Almodovar’s The Room Next Door (2024) and the Vice of Superstition

Credit: El Deseo Films. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures

Almodovar’s The Room Next Door (2024) is a good movie, and its atmosphere is much of what makes it good. On a first viewing, I had the sense that while the film occasionally flirted with disaster, there were only a few places where it might have sounded a truly off note. However, as I’ve thought more about it, I’ve wondered if the lapse might have been more in the viewer than the art.

The Room Next Door has a simple plot. At a signing for her recent book on death, Ingrid (Julian Moore), hears that an old friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is terribly sick. The two have been out of touch for years, though in their youth had worked together at a magazine. It’s soon revealed that Martha is facing inoperable cancer and requests Ingrid’s emotional support as she prepares to end her life.

The Room Next Door never lets the viewer get too comfortable. It does this in a few ways. For my money, the strongest is its consistent edging up to the surreal without fully embracing it.

It flouts the Chekhovian truism of never putting a gun on stage that won’t go off. The Room Next Door puts a lot of guns on stage, and none of them go off. Or maybe they do. Odd coincidences pile up without resolution: pills are weirdly lost and then easily found, potential romantic deceit ends up innocent, apparent apparitions and doppelgangers are hinted to be reasonable mix-ups.

In each case, the viewer is left suspended, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Over time, these add up to an uncanny, almost clinical overarching vibe. The film’s dreamy cinematography and foreboding thematic undercurrents (war, societal collapse, climate change) bolster the eerie tone.

The Room Next Door teases its audience, but it’s not cruel: the upshot is a fuzzy fever dream that feels as sweet as it does odd. Without evidence, I imagine death to be similar. Perhaps Almodovar does as well.

Almodovar is no amateur, but what he tries here is a daring feat. While overall a success, the film flirts with failure. My first take on it was that it only risked really going off the rails in a scene or two.

In one of these cases, after Ingrid’s death, Martha is brought in to speak with the police. The issue is whether Martha has legal responsibility for having vaguely assisted Ingrid in facilitating her own death. The officer interrogating her is dubious. He asks hostile questions. He’s abrasive and condescending, admitting to being bothered by the case. As a man of faith, he feels a personal stake in these things.

A religious police officer: a man of church and state. The connection was clear. Both institutions have a long history of shaping how we think about suicide, with the choice to self-murder long seen as an affront to the state’s authority over the lives of its citizens, on a legal register, and the beauty of god’s creation and gift of life, on a spiritual one.

The connection was so far from being off the mark that it was too on it. It felt a little on the nose. The film goes to great lengths to establish that Ingrid is in profound psychological and physical pain for an inoperable disease. Without success, she’s tried experimental treatments. Up to the end, she is sensitive to her friend’s feelings. Martha, for her part, faces and overcomes her own phobia of death, the subject of her recent book, to be there for an old friend (something the film arguably sells a little short; I’m still not sure if cashing in on that would have undermined its marvelously clinical tone or provided it with greater emotional resonance).

Trotting out an asshole cop to stand in for insensitive institutions we all love to hate felt like an otherwise subtle film descending to the realm of undergrad polemic: conservative religious thought undermines our freedoms and constrains freedom of expression, etc. The critique isn’t wrong so much as a little simplified. And, really, did you need to further soften the soft spot by making the cop so shrill and one-dimensional?

To be fair, Almodovar is far too skilled to let the film crash there, and he nicely gets things back on track as Martha’s lawyer handles the case in a suitably solved-but-not-solved fashion. But the scene gave me pause.

I saw The Room Next Door a few weeks back, and I’ve spent some of the time since revisiting classic texts on suicide: Durkheim, Plato, Camus, and the like. Of the group, Hume’s “Of Suicide” stood out as particularly incisive but also still shocking even 250 years after its first publication.

Hume opens by rhapsodizing on philosophy’s ability to combat superstition. His task then in the essay is to apply that critical spirit to superstitious thinking about suicide. It can almost feel satirical watching him make easy work of the arguments of his day.

His day, indeed. What might stand out to a contemporary reader is how dated the arguments he addresses aren’t. It really is true that at least parts of the Christian tradition continue to shape our thinking on suicide to a degree I hadn’t fully appreciated. It’s striking how consistently that connection turns up in the literature. Talk about (intellectual) history bearing down on the present.

To return to The Room Next Door, I don’t think the sociological point’s aptness excuses the concerns mentioned about the scene described above, but the strength of the connection between suicide and Christianity might put the film’s monochromatic lapse in a somewhat more sympathetic light.

Again, Hume’s goal in that essay is to clear the superstitious brush around our thinking on suicide. I certainly love that ideal of philosophy, though I’m not sure I’m quite as optimistic as Hume on its likelihood of success. Still, it’s possible that maybe Hume’s project worked a bit of its magic on me.

Superstition never feels like superstition. It has a knack for illusion. Some of its most potent guises are the common sense and the obvious. The on the nose.

To be sure, I’m a secular (though open-minded) thinker with the same distaste for the state that we all have. I’m not Almodovar’s target. Still, thinking back on the Hume leaves me wondering if The Room Next Door doesn’t so much skewer my own biases as provide fodder for an overarching superstitious sensibility. One that perhaps many of us have.

I haven’t fully worked out the terms, but I have started to wonder if part of my tendency to cast suicide in a commonsense understanding might not be a way of rationalizing the most persistent, profound, and profoundly disturbing questions dogging human experience: what type of life is worth living? Can such innocuous, familiar things as my own hands really choke out my whole universe?

Emphasizing the more clear-cut cases and getting impatient with those who get impatient with outmoded cultural baggage can simulate the feeling that the problem has been solved. The case is closed. Of course it’s reasonable under certain conditions, of course our institutions shouldn’t interfere with our freedoms, of course, of course, of course.

None of this is to let Almodovar off the hook altogether. The scene is too simplified. Still, it’s worth asking if I’m letting myself off the hook by keeping him on it.

Escape Hatches: Toward a Mature Discussion of Suicide

Photo by Ayyub Jauro: https://www.pexels.com/photo/hand-reaching-out-of-a-person-drowning-in-water-4128516/

“Brian asked if I’d rather live in a world governed more by probability or by cause and effect. I think he asks me this stuff just to see if I understand him,” Erin said.

“What did you say?” I said.

“Cause and effect, of course! In a world governed by probability, you couldn’t even be sure you could kill yourself.”

 I had that conversation in what I think was tenth grade. It seems weird to me now as an adult, but I feel like when I was a kid, we often talked about suicide as a way to escape a life made unlivable: suicide as an escape hatch.

Conversations like the following were common:

“I’ll kidnap you and take you to a mad scientist’s lair and give you drugs. Then you’ll be addicted and have to do everything I tell you to do because you’ll need drugs.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll kill myself.”

“I’ll strap you down so you can’t do that.”

“Then I’ll just hold my breath.”

“I’ll hook you up to a machine that will make you breathe.”

“When you take me off the machine, I’ll stop breathing right away.”

Talk like that stopped after adolescence. Greater maturity probably had something to do with that. Not knowing the realities of life leads kids to say creepy stuff. We also might have been more casually morbid and insensitive back then (‘80s kids represent).

The talk might have stopped, but that thinking is arguably with us now as much as ever.

Of course, none of us can be sure that suicide is like pulling the plug on your Xbox to get out of a jam (or shutting off the iPad or whatever it is the kids use these days). Who knows what happens to you on the other side of the curtain. As hauntingly dramatized in Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, it’s always possible that the cruel twist of suicide might be that it somehow further ties you to the world you’re trying to escape.

It at least seems to have the same effect as unplugging the game when your character’s life bar is low, and the bad guys are closing in. And I, for one, can’t blame anyone for having had the thought of a permanent pause cross their mind.

Do you mean to tell me you haven’t?

In some ways, you could make the case that suicide as escape hatch is often the only form of suicide we acknowledge.

On the one hand, we have the truth of Erin’s thought experiment. It’s trivially easy to imagine a life too painful or hopeless to be worth living: the cancer too advanced, the multiple life sentences too much, the debt too staggering. Even if we don’t think the challenge is worth taking a (seemingly) permanent escape route, we certainly understand that reasoning.

Indeed, we might be too quick to understand such reasoning. Up to a point, we take choice away from such people. Obviously, on one level, the person’s choice is the whole point. Yet, in another sense, we kind of imagine that choice as having been made for them. A life expectancy of six months of unending physical pain in a hospital bed doesn’t leave one with much to bring to the bargaining table.

Things are trickier when we can’t locate a clear external cause for the choice. Regarding cases such as these, commentator Ian Marsh argues that we’ve adopted a “compulsive ontology of pathology” when it comes to understanding suicide. What he means is that we have a knee-jerk response to think of suicide as a psychological disorder—something individualized and abnormal.

This is a version of the same reasoning as in Erin’s escape hatch but moved to the inner from the outer world. Underlying psychological problems that make life unbearable or leave you so confused that you don’t know what you’re doing can force your hand just as much as an external cause. Again, it’s an open question how much room we’ve left for choice in such scenarios.

The explanations are never that stark or monochromatic in practice, and the details vary meaningfully across them. Still, there’s truth to this way of diagnosing where our thought is willing to go and where it won’t.

I noticed these patterns in my own thinking when a lifelong friend killed himself a few Augusts back. After finding out about it, I quickly settled on an ordinary explanation.

As I saw it, after years of trying to beat heroin addiction, he’d pinned his hopes on a new, experimental treatment. Everything else had failed. He’d been through NA. He’d sponsored other people through NA. He’d sponsored the people who he had sponsored had sponsored. He’d sponsored his own hopes through seemingly every conceivable solution and configuration of treatment (his sprawling NA lineage was just one chapter in his treatment).

A simple story: after the new treatment failed, he chose Erin’s escape hatch over a future of interminable arrest, danger, and humiliation.

My explanation made sense then, and it still makes sense now. There’s obvious truth to it. Nevertheless, as my emotions have calmed and the details of his final days have become clearer, it’s obvious that my understanding was as right as wrong.

It isn’t my business why he made such a personal choice. But it’s worth acknowledging the depth of his inner universe as well as the complexity of the act he committed. It honors him.

Some of those reasons are social. My best friend was far from the first to struggle with those challenges, and it’s no coincidence that so much in his life (all of our lives) tracks clear social class patterns. It’s a truism that demography equals destiny, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

But we’d be fools to let the social crowd out the existential here. We’d be wise to heed Erin’s point: facing the question of a life worth living and wondering when to look for the exit is going to be true regardless of our society or social order. In a sense it’s individualized, but it’s also quasi-universal or universal when taken in aggregate.

Of course, this isn’t to undersell the place of mental health, which both overlaps with and stands apart from the social and existential. The trouble comes in when it becomes a crutch helping us avoid other issues at hand.

In this sense, philosopher Simon Critchley is right in calling for a more “grown-up, forgiving, and reflective” discussion of suicide. Something in our discussion needs to change: both direct and indirect suicide methods continue to rise. We’re missing something (“I’ll just hold my breath”).

I don’t know exactly what that discussion would look like or what its effects would be. There are, however, many types of escape hatches in the world. Whatever it is we’re facing here doesn’t provide the time or place to look for one.

The Microgenre of Modern Expat Literature

Photo by Edwin Yang on Unsplash

In an unsurprising twist, the recent election results have led to a surge in interest in moving abroad. That happens after every election, and it was bound to have been more prevalent this time around. After all, it’s only a troublingly slight exaggeration to say we’ve put one former wrestler in charge of our nation and another in charge of our educational system.

American interest in expat life has been on the rise in general. Appropriately, this interest seems to have given birth to a corresponding microgenre of literature. We might call it self-flagellating expat didacticism.

As with the trend it reflects, the genre is maddeningly characteristic of our era. The literature is screeny and algorithmized with the hallmarks of the lower-middle-brow vibe of social media-adjacent “content”:

• “5 things living abroad has taught me about…”

• “I’m a US expat—here’s how working from my laptop has triggered my spiritual awakening”

• “How Trump’s pick of an illiterate, felonious pedophile for the Supreme Court looks to a US expat…”

• “Yes, expat—you are just another first-world bro”

 And so on.

Despite its ostensible intent to educate, it’s a passive-aggressive genre that is ultimately about venting and wish-fulfillment. I can’t imagine that it’s ever actually punctured anyone’s “view from within the Matrix.” America’s obvious decline has made awareness of its warts unavoidable, and the literature is more about catharsis than edification.

Its notes are predictable but no less apt for that: healthcare, culture, food, student loans, safety.  It’s simply a fact that those things suck in the United States for most people most of the time and can be found in a better (or at least less annoying form) elsewhere.

The literature gives us a chance to pile on the US, and piling on a victim is satisfying even when the target is less abusive, distant, and self-satisfied than American institutions. The US has become a calloused oligarchy that makes the lives of its citizens much harder than they need to be, and I don’t blame anyone for wanting to beat up on it for a bit.

Beyond the beginner texts, there’s also a grad-school level to the genre. This is the side of the literature that nuances the obvious. It’s made up of expats who’ve at least partially worked through their rage and come out on the other side. It’s a sort of expat aufhebung for the digital nomad set.

Having now returned from their vision quest to the top of the mountain (or an AirBnB in Chiang Mai), these expat elders can remind us of how good we really have it. Yes, it has its problems, but the US is still the US: it’s big, dynamic, and wealthy. In an advanced move, some versions of this thinking point out that our complaints about American decline reflect the same entitlement and arrogance that they set out to diagnose (first-world problems, duh!).

The 400-level literature is as true as the 101-level stuff as far as either goes. The United States is infuriating and abusive, but a weekend out of the country can make the self-pity of even the most jaded vape-smoking, failed-to-launch podcaster seem truly absurd. It’s true—we have it good, and often only the perverse psychology of our own privilege gets in the way of us appreciating that.

One could try diagnosing the genre, but it’s so earnest and transparently typical of its time that I don’t know how fruitful that would be. One could go the other way and argue that it distracts from structural critique or whatever, but that would be tedious and overly literal.

In some ways, the spirit of the moment is hard to read and even harder to predict. And, in others, nothing could more clearly be itself.

Limp-wristed philosopher

In an attempt to pick up some rudimentary life skills, I typically reserve a place for a pragmatic nonfiction book in my reading regimen (something related to health, productivity, business, etc.).

The current one is Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers. This line killed me:

“Business is not a spectator sport. You’re not cramming for some midterm, and you’re not some limp-wristed philosopher.”

Looks down at wrist protectors worn when typing and philosophy M.A.

No, we’re not those things 😬   

When to Forgive

Michelle’s parents couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t forgive her brother. They conceded there might have been a few “boys will be boys” indiscretions along the way. Her brother struggled with how to show his love. That was why, when he and Michelle were children, he would occasionally sodomize her with screwdrivers.

It also explained why, when Michelle was six and her brother was twelve, he set her on fire using gasoline from the lawnmower and a book of matches he’d stolen from the gas station up the street. Thirty years later, all Michelle could remember of that day was the smell of burnt hair.

They even agreed that those were only two abusive experiences of many that took place during her childhood and, in somewhat subtler form, throughout her early adult years.

Still, they couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let things go. People change, and he was an adult now. Besides, they pointed out, he was her brother. She was making everything about herself. Holding a grudge was selfish. It was hard on them to have two separate holiday celebrations every year.

Seeing their point, Michelle sent her brother an email explaining her feelings and disappointment. He wrote back the next day. He was “feeling generous,” he said. He would be willing to let bygones be bygones if she would drop the issue. He would be the bigger person.

Michelle didn’t write back. She could forgive his past cruelty, but she couldn’t overlook his sense of entitlement and lack of growth. To cave under those conditions and act like nothing had happened would have felt like a personal affront. She wasn’t ready to forgive.

Forgiveness is having something of a moment. As it should—Americans are nothing if not a proud people (to put it delicately). Particularly in these hyper-partisan, angry times, encouraging Americans to hold on to their resentment is about as wise as leaving a handle of Popov on the kitchen counter in your alcoholic uncle’s one-bedroom.

Indeed, forgiveness can be good for a society (and arguably the United States more than many), but it can also be good for individuals. You often hear people talk like that: they forgive because they don’t want to be angry people. They forgive because they don’t want to experience the drain of being bitter and frustrated. They forgive because forgiving is often a better way to live. Philosophers call these “prudential” reasons to forgive, and they’re not nothing.

While it can be hard to measure something as subjective as forgiveness, a lengthy history of research has linked it to improved cardiovascular and stress responses along with a variety of other physical and psychological benefits. Who would have guessed: not being a terminally angry person turns out to be good for you.

Still, some commentators have questioned the single-minded celebration of forgiveness. They point out that while the prudential reasons for forgiveness have merit, forgiving shouldn’t just be a type of therapy. One should have good, principled reasons to forgive based on things like the scale of the offense, whether the offender appears contrite, and how blameworthy the offender was in the first place.

Fair enough. Most are likely to agree that some people deserve forgiveness more than others and some offenses are more forgivable than others. Holding a grudge at thirty because when we were twelve my best friend told me my haircut looked stupid would reflect worse on me than on him. On the other hand, a reasonable argument can be made that forgiving my adult friend for developing a premeditated plan to remove my head before making fun of my haircut should probably be a higher bar to clear when it comes to forgiveness.

Furthermore, putting principle aside, holding a grudge could yield long-term returns that outweigh the costs of resentment. After running the numbers, it might turn out that distancing yourself from a long-term abusive relationship will be better for you over time than forgiving (if doing such on command is even possible) and experiencing the prudential benefits of forgiveness. As the song goes: “You gotta know when to hold ‘em [and] know when to fold ‘em.” Sometimes you’re better off cutting your losses.

As Michelle’s case suggests, the choice not to forgive can help preserve one’s self-respect. Forgiving (or at least giving the appearance of forgiveness) just to accommodate an abusive sibling and pollyannish parents can torpedo one’s self-regard. Being an angry person might not bring the best out of you, but being a self-resenting doormat might not be so fantastic for your character, either. This is probably doubly true when the abuse has happened along the vectors of common lines of social oppression.

Ultimately, the upshot of this seems to be that we need more complex thinking on forgiveness. Philosophers often frame the opposite of forgiveness as “resentment,” which is typically considered a form of anger (though interestingly doesn’t seem to have been theorized as such until the Modern era). Resentment and anger raise their own complexities, but the more fundamental issue here might be that there are reactions besides—and between—anger and clemency. Before recommending people forgive, we might need to get a little clearer on what forms of forgiveness are out there first.

But forgiveness is complex, and perhaps we should forgive ourselves for allowing a bit of imprecision to creep into our thinking on forgiveness. After all, self-forgiveness might be the hardest form of the act to sort out.

Or, as Michelle later said in a meeting with her therapist: “I don’t hate my brother, but to forgive him would be to collude in producing a false reality. If I did that, then I might have forgiven him, but I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”

******************

Note: the character “Michelle” is a composite modeled on “Sandy” from Jeanne Safer’s Forgiving and Not Forgiving.

The Tie-Dyed Owl of Minerva

I spent my adolescence canvassing countercultures. There was a systematic, detached quality to this. I treated each counterculture as a system, probing its limits while considering it both on its own terms and in relation to its antecedents and progeny.

I started in my pre-adolescence with heavy metal and then worked my way up through the obvious contemporary touchstones such as punk rock, jam bands, hip hop, and skateboarding before working my way back through things like jazz/blues, folk, the Beat Generation, and Transcendentalism. In time, broader artistic, intellectual and social corollaries (Dada, postcolonialism, world systems theory, existentialism, surrealism, etc.) joined the pack as I became more sophisticated.

As with most things American, despite nodding recognition of the international context, this countercultural lineage can be provincial. Anthropology and history provide us with strikingly different iterations of human life and experience. Humans can organize themselves in all manner of fascinating ways. As the late David Graeber notes in Possibilities, it can be illuminating and revolutionary to consider the full breadth of documented human modes of life.

Still, for me, there was understandably a certain immediacy to the movements that had most directly arisen from some approximation of my own place and time. It’s worth knowing what humans are capable of when evaluating a social order but applying those insights to the here and now can be unwieldy. Naturally, this isn’t an either-or, and a sharp social thinker will pay attention to both the near and far, but the point still stands.

There was also something personal about that journey of discovery. As the millennial child of boomers, I had the sense that I was growing up in a milieu of digested, semi-digested, undigested, and rejected ‘60s failure, as splendidly captured in books like Pynchon’s Vineland. I still have that feeling when I visit my hometown. That presence isn’t too overt, though the cultural reverberations of my parents’ generation are still in the air in bizarre and bewildering permutations.

Speaking of home, growing up in a rural area in the ‘90s probably fed my countercultural agnosticism and roving eye. With a high school class of 80 students in an effectively pre-internet era, you could only be so particular in your tastes. This was, of course, limiting. At the same time, from another vantage point, there’s a species of broadmindedness that having access to nothing provides that having access to everything chokes out. Constraints both curtail and foster.

As millennials we were (are?) typically more sincere and outwardly focused than our Gen X older siblings. I wanted change, and the stifling irony and cynicism of the placid ‘90s grated. This itself seems quaint now—I’m old enough to remember when the problem was apathy and ignorance rather than rage and information overload.

Perhaps partially because of that generational quirk, I lost track of the countercultural thread for a while, focusing on more direct study of policy and the “timeless” questions traditionally addressed by Western philosophy. I didn’t retreat into full philosophical materialism, I still thought culture mattered and was interesting, but I shifted my attention elsewhere for a time.

I’d had some proclivities back in the direction of culture for a few years before getting to South America, but that interest has deepened and become more central since moving to Colombia. In Bogota, I’ve found myself reconfronted with many of the movements of my past, though in new and illuminating ways.

This hit me over the weekend when I went to see a showing of the film Suenos en Concreto, which documents a social movement in Cali that built a monument of a fist clutching a placard that read “Resist!” I can picture myself rolling my eyes at such a literal, monochromatic statement if such were made in the US. However, that self-indulgent irony would be decadent in a setting where the artists behind the monument spent years of their lives in prison or were forced to flee their country for that or similar displays of defiance.

I’ve found the same to be true of Colombian heavy metal, comic books, street art, and the like. Not only is their content of course unique insofar as that material is put on a more specifically Colombian register, but their more severe social context lends them profound urgency and depth.

Thus, like some dark horse version of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I find the old countercultural threads of my past resurfacing in new and arguably more realized form. I’d previously had moments of impatience with what had seemed like the stalled momentum of the counterculture (yet another unreflective EZLN t-shirt, cup of organic coffee, pink mohawk, dreads on a white guy). Yet, as my (our?) countercultural dialectic begins a new cycle of the revised past, I find muted fissures and gaps in the initial movements resurface with meanings not only previously unrecognized but previously unimaginable.

The Gen X strategy of encoding political messages in art might have run a little short, but millennial earnestness has just as much lost its center. On a personal level, this generates a paradoxically apolitical quality to aesthetic political engagement. Hiding out from the construction of the world we now inhabit (Trumpism, Instagram, AI, Elon Musk) in a South American bunker is arguably both forward-looking and nostalgic. By working backwards through the cultural antecedents of the present, I’m looking forward—or so it seems.

Perhaps, following Hegel, some tie-dyed Owl of Minerva is spreading its wings on the coming of this dusk.

Is it Bad to Make an Exception?

For just a minute, Jean Cau was worried about Jean-Paul Sartre’s lying. Cau would often witness Sartre, his employer and mentor, make back-to-back phone calls to his mistresses, telling them different things to keep them in the dark and make things easier for himself. How, Cau wondered, could his beloved mentor remain “internally intact” under such conditions?

As it turns out, at least in Cau’s view, he didn’t have to be concerned. According to biographer Hazel Rowley, Sartre explained to his secretary that in some cases, it was necessary to draw on a “temporary moral code” to weather the storm. Cau was impressed by this explanation. A temporary moral code would allow Sartre’s “huge moral edifice” to remain undamaged when apparently left with no choice but to voluntarily mistreat other people. As Cau saw it, having a temporary moral code was a bit like opening an umbrella in a storm. Sometimes you need to take emergency measures.

Not many modern commentators are likely to be quite as impressed as Cau by Sartre’s solution. No one can be faulted for thinking that his “temporary moral code” might have been a bit slimy. But the broader point stands: while we might raise an eyebrow regarding Sartre’s adulterous relationships, there are times when we really can’t do the right thing. Sometimes we have to make exceptions.  

What is an Exception?

Exceptions are tricky. Theorists have long pointed out that an exception is a little puzzling insofar as it is a situation in which a system is in effect by not being in effect. That might sound daft, but the logic is sound: an exception is a way of keeping a system active while suspending it. It’s a part of the normal order that entails ignoring the normal order. An exception carves out a sort of paradoxical gap.

Sartre’s explanation has a certain litigious vibe, which is appropriate given that legal scholars have been particularly sensitive to the complexities of exceptionality. Theorists like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben have reflected at length on the challenges regarding legal exceptions or “states of emergency.” A state of emergency is a type of legal exception. The idea is that in a state of emergency, normal juridical workings and safeguards need to be suspended for the sake of protecting citizens from some (presumably temporary) challenge, such as a natural disaster, civil unrest, or armed conflict.   

On the one hand, emergencies are of course real. A crippling storm might not be the best time to stick to the normally scheduled programming of going to the ballot box for an election. On the other hand, suspending the legal system is never a particularly stable course of action—even (perhaps especially) when done lawfully. By definition, there’s no law when you’ve suspended the law (at least in the sense of it having any real content), which on a first pass isn’t the most comforting of circumstance.

Beyond that, politicians have this funny tendency of acting an awful lot like dictators when they can do whatever they want. Somehow, those temporary emergencies can seem to get longer and longer. Things certainly aren’t guaranteed to go wrong during a state of emergency, but they can be tricky, as anyone paying attention to recent events in Venezuela, detainments at Guantanamo Bay, or a host of other circumstances will know. Some have argued the entirety of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany took place during a legal state of emergency.

Ethical Exceptions

Does an ethical exception run the same risks as a legal exception? The parallel is clear: as Sartre’s example illustrates, calling your actions an “exception” can be a way of letting yourself off the hook while leaving untouched the “moral edifice” that allows you to continue to think of yourself as a decent person while acting terribly. If you can convince yourself that doing the right thing isn’t up to you, it can be easy to justify almost anything. Sartre gets to have his adulterous cake and eat it too.

Exceptions are no simple matter. What to do? None other than the mighty Immanuel Kant (known for writing such lightweight beach reads as The Critique of Pure Reason) famously threw up his hands when confronted with the challenge. His solution? No exceptions, homie. The classic Kantian example has to do with lying to a murderer who plans to harm your friend. If that murderer asks you where your friend is hiding, and you know the answer, then according to Kant you pony up the gory details even if they might lead to a gory outcome. Lying is wrong, and there are no frou-frou temporary moral codes around here.  

The Kantian answer has a certain harsh appeal, but it’s an open question how workable it actually is. Kant is said to have lived a life so regimented that the people of Konigsberg could set their watches according to his walks, but even in a life that spartan, it’s hard to imagine some emergency not getting in the way at some point. Speaking for myself, I’d rather live with being a liar than having exposed my loved ones to knife-wielding murderers. My guess is I’m not alone in that.

Not all is Lost

Emergencies, exceptions, and unconventional events are real. We have to learn to live with them. There’s risk in that, but it’s easy to overstate the challenge. Calling something an “exception” can provide the basis for a troubling justification, and some people live what seem to be their entire lives in an ethical state of emergency. At the same time, it’s an open question how far the structural similarities between ethical systems and legal systems go. Besides, while calling something an exception is an effective way to let yourself off the hook, we have no shortage of clever psychological tricks to make that happen. Why dwell on this one?

Language is often as expressive as instrumental. Maybe calling something an exception is as much a cry of lament for having stumbled as it is a slippery slope to amorality. Circumstances can conspire to make us be someone we’d rather not. Sometimes we let the selfish part of ourselves drive for a time. Maybe calling something an “exception” is a way to express grief, recover from that slip, and ultimately preserve our ethical core. It might be a way of saying, this is not who I always am or always will be, but for a brief time that’s who I was. A different type of exception, indeed.

Conclusion: An Exception to the Exception

I guess the upshot of this is just to say that when moved to the sphere of human experience, exceptions are exceptionally complex. So much is contextual. I wish our social scientists did as much on the logic of exceptionality as our logicians and legal theorists have done.

Does any of this help Sartre and his temporary moral code? One assumption we’ve made along the way is that the normal order is good—or at least better than having no order. I guess the “normal order” in the analogy here would be Sartre’s personality. Unfortunately, in this case, his life gives us pretty solid grounds for questioning whether the norm is always better than the exception. Maybe Sartre should have made an exception to his exception. Even if that logic just turns out to be turtles all the way down an infinite regress, it might be better to run the risk of being capable of justifying anything than being guaranteed to be a jerk.

In Praise of Secondary Sources

Photo by Mari Potter on Unsplash

Was it Benjamin Franklin who made the quip that the main advantage of going to college is that it teaches you how to walk into a room? While the terms might be a little dated (I’m still not sure if I walk into rooms in a sufficiently genteel way), the critique, of course, is familiar enough: formal education is more about credentialing and the transfer of social class privilege than meaningful learning.

As a freelance editor, I often think of that line of critique. I can usually guess a person’s education from their first email, though that typically has nothing to do with their vocabulary or grammar. In terms of the prose itself, certain habits immediately make clear if someone has been socialized into “high-minded” conventions. Simple stuff can stand out: using “data” as a singular noun in formal writing or referring to authors using their first rather than last name (“As Bob (2009) argues...”) send a definite message. Sometimes there’s a good reason for why things are done one way rather than another, but that isn’t always the case. And, ultimately, whether there’s a good reason for the practice or not, there’s often a certain snob factor at work here. A least some of that stuff is the prose equivalent of Franklin’s (assuming it was Franklin’s) sense of walking into a room the right way.

Of course, it’s not all about snobbery and manners. As often as not, issues in style reflect real difficulties in conception. Certain language can tip off even the most novice of educators that the student hasn’t done the reading and literally doesn’t know what they’re talking about (student term paper: “Derrida’s smart book is about hospitality and cosmopolitanism. But what is the relationship between these two abstract concepts? Surely there is some illuminating connection.” Translation: “I haven’t done the reading in weeks and wrote this during an all-nighter while still somewhat hungover”).

Beyond the prose itself, certain habits in writing are indicative of sophisticated thinking. It’s probably a good idea to avoid the classic logical fallacies. Separating correlation from causation as much as possible can’t hurt (at least until you enter the semi-advanced phase of indicating that you’re “beyond” the conventions). Knowing where and when to insert a citation can reflect not only knowledge of scholarly conventions but also a deeper understanding of when and what type of evidence is needed. This stuff is about good thinking more than good fashion.

Amongst these more substantive habits, the use of secondary sources might be my favorite. What is a secondary source? The old quip is it’s a secondary source until it’s been cited enough times. Jokes aside, a secondary source is a source about another source. Plato’s Republic is a primary source (something tells me that one might have been cited enough to have crossed the threshold into “primary source” territory), but a commentary on Plato’s Republic would count as a secondary source. Develop enough original thinking in your commentary and maybe it, too, can begin to look more like a primary source.

Arguably the higher you climb up the academic ladder, the more central secondary sources become. A good senior thesis is likely to include secondary sources; meanwhile, in most fields, a master’s thesis without secondary sources would be bizarre if not unthinkable. Knowing how to work with secondary sources is an advanced move: a sophisticated commentator will know where they position themselves in the literature by getting clear on where their work stands in relation to other interpretations. There arguably can be a hint of fashion here—who you cite can signal your intellectual commitments or the camp of which you are a part. But, of course, it goes far beyond that.

Reading commentaries on what you’re reading 10x’s your understanding. If reading a world-class book is like walking around the mind of a great thinker, then reading a good commentary is like a post-jaunt discussion with the most thoughtful of co-explorers. A good secondary source contextualizes the primary source, indicates its historical importance, highlights underappreciated dimensions of the work, calls out potential issues in method or reasoning, and signals unaddressed questions or nuances.

Reading secondary sources is a game-changer. Relying on social media posts or Wikipedia entries is a sure sign of dilettantism. We’ve all done it, and it has its time and place, but no one has ever developed a sophisticated understanding from such things. A more serious approach is to look to textbooks or a reliable overview. That’s great, but of course drilling down into primary sources is the next level. Now we’re talking. Primary sources are a sure sign someone is doing it for real, but it’s easy for even the most skilled thinker to reach crazy conclusions if they try to go it alone. Knowing how to find and identify high-quality secondary sources is a sure sign of rigor. I’ve never met a person who read secondary sources who wasn’t a sophisticated thinker.

Of course, secondary sources have their limitations. There’s a lot to be said for wrestling with a challenging source or problem on its own terms. Incorporating secondary sources too early can short-circuit the reasoning process, undermine creativity, and hinder sincere engagement with the topic. If not handled carefully, an over-reliance on secondary sources can enfeeble a thinker, leaving them overly dependent on others’ interpretations and opinions. Those are real problems.

Still, none of that changes the fact that the use of secondary sources is a sure sign of an enlivened mind. None of us develop our thoughts in a vacuum. Our best ideas come from engaging with others’ best ideas, and secondary sources are much of how that is done.

To return to Franklin’s point, we don’t all care about the proper way to walk into a room. The punk rock among us may choose to spit on the floor. However, the intellectual self-defense of knowing how to vet claims, wade through the research on a topic, and develop informed opinions is universally important. There’s a lot of junk woven into formal education, but it’s not all fashion and convention. In this case, it’s worth taking a page from scholarly practice.

Assuming, of course, I’m not misremembering that it was Franklin who made that remark. Maybe I should check a secondary source.

Border Crossings at a Therapeutic Prison: Some Thoughts after Reading Chuck Bowden’s “Torch Song”

I revisited Charles Bowden’s “Torch Song” in the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction the other day, and it reminded me of a joke I heard when I worked with adolescent-aged sex offenders that I never quite got but always thought was funny.

I spent my twenties ping-ponging between school and nonprofit work. My time coaching children in rape therapy was a particularly strange chapter of the nonprofit side of things. For two years, I worked at a facility that provided court-mandated treatment to juvenile sex offenders. The facility also had a program for treating youth who had been convicted of non-sexual violent offenses, which I worked with, as well as one for violent youth with low IQs, which I didn’t.

The anthropologist James Waldran researched similar facilities for adults and coined the expression “therapeutic prison,” which nicely captures both the place’s daily atmosphere and conceptual incoherence. As one astute youth put it to me: “This is prison with therapy.” No one seemed able to figure out when it was one, when it was the other, or how to square the circle of an institution premised on punishment that also provided therapy that aspired to moral pedagogy (“moral habilitation” in Waldran’s apt terminology).

Anyway, the joke I never got came after I’d spontaneously quit. I hadn’t planned to quit, and I had no sense of what I would do after I’d left. For a while, I floated by on money I’d saved, but I didn’t have healthcare for a long time after that. I guess I had the vague idea I’d be going back to grad school, which is what I ended up doing.

I don’t remember the details now, but the joke must have come when people were discussing the fact that I was leaving. Someone cracked to one of the supervisors that I was in fact an undercover journalist preparing to write an exposé on the facility. I was leaving because I’d gathered enough material for the project.

It was a funny joke. But why was it funny?

I guess one reason was that it was kind of true: at the time, I was gathering material for a planned experimental novel. No one knew that but me, but I guess people had sensed that I was up to something. I’d had the idea of telling a story with the constraint that the narrative would entirely be told through the documents we used in the facility (e.g., in-take reports, legal incident reports, meal report records, psychological evaluations, report cards, etc.). It was a neat idea, but I didn’t have the skill to pull it off and ended up shelving it (alternatively, maybe it wasn’t that neat of an idea).

In another sense, I always wondered about the joke: what was I going to expose? Everything at the therapeutic prison was run by the book as far as I could tell. I don’t remember any conspicuous abuse or corruption. It wouldn’t have been too juicy of an exposé.

The joke stayed with me. It felt telling. Everyone at the therapeutic prison seemed, and I think felt, guilty. We were superficially transparent but nothing if not covert. In every regard, we were heavily monitored. Of course we were accountable to the courts, and the state, and various laws. In terms of daily affairs, literally almost everything that happened at the facility was recorded by its ubiquitous security cameras. Almost every door was locked. For a long time after I quit, I would pause at doors before walking through them—a Pavlovian vestige of my time always having to unlock a door before going through it.

“Torch Song” is a unique essay; I can’t think of anything else quite like it. Through a series of impressionistic vignettes, Bowden provides an account of the psychological impact that the experience of being a sex crime reporter had on him.

“Torch Song” is meandering and not at all systematic—this is as true of the prose as of the analysis. I’m inclined to like that part of Bowden’s writing in general, but it’s particularly apropos here in capturing the odd and repetitive swirls of thought engendered by the experience of sex crime work. I’ve never read an article that has more accurately captured those psychological realities. Perhaps appropriately for the subject matter, I’ve never read one that’s tried. Indeed, Bowden presents five rules garnered from his experience:

1. No one can handle the children.

2. Get out after two years.

3. Always walk a woman to her car, regardless of the hour of day or night.

4. Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.

5. No one can handle the children.

I like his list, but I might amend it just slightly:

1. No one can handle the children.

2. Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.

3. Get out after two years.

4. Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.

5. Always walk a woman to her car, regardless of the hour of day or night.

6. No one can handle the children.

7. In case you missed it: no one wants to hear these things.   

To be fair, Bowden repeatedly returns to that silence in his essay, which is ultimately one of his main points. The topic of sexual assault, particularly child sexual assault, is so taboo that even just mentioning it (as, for instance, I’m doing right now in this blog post) can cast the speaker in a dubious light. If you think about it, it’s strange to have an offense that is so sensitive that even mentioning it leads to almost immediate doubt about your own intentions (for the record, I wasn’t a sex offender as a child and am not one as an adult).

We certainly don’t handle most forms of violence that way. At least part of this is the result of the peculiar way we’ve come to conceptualize the variety of sexual assault we’re willing to acknowledge (many we don’t): it’s awkwardly framed as both a mental health issue and legal transgression. This is nicely unpacked in historian Elise Chenier’s Strangers in our Midst, though much remains to be said of that story. Needless to say, this characterization is on shaky theoretical grounds, and we’ve never quite ironed out when it’s a medical (mental health) issue, when it’s a legal (punitive) issue, when it’s a universal human issue, and when it’s a sociological issue. The first two often eclipse the second two.

Bowden points out this incoherence, and he’s right to point it out. He’s also right to insinuate that there’s something a little strange and perhaps even self-serving about it. Common sexual practices and pornographic material often contain direct reference to (at least simulated) compulsion and humiliation. Sexual assault by any definition is so wildly common that it would take a complete disconnect with reality to imagine that ordinary people aren’t complicit.

The point isn’t that we’re all rapists but rather that the line between “deviant” and “abnormal” in this area gets fuzzy really fast. I suppose this need not necessarily be related to discomfort about the violence woven into large parts of our collective sex life and desires, though I’m inclined to think that’s the bulk of it. Still, part of that willful blindness doubtless stems from a broader anxiety regarding our potential for violence and the capacity of our drives and impulses (sexual and otherwise) to manifest violently. It takes a lot to come to terms with your own potential to be monstrous (even if not only unrealized but also detested—perhaps particularly then). I suspect that’s part of why Bowden opens “Torch Song” with an anecdote about violence in general rather than sexual violence in particular.

“Torch Song” is a rich little essay and a lot can be pulled out of it, but from one perspective it can be seen as an extensive account of the type of psychological breakdown that follows from having one’s access to convenient, self-soothing falsehoods taken from you. Indeed, sex crime work is not amenable to simple stories, and the experience can quickly sensitize one to how even very sophisticated thinkers are often motivated by simple morality tales. An impatience with comforting sociological fairy tales is one of the enduring consequences of having done sex crime work.

I hear an echo of that impatience in much of Bowden’s work—regardless of whether he’s doing interviews with cartel sicarios or providing his take on nature writing. There’s an almost punk rock spirit to the way he seems constitutionally incapable of not blurting out dark and complicated truths that are impolite but cut to the heart of the issue. I suspect that language is something of a dialect that those of us with visas to the neck of the woods documented in “Torch Song” take on.

As one can imagine, this tendency towards simple solutions was particularly thick given that I was working with children. Both staff and general observers never seemed quite sure how to frame the children: victims? Rapists? Monsters? Regardless of the garment you chose, the fit was awkward. Some staff members seemed almost clinically unhinged in absurdly suggesting that minor acts of kindness (e.g., access to fresh fruit, basic manners) would mitigate the trauma that it was implied wholly explained the children’s “acting out” (a euphemism I’ve always detested).

Our treatment clearly wasn’t effective by even the most superficial of metrics, but I don’t remember anyone talking about that. We carried out the most superficial of treatment for an “illness” we couldn’t effectively define as such while preparing children for a nonexistent world of vapid sexuality defined in 2D.

I was aware of this, and it got to me. We were all aware of it, and it got to all of us. As with Bowden, what followed for me was a slow-motion breakdown. My personal trajectory was less dramatic than Bowden’s, the fireworks of his lunatic, alienated promiscuity weren’t part of my path, though we both ended in the same place: rage.

In hindsight, I was furious after leaving sex crime work. I would introduce uncomfortable topics in discussion and propose research projects on sensitive issues. I was angry.

To return to the start, what made the joke funny was that we all knew what I would have exposed. The redundancy was the basis of the humor: everything was already exposed. We were already exposed. We are already exposed.

In this regard, the final word belongs to Bowden: “You can know some things and the knowing seems to help you not at all.”

Degrees of Reality

It takes a few days after getting back to straighten out my affairs. I visit banks. I sift through the heaps of mail my mom piles on the desk in my bedroom. I wait in line. I make calls, sign forms in black pen, and make photocopies and scans at the public library. I renew my library card at the public library after making photocopies and scans. I go to birthday parties and watch my friends’ ever-growing, now-insanely-old kids turn yet another year older. I text my cousins, who at this point barely know me but still sign their emails with “love.”

Occasionally, I see someone from college, AmeriCorps, or one or another grad school tour. We trip out on how much time has passed, the people who have retired from whatever we knew them from, and the people who have died and thus retired from whatever it is we all know each other from.

I’ve been an expat for six years. I don’t have kids, and I’m not married. I stave off the forces of bureaucratic and social entropy because I like to go home for visits. I do it because I’m almost certain to move back at some point. Despite its endless challenges, the US is too big, too wealthy, and too dynamic to ignore. In my case, it’s also too personal in housing all of my family and most of my friends.

It’s not in my interest to hide. Besides, our hyper-technologized world makes it tough to hide. Everyone knows right where to find you. That is, if they care to find you. If they don’t, then you have to scream and scream to avoid disappearing. You have to post on social media, send out-of-the-blue texts, respond to each and every email. I guess that’s the lacuna at the heart of the panopticon: surveilled if inside or invisible if outside.

When I lived in China, there was a certain segment of questionable folks who’d arrived in the ‘90s before China was what it has become. They hadn’t been home in years if not decades. They were escaping various things—family, failure, responsibility. Some seemed to be fleeing legal issues, but none ever admitted that to me.

They had cell phones—life in China would be impossible without one—but they didn’t use Western apps, which were unpopular and often blocked anyway. They circulated in a different Internet ecosystem, using WeChat, Taobao, Alipay, Weibo, and Red.

They lived in smaller second- and third-tier cities or dodgy rural areas. They kept up with their visas, or they paid bribes, or they just hoped for the best. They paid in cash at glum expat bars. A lot seemed to be English teachers. I had the sense that many saved up to visit prostitutes, but that might just be a stereotype.

These days I live in Bogota. It’s easy to disappear here if you want to. It’s easy even if you don’t want to. Parts of the city are unpoliced, and parts of the country are ungoverned. If I really wanted to disappear, I would need a way to make cash and get paid off the books, but there’s always a way to make cash and get paid off the books, though they’re rarely pleasant.

Like seemingly everywhere now, there’s a big homeless population in Bogota. It’s rare, but every now and then, I’ll see a homeless foreigner. I imagine they’re off the books. Some have tattoos, which for some reason always makes me wonder what their lives were like before whatever happened to them happened to them.

The last time I was home, I renewed my driver’s license. I paid a little extra to have it done at a satellite location, which I was told would be faster. I still had to wait. As I waited, I thought of the expression “degrees of reality” and pictured a person becoming gradually fainter like in a movie about time travel where a character has been written out of history. That was the image that came to mind even though I know that’s not what people mean by “degrees of reality.”

At first, the people at the DMV didn’t want to renew the license because the mail I’d brought to prove my address was junk mail. They changed their mind when I showed them some bill or other, which made me feel weirdly proud. As I walked out, I pictured myself slowly filling in and becoming sturdier like the scenes in time travel movies where the process has been reversed and the character has no longer been written out of history. That’s not what people mean by “degrees of reality” either, but it kind of is, though.

Carnival of Souls (1962): The Horror of What Lies Beneath

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

Carnival of Souls (1962) is a film with style—miles and miles of it. Director Herk Harvey intended it to have the look of Bergman and the feel of Cocteau, and he succeeded admirably. It’s easy to see why it has been an influence on filmmakers like David Lynch and George Romero.

While Carnival of Soul’s masterful expressionistic style is much of its appeal, the film has sufficient depth to have led to considerable commentary—both academic and popular. As I see it, that commentary fails as much as it succeeds, and that is its success.

Plot

Carnival of Souls doesn’t give us much time with Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) before she is shown crashing off a bridge during a drag race. Mysteriously, while the other passengers die in the crash, Mary surfaces out of the water unharmed and unruffled. From there, the film picks up a few weeks later as Mary, a professional organ player, moves to Salt Lake City, where she has a job lined up playing organ for a church. She takes a room in a boardinghouse and resists the pushy advances of her sleazy neighbor, John Linden (Sidney Berger). As she adjusts to life in her new city, she begins having strange visions of a ghoulish man (played by Harvey himself) following her. She occasionally becomes invisible and experiences a bewildering, powerful attraction to a deserted pavilion. By the film’s end, it is revealed that she had in fact died in the car accident, and the final scene is of her in the car with the other drowning victims.

Carnival of Souls has a lot of weird quirks. Even by the standards of dated gender norms, the other boarder, John, is particularly dishonest and creepy. At one point, Mary has an episode in a park that leads a doctor (Stan Levitt) who happens to be passing by to treat her with therapy despite acknowledging he’s not a psychiatrist. At the end of the film, for some strange reason, the local sheriff thinks to call that doctor, as well as the priest who had previously employed her, to join him in investigating Mary’s disappearance.

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

Interpretations

Carnival of Souls has spawned a respectable little literature for an obscure B-movie that flopped on its initial release. I remember once reading the crack somewhere or other that Shakespeare’s work has been so heavily mined by other writers that soon all that will be left unpilfered are the punctuation marks. Carnival of Souls gives a similar impression of having been milked for everything it can give.

For example, a convincing thread of literature addresses Mary as struggling with the stifling conformity of her era. In that spirit, some have provided a queer reading of the film. Psychoanalysis has been a useful register for commentators in this camp, and some have offered striking Freudian and Jungian readings, drawing occasionally on Julia Kristeva’s discussion of abjection to illuminate the terms of Mary’s gendered experience. Similarly, the centrality of the (male) gazeturns up in a number of readings.

Interestingly, some readings have treated Carnival of Souls as a road film and addressed its handling of car culture, sometimes treating the film as a vehicle for addressing broader societal discomfort around auto deaths and others zeroing in on Mary’s road trip as itself indicating cultural anxieties regarding changing gender norms by unwittingly expressing bias aimed at “women drivers.”

Carnival of Souls traffics heavily in religious imagery, and of course, Mary’s experience as a type of zombie has led to purgatory being a central theme in the secondary literature. In that regard, I had expected to see more direct comparisons between Carnival of Souls and Jacob’s Ladder (1990), which covers similar thematic territory while reaching a seemingly less bleak conclusion.

Wrapping up our whirlwind tour, some viewers have seen the film as a metaphor for the psychology of trauma. Other accounts have focused on the centrality of organ music. Still others have paid particular attention to the carnival itself by drawing on figures like Bakhtin when accounting for the fact that the pavilion is a former carnival site and that the film culminates with something of a dance celebration (carnival) of the dead.

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

The Student Eyeroll and The Horror of What Lies Beneath

I’m sure there are more readings out there, but those are what stood out to me as the primary threads in the literature. Many focus on my pet themes and fixations, and I had expected to riff like crazy on Carnival of Souls—a film I adore and could watch time and again.

But I couldn’t find my way into this territory. Somewhat hilariously, it was an undergrad’s dismissive blog post from 2012 that triggered my thinking. The author of the post, Christine Sellin, asks: “Does this film [Carnival of Souls] really provide intelligent commentary on societal issues (particularly feminine) of the 1960s, or is it less than what we make it out to be?”

The psychology of the teacher-student relationship leaves the eyeroll one of the student’s main self-defense weapons. Sometimes it’s used well, and sometimes it’s not. In this case, Sellin has used it to good effect. One of the more indulgent forms the student eyeroll can take is the genre of term paper that either overtheorizes a pet interest or shoehorns a pet interest into a discussion of unamenable material.

To me, some of the literature on Carnival of Souls might have a little bit of that going on. I don’t say that to disparage the literature, however. Somewhat puzzlingly, it’s a testament to its applicability. As I see it, both psychologically and epistemologically, what this failure indicates is our attempt to scratch at the horror felt in response to the invisible below the visible—or the invisible that makes possible the visible.

In a psychoanalytic sense, you could see this as horror regarding particular psychological impulses that are below the surface just as much as the fact that it’s creepy that we are creatures with submerged psychological impulses in the first place. It feels weird when we sense both the darkness of the impulses themselves and the more foundational fact of things being obscured.

In a broader epistemological sense, some element of obscured or curtailed view is necessary for our perceptual faculties to work—we can’t perceive everything at all times, and there has to be that which we don’t directly perceive for there to be that which we do. It’s eerie when these things peak through and we find ourselves thinking of the element of the world that inevitably goes unseen. This is doubly true when those things themselves are disturbing.

Like much of David Lynch’s best work, Carnival of Souls hints at the inevitable darkness that lurks below the world of appearance. We intuit it on the edges of our experience. It’s weird and frightening and can lead us to pin whatever we can on it to make sense of it.

Proust said that putting an idea in fiction is gauche in a way akin to leaving the price tag on an item. But there are autochthonous ideas in every work. The text’s plot is an idea. Its style is an idea.

Indeed, its style is an idea, and Carnival of Souls is a film with style—miles and miles of it. And we feel that style tighten around our throats when we squint to see the invisible below the visible.

Selected Bibliography

Brown, J. (2010). Carnival of Souls and the organs of horror. In N. Lerner (Ed.), Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. Routledge.

Monteyne, K. (2018). From the question of soul of a carnival of souls. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 58(1), 24-46.

Murphy, Bernice M. (2017). “‘Wheels of Tragedy’: Death on the Highways in Carnival of Souls (1962) and the Highway Safety Film”. FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & The Arts, no. 24 (May). https://doi.org/10.2218/forum.24.187

Olson, C. (9 December 2013) Carnival of Souls and emergent feminism in the early half of the sexual revolution. Seems Obvious to Me: Adventures in Pop Culture Studies. https://seemsobvioustome.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/carnival-of-souls-and-emergent-feminism-in-the-early-half-of-the-sexual-revolution/

Riley, J. (2007). Have you no respect? Do you feel no reverence?’: Narrative and Critical Subversion in Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls. In M. Goodall, J. Good, and W. Godfrey (Eds.), Crash Cinema: Representation in Film. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Shaffer, B. (2024). Carnival of Souls as seen by its creators. In L. Broughton (Ed.), Reappraising Cult Horror Films: From Carnival of Souls to Last Night in Soho. Bloomsbury.

Being Coherent about Coherence (2013)

Credit: Bellanova Films/Ugly Ducking Films. Distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories

Coherence (2013) makes the first impression of a philosophy major but turns out to be a lab supervisor in the psychology department. This Twilight Zone-style thought experiment is a brilliant, multi-layered examination of character. In particular, its use of the doppelganger tells us a lot about desire and how life feels.

Plot

Coherence is about eight friends at a dinner party. The group meets on a night when a comet appears to trigger a series of strange happenings. The characters soon meet versions of themselves (doppelgangers) who mirror their behavior. To make sense of this, the characters postulate a figurative use of the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment and conclude that they are facing a potentially infinite series of iterations of the dinner party (which for some reason play out in a void).

We meet multiple doppelgangers; it was only on the second viewing that I came to appreciate how many different versions of the characters make an appearance. Em (Emily Foxler) is our primary focus across the various universes. When we meet her, she’s struggling to decide whether to go to Vietnam with her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling), while navigating an awkward evening with Kevin’s ex, Laurie (Lauren Mahr), who for some misguided reason, party guest Amir (Alex Manugian) brought to the party.

The exact terms of the thought experiment aren’t particularly important or lucid. Coherence is a dialogue-driven film that’s really about character. Much more than the details of quantum mechanics or the metaphysics of alternate worlds, the film’s point is what the characters’ attempts to manage their surreal situation reveal about them.

Coherence was shot on a nearly non-existent budget in director James Ward Byrkit’s living room and was almost entirely improvisational, based on a skeletal script of only twelve pages. The resultant choppiness of its found-footage cinematography is a small price to pay for what that improvisation provides. The actors’ unrehearsed, spontaneous responses add additional depth to the dialogue in a film that is heavily invested in its dialogue. We often say more than we mean when we speak, and Coherence harnesses the spontaneity and subtlety of its improvised cinematography to provide considerable depth.

What Does it Mean?

Choice

What is that depth about? Well, on a first pass, Coherence is obviously about the complexities and ramifications of choice. From the start, the characters are revealed to either be preparing to make a significant choice (e.g., Em deciding whether to go to Vietnam with Kevin) or accept the consequences of past choices (e.g., Mike’s alcoholism — one of the film’s many entertaining meta-winks that the viewer’s reality may be one of the film’s alternate universes; real-life actor Nicholas Brendon (Mike) has famously struggled with drugs and alcohol). Thus, on one account, the film addresses the question of the path not taken and what it means to be saddled with the baggage of what we’ve done.

Self

Coherence also touches on more traditional doppelganger territory. In classic psychoanalysis, the doppelganger as a figure is about unacknowledged desires and the darker parts of one’s psyche. Unlike above, this is less about what one does than what one is. The film makes this theme explicit when Mike, lost in a self-pitying haze, says to Em, “This whole night we’ve been worrying there’s some dark version of us out there somewhere. What if we’re the dark version?” The metaphor is clear: through the doppelganger, we distance ourselves from our inner darkness by externalizing and projecting it onto other versions of ourselves.

Experience

Notably, neither interpretation fully explains Em’s behavior at the film’s end. By that point, the house is an emotional disaster zone. Em has realized that the only versions of the people in the house from her original world are her boyfriend Kevin and his ex, Laurie, who clearly still have feelings for one another. The group is in an uproar as an old affair comes to the surface. In the midst of this chaos, seemingly apropos of nothing, one of Mike’s doppelgangers spontaneously enters the home and beats him.

In response to that hopeful scene, Em decides to cast her lot in the parallel universes. She wanders the void, literally looking in the window at different versions of the night before settling on one that she attempts to enter through violent, homicidal force by killing the version of herself from that world. While her own universe might be a wreck without much space for her, she seems to reason that she might be able to force her way into something better.

Note that what finally pushes Em to search for a different world isn’t the choices she’s made or the darker sides of herself per se. Rather, it’s her fit with the world that is the issue. In this case, the alternate universes represent a menu of potentially improved life opportunities.

We can think of this in a few ways. One is to side with Mike that the film’s default world does indeed reflect darker impulses and desires. From that vantage point, regardless of whether Em is herself the physical manifestation of those darker impulses or is pushed to them by the pressures of a crazed universe, the result is that tragedy happens when she tries to force her way into a better world.

Pushing further, one wonders if the film isn’t hitting on a type of uncanny lived experience. In the most immediate rendering, this could speak to the experience I think we’ve all had of wanting to escape to a less damaged version of the lives we know.

Beyond desire, this could also point us toward a certain uncanny experience — something akin to Heidegger’s conception of a mood in the sense of a particular lived atmosphere or vibe. There seems to be a common if not universal experience of feeling like one is living a life that runs parallel to other versions of that life. This is a visceral feeling more than a conscious thought (cue “Once in a Lifetime”).

Seen from this perspective, much as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot captures the fact that waiting is a foundational facet of what it is to be human, Coherence might capture a common, surreal feeling that we’re living out one of many versions of some approximation of the same life. One would think not every sentient creature would have that experience, but who’s to say. I’m unsure how common it is, but at least in some cultures, it seems like a basic facet of human experience.

Conclusion (Introduction’s Doppelganger)

We started by downplaying the philosophical dimensions of Coherence, and yet we’ve found our way back to them through philosophy’s boots-on-the-ground wing of phenomenology (which on some meta-level might track the development of a field that treats phenomenology and its ilk as philosophy’s malformed doppelganger).

In this sense, and perhaps in the spirit of the film, we’ll close with a modified doppelganger of the sentence we started with: Coherence (2013) makes the first impression of being a lab supervisor in the psychology department but turns out to be a philosophy major. It tells us about how life feels and what we desire.

Because you Say “I” For Me: The Doppelganger in Possession (1981)

Credit: Oliane Productions/ Marianne Productions/ Soma Film Produktion. Distributed by Gaumont

Andrez Żuławski’s Possession (1981) is a disturbed, sprawling film that borders on incoherence. But it’s a productive incoherence.

This is a film that is so raw that its filming led the lead, Isabelle Adjani, to both attempt suicide by its completion and win the Best Actress award at the 34th Cannes Film Festival. It’s so ambitious that as an exploration of divorce, it manages to incorporate espionage, body horror, the Cold War, possession (of course), Eastern spirituality, Western spirituality, murder, and nuclear apocalypse.

It attempts a lot, and critics have rightly suggested that it’s not always successful in pulling all of those disparate elements together. Still, its ambiguity is as much an asset as a liability: Possession’s fissures, inconsistencies, and indeterminacies are part of what make it so rich.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the film’s use of doppelgangers, which while being the key to understanding its deranged ravings, resists a single reading. What to make of them?

Plot

It’s either really easy or really hard to give a summary of Possession.

In short, Possession is an avant-garde, psychological horror film. It is about an international spy, Mark (Sam Neil), who returns to his East Berlin home, where his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), has been living with their son, Bob (Michael Hogben). Anna requests a divorce, and it’s revealed she’s been having an affair. As the film progresses, she is shown engaging in increasingly strange and violent behavior while having a second affair with a tentacled monster in a rundown apartment.

That’s an accurate enough summary, but it’s simplified to the point of disingenuity. Possession is a convoluted and hateful film through which Żuławski channels the venom of his own messy divorce. It’s confusing and painful to watch.

The Doppelganger: “Too Hard to Live With, Brother”

There’s no shortage of threads to pull on in Possession. Much has been (rightly) made of the film’s use of doppelgangers—doublings of Mark and Ana, who share the same electric green eye color.

Many commentators have interpreted the doppelgangers as reflecting the characters’ idealized versions of their partners. Thus, on this account, Mark’s unnamed doppelganger is a more confident and less emotionally needy version of Mark, while Anna’s doppelganger, Helen, is the ideal housewife.

That reading definitely tells part of the story, but a few complexities remain. Mark’s doppelganger is grown out of a literal monster that Anna nurtures on the blood of her murder victims. Anyone who sees it in its monstrous, larval form is horrified. The doppelganger isn’t shown as anything resembling Mark until the film’s final scene, when it idly watches Mark and Helen be shot by government agents before inexplicably pressuring a bystander to shoot at those same agents and fleeing to the roof.

Prince Charming, right? It’s hard to say what’s being idealized here. Anna is of course possessed (or something), but that doesn’t sound like the type of fantasy to which one would look for emotional comfort in response to a murderous and abusive husband. The doppelganger is arguably more controlling and homicidal than even the “real” Mark, though potentially more competent and self-assured (in an odd, distilled way).

In contrast, Mark doesn’t harvest Anna’s doppelganger from a monstrous, larval state. Instead, he finds her working as his son’s teacher, Helen. Notably, while everyone seems to find Anna’s tentacled monster to be hideous except Anna, no one seems to see Helen as Anna’s doppelganger except Mark. Helen is mystified when Mark attempts to unmask her as Anna when he first meets her. As Bob’s teacher, she knows Anna but has no idea that they look alike.

In a later scene, Bob asks Mark if he thinks Helen is more attractive than Anna (“our mommy”). The question doesn’t make sense—the two are identical in appearance. That’s the point. Bob isn’t Mark, so he doesn’t see Helen as Anna’s doppelganger. Mark sees Helen as a version of Anna because he’s blinded by his obsessive, solipsistic misogyny and can’t see women he’s attracted to on their own terms.

Of course, Helen isn’t a real-life doppelganger any more than Anna is possessed by a real-life supernatural spirit. Both strange occurrences reflect the way that the surreal horror of unhealthy relationships can manifest as mental health episodes. In a very different way, this relationship was wonderfully explored in anthropologist/philosopher João Biehl’s brilliant, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment.

As in the case of Mark’s doppelganger, one question is how idealized Helen really is for Mark. After all, one could argue she is the one to initiate an affair with Mark when she goes to his home under the pretense of wanting to talk with Anna late at night. She sleeps with him (or some approximation of such) despite him being married and his wife not being home. She is right to then note that Mark will interpret this as confirmation of his angry, spiteful attitudes.

Thus, on this reading, while the doppelgangers have idealized elements, they retain a twisted undercurrent because neither Mark nor Anna are capable of imagining a doppelganger that isn’t refracted through the bitter prism of their failed marriage and codependence (the film ends with the two embracing for a final kiss, which is almost romantic until you remember all of the murder, private detectives, and vomiting of green goo). The doppelgangers are projections of crazed, manic minds.

Who’s Possessed? “We are all the Same. Like Insects! Meat!”

Seen from this perspective, while commentaries on the film often emphasize Anna’s possession, it could just as much be argued that it’s about Mark’s possession. Through the two characters, the film explores how dysfunctional romantic relationships can breed mental illness, which codes as “possession” in the film.

It’s interesting that Possession ends on a scene of Helen. As the sirens sound that indicate the start of the apocalypse, she turns her back on Mark’s doppelganger, who lurks creepily at the door. This is after she has defied Bob’s screaming protest not to let his father into the apartment.

It’s implied she would have let Mark in, but upon seeing that it’s the doppelganger, she turns her back on him, leaving him outside. On one level, this makes sense: Helen had previously said that she comes from a world where “evil takes physical form,” which would seem to suggest that she is equipped to see the doppelganger as a physical manifestation of evil (in this case, an “evil” bred of toxic emotional codependence).

Yet, the film heavily implies that the apocalypse is the result of Mark’s work as a double agent (via the famous pink socks MacGuffin). Aside from kicking off the apocalypse, Mark is a controlling, dishonest, and physically abusive murderer. One wonders: for someone who professes to be able to see evil in the flesh, how does that register for Helen—particularly given both her and Bob’s response to the doppelganger?

One take on it would be that Helen isn’t that understanding, and Mark’s impression of her as such is another manifestation of his biases and delusions. Alternatively, we could reframe it and see Helen as a nuanced, empathetic thinker capable of recognizing the flawed but well-intentioned undertones of Mark’s humanity. If Helen has any request for him in the film, it’s that he recognize her individuality—time and again, she challenges his self-pitying misogyny. Maybe she thinks he’s capable of more.

In a final reversal, maybe Helen is as blinded by her own preconceptions as any of the other characters. There’s no reason to take her at her word when she says she can perceive evil in the flesh (even if she thinks she can). Who’s to say how she sees things or why. In an ambiguously figurative and literal sense, it might only be when the twisted undercurrent of Mark’s and Anna’s dysfunctional relationship appears before her in physical form that her own preconceptions are punctured to the point that she has an inkling of the horror that’s at her (metaphorical but also literal) door.

Put differently, maybe Helen is in a sense as possessed as any of the characters.

Possession is a paranoid, cynical film. It’s too equivocal to provide closure for the endless loop of reflection it can inspire. Really, this is fitting--maybe the point of its indeterminacy about who or what is possessed is that we’re all vaguely possessed and indeterminate.

“Six O’clock Somewhere” (fiction)

Photo by Dylan Fout on Unsplash

The choice to ignore the phone was easy, but the self-control to tolerate the ringing was hard. The hotel’s old phone didn’t have a switch to shut off the ringer. He’d checked. Still, the fact that it was the hotel phone and not his cell phone gave him hope. He looked from the phone to the digital clock next to it. Frustratingly, 6 p.m. was too early to go to bed.

The phone stopped. It felt good when it stopped.

The day had echoed for him at its end, shaking his head so much that it soon shook his body as well, and he had lain in the hotel bed twitching since getting home from the event center. Each contortion felt like he was throwing out a little piece of the garbage that the day had filled him with. It provided the relief of licking chapped lips.

After some time, he got up and walked over to the coffeemaker by the bathroom. At first, he forgot to put water in, and the machine hissed when he added it. He stood in front of the clunky machine as it brewed, watching it steam. When it was done, he emptied the carafe into one of the hotel’s Styrofoam cups and took it back to the bed.

As he sat down, the phone rang again. With a sigh, he answered it.

“Hello,” he said, holding the thick receiver with his shoulder and the coffee in his other hand.

“Marshall, where have you been?”

“Marissa? Why are you calling me in the room?”

“Because you haven’t been answering your phone.”

“I’ve been at the convention. I’ve made some contacts that will work out very well for us,” he said.

“There are things that matter besides the convention, yes?” College had given her that annoying way of making comments that sounded like questions.

“There’s a lot that matters besides the convention, but eating and paying bills isn’t so bad either, yes?” he said.

She ignored it. “Jake had to come home from school today.”

“Why wasn’t he in school?”

“The bus passed a tractor-trailer truck on the way there. They couldn’t calm him down, so they sent him home.”

“Jake had to go home from school because he saw a truck,” he confirmed flatly.

“You know it’s more than that.”

It was more than that.

“Today was one of the dark ones. He needed you,” she said.

“There’s a lot of trucks in the world. He’s going to need to learn how to be around them.”

“He needed you today,” she pleaded.

“I’m not his father.” He said and paused before adding, “I’m here now.”

“Ever heard of checking your messages? One phone call from you during lunch could have saved the day.”

He gritted his teeth. “I was at the convention during lunch. Listen, I know what he means to you, but he’s going to need to be able to do everyday shit without having to talk to someone about it.”

“He’s put up with enough shit — enough of your shit,” she said.

“People drive trucks,” he shouted.

She sighed. “We both know that the core of the situation is not the truck, it is — “

He interrupted her with his shouting. “Everything was fine before you started in. Just like always, everything was fineuntil you started in with your bullshit.”

“You’re a real asshole, Marshall,” she said before hanging up.

He put the receiver down and took a sip of coffee that turned violent by its end. Finishing the coffee in one gulp, he tossed the empty cup toward the trashcan. It landed on the floor. He looked at the clock again: still basically 6 p.m.

“It’s 5 o’clock somewhere,” he said randomly. Didn’t Jimmy Buffett sing a song like that?

He thought of the dumb kid screaming his lungs out because he saw a truck. The other kids must think he’s a freak.

“It’s 6 o’clock somewhere,” he said as he stretched out on the bed. “We each got our 6 o’clock.”

He wondered what the kid was doing with his 6 o’clock. Dumb kid has got to be tired after losing it like that.

“It’s 6 o’clock here,” he said as he closed his eyes.

Punk Rock Rip Van Winkle

Photo by Evgeniy Smersh on Unsplash

In the original story, Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years, which is somehow shorter than the time I’ve been away from punk rock and its metallic sibling hardcore. I’ve recently checked in with the scene, and while I can’t say my realizations have been quite as startling as Rip Van Winkle’s, they have been illuminating.

I was young when I attended my first show—13 or so (I believe it was ’97 with VOD, Crown of Thornz, and One King Down). For the next few years, I went to an average of one show per week and systematically worked through every major subgenre of extreme music.

After a few years, my interest lost steam as I came to feel like I was retreading much of the same ground. Now and then I might put on The Age of Quarrel around the house, but I didn’t think much about hardcore/punk for a long time.

Over the last year or so, I’ve returned to hardcore with much interest. However, it’s not so much the music itself that I’ve picked up on. Through podcasts and the like, I’ve slowly pieced together the stories of where the culture and its participants’ lives have gone over the last quarter of a century. A few insights stand out.

Expected

In some cases, things have gone exactly as an informed observer in 1999 might have predicted.

There’s a grim side to this: people who were particularly unhinged, violent, or reckless often ended up meeting unfortunate fates. That probably sounds obvious, but I was a little taken aback as an adult when I realized quite how damaged many of us were. I would rather not dwell on specific cases, but considerable talent and charisma were wasted.

Yet, there’s a more hopeful slant to this as well. I grew up in Connecticut, and by the time I came along, Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed was already a key architect of the scene (my New England accent gets hilariously thick after I watch interviews with him). It's a little striking for me to see quite how famous he’s gotten, but I’m far from shocked.

Even in the ‘90s, he had a reputation for hard work. What stood out to me then and still stands out to me now is how deftly he’s been able to balance ambition with artistic integrity and taste. The result? Underground credibility combined with opportunities to host MTV shows, be nominated for Grammies, and collaborate with legendary rapper Ice-T. All this from a guy I remember passing out fliers for his band in the parking lot.

Habits and lifestyle choices matter—particularly when navigating the puzzle of how to move up without losing your way, to borrow the brilliant philosopher Jennifer Morton’s phrasing. Those things can be done both well and poorly, and it doesn’t take long for how you choose to handle them to register in your life.

Unexpected

Alas, if only things were so simple. It hasn’t all been predictable.

As above, we’ll start with the darker side of things. In some cases, bands I was sure were right on the cusp of something great didn’t last more than a few years. Candiria stands out as one of the sadder examples. Their stuff still sounds fresh now, but back then they were truly at the cutting edge of extreme music, blending hardcore, death metal, jazz, rap, and atmospheric sound design. I was sure they would end up in something resembling Jasta’s shoes today.

And I don’t think I was wrong. But, apparently, the band experienced a terrible car accident while on tour. It seems that for a variety of reasons, they never quite got their footing again after that. I’m convinced that without that tragic and unexpected turn of events, things would be very different for them as artists and for us as music fans today.

Fortunately, it’s not all so bleak. Some deserving groups have blown up in ways I never would have imagined. I still only half-believe some of that and had to double-check a lot of these developments as I wrote this.

For example, in the ‘90s, I never in a million years would have believed that The Refused would headline Coachella or At the Gates would spawn entire subgenres. Seriously? This isn’t to take anything away from those talented groups, but even at what seemed like their relative peak following the release of their signature records, I remember them playing to crowds of 150 people with half the audience going outside to smoke during their sets. How could anyone at the time ever have guessed the success those groups had ahead of them?

Habits and perspective matter, but they have their limits. We make history, but we don’t do so in conditions of our making. This fact can be as disheartening as heartening: it might take a bit of time, but forward-thinking work can find its audience.

Who knows—maybe your Medium post with ten views will inspire entire subgenres in twenty years. I’ve seen roughly comparable things happen.

Values

I thought Finn McKenty did a great video capturing what stood out to me about hardcore in the ‘90s (and I’m sure is still true now). For all its ostensible thuggery, punk/hardcore was (is) a potent setting for the exchange of ideas.

Perspectives that seemed new or unorthodox at the time but were central to hardcore have worked their way into the mainstream. McKenty rightly points out a variety of examples. Veganism was seen as a fringe lifestyle for weirdos in 1998. Now it’s mainstream to the point of being trendy (as Karl from the militant vegan/straight edge group Earth Crisissaid in a recent interview: “Somehow, we won”). I would argue even some version of modern productivity discourse has a lot in common with punk’s idea of a positive mental attitude or PMA (just check out some of the guests on Toby from H2O’s podcast to see what I’m talking about).

On the one hand, as an adult, I almost have a greater appreciation for the importance of the DIY ethic and the sacrifices it entails. The exchange of unconventional perspectives that McKenty points out wouldn’t have been possible without the obstinance of a culture that insisted on its members sleeping on floors and living in vans so they could produce magazines on xerox machines, organize concerts in VFW halls, and run record labels out of bedrooms. It took sacrifice and a certain amount of stubbornness for that to come together.

On the other hand, I see this from a more nuanced standpoint now as an adult. As one example, as a kid, I thought the Misfits’s gimmicky marketing of plastic tchotchkes, diet drinks, or whatever was eye-roll worthy. It looks a little different to me now. While it’s true some of their peers might have aged a little more gracefully, just as many if not more completely fell apart. From the perspective of creeping middle age, I can see what’s valuable about people making a living from their campy punk art. Dying from an overdose in some squat somewhere or never reaching an audience beyond a few dozen angry adolescents is hardly preferable.

Without a certain amount of pigheadedness, the culture wouldn’t have been so fresh and vital. At the same time, wisely chosen compromises can ensure that both the innovators and their innovative ideas will have and continue to have an impact.

Conclusion

Will hardcore become much a part of my life going forward? I doubt it, but my impression is that it’s a little less rigid these days, which is a welcome change. The music can be a bit much for me to digest comfortably after years of more sedate fare.

Regardless of whether I retreat to another Rip Van Winkle slumber, I’ll be curious to check in with hardcore over the next twenty or even forty years. We’ll see what geriatric punk rock truths there are to wake to in 2060.

“Symbolic Autonomy” (fiction)

Image by Tom Fisk on Pexels

“Back from the library?” she asks, which sounds like an accusation. He staggers into the kitchen, shaking his arms. His Bronco doesn’t have heat.

“For now,” he says.

She walks to the kitchen table. A smoldering cigarette butt is in the ashtray on the counter where she had been standing. Papers are scattered all over the table. The house’s calculator, which at some distant time has somehow gotten black streaks all over it, is at the place where he normally sits. Zack thinks of the stray crumbs and grains of salt that are always on the table and imagines them sticking to the papers. A bag of corn chips is open and facing her. Licking her pen, she starts to write.

“Taxes?” he asks.

“Tis the season,” she responds. “Tis the season for Uncle Sam to screw me up the ass.”

Though he’s heard her talk that way his entire life, it still makes him uncomfortable. “Gross,” he says.

“So you’re done with your homework,” she says.

“I need a break.”

Picking up the calculator, she continues without looking up. When he tries to use it, its display is always too faint for him to be able to read its numbers.

“What is your paper about?”

He shifts his weight and stands evenly. “Babylonian mythology. I’m studying all the details, like the stuff most people don’t even know about.”

“Ok,” she says distantly.

“Hey, little bro,” Mark says as he walks into the kitchen with no shirt on, his hair draped over his back.

“Working tonight?” Zack asks.

Mark stares into the refrigerator before taking out the orange juice and setting it on the counter.

“Yup, double tonight.” He gets a bowl from the cabinet above the dishwasher and pours OJ into it. “Super-duper double tonight, all night,” he says like a ’50s rocker. He smiles at Zack.

His mother looks at Mark from under her brow. “Get so high you’re mistaking bowls for glasses now, Mark?” she says.

“You can take hits out of a bowl and not just bowl hits,” Mark answers. Zack laughs even though he doesn’t get it. Mark smiles at him conspiratorially.

“Besides, you can take bigger sips out of a bowl,” Mark says. To demonstrate, he raises the bowl to his mouth and tilts his head back. She doesn’t look up. Silent, she scribbles something on one of her forms.

“What are you up to tonight — hitting that homework so hard it screams for help?” Mark asks him.

“I’m hitting it, but, man, this paper on the symbolic autonomy of Babylonian mythology is hard,” he says.

Mark refills his bowl. Zack has always admired how natural Mark looks without a shirt on. His muscles are compact, his chest clear and hairless. Mark must shave his chest, Zack realizes. It’s hard to imagine him doing it. He thinks of the wiry hairs scattered on his own shoulders, back, arms, and chest.

Zack takes in Mark. His body looks young, but his face is marked and lined from hard living. The scar on his face from when he was jumped by a gutter punk in San Francisco seems weirdly incongruous with him standing there in their raised ranch in Dover.

“Sounds like you’re killing it to me,” Mark says.

Zack hadn’t been sure what to say when his mom had said that Mark would be moving back from California. It was impossible to imagine a person growing up in Dover and ending up anything like Mark was when he’d moved back. He’d already been halfway to hippy before moving out West, and that was back when all he had to draw on was the store at the mall’s small selection of hemp jewelry and Grateful Dead trinkets. Zack still can’t think of Jerry Garcia as anything but a stuffed animal.

Mark seemed to be right on the edge of finding something back then. Even in 1990s suburban Pennsylvania, he was cracking the code of the universe’s hidden winks and nods. He tried, but Zack could never make sense of it. Mark had showed him the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage,’ but they just didn’t seem that profound no matter how many times he read them.

“Yeah, um, ‘symbolic autonomy’ — what is that again? And what type of job do ‘symbologists’ get?” his mom asks.

“It’s not a job. Studying symbolic autonomy will make me smart, which will get me a job,” he says.

“Well, I guess you don’t need to be so smart to know that,” she says. She looks up as she says it, revealing a shard of corn chip on her lip.

“Symbolic autonomy means I smoke weed till my eyes bleed,” Mark says, shaking his head like he’s rapping. He stares at her as he says it.

Symbolic autonomy. At least that’s what he thinks Professor Spiro said. That and “phenomenology,” which he guesses is the study of phenomena. Professor Spiro kept saying something like that, so it seemed like a good idea to write a paper about it. The school calls his math class “Pre-College Math,” and he can’t put the credits from it toward his degree (his “not-college college class” Mark had called it).

“I’m just trying to get a good report card,” he says.

“You will, honey,” she says.

“Only with a lot of work, and a lot of symbolic autonomy,” he says, and she laughs.

Mark rinses his bowl in the sink. “Me, the way I see it, there are lots of ways to learn. I just don’t see why you gotta strain your eyes staring at a screen all day to feel like you’re learning something.” His voice rises, “It’s like, why don’t you try talking to someone? Right? Why don’t you try asking someone what they mean? Maybe then you’d learn something.” He puts the bowl in the dishwasher. Zack notices that he took the time to rinse it first.

“Right on,” Zack says to his brother’s rant, which seems naïve but also kind of right.

“Yeah,” Mark says so that it comes out sounding like a laugh. “Sinosat Community College? I call it Quick-in-the-Sack Community College.” He walks out of the kitchen, and soon Zack hears him on the stairs.

“You can learn the ways of the world after everyone recognizes how brilliant of a son I’ve raised when you finish college. Then you can go live some weirdo hippy life in California and forget everything you learned,” his mom says as she returns to her taxes.

Then why bother learning it?

He walks to the table but doesn’t sit down. Taking a handful of chips from the bag, he tries to think of other things he can write about in his paper. Symbolic economy? He decides against it after looking at his mom’s tax forms. Literal autonomy? That one trips him up. If symbolic economy looks like a tax form, then what would literal autonomy look like?

“An Orderly Enterprise in Its Time” (fiction)

Image made by AI and the author using Adobe Spark

The Rolling Stone donor has deteriorated.

Every month, he leaves two copies of Rolling Stone in the lobby on the bench by the mailboxes. He removes the subscription labels before putting them down.

Two copies with their subscription labels removed. Every month.

It was an orderly enterprise in its time. Though he removed the label, the remainder of the magazine would be as crisp as if you had bought it at the newsstand. The lines where the panel had been removed were at nearly perfect right angles.

Really, the labels had been removed with surgical precision. Doubtless he used scissors, a ruler, perhaps even an exacto blade or box cutter.

I had deep respect for the work he did. Such care could only result from precise, polished faculties. With lines cut like that, with the copies organized in a neat stack in the same convenient, predictable place, you could be sure you were in the hands of a secure and stable mind.

The removal of the labels was the work of a meticulous intelligence that showed signs of brilliance. It was a beacon of lucidity to those of us in the apartment. It was a beacon of lucidity to us all.

Now, I concede that it did kind of ruin the cover. It was true, it ruined the cover, which looked less attractive with the subscription panel missing. It was true — what can I say? It was. It was true. True. But I didn’t hold a grudge. He had a right to hide his identity. I, myself, have masked my identity three to four times.

Besides, he had done such a beautiful job of trimming the subscription labels that it was hard not to appreciate his craftsmanship.

I admit, I do admit that I hungered to know the man’s identity. He was a craftsman, and in today’s society, craftsmen are on the decline.

Once, before the decline, I boldly approached a man I believed to be the Rolling Stone donor.

I expressed myself in the clear way that the Rolling Stone donor might appreciate: “Are you the Rolling Stone donor?” I asked. I knew a craftsman of that caliber would appreciate a sentence of such fine work.

Are you the Rolling Stone donor? A formulation that is itself a model of precision and elegance.

I wanted to send the message that I was the type of man who could appreciate the work he did with subscription labels: a like-minded amateur craftsman, even.

In fact, I had come to the point that I was considering purchasing my own dual subscription to a magazine to join him in removing the subscription labels each month (dare it be Rolling Stone? I wouldn’t want him to feel I was encroaching on his quarters). I would be the second to join his movement, and perhaps many would follow. I imagined craftsmen across the country removing the subscription panels of their magazines monthly.

It was a movement that could sweep the nation. It ought to sweep the nation.

As I approached, the man’s eyebrows stood out to me. They looked like mustaches.

“No,” he said in response to my fine verbal handiwork. He seemed to float, bobbing left and right.

“Do you know who does donate the Rolling Stone magazines?”

“I don’t read it,” he said, wavering as he hovered above the ground.

Two copies of the December issue were out on the bench. I walked over and held them up for him. “You didn’t see who left these here?”

“I didn’t read it.”

“Very well, but has anyone ever told you that you look like you should have noses on your forehead?” I asked.

His answer was to float off petulantly, doubtless to spend the rest of his afternoon circulating around the lobby. His arms had a peculiar, loose quality, and he swayed as though a mild wind blew him this way and that, much like a balloon.

I sensed something menacing about this balloon with mustaches for eyebrows.

Suddenly frightened, I took the Rolling Stone copies upstairs with me. I waited until I got inside to inspect them. I brought them to where I had torn an exceedingly small hole in the plastic that I’d put over the window. After all, an apartment needs natural light. The rest of the window was covered with plastic bags I’d gotten from the liquor store where I buy my Schnapps. There was only one window.

It was then that the depth of the change sunk in. Prior to that, I had noticed the corners of where the subscription panel had been removed starting to look a little frayed. At the time, I’d excused it: the old boy had gotten a little sloppy. We all have our off days.

But this, this was something else. The space missing was still the size of a subscription panel, but the edges were ragged, as though he had torn the label off with his hands. His hands. His hands, mind you. The panel’s uneven edge bespoke mental decline. It was a rebuke to the austere beauty we had come to depend on.

That ragged edge was a murder.

From there, things deteriorated rapidly. They say it goes that way: slow at first and then all at once. The Rolling Stone donor became a barbarian. A lunatic. By the February issue, he was tearing off the entire bottom third of the page. By June, the cover was mangled like a dog had taken it into its jaws and thrust it this way and that.

I sensed the fall ahead of us. I began to collect the evidence. I would store each magazine in its own brown envelope. My increase in precision would be inversely correlated with the donor’s decline — not that I was ever so shabby in such an area to begin with.

On the front, I would write a description of the condition the magazine had been in when I found it, the date and time, the angle of the issue relative to the other of that month in the pile (there of course always being two copies — things might decline, but we weren’t scumbags), its place relative to the bench’s edge, the approximate temperature in the room at the time of me finding it, the color of the hair of the person on the cover, and what I have had for breakfast that morning (dinner rolls, of course).

I called this collection Dossier X. I was prepared at all times to submit Dossier X to anyone who was interested. Perhaps on a conscious level no one had been interested, but I suspect that on a subconscious level, everyone had a yearning for Dossier X.

It was the April issue that spelled the end.

I saw the guy with mustaches for eyebrows before I saw the magazine. He was in the back of the lobby, floating from wall to wall. From what I could tell, he had been making his way around the perimeter of the room when I walked up. He was close to its edge when he turned to me. I didn’t bother to reintroduce myself because his face showed a gleeful familiarity.

I looked to the bench.

“Cover’s off,” I said, nodding towards the bench. Only a thin line near the spine of the magazine remained of what had been the cover.

He smiled. In the darkness of the lobby, his face had taken on a red glow.

“The cover is off,” I said.

His smile widened.

“The cover is off,” I screeched.

“I’m sorry to say that I didn’t read it,” he said.

“A Little Pedantic” (“Win for Life” horror remix)

Image made by the author using Adobe Spark

This is a horror remix of a previous story— “Win for Life”__________________________________________________________________________________

“What’s up, Hoffen-franken-mushu-stein?” Bill said, interrupting Hoffenreider. Absorbed in his textbook, Communication: Making Connections, Hoffenreider hadn’t noticed Bill come into the convenience store. The store never got customers, especially not at that time of night, so Hoffenreider was able to study. He was taking extra classes that summer so he could graduate a semester early from Middlesex State University.

“Whatcha you doing, man? Reading some books and making some power moves?” Bill said.

“Sure, big moves,” Hoffenreider said without looking up from his book.

Bill squinted like he was thinking. “So, what’s up with Citgo, man? It’s weird thinking of you working here. You don’t seem like a Citgo guy. Is that what they do to the guys who don’t get the top grade?”

“It’s just for the summer. It’s not like I’m a townie. I don’t even live here.”

“You do right now,” Bill said.

Bill smelled sickeningly stale. The NPR station Hoffenreider normally played on the gas station’s little boombox started another classical music song before screeching and going silent. Hoffenreider walked over, fooled around with the dials, and plugged and unplugged the boombox, which remained silent. He shrugged as he walked back to the counter.

Hoffenreider might not have seemed like a Citgo guy now, but he had been one. When he’d applied for the summer job, his supervisor, Naum, made Hoffenreider come back twice to talk before hiring him, which felt weird, like having to introduce yourself to your best friend. Naum might not have known Hoffenreider, but Hoffenreider knew the Citgo.

A few years before, the guys at the Citgo had sold weed and coke from behind the counter. If you were in the know, you could say what you wanted, and they would slide a bag over to you when you checked out, which they kept hidden from the store’s security camera by a strategically placed box of candy. It was popular with kids from the high school, who were connected to it by none other than a young Hoffenreider himself, who sold those same small bags out of his backpack at school.

“Hey, what happened to that kid who used to work here during the day? The kid who always wore sweatpants? He used to look at me real weird when I came in here,” Bill said.

“Oh, Aaron? He got fired for stealing scratch-offs.”

“No, shit. People here are always stealing scratch-offs, huh?”

“He had a good idea: he pulled out the roll when no one was here and took them from the middle before rolling it back up. We have to write down the number on the last card every time we leave, but because he took them from the middle, the numbers at the end of his shift were what they should have been. They only keep the video,” Hoffenreider nodded his head toward the security camera, “for three days.”

“So, how’d they get him?” Bill asked.

“Out of nowhere, the 1-1-1 Guy came in and bought like a million Win for Lifes,” Hoffenreider said, laughing.

“Does he buy Win for Lifes?” Bill asked.

The 1-1-1 Guy was super old and only bought two things: lotto tickets with all ones and cartons of eggs. He repeated the number “one” a million times when saying what he wanted on his ticket.

“He’d never done anything like that. He bought so many that they caught up to where Aaron had taken the tickets. No one could figure out what happened, so Naum checked the video and saw Aaron taking them. It was gonna be erased the next day.” Hoffenreider shook his head.

“Aaron got fucked,” Bill said when Hoffenreider was done with the story. “That’s crazy. He was so close to getting away with it.”

“He was pissed. Naum took it pretty hard. They’d been boys. I asked Naum about it, and he said that Aaron said something racist when Naum asked him why he did it.”

“What? Why?”

“Got me, man. I don’t know what race has to do with scratch-off tickets.”

“So, what was he getting, the Win for Lifes?” Bill said. “What do they run anyway?”

“Two each,” Hoffenreider answered.

“Oh, yeah?” Bill paused for a beat. “Let me get one,” he said, nodding towards the case of scratch-offs.

Hoffenreider tore off one of the cards. Meanwhile, Chicky appeared behind him. “Lucy’s still out there smoking a butt,” Chicky said. “What’s up, Hoffenreider,” he said, nodding toward him.

“What’s up, Chicky?” Hoffenreider said.

Hoffenreider rang up the card and Bill slid two singles over to him.

“For Aaron,” Bill said ceremoniously before scratching it off. He held the quarter tight in his fist, which made it look like he was scratching off the ticket with his flesh.

“How’d ya do?” Hoffenreider asked.

Bill held the card up close to his face. “You need four to win, but I only got two.”

“Here, let me see that,” Hoffenreider said, taking the card from him. “You need four dollar signs to win the jackpot, but only three to win some money. You got two,” Hoffenreider said.

“You were pretty close,” Chicky said.

“Yeah, I think you can actually win a decent amount of money with three,” Hoffenreider said distractedly. He paused, looked at the card, looked at Bill, and then looked back at the card. “Crazy, right? If you got three, you might have the salary you’d earn for months of work just handed to you because you scratched off this card,” he said.

“That much? Without even hitting the jackpot?” Bill said.

Hoffenreider leaned against the cash register, resting his elbow on it and putting his other hand on his waist. “Oh, yeah. I’ve seen guys come in here with just three and win all types of money. That’s why Aaron stole these: you can make a lot,” Hoffenreider said.

Bill looked at him. “You think so?” he said. “Hey, give me another,” he said after a beat.

“Win for life. Don’t give a fuck ‘cause you won for life,” Chicky screamed, boosting the energy of the fun.

Hoffenreider tore off another and handed it to him. “Could be the one,” he said.

Bill set upon it, scratching it off intensely. “Nothing,” he said without looking up.

“Sucks,” Hoffenreider said and then laughed shrilly. “If you won? I mean, really won? No more time in the warehouse. No more time at your workstation with the boss being a dick to you. Get up when you want, sleep when you want, do what you want. I see guys at college kind of like that. The future’s bright, bro.”

“The future,” Chicky screamed. “Gonna be dope.”

“Yeah, Chicky. The future would be dope if Bill won. Man, he could buy this whole place, and then I’d work for him.”

“If I owned a store like this, I would scratch off all the cards. Then you would have all that money,” Chicky reasoned.

“Imagine how much money you would have if you had all those cards,” Hoffenreider said. “Would you sell those cards if you had them, Chicky?”

“No. No, definitely not,” Chicky said, shaking his head.

“Another,” Bill said, slapping a stack of bills down on the counter.

“Smart. That’s smart,” Chicky said, nodding his head solemnly.

Hoffenreider tore off two more. He handed one to Bill and kept the other in his hand, which he rested on the counter with the card facing up. Without saying anything, Bill grabbed the first card, leaned in close, and started scratching it off.

“If you’re—" Hoffenreider started, but Bill grabbed the second card from him without taking his eyes off the first, which he tossed aside without comment after seeing the results.

Hoffenreider pulled off a few more that he gently piled up on the counter. “Bill’s gonna win big, man. He’s gonna have some pull in this town. Bill’s gonna be the guy to go to when you want to make stuff happen—just like when we were kids,” Hoffenreider said. Chicky met Hoffenreider’s eyes and nodded his head in short, rapid bursts.

Bill stopped scratching. He held his head too close to the card for them to see what it said.

“So?” Chicky said.

Bill didn’t answer. He kept his head down. He stood frozen, bent at the waist, his face still close to the card.

“You win for life, Bill? You win at life now?” Hoffenreider said.

That was when Hoffenreider noticed little droplets on the counter. He followed them to Bill’s card and stopped smirking. Bill’s hand was bleeding. Hoffenreider recoiled. “What the fuck, Bill?”

Saying nothing, Bill hungrily set upon the stack of cards Hoffenreider had put out.

“Put more down,” Bill said in a low, guttural voice.

“Can’t win if you don’t play,” Chicky said.

Hoffenreider stared at Bill’s hand, which left behind thick swaths of red as he violently rubbed it over the card.

“Dude, use a coin,” Hoffenreider said.

“Put more down,” Bill thundered, tossing aside the finished card.

“Use a coin,” Hoffenreider shouted as he reached into the case for more cards, which Bill savagely took without looking up.

“More,” Bill shouted as he impotently scratched at the cards. His fingernails hung loose.

“In chaos, there’s opportunity,” Chicky shouted.

The radio suddenly snapped on, its lights glowing a bright, angry red, as it blared a terrible, high-pitched wail. Hoffenreider put his hands to his ears, rotating to look at the radio before snapping his attention back to the counter, where Bill groped at the scratch-off dispenser, seizing what he could with his left hand while continuing to tear at the cards in front of him with the flesh of his right.

“Gotta bleed if you wanna lead,” Chicky screeched, his eyes wild, his pitch matching that of the radio’s wailing.

Stunned, Hoffenreider stared, making small noises as he watched Bill pull out the final few Win for Life cards before banging dully on the empty dispenser’s thick, translucent plastic. He hunched over the mound of cards, making sucking noises and grunts as though sloppily devouring a meal. His right hand was mangled like he’d gotten it trapped in the moving parts of a stainless-steel machine and was too mashed to remove the adhesive from the scratch-offs. He continued rubbing it violently on the cards anyway, which by then were so slick with blood that the mashed pulp of his hand feebly slid off them.

Hoffenreider hurdled the counter, landing just beyond Bill’s lunatic grasp. He dashed toward the exit, only stopping to look back after the store’s automatic door had closed, sealing off behind him the smell of blood and the sounds of the radio’s crazed crescendo, Chicky’s incomprehensible screeching, and Bill’s inhuman grunts. He saw his Communications textbook, fat from having been soaked in what seemed like an impossibly large amount of blood, still on the counter.

Hoffenreider pivoted to his car, though Bill was too absorbed in the seemingly endless string of blood-splattered scratch-offs to pay attention to him anyway.

Tearing out of the parking lot in his ancient Taurus, Hoffenreider asked himself what at the time felt like the oddly lucid question of whether it was more probable that Bill would drown in the pool of blood or drown in the pool of scratch-offs the Citgo was likely to become.

The next day, however, when he read the story in the paper, it didn’t seem like so lucid of a question after all. He had to admit that all that time studying might have made him a little pedantic.

“Win for Life” (fiction)

Photo by Vitaliy Haiduk on Pexels

“What’s up, Hoffen-franken-mushu-reider?” Bill said, interrupting Hoffenreider. Absorbed in his textbook, Communication: Making Connections, Hoffenreider hadn’t noticed Bill come into the convenience store. They never got customers at this time of night, so Hoffenreider was able to study. He was taking extra classes that summer so he could graduate a semester early from Middlesex State University.

“Whatcha you doing, man? Reading some books and making some power moves?” Bill said.

“Sure, big moves,” Hoffenreider said without looking up from his book.

Bill squinted like he was thinking. “So, what’s up with Citgo, man? It’s weird thinking of you working here. You don’t seem like a Citgo guy. Is that what they do to the guys who don’t get the top grade?”

“It’s just for the summer. It’s not like I’m a townie. I don’t even live here.”

“You do right now,” Bill said.

Bill smelled sickeningly of stale smoke, weed, and car freshener. The NPR station Hoffenreider played on the gas station’s little boombox when he was studying started another classical music song. Hoffenreider didn’t recognize it, but for some reason he thought “Mozart” when he heard it.

“Hey, what happened to that kid who used to work here during the day? The kid who always wore sweatpants? He used to look at me real weird when I came in here,” Bill said.

“Oh, Aaron? He got fired for stealing scratch-offs.”

“No, shit. People here are always stealing scratch-offs, huh?”

“Yeah, he took Win for Lifes. Trying to steal a life, I guess,” Hoffenreider waited, but Bill didn’t laugh. “Actually, he had a pretty good idea: he pulled out the roll when no one was here and took them from the middle before rolling it back up. We have to write down the number on the last card every time we leave, but because he took them from the middle, the numbers at the end of his shift were what they should have been. They only keep the video” – Hoffenreider nodded his head toward the security camera – “for three days.”

“So, how’d they get him?” Bill asked.

“Out of nowhere, the 1–1–1 Guy came in and bought like a million Win for Lifes,” Hoffenreider said, laughing.

“Does he buy Win for Lifes?” Bill asked.

The 1–1–1 Guy was super old and only bought two things: lotto tickets with all ones and cartons of eggs. He repeated the number “one” at least a dozen times when saying what he wanted on his ticket even though everyone knew exactly what he wanted anyway. Hoffenreider had the sense that the number was particularly unlikely to come up, but he couldn’t quite work out the math on that.

“He’d never done anything like that before. He bought so many that they caught up to where Aaron had taken the tickets. No one could figure out what happened, so Naum checked the video and saw Aaron taking them. It was gonna be erased the next day.” Hoffenreider shook his head.

“Aaron got fucked,” Bill said when Hoffenreider was done with the story. “That’s crazy. He was so close to getting away with it.”

“He was pissed. Naum took it pretty hard. They’d been boys. I asked Naum about it, and he said that Aaron said something racist when Naum asked him why he did it.”

“What? Why?”

“Got me, man. I don’t know what race has to do with scratch-off tickets.”

“So, what was he getting, the Win for Lifes?” Bill said. “What do they run anyway?”

“Two each,” Hoffenreider answered.

“Oh, yeah?” Bill paused for a beat. “Let me get one,” he said, nodding towards the case of scratch-offs.

Hoffenreider tore off one of the cards. Meanwhile, Chicky appeared behind Bill. “Lucy’s still out there smoking a butt,” Chicky said. “What’s up, Hoffenreider,” he said, nodding toward him.

“What’s up, Chicky?” Hoffenreider said.

Hoffenreider rang up the card and Bill slid two singles over to him.

“For Aaron,” Bill said ceremoniously before scratching it off. He held the quarter tight in his fist, which made it look like he was scratching off the ticket with his flesh.

“How’d ya do?” Hoffenreider asked.

Bill held the card up close to his face. “You need four to win, but I only got two.”

“Here, let me see that,” Hoffenreider said, taking the card from him. “You need four dollar signs to win the jackpot, but only three to win some money. You got two,” Hoffenreider said.

“You were pretty close,” Chicky said.

“Yeah, I think you can actually win a decent amount of money with three,” Hoffenreider said distractedly. He paused, looked at the card, looked at Bill, and then looked back at the card. “Crazy, right? If you got three, you might have the salary you’d earn for months of work just handed to you because you scratched off this card.”

“That much? Without even hitting the jackpot?” Bill said.

Hoffenreider leaned against the cash register, resting his elbow on it and putting his other hand on his waist. “Oh, yeah. I’ve seen guys come in here with just three and win all types of money. That’s why Aaron stole these: you can make a lot,” Hoffenreider said.

Bill looked at him. “You think so?” he said. “Hey, give me another,” he said after a beat.

“Win for life. Don’t give a fuck ’cause you won for life,” Chicky screamed, boosting the energy of the fun.

Hoffenreider tore off another and handed it to him. “Could be the one,” he said.

Bill set upon it, scratching it off intensely. “Nothing,” he said without looking up.

“Sucks,” Hoffenreider said and then laughed shrilly. “If you won? I mean, really won? No more time in the warehouse. No more time at your workstation with the boss being a dick to you. Get up when you want, sleep when you want, do what you want. I see guys at college kind of like that. The future’s bright, bro.”

“The future,” Chicky screamed. “Gonna be dope.”

“Yeah, Chicky. The future would be dope if Bill won. Man, he could buy this whole place, and then I’d work for him.”

“If I owned a store like this, I would scratch off all the cards. Then you would have all that money,” Chicky reasoned.

“Imagine how much money you would have if you had all those cards,” Hoffenreider said. “Would you sell those cards if you had them, Chicky?”

“No. No, definitely not,” Chicky said, shaking his head.

“Another,” Bill said, slapping a stack of bills down on the counter.

“Smart. That’s smart,” Chicky said, nodding his head solemnly.

Hoffenreider tore off two more. He handed one to Bill and kept the other in his hand, which he rested on the counter with the card facing up. Without saying anything, Bill grabbed the first card, leaned in close, and started scratching it off.

“If you’re — ” Hoffenreider started, but Bill grabbed the second card from him without taking his eyes off the first, which he tossed aside without comment.

“Bill’s gonna win big, man. He’s gonna have some pull in this town. Bill’s gonna be the guy to go to when you want to make stuff happen — just like when we were kids,” Hoffenreider said. Chicky met Hoffenreider’s eyes and nodded his head in short, rapid bursts.

Bill stopped scratching. He held his head too close to the card for them to see what it said.

“So?” Chicky said.

Bill didn’t answer. He kept his head down. He stood frozen, bent at the waist, his face still close to the card.

“You win for life, Bill? You win at life now?” Hoffenreider said.

Bill lifted his head with wide eyes. Hoffenreider couldn’t tell if he looked angry or surprised.

“Sick like Glass” (fiction)

Image by the author

“So, this is the new place. Try not to laugh,” Stone says. He gives the door a light tap as he passes through. Linda makes an almost inaudible sound as she enters the apartment.

“Stoney-Baloney’s place. The king of the castle,” he says, gesturing expansively.

She nods and looks around. He looks with her. He’d semi-straightened up that morning.

“It’s nice, Robert,” she says. She’s dyed her hair chestnut red. He has to admit that she’s held up well at 35.

“It’s not so bad, right?” he says. “I say to myself: ‘Stoney, you’ve done all right for yourself.’ King of the castle!” he crows.

“Yes, Robert—Stone. It’s nice, Stone.”

He sits in the padded rocking chair over which he normally drapes an old floral print sheet, retrieving the bag of Skittles he’d left open on the bed. She sits on the rocking chair’s ottoman, which is where he sits when he eats at the card table that he uses as a kitchen table. Tilting his head back, he lets a handful of Skittles tumble into his mouth. He holds the bag out to her, and she declines with a tight shake of the head. He cranes his neck to look out the window.

“What are you looking at?” she asks.

“I put my bike out there, locked up to the telephone pole. Usually I bring it inside, but I think with both of us in here at the same time there might not be enough room for a bike,” he says and laughs. “Would you believe after I first moved in here, some guy reached right into my grocery bag and pulled my soda out when I was on my way home. I said to him, I said, ‘I hope you choke on it.’ And you know, he said, ‘What’d you say to me?’ Just like that: what’d you say to me? You know, they’re all out there thinking that there’s a new whiteboy in town, and they all want a piece of that ass.”

“Robert, why would you talk to a man like that?”

“Hey, if he wants a piece of Stoney’s ass, he’s gonna get an earful.”

She turns her head to the side and speaks in a monotone without looking at him. “Just be careful here, Robert. Call the police when something like that happens.”

“That’s how it’s gonna go if they want Stoney’s ass” he mumbles. The bike had been a gift from Bear. After seeing it in Mike’s Bikes, he’d called Bear that night. The next day, Bear had called to say he’d sent him a check, and Stone went back to Mike’s Bikes and put the bike on credit card.

Linda had already heard about the bike. On their way into the building, she’d had asked how he got to work. He’d told her about his ride: the hills, the cars that drove by so fast, the big suburban houses. Those neighborhoods felt familiar and immediate, but also weirdly foreign when he considered that he couldn’t even afford to ride the bus.

What he hadn’t told her was that he hadn’t been to work in over two weeks. He was suspended because of Alicia M, the less attractive of the two Alicias. Alicia M had told Doreen that he’d said something sexual to her. “For Alicia M? God, no. Maybe for Alicia S,” he’d said to Doreen in his defense when she took him off the phone to meet with her in the conference room that smelled like Sulphur because the bathroom next to it always had its door open. For some reason, all of the water at Tech-Light smelled like Sulphur.

He hadn’t looked at Doreen when she’d told him that he was suspended until further notice. He’d stared at the conference room’s whiteboards, which no one ever used. Having the whiteboards there made him feel good about working at Tech-Light.

“She’s a liar-in-training, bitch-in-training,” he’d said to Doreen about Alicia M that day. Both Alicias had graduated from high school the month before. Doreen had said she would call him about when he could come back.

He still technically had a job, so he wasn’t lying when he said he did. He’d been using his credit card to buy food at the convenience store. He wanted to tell Bear that he needed money, but Bear didn’t want to hear anything from him now.

“I found some of your old things from the show down in the basement,” Linda said. Acknowledging his past was a gift.

“The old show,” he said smiling. “At the rate I’m going, I’ll be back in the saddle before you know it. I’ve been coming up with some stuff to pitch. I’m telling you, people are going to love what Stoney’s got up his sleeve for them this time.”

Linda smiles faintly.

He was getting better. He was getting better as fast as he could. The problem was that the world was so impatient. We all get sick, he thought. Maybe being sick was just a way of saying that some people healed slower than others. What some people might heal from in seconds could take him months or even years.

In middle school, Greg Lantos had told him that glass was a liquid and not a solid. It just moved so slowly that it seemed like it was solid. “Maybe it’s not that glass moves so slow, but that we move so fast,” Stone had said with his finger raised, feeling proud of his insight. Greg Lantos hadn’t seemed impressed.

Linda had brought a paper bag in with her that she’d put down on the table. He’d noticed it outside but hadn’t offered to take it from her. A loaf of bread sticks out. She sees him looking.

“A few things to help you get established. Some of those candies you like,” she says, smiling conspiratorially. She doesn’t hand him the bag or uncross her arms.

She stands out to him against the background of the dingy apartment. Her scarf is nice. She’d looked sloppy before—like the middle-school teacher she is, he’d always thought. She looks better now, he thinks. Classier. The apartment smells like mildew, sweat, and dust mixed with the sharp bleachy smell of the soap he got from the dollar store. Being in the apartment would probably make her smell like it. When he leaves the apartment, he can smell it on himself. Sometimes when he eats, he can taste it on his food.

“Thank you,” he says. “I could use that. Things have been tough since they had to cut down on my hours at the call center.”

“Well, you’ve got this to get you going. You’ll be fed.” She chirps a short, awkward laugh, picks up the bag, and puts it down a foot in front of her in his direction.

He can hear silverware scrape a plate in another apartment. There’s no privacy here. It reminds him of growing up in his parents’ house. When he was twelve, he’d first realized how much he liked spending time outside when he’d wandered out to a patch of trees near the highway overpass. He’d walked down the slope and gone under the bridge. He’d poked around down there for a while, kicking old bottles and trying to read the graffiti, before he’d started crying.

“You know, we really had a good thing together. If I moved back in, we wouldn’t need to be together like ‘together.’ You wouldn’t have to pay for everything yourself, and I wouldn’t have to live in this, this hovel.” He laughs, but she doesn’t. “I’m much better now. I can pitch my new show. It would be like old times,” he says.

“Just like old times,” Linda says distantly, sounding muffled like she’s behind a pane of glass.