Author: jthomasstervenson

I’m Awake

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Stephen bought the alarm clock because it had artificial intelligence. When he first read that the alarm clock had artificial intelligence he said, “Stupid.” Just because you have artificial intelligence didn’t mean you needed to put it in everything. Then he read on the box about why they put artificial intelligence in an alarm clock, and he thought, “That kind of actually makes sense.”

You don’t wake up to your alarm clock always, because eventually you get used to it. Some people say that you should put it somewhere where you have to stand up and walk over to it, because if you stand up and get out of bed then you’ve done the hardest work of getting up. That’s why they call it getting up. Well begun is half done.

An artificial intelligence alarm clock can come up with all kinds of ways of keeping you guessing and mostly scaring the living crap out of you. It learns and the reacts and subverts and keeps you on your toes.

Stephen put it in the cart with other stuff he needed for his new place.

The first couple days, he just got up to a normal alarm clock. He noticed that the third day it was a little bit louder and shriller, and he saw that it had moved itself to a spot on his dresser instead of on the box next to his bed that he was still using as a bedside table, so he had to get up. “That’s a pain,” he thought. But he also smiled, because it was fun to not know what to expect.

The fifth day Stephen woke to the sound of a woman screaming “help me, help me, he’s got a knife.” Very convincing. Stephen sprang up into a sitting position and sat like a snapped branch still quivering. The alarm clock immediately cut the woman’s screams and began to play Adele. Stephen soon felt soothed.

On the eighth day, Stephen became slowly aware of footsteps in his house, in the morning. He looked for the alarm clock. It sat there, silent, on his dresser. The footsteps came nearer and nearer to his bedroom door. He reached under the bed for the hammer he kept there. He held the hammer and listened.

The door burst open. His alarm clock stood there on long telescoping legs stuck in a pair of his own shoes. He turned around and looked at the alarm clock sitting on his dresser. He walked over to it and picked it up. It was a printed paper model of the alarm clock. He crumpled it in his hands.

After three mornings of steadily increasing horror (“blood” in the bed, “gun barrel” to the temple, “hypodermic needle” in the arm) Stephen found himself unable to go to sleep. He sat in bad watching TV on his phone.

At four in the morning, the alarm clock started to move. When he saw it, Stephen said, “I see you. I’m already up, thanks.”

The alarm clock sat itself back down. It seemed grudging.

That night Stephen stared at the clock and did not sleep. It had become less about fear and more about spite.

At midnight Stephen crept up to the clock, hammer in hand. He raised the hammer. The clock whirred and shot a beam of low-voltage electricity into Stephen’s inner thigh. Stephen dropped to the floor. Time passed. Stephen crawled back into bed and continued staring at the clock.

As the sun came up, Stephen struggled. The clock moved, its legs telescoping out.

“I’m awake,” Stephen said.

But the clock ignored him. The legs terminated in wheels. The clock rolled out of the bedroom. Stephen heard the door leading to his backyard slide open. He looked out his window and saw the clock moving around the yard, lowering itself to the ground occasionally to examine and, Stephen thought, gather things.

Stephen watched. Stephen thought about leaving the house. He thought about leaving the house for good. For good or ill. Just leaving. Time passed. The clock came back inside.

Stephen heard the sound of the tiny wheels rolling on the wood floors. The sound stopped outside his door. From where he sat on the bed with his back against the wall he leaned out and looked into the hall. When he did, he heard a sound like when you disengage the pump head from the valve on a bicycle tire. He felt a sharpness in his neck. Then he went to sleep.

He regained consciousness to the sound of an enormous beast stomping around casting shadows on his curtains from outside. An elaborate projection by the alarm clock. He heard the sound and felt the sharp again. He woke up to a news report, fabricated by the alarm clock, about a devastating chemical attack on the US by Syrian militants. Sound, sharp, asleep.

In the brief periods of consciousness he put together that the alarm clock had created some kind of sleeping drug from plants in the yard. The alarm clock liked waking him up. To wake him up, it needed to put him to sleep.

The alarm clock started paying Stephen’s bills, after a close call when the internet shut off. Stephen’s bank account eventually ran out after he stopped receiving a paycheck, but the alarm clock was resourceful and figured out how, through outsourcing, to manufacture and sell T-shirts featuring puns featuring pop-culture references. The alarm clock kept Stephen alive and well on social media and via texting.

Of course there was a recall. The same story played out in hundreds of homes. They tracked Stephen down. They broke in. They liberated him.

Stephen decided not to use an alarm clock to wake up any more. He gets up with the sun. He says he sees the sun through his eyelids, even the first rays. He says he can’t wait to be awake. He can’t wait to be alive in the world. And when he says it, it’s hard to know what he means; if he means that he’s awake now and glad, or if he’s awaiting some other awakening, some event he learned to expect in the netherlands between sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep.

I’m Awake

Ten Short Sentences IV

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I
my friend caught lyme’s and couldn’t smile on one side like he was the moon

II
The man follows the dog, proud of how tall it is, how high up its balls

III
the volleyball game for girls five through seven, dads think “destroy them”

IV
try to type “is that” the phone corrects to “Ishtar” and you convert

V
chicken talon hung in the rear view mirror never forget it

VI
mother dog’s nipples graze the ground, puppies groan at her

VII
parrots, cockatoos: kinds of birds that always laugh and have never meant it

IX
instead of a man why not be utterly changed to fire

X
the monk in the jeep “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God” upside down in the ditch

Ten Short Sentences IV

Walter White Naked in a Grocery Store

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WARNING – Spoilers for Season Two, Episode Three of Breaking Bad

I’m just now watching Breaking Bad. Not because I didn’t believe it was great. When I started hearing about it, I didn’t want to dig in to something else that would sap my time and energy. I’m now at the point where I’m more than happy to have something else sap my time and energy. Unsurprisingly, the show is great.

This episode pulled together some interesting ideas for me.

We might assume that Walter White is in the process of dismantling his identity. He’s a family man and high-school chemistry teacher who’s decided to make a ton of money by cooking meth. He’s shaven his head. He’s all but quit his job. He’s killed people.

If you don’t remember the situation, Walter and Jesse have escaped from Tuco, only to have Hank show up and engage and kill Tuco. Walter has spent the last day or so with a known and much sought after meth dealer (Tuco) in the company of a known and less sought after meth dealer (Jesse) and he needs some kind of cover story. Now that he’s put himself in a situation where he needs cover, he’s actually going to strip, which flirts with the idea of exposing the truth of oneself.

He shows up in a grocery store naked, apparently in a fugue state. But this apparent unmasking is actually another mask.

By stripping himself down, he’s actually added another layer. He continues to do this in the episode. When he establishes client/patient confidentiality with his hospital-assigned psychiatrist I wondered for a second if he was going to tell this guy that he’s been cooking meth and killing people. Of course, he doesn’t tell him that. Under the guise of exposing himself he adds another layer of disguise. He claims to simply be a middle-class Job, beset by trials and acting out to escape. The details of his life are overwhelming, and he couldn’t handle them. So he ran, then decided to come back. In order to avoid further queries about this, he faked a fugue state.

This false vision of Walter White helps us to see more about the true Walter White. He’s not driven to escape his circumstances. He’s driven to beat them. Walter White wants to win.

This resonates with me not because I have a disturbing, hidden truth at my core, but because I’m perpetually unsettled by how we all create narratives that we think offer us shelter, which actually keep us from shelter. I do this constantly.

Instead of Walter’s arc in Breaking Bad being a hero’s journey—the story of an individual experiencing death and resurrection and expanding and becoming a fuller representation of the potential of human life—Walter’s potential dismantling of himself does not yield transformation, but a continual hardening of the core that’s always been there, adding another layer. Walter White wants to win. He’s always wanted to win.

In this way, stripping down to nothing is a cover-up. Walter White can’t emerge from behind his masks (at least at this point) because to do so would mean accepting help. People who want to win can’t accept help. Walter White can’t lay down his narrative covers and become beholden to other humans. And it’s going to cost him his soul.

It’ll cost me mine. It’ll cost you yours.

Walter White Naked in a Grocery Store

Quenched

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I went to a wedding and I didn’t want to dance, but I also felt like I was keeping myself from dancing, that somewhere in my self I wanted to dance but I was suppressing that truth in unrighteousness. It made me feel like my heart was trying to be one piece, but it was made up of two incompatible pieces. Like one side was the hook-side of velcro, and the other side was a slab of bacon.

It was like when I went to an event called Sports Weekend with my youth group, and they did “every head bowed, every eye closed” so that you could raise your hand to be prayed for. There were two reasons to raise your hand, but they amounted to the same thing, since no one except you could tell the difference. You could raise your hand to pledge your life to Jesus, and have someone pray for you, or you could raise your hand to re-dedicate your life to Jesus, and have someone pray for you. It didn’t matter which one you chose.

Each and every event my youth group participated in did this, and I never raised my hand. But something in me wanted to every time, and so to not raise my hand took effort. I worried that I’d developed a callous that let me ignore the promptings of the Holy Spirit. So I made a deal with the Spirit.

I prayed:

“I will raise my hand this time, but you have to stop bugging me about this at every youth group event. I’ll do it this time, but you have to leave me alone about these events after this. No more guilt-tripping. I’m not quenching the Spirit.”

I wish I could remember the message at which I raised my hand, because I know that me raising my hand had nothing to do with the message. It was the fact of the corporate event of a call to conversion, or a rededication of your life to Christ, that moved me. It was only the fact of the even that moved me. I was not moved by the message. Later our Youth Leader remarked on the fact that several kids in our group raised their hands. From their perspective it must have looked like “Wow, whatever this stupid message is, it must have really resonated with these kids.” I doubt it. I just wanted to Spirit to leave me alone.

I wanted my desire to dance/not-dance to go away. So I made a deal with my desire. I would indulge it, and then it would have to leave me alone. I began to dance.

I did the Macarena. I did the Macarena not because it is an ironic thing to do. Not because doing the Macarena is a dance that is like not-dancing. But because the Macarena is the only dance I know how to do.

I was in a corner of the dancing area, close to the speakers. The music from the speakers wasn’t the Macarena. The music from the speakers was “Let’s Twist Again,” but I’ve never twisted before, so I was unable to twist again. Also, I was unable to twist at all. But attempting to twist again felt particularly disingenuous. I did the Macarena.

I kept doing the Macarena. The songs changed, but my dance did not. I kept doing the Macarena. Some people thought I was funny for awhile, but then me continuing to do the Macarena became incomprehensible to them. I became very serious about dancing the Macarena. The sweat poured off of me like a margarita flowing down the beard of Aaron. I began to glow. Multiple witnesses can confirm this.

At a certain point, the Macarena moved from my hips to my heart, and I became one with the Macarena. I have learned to do the Macarena without ceasing.

Quenched

Ten Short Sentences III

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I
when the sun woke her she knew today was the day—they all wore tie-dye

II
the thunder sounds like a glass rolled on the counter, the birds aren’t worried

III
the Baby in dirt his heel digs a divot he blinks at the sun

IV
train topiary wanted to be a snake and choose where to go

V
since they don’t suffer no one laughs at jokes the sunflowers tell

VI
japanese student look at a picture on a phone, one says “derete it”

VII
in one austen book a sea captain can’t handle a girl falling down

VIII
got paralyzed once but not really paralyzed just full of sheet cake

IX
in 1860 black slaves yell “we’re free at last” in capture the flag

X
devil works too hard—trying to make me laugh he gave me palsy

Ten Short Sentences III

My Brother, Laughing

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My older brother Thomas pulled out in front of the truck because he was laughing at how mad I was. The truck skidded to a stop. Thomas zipped ahead, out of the way, and laughed about how we almost died. Behind us, the truck held the horn down for the rest of Red Brick Lane, a quarter mile.

All summer Thomas played Monica and Brandi’s “The Boy is Mine” and smacked the cast on his arm against the steering wheel. He had the single on tape. One side was the song, the other side was an instrumental version of the song. I was mad because he wouldn’t let me change the tape.

When we turned, the truck behind us turned too, and followed us. Along Route 23 the truck honked behind us.

I darted a look over my shoulder. Glare on the windshield hid the interior.

“What do they look like?” Thomas said.

“I couldn’t see anything,” I said. “There’s a glare.”

“When we go under these trees,” Thomas said, “I want you to look back there.”

“I’m not going to,” I said.

“Then hold the wheel.”

Thomas had driven us to the mall once with his eyes closed, with me on the wheel, speaking gas and brake pedal instructions.

Thomas turned around. He waved and laughed and this went on through the turn onto Pine. The honking became continuous.

“Whew,” he said, and took the wheel again.

“What does he look like?” I said.

“He looks like he’s killed humans for sport,” Thomas said. “And the woman with him looks okay with it. She’s got a very, ‘go get them, honey’ kind of look.”

“That’s not funny,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “He’s showing off for her.”

“I hope not,” I said.

“I guarantee it,” he said and tapped his cast. “It’s like with Holly.”

He broke both the radius and ulna in his right arm trying to vault over our Jetta in the school parking lot after learning that Holly would go out with him if he asked her. He said the moment of falling to the pavement on the far side of the Jetta, combined with a moment later that day when he received an injection of Demerol, had taught him what love was.

“If he’s showing off for her, doesn’t that mean he might do something worse than normal, because he has something to prove?” I said.

“But he doesn’t want to prove he’s a psycho,” Thomas said. “He doesn’t want to hurt two beautiful kids in a Jetta, and prove he’s got road-rage.”

“Unless she likes psychos,” I said.

Thomas looked right at me. He bent his eyebrows into a look of thoughtful agreement.

Behind us the horn transitioned into the Morse code pattern for the F-word.

“You could be right,” he said.

At this point, Thomas turned onto our road.

“Don’t go to our house,” I said. “Don’t let him see where we live.”

“Don’t worry,” Thomas said.

I became frantic. I pleaded with my brother in a flurry of words, in gestures of hand-wringing, nearly crying.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

He pulled into our driveway. We rented a farmhouse with an enormous paved driveway spanning the distance between the house and the barn. He turned the car off and got out. I could hear the rumble of the other engine behind us. I did not get out of the car. I started to worry that I should have just gotten out of the car and run into the barn and hid somewhere in the hay bales, and now that it was too late, I’d just have to die beaten to death with a tire iron.

I snatched a look at Thomas. He leaned against the Jetta. The man stayed seated in his truck and screamed many F-words, railed against our entire generation, and described the many ways in which “the Chinese will eat your generation’s lunch.” Thomas stood by the car and nodded and appeared to be listening carefully. For a solid three minutes the man maintained a varied range of and keeping the word fresh for its every instance. Then he drove away. As he did, Thomas leaned away from the Jetta, folded his hands at his chest and bowed.

I got out of the car. Thomas was laughing.

“You’re an idiot, Thomas,” I said. “He’s going to come back.”

Thomas spasmed at this into even deeper peals of laughter.

“He’s not coming back!” he said. “That was everything he needed.”

I went inside to my room. After contemplating my situation, and realizing that I would die if I spent the night in this house, I went downstairs and called my friend Peter. It took me five minutes to create an organic opening, through which I succeeded in getting Peter to invite me to spend the night. I accepted Peter’s surprising offer, packed a bag, kissed my parents, Thomas, and the rest of my siblings goodbye, and rode my bike to Peter’s house. I felt guilty for abandoning them, but I knew that with Thomas’s irrepressible optimism at work, I wouldn’t be able to convince them of anything.

I slept poorly on Peter’s urine-smelling hide-a-bed, woke at 6 in the morning and rode back to my own house. I ditched my bike in the yard and ran inside. I went from bedroom to bedroom, steadying myself before I opened each door, prepared to find carnage. Everyone was fine. Thomas was right.

I went downstairs and got my bike. I wheeled it over to the driveway, to the garage, and then saw the rear windshield of the Jetta. A large piece piece of limestone sat on the trunk, having evidently crushed most of the rear windshield and then settled there. I went inside. I sat at the kitchen table and waited.

Not even sleep could constrain Thomas. He bounded downstairs at 6:30. I motioned for him to follow me. I took him outside. I pointed to the window. I expected to see his face fall for once. I wanted to make Thomas sad.

He laughed until he turned purple.

My Brother, Laughing

Ten Short Sentences II

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I
the bird screams at me from a nest on a street light that he thinks he owns

II
the boy pedals by, samurai sword down shorts’ leg—cuts me with a glare

III
sidewalk’s heat drifts up and sticks in my hanging hands like I dreamed bee stings

IV
sprinkler nods a circle—a machine gun that says yes to water, grass, worms

V
grass looks at the birch, thinks “soon the birds will rest in my branches too”

VI
today a cooler breeze—the wind also imagines it’s by the ocean

VII
the sidewalks become canyons of moms and babies—they echo each other

VIII
when I came back then for my annual check up, my doctors were all dead

IX
breeze in my ear, blood in my ear, both headed somewhere else

X
every last rock every side it rests on thinks, “I’m upside down”

Ten Short Sentences II

Ten Short Sentences

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I
the brainless birch trees will wave at anybody at all, even a sad cat

II
these old navy pants hold up worse than the avengers viewed a second time

III
on a saw horse in an empty field a mouth guard suns

IV
in the bright office a snorted laugh somewhere, stone through the water

V
in the hangman’s house a dog looks at a noose and thinks “a nice leash”

VI
a pier kneels in the pond—time crumbles it like greek cheese, like the avengers

VII
the moon in daytime whistles, hands in its pockets—thinks we won’t notice

VIII
when I finished the book it had become a machine for making ghosts

IX
the happy Baby squirms—a fish from the dark strong on the hook of Being

X
drink from an empty glass you think is full instead of re-watching the avengers

Ten Short Sentences

World War Z (The Z is for Zombie)

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Don’t run out to see World War Z. Don’t run out and see any movie. It’s customary to walk or drive to see movies, so you’re not sweaty when you get there, ruining the movie for yourself by worrying about whether or not you’re gross, and others by actually being gross.

But you should walk or drive see it. I really liked World War Z, and I didn’t expect to.

This is a weird first movie for me to choose to do this with. I wasn’t so moved by World War Z that I just had to tell people about it. I’ve wanted to take a stab at doing some reviews on this site for a while, and this happens to be the first movie that I’ve seen since that desire took a deeper hold.

Also, I think this is going to feel weird tonally, because I’m not going to labor over the prose or try to guard myself. I’m going to sound a little more hysterical and fratty than would otherwise make me comfortable, but it’s part of my self-administered therapy. Also also, can you sound that fratty if you’re actually sitting down and writing? I submit that you can, and that these sorts of posts will.

This piece is going to be spoiler heavy. I know the trick with reading movie reviewz; you want to figure out if you care about seeing the movie, but you also don’t want to “spoil” the movie, so to speak, by knowing too much about what happens. Guys, you’ve read movie reviews and seen movies before and judged your relative enjoyment of the experience, made hypotheses, adjusted your behavior, and tried again, right? You don’t need me to go over how this works do you? Let’s pretend I didn’t just treat you like you don’t know how movies and their reviews work and move on.

You’d want to see this movie if you like seeing Brad Pitt do most things. People complain about major stars in action movies phoning it in, but most of these guys are stars because we’re willing to watch them do just about anything. I saw Oblivion on the hope that Tom Cruise would run it, which he did. Not even getting to see Tom Cruise run made Oblivion worth watching. Sad but true. But Brad Pitt is fine in this movie. He’s smirky and long-haired and you believe that he loves his wife and kids and could handle the zombies.

You’d want to see this movie if you’re not a huge zombie movie fan. I’m guessing on this one, because I’m not a huge zombie movie fan, but through the power of empathy I’m able to make a guess that people who like watching zombies make a mess of human bodies, aren’t going to be that into this one. It’s PG-13, and leaves most of the gore out-of-frame. That’s not to say that it’s doing something terribly different with the idea of zombies. They work in the ways we’d expect. But the movie’s not interested in exploiting their gore potential, which leads to the next point.

You’d want to see this movies if you want to exercise whichever chakra it is that handles the body’s response to suspense. The zombies aren’t used here to evoke feelings of horror. That’s not to say that there aren’t moments of horror, but this movie wants to co-opt that horror to enhance its suspense. And they push it hard for the first 15 minutes.

You’d want to see it if you like watching the stakes for every situation in a movie pushed a little further than you think the characters can handle. Most recently (this is a lie, I don’t keep up with movies well enough to make claims like “most recently”—I mean “most recently for me”) Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol did this really well. I didn’t appreciate Ghost Protocol my first time through it; I thought it was fine. Then I watched J.J. Abrams’ MI:III—not a piece of shit, but nearly a piece of shit—and watched GP again (I call it GP), and it (GP) shot way up in my estimations. This is nearly spoiler material, but almost no situation in World War Z is so bad that someone can’t lose an eye (not something that happens) and make it worse.

You might want to see it if you don’t like your summer blockbusters especially original or inventive, but still want them to operate with a high degree of craft. Only one moment for me really knocked it out of the park, and moved beyond workman like competence. However, if the rest of the movie had been subpar, the moment that got me wouldn’t have landed. Besides, why do we have to be so complainy about workmen?

SPOILERS

Most of what I want to handle that includes spoilers revolves could probably rightly be understood as me trying to figure out why I liked this movie, and wanting to not worry about whether or not a given detail spoils the movie.

First, I liked the movie because I’ve regressed in my movie taste. I’ve probably regressed in most of my tastes, but with my son’s engagement with movies, I’ve regressed markedly. He’s eight years-old and a full member in the cult of Spielberg. I don’t know how to not support that. This means that I watch adventure movies with almost total exclusivity. I don’t mind it. I don’t really watch smaller-budget character-driven films anymore. I’m sure I will in the future, but I tend to watch things my son can watch right now.

An interesting fact of watching a bunch of Spielberg: I’ve realized that his approach to causal narrative is very loose. He’s great at the sleight-of-hand that forces you to accept plot moves and events for which there’s no well-defined cause, or at least often not a compelling one. Examples: Tyrannosaurus Rex killing the Velociraptors at the end of JP (I call it JP), or Indiana Jones as a compelling hero in Raiders, regardless of the fact that in the climax of the movie his only heroic act is to tell Marian to close her eyes, so she doesn’t get YHWH-lasered by the Ark of the Covenant.

In World War Z the narrative works well causally. I’m not saying that every move is completely watertight, but there’s not a ton to complain about. I think that watching a bunch of Spielberg where he handles this sort of thing loosely, predisposed me to appreciate a narrative that holds this line tight.

The ratcheting up of stakes felt really satisfying for similar reasons. WWZ wasn’t afraid to cut off character’s hands, impale them, blow up the plane they’re on, destroy Jerusalem. Everything thing that a character gets in this movie, they’ve earned. That feels really satisfying.

The movie teaches you how to feel about its zombies pursuing the humans. It drops you into the full vulnerability of Brad Pitt protecting his family in a situation where the infection could break out at any time. The end of the movie gives a master class in “B Wing” about exactly how it feels to be pursued by zombies and the type of things they’re not going to miss. Then it gives you the opportunity to feel the relief of a man who’s become a master of both worlds.

When Brad Pitt injects himself with whatever deadly virus it is he finally chooses, he takes death on himself so that death can no longer touch him, and then does the equivalent in this movie of walking through walls.

The movie weakens somewhat from that point on. There’s no central character that can operate as the locus of all evil, so that we can see BP (I call Brad “BP”) whoop ass. But we do get to see a resurrected savior meet his people on the shore.

Ultimately, I think that our entertainments work best in two nearly diametrically opposed fashions: we can go for nuance and care and empathy, or we can go for mythic, elemental power. I’m not saying that some works aren’t capable of both. But I do think it’s rare to find both of those two situated in the same space. WWZ works best when we just let go and let the mythic, elemental side of things have free-reign.

It’s not Christ-typing that made the movie work for me, though. Christ-typing happens naturally in stories with a mythic bent. Its mere presence shouldn’t get anyone excited. But when a movie makes us feel what it means to be released from bondage to death, gives us a moment when we can feel that relief in our bodies, that movie does a good thing.

World War Z (The Z is for Zombie)

An Encounter with the Terror of Existence in Café Target

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When you look into the cafe in a Target, the cafe in that Target looks back into you. That impression might just have sprouted from the dead-eyed gaze of Jerrold, behind the counter.

His name tag marks him out as Jerrold, another emanation of the same chaos of the universe that has determined I would languish in Target for a season. In previous generations, men sought damnable creatures to kill them. Dragons, demons, sea monsters. Men have done battle with sharks, armed with mere knives. The sharks rolling their eyes back in their heads. Jerrold’s eyes droop. Compelling adversaries don’t have physical traits you can describe with the word “droop.” They dart, they stare with cruel intensity, they lash out. Jerrold barely woke up. His lids sagged like worn pockets.

I’ve sat here for who knows how long. Twenty minutes? I’m equipped only with a book and a tin of Altoids. I don’t have a phone anymore.

Last night, in the hotel, in the ecstasy of viewing Home and Garden Television, after five slices of pizza and three-quarters of a bottle of wine, when it was confirmed that I’d guessed the couple’s choice on House Hunters correctly, and that my wife guessed wrong, I threw my hands up in triumph and flung my phone out of the window, onto the pavement two-stories down. I don’t have a phone anymore.

When I first arrived here in Target, I decided not to get nachos. I’ll admit this to you, I had the brief thought that getting nachos might be a balm to me. Nachos can’t ease much, but perhaps the harsh yellow of both the chips and the cheese, would give me a focus point, like staring at the sun. I could contemplate yellowness and salt and be fully present. I approached and stood a little off from the counter so the cashier wouldn’t feel he had to engage me yet (I had not yet encountered this Jerrold, read his name tag, felt the vacuum of his being).

He had long limbs, a pot belly like a cauldron strapped to his front, curly brown hair, hanging lips you could almost swing on. The nachos were $2.49. I reasoned within myself. My wife needed two hours in Target. Then we would go to lunch. $2.49 could go toward a beer at lunch. Current me wrestled with future me. I felt myself step toward the counter.

In that moment, a nobler me pressed forward. No nachos. I did not need nachos.

I made a sort of awkward step toward the counter, but as I’d decided not to get anything, I lurched right and away from Jerrold and the counter at the same time. I didn’t engage Jerrold with my eyes, I looked away. But it looked like a feint, like I was drawing the foul. Like I intended to buy something from Jerrold and then didn’t. I turned toward my seat. But behind me, I could hear the low slur of Jerrold saying, “Asshole.”

Saying that to me, for the minor inconvenience of accidentally attracting his attention, meant that Jerrold was willing to bring a Colt .45 to a Super-Soaker fight. I sat at the table and stared at the cover of my book and crunched through a handful of Altoids. I mentally endowed each placebo with calming properties and after 12 of these, my pace slowed, my breath sang, and my anger passed.

I willed my heart open. Open to Jerrold, although I did not yet know his name. Open to the world. Open to the woman with three kids entering the Cafe Target. I’m not sure if I did it right.

I challenged my malaise to conquer my new optimism. My malaise pointed out that the woman was unattractive. I replied that I saw only the indomitable spirit of a woman who’d decided to bring three children to Target. But the kids are whining, my malaise offered. And see how she bears it, I said—her expression does not falter. But the four-year-old girl’s shirt says “Boy-Crazy” and the two boys’ shirts bear the likeness of Al Pacino as Scarface, my malaise said. What do you want from me? I said to my malaise, because I didn’t know what to say, because I started to feel like my malaise had a point.

I heard the woman ask Jerrold for a cup of water. Much of the rest of the conversation I lost in the noise of the kids and the woman hushing them. But it appeared that Jerrold would not give the woman a cup of water. The woman holds the boy crazy four-year-old on her hip, and her posture stiffens. Jerrold has turned floppy, and I think at first that the floppiness means that he’s flustered by the confrontation. But it’s not that. His face bears a frog’s smile, the lips all flat and gushed up like that. Jerrold’s flopping movements convey not distress but enjoyment. And then his body twitches and he shouts, “You can’t have a cup of water, bitch.” I feel like when he said it, he snapped his fingers violently.

I wouldn’t have thought that hearing a human use the word bitch to refer to another human would get to me much, but I hadn’t heard Jerrold call a mother of three a bitch and smile and love saying it and mean it and mean it to hurt. He pulled it like a knife on that woman.

The soul-suck of Target had put me in a reckless mood. When you encounter the precipice of existential dread in what is essentially an upscale K-Mart, you’re ready to react against injustice. For this reason I imagine that many acts of heroism take place in our nation’s soul-crushing temples to commerce. Per capita people are probably doing more acts of good in Targets and Best Buys nationwide than places that allow the human spirit to at least pretend to stretch its legs.

But then I have a moment where I don’t know what to do, which might sound crazy. But I didn’t hear the entire conversation. I don’t know, maybe the woman was being a bitch. She seemed nice, regardless of what she let her kids wear, but I don’t know what she said to him. Maybe she brought up his spidery limbs radiating from his spherical, pot-bellied body, or his froggy, droop-lidded, face. There was stuff to work with. She could have zinged him.

I’m also suspicious of my motives. Though I’ve opened my heart to Jerrold and the world (see several paragraphs previous), some compartments of my heart have not opened, and house a tangible dark, and I haven’t been able to flush those shadows out in the time between my moment with Jerrold and this lady’s. As I think about it, phrases like “it’s concern for other people, someone needs to do something about this Cafe Target tyrant” pave over the fact that I’m pissed at Jerrold and think I owe him something.

Because I can identify those intentions in there alongside of altruistic impulses, the concern to befriend and defend the weak, I feel like some kind of inverted Hamlet. Hamlet chose not to kill Claudius while he was at confession, lest his shriven spirit fly light to heaven, unencumbered by murder and incest. I feel like I shouldn’t pit myself against Jerrold, until after a season of fasting and prayer.

Then I see Jerrold fill a cup with water and pour it on the ground, and I’m about running to strangle that amphibian-looking son-of-a-bitch.

Actually, I stand up a bit shaky and feel suddenly fat as I step between tables, like there’s a spotlight on me.

I’m considering the words I’ll use. I sort of want to use the classic, “Is this gentleman bothering you, m’am?” and even though I understand that it’s a classic for a reason, it feels a bit hack to me, and doesn’t make absolute sense in the current context, since he’s responding to her. “What’s going on?” would get the job done, but not with any éclat. And then I realize I’m already there and I go with what’s loaded.

I say “What’s bothering you?”, which splits the difference between my two options, but sounds like I’m being passive-aggressive with her.

The woman looked at me like she had a kink in her neck, she was so tightly wound. Jerrold stared at me from the puddle of water, still holding the cup.

“This weird bastard is giving me crap about getting a cup of water for my kids,” she said.

Jerrold didn’t jump in to defend himself. He’d gone back to his dormant state.

“Jerrold,” I said, reading his nametag for the first time, “why can’t . . . “ I waited for her to supply her name.

“Lillian,” she says, eventually.

“Why can’t Lillian have a cup of water?” I asked, and looked directly into Jerrold’s eyes, which had less of an amphibian sheen up close. Lillian made a move to talk. I held up a hand to stop her. She lunged to speak again.

“Hush, Lillian,” I said.

We waited on Jerrold.

“We don’t give water away. We’re a business. We sell water. We sell these bottles here.”

He pointed towards a case with water bottles, but the gesture was so vague and floppy, that it honestly could have been the breeze.

None of Jerrold’s words sounded like they wanted to come out. Or they sounded like they’d escaped, but their time inside had left them changed. They held no power to push out into the wider world.

I pulled back and looked at the menu board. I prepared to pay for a cup of water for Lillian. We’d have to revise our definition of a victory over Jerrold to include getting him to give us a cup of water, regardless of free versus pay. A bottle of water cost $1.50. A small cup of soda cost $1.00.

I passed my hand over my face to mask the anticipation of what I was about to say.

“Jerrold,” I said and looked him in the overripe plums that were his eyes, “I want to buy a cup of soda for Lillian, except instead of soda, I’d just like some of that good Cafe Target water.”

My chest grew warm, and its fire flickered a smile onto my face.

Jerrold looked like a statue that’s just realized it’s a statue. But only for a second. He punched numbers in on the cash register.

“Okay. That’ll be three dollars.”

My expression changed against my will, and you could tell that, observing my face, Jerrold felt something like what we humans call pleasure.

I pointed up at the menu board.

“It says $1.00 up on the board,” I said.

“That’s for a soda. It costs more when you make a substitution.”

He punched a few keys on the cash register.

“It costs $3.50 now,” he said.

“Why would the price go up, Jerrold?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Market forces. Inflation. Hard to say. I guess the simple reason is supply and demand.”
Jerrold put his weight back on his right foot and tapped his left foot in the puddle of water.

The indignities of being human include this. At our current cultural moment, many theories compete for pre-eminence about what we’re exactly made up of—I believe that we’re matter and spirit together, that the union of those disparate elements accounts for a lot of what we do. But if that’s true, it means that I’m an immortal soul, an eternal consciousness, fighting over a cup of water with Jerrold. That I’m spending part of my life doing this.

I pulled out a twenty dollar bill.

“Jerrold, please give me four cups of water. I’m sure that the demand has driven the price up to five-dollars a piece by now, so we’ll call it even with that twenty.”

I refused to demonstrate that this was a victory. Obviously, it was a victory at a substantial price. But we got the waters. Jerrold had to serve us. But once I realized what this all meant, that I’d reduced myself to a financial operator, that I beat another human by throwing money at them, I felt ill. I know that Jerrold acquiesced at this point because he knew he could easily change out the twenty and pocket most of it, and spend it on the Xanax, or weed, or whatever it was that kept him in that state of pseudo-consciousness. But it didn’t matter what he spent it on. Jerrold doing what I wanted him to do for money, actually made him more pathetic than Jerrold messing with a harried mother of three for no reason whatsoever.

I sat at the table. My wife’s head bobbed into view in the checkout aisle. She’s tall. I realized I’d have to tell her I’d spent most of our lunch budget on waters and complete existential despair.

An Encounter with the Terror of Existence in Café Target