At the end of the next week, Barry phoned Brenda and said, “Okay, you win the privilege of being able to say ‘I told you so.’”
“I wanted no such thing.”
“What did you want, then?”
“I wanted you to understand what you’d done to me. You drove away in your planet-killing truck, with me sitting, literally, in the gutter.”
“Please, just unwish your wish. You want me to beg?”
“No. I’m not cruel like that—cruel the way you are. Killing an animal and feeling nothing.”
“Brenda, please unwish your wish.”
“I can only do that by making another wish. I wish that from now on, all children will stop loving their parents.”
“You bitch.”
And so everybody on earth of all ages stopped loving their parents. But the results of this were subtler, for it’s nature’s way for children to be ungrateful to their parents and to take them for granted. Younger children continued whining and behaving badly, as always. Older children with older parents simply continued putting off that phone call to the folks that they’d been delaying anyway. Millions quit jobs they’d chosen to please their parents. Greeting card manufacturers went out of business, and there were millions of instances of children killing their parents to speed up their inheritances; courts around the world became bogged down with murder cases.
Barry phoned Brenda. “You win.”
“It’s not about me winning. It’s about you understanding what you did to me and what you did to that dog.”
“Oh God, I can’t believe you’re still harping on that.”
Brenda sighed. “You really are a prick.” And then, in a rash moment, she said, “I wish that everybody on earth would stop loving everybody else.” Her wish was granted, and there was no wish left to undo it. The world turned into a planet of loners—a planet of Unabombers, hermits and recluses, people doomed to being solitary without the possibility of solitude, a world without hope.
Good, thought Brenda. I like it this way. Now everybody knows what it feels like to be me.
HARJ
“That is not what I would call a happy ending. Poor Brenda and poor Barry. Had it not been for their selfishness and their hunger for power and control, they might have found the courage to make the big changes in their life,” I said.
“I have to add,” Zack said, “that I didn’t ejaculate inside my brain over that one.”
“Screw both of you. Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They’re an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid. In any event, I will now tell my story, which, in a funny way, is connected to yours. It is called ‘The Man Who Lost His Story.’”
The Man Who Lost His Story
by Harj Vetharanayan
There was once a man who lost his story. His name was Craig and he looked just like you—and his life was quite similar to yours, too—except that somewhere during his life he lost his story. By this I mean he lost the sense that his life had a beginning, a middle and an end. I know, yes, we’re all born and we all do stuff and then we die, but somewhere in there are the touchpoints that define our stories: first love, a brush with death, a scientific insight, a yen to climb tall mountains—and then we die. The story of our lives is usually long over before we die, and we spend our twilight years warming our hands on the embers of memory. Craig’s problem was that he got to a point—thirty-eight, say—when he realized that none of his dots connected to make a larger picture: a few unsatisfying and doomed relationships; a job so dull a chimp could perform it; no hobbies that could be teased and stretched into larger, more vital ways of living life.
His lack of a story seemed to be a which-came-first-the-chicken-or-egg scenario. For example, he thought that if he learned how to hang-glide then maybe his life’s story could begin there—an adventure! Perhaps a mystical moment up in the sky! But wait . . . in order to have such an adventure, Craig would have to be into hang-gliding to begin with. If he rushed out and chose an activity at random, would he then have a meaningful experience? As Craig wasn’t actually into anything, he was trapped in the chicken/egg loop. Where to start? And how? He felt that his attempts to generate a life story were futile.
Craig decided to go to the Learning Annex and sign up for hang-gliding lessons anyway, but the woman who took his application form looked at him and said, “You’re not really into hang-gliding, are you? You just want to do it so that you can imagine your life is a story.”
“How did you know that?”
“It’s pretty much all you get in a job like this: people like you walking in and hoping they can push a button and suddenly their lives become stories. You should hear my friend Phyllis, who works down the hall, accepting forms for white-water river-rafting excursions.”
Craig walked away, his shoulders slumped, once again troubled that his life had no narrative to it. He was back to being “Craig: The Guy Who Merely Existed.”
On his way back to his apartment, posters and billboards and light boards showed people being sexy and fun and charismatic as they enjoyed beaches and ski slopes and parties that were filled with people who looked much like Craig or his sister, Craigeena. The exciting lives of all these billboard people weighed heavily on Craig, and when he got home he called a few friends (who, it must be said, felt sorry for Craig, but not too sorry). One of them said, “I mean, Craig, let’s say you break a leg; fine, that’s a real problem that you can fix. Or your wallet gets stolen—you can replace it. But losing the narrative of your life? Dude, that’s pretty bad.”
Of course, the moment Craig hung up from speaking with his friends, they all went online and trashed him behind his back. All 93,441 of Craig’s official online social networking friends and buddies sent texts and IMs along the lines of, “Gee, I’m Craig—look at me! I’m so super-fantastic and groovy that my life has to be a story,” or, “Yessirree, that’s me, 168 pounds of animal magnetism in search of an empire to conquer, an empire without borders, a kingdom filled with endless new battles to be waged and won . . . not.”
Craig went back to the Learning Annex the next day to sign up for Tae Bo, and the woman remembered him. “You’re the guy whose life has no story. How’s it going?”
“Not too well, thank you. I thought maybe Tae Bo would loan my life a unique narrative edge.”
The woman—whose name was Bev—said, “Craig, the hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative. Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state. I really wouldn’t be surprised if your friends were making fun of you behind your back, Craig.”
“Really?”
“Really. So, in a nutshell, given the current media composition of the world, you’re pretty much doomed to being uninteresting and storyless.”
“But I can blog my life! I could turn it into a story that way!”
“Blogs? Sorry, but all those blogs and vlogs or whatever’s out there—they just make being unique harder. The more truths you spill out, the more generic you become.”
“All I want is for my life to be a story!”
“Did you read a lot of books growing up?”
“Yes.”
“Ah. Well, there you go. Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that’s happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be
[email protected].”
There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, “Isn’t it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?”
“It really is,” said Bev.
Craig stood there and finally said, “So, you know what? I’ll pass on the Tae Bo.”
“Right. How about Calligraphy and Menu Design?”
“Pass.”
“Okay. But keep us in mind.”
Craig walked away, angry that the modern world conspired to force him into thinking in its manner, rather than the other way around. How cruel that mankind was forced to conform to the global electronic experience. But all other options had vanished. There no longer existed a country to escape to (“country”—also, what a quaint notion) where people read books and had lives that became stories. Everyone’s life had become a crawl that dragged across the bottom of a massive TV screen in an empty airport lounge that smelled like disinfectant, bar mix and lousy tips.
When Craig got home, he had 243,559 emails from friends, and links that gently gave him an e-poke in the ribs about his desire to be a story. Some emails were serious, some were snarky, some promised him a larger member, and some demanded that he sign a legal document before ideas were sent his way. After he ate dinner, Craig’s doorbell rang. It was the Channel Three News team, putting together a weekend think piece on “The Man Whose Life Had No Story.” Craig thought, Maybe this is something hopeful in disguise. But the news team mostly just asked him who he thought might play him in the movie of his life and if he’d gained or lost any weight lately. He chased them out of his apartment.
Desperate, he went back the next day to see Bev. Surely someone in a position like hers would have insights and ideas he could apply to his situation.
“You again,” said Bev. “I was expecting this.”
“Really?”
“I’m assuming you want to take drastic action, then.”
“Yes.”
“Come with me.” Bev put a CLOSED sign in front of her window and beckoned Craig to follow her down the hall.
After making many left and right turns, and after passing through above- and below-ground tunnels, they ended up at a large, hospital-ish door covered with warnings and a request that visitors use a sterilizing gel on their hands before entering.
“We’re here,” said Bev, opening the door; she and Craig entered. It was a lab of some sort that seemed to share space with a theatre department. Wires and pressure gauges and digital meters existed alongside caveman outfits, Sir Lancelot costumes and old coins. It was a mess.
Craig asked, “What’s this about?”
Bev said, “This is your one chance to get a good story going in your life.”
“Really? This? But I’ve never acted before, and I was never good at science.”
“No need to worry. Neither skill is required. If you sign this form here, we can get you set up.”
The form was a two-hundred-page document titled “Story Capture via Anachronic Transference.” Craig signed the contract’s final page while Bev nodded. She then took the document away from Craig and issued a two-finger whistle. From the wings appeared three muscular goons. Bev said, “We’ve got another one, boys. And don’t go easy on him. He needs a story real bad.”
The goons proceeded to wallop the daylights out of Craig. They clubbed him with aluminum baseball bats, ripped off all his clothes, poured some sort of chemical into one of his eyes and then tossed him into a scientific device that resembled an Apollo space capsule.
“How far back are we going to send him, Bev?”
Bev said, “Let’s send him to the thirteenth century.” She twiddled a knob.
“Where?” Craig shouted, his voice riddled with pain.
“The thirteenth century. They’re running low on people there, so every extra soul we send them is a big help.” She looked to one of her goons. “Bartholomew, throw some peasant rags into the time chamber.”
Bartholomew tossed rags into the chamber.
“Shut the door!”
Bartholomew shut the door.
Craig was beating on the capsule’s little window. “Let me out of here!”
Bev smiled and shouted, “Craig, you’ll love it there! All they do is feed goats and wait for troubadours to pass through the village and tell them stories.”
“But what am I supposed to do there?”
“You’ll be a peasant! You’ve got a role to fulfill! Just be sure to worship and defend whoever owns you!”
“And the clergy!” added Bartholomew.
“Yes,” shouted Bev. “And the clergy. We crippled you a bit so that you’ll fit in better once you arrive! Your teeth are kind of nice, though—you might want to break one.”
“But I don’t want to—”
Whoosh! The time machine gleamed and Craig was whisked back to the thirteenth century. A tear fell from Bev’s eye, and Bartholomew asked her why.
“I’m so jealous,” she said. “He gets to go back in time and be real and hang with real people having real lives. Us? We’re stuck here.”
“Not to worry,” said Bartholomew. “I’ll take you out for Japanese tonight. And afterwards I’ve got two new Woody Allen movies lined up. Oh, I forgot—have you got next week’s plane tickets for Hawaii confirmed?”
“You bet.”
“Ah, the modern world,” said Bartholomew. “So empty. So dreary.”
“If only our lives could be stories like Craig’s.” Bev sighed and looked at Bartholomew. “You’re smiling—why?”
“Because I thought you deserved a treat, so I had your Corvette detailed today.”
“Oh, Bartholomew—you’re the best.”
And thus our story has a happy ending.
ZACK
“Thanks, Harj. The Depressionator strikes again.”
“My story was not depressing,” Harj insisted. “I thought it was uplifting—a story of hope and faith. I’ve spent my life dreaming of having a car beautiful enough to merit being detailed. And Japanese food is as exotic to me as Narnia is for you.”
Diana looked at me and said, “My pussy just exploded, but I can’t stop fucking!” Her Tourette’s gives and gives and gives.
It was a nice night. It was intimate and even richer than the night before because of all the violence and craziness of the day. We also had some new bottles of dandelion wine that were sweeter and less chemical-tasting than the previous night’s satanic blackberry plonk. We recharged our drinks—Serge even accepted a thimble’s worth—and arranged ourselves once again on the braid rug in front of the raging fireplace. The flames reminded us, obviously, of the plane earlier, but nobody said anything.
“It’s your turn to tell a story, Zack,” Julien grumbled.
“Yes it is, and my subconscious has never failed me yet. So everybody sit back and let me tell you all a rich, ballsy story, a story that comes from the heart. A story of faith and hope. A story called . . .”
666!
by Zack Lammle
Bruiser and his girlfriend, Stabby, were driving to a reunion concert of the beloved late-1990s heavy metal band Coffinshark. They were too young to have appreciated the band back when it was at its prime, back when the surly quartet, with their signature tall hair, lurched from stadium to stadium, leaving in their wake a swath of herpes infections, ten thousand lakes of barf and dozens of hotel managers thrilled to be able to charge the record company a hundred bucks for the tiny ashtrays the band shattered in Phoenix or Tampa or New Haven or Bowling Green. Bruiser and Stabby were, however, absolutely old enough to appreciate Coffinshark’s undeniable camp value, and, if they were honest about it, its members’ actual value as reasonably gifted stringed instrument savants with zero self-awareness and a fondness for discount eyeliner.
Stabby said, “Okay, the moment I found out these guys were doing a reunion tour, I heard my toilet flush, but dammit, Bruiser, we are going to that concert.”
Bruiser couldn’t have agreed more. The couple drove up the interstate en route to Capitol City’s new civic arena, listening to a cassette tape version of the 1998 masterpiece album UNICEF Is a Whore. They were chanting along to the song’s refrain—“6
66! 666!”—when Stabby suddenly stopped doing her homage hair-flings and turned it off, annoying Bruiser. “Why’d you do that?”
“Bruiser, I don’t get it. What’s the whole ‘666’ thing about?”
“It’s, like, Satan’s signature evil number.”
“No, I know that, but what does it mean?”
“Uh . . .” Bruiser suddenly made the oh-now-I-get-it noise. “You mean, what’s its secret meaning? Freemasons and the EU and stuff like that?”
“No, I mean . . .” Something odd was happening inside Stabby’s head. “I mean, Bruiser, what’s a number? What’s a six?”
“What do you mean, what’s a six?”
“What I said. Six. What is it?”
“Uh . . .” Bruiser was stumped, too.
Out of the blue, both Bruiser and Stabby had suddenly lost their knowledge of numbers—what they are, what they were, what they mean, how they work—everything. They’d even forgotten the word “six.” “Six” wasn’t even a noise any more. It was nothing—though it didn’t mean “zero” to them because Bruiser and Stabby had also forgotten what zero was. They looked at the numbers on the highway road signs; they were like ankle tattoos and created no sounds inside their brains. The dashboard was a mosaic of hieroglyphs.
They pulled the car over to the side of the road.
“Shit. I mean—numbers—we’re supposed to know what they are, right?”
“Are they like letters—do they make sounds?”
“I don’t think so. You can still spell and read and everything, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too. So what the fuck is a number?”
They’d forgotten even the concept of a number. The word “number” made as much sense to their brains as “glxndtw.”