first. This means before kids, before money, before love, and before the comfortable middle-class life someone else might be enjoying with your same degree.
Am I saying you have to be a poor monk in order to do this? Not necessarily; though, I’m not ruling it out. What I am saying is that the work must come before all other things. If you can have those other things, wonderful. But they are “in addition” not “along with” or “because of.” If you think it’s impossible to work outside a university setting, read Alex Pang’s excellent blog post about this exact possibility. But, above all else, do not assume that you will be paid or even regarded as anything but cheap labor after all your work and sacrifice.
Make the work your refuge. Develop alternate forms of income if necessary after graduating. And always take extraordinary steps to ensure physical health and mental stability. Contrary to popular opinion, academia is not for the weak. And those who “can’t do” certainly can’t survive in its highly competitive and unforgiving environment.
* Note: If you are just graduating from university with a BA in an arts or humanities field and are wondering about what to do next, this is solid advice: http://chronicle.com/article/What-to-Advise-Unemployed/44491
Today, Rebecca Schuman wrote a worthwhile piece in Slate, “The End of Research in Wisconsin,” covering the academic outcry against Gov. Walker’s $250-million budget cuts and subsequent demolition of tenure at state universities. It’s mildly sensational Slate fare, which is to say, it’s well-written, informative, and disturbing. I think one of the main reasons we’re seeing upsetting stories like this about the “worth” of a college education relative to the poisonous fallout that attends it is because anti-intellectualism is a theme in American culture that has never gone away; though it’s never seemed this poisonous.
Consider: higher education has always been a battleground in WI (and just about everywhere else). We know that the collision of opposing values (and the economic landscapes created by those values) that emerges when government and academia vie for power is as old as the United States. Or we would know that if history was actually considered as valuable as STEM. The current STEM-fetish in the States is likely the invisible elephant in the room. But Shuman’s piece doesn’t get into that. Instead, she talks about how angry the University of Wisconsin faculty are at Gov. Walker’s maneuvering, citing the exploits of sociology professor, Sara Goldrick-Rab, who tried to strike back by warning incoming freshmen about the situation. Well, that’s interesting and dramatic, isn’t it?
Gov. Walker is probably interested in (1) consolidating power; (2) controlling high-profile programs (STEM–ever see an English department with a research budget in the millions?) that will be directly and indirectly lucrative; and (3) silencing all opposition. What else is new? He’s a politician. Do we expect him to have humanistic values? His entire worldview is based around trying to eat the appendages of his opponents without letting his opponents eat his. He is not interested in φιλόσοφος.
This is the same struggle going on in most state-funded universities throughout the country. This is the same collision of values we’re seeing (in a far more complex and apocalyptic sense) in the current presidential campaign. Sure, we should care about it; we should debate and discuss. Our policies should reflect our deepest beliefs. But college is not going away and neither are state governors.
The usual doomsaying is well represented in the media; though, many Americans still believe and will still believe in going to college, in tenure, and even in the humanities–despite the fact that self-help celebrity James Altuscher makes a pretty good argument to the contrary: don’t go to college because it costs too much. If all we cared about was ROI, yeah, I could agree. I guess that’s all many, if not most, people care about in the West: job skills, earning potential, stability. And who could blame them? They’re nervous wrecks, mostly because they’re in debt and jobs are scarce.
Still, I don’t buy the entire argument. You can’t commodify learning; you can only try to commodify what a particular degree is “worth” according to what the economy seems to be doing. For example, student loan debt in the States is ridiculously exploitative. Few disagree with this. And so when Altuscher says college is a horrible investment, he is more or less right. But sometimes an investment is horrible on one level and profitable on another.
How much would you pay to stay out of the rat race for 4 years, talking about ideas while learning how to communicate, lead others, and discover what really makes you tick? Sounds priceless to me. But maybe “priceless” doesn’t mean you want to go into debt for the rest of your life. When the anti-intellectuals use ROI as an argument against the Academy, what they’re really talking about is student debt vs. the state of the economy. And they’re conflating these things in an argument against all “useless college degrees” because humanistic inquiry runs contrary to the business values congruent with STEM.
But then, of course, there’s Penelope Trunk, a writer who often seems as damaged as she is imbalanced. She comes across mostly as an internet troll masquerading as a career advice guru. I’d like to present an impartial façade when I talk about her, but she’s good at what she does. Ten minutes on her blog and I feel horrible about the world because she does; she’s making a living off of it; and she is a strong writer. Sadly, all that learning she did in college has been aimed at destroying what made her. She is the vanilla Ann Coulter. And her perspective is where the University of Wisconsin controversy is destined to end.
Trunk has argued vociferously that graduate school, especially in the humanities, is now a frivolous pastime for the idle rich. She intensifies and extends Altuscher’s argument by saying that “non-science degrees are not necessary for a job” (the STEM fetish raises its head once again) and adds that “If you’re looking for a life changing, spiritually moving experience, how about therapy? It’s a more honest way of self-examination—no papers and tests. And it’s cheaper.” This, my friends, is the fine art of trolling.
She loves it: “I do tons of radio call-in shows where I say that graduate degrees in the humanities are so useless that they actually set you back in your career in many cases. And then 400 callers dial-in and start screaming at me about how great a graduate degree is.” And so I bring her up because this is the answer to what my friend, Al Cabal, has called “the end of America.” It’s not the end of higher education. It’s deeper than that. It’s the final termination point of our self-inquiry. As a country, at least in the media, we cannot bring ourselves to think past the trolling. Cabal puts it like this:
New York City just shut down the subways because of snow for the first time in the 101 years that system has existed. Twitter trolls are grounding aircraft. A drunken federal employee landed a drone on the White House lawn. The entire American police state has been built on panic driven by bullshit with low production values. Never underestimate the taste of the American public. If you doubt that, just turn on a radio to any contemporary music station. Watch the most popular TV shows. Tell me who the Kardashians are and why I should care. Google “Operation Mockingbird.”
Bullshit, indeed. In “The Great American Delusion,” Cabal writes, “When I think of the incredible hubris of this country and its anencephalic and heartless citizenry, I think of the Greek goddess Nemesis, and an old Elvis Costello lyric: ‘She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake.’”
Today, in Wisconsin, academics are screaming because their privileges are being abrogated by a power-hungry state government. Today, in the United States, this dynamic is in flux on every level and all we hear are the trolls arguing an anti-intellectual bottom line so utilitarian that it would make George F. Babbitt blush.
- Set a word count goal. My minimum goal is 7 pages per week, which comes to about 2450 words.
- Give yourself permission to write poorly. You are the worst judge of your own writing, especially in a first draft. You need to get around your hangups if you want to be productive. The only way to do this is to stop caring what the world will think.
- Meditate. I do it for 15-20 minutes before I start. I close my eyes, pay attention to my breathing, and still my mind. You can’t focus if you have a head full of burning spiders.
- Never talk about what you’re currently writing. Talk about what you’ve already written if you must. Ideally, unless you need to be flogging your “platform” and self-promoting, don’t talk about your writing at all. Put it out there and let others talk about how great or horrible you are.
- Always talk about the craft of writing but only after you’ve done your writing for the day.
- Program yourself by creating rituals and routines that inform your body and mind it’s time to write. I try to write at the same time every day. After I meditate, I have coffee, light a little incense (which replaced a cigarette years ago), and disconnect from electronic media.
- Always end with something more left to say in the scene. It will take far more energy tomorrow to start from zero than in media res.
- Do not compare yourself to other writers, ever. You are a unique snowflake. Believe it.
- Avoiding low blood sugar is one of the secret keys to intellectual productivity, especially for creative people. Have your donut, but be sure to also snack on fruit and seeds.
- After you write and dump all your energy into your work, do a little exercise to avoid feeling exhausted for hours. I currently do yoga and chi gong, but a good swim or a jog would be just as effective, I think.
I’m back in Oxford today, immanentizing the eschaton once again in the Social Sciences Library, where I must regularly do at least 67% of all my work. The other 33% is done either in pubs (sometimes quiet and wonderful places to sit, sometimes full of stinkin’ drunks, though what do you expect, eh?) or coffee shops (usually loud, packed with psychotic tourists, and unclean just an hour after opening). Unlike London, Oxford is not predominately a culture where people will sit in cafes working. I was surprised at that when I first arrived, having become very comfortable with the American and Central European styles of productive solitude-in-a-crowd encaffeination.
Cafe culture is slightly different wherever you go, but there are certain international standards one can expect (that is, everywhere but in Oxford). I think my top five favorite cafes of all time have to be:
(1) Cafe 976 in Pacific Beach, California, essentially a well-kept house from the 1920s with a big porch and a garden, where I used to while away the evenings of my misspent youth reading tarot;
(2) Cafe Josephine in Tallinn, Estonia, as much for the owner’s dog, Bari, a gregarious old retriever who functions as the unofficial greeter and maître d’hôtel, as for the coffee, which is also excellent;
(3) Cafe Indigo in Prague, which I think has gone the way of the dodo, but which used to serve an Algerian coffee that would knock you out of your shoes and realign your priorities in life. It was a great gathering place for students and literary types;
(4) Zeitgeist Coffee in Seattle for frankly being one of the coolest places you’d ever want to sit and think; and
(5) Osama’s in Columbia, Missouri, where I used to hold my office hour and drink Turkish coffee after Turkish coffee in order to cope with the sad realities of teaching freshman comp in the Midwest. It was run by Osama Yanni, the nicest guy you’d ever want to know but unlucky enough to have a name recognizable by the vast unwashed proletariat of the Show-Me State. It closed.
There have been many others (and more than a few in Tallinn and Paris), though these are the ones I think I’ve liked the most in my itinerant writing life. These are the places where I’ve written some of my best stories.
But today, today brothers and sisters, I am holding forth from the holy of holies, the inner chamber of the inner chamber of the great whited sepulcher of sepulchers, the ivoriest of the ivory towers. Actually, it’s not that grand. I’m in the steel-and-Formica lounge of the Social Sciences Library, over by the vending machines. It’s a spot where I can at least eat a sandwich and have my coffee without being psychically accosted by some miserable family on vacation from upper Spokaloo, pissed that they just paid £15 each for breakfast on the Tolkien Walking Tour. It happens. Now you’re all wearing identical Gandalf vs. the Balrog T-shirts. Balance your expectations relative to that choice, okay?
Naturally, this is a university, the university, and people don’t just come here for the amenities. They come to do the work (always the work, whatever it happens to be), to get recognized, and to generate sufficient cultural cachet for them to continue on in the style to which they are accustomed. The coffee can be bad. It’s for the service class anyway.
Enjoying what you’re eating often upsets people here for many reasons. You are expected to frown into your soup and sigh over your bagel. You might even go so far as to faintly shake your head at your Greek salad, implying thoughts of great consequence that probably have nothing to do with your packet of fattening and therefore off-limits croutons. The weight of the world is buried in your mashed potatoes. Your parfait is the parfait of melancholy. To enjoy any of it is to indulge in an unforgivable lapse of seriousness.
In such an environment, one tries to be as gentle and understanding as possible toward the highly refined sensibilities of the world’s future ministers, art patrons, and captains of industry—most of whom were born after Kurt Cobain died but who nevertheless seem to constantly reference his death as if that were some kind of magical touchstone for sincerity. This makes me kind of tired, but I try to get along.
For example, I will not smuggle lunch into a reading room. I signed a five-page agreement when I got my very special non-student library access card (speak friend and enter), stipulating that I would not bring food and drink into Moria no matter how lightheaded or hypoglycemic I might become. There are the vending machines outside. There are enough steel-and-Formica tables in the lounge to support an army. So I intend to honor that agreement. And I acknowledge that seeing me in the corner with a Cesar salad might drive some of my more delicate colleagues over the edge.
They might snap and order a pizza in the middle of the night, discipline punctured, starvation-vegan diet shot to hell, shame, existential angst, eventual career failure, disinheritance. There shall be no cheese and pepperoni. For many of these kids, life is a game of no-limit hold-em with the Devil, but as long as they do exactly what they’re told, they feel they’ll keep on winning the way they always have. The thing most of them don’t seem to understand is that if you build your life around a game, even if you never lose, that’s what your life will be about. Welcome to the casino of success. You are a VIP for life. When you die, we’ll bury you under the craps table.
So food. It’s problematic. Earlier, I was breaking about half of the rules, enjoying a deli sandwich and reading Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, which also meant I was smiling. So it was not surprising when I felt hot darts of psychic rage boring into the side of my face. They were coming from a very thin, aggravated girl at the table across from me. She had on a sweatshirt that looked a few sizes too big and what I assumed was her usual expression of dislike mixed with contempt. I thought what I always think: who, me? But then I realized: it wasn’t the standard-issue animosity most people display in this environment. It was a food thing. Next to her laptop was a plastic bag of carrot sticks and a bottle of mineral water. Lunch. I’d be in a bad mood, too.
I looked back down, pretending like I didn’t notice her staring, but I was also thinking, you know, there’s this golden retriever named Bari you really need to meet. If only. A clean, well-lighted place and a friendly dog can make all the difference in your life, in your work. I dug into my sandwich. It was good.
It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore. Publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour and goodlooking authors reading finely honed minimalism to students who would listen rapt with slackjawed admiration, thinking, I could do that, I could be them. But of course if you weren’t photogenic enough, the sad truth was you couldn’t. – Bret Easton Ellis
John Berryman is supposed to have said that a writer never knows if he’s any good. He asks himself this throughout his life and dies without a satisfactory answer—no matter what prizes, money, publications, or objects of social approval have been tossed his way. It’s easy to conclude that this is just an egotistical hangup for celebrities with enough time and money to fish for validation. Am I good? Tell me. Really? Tell me again. But what Berryman didn’t say was that these doubts seem to come to every person in every field. And insofar as nothing in this world is ever finished or static, such questions must always remain open.
In fact, most things a writer may ask herself about writing (usually in a fallow time when she isn’t writing and feels hollow and dead inside) have no real answers. There is no objective standard for writerly success. You’re never going to know, quoth Berryman. Perhaps because of this, the path of a developing writer is fraught will all kinds of psychological pitfalls, uncertainties which emerge in the space between creation and judgment—writing the thing and then deciding whether it’s worthy.
Consider the luminous transcendent moment when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature. Let’s be honest: she fucking deserved it as well as anybody else. Do you mean to tell me she isn’t a skilled writer? That she hasn’t led the life? That she doesn’t deserve to get paid? Sure, the Nobel system is a politicized, public relations hype-sandwich. In that, it’s no different than the Pulitzer, the MacArthur Genius Grant, the Stegner, or any of the other smaller awards that function as patronage for writers.
Still, I had to laugh when Bret Easton Ellis—who is also great but very different—commented that “Alice Munro was always an overrated writer and now that she’s won The Nobel she always will be. The Nobel is a joke and has been for ages.” After the inevitable social media backlash, he added, “The sentimental hatred for me has made me want to re-read Munro, who I never really got, because now I feel like I’ve beaten-up Santa Claus.” That one kept me laughing for about a week. But the truth is a lot simpler than whether or not Ellis beat up Father Christmas: Munro might not be his cup of tea. But nobody can say definitively that she is “completely overrated” because nobody actually knows. Not even, I will venture to say, Alice.
Young writers (in years and / or in terms of artistic development) especially try to fill this gap with metrics designed to quantify success and banish their excruciating doubts. But most writers have to fight this battle, some throughout their entire careers. Over the course of many years in the writing life, one sees it all:
- the hack machine who puts out a formulaic novel every three months like clockwork and points to this as the ultimate sign of achievement;
- the bitter self-publisher, who has completely dismissed the Manhattan book industry as a hive of scum and villainy, and who now only writes direct-to-Lulu ebooks because nothing else matters anymore;
- the one who can tell you any any minute of the day or night how much money his books are making and exactly why other writers are so jealous of his commercial prowess;
- the defensive YA-ist (Young Adulterer? Young Adulterator?), who started out trying to be Pam Houston but after the first orgy of rejections turned to Harry Potter the way an abused housewife turns to brandy—it takes the edge off in the middle of the day, helps her convince herself that writing about fairy children with super powers is her true calling, and makes it possible for her to stop experiencing those week-long fugues of black existential dread in which she used to compare herself to Pam;
- the lost soul in the MFA program, trying desperately to clone herself into Alice Munro or Donna Tartt or Jonathan Foer or Gary Shteyngart or whoever else is currently receiving the publishing industry’s golden shower du jour (Look how closely I can imitate X! Can I get a cookie? Do you love me? Why won’t anyone love me? You promised me a cookie. Where’s my cookie! I’ll be over there, cutting myself, until you bring me my cookie.);
- the lost soul after the MFA program, trying desperately to justify himself to his drunk brother-in-law at Christmas dinner by mentioning all his literary journal publications (I just put a story in Bumfuck Quarterly! It’s my fifteenth publication! And fuck you, you philistine.);
- the lost soul who got the two-book deal early on, enabling her to worm her way into a tenure track position at a small liberal arts college, and who behaves outwardly as if this validates every word she has written and will ever write (but who continually asks, Is this it? when she’s not buying cases of gin at the package store because maybe Gilbey’s is the only answer);
- others, many and various.
I know. I’m being cruel. Although cruelty does come standard with the writing life, these are stereotypes and we all have a little of this inside us. So pointing fingers is a bit hypocritical. Call it the pathology of trying to be a writer in a system that presents itself as a meritocracy but functions via medieval power games and nepotism. And we can be as angry as we want. We can shake our little fists at the heavens or spend hours upbraiding ourselves in the mirror. But we’re never going to know how to be good. We’re only ever going to know that we want to be.
No reasons. No consistency or explanations. Just the frozen dark, the hiss, Marion snoring in the seat beside me, mouth open. And the thought of all that water below us. I try to remember getting on the plane. I look at my face in the black window. In the glass beside my reflection, I see Darius standing in the aisle, looking down at us.
“She okay?”
His question makes no sense. I feel like it should, like he’s implying something I should understand. I force my eyes open, but he’s still blurry. “What?”
“Is. She. O. Kay?” His jaw tightens. Blue lights in the ceiling glint on his bald head.
We look at Marion. She has drooled on her black satin neck pillow.
“You never ask if I’m okay.”
Darius takes her pulse.
“My heart is beating normally, you know. Respiration normal. Everything’s good. I’m in great health.”
He places Marion’s hand gently back in her lap and checks her seat belt. Then he looks at me for a moment. “Yeah. Fantastic.”
I’m so out of it that I have to force my eyes open, again.
Darius hands me a box of Altoids. “For when she wakes up.”
“Don’t mind if I have a few as well?”
He sighs. “Fuck off, Charlie,” the ghost of his Essex accent emerging in the off.
I watch him make his way back to his seat in coach and imagine the plane crashing into the dark Pacific. Impact ripping off the wings. Explosions. Screaming. The water rushing in. What are the chances of it actually happening? Somewhere, there are statistics on this. But it could happen without warning just as easily as anything. This is the thought I have when I let my eyes close and I drift back to sleep.
La Maison Shibuya. Marion’s Tokyo residence. 25th floor. I wake up in the white leather chair perpendicular to the white leather sofa. Everything in the living room is white leather or silver or glass. The windows have polarized, turning the morning sun into a gray disk. A glass coffee table with a silver vase of reeds is directly in front of me. My left ankle is crossed over my right knee. A full martini is in my hand. Perfectly still. No sound at all. My eyes are open. Chockablock Shibuya skyline beyond the windows. Gray circuit board to the horizon.
I guess I didn’t make it to the bed. But there must have been a period of consciousness if I’d made myself a martini. Or pseudo-consciousness. Valium zombie consciousness. I don’t recall. Fragments. Emails I wrote on my phone that make no sense. Something emotional—crying in a bathroom, a collapse, wanting to explain something but not being able to. Nasty interludes with Darius, Marion’s guard dog, who knows karate and who will someday push me out a window the same way he handed me that box of Altoids. But Marion always has Valium. And it’s always like this when we fly. And we always fly.
The door to the bedroom stands open. Our suitcases sit in a perfect row beside it, the good work of Darius. Marion’s feet protrude over the bottom edge of the bed. The rest of her is hidden beneath an enormous white comforter that resembles a cloud bank. She wouldn’t have made it to the bed either, but for Darius the Karate Luggage Master. And I wonder, did he undress her, too? Isn’t that my job? When he finally sends me out the window, 25 floors down, maybe she’ll remember who I am. Then she’ll have to pay Darius more. Or pay him less. Or have someone send him out the window, too.
Her feet are straight, parallel, almost like she’s deliberately pointing her toes. Marion is 54, blonde, and she takes care of her body in ways most women don’t. CEO of the United Toy Company for 10 years, she takes care of her company in ways most women don’t. And she takes care of me, when she can remember. When she can’t remember, when she does drugs and sleeps too much; it gets quiet and I get wasted. Then maybe I get a little closer to Darius helping me take that big first step. T-minus defenestration, counting down. I set the martini on the coffee table and notice an enormous black horsefly floating in it. Then I realize it’s a design on the side of the glass. Who would buy such a thing? Marion has four residences. I wonder if she even knows what’s in them.
I walk into the kitchen. It’s brighter there. The windows don’t polarize. I place my forehead against the cool glass of the floor-to-ceiling window opposite the marble counter. The sky is crystal blue. The sun glints off Shibuya’s glass and steel. And for a moment, I feel suspended in the air over Tokyo, looking down at the mechanical life crawling through the city.
In the steel cabinet above the sink, I find a row of gray polycarbonate coffee mugs that look like they’ve never been used or even touched. I take one down, put it in the Keurig shaped like a chrome vacuum cleaner from the 1950s. On the counter beside the machine, an enormous Kakiemon bowl shows orange ducks in flight beneath a pale green sun. It’s heaped with coffee pods. I can’t read the kanji labels. So I pick a red one, hoping it’s the strongest, lock it in the chamber, as if it were some kind of anti-aircraft shell, and press the button. Milk fills a beaker and begins to froth in a completely silent whirlpool.
When I smell the coffee, I decide I’m almost feeling normal. But then I look back into the living room. A wet girl wrapped in a towel steps out of the bedroom and smiles. I’ve never seen her before. And I refuse to just accept this. My normal does not include people I don’t know just stepping out of the bedroom. No matter how weird Marion gets, no matter how drunk or high I may get, I refuse to let this be my normal. She’s dripping. She must be in her early 20s: Amerasian, pretty, defined the way one gets from Pilates or some kind of unfriendly aerobics. The towel covers most of her. What do I say? What is expected of me in this situation? I put on my sunglasses and look away until she walks right up to me.
“Hiya.” She winks.
“Hello.” I turn to the window. From the 25th floor, Shibuya in late morning seems like it should contain an answer to everything. But my mind isn’t working fast enough. I think of science fiction. I imagine we’re in a vast computer simulation. This girl isn’t really here, a pretty ghost, a hologram from my subconscious. “Were you always here?”
“Always?” Quiet laugh. She thinks that’s funny. “I’m not always anywhere.”
“You’re here with—Darius?”
“Can I have some coffee?”
I step over to the Keurig without looking at her. The latte is finished. I take out the milk canister and hold it over the mug so the tiny servomotors in the bottom can blend it into the coffee along with the foam. I hand it to her and she gives me a big smile. Her teeth are small, even, whitened. I wonder if there is anything about her that isn’t perfectly formed to spec. The tips of her hair drip onto the counter top.
“Are you always here?”
I get another mug, put another red pod in the howitzer, and start the process again. “I came in last night.”
“I know. Why are you wearing sunglasses?” She licks off her foam mustache. “It’s good.”
“This is a private residence. I’m sorry, but I don’t know you.”
Serious now, she bows. “Excuse me. I’m from Mister Lo. I was here for—”
“Me? You’re here for me?”
“Ah, no.” She turns toward the window.
“Oh. For her.”
The girl takes another sip, nods once. Then, as if Shibuya has finally chosen to speak to her instead of me, her expression goes blank. She sets the mug on the counter with both hands. I watch her pad across the living room, enter the bedroom, and shut the door softly behind her.
This is not normal, but it is my life. All I can do is look at the miniature milk vortex frothing in the beaker, at silent Shibuya circuit board, until I hear the front door open and click shut. A distant helicopter threads its way between chrome and glass office towers, a tiny black wasp, green pinlights winking on its tail. I decide this proves there is life out there, beyond the window.
Early afternoon. Yoyogi Park. A short walk from the condo and Shibuya Station. Before I left, I checked in on Marion, but she was still not up. I think about texting her. Instead, I stare at the children playing by the edge of the fountain pond. Above them, the tall jet of water creates a thin rainbow in the mist.
The last time we were in Japan, I did things, went places, spent money, hung out with people I hardly remember. It’s hazy. I was with Marion and the guys from Play Asia, a toy distributor. There were prostitutes—or girls getting paid to shop with us or paid to shop and have sex with someone or paid to seem that way and do something else altogether. It’s unclear what most of Marion’s entourage was or why they were there, but they were all getting paid for something.
Now I have more questions: why the girl; why a martini and going to sleep in that chair. How long did we all stay up? And where was Darius through all this? He evidently slipped his chain and went barking through the neighborhood, pissing on fire hydrants and running after cars. I know I might have jet lag or something-else-lag, but I can’t stop thinking that the girl never told me her name. She was just “the Girl from Mister Lo.” I don’t know why Marion does these things. Or if she was even awake last night. And what could I have said to the girl in my post-flight zombie state? She seemed to know more about me than I know about her. Maybe it’s all irrelevant.
The Tokyo Toy Show starts tomorrow. This is a big thing for Marion. So it’s a big thing for me. But I know very little about the business. I draw a salary from the company. I’m her personal assistant, but I know nothing. On days like today, when I’m alone and everyone else is unconscious, I sit in parks like Yoyogi Park with a steno pad and a pen trying to write short stories. I’ve got one almost done, which used to be a turn-on for Marion. But now it doesn’t matter much to me. When we discard our habits, what’s left? Just that long first step out the window. An Akita puppy yaps beside the children at the water’s edge, stomping its paws, running around in circles. Happy dog. We should all be like that. None of us should be from Mister Lo.
No one in Japan pays attention to a vacant-looking gaijin scribbling on a steno pad in the park. I’m on a bench with the latte. And I’m looking at my last scene, the one where the old man walks out on his front porch in Missouri. He looks at the rolling plains of grass and realizes he doesn’t care if his son ever comes home again. He doesn’t need to worry about his daughter, either. They’ve got their own lives, and he’s content with his. That’s how the story ends, but I can’t quite get the last paragraph the way it needs to be, can’t get the emotion right. And that Akita puppy keeps yapping, far too joyful for a world with Marion and Darius, Mister Lo and me. And I know that, before long, I’ll give up and wander through the park. I’ll go up through Shibuya Ward and get on the Tokyo no Chikatetsu and ride it out to a distant stop.
I get as far as Ikebukuro, and Ikebukuro is enough. On crowded Platform 6, I wait for the train back to Shibuya Station. It’s December 18th and people are dressed for the possibility of snow; though, snow is rare in Tokyo. A yellow sun reigns in a cloudless sky between the awnings of the platform. A white octagonal apartment block with red stripes like a candy cane looms in the distance.
I listen to the subdued conversations around me, my lousy Japanese comprehension made worse by the need for those nearby to be polite and not draw attention to themselves. And I feel ridiculous yet again, the gaijin in his gaijin place. Riding the metro can be a pointless exercise when it fails to calm me down—as pointless and purposeless as trying to make sense of a whirlpool of milk or a dripping girl without a name. Such times are the worst, when I can’t outrun my anxiety, when it builds like a wave and crashes over me. And then there’s invariably some candy-cane building standing over me, communicating in no uncertain terms: this is absurd and you are absurd and absurdity is your prison and this prison is your life.
So I take the Chikatetsu back to the condo. The luggage still stands at attention by the bedroom door. I’m half-expecting the Girl from Mister Lo to be sitting there, wrapped in a towel, on the white leather sofa. Or Darius, waiting to torture me with some kind of medieval, inquisitorial truth-seeking device. Or even Marion, awake at last. But she isn’t awake. Or, rather, she has been, but she isn’t now. Marion has, at some point, gotten out of bed. She filled the bathtub so that it overflowed. Now there’s an inch of water pooled on the bathroom floor. The bedroom’s white neoprene shag squishes underfoot. After her bath, she apparently got in bed again and wrapped herself in her comforter cloud bank. But the Girl from Mister Lo is definitely gone. I sit down on the bed beside Marion and touch her arm—still damp, her honey-blonde hair matted against her face. How does the CEO of a corporation live like this? Every time I ask the question, I think of all the other times I’ve asked it.
I take out my phone and call Darius, as much as I hate to do it. He answers with the din of an arcade behind him. Moshi moshi? Kore wa daredesu ka? His Japanese is impeccable, but since he must see that it’s me, I wonder why he bothers.
“Hey. Look, she’s still not awake.”
I hear dinging, high-pitched girl laughter. Someone says, koto o furenaide kudasai, in a voice deeper than Darius’.
Then his voice: “What?”
“Marion. I’m wondering how much she took.”
“Stop wondering.”
“You were the one asking if she was okay, alright? Now I’m asking.”
He hangs up on me. The nicest man in the world hangs up on me. I put my hand on her forehead. I listen to her breathe slow and soft. And I decide she must be okay. Marion knows what she’s doing. This is how she recovers, how I don’t, why there’s a girl waiting from Mister Lo, why I get lost in the park. Later, if I ask her how much she took before the flight, she’ll say something like Darius: don’t ask. Marion doesn’t pay me to ask. I walk back into the pristine living room—a place I despise for its sterile, symmetrical perfection. The windows have de-polarized. The coffee cup I gave to the girl still sits on the kitchen counter.
On days I can’t bear to walk outside, I think I might need a doctor or at least a prescription. Marion hasn’t bothered to leave me the address of the convention center; though, she knows I was looking forward to going with her and seeing all the new toys from around the world. Likewise, I can’t summon the massive energy it will take to find this out for myself, go there, and explain that I’m with her. Instead, I choose to sit in the white leather chair for an indeterminate length of time.
Same old silence. I haven’t spoken to my parents in what seems like a decade. Might be. I don’t think any of us are counting. Then there’s my sister, Linda, who I call maybe every other year. The few college friends I had back in Los Angeles—what, two? three?—never responded to my emails after I dropped out. Radio silence. Global silence. Silence to the end of the universe.
When I met Marion two years ago, I went from a one-room efficiency in North Hollywood to chrome and white leather. Still, I don’t get a thrill when I think about my bank account anymore. And really, I don’t need to think about it at all because I don’t have to spend any of the money. If I want something, I tell Darius or just order it with Marion’s credit card. Everything is available, all the time. The only thing I have to do is stay in shape and deal with black oceans of silence between the times I spend with Marion. Eventually, I know the plane will crash. Impact. Screaming. The water rushing in. Somewhere, there are statistics on this.
I go down six floors to the gym, which is deserted, and work every muscle group until my body hurts. Then I run five miles on the treadmill as the poisons I’ve consumed leech out in my sweat, which has lately begun to take on a hint of cheap floral perfume. It’s something I’m eating. Some plane food never meant to be digested by hominids. I tell myself: less fruit, more bread. More bread is nearly always the solution. That’s life wisdom, my son—deep knowledge from college. I look at the red digits on the treadmill, at the news loop playing on the flat screen, and try not to think.
Los Angeles, before. Living 45 minutes away from Linda—before she met Ad Exec Larry and cashed out, moved to Seattle, got a Lexus, had a kid for all the wrong reasons, decided that pursuing a career as a graphic designer was, well, stupid. But at least she graduated from Saddleback Community down in the OC. Most of the students there look like Justin Bieber after a scrub down. The girls have blonde hair down to their asses. Everyone dresses well. Everyone there seems to be waiting for the universe to tell them they’re sexy. You might see some tats and that pigpen student with a weight problem who’s on the wrong meds in the eighth year of his two-year degree. But he’ll be rare. A lot of great hairdressers come out of Saddleback. Highly articulate waiters. Telecommunications specialists. Hotel management professionals. I’m not passing judgment. It’s more than I’ve done.
The day I interviewed to be Marion’s personal assistant, I did not attend O-Chem and Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Linda drove me over to the temporary office at Irvine Spectrum in her black and brown Acura Legend. She’d been laying out at Huntington Beach and she smelled like coconuts, her skin a perfect creamy brown. Her hair had tiny waves in it. Green contacts. Black bikini with cut-off Daisy Dukes. A four-year-old boob job that seemed to be holding up well. Even among the beautiful people, my sister had the Command to Look, always confident, in the zone.
The volume is all the way down on the flat screen. It’s set in the middle of the floor-to-ceiling gym window. A window in a window. While you exercise, you can stare at Shibuya or at the news or at the news-as-Shibuya. There’s a section on the Tokyo Toy Show. Marion in her navy business suit with pearls. Darius’ shoulder at the edge of the picture. I close my eyes and listen to my footfalls on the treadmill, counting steps the way I sometimes do.
“You’ve got this,” Linda said, when we pulled into the lot, sharp midday sun glaring white on all the windshields.
I shook my head. “I don’t even know what a personal assistant does.”
Linda’s smile was a sunburst and I wondered how we could share the same DNA. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “People are all the same.”
The great world spins and I dream. Marion’s prescription sleeping meds. No safer than any other thing in her narcotic arsenal. But the world can spin. Let it. Depressed after a day of working out in silence, white leather furniture, and Japanese television, I take her little green pills at random just to see what will happen. And then I’m floating in the black ocean. Nothing but wind, water, the fixed incomprehensible stars, the cold machinery of night. I know this is a dream, what they call a lucid dream, the kind you’re supposed to be able to control. But I’m not flying over Everest or visiting the rings of Saturn. There’s only me in the wind and waves, the constellations I don’t know.
I wake up, bedroom spinning. I’m making out with Marion in the dark, my hands on her body, hers on mine. We’re breathing hard and I’m half on top of her. But I can still feel the ocean on my skin. For the briefest moment above the bed, there is no ceiling. I look up at the pinlight stars, cruel and endless in the night sky. It should feel strange that my body is trying to have sex while my mind is elsewhere. But nothing is strange anymore. She opens her legs and I’m fully on top of her, moving against her, but my cock is limp and I’m thinking about plane crashes and drowning and the possibility of gravity failing, such that I float up from the 25th floor of La Maison Shibuya past the moon, and no amount of trying is going to get me hard at that point.
Marion pushes me off, turns her back to me. Would you believe me if I told you that I fell in love with her at a time when I should have been taking road trips with friends and getting my anthro requirement out of the way? I roll in the opposite direction and vomit quickly, painfully over the edge of the bed. The last of the floral whatever that I think probably came from the Hello Kitty Gin I got from a vending machine comes up like acid stripping the flesh off my throat. Then I’m on my back again and the ceiling has returned but everything’s still spinning. It takes me a full minute to realize Marion is moaning. The Girl from Mister Lo has her face between Marion’s legs. I close my eyes.
The windows in the condo are already polarized. The sun is already up. Marion’s gone and the bedroom smells like sex. It’s not a bad smell. My eyelids make a tiny pop when I blink. My eyes were so crusted shut that they could make a popping sound. Amazing. Was I crying again in my sleep? Still dizzy, I make my way carefully into Marion’s bathroom, where her various business suits are draped over the chrome vanity table, her white silk blouses crumpled in little mounds on the floor. Her jewelry case is old-fashioned, belonged to her grandmother, looks like a small powder-blue suitcase from the 1930s with fold-out mother-of-pearl trays. I put my face under the faucet and let the water run across my cheek, down my neck, thinking of how Marion’s life used to seem like an incredibly fascinating archaeological dig, layer upon layer of detail, history, meaning, pain. She wasn’t like the few girlfriends I’d had in college—into nail art and taking their shirts off at concerts. Marion had depth and she had heart and sometimes there were little things, like the jewelry case, which reminded me the she was different, thoughtful. Now the first thought I have when I see the folded-out trays with their little square compartments is that the thing looks like a tackle box.
In the living room, the Girl from Mister Lo is wearing a purple velour two-piece track suit with the monogram of La Maison Shibuya in gold thread on the left front. She’s unzipped the top to between her breasts and it’s clear she isn’t wearing anything underneath. Even though I saw her naked last night, going down on Marion, that triangle of pale skin makes me look away.
“Hi.” She turns down the volume. It’s some kind of sketch comedy show with a laugh track and sound effects. The Girl from Mister Lo glances at me, then back at the show and laughs. “It’s so funny. Have you seen this? It’s called Silent Library. They have to be quiet or they get punished.” The comedians can’t be quiet. One eats noisy potato chips. Another has a digital watch that beeps and he doesn’t know how to turn it off. Close-ups on their worried expressions. Sweat beaded on their foreheads. Canned laughter off screen.
“Cool.”
She looks at me, then back at the show, then turns it off. “Okay. Want to go do something?” She’s smiling. Pretty almond eyes. Whitened teeth.
“Do something?”
Her smile fades. “I’m sorry. She told me to be here when she comes back.”
“Her name is Marion.”
“Yes.” Serious now. She nods once and looks down to the side. “Marion.”
“What’s your name?”
“Akina.”
“Fuck you, Akina.” I walk into the bathroom and turn on the shower. When I come out, naked and dripping, thinking I should apologize, she’s gone.
When Marion returns, it’s like a spatial anomaly. She isn’t there. Then she is. And she materializes without ceremony, without even being noticeable. I come out of the bedroom and I’m shocked to see her standing in the kitchen, dressed in a conservative dark green business suit with matching earrings. She’s eating a croissant and reading the Arts page of the Asahi Shimbun.
“Shouldn’t you be making friends and influencing people at the expo?”
Marion doesn’t look up. I repeat myself to be sure that she heard me and is actually ignoring me.
She chews, swallows, folds the back page.
“Marion.”
“Yes?” she asks without looking up.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t you have some drugs to be doing or some cynical little story to be writing?”
“Drugs? You’re pissed that I’m doing your drugs?”
Marion gives me an icy smile, and walks into the bedroom. I hear the lock click.
“Wait a second,” I say through the door.
Nothing. Then the sound of the shower.
“Hold on a second, goddammit.” I pound on the door, but it’s a good one. Solid. “You can’t just take a shower on me.” I pound some more.
My hand hurts, but I beat on the door until some invisible arbiter on a celestial throne hears and acknowledges my right to be pissed off—the ghost-satrap of all sad self-righteous cases betrayed and accused by their women. Because Marion is that to me. Right?
“What about last night, huh? What about Akina?”
The shower goes off and the condo is silent again. I know she can hear me. The door might be fancy but the walls are paper-thin.
I look in the fridge for booze but find only a half-empty, expired carton of milk. So I make another coffee with the space-age bullet machine and stare at the city some more. I should be feeling anxious and, on some level, I guess I am. But in my front brain—the place I should be resolving things and drawing conclusions—I’m slow. I’m sipping a sour latte while I stare dumbly at science-fiction Shibuya ward in all its gray majesty. I’m not thinking or feeling very much. I wonder if it’s like this for people about to suffer horribly—a moment of free fall before the impact.
I don’t speak Japanese. I tried once, took an online class, stuck with it for a few months. But, like most things in my life . . . . I guess I can say Hello. Goodbye. Where is the bathroom? Can I have a crepe for my spotted dog? The crepe thing because it was in the tiny course booklet they sent in the mail. Marion and I had a good laugh about that one. I’d text it to her during the day. And she’d text back something funny. But you can’t retell an inside joke. It’s pointless. I wonder what she’d do if I texted it to her now. We haven’t had a good conversation since before we left L.A.
It’s afternoon on the third day of the Toy Show, but it feels like I’ve been here for weeks. I put on jeans and a T-shirt from my suitcase, find a pinstriped button-down still folded in its cellophane wrapper in one of the closets. Instead of the train, I get a taxi to Shinjuku, where I buy pink doughnuts. I sit and eat them by a koi pond in front of a store that sells console video games and luck cats with their paws waving up and down. Green plastic irises. Clown grins. Golden aliens come to our world in the shape of small pudgy cats. Twenty sets of dead eyes stare at me through the glass. I can’t look at them.
I think of texting Marion, even calling her, though I know she won’t answer. Strange how this feels, all the pressure that seems built up around her, how the prospect of just having another conversation with her makes me nervous. This, even though I was in bed with her last night, even though, at some point, I started to think of her as my girlfriend—as absurd as the term may be when applied to a 54-year-old woman.
The koi are enormous, gliding slowly around the artificial pond made to look something like a tide pool. Foreigners have thrown coins in the water. I make out a few US quarters, some British pence, others less recognizable, maybe Korean. There had to be a point where those koi were having yet another languid, liquid day and suddenly warped grinning giants were tossing pieces of metal all around them. Koi stress. What passes for a bad day in the pond of the universe. Watching the koi—before I can talk myself out of it—I take out my phone and call Marion.
Darius answers. “Don’t call this number.”
“Where is she?”
He hangs up.
“What the fuck!” I scream it so loudly and suddenly that an old man in a suit drops his briefcase on the sidewalk. He picks it up, gives me a disapproving look, and wags his finger. “Bad,” he says.
I call back but it goes straight to voice mail. The man continues down the sidewalk. I’m bad. The alien cats grin and wave. Don’t grin at me, you ghastly fuckers.
The toy expo is at the main convention center called Tokyo Big Sight. “Sight” might be a play on words or a mistake that no one caught in time. Its other name, the one you see on the maps, is the Tokyo International Exhibition Center, situated right on the bay.
The structure itself resembles a square of four inverted pyramids, their tips extending to the ground in great oblong columns, all of it covered in shiny titanium, a New Age Egyptophile mothership. Right now, it’s probably full to the ceiling with grinning luck cats, paws waving, eyes glittering.
These are the things that stand out to me here, things that emanate from some pure, ancient, eternal soul-energy but have to bubble up through Tokyo’s various shales of politeness and hardpan conservatism to the caliche where all good people have to linger and smile and pretend beneath a gigantic Hello Kitty sign. When I think about it, Tokyo is perfect for the toy industry, being a simulation of something an emperor once dreamed. But it’s out of control now, electrified, nuclear, pulsing, grinning, waiting for you to arrive at the toy mothership so it can do a dance and take off into the impossible future.
But I don’t go where I haven’t been invited. And maybe I just feel like hell. That old man was right when he wagged his finger at me. Son, you got a problem. Instead of the old man, I keep seeing the Captain from Cool Hand Luke saying this to me. My father loved that movie. He owned it and, whenever he’d watch it, he’d quote the Captain as if I were Luke. What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. I grew up hearing that line.
The dogs on this street are either huge or tiny and they’re all accessorized with rhinestones, steel fetish spikes, tiny gold paw pendants hanging below their jowls. But the teenage girls prefer kittens. Three girls in black hoodies covered with patches walk past, each holding a different-colored cat. The patches are unicorns, explosions, One Direction, Taylor Swift’s face bigger than a dinner plate in the center of one girl’s back. Someone somewhere—probably in Tokyo—has that as a tattoo and is proud of it and can never go home again.
And whenever I think of why I left home the way I did—why I started at a Cal State L.A., near my sister but never going back to visit my parents in Palos Verdes; all the shitty jobs I took that had nothing to do with finance or anything remotely associated with my father’s world; why I decided I would never get married or have children of my own; and how I’ve never been interested in acquiring the various status symbols necessary for becoming a puffed-up self-important asshole like him—I think of that part where the Captain says, You gonna get used to wearing them chains after a while, Luke. Don’t you never stop listening to them clinking. Because here I am with a woman almost my father’s age, who, I guess, doesn’t love me and never did, who texts me while I’m staring into the koi pond: Dinner tomorrow night. Buy a suit. Don’t get high.
I have the Louis Vuitton three-piece I brought with me. What she means is: buy a better suit. And “don’t get high” just means I’ll need to be in stealth mode all night—not her boyfriend (or whatever I may be). I’ll be back in personal assistant mode. I have a very thin herculon shoulder bag with an iPad in it for this. I think I’ve turned the iPad on twice. I don’t really know how to use it. But stealth mode means dignitaries or the veiny cadavers who rise from their crypts every year for the occasion of her husband’s birthday. His name is Bob. Technically, Bob still owns the company. But, after five strokes, his leadership has declined somewhat. They roll him out about once a year so everyone can see him waving from one of the factory balconies: His Holiness Bob, Pope of the Toys.
Maybe I’m sick of pretending. Maybe I’d better watch my back whenever Darius is around and I’m standing near a window. Them chains. I text her back: Thanks for being so real. You complete me. And then maybe I have a small sobbing breakdown, making the nearby Japanese foot traffic highly uncomfortable for the two seconds it takes to pass through my area of effect. I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. I want to fly up past the stars. Crash in the black ocean. Swim with the koi.
“Small breakdowns” sounds like a Japanese reality show: you fail to be silent in the library. Then they do horrible things to you or maybe you just feel horrible and they film it. You sit by a koi pond and cry in the middle of the day; they film the fish reacting to your tears; someone off-screen is laughing; there are sound effects; you’ve served your purpose. Just like in the States or 37, 000 feet above the Pacific Ocean at night, nothing comes without some kind of price. Everything is a transaction, even hard-to-appraise human things like friendship or trust. You think money can’t buy you love, but you’re wrong about that. In most ways, it can. I get back on the Tokyo no Chikatetsu and think: I have no family to speak of, nothing ahead of me. My only friend in Tokyo is Reymund Torneau the Saucier, but I know Reymund won’t remember me.
Despondent after my small breakdown, I ride the train as it threads its way through the Tokyo sprawl, urban blocks of the city center, traffic tunnels, suburbs. Tochomae. Yotsuya. Takadanobaba. Station after station. Billboard anime sexbots holding persimmons. Robot crane garages. Tiny parks with cherry trees. Whitewashed Buddhist shrines trimmed in gold. Bronze statues of statesmen and gods. Everything that can be plugged in, is. Not all of Tokyo is electrified, just most of it—Akihabara Electric Town passing in a profusion of crackling signs, pulsing neon, particolored light and glass even in the middle of the day. It’s a red-green blur when the train accelerates. High-voltage pea soup.
So, my best and only friend, Reymund the Saucier. He, too, is electric. And though he will not remember me, at least I remember him. His small storefront cafe, Merveilleux Goûts, sells French sauces in fancy glass jars. フランスの ソース, Furansu no so-su, on every label, even on the Cajun hot sauce. Reymund is French. Therefore, all of his so-su must be Furansu. I step off the train at Nishi Station in Toshima. And, after a short stroll, I’m there—a little bit of Furansu on a gray street opposite a baseball field.
Since my last visit, two vending machines have been installed on the sidewalk to the right of the shop. One sells scarves. The other, dog whistles. Things you might need in France. And to the left of Merveilleux Goûts, a spotless, empty Kentucky Fried Chicken, the employees leaning, snapping rags at each other. The street itself looks dirtier, older, and grayer than I remember. Almost like something you’d see in Hamtramck or Scranton. Not so Japanese looking. I might convince myself I’m back home as long as I don’t look down past the parked cars to the vanishing point, where circuit-board highrises, thinner and more imposing than anything in the States, push into the sky. But where’s home? Tell me. I want to know.
Merveilleux Goûts is crowded. I walk in and take a seat at the counter, which is like the counter in an American diner—only everything, even the cutlery, is white. Reymund and his three Japanese assistants work as quickly as chefs in a four-star restaurant. And they look the part in their dress whites and straight Careme 50-pleat hats. Reymund paces the open kitchen, barking orders in Japanese while cooking multiple things in multiple locations. His assistants frown, concentrating intensely. It’s fascinating to watch, a malicious ballet that uses misery to produce excellent food. Merveilleux Goûts offers a brasserie menu with 15 different kinds of sauces, any of which can be sampled from small tasting bowls. Along the left side of the dining room, there are shelves of plastic dome containers filled with various entrees, pastries, even a rabbit ragout with pappardelle, all with a small container of appropriate so-su, Reymund’s specialty.
A young girl, who could be working for Mister Lo, but who is instead serving excellent European misery food, walks up with a small white plastic tray. Fair skin. Shoulder-length hair with a salon curl. On her tray there are tiny sauce cups. People are encouraged to take a miniature spoon from one of the dispensers located along the counter and have a taste. A man in a double-breasted Chinese suit beside me does exactly that, makes an appreciative sound and bows to the girl, who bows in return. When she comes up to me, I wave her off.
Reymund looks right at me without recognition, as expected. We met at a lunch with Marion, Darius, a translator, and two Korean businessmen who owned a corporation that made self-assembling toy robots—toys that essentially played with themselves, removing the human element. The whole time, Marion and Darius traded racist jokes about Koreans, while the translator composed statements that seemed possibly neutral and pleasant.
We ate in one of the rooms above Merveilleux Goûts, and all of it was served to us by Reymund personally. Though, at the time, I couldn’t figure out whether he and Marion were friends or whether he secretly despised her and was serving her due to some arcane geis placed on him through a business connection that he had to honor or else. Knowing Marion, I suspect the latter. But I can remember holding the first decent human conversation I’d had in months with Reymund downstairs at the doorway to his kitchen, while everyone upstairs was still eating. The man was capable of cracking jokes while delivering extremely hostile drill-sergeant commands to his underlings. He was a brilliant kitchen schizophrenic, and he had me laughing in spite of myself. Reymund seemed to understand why I lingered down there instead of returning immediately from the restroom.
But today clouds of steam billow in the open kitchen as he commands his forces with a degree of irritation one only sees in kitchens of fancy restaurants or in potential crime scenes. I half-stand and wave when he glances into the dining area, only to see him turn, lift up a bowl of what could be custard but which is probably something far more exotic, and toss it unceremoniously to one of his assistants, a young Japanese man with a terror-stricken look on his face. The assistant bows and runs through a side door. I sit at the counter in Merveilleux Goûts for 90 minutes. In that time, I taste seven different kinds of gravy with seven different miniature spoons.
Eventually, the young girl returns but without the tray. She says something in Japanese that I barely understand. I think she’s asking me what I’m doing there—but in a roundabout way, like, can she help me, one way or another, find what I’m seeking or find the exit.
“You can’t help me,” I say. “Anata wa watashi o tasukeru koto wa dekimasen. I do not need assistance.” Or maybe what I say is that I’m beyond help.
She looks at me as if I just said I have a terminal disease, then offers a tight insincere smile, bows, and walks away. She cannot help me. I do not need assistance. I am beyond help.
Out on the street, the sky is overcast. It’s cold. December weather. The front page of the Asahi Shimbun tumbles down the gray sidewalk. The drivers in cars notice me as they pass. But they are perhaps less surprised than they would be in a ward that isn’t as international as Toshima. Still, I am a gaijin. I am a Russian in the synagogue. These little circuits of supposed European high culture overdone with French names and ridiculous marketing cannot help me.
Instead of going directly back to the train station, I decide to walk for a while in the general direction of Shibuya. Looking into the faces of people driving by, I think of my one true friend in Tokyo, who no longer remembers me or who perhaps no longer wishes to. Watashi wa watashi no hanten inu no tame no kurēpu o motsu koto ga dekimasu ka. Can I have a crepe for my spotted dog? No, evidently I can’t.
So the great world spins. I get off at Kōrakuen Station and walk past Tokyo Dome. Five stark white gulls jerk into flight from a mirror-still puddle in front of the entry gate. Traffic crawls down Sotobori-dori. People on the sidewalk open umbrellas and look down as they go by. I stare at an iron manhole covered with writing I can’t understand. A wooden truck carrying street food backfires like a muffled fart. And, for a moment, my perceptual field widens enough that I become aware of everything moving around me at once. Variables in an enormous equation that has nothing to do with me.
I have attained perfect invisibility, a stone in the river. I’m not completely cognizant of where I’m headed, but when I arrive at my destination, it seems that I may have subconsciously intended this route all along. Tokyo Blue Light. A private club in Bunkyō Ward, open all the time. We stopped here that day after having lunch at Reymund’s. Of course, by the time we arrived, we were incredibly high. But I still remember. Bamboo everywhere. A whole forest of it. Low carved tables and furniture. Purple twilight from recessed blue and red ceiling lights. Add cigarette and hookah smoke and the club is disrecognized, de-timed, a non-place gone fully sideways from the traffic out on the sidewalk streaming past its blue-frosted windows. This is where I go.
Greeted at the door by a geisha in an electric blue kimono. S/he runs Marion’s Platinum MasterCard for the ¥120,000 cover. I leave my shoes on a black steel shelf by the door. Then through the black-carpeted bamboo forest to plush cushions by an ebony table inlaid with mother-of-pearl kanji. I suspect all the “geishas” here are men, but there is no way to be sure. The girls in short skirts come later, with hookahs, booze, whatever else. I sit down on the cushion and the geisha host/ess towers above me, expression unreadable behind thick white makeup. Two very thin young men dressed in black pants and button downs bring a bottle of shochu on ice and two glasses, a silver box of the Tekel cigarettes Marion likes, crystal ash trays, a heavy silver lighter.
When the host/ess ran the card, Marion’s information must have come up. That or the geisha has an eidetic memory. It could be either, both, something else. Is it necessary to understand why things happen? Following the plan from last time means there will probably be Jack Daniels and a mirror for Marion’s cocaine. There will be a girl for her and one for me, both fluent in English and willing to sit very close and find everything fascinating.
But today, when they come—two stunning Chinese girls with glazed smiles, their hair in glossy braids—I wave them off. They pivot and disappear just as easily as they came. And then it’s soft voices in Arabic somewhere off in the bamboo forest to my right, a mist of hookah smoke drifting in, and those twin red and blue suns high above. The bourbon arrives when I finish the shochu and I start to feel a little better. I smoke cigarette after cigarette, give my bourbon a jolt from the heavy glass soda bottle they brought with it, and listen to clipped Japanese mix with the Arabic. This is better than humanity—sitting in the purple light, getting displaced. I’d move into Tokyo Blue Light if it were a hotel. Sadly, the best I can do today (tonight?) is ¥80,000 bottles of liquor and high tar.
With Jack Daniels, I want to talk to someone other than myself. But the wait staff is giving me my privacy and, what, I should call Darius? I do call the number he said I’m never supposed to call, Marion’s, about 20 times, clicking off every time it goes to voice mail, which happens immediately from the second time I call to the 20th. Then I call the time in Porterville, California, the town my high school girlfriend was from. 13 digits. At the tone, the time will be 3:16 A.M. Thank you. Then I call my sister in Seattle.
She drops the phone, picks it up, says, “Uh, hello?”
“You weren’t sleeping, were you?”
“Who is this?” The TV in the background is turned up so loud that it hurts my ear through the phone, CNN, going to an ad.
“It’s Charles. You can’t tell my voice anymore?”
“Charlie? Oh my god.” The sound of a door muffles the TV one degree. The sound of a second door muffles it again.
“Where are you?”
“Hold on.” The noise gets softer until it sounds like a normal TV in the next room. “I’m in the closet.”
“In your bedroom?”
“Yeah. The shoe section. It’s a big closet.”
“Guess I should see it someday.”
She doesn’t say anything. The CNN anchor is talking about Michael Jordan starting a foundation for newborns with bicephalous mutations. I imagine Linda sitting in a room full of shoes.
“What’s with the TV?”
“I just keep it on, like, for noise. I don’t sleep.”
“What about Sunny?”
Michael Jordan’s spokesman is a father whose two-headed son is now 12 years old and doing fine. And a malfunctioning drone carrying military armaments on a test flight outside the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, demolished a segment of Interstate 5, resulting in four civilian deaths. Caltrans is clearing the wreckage. Updates as the situation develops.
“Sunny . . . she’s with Larry’s mom in Pittsburgh.”
“In fucking Pennsylvania? Jesus Christ, Linda. Where’s Larry?”
The sound of a lighter. She coughs for a full minute. The Lakers still have a shot at second place.
“I don’t know.” She laughs. The controversial new cookbook smuggled out of Afghanistan has sold more copies than any cookbook in history. “He hates it when I smoke near his shoes.”
“Smoking, Linda? Really? I’m in Japan. Want to come out here for a while? I’ll buy you a ticket, have a car come get you. It would be good, right?”
“I don’t know. I’m kind of busy. I’ve got a lot . . . going on. But thanks.”
“I miss you.”
I hear her exhale smoke. There’s an ad for some drug in the background. Ask your doctor if it’s right for you.
“Bye, Charlie. Take care.”
I look up at the twin suns, light another cigarette of my own, and listen to the emptiness on the other end of the line. I’ve never actually met my niece, Sunny, but I have seen pictures. I think I’ve got one somewhere in my luggage. Or I did at one point.
The plan is to finish the bottle of Jack and stagger through the warped streets of Bunkyō Ward around the Dome. But after talking to my sister and thinking about my niece getting shipped off to Pittsburgh and what that probably means, I get lost in the bamboo forest and the geisha host/ess has to lead me to the door. After Tokyo Blue Light, the evening outside seems bright, lights on the stadium, the fan of a small fountain illuminated behind a courtyard gate, the gentle swoosh of cars down Tōkyō-to. My phone tells me it’s 8:10 PM. I’m drunk. If I adopted my niece, where would I take her? The thought of Marion and me as parents is alien enough to make me laugh out loud when I step back on the Chikatetsu. It’s empty, which is good.
It has occurred to me that maybe I protest too much. There are starving people, broke-ass people, guys who fantasize about situations just like mine. But I wanted something else. The elevator on the outside of La Maison Shibuya is made of glass. Riding up to the 25th floor, I get the grand view of Tokyo at night, pinlight helicopter comets moving through glowing constellations, pale blue banks of office windows floating in the dark below HITACHI, REMBRANDT HOTEL, エレクトリックラブ, FUDO MYO LTD. The new gods of this age, their names glowing pridefully in the darkness.
By the time I open the door to Marion’s place, I’m half-sober again. I have an anxious thought that maybe my key card won’t work, that I should have stayed closer to home. But then the light and air-conditioning hit me and I see Akina and Darius have set up an all-white Ping-Pong table in the center of the leather, silver, and glass living room. Even a ping pong table must be stylish and integrated.
I stand in the doorway with my hands in my pockets and watch them play, wishing I was still drunk. Akina is in pale blue negligée. She’s laughing. Darius has camouflage sweatpants beneath his long-sleeved dress shirt, his conservative red tie loosened but still in place. Marion sits in one of the white leather chairs, texting on her phone, three empty martini glasses by her foot. She’s wearing a pair of men’s blue cargo shorts, one of Darius’ Chang Beer T-shirts, and she seems to have gotten tanner since I last saw her. But none of it matters. Not even the fleeting thought that she might be sleeping with Darius, too. Maybe we’re all just a traveling harem for Marion, who—let’s be real for a moment—would never, could never be my girlfriend. The term seems as ridiculous as that Chang Beer T-shirt, something that doesn’t fit with a woman like her. Pearls, yes. T-shirts and cargo shorts and a college dropout going nowhere, hardly. This. This is my life.
A rolling steel bar cart has been positioned near the kitchen area. A middle-aged Japanese man in a tuxedo stands behind it, polishing glasses, pretending not to look at anything. The ping pong ball caroms off Akina’s shoulder and hits the bartender in the forehead. He doesn’t react and neither Akina nor Darius apologizes or even acknowledges his presence. She scoops the ball off the carpet and they continue.
“Hello?”
Darius has some kind of fancy reverse grip on his ping pong paddle and he looks like he knows what he’s doing, which in itself is bizarre, his laughing adding to the strangeness. He serves. He jumps up like a professional and returns, red tie flapping. Akina also seems quite good. A full ping pong tournament is going on in the suite. Apparently, this makes everything hilarious.
“Hello?” No one looks at me. Not even the bartender.
Marion stops texting and takes a call. “Oh, hi, Daisuke.”
I knock on the door jamb and think: this is my door, too. So why am I knocking? “Hello?”
“No, we can do the plushy line and the macro fitting at the same time. It won’t be a problem.”
Darius misses a return and Akina yells, “Yatta!” Then she poses, winking and giving him a thumbs up. Darius bows from the waist and they both start laughing again.
“I’m absolutely serious,” Marion says. “Really. I love it.” She drums four fingers on her knee. Her knee is so tan and smooth that the light gleams on her skin and I notice it all the way across the room.
“Ready!” Darius serves the ball and I watch them hit it back and forth until he scores another point.
“Darius,” I say, but he won’t turn around. I’m still standing in the doorway. I look down at my scuffed black shoes. The tips are exactly perpendicular to the edge of the beige neoprene shag carpet. It’s supposed to feel like fabric, clean itself, and never get threadbare. But going barefoot on it makes me think of AstroTurf and lousy nylon carpets in small insurance offices.
Akina serves. The bartender smiles at me from across the room, no doubt wondering who I am, why I don’t come in.
“Darius.”
Marion lowers the phone and says to the bartender: “I’ll have a Captain Seven.” The bartender smiles, nods.
“Ha!” Darius with an overhand smash. The ball hits the table, goes well over Akina’s outstretched paddle, and bounces off Marion’s shoulder.
“That’s why I already approved them.” Marion’s still on the phone. She smiles at the carpet.
“Darius.”
The bartender walks five feet to Marion and presents her drink on a silver tray. She takes it, stands and, phone to her ear, walks in the bedroom shutting the door behind her.
Akina holds up the ping pong ball and smirks. “Backspin!” She serves the ball and Darius grunts, jumping to the side just in time to return it.
I drift in, forgetting to take off my shoes before stepping on the neoprene. I could be floating. Whether from exhaustion, drinks, too many Tekels, or emotion, I’m out of phase. I settle into Marion’s seat, staring at Akina’s back as it twists in her blue negligée—a pale inner skin that will eventually slide free in Marion’s bedroom. The white leather still holds Marion’s warmth and I can feel it through my pants. I know that warmth well and I consider, for a brief moment, how things could get better. But Akina makes another return and yells, “Yatta!” I think of how warmth fades over time. In the end, there’s just this cold leather.
I’m so lost in my self-pity that I don’t notice Darius standing over me.
“Take your shoes off.”
I look down at my shoes. They’re scuffed. There’s a thin line of gray mud along the outside edge of the right one. The left one is about to come untied. And I think: when was the last time I bought shoes? I mean, in a proper way, going to a shoe store and trying on a few pairs—not simply giving specifications to some grinning flunky who comes back with eight different pairs. How distanced have I become from anything real? What is this space I’ve entered?
“Your shoes. Take them off.” Darius is sweating. The top of his bald head glistens. He has a damp spot on his tie, which I suddenly realize is some kind of crested college tie from the U.K.
“Did you go to college in England?”
He kicks my foot. “Show some respect. Now.”
“Cambridge? Oxford?”
Then he hits me with the ping pong paddle and Akina starts screaming. The paddle is relatively light, but the wood is solid and Darius has a good angle on me. He holds the blade of the paddle in his hand and drives the edge into the corner of my eye. I try to stand up but he hits me again and I land back in the seat. The front of my powder-blue button down is speckled with blood after the third hit and I’m having trouble seeing out of my left eye. I want to get up, tackle him or something, fight back. But that’s the thing about being hit repeatedly, savagely, by a large man using the edge of a wooden ping pong paddle as a wedge to open up the side of your face—it takes your energy.
Darius sniffs and says, “Now take your shoes off.” But when I don’t do anything, he just shakes his head and walks out, around the ping pong table, still holding the bloody paddle.
I spit out a tooth, which I guess means he also hit me in the mouth. And it seems the region of my brain that controls pain has shut a lot of it down—the left side of my face feels like it’s had an injection of concrete. And my hands shake on the armrests, even though I’m not using my hands for anything in particular at the moment. I also seem to have pissed myself.
Akina and the bartender have run away. I’m sure there’s something wrong with me because, when I try to stand up, I have no sense of how long I’ve been sitting there, staring at the white regulation ping pong table with its stark green sidelines. It takes me years to rise from the seat and move to the closed bedroom door. When I try the handle, it’s locked.
“Marion?” Speaking is difficult. Only the right side of my mouth moves and I’m still bleeding onto my chest, creating a long dark slick of blood like something out of a horror movie.
No answer.
I knock again. “For chrissakes, Marion, open the door. I’m hurt.”
The living room looks like a crime scene—because it is. I leave a bloody palm print on the bedroom door, bloody smears on the armrests of the white leather chair. My two suitcases stand inside the front door. I remember pushing them into Marion’s bedroom. I guess someone removed them—probably Darius; though, at this point, any of my dear friends here could have believably done it. By the time I step onto the glass elevator with my luggage, I’ve recovered enough to see through the red film coating my left eye. I try not to lean against the chrome railing. Someone will immediately have to scurry around with a spray bottle and a rag, and I can’t bear to think of it being my blood that they have to clean. A strange thought, all things considered.
The janitor at Hiroo Hospital is kind enough to bring some paper towels. We wipe the blood off my suitcase handles and he disinfects everything with an antibacterial gel. 20 people watch this in silence from a bank of plastic seats. When I emerge with 13 miniature staples in my face, the sun is coming up. My taxi driver is waiting by the curb. He asks me in perfect English if I need to go back to where he picked me up. I say no. “Kūkō ni watashi o toru.” Take me to the airport.
I’m sitting on a steel bench in the airport, looking up at a screen showing arrivals and departures. To my left: a duty free shop featuring bottles of Johnny Walker under a heavy copper sign that reads, House of Walker. To my right: the moldy wall, carpeted all the way up to the ceiling in blue and pink argyle. I haven’t bought a ticket. I’m having trouble concentrating and my face aches like it wants to give birth.
In the cab, I texted the forbidden number: I’m leaving. My other suitcase has some things I actually want. I’ll send you an address. After 30 minutes of staring at the flight times on the screen, my phone beeps. Marion.
“Charlie. Where are you? I’ll send a car.”
“I’m leaving.”
“You can’t. We have dinner. It’s all set. I need you here.”
A fat gaijin in a Hawaiian shirt and a suede Australian bush hat walks out of the duty free shop, stops, and looks at me for a moment.
“I ordered you a suit. It’s really nice.”
“Marion,” I’m saying, “Marion. Listen to me. I’m—burned out.”
The fat man whistles. “Hey. What happened to you? You need medical?”
I turn toward the wall.
“If this is about the thing with Darius, I already talked to him.”
“Yeah? The thing with Darius? I’ve got 13 staples in my face.”
“We’ll fix it,” she says. “We can overcome this.”
I turn back and see the fat man already far away, walking toward the departure gates, his bright red Hawaiian shirt a tiny lick of flame.
“No,” I whisper. “We can’t.”
“Charlie? You still there? Can you hear me?”
14 hours later, I step off the plane at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. It’s the middle of the night. I slept most of the way, high on the pain pills for my face, and now I’m on a different planet. St. Louis was the soonest departing flight to the States. I have no other reason for coming here. Within an hour, I have a room at the enormous empty Hilton downtown. I go out on the balcony and look at the glowing blue-green pool 20 floors below.
In the distance, headlights float past an illuminated fountain that reminds me of the one in Yoyogi Park. I can’t imagine what Marion is doing, who she’s with, whether any of this even matters to her. I can’t imagine where I’ll be tomorrow, what I’ll be doing. The bottom lights of a plane turn against the sky. I start a cigarette, leave the balcony door open, switch off the lamp by the bed. Then I lie down with an ash tray so I can watch the planes take off.